He’s Nailed It (or in Swedish: “Spikning”)

The cafe in the library at the Hogskola on Gotland

Visby (see previous post) is a summer town, where most visitors go to enjoy the beach.  Sure, the medieval walls and the museums are there year-round, but some tours and other visitor services only run mid-June to mid-August.  So why would I go there in an unseasonably frigid April?  To watch my husband, Ernest Adams, take part in a strange European ceremony left over from the Middle Ages.

And on the other side of the room is the plank for spikning; this photo shows publications in place before Ernest’s was added

But first, you need a little paragraph of history to get the background:  The Protestants split off from the Catholic Church in the 16th century as the result of a movement called the Protestant Reformation, which was kicked off by a German monk called Martin Luther, who famously nailed 95 theses to the door of a church.  The biggest bee in Luther’s bonnet was about the selling of indulgences, that is, people paying money to the church for official documents saying that their sins would be forgiven.  Luther was appalled that the tremendously wealthy Pope Leo X would defraud people of money when surely only God could forgive sins (and without money changing hands, even if the church did need the money to repair St Peter’s Basilica), and Luther not only said so, he pretty much wrote down 95 reasons why and nailed them to the church door in Wittenberg, in Germany, in 1517.

Selecting a place for the nail before the audience arrives (Prof. Stephen Batchelder on the bench, Ernest Adams kibbitzing from the floor)

Now, having learned about that years and years ago, I had always assumed this was a bit of seriously in-your-face vandalism in the cause of religious activism, and that nailing his opinions up on the church door was a slap in the face of the establishment, but I’ve recently learned that I’d gotten it absolutely wrong.  Nailing your thesis to the door—or to whatever other bit of architecture was traditional where you lived—was, back then, a valid means of scholarly publication.  You wrote your argument and nailed it up so people could take your paper down off the door, read it, and put it back for the next person to read.

Dr Ernest presents his doctoral work

And in some parts of Europe they continue the practice to this day, generally nailing up the theses (US: dissertations) of new PhDs. The author pounds in a nail and hangs the thesis on it by a loop of string, the idea being that the public can take down the document, read what someone has written, and then come to hear the author’s defense (aka their orals,  oral examination, or viva), prepared with questions to ask.  And that’s why I went to Visby: because my husband’s colleagues at the Hogskola på Gotland, a university where he’s a part-time lecturer, asked him to nail up his PhD thesis—something of an honour, since he earned his degree elsewhere.

Stephen makes a hole in Ernest’s dissertation/thesis with an electric drill, after the speeches and before the nailing

The spikning (nailing) ceremony didn’t actually involve a church door, or any door at all.  Spikning ceremonies at Gotland  use a plank of wood set into the wall of the library’s café.   And they haven’t been nailing theses on Gotland for very long; the Hogskola there is the youngest university in Sweden, although it’s merging this summer with the prestigious university in Uppsala (established 1477) where they’ve been nailing up papers for centuries.  Some new PhDs in Uppsala, it seems, use hand-forged iron spikes; my husband actually ordered some of these, but they didn’t arrive in time for him to use one. (So now we’ve got a couple of hand-forged iron spikes lying around.  Any ideas on what we could use them for?)

Ernest hammers in the nail

At some Swedish institutions, your adviser signs off on your thesis by writing Må spikas—meaning “May be nailed”; at some, nailing up your thesis is a requirement for getting your degree.  Some require you to give a copy of the thesis to the university library as well, as that’s a bit more practical for readers, and some have gone over to what’s called e-spikning or e-nailing—posting theses on-line.  I rather like the sound of the Institute of Technology at Linköpings Universitet, where PhD candidates nail their theses to “the oak outside…building C”, which seems much more authentic than the bulletin boards and such that other places use.

Ernest and the Rektor

The University of Gothenburg’s School of Global Studies advises students to “contact the reception for borrowing a drill, hammer, and nail.”  That would have been handy at Gotland, where staff made arrangements for the hammer and nail to show up at 2:00, but they didn’t arrive until 3:00, brought by a young woman in blue jeans, a striped T-shirt, and running shoes, whom Ernest thought at first was someone from the facilities staff.  She turned out to be Erika Sandström, Rektor of the university, that is, the head of the whole institution, what in the US we’d call the President and in the UK we’d call the Chancellor.   That mix of formality and informality is particularly Swedish, I’m told, and I rather like it; they seem to value substance over formalities.

Colleagues and game design students at the party

At 3:00 the speeches started, with professor Stephen Batchelder introducing Ernest, and then turning the microphone over to Ernest to talk a little about what he’d written, after which Stephen drilled a hole through a copy of the thesis with an electric drill (whatever they used in the Middle Ages, it must have taken a lot longer).  Then we all trooped into the café where Ernest stood on a bench to reach the empty spot they’d chosen in advance (and into which they’d secretly drilled a pilot hole).  He pounded in the nail, hung up the thesis, got a bouquet and a gift (and a hug from the Rektor), after which we all had drinks and canapes.

The process works! Just as we were leaving, I snapped this unknown woman taking down a thesis to have a look.

The punchline here is that Martin Luther probably didn’t nail his theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg, or at least that’s the most recent word from historians who’ve looked at the evidence.  That church burned down in 1760, but was rebuilt, and in the 19th century it was given new doors, with Luther’s 95 arguments inscribed in bronze.

In any case, now my husband is not just Ernest, but Dr Ernest; his dissertation/thesis—Resolutions to Some Problems in Interactive Storytelling—is the last student paper he’ll ever have to write; and you could say, using an American expression, that he’s nailed it.

An English Christmas 3 (Revisited) : Bring Us a Figgy Pudding

This post, part of the sequence that first ran in the Christmas season of 2010, should have been gone live yesterday, but my hosting duties got in the way of my posting duties.  Hope you’ll enjoy the original post and updates in any case.

Don’t want to make your own? Traveltrade.visitlondon.com posts this photo with a suggestion that you buy your pudding from Fortnum & Mason.

