Booklaunch Issue 13

EnvelopeBooks title wins first prize

Just a year after bringing out its first book, Booklaunch’s publishing partner, EnvelopeBooks, has a prizewinner on its hands. Marguerite Poland’s powerful novel A Sin of Omission has been chosen by judges in South Africa as their 2021 Sunday Times CNA “Book of the Year”, the country’s most prestigious literary award.

A Sin of Omission is the fifth novel by Poland, a highly acclaimed novelist and linguist, fluent in both Xhosa and Zulu. Her book was published in South Africa by Penguin Random House in 2019 and will be published in the UK and Ireland by EnvelopeBooks in May. In 2020 it was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Set in the 1870s, A Sin of Omission tells the story of a young black Anglican priest torn between his loyalties to his people and to the Church.

Poland’s win coincides with fellow South African Damon Galgut’s winning of the Booker Prize for The Promise, after his being shortlisted twice before, in 2003 and 2010.

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The design team is looking for 100 volunteers to take part in focus groups. We need feedback on what works and what doesn’t and what could work better.

Please email Jenny Chalcott at subs@booklaunch.london. Participants will be warmly rewarded with a literary gift.

Florentine enthusiast pens masterpiece

Florence is Western culture’s bridge between the medieval and the modern. In Richard Lloyd’s new magnificent book, the story of that journey is ably illustrated with photographs and explanations. Shown here: Orcagna’s tabernacle in Orsanmichele, Florence’s “most spectacular and ornate piece of Gothic art”. It was designed to house Bernardo Daddi’s Madonna delle Grazie, a formulaic image of the Virgin and Child that evolved, Lloyd tells us, from images of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of the Earth (holding her son Horus) to whom an earlier, Roman building on the site was probably dedicated. The year after Daddi completed his painting, the Black Death struck and many of those who survived credited their good fortune to the intervention of the Madonna. May be worth making a quick pilgrimage to it now. See also page 7.

ON OUR INSIDE PAGES

LINGUISTICS

Page 3 Lingualia Quiz, solution and wordplay

Page 4 Simon Prentis challenges Chomsky

Coming soon—Belle Nash

A new literary hero is about to burst forth: Belle Nash of Bath—dandy, city councillor and confirmed bachelor.

Surrounded by a bevy of female friends, and a couple of adoring men, Bellerophon Nash—grandson of Bath’s celebrated master of ceremonies Beau Nash—is about to investigate his first mystery: the failure of a soufflé to rise.

Trivial? At first sight, yes. But when Belle and his accomplices stake out two ne’er-do-wells, the corrupt state of Bath officialdom is laid bare—as is his new young assistant, though under different circumstances.

Belle Nash and the Bath Soufflé is due out in March and will be the first in a five-part series, The Gay Street Chronicles. It has been welcomed by Alexander McCall Smith (“a real romp of a book!”), Peter Tatchell (“a rollicking tale of intrigue and romance!”) and Matthew Parris (“incisive, outlandish and brilliant!”).

To sponsor this book and get your name in its list of patrons, email book@booklaunch.london.

EnvelopeBooks is looking for patrons to sponsor books and advise on new titles. If you’re interested in joining our co-publishing scheme, email: editor@booklaunch.london.

Readership 50,500 UK copies plus website users

Page 5 Lyle Campbell’s life in language research

Page 6 Bullying in Belfast and adolescent love

Page 7 How the Renaissance flourished in Florence

Page 8 Veterinary history around the world

MEMOIRS OF AN ENGINEER

Page 9 Harry Lott left a vivid account of his social and professional life in Canada, Iraq and Kenya as well as during the First World War

Page 13 The unequal fight for British Modernism

Page 14 Pros and cons of the informal economy

CULTURAL IDENTITIES

Page 15 Why was liberalism deaf to the black voice?

Page 16 The ascendancy of a Welsh Marcher family

Page 17 The White Rhodesian case for recognition

Page 18 Elemental science in an Edinburgh novel

Page 19 Po Cheng’s journey to medieval China

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I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said ... Bart O’Fehfon

While out walking with me, a neighbour described a passing bird as predacious. I should have known better than to query his use of the word, given that he’s a prof of biology, but it sounded dicey to me, and I duly asked him if it really was a technical term or if he was just using it as a conversacious alternative to predatory.

He assured me it was legit. I remained sceptical, and suggested that it was just a ‘potential’ word, mimicking rapacious, tenacious, mendacious, capacious etc. When we got home, I checked. Sure enough, predacious has its own headword even in my COED, not to mention my NODE (three times the size).

‘Potential’ words abound. (The linguist David Crystal claims that they outnumber real words.) Here are two that come to mind instantly: pecunious and disinform. A working definition might be ‘words that have not yet entered regular usage but that look plausible, thanks to being constructed from existing word-elements and/or through existing word-formation processes’.

Lingualia Quiz 5

We’re offering a prize for the most conscientious response: a copy of Richard Lloyd’s book on Renaissance Florence (see—once again—page 7). Good luck.

The following places have something in common with the following people. Can you identify the people and the common factor?

• Lake Tahoe, the Gobi Desert, the River Humber, East Timor, South Australia, and the Gulf of Bothnia

• a paedophile narrator, a notorious assassin, and an Asian pianist; and also, slightly more awkwardly, an Asian-American cellist, a Euro-American actress, a UN bigshot, a comic boating novelist, a modernist war novelist, and a Victorian/Edwardian painter.

Clue A. Here are a few borderline cases:

• the Faroe Islands, the Mississippi River, the Rock of Gibraltar, Lake Baikal, South Vietnam

• an Italian scientist, an imagist American poet, a miserable French protagonist, and a comic hero and his foils

Clue B. They also all have something in common with the following creatures:

• the red fox, black rat, common magpie, African leopard, and European toad and eel

SOLUTION TO QUIZ 4

We asked what the following four sequences had in common and whether you could add a further item at the end of each sequence:

• oblige, average, heather, metacarpal, identifiable, internationally

• Puck, Shylock, Fortinbras, Bassanio

• Grey, Baldwin, Macmillan

• Guinea, Germany, Singapore, Madagascar

The answer is that each item, as spelled, can be broken down into a number of separate English words consecutively (for example, for-tin-bras and in-tern-at-I-on-ally) with the maximum number of sub-words increasing by one in each item. Relevant follow-on items for each sequence in turn might be:

industrialisation / Robin Goodfellow / Campbell-Bannerman / North Macedonia

Sad to say, no one got it right this time so—no prizes.

So not all neologisms begin as potential words: contrast googling and instagramming. Prior to 1998, googling was not a potential word, since Google wasn’t an existing word or morpheme/word-element; by contrast, instagramming was a potential word, since the word-elements instant and -gram and -ing existed, as did the word-formation techniques of clipping, blending, compounding and function-shift.

One way to collect potential words is to find the gaps in ‘asymmetry charts’. See the highlighted items in this chart, for example:

predacious rapacious capacious preparacious trepidacious predatory rapatory capatory preparatory trepidatory predation rapation capation preparation trepidation predacity rapacity capacity prepacity trepidacity predacitate rapacitate capacitate prepacitate trepidacitate predator rapator capator preparator trepidator predare rapare capare prepare trepidare predarative raparative caparative preparative trepidarative

Having established that predacious is in fact a real word, I then assumed that it had graduated only recently from the ranks of potential words—in the way that restitute and weaponise have, for instance (neither of which appears in my NODE, dated 1998—the same year as Google was founded). But it turns out that predacious dates back to at least 1713.

For the record, it was indeed predated by predatory (that was an unconscious pun, by the way, when I wrote it), but not by much. Predatory dates back to 1589, according to the OED, though initially referring only to human pillagers. For referring to beasts of prey, its first recorded use was in 1626. And predator, surprisingly, emerged long after both adjectives—it’s first attested in 1922. Until then, it remained a potential word. Similarly with the related verb predate, first used as recently as 1974, according to the OED II (though again absent from my NODE).

Here are some other asymmetry charts:

intrepid trepid intrepidity trepidity intrepidation trepidation

arrive contrive deprive arrival contrival deprival arrivance contrivance deprivance arrivation contrivation deprivation

Here are a few more examples of potential words, in addition to the above-mentioned pecunious and disinform (which might be actual words, but don’t appear in my NODE):

ablute cathart impatriate intonate necrose surveille vexate blanketage conversal interdisciplinarity (and precarity and magicality) overdog

preferral (and referment)

bigly elsewhen reflexly thenabouts alacrous (and celerous) attitudinous combobulated fundamentary (and rudimental) precautious (and paucious) wistless (and doleless, fretless etc, and aimful, gormful, etc.)

Several other items on my list let me down by featuring happily in NODE:

disinvent exfiltrate potentiate altercate (though labelled archaic) unintelligence adultly somewhen (labelled informal) standardly burglarious (labelled archaic) consternated couth (labelled humorous) imitable kempt pervious scathed utile zeroth

(Not that NODE is failsafe. It obligingly omits two other words on my list, woke (adj.) and adolesce, but it turns out that they were attested as far back as the 1940s and the 1850s respectively.)

A potential word seldom fills a lexical gap, which is why potential words are seldom actualised into neologisms. (In the list three paragraphs above, only the underlined items would really fill lexical gaps.) Obversely, most neologisms were once potential words (though not all, as noted previously). Some recent examples, all absent from NODE, in addition to the above-mentioned restitute and weaponise:

boostered clickbait facepalm instrumentalise learnings metrosexual nonbinary repurposed side-hustle staycation stealthing transphobia

NODE, does however, have detectorist euthanize and chat room

What does it take for a potential word to graduate into an actual word? The blessing of a dictionary, perhaps. And what prompts a dictionary to allow that upgrade? Who knows? The OED’s policy used to be something like ‘ten occurrences in reputable publications’, yet the OED does contain some nonce words, such as Mammonolatry (coined by Coleridge).

Consider a few recent quotations containing words that look well-formed and plausible but that once again don’t feature in NODE.

‘The whole cause of their inimity was that they were describing the same phenomenon in different words …

(Sam Leith, in The Spectator online)

‘I’m very perseverant, and never give up.’

(Nick Mocuta, quoted in the Daily Star)

‘Elon Musk … has become embroiled in an “absurd” dispute over his company’s use of a flatulating unicorn image.’

(Mark Molloy, in the Daily Telegraph)

‘Here are some tentative answers that I’ve managed to find online or to research elsewise.’

(Lingualia 14)

Nasa instrument systems engineer Begoña Vila adds: ‘…

We know when we first focus on a star in space, … the 18 individual mirror segments won’t be aligned. But then we’ll adjust the mirrors to bring all the spots together to make a single star that’s not aberrated and good for normal operations.’

(BBC news website)

And a couple of quotations from earlier in the 20th century:

‘… and in these following pages, written only for certain eyes to delectate … I pay my tribute to the cause of so many tender hours of bittersweet reading.’

(‘Woodbine Meadowlark’, in The Pooh Perplex by Frederick C. Crewes)

‘Funes the Memorious’

(translation of the title of a J.L. Borges story).

‘When

Head of Medusa (c. 1597) in the Uffizi by Caravaggio. The Medusa’s head was worn by statues of the Medici on their breastplates. See page 7.

At the simplest level, language is just an agreement that certain noises mean certain things, and other animals do this too. Some monkeys have different alarm calls to distinguish between predators like snakes and eagles, and use them to warn others in their group to take the appropriate evasive action. We humans are by no means unique in using unrelated signs and noises as a way of conveying meaning to others.

But it’s what we’ve done with these noises that matters. It’s a small thing in itself, but it’s the crucial difference between human language and animal communication. What we’ve done is to isolate some of the noises and use them as units of sound that we combine to make words. What that means is that, unlike other species, we don’t just make a different single noise for each thing—a unique analog representation of objects with sounds. You’d soon run out of noises that way. What we do instead is to put small numbers of noises together in a digital sequence, using them in combination. That makes new sounds easier to create and remember.

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses over 150 symbols to represent all the known sounds used by humans in their languages—but no language uses them

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of Brazil; it may have only eight consonants and three vowels but its speakers have little difficulty in expressing themselves. That’s because even with the simplest of combinations, at least 8 x 3 = 24 different syllables can be made using this tiny range of vowels and consonants. That means that with two-syllable words there are 24 x 24 = 576 possible combinations, and by adding one more syllable the language can have as many as 24 x 24 x 24 = 13,824 different words. So with three syllables made by combining as few as eleven sounds, the number of potential words available is already close to the number of words the average adult is familiar with—in any language.

With that in mind, we can begin to see how language could have evolved through a process of gradually reducing the number of analog calls in use, and using them in digital clusters instead—and there is increasing evidence that other species have begun the process of combining sounds in this way. That doesn’t mean they’re about to burst into speech, however. All such processes are extremely gradual. The archaeological record shows that early humans started using simple stone tools as long as two million years ago, but another million years passed before any significant change was

Leading

possible ways to arrange them in a sentence. They are SVO (the order we use in English), SOV, OSV, OVS, VSO and VOS, all of which exist in human languages, although the last three are quite rare. And though it may seem common sense to native speakers of English that the order of a sentence should be subject-verb-object, nearly half the languages we know about use the order SOV, with the verb coming at the end of the sentence. This means man dog eat is the most common way of expressing a good result for the human. But it doesn’t matter which arrangement is used, as long as it’s consistent. SVO works perfectly well for English, despite being a minority choice.

The development of grammar probably occurred quite slowly. Like the switch from analog to digital in the creation of words, grammar is unlikely to have burst fully-fledged onto the scene. But there is likely to have been a quite natural progress from using words literally, to using them to show the relationships between things. We don’t need to go back very far in time to find examples in the historical record. Consider the expression ‘going to’. We know that even as recently as Shakespeare’s time ‘going to’ meant what it literally says, that you were physically going somewhere to do something.

https://geni.us/ SPEECH

READERS’ COMMENTS

Steven Pinker: I think you’re right … .

Desmond Morris: Crisp and clear—I agree with your hypothesis.

James Lovelock: I couldn’t stop reading it … this book should be widely read!

Yoko Ono: Bravo! A compelling read.

Jee Mandayo: Sapiens fans will love this.

all, or even most of them. All a language requires is that you have a range of them that can be used in combination. This is the raw material of speech. We all do it, even if the sounds we make when speaking French can be very different to those of German, Swahili, or Chinese. It’s the same trick in every case. A small number of sounds are combined to make a large number of words. In linguistics, each of these distinct and different sounds is called a phoneme. You can think of them as vowel and consonant sounds, a closed set of noises that is the signature of that language.

