Colony – Rob Grant

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I’ve been going down a bit of a Red Dwarf rabbit hole for a while now, re-watching the various TV series along with various making-of documentaries and other random extras to be found on the DVD sets I have, so looking along the bookshelves to find the next thing to read my eye was caught by Colony. Rob Grant co-wrote the first six series of Red Dwarf with Doug Naylor however by the end of that in 1997 there was what can euphemistically best be described as creative differences between the two writers and their writing partnership was dissolved leaving Naylor to continue Red Dwarf on and off for the next five series and the TV film. Colony is not a Red Dwarf novel but it is set on a spaceship so here we go…

First the similarities to Red Dwarf, it’s set on a huge spaceship which is carrying the last survivors of the human race, OK in the TV series timelines are so messed up that that is one of the possibilities explored rather than as here in the novel it is a central premise. It is set far in the future, three million years in the case of Dwarf, ten generations in this novel and yes things have gone horribly wrong in both cases. So what’s different about the novel? Well lots. The spaceship Willflower is designed as a colony ship to take the best and brightest of the human race away from an Earth dying due to the ravages of climate change. If that sounds like eugenics in action then Grant makes that quite clear with the Nazi like plans for population control and the horror Eddie feels towards these plans as they are made clear to him by the ships’ priest Father Lewis. Each generation will inherit not only the possessions of their parents but also their jobs, ostensibly this is to ensure training from an early age in the job which may be highly complex, such as chief scientist or captain but it also means that those employed in menial roles can never see their descendants aspire to anything better. As Lewis points out the children of those on board working in the ‘Sexual Recreation Centre”i.e. prostitutes would be born into prostitution and Eddie is repelled by the thought.

But back to our hero, Eddie O’Hare, who is he? Well he’s not supposed to be on the ship for a start. He’s an accountant who saw millions of his bosses money just vanish in an inexplicable way on the computer system and was being hunted on Earth by hit men contracted to preferably get back the money but also to definitely kill him, so when he gets the chance to escape onto the ship by swapping places with someone he leaps at it. On board he is to be Charles Perry Gordon and when he gets there he discovers that Gordon is the architect of this abhorrent social system and he’s stuck with justifying it or be found to be an impostor which would lead to “the non-permanent suspension of life” which is the ultimate punishment and turns out to be removal of the brain and spinal column and storing this in suspension, yet another of Gordon’s bright ideas. All this occurs in the present and the book then shifts from Generation I to Generation X where descendants are badly running the ship as described in the precis on the dust wrapper.

The captain is an irresponsible adolescent with a penchant for naming planets after unpleasant bodily functions. The science officer is a religious zealot nutball, who responds to technical problems by singing hymns and whipping herself. And the ship is savagely damaged, out of control and on a deadly collision course with a grotesquely large planet.

It is this section of the book that I really became engrossed in the story, the first third is basically setup for this bit and whilst the early parts are necessary and a good read, Grant really gets into his dark comedy stride with Generation X. Like a good detective story you have been told, almost in an offhand manner, everything you need to know to work out what is really going on and the best bit is that you don’t realise that you need to pick up all this info as it doesn’t feel like a mystery until all of a sudden you get the resolution. I really enjoyed the book and am frankly amazed that the first edition has sat on a shelf here since it came out in 2000 and I’ve only now read it.

Rob Grant sadly died suddenly earlier this year just a week after announcing his next novel, a Red Dwarf prequel, having finally resolved the legal dispute over ownership of Red Dwarf, with Grant and Naylor agreeing to both be able to use the concept in 2023. The book was ultimately completed by Andrew Marshall.

War – Sebastian Faulks

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I mentioned on last weeks blog that the Agatha Christie didn’t last the week in Belgium however I did have a backup, although it turned out not to be as expected. I spotted War by Sebastian Faulks in a bookshop just before I left and thought it would be appropriate as I was based in Ypres for the week so surrounded by battlefields and cemeteries for the war dead of, mainly, combatants of World War One. I’ve been meaning to read something by Faulks for some time as his reputation led me to expect great things and I wasn’t to be disappointed in that regard. But if I had looked more closely I probably wouldn’t have bought this book as it turned out to be extracts from three of his novels, ‘Birdsong’, ‘Where My Heart Used to Beat’ and ‘A Week in December’ but at least it gave me a chance to try his works, which is presumably the idea. The books cover three different periods, ‘Birdsong’ is set during World War One, ‘Where My Heart Used to Beat’ is World War Two and ‘A Week in December’ is modern times Muslim jihad terrorism in London.

Let’s start with ‘Birdsong’, the extract is forty five pages of an over five hundred page work first published in 1994 and whilst the novel focuses on, Stephen Wraysford, a young officer in the Great War, the extract in ‘War’ deals largely with Private Jack Firebrace, an ex miner who is tunnelling out from the trenches through no man’s land to undermine or bomb the German positions. This is of course extremely dangerous, not just from possible collapse of the damp soil but from enemy shelling and the ever present possibilities of meeting German’s coming the other way. The book is wonderfully written, it’s no surprise to discover that it is probably Faulk’s best known work as the extract drew me in to the claustrophobic existence of the tunnellers and the awful conditions in the trenches. The first paragraph of the extract gives a feel for the novel:

JACK FIREBRACE lay forty-five feet underground, with several hundred thousand tons of France above his face. He could hear the wooden wheezing of the the feed that pumped air through the tunnel. Most of it was exhausted by the time it reached him. His back was supported by a wooden cross, his feet against the clay, facing towards the enemy. With an adapted spade, he loosened quantities of soil into a bag which he passed back to Evans, his mate, who then crawled away in the darkness. Jack could hear the hammering of timbers being used to shore up the tunnel further back, though where he worked, at the face, there was no guarantee that the clay would hold.