It’s Christmas day as I write this so, since I’ve told you about Christmas cake and mince pies, there’s just time to tell you about Christmas pudding before the holiday is over, and I’ll have covered the Big Three.

Christmas pudding is traditionally a steamed concoction of dried fruits and suet held together with a minimal amount of breadcrumbs or flour. It’s also called plum pudding, but doesn’t have plums and probably never did; the name comes from the prunes that it used to have and that some recipes still call for.

Update: But as I learned from a guest at Christmas dinner yesterday, at one time raisins could be called plums.  In fact, any fruit that in any way resembled a plum could be called one; the Oxford English Dictionary features a quote from the 18th century in which somebody refers to a “great Plum” that “is called Mango”.  Hmmm.

Some recipes use a lot of dried figs; puddings like today’s Christmas pudding probably inspired the “bring us a figgy pudding” line in “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”.

And Christmas puddings are soaked with spirits—as is pretty much everything in the United Kingdom at Christmastime, including the inhabitants.

There are some pleasant traditions associated with Christmas pudding. For starters, for at least the last 150 years there’s been a tradition that everyone in the household should take a turn stirring the pudding, and the longer you stir, the more good luck you’ll have in the next year. Clearly some sly cook 150 years ago came up with this as a labour-saving idea.

In another tradition, the cook adds coins or other inedible prizes to the pudding, and each diner has a chance of finding one—if not breaking a tooth on it. Christmas puddings are best eaten carefully.

Originally the prizes were coins, and if you found one in your portion, you got to keep it. Nowadays it’s more likely that the cook will stir in symbolic objects, little trinkets about the size of charms on a charm bracelet, though the symbolism varies from family to family. For some, a tiny horseshoe means good luck, or a tiny anchor means you’ll find a safe harbour (which could be interpreted as a new home, a new job, or anything else you like).

Here again, I’m lucky enough to have heirlooms handed down from my mother-in-law. In our Christmas puddings, you might find a silver sixpence, a button, a thimble, or a ring said to be a grandmother’s wedding ring, though if it was, the grandmother must have had truly tiny hands. The coin predicts wealth in the new year, the button says you’ll get new clothes, the thimble means plenty of work, and the ring stands for love. (You can keep the luck, but you have to give the prizes themselves back. In the first place, they don’t make silver sixpences anymore.)

We had our Christmas pudding earlier today—flaming Christmas pudding at that. You pour warmed brandy over the pudding and put a match to it. If you dim the lights before dessert, it looks pretty impressive, with blue flames flickering all over and around the dark pudding. And in case there isn’t enough liquor involved in the making of the pudding or the flaming of the pudding, you serve it with a hard sauce made of butter, sugar and brandy, that melts over the hot pudding.

I was asked for fruitcake recipes after the Christmas cake article, so I’ve put recipes for Christmas cake and for Christmas pudding in the Featured Link section (right hand side of the screen). My favorite Christmas pudding comes from a chef called Nigel Slater; his is the only one I’ve seen that calls for dried apricots. The first time I made it, I didn’t have all the dried fruits it called for, so I substituted more apricots for anything I didn’t have, the result was fabulous, and now I add extra apricots on purpose.

Of course, you’re supposed to make the pudding ahead—in earlier times, some people made the pudding at New Year’s and kept it to eat at the following Christmas. For those who don’t have time for such things, or confidence that a pudding made 12 months ago is still edible, there are plenty of Christmas puddings in the supermarkets, most of them in microwaveable bowls so there’s no steaming.

Or you could order Christmas pudding at High Timber, a restaurant in London that serves the dish, but only to diners who sign a legal waiver. They’re afraid you’ll sue if you chip a tooth, or swallow one of the charms. A serving isn’t cheap, either, at £7, but that’s because you get to keep the charms—and they come from Tiffany’s.

Merry Christmas!

Update on Newton’s Apple Tree

A special welcome to new subscribers who came here after seeing the previous post on Freshly Pressed, WordPress’s showcase of selected blog posts. I was grateful that they included my apple-y article, and wonder whether, if that has been freshly pressed, we’ll get apple juice, and eventually cider…

The title card from the section of the Paralympics opening ceremony called “Gravity”

Turns out that the Paralympic opening ceremony was titled “Enlightenment”. Who knew? The section called “Gravity” used a title card (see illustration) , but the name of the production as a whole was never shown or announced. (One of the presenters said something about enlightenment being a theme of the evening and of Professor Hawking’s life; that was about it.)

Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, the Enlightenment brains behind the Declaration of Independence

So what I saw (see previous post) as a tribute to the scientific revolution was really a tribute to enlightenment in many forms, including the capital-E Enlightenment of which Newton was a part—an intellectual revolution in which people turned to reasoning and science to determine how society should work. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson produced the Declaration of Independence as part of the politics of that Enlightenment, although today sometimes it seems we’re living, to go by current US politics at least, in the Endarkenment.

Sir Isaac Newton

Newton dedicated himself to truth, as a good Enlightenment scientist would, quoting in his notebook a sentiment that goes back to Aristotle that loosely translates as “Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend”, meaning he would choose truth over whatever an authority told him. (A loose translation is good enough, not least because Newton wrote it in Latin when Aristotle’s original was in Greek—go figure.)

I would be doing Newton a poor service, then, if I didn’t correct mistakes when they come to light. So, many thanks to WordPress blogger 3arn0wl who suggested that the tree I said was a descendant of Isaac Newton’s original was in fact the original tree itself, still growing after more than 400 years, which turns out to be true, or at least, almost certainly true.

Pity the other trees in the Woolsthorpe Manor orchard. Newton might even have seen apples fall from this tree from time to time, but not on the one crucial occasion.