For language to work it doesn’t matter what the sounds are, only that there is a limited number of them and that they are used consistently and exclusively: the big secret of human language is its ability to generate a huge number of different words from a small number of sounds. Of course, language is not just about words: without grammar to organise them, it’s difficult to make yourself understood with any precision. But words are still the indispensable first step, for without them there can be no grammar. So it should be no surprise that our animal cousins show so little sign of being able to use grammar: they don’t have the words to make it necessary.

With spoken language, the basic unit is the syllable, which in its simplest form is a combination of a consonant and a vowel—like la, di and da. English has a relatively large number of phonemes (around 44, depending on the dialect) and some of the oldest known languages, such as the Khoisan group of so-called ‘click’ languages, use as many as 24 vowels and 117 consonants. But even languages with very few phonemes can manage just fine: as a crude rule of thumb, the number of syllables available is the number of vowels multiplied by the number of consonants.

Take the Pirahã language spoken in the rain-forests

EDITOR’S NOTE

Language distinguishes us from animals; how did it develop? Noam Chomsky credited it to a “Language Acquisition Device” but that’s a little woolly, suggests linguist Simon Prentis. Although we can now locate specific areas in the brain that handle speech and have found a gene that may be involved with language production, that still doesn’t explain how language started. It couldn’t have sprung into existence fully-formed; there had to be a process. Our task, now, is to work out what that process might be. How could speech have begun to emerge from animal communication? The key, says Prentis, is digitisation.

made to the sophistication of these tools. Things take time to develop.

But understanding the essential simplicity of the trick that lets us create and use large numbers of words can help us unmask the mystery of language. Once the idea of putting noises together in this way has taken hold, it’s just a question of slowly agreeing which combinations of sound refer to the things we are interested in. The key thing is that it doesn’t matter what the sounds are. There’s no reason why the molecule H2O, the essential building block of life, should be called water rather than eau, acqua, νερό, पानी or 水. It’s essentially an accidental and random process, limited only by the range of noises we can make with our mouths.

Grammar school

Once the idea of using words has taken root, the next logical step is to find a way to use combinations of words to express more complicated ideas. All languages do that. But once you start to do it, you soon need to have an agreement about word order. To give a simple example, if we already have the three words man eat dog, the meaning of the sentence will depend on what we’ve decided about the order of words. If we’ve decided that the person doing something should be mentioned before the thing that’s having something done to it, then man eat dog tells us that the man is the one getting a meal. But if we’ve decided that the rule in our language is that the thing should come first, then the same sentence, man eat dog, means that the dog is the one getting the meal. Speakers of English may consider that strange, but languages do exist that naturally use that order.

The key parts of any sentence in any language are the ‘subject’, ‘verb’ and ‘object’, and there are only six

But during the 18th century the meaning began to change to mean simply the intention to do something, a more neutral marker of the future—a process that linguists call ‘semantic bleaching’.

The evolution of grammar is also reflected in the types and frequency of the words we use when we speak. Linguists make a distinction between so-called ‘content’ words—nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs like dog, eat, dirty and slowly, which tag physical objects and qualities in the real world—and ‘function’ words which map the connection between them, like in, on, under and through. What’s interesting is that content words make up the vast majority of our vocabulary: as many as twothirds of all the words we know are nouns, around 20 percent are verbs, with adjectives and adverbs together accounting for most of the rest. Despite that, between one half to two-thirds of all the words we use when we speak are function words, a fact that is less surprising when you realise they are the glue holding the structure of a sentence together.

If the first step to human language was the creation of words through the digitisation of analog sounds, we would expect the earliest stages of human speech to have been as clumsy as we can feel when we start to learn a foreign language—trying to make ourselves understood with just a handful of nouns, verbs and gestures. This is largely the way children learn their first language too—using first one word at a time, then two, and only later learning how to use function words. It is tempting to see a parallel here with the way an embryo mirrors the evolutionary history of the animal it will become. And there is another, clearer hint that this may be so.

Writing also began as an analog system, with pictures representing words. And just as we

linguists still accept Chomsky’s 1960s idea that genetic mutation led to language learning. Simon Prentis has another theory

Linguists usually focus on results; here, Lyle Campbell recalls a lifetime of datagathering and discovers that he’s a

Languages are becoming dormant at an ever faster rate, and with so many in threat of imminent loss, linguists feel that undescribed or poorly described languages should be documented urgently. Documentation also needs to be carried out for communities who want data so they can attempt to learn their languages, teach them, revitalize them and reverse the trend towards language loss. Collaborating with communities whose languages are under threat to provide adequate documentation is one of the greatest services linguists can render.

It is difficult to overstate the seriousness and severity of the endangerment crisis. The full status of language endangerment in the world is made particularly clear in the Catalogue of Endangered Languages. It reports endangered languages on all continents except Antarctica and in nearly all countries of the world with very few exceptions.

The Catalogue of Endangered Languages lists 3,113 currently endangered languages. This is 45 percent of the 6,851 living languages in the world as listed by Ethnologue in 2018—a shocking proportion of the overall linguistic diversity of the planet. Of these, 815 languages are severely or critically endangered—that’s 26 percent of all the endangered languages—and 437 languages are critically endangered.

The consequences of language endangerment can be seen from the perspective of whole language families. There are, or were, about 398 independent language families known in the world, including language isolates (language families with only one member). Of these, 91 have lost all their mother-tongue speakers, i.e. no language belonging to any of these families has any remaining native speaker (Campbell 2018). This means that 23 percent—nearly a quarter—of the linguistic diversity of the world, calculated in terms of language families, has been lost.

Moreover, two-thirds of these 91 language families have lost their last mother-tongue speaker in only the last 60 years. This confirms reports of the dramatically accelerated rate of language loss in recent times. Many other languages and language families are on the brink of total dormancy and so the numbers representing the world’s linguistic diversity will soon dramatically worsen.

Though not really comparable, the loss of a specific language can be likened to the loss of a species, say the Siberian tiger or the right whale. but the loss of whole families of languages is similar in magnitude to the loss of whole branches of the animal kingdom, say to the loss of all feline animals or all cetaceans. Just imagine what the distress of biologists would be, attempting to understand the animal kingdom with major branches missing. Yet what confronts us is the staggering loss of essentially a quarter of the linguistic diversity of the world, already gone forever.

A mystery variety of Quechua

Early in my academic life, when I was a graduate student just about to go off to do my dissertation research, I was invited to participate in a survey of Quechua dialects

READERS’ COMMENTS

Prof. Judith Maxwell, Tulane University: A rollicking account of the dos and don’ts of fieldwork, Linguist on the Loose does for linguistics what Indiana Jones does for archaeology with the advantage that Linguist is all true: an impassioned plea for language documentation, a call to adventure … and hard work.

in Peru and Bolivia. As we did our survey, we kept being told of a strange and different dialect in Apolo, Bolivia. We resisted going there because the only ways in were either a trek of many days on foot over the Andes or a bush plane. However, we were told so often of this unusual dialect that ultimately we decided to check it out.

Apolo is on the jungle side of the Andes, at about 7,000 feet (2,000 meters) elevation. At that time, guerrilla activity had been announced in the area and this required us to obtain a salvoconducto, an official document from the government in La Paz, a permission to enter the dangerous area. The bubonic plague was also announced in the area.

The flight was, unsurprisingly, delayed. When we showed up at the scheduled departure time, pieces of wing and the plane’s tail were scattered around on the ground with the pilot and his assistant filing down bits here and there so that flaps would move without sticking. Eventually the plane was reassembled with all its pieces. Before take-off, the plane was sprayed with DDT—for the bubonic plague. We, naturally enough, knew nothing about bubonic plague nor about what DDT might be able to do to keep a plane from catching it; only later did I figure out that the DDT was for killing fleas and stop them coming back over the mountains with the plane to infect other areas.

The smallish cargo hold of the plane was filled with beef carcasses to be flown out to Apolo and due to the combination of DDT and beef carcasses, the plane stank; fortunately once airborne, the smell was no longer so noticeable. The plane itself had only four seats for passengers—we were five passengers.

The section behind the seats had been loaded with iron elbows for construction, tied down with ropes. Being a gentleman, I ended up seated on the iron elbows, grasping onto the ropes that tied the iron elbows down.

The international airport in La Paz, our starting point, is the highest in the world, at an altitude of 13,325 feet (4,062 meters). The flight to Apolo had to cross the Andes, over 21,000 feet (6,000 meters) high, flying through mountain passes of around 17,000 feet (5,500 meters) altitude, unpressurized and with no oxygen.

Upon arrival over Apolo, the plane’s landing gear would not come down and as darkness was coming on, the pilot flew the plane up quite high, let it fall nosefirst, for what seemed a great distance, and then sharply pulled the plane out of its nosedive as we got close to the ground. This was done some three times before the wheels finally came down and we landed.

We were met at the airstrip by the comandante in charge of the outpost there. He was drunk. He alternated between aggressively demanding our salvoconducto document in Spanish and demanding ‘the contraband’ in Portuguese, contraband activity in the area being something we were unaware of until it was demanded of us. After a seemingly long time of aggressive harangue, we finally convinced him that we would appear in person in the morning and bring our salvoconducto to the official headquarters. The next morning a junior officer officially registered us and our documents;

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the comandante was apparently sleeping it off.

It turns out that the guerrillas were nowhere near this area; reportedly they were much further east and south of there, nor was there any sign of bubonic plague.

The dialect of Quechua in Apolo, though interesting, was not as unusual as we’d been told. It appeared to be the result of immigrants from further north, in Peru, whose dialect sounded unusual to those speaking Bolivian varieties of Quechua.

Apolo was a very pleasant place—sunny, warm, not hot, not so high as to cause altitude sickness, with lots of orange trees and beautiful waterfalls. We had planned on being there just a couple of days but had to wait until they could get a plane without landing gear problems.

This one was even smaller but again with only four seats for passengers, one of whom was a Quechua woman with a stereotypic large round basket on her lap with chickens’ heads sticking up through the netting covering it, gawking around nervously. This time, however, the mountains were completely socked in with clouds and the pilot flew by his wristwatch, making slight turns every few minutes to adjust the direction of flight. I still had shocking images in my mind of nearly scraping mountains on either side of the plane on the flight out to Apolo when the visibility had been good. This return flight through the clouds evoked varied emotional reactions of the most negative and unpleasant sorts.

I have flown on other bush planes elsewhere, including one in Chiapas, Mexico, that had pieces of it strewn about, with filing and hammering on plane parts going on before take-off. However, these were few, and I always avoided them unless there was no other choice.

People-eaters

There were once four languages in the Xinkan language family; today there is no longer any native speaker of any of them. At that time three of the languages, though extremely endangered, were still spoken by a few elders of their communities. The fourth language, Yupiltepeque, no longer had any speakers, though a few elders could still remember a handful of words and phrases they had learned as children from old people in the community, long ago.

When working with Guazacapán Xinka of southeastern Guatemala, I encountered very trying difficulties in attempting to analyze the glottalized consonants. In frustration one day I gathered a group of eight of the most knowledgeable remaining speakers to ask them questions to try to solve the problem. In this meeting, don Alonso, the oldest and most respected of the group, announced to everyone present that apparently the gringos, meaning North Americans in this context, were not the people-eaters and that it must be the ingleses, the English. I hadn’t previously been aware of this suspicion.

The idea of foreigners as people-eaters, I learned later, seems to have come from hospitals and from the practice of using cadavers of Guatemalan Indians in medical training. Often the Indigenous people there would resist going to the hospital, continued in the book

attempted coral snake incursion into the author’s bed, clever thieves, and more.

About the Author

sociologist too

Lyle Campbell is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

April 1967

A new student sits next to me in class I must have been seventeen when I saw you for the first time. I was in a French class, sitting in my usual seat in the middle file at the back of the class, half slouched in a desk that would soon be too small for me, my tie slightly crooked in a manner that for some reason enraged even the most placid of teachers.

Simpson, our teacher, was late, an event that was not unusual and that we hardly took any notice of. I wouldn’t have cared if he hadn’t turned up at all. I intensified my slouch. The rest of the class talked in whispers, not wishing to attract the attention of the headmaster, whose office was nearby.

The door opened. Simpson at last.

‘This is Frances Creighton,’ he said. ‘New girl.’

He rambled on about a new pupil, trouble in her last school, needed time to adjust, someone to look after her in her first few weeks. I wasn’t really listening. I never did. How was I to know how important it would become?

He must have looked round the class for an empty desk and found the one beside me. Though now I’m not sure if he hadn’t planned to put you beside me from the beginning. He and I had never really got on. There was something about him that brought out the worst in me: I took to handing in all my work late and going home early on those days when I had French last period, but also always made sure that any work I did for him was perfect and it infuriated him that he could never fault me on it.

‘There is an empty desk over there,’ he said. ‘You could do worse, I suppose, though admittedly not much. And Roberts could do with someone fresh to liven him up.

The class laughed and, at the sound of my name, I looked up. And saw you, for the first time. Frances.

You were still standing beside him, half smiling in an effort to remain inconspicuous. I suppose you were nervous but you didn’t look it—not as nervous as I would have been in your situation. You were dressed in your own clothes: mustard corduroy trousers and a plain white blouse with a small gold cross at your throat. I remember thinking I had never seen anyone who looked so well. Your black hair was swept away from your face and did I imagine it or was that a trace of lipstick on your lips? Not being in uniform made you look older, more self-assured, someone apart and extraordinary. Simpson looked ridiculous beside you, even if he didn’t realise it.

‘This is Frances,’ he said again. ‘Say hello, Roberts.’

I managed to stammer something and the class laughed again, enjoying my discomfort. You allowed yourself a half smile as you turned towards me and the laughter in your eyes was enough to save me from utter disgrace. Simpson went on, pleased with his introduction. He was obviously having fun.

‘Roberts,’ he said to you, ‘is one of our enigmas. You will note that he needs a haircut. Some of my colleagues send him home from time to time to get it attended to but I never do. I have always worried that, like Samson,

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kirby Porter grew up in Belfast near the Harland and Wolff shipyard. He studied Russian at Queen’s University Belfast, took further degrees at the University of London and the University of Wales, and became a Head of Library Services in London. A once-active trade unionist, he gave talks on Russian and Irish poetry. He now lives in Scotland.

his strength resides in his hair and that, were it to be cut, he would be unable to remain upright at all, and I would be forced to teach him French as he lay helpless on the floor. He would not be my ideal as a companion for you but as there is a free desk beside him I am afraid you are lumbered with him. As are we all—as are we all. And, you never know, you might get on. Samson and Delilah, as it were.’

He directed you to your seat and there was further laughter. I was surprised there wasn’t applause.

You walked uncertainly towards me and as you sat down you smiled at me again. So much for my putting you at your ease, I thought; you were the one rescuing me. As the laughter died away I was grateful once again for the smile and the bond I imagined it had created between us.

