Remember me to Leicester Fields

In the continuing War of the Algorithms, I've really been needing palate-cleansers. 

This latest battle is with YouTube. It's creepy enough when ads for something I've recently ordered online stalk me throughout a video I'm watching. 

However, in the past few months, it seems that the content I'm sent is narrowing alarmingly.  Even accidental pauses while scrolling though suggestions count as indications I might be interested, when I'm really not.

 

Last week, I encountered a time-lapse video, which picked a Paris intersection, and ran through possible sights seen from this vantage point from Before the Common Era to the present. Foolishly I decided to suppress my distaste for AI, and watch. It was fairly interesting, although I suspect a factor in my enjoyment might have been my not-so-detailed grasp of French history. 

I counted it as a guilty pleasure. 

Predictably, a couple of days ago, a similar video appeared in my "recommended" list -- this one showing a time-lapse view of London from someone hovering a bit back from the south bank of the Thames, looking towards Westminster starting just before the Roman occupation, and gradually, the palace of Westminster appeared (some time in the eleventh century), followed by the other familiar landmarks.

Just before the Westminster bridge began spanning the Thames in the mid-1700s, my first flash of irritation came, when the creator of this thing decided that the Great Fire of London in 1666 was not nearly interesting enough, and set Lambeth ablaze as well.

During the glimpse of the Blitz in the 1940, a bomber crashed nose-down on Westminster Bridge, something I'm reasonably sure didn't happen, as devastating as the Blitz was.

Then, instead of stopping with the present-day, the time-line veered into the 2030's and beyond, with a horrific mushroom cloud appearing in the western horizon, followed by the Elizabeth Tower, containing Big Ben, hurtling over the bridge to crush the fleeing pedestrians.

That'll teach me, I guess.

It occurred to me that, as Demeter entered her final descent last summer, I had watched fewer of my favourite YouTube channels, which would have a hand in making my algorithm go a bit awry.  Yesterday, I spent quite a bit of time retrieving a collection of videos giving me quite a bit of pleasure last spring.  They're not flashy, but they're well-crafted, and well-researched.  This one helped me pinpoint the location of an inn that one of my great-great-great-great-great-uncles ran in the early 1790s:

  

This is the work of Scott Hatton, whose Underground Map Project is to record walks between the stations, each video with a helping of local history.  They're rather like watching some of the better presentations of the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa. 

Furthermore, his blog The Underground Map has assisted me in pinpointing other London locations relating to my long-departed relatives.  It features detailed local history and a rather wonderful layered map, where you can see your chosen location on maps as early as 1700.

All mercifully free of AI slop.  I've subscribed to Hatton's YouTube channel, and bookmarked the blog, which I should have done last spring, before Demeter started fading away. 

I'll be watching my algorithm carefully.

And reading more books.

Putzing around Putney

Don't let the rather twee titles and descriptions of these videos put you off.

I can't quite recall how I stumbled across this extensive list of walking tours of London neighbourhoods and beyond, but I find them enormously cheering. 

On a down day, I pick an area of London associated with either my family history or that of the Resident Fan Boy, and usually it's just the ticket.  The guide is Julien McDonnell of Joolz Guides. He's from the Muswell Hill area originally, studied philosophy (of all things) in Manchester, and his video walks - usually chatting companionably with his videographer - are charmingly informal, and cover pretty well any area of London you can think of.  (He's a pretty snazzy dresser, too.)

Here's a recent one about Putney.

This is vastly more entertaining than it sounds

Okay, I've spoken about Jay Foreman's videos before, but I'm married to a maps geek -- particularly transit maps. As the Resident Fan Boy is a Doctor Who fan, this may not surprise you. 

This is the second half of Foreman's dizzying verbal essay on the classic London Tube map, and like all of his videos, it's advisable to keep your finger on the pause button to catch the visual jokes that flash by, so quickly, it's practically subliminal. 

For example, there's a section in which Foreman lists transit maps from around the world that owe their appearance to Harry Beck's original design. One of those cities is Toronto, which you are not going to register without pausing the video. Trust me. 

Also included is a quick written critique of each city's transit map. I paused the video (after repeated scans) and quickly transcribed what Foreman wrote about the TTC: 

Toronto. At first I thought the uneven distances, wonky angles in the suburbs, and "north" compass point were redundant, but I just had a look on Google Maps, and it turns out Toronto's pretty griddy, and this is pretty much to scale. 

Foreman is not wrong; I lived there, and as a home support worker in my misspent youth, went to almost every TTC station to reach clients. 

Anyway, if you like London, and especially if you love transit systems, you'll enjoy this. You'll probably enjoy it, even if this is not the case. There's a very funny ad at the end, but it's a wee bit disgusting.   I'll be showing this to the Resident Fan Boy next. (But not on my blog; I'm not that crazy.)