I spoke with Ann Moynihan, National Trust Support Officer for Woolsthorpe Manor, to get the true story, and found her a gold mine of information. The celebrated tree, the most famous apple tree since the Garden of Eden, was identified by about 1779 as the one from which Newton said he saw the apple fall; that’s less than 65 years after he died. So while we don’t have firm proof, it’s very likely to be the right tree; dendrochronology (tree ring measurements) show that the tree is over 400 years old; and we’re not likely to get any closer to the truth than that.   It’s possible that by 1779(ish) folklore could have pushed in already and marked the wrong tree as the hallowed one, but why, as William of Ockham might have said, complicate the story?

Ten years ago, Newton’s apple tree and 49 others were designated Great British Trees in honor of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee.

The tree being so famous, when it blew over in a storm in 1810 the press got the story and ran with it, lamenting the death of the tree in quantities of ink—but the tree wasn’t dead. People rushed to make a profit on boxes and even chairs made of the dead branches, but the remnants of the tree sent up new shoots; there was life in the old fruit yet.

In fact, Ann suggested that the tree regenerated a la Dr Who.  (I’ll have to explain for those who haven’t encountered Dr Who, but with apologies to Ann, because a joke is never funny if you have to explain it; in short, Dr Who is a character in a science fiction television show who, whenever the actor playing the character quits but producers want to keep the show going, is said to have “regenerated”, and come back to life looking like the new actor who will take the character on.)

Key fobs made from branches pruned from Sir Isaac Newton’s apple tree, on sale in the shop at Woolsthorpe Manor.

Ann wasn’t familiar with the story I heard from the staff member in the shop at Woolsthorpe Manor, about the tree having been tested against the DNA of a piece of wood signed by Newton himself, but said that the Royal Society has a piece of wood from the same tree—and here, Americans and other non-British readers might want a word about the RS, which is proud to claim Newton as a former member.

The London premises of the Royal Society

Officially, it’s the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge; the American equivalent would be the US National Academy of Sciences, but the RS is 200 years older than the USNAS. It’s a nonprofit body of eminent scientists who support excellence in science, giving grants for research and education projects and advising the government on scientific issues. The RS has recently made a picture database available on the internet; you can try looking up “Newton apple tree” (see Featured Links), or better yet, read the RS’s blog about the pictures of Newton’s apple tree in their collection (click here).

And in its collections of amazing items from the history of science, the Royal Society has a piece of the original apple tree, a piece that’s been up in the space shuttle. The RS lent the 4-inch chunk to British astronaut Piers Sellers who took it up in 2010, along with a picture of Sir Isaac Newton, for what was meant to be the final voyage of the Atlantis shuttle.  (The Atlantis got a reprieve and kept flying, eventually carrying out the last shuttle mission when the program closed down in 2011.)

Piers Sellers, Anglo-American astronaut, took a fragment of wood from Newton’s apple tree on a space shuttle flight.

If you aren’t a space shuttle astronaut or a Fellow of the Royal Society, and you can’t get to Lincolnshire to visit the tree yourself, you still might be closer to the tree that you might suppose; shoots from Newton’s tree have been sent all over the world, grafted onto different rootstock, and produced genetically identical trees.  In Britain, the tree grows in Cambridge at Trinity College and in the University’s Botanic Garden; elsewhere in the UK they have the ‘same’ tree at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Oxford, the Institute of Physics in York, and—though I haven’t confirmed this one—Kew Gardens in Kew, in London.  With pointers from Ann and some serious Googling, I’ve found more instances of Newton’s tree in the US (MIT), Korea (the Korean Research Institute for Standards and Science, in Daejeon), Australia (Monash University), and China (at Nanjing University and at TianJin University).

A descendant of Newton’s apple tree growing in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, although the photographer, rather unusually, seems to have been more interested in the trunk than in the leaves

I feel very much more enlightened now, on the subject of Newton’s tree, which is presumably not one of the enlightenments the producers of the Paralympic opening ceremony had in mind, but that’s okay; I took their point about seeing disabled people in a new light as well.  After watching Olympic athletes show how far you can push the human body to do amazing things, I thought I must have seen the absolute limit of achievement in sports, but the Paralympics showed me how wrong I was; like the best in any field of endeavor from sports to science, the Paralympians push the boundaries even farther.

Photos of Woolsthorpe Manor orchard are mine, the “Gravity” title card is a screen shot from the Channel 4 coverage of the Paralympics, and all other photos are from Wikipedia and used under the Creative Commons license.

Isaac Newton and the Paralympic Apples

Apple dancers at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Paralympics

Olympic sports have continued here; the Paralympics don’t end until tonight. British viewers saw the full Paralympic opening ceremony, and we’ve had 4 channels showing events live all day long. I gather that in the US, NBC showed only about 5 hours of the Paralympic action, total—hard to believe.

A performer enters, riding in her wheelchair on a gigantic apple, which sits on a book. Books made up another theme of the ceremony, representing, among other works, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Newton’s Principia Mathematica

The Paralympics’ opening ceremony, like the Olympic ceremony, tackled a revolution, in this case the scientific revolution. The connection between Newton’s apple—represented in many forms, including the real apples given to each spectator on arrival—and the Paralympics might not be obvious, though when you watch some of the people who run on those remarkable blades instead of feet, it’s clear that science and technology underpin some events. But I’d guess that the choice of theme had much to do with the contemporary world’s most famous disabled person being British and a scientist: Stephen Hawking, who narrated the production.

Professor Hawking, looking very small on the main set in the enormous arena

The UK can’t actually claim that the scientific revolution began here—can’t leave out Copernicus for starters, and he was Polish—but I guarantee you that a good proportion of the population finds that the phrase “scientific revolution” brings to mind that apple hitting Isaac Newton on the head 100 years after Copernicus. Newton wasn’t actually conked on the head, but there was an apple tree, he did watch an apple fall and, watching it, wondered why apples always fall down and never out to the side or something, a bit of daydreaming that led to the universal law of gravitation. Descendants of Newton’s apple tree still grow in the same orchard at his home in Lincolnshire, which I visited just a couple of days before those apple-wielding performers (see illustrations) appeared on my TV/telly, so I’m using that as an excuse to write about Newton in the middle of my streak of Olympic-ceremony posts.

