At the conclusion of World War Two no one was seriously of the opinion that Glasgow didn’t need to urgent address the acute housing and quality of life dilemmas besetting the city’ inhabitants. For their part, the planners focusing on the city certainly had (or at least professed) good intentions in their efforts to ameliorate what was for tens of thousands of Glaswegians a polluted, congested and thoroughly unpleasant living environment. For all the planning and the vast sums of money poured into redevelopment however, the results were and continue to be more than disappointing. As discussed in the first two parts of this blog series, the uncoordinated approach of having two rival sets of planners trying to implement conflicting visions of a new Glasgow didn’t help matters at all.
Map credit: Glasgow City Council.The Clyde Valley Regional Park Plan with the umpf of the UK government behind it got more of its planned restructure of Glasgow off the drawing board than the discredited Bruce Plan. The core of CVRP’s plan was the “overspill policy”, relocating the surplus population away from the slums of inter Glasgow to new, modern, sanitary, green and spacious accommodation far from the inner-city. There were two planks to the planners’ intended re-housing fix – the creation of five purpose-built “New Towns” outside of Glasgow, at East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Cumbernauld, Irvine and Livingston, and the establishment of four new housing ‘schemes’ (ie, estates)«A̴» on the outskirts of Glasgow — Castlemilk, Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Pollok. Irvine new town (Image: earlyooters.blogspot.com).Avoiding the city slums only to find a brand new set of problems
What looked good on paper (modern flats, heating, indoor toilets, more space, etc) transpired in reality for many of the relocated residents into a deeply dissatisfactory and frustrating experience. Flaws soon surfaced in many of the flats and houses, shoddy construction«B̴», poorly designed heating and ventilation, crumbling housing stock (eg, Castlemilk and Drumchapel). For these residents, the initial hopes and optimism floundering on what Florian Urban calls “a sculpture park of failed modern utopias”. There were grounds for hopefulness at the beginning. After the poky, dirty, overcrowded tenements of Glasgow central, the former inner city residents you imagine would have welcomed living in the housing schemes, many of which were “the equivalent size of many towns in Scotland”, but their positivity were cut asunder by infrastructure realities – there was nothing like an equivalent level of facilities provided to cope with the large implants of population. In a catastrophic piece of non-planning the areas of the schemes had hardly any places for residents to shop or to meet new people and socialise (no pubs, no dance halls, no cinemas, etc) and the promised open spaces for leisure activities failed to materialise. Public transport to take estate residents to the city centre did not run frequently enough and was relatively expensive. The promised local employment opportunities for the new estates were not forthcoming, so unemployment became a major problem for the schemes’ residents (‘Overspill Policy and the Glasgow Slum Clearance Project in the Twentieth Century: From One Nightmare to Another?’, Lauren Paice, IATL Reinvention, Vol 1 Issue 1, May 2013, http://Warwick.ac.uk; ‘Billy Connolly classically described the new estates as “deserts wi’ windaes”’, The Herald, 07-Nov-1998, www.theheraldscotland.com). Scheme in Easterhouse.Scourge of Easterhouse
Easterhouse has the unwanted distinction of embodying the most dire consequences of the failings of Glasgow scheme planning. Physically isolated on the eastern edge of Glasgow, the severity of Easterhouse’s housing estate social problems and their persistence in the 21st century, has drawn a lot of concerned celebrity attention…. Princess Diana, PM Tony Blair and French President Chirac et al all made special visits to its notorious “sink-estates” (‘What’s Happened To Easterhouse: the Most Notorious Housing Scheme in Glasgow’, Francisco Garcia, Vice, 14-Nov-2016, www.vice.com). So depleted was its basic amenities, so lacking in a sense of community spirit, its infrastructure and housing problems magnified by a unemployment rate calamitously high (31.9% cf. a national average of 13.7% Hansard, 3 May 1985), the suburb’s schemes became a case study for social planners on what not to do to create a successful housing development (Paice). Easterhouse’s continuing woes have been compounded seemingly by a corresponding lack of political will to effect meaningful change (Hansard). Rather than leaving their problems and worries behind in the toxic slum tenements of the city, the dispersed Glaswegians found in the peripheral, facilities-deficient housing estates and towns a raft of new social problems…spikes in incidences of drunkenness and family violence, suicide, etc. Alienated and bored youth reacted to the lack of things to do by engaging in vandalism and petty crime (with young gangs perhaps no where active in the late Sixties than in Easterhouse and it’s so-called “Ned culture”)..
Family dislocation
Relocation to the edges from the city led to other unforeseen or unaddressed problems, including a major disruption to the extended family network…many residents in the new projects were now too far away from their past abodes and cut off from their extended families and friends, resulting in a heightening of a sense of isolation (Paice). This outcome was even more perturbing for those Glasgow citizens who had been forced into relocating to the schemes and New Towns.
Cumbernauld Town Centre: “the rabbit warren on stilts”.Though the Glasgow schemes and the New Town project have been widely maligned as abject failures and disasters by both observers and residents, not everyone has come away with a negative perception: the people of Cumbernauld in a 1980s poll gave the program an 87% approval (of course some schemes and some New Towns did better than other). At the very least, the housing experiments did free thousands and thousands of Glaswegians from the abomination of slum life in the city and transported them into new and better if still far from perfect living conditions… certainly anywhere after the Glasgow slum tenements had to be a step up, although some would argue that after fifty or sixty years, the New Towns with their persisting ailments, no longer new, were showing the clear signs of the foundations of new Glasgow slums«C̴» [‘Neighbourhoods New Towns’, (W Hamish Fraser), The Glasgow Story,www.theglasgowstory.com]. Craigshill 1960s (image: Livingston Devlt Corp).Divine right of technocrats
Nonetheless, a deep sense of dissatisfaction was and continues to be the general feeling about the two housing programs. Both plans for Glasgow’s regeneration, both the Scottish Office and Glasgow Corporation, were guilty (unsurprisingly) of taking a technocratic, “top-down’ approach to the re-housing solution. Both groups of planners failed to consult the residents themselves on what they wanted, the very people whose futures were riding on the experiments’ success and would be most affected by the results…a blind “focus on processes and numbers rather than people and their lives” (‘Modernizing Glasgow – Tower Blocks, Motorways, and New Towns 1940-2010’, Florian Urban, Glasgow School of Arts,www.radar.gsa.ac.uk). In hindsight, had they done so, at least some of the chronic and systemic problems may have been averted.