Get lost

Elder daughter lives in South Wimbledon. At least, that's what she keeps telling me.

However, when I check Google Maps to place stories she tells me about her neighbourhood, it appears to be Merton. I don't like conflict, but I do like to be accurate.

Part of this is because I'm a family historian, and it's important to get place-names right.  Take a few weeks ago, when I was trying to convince a guy who has "manages" the grave of one of the Resident Fan Boy's distant cousins, that he had the wrong birth registration, and that the said cousin was born in Kensington, not Suffolk.

After some polite wrangling, my documentation convinced him, and I went to fill in the correct birthplace at Find A Grave, only to find that the only option that the automatic field would accept was "The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea" - which didn't exist when the said cousin was born a century and a half ago.

See, London has gone through many administrative changes in its long history, and the confusion isn't mitigated by the fact that many versions of the geographical, political, municipal districts/boroughs/what-have-you continue to co-exist.  Some disentangling is in order.

This is not a bad place to start. It's one of many, many videos created by Jay Foreman, on the many, mystifying aspects of the organization of London, and, indeed what is, and is not London. The videos have high production values, and are hilarious.  You also need to keep your finger on the pause button, because there are several jokes that appear in a flash. His latest YouTube video is tackling Tube maps.  You have to be very witty to make that sort of thing engaging -- and Foreman and his team are.  Even the ads at the end are funny.

But what if you have concerns beyond London? For example, my mother was born in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, but many websites will only permit me to say that she was born in Wolverhampton, West Midlands.  

This "Map Men" video, presented by the afore-mentioned Jay Foreman, plus Mark Cooper-Jones, doesn't solve my fillable fields problem, but is a damn entertaining intro to the crazy world of English counties - and whatever happened to Huntingdonshire and Rutland.

And if your geography problems are global (and whose aren't?), the Map Men can distract you from those too.

All clear, then? Good.

Times like these

It was a long weekend like this one, except that it was in the spring. I was heavily pregnant.   I lay across our bed, watching the televised footage of the memorial concert for Freddie Mercury being held at Wembley Stadium.

I didn't know it at the time, but elder daughter would be born five days later.

Today, I wondered if she could hear all those Queen tunes from the womb, because, three decades later, she was at Wembley with a cousin and a room-mate, sitting up in the gods, attending the Tribute Concert for Taylor Hawkins, the Foo Fighters drummer, who died suddenly last March.

And technology being what it is, I was alerted that the concert had begun, by an Instagram picture posted by the cousin and tagging elder daughter.  Sitting with my early morning coffee at Moka House, I soon discovered that I could stream the concert on my laptop via the MTV YouTube channel -- with the sound muted, of course.  My iPhone earbuds are incompatible with my Mac.  (Gee, thanks, Apple.) When I had to leave to set up Demeter's breakfast, I followed the line-up via blog updates, until I could hurry home mid-morning.

I'm not a true-blue fan of the Foo Fighters, but elder daughter has been enthusiastic about them for the past five years, and so I'm reasonably conversant with about half a dozen of their better-known songs and familiar with a lot of their biographical details, having been exposed to documentaries about them during each of elder daughter's visits.

The real thrill for me was watching this Wembley show, knowing elder daughter was there -- much like her visit to three Court One games at Wimbledon, when the summer began.  I know a little about the Foo Fighters and far far less about tennis, but I knew she was in the crowd and excited beyond belief to be there.

The show had a bit of everything.  Hawkins' connections were everywhere in the rock/pop scene. When I got home, I was confronted with the very early-Seventies-style of interminable guitar solo, supplied by the James Gang, reunited after decades for this concert only.  (Not a criticism, I rather like "Closet Queen" with its variations on Ravel's Bolero, and Guaraldi's "Cast Your Fate to the Wind".)  

While getting Demeter's breakfast, I had missed the legendary Chrissie Hynde (totally in control at 70) and the Pretenders, Liam Gallagher, and Niles Rodgers, to name a few.  I caught what I'd missed later, before the lawyers hauled the YouTube video down, as I knew they would.

There was a seam of bereavement running through the performances, as well.  Wolfgang Van Halen played songs by his late father Eddie;  AC/DC lost Malcolm Young some time ago. Rush has lost Neil Peart, and tonight were playing to a politely bewildered crowd of Brits born in the nineties and "naughties".  I'm not unsympathetic - Rush has bewildered me for years.  Taylor Hawkins was a fan, though.

And then there was Queen - what's left of them.  And elder daughter now saw them in the flesh, from her seat up below the rim of the Wembley. Dancing with vicarious glee in the living room, I shared the moment with her - via texts, of course, this being the 21st century.

