A Note on Carpet Biting, and some answers to questions

A few small points. The description of Hitler as a 'carpet biter' ('Teppichfresser') occurs in William Shirer's Berlin Diary, in an account of Hitler's 1938 Godesberg meeting with Chamberlain. I think he attributes it to German journalists who were retailing rumours of terrible rages. In my childhood, when the idea that Hitler's actions were best explained by madness was common, I recall hearing the phrase used a lot by adults.

I don't want to start a discussion on this slightly delicate subject, but I think some contributors are confusing it with the wholly different expression 'pillow biter',  which I seem to recall, entered currency during and after in the strange trial of several leading figures in the then Liberal Party (they were acquitted) at the Old Bailey in the late 1970s.

I do not doubt that the events in Ms Olsen' s book have been covered elsewhere, nor do I suggest that this book is a breakthrough in research - though I think the America First affiliations of JFK , Kingman Brewster (his NY Times obituary didn't mention this)  and, as it happens, Gerald Ford, may come as a surprise to many.  I note that one contributor is so incredulous of this, that he thinks (thanks a lot!) that I have mistaken JFK for his father Joe, whose hostility to intervention is so well-known as to be a cliche,  and would be no suprise to anyone. No, it's JFK.

The point is that this is an accessible popular account of an era which is little-discussed in Britain, which has made a major impact in the USA but which has not even been published here.

One reader seems to think that I can't see why the USA's people should have wanted to intervene in the 1939 war. On the contrary, I am amazed that the USA did intervene, and keenly aware that they very nearly didn't.

In fact, when the Chicago Tribune, in 1941, revealed the USA's supposed 'war plans' for invading Europe, Hitler came close to switching his forces westwards, away from the USSR.  to knock Britain out of the war before the USA could send an Army to this country. Pearl Harbor changed his mind.

 

Given the incredible closeness of this outcome, and the heavy price exacted by the USA for its support, I am driven back to my original point - why did Britain think that entering a war against Germany in 1939 in any way suited her interests?

 

One reader suggest that I am an 'admirer' of David Irving. I most certainly am no such thing.

We Should Have Stayed out in 1914 - major historian agrees

I’m pleased to see that the historian Niall Ferguson is saying  (here http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/30/britain-first-world-war-biggest-error-niall-ferguson) that Britain had no need to enter the First World War, and in fact that it was a terrible mistake for us to do so.

 

Good.  This seems to me to be the only worthwhile debate we can have about that conflict. If it were true that it was some sort of struggle between freedom and tyranny, or civilisation and barbarism (which it wasn’t) , then the excuses made for the generals and the politicians might have some validity. If the stake truly had been that high, then all kinds of incompetent fumbling, and trial and error with thousands of men’s lives at stake, might just be excusable.

 

But as soon as it is reduced to a mere war of choice, into which this country for one fell through error, scheming  or simple panic, then the colossal butcher’s bill is plainly unjustified.

 

I’d add that there’s no real doubt that Germany began the war. I really don’t know why anyone bothers to argue otherwise.  The great German historian Fritz Fischer established this beyond all doubt in his unmatched work of 1961 ‘Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegzielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918’ This was published in English with the emollient and evasive title ‘ Germany's Aims in the First World War’ . A more accurate (if slightly sensational translation, as the word ‘grab ‘ is slightly more violent and demotic than ‘Griff’) would be ‘A Grab for World Power - The War Aims of Imperial Germany 1914-1918’. Perhaps ‘Grasping for World Power’ would be more accurate, if less literal, as is often the case in translation.  (this article http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/books/2012/09/lets-not-be-beastly-to-the-germans/ is also helpful in explaining the situation). Barbara Tuchman’s marvellous ‘Guns of August’ is also quite plain that Germany had been aching to march through Belgium into France for years, and had all but openly begged the Belgians to allow this to happen . At the same time France, burning with the desire to revenge her (deserved) defeat in 1870, was virtually desperate to drag Britain in this futile conflict, and actually pulled its troops back from the German frontier in July 1914 to avoid any possibility of an incident allowing the Germans to portray France as the aggressor (in which case Britain would have stayed out).

 

Meanwhile British and French soldiers had been in secret talks for years, more or less committing Britain to march in the event of war, without the knowledge of the British government. Quite why so many members of the Liberal government fell in so quickly with a war they initially opposed, I’ve often wondered. It certainly wasn’t some kind of bankers’ conspiracy. The City of London, and most of the British economy, were aghast at the prospect of a European war. I think we just have to put it down to stupidity, cowardice and human weakness, the things which explain so much of history.

 

Why wasn’t it (as my Grandfather’s old medal says, in words engraved on one whole side of the bronze disc he and many others were given when it was all over) ‘The Great War for Civilization’ ?

 

Well, it obviously didn’t work out that way. It probably put paid to Western Christian civilization, though it has taken about a century to die.

 

But even at the time, our side wasn’t that marvellous. Experts on suffrage have pointed out that Imperial Germany, in 1914, had a broader suffrage than Britain. The mighty German Social Democratic Party (then still a united force) was growing constantly in power and strength. Austria-Hungary, our other enemy, was s surprisingly liberal empire, almost multicultural in modern terms, and heartbreakingly civilized (in cultural and scientific terms) compared with the horrible things which would follow in the regions it governed.  As I’ve noted here before, Stefan Zweig’s ‘World of Yesterday’ portrays a nation which, at the time, seemed stuffy and oppressive, but on which millions would look back fondly after it had vanished from the earth.

 

Belgium, well, I suggest those who are interested study Paul Belien’s ‘A Throne in Brussels’ , for an unsentimental (and very Flemish) look at that artificial country and its very odd monarchy.  I don’t, by the way, endorse Dr Belien’s political position, or approve of his party, the Vlaams Belang.  But it’s a fascinating book.

 

We’ve discussed here before the supposed ‘commitment’ of Britain to rush to Belgium’s defence, which is a) nothing quite as clear as is claimed, and b) was the sort of commitment Britain had oiled out of in the past when it was foolish or inconvenient to fulfil it. (This casts a flickering yellow light on the clinically mad guarantee to Poland of April 1939, in which we actually invented, quiet needlessly,  a dangerous commitment to defend an unlovely country which we couldn’t in any case save, thus once again giving someone else the right to decide when, where and about what we entered a global war -  as if we actually desired to repeat the disaster of 1914 in detail).

 

 

France had recently recovered from the Dreyfus affair, but remained a profoundly divided and often bigoted society, by no means friendly to Britain. Russia, our other ally, was an autocracy, barely beginning to reform itself into a modern state, having abolished serfdom only a few decades before.

