Showing posts from: February 2019
Westfield, an Antipodean Commercial Property Phenomenon
The Westfield business group, after its recent merger with a Franco-Dutch real estate Goliath made it the largest commercial real estate corporation in the world, has come a long way from its humble beginnings in Blacktown, NSW nearly 60 years ago.
⇡ Westfield development signage, 1960s (Source: ‘Westfield History’)
The story begins with two postwar Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. They both arrive in Sydney in the early 1950s and both separately start up small businesses in western Sydney. Frank Lowy and John Saunders (originally Jeno Schwarcz) come into each other’s world when Lowy would regularly deliver small items to Saunders’ milk bar. The two hit it off and in 1955 they combine their skill sets and open a delicatessen together in Blacktown (outer western suburbs of Sydney).
Lowy’s road from small goods deliverer to nation-wide/international mall king
In July 1959 Saunders and Lowy, having adopted the one-stop-shopping model of US retailing and recognising the population growth potential of western Sydney, open their first shopping centre – Westfield Plaza❈ in Blacktown [‘Australia’s retail history – Westfield Parramatta’, 29-Sep-2017, www.arc.parracity.nsw.gov.au]. With 12 shops, two department stores and a supermarket, “people flocked to see the plaza which newspapers of the day described as the most modern American-type combined retail centre” [Scentre Group, (history), www.scentregroup.com].
Westfield Plaza of itself was not anything like a full-blown shopping mall on the American scale, but it did launch Westfield✥ on its skyward trajectory. In 1960 the Westfield Development Corporation was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange as a public company. According to the gurus of applied finance, such has been Westfield’s phenomenal success in the commercial property game that “anyone who had the foresight to invest $1000 in the fledgling Westfield group back in 1960 and (then) reinvested all the dividends back into stock would have a holding valued at $136 million” (as at 2004) [‘Lowy’s retail revolution’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26-Apr-2004, www.smh.com.au ].
⇡ Burwood Westfield Shoppingtown, 1966
Westfield Hornsby shopping centre (1961) opened two years after Blacktown…by 2018 there were about 36 Westfields in Australia, the majority in the eastern coast states of NSW, Victoria and Queensland❂. In 1977 Westfield took the plunge and moved into the American market. The first US Westfield mall was the Trumbull Shopping Park in Connecticut…by 2005 there were Westfields in 15 American states, many clustered together in particular cities (in 2018 the total number of Westfield malls in the US was given as 33). Worldwide there are over 103 Westfield shopping centres including in the UK, New Zealand, Italy, Croatia and Brazil [‘Westfield Group‘, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
⇡ Westfield Eastgardens (NSW)
The Lowy/Westfield formula for success
Locating for growth: Unlike the mall pattern in America (developments on the edges of urban sprawl) Lowy and Saunders put their retail centre developments in places that were close to railway stations, in areas that were growing or were already built-up, allowing Westfield to “dominate the prime catchment areas for retail spending” [‘Sir Frank Lowy’s Great Australian success story’, Australian Financial Review, 14-Dec-2017, www.afr.com].
Westfield’s involvement in commercial property projects did not confine itself to solely building the shopping centre, but rather it retained an ongoing role in the venture through ownership of the investment portfolio. Thus, Westfield maintained a constant cash flow while its assets ensured it would be able to secure finance for future expansion. With the growth of department store retailing from the 1960s, it was specialist developers like the Westfield Group and Lend Lease who became the dominant players over time in the Australian landscape [‘Westfield’s history tracks the rise of the Australian shopping centre and show what’s to come’, (Louise Grimmer & Matthew Bailey), The Conversation, 13-Dec-2017), www.theconversation.com].
The challenge of online shopping
Lowy’s Westfield, like all 21st century retail industry players, has had to adjust to competing with the modern worldwide phenomena of the “digital revolution”. Large retail players losing market share to online sales have adopted strategies such as moving to “smaller, more carefully curated boutique stores in affluent areas” (eg, DJs, Debenhams UK), thereby severing their reliance on being inside big shopping malls [ibid.].
The advent of pop-up stores has also provided a challenge to established retail stores and malls in the 21st century. Uniqlo, In-N-Out Burgers, Niké, Nestlé, Coco-Cola, and numerous other businesses have established their pop-up presence in Australia over the last decade or so. The immediacy and flexibility of this retail mode have allowed them to drastically cut their overheads and take a share of the permanent entities’ market. Westfield’s response has been to rebrand its casual leasing division as the “Pop-up Department”, and thus making it easier for pop-ups to be accommodated within the Westfield shopping centre umbrella [ibid.].
