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Personal Note Archive September 2007

5th September 2007

Sometimes everything seems to be alright in the past. In his novel Women In Love D.H. Lawrence has one of his characters sitting in the park of an old mansion thinking: "how lovely, how sure, how formed, how final all the things of the past were - the lovely accomplished past .... And then what a snare and a delusion..." It sometimes seems as if everything in the past is tamed by passing. Recently there was an annual Second World War re-enactment show at the Hop Farm in Kent. Trouble was caused by a few people who took their Nazi re-enactment a bit too seriously. There was an outcry of course, but then the whole idea of the Second World War as a family day out is a little unsettling. Maybe those overzealous German re-enactment troops were simply reminding us what the reality of the Second World War was like. They were living history. History has a gentle avuncular reputation, when in fact it's not so nice. History is not reassuring in what it records, but in showing that life goes on inspite of what history records.

 

 

10th September 2007

Longleat Safari Boats

The Yangtze River dolphin has recently made headlines around the world due to concerns that it may have become extinct. Only a few hundred years ago nobody would have been interested. Opinions on nature began to change towards the end of the eighteenth century when the romantic poets were starting to write about lakes, mountains and daffodils. In the nineteenth century nature became something of a craze, and in 1828 the Zoological Gardens, better known now as London Zoo, opened in London's Regents Park. Thirty thousand people visitied in the first seven months. Zoos are now a huge business, and on our own trips, we give my daughter a break from historic properties by taking her to whatever animal park is in the area. It seems you never have to go far to find one. In a recent trip to the west country it was Longleat Safari Park, an otter sanctuary and a hedgehog hospital. But I can enjoy Longleat Safari Park too, because it illustrates an historical trend just as strongly as Wordsworth Cottage. And at a safari park my daughter can enjoy her parents' anxiety as they drive through the monkey enclosure, and attempt to hand feed fallow deer.

 

 

 

15th September 2007

Brooklands motor racing circuit

In the recent Formula 1 "spying scandal" McLaren and Ferrari have been compared to countries spying on each other. During the first years of the twentieth century motor racing was actually organised on national lines. A newspaper magnate named Gordon Bennett sponsored a series of races in which each team represented its country, and all parts on the car had to be manufactured in that country. Although some of the national colours used in those days are still seen on racing cars, red for Ferrari for example, the Gordon Bennet Trophy ended in 1903, partly because of accidents, and partly because car manufacture was an international business. Nationalism and motor racing did not mix. Even in the 1930s when Hitler was providing 450 000 Reichmarks to Daimler and Auto Union, and attached a Nazi sports director to the Mercedes, Mercedes still used a British driver in Dick Seaman. Motor racing has no clear dividing lines. People come and go. They take their secrets with them. Ferrari act as though their team is a castle with walls, when in fact there are no walls. The teams are continually swapping personnel, and information. McLaren's spying was only unusual in a sense of degree. In essence it was no different from the normal life of Formula 1, in which the separate identity of the teams is largely an illusion inspite of the ferocity of the competition between them.

 

 

22nd September 2007

Stourhead Wiltshire, built on the buying and selling of money

The recent problems at Northern Rock are all to do with the buying and selling of money. I'm a bit hazy on the details but I get the impression Northern Rock have been a bit too keen with their buying and selling of money. Until the end of the seventeenth century the buying and selling of money in any form was considered a sin. It was called usury. Attitudes began to change, and the eighteenth century economist Adam Smith declared that if money can be made with money, then money can justifiably be paid for. The huge estate at Stourhead in Wiltshire is the result of the wealth made by Hoare's Bank. This was one of the earliest organisations to exploit the change in attitude to the old sin of usury, and the Hoare family made a fortune doing it.

 

 

30th September 2007

Woods at Ebernoe Common, Sussex

The feature of any landscape which announces Autumn most clearly is obviously the trees. 8000 years ago the area which is now Britain was covered in a vast forest, known as the Wildwood, or the Milkwood. Early migrants into northern areas, following warmer temperatures, were frankly scared of the dark woods, and cleared them as quickly as they could. By 500BC half of England had been cleared, and today only 1% of the Wildwood remains, and even that has been influenced by management. Oliver Rackham in History of the Countryside thinks the last of the true Wildwood was cut down in the Forest of Dean in the thirteenth century. The closest we can get to the Wildwood now are the forests at Glentrool in Scotland, Kingley Vale in Sussex, Ebernoe Common in Sussex and Binswood in Hampshire. All of these places would make for a lovely Autumn walk. It is a feature of the modern age that we enjoy the forests that remain - although at Kingley Vale the yew forest is so thick in places that you begin to see why early Britons were scared of the deep, dark woods.