Elite Sport in the Age of COVID-19: A Sporting World in Hibernation

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Society & Culture, Sport

The spectacle of sport—either viewed from the bleachers, the corporate box, or beamed into punters’ lounge rooms—is in a COVID-induced drought just about everywhere in the world. The sports’ governing bodies find themselves in the “Twilight Zone”, sustaining a massive hit to their revenue sources and at the same time desperately trying to keep their sport relevant to the aficionados. How well they’ve managed to keep their heads above water varies from sport to sport and from country to country.

All the world’s domestic cricket leagues are in indefinite abeyance and all upcoming test fixtures have had the red-ink drawn through them. National bodies like the ACB (Cricket Australia), suddenly with time on their hands, have more carefully examined their finances and discovered worrying “bottom-lines”. Many are anxiously pondering how they are going to connect all the dots moving forward (as they say). Meanwhile, international cricket’s online bible, ESPN Cricinfo, has taken to filling its content with nostalgia trips  – substituting the now non-existent live scores with scoresheets of some of the more memorable past world cups.

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Boxing has also delved back into the sport’s history, not to re-project grainy footage of epic bouts from the pugilistic past onto screens, but to stage simulations of the fights that could never be …pitting the heavyweight greats of different eras against each other in contests to ‘decide’ who is boxing’s GOAT, leaving fans to agree or disagree with the computerised outcome. The overriding objective, to keep the fans’ appetites whetted – until the actual thing becomes a reality again. Motorsport, with the Formula One series a non-starter, has followed boxing into simulation substitution, staging its first “Virtual Grand Prix”, E-racing proving a real hit for for the “petrol-head” fandom [‘Coronavirus: The sports turning to gaming during lockdown’, (Joe Tidy), BBC News, 26-Mar-2020, www.bbc.com/]. In contrast to boxing, the theatricality of professional wrestling in the US gets the go-ahead…in Florida at least that’s the case, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has deemed WWE wrestling an “essential service” to Floridians and has has given the ‘sport’ his gubernatorial blessing✱ [‘Pro wrestling company WWE is an essential business during the coronavirus pandemic, Florida Gov. DeSantis says’, (Yelena Dzhanova), CNBC, 14-Apr-2020, www.cnbc.com].

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(Image: virtuair.com)

The rugby codes have pulled down the shutters everywhere the game with the odd-shaped football is played. In Australia the 15-a-side game, rugby, has had its ongoing revenue source cut off, like everywhere else, but the difference is the ARU (Rugby Australia) was already in a parlous financial situation…before the virus hit. Now the code in Australia is undergoing an existential crisis, its own trial-by-fire. For the bedevilled ARU, massive player pay-cuts plus a wholesale bail-out from the IRB is the most likely end-game. The rugby league variant of football is in a state of flux as well. With the NRL, the sport’s national body, discovering that, despite its annal multi-million dollar TV and Foxtel revenue streams, it has found its cash reserves are sorely depleted. The NRL at least has a plan for restarting games, which it has styled the “Apollo Mission”. Mustering up the unilateral front of a Donald Trump, it announced early in April that it’s target date to resume playing was 28th May. Unfortunately, it didn’t consult with the relevant government authorities before taking this solo step. Given that, a) the state borders remain closed in Australia, and b) rugby league is a heavy body contact sport, the NRL’s 28th May quest may just turn out to be “mission impossible”. South of the Murray River, the AFL, custodian of the football code known colloquially as “Aussie Rules”, having formed a coronavirus ‘cabinet’ to chart the way forward is thinking aloud about different options for a possible winter restart (another “watch this space” scenario) [‘Mid-winter return likely for AFL restart after coronavirus shutdown’, (Mark Duffield), The West Australian, 17-Apr-2020, www.thewest.com.au].

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(Source: ESPN.com)

Interestingly, about the only sport in Australia at the elite level given the green-light to continue is horse-racing (and it’s offshoot harness racing) – sans on-course spectators❂. This is perhaps surprising considering that horse-racing seems to fail the social distancing test (involving as it customarily does a conga-line of 16 jockeys in pretty close proximity). But the so-called “Sport of Kings”, if no longer seeped in the landed aristocracy, is intimately connected with the corporate “Mr Bigs” of society. Considering this and the kind of very serious money thoroughbred racing attracts, that it’s managed to secure a special exemption shouldn’t really surprise. Money talks, as the cliche goes [‘Why racing is so keen to avoid shutting its doors’, (Damien Ractliffe), Sydney Morning Herald, 25-Mar-2020, www.smh.com.au].