After a long parade of well-known musicians playing some of Hawkins' favourite music, the Foo Fighters took over.

At this moment, it became crystal clear that, for all of the variety of songs and musicians preceding this moment, it was a Foo Fighters crowd, come for a Foo Fighters concert. The singing had, up until this moment, not been as loud and cohesive. The thousands in the stadium now knew every word. 

And then Paul McCartney showed up. 

I thought he might, since he's a close friend of Dave Grohl's, but I still leapt to my feet in shock, texting an expletive to my daughter at Wembley, while  swaying eight times zones away.

The Foo Fighters were backed by a series of notable drummers, including 12-year-old Nandi Bushell, and Taylor Hawkins' 16-year-old-son Shane, in a frenetic and emotional performance that stood out among a day of many such moments.

I know just enough about the Foo Fighters to guess that the concert, which had last nearly six hours, was drawing to a close, when Grohl, standing alone on the stage, with half a dozen empty drum kits behind him, accompanied himself on guitar, while the vast crowd sang along to the quintessential FF song "Everlong".

I felt rather jet-lagged afterwards.

Maybe it was the stimulation of so much music.

Maybe it was because a piece of my heart is residing in London.  She got home long after midnight.

The Battersea Poltergeist

November 2nd is All Souls' Day, and in Mexico, it's the final Day of the Dead, so perhaps it's not inappropriate that the Hallowe'en decorations in our neighbourhood have not yet been taken down.

Ghost stories are not limited to the end of October, however.

I follow BBC Four on Facebook, and on Hallowe'en, my attention was caught by a multi-part radio programme entitled The Battersea Poltergeist, which was first broadcast at the beginning of this year.  As it happens, I have familial connections to Battersea, so I tuned in.

The haunting took place over about a dozen years at 63 Wycliffe Road.  The house is long gone, as is the part of the street it occupied, but I brought up Google Maps and entered the address.  I was astonished, and rather alarmed, to be directed to an area about a nine-minute walk from elder daughter's flat --- in South Wimbledon.  

Fortunately, along with the half-hour episodes, there are three "case updates" to accommodate just a few of the listeners' hundreds of questions and comments. One of the discussions involved the proximity of railway lines, so I learned that Clapham Junction Railway Station is about a mile to the west of where the house stood, that part of what was Wycliffe Road is now Ashbury Road, and that Lavender Hill is just to the south.  That narrows the area to somewhere around the Greek Orthodox Church of St Nectarios, about five miles north of elder daughter's flat, and one mile south-east of where one branch of my ancestors were living in the second half of the nineteenth century, near the west edge of Battersea Park.

Nicely oriented, I settled in, listening (in daylight, of course) to nine episodes over Hallowe'en, All Saints' Day, and All Souls' Day.  It's a twisty-turny, rollercoaster sort of tale, veering from inexplicable to explicable, from other-worldly to mundane, and from belief to disbelief-- and back again.  It's a mixture of dramatization - the cast is led by none other than Toby Jones - and interviews, including several with Shirley, the original tormented girl, who is now eighty.  (At least she was in early 2021.)  All in all,  we have a fascinating examination of the paranormal, and our differing perceptions of what is plausible.  Follow the above link, and give it a listen.

I'm a little perplexed by the illustration of the series. 

The image is spooky and arresting, but it shows a green-eyed girl against a very old map of the East End of London.

And not particularly close to South Wimbledon.

Shirley Hitchings was (is) a brown-eyed girl, and Battersea is south of the Thames.

Snow glob

It's the shortest day of this benighted year.

There's a Great Conjunction tonight, not seen since the 13th century (the one in the 17th century was apparently not visible at night), so, of course, we've been socked in by a relentless grey sky pelting us with heavy rain and fat mashed-potato gobbets of snow.  

The ground was already saturated when the snow plummeted, and so the white stuff is not getting much of a purchase on the soggy ground.  It has managed to accumulate not far north of us; the buses in and out of the Saanich Peninsula have been cancelled, as have several sailings of the ferries.  

A friend of Double Leo Sister, whose only crime was venturing from Parksville for a medical appointment, and dropping off Demeter's gift, has spent the better part of the day trapped on the Malahat Highway, a road that follows the south-east coast of Vancouver Island through the Cowichan Valley, and by some heart-stopping chasms, and. if blocked by snow or the resulting accidents, is practically inescapable.

I limited my forays to miserable short slogs, and spent the morning taking advantage of the Resident Fan Boy's ill-advised trip to a shopping mall.  I slipped my treasure trove of presents into bags, and emptied the contents of the "rehearsed" Christmas stockings into old purses, suitable for hiding until Christmas Eve.  