Social engineering, the “Glasgow Effect”
Glasgow’s 20th century standing as the British Empire’s “Second City” and an economic and industrial powerhouse in the region came at a cost. Studies have long revealed that Glaswegians have a proportionately higher early death-rate—and not accountable by poverty alone—than other comparable great cities«D̴». A 2016 report by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health (‘History, politics and vulnerability: explaining excess mortality’) concluded that the combined historic effects of overcrowding, poor city planning (1960s-’80s) and “a democratic deficit–a lack of an ability to control decisions that affect their lives”—were the causes of the city’s susceptibility to premature death (“Revealed: ‘Glasgow effect’ mortality rate blamed on Westminster social engineering”, Karin Goodwin, The Herald, 16-May-2016, www.heraldscotland.com). The SO took this tact, the GCPH asserted, knowing full-well that the policy would be damaging to the long-term health of Glaswegians (Goodwin).
Castlemilk ca.1965 (Source: Gordon Waddell (Pinterest))
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“Skimming the cream”
The evidence points to a deliberate government policy of social engineering experiments in Glasgow…Scottish Office documents released under the 30-year rule reveal a calculated policy in determining which inner city residents were relocated where. ”Skimming the cream” (rehousing the best preferred preferred citizens in the choices parts of the new settlements) was practiced. Skilled workforce and young families were chosen to reside in East Kilbride and the other New Towns while the centre was left with “the old, the very poor and the almost unemployable”. This tactic and the steering of economic investment away from Glasgow resulted in a “serious population imbalance” (Goodwin) and putting the vulnerable ’stayers’ in a jeopardy.
Murray Drive (Photo: Stonehouse Heritage Group)
Postscript: Belatedly aborted Stonehouse – New Towns become surplus to needs
There was meant to be a sixth New Town built to absorb overspill population from Glasgow…the small village of Stonehouse was slated to accommodate 22,000 new homes and 35,000 people, in fact local farmers had their land compulsorily purchased and the first 96 homes in Murray Drive were not only constructed«E̴» but in 1976 the first residents were already two days in occupancy before the Scottish Office suddenly got “cold feat” and pulled the plug on the development! Why was Stonehouse New Town axed and why did it occur so late in the process? Originally proposed in the early Sixties when planners had identified a continuing need for new houses on the periphery, by 1973 two developments had prompted a policy change — Glasgow city had depopulated dramatically as a result of the dispersals (1970-73: 58,000 Glaswegians left) and the authorities were concerned that too many young people were leaving the centre. The emphasis for the inner city refocused on renovating rather than demolishing and rebuilding and the SO began redeploying resources towards regenerating and rehabilitating the East End of Glasgow. Roger Smith’s answer to the obvious question of why the authorities still kept going with Stonehouse after it was apparent by 1973 that the project was a “no-goer” is that the government machine at both the centralised and local level was simply incapable of “respond(ing) quickly to changing events and new understandings of existing situations”…which seems to sum up many of the urban planning missteps made in postwar Glasgow (Roger Smith (1978) Stonehouse—an obituary for a new town, Local Government Studies, 4:2, 57-64, DOI: 10.1080/03003937808432733; ‘The Scottish town that never was’, Alison Campsie, The Scotsman, Upd. 04-Jun-2020, www.scotsman.com.au).
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«A̴» which initially were unfortunately called “townships” until someone pointed out Apartheid South Africa’s use of the same term to delineate non-white homelands
«B̴» the haste of the estate building program contributed to this
«C̴» as a result of multiple factors including lack of investment, cost-cutting on building materials and techniques, poorly maintained estates, apathy and neglect, pollution, loss of community pride, etc.
«D̴» 30% greater risk of dying before 65 than comparable deindustrialised cities like Liverpool and Manchester (Goodwin)
«E̴» everything else planned remained unbuilt, schools, swimming pools, sports centre, factories, etc.
”Greetings everybody, this is your number one enemy” (typical sign-on for“Tokyo Rose”)
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Image: National WWII Museum
In just about every movie and television series Hollywood has made involving Japan and WWII the name of “Tokyo Rose” invariably seems to pop up. Its a standard trope in American war dramas and TV comedies like McHale’s Navy. The San Francisco Chronicle called Tokyo Rose “the Mata Hari of radio”. However, unlike Mata Hari(ǟ), there was no actual “Tokyo Rose”. The name was generic, applied to some dozen or so English speaking Japanese women radio broadcasters who penetrated the airways of American, Australian and New Zealand servicemen in the Pacific theatre of war. Tokyo Rose wasn’t even confined to Tokyo, the female propagandists operated from several cities in the Japanese Empire including Manila, Shànghâi and Tokyo(ɮ).
Many Tokyo Roses but one message
The Tokyo Rose broadcasts would follow a familiar pattern…in between spinning American pop records (to remind the GIs of home), the women in conversational manner would make jokes and taunt the servicemen in an attempt to sap their morale and blunt their appetite for war(ƈ). Paradoxically, for some of her American GI audience the Tokyo Rose radio broadcasts had an opposite effect, they were popular as entertainment and “a welcome distraction from the monotony of their duties” (‘How ‘Tokyo Rose’ Became WWII’s Most Notorious Propagandist’, Evan Andrews, Upd. History, 26-Nov-2019, www.history.com).
Listening to Tokyo Rose on Zero Hour (Source: psywarrior.com)
As stories of Tokyo Rose were spread between GIs, she took on a mythic element in American minds, it was said her snippets of information were “unnervingly accurate (about the Allies), naming units and even individual servicemen” (‘Tokyo Rose (1944)’, www.publicdomainreview.org). The ramifications of this belief were to prove momentous later on for one of the women identified as Tokyo Rose — see Note (ɖ).