After a hard days digging Jack was expecting a rest but was put on guard duty instead due to shortage of men. However exhaustion overtook him and he fell asleep where he was discovered and condemned to be shot at dawn for desertion of duty such was the black and white horror of World War One.

The extract that follows from ‘Where My Heart Used to Beat’ is fifty eight pages from three hundred and fifty so more representative and roughly a sixth of the entire original book, which first appeared in 2016. The action in the extract takes a first person narrative of a newly commissioned officer during World War Two who is part of the British Expeditionary Force, that strange time before it was known as the British army in WWII and is forced to retreat to Dunkirk for the great small boats rescue. On his way specifically mentioning passing through Poperinge, just a few miles from where I was sitting in Ypres reading the book and where we had been the day before. This sudden intrusion into my modern experience was remarkably evocative as I imagined the hardship of the troops passing through the now lovely fields in this part of Flanders. Again it is beautifully written and when the unit are back in combat, this time fighting their way through Italy to Monte Cassino in the push to get the Germans out of Italy you really feel you are alongside the men as you are totally pulled into the narrative.

The third extract from ‘A Week in December’ is just twenty eight pages out of four hundred and the book was first published in 2009 but set in December 2007. The book itself is a satirical dealing with the money men of the City of London that were about to pull everything down in the great financial crash of 2008 and focuses on seven characters with the main one being the hedge fund manager John Veals. However the extract doesn’t mention him of five of the others being instead the story of Hassan al-Rashid whose Muslim faith has got him involved in extremism to the point that he agrees to be part of a bombing of a London hospital. I’m intrigued how this fits into the entire work so I’ll almost certainly have to read the full book at some point but of the three ‘Birdsong’ is top of my list to search out closely followed by ‘Where My Heart Used to Beat’, I definitely need to read more Sebastian Faulks.

Death in the Clouds – Agatha Christie

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I’ve just returned from a week long holiday in Belgium and looking around on my shelves for something to read whilst there I decided on the most famous fictional Belgian of all, Hercule Poirot. Oddly despite loving detective fiction I’ve never read much Christie before starting this blog and this book is one that was new to me, but I chose it on the basis that a crime mystery is always good holiday reading and so it proved. The mystery concerns a flight from Le Bourget which at the time was the airport for Paris to Croydon which was its London equivalent, this being the days before Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and Heathrow for London. Planes back in 1935 were also much smaller and slower but considerably more luxurious for all passengers than is the case today. Poirot (seat 9) is one of the passengers in the rear compartment, which was then the better section, this had eighteen passenger seats and on this flight only eleven were occupied one of which would be for the victim (seat 2) and one the murderer (seat ?, oh I’m not going to tell you that). The plot is carefully written with plenty of clues but not until Poirot unmasks the killer and their method from page 216 of 223 did I see who it was although it obviously had to be a passenger, or possibly one of the two stewards.

On the way to the solution Christie has a little fun with her profession as one of the passengers is Daniel Clancy, described as a well known mystery writer but she is clearly sending up the art of writing crime thrillers as Clancy is depicted just totally obsessed with his next novel that he fails to notice what is going on around him. He is also picked on by Inspector Japp as an obvious suspect although it is Poirot who arises the suspicion of the inquest jury as the murder weapon is found jammed down the back of his seat on the plane. So we not only have a mystery writer as a character but also the most famous of Christie’s detectives as prime suspects. The book was first published in 1935 so five years after Christie had married Max Mallowan, the noted archaeologist who specialised in the near East, and who should be occupying seats seats five and six but a father and son who are archaeologists whose primary interest were Persian artefacts. Christie also has fun with references to dull pottery fragments and digs in out of the way places and these two are also obsessed with their finds to a point of not noticing what is going on around them other than the son, Jean Dupont, killing a wasp that was flying around them which turns out to be significant.

The plot revolves around the victim, Madame Giselle, who has made a fortune lending money to wealthy but temporarily short of cash individuals and carefully holding information regarding them that would be damaging if released to ensure the repayments. More than one passenger has the potential to be one of Giselle’s clients and therefore has a motive and investigating this leads Poirot hopping between London and Paris working with both Scotland Yard and the Sûreté whilst following up leads. It was interesting to have Poirot dashing from one place to another rather than using his ‘little grey cells’ during quiet contemplation of the facts. It made a great read and needless to say it didn’t last the anticipated week as I needed to know what was going on so putting the book down became increasingly difficult.

A little bit about this well known cover, by artist Tom Adams, which stayed on the Fontana edition here in the UK for many years from June 1969 and was instantly recognisable from its ubiquity on bookshop shelves. It was clearly the inspiration for the 2008 Doctor Who episode ‘The Unicorn and the Wasp’ where the Doctor meets Agatha Christie at a house party and the various guests are attacked by a giant wasp which is how it looks in the cover art. Because I hadn’t read the book before, although it’s been sitting on my shelves for many years, I hadn’t previously noticed the glaring error on the cover where the name painted on the fuselage of the plane is Hengist but the aircraft in the book is called Prometheus.