The sports calendar’s prospects for the rest of 2020 are looking at the moment pretty much a blank slate. Most of the sporting tournaments around the globe once the COVID-19 crisis, were catapulted into a state of suspended animation… some not officially abandoned at this stage but just kind of hovering in the ether, nothing really happening. After much hand-wringing Japan and the IOC finally swallowed a bitter dose of reality and pulled the plug, postponing the Tokyo Olympics for 12 months (although it’s still going to be called the 2020 Olympics whatever year it’s done). This year’s Wimbledon has been cancelled, so the strawberries and cream set will need to find another diversion for June-July. US basketball and baseball were among the first franchises to be halted. The US Masters has been canned for the year and the remaining golf majors have been postponed to a (fingers-crossed) TBA date. The IPL was postponed indefinitely but the scale and magnitude of India’s struggle against the coronavirus doesn’t bode well for its 2020 chances. The cricket T20 World Cup for later this year, a case of wait and hope.

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🔺 In a game in Brazil in March before pro-football was suspended, the Gremio team took the field wearing masks to protest the dangers players were exposed to during the pandemic 

What of the world game, football, what’s it’s current state of play? Well, just as gloomy in the main, all of the world’s major leagues have been suspended. The showcase EPL is optimistically hoping to resume in summer, none of the clubs more so than Liverpool FC, which having dominated the season up to the disruption, sit tantalisingly close but still short of claiming the league title. But world soccer is not entirely without ‘premier’ league football in the time of coronavirus. A handful of maverick countries have ploughed on regardless, or should I say, in disregard (or even denial) of the virus crisis. Belarus, with it’s “gung-ho” president, continues to play football⊰ – in stadiums with supporters in attendance, shoulder-to-shoulder, despite having recorded nearly 4,800 corona cases to date. The Vysshaya Liga, virtually unknown outside Belarus prior to the crisis, has by default, been elevated implausibly to the centre of the football universe. Fans from other soccer-starved countries like England have adopted Belarusian teams and now keenly follow the fortunes of these proxy clubs from afar. Both Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, the governments of which have buried their heads in the sand over the COVID-19 pandemic, have followed Belarus’s lead in keeping their peoples sated with bread and association football [‘In Belarus, unlike most places, soccer plays on despite virus’, (Yuliya Talmazan), NBC News, 20-Apr-2020, www.nbcnews.com].

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🔺 Taiwanese baseball: synthetic “seat-fillers”, creating the illusion of making the stadiums look less empty during games (Photo: Cronkite News)

Some mass-supported sports played a few games behind closed gates before calling a halt to the season due to the pandemic. Many of the players commented on the strangeness and the flatness, the lack of atmosphere in the games. Taiwan, one country which has managed an effective response to coronavirus, has come up with a novel and innovative way of countering this problem. The country’s new baseball season opened a week ago with a ban on spectator attendance…in a bizarre move the organisers  have installed dummies and cardboard cut-outs of fans in the bleachers, a contrivance intended, I guess, to make the players out on the diamond feel like they’re not all alone [‘Dummies replace fans at baseball in Taiwan’, Reuters, 14-Apr-2020, www.mobile.reuters.com].

Postscript:  Odd man out in the Americas
All the football-obsessed countries of Latin America have suspended their 2020 competitions due to the Covid-19 crisis except one, Nicaragua. The refusal of the Central American state’s president, Daniel Ortega, to halt Liga Primera soccer games (and other sporting events) is in keeping with his general, ‘ostrich’ stance of not taking any preventive measures against the pandemic✧ [‘Nicaragua Not Backing Down Despite Criticism Over Lax Measures During Pandemic’, (Carrie Kahn), NPR, 18-Apr-2020, www.npr.org] .

⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳⬳

✱ which no doubt pleased President Trump, a longtime friend of WWE head ‘honcho’ Vince McMahon
❂ horse-racing has been suspended in New Zealand, the UK, Ireland and South Africa among others, but still receives the thumbs-up in horseracing-crazy Hong Kong and California
⊰ and ice hockey, another favourite game of the president
✧ the only other country that didn’t close down it’s domestic football competition, the tiny African nation of Burundi, finally called a temporary halt to matches earlier in April

Forecasting a Violent Reprisal on the Home Front: The Weathermen, the US’s Own Home-grown Proto-Terrorists

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Politics, Popular Culture, Regional History, Society & Culture

I remember where I first heard about the Weatherman, or as they later came to be called, the Weather Underground (Organisation). Some time during the 1970s I was thumbing through the pages of the 1973-74 edition of Pears Cyclopaedia❈ and came across an entry on this oddly named group subsumed under the section on “Ideas and Beliefs”…the meteorological sounding name triggered my curiosity. As the Pears editor noted of the name: a “rather incongruous name for the most radical and volatile of the many groups making up the so-called ‘underground’ in the United States of America“⊡.

What most struck the editor about the phenomenon was that “the Weathermen appear(ed) to be largely drawn from the highly intelligent and well-educated strata…well-to-do, academic backgrounds”, something Pears opined to be “sinister and ominous” (a hint toward class betrayal perhaps?). The entry goes on to explore a classic conspiracy theory, the “fantastic speculation, widely held in America” that “the Weathermen are in reality financed and backed by the country’s extreme right—as a means of discrediting in the public eye the slow but steady move toward socialism that seems to be developing there”(?!?). The Pears writer adds a coy reference to one of the leaders of the group (unnamed), “an attractive and dynamic woman university lecturer (who in 1970) was placed on the FBI’s notorious ‘most wanted criminals’ list”✥.

(Source: Yale University)

The origins of the Weather Underground lie in the tumultuous politics of Sixties America—the emergence of the “New Left” and the “Counterculture”, the struggle for civil rights and the growing anti-war movement of those disaffected by the growing catastrophe of Vietnam. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had assumed the mantle of leadership of the “youth rebellion” in America and of the anti-war movement. The Weathermen, dissatisfied with the SDS’s limited, reformist approach to curing the ills of modern capitalist society (with its emphasis on disruption and non-violent student demonstrations), split off from the SDS, who they labelled “movement creeps”, in 1969. After the Chicago “Days of Rage” riot, the Weathermen determined on a new, direct and revolutionary approach to changing a society that they avowed hatred for.

Bombed interior of Capitol (Wash DC) (Photo: Washington Post) 🔻

1970 was the year that domestic terrorism embarked on a rapid upward trajectory in the US. The catalyst for the Weathermen adopting a more extreme line was Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War into Laos and Cambodia and the Kent State student murders. The fringe policos went underground and turned ‘outlaws’. “Declaring war on the United States”✪, the network operating in small clandestine cells launched a series of bomb attacks on targeted sites—police stations, court houses, military installations, banks, the Capitol and Pentagon buildings in Washington DC, etc. Weather Underground attached the tag-line “bringing the war back home” to this serious switch of tactics.

1971, the assault on the “Amerikan war machine” continues

The following year brought no let-up by the Weather arsonists and incendiaries. The International Association of Chiefs of Police declared 1971 the worst year for bombings in US history. Despite causing such upheaval, the Weathermen failed abjectly to achieve any of their avowed aims [Daniels, Stuart. “The Weathermen.” Government and Opposition, vol. 9, no. 4, 1974, pp.430-459. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44482282. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020].

A giant fail

The Weather faction (WUO) failed for a multiplicity of reasons fundamentally arising out of a muddled understanding of how to effectively use political discontent to build a mass movement. The Weathermen aspired to be the revolutionary vanguard to lead the revolution that overthrew US imperialism and capitalist society. Yet it laid none of the groundwork necessary to achieve it! WUO established no popular support base for its leadership and it stayed numerically small, a “Prairie Fire” that failed to ignite!₪

Finally, in 1974, the folly of this omission was recognised within Weather and some members tried to re-orient the organisation to a policy focused on wooing the American working class. The hardliners in WUO however resisted and predictably clung to the old guerrilla war tactics, with the result of a splintering and further weakening of Weather [‘How the Weather Underground Failed at Revolution and Still Changed the World’, (Arthur M Eckstein), Time, (02-Nov-2016), http://time.com].

Rather than the Weathermen’s actions and tactics leading to a crystallisation of the (new) left in America as a cohesive force, its recourse to the nihilism of violence, the pattern of random bombings, alienated it from other sections of the far left such as SDS (Daniels). The greatest damage of the group’s bombings in fact was a self-inflicted one, when three of the Weathermen accidentally blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970⊕.