 

By the way, how France managed to survive the first months of the war, I still cannot fathom. Its armies were  so incompetently led, and so many men needlessly sacrificed in moronic frontal charges,  that it is a matter of amazement that Germany’s professional soldiers did not manage to roll them up in a matter of weeks - and, by the way, the idea that plucky British soldiers saved the day is not borne out by the facts. The Old Contemptibles fought bravely, but made only a marginal difference to the speed of the German advance. Quite possibly, the Belgians’ futile but courageous defence of Liege probably prevented a swift German triumph. Tuchman’s book is terrific on this part of the war, and on the astonishment caused when Germany unveiled its enormous mobile siege guns, ominous and disturbing weapons unlike anything ever seen before in human history, foreshadowing all the mighty works of perverted science which have been such a feature of the modern world.  

 

Professor Ferguson says, in my view quite rightly, that we would have lost nothing significant by staying out of war in 1914, and might well have saved much that is valuable. If this is true, (and it is) then Joan Littlewood’s ‘Oh What a Lovely War!’ is more truthful and moral than an awful lot of respectable history. And the triumvirate of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen, whose literary and poetic accounts of that war I tried so hard, for so many years, to resist, were right. 

Not So Special - an Amazing Account of the USA's unwillingness to Enter World War Two

For reasons I’ll explain in time (but not today) , I’ve been reading a book which has (as far as I know) only been published in the USA, though it’s available here readily as a Kindle download. It’s called ‘Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II’,  written by Lynne Olsen. As far as I can discover it has not been reviewed in this country. I would strongly urge the publishers, Random House, to release it here.

 

For it would be a revelation to millions of British people, who have a vague assumption that the USA is Britain’s natural ally and good friend, and that American intervention ‘on our side’ in the Hitler war was inevitable and popular.  The truth is that it nearly did not happen, and was bitterly unpopular with millions of ordinary, patriotic Americans.

British readers may now – 75 years later – at last be ready to learn this unwelcome and disturbing truth in all its fascinating detail.

If so, they should read it in conjunction with another shocker (which has been published here but has not got as much attention as it deserves),  Benn Steil’s ‘The Battle of Bretton Woods’, about Britain’s utter defeat at the hands of the USA in economic matters (the man who encompassed that defeat was Harry Dexter White, a senior American official  but also – quite astonishingly – a Soviet agent).

 

‘Those Angry Days’ recounts the extraordinary period in American history between the Munich agreement and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Its principal villain is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in this account appears as a pathetic broken reed, vacillating, feeble, indecisive and tricky, as well as vindictive to those who crossed him and willing to sanction shockingly underhand methods against opponents. Charles Lindbergh, the great flyer, and dogged opponent of intervention, comes across as more tragic than bad – a man so determined to speak what he saw as the truth that he did not care if his words and actions helped the cause of wicked men.

 

But even to me (and I have long known that the USA is a foreign country which has no special regard for Britain and is often hostile to it when our interests conflict, as they must) the book is full of revelations.

 

Let me list a few : The presence of active Anglophobes at high levels in the US armed forces, the support for the neutralist movement ‘America First’ of figures such as John F.Kennedy,  Gore Vidal and Kingman Brewster (later a well-liked US ambassador to London), the huge public support for staying out of the war, the general mistrust of Britain, thanks to what was regarded as our misleading propaganda during the 1914 war, and Britain’s default on its war debts to the USA in 1934;  the pitiful weakness of America’s army and air force in 1939, the extraordinary (and in my view historically decisive) events which led to the selection of the anti-neutralist Wendell Willkie as Republican candidate for the 1940 presidential election, the closeness and dishonesty of that election, the narrowness by which lend-lease passed through Congress, the even greater narrowness by which the newly-conscripted US Army avoided disbandment in 1941, Roosevelt’s repeated failure to put his promises of support into effect, the dismal quantities of real aid which lend-lease produced at the beginning, the accounts of Hitler’s repeated restraint of his Navy, so as to give Roosevelt no pretext for getting involved in the battle of the Atlantic  (so much for the idea that Hitler was an irrational carpet-biter).

 

Then there are the various luncheon-clubs and networks (coincidence theorists would call them coincidences)  through which interventionists covertly co-ordinated speeches,  articles and actions sought to capture public opinion, and the US government,  for their cause.

 

It mentions, but not in enough detail for me, the terrible stripping of British assets in 1939 and 1940, as the price for lend-lease, including the sale at knock-down prices of valuable enterprises such as American Viscose. It hasn’t so far (I’ve still not finished) described  the humiliating emptying of Britain’s gold reserves  - an amazing operation involving nerve-racking shipments of great weights of disguised bullion (labelled ‘fish’) in warships through terrible storms, from Plymouth to Halifax and then on to a secret vault in Montreal, guarded by a detachment of Mounties,  from which they could eventually ( I presume) find their way by land to Fort Knox.

 

It also describes, with cold accuracy, the extent of naked anti-Semitism in the USA at that time,  with open Judophobic prejudice expressed in government offices, and quotas for Jews at Ivy League universities. This unlovely feature of the pre-war USA  went further than the book describes ( and stayed, as far as I know, into the 1950s in some places) .  When I lived in Washington DC, for instance, many older people still remembered (though they spoke softly when they did so)  that certain areas and apartment blocks had until quite recently been ‘restricted’, that is, Jews were forbidden to live in them. The same was true in New York City.

 

How all this would have ended if the Japanese had *not* attacked Pearl Harbor, and if Hitler had not then declared war on the USA in fulfilment of his treaty obligations, I do not know. There’s a ‘Fatherland’ type novel to be written about a world in which the USA stayed out, and Stalin still beat Hitler (as I think he would have done). What sort of Europe would that have produced? And what sort of Far East?

 

If the Republicans had selected an isolationist Presidential candidate at Philadelphia in 1940 ( as they would have done in the absence of a brilliantly-orchestrated campaign for Willkie) Roosevelt would have trimmed still further in that direction. He might never have introduced Lend-Lease or the Draft . The September 1940 destroyers-for-bases deal (some of these ancient ships actual ended up in the Soviet navy)  might also not have happened.  

 

But something like Bretton Woods, at which Britain was definitively forced to abandon its Empire and all that went with it, probably would have happened – though perhaps the Soviet influence on it would have been more obvious, rather than exercised through Dexter White, a secret agent who was partly paid for his work in expensive carpets.  

 

From 1940 onwards, Britain had irrevocably lost the economic and military capacity to hold on to what it had, and the USA was determined to use this opportunity to become top nation. American aid to Britain during the war was just enough to keep us fighting, but not remotely enough to allow us to recover from the bankruptcy the first stage of the war had caused.

 

The USA is another country. It has different interests from us. I love the USA and like its people, but I never make the mistake of imagining that they would allow any sentiment to get in the way of their national interests when they differ from ours. Nor should they. Nor should we. It would be good for our relations if we dropped the sentimental gush about Churchill, and recognised the true position. 

Will London one day Secede from the United Kingdom?

I have argued for some time that London is the fifth state in the United Kingdom, almost completely separate from England, and more important than Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland (which is in any case a provisional (mot juste) member of the UK, its sovereignty transferable to the Irish Republic by referendum at any time).