For Art & For Life – Vincent van Gogh

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This book consists of a collection of letters from van Gogh, mainly to his brother Theo, although there are other correspondents. I was at once struck by how van Gogh writes as he paints, with descriptions of people and landscapes as though he was actively setting them down on paper or canvas. Take for example a letter from November 1885 written in Antwerp, where he had recently moved and he is trying to get a feel for the surroundings that are so different from the countryside he has just left.

… with the city behind one at the end of the landing stages where the Harwich and Havre steamers lie, there is nothing, absolutely nothing to be seen in front except for an infinite expanse of flat, half flooded pasture, immensely melancholy and wet, with undulating dry reeds and mud – the river with a single small black boat, water in the foreground grey, sky misty and cold grey – still as the desert.
As to the overall impression of the harbour, or of one of the docks – at one moment it is more tangled and fantastic that a thorn hedge, so chaotic that one finds no rest for the eye, grows giddy, and is forced by the papillot-ering colours and lines, to look first here, and there, unable to distinguish one thing from another – even after looking at the same point for a long time. but if one moves on to a certain spot with an undefined stretch of land in the foreground, then one again encounters the most beautiful, most peaceful lines and those effect which Mols, for instance, so often achieves.

The artist Mols referred to above is either Florent or Robert Mols, probably Robert as his works seem to fit the description better. This extract is from the happier early times whilst van Gogh was still learning his trade and numerous letters describe studies he is making of the peasants around his countryside home and the only significant painting he describes working on is ‘The Potato Eaters’ shown below. Note the book doesn’t contain any images but I found it helpful to refer to his pictures when reading the letters that describe them.

I think the best way to review the book is to use van Gogh’s own words as I so enjoyed the letters that I’m amazed that I hadn’t come across them before. The book is an excellent replacement for the autobiography he never wrote, and would never have regarded himself as an appropriate subject for, as you get the see how he is thinking and reacting to his surroundings and ever present money troubles as paint and canvases are so expensive especially when he isn’t successfully selling any of his works. After the first section ‘Becoming an artist’ we move on to ‘The best days’ when he is at his most productive and he describes furnishing his home and hanging a series of paintings of sunflowers there, these were simply decoration to the house but now of course are some of his most valuable works. But the painting from this period I want to highlight is described below.

In my picture of The Night Cafe, I have tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can destroy oneself, go mad or commit a crime. In short I have tried, by contrasting soft pink with blood-red and wine-red, soft Louis XV green and Veronese green with yellow-greens and harsh blue-greens all this in an atmosphere of an infernal furnace in pale sulphur, to express the powers of darkness in a common tavern. And yet under an outward show of Japanese gaiety and Tartarin’s good nature.
But what would Mr Tersteeg say about this picture, a man, who faced with a Sisley, Sisley mind you, the most unassuming and sensitive of the impressionists said “I can’t help thinking that the artist who painted this was a little tipsy”. Faced with my picture he’d say it was a raging case of delerium tremens.

The picture he is describing so wonderfully, I love that last line, is ‘Night Cafe in Arles’ and wow has he leapt forward with his use of colour. With ‘The Potato Eaters’ he describes that it should be hung with a gold background to lift the darkness of the image but here you would need a more subdued wall colour to get the best result. In contrast Alfred Sisley is positively restrained.

The final section of the book is entitled ‘Towards the end’ and begins after van Gogh had threatened his friend Gauguin with a razor and was found the next day having severed one of his own earlobes, clearly the mental issues that would result in his suicide are starting to make themselves apparent. Gauguin sensibly left van Gogh’s house in Arles soon afterwards but this left van Gogh on a downward spiral and considering either entering an asylum or joining the Foreign Legion. The former would cost him money, which he didn’t have, whilst at least he would earn something in the army, unfortunately whilst in hospital recovering from his injury his house and studio was ruined in a flood so he would have to move at the very least. It turns out that he did move but to an asylum at his brothers expense and here he starts to understand his mental condition through contact with the other inmates and he still paints as explained in this letter to Theo dated September 1889

Aha! The Reaper is finished. I think it’ll be one of those you’ll keep at home – it’s an image of death as the great book of nature speaks of it – but the effect I’ve been looking for is – ‘on the point of smiling’. It’s all yellow except for a line of purple hills. A pale and golden yellow. I find it odd that I saw it like that through the iron bars of a cell.

The Reaper painted in the asylum in 1889, just ten months later he was dead

9th & 13th – Jonathan Coe

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I needed something short this week, the last eight books have averaged 335 pages each, which is a lot to read and write about every week. This slim volume is the complete collection of short stories by British novelist Jonathan Coe and even then it is so short he still had to add a piece of journalism to get the book to much more than a pamphlet. There are three short stories and as Coe explains in the introduction this is mainly due to how difficult he finds writing “over a short distance” and finds that even if he starts out to write a short story he gets involved in the various possibilities and ends up with a novel instead. I’m glad he included the extra article especially as it is the first time it had appeared in English, it was written for the French film periodical ‘Cahiers du Cinéma‘ (Notebooks on cinema), as I really enjoyed it. Knowing that there wasn’t much material to work with Coe originally considered making the entire volume a collection of pieces of journalism from the seven or eight years he worked in that field before the novels took over, but rejected that idea:

it provided a perfect moment to rescue some lost journalistic gems from undeserved obscurity. Having trawled through my hard disk, however, I’ve reached the conclusion that obscurity is exactly what most of that writing does deserve.