⇡ Westfield Geelong (Vic.), 1986
In the face of growing online competition from e-commerce giants such as Amazon, the malls and large department stores have made concerted efforts to lure back lost customers…to take Westfield as an example again, the approach has been to try to enhance the in-store services available to customers, to provide “unique services and experiences” that would value-add to their visits in a way the online businesses couldn’t offer [ibid.]. This prompted a strategy change from Lowy◙, a refocus on “developing flagship stores in prime international retail sites, (and) developing shopping experiences, not just transactions”✦ [‘Sir Frank’ (AFR), loc.cit.].
The model for the new approach, as usual, has been the overseas malls, especially the US. These shopping enterprises, to entice the buying public to desert the online mode and return to the physical store, have taken to offering punters a new mix of leisure and entertainment options inside the malls. Shopping centres in Australia have already embraced some of these innovations⊙ (like upscale dining, cinema complexes, fitness clubs) and are certain to add many of the other mall features already in place in the US (eg, concert venues, day spas, art galleries, farmers’ markets) [Grimmer & Bailey, op.cit.].
Footnote: Remarkably on song as Frank Lowy’s business antennae has been, there have one or two lapses (over a sixty year span!) where Frank DID NOT emerge out of a deal with “laugh lines around his pocket” (a “Fred Daggism” (AKA John Clarke)) … probably the lowest point was Lowy trying to buy the TEN Network in the 1980s and getting his fingers badly burnt. Within the milieu of the mall Lowy has had a reputation for being a tough landlord. At one point Westfield Group was brought before the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) which found that Westfield had abused its market and commercial power. Lowy was forced to formally undertake to “not engage in unconscionable conduct and intimidation” of tenants [‘Westfield promises not to bully’, (Anthony Hughes), Sydney Morning Herald, 18-Jun-2004, www.smh.com.au].
⇡ Westfield’s founder & entrepreneurial driving force
PostScript: Nothwithstanding Westfield’s measures to try to counter the inroads made by the online merchandisers, Westfield, in line with the catch-all trend adversely affecting global retailing, had suffering a downturn in trade. Ultimately Lowy (and his sons) decided at the end of 2017 to sever their hold on the hitherto family business empire. Lowy meticulously and vigorously negotiated the sale of Westfield to international property giant Unibail-Rodamco, a societas Europaea (a public company set up under the auspices of the EU). The transaction netted the Lowy family a cool $32.7bn with the new merger entity taking the name Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield [‘Westfield: Lowy family sells shopping centre empire to French property giant’, (E Morgan & I Verrender), ABC News, 12-Dec-2017, www.mobile.abc.net.au].
▂▁▃▂▁▃▂▁▃▂▁▃▂▁▃▂▂▁▃▁
❈ some sources give the name as “Westfield Place”
✥ etymology: ‘West’ = the location in Sydney’s western suburbs \ ‘field’ = the first centre was located on subdivided farmland
❂ Burwood Westfield Shoppingtown (inner west Sydney) opened in 1966, was the first Westfield to carry the (now characteristic) company logo…it was also the first to contain a major department store – David Jones [1959 Westfield Place opens in Blacktown’, (Australian food history timeline), [www.australianfoodhistorytimeline.com.au]
◙ Westfield’s two-man partnership came to an end when co-founder John Saunders sold out his half of the business in 1987
✦ in 2014 the Westfield Group undertook a major organisational restructure, splitting into two entities – Scentre Group (Australasia) and Westfield Corporation (Europe and America)
⊙ the Chadstone Shopping Centre in Melbourne, for example, now has the Legoland Amusement Park within its walls
The Franco-British Union Redux …Version Deux
The prospect of Britain and France forming a union with each other in 1940 – albeit in the most desperate throes of a world war going horribly wrong for the allies – was of itself incroyable as the French would say, unbelievable, incredible, add any other appropriate adjective. But even more of a shock perhaps was that there was to be a redux, a second go at hoisting the exotic banner of a Franco-British Union (FBU) … in 1956, sixteen years after the first attempt, there was FBU Mach II.
This one, like the plan in the early period of World War II, was born out of a dangerous international crisis, this time over control of the Suez Canal which was vital to Western oil supplies. The year was 1956, the initiative (wholly one-sided on this occasion) came from embattled French prime minister, Guy Mollet. A tentative first step towards Franco-British coordination had been taken with the setting up of the Anglo-French Task Force to take counter-action against Nasser’s sudden act of nationalising the Canal✡.
The French Fourth Republic was confronted with a string of simultaneous, serious issues, both domestic and external to Metropolitan France. Firstly, on the home front, the country was beset with economic difficulties.
Added to these woes, France was deeply (and seemingly inextricably) mired in an increasingly toxic North African war – its colony Algeria was in a struggle with the French for independence from the colonial power – the Algerian War of Independence. And as already mentioned the Suez Crisis was on the point of escalation as France and Britain found themselves players in a deadly stand-off between Israel and its US ally on one side, and Colonel Nasser’s Egypt on the other.