 

And now we have begun to see reports that (rather predictably) there is supposed to be a ‘brain drain’ from the provinces to London, and that the supposed economic recovery (how funny that phrase will sound in three years or so) is largely limited to the capital and its surrounding satellites.

 

Well, I never. Actually, London has almost always dominated Britain, especially since the coming of the railways created national newspapers and national politics. It’s partly because of our compact size and our long unified history. Compare other countries such as Germany, Italy or the USA, where there are many major cities of equal standing, and the capital is (at most) first among equals) and often less than that.  Even centralised France probably has more distinct provincial power bases than Britain does.

 

But something has happened to make the division between London and the rest much, much more important.

 

It’s mainly de-industrialisation, which has also affected London. My own daily journey from London to Oxford is a good illustration of this – once it took me past the AEC factory that made proper London buses, Huntley and Palmer’s Biscuits, Sutton’s Seeds and Ideal Casements in Reading (all now gone), and the coal-fired power station at Didcot, now a sort of tomb, closed by insane regulations and awaiting demolition. Or take York, where I was at university. When I arrived there in October 1970 it had a huge railway workshop, a major glass factory, and several British-owned chocolate works – but not a single chain supermarket.  Travelling from Oxford (which then had an ironworks , a cake factory,  a car factory and pressed steel plant, a brewery and a cattle-market, and now just assembles German cars) to York by train took me through the vast industrial zones of Birmingham, Derby and Sheffield. When I see Sheffield now I simply cannot believe the transformation, and sometimes wonder if I am imagining the great steelworks. As for the coalmines, it is astonishing how they too have disappeared as if they had never been. As for Glasgow, when I go back there now I feel like Doctor Who, returning to a place he hasn’t visited for about a thousand years. Look carefully and you will find traces of what was once there.

 

Instead, the City of London (again transformed by vainglorious architects) has become a huge smokeless factory turning out funny money by the ton. Even there, I can remember, back in 1977, the thrilling sight of scores of delivery vans beginning to line up in Fleet Street towards 11.00 pm, as the giant presses began to hiss and thunder deep down beneath the newspaper offices, still in all their shabby grandeur.

 

It makes me think back to that period in the early 1980s when ITN’s old News at Ten programme had a nightly feature on job losses and job gains. The losses, shown in red figures, were almost always factories. The gains, shown in blue figures, were almost always new supermarkets.  They were exciting, unsettling times but I didn’t truly understand how much of a transformation was going on.

 

I think that was because by then I was living, as I did for seven bizarre years, in London. How I used to long to live there. How glad I now am that I don’t. Unbelievably, I paid rent of about £60 a month (out of a pre-tax annual salary of £5,500) on a small but perfectly pleasant top-floor flat in a late 19^th century street between Finchley Road and West Hampstead, quite close to the famous Abbey Road zebra crossing. I still remember the thrill of having my own phone, with a number beginning (as they still just did in those days ) 01.  Later (after some frantic saving and a family loan) I managed to find an even smaller leasehold flat in a 1930s block mainly inhabited by Austrian refugees from National Socialism, for £29,000, which meant taking out a huge loan, though by then I must have been up to more like £8,000 a year.  I mention these figures because they now seem so utterly ridiculous, and bear no known relation to anything today. Like most people of my age, I gasp to think that these properties have now risen in price to such an extent that I couldn’t afford to live in them now, though I am far better–paid (in real terms as well as in raw figures)than I was then.

 

London has become a mad city, its centre entirely inhabited by the absurdly rich, and serviced by the absurdly poor. It isn’t quite a Third-World city, partly because so many people *work* in London who don’t live there, and trail in and out each day from commuter towns and obscure, distant suburbs, They pay the appalling fares, and endure th disagreeable conditions, because they really have no choice. (By the way, I was surprised to find the word ‘suburbs’ in the 1611 Authorised Version of the Bible the other day, the 23^rd Chapter of the Second Book of Kings since you ask, in a passage about the stamping out of pagan idols. I had always thought of it as a 19^th-century invention).

 

These daytime inhabitants give London a middle class clientele, moderating the extreme divisions between the super-rich and their super-poor servants.

 

Also, central London still has the physical shape of  a mixed city in which ordinary people actually lived. It will take a while for its new role to turn it into something more like what it really is, a super-glossy, unaffordable heart, fringed by overcrowded dormitory zones for service workers, while real life retreats outwards. What will happen if the Funny Money Factory fails, I tremble to think. Detroit may offer some lessons, but London is unique, and its decline will be unique too.  

 

As it is, I feel a sense of crossing a frontier each morning and evening, somewhere in the wilderness between Slough and Southall. England, for all its many problems caused by de-employment, overcrowding, insane over-use of motor-cars,  globalisation, commercial cloning and mass migration, is a different experience from London and feels different while you are there.

 

And London is also the first part of the country to have an explicitly republican form of government with a directly-elected chief executive, elevated above the common herd, and a (currently) weak and subservient legislature.

 

I am perpetually amazed that more people aren’t interested by this. Constitutional flux, leading first to disorientation and then to radical change,  is one of the great ‘achievements’ of the Blair-Campbell government . Readers here will know that I suspect the next (2015) United Kingdom general election (if Scotland has not by then seceded) will be the last to be held under clear first-past-the post rules.

 

Almost every new political formation created in the last 30 years from the EU Supreme Soviet to the Scottish and Welsh Assemblies, and the weird Belgianised construct which sort-of governs Northern Ireland,  has used some kind of proportional method. Oddly enough, the London Mayoralty ,alone, has taken an partly American, rather than a European direction. Even that contains a form of transferable vote if there are more than two candidates for  mayor (as there always have been) , and a party list system as well as direct constituency elections for the GLA.

 

True, some other lesser cities have also chosen to have mayors, but they simply lack the London Mayor’s powers and status (especially powers over the police, and access to the national media).

 

The Mayor of London is supposed to face question time before the GLA, in theorty like PMQs, but in fact not. The session hardly ever attracts any attention. They don’t elect him. He has his own independent mandate and can ignore them if he wishes. In fact it will probably be in his interest to do so some of the time, just as Governors of US states often make their names by defying,  or defining themselves against,  their own legislatures.  He is also a national politician, whereas they are not.

 

The other interesting thing is the way in which the post de-politicises its holder. Neither Ken Livingstone nor Al Johnson  have much connection with the parties they nominally belong to (and Mr Livingstone was actually chucked out of his party). The Mayor of London lacks rural constituents, or many elderly ones, and is compelled to be economically and socially liberal, keen on multiculturalism, a booster for big buildings and grand projects. If he doesn’t like such things he had best not stand for the post, because there would be no point in holding it. The post holds him, rather more than the other way round, which is actually the case with an awful lot of supposedly desirable jobs.