Ivy and Her Nonsense

The first story is a fictionalised version of Coe’s memories of a childhood Christmas spent at his grandparents home in Shropshire when he was seven years old, he grew up in the south west corner of Birmingham so Shropshire was only just over the border. It is clearly a happy time and the book is dedicated to his grandfather in tribute even though he did advise Coe to give up writing and get a job in teaching, but that was before he started to become successful and sadly his grandfather didn’t live to see him published. The story is told from the young boy’s perspective, so not really understanding what is going on around him, his grandmother had been on the jury of a murder trial just a week or so earlier and the adults were trying not to discuss the case in front of Jonathan and his sister whilst the children were fascinated by anything they could glean.

9th & 13th

With story two we leap across the Atlantic to New York with a piano player telling the story of how he met a young woman, new into town and what might have happened if things had gone as he wishes they had. Wonderfully this story is available in a recording where the explanation of the chord described is played, which helped me a lot as I can’t play so was struggling with the imagery. You can hear the story here.

V.O.

The title stands for Voice-over and it only becomes clear why near the end of this quite poignant love story set at a horror and fantasy film festival which William is attending as part of the panel of judges, in his case specifically with regard to the soundtrack as he has made a career as a composer. The films however are rather mediocre and not to his taste, being rather more gore spattered than his normal viewing. Coe clearly had fun coming up with unpromising film ideas, my favourite being the “hilarious necrophiliac comedy called One Corpse at a Time, Please!”, although like William I’m quite sure I don’t want to see it. We start with William being interviewed by Pascale although the interview is soon forgotten and morphs into something more serious without either of them apparently realising where it is going, the denouement is beautifully written and perfectly ends the tale.

Diary of an Obsession

Finally we reach the piece of journalism and it explores a fascination that Coe developed from childhood with an obscure film by Billy Wilder called ‘The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes’. It follows his rising interest from first seeing a novelisation of the film for sale in a Cornish bookshop in 1972 whilst aged eleven during a family holiday, and frankly the cover design with Sherlock Holmes framing a half naked woman horrified him as he loved the Holmes stories and this clearly wasn’t an appropriate interpretation. Three years later the film was broadcast on the television and he watched it, somewhat confused by the story line which seemed to jump around rather a lot but drawn in by the music soundtrack by a composer he had never heard of. Eventually over the years Coe would grow up and marry but still was drawn back to the film much to the bemusement of his wife especially after he bought a copy of the book and whilst reading it discovered that a lot was missing from the film. It turned out that studio executives had made Wilder heavily chop the film he had made to the point that it barely made any sense to the viewer and Coe then became obsessed by finding out if any of the edited out parts still exist. He wrote the article that this part of the book features in 1998, but there is a postscript as in 2004 he sent the article to Wilder himself, now aged ninety four, and asked if he could do a follow up interview. Wilder was delighted that somebody was still interested in this largely bowdlerised work but declined the interview. The article is really well written as you follow Coe finding out more and more about the film and its music over the years so I would very much like to see more of his journalism rescued from obscurity.

William Blake: Dante’s Divine Comedy – Maria Antonietta Terzoli & Sebastian Schütze

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First things first, this isn’t a review of Dante’s Italian masterpiece The Divine Comedy, rather it is a book of a whole collection of works of art by the English artist and poet William Blake. I have the Folio Society edition of Inferno, the first book of Dante’s trilogy, illustrated by Blake and when I saw this profusely illustrated volume from Taschen of all 102 of the illustrations he produced for the three sections I had to have it. Blake died in 1827 before completing the series of works and some are little more than sketches but the ones that are completed give a feel for how the complete collection would have looked like. In total he produced seventy two works for part one of Dante’s great poem, Inferno, twenty for part two, Purgatorio, and just ten for the concluding section Paradiso.

This book is split into four main sections, the first is by the head of the department of Italian Studies at the University of Basel, Maria Antonietta Terzoli, and summarises the poem along with putting it in historical context. The second is by professor of early modern art history at Vienna University,Sebastian Schütze, and looks at earlier artists works influenced by Dante including famously Michelangelo and Gustave Dore and how these could have influenced Blake in his re imagining of the work. Both of these sections are profusely illustrated by works from other artists to give context and Schütze also looks at other works by Blake. The third section is also by Schütze and consists of all 102 plates each in a double page spread, where they are compete enough, or single page where just a sketch or even just a plan as to what would be there exists set against the quote from the poem that inspired the work and a brief analysis of what is depicted. The final section deals with the handful of works where Blake completed the line engravings that would have been used if the works had been completed and printed.

The poem starts with Dante, dressed in red, walking through a wood when he is pursued by three wild animals. He meets the ghost of the ancient Roman poet Virgil, dressed in blue, who explains that Dante has been chosen to explore Heaven and Hell and that Virgil will be his guide and protector. The image above is the first of the plates by Blake and represents this encounter with the leopard, lion and she-wolf with Virgil pointing out the route to safety even if it is on a hazardous journey. The originals of the art are in seven museums and galleries around the world, this one is in The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, and what I like about this book is the fact that Taschen have obtained wonderful reproductions of all the works regardless of where they are now situated so the reader can fully appreciate the skill of the artist.