A 430-voice chorus sings Principia , a violently discordant piece by composer Errollyn Wallen inspired by Newton’s work

Isaac Newton was born prematurely at Woolsthorpe Manor on Christmas Day 1642, so small that the nurse said he could fit into a quart jug (in the US we’d have said pitcher; Brits think pitcher is as quaint and old-fashioned as Americans think jug is). Servants sent out for supplies for the baby sat down and goofed off rather than hurry, as they didn’t expect him to be alive when they got back anyway.

Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire, where Isaac Newton was born, grew up, and did some of his most famous work.

On the other hand, local superstition at the time held that it was lucky to be born on Christmas Day. It was also supposed to be lucky to be born after the death of your father, as odd as that sounds, and the baby’s father had died a few months before. When his mother, Hannah, remarried, she left three-year-old Isaac at Woolsthorpe Manor with his grandmother. Lots of books will tell you that this meant her new husband didn’t accept his step-son, but the National Trust (historic preservation group that maintains the house) says it’s more likely that Hannah shrewdly left her son in the Newton home to make sure no one questioned his right to inherit the place.

The farm at Woolsthorpe Manor

When he was older, his mother also demanded he do his familial duty and work on the farm—Woolsthorpe Manor sounds grand, but it was really just a glorified farmhouse. Had that worked out, he might have remained illiterate like his father, who never learned to write his own name. (There’s a grid of small cup-shaped gouges on a plaster wall at Woolsthorpe Manor that historians think is an inventory of livestock; presumably that was how you kept track if you couldn’t read or write.) But Newton’s mother found she could lead a scientific genius to the land, but she couldn’t make him cultivate it.

Newton, first scientist ever knighted, was granted a coat of arms; claiming descent from a certain baron, he was allowed to adopt that baron’s ancient symbol. The crossed bones are not uncommon on arms and don’t imply piracy; National Trust staff suggested they are sheep bones, as the family made its money in sheep.

In the end, she allowed him to go to school, and from school to Cambridge, where she expressed her feelings about his choice not to be a farmer by giving him so little money that he had to work as a servant for richer students. It doesn’t seem to have mattered much. The only thing that could keep him away from Cambridge was the plague, which closed the place down in 1665.

As far as is known, this is the apple tree from which Newton said he saw the apple fall, one of several in the orchard that lies just outside the front door at Woolsthorpe Manor. It’s certainly over 400 years old. The variety is Flower of Kent, and it’s a cooking apple.

So Newton went back to the farm and sat there by himself, totally revolutionizing science, later saying “I was in the prime of my age for invention”. He not only saw the apple fall and worked out his theory of gravitation, but developed the three Laws of Motion, invented calculus, worked out principles of mechanics and of planetary motion, and did famous experiments with light. His work always began with observation, and he was such an inveterate experimenter that, rather less famously, he stuck a blunt needle into his eye to see how pressing on his retina would alter his vision.

Performers pull giant apples into the stadium

A trip to Woolsthorpe Manor includes a chance to see the window that Newton covered, leaving only a small opening so that he could direct sunlight through a prism and break white light up into colours. Newton didn’t invent the prism; people knew them from way back. Ships used prisms to let light in below decks, for one thing, and Newton bought his prism at a country fair, maybe sold as toy for children. In any case, before Newton, people thought that prisms added colour to light, and that all colours were mixtures of dark and light, so that (I’m not making this up) one theorist said that red was produced by the purest white light with the least amount of dark mixed in (I know, I know) and black was pure darkness, but if there was just a little light mixed into the darkness, you got a sort of dull blue. Newton used a second prism to bend the light again, merging the colours to produce white light, which pretty much knocked the ol’ prisms-apply-colours theory off the table (and at least it didn’t require any of that needle-in-the-eye business).

A giant apple floats in.  Before Newton, people thought objects contained more or less of properties called gravity and levity, which made those objects heavy or light.  This, then, is an apple full of levity, I suppose.

Isaac Newton ended up the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, an extremely prestigious position. One of his professors had the job, but resigned so Newton could have it; he was that good. Three-hundred and ten years later, Stephen Hawking got the job*, which leads us back to the opening ceremony of the Paralympics, in all its apple-y glory.

Apples floated in on wires. Performers rode in on gigantic apples, dragged in enormous apples on carts, tossed around beachball-sized apples, juggled apples. On cue, everyone in the stadium bit into their free apples for one thunderous communal crunch.

Apples everywhere…

And Professor Hawking told us via his synthetic voice that “There is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being”. True, but some are less run-of-the-mill than others, and watching Paralympic athletes you can’t help but be majorly impressed. I’m going to miss the games. (I’ve already looked up a wheelchair basketball team near me and hope to go see them play.) But at the moment, I’m looking forward to tonight’s closing ceremony. Just in case there’s audience participation, I’ve got some apples standing by.

* Lucasian professors are required to retire at 67, so Professor Hawking left the Lucasian Chair in 2009, replaced by physicist Michael Green.

Photos of Woolsthorpe Manor are mine; others are screenshots from the broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Paralympics

Brunel, part 2: A Visit to the SS Great Britain

The iron hull

In the previous post, I wrote about Isambard Kingdom Brunel, depicted as a cigar-wielding luminary of the industrial revolution in the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
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The bow

That post ended on Brunel’s three ocean-going steamships, one of which—the SS Great Britain—sits now in the same drydock in which it was built in 1843, an attraction for historically minded visitors.
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Remarkable gilt decorations on the bow

Being an historically minded visitor, I went along to Bristol a while back, and visited.
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The stern, showing the water seal that makes the ship appear to float

A glass seal keeps the elements from corroding the iron hull;  visitors can go below the seal and see the hull up close, while climate control systems minimum corrosion. A few inches of water on top of the glass completes the effect so that the ship appears to float.
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The ‘Mr Brunel’ I met on my visit

Very clever design – but then, clever design is what made Brunel famous.
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The dining room for first class passengers

And the Trust that maintains the ship and museum is passing that legacy on to promising schoolchildren by naming a few “Future Brunels”.
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Steerage, anyone?