🔺 Scene of the WUO terrorists’ backfiring bomb (Source: Bettmann/Getty Images)

The middle-class dilemma

The Weathermen were essentially middle-class kids who took inspiration from grass-roots radicals and authentic working class militants like the Black Panthers. Therefore, they knew that to be taken seriously they needed to lose the bourgeois tag, to ‘declass’ themselves (to use Michael Miles’ term). Hodgdon has suggested that they were motivated partly by the “guilt arising from members’ acute consciousness of their own white privilege” [Hodgdon, Tim. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 144–146. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41887583. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020]. The outcome was a resort to high focus violence by WUO which it equated with the demonstration of revolutionary commitment. Ultimately, violence became a habitual self-indulgence for the Weathermen. Fascinated with the idea of terrorism per se, their actions became more anarchic and nihilistic and only served to further isolate them from Middle America (Daniels).

Weather logo 🔺

A junket of romance and fantasy

Students of the WUO phenomena have noted how remarkably detached the group was from the realities of contemporary USA. Exhibiting a romantic view of Third World Liberation Movements, importing the urban-guerrilla tactics of the Tupamoros of Uruguay, of whom the Weathermen were only ever pale imitations. For ideological underpinnings, the Weathermen cherrypicked from Marxist political theory (Mao, Guevara, Marighella, Debray, etc) to forge a blueprint for extreme militant action. The often immature and at times infantile Weather members revelled in their status as deviants in society…and in their notoriety as politicised “bad-boy rock stars” of crime. Clearly, more than a few of the members gained a huge thrill from being publicly portrayed as fugitives, enemies of the state [‘”Prairie Fire” Memories’, (Jonah Raskin), Tablet, 18-Jul-2019, www.tabletmag.com].

🔺 The character “Mark Slackmeyer” in Garry Trudeau’s ‘Doonesbury’ comic is based on Weatherman Mark Rudd

Their ready resort to acts of violence was one manifestation of this, as was their indulgence in drug-taking (wholeheartedly embracing LSD and ‘grass’) and “free love” as integral to what they saw as liberating themselves from the strictures of a rigid and corrupt society (Daniels).

PostScript: Weather Underground, fade to black

Having failed to make the slightest dint on the fortress of the American political and economic elite, the Weathermen reduced their bombing acts after 1971 and continued to scale back through the rest of the seventies. The Weather Underground lingered on for several years before eventually petering out. This however did not stop the FBI from pursuing the home-grown terrorists long after they had ceased to be active. As Eckstein noted, the FBI’s responses to the Weather phenomena had caused the Bureau embarrassment. The FBI, the nation’s chief law enforcement organisation, continued to get them wrong…initially they underestimated Weather’s seriousness as a hostile element, then they overestimated its effectiveness. The FBI persisted with a misreading of their strength, thinking there were around 1,000 Weathermen guerrillas at large in the US, overstating the reality by a factor of ten. The FBI also illegally botched the evidence against the group so none of the Weathermen could be prosecuted for conspiring to bomb government buildings [‘The Americans who declared war on their country’, (Mark Honigsbaum), The Guardian, (21-Sep-2003), www.theguardian.com ; Eckstein, Time; ‘Bad Moon Rising’, AM Eckstein, www.yalebooks.yale.edu].

⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉

❈ an annual British publication (first published 1897, now discontinued), a one-volume compendium of general and specialised knowledge in a select number of different fields

⊡ the original name, ‘Weatherman’, was taken from the lyric of a 1960s Bob Dylan song

✥ Bernadine Dohrn – who with Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Jeff Jones, Trevor Robbins, Kathy Boudin, Karen Ashley, Howie Machtinger and John Jacobs, founded the Weathermen. Jonah Raskin points out that a significant number of the members were, like him, Jewish (Raskin). Dohrn also headed up a Women’s Brigade within WUO

✪ a ‘symbolic’ war as Todd Gitlin described it

₪ Prairie Fire was the name of WUO’s 1976 published political statement, and a metaphor that the organisation was fond of using (eg, “a single spark can start a prairie fire”)

⊕ the three WUO bomb assemblers were the only victims of Weathermen bomb explosions as the group always forewarned the target locations so that humans could be evacuated from the spot in time

The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co: An American Business Venture in the Colonial Australian Outback – Part I

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Old technology, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History, Society & Culture