The next painting I have chosen to give a feel for the remarkable art produced by Blake for this project is of Minos the judge of Hell which Dante and Virgil encounter on entering the second of the nine circles of Hell in canto V of Inferno. Minos determines in which of the nine circles a sinner should be placed. This is only part of the full work by Blake, many of the works published in the book also have full page details of them included so you can greater appreciate the skill of the artistry. Dante and Virgil are climbing up to him through a pit of flames in the bottom left of the full image, the upraised fingers of Virgil’s hand can just be seen in the selection. This example is executed in pencil, pen and ink, chalk and watercolour, whatever medium or combination of mediums Blake thought would give the effect he required, again it is in the National Gallery of Victoria

The next double page spread I have chosen is from canto 14 of Inferno by which time Dante and Virgil have reached the third ring of the seventh circle of Hell, this depicts Capaneus the Blasphemer who was killed by Jupiter for his pride that placed him above the gods. This is one of several examples in the poem where classical mythology intersects with the more basic telling of Christian belief of Hell ruled by Lucifer, who they also meet, and a heaven with Christ and angels. Virgil addresses him:

O, Capaneus, because your pride remains unquenched
you suffer greater punishment.
In your own anger lies your agony
a fitting torment for your rage.

Capaneus seems unmoved by the torment however at least in Blake’s interpretation. Yet again the original is in The National Gallery of Victoria.

As an example of one of the pictures that is not finished, although others are considerably more sketch like than this, is a depiction of the final circle of Hell, the Circle of the Traitors where in the ultimate irony they are locked in ice. The extreme right shows two figures, their hair entwined, these are the Alberti brothers who killed each other in a dispute over their inheritance. Dante includes numerous people that would be familiar to his readers at the time, around 1320. This work is in the Fogg Art Museum, one of the Harvard University Art Museums.

I’d like to go back to the cover which depicts the giant Antaeus setting down Dante and Virgil in this final circle so that they could cross the cavern surrounding this circle of Hell. The book is wonderful and whether you are interested in Dante’s great work or the art of William Blake, or indeed both as I am, there is so much to get from this volume. The production is of the highest level as you would expect from Taschen and the whole book consists of 464 lavishly illustrated pages on fine quality art paper and as such is very heavy weighing 1.59kg.

London: Portrait of a City – Roger Hudson (Comp)

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It is not a pleasant place… It is only magnificent…

Henry James 1881

James went on to say much more about the city but I think these ten words capture the essence of London possibly better than anyone else, certainly London as he knew it was at the height of its powers in the late Victorian age. This is the final volume in my August 2026 reading theme of which the first three books have been part of a logical set published by the Folio Society, unfortunately they only produced three books in the series but after bouncing around the UK for the rest of the month at the end I’m going to concentrate on this selection of writings and pictures focused on the capital, London, also using a Folio Society publication.

This book follows a similar structure to the other three with various paintings illustrating the city as the centuries pass with contemporary texts selected by Roger Hudson to complement them. The first chapter deals with Roman times until the reign of Richard III (died 1485) which is a massive 1540 years, but as Hudson explains there is little in the way of writings about London during that period and the only substantive passages are both from the reign of Henry II (1167-1189). These are by William Fitz-Stephen, a Londoner, and Richard of Devizes who despite his name was a monk in St Swithen’s at Winchester which previously had been the capital, and still hoped to be again, so had no love for London. The contrast between their two passages is fascinating.

The Thames and The City from the terrace of Old Somerset House – Canaletto 1750

The next chapter covers the Tudor period (1485-1603), which is when London sealed its dominance as the capital and a poem written by the then ambassador from Scotland in 1501, William Dunbar, flatters the city.

London, thou art of towns A per se,
Sovereign of cities, seemliest in sight,
Of high renown, riches and royalty;
Of lords, barons and many a goodly knight,
Of most delectable lusty ladies bright;
Of famous prelates in habits clerical,
Of merchants full of substance and might,
London, thou art the flower of cities all.

Hudson quotes the whole poem but I think the first verse gives an idea of how it goes and I was also thrown initially by the strangeness of there being an ambassador from Scotland, but of course back then it was a separate kingdom.

The book continues in chronological order through the Stuarts and of course the revolution and the impact the Protectorate had on the capital with the march of The New Model Army in 1648 into the city to demand back pay, London alone owed £100,000 around £15 million in today’s money. I didn’t know anything about this aspect of the revolution before reading this book, for more about this period of English history see another Folio Society book ‘The Trial of Charles I‘ which I reviewed in 2020.

Smithfield Market in the early 1800’s – aquatint after Thomas Rowlandson

After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the city saw a flowering of culture and the great fire in 1666 gave an opportunity for a major redesign of the cluttered streets. This period is largely covered by extracts from the diaries of John Evelyn and of course Samuel Pepys, I really must read his diaries again, its been over twenty five years since I last did so and the sections quoted reminded me of how very readable he is. The book also includes a double page spread of Wenceslas Hollar’s famous prospects of the city before and after the fire showing just how extensive the destruction was.