Iva at the mike
Iva Toguri/“Orphan Ann”, the ‘real’ Rose?
American opinion hit on a surprising candidate for the real identity of Tokyo Rose, Iva Ikuko Toguri (D’Aquino). Toguri was one of its own, a US citizen of Japanese descent born in Los Angeles who found herself stuck in Japan as hostilities broke out between the two countries. Coerced into broadcasting on Japan’s ‘Radio Zero’ shortwave station as a disc jockey, Toguri played records and performed comedy sketches. She did appeal in her friendly American voice to lonely GIs to return to their loved ones in the US but her propaganda value to the Japanese was considered limited(ɖ). Returning to the US after the war Toguri, labelled by the press as “the one and only Tokyo Rose”, was eventually tried in 1949. Toguri’s conviction for treason was dubiously arrived at and it was widely felt she was made a scapegoat (‘Tokyo Rose’, Upd. 6-Oct-2020, www.biography.com). The supposed “Tokyo Rose” was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10,000, serving six years and two months. On release she spent overs 20 years living in Chicago ‘stateless’ before a fresh investigation of the case discovered two of the prosecution witnesses had been coerced by the Justice authorities into perjuring themselves…consequently President Ford pardoned her in 1977 (‘Iva Toguri Patriot’, American Veterans Center, (YouTube video, 2021)
A parallel but very different story to Tokyo Rose is that of Mitsu Yashima. In the 1930s Mitsu (born Tomoe Sasako), a Japanese artist, was pro-peace, anti-military and anti-imperialist in an increasingly militaristic right wing Japan. After imprisonment and torture for her left-leaning views she and her husband escaped to the US in 1939. Once America committed to the World War Mitsu joined the war effort – working for the Office of Strategic Services, she used her language skills to broadcast anti-Japanese propaganda through the airwaves. On radio she made a particular pitch to the women of Japan, urging them to commit acts of sabotage aimed at helping to bring the Japanese military machine to a halt (‘Mitsu Yashima’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org ; ‘The Epic Lives of Taro and Mitsu Yashima’, Greg Robinson, Valerie Matsumoto, Discover Nikkei, 11-Sep-2018, www.discovernikkei.org).
Credit: IMDb
Postscript: Hollywoodised Tokyo Rose
As the war in the Pacific was reaching its climax the US made its own propaganda capital out of Tokyo Rose with a 1946 potboiler of a movie of the same name. Tokyo Rose exploited and sensationalised the story, The feature was “not merely a fiction, but a dangerous distortion of the truth”…according to Greg Robinson, it depicts the title character‘s radio propaganda as being “directly responsible for the death of demoralised American soldiers” and thus contributed to the jaundiced atmosphere that pervaded the subsequent trial of Iva Toguri (‘Tokyo Rose: The Making of a Hollywood Myth’, Greg Robinson, Discover Nikkei, 01-Nov-2021, www.discovernikkei.org).
▓ See earlier blogs on Lord Haw-Haw and Axis Sally in this series of war radio propaganda broadcasters, WWII’s Psychological Warriors of the Airwaves, Part 1 and Part 2
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(ǟ) ”Mata Hari”, the nom de plume of a Dutch exotic dancer executed by the French for allegedly spying for Germany during WWI
(ɮ) none of the female radio hosts ever referred to themselves as “Tokyo Rose” on air (it was purely an American invention”)
(ƈ) and as with her Axis counterpart in Europe, Axis Sally, the Tokyo Roses would try to sow little seeds of doubt in GI minds about the fidelity of their wives and girlfriends in America
Current Lord Chamberlain Andrew Parker (fmr MI5 head) (Source: The Times)
The Lord Chamberlain (LC) is the most senior member of Queen Elizabeth II’s Royal Household retinue. The office has been around in Britain for over 600 years, the incumbent is usually a peer and traditionally has always been male. Today, the LC handles the organisation for the Queen’s attendances at garden parties, state visits, looks after HM’s thoroughbred horses and he supervises the annual upping of the Royal swans. For much of its history though the LC had another, controversial role, censor of the British Theatre with virtual dictatorial powers — he “was answerable to no-one, not even parliament, and was not obliged to justify his decision to playwrights or theatre managers” [NICHOLSON, Steve. Theatre Censorship in Britain (1909-1968) In: Les censures dans le monde: xixe-xxie siècle[online]. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016 (generated 17 novembre 2021). Available on the Internet: . ISBN: 9782753555495. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pur.45008.] A much aggrieved George Bernard Shaw characterised the LC as the “Malvolio of St James’ Palace” [‘The Censorship of the Stage in England’, G. Bernard Shaw, North American Review, August 1899, Vol 69, No 513, pp.251-262, www.jstor.org/stable/25104865].
Walpole, the first PM (Source: History Today)
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The politics of early Georgian drama
Theatre censorship had existed in England since the 16th century but institutionalising its practice as a function of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (LCO) was a political manoeuvre by the ”First Minster“ Robert Walpole in the 1730s to blunt the weapon of satire which was being effectively used theatrically against his government. The 1737 Licensing Act handed the LC the “power of god” over the English theatre, remarkably this legislative arrangement stayed in force until as recently as 1968. Hitherto to the crackdown critics🄰 of the ruling Whig Party were relatively free to make satirical attacks through the theatre of the day to expose the political corruption of Walpole’s government. The LC’s new carte blanche powers were designed to silence a theatre increasingly hostile to Walpole and the Whigs🄱 [‘The Licensing Act of 1737’, Eliza Hay, www.ericsimpson.sites.grinnell.edu].