⇲ The Algerian War (Source: AP)
Adding to Mollet’s Middle East anxieties, in the wake of the Suez Crisis, was a build-up of tensions on the Israeli-Jordanian Border. If that were to escalate, Mollet was worried that it might spill over into fighting between the French (allies of Israel) and Britain (allies of Jordan)…bringing London and Paris together at this time would bring a security measure against such an eventuality [When Britain and France nearly married’, (M Thomson), BBC News, 15-Jan-2007, www.bbcnews.co.uk].
In the midst of all this, Mollet, an affirmed Anglophile, made a huge call…he proposed in secret to his UK counterpart, Anthony Eden, that the two wartime allies (and erstwhile hereditary enemies) establish a political union. Mollet’s proposal entailed a common citizenship for both peoples and he ventured that French men and women would be prepared to accept Elizabeth II as their head of state. Eden and his cabinet immediately rejected Mollet’s offer out-of-hand…but there was a corollary from the French premier.
British Prime Minister RA Eden ↸
Completely out of left field, the French prime minister made a second request to Eden, this one an even more intriguing, mind-boggling proposition that France become a member of the British Commonwealth! The British PM apparently warmed to the idea of having the French in the. Commonwealth, telling Mollet that it would receive “immediate consideration”, but nothing eventuated from the proposition❉, leaving observers to muse on the curious theoretical conundrum of what might have been – eg, the exquisite contemplation of the British monarch adding “Queen of France“ to her list of titles! [‘Incroyable, but true … France’s 1956 bid to unite with Britain’, (Angelique Chrisafis), The Guardian, 16-Jan-2007, www.theguardian.com]. The proposal was short-lived in any case…as soon as the disastrous Anglo-French incursion floundered, Mollet abondoned the idea altogether [Thomson, loc.cit.].
The most surprising thing about this extraordinary episode is that nothing was known about it publicly until 2007! The documents relating to it in the possession of the British government were declassified in 1980 and then apparently forgotten more or less completly. They sat, gathering dust, in the National Archives in. London until discovered in 2007. The scoop was unearthed by BBC journalist Mike Thomson and the news met with amusement in the UK – the BBC scoffed at the notion, dubbing the proposed union ‘Frangleterre’ [ibid; Thomson, loc.cit.].
French Prime Minister G Mollet ↸
In France the disclosure precipitated an outcry. Responses were, not surprisingly, generally ascerbic. Many politicians and ex-politicians saw the revelation as outrageous, scandalous, and some even thought it amounted to an act of treason on Mollet’s part [Thomson, ibid.]. Intriguingly, a search of the French archives failed to turn up any trace of Mollet’s FBU proposal among the records.
PostScript: In the fallout of the crises, both leaders found themselves politically undone within twelve months…Eden, humiliated by the backdown over Suez, was forced out of the top job, and Mollet’s government collapsed after a public backlash at the disclosure that Mollet had approved counterterrorist tactics including torture against the Algerian rebels [‘Guy Mollet’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Epilogue: FBU: two 20th century manifestations of a desire for unification between France and the United Kingdom, one emerging in global war-time, the other out of an international crisis. In turn, the first initiated by one of the allies and subsequently rejected by the other, with the roles reversed and the same outcome in the second instance.
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✡ this was preparatory to Mollet and British PM Eden combining with Israel to launch an invasion force of Egypt
❉ one year later after the signing of the Treaty of Rome (1957), France became a founding member of the European Common Market (later EU)
The Incroyable Political Union of 1940, Part 2: Choosing Peace Without Honour and the Seeds of the Brits’ “Doing it My Way”
At a critical junction in the escalating crisis in France, Churchill and de Gaulle met at the Carlton Club in London on 16 June 1940. With an acute recognition of just how close and tangible French annihilation by the Nazi war machine was, the two men from each side of the English Channel agreed that union of the two countries was the necessary way forward. The agreed plan was for de Gaulle to take the British offer for an “indissoluble union” back to the French Council of Ministers (henceforth FCOM) for approval.
⬇️ Charles de Gaulle
Given the broken morale of the French army, an out-weaponised “spent force” utterly helpless to stop the Nazi Germany military machine from overrunning the country, surely the cabinet, as distasteful as the notion of a merger with Britain might sound to many patriotic French men and women, would endorse the proposal for a Franco-British Union (henceforth FBU) as the only viable, rational move available?