Later on we are introduced to the dark side of the city in a chapter entitled Hogarth’s London 1700-50 which not only includes cartoons by Hogarth but Gillray as well despite him being an artist of the 1800’s but he also deflates pomposity so belongs here. The texts in this chapter are from John Gay, the writer of the Beggar’s Opera, and Jonathan Swift amongst others which add to the expression of deprivation both in standards of living as the city grew as well as in moral standards.

Trafalgar Square by Moonlight – Henry Pether 1860’s

By the time we reach the 1800’s properly London was the capital of an empire and whilst the poor were still oppressed, as vividly shown in the writings of Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew, the city was becoming more and more wealthy with monuments and great squares and parks being constructed. This affluence was satirised by Lord Byron in his great poem Don Juan particularly in the section quoted in the book.

There stands the noble hostess, nor shall sink
With the three-thousandth curtsy; there the waltz,
The only dance which teaches girls to think,
Makes one in love even with its very faults.
Saloon, room, hall, o’erflow beyond their brink,
And long the latest of arrivals halts,
‘Midst royal dukes and dames condemn’d to climb,
And gain an inch of staircase at a time.

St Paul’s in the Blitz – Herbert Mason 29th December 1940 (incorrectly dated as 1941 and without photographer citation in the book)

I don’t know what I expected from this book but it has provided a vivid history of the city expressed in the words of the people who were there at the time. I think it would make a great gift for any Londoner, I lived and worked there for a few years in the 1990’s so am familiar with many of the aspects covered both in the chosen paintings and texts and greatly enjoyed revisiting the city if only vicariously.

Travels of a Victorian Photographer – Selected by Roger Hudson

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The third and last of this brief series by The Folio Society turned the original concept on its head. Whilst the first two were in turn a book and then a collection of writings both were illustrated by contemporary photographs. This time it is the photographer that is featured and the images are illustrated by selected texts. For me despite the fact that this is supposed to be a book of photographs there simply aren’t enough of them and they are somewhat overwhelmed by the text presumably in an attempt to match the balance of text to images from the first two volumes which is somewhat unfair to the great Francis Frith. With that in mind I have selected six images that I think show what Frith was doing and why he is was important not just for photographing so much that is now lost but for his impact on the developing tourism industry and indeed without ever knowing it, the postal service.

Portsmouth harbour

Fortunately I knew the name of Francis Frith many decades before I read this book as I was a deltiologist (a collector of postcards) from a child and as I got older and took it more seriously was a founder member of The Potteries Postcard Society in Stoke of Trent back in 1983, so I was really looking forward to this book when it came out in 2001 as Francis Frith was a pioneer in the field of souvenir images. Firstly may I apologise for the reproduction of the pictures, the book really didn’t want to lie flat so the sharpness of Frith’s work is sometimes not as I would like with these handheld pictures of the quite glossy pages. Oddly this is in tune with the book itself as despite it being ostensibly a book about him, Francis Frith is only mentioned in the introduction and it is the texts by twenty nine different writers such as Beatrix Potter, Charles Dickens, Francis Kilvert and Henry James that makes up the bulk of the contents so I would like to right that wrong in the next paragraph or two.

Ventnor – The Isle of Wight

Francis Frith was born in 1822 and started his career as a wholesale grocer in Liverpool which was so successful that he could sell the business at the age of 34 and effectively retire as what would now be the equivalent of a multi-millionaire. On the proceeds he started to travel and went to the Middle East and the Holy Land where he indulged his new hobby taking advantage of the very early days of photography which had only been invented in 1839. With the success of selling prints from his work he decided to set up the worlds first photographic business F Frith & Co.and started supplying shops with high quality photographs of their local sites for them to sell as souvenirs, this new business also went on to be wildly successful with Frith employing numerous photographers to travel the UK taking photographs and by 1886 the catalogue listing the images available ran to 670 pages not just of British locations but selections from around the world which Frith bought in to increase the available range. Sadly Francis Frith died in 1896 so never saw the fame his business would achieve when international regulations changed on the layout of postcards in 1902 to allow writing on the same side as the address and the resulting explosion in sending postcards from wherever you went which Frith & Co. were ideally placed to take advantage of with their vast archive..

Chester – The Rows

Frith & Co. were one of the leading UK companies in postcard production and there was a good chance that a seaside view postcard sent up until the 1960’s would have the name Francis Frith on it, I know I still have lots. But in 1970 with no family members still involved, and the then managing director about to retire, the decision was made to close the company and that might have been it, indeed the factory was due to be demolished in 1971 and the priceless historical archive of over 300,000 images, a lot of which were on glass plates, destroyed; but fortunately it was saved with just a week to spare before the bulldozers went in and we can still admire the work of Francis Frith to this day, as just ten years ago (2016) the digitisation of this enormous body of work was completed. The last 200,000 photographs were scanned in just two years and they are being cleaned up as and when somebody orders a print which is obviously a more practical way of prioritising the work and photos were still being released to the online archive up until 2023. The physical collection is now housed near Salisbury but the website is available to everyone.

Stratford Upon Avon – Shakespeare’s birthplace circa 1850 before its extensive restoration

As I said the book barely mentions Francis Frith and certainly doesn’t give the prominence due to his work. It is split into counties and Dorset for example occupies thirteen pages on which there are just five photographs and none of those are quite the size of a half page. The rest is mainly given over to sizeable extracts from the novels of Thomas Hardy, apart from a couple of pages quoting from the diary of William Allingham regarding a trip to Lyme Regis with Alfred Lord Tennyson and Francis Palgrave. What it did do though is introduce me to the works of authors I had heard of but never read before and I particularly enjoyed yet another Francis, The Reverend Francis Kilvert, who was a clergyman based near Hay on Wye just over the Welsh border but in this extract from the 1870’s he was down in the farthest south west of mainland England.