1737 Licensing Act
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Examiner of Plays
The LC was provided with two officers to put the spadework, a Examiner of Plays🄲 and a Deputy Examiner of Plays (the offices remunerated by yearly stipends of £400 and £200 respectively). The examiners’ task, assisted by secretaries and other auxiliary staff, was to read the plays that came before them (the LC himself did precious little of the actual reading of the plays) and write “Reader’s Reports” for the LC. They were also required to visit theatres to check on their safety and comfort and to ensure that the LC’s licensing rules were being observed. Theatres without a licence were liable for prosecution and financial penalties [‘Licensing Act 1737’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Although the ultimate decision on a license rested with the LC, the recommendations to make or break a new play came from the examiners, little wonder then that Bernard Shaw called the examiner “the most powerful man in England or America”.
Above and beyond the spoken word and the text
Censorship was not confined to bowdlerising the texts and banning plays outright🄳, the scope of the Royal censors extended to the actors’ gestures, the costumes, the sound and lighting effects, the set and the stage directions (Nicholson).
Osborne’s 1965 play ‘A Patriot for Me’, the controversy of the dramatist’s refusal to make cuts helped end the LC’s censorship
The view from within the Lord Chamberlain’s Office bubble
The LCO saw themselves as licensors rather than censors. They never really grasped why any reasonable dramatist or manager could object to their control, concluding that playwrights who did so were just trying “to exploit an unsavoury incident or fact”. In the LCO’s Pollyanna-like world view authors of “ordinary decent plays” on the other hand had nothing to fear. The LCO took a disparaging and contemptuous view of the modern playwrights who would rail against their invervention (such as John Osborne and Edward Bond🄴). The LCO tended to justify its censoring role in patronising terms, seeing itself as a moral watchdog, protecting the average playgoer from unsavoury plays, custodians of good taste on the English stage (Nicholson).
Theatre Royal Drury Lane (Source: architectsjournal.co.uk)
Zero guidance for the artist
The Act’s vagueness placed playwrights in an additional dilemma, the office of the LC never really spelt out explicitly what constituted a play’s suitability or unsuitability for a licence, leaving dramatists and the actor-managers of theatres guessing as to the basis of the objection. Plays rejected for a licence or having their manuscripts blue-pencilled for wholesale cuts were usually generically herded under a non-specific catch-all of being either ”immoral or improper for the stage”.
St James’ Palace, home of the Lord Chamberlain (Source: Pinterest)
An effort at codifying
The 1843 Theatres Act made a partial effort at codifying and limiting the LC’s powers, stipulating that a play could only be prohibited if “it is fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum or of the public peace”. A joint select committee in 1909 advising the LC provided further clarification of the powers, the following were said to be “no-nos” in plays: indecent subject matter; (if a play contains) “offensive personalities”; (if it infers) “violence to sentiments of religious reverence”; “represents invidious manner of living persons”; “calculated to conduce crime and vice”; “impairs friendly relations with foreign powers”🄵 [‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Plays with British Library Curator Dr Alexander Lock’, People of Theatre, (Vlog, 2021), www.peopleoftheatre.com].
‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’ (Photo: V & A Museum)
Plays that dealt seriously with contemporary issues especially sexuality were severely blue-pencilled, eg, prostitution in Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession. The continuing influence of religion saw the LC come down heavily on blasphemy, the portrayal of biblical figures were taboo (eg, Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Obscene language in plays was a serious infraction of the code. Into the 20th century the censorship of the LC maintained its prescriptive role, plays that earned the ire of the examiners included such classics of the modern theatre as Waiting for Godot (bodily functions or parts, even mere sexual suggestiveness) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (homosexuality) which had already had a successful run on Broadway in the US. Increasingly as a result the LC was seen to be out of touch with modern concerns and realities.
Source: WNYC
Self-censorship and censorship by proxy
The LC held such control over theatrical performances in Britain that it even prompted an element of censorship by proxy. Rudolf Weiss has noted that fear of the LC‘s wrath led some playwrights to self-censor their work to secure a license and thus a hearing in Britain. Some of the autocratic actor-managers—fearful of financial losses arising from an aborted production—have done the LC’s work for them [‘“Unsuitable for theatrical presentation”: Mechanisms of censorship in later Victorian and Edwardian London Theatre’, Rudolf Weiss, www.ler.letras.up.pt].
Lord Chamberlain in 1960s, Baron Cobbold, resisted calls to abolish censorship (Artist: George JD Bruce)
End of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship authority
Opposition to censorship was in the air in the 1960s with the emergence of a permissive society…a new generation of young playwrights like Osborne, Pinter and Bond were exploring increasingly polemical subjects in modern society. The Arts Council of Great Britain described the LC’s veto power as having “a contraceptive effect on the development of British drama” (Nicholson). The coup de grâce for theatre censorship came from the reformist Wilson Labour government🄶. The 1968 Theatres Act was part of a broad sweep of modernising legislation during the Sixties, along with the end of capital punishment, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the introduction of the pill and the legalisation of abortion [‘50 years after Theatres Act, censorship has evolved’, Sandra Osei-Frimpong, Index on Censorship, 14-Aug-2018, www.indexoncensorship.org]. The repeal of stage censorship opened the floodgates for creativity and bold innovation – just one day after the ban ended, the controversial US counterculture musical Hair (New Age nudity, drug-taking) opened on London’s West End.
G Bernard Shaw (Source: thefamouspeople.com)
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Footnote: Loophole in the system
The LCO’s net was wide but there were ways to get round the expurgator’s ban…when one Shaw play was banned in Britain for perceived profanity, the Irish playwright simply resorted to staging it in Liverpool and then Dublin. Later on some playwrights avoided the public theatre circuit altogether and put on their work exclusively at (private member) club theatres around the country. Even British drama institutions, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre, frustrated by the LCO’s persistent interference, “threatened to turn themselves into private clubs for specific productions to evade the LC’s rulings” (Nicholson), which contributed to the groundswell of groups and individuals campaigning to end theatrical censorship.