General Weygand – ‘minister’ for the opposition
The senior military officers back in France however were working to a different agenda. The opposition to an alliance between France and Britain was led by General Maxime Weygand. Weygand, the senior military man in France, used his influential position with members of the cabinet to intervene into the political sphere. Going beyond the limits of his (military) authority✻, Weygand made a concerted effort to undermine the case for union spearheaded by the premier Paul Reynaud.
Général d’armée
Weygand engaged in bullying, abusing and threatening of the undecided politicians until they acquiesced and rolled over into the camp of those favouring a separate armistice with Hitler [Philip C. F. Bankwitz. (1959). Maxime Weygand and the Fall of France: A Study in Civil-Military Relations. The Journal of Modern History, 31(3), 225-242. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1875584].
⬇️ The powerbroker (Weygand)
Weygand V Reynaud
Weygand resorted to various dirty tricks to overcome Reynaud’s efforts to get FCOM to accept Churchill’s offer, such as wiretapping the French premier’s phone which allowed the general to know what Reynaud was scheming with the deliberating ministers and stay one step ahead of him. Weygand also resorted to brandishing the spectre of a communist takeover if France didn’t sue for peace with Germany [Shlaim, A. (1974). Prelude to Downfall: The British Offer of Union to France, June 1940. Journal of Contemporary History, 9(3), 27-63. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/260024].
Tactically Weygand has it all over Reynaud in their head-to-head contest to sway the minds of the ministers. He exploited French fears and mistrust of forming an alliance with the English. Weygand could also count on the support of the vice-premier, the influential Marshal Pétain, to help defeat Reynaud’s plans. The Third Republic’s president (Albert Lebrun) was another unhelpful factor in the crisis’ equation – a stronger figurehead may have provided firm support to the government’s alliance objective, but Lebrun’s weak and ineffectual recourse was to merely try to appease all sides of the political crisis [ibid.].
Premier Reynaud for his part made a number of tactical errors that contributed to the failure of his objective. His omission in not inviting the British PM to the key FCOM meeting, denied the wavering ministers the opportunity to hear Churchill put the British pro-union case directly to them and let them gauge how genuine he was about FBU. While Weygand was actively busy rallying ministers to his side, Reynaud prevaricated way too long without taking decisive action◈ (ie, pushing FCOM at the earliest instance to reject the armistice path). Lacking the resolve to act, he tried to “manoeuvre and temporise” rather than tackle the issue (and Weygand) head on [ibid.]. The longer the cabinet crisis went on, the more the situation tilted towards the pro-armistice party.
An accumulation of Gallic doubts
As the military situation worsened daily in June 1940, the ministry found more and more reasons to reject the FBU route. De Gaulle detected an “extremely acute Anglophobe feeling” within the armistice collaborators, a feeling heightened by the French public’s anger at the fallout of the Dunkirk operation (viz the British abandonment of a large number of French POWs).
British motives were increasingly questioned by the French ministers …national pride was at sake for some like former PM Camille Chautemps who feared that agreeing to FBU would relegate France to the status of a British dominion, it was thought that the scheme was a ruse to allow Britain to get its hands on France’s colonial empire [ibid.]. There was a sense among the armistice party that if France made an early request for armistice with Germany, it would enhance the republic’s chances of receiving favourable terms. The mindset was typified in the ominous words of minister of state Ybarnégaray: “…better be a Nazi province; at least we know what that means”※[ibid.].
There was also a belief within the proponents of armistice, fostered by the French military hierarchy, that Britain itself was doomed, that the island’s demise at the onslaught of the Nazi juggernaut was inevitable…as Pétain put it, union with the UK would be committing France to “fusion with a corpse”. Another key advocate of armistice and German collaboration, Pierre Laval, (later vice-premier of the Vichy state) “fear-mongered” freely – disseminating the speculation that when the eventual peace negotiations came (after the defeat of FBU), it was France that would have to pay for the war! [ibid.].
⬇️ Marshal Pétain boards the Hitler train
The burden of swelling ‘defeatism’
As each day passed and with France’s military defence now non-existent, a wave of defeatism descended over the French people and the government. With the pro-armistice camp holding the dominant hand, minister Chautemps’ proposal that FCOM request a separate peace with Germany was effortlessly passed. The despairing Reynaud, sensing that further efforts for FBU were futile and also concerned at the prospect of a divided republic, fell on his sword, resigning immediately. Marshal Pétain hastily assumed the reins of government, thus beginning four years of Vichy proxy rule of France on behalf of Herr Hitler [ibid.].
Footnote: The road to Brexit?
When FBU failed to crystallise in 1940, Britain was left with the full realisation that it had to go it alone against Germany. To survive against such odds the UK looked west to the USA, not to Europe. Churchill and his government thereafter channeled its diplomatic energies towards enticing America into joining Britain’s war against Nazism๏.