❝Such days as when the Royal Mail was run by Cobb & Co❞ ~ Henry Lawson

🌀-🌀-🌀

Cobb and Co is a name that still has much currency within Australian and New Zealand society. In New South Wales in the rural tourist industry there is the “Cobb & Co Heritage Trail” which invites travellers to take the “historical self-drive” following the outback route from Bathurst to Bourke that the celebrated erstwhile coach service once trekked. Queensland holds a Cobb & Co festival each year to honour the historic Surat to Yuleba route. There are touring bus and coach businesses operating that have also appropriated the name…in addition there are “Cobb & Co hotels” and “Cobb and Co bottle shops” scattered around regional areas of the eastern states※.

⇓ Cobb & Co Heritage Trail

All of this is testimony to the fame of the original Cobb & Company which was once a household transport name, etching for itself a place in the folklore of Australia’s outback regions. The company’s story begins in the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s. In 1853 the American Adams & Co coach firm despatched Freeman Cobb and three American colleagues⚀ to Melbourne with the objective of establishing a local operation which would capitalise on the hordes of fortune seekers flocking to the Victorian gold rushes. As things transpired, Cobb ended up starting his own coach service together with the other Americans🔰, thus was born Cobb & Co.

Freeman Cobb ⇑ (Photo: www.geni.com)

The first trip (January 1854) of Cobb & Co carrying passengers, goods and equipment went from Collins Street (Melbourne city) to the Forest Creek goldfields (now Castlemaine) and to Bendigo✫. Cobb & Co was a winner pretty much from the outset…by 1856 the company was worth £16,000 (in 2011 values around $2.1 million). Freeman Cobb however didn’t stick around to see the full flowering of it’s success, after three years he sold out of his eponymous company, moving on to other (less successful) ventures. Cobb & Co changed hands a couple of times, and then in 1861 it was purchased by a consortium of nine US and Canadian businessmen for £23,000 ($3.4m in 2011) [‘Cobb & Co: historical transport’, (Kathy Riley), Australian Geographic, 18-Oct-2011, www.australian geographic.com.au].

The driving force of the firm under the consortium was another American immigrant, James Rutherford. Rutherford began by organising all of the company’s lines (the different routes), making them more profitable concerns. Under his leadership Cobb & Co expanded into NSW and Queensland (the NSW operations were based at Bathurst). At the company’s peak in the 1870s, it’s coaches were covering a distance of nearly 45,000km a week with routes stretching from the very top of Queensland (the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cooktown) down to southern Victoria [ibid.; ‘In the Days of Cobb & Co’, Sydney Mail, 20-Apr-1921, www.trove.nla.gov.au]. As one one chronicler of the iconic transport company’s story observed, Cobb & Co was many things combined – “the Qantas, the Australia Post, the TNT and the Holden of its day” [Sam Everingham, Wild Ride, The Rise and Fall of Cobb and Co, (2007)].

James Rutherford ⇓

(Photo source: State Library of Queensland)

What accounted for Cobb & Co’s spectacular success in the coach transportation business?

The decisive factors were manifold but basically Cobb & Co beat it’s competitors in several logistical areas. It’s coaches were faster and more efficient…while the rivals used heavy, rigid English coaches for their runs, Cobb imported American Concord coaches (made in New Hampshire and used in the American West) which were rounded and lightweight and had supple coach bodies – far more suited to the rugged Australian landscape than the cumbersome English coaches. Consequently Cobb & Co’s coaches gave a smoother, faster ride [Riley, loc.cit.] (the Concords, though superior, apparently didn’t always deliver that smooth a ride as they were known colloquially as the “red bone-shakers”).

A replica C & C Concord coach on display at Timbertown, NSW ⇓

The Concord coaches were fitted with leather braces and straps in place of the inflexible iron ones used on other horse-drawn vehicles which had a tendency to snap too easily (leather also provided greatly superior suspension for the carriage). Concord coaches were made to last the rugged journey and so contributed to a reputation for reliability that the Cobb service was able to establish [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.].

A master stroke by Cobb was to establish a series of changing stations every 16-32km along the routes. This gave Cobb & Co journeys the big advantage of always having fresh horses, enabling the drivers to maintain high speeds over long distances.