Arts Theatre Club production, 1955 (Photo: V & A Museum)
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🄰 with dramatist Henry Fielding in the forefront along with the Jacobite opponents of the Whigs
🄱 in theory the LC’s authority was limited to Westminster but effectively its jurisdiction applied to all Theatre Royal playhouses [‘Theatrical Oligarchies: The Role of the Examiner of Plays’, Oxford Scholarship Online, www.oxford.universitypressscholarship.com]
🄲 sometimes called ‘Comptroller’, in the 20th century they have mainly been military men-turned courtiers
🄳 each year relative few plays actually got banned, expurgation was the common recourse
🄴 whose play Saved was one of the last to be banned
🄵 these grounds would prove very controversial in the 1930 when the LC Lord Cromer banned a number of English plays which were hostile towards Nazi Germany (a manifestation of London’s appeasement approach to relations with Berlin). Cromer even send some scripts to the German Embassy for their ‘approval’! [‘Theatre of War: how the monarchy suppressed anti-Nazi drama in the 1930s’, Steve Nicholson, The Guardian, 22-Jul-2015, www.theguardian.com]
🄶 the previous Labour (Attlee) government had unsuccessfully tried to pass an anti-censorship bill in 1949
Between 1899 and 1902 Britain and the Afrikaner republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State were locked in conflict in the Second South African War, more commonly known as the Boer War (or more accurately the Second Anglo-Boer War). With the overconfident British failing to secure the expected quick victory over the Boers’ “citizen army”, the war dragged on into a long guerrilla engagement. In 1901, in the middle of the conflict in South Africa, of all things a cricket team from South Africa visited England and Ireland to take part in a series of international matches. How did this sporting incongruity take place while the two countries were engaged in a controversial, bitterly fought and increasingly divisive war?
Lord Hawke’s MCC tourists to SA 1898-99
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Making it happen: JD Logan, the “Squire of the Southern Karoo”
In fact, the tour of Britain had been originally meant to occur in 1900ⓐ, but was cancelled due to the outbreak of hostilities, understandably enough. At this point in stepped Cape Province-based expat entrepreneur and cricket patron James Douglas Logan with his (long-cherished) plan to organise a new tour. Logan negotiated with the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) through the highly influential Lord Hawke, who managed to persuade the MCC to give the tour the green light. Despite the war still very much raging and the outcome far from decided, it was rescheduled for the following year. The announcement for the tour to take place in 1901 unleased opposition and misgivings from within both countries.
Newspaper cartoon of James Logan (Source: hermanus-history-society.co.za)
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The South African press lambasted the team chosen–a mix of “socialite-gentleman” cricketers (including Logan’s own son who had never played first-class cricket!) and more skilful players—for being overall well below par. Moreover, the press criticised the private venture by the “Laird of Matjiesfontein” as being not legitimate because the touring players predominantly from the Cape Colony had not been officially selected by the South African Cricket Union (which had suspended the Currie Cup and disbanded with the onset of war) {Sport Past and Present in South Africa: Trans(forming) the Nation, Scarlett Cornelissen, Albert Grindingh (Eds.), (contributor Dean Allen) 2013; Peter Wynn Thomas, The Complete History of Cricket Tours At Home and Abroad, 1989}.
Sherlock’s creator: make war, not cricket
From the host country, probably the most vociferous critic was world renowned author (and cricket fan and amateur player) Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle, in the forefront of countering the anti-war propaganda within the British homeland with his own pro-war propaganda, was incensed that a team of predominantly English-speaking cricketers should be coming to Britain to play when they should be stay in South Africa and fight the Boers. The vexed authorof Sherlock Holmes called it “a stain on their manhood” (Cornelissen, Grindingh).
Conan Doyle in cricket gear (Source: arthur-conan-doyle.com)
Despite the dissenting voices, what ultimately clinched it for Logan’s private tour was the MCC and the major English county clubs’ agreeing to give the tour matches first-class status. Even then there were second thoughts on the South Africa side and a suggestion made that the tour should not go ahead…this was scotched by the MCC who insisted it proceed to prevent the dislocation of the 1901 English season (Cornelissen, Grindingh).
Jimmy Sinclair (Photo: Cricket Weekly Record)
The crickettour 🏏
Logan’s 14-man team was predominantly Uitlanders (‘foreigners’, immigrants, mainly British in composition but from other countries as well)…it included one Afrikaner cricketer Johannes Kotze who proved one of the more accomplished performers. The South Africans’ ‘gun’ batsman coming in to the tour was JH Sinclair, however his batting never really got going on the tour (unlike his bowling which was quite effective). Sinclair had been captured by the Boers but escaped in time to make the trip to Britain. Maitland Hathorn was the most successful “willow-wielder” on the tour (827 runs, average 35.95). Overall the team performed moderately though it did beat five of the major counties and tied one. Financially, Logan lost a substantial sum on the venture.
1901 Sth African tourists (Source: ebay.com)∘
Cricket’s special role serving the Empire
To the English, cricket, the game they invented, was the quintessential sport, and an essential companion of empire building. This was the “golden age“ of cricket (1895-1914) with WG Grace’s shadow still very much dominating the sportⓑ. The Victorians revered cricket as an established institution, it was integral to the ethos of the English gentleman and a sign of his cultural supremacy. Moreover cricket was considered educative, part of an Englishman’s training. Spreading the game to the Empire, to Australasia, the West Indies, the Indian Sub-continent and Southern Africa, symbolised the “civilising mission of the Englishman abroad”. Participation in cricket was equated with the civility of English Victorian society and an endorsement of Anglo-Saxon values. Cricket tours by the MCC, the sport’s governing body in England, stimulated the colonies‘ interest in the English game, but its deeper purpose was to “promote imperial ideology”, extolling the virtues of allegiance to Britain, Empire and patriotic duty {Dean Allen, Empire, War and Cricket in South Africa, Logan of Matjiesfontein, 2015}. Allen’s thesis is that cricket was injected by the English ruling classes into South Africa “as much for political and propagandistic reasons as for sporting ones”
War an instrument of empire with cricket the mentor
The late Victorians affirmed that “manly games” were integral to training for life. Above all the ‘school’ of cricket taught lessons of “discipline, self-abnegation, a sense of fair play and team-work”, it built character. Britain’s willingness to engage in the 1899 War to enlarge the Empire—the scramble for colonies in Africa in competition with Germany and France—brought the cricketing fraternity squarely into the frame. Cricketers, to the English mind, were “made of the right stuff” for mortal combat, they were up for martial challenges (Donaldson, Peter (2017) ‘We are having a very enjoyable game’: Britain, sport and the South African War, 1899-1902. War in History, 25(1). ISSN 0968-3445). Many cricketers enlisted in the South African War (some former teammates found themselves on opposing sides), and there were cricketing casualties in the conflict {Dean Allen (2005) ‘Bats and Bayonets’: Cricket and the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902, Sport in History, 25:1, 17-40, DOI: 10.1080/17460260500073033}, including some fine players of the day like Anglo-Australian test bowling ace JJ Ferris.