These are 11- and 12-year olds chosen for their interest and aptitude in science and engineering and for their ability to work well in groups.
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The deck, with a budding mariner at the ship’s wheel

They take part in 6 activities per year for 5 years, including such events as trips to an amusement park to study the physics and engineering behind the mechanical rides.
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Only way to have fresh milk during the voyage was to bring along sufficient livestock

Fortunately, you don’t have to be a Future Brunel to visit the ship and the museum, which together make up an award-winning heritage attraction on the Bristol waterfront.
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Brunel’s innovative propeller

If you can’t get there yourself, please click on the Featured Link and have a look at the SS Great Britain‘s official website.

The Greatest Britons: Two Guys With Cigars

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, played by Kenneth Branagh in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics

The opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics each featured, near the beginning, a guy with a cigar reciting from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  A lot of viewers would have recognized Winston Churchill in the closing ceremony, whether from war movies, history class, or documentaries; he was  Prime Minister of the UK during the second world war.  But the cigar-chewer in the opening ceremony was someone non-Brits aren’t likely to have run across.  Some people thought it was Charles Dickens and some went for Abraham Lincoln, but in fact the actor was playing Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

As that probably doesn’t tell you much, I’m here to answer the question “Who was Brunel?”, which is the easy part.   “Why were these guys quoting Shakespeare?” is harder.

Winston Churchill, played by Timothy Spall in the closing ceremony at the 2012 Olympics

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a 19th-century engineer who designed and built bridges, tunnels, viaducts, railway lines, and ships in an era in which that kind of civil and mechanical engineering was comparable to today’s Silicon Valley for excitement, new technologies, and transformed economies.  Victorian industrialists—of the type in the Olympics’ opening ceremony, who raised the smokestacks of the factories and presided over the change from the agricultural to the industrial—invested in the huge projects that engineers such as Brunel dreamed up.  Note I have to say “such as” Brunel because I can’t say “like Brunel”, as nobody else was like him:  he was the greatest.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel himself

Brunel was born into engineering.  His father, a civil engineer and inventor, could have been wealthy if only he’d remembered to patent his inventions, but died nearly penniless, dependent upon his more famous—and more solvent—son.  ‘Our’ Brunel’s father, despite being knighted by King Edward VII and boasting membership in the Royal Societies of multiple countries, spent time in debtor’s prison, until the government bailed him out on condition he wouldn’t leave England.  An imminent deal with the Tsar scared them into forking over the money; they didn’t want Brunel (Senior) moving to Russia and building marvelous things there.

Straight out of school, 16-year-old Isambard began to work for his father, soon running the era’s hottest project: building the world’s first tunnel through the soft mud that lies under a navigable river—in this case, the Thames.  The Brunel tunnel is still there,and still in useby the London Overground Railway.  Opened to the public in 1843, it didn’t even need refurbishment until the 1990s, though building the tunnel cost several lives and almost killed young Isambard.  After a terrible accident and a long recovery Brunel (Junior) went on to different kinds of engineering work of his own, most notably for the Great Western Railway.

Statue of Brunel at Paddington Station in London

On the first train ride Brunel ever took, he jotted down some notes, the jagged letters showing how jerky the train was, and added “The time is not far off when we shall be able to take our coffee and write, while going noiselessly and smoothly at 45mph – let me try”.  He got his chance to build a railroad–only two years after his first ride.

The financial backers of the Great Western Railway wanted to connect London with the popular holiday (US: vacation) spots in southwest England by rail, which was no small thing in the 1830s.  You had to get approval from Parliament, and counter the arguments of people who claimed railway passengers wouldn’t survive going through tunnels (they’d smother), or feared that cattle would be harmed by walking under a railway bridge, or—my favorite—were concerned, as was the provost of Eton College, that the railway would be “dangerous to the morals of the pupils”.

The SS Great Britain in drydock today

Brunel had to testify before Parliament for eleven days, but eventually Great Western got permission to build the railway.  Then Brunel suggested they go one better: why not operate steamships, too?  A passenger ought to be able to buy one Great Western ticket, he said, and travel all the way from London to New York.  While they chewed on that, Brunel surveyed the new line himself and did ingenious things with the gradients and with the gauge (distance between the rails) to smooth out the ride.  And a few years later, they let him design the ships.

People clearly thought he could do whatever he set his mind to do.  He experimented with trains propelled by carbon dioxide (the Gaz Engine), which didn’t work, and with trains pushed by air rushing to fill a steam-engine-generated vacuum (the Atmospheric Railway), which did work, but not very well. One modern author suggests that if he had wanted to build a steam rocket to go to the moon, someone would have paid to let him try it.

The SS Great Britain in 1844, believed to be the first photo ever taken of a ship

But before designing ocean-going ships for treacherous Atlantic crossings, his only experiment in nautical design was the Bertha, a dredger that removed silt from the Bristol docks.  Even more formidably, the general wisdom said steamships couldn’t cross the ocean; steam for short stretches, sure, but for the Atlantic you had to have sails.  But where Brunel was concerned, the general wisdom often proved wrong.

If you visit the SS Great Britain today, you might meet “Mr Brunel”. Photo by Paul Blakemore, used here by courtesy of the SS Great Britain Trust

He’s probably best remembered for his ships (though Britain’s fascination with the sea may be a factor there).  First came the SS Great Western—in its day, the largest steamship ever, wooden-hulled with paddle wheels for propulsion and a few sails to keep it upright. Next came the SS Great Britain—even larger, with an iron hull and a screw propeller.  You can visit the ship today in Bristol, where it sits as a museum in the same shipyard, in fact in the very same drydock, in which it was built. It was so big they had to adapt the locks between the shipyard and the ocean before it could get out, but Brunel’s last ship, the SS Great Eastern, was even bigger than that.

Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol. The toll hasn’t changed since 1952, so drivers pay 50 pence to take a car across, though they don’t bother to collect the 5 pence from pedestrians and cyclists anymore.

Brunel died not long after the SS Great Eastern’s maiden voyage.  As a memorial, some of his fellow engineers drummed up funding and completed the Clifton Bridge, which Brunel had designed and begun building almost 30 years before.  (The original project had been abandoned when the money ran out.)  The new bridge was finished in 1864, though without the decorative sphinxes on the tops of the towers that were part of the decorations called for in the original design.

Kenneth Branagh, when he isn’t playing Brunel. He’s one of the UK’s leading Shakespearian actors, but a wider American audience might remember him as Gilderoy Lockhart in the Harry Potter movies.

Back in 1836, the first iron rail of the Clifton Bridge, when laid across 700 feet of empty space over the Avon, had fallen into the water 300 feet below. Brunel said as soon as they could put another in place, he’d ride across it in a basket to show it was safe.  He got stuck halfway across, and had to swing himself out of the basket and up to the bar to get it going again.  That’s where the analogy with today’s Silicon Valley breaks down: people like Steve Jobs have given us marvelous new technology, but they never had to risk their lives to do it; they didn’t contend with exploding steam boilers, they weren’t caught in unfinished tunnels when the river decided to flood in, they didn’t have to do death-defying aerial acrobatics to prove their projects were safe.  You can’t call Brunel the chief geek of his day; he was a bit more Indiana Jones and a bit less Bill Gates, though it’s mindboggling to think what Brunel might have created if he’d had a Bill-Gates sized bank balance to draw on.

And finally, Timothy Spall when he’s not playing Churchill, although in this photo he is in costume for another film. He’s also a major actor here, but going with the people-have-probably-seen-the-Harry-Potter-films approach, I’ll say you might have seen him as Peter Pettigrew, aka Wormtail.

Getting back to the Olympic ceremonies where we started, I should mention that Brunel and Churchill are linked by more than just being British public figures often photographed with cigars; Churchill came first and Brunel came second in a poll a few years ago for “The Greatest Briton” in all of the history of Great Britain.  The BBC aired new documentaries on the lives of the candidates, current public figures presented the cases of their favourites, and the viewers phoned in their votes. Bookies started out giving 20-to-1 odds against Brunel, but they hadn’t counted on the loyal engineering students of Brunel University in London, some of whom voted multiple times (perhaps the railway had undermined students’ morals; the bookies eventually had to close the book).

So Churchill came first and Brunel came second.  Going on down the list, Princess Diana was third, Darwin fourth, and Shakespeare fifth, which brings us back to why Churchill and Brunel were quoting Shakespeare.  But on that question, your guess is as good as mine.

Except for photos of the opening ceremony, which are screenshots from the BBC video of the event, and the photo of “Mr Brunel” at the wheel of the ship, which is used by permission of the SS Great Britain Trust, all pictures are from Wikipedia and are used under the Creative Commons license.

Amelia Earhart: Keeping Burry Port on the Map

Amelia Earhart, showing the Friendship in Burry Port Harbour, 1928. (Photo used by courtesy of John Ridgway and the Pembrey-Burry Port Town Council.)

Before we moved to the UK, we would come over on vacation/holiday, rent/hire a car, and wander with no fixed plan from one wonderful-thing-you-could-never-see-in-the-US to another.  And the UK never let us down.

Amelia Earhart Monument, Stepney Road, Burry Port, Carmarthenshire

You don’t even need a guidebook for this kind of travel, because wherever you go over here you’re almost guaranteed to pass a sign reading “Footpath to the Stone Circle” or “18th-Century Tidemill” or “Roman ruin”.  My biggest double take was at a sign in Cheshire reading “Secret Nuclear Bunker”, seeing as how putting up “This way to the Secret Nuclear Bunker” signposts is just a tad counterproductive.  (It turned out that the decommissioned Cold War bunker at Hack Green had just been opened to the public.  I’ll do a post on it later; if you can’t wait, follow the link to their website, listed under Featured Links.)

Weather vane atop the monument, with image of the Friendship complete with pontoons

So on our recent getaway to south Wales, we weren’t surprised to see signs for Neolithic mounds, medieval castles, and ruined abbeys.  But we were surprised to see a sign for an Amelia Earhart memorial in the little town of Burry Port (population about 4200)—and of course we turned off the main road to find it.

Of course we knew that Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, but what we didn’t know was that her first crossing wasn’t as a pilot, but as a passenger, or—to use her own description— “like a sack of potatoes”.  She also went along to keep a log of that 1928 trip, but the pilot, Wilmer “Bill” Stultz, and the navigator/copilot/mechanic, Louis “Slim” Gordon, were men (and men with names out of a Hollywood war movie, at that) and she didn’t do any of the flying.  For one thing, she wasn’t rated to fly using instruments only, and their flight path, planned to take them from Newfoundland, Canada, to Southampton, England, was fogged in for almost the entire crossing.

The lighthouse at Burry Port, with a rainbow, though it’s hard to see at this resolution (sorry).  Photo from Wikipedia used under the Creative Commons License.

After 20 hours of fog, without reliable airspeed data and with the radio on the blink, with fuel running low and unsure of their position, the crew brought their souped-up Fokker F7, the Friendship, down below the clouds and found themselves crossing busy shipping lanes—good news, because it meant they were getting close to Europe.  But they still didn’t know where they were; their best guess was that they were close to Ireland.