Cobb & Co coachmen – risky adventures, pitfalls and hazards of the job

The drivers themselves employed by the company were possessed of extraordinary skills in managing their horses and vehicles. They had to be to negotiate all the difficulties and obstacles in their paths and still keep on schedule…atrocious roads made worse by inclement weather, flooding of creeks and rivers, and unpredictable encounters with dangerous bushrangers◘, were all recurring events that challenged the mettle of the coach drivers. The dangers aside, experiencing the thrills and (near) spills and the full-on ‘wildness’ of a Cobb & Co journey through “the bush”, must have been an exhilarating experience for colonial travellers in the day.

Many of the drivers, some of which Cobb and (later) Rutherford recruited from the US, were colourful characters in addition to being accomplished horse handlers…blokes such as Dick Houston, Jim Conroy, ‘Silent’ Bob Bates, H Barnes, and not least “Cabbage Tree” Ned Devine. Devine, with his team of distinctive light grey horses, was by all accounts a particularly exceptional driver (earning himself a very good wage of £17 a week)…when the first English cricket team toured Australia (HH Stephenson’s, 1862), Devine was their driver on the Victorian leg of the tour [K. A. Austin, ‘Devine, Edward (Ned) (1833–1908)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/devine-edward-ned-3405/text5169, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 31 May 2019].

Ned ‘Cabbage Tree’ Devine ⇓

(Photo source: State Library of Victoria)

Similarly, Cobb & Co’s grooms played an integral role in the highly organised operation…each groom was personally responsible for eight to ten horses and for their gear. The clockwork operation saw the drivers sound a bugle when they were one mile from the next staging post, this alerted the grooms to have the fresh team of horses primed and ready the minute the coach arrived. The pay-off for such a high level of efficiency, superior speed and dependability was that Cobb & Co scored lucrative mail contracts from the colonial governments [ibid.].

Cobb diversifies from its passenger and goods transport base

General manager Rutherford was the catalyst for Cobb & Co’s diversification into new businesses. Initially this payed dividends with its first move, appropriately enough, into coach and buggy building at Bathurst, NSW. Just four years into this activity Cobb & Co could boast that it was the largest coach-maker in Australia [ibid.].

Rutherford also acquired pastoral properties for the company, another profitably step for Cobb & Co. By 1877 they had nine sheep and cattle stations across NSW and Queensland covering an area of 11,000 square kilometres and turning a net profit of £77,500 (equivalent to $11.3M in 2011)…this was at a time that the company’s revenue from coaching – the principal business – was yielding only £11,500 ($1.7M) a year by comparison [ibid.].

By the end of the 1870s Cobb & Co had been in business for 25 years and had already established itself in the eastern mainland states as something of an institution in the “wide, brown land”. It had undergone diversification and experienced growth, but as I will show in Part II, the remarkable good fortunes of Cobb & Co was about to take a decided turn for the worse.

💫 –💫 –💫

PostScript: Exporting the Cobb & Co model

Unsurprisingly, the spectacular trajectory of Cobb & Co’s rise in fortune and fame drew imitators elsewhere. A number of coaching services, some using the same name (although totally unrelated to the original eastern Australian company), sprang up independently in South Australia, Western Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Africa. This last concern was started up by Freeman Cobb himself in 1871, hoping to cash in on the discoveries of diamonds and gold in the Kimberley and the Transvaal (unfortunately Cobb couldn’t reproduce his Australian success, dying in South Africa still in his 40s) [K. A. Austin, ‘Cobb, Freeman (1830–1878)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cobb-freeman-3237/text4883, published first in hardcopy 1969, accessed online 29 May 2019].

‘Kiwi’ Cobb & Co

The New Zealand version was begun by Charles Cole, who’d previously ran Cobb & Co’s Smyth’s Creek to Ballarat line in Australia❎. As in Victoria and NSW the impetus for the initiative in NZ was the gold rush in Otago (1861). Cole’s Otago coach proprietorship was in partnership with the Hoyts brothers (operating as Cole, Hoyt & Co., proprietors of Cobb & Co. Telegraph Line of Coaches)…later the service was extended to Christchurch and Canterbury. The legendary Ned ‘Cabbage Tree’ Devine worked at one time for the New Zealand outfit, driving the Dunedin to Palmerston and Oamaru routes [Austin, ‘Ned Devine’, loc.cit.; ‘Cobb & Co (New Zealand)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛

※ in fact there are all manner of commercial enterprises in Australasia using the “Cobb & Co” handle as a trading name – restaurants, bars, B ‘n Bs, screen printers, clockmakers, kitchen manufacturers, etc.