Last week, I made a careful inventory of the RFB's collection of Doctor Who novels, and slipped into Russell's Books for four more to fill out his stocking.  I discovered a few days later, that the RFB, having run out of space in his designated and sacred Doctor Who bookshelf, has been adding his novels to a lower shelf in the dining room.  I checked today to see which books I'd duplicated.  All four, dammit.  Now I've got to sneak into Russell's with only three shopping days left - something I'd hoped to avoid.  (I'll stick the four duplicates into one of the many "little libraries" in my neighbourhood -- perhaps the one on my old street.)

On a brighter note, yesterday, I prepared the Christmas tourtière for freezing, so I rewarded myself this morning with an account at the Globe Theatre, in order to live-stream (Snow) Globe, this year's version of the annual Christmas play for children at the famous venue for Shakespeare's plays -- closed for business, along with all of London's theatres, by this new plague.

It's snippets of Shakespeare, snatches of modern Christmas songs, and written and performed by Sandi Toksvig, and contains wry wit, in-jokes, and much of the longing for contact that has beset rather more of us than usual this year.  I enjoyed it very much.

I'll go to the roof tonight.  The forecast is for clearing skies.

Choral comprehension

The point has been made - many, many times - that the chord structure in Pachelbel's Canon is in the chord structure of many popular songs.  (Actually, back in my Prairie-Home-Companion-listening days, the very same point was made about Beethoven's "Ode to Joy".)

However, it's still great fun, and I ran across this video this week.

Incidentally, the choir here is the rather famous Crouch End Chorus, from North London.  I have a copy of the album they recorded with Ray Davies of a selection of classic Kinks songs.

However the earliest pot-shot at Pachelbel that I can recall is this YouTube classic from about ten years ago.  It was viral then, and perhaps enough time has elapsed that I can share it here:


Between these two offerings, there are well over a dozen songs -- although, frankly, I think they're stretching a bit with "Let It Be"...

Face-plant in Chelsea

Elder daughter suddenly appeared on FaceTime on my phone this morning. She wanted to show me her teeth.

Maybe I should explain.

About three weeks ago, elder daughter was in London. She had arrived three days before, booked into an AirBnB in Hampstead, done a London Walk, taken the Chunnel to Paris to meet up with a Belgian friend for a day-trip, and on a Wednesday morning, was on another London Walk in Chelsea. I think it's safe to say that she may have been still recovering from jet-lag, although I'll bet she'll hotly deny it.

She'd paused to take a picture of a rather unremarkable sculpture in front of a Mercedes-Benz dealer, noticed the group had progressed up Cheyne Walk, so ran to catch up. Somewhere in front of Keith Richard's old house, she slid home, leading with the left side of her face and torso. Her fellow walkers helped clean her up a bit with wet-wipes and bandaids.

I believe she completed the walk, but was unable to go "home", because she had a ticket for Ian McKellen's King Lear at The Duke of York's Theatre in the West End that evening.

To say this put a dent in her visit is a understatement. It put several other dents into her, as well.

By the evening she was sporting a burgundy shiner to compliment a road-rashed jaw and scraped knuckles.

A brisk exchange of texts ensued, whenever both she and I had WiFi access, mostly pleadings on my part to get a gel pack and ice, ice, ice.

On the train to Sutton Coldfield to visit cousins the following day, she developed a chronically painful shoulder. By the time she was en route to Heathrow, a little over a week later, she was in agony from sore ribs.

She had to wait through the Labour Day weekend to see her doctor. The receptionist told her that they were booked for the day -- until elder daughter mentioned "slight" problems breathing, and the receptionist's voice went up a couple of octaves.

So elder daughter has been on anti-inflammatories for a week, at which point she chose to tell me that her front teeth are no longer symmetrical.

Well, they looked okay, but I told her that her grandmother knocked three teeth loose when she was a teenager. About a decade later, I came out, and so did one loosened tooth. The other two made their exit with my sister.

Elder daughter will consult with her doctor and dentist. I've told her to blame it on her crazy mother. They've met me, after all.

For three weeks, I've had "Brimful of Asha" on the brain, except I find I'm substituting "Face-plant in Chelsea", and "Ev'ryone needs a pavement to fall on; ev'ryone needs a pavement..." My twisted psyche strikes again.

A mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up Globe

This past week, the British media (the arts sections anyway) were in a bit of an uproar over the termination of Emma Rice's tenure as the artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London. She's staying for the 2017 season, but apparently is on the outs because she used "inauthentic" lighting, and other modern interpretations, which is apparently not the Globe's mandate, but has also been pulling in the audiences.

I was pulled in as well -- the Globe had a live-stream last month, which permitted me to take in the closing night of Rice's Bollywood-flavoured A Midsummer Night's Dream, which reminded me pleasurably of a simply gorgeous subcontinental production I saw in 2008.