 

The only significant difference between the two incumbents so far is the extent of the congestion zone in which cars are charged for entry. The other difference is  that Mr Livingstone’s political career was ending when he got the job, whereas Mr Johnson’s may be just beginning. Or it may not.

 

Both men, being strong individuals better suited to Presidential politics, found the House of Commons  (a very jealous place) hard to handle, and performed disappointingly in it.  I wonder if Mr Johnson really does have that much of a future there, especially since the Tory party is (alas,  too late) on the slide towards the great skip where it has long belonged.

 

Perhaps we shall have an enjoyable paradox, if Scotland and Northern Ireland (and surely then Wales too) leave the Union, of London doing the same, and Mr Johnson becoming (oh, irony of ironies) a major figure in the politics of the EU. What, then, of the  rump of England, shorn of London and cut off by bristling frontiers from Wales and Scotland? Shall we have our capital in Milton Keynes and make ‘Sailing By’ our national anthem? Or will it be even worse than that? An independent Cornwall beckons. Time I started learning my ancestral tongue.

An Interesting discussion of comparative murder rates in the US and Britain

I have many times pointed out that the official murder statistics in Britain (and also the suicide rates, as defined by mdoern coroners' verdicts) are open to question. Now an American correspondent has sent me a link to this interesting discussion of the subject, on which I invite comments:

 

http://rboatright.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/comparing-england-or-uk-murder-rates.html

One statistic you CAN trust: We're 100 per cent wrong about what really matters

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

We are surrounded by night and fog, befuddled by official lies. Who believes the inflation rate is accurate? Crime figures – which I’ll come to in  a moment – are known to be fiddled. Our schools produce millions of exam certificates – clutched by hundreds of thousands of illiterates.

The drug laws are openly defied by the police and customs, who refuse to enforce them – a giant undeclared experiment in decriminalisation that makes Amsterdam look puritanical.

Our hopelessly indebted economy, whose main exports are thin air and rubbish for recycling, is repeatedly proclaimed to be healthy as we tremble  on the edge of a crash worse than 1931.

It seems increasingly likely that we have not been fully informed about a recent severe prison riot, in which case years of appeasement of prisoners with in-cell TV sets, and a blind eye turned to drugs and gangs, has failed.

A jury (God bless it) has taken 20 minutes to acquit a man who defended himself against a violent burglar – a case that should never have been brought to court in a civilised country.

The innocent man, Andrew Woodhouse, had previously  lost equipment worth £25,000 to thieves, crimes a proper police force would have prevented. He faced prison if convicted. The thieves .  .  . were fined £75

Did the jury know something the Government and the police don’t know – or won’t admit – about modern Britain? I suspect they did. No wonder juries are being quietly abolished.

 And now we have this astonishing outburst by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Tom Winsor, given in an interview with The Times newspaper. Here is the crucial passage in full: ‘There are some communities born under other skies who will not involve the police at all,’ he says.

‘I am reluctant to name the communities in question but there are communities from other cultures who would prefer to police themselves.

‘There are cities in the Midlands where the police never go because they are never called. They never hear of any trouble because the community deals with that on its own .  .  . They just have their own form of community justice.’

He has spoken to chief constables who say the calls they receive are ‘close to zero’ from some areas.

‘It’s their belief that those communities are administering their own form of justice,’ he says. ‘It’s not that the police are afraid to go into these areas or don’t want to go into those areas, but if the police don’t get calls for help then of course they won’t know what’s going on.’

It’s impossible to know the scale of the problem. ‘They don’t know what injustices are being perpetrated .  .  . It’s almost a closed book because we can’t go there so don’t know. It could be anything from low-level crime right up to murder .  .  .  [Honour killings] are the most extreme example. That is murder. There is no honour in it.’

Now, I think this is the most shocking statement made by a senior public official in modern times.

Either the poor man is deluded, or he has revealed a truth so huge and so shocking that the nation should be convulsed with controversy and demanding a full examination of it.

Yet instead we are consumed with a marginal scandal about  a fat, ugly man accused of putting his hand on women’s legs. What will happen when we eventually wake up? Or will we just sink giggling into the sea, drugged into acquiescence as our civilisation ends?

A lesson from the land of kipper ties

One of the many delights in the clever, thoughtful and absorbing film American Hustle is its portrayal of the way we looked in the 1970s, medallions and all.

Famously, people who got married in that odd decade tend to hide their wedding pictures. How did those of us alive then not realise we were ridiculous? For we didn’t.

And that is the great lesson we really need to learn. Much of what we do, think and say now (let alone the way we dress) will without doubt seem absurd to later generations. Rather than sneering easily at the past, we should try to see ourselves through the eyes of the future, and to recognise (at the very least) that what is most fashionable now, in politics and morals and culture, is what will appear most badly mistaken 40 years hence.

Fanning the flames of another nightmare

Now that we have reduced Syria to ruins and refugee camps through our noble benevolence, we want to do the same to Ukraine.

Western media and politicians, who do not even understand their own societies, repeatedly descend on foreign countries posing as liberators, encouraging and funding rebellions.

Too late, they find they have called  up unstoppable, demonic violence, and lit fires they cannot put out. Ukraine is  a prime candidate for a disastrous  civil war.

Its people used to live together relatively harmoniously. But the Ukrainian-speaking West is very different from the Russian-speaking East, and the EU’s clodhopping intervention in Kiev is encouraging divisions between the two.

The people who backed the rebels in Syria claimed to be surprised when many turned out to be Islamist fanatics of the sort we try to deport from Britain. Maybe they really were surprised, though it was quite predictable that such people would hate Damascus’s secular state.

Well, let us spare these geniuses any surprises about Ukraine. Already a sinister faction called ‘Pravy Sektor’, violent and ugly, has elbowed aside the smiley crowds in Kiev. Nationalism in this much-invaded, blood-steeped part of the world has an especially dark past. Do we really want to revive it?

The Prime Minister says that Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That is one of his favourite books. Really? This clear-eyed account of the First World War makes it absolutely plain (pages 153-155 in my 1966 Penguin edition) that British and Commonwealth troops frequently killed German captives after they had surrendered.

Everyone knew. Nobody cared. So why is Marine Sergeant Alexander Blackman in prison for doing the same, while we idealise the dead of the Great War?

Hurrah! The Coalition have quietly renationalised part of the railway system – the East Coast line – and it is working very well without a useless ‘Train Operating Company’ to vacuum money into shareholders’ pockets.

Alas! They are trying to privatise it again, probably to a foreign state-owned railway. Night after night, on my own line, almost everything is broken down except the stupid, endless loudspeaker announcements and the computerised, empty apologies.

How I long  for the return of BR.

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Are we wise to take sides in Ukraine?

Is it just me or does most of the newspaper and broadcast coverage of what is going on in Kiev seem clearly sympathetic to the demonstrators, even though they are doing quite a lot of damage to public property, and in many cases openly carrying weapons?