Nine years earlier

My Pentecostal church holds a Bible class Brother Sammy clapped his hands.

‘Well, now,’ he said. ‘What about a quiz?’

‘Oh, yes please,’ a hundred voices shouted. Relief was now universal. Everyone liked quizzes.

Brother Sammy was good at his job. He didn’t speak at once.

He knew how to wait, how to allow the promise of prizes to work its magic.When he next spoke the hall throbbed with suppressed anticipation.

‘All right,’ he said.‘Here’s the question. What’s the difference between Brother Archie and Michael Roberts?’

I jumped at the sudden mention of my name. And at the strangeness of the question.

The rest of the children stirred uneasily. This wasn’t what they’d expected.

‘How many days did Jonah spend in the belly of the whale?’

‘How many times did Joshua blow his trumpet before the walls of Jericho came tumbling down?’

Those were the usual sort of question. This was something new: something terrible.

I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. The back of my throat hurt and I had difficulty breathing. I knew something awful was going to happen.

Brother Sammy continued to smile. ‘Come on now,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it as plain as the nose on your face,’ he said.

‘Look.’ He held up a shilling between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, moving it so that its shiny smoothness glinted in the light.

‘There’s the shilling that will go to the one who gets it right. What about you, Jackie? It’s not like you not to have a go. Come on, now. What’s the answer? What’s the difference between Brother Archie and Michael Roberts?’

He must have been desperate; a shilling was untold riches to the boys and girls sitting in front of him.

I looked up at Jackie, silently begging him not to say anything. He was my friend after all and I was sure that if he said nothing, then I’d be all right.

Jackie looked at me, and then back at the shilling, and hesitated for a moment longer.

‘Brother Archie’s older than Michael,’ he shouted. The floodgates had opened. All around me arms went up begging for attention. The bolder children just shouted out their answers.

‘Brother Archie’s got black hair.’

‘Brother Archie’s got brown eyes.’

‘Michael still wears short trousers.’

Brother Sammy let them go on with their wild guesses, timing his eventual intervention to perfection once again. With the children at fever pitch he held up his hands for silence.

‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to tell you,’ he said at last, smiling as sweetly as ever.

‘Brother Archie’s name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, put there by the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ so that, when he dies and the Day of Judgement is at hand, he will be allowed to pass unscathed through the Heavenly Gates to sit at the feet of God the Father. But Michael ...’

He paused here, perhaps trying to recapture his mood of righteous indignation.

‘But Michael,’ he shouted, ‘is a sinner. His name has been expunged from the Lamb’s Book of Life by his actions tonight and when he dies he will go straight to Hell, to burn in the fire for ever and ever and ever. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.’

The last words were thundered at the top of his voice while he struck the top of the table over and over again with the palm of his hand until the sweat poured down his face.

‘Stand up, Michael Roberts,’ he said in a voice which scared me even more because of its measured, reasonable tone.

I forced myself onto trembling feet. I think I must have been crying despite myself, because my throat was sore and dry.

I tried to turn away from Brother Sammy’s stern eye but everywhere I turned, another Brother pinned me down: Brother Archie, Brother Ivan, Brother Robert.

People who I’d liked and respected—and who I thought liked me.

At that moment, they all looked alike, smiling replicas of Brother Sammy, devoid of any individuality, any semblance of humanity.

‘Pride is the worst of all sins,’ they said, not to me now but to the other children, who sat, as before, at once terrified and relieved—terrified of the awful menace of the Brothers’ anger—relieved that it was being directed at someone other than themselves.

‘That is Michael’s sin,’ they continued, their voices still not above a whisper.

‘To set himself above the God who made him, who made us all, in wonder and majesty. To substitute his own words for those of God, to act as the mouthpiece of Satan himself. And in his anxiety to do the devil’s bidding, to try and involve all of you in his wickedness; to trap you with his conceit—you, who had thought him your friend.continued in the book

EDITOR’S NOTE

Much of the fiction emerging from Northern Ireland in the last 50 years has centred on the Troubles. In this novel, set in the late 1960s, the protagonist is not yet conscious of the tribal tensions that will soon beset his native Belfast. His are interior troubles: teenage insecurity--but an insecurity with a dark back story that will hamper him and his personal development as he tries to navigate his place in an emergent youth culture indifferent to the deference of the past. A brilliant first work.

When his girlfriend is killed, Michael Roberts finds himself reliving painful memories of childhood love and bullying Kirby Porter

The city that gave us the florin and the florentine also gave us the Fine Arts, product of trade, theology and tyranny. Richard Lloyd guides us around

EDITOR’S NOTE

In 1633 the Pope condemned Galileo for challenging Church teachings on astronomy, and he was exiled to Arcetri, in the hills south of Florence. It wasn’t until a century later, nearly 20 years after the Church had lifted its ban on his books, that his body was brought back to Florence and entombed in the church of Santa Croce. For the author, Galileo’s return marks the end of Florence’s history as the centre of artistic development. He begins his story with the Baptistery of the Cathedral, the oldest public building in the city and in many ways its symbol (pictured below). In between, he explains the evolution of Renaissance art and interprets the stories of Christian saints and Greek mythical characters on which so much post-medieval creativity then depended.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Lloyd’s love of the Italian Renaissance began at Winchester College, where he was a scholar. After a brief period at the British Institute in Florence, he studied PPE at Oxford University and then went into the City. Following his retirement he has returned to Florence as a guide and to research Christian and pre-Christian mythology.

Veterinary and human medicine are separate endpoints of one discipline. Both evolved at about the same time, had a common root and shared advances, initially with veterinary adoption or adaptation of learning from its human partner. Later, this led to knowledge flowing from animal to human patient. (There have always been individuals such as Aristotle who recognised the value of comparative studies, though collaboration has been frequently interrupted by religious dogma.)

Graphic images from the Palaeolithic era show that animals have constantly played a significant role in human interpretation of their own lives. The use of these very early images, frequently beautifully executed with significant accuracy, can enable dating, and therefore establish a time frame that gives the basis for creating a record.

The first written evidence of veterinary ‘professionals’ and veterinary procedures has been dated to around 2000 BC. The first specifically veterinary books appeared in print in the late 1400s and early 1500s, the most important being derived from surviving Roman and Byzantine manuscripts.

Printing enabled and enhanced education, the enlarge-

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bruce Vivash Jones graduated from the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in 1951. Since retiring from his consultancy business in 2003 he has been studying the history of the veterinary profession and of veterinary medicine. He is published by 5mBooks.com, which specialises in agricultural books for farmers and smallholder.

ment of libraries and the establishment of universities. This aided the training of a specific group of individuals, who became known as veterinarians. The first school was established at Lyon, France, by Claude Bourgelat in 1761 and was the forerunner of the now global teaching of veterinary medicine and science.

The societal activities of humankind arose in three centres of civilisation. The first centre was Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Aegean (Greece), which became the dominant global culture for veterinary and human medicine, influenced by the Christian religion.

The other two centres were China and India. These old, sophisticated and highly developed civilisations not only created their own medical science but understood veterinary and human medicine as two parts of one discipline. Again, both were influenced by a spiritual dimension: Confucianism in China and Buddhism in India.

These cultural centres interacted with other neighbouring communities creating significant spheres of influence. Following the introduction of Islam in the 7th century AD, there was intense interest in all branches of science including veterinary medicine, which resulted in the preservation of much Byzantine and Greek knowledge, to which contributions were made in the Arabic language.

In all these centres there was a strong background belief in mythologies involving animals. Almost all beliefs involved animals in fables associated with their founder, and animals were given god-like roles. They were also involved in sacrifice, frequently with the use of body organs for divination.

Warfare provided the prime motive to develop, understand and expand what became the veterinary art. From about 4000 BC, it was realised that domesticated horses had a greater value when trained to be ridden or draw

Mutton —Alice.’ How do we relate to animals? Bruce

vehicles than to be used as meat. This in turn created a need to care for them, feed them well and train them and a class of professionals was created that took on these duties, including treating post-conflict injuries. While veterinary medicine advanced the cause of equine welfare, warfare in turn drove veterinary progress.

Dogs have a similar history. While their use in ancient war may be exaggerated, dogs played a significant role as messengers and still do in guarding. They are also significant in hunting for sport, which they appear to enjoy. This has resulted, over the centuries, in much wounding and injuries, and canine medicine and surgery again advanced to deal with these issues.

The utilisation of animal products is affected by religious belief. This is most obvious in the consumption of pig meat, which is eschewed by two major world religions. Another religion prohibits the eating of bovine meat and a fourth favours vegetarian practice and promotes animal welfare. The impact of religions on veterinary medicine is variable; the use of animals in ritual slaughter, for example, involves selection of healthy beasts, which may have influenced clinical observation skills. The remains of sacrificial beasts reveals that such animals were seldom diseased.

EDITOR’S NOTE

and Inspector-General of French Veterinary Schools. He was reputed to have amassed a private library of some 40,000 volumes. While not all of a veterinary nature, the library did include almost all known printed veterinary works up to 1838, as well as many rare and priceless manuscripts. When the collection was dispersed a significant part was acquired by the Alfort Veterinary School and is held in its library. Fortunately, the collection was catalogued by P. Leblanc and a copy is held in the British Library (BM, No.822, c1). Leblanc also wrote a summary of those items that related to veterinary medicine and animal husbandry. These totalled 5,812 works with 1,598 directly related to veterinary medicine (up to 1838). At that time by far the majority were by French authors. One category, Treatises on the Diseases of Different Animals, comprised 216 works, of which 115 were in French while just seven were in English. Huzard’s summary was published in English in 1848 (Leblanc, pp. 214–16).

In 1851 Count G.B. Ercolani, writing in Italian, published the first volume of his Historico-Analytical Researches on the Writers of Veterinary Science, with the second volume in 1854. J.C.F. Heusinger, a German national, living in Cassel, France, and writing in French, produced Researches in Comparative Pathology in 1853;

The ambition of this book is massive. Based on written records going back 4,000 years it pieces together how humans have interacted with animals and how their knowledge of animal disease, welfare and medicine has developed. The book can be read from front to back or topic by topic, says its author, and it covers “equines, bovines, ovines, caprines, porcines, canines, felines, avians and aquatics”, on every continent. Its range of enquiry goes from the early domestication of animals and their exploitation for food, fibre, traction and transport to their use as companions.

One area of veterinary research that lags behind its human counterpart is that of the archaeology of animal disease. Apart from the rare graves of pet dogs, diseased animals were either buried in unmarked graves or burned. However, some recent discoveries have helped to add to our knowledge and show many of the ailments and injuries from which humans also suffered in antiquity.

Veterinary education commenced in 1762 in France and by 1800 existed in every major European state including, belatedly, Britain in 1791. By the mid-1800s it was becoming established in the United States, Canada, India, Egypt and Mexico, and by 1900 had approached global coverage. With the establishment of veterinary schools, organised research, national disease eradication programmes and, in particular, a profession of specifically trained individuals was created.

The recording of the history of veterinary medicine has an interesting history in itself. From the beginning there have been individuals working to trace its roots. The earliest printed publications came from France, with the first identified author being P.J. Amoreux at Montpellier, who produced a listing of authors of veterinary related topics up to 1773, followed by C.F. Saboureux de la Bonneterie with A Translation of old Latin works relating to Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine (1773) and L. Vitet, Lyon, who wrote An Analysis of Authors who have written on the Veterinary Art since Vegetius (1783). Amoreux then elaborated on his earlier work with An Historical Precis of the Veterinary Art (1810). All these books were in French, with French authors being prominent as the first writers on veterinary history.

It is not easy to trace early veterinary texts in manuscript form. A notable early collector was J.-B. Huzard (1755–1838), Professor at the Alfort Veterinary School

the title is misleading as the text is about historical literature and animal plagues. G.A. Piétremont wrote The Origins of the Domesticated Horse (1870) and Horses in Prehistoric and Historic Times (1883), both in French.

The interest in historical veterinary medicine then moved away from France with the Outline of the History of Veterinary Science for Veterinarians and Students (1885) by F. Echbaum, Berlin; History of Cattle Breeding and Medicine in Antiquity (1886) by Anton Baronski, Vienna, author also of The Training and Taming of Domestic Animals in Prehistoric Times (1896). A. Postolka, Vienna, contributed A History of Veterinary Medicine from its beginnings to the Present Times (1887). All these works were in German.

The first record of veterinary history in English in book form was made by Delabere Blaine as the opening chapter in his Outlines of the Veterinary Art (1802). He discussed both the ancient origins as well as the establishment of the London Veterinary College. The Encyclopaedia Britannica in the fourth edition (1806) included a good article on the subject (but under the Farriery title), said to have been written by Jeremiah Kirby. Later editions had revised texts by William Dick and George Fleming. The Short History of the Horse (1824) by Bracy Clarke includes a section that traces the origins of veterinary literature.

Sir Frederick Smith wrote excellent books enhanced by his practical knowledge of veterinary medicine and the profession, as well as many papers. The Early History of Veterinary Literature and its British Development (1919–1933) in four volumes, remains a valuable and unique resource; The Veterinary History of the War in South Africa (1919) gives a first-hand description of the Boer War (1899–1902) and its horrific wastage of animals; and The History of the Royal

‘Let me introduce you to that leg of mutton,’ said the Red Queen. ‘Alice—Mutton;

EDITOR’S NOTE

Harry Lott’s memoirs are a jaw-dropping reminder of what the British Empire really meant—its astonishing reach and the assumption of unimpeded access. There were obstacles; posted after the First World War from northern France, where he was helping to clean up the battlefields, to Iraq, Lott records that the Arab Revolt of 1920 “caused us a great deal of anxiety and expense” but also treats it with the same resignation that might have been accorded to an outbreak of dengue fever. Global access is matched in his accounts by social access. Sailing to Kenya in 1924 “I made several new friends including Lord and Lady Howard de Walden.”

In my young days there were five distinct classes of society in East Anglia, a district almost entirely devoted to agriculture.

• The landed gentry and the owners of large estates;

• Professional people including doctors, lawyers and the clergy;

• Yeoman farmers and smaller landowners;

• Tradespeople including shopkeepers, innkeepers, millers, blacksmiths, bakers, grocers, and owners of small businesses;

• The working class, mainly farm labourers (male) and servants (female).

My family and direct ancestors were all yeoman farmers or small landowners employing one or two servants and several labourers.

None of my ancestors were from the landed gentry, nor were they professionals. I was the first in the family to go to College and graduate with a degree in engineering —but even that was hardly considered ‘professional’ in those days.

The members of each class kept very much to themselves and rarely married out of their class. Almost all my ancestors married into similar yeoman farmers’ families. The term yeoman was used for those farmers who owned land, either freehold, leasehold or copyhold.