Dominic Tierney has drawn a connecting line from the recent Brexit phenomena back to the events of 1940, a commonality of the impulse to go solo. Tierney sees the ‘Brexiteers’, those conservative proponents intent on exiting from Europe, as invoking the “spirit of Dunkirk” [‘When Britain and France Almost Merged Into One Country’, (Dominic Tierney), The Atlantic, 08-Aug-2017, www.theatlantic.com].
PostScript: an alternate history of the “Anglo-French Confederation”
The unfulfilled ‘destiny’ of FBU is a boon to the “what if?” school of history buffs who revel in imaginative reconstructions of past seminal events✥. Theoretical questions abound about FBU had it become a reality…eg, how would the new super-state reconcile the British monarchy with the French republic? Where would real power lie within FBU? How would the Napoleonic legal code mesh with the very different Anglo-Saxon legal system? What would the entity’s ‘indissoluble’ union (Churchill’s very problematic term) really mean in the long run? And so on and so on [‘What if Britain and France unified in 1940?’ (David Boyle), in Prime Minister Corbyn and other things that never happened, edited by Duncan Brack & Iain Dale, (2016)].
The notion of FBU, though stillborn in 1940, did raise its head yet again years later – see the following post in this series The Franco-British Union Redux …Mach II
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✻ to the point of directly and flagrantly disobeying the government’s directives, such as refusing point-blank to relocate to North Africa if a French government in exile was to be re-established there [Barkwitz, op.cit.]
◈ and the element of surprise had been lost for the FBU camp with the army tapping Reynaud’s conversations
※ in his postwar memoirs Reynaud soberly wrote: “Those who rose in indignation at the idea of union with our ally, were getting ready to bow and scrape to Hitler”
๏ later Churchill and Attlee governments both distanced themselves from the suggestion that they revisit the idea of union with France [Shlaim, op.cit.]. And the Eden government during the Suez Canal crisis flatly rebuffed a request from France for the two countries to ally
✥ the bona fide aficionado of “alt-history” salivates over the prospect of “what if happened” scenarios. There has been something of a tradition of detective novels hypothesising on different historical events, eg, Robert Harris’ Fatherland which rewrites the postwar world based on the premise that Hitler did not die and the Third Reich won the Second World War
The Incroyable Political Union of 1940, Part 1: Questions of Pragmatic Necessity and the Remoulding of a Future Europe
”The Governments of the United Kingdom and the French Republic make this declaration of indissoluble union and unyielding resolution in their common defence of justice and freedom, against subjection to a system which reduces mankind to a life of robots and slaves.”
~ British offer of Anglo-French Union, June 16, 1940
[Great Britain, Parliament, Parliamentary Debates, Fifth Series, Volume 365. House of Commons Official Report Eleventh Volume of Session 1939-40, (London, His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1940), columns 701-702.]
ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ
I first heard of this astonishing plan to politically unify Britain and France in WWII – to make French citizens British and British citizens French – in a television documentary broadcast on SBS – Churchill’s Bodyguard (2005)✻. The thought that these two Anciens rivaux of Europe nearly became one country seems, from this vantage point looking backwards, a simply incredulous thing to contemplate❂.
⍗ WSC (Source: PA)
The catalyst for the June 1940 proposal to fuse the two European allies was France’s military debacle: Nazi Germany launched a massive offensive into France in May and French forces offered scant resistance as the German Wehrmacht steamrolled on towards Paris with alarming speed. In late May the British Expeditionary Forces were evacuated from France, however the British left some 90,000 French troops in Dunkirk, abandoned to the fate of the conquering German army.
Before the crisis in the UK: Laying the groundwork for a federation
In the late 1930s, with threats to European stability and democracy emerging from both the Right and the Left, federalist ideas and sentiments started to gain currency within the UK. There was a thriving literature on the subject…liberal and socialist thinkers like William Beveridge, Lord Lothian and Lionel Curtis, were disseminating federalist ideas which were supported by many prominent politicians from both sides and by members of the Anglican Church. Andrea Bosco has drawn attention to the activism of a grass-roots movement known as the Federal Union which functioned as “a catalyst for (Federalist) ideas and behaviours“, generating popular backing in GB for the federal idea. French political economist Jean Monnet, as chair of the Anglo-French Coordinating Committee based in London, had the most developed perspective of the “Pan-Europeans”. Monnet took some of his inspiration from the vibrant British federalist movement and even discussed federalism with the then UK prime minster, Neville Chamberlain (more of Monnet later). Before the war a bill✫ was drafted at Chatham House◘ anticipating the Franco-British Union (henceforth FBU) [‘Britain’s forgotten attempt to build a European Union’, (Andrea Bosco), (London School of Economics & Political Science), 20-Jan-2017, www.blogs.lse.ac.uk].