Apart from the thrill of being able to watch along with the crowd on the South Bank, the production was a delight with Katy Owen as a truly manic and rather dangerous Puck, Miaow Miaow (yep - she's a cabaret artist) as a voluptuous and uninhibited Titania, and a male Helena who is the gay BFF of a bossy Hermia. If you follow this last link - and you really should - you'll see "Helenus"(Ankur Bahl) and Hermia (Anjana Vasan) slip in a riff from Beyoncé's "All the Single Ladies", but you'll have to press the play button yourself, because I can't embed it.

The Twitter reaction has been amusing. Lots of pointing out that if the Globe really wants authenticity, they can dispense with the female actors altogether, and encourage disease, prostitution, and fruit-hurling in the audience.

This being the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death, it's been a bumper year for seeing his plays. I have summer memories of a male "Maria" planted barefoot on a volcanic rock outcropping blasting an electric guitar accompaniment to "Lola" while his black Elizabethan skirts rippled in the breeze during the finale of a crossed-dressed Twelfth Night on the grounds of Camosun College. I watched Croatian dancing by flashes of lightening in another Greater Victoria Shakespeare Festival production of A Winter's Tale - no rain until the final bows, because Victoria is a bit like Camelot.

We bagged the Royal Seats for A Company of Fools and their warped take on Pericles, one of the few Shakespeare plays that I have neither seen nor read. And I saw a remarkable and illuminating eighty-minute, four-person interpretation of Romeo and Juliet at the Gladstone Theatre here in Hades. Among many other live Shakespeare goodies available both in Victoria and Ottawa, of course.

However, the very wisest thing I've done on Facebook this year is to "like" the BBC's "Shakespeare Lives" page. Along with vintage clippings of classic Shakespearean productions over the past fifty or sixty years, they featured the "Complete Walk", an ambitious collection of eleven-minute films of all Shakespeare's plays -- performed in the countries and counties in which they are set.  Some short clips are still available for viewing -- go take a look!

My take on the Emma Rice controversy?  Shakespeare knew all about appealing to the groundlings and the people who could actually afford seats.  He also knew about what happened if you crossed swords with those with the power to shut you down.  He persevered and survived.  I trust Emma Rice will do the same.

Claiming London, Part Two

Sometimes YouTube gets a pretty loopy idea of what videos I'd like to see. If I click on something by accident, or out of curiosity, I get bombarded with offerings, some of them downright weird or disturbing. Thank goodness that this isn't usually the case. I had been exploring videos by Polly Hudson Design, because some of them illustrate changes in London over years and centuries. I posted one of them a couple of weeks ago

As a result, the video below showed up in my recommendations last week. It's a creation of Brighton animators "Persistent Peril" and is based on an essay by Peter Ackroyd. (I read his London: the Autobiography about seven years ago, if "read" is the proper word.)

The animation is delightfully detailed; watch for what happens in the insets, and pay attention to the tiny figures that scamper across both Cripplegate Without and Cripplegate Within. (You may want to view this on YouTube and enlarge it.) I particularly like the stork that drops a bundle down a chimney -- which turns out to be the infant Thomas More!


I have a connection with Cripplegate - but not in the time-frames described in detail in the video. My great-great-grandfather claimed to have been born there in his entry on the 1871 census -- his 1859 admission to the Freedom of the City showed him as being born on Hackney Road, which is considerably to the east and outside the City of London itself.

Clicking on the map should enlarge it.

However, I do know that my great-great-great-grandparents lived near where the Barbican Centre is now, and I'm including a detail of one of my family history Google Maps. They ran an inn in Bridgewater Square (the pink marker with a halo around it - you can click on the picture to make it large) in 1817. Later, they moved to Jerusalem Passage in Islington (the pink marker in the top left-hand corner), then to Butcher Hall Lane in Smithfield (pink marker just to the north of St Paul's Cathedral) in the early 1830s. I tracked them through the christenings of their children and my great-great-great-great-grandmother's 1833 will.

The Resident Fan Boy has a Barbican connection as well. The little green house with a flag denotes what I believe to be the location of the White Cross Street Prison, where one of my husband's great-great-grandfathers, a struggling solicitor, was imprisoned for debt in 1846. When a boy, he lost two young brothers, who were both buried on April 19th, 1823 at St Stephen Coleman Street, the gold house-shape on Old Jewry Street (the church was at the north end), south of London Wall. As you might expect from the video, St Stephen was destroyed, just as most of Cripplegate was, in 1940 by German bombers.

The purple marker is about where I figured Shakespeare was living during his London years, judging from books on the subject and a podcast of the Shakespeare London Walk tour. The video suggests that he lived north of the London Wall -- perhaps he moved!