A yeoman would be one of the Principal Inhabitants of the town or village and might typically perform certain civic duties such as constable, churchwarden, local surveyor, or bailiff to the lord of the manor. My great-great-grandfather, John Lott No.2, was one of the Principal Inhabitants of East Bergholt where he was churchwarden and also local surveyor responsible for repair of the roads.

The gentry, often titled and with a family estate, generally employed a butler, one or more footmen, a lady’s maid, a valet and a housekeeper with a staff of female servants including a cook, housemaids and kitchen maids. Sir Richard Hughes, from whom John Lott No.2 bought a moiety in the Valley Farm, was a member of the East Bergholt gentry.

The wife of an English emigrant to Canada, in whose

VOL 1 / 1883-1907

englAND: A childhood in village and CITY

homestead I stayed some months when in Saskatchewan in 1911, told me that she had been an assistant cook in an English household where there were 30 indoors servants. She had married an assistant gardener on the estate and they had emigrated to Canada in 1883, the year that I was born.

Of the ‘professional’ class the clergy were generally graduates of either Oxford or Cambridge and were often younger sons of the gentry who, incidentally, often held ‘advowsons’, or the right to appoint a parish priest.

Relationships between Employer and Employee

One may deplore the class difference between employer and employee of those years, but I can personally affirm that the relations between them in my experience were cordial. The employer was far more considerate than many are today and the employees showed a great interest in and zest for work as well as a respect for their boss.

A domestic servant girl was probably more comfortable working for a considerate mistress than living at home in her parents’ cottage. It seemed quite natural to both parties that she should have all her meals alone in the kitchen where she had access to as much butter, bread, and cheese as she wanted. When she removed the main course from our midday lunch in the dining room, there was always a good helping of meat or poultry cut ready for her on the dish and she could also have what was left of the sweet course which was generally steamed or baked pudding or pie. However, I must, with sadness, tell two true stories. The first was told to me by my father of one of his farm-workers, a man whom I remember well and who had a family of young children. In those days there were

READERS’ COMMENTS

David Shannon: An invaluable window on a now obscure part of the common history of the British Empire and Mesopotamia.

Peter Topping: Fascinating to read of Balfour Beatty’s ability to bring together syndicates to finance the engineering of major projects in politically unstable areas.

no children’s allowances, free medical attention, or free transport to schools.

About five hours after starting work in the fields, the men stopped for elevenses to eat some bread and cheese and to drink (as a rule) cold tea. The small piece of cheese, held in the hand with bread, was called a ‘thumb-piece’. This man told my father that every week he kept his thumb-piece till Saturday, pretending to eat it each day, as he did not want his mates to know that he couldn’t afford more than a small piece of cheese once a week.

The other story was told to me by my aunt Alice who died in 1947, aged 96. It was about the annual festive family gathering in July, which they called the ‘Fair Party’, when my grandparents at Wenham Place entertained as many relatives as possible staying in the house, the remainder finding accommodation in The Priory and the Hill House, both occupied by near relatives. All of them came in their own horse-drawn transport, either a two-wheeled chaise, or trap or high dogcart with iron tyres. None, I think, brought their grooms, so that no accommodation for servants had to be provided.

One of the special sweet dishes always produced for the feast was a rich ‘syllabub’ with warm milk added straight from the cow into the bowl of wine and spices. The cowman, years later, told Aunt Alice that after he had milked the cow into the bowl, he had always wished he could have had a taste of the wonderfully scented dish.

I am afraid that sharing a little of it with him or the servants never occurred to anyone. Those were not good days for everyone.

The KiTchen Boy

When my father was farming at Woodgates the resident servant had the help of the ‘back’us’ (back-house) boy, as he was sometimes called. He was probably the son of one of the farm-workers and, after leaving the village school in his early teens, earned a few pence (later a shilling or so) a day until he was old enough to work on the farm. His hours of work were nearly as long as the

This is classic social history, a five-volume memoir recalling the impact that Canada, France, Iraq and Kenya had on a British engineer— Harry Lott—and he on them, from 1907 to 1933

men’s, from 6 am (or 7 am in the dark winter days) to 5.00 or 5.30 pm, with half an hour off for breakfast and an hour for lunch. On Saturday he probably left work at lunchtime and only did a few essential jobs on a Sunday morning.

His first job was to pump many pails of water and carry them to the ‘copper’, a circular brick-encased tank with a hemispherical bottom, in the back kitchen. He had to light the fire underneath the copper and keep it going with wood until the water was nearly boiling. A large round removable wooden lid prevented the steam from escaping. This provided the hot water for the house and, once a week, for the laundry.

After breakfast he cleaned the boots of the family.

VOL 2 / 1907-14

CANADA: YOung land of opportunity

I was musical and enjoyed playing the piano, becoming organist of our church at the age of 15, a position I held until I went to study Engineering at the Central Technical College in London.

After three very frugal years at college, my first real job was with a consulting engineering firm which sent me on the Atlantic cable laying expedition in 1905. During that trip, whilst our ship was being repaired in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I fell in love with Canada. It was a young country with many opportunities for a young man and I decided to return.

So it was that on 5 July 1907, having obtained Father’s permission and two weeks before my 24th birthday, I boarded the SS Victorian at Liverpool docks, bound for a new life in Canada.

Canada was a popular destination for engineering graduates from the Central Technical College and there were a number of us in Montreal. With E.G. Sterndale Bennett (the future theatrical impresario), I helped to organise a dinner for Old Students at the impressive CPR railway hotel, Place Viger. Sterndale Bennett was also one of the prime movers of a group of us who began to meet in the evenings to discuss the idea of forming a contractors’ company for prospecting in the West.

In early January I met members of the Zingari Snowshoe Club for a tramp over Mount Royal, across the Park Slide lit up with arcs and thronged with tobogganers. Tobogganing on the Park Slide was so popular that there was a long waiting list for membership. The slide was a run of about half-a-mile long, straight down the slope of the mountain, well lighted with electric arc lights.

I was lucky to be friendly with a member and had a thrilling experience on my first evening. The flat toboggans, on lignum vitae or bone runners, were started at the top with a push off by one of the crew. There were four parallel grooves, so that four toboggans could go down in a race together. I believe that the best runs took about half a minute so that, allowing for the gradual slowing down to a halt at the

continued in the book

There were no shoes worn in the daytime in those days and farm boots were generally very dirty. He had to scrape off the mud with a blunt knife and then use Day & Martin’s Blacking, which had to be mixed with a little water before being applied with a brush. Then it took another few minutes’ brushing with another brush to get a shine on the boots.

He had to chop enough sticks, from hedge faggots, to light all the fires in the house. There were fires in all rooms, including the bedrooms, and they were started with wisps of straw. He then had to fill and keep filled all the coal scuttles and the big kitchen range.

The knives had to be cleaned on a board about 2ft

6ins long and 6ins wide, covered with a thin leather. To this a little knife powder was added and each knife was rubbed until it was shiny. Stainless steel knives were unknown.

He fed the fowls and brought in the eggs and, once a week, turned the handle of the churn to make butter. Sometimes this took only half an hour—sometimes three times as long. He was also useful for other odd jobs and running errands.

On baking day, once a week, he had to fetch enough faggots to heat the long brick oven, starting the fire about 9am and keeping it going until noon, when he cleared all the ashes with a broom of green twigs, leaving the floor of the oven ready continued in the book

VOL 3 / 1914-19

France: trenches and reinforcement

Not until 21 March 1918, when Ludendorff’s armies launched their mightiest assault of the War, were preparations made in our area for a plan to construct a complete system of defences behind the lines for use by our armies if forced to retreat. This part of the defence was 65 miles long. The assistant engineer-in-chief had under his orders about 40,000 men, who had been ‘thrown out of work’ when trench warfare changed to battles in the open. These men included tunnelling companies, forestry companies (which had been responsible for providing the timber for dugouts and props for mine tunnels), army troops companies and labour companies, some of them West Indian and some Chinese.

I had to do much of the detailed siting of the new

trenches and machine-gun positions. As soon as we had marked out each new scheme, it was my job to brief the officers commanding the units who had to do the actual digging and construction.

My first base was at Hauteville, from where I made daily visits to the divisions in the line. On one section of the line I found a Chinese labour company with only a few men doing any work. Having asked why, I learnt that the task, a heavy one of digging over 100 cubic feet, had been completed by these men in four hours—a very creditable performance—so I asked them to march away, for fear that a very senior inspecting officer would get a bad impression, seeing so many of the men idling, especially as imported Chinese labour was expensive.

No sooner had the Chinese gone than Field Marshall Haig appeared and I was introduced to him. After a walk around the works in the area, I was invited by him to share their picnic lunch, which his ADC had laid out under a hedge. Haig was the perfect host, getting up from the ground to offer me a second helping of chicken and salad which, with strawberries and cream followed by hot coffee, made a perfect meal. And so 21 June was a red-letter day for me.

Page 9, left: The Lott grandparents’ home at Great Wenham.

Page 9, right: A mowing team at Wenham Grange in 1880.

Above: The Park Slide, Montreal, c. 1908.

Below: A Ford run-about, used for inspecting the Light Railways in Northern France

On 9 July 1918 I heard of my appointment as Controller of Foreways, 5th Army—a staff job. The Foreways were the Light Railways (LR) used to supply men and materials, water and rations to the trenches, heavy and field ammunition to the batteries at the front and to evacuate wounded personnel. I had three Army Tramway Companies under my orders and administration:

• No.3 Foreway Company RE, consisting of three Officers and 112 other ranks (ORs) with 67 ORs attached, had to maintain 12½ miles of track and eleven 20hp tractors in the Forest of Nieppe back to Divisional Dumps at Harstone and Thiennes and had to operate the system as far back as La Lacq Corps RE Dump.

• No.8 Foreway Company RE, consisting of six Officers and 150 ORs, had just completed 2½ miles of track on the Hinges and Plocy Farm lines and had instructions to survey and construct the Canal Line beside the La Basse Canal to connect with the Gonnehem Light Railway. It had two Tractors and 30 one-ton wagons.

• No.10 Foreway Company RE, which was operating and maintaining the Essars Line and carrying about 80 tons nightly to the 40th Division.

I went first to see the tracks at Hinges and the 12 miles

VOL 4 / 1919-24

Mesopotamia: Laying basic infrastructure

Soon after the Armistice in November 1918, I and several of my colleagues caught Spanish Flu; I spent three weeks in hospitals in Lille and Étaples before being sent to convalesce in the luxury of the Grand Hotel du Cap Martin, not far from Nice. When I returned to the battlefields in February 1919, I joined the staff of the Royal Engineers as senior construction engineer managing the clearance of the battle areas.

I remained in that role until September, when my engineering experience was required in Mesopotamia, where I was to look after the existing electricity generating, water supply and refrigeration facilities, and construct new ones to service British garrisons and the local population in an area 800 miles from east to west and 300 miles north to south around Baghdad.

Besides having a team of Army officers, all engineers, under my command and administration, I also had about 8,000 men, most of whom were civilians. The majority of these were locally recruited Arabs and Persians, with a few Baghdadi Jews.

For skilled craftsmen such as electricians, mechanics, and wiremen, also clerks and store-keepers, I had several companies of enrolled Indians from the Indian Army, including Hindus and Muslims, Sikhs, and Punjabis. The Indians were highly skilled and were indispensable in running the electric power stations, erecting power lines, wiring barracks and working as brick-makers, patternmakers, etc. Each company had its own British officers and NCO’s, and Sikhs predominated amongst the mechanics and electricians.

My first few days in Baghdad were taken up settling in, meeting my staff, and making familiarisation visits to the Hinaidi filtration plant, a flour mill, a meat freezing plant, our dairy farms, the workshops, a new jetty, and the site of a new pumping station.

An interesting sideline to my main duties in Mesopotamia was the completion of the 350 mile stretch of new road from Khanaquin, on the Mespot-Persian border, to Kasvin, not far from Tehran. The route had been selected extremely well by Russian engineers under General Denikin, and became the main route into Persia (Iran) from Iraq, crossing three mountain ranges over passes at elevations of 6,500ft to 7,700ft, all reached by a series of hair-pin bends. Our work involved widening and surfacing the track, and installing culverts and bridges where necessary; for this I had several detachments of Punjabis operating stone-crushers and road rollers along the route.

When I visited any of our works, I would raise Cain if I found any of the men, Indians or Arabs, slacking. A certain amount of surplus labour at times was inevitable, but the climate, personal inclination, and surroundings, as well as cheap labour and supervision, all tended towards slack performance of duties.

On my arrival in Basra I was able to catch up with Inglis, Morgan, and several others. We visited Shaiba to see the new cantonment and RAF buildings, the ice

of 60 cm narrow gauge lines in Nieppe Forest and to inspect the monorail at Chocques. Over the next two months I made visits to check progress along the lines at locations including Nieppe Forest, Chocques, Beuvry, Vendin-les-Béthune, Gosnay, Warlincourt, Allouange and I also visited the concrete factory at Aire whose supplies were important to us. We were far enough behind the front line at that time for these visits to be relatively unhindered by shelling.

My job as Controller lasted only until the Germans were forced to retreat by the onslaught from the combined British, French, Canadian, Australian and US troops, leaving their own tramways more or less intact.

In September, the Germans evacuated Estaire and we were able to cross the canal at La Gorgue and check the condition of the LR track there; it was in reasonably good condition, damaged only at points and bridges. On 7 September, I met 5th Army Commander General Birdwood and Major General Percy Hambro and we all boarded a LR Truck to inspect the line as far as the end of steel at a junction NE of Merville. continued in the book

plant and the power house, before catching the train to Baghdad. The journey took 30 hours over two nights and a day, but it was better than having to take the river steamer to Kut. There was some excitement during the night involving an Arab train robber but, alas, my automatic pistol was unloaded at the time. Baghdad was still fearfully hot in September, with daytime temperatures up to 116 degrees, only dropping to 82 degrees at night. Whenever possible, I visited our facilities in the early morning or after siesta in the afternoon. There was trouble with the dairy farms’ pumping plant, which I found in an appalling condition with only one barge pump running. At Hinaidi cantonment we took over the substation and

Top: The Rumpler Taube, a pre-war monoplane and the first military plane to be mass-produced in Germany.

Middle: After British forces captured the Vilayet province of Baghdad, Ottoman stamps were sent back to London to be overprinted by Bradbury, Wilkinson & Co., the stamps’ original printers.

Above: 1921: “The somewhat uncomfortable voyage from Marseilles to Bombay took 17 days and I felt miserable, despite taking Mothersill’s Seasickness Remedy daily.”

VOL 5 / 1924-33

London, Travel and the general strike

In February 1924, at the age of 40, I was finally demobbed and passed my responsibilities to the GHQ staff in Basra. After 4½ years in Mesopotamia I reverted to the rank of major and on returning to civilian life in London dropped the use of a military title altogether.