After dinner Cept. P. took Miss Lewis and me down to Land’s End, a little triangular point of rock reached by passing round to the seaward side of a tall upright shaft of cliff. The accomplishment of an old dream.
Coming back we met a noisy rabble of tourists, males and females, rushing down the rocks towards the Land’s End as if they meant to break their necks, and no great loss either. The rest of the insufferable snobs had of course been endeavouring to insult the ladies and Capt. Parker suggested that a kicking might tend to mend their manners.

I’ll definitely have to read more of Kilvert’s Diary, it appears to be a lot funnier than I expected, it’s a great pity he died so young.

Drying sails on Brighton beach

I suspect that the lack of focus on Frith despite what the average reader would expect from the title is partly what ultimately killed off this short series from The Folio Society after just three volumes and I have greatly enjoyed reading the first two J B Priestley and Sir John Betjeman but I was disappointed by this final volume. So I will finish with a view of The Lake District in north west England as a carriage which had been converted into a mobile darkroom by Frith & Co can be seen, it was probably also temporary living quarters in some of the wilder parts of the UK for the luckless photographer assuming he could squeeze in with the dangerous chemicals and bulky equipment which would take priority for space.

Kirkstone Pass – The Lake District – with one of the Frith mobile darkrooms on the road

Next week I’ll be exploring the capital in another collection of writings selected by Roger Hudson for The Folio Society.

Betjeman’s Britain – selected and edited by Candida Lycett Green

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This is an excellent companion volume to last week’s English Journey by J B Priestley. Whilst Priestley was covering the depths of the depression and concentrates largely on the people he encounters on his journey around England in 1933, this book is a selection of Betjeman’s writings between the late 1930’s and the mid 1970’s selected by his daughter, Candida, and ruminates mainly on landscape and architecture. The photographs that illustrate the book are also literally lighter in tone being sepia renditions rather than the harsh black and white of the Priestley volume. Earlier this year I read ‘Trains and Buttered Toast‘ which was also a collection of Betjeman’s talks and essays but there are very few duplications between the two books, in fact I can only think of one, which is the 1937 BBC talk entitled ‘Cooke of Cookesborough’ which is so well written and amusing it was certainly no hardship to read it again. Trains and Buttered Toast is mainly drawn from his BBC talks but Lycett Green has chosen far more widely so we get newspaper articles and longer sections from books he wrote, such as the 1958 ‘English Parish Churches’ and, of course, the Shell county guides several of which he edited along with artist John Piper and others with both of them contributing heavily to the text and photographs. The first book in the series was written by Betjeman and was dedicated to his beloved Cornwall and the West Country represents the first 79 of the 318 pages in this book, Priestley was a novelist and playwright and wrote beautifully but Betjeman was a poet and you can tell by his love of words.

Stepper Point from Polzeath, Cornwall by John Gay

I just want to quote a passage from his 1949 BBC talk about Port Isaac in Cornwall:

Can it really be that a town is half a mile away? I have walked between high Cornish hedges from St Endellion, once the parish church of Port-Isaac. The tower dwindles. The land winds. The slate of the hedges is overgrown with grasses, bedstraw and milky-pink convulvulus, pale-purple scabious and here and there darker valerian. From several places, standing on a hedge of looking through a gate, I can glimpse the sea. The sea is there all right, the great Atlantic, emerald green, wrinkled, glittering, sliding streaks of water, spotted dark blue here and there with reflections. It was a full tide, tamed and quiet for the moment, sliding around this inhospitable coast of North Cornwall, with white crescents of surf floating close inshore. From here on these high up fields, where blackthorn is sliced by the sea wind and leans inland, I can see all along the rocky cliffs to Tintagel Head. Behind me is even grander coast to the Rumps Point and Pentire. Cliffs and ocean are fine to watch, from these high windy fields as cloud shadows race over them. But where can there be a town? Less than half a mile and still no sight of it!

Eventually he does see his destination, but the beauty of the description of that short walk almost puts me beside him on the way to it.

St Pancras train shed, London by John Gay

Betjeman is probably best know for his enthusiasms for railways and churches and there are many lovely descriptions of both throughout the book, the chapter on London illustrates this perfectly as it consists of seven pieces, three of which are railway stations, two churches along with two others:

  • Westminster Abbey – from his preface to the eponymous guide published 1972
  • Paddington Station – Wheeler’s Quarterly Review, Spring 1968
  • King’s Cross Station – Wheeler’s Quarterly Review, Autumn 1969
  • St Pancras Station – Wheeler’s Quarterly Review, Winter 1969
  • Middlesex – Daily Telegraph, 12 August 1963
  • Bedford Park, Chiswick – Daily Telegraph, 22 August 1960
  • St Paul’s – Daily Telegraph, 25 May 1957

The article on Middlesex bemoans the encroachment and eventual swallowing up of what was once a fertile county by the ever spreading London conurbation, whilst Bedford Park is a purpose built Victorian suburb of the city which is largely praised for it’s overall plan. But it is his descriptions of the abbey, cathedral and magnificent railway stations that Betjeman really comes into his own.