At the bottom, south of Cripplegate Within, we see three blue markers and a pink one. The first blue is the location of the leather goods shop on Godliman Street, the longtime business of one of the Resident Fan Boy's great-grandfathers; he ran it until his death in 1894. Just to the east, the approximate address on Cannon Street where the same great-grandfather lived with his sister in 1861; both had just arrived from Berlin. Further along on Bucklersbury, the solicitor's office where the RFB's great-great-grandfather articled with his uncle -- some years before both went bankrupt. Finally, in the bottom right-hand corner, the Lombard Street office where my great-great-grandfather printed The Daily News from the 1850s to the 1870s. He was the one who had claimed to be born in Cripplegate -- but, in all likelihood, had not.

Claiming London

Both the Resident Fan Boy and I have London roots, mine on my paternal side, his on three or four branches of his father's and at least one branch of his mother's.  This is probably why I find this video eerily beautiful.

 London first appears as a knot at the centre of the Thames, then bulges and spreads, surrounded by satellites of the farms and settlements that would become villages in Middlesex, Essex, Kent, and Surrey before morphing into Greater London neighbourhoods.


My husband's and my London ancestors first made their appearances in the city during the eighteenth century.  The earliest record for the RFB is the marriage of his Huguenot great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents in Blackfriars in 1717 - three years into the reign of George I,  when the music first changes in the video.  The earliest record of my ancestors in London is the 1769 apprenticeship record of my Worcester-born great-great-great-great-grandfather, then fourteen, in Aldgate -- George III had been on the throne for nine years.

It makes sense that our forebears should appear in London with the sudden burgeoning of the capital in the Georgian era.  By the mid-twentieth century, no one in either of our direct lines remained in England's capital city.

As much as I like to imagine an ancestor attending a Shakespearean play at the Globe or the Rose, or walking the same streets as Geoffrey Chaucer, so far it seems that those of our great-grandparents who put down roots in London, came to the great city with millions of others in the eighteenth century.

"The Enraged Musician" (1741) - William Hogarth

Through a glass, sneakily

One of the wisest things I've done this month is to "like" BBC Culture on Facebook. I've been getting links to all sorts of interesting articles.

The five regular readers of this blog - I may be overestimating, but I'm a fan of self-delusion - know that as a non-driver, I amuse myself at times with the mini-dramas that take place on buses. I call these "Writes of Passage", because I think I'm being clever - that self-delusion thing again.

George Georgiou, a London-born photographer who now makes his home in Folkestone, Kent, has been capturing what he calls "micro-dramas", but these are taking place outside the bus.  An article on the BBC Culture web site  describes one of his latest projects, Last Stop.  Georgiou would spend as long as twelve hours, riding  the length of London bus routes, sitting by the window with his camera in his lap, gazing into a right-angle lens, which looks something like this:

This, according to the article, allowed him to take his pictures undetected -- although if you peruse Last Stop (and you should), you'll see a couple of definitely suspicious stares.

I'm now tempted to purchase a right-angle lens and follow Georgiou's lead, except for four problems:
1) the cost of a damn right-angle lens;
2) the legality of snapping people without their knowledge;
3) the fact that Georgiou is a far, far better photographer than I;
4) the mud that cakes the windows of OC Transpo buses at this time of year - and depressingly enough, from November to May.

Reason Number Four is why most of my "Writes of Passage" concern dramas within the bus.

Four-century see-saw

This is London Bridge in 1616, in a famous engraving by Claes Janz Visscher.  If you look at the lower right hand corner, you'll see heads on spikes, a little public service announcement for people considering treason. (Click on the picture, if you must.)

And this is the same scene in 2016, drawn by artist Robin Richards.

If you go here, you can spend hours of fun, sliding back and forth between two years that are four centuries apart.

Not me, though. I'm going to bed.

Focused and critical

Some years ago, I took a course on documentary film.  I have never forgotten it.  It was taught by a National Film Board of Canada film-maker, and among the many things he pointed out to us was the fact that a documentary film can never ever be totally objective, no matter what you've read about cinéma vérité.  We are looking through the film-maker's eyes; s/he has chosen what to shoot and where to zoom or pan out.  We saw many classics, among them Titicut Follies by Frederick Wiseman, about the Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts.  I chiefly remember a chilling scene where a prisoner declared insane by the state articulately argues that he is sane, and how the staff, after his departure from the meeting, explain among themselves how everything he has said proves his mental illness.

Today, I remembered that National Gallery, Wiseman's latest film, was showing at the Bytowne Cinema.  There was a huge line-up to see it, but I managed to secure a seat on the far aisle.  The movie begins with galleries filling with art-lovers and their faces which all have similar expressions:  the head pulled back, the eyes focused and critical.  The faces are all male, for some reason.  When the voices begin, they are female - the voices of the docents, addressing crowds of patrons, or lectures for art teachers,  or workshops for blind and nearly blind art-lovers who are feeling specially upraised outlines of paintings while they listen.