The 1920s were turbulent years. In 1926 Mussolini dissolved the Italian parliament and declared himself dictator. Trotsky resigned as chairman of the Russian Revolutionary Military Council and battled for power with Stalin following the death of Lenin. In Germany, Hitler, having published Mein Kampf, resurrecting the NSDAP party in Munich. There were also uprisings and changes of government in Greece, Spain and Austria.

In March, the Electricity (Supply) Bill was debated in Parliament and George Balfour, for whom I then worked, took part. Despite Conservative opposition to what was seen as nationalisation, the bill was eventually passed and the Central Electricity Board was established to manage the supply and distribution of electricity across the country.

The unions were increasingly talking of striking and we watched an anti-strike procession of 20,000 women pass through Central London on 17 April; the working-class crowds were only angered by the sight of society ladies on horseback.

The opposition of working-class women did not prevent the General Strike from starting at midnight on Monday 3 May, when all the unions came out in sympathy with the miners, who would not agree to reduced pay and longer hours. The Strike lasted eight days, during which there were clashes with police across the country.

The next morning it took 2½ hours for West and me to drive from Ealing to the City, as the streets were packed with motor and other vehicles. We decided not to go home in rush hour; instead, we went to see Mercenary Mary at the Hippodrome and then had dinner at the Troc Grill Room where we had a ‘jolly evening watching a cabaret’, before driving back to Ealing ‘at top speed at 1.30 am after an Oxo at a coffee stall’. By Wednesday ‘the traffic was a little easier on roads to the City.’

On Saturday 8 May I went with West and Brandes to the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) to volunteer as ‘motor-men’ but with no luck. So we went on to Chiswick where I left them getting jobs as a bus- driver and conductor for the London General Omnibus Company (LGOC) whilst I walked back to the Club.

I had dinner with West on Monday and ‘he was full of his bus-driving experience’ telling me how he and Brandes had spent the day keeping a bus route going for the LGOC. I had been to the office as usual, travelling to and from the City on the Central London Railway which was also run by volunteers.

On Tuesday 11 May I noted that ‘transport services were improving everywhere and there were 700 LGOC buses on the streets.’ The Strike was called off by the TUC at 1.00 pm on 12 May to the surprise of many of their members, leaving the miners to fight their own battle with the mine owners. The miners held out until November when they gave up their struggle and accepted the pay cut of 13% and an extension to the length of shifts from seven to eight hours imposed by the mine owners.continued in the book

Top: “My German Nusseldorfer managed to climb the Paitak Pass without difficulty and that evening we reached Karind, above the snow line, about 4,500 ft above Baghdad. There we were given a room by the Sappers & Miners Company in a house with a roof but no doors or windows.”

Above: Two Wakamba porters at the confluence of the Maragua and Tana rivers, with “local Kikuyus, sitting and feeding”. “Feeding,” note.

Left: The Eruption of Mt Kilauea, Hawaii, May 1924. A newspaper account of the bravery of a Miss Dodds was “rather exaggerated; she was on the rim of the crater more than 1,500 yards from the pit whilst Miss Green and 7 men, including myself, were in the crater only a few hundred yards from the exploding pit.”

Because of his background, Robert Best found himself torn, as he entered his forties in the 1930s, between what he recognised as the new Zeitgeist—the Central-European brand of modern minimalism that seemed to embody social and aesthetic progress—and his private and business commitment to the relative status quo in design and manufacturing. For these reasons—his personal tastes and upbringing, and his obligation to maintain the momentum at Best & Lloyd, the factory he ran—he could not be an acolyte of the Modern Movement when it arrived in Britain.

He shared some of its moral aims, not least its wish to give the public things that worked better, but in general he had not observed that Functionalist design was necessarily superior, nor that it had the capacity to elevate the public mind, nor that it deserved to be campaigned for. He also had strong reservations about those individuals and groups that did such campaigning, and about the techniques they used.

The main tool for promoting Functional design in the 1930s and 40s, other than books and the popular press, was the exhibition, and one of the most important was the ‘Exhibition of British Industrial Art in Relation to the Home’ held at Dorland Hall, off Lower Regent Street in

agenda of its own within art circles of the period, it had also become a modish preoccupation for individuals and groups with ‘superior’ or ‘expensive’ tastes. Best did not like anyone assuming the moral high ground in order to dictate standards and thought it divisive; others simply objected to who was doing the dictating.

To take a case in point, while most participants in the Dorland Hall exhibition in 1933 agreed that the mind of the public needed to be elevated, members of the Design and Industries Association—ostensibly the event’s main sponsor—sat so uncomfortably with those recruited by the magazine Country Life that they refused in the end to give the event their formal support. That run-in between supposedly ‘authentic’ Moderns (capital M) and ‘bogus’ modernists (small m and an -ist ending), or between intellectual fellow travellers and followers of high fashion, has been documented extensively, but does not represent Best’s position. It was the authoritarianism that both sides were willing to engage in that he took issue with, and on this count he was largely alone.

My Modern Movement documents Best’s growing awareness of this distance between himself and those who claimed to speak for British design, as well as his opposition to the culture of imposition that they

Robert Dudley Best

London, in the summer of 1933. Two years earlier, an inspirational exhibition of Swedish goods had also been held at Dorland Hall, illustrating a standard of beauty and craftsmanship that caused some consternation in UK educated circles. The Swedish exhibition added fuel to the growing perception that Britain was lagging behind its overseas rivals and that its products looked clumsy and dated.

Best did not see this. His father had occasionally sent him abroad to sell—or, failing that, to assess interest in—the firm’s products and he had travelled to Germany in 1923 to visit the first post-war trade fair, in Leipzig, to inspect new glassware. The feedback he got from buyers was that English design, though largely untouched by novel European trends, was valued—both for its enduring qualities and for its recognisable Englishness. He thought this gave the UK a different sort of competitive edge and one that should not be disregarded.

This dissenting voice—that there was sufficient merit in British household goods not to warrant apology—is not often found in accounts of the period, although he was not alone. When the Gorell Committee proposed that the government fund a permanent exhibition of good design to raise public standards, Parliament took the contrary view that design could be trusted to evolve at a more natural pace without the need for an expensive state-sanctioned showcase—although it did back the Committee’s proposal for temporary exhibitions, local exhibitions and travelling exhibitions, at home and abroad.

Best’s vested interest in Best & Lloyd partly explains his hesitancy about Functional design but has also to be seen side-by-side with his distaste for how Functionalism was being promoted. While modern design had an

EDITOR’S NOTE

thought appropriate to their mission. As such, it is—or could have been, had it been published at the time—an important book, with a message similar to that of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies The Open Society, which appeared at the end of the Second World War, is a defence of democracy in the face of totalitarian tendencies and ideas of historical inevitability that Popper traced back to Plato (in Volume 1) and to Hegel and Marx and others (in Volume 2). Best’s study, far less grand, is mostly a memoir of his own life but increasingly broadens into an examination of how various contemporaries co-opted by the state engaged in an apparently benign economic campaign that had offensive political overtones.

My Modern Movement recognises that for people of ‘advanced’ tastes, Functional design was a welcome corrective to the debased aesthetics of the commercial world but cautions against the methods it used to make its case, for reasons that its propagandists found hard to understand. If ‘the few’ knew better than ‘the many’, and had an obligation to elevate the less capable whether they liked it or not, was it not reasonable for ‘the few’ to impose their own standards from above?

In the context of the times, with a centralised culture built around the BBC and growing cross-party acceptance of the need for a welfare state, such an idea did not seem problematic. If those with superior minds and educations did not intervene on behalf of the masses, they would have been betraying their own enlightenment and their obligation to elevate the less capable. But if they did intervene, where did this leave the democratic principles that our liberal society prides itself on?

Although raised in material comfort, Best was ill at ease with the privileges and entitlements enjoyed by the rich and the clever. In 1942 he worked with J.B. Priest-

If the English lighting designer, Robert Dudley Best, had been alive today, he’d have voted for Brexit. Although an internationalist, he was outraged that a clique of London intellectuals should use authoritarian means to impose a new aesthetic on the public and on the provinces. Best had to sell the products he made; the critics merely commented on them. And yet they had the ear of government, claiming, without evidence, that Modernism would expand British trade abroad. This extract is taken from the book’s introduction by Best’s editor, Stephen Games.

ley and others to set up ‘Common Wealth’, a left-wing grouping intended to counter the Labour Party and its suport for state control, and to encourage cooperative ownership, decentralisation and syndicalism.

My Modern Movement reveals the extension of these ideas into Best’s thoughts on design, notably his aversion to exhibitions proposed by bodies like the Council of Industrial Design to promote modern manufacturing. Best argued that these events, however well meaning, were redolent of fascism. The selectors appointed themselves; did not hold themselves to account; did not see any need to make the reasons for their selections transparent; did not submit their selections to testing; and did not invite the participation on equal terms of those who supplied the products being exhibited or those they were meant to educate. Instead of leaving questions of merit open to debate, they made them subject to manipulation and ideology—as were exhibits at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Best called instead for collectivist exhibitions that gave equal weight to expert and public tastes, and left preference a matter of individual choice.

Design propagandists responded that the uneducated could not play an equal part in the discussion on design because they were too ill-informed—that they

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only acquired an opinion of any value once experts had trained them to a higher understanding—but the freedom of the ill-informed to make judgments is exactly how Western democracy works. We grant ultimate authority to those who appear least qualified to exercise it, not because we are convinced that each individual elector is part of a Great Brain that collectively knows what none of its constituent parts knows independently, but because every other political system seems to us even more egregious—the so-called Winston Churchill defence.

This simple idea lay at the heart of Best’s attack on the design establishment of his day. In his view, the sense of noblesse oblige that motivated such bodies as the Council of Industrial Design, set up in 1944 to improve the quality of British manufacturing and make it more saleable, saw no reason not to batter the public into giving up what it felt happy with in favour of more ‘cultivated’ alternatives.

Best was affronted by bullying. As a manufacturer he did not want to be dictated to by theorists and intellectuals; as someone without a university education he did not want to be dictated to by scholars; as a designer, he did not want to be dictated to by artists; and as a Brummie he did not want to be dictated to by Southerners. He recognised that he lacked sophistication and that his tastes were too conventional for the various smart sets, but he also saw that his vulnerability alerted him to the little abuses committed habitually by others and the tendency of the metropolis to ride roughshod over regional self-determination.

It was to exorcise his fears and prove his competence that he wrote the book that follows—to raise issues that more literate rivals were insensitive to while also confessing beguilingly to his limi-

continued in the book

READERS’ COMMENTS

Maggie Bawden: Robert Best was there at the making of 20th-century design and in My Modern Movement he tells the real story of what was at stake in the battle for the new.

Sir Charles Tennyson CMG: Bob Best knows how heartily I disagree with him … but I commend my old friend’s book as a thoughtprovoking contribution to a controversy.

‘Fascistic’ bullying in the 1930s and 40s allowed Design’s elite to force the views of the few on the many. No, not Arthur Birling

INCLUSIVE GROWTH International Monetary Fund Softback, 412 pages November 2021

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Corinne C. Deléchat: Division Chief at the IMF in Washington. An experienced macroeconomist, she has specialised in emerging markets and low-income countries in Africa, Latin America and Central Europe.

Leandro Medina: Senior Economist at the IMF, where he has been for over 10 years. He is a graduate of George Washington University.

The informal economy is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that is difficult to measure and analyse. By definition, informal activities are not recorded or are underrecorded, and participants do not want to be accounted for. It covers a large range of situations within and across countries, and it arises for a broad spectrum of reasons.

At one end of the spectrum, informality can be the result of a deliberate choice, with individuals and firms deciding to remain outside the formal economy to avoid taxes, social contributions, or compliance with standards and licensing requirements This choice relates to the often-held but misconceived view that informality is mainly caused by firms and individuals ‘cheating’ on the system to avoid paying taxes. At the other end, informality can exist when some individuals are too poor or too uneducated to access formal employment, public benefits and financial services, and therefore need to rely on informal activities as a safety net.

But not all informal workers are poor, and not all poor workers are in the informal sector. Some workers can be simultaneously or successively employed in the formal and informal sectors. Informal firms range from precarious (hand-to-mouth) one-person operations to thriving small businesses.

The drivers of informality are similarly multifaceted. They vary from low economic development; inequality of access to health, education, and other basic public goods; the state of the legal and regulatory environment, notably in labour and product markets; the design of the tax and social protection system; and the quality of institutions.

This book’s chapters advance the discussion by illustrating that the high incidence and persistence of informality, particularly in emerging market and developing economies, is an obstacle to sustainable development because of its close but complex links with economic growth, poverty and inequality, including gender inequality.

Informal firms do not contribute to the tax base and tend to remain small, with low productivity and access to finance. Countries or regions with high informality thus tend to grow less than their potential. Informality also deprives governments of sizable tax revenue that could be used to improve basic public services (the lack thereof, in turn, contributes to informality).

Because informal workers lack formal contracts and social protection and tend to be less educated, they are more likely to be poor and to lack decent work conditions, compared with peers in the formal sector. High informality is, moreover, associated with high inequality: workers tend to earn less in the informal sector than formal sector peers with similar skills, and the wage gap between formal and informal workers is higher at lower skill levels. This explains why the large decline in informality in Latin America observed over the past 20 years was associated with significant reductions in inequality.

Informality is also related to gender inequality: in two out of three low- and lower-middle-income countries, women are more likely than men to be employed

Informal economies provide incomes for the poor but they’re fragile and can damage the macroeconomy Corinne C. Deléchat and Leandro Medina

EDITOR’S NOTE

Informality is a widespread and persistent phenomenon that affects how fast economies can grow, develop and provide decent economic opportunities for their populations. But what effect does an informal economy have on a country’s macroeconomy? Because of the pandemic, we now know much more about the phenomenon and its impacts and vulnerabilities. Essays in this book cover interactions with labour and product markets, gender equality, fiscal institutions and outcomes, social protection and financial inclusion.

informally and to be in the most precarious and lowpaid categories of informal employment. For example, UN Women (2016) finds that the gender wage gap is 28 percent in the informal sector in sub-Saharan Africa, far higher than the 6 percent gap in the formal sector.

The International Labour Organization (2018) estimates that, globally, 85 percent of informal workers are precariously employed in small, informal firms, with only 11 percent of informal workers employed in formal firms. Providing workers with decent jobs and facilitating the transition of small firms to formality is thus urgently needed to support inclusive development, as acknowledged in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

This sense of urgency has only been reinforced by the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic. The pandemic has crushed informal activities, particularly in developing countries, where large segments of the population are not covered by existing social protection schemes. The need to provide a lifeline has emerged as an urgent priority for governments. Strict lockdowns destroyed the livelihoods of taxi and minibus drivers, street and market vendors, and bar and restaurant owners depending on daily incomes for survival. Yet countries with thin or nonexistent social safety nets have formulated ad hoc and sometimes innovative cash or in-kind transfer plans in a matter of weeks. Since March 2020, 139 countries and territories around the globe have planned, implemented, or adapted cash transfers to support their citizens.