May Day punting on the River Cherwell, Oxford by Thurston Hopkins

The other big difference to last week’s book is that this time we get out of England, visiting Wales, Scotland, Ireland and even the Isle of Man where he seems perfectly at home in a tiny country that always feels slightly more foreign than it’s location would suggest, enjoying the ceremony of Tynwald Day and the unspoilt countryside and of course the trains away from the crowds of holidaymakers in the capital, Douglas. It was a really fun read, even more enjoyable than ‘Trains and Buttered Toast’, the choice of longer articles than in that other book, especially the ones from Architectural Review, gave Betjeman more room to express himself and the selection by Lycett Green was impeccable letting her father’s writing shine through and including several of his poems.

The final picture in the book shows Sir John standing on the dunes at Trebethrick where he had a home and where he died in 1984. He was the only Poet Laureate to have already have been made a knight of the Realm before taking on the role, gaining the honour in 1969 before becoming Laureate in 1972.

John Betjeman at Trebethrick, Cornwall by June Brown

English Journey – J B Priestley

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It’s time again for my August themed books and for this year I’ve chosen to feature some titles from The Folio Society starting with English Journey by J B Priestley. Annoyingly for a month that requires four entries the society only produced three books in this short series from the 1990’s so I have added a logical fourth to round them out as the books themselves deserve attention. Especially this first title ‘English Journey’ which is a classic analysis of the state of England in the depression years and particularly the year 1933 when Priestley undertook his travels across the country. The photographs used in this Folio Society edition are from the 1984 Jubilee publication by William Heinemann Ltd although eight pictures from that version could not be obtained due to changes in copyright. The photos are all contemporary to the text, so from the 1930’s

Halifax Townscape by Bill Brandt 1936 – From the chapter ‘To the West Riding’

The book begins and ends in places largely untouched by The Great Slump which had decimated the industrial north and was triggered by The Great Depression in America from 1929 to 1933. Priestley set off to find out how England had been affected by the economic collapse without realising he was seeing it probably at its worst and he started off in the south of the country where he saw some economic decline in Southampton and Bristol, far less in The Cotswolds but then as he heads north through Birmingham and The Black Country and then into The Potteries and Yorkshire poverty increases along with the dirt and grime of industry both past and present. A quote from his chapter on The Potteries and that nebulous new city of Stoke On Trent which doesn’t have a city centre that can be recognised and still doesn’t to the confusion of anyone who visits there. Priestley keeps struggling to work out where he is.

But the general impression is of an exceptionally mean, dingy provinciality, of Victorian industrialism in its dirtiest and most cynical aspect. The look of these places bears no relation to the work that goes on in them. It seems to me to be monstrous that good craftsmen, whose families have been working for generations perhaps with Wedgewoods or Adams or Spode, should be condemned to live in such miserable holes as these.

In the next chapter ‘To Liverpool and Manchester’ the great wordsmith finds himself lost for words when trying to describe what he found in Liverpool and the deprivation he found in the slums there and determines that “Miserably I decided that somebody else must give a plain fair account of this great city, the task, in the time, was beyond me”

Notts County v Nottingham Forest – Nottingham Guardian newspaper 1931 – From the chapter ‘To Leicester and Nottingham’

But it’s not all doom and gloom, Priestley manages to attend a football match, has great fun making very poor attempts at creating pottery items in Stoke, goes to Nottingham Goose Fair and even see rehearsals for one of his plays being put on at The Palace Theatre in Manchester, He admires the Bourneville district of Birmingham along with Chipping Campden and Boston on market day But its in the dark oppressive places that he really comes into his own and I don’t think I’ve read such a powerful text on squalor and deprivation largely caused by the decline of industry in the early years of the 1930’s

Phoenix Passage in Dudley photographer unknown circa 1930 – from the chapter ‘To the Black Country’

The longest chapter is describing a trip to the West Riding of Yorkshire, specifically to Priestley’s birth town of Bradford where he had arranged to attend a gathering of survivors from the First World War of his old regiment. Priestley himself was invalided out of the front lines in 1916 when the trench he was in was hit by a mortar shell and very few of his old comrades from that time were still around and able to attend the reunion but he did meet some and according to his account of the event a good time was had by all. But it is in this section that Priestley’s anger at the conflict and loss of life which had ended just seventeen years earlier is most on display, and for me some of his best writing in the entire book is in this chapter, a small section of which is shown below.

This is not a hugely positive book, how could it be when it is dealing with the early part of the depression and the waste of skilled men desperate for non-existent jobs to earn money to feed their families or the still ongoing aftermath of WWI with broken men struggling to cope with mental and physical issues. I refer to men as this was still a time when the roles of the sexes were largely differentiated, yes Priestley encountered women at work, largely at repetitive manufacturing such as he found in Birmingham and The Potteries, but the heavy industries in the north were on their knees and it was men that were employed there bringing in the income. I encourage everyone to read this book, especially now as who knows where AI and robotics are going to take us. A lot more unemployment looks to be not that far ahead as manufacturing increasingly replaces humans with machines that can work twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. I had not thought of Priestley as a social commentator before, for me he was a playwright and novelist, but he is a powerful writer especially when he rails against injustice.