M. Monnet ⍗
Proponents of FBU: the British
British PM Churchill, though harbouring doubts about the viability of the proposed union, was in the vanguard of the initiative. Churchill and the all-party UK war cabinet were desperate to stop the French capitulating to Hitler (failing that the PM deemed it imperative that the French fleet not fall into Nazi hands) [Shlaim, A. (1974). Prelude to Downfall: The British Offer of Union to France, June 1940. Journal of Contemporary History, 9(3), 27-63. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/260024].
The British offer of union, described by Shlaim as a deus ex machina, came when it did, as an attempt to mend the deteriorating relations between GB and France. Westminster, by making a “spectacular gesture of solidarity” with the beleaguered French, was hoping to silence the criticism within France of British motives. It was also intended to shore up the position of French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, who was the key political figure on the French side most in favour of the Union. By making common cause with France, the British were trying to raise French morale to stay in the fight against Germany and to discourage the Nazis. At the same time, by securing FBU with France, it hoped to entice to its side the “weak neutrals” of the Continent, away from the pull of the Third Reich. It would be wrong to assume everyone associated with the government in Britain was on board with Churchill’s scheme to fast-track an Anglo-French union…top Whitehall civil servant Sir Orme Sargent for instance felt the UK public was not ready for a union with France and urged it be delayed to after the war [ibid.].
Proponents of FBU: the French
Reynaud was the political face of the pro-FBU cause within the French ranks, but behind the scenes the concept was largely the brainchild of the aforementioned Jean Monnet. After the war Monnet’s untiring efforts at unification saw him identified as the “father of European integration”. In early 1940 as the war began to encroach closer and closer to France, Monnet was preoccupied with finding a way of avoiding the excesses of nationalism and militarism plaguing Europe. FBU was intended to be the “prototype of complete union” (Shlaim)…Monnet saw the surrender of national sovereignty by France and GB as the first step on the road to greater Europe’s supranational integration⌺. The incorporation of the two countries and economies was a starting point for the ultimate political unification of Europe. Monnet’s relentless advocacy of the merits of a “United States of Europe” postwar, helped to bear fruit with the creation of the Common Market and the European Community. 
Although, for the British participants in the drama, eventual European unification was not the rationale for making FBU happen, there were some on the English side of the channel who endorsed M Monnet’s integrationist ambitions, such as Professor Arnold Toynbee and Sir Arthur Salter. Even Churchill’s private secretary at the time was eyeing off the prospect of new openings and a shifting role for the UK – even going so far as to affirm that a union with France could be a “bridge to Europe and even World Federation” [‘When Britain and France Almost Merged Into One Country’, (Dominic Tierney), The Atlantic, 08-Aug-2017, www.theatlantic.com].
The consensus in the British block did not endorse Monnet’s visionary role for FBU, the hard-nose pragmatist view of Westminster was that, at that time of extreme and extraordinary peril, the union was purely one of expediency. The British offer was, in Avi Shlaim’s words, “no more than a last and desperate effort to keep France in the war against the common enemy” [ibid.] – a short-term objective only.
French military leader General de Gaulle (despite like Churchill harbouring some reservations about the concept) threw his weight behind FBU, believing it represented “a grand move to change history” [ibid.]. The linchpin for the Union’s success or otherwise came to hinge on secret talks between Churchill for the British and de Gaulle for the French. It was indeed an irony that on this occasion the “two patriotic statesmen, the symbols of independence and nationalism” (of their respective nations) were in synch with each other in seeking a supranational entity (Shlaim).
Like PM Reynaud, de Gaulle (still at this stage a junior minister in the French government) advocated FBU as the sole way forward because he wanted to fight on against the German invasion forces. Unfortunately for them (and the stricken French republic), the military high command and the majority of the French cabinet had other ideas. In the second part of this blog, we will look at how the events of June 1940 planned out and discover the fate of FBU and it’s postwar reverberations for Britain and France and for contemporary Europe as a whole.
Richard (the Lionheart) Plantagenet
Postscript: Incroyable or incredible as the prospect of an Anglo-French union in 1940 might seem to us today, it would not have been without precedent. The Norman and Plantagenet monarchs in England in the 11th through 13th centuries ruled what was in reality an Anglo-French state.