As discussed in Chapter 10, this crisis like no other can be an opportunity to leverage digital solutions to (1) set up more permanent mechanisms to expand social protection and (2) provide vulnerable individuals or firms with adequate incentives to join a national register as a step toward formalization. Other tools can include a combination of support to small and medium-sized enterprises (incubators, preparation of financial accounts), as well as tax policy, and administration measures (adequate minimal threshold for VAT, simplification of tax payment procedures, incentives to be part of the taxpayer registry).

Gaining a better understanding of the causes and effects of informality is thus central for policymakers to be able to tackle key economic development challenges. However, understanding is complicated by obvious measurement difficulties because participants in the informal sector either do not wish to be accounted for or are difficult to reach.

Multiple methods, which can be categorised as either direct or indirect approaches, have been used to measure the size of the informal economy. The direct methods depend mainly on surveys and samples based on voluntary replies, tax audits, or other compliance methods; the results, therefore, are sensitive to the way a questionnaire is formulated or the willingness of respondents to cooperate.

The availability of direct microeconomic data has, nonetheless, much improved. For example, the ILO’s 2018 report Women and Men in the Informal Economy

compiles comparable data on informal employment and employment in the informal sector for more than 100 countries, representing more than 90 percent of the world’s employed population age 15 years and older. The indirect approaches, as applied in the first section of this book, suggest the size of the informal economy in total output through alternative measures or indicators, such as the consumption of electricity or the cash in the economy.

Both approaches lead to similar conclusions regarding the size and evolution of informal economies within and across countries: (1) the informal economy is large and represents, on average, one-third of the global economy; (2) informality tends to decline over time and to be lower but still significant in more advanced economies, as compared with lower-income countries (although the declining trend is not universal, and informality has increased over the past decade in several countries, such as Ecuador, Namibia, and Venezuela); (3) informality varies significantly across regions and countries. Latin America and the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa stand out as the two regions of the world with the most informality. For low-income countries, the average size of the informal sector remains large at 36 percent (14 percent for advanced economies).

The design of effective policies to address informality is complicated by the multiple causes and forms of informality, both across and within countries. Informality is shaped by each country’s unique socioeconomic and institutional setting, which means that no one formula can address informality. Nonetheless, the findings presented in this book indicate common guiding principles for policy design.

Four broad policies can effectively address the root causes of informality:

• Improved access to and quality of education is probably the single-most powerful way to lower informality Education reforms aimed both at enhancing equality of access and ensuring that students remain in school until the end of the secondary cycle are particularly important. Ample technical and vocational training opportunities will also help.

• Tax system design should avoid inadvertently increasing incentives for individuals and firms to remain in the informal sector (Levy 2010). It is generally recognized that simpler value-added and corporate tax systems (with lower rates and no or minimal exemptions and loopholes), as well as low payroll taxes, help reduce informality. Supportive social protection systems, including progressive income taxes and protection for the poorest, help address distributional aspects.

• Policies to enhance financial inclusion by promoting expanded access to formal (or bank-based) financial services can help lower informality. For informal firms and entrepreneurs, lack of access to finance is a key constraint, stifling productivity and the growth of their businesses. Countries where access to finance is broader tend to grow faster and have lower income ine- continued in the book

Citizenship is one of the defining features of a sovereign nation-state. Who is allowed to enter and settle helps to define the nature of a country.

In the US, we have an ideal that citizenship is open to all. France has had a similar approach, with an ideal that anyone can be a French citizen, as long as they agree with Republican ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood. Germany, on the other hand, has had a long-standing commitment to an ethnic version of citizenship, while the UK has had a focus on the broader commonwealth.

Each of these founding myths and forms of citizenship has clashed with and been challenged by immigration.

After the US Civil War, citizenship was guaranteed to former enslaved men, yet other groups would be denied citizenship, including Chinese immigrants who began arriving after the war. Black Americans, although theoretically free, were subject to a variety of means to restrict their ability to participate in the most fundamental aspects of citizenship, including voting.

The history of voter suppression in the US has often been violent, from lynching and massacres at the end of Reconstruction to mass incarceration and, most

been passed making it more difficult for tribes on reservations without street addresses to vote. The American Civil Liberties Union has had to issue a warning that the Republican Party’s efforts in certain states constitute a threat. And this is not just happening at the state level but at the national level.

Citizenship and immigration in Europe

There is much truth to the conventional wisdom which speaks of two archetypes, the ‘cultural nation’ and ‘state-nation’, as exemplified by the two polar opposites, France and Germany. Germany’s long-standing contention that it is not a country of immigration is linked to the idea that there is a need to foster an ethnically German nation. However, even in republican France, the Revolution resulted in the enforcement of the Parisian identity over the rest of the country, despite the Revolution’s appeals to a unifying idea over ethnicity.

Britain

Britain has birthright citizenship (jus soli) but, unlike the US, persons born to parents in the country illegally are not automatically granted citizenship. There is a great deal of overlap between Britain’s citizenship, immi-

ritories Citizenship’ (BDTC) and ‘British Overseas Citizenship’ (BOC), the latter of which was not useful to its holders in the Commonwealth for entry. The point of the Act was essentially to control immigration by defining nationality narrowly. The second category, BDTC, entrenched the concept of patriality hinted at in 1968 and entrenched in 1971. The Windrush scandal brought the issues with these policies into sharp relief.

France

The first French Constitution of 1791 extended all French laws to foreigners and the subsequent 1793 Constitution even extended them some political rights. The counter-revolutionary period and its xenophobic paranoia then drew back many of these privileges.

France adopted the jus soli principle (citizenship acquired by birth within the territory of the state, irrespective of parental citizenship) in 1889 to transform its second-generation migrants into citizens. Ironically, jus soli came to be the law because of resentment against migrants in frontier departments of the country being exempted from universal conscription and military service.

According to Brubaker, the reconstitution of French

THE ROOTS OF RACISM

THE POLITICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY IN THE US AND EUROPE

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EDITOR’S NOTE

Anti-immigrant radical-right parties are on the rise in Europe, Donald Trump still defines Republicanism in America, British Conservatism is—according to Lord Patten—now a party of English Nationalists. In all these setting, says the author, troubling immigration policies represent an extension of underlying racism and structural discrimination. In the following highly edited extract, we carry the author’s summary of how we got to where we are; she goes on to speculate on the future of racist ideas and politics and how these can be dismantled.

recently, the disenfranchisement of minority voters through more sanitized rules and regulations. Today, it is Republicans who adopt the latter strategies. During and after Reconstruction, it was the Democratic Party that focused on keeping newly freed Blacks from voting.

When black men gained the right to vote it became clear that black voters, who were a large part of the population in the South, could easily sway elections, and many freed Blacks were elected to Congress and state legislatures, In all, 16 African Americans served in the U.S. Congress during Reconstruction, more than 600 more were elected to the state legislatures and hundreds more held local offices across the South.

Former ‘night riders’ who had hunted down slaves now became members of organisations, like the Ku Klux Klan, that terrorised those who attempted to register to vote or exercise their new rights. The violence that ensued ultimately led many Blacks to leave the South as part of the Great Migration to the North and West of the US and the lack of reparations left most Blacks in poverty. Even when thriving communities arose, some were attacked and destroyed by Whites, such as Rosewood, Florida.

After Reconstruction, forms of slavery were imposed by other means. Sharecropping and the incarceration of black men for minor crimes such as ‘vagrancy’ were used to develop a labour force through incarceration. Many of these men did back-breaking work in the fields and the mines without pay or were put on chain gangs that did hard labour building roads or working in the fields.

Despite the fact that the US has always considered itself a beacon for democracy, voter ID laws are now proliferating across the US in states where Republicans control state legislatures. In North Dakota, ID laws have

gration and race-relations policies. British citizenship policy is derived from the relationship with its empire. Britain lacked a coherent citizenship policy until forced to decide on one by the influx of Commonwealth immigrants after World War II and the subsequent public outcry. As Rieko Karatani argues,

Previous works on post-war immigration policy in Britain have mainly focused on the way in which it became racially discriminatory. They have not asked why British governments waited until 1981 before creating the status of British citizenship and have remained silent about the fact that the status of British citizenship, unlike that of other Western democratic countries, is still not defined by nationhood.

The 1948 British Nationality Act created a British citizenship synonymous with Commonwealth citizenship, thus allowing ‘some 800,000,000 subjects of the crumbling empire, inhabiting a quarter of the earth’s land surface, with the equal rights of entry and settlement in Britain’ (Joppke, 1999, p 101). This policy came under scrutiny as the race riots of 1958 in Nottingham and Notting Hill brought forward the issue of race.

The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act introduced the concept of patriality, which was meant to allow overseas British subjects with demonstrable links to the British Isles—such as those who had at least one parent or grandparent born in the UK—to receive entry into the UK.

The policy was strengthened in the 1971 Immigration Act which officially created the distinction between the patrials and non-patrials. Patrials were allowed to enter the UK and were free of immigration control but nonpatrials were asked to obtain a 12-month work visa.

The British Nationality Act (BNA) of 1981 created a category of ‘British Citizenship’, although it also expanded it to include the ‘British Dependent Ter-

READERS’ COMMENTS

Aaron Winter, University of East London: An important, timely and much needed comparative analysis.

Justin Gest, George Mason University: Connects the bitter divide over immigration to the lingering politics of prejudice.

citizenship and particularly the ‘challenge to jus soli’, came about due to the emergence of a large population of second-generation North African immigrants, many possessing dual citizenship; increasing concern about the emergence of Islam as the second religion of France; a Socialist government perceived as ‘soft’ on immigration; the emergence on the left of a ‘differentialist’, cultural-pluralist discourse on immigration; [and] the rise of the National Front.

The National Front (FN) helped set the agenda when the RPR/Union for French Democracy (UDF) government became concerned about the impact of anti-immigrant sentiment.

Anxious to staunch the loss of their supporters to the FN, the traditional centre-right parties hardened their policy platform on immigration and related issues. After gaining a narrow election victory in March 1986, they announced that the government would introduce legislation ending the automatic acquisition of French nationality by people of foreign origin. (Hargreaves, 2007, p 155)

A law passed in November 2003 further introduced restrictive conditions to obtaining French nationality for the foreign spouses of French citizens. The minimum length of marriage before one could apply for French citizenship was extended from one to two years, plus the married couple had to prove that they were living together and that they had a good knowledge of the French language.

Germany

Germany’s conception of citizenship focuses on the idea that only people with German blood can be German citizens. This approach was also influenced by the view that Germans had of the ‘temporary’ workers (Gastarbeiter) who ended up becoming

For centuries, countries that seemed to be in the vanguard of white democratic liberalism nonetheless silenced the black voice Terri Givens

The family which is the subject of this book emerged into the light of historical sources in the March of Wales during the thirteenth century. The March of Wales (Marchia Wallie) was a term used in the medieval period to describe the lands, of varying extent from place to place and from time to time, which lay to the west of the English midland counties or which ran along the southern coastal rim of Wales. Historians have argued over the date or dates of its creation but have generally agreed that it was a land of Anglo-Norman, subsequently English, lords who exercised quasi-regal powers over a Welsh population who were often confined to the upland areas of lordships, the ‘Welshries’, and an immigrant English population who inhabited the more fertile lowlands and the towns which were created and privileged by the lords.

In that reconstruction of the March the Welsh population is often pictured as being of little account, the principal focus being on the Marcher lords themselves. And yet that was not always true, and it became less true as the thirteenth century wore on. In many areas of the March, English ‘gentry’, often lesser lords holding sub-lordships or manors, were joined by a growing elite of Welsh notables who can also be described as gentry.

PATRONAGE AND POWER IN THE MEDIEVAL WELSH MARCH

ONE FAMILY’S

STORY

University of Wales

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Writing in a celebrated study of the fourteenth-century March of Wales published in 1978, Rees Davies noted that ‘the “gentry” of the medieval March are an even more elusive group than their English equivalents. … ’

I cannot claim Rees Davies’s words as an inspiration; but stumbling upon them when this book was being finished, they seem to be a kind of justification.

Not that the attempt to recount the story of the family that dominates these pages needs much by way of justification. Emerging in historical documents as a Welsh family of relatively modest status on the western fringe of Herefordshire in the early thirteenth century they rose to great heights of power and influence not only in the March but in the land known as pura Wallia, ‘pure Wales’, to the west. Here they attained the very highest positions: in the fourteenth century a member of the family was the first Welshman to hold the office of Justiciar of South Wales, while he and one of his sons and a nephew acted as deputy Justiciars. By virtue of specific royal commissions, the family periodically exercised a remarkable control over much of Wales. And some of them would climb even higher, as they turned eastwards from Wales and the March.

what hazardous status of Welsh Marcher lords; another was a prominent crusader, while yet another fought against Owain Glyn Dŵr, was captured by his forces, and subsequently freed. In addition, though some members of the family were dignitaries of the Church, others were suspected of the heresy of Lollardy.

And beyond involvement in war, rebellion, and suspected heresy, the family had to face the problems of the Great Famine of the second decade of the fourteenth century, the Black Death of the late 1340s and the return of plague at intervals after that date. Merely to have survived as long as they did is an achievement.

Some individual members of the family have attracted attention from historians but this is the first time that a tolerably full account of the descendants of an obscure Welshman named Meurig ap Philip has been given. At first sight the task of tracing the family’s progress seems a more than daunting one: record repositories have so far failed to reveal an archive of family documents; chronicle references to the family are far from plentiful, even if sometimes telling; no Welsh poetry survives by which we may gauge their impact within the Welsh communities of the March and southern Wales—though some of the Welsh poets showed them-

ruler. This time, that ruler was Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Gwynedd. Taking advantage of the distraction of the king and his barons Llywelyn was able to conquer or bring to his side much of Wales.

By 1262 Llywelyn had extended his power even into the Middle March, that area of the Anglo-Welsh borderland which would in later centuries become Radnorshire. Llywelyn’s conquests in the March were aided by the fact that many of the magnates of that region were closely involved in the political struggles in England. Two of the greatest Marcher lords, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore and Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and lord of Brecon, had been baronial nominees on the Council of Twenty-Four and they continued to be deeply involved in the politics of the English realm. They had limited time for involvement in the affairs of Wales. The Mortimer family had been fighting for over one hundred and sixty years to establish themselves as lords of the March and in the process had developed an obsessive determination to secure their hold on the great lordship of Maelienydd. But now their hold on that land was under grave threat.