 

This reminds me very much of the similar sympathy accorded, at the beginning, to the protests in Damascus against the Assad state. So does the attendance at protests, in Kiev, of such foreign figures as Baroness Ashton (of the EU ), Guido Westerwelle, from Berlin, and Senator John McCain, from the USA. In Syria’s case, their role was performed by foreign diplomats who left little doubt that they sided with the protestors. I very much fear that these actions, which seem to me to be deeply irresponsible and to raise the stakes to a far greater height, could be the cause of a severe conflict in a country just as unstable as Syria, and as fundamentally divided.  Anyone who has seen the ghastly destruction inflicted on Syrian cities, and the misery visited on countless innocent people in that country, must wonder whether any cause could possibly have been worth this. If the same sort of thing now comes to Ukraine, who will be to blame?

 

This is a big problem with any kind of coverage, or discussion, of foreign matters. The citizen of a free, law-governed country does tend to form a romantic attachment to the protestors (I’ve done it myself, notably in Prague in the late autumn of 1989 - though not when violence was involved. Once you’ve seen real violence, you hate and fear it).

 

The reporter, usually not understanding his own country’s past or nature, may imagine that all that is needed is the overthrow of existing power, and then a new dawn will arrive. Very misleadingly, this was more or less true in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria(sort of) and Hungary (up to a point) in 1989, and later in the Baltic Republics. It was a good deal less true in Romania, where the death of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu was a thinly-disguised lynching, and the transfer of power far from open.  As for the former Soviet Republics of Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan and Kirghizstan, I invite readers to do their own homework or (in some cases) to consult my own past articles on some of these paradises, whose faults (often remarkably similar to those of Mr Putin’s Russia, if not worse) tend to be ignored because of their useful airbases, their strategic positions or their oil and gas.

 

So here we have the Western-oriented youth versus stone-faced old monsters from the wicked past.  Simple, eh? Or not? So once you start disapproving of one side, you can very rapidly be swept into supporting the others. Some here may accuse me of doing this with Vladimir Putin. This is understandable. Most people don’t read much further than headlines and titles, and aren’t aware that – while I praise Mr Putin’s foreign policy stances - I am consistently rude about Mr Putin’s tyrannical tendencies, and about his state’s general corruption, violence and lawlessness at home. Mr Putin’s staff , by contrast, are well aware of this, and understandably won’t return my calls.

 

In fact, I think it is perfectly possible to see good in both sides. No doubt the government of Ukraine is an unlovely thing, headed by disagreeable people ( though their political opponents aren’t, in most cases, much of an improvement). No doubt the protestors, as long as they remained peaceful, had an excellent case against the misdoings of that government.  But ask yourselves: If the demonstrators win, and overthrow the present lot, will the new government be significantly cleaner, more liberty-loving or lawful? And will Russia be happy to have an EU puppet state hanging around next to its back door?

 

Don’t mistake the ostensible aim of these protests for their actual aim. This is a struggle for power between Russia and the EU (itself an instrument of German foreign and economic policy - stripped of old-fashioned chauvinism, militarism and the rest, but an instrument even so) . This struggle is going on because of the current temporary and probably passing weakness of Russia, following the collapse of the USSR.

 

Russian weakness in the 20^th century three times allowed Germany to push its sphere of influence eastwards – once at the 1917 Peace of Brest-Litovsk, when German ambitions in this part of the world ( often summarised under the title ‘Mitteleuropa’) were nakedly on display until reversed by defeat in the West and the subsequent Treaty of Riga. Then during and after Barbarossa in 1941-43, when German armies temporarily established control over remarkably similar zones to those claimed at Brest-Litovsk. And then after the sudden dissolution of the USSR, at Christmas 1991, so well described in his book ‘Moscow- December 25 1991 - The Last Day of the Soviet Union’ by my friend Conor O’Clery. This followed the extraordinary meeting on December 8^th of that year in the Belovezhskaya Forest, at which the then Ukrainian leader, Leonid Kravchuk, helped to dissolve the Union and so make his troubled country fully sovereign.

 

This is an intensely complex part of the world. Ukrainians are not Russians, though quite a lot of Russians live happily in Ukraine. In the days when Christendom still existed (before 1917), many Ukrainians were not Orthodox, like their Russian neighbours, but belonged instead to a special province of the Roman Catholic Church, a deep cultural difference. Confusingly, quite a lot of Ukrainians were and are Orthodox. The borders of Ukraine were far from static. The city now known as Lviv has also been (in one century) the Polish city of Lwow, the Soviet city of Lvov and the Austro-Hungarian city of Lemberg.

 

But within the borders of modern Ukraine there are many millions of Russians, who speak Russian and nothing else, whose roots are in Orthodoxy rather than in Catholicism, who look to Moscow as their capital, who read Russian books and newspapers and watch and listen to Russian TV and radio stations,  and whose relatives are in Russia. These live mostly in the east of the country. Many also live in the  Crimea, that beautiful and strategically vital peninsula (containing the indispensable naval station at Sevastopol). Crimea, formerly part of the Russian Soviet Republic was also given to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine by Krushchev (sorry for earlier error) , in a gesture whose full implications he cannot have guessed at. Some of these issues are discussed in detail here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/09/as-ukrainians-force-russians-to-turn-their-back-on-their-language-and-change-their-names-i-ask-is-th.html

 

Is it really wise to stir up conflict between these two parts of the population, in a manoeuvre to drag Ukraine into the orbit of Brussels (which, as we well know in Britain, is not a trading bloc but a political formation) rather than of Moscow? Ukraine’s independent existence is surely a pretty big concession by Moscow in the first place, made at a moment of unique weakness and still resented. Must this now be pushed further, establishing an EU bridgehead right up against Russia’s border? Could such an arrangement last? How might it end?

I might add that EU expansion into (for example) Romania and Bulgaria has not, as it turned out,  transformed those countries into fully modern law-governed states. There is no magic wrought by the blue flag with its circle of yellow stars. Corruption, misgovernment, stupidity, do not flee at the sight of it. Ukraine linked to the EU will not suddenly become like Austria.

 

Also, as the world has many times found, sometimes it just makes sense to have neutral cordons between power blocs, rather than to strain loyalties to breaking point by alliances and connections which are disliked as much as they are liked.

 

This sort of foolishness, the quest to have an outright victory on this issue,  reminds me of two things – first of the stupidities of the 1920s and 1930s, the unrealistic, idealistic borders of Versailles  which in the end brought death and ruin to the regions in which they were drawn.  Secondly, it reminds me of the encouragement of protest without any careful thought as to where it might end, in Syria, three years ago.

 

Untune that string, of stable government, and see what discord follows.