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✻ based on the memoirs of Winston Churchill’s long-time bodyguard, Walter H Thompson
❂ although the idea of an Anglo-French Union didn’t simply emerge out of thin air in 1940. The military alliance between the two countries in the face of the menace of an encroaching fascism in Europe had been taking shape since 1936…which in turn had built on the 1904 Entente cordiale, agreements which formally ended centuries of on-again, off-again Franco-English conflict [Mathews, J. (1941). The Anglo-French Alliance and the War. The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 21(4), 351-359. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/42865013; ‘Franco-British Union’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
✫ Act of Perpetual Association between the UK and France
◘ a London “think tank” known officially as the Royal Institute of International Affairs
⌺ M Monnet was an unapologetic Anglophile, having lived and worked in London for part of his career he admired the British welfare system and had a sincere appreciation of GB’s assistance to France in two world wars
Man V Sheepdog: A Sample Bag of Life on a South Island Sheep Farm
We booked into Rydges Hotel in Queenstown✲, New Zealand’s capital of adventure tourism. Whitewater rafting, bungy jumping and Jet Shotovers beckoned, but as our hotel was handily situated in proximity to the wharf on picture perfect Lake Wakatipu, something more sedate – a leisurely boat trip across its glistening waters – was what took our immediate fancy.
From the Queenstown wharf we caught the vintage twin screw steamboat TSS Earnslaw❁…the journey was a complete step back in time…a slow and leisurely ride across Lake Wakatipu with the boat chugging along at a 1924 pace. No one on board much minded the pedestrian progress we were making. The only downside to the trip was trying to avoid inhaling the vessel’s toxic nasties, trying to survive the vile fumes of black smoke emitted from the steamer’s coal-fired boilers pervading the air inside the Earnslaw.
Once at Walter Peak High Country, we were immediately taken on a guided tour of the working farm. We got up close with the farm’s various livestock – Scottish Highland cattle, red deer, lambs and some adaptable llamas. My favourite critters on the farm were the “hairy coos” as they are called in Scotland. These Erse ‘Heilan’ cows, sandy-golden-tan in colour and rather soporific in nature, were a delight with their full coats of shaggy hair endearingly covering their eyes.
My highest highlight of the tour however was the demonstration of rounding up and penning a drove of sheep. This was made memorable by the antics of the leathery-faced old shepherd guy and his “Abbott and animal Costello” routine with the farm’s working border collie. The old farmer was a real joker, entertaining us with his dry commentary which bore more than a touch of the John Clarke quippery – and the same flat deadpan delivery. To start the show, he barked out instructions to the collie to tear madly all over the top paddock fetching the grazing sheep. After terrorising and cajoling the sheep into one cowering bunch, the dog efficiently corralled them into the enclosure at the south end. Then, with mission accomplished, the farmer, with comic timing and mock annoyance, remarked of the still heavily panting dog, “I don’t know why he’s so tired! I’m the one who does all the work”!
The one-liners didn’t stop when the farmer donned his “shearing kit”, the blue and red overalls of his defleecing trade, to do some serious bladework. With a couple of hand-picked Romneys, he demonstrated (with accompanying audio) how to give a sheep the “Full Monty” crew cut! I’m not sure if the sizeable cohort of Japanese tourists on hand were sufficiently au fait with ‘Kiwised’ English to get the gist of the demonstrator’s jokey spiel and all the nuances of his wry humorous asides, but they generally seemed to sense the comic implications of the situation and enthusiastically laughed accordingly.
The other stand-out feature of the visit, the afternoon tea, was held in the Colonel’s Homestead, an elegant turreted terracotta red and white building set against the impressive backdrop of the towering Walter Peak. The high tea worked a treat with very generous servings of scones and pikelets and the obligatory jam and cream, all washed down with a nice cuppa. Afterwards, a leisurely lakeside stroll through the homestead’s très picturesque English-style gardens set the seal on a great day’s outing.
Time passed at the right pace on the return journey in the Earnslaw to Rydges – the tour operator organised a traditional sing-a-long to the accompaniment of the boat’s period-piece piano. We were given a complimentary “NZ Song Book” and encouraged to join in. The songs were every bit as vintage as the 1912 vessel and only a bit cringeworthy, but hey it was all part of setting an authentic mood for a momentary step back into yesteryear.
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✲ Kiwi anecdote # 379 – No double entendres please, we’re New Zealanders! The Queenstown Rydges’ street entrance unusually is on the building’s fourth floor, owing to a bit of a ridge in the landscape where it was built. Our room was on the sixth floor. Returning to the hotel on the first night of our stay, I decided to walk up the stairs (only two flights) to our floor. Perplexingly though when I reached the top of the stairs on the fifth floor, I couldn’t see the staircase which led to the next floor, our floor! It was not where it should (logically) have been. I scouted around level 6 for a bit but weirdly the staircase couldn’t be sighted. So, puzzled, I went back to the fourth floor to ask reception. The attractive young, blonde Pakeha woman on duty responded to my query in a slightly patronising tone, reserved I imagine, for the utterly clueless…she said to me firmly: “Sir-r-r-r, we are a very normal hotel in Queenstown, we always have sux here between five and seven”. Realising that the immediate implication I had drawn from what she had said, had not for one scintilla dawned on her, I was sorely tempted but managed to restrain myself from replying, thanks very much for telling me when, all that’s missing now is where! Ba-boom!