Describing developments in late November of 1262, a Welsh chronicler writing at the abbey of Cwmhir in

selves ready to compose praise poems for the ‘English’ lords of the March and for the Welsh gentry figures who acted as powerful agents of royal and Marcher rule in Wales. But enough scattered material survives to make possible a portrait of the several generations whose experiences and achievements mark them out as amongst the most interesting and significant families of Welsh origin in the medieval March.

They cannot meaningfully be described as ‘typical’ of a class of rising gentry in the March; in those lands, above the level of those who struggled simply to survive through warfare, political turmoil, deteriorating weather conditions, famine and plague, it is close to pointless to label men and women as ‘typical’. Their shared characteristics were ambition, opportunism and tenacity. How those characteristics manifested themselves in individual cases was often the product of a great diversity of backgrounds and circumstances, that mysterious chemistry that makes the study of the medieval March so fascinating.

Prologue: Crisis at Cefnllys

Until both main branches of the family died out as a result of failure of heirs in the male line, they had succeeded in surviving for nearly two centuries in very turbulent times. They were deeply involved in some of the most dramatic events of the Middle Ages in Wales and England such as the fall of Llywelyn, Prince of Wales, and the struggles of Edward II and his barons which ultimately led to the capture and death of the king. The family produced at least one literary figure, a member of Geoffrey Chaucer’s circle, as well as soldiers, diplomats, powerful administrators, persons of note at the far from tranquil court of King Richard II; two attained the some- continued in the book

READERS’ COMMENTS

Huw Pryce: This engaging study throws revealing new light on the realities of power in medieval Wales and its borders.

Emma Cavell: A brilliant study of a lesser Welsh family, whose two centuries were packed with determined careerism, intrigue and, above all, upward social mobility.

in the summer of 1258, the kingdom of England was in turmoil. Political tensions between Henry III of England and his leading barons exploded into a real crisis. Exasperated by their effective exclusion from the king’s government, the barons forced Henry to accept a Council of Twenty-Four, half to be chosen by the king and half by the baronial opposition. That council would begin the process of reforming Henry’s government. Thus began years of confrontation between king and baronage, much of it violent, which threatened to tear England apart. This crisis had wide-reaching effects, nowhere more so than in Wales. As so often, problems within England created an opportunity for an ambitious Welsh

EDITOR’S NOTE

central Wales told of dramatic events at the nearby castle of Cefnllys, which was the principal stronghold of the Mortimers in Maelienydd. Another chronicler, this time writing at the abbey of Strata Florida in Ceredigion, added … that Cefnllys had initially been taken by treachery by certain of the men of Maelienydd, who had called in the prince’s officers. Those officers had burned and damaged the castle. And in another addition to the story, the Strata Florida chronicler had recorded that the men of Maelienydd who had taken the castle had killed the gatekeepers and had seized the constable of the castle, together with his wife and his sons and daughters. These had evidently not been killed but had been taken as prisoners … . It had been a dramatic incident. And the account of the Strata Florida chronicler includes one further and crucial detail about the castellan who had been captured with his family when Cefnllys was taken. His name was Hywel ap Meurig. Hywel ap Meurig: Questions of Ancestry hywel ap Meurig’s very name was of significance. In the first place, the patronymic ‘ap’ (‘son of’), reveals quite clearly that he was Welsh. This was no English official of an English Marcher lord. Indeed, the Marcher lord in question, Roger Mortimer, was himself half-Welsh, for his mother was Gwladus Ddu (the dark-haired, darkeyed), one of the daughters of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s grandfather, Llywelyn ab Iorwerth (Llywelyn the Great). So Roger Mortimer and Prince Llywelyn were cousins. Roger’s Welsh ancestry may make it more intelligible that he had employed a Welshman in a particularly powerful and sensitive post, as castellan of the most significant Mortimer castle in Wales yet built. For the castle of Cefnllys was a stone castle, built relatively recently, by Roger Mortimer’s father,

What had been an unexceptional medieval Welsh family gained prominence in Wales, the borders and increasingly England, through the patronage of great lords of the March, such as the Mortimers of Wigmore and the de Bohun earls of Hereford. In return they defended patrons including Llywelyn, prince of Wales, in the 13th century, and Edward II in the 1320s. They prospered in the face of dangers, some becoming Marcher lords, others becoming diplomats and courtiers of English kings. Over some five generations many gained knighthoods. This is their story.

Sometimes, minor players offer the most revealing histories. Enter Hywel ap Meurig, one of medieval Europe’s great social climbers David Stephenson

Ever since siding with Ian Smith in 1965, Rhodesians have been alienated at home and abroad. Duncan Clarke is on a mission to rehabilitate them

Rhodesian culture had a flavour that set it apart from South Africa and Britain. It was never to everyone’s taste, though, especially among those who had come from abroad or only lived there temporarily. A few came to detest Rhodesia’s white inhabitants. One such was the Nobel laureate Doris Lessing (née Doris May Tayler).

Lessing had been born in Persia, came to Rhodesia in 1925 with her family at the age of five and lived on a farm. She was schooled at the Salisbury Convent, which she left at the age of 14, and became in turns a nursemaid, telephone operator and clerk. By 18 she was working in Rhodesia’s parliament.

Her adulthood in Salisbury was often spent among a small, white, left-wing coterie of foreigners. Between 1942 and 1944 she belonged to the officially unrecognised and short-lived Communist Party of Southern Rhodesia and met her second husband, Gottfried Lessing, at the Left Book Club, which foreign Communists controlled and which MI5 regarded as a ‘subsidiary of the Communist Party’. Lessing, a Russian-born, German refugee, convinced her in 1945 that it was her revolutionary duty to marry him and give up her two children and former husband, Frank Wisdom. A lifelong apparatchik for the German Democratic Republic, Gottfried was murdered in April 1979 during an ambush in Kampala. By then he and his wife had divorced.

Doris Lessing regarded Rhodesia’s white settlers ‘as a nation of petty bourgeois Philistines’, an attitude common among condescending British critics, who considered Rhodesian society ‘uncultured’ and insufficiently deferential. In Lessing’s view, however, its evils were worse than cultural: it was an imperial capitalist colony built on the back of the colour bar, a view shaped by ahistorical sloganeering.

In later years, as her friend Anthony Chennells has noted, Lessing’s views on Rhodesians softened markedly but in the 1940s and 50s she was passionately hostile, eventually leaving Rhodesia in March 1949, at the age of 30. In England in 1952 she joined the British Communist Party, remaining a member until 1956.

Lessing’s first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950 and brought her immediate literary fame in London and, in 2007, the Nobel Prize for Literature, the only Rhodesian to have been so honoured.

In 1981 the book was made into a film by Michael Raeburn, shot mainly in Zambia and providing a beautiful portrait of rural Rhodesia amid a toxic take on its social relations. By the time the film came out, however, Lessing had become an anti-Communist, writing about her disassociations in The Golden Notebook (1962). Indeed, by 1980, she would refer to her early Communist flirtations as a ‘phase of madness’.

In The Grass is Singing, the main character, Mary Turner comes across a suitcase of books about Cecil Rhodes (the Englishman who had led the conquest of southern Africa in the late 19th century) but does not read them. Many literary critics took this act to represent a rejection of Rhodes and his settlers. ‘By encountering and then ignoring the books,’ wrote one

EDITOR’S NOTE

critic, ‘Mary symbolically betrays the colonial project Rhodes advocated. She no longer feels a sense of loyalty to other white settlers; the only person who matters to her (whether as enemy or beloved) is Moses,’ a native employed by husband in their farmhouse.

Despite her disdain for Rhodesia and growing disaffection for Communism, Lessing returned in 1956, financed by Izvestia, the Moscow-based Soviet broadsheet, to write about the Federation. Allowed in for one month, she was then declared a prohibited immigrant. She tried to enter South Africa but was denied entry and flown back to Salisbury. She did not return again until 1982, by which time Zimbabwe—successor to Rhodesia—had just experienced its brief honeymoon period.

Back in Britain in 1957, Lessing wrote Going Home, a mix of reflective narrative and travelogue. She was still nominally a Communist, believing that the centralist countries would prove more democratic than the West, but the Soviet invasion of Hungary in October 1956 had begun a process that saw her leaving the party by December.

Years of anti-establishment activities followed, including involvement in anti-nuclear protest. By 1962, she had veered off into Sufism, cultism and other causes unrelated to Africa. She seemed to have lost interest in Rhodesia, just as events there were moving perilously towards civil war. In her subsequent wrtings, the entire end phase of the independence campaign attracted little if any comment from her.

But something was evidently changing. In 1956 she had written, ‘Africa belongs to the Africans … the sooner they take it back, the better.’ Then came an unexpected caveat: ‘a country also belongs to those who feel at home in it.’ One writer has remarked that she was undoubtedly one of those, insisting on a right for herself that she had not previously granted Rhodesian settlers en masse—because she was different.

From her earliest years, Lessing had never identified as a standard Rhodesian: she regarded such types as ‘dead, narrow and stultifying’. For her, Rhodesia was ‘an ugly society’. She considered herself as an outsider, trapped by circumstances in a society which she mocked, castigated and despised, aligning instead with misfits, eccentrics, traitors and ‘kaffir-lovers’.

One can readily understand this marginal milieu. In the 1970s there was no shortage of people who did not fit the norm, took on alternative lifestyles (as hippies, dissidents or lang hare) or exerted overt sympathy for the disadvantaged. They would often be seen as outsiders and often were—but they were not castigated as disloyal or traitors, or thought of as any less Rhodesian.

After the bush war ended, Lessing wrote African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe, which chronicled trips she had taken in 1982, 1988, 1989 and, fleetingly, 1992. On these occasions she was again shocked, but this time not by the Rhodesians but by the tyranny of that ‘odious man’, Robert Mugabe. Her new perspective enabled her, perhaps, to take a more benign view of what had come before and to regret some of the changes. The arrogance and failures of the one-party

White Rhodesians are time-trapped. Having made a viciously difficult trek up from South Africa in the 1890s, they went on to build a nation state that they regarded as a paradise but then acquired pariah status for opposing majority black rule during the 1960s and the bush wars of the 1970s. Today they are almost invisible to the West, in spite of having had their farms sequestered, often violently and with the connivance of the Zimbabwean authorities. Where do they now stand? In this passionate reappraisal, the author looks back in anger and sorrow at those he considers the victims of liberal hypocrisy and governmental incompetence.

Royal Sable Publishing Softback, 750 pages

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state were now on visible display and she could not fail to miss them. African Laughter was more a travelogue than a diagnosis on the looming and deepening crisis but it caught the zeitgeist about the decay, corruption and false dawn that had become Zimbabwe’s lot.

To what extent did she ever understand Rhodesia? Lessing had written: ‘I am struck continually by the parallels between pre-revolutionary Russia as described by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gorky, and that part of Africa I know.’ But did she really know it, as it was when the chimurenga—the African revolutionary struggle—was in full force? Rhodesia may have resembled late-19th-century agrarian Russia in some ways but there was no parallel to Russian serfdom. The bush war was not all ignited from within, as by the Bolsheviks in pre-Soviet days. Great Powers did not step in to assist Lenin’s party cohorts as they did very materially in Rhodesia’s case.

Nor had Lessing acquired any deep insight into the civil war years. Her understanding of the conflict, which she attributed solely to unadulterated Rhodesian intransigence, entirely ignored the geopolitics of Southern Africa, the sanctions war, the ‘hot war’ inside the Cold War, Sino-Soviet revolutionary strategy within Rhodesia, foreign-armed and foreign-financed insurgents, and regional African political ambitions.

Full appreciation of these external dimensions have only recently started to be appreciated—but not yet by all. For decades they have been underplayed and wilfully discounted in inheritor state mythology: that the war was not attributable to any external causes and was prosecuted without the assistance of the USSR, China, Western interests and lobbies.

Even Michael Raeburn, Lessing’s filmmaker, came to worry about Mugabe and Zimbabwe, despite many years as a sympathiser for Zapu and nationalism. In 1969 he filmed the ‘documentary’ Rhodesia Countdown, an agitprop pastiche and call for revolution that stereotyped the country along the lines of anti-colonial tropes and classic master/servant imagery. The film would later be taken to The Moscow Film festival as the official Zapu film entry and in guerrilla camps in Zambia.

Over the years Raeburn would produce more films and write three books, including, in 1978, Black Fire!: Accounts of the Guerrilla War in Rhodesia. Delighted by independence, Raeburn returned, but became disillusioned and his 2003 film, Zimbabwe Countdown, was in essence a mea culpa for his earlier support for the revolution, and by inference Zanu and Mugabe.

Released in France as Zimbabwe: de la Libération au Chaos, the film took first prize at the African Film Festival Milan 2003; first prize ‘Beyond Borders’ in Clermont Ferrand; the Prix Italia, Catania International Festival; the Cape Town World Cinema Signis International Jury Award and other accolades. Yet he still managed to portray the 1980 change of guard in terms of empire and colony. He showed the guerrilla army choir on display at the independence ceremony, and the late Chenjerai ‘Hitler’ Hunzvi, nemesis of the white farmers, articulating the land strategy of continued in the book

READERS’ COMMENT

Michael Holman, former FT Africa

Editor and author of Postmark Africa: Half a Century as a Foreign Correspondent, EnvelopeBooks, 2020: I am in awe of this portrait of white Rhodesia. The mastery of detail is astonishing, the sheer intellectual power extraordinary.

9781913207526

At any moment, things can go wrong. This clever novel explores the fragility of our dependency on mineral imports Fiona Erskine

1. Demolition

The demolition crew found the body. A gale blew across Leith docks, drowning the rumble of bulldozers, squeal of hydraulic scissors, juddering percussion of jackhammers and crash of falling masonry. Gusts of wind whipped the concrete dust into weird shapes: mini tornadoes with tentacles and claws, ephemeral and monstrous.

The abandoned SAI fertiliser factory occupied a promontory of land reclaimed from the Firth of Forth, a fenced site that stretched two miles east–west and half a mile north–south on the edge of the Port of Leith, Edinburgh’s dockland. Little remained above ground. The offices and stores, tanks and reactors, towers and chimneys had been reduced to shards of broken brick, jagged concrete wedges, spaghetti junctions of metal pipe and beam. The demolition forces, a phalanx of specialised destruction machines, trundled towards the last remaining structures above the deep-water dock. The mechanised locusts munched through the factory, flattening everything in their wake, leaving behind a wind-blown desert: order to chaos, symmetry to entropy, meaning to insignificance.

Kelly was driving the grapple, a hydraulic excavator

READERS’ COMMENTS

Trevor Wood: A mesmerising weave of stories and science.