They tried twice to drop a message onto the deck of a convenient ship—in those days, such drops weren’t unusual, and ships would often help by marking their latitude and longitude on decks for pilots to see—but they missed.  Earhart wrote the messages, tied them around oranges to weight them, and dropped them through the hatch, but they fell straight into the water.  The captain had seen the aircraft, though, and when he realized it was the Friendship but couldn’t reach them by radio, had the ship’s position chalked onto the deck.  But by that time the Friendship, too low on fuel to keep circling and with the crew getting worried, had flown on.  They had to trust that they were still on course and that Ireland must be close, because otherwise they were going down in the ocean.

Inscription on the monument.  The smaller plaque says it was unveiled by Sir Arthur Whitten-Brown; for more info about Sir Arthur, see the main text

And they made it, pretty much just in time.  Even with the two fuel tanks that were standard for the Fokker and the four extra ones added for their crossing, they had less than an hour’s worth left.  They put the plane, which had been fitted with pontoons, down in an estuary, moored it to a buoy, and waited for someone to row out to get them—which didn’t happen for some time.  People saw them waving, waved back, and went on about their business.  Eventually and old man in a coracle paddled over, but as he didn’t speak English, there wasn’t much of an exchange of information.  He was speaking Welsh, because they weren’t in Ireland after all: they were in Burry Port, Carmarthenshire, Wales.

The monument in a different light. (Photo used by courtesy of John Ridgway and the Pembrey-Burry Port Town Council.)

That accidental visit put Burry Port on the map (or at least, it has kept Burry Port on the map, now that it’s no longer the region’s main gateway for coal export).  It didn’t take local people long to realize exactly who had landed, and they swarmed the crew, with one souvenir hunter famously tearing Earhart’s flying scarf right off her. (Wonder where it is now?) The flyers wanted to refuel and go, but ended up having to stay the night—there’s a commemorative plaque at the hotel—because the fuel left wasn’t even enough to allow them to take off, and it must have taken hours even to partially fill the tanks. One report says the fuel was rowed out to them in 2-gallon cans.

Statue of Sir Arthur Whitten-Brown and Sir John Alcock at Heathrow AIrport, found on Wikipedia and used under the Creative Commons License.  Sir Arthur was born in Glasgow, but to American parents, so there’s another Anglo-American connection for the story.

Meanwhile, the press found them.  Earhart tried her best to get Stultz and Gordon into the photos, but the reporters only wanted to publicize the first woman to cross the Atlantic, even though she had only come along for the ride, an adventurer rather than an aviator. She was already famous, with impressive records for altitude, speed, and distance, either as the best woman in those competitions or the best flyer, full stop.  And in 1932 she did of course become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic at the controls of the plane.

Amelia Earhart being greeted by the mayor of Southampton (who wears a chain of office, just like the ones I told you about a few weeks ago — see http://mefoley.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/civic-pride/) (Photo from Wikipedia used under the Creative Commons License. )

I would never have known of the 1928 flight, and might never have seen the pleasant little town of Burry Port, either, if we hadn’t detoured to see the Earhart monument.  It was erected in1930 and unveiled by aviation hero Sir Arthur Whitten-Brown, one of the team of two who in 1919 first flew nonstop across the Atlantic.  (You thought that was Lindbergh? No, Lindbergh did the first solo flight.)  The unveiling must have given Sir Arthur, who lived in Swansea, some satisfaction, although he missed getting to meet the crew of the Friendship.  They took off for Southampton while he was being rowed out to see them, unaware that he was coming.

The British traditionally use this sort of blue plaque to mark historical sites in towns and cities; I’ll be doing a post on the blue plaques themselves, soon.  (Photo used by courtesy of John Ridgway and the Pembrey-Burry Port Town Council.)

Nowadays it’s a heck of a lot easier to fly to the UK, so come on over, hire a car or get a rail pass, and see what you find.  It could be a bit of our shared US-UK history, like Amelia Earhart’s landing in Burry Port.  Or it could even be a Secret Nuclear Bunker.

Civic Pride

Two members of the all-female police team providing security at the recent Guildford civic procession.

On a recent visit to the US, somebody asked me if I travel around Europe much now that I live here, and I said I didn’t, which just goes to show how your yardstick for making such measurements can be altered by familiarity.

Travel much? Not me—I’ve only been to Sweden (twice), France, the Netherlands (twice), Spain, and Ireland (three times) since moving to England–plus India, though it’s not in Europe. And our travel within the UK is also European, isn’t it? We’ve been from Land’s End to John O’ Groats (US equivalent: coast to coast).

The civil parishes that make up the Borough of Guildford, with Guildford itself as the grey blob in the middle

But with all that going on, I haven’t taken as much notice as I should of the history and traditions of the Borough of Guildford, an area that includes the town of Guildford and outlying villages like mine, and the local government that operates here.  At the moment, Guildford is extremely pleased to be the last stop for the Olympic torch before its final run to London, so now, when everybody’s taking a little more pride in the place, seems a good time to tell readers something about the Borough.

We’ve just had elections, which means the new complement of borough councillors have elected one of their number to be the mayor, instated that new mayor in a Mayor Making ceremony at the Guildhall, which I didn’t see, and kicked off the new mayor’s year in the job with a civic procession, which I did see—so I’ll start there.

Civic procession heads up Guildford High Street

The crown first gave Guildford the right to elect its own mayor about 650 years ago.  There’s no telling how long local dignitaries have been putting on their full ceremonial regalia and processing from the Guildhall to Holy Trinity Church, but like most local worthies you’ll see around the UK, their costumes seem to have been been frozen in the 1700s. As figures wearing tricorn hats (for women) or bicorn hats (for men) emerged from the Guildhall, a little girl near me gasped and sang out “Pirates!”

Superintendent McInnes leads the way, followed by David Peters, town crier.

First came Neighborhood Superintendent Darren McInnes, representing the Surrey Police, though he was spared the pirate get-up, and wore an ordinary modern uniform. A neighborhood superintendent assists a chief superintendent, of which Surrey has three; Guildford is in West Surrey, Sup. McInnes’ territory.