⚀ the others were James Swanson, Anthony Blake and John Murray Peck (who later became a successful stock and station agent in Melbourne and a vice-president of the Essendon Australian Football Club)

🔰 the average age of the four American founders was just 22 – although they did have combined experience working for Adams, Wells Fargo and other coach companies in the US

✫ Cobb charged £5 per passenger for the roughly 110 ml journey [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.]

◘ one of the best known bushranging incidents involving Cobb & Co was the 1863 holdup at Eugowra (in the NSW central west)…notorious bushranging gang led by Frank Gardiner and Ben Hall robbed a Ford & Co coach (the firm was takes over by Cobb & Co one week later) of £14,000 in gold and banknotes from the goldfields [‘Details of the Robbery’, (Welcome to Eugowra in the heart of bushranger country), www.eugowra.aus.net]

❎ Cole brought one of the custom built Concord coaches across the Tasman with him to Otago

Messengers by Appointment to Her Majesty – the “Silver Greyhounds” Service

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
International Relations, Regional History, Society & Culture

The Brits are nothing if not traditionalists. Take one of the primest examples of their fidelity to tradition – royalty! Putting aside the interregnum of the Cromwellian Commonwealth (1649-1660) as an aberration, the people of GB have faithfully stuck with the monarchy as the preferred form of rule for the long haul. Kings or queens have ruled Britain, or at least England, since the Anglo-Saxon King Egbert unified various regions of England and Wales around 830 to be recognised with the title Bretwalda (“ruler of the British/Anglo-Saxons”) [‘Kings and Queens of England & Britain’, (Ben Johnson), Historic UK, www.historic-uk.com].CD757CBF-70AD-4CB8-A409-6FB4056AF14B

Despite the small island in the North-eastern Atlantic not having been the most ‘united’ of kingdoms of late (witness Brexit, Scottish secessionist moves, etc), the British monarchy still possesses a very healthy pulse indeed. There remains a British queen, though now a nonegenerian, one with a clearly defined line of succession to follow her. The contemporary Windsors seem determined to uphold the prediction of Egyptian king, Farouk I, who upon being deposed from the Alawiyya dynastic throne in 1952, remarked with graveyard humour: “Soon there will be only five kings left…the king of spades, the king of clubs, the king of hearts, the king of diamonds…and the king of England!”

1E0ABF7E-EF1E-49C3-89CC-272D489F10A1So given that Britain has the stability of a long-reigning queen and the institution of monarchy is firmly rooted in Anglo-Celtic soil, then it should not really come as a surprise to discover that the queen retains a team of  “secret mission” messengers who are at her beck and call 24/7. The title queen’s (or king’s) messenger does have an anachronistic ring to it – when you conjure up images of darkly-clad couriers  (perhaps spies), secretly scurrying from castle to castle across Medieval Europe on royal business.

A long tradition of HM service 

The role of messengers as part of the English monarch’s contact network appears to stretch back a whole millennium. The 13th century monarch, King John, younger brother of the more flamboyantly heroic Richard the Lion-Heart, apparently used his messengers for less orthodox missions (such as transporting part of the dismembered body of Norwich traitor Henry Roper). The earliest recorded King’s Messenger was one John Norman, appointed by Richard III in 1485 to deliver his private letters [Marco Giannangeli, ‘Queen’s Messengers face the axe, heroes who resisted all tyrants, honeytraps and pirates’,  Daily Express (UK), 05-Dec-2015, www.dailyexpress.co.uk].

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‘Silver Greyhounds’

The royal messengers are colloquially known as “silver greyhounds”, a name bestowed on them by the Stuart king Charles II who to aid their identification at their scheduled destinations, gave each of his messengers one greyhound figurine  which he had broken off from a silver breakfast platter [’The Silver Greyhound – The Messenger Service’, (Keith Mitchell), 25-Mar-2014, (History of government blog), www.history.blog.gov.uk ]. These days the tradition continues with the appointed QMs being issued with silver greyhound badges or tie-clips.