 

Very few governments have much true legitimacy. Ours is one of the few that has reliable title deeds, going back more or less continuously to 1688 (though that revolution was marked by an outbreak of terrifying unrestrained violence, looting and arson in London, and there are some who will argue that the removal of the Stuarts from the throne, and the flight of James II, were and remain technically illegitimate). The USA was established by the violent seizure of other people’s land, followed by an armed revolt. Most governments in Europe were installed, or re-installed by invaders in one form or another, having earlier been removed by other invaders,  or trace themselves back to bloodshed regicide and riot. The horrors of civil war and revolution are never very far away, and they are terrible. Who, knowing this, would stir the cauldron of revolt? Can such a person  truly be said to care about the people? They are the ones who always suffer. 

I acquire some Unlikely Allies in the fight against Big Dope

Here’s something for the Cannabis Comment Warriors to get bothered about. The poor things patrol the Internet searching for the tiniest expression of dissent against the idea that Big Dope is Good and Must take Over the World, and then descending on the offender with wave after wave of anger-enhanced word-bombs. And I haven’t given the chance to launch a raid here for some time. 

 

Once again a Pay Wall prevents me from reproducing in full, or linking to an interesting article on the subject of Dope. A recent one,  by the London ‘Times’ writer Robert Crampton, is in response to President Obama’s rather relaxed remarks about cannabis, or marijuana as they call it in the USA. I urge you to get hold of it because, although Mr Crampton has swallowed much of the silly conventional wisdom on this subject he has not swallowed all of it. And so he has had enough sense to notice that the ‘soft drug’ propaganda about cannabis is simply misleading.  He thinks it should be harder to get, not easier.

 

He says he has ‘dabbled in’ cannabis perhaps a dozen times, though the experience was less enjoyable the more he did it. (Would a prominent writer for a respectable national newspaper offer such a confession if there truly were a ‘war against drugs’ in this country?).  It made him ‘at best silly and sleepy, at worst paranoid, unstable, offensive’. Crucially, he concluded that it ‘seemed to me to be far more powerfully mood-altering than the received wisdom claimed’  Acquaintances who smoked it a lot were not just tedious and ‘a bit dozy’ but ‘many seemed to be seriously mentally impaired.’ 

 

I can however link to *this* blog by my old adversary, and Unashamed Member of ‘Blairites for Cameron’, John Rentoul of the ‘Independent.

 

Here he is

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/if-cannabis-is-legal-more-teenagers-will-smoke-it--and-that-cant-be-good-9044349.html

 

 

Again, it’s full of wearisome conventional wisdom, including the comical claim that cannabis use is diminishing (that must be the reason for all those busy hydroponic gear shops all over the country, and the pathetically ineffectual yet incessant police raids on a tiny minority of cannabis farms) But I’ll tell you what struck me most about this rather feeble call for inaction.

 

First of all, he spots that the Big Dope legalisers don’t actually have any answer to organised drug crime in Colombia, Mexico and Afghanistan (he ignores, as establishment people always do,  the real answer, which is that this wickedness is financed and kept going by the greed and selfishness of western drug abusers, and the best hope is that those users are deterred from purchase by properly enforced stringent laws. )

 

He writes : ‘Then there is the harm done by the control of the production and supply of drugs by criminals. Yes, it is a problem. But we are mainly talking about cocaine and heroin, if we mean organised crime and drugs, and a lot of the harm in those cases is suffered in Colombia and Afghanistan. I don’t have the answers to that; but then, neither do the advocates of legalising cannabis, who tend not to propose legalising “harder” drugs, yet.’

 

I just love that ‘yet’.  I also quite like the “harder”. Has Mr Rentoul cottoned on to the fact that cannabis may in fact be one of the hardest of all drugs, because of its correlation with irreversible mental illness, surely one of the most dreadful fates that can befall us? I do hope so. It’s about time that the ‘soft’ drug promotion of cannabis, one of the most successful PR frauds in human history, was exploded.

 

And then, in a  few throwaway words he concedes the whole point of the book I spent ages writing, that I have been excoriated and jeered at for writing, which few newspapers have bothered to acknowledge, let alone review, namely that the law against cannabis is a dead letter, and no war has been fought or is being fought against it: he says  ‘the most common legal position all over the world:[is] illegal but not stringently enforced for small amounts.’

That’s not what certain academics seem to think, with their claims of thousands of drug abusers languishing in prison and the implication that these are innocent citizens caught up in some sort of draconian prohibitionary round-up because they have been detected by inflexible police officers in possession of tiny amounts of drugs held for 'personal use'. (Twaddle, by the way).

He also says, very much like Mr Crampton : ‘But it is possible that, in some cases, it acts as a trigger for serious mental illness, especially for male teenagers.’

 

So there you are, see. It isn’t just reactionary, brutal old me. Other people including members of the liberal elite , recognise that the dangers of cannabis are severe, and that legalising it may not therefore be a good idea. And at least one such accepts my point that the laws against cannabis possession are not really enforced (though he doesn’t seem to understand the implications of this for the rest of his argument).

Not So Simple - Sherlock Holmes, God, Time, Steam and Speed

Well, I think we can all agree that none of the elaborate formulae proposed to work out the speed of the Paddington-Exeter train from the telegraph poles could possibly be described as *simple*. Whereas Watson’s suggestion, that Holmes could have worked it out by counting the quarter-mile posts (dismissed superciliously by the Great Detective) *would* have been simple. I think Holmes is showing off that this cumbersome, messy and time-consuming brainteaser is *simple* for him.

 

Some British railway lines still have quarter-mile posts, though I find that more and more they are being replaced by posts every tenth of a mile, or 176 yards or eight chains, an attempt to decimalise tradition (which actually works in this case, because you can cut a mile into tenths if you really want to). On some stretches, notably just outside Paddington station, the distance to the buffers is confusingly measured by two sets of posts, one in foreign metres and the other in English miles and chains.

 

To my great joy, railways in this country still mark bridges by their distance apart in miles and chains (a chain is the length of a cricket pitch, by the way - 22 yards). I wonder how this has survived the metric fanatics . Note for those who enjoy these things, which I know isn’t everyone - the Radio 4 Today programme on Tuesday morning, in a delightful item about a flood-encircled village in the Somerset levels,  filled me with unexpected joy when not only did they give the depth of the flood in feet, but a farmer talked of delivering ‘several hundredweight’ of sausages. The hundredweight is one of my very favourite customary measurements because it sounds as heavy as it is, and utterly English. I used to hump half-hundredweight bags of barley (56 pounds) when (back in the late 1960s) I did a summer job at the lamented Morrell’s brewery in Oxford, now turned into desirable residences. I also rolled barrels, slung crates, stood for smelly,  hamstring-straining hours at the (half-pint) bottle-washing machine and learned how to skive, and how long you could get away with it before being noticed (earlier work, mainly on farms, had been constantly under the eye of the employer, and so skive-free) . Some of the smaller clubs still took deliveries in Firkins (the measure used in the Authorised Version of the Bible, when it described how much water Jesus transforms into wine at Cana, six waterpots containing two or three firkins apiece, or ‘twenty or thirty gallons’ apiece in modern translations). How long before we have a metric Bible in which we are required to walk two kilometres with a man who asks us to accompany him for one, Noah’s Ark is measured in metres and centimetres, and the miracle of Cana is measured in litres?