Australian troops playing cricket at the front in SA (Photo: awm.org.au)∘
Endnote: Pioneering South African XI on the Sub-continent
An unintended co-occurrence of the Boer War was that it led to the staging of the first cricket match between South Africans and local cricketers on Sub-continent soil, 90 years before Apartheid sport ended in South Africa. ‘Representing’ South Africa were Afrikaner POWs incarcerated in Ceylon…Diyatalawa Camp v Colts XI, Nondescripts Club ground, Colombo 1901. The local XI won! {‘The First South Africa. side to play in the sub-continent: Boer Prisoners of War in 1901’, CricketMash, 4-Jul-2020, www.cricmash.com}.
Mafeking reported in cricketing terms (source: independentaustralia.net)∘
Postscript: 1899 South African War, cricket as antidote to physical and moral degeneration
The poor health of many Boer War recruits and Britain’s early reversals in the war added weight to prevailing concerns about national and ‘racial’ degeneration {Robb, George. “The Way of All Flesh: Degeneration, Eugenics, and the Gospel of Free Love.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 6, no. 4, University of Texas Press, 1996, pp. 589–603, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4617222.} Some commentators of the day, bemoaning the ”neglect of an active athleticism“, called for more playing fields as an antidote to the decline of young working class men, so that they could be the beneficiaries of the ”cricket way of making honest and healthy Englishmen” {Anthony Bateman, Cricket, Literature and Culture: Symbolising the Nation, Destabilising Empire, 2016}.
𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽
ⓐ the English MCC side had just concluded their own tour of South Africa in April 1899, just six months before the war commenced
ⓑ Dr Grace loomed larger than life in cricket during this period as the sport’s first genuine superstar
The first two decades of the 21st century have been witness to a raft of passing fads and rages, we’ve seen the likes of Planking, Twerking and Tebowing, etcad nauseam, it makes me wonder whatever happened to the, by definition, sedentary craze of pole-sitting? Like most crazes, I guess, it is of its time and the shelf life is never infinite. It’s day, or its heyday, was in the 1920s up to around the early 1930s when the peak of the craze subsided.
‘Shipwreck’ Kelly at work
Pole-sitting
The initial exponent of pole-sitting or specifically flagpole-sitting, so far as we know, was New Yorker Alvin ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly. Prior to his preoccupation with pole-sitting, Kelly was a jack-of-all-trades, trying his hand as a steelworker, steeplejack⋖a⋗, high diver, boxer and movie double. He also was a naval ensign during WWI and held a pilot’s licence and performed aerial stunt flights. Opinions differ on how ‘Shipwreck’ got into the business of pole-sitting, one view goes that the habit came early, scrambling up a pole at the tender age of seven, others attribute it to a dare or to a publicity stunt for a Philadelphia department store [‘Body of ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly Lies Unclaimed in Morgue’, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 13-Oct-1952, (Google News Archive)]. In January 1924 his ‘career’ took off with a record-setting sit atop a pole for 13 hours and 13 minutes to help promote a Hollywood film. Kelly’s best-ever effort was 49 days and one hour, Atlantic City 1930.
AK keeping up with the news at ground-level (Photo: Everett/Fine Art America)
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At the height of his popularity Kelly was earning $500 a day, coming from charging money to people to watch his feats of endurance, from books about his life, from endorsements and personal appearances. His fame also led to a 28-day tour of the United States, sitting on poles in a different city on each day of the tour. But the glory days did not last, the onset of the Great Depression saw his popularity plummet rapidly, Americans quickly lost interest in spending precious money watching men sit on poles with more serious and urgent concerns taking centre stage in their lives (Saratosa Tribune).
‘Dixie’ Blandy (Source: Facebook)
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Pole-sitting became competitive with Richard ‘Dixie’ Blandy challenging and even besting Kelly’s 49-day record. Brandy’s accomplishment, 77 days, was the stuff of legend, sustained as it was on a diet of bottles of whiskey and three packs of cigarettes a day [‘The Mad 1920s: Fad of Pole-Sitting’, Messynessy, 25-Sep-2020, www.chic.com]. Interestingly, prior to being bitten by the pole-sitting bug Blandy, like Kelly, tried an assortment of jobs including circus worker, boxer, house painter, steeplejack, riveter, merchant marine, salesman and (wait for it) flagpole painter. Unlike Kelly though, the Louisiana-born Blandy didn’t become inactive because of the Depression, continuing the activity and even breaking his 1933 record twice more, the second time in Stockholm, Sweden, added to Dixie’s legend – a sit of 125 days in a chair affixed to a pole 200-feet above the ground, while consuming 92 bottles of whiskey and his customary diurnal 3 packs of cigs⋖b⋗.[‘Richard Ernest “Dixie” Blandy’, Findagrave, www.findagrave.com]. Blandy actually died on the job, killed in 1974 when the flagpole supporting him collapsed.