Literary Review: An original and fascinating combination of memoir and crime novel.

Undiscovered Scotland: Fascinating insight into the workings of an industrial plant.

with an articulated jaw in place of a digging bucket. Steel teeth chomped through the covered aerial conveyors which had once transported powdered phosphate rock on huge rubber belts to the heart of the factory. The grapple left a trail of carnage to be sorted and shifted.

From inside the ‘hoose’, a cab on a rotating platform above the moving undercarriage, Kelly manoeuvred the grapple gingerly towards the edge of the quay, alert to the sharp smell of seaweed. One false move and the bright yellow juggernaut with its crawler feet and long giraffe neck would topple into the North Sea. Even if he escaped from the hoose, the freezing water would kill him before they could fish him out of the shipping channel. Journey’s end.

Kelly attacked the final structure, an elevator tower designed to raise the ship’s cargo from quay to conveyor. Rat-a-tat-a-tat-rat-a-whoofffFFFF. The walls of the intake elevator collapsed under Kelly’s assault and a cloud of rose-gold confetti mushroomed and shimmered above the ruin. As the dust cleared, he edged forward, peering through the grimy glass of the cab at the exposed elevator shaft, grapple poised, one hand on the joystick, ready to rip its guts out.

Something stayed his hand. He couldn’t say exactly what. A lull in the wind? A break in the clouds? The plaintive cry of a gull that sounded almost human? A shaft of sunlight illuminated shapes beneath the metal structure. Scratching his head, Kelly flicked the windscreen wipers to nashing and matched the stroke with a squealing rag on the inside of the glass. He peered through, swallowed hard, and stopped the machine. Angry Pat responded to the radio call, stomping over the rubble, bellowing obscenities. The demolition crew foreman followed the new yodelling school of management. What started out as a quiet transaction in a warm

office, a contract signed with just the scratch of a biro on smooth paper, was amplified over time into a series of increasingly strident shouting matches. Angry Pat was the last in the line of yodellers. Having received his instructions over mountains of obstacles, across gulleys of incomprehension, he passed them on by haranguing with ever-increasing ferocity and volume, berating men who valued their jobs too much to shout back.

Kelly ignored the tirade, as he ignored most of the invective that spewed from Angry Pat, and nodded at the ruined tower. Crumbs of concrete dangled on threads of steel reinforcement bars. The elevator, a tangle of buckets and chains, was listing to one side, the flimsy floor had been torn apart to reveal the machine room below. A metal ladder led down past a huge pulley wheel into a deep basement. Directly underneath the wheel, a conical mound of powdered rock had formed, undisturbed for years, most likely, but now slowly collapsing, like a sandcastle at high tide. With a grimy finger, Kelly pointed to the unmistakable shape of a human head which had emerged from the settling pile.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Angry Pat backed away, eyes wide.

The job had a tight schedule. The old fertiliser factory on the docks had to be razed to the ground before

EDITOR’S NOTE

the vault where a police photographer was fiddling with his camera.

‘Aye.’

He paused at the lip of the crater. A vacuum truck had sucked away the last of the powdered rock, and Kelly let out a gasp as he took in the scene below.

Everything in the basement under the elevator pulley was encased by a thin shell of hardened phosphate rock, creating a macabre tableau. The human figure could be seen clearly now, seated on a chair, the body upright, hands resting on a rude desk, fingers splayed as if pointing to several objects on the flat surface. The head, the body, the furniture and the objects, perfectly preserved.

‘Tell me exactly what happened.’

‘I already told the polis—’

‘Tell me.’

He reappraised her. Not one to mess with, for all she looked like a wee clootie dumpling. But there was little enough to tell. He translated the technical terms of demolition into lassie-speak as best he could.

‘Looks almost staged,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘Whoever it was, they lived there.’

‘How do you know?’

Kelly pointed to the braziers. On either side of the

Phosphate Rocks defies genres. Every two or three chapters there’s the equivalent of a Royal Society lecture on one of the elements in the periodic table but it is also a crime novel in the style of Noir Fiction and a social history on the demise of the Leith Docks in Edinburgh. The story kicks off with the discovery of a mummified body in an old fertiliser factory. As a police investigation develops, a former foreman at the site is confronted with ten objects which offer clues and memories. A remarkable mesh of the human and the detached.

the area could be redeveloped as a shopping and entertainment centre. It was a fixed-price demolition contract and they were already over budget. Angry Pat hesitated, looking sideways at Kelly with an unspoken request. Kelly turned away and spat into the sea.

The foreman’s shoulders slumped. ‘Virgin Mary’s bollocks.’

He phoned his boss before he called the police. it took days to sift through the rubble. The police impounded the demolition equipment, machines too crude for delicate excavation. The crew were laid off; no other jobs would take lone men who were only as useful as the snippers and dozers and grapples they operated. Kelly remained on half wages to hang around and guard the kit.

New machines arrived: tiny grabbers and sifters, with hoses and sniffer snouts, followed by men and women in white overalls with brushes and bags who took care not to disturb the body, hand-digging to preserve as much evidence as possible.

Kelly made it a rule to stay well clear of the police, but the woman in uniform tracked him down to the store where he took naps between security shifts.

‘Detective Inspector Rose Irvine.’ She announced herself with a rap on the door of the windowless lock-up. ‘Can I have a word?’

He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and ran fingers though tousled hair, catching an unpleasant whiff of his own oxters.

She waited for him to emerge and lock the door before she marched back to the crime scene. He stopped to take a leak behind one of the huge rubber tyres, zipped himself up and followed.

‘You the lad that found… this?’ She nodded towards

seated figure stood two perforated 50-gallon drums, the tops hacked off to leave jagged steel edges, multiple saucer-sized holes punched through the sides. The sort of luxury item working men rely on for heat during winter jobs.

‘Who is it? How did this happen? Any ideas?’

Kelly shook his head. He had no clue, but he knew one person who might. A man who knew everything that ever went on in the old factory.

‘You’d best talk to John.’

2. John John has a face like a well-kept grave.

He arrives early one morning at Torphichen Street Police Station: a tall, thin man with cropped grey hair and the demeanour of a professional undertaker. He is neatly dressed in polished leather shoes, grey trousers with stay-press seam, an ironed white shirt, blue tie and burgundy V-neck jumper under a padded anorak. Despite the layers, he shivers in the slanting winter light and blinks repeatedly as he states his business at the counter.

‘I’ve come about the ess-eh-eye.’

A short, plump woman emerges from a side room with outstretched hand. She wears a black serge uniform with silver buttons and epaulettes, fair hair scraped back from a round face.

‘Mr. Gibson?’

She smells of flowers and reminds him of summer.

‘Aye.’

‘Detective Inspector Rose Irvine.’ Her handshake is warm and surprisingly firm. ‘Thanks for coming in.’ He follows her up a flight of steps and waits while she recovers her breath. Outside Interview Room Number Two she gestures for him

Granny Wen had hung out a blue flag, signifying that her back-room establishment was open for business. Indeed the place was already bursting at the seams but this didn’t prevent the schoolmaster from being spotted by Little Bully Ba, who thrust a brightly coloured ‘cocktail’ into his hand. Not only wine but also Granny Wen’s own illicit spirits were dispensed there, including a ‘gin’ which she distilled herself from the skins of sweet potatoes.

‘You’re late, Sir,’ the boy complained. ‘You’re way behind. You’ll need to drink up.’

‘With pleasure, my boy. But surely one ought to savour slowly what’s good in this life?’

‘Must you, Sir? Just think what a bad example that would set for everyone else.’

That first cocktail, despite his best efforts, led to a second, and the second to a third, at which point Po Cheng found himself staring at a photograph—no doubt clipped from a magazine—which Granny Wen had pinned up on the wall. It showed a cliff-top monastery, this being a subject which the old woman thought might be of interest to the tourists whom only she and Boss Ba believed would ever turn up this far from any airport.

Out of the corner of his eye, Po Cheng caught a glimpse now and then of Beauty Ba, who was surrounded by a bevy of giggling village girls, and it was easy enough to guess just what it must be they all found so amusing.Those who knew the most would be explaining to those who knew less just what it was that awaited a bride on her wedding night.

As for the bride, Po Cheng had admired the young woman ever since his arrival in the village, but only from afar. Her father, he had come to know, had on various occasions in the past been taken in for questioning by the provincial authorities about this matter or that but had each time been set free again.This was no proof of his innocence, in the opinion of the schoolmaster, but rather a typical case of the little fish going into the pot and the big fish being thrown back into the sea.

Having made his appearance, the reluctant guest then began to edge his way towards the door. He had had, he told himself, a lucky escape. Just imagine, for instance, if he himself had owned a milk cow!

Once outside, he forced himself to walk straight. Some elderly gentlemen, he noticed, had brought chairs out from their houses and were sitting under the village’s lone streetlight smoking their long-handled pipes.What he failed to notice was that—when leaving Granny Wen’s premises— he had set off in precisely the wrong direction.

‘What an idiot!’ he thought, upon finding himself not back at the schoolhouse but on the bank of Nettle Brook. ‘One misstep at the start, as they say, and a thousand leagues adrift by the end.’

He sat down. He stretched out, taking care to avoid the nettles. Best to have a little rest first, he decided, and to clear his head, and then he could walk back through the village properly, as if he hadn’t a care in the world, as if it had always been his intention to take the long way home.

serendipity | heaven’s certainty, earth’s continGency a rude aWakeninG | fine on foot but better on Water Will he have What it takes? | miss linG lends a hand

He was awakened by the voices of strangers: two gentlemen who were evidently not country people and who seemed none too pleased to have been sent to the countryside on some important errand only to find, in Nettle Village, that the inhabitants were all still asleep and lying just where they had dropped the night before.

‘What a backwater! Nettle Village! The name speaks for itself.’

‘All the better for us then.We can simply cross it off our list.’

Po Cheng sat up and rubbed his eyes. The two were wearing fine silk robes of the type worn in the past by government officials, something which did not surprise him in the least. What better indication could there possibly have been of just how far Nettle Village remained behind the times?

‘Begging your pardon, Gentlemen,’ he called to them, ‘but not so fast. Not all birds, even if they share the same nest, are birds of a feather.’

This, coming from the undergrowth, got their immediate attention.They parted the foliage with some care and so saw before them someone who, while still on the ground, still seated on a tuft of moss, was at least sitting up straight.

‘And what manner of bird is this, would you say?’ the taller one asked the other.

‘A ground-nesting one,’ replied the other, sarcastically.

The taller official had a scroll under his arm, which Po Cheng, as the village’s schoolmaster, insisted that he should unroll. The two gentlemen exchanged a sly look and then they together unrolled the notice:

men of talent souGht!

only superior persons need apply!

So that was it: they were recruiters who had been sent out to round up candidates for the soon-to-be-held Provincial Examinations.There was still time, they assured Po Cheng, if he wished to try his hand, and they were authorized to provide each suitable candidate with sufficient travel money to get him to the provincial capital.

‘And just how is one to demonstrate that suitability?’ inquired Po Cheng, cautiously.

With a poem. By improvising a couplet in praise of the Emperor’s policy of seeking out men of talent even in the most benighted provinces of the Empire.

‘Ah,’ Po Cheng challenged them. ‘So you mean to say that there still is an Emperor?’

‘Of course there is. As soon as one dies, another takes his place.’

There was no time to lose. Fortunately, perhaps owing to some distant rainstorm during the night, Nettle Brook, which had until then been a mere streamlet, had

now become a river, and this was all the inspiration that he required to produce the following encomium:

a river, havinG summonded the stream, then transports its tribute to the sea.

This did the trick. Po Cheng was handed a small purse containing the promised travel money, told that there would be a riverboat along soon, and warned to make sure that he was on it.

‘Just like that,’ he thought. ‘Until this, my life had seemed to move at a snail’s pace.’

But now, scarcely had the two recruiters gone on their way than he heard what he was at once able to recognize— and never mind if he had never heard one before—as the whistle of a riverboat.

the boat, the Dragonfly, was a dilapidated-looking craft which by no means skimmed over the surface of the water but rather chugged along, already half-submerged in the rapidly flowing river. On its crowded deck, people were zealously guarding their possessions, be they in bundles, boxes, cages or hutches. Riverboats were notoriously unseaworthy and likely to be overloaded, and so the children on board, while they were allowed to run about, all had hollow gourds attached to their arms and legs.

Candidate Po, being unaccustomed to this form of travel, sat still, facing forward, with his back braced firmly against a bulkhead, and willed the boat to remain afloat. As for the examination and the stiff competition which he was certain to face, he remained sanguine. His competitors would no doubt turn up well prepared, having turned the pages of countless books, but how many of them would have faced the even greater challenge, that of trying to pass one’s knowledge on to others?

In due course a sign appeared on the riverbank, nailed to the trunk of a tree, and it carried most welcome news, namely that the Dragonfly was now approaching the provincial capital:

briGht prospect toWn Welcomes those Who have What it takes!

One more bend of the river and the town itself appeared, its sprawl of low buildings being dwarfed by the dome of what could only have been the Examination Hall.

‘Ah so!’ declared Po Cheng, in wonder. ‘And what if I’ve bitten off more than I’m able to chew?’

He allowed the others to disembark first. What if he failed to make the grade? Failed to measure up? Was it too late to take the riverboat back upstream, find the two recruiters and return his travel money?

Then he saw her. The other passengers had already disappeared into the town, leaving just a single figure remaining on the dock, the familiar figure of someone wearing a wrinkled khaki shirt and baggy trousers. Was he imagining things, Po Cheng asked continued in the book

MUSTARD SEED ITINERARY EnvelopeBooks

Softback, 302 pages

October 2021

9781838172046

RRP £12.99

Special offer to Booklaunch readers

£6.49 (Half Price) inc. free UK postage via our website

EDITOR’S NOTE

When schoolmaster Po Cheng drinks too much and falls into a dream, he finds himself en route to China’s imperial capital, where he rises up through the giddy ranks of the civil service to become Prime Minister. Truly, Heaven has smiled on him but what Heaven—and alcohol—hand out, they can also claw back. Trouble is brewing and Po Cheng’s eminence means he must now take the rap and face consequences inevitable from the start. Mustard Seed Itinerary is a brilliant first novel by an important new voice, bringing to the formal conventions of traditional Chinese literature the wry humour of Carrollian satire.

https://www. booklaunch.london

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Mullen lives in Edinburgh. He is also the author of Call of the Camino: Myths, Legends and Pilgrim Stories on the Way to Santiago de Compostela. His volume of short stories, Americas, was shortlisted for a Commonwealth First Book award.

In Daoism, only a blockhead would return none the wiser from a dream journey. And Po Cheng is no blockhead Robert Mullen

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