 

However you measure it, that’s a lot of wine. Though I believe a wine firkin (the word means a quarter and apparently comes from the Dutch) was different from and perhaps smaller than an ale firkin.

 

 

As for Holmes’s atheism I need slightly to revise that view. He may well have been a Deist, and therfeore a theist, though not, I think, a Christian. I would draw the attention of the reader to this passage from ‘the Sign of Four’ ( Chapter 2) in which Holmes abruptly stalks out, having airily dismissed Watson’s remark that Mary Morstan (Watson's future wife) is a very attractive woman. Holmes declares: ‘I am going out now. I have some few references to make. Let me recommend this book,—one of the most remarkable ever penned. It is Winwood Reade's "Martyrdom of Man". I shall be back in an hour.’

 

 

Reade is mentioned again later in the story. Reade was , if not the Dawkins of his time, rather close to it (and was actually denounced by W.E.Gladstone at one point).  Alert readers of the stories, at the time they were published, would certainly have taken the reference as a sign of a rather aggressive anti-religious position on Holmes’s part.

 

 

Though he was a secularist rather than an actual atheist, Reade was strongly hostile to traditional religion. Those interested in Holmes’s religious opinions would do well to look at a web article by Mr Drew Thomas, ‘Sherlock Holmes on Religion’, which adduces several quotations (including the thoughts on the rose in ‘The  Naval Treaty’) to show that Holmes had some Biblical knowledge, a wide literary knowledge (including of foreign sources) and sometimes contradicted himself.

 

How interesting that this character, invented as an entertainment for weekly magazine readers, should have become such an abiding and interesting figure, though he never lived, that we speculate to this day on what he might really have been like, and would all (I think) wish to sit at a dinner table with him, if he existed, and also fear to do so in case we were humiliated.

 

And yet when Conan Doyle sought to create lasting literature, he failed. It is as if, 100 years from now, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher were to survive in the public mind, while every Booker Prize winner for the past 25 years was utterly forgotten.

 

‘Bert’ , one of our contributors who professes to know all (but who still hasn’t explained what, apart from the EU Landfill directive, lies behind the widespread and accelerating abolition of normal weekly rubbish collections in Britain, though he professes to know that it isn't that) now doubts that the EU decides when our clocks go backwards and forwards. Why does he keep walking into these things without checking?

The details of the directive involved (and its history) are to be found here http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2007:0739:FIN:EN:PDF

 

One small but (to me) highly significant result of this has been that the former British law, which prevented the introduction of Summer Time on Easter Sunday itself out of consideration for churchgoers, has been over-ridden, so that the clocks now quite frequently go forward on Easter Day, making the most important single service of the year awkwardly early for many believers, especially those with young families. I doubt whether a similar inconvenience could or would be imposed by EU directive upon followers of Islam.

 

Bert also opines that he likes the later sunsets brought about by jamming the clocks further forward than real time (which must be and can be defined by the relation between our planet and the Sun). Whereas he notes that people such as me dislike the dark winter mornings which are the inevitable price for this. He seems to think that this means we should compromise with the silly mess we have now. I disagree.

 

Left to me, time would simply stay the same all year round. Since larks and owls will never agree, why not let the planet, and the position in which it stands in relation to the sun, decide the matter impartially?  

 

If ‘Bert’ wants to feel as if he more light at the end of the day, he has an easy remedy which doesn't involvemessing about with anyone else's life. This remedy, as it happens, is not available to those (such as me)  who are compelled to be early-risers.

 

Let him get up earlier in the morning, so ensuring (I promise) that sunset will *feel* later, when it eventually arrives. I, like many people, cannot by contrast get up later, as if I did I wouldn’t get to work on time, and many other important tasks and duties, dependent on the agreed legal time, couldn’t be done. Time may be a human, subjective measure, but it measures a cosmic, objective fact. Noon should coincide, as closely as possible within each nation, with the time at which the Sun is at its zenith. Where nations are too big for this, they should have agreed time zones. Without any such arrangement,  the clocks lie. What other measure of objective reality do we treat in this way?  

 

What would we think of car speedometers which agve a deliberately false reading of speed, petrol pumps which deliebrately falsified the flow of fuel, electricity or water meters, or butcher's scales,  set to give inaccurate readings?  We'd prosecute, most ofthe time. So why is it permissible to set the clocks to a false measure?

 

I am complexly unconvinced by the arguments for clock-switching, a silly faddish nuisance from the age of rational dress, sandals and fruitarianism, which somehow caught on during wartime, but whose alleged benefits seem to me to remain wholly unproven by any careful, unbiased objective study of measurable facts. People such as me have already been forced to undergo absurdly late sunsets in summer, again a great nuisance to parents of young children,  or to people who for any reason need to rise early for work. And I might add that recent work showing how badly shift-work affects the body, seems to me to provide an argument against messing round with body clocks at all, unless strictly necessary during long-distance travel. I suffer from a malaise similar to jetlag for some weeks after the clocks go forward each spring (and by contrast feel an enhanced sense of physical wellbeing when they return to their proper time in October). 

Can Sherlock Holmes survive in this Feverish Age?

The law, it seems,  can no longer protect Sherlock Holmes from anyone who wants to use the character freely wherever and however he likes. What a pity.  Those of us who think there is a ‘real’ Holmes, the character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in a few dozen short stories and four longer ones, may just have to lump it. Millions of people will soon think that the Cumberbatch version, or the noisy recent movies, are the real thing. I think fewer and fewer people actually read the stories. I noticed, on a recent celebrity version of University Challenge, featuring men and women in their 40s and 50s,  that even the cleverest of the contestants had no deep knowledge of the Holmes stories, and couldn’t identify ‘The Speckled Band’ from a plot summary.

 

I for one actively dislike the TV modernisation of Holmes and Watson, in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays Holmes as a sort of detective Dr Who. In fact (I didn’t invent this thought, but wish I had) much of the BBC’s output now seems to be governed by a rule that everything must be more or less like ‘Dr Who’, even the news- postmodern, ironic, fashionably cool, omnisexual,  omnicultural , so slick that slickness may even be the entire point. It uses a great idea without showing it any real respect.

 

How would the programme called ‘Sherlock’ cope if it were not based on the original idea of Holmes and Watson? Not to mention Mycroft and Moriarty and Mrs Hudson?  

 

If there were no basic idea and memory to build on, would anyone care, or watch? I don’t know. Perhaps they would, but I doubt if it could have reached the near-cult standing it has attained with so many TV critics. When I forced myself to watch one episode, in which Irene Adler was transformed into a naked call-girl (I think this is what happened, it was hard to follow) , I immediately resolved to buy a boxed set of ITV’s 1980s portrayal of Holmes, in which Jeremy  Brett got closer (I believe) than anyone else to portraying Conan Doyle’s invention.