Three pieces that figure heavily in my own life are featured, albeit briefly: "Doge Leonardo Loredan" by Bellini; "The Fighting Temeraire" by Turner (both favourites of my mother's), and the Burlington House cartoon which I encountered on my first trip to London. I had never heard of it before and loved it so much that I would hurry back into the National Gallery at every opportunity to drink it in, even if there were only fifteen minutes available.  I got posters and postcards of it, of course, but it didn't match the magic of being able to gaze on the original.

The film takes us into boardrooms where the accents are (mostly) Oxbridge, females address males whose arms are crossed.  We return to more docents where the accents are more varied: Scottish, Australian, and (mostly) Estuary.  The faces of the gallery staff are all white, while the gallery visitors are every colour, and, in the case of school groups, possibly there under duress.  All manner of people bundle up against the weather (I think this was mostly filmed around Christmas of 2012) and wait overnight to secure tickets to a Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit. Greenpeace guerrillas post a protest banner across the facade as passersby gape and the police wait to move in.  Paintings being cleaned and restored, and scholars argue for and against such restorations. We see a television arts series being filmed, and press conferences, and opening galas attended by very wealthy people.  We see a life class featuring models with, miracle of miracles, unwaxed pubic hair.  We see piano recitals, ballet, and a poetry reading by Jo Shapcott.
This isn't footage from the documentary, but a film by the National Gallery done about the same time.  Jo Shapcott says roughly the same things in Wiseman's documentary, but ruins it a little by explaining that Callisto was experiencing rape a second time when exposed by Diana, because she had experienced "rape of a sort" by Jupiter.  I have double-checked the versions of the myth.  I think it's pretty safe to say that she was raped by Jupiter, period.

By the third hour, I was fighting to keep myself awake -- not because it was boring, but because the movie is probably about 45 minutes too long.  But I was happy I stayed to the end which features faces from many of the paintings that have been featured.  They stare at us, the eyes focussed and critical.

The hell below Haggerston

The Blackest Streets: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Slum by Sarah Wise

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I got this book out of the library for two reasons: 1) someone recommended it in the Goodreads reviews for Lost London: 1870-1945 which I'd recently bought; 2) I thought, based on my struggles with working out historical London streets, that I had ancestors living in the Nichol around 1840. I've since discovered that my lot were actually in Haggerston, several blocks to the north, but never mind.

This is a very readable account of the neighbourhood behind St Leonard Shoreditch which, for about one century, had the reputation of being the dirtiest, poorest, and most dangerous place in London. Sarah Wise doesn't dispute the dirt and poverty, but she has some perspective to offer on the danger. The Nichol was a dangerous place to live, no doubt, but more for malnutrition, disease, and domestic violence than murder. Wise tells the story of how a rather rural area surrounded by gardens became a dark warren of poorly constructed and overcrowded buildings in a few decades. We hear what it was like to grow up in such an area, why so little was done for the residents, and finally, the grand plans to transform the neighbourhood into a wholesome and aesthetically pleasing community for the "deserving poor", with predictable results.

It's an interesting angle on the nineteenth century and underlines how much, and how very little, has changed.

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A matter of time

This picture was taken in October.

October 19th, 1910, to be exact.

I love the timelessness of it, although the rain of that long-ago day has ceased, the pavement dried, the leaves rotted, and actually, the building itself, built in the eighteenth century, was demolished in London in 1960. In 1850, a seven-minute walk away to the west, was the last residence of the Resident Fan Boy's great-great-great-grandmother Harriet Hammond Croose Pasquier where she lived with her second husband, an artist. Between 1820 and 1825, a six-minute stroll northwards from Queen's Square (would it have been called Queen's Square then?) would take you to the house of the RFB's great-great-great-grandparents in another branch, solicitor Matthew and Ann Elgie. This is where they lived briefly with their young, large family and where two of their small boys died. (The Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, which borders Queen's Square, was not yet built.) And a twenty-minute walk to the east, in 1826, my great-great-great-grandparents Richard and Virtue Hales were living in Jerusalem Passage. After a rather disastrous foray into innkeeping in the Barbican area, Richard was back to being a printer and book-seller.

I know about where our ancestors were because I've been plotting them in one of several Google Maps, after being inspired by a British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa lecture a few years ago by John Reid. I now have some idea of what our ancestors in London may have passed on a daily basis because I stumbled upon Lost London: 1870-1945 by Philip Davies in a Chapters bookstore last week. It's a coffee table book, chock-full of gorgeous plate photographs of a London demolished to make way for new structures -- or bombed all to blazes during the Second World War.