❁ the Earnslaw briefly popped up in the movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) as an Amazon River boat(sic)
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New York – Once was (Briefly) “Nieuw Oranje”
America’s greatest city, the vast metropolis of New York, can claim an interesting and varied history of nomenclature. Until the English hold on New York was established permanently in the late 17th century (permanently that is until the American Revolution!), the settlement changed hands and names several times.
⇩ Manhattan Island 
Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of the early colonial period of America will know the early Dutch association with the area of New York. Based on the earlier exploration of the area by Henry Hudson, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) established a trading post on the southern tip of Manhattan island in 1624. The Dutch named the post New Amsterdam✲, the capital of its American colony Nieuw Nederlandt (New Netherland) – comprising an area including the hub of modern-day New York City, a strip of upstate New York including Beverwijck (now Albany), centre of the WIC fur trade, part of Connecticut and New Jersey and bits of the coastline down to the Delaware.
⇧ 17th century map of Nieuw Nederlandt
The English already had a foothold on Long Island and were keen on securing New Amsterdam and New Netherland for themselves…the English king Charles II granted his brother James, Duke of York rights to a large chunk of land on the Atlantic Seaboard. James duly launched an invasion fleet in 1664. Under pressure, the unpopular Dutch governor Pieter Stuyvesant failed to muster any significant support for its defence and was forced to surrender the settlement without any bloodshed. The occupying English force renamed it New York in honour of the Duke and future king of England and Ireland, James II. Richard Nicholls became the New York colony’s first governor.
A much less familiar fact is that New York was known by two other names at different periods in its history. The first European to set eyes on New York harbour was Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524 …. Verrazzano named the place New Angoulême after his patron Francis I of France (formerly the Count of Angoulëme). Verrazzano never attempted to establish a settlement there✥.
Manhattan Transferred
In 1673 during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, a sizeable Dutch fleet led by Admiral Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest AKA Keesje de Duivel (“Little Cornelis the Devil”) and Jacob Benckes, turned up in New York harbour, demanding the city be surrendered to it. Evertsen knew from intelligence gathered that the English governor (Francis Lovelace) was absent and the settlement’s defences were in a shabby state with Fort James being poorly garrisoned. After a brief military flexing of muscle by the Dutch, the English acting commander surrendered without resistance – in a reversal of the events and results of 1664! [‘The End of New Netherland’, (American History From Revolution to Reconstruction and beyond’), www.let.rug.nl].
New York was renamed Nieuw Oranje (New Orange) in honour of the Prince Willem of Orange (ironically the future King William III of England and Ireland). The officer commanding the Dutch land forces, Captain Anthonij Colve, was appointed governor-general of the restored Dutch colony. The Dutch coup was short-lived however, within a year the English had regained the settlement through the Treaty of Westminster – by which the Netherlands received Suriname in South America as a swap. New York was New York again – this time for good!
PostScript: New York by metonym✪ or other informal name
Aficionados of mainstream American popular culture know Gotham or Gotham City as the supposed abode of the superhero Batman, courtesy of the long-running DC comic strip-cum-TV and film series (Gotham City is modelled on NYC albeit evoking the darkest possible manifestation of the city). The original attribution of ‘Gotham’ to New York however long predates the Batman phenomenon (the first Batman comic hit the book stalls in 1939). Its genesis was a creation of the mind of celebrated 19th century writer Washington Irving…Irving first referred to Gotham/NYC in a satirical periodical on New York culture and politics, Salmagundi, in 1807, and the association caught on with the public [‘Gotham City’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
There are a host of other nicknames for New York but by far the most popular, the most affectionate, is “the Big Apple”. The term gained currency on provincial racecourses circa 1920 and was made popular by newspaper reporter John Fitz Gerald, [‘Why is New York City nicknamed the “Big Apple”?, Elizabeth Nix, 23-Jul-2014, www.history.com].
As The New York Times‘ Sam Roberts remarked of the city’s Dutch name of 1673/1674:
(New York) “was the Big Orange before it was the Big Apple”! [quoted in ‘When New York was officially named New Orange’, Ephemeral New York, 07-Mar-2011, www.ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com].
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✲ the colonists followed this later by naming the adjacent island, present-day Long Island, Nieuw Amersfoort
✥ leaving aside the undocumented and speculative claim made on behalf of Norseman Lief Ericsson who may conceivably have been the first to visit the site of New York over 1,000 years ago
✪ metonym: the use of a (descriptive) name in place of the proper) name because it is closely associated (eg, the “White House” in lieu of the US Presidential Palace)