Publicity shot: Dixie was popular with the ladies, married 6 times (all his wives met him via the phone at his pole-sitting events) (Source: Dayton Daily News)❕Paalzitten (Noordwijkerhout)❕
Blandy notwithstanding, the fad had seen its day after the Depression bit hard. Since then there have been attempts from time to time to revive the pole-sitting caper. In the Netherlands for example pole-sitting became a competitive sport In the 1970s – the Dutch call it Paalzitten (literally “sit tight”). This is a world away from the pursuit that made Alvin and Dixie famous, the poles in the Netherland sit above not solid ground but water and nose-bleeds are uncommon as Dutch derrières are perched barely two arm lengths from the level of the water…“a tourist attraction more than a spectator sport”. [‘Paalzitten Is A Dutch Competitive Sport Where You Have To Sit On A Pole For Hours’, The Engineer, www.wonderfulengineering.com].
💢 💢 💢
Stylites
The fad of Pole-sitting originated in the 1920s as we have seen, but there are historical precedents for this curious pastime. In the early Christian period certain ascetic monks of a particularly fanatical bent practiced something broadly analogous to pole-sitting. These holy men of Late Antiquity were called ‘Stylites’ (from Greek stylos, ‘pillar’). Stylites were “pillar-dwellers” not pole-sitters, and their motivation was spiritual salvation rather than money and fame which spurred on ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly and his ilk. Stylites’ also differed from the pole-sitters in modus operandi, standing on the pillars was their preferred position. Sitting was something they tended to resort to only when overcome by fatigue or perhaps sleep.
6th century depiction of Ur-Simeon Stylites
The ‘poles’ in question were in fact narrow columns or towers atop which were small platforms which housed the Stylite. The platform were usually encircled by a railing of sorts to prevent the hermit-preacher from falling off. The most famous of the practitioners—the ur-Stylite—was Simeon Stylites the Elder whose early zeal for Christianity led him to ascend a pillar in Syria in AD 423. Later he relocated to a second, nearby pillar more than 15 metres above the ground, apparently staying in it till his death 37 years later⋖c⋗.
Icon depicting both Simeon the Elder & Simeon the Younger
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Simeon’s devotion to the practice made him quite a celebrity in the Christian world, he corresponded with the high and mighty including the Eastern emperors Theodosius II and Leo I, even exerting some influence on ecclesiastical matters, such was his standing. Visitors flocked to observe him praying, preaching and fasting on his high platform. Pilgrims and sightseers sought spiritual counselling, healing for the sick, intervention on behalf of the oppressed, etc. Simeon was too popular, a double wall had to be constructed around his pillar to keep the thronging multitudes from getting too close and disturbing his prayer sessions [‘St. Simeon Stylites’, Britannica, www.britannica.com].
Luke the Stylite
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The pre-Medieval Christian lifestyle caught on among the more ascetically inclined of the early Byzantine clergy (including women) with many following the prototypical Stylite, some even adopting his name. The more notable of these include St Daniel of Constantinople, St Simeon Stylites the Younger (Antioch), St Alypius of Paphlagonia (north-central Anatolia) and St Simeon Stylites (III) of Lesbos. As this list shows, prominence in the Stylite calling was a passport to sainthood. The Stylites needed to be a stoical lot as they were exposed to all kinds of weather at the top (although some were fortunate enough to be furnished with a small hut to escape into in time of severe inclemency).
Georgian hermit headquarters (Source: Vintage News)
Footnote: If you think the Stylites were confined to the so-called “Dark Ages”, think again! The practice has not entirely been extinguished in the 21st century. A monk in Georgia (Maxime Qavtaradze) in 2013 celebrated 20 years of lofty solitude as a ascetic hermit atop a mountain pillar a la the Stylites⋖d⋗. The original Stylites however would not recognise their barest of existences in the Georgian pillar set-up…Maxime lives in a small cosy cottage with adjoining church house on the top of his pillar, and the monk descends twice a week to the village below to say prayers with his parishioners [‘Georgian Monk Renews Tradition, Lives Atop Pillar’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 11-Sep-2013, www.rferl.org].
⋖a⋗ perhaps serving as a kind of altitude training for his later pole-sitting marathons
⋖b⋗ to avoid a calamitous outcome in marathon stints, the pole-sitters tied their legs to the vertical structure when wanting to sleep
⋖c⋗ meagre parcels of food were fetched to Simeon by his disciples
The first time I wandered through Waverley Cemetery in the chic, beachside eastern suburbs of Sydney I was somewhat bemused to find in the midst of the congested maze of gravesites of famous Australians—poets, politicians and judges, sports men and women, aviation pioneers among others—a large, impressive marble, bronze and mosaic memorial to the martyrs of the 1798 Irish Rebellion.
Honouring the sacrifices of 1798
The connexion only became clear to me later when I did some research on the ‘mystery’. The nexus linking the heroic but lost cause of nascent Éireannach 18th century insurrection against the indignities of English rule to a Sydney cemetery turned out to be one Michael Dwyer, whose remains along with those of his wife are buried within the grand monument. The memorial was constructed for the 100-year anniversary (1898) of the uprising, the plot and monument paid for by the local Irish community in New South Wales.
Michael Dwyer, hero of Wicklow resistance
Dwyer in the ‘Pantheon’ of Irish independence heroes
Native Wicklow man ‘Captain’ Dwyer fought in the ‘98 Rebellion, later leading an effective guerrilla campaign against the British army in the Wicklow Mountains. Dwyer held out till 1803, earning himself the sobriquet “the Wicklow Chief” before his eventual capture and transportion to the NSW colony (not America as he had been promised). In any event Dwyer got off pretty lightly compared to many of the rebels – given his freedom and a land grant of 100 acres on Cabramatta Creek. Dwyer’s life in Australia was a roller coaster of a ride and colourful to put it mildly…twice imprisoned and tried for plotting an Irish insurrection against the British authorities in NSW, a highly dubious charge that that he was acquitted of (though he still had to do time in Norfolk Island and Van Diemens Land penal colonies). When the NSW Corps overthrew Governor Bligh in the Rum Rebellion, Dwyer was reinstated as a free man, fortune favoured him again a couple of years later when he was made chief constable of police at Liverpool, NSW, and then it deserted him once more when Dwyer ended up in debtors’ prison (Ruan O’Donnell, ‘Dwyer, Michael (1772–1825)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dwyer-michael-12896/text23301, published first in hardcopy 2005, accessed online 9 September 2021; O’Sullivan, Michael, 1798 Memorial, Waverley Cemetery, Dictionary of Sydney, 2012, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/1798_memorial_waverley_cemetery, viewed 10 Sep 2021).