After the establishment of the British Foreign Office in 1782, the role of the King’s Messenger took on an enhanced importance, and from 1795 with the resumption of war with France, a greater hazard for the couriers. Journeying through enemy France on secret mission was especially frought with danger for the messenger…one such silver greyhound, Andrew Basilico, when caught by the French, had the foresight to eat the part of the paper containing the covert message to ensure the integrity of the message [‘Queen’s Messenger’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

In the 19th century royal messengers could claim expenses for their journeys on behalf of the Crown. Some canny messengers supplemented their earnings on the side by selling the empty seat in their carriage (a practice the government tried – albeit unsuccessfully – to outlaw in the 1830s) [Mitchell, loc.cit.].

In the 20th century with East-West political tensions on the rise, KMs and QMs continued to play an important role against a backdrop of tense Cold War espionage encounters. George Courtauld, a retired silver greyhound, in his memoirs recounts some of the hazards of smuggling the confidential messages of Queen Elizabeth through communist countries, including the tricky business of dealing with Eastern Bloc “femme fatales” (the ‘honeypots’) [Giannangeli, loc.cit.].

A QM vade mecum: apparently the book of choice for aspiring King’s and Queen’s Messengers in the 20th century  (Courtauld) ⇩

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The modern day Queen’s Messenger

QMs (officially in Whitehall protocol known as the Corps of Queen’s Messengers) in Britain today are employed by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Despite the glamourous image of the world of international spies, as portrayed in popular culture, today’s QMs live a decidedly “un-James Bondian” lifestyle, no luxury accommodation in the Bahamas, no first-class travel, nor the trappings, thrills and supposed sexual exploits of jet-setting secret agents!

A peak under the dusty sheets of the service

The QMs Corps, as with all “cloak and dagger” official organisations with a culture of high security, functions on a “need-to-know” basis. A 2015 Freedom of Information request to Whitehall did shed some light (but no insights into the inner workings) of the obscure world of QMs. The FCO communique revealed that the QMs dress in plain clothing and are not particularly well remunerated, being paid at only C4 officer scale (£25,200-£33,250); at that time the QMs were 18 in number and all males in the age range 40 to 70✴. The FCO in true intelligence protocol would “neither confirm or deny” if QMs were armed✲. The requisite skill-sets of QMs stated in the document include the capacity to travel on short notice; work overseas for extended periods; work independently or within a team; think quickly on one’s feet; and remaining calm under pressure (occasionally extreme pressure)⌽ [FCO written reply, FOI Ref: 0315-15 (27 April 2015), http://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk].

‘Queens Messenger’ (2001): a modern attempt to use the QM motif to make a James Bond style post-Cold War action flick ⇩

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Is there still a role for the Queen’s Messenger in the 21st century?

The “hands-on”, person-to-person couriering of QMs seem out of place in the world of modern state communications, a “snail mail” approach compared to the instantaneous transference of information via electronic platforms. Unsurprising then, that in recent times, whenever a critical eye is routinely turned to British government spending, the microscope fixes its gaze on the QM service – which thus far survives despite seeming to habitually “fac(e) the chop (from) cost-cutting Foreign Office mandarins…(viewed as a) “legacy of a by-gone age” [Giannangeli, op.cit.].

An uncertain new world of unsecured information

The mechanism of modernity, those same communication innovations of the online world also create the very justification for the continuance of the QM service. Today we are awash with online crime, cyber-hacking, code-breaking and security interceptions by groups like Wikileaks. In such an environment Buckingham Palace is faced with a choice – trust those who you trust, the loyal silver greyhound retainer, or take the odds on the random anonymity of the vast, ungovernable cyberspace. On an ad hoc basis the royals will continue to find merit in relying on QMs,  “safe-hands” who can get the task done seamlessly, rather than always leaving it to the quicker but potentially more chancy method of transferring the message electronically [ibid.].

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Footnote: the official case carried by the silver greyhound, presumably containing “the message”, has its own diplomatic passport and therefore cannot be opened, x-rayed or inspected by airport staff when transiting customs – although the QM himself and his personal luggage are subject to the normal airport procedures [‘Her Majesty Queen’s Messengers – History and Current Status’, (Passport-collector.com, 22-Mar-2016), www.passport-collector.com]


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✴ in the main, in practice QMs tend to be men and recruited from the ranks of retired army or police officers

✲ these days QMs almost certainly would never carry guns on missions. Apocryphal or not, it has been suggested that the greyhounds are however ‘armed’ with an excellent, aged bottle of Scotch on their travels [Giannangeli, op.cit.]

⌽ QMs receive core training which comprises induction, mentoring, security, IT and SAFE training