 

But he did that by simply sticking as close to the stories as he could. I’ve been reading them since I was about 11 years old. Lately I’ve read many of them aloud to others.  I have a treasured collection of the long stories, the a faded red John Murray edition,  with an inscription from my brother, which he gave to me when I was 13, and various ancient stiff green Penguin editions of the short stories. I was recently given a lovely complete Holmes (after several of my other copies vanished) with many illustrations by Sidney Paget, who really invented the idea of the detective that most people have, particularly the deerstalker hat that Doyle never mentions. I think that ‘The Sign of Four’, with Toby the dog, and Jonathan Small, and the crazy Sholto brothers, is my favourite, the long hunt through Victorian South London as the night pales into dawn, the wit by which Holmes gets information out of people who don’t want to give it to them, the worryingly ambiguous choice given to Jonathan Small in the Agra Fort, all live in the mid as indelible moving pictures.

 

They’re full of the driest wit. Doyle often puts French or German epigrams into Holmes’s mouth and doesn’t bother to translate them . And Holmes has always struck me as something of a late-Victorian Cambridge atheist, a man of cold science and colder reason, dismissing religious sentiment as superstition and worse (there’s a strong undercurrent of this in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’).

 

I also have personal reasons for feeling especially fond of the Holmes canon. The story of ‘Silver Blaze’, which is reckoned by so many to be the best of all, and which contains the immortal remark about the incident of the dog in the night-time (now alas, overshadowed by a modern novel of that name in so many minds) is set largely in stables near Tavistock, on the edge of Dartmoor which are remarkably similar in position to the 18^th century house (with large stable block) in which I spent my formative years at boarding school. We certainly believed that our school was the model for King’s Pyland.

 

By the way, can anyone solve this mystery? In an e-mail exchange shortly before he died, my brother and I puzzled over the journey Holmes and Dr Watson make to Tavistock by train.

 

We examined the Sidney Paget picture of their arrival, to see if we could see any resemblance to either of the Tavistock railway stations we remembered from our childhoods (both, outrageously, are now closed, and the North station, the obvious arrival point from Paddington, would have involved a change of Exeter which isn’t mentioned in the story)  . (Come to that, at which of the Canterbury stations did Holmes and Watson crouch behind a pile of luggage as Moriarty’s special train ‘passed with a rattle and a roar, beating a blast of hot air into our faces’.  I don’t recall an ‘open curve’ of line leading into either of the two Canterbury stations of today.

 

And we found that both of us had also always been puzzled by the following exchange :

 

‘And so it happened that an hour or so later I found myself in the corner of a first-class carriage flying along en route for Exeter, while Sherlock Holmes, with his sharp, eager face framed in his ear-flapped travelling-cap, dipped rapidly into the bundle of fresh papers which he had procured at Paddington. We had left Reading far behind us before he thrust the last one of them under the seat, and offered me his cigar-case.

 

"We are going well," said he, looking out the window and glancing at his watch. "Our rate at present is fifty-three and a half miles an hour."

 

"I have not observed the quarter-mile posts," said I.

 

"Nor have I. But the telegraph posts upon this line are sixty yards apart, and the calculation is a simple one.”

 

Are they? Not any more. Is it? I’ve tried to do it many ways round, and it certainly didn’t seem to be simple, as sixty doesn’t seem to me to go neatly into 1,760, or any of the sub-divisions of the English mile. Is this a joke, a mistake, or something else (there are, famously, errors and contradictions in the Holmes canon, though I’m not such an enthusiast that I can recall what they are)?

 

But oh, for the Holmesian world of steam expresses from Paddington, long, detailed crime reports in vast closely-printed newspapers, flaring lamps,  mysterious butlers, Napoleons of Crime, defrocked clergymen, telegraph wires swooping past  the train window, station-masters, rude noblemen, Baker Street irregulars, and the rest.

 

It is a refreshing, absorbing place in which the weary soul can hide from the cares of the day (I seem to remember that George Orwell’s Gordon Comstock, in ‘Keep the Aspidistra Flying’ could by the end of his period of penury and failure read almost nothing except Sherlock Holmes, hunched in his dismal lodgings).

 

There will always be, to a 20^th century person, a fairytale quality about Victorian and Edwardian London, an experience we just missed but saw traces of, that vast ( and largely) peaceful wilderness lent a romance by the dingy fogginess of the days and the deeper mystery of the nights. The railway line from Liverpool Street out through the old East End used (until the 1970s or so) to give a pretty worrying idea of what that London had actually been like. Nowadays it’s been cleaned up beyond recognition.  British towns and cities, even in my childhood, had more or less clear borderlines of class and wealth beyond which you didn’t venture unless you were in the mood for surprises which, even if mild, might not always be pleasant. It’s noticeable how many of Holmes’s best stories begin with a dash southwards into what Joseph Conrad (in ‘the Secret Agent’ ) so memorably called the noisy, dirty, dangerous night of South London’.

 

But it is not just in dank streets that evil lurks. Who can forget this passage (again arising from a train journey) in ‘the Copper Beeches’ : ‘All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.

 

     "Are they not fresh and beautiful?" I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.

 

     But Holmes shook his head gravely.

 

     "Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there."

 

     "Good heavens!" I cried. "Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?"

 

     "They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside. “ ’

 

The later stories, it is true, are plainly written to meet the demands of magazine editors, themselves pestered for more by a hungry public. All writers of popular fiction eventually face this crisis, from which Doyle (who much preferred his now unjustly-neglected historical fiction) sough to escape by killing Holmes, and was then forced to resurrect him (he was, as they say, never the same again).

 

It is surprising how often Holmes fails to save those who seek his help. Very often, the clue lies in the distant past and far away  - the American west, or in some West Virginia coal-mining valley, or an Australian goldfield. Doyle was a romantic, really, and also very drily funny. The Brigadier Gerard stories are believed by many to have provided some inspiration for George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman, though Gerard was a courageous idiot rather than a clever poltroon. Everyone has forgotten the Professor Challenger stories – including a full-length book ‘The Lost World’ which just happens to describe an inaccessible plateau in a remote part of South America where dinosaurs and pterodactyls survive (ring a bell?).  The moment when Challenger releases a pterodactyl in a London lecture hall is one of my favourite Doyle. moments.

 

Others are to be found in the ‘Conan Doyle Stories’, now hard to obtain, small delights such as The Lost Special, the Croxley Master, the Terror of Blue John Gap and the Horror of the Heights, not to mention the absolutely horrible story of Lady Sannox.

 

If you’ve read all this, then the Holmes stories live even more colourfully in your mind. You begin, just begin, to enter into the imagination of one of  the greatest of all Victorians. Those of us who still read, rather than leave our literature to the TV , will always have this (and Jeremy Brett)  to fall back on. But it is a shame about everyone else. TV first imitates, then devours , then recreates in its own image.