First steps on a long road to liberty
The inspiration for a surge in Irish nationalism and a sovereign republic free of English domination came from the French and to a lesser extent American revolutions. Ireland had a parliament of its own in Dublin but democratic participation was strictly limited by religious and property entitlements, squeezing out Catholics and Presbyterians and leaving the “Protestant Ascendency” in control of the country. The Society of United Irishmen (SUI), a secular organisation not restricted to Catholics¹,was formed to push for real autonomy for the Irish. Some reforms were forthcoming such as the franchise for non-Protestants but this was not near enough for the more radical elements of SUI.
Wolfe Tone
The SUI leader (Theobald) Wolfe Tone forged links with French republicans aimed at overthrowing English rule, leading to a 1796 invasion of Ireland by a nearly 14,000-strong French army. Unfortunately nature intervened and the invasion fleet ran into storms off the Irish west coast, loss of vessels and lives forced the abandonment of the invasion. The response of the government in Ireland—symbolically known as Dublin Castle—was to crack down heavily on the SUI radicals. The SUI was driven underground in a wave of repression culminating in the imprisonment of many of the organisation’s leaders. Though the Irish republicanism of SUI was a popular sentiment in the country, it didn’t have universal support even on the Catholic side, the Catholic Church strongly opposed what it saw as the ‘atheistic’ United Irishmen (‘The 1798 Rebellion – A Brief Overview’, John Dorney, The Irish Story, 28-Oct-2017, www.theirishstory.com).
Battle of Vinegar Hill
An uncoordinated insurrection
The Irish rising in 1798 was ill-timed and badly organised – most of the SUI leadership was still incarcerated. The insurgents’ planning was strategically inept, the rebellion was intended to be nationwide, but was largely confined to isolated pockets – Wexford, Leinster, Mayo, Antrim and Down. Dublin which should have been central to the revolt played virtually no part in it (Dorney). Historian Thomas Bartlett disputes the commonly held view of the rebellion being a localised affair…he argues that far from being confined to the east coast, the uprising produced “tremors throughout the country” with disturbance occurring in a very large number of counties (Bartlett, Thomas. “Why the History of the 1798 Rebellion Has Yet to Be Written.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an Dá Chultúr15 (2000): 181-90. Accessed September 8, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30071449). The rebels had some brief, early successes (especially the Battle of Oulart), but superior English troops and weaponry overwhelmed the poorly equiped Irish force inside a month. A subsequent incursion from a small French expeditionary force offered a momentary flicker of hope for the rebel cause but this was quickly snuffed out as the English-led forces took complete charge of the country. Retribution against the rebel leaders was swift and uncompromisingly brutal, most were summarily executed (or in Wolfe Tone’s case took his own life while awaiting execution). Atrocities were committed on both sides. A large number of the insurgents (like Michael Dwyer later on) were transported to the penal colony in New Holland. The failed ‘98 rising left a mixed legacy, intensifying the level of sectarian bitterness in Ireland but also inspiring countless Irish republicans and revolutionaries to continue the struggle for a free Ireland (‘The 1798 Irish Rebellion’, Thomas Bartlett, BBC, 17-Feb-2011, www.bbc.co.uk).
1800 Act of Union
In the wake of the crushing of the rebellion by the Marquis Cornwallis², fundamental political changes were enacted. The Irish Parliament was dissolved and direct British rule imposed by virtue of the 1800 Act of Union with Ireland, a situation that would stay in force until the Irish Free State came into being in 1922.
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¹ in fact many of the leaders like Wolfe Tone, Harvey and Keogh were Protestant
² the same (Lord) Cornwallis in the forefront of the ignominy associated with the 1781 English surrender at Yorktown which ended the land conflict in the American War of Independence
Map credit: Glasgow City Council
Irvine new town (Image: earlyooters.blogspot.com)
Scheme in Easterhouse
Cumbernauld Town Centre: “the rabbit warren on stilts”
Craigshill 1960s (image: Livingston Devlt Corp)
Castlemilk ca.1965 (Source: Gordon Waddell (Pinterest))
Murray Drive (Photo: Stonehouse Heritage Group)
Image: National WWII Museum
Listening to Tokyo Rose on Zero Hour (Source: psywarrior.com)
Iva at the mike
Belated presidential pardon (Screenshot ‘Iva Toguri, Patriot’)Mitsu Yashima (Source: Densho Encyclopedia)
Credit: IMDb 
Current Lord Chamberlain Andrew Parker (fmr MI5 head) (Source: The Times) 
Walpole, the first PM (Source: History Today) 
1737 Licensing Act 
Osborne’s 1965 play ‘A Patriot for Me’, the controversy of the dramatist’s refusal to make cuts helped end the LC’s censorship 
Theatre Royal Drury Lane (Source: architectsjournal.co.uk) 
St James’ Palace, home of the Lord Chamberlain (Source: Pinterest) 
‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’ (Photo: V & A Museum) 
Source: WNYC 
Lord Chamberlain in 1960s, Baron Cobbold, resisted calls to abolish censorship (Artist: George JD Bruce) Arts Theatre Club production, 1955 (Photo: V & A Museum)
Publicity shot: Dixie was popular with the ladies, married 6 times (all his wives met him via the phone at his pole-sitting events) (Source: Dayton Daily News)
Luke the Stylite
Georgian hermit headquarters (Source: Vintage News)
The first time I wandered through Waverley Cemetery in the chic, beachside eastern suburbs of Sydney I was somewhat bemused to find in the midst of the congested maze of gravesites of famous Australians—poets, politicians and judges, sports men and women, aviation pioneers among others—a large, impressive marble, bronze and mosaic memorial to the martyrs of the 1798 Irish Rebellion.
Wolfe Tone
1800 Act of Union