The row of buildings in the second picture (taken September 1908) used to stand on Aldgate High Street and are now where The Hoop and Grapes pub is located, one of the oldest taverns in London, with cellars dating back to the thirteenth century. If you walk for six minutes to the north, you'll find yourself in Petticoat Lane, where, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, my great-great-great-great-grandfather William Hales ran another public house, and where his children, including my three-times-great-grandfather, were born. Steps away from the houses in this photograph is St Botolph Aldgate where many of my ancestors were christened and married, probably buried too.

This bleak block of houses (taken just before its 1931 demolition) is Provost Street, Shoreditch where my great-great-great-grandfather James Janes lived with his wife Sarah and my great-great-grandmother Jane was born in 1827, the youngest of five. James worked as a tailor and was still living here at the time of the 1841 census. Did Provost Street look this forsaken at that time? I sincerely hope not.

So many others: the Strand as the Resident Fan Boy's grandmother may have remembered it; the busy streets around St Paul as the RFB's great-grand-father may have recognised it (although he probably would have been shocked by large advertisements cluttering up the surroundings just before the First World War -- he died in the 1890s); sights south of the Thames no doubt passed daily by some of my more recent ancestors.

There were several copies of this lovely book at Chapters, at a rather reasonable price....

Love in the time of cholera

I'm not a fan of Valentine's Day. It's not just the fact that I'm the mother of one child still in elementary school; any mother of elementary school students hates Valentine's Day unless she's crazy. Or Martha Stewart. Which amounts to the same thing. (For the record, we distributed hand-made valentines until second daughter hit Grade Three. At that time, I gave up and went for cheap drug store valentines.) It's the commercialism, the forced, fake romanticism, and the underlying idea that it's imperative to get laid on that date. I don't mind the chocolate aspect; I am a fan of chocolate.

So it was with some relief that I headed off for the first post-bus-strike meeting of the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa (BIFHSGO -- members pronounce it "Bufizgo") this morning. I arrived at the National Library and Archives, and the meeting area was packed. I'm not sure whether this was because the bus strike is over or because Alison Hare was speaking.

Alison Hare is a professional genealogist and she has spoken to BIFHSGO (and many other family history societies and organizations) before. Her talks always get high ratings. She's not a flashy speaker, but she is thorough and clear. This morning she was speaking (apologetically, given the subject matter and the date) of the cholera epidemics that hit Great Britain several times during the nineteenth century, in particular the epidemic of 1854 and of a pump in Broad Street in the Soho district of London that became a turning point in the understanding of how cholera was spread. This has been written about extensively and I can link you to Stevyn Colgan's recent blog for a quick overview.

Alison Hare's interest in the Broad Street cholera epidemic is personal. See, the British physician (and anaesthesia pioneer) John Snow demonstrated that the pump on Broad Street was contaminated by mapping out the deaths from cholera during those few, terrible September weeks in 1854 in the streets surrounding the water pump on Broad Street. Each death appeared as a line, and sure enough, the houses closest to the contaminated pump had the highest number of lines. One of the lines in nearby Bentinck Street should represent Alison Hare's ancestor Harriet Iddiols who fell ill with cholera while heavily pregnant, but she was hastily evacuated to Gravesend with her family. She died within a few days and the particulars of her death appear in John Snow's notes, although she is not named.

So Alison Hare set out to provide some names for the lines on John Snow's maps, using her skills as a genealogist. With the birth/marriage/death index, the censuses, some strategically-ordered death certificates (it would be hideously expensive to order more than a few), and other online documents, she hunted down the name of the baby who was the starting point for this terrifying breakout that decimated the neighbourhood. Her name was Frances Lewis; she was six months old and when she fell ill with cholera, her mother rinsed her diapers into the sewer which was only a couple of feet from the water pump. Cracks in the lining of the sewer allowed the vibrio cholerae bacterium to enter the well that supplied the pump. Baby Frances died hours later. Towards the end of the epidemic two weeks later, her father succumbed as well.

Alison made up her own maps and charts for her presentation and instead of lines or dots, there were names, and with the names came stories of families trying desperately to care for one another, suffering and fear, love and loss, pieced together from the data and from contemporary accounts, particularly those of Henry Whitehead, the local Church of England minister trying to comfort the living and dying in his parish. He didn't give names either, but because Alison Hare knew the circumstances of Harriet's neighbours on Bentinck Street, she could figure out which families Whitehead was visiting in those frantic days.

A distant relative heard of her search and sent her photographs of Harriet Iddiol's husband John who remarried five months after his wife's death ("He had to," Alison told us, "There were young children."), and subsequently moved to Nova Scotia. There was also a portrait of one of Harriet and John's daughters. "They look like nice people," said Alison. "They had gentle faces." The faces looked almost exactly like her own.