Next came David Peters, town crier and beadle who, as he wasn’t crying, I must assume was beadling. Mr. Peters’ father, grandfather and great-grandfather all held the same office; his family has had the town crier-ship in Guildford sewn up for over 100 years. You can click here for an article about him, and a photograph of the three bells he uses in his town crying (professional tip: don’t wear gloves; you might drop a bell and ruin it).

A beadle, by the way, protects the mayor, among other traditional duties that aren’t perhaps needed so much today, including going into pubs on Sundays to find out who skips church. Mayors had Common Criers working for them by at least the early 1300s, although the Ancient and Honourable Guild of Town Criers, to which Mr Peters belongs and which sounds wonderfully medieval, was only established in 1978.

The town crier and sword bearer enter the churchyard through an honor guard of military cadets. The sword is so long, I didn’t manage to get a photo that includes its whole length.

A sword-bearer followed, carrying such a long sword that I’m not sure I got a single photo of him that includes the whole length of the thing. It’s a 16th-century German zweihander, made to be used by a horseman who, holding it in both hands, would strike down against the foe on either side (presumably being very careful of the horse’s ears). The sword isn’t an official part of the borough regalia; staff at the local museum tell me that they carry it in the procession just because they happen to have it, though nobody knows where it came from or why it’s there.

A mace bearer

The procession also had two mace-bearers for the simple reason that Guildford, happily and unusually, has two ancient ceremonial maces, including one of the finest of only 15 civic maces in the UK that date back to the 1400s. (Guildford’s back-up mace only dates back to 1633.) Maces are symbolic clubs; mace-bearers originally would have carried serious workaday clubs and would have used them to clear the road of rabble. When not carrying a ceremonial mace, one of the mace-bearers doubles as the mayor’s chauffeur.

Mrs Karin Sehmer, seen here in her green uniform, with medallion of office and traditional plumed hat, is the current High Sheriff of Surrey. At one time, sheriffs had real law enforcement jobs as the king’s highest representatives in their counties; now the office is honorary, but the monarch still appoints her High Sheriffs—the Lord Lieutenant of the county gives the queen a list of three nominees, and she chooses the person for the job by pricking the name with a brass bodkin. No, I didn’t make that up. And a bodkin, in case you weren’t aware, is something like a poniard. If you’re interested in such wonderful and archaic English words, you may enjoy knowing that the High Sheriff’s address is the Shrievalty Office—the word sheriff comes from shire (county, roughly speaking) and reeve (a high-ranking official).

The Mayor of Guildford in the foreground (with red robe, gold chain, and staff) with the High Sheriff of Surrey (in green uniform with plumed hat). Behind the mayor is the Deputy Mayor; the tall fellow behind the HIgh Sheriff is the Chief Executive (formerly Town Clerk)

The mayor has to make do with a decidedly less macho address: official correspondence comes to the Mayor’s Parlour. Our new mayor is Councillor Mrs Jennifer Jordan, seen here in a scarlet robe with squirrel-fur trim. The staff she carries is supposed to have been given to the Borough by Elizabeth I, and is not a canonical part of a UK mayor’s outfit. It’s made of campeachy wood, imported from Central American for dying (and so might have been donated by someone connected with the wool trading that made Guildford prosper in those days). Its silver top is engraved FAYRE GOD. DO JUSTICE. LOVE THY BROTHER. 1565. but  a town official confided that one former mayor was found to be carrying it upside-down, bashing the inscription on the stones of the street.

A British mayor usually wears a gold chain of office; in these photos, the new mayor’s white frills almost hide the chain and the badge of office that hangs from it. Guildford’s chain, being old and historic, is less showy than some (there’s a picture of mayors with more modern chains, below). A member of the Onslow family, local landowners of historical importance, donated the solid-gold badge in the 1600s, and had the gumption to put his own arms on the reverse in defiance of the law against such self-aggrandizing. King James II prosecuted him for the offense, and while the charges were eventually dropped, the town’s mayors didn’t use that badge again until James II died.

Lord Onslow, the High Steward, greets Colonel Crowley, in the company of Guildford’s MP, Anne Milton

Next in procession comes the chief executive (formerly known as the town clerk), who walks beside the deputy mayor. They’re followed by a row of three: Anne Milton, the Member of Parliament for Guildford; Colonel Patrick Crowley of the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment, the only regiment to have the freedom of the borough (I’ll explain that in a future post); and Guildford’s current high steward, Lord Onslow, that is, Rupert Charles William Bullard, 8th Earl of Onslow. The High Steward, like the High Sheriff, used to have a role in local law enforcement but now holds only a ceremonial position; the council invited the current earl to take on the job when his father, the previous High Steward, died last year.

Honorary Freemen (in blue trim) and the Honorary Remembrancer (in red trim)

The highest honor the Borough can bestow is that of Honorary Freeman, a title which in most towns and cities comes with privileges, such as the right to carry your sword unsheathed, or to herd your sheep and cattle over bridges without having to pay the toll. I’ve heard of a town whose councillors thought it’d be fun to get a flock of sheep and have the new freemen herd them over a bridge, which they did, but  when they got to the other end, the sheep scattered through the town and had to be rounded up, which took some doing.

Some of Guildford’s Borough Councillors

The freemen wear black robes with blue trim; in the photo with them, in black with red trim, is Honorary Remembrancer Matthew Alexander. The title is so wonderfully medieval, so redolent of history and old books, it almost gives me cold chills—so I was disappointed to find that it only dates back to 1933. The honorary remembrancer keeps track of important events and presents the council with a bound book containing his report at the end of the year.   These dignitaries wear, instead of 18th-century tricorns and bicorns, what’s known as a Tudor bonnet, an academic-style cap used by many universities here instead of mortarboards. (My husband is about to get his PhD from a university where they wear Tudor bonnets, and just so he doesn’t get bigheaded I’ve been calling him Dr Squashy Hat.)

Some of the visiting mayors, wearing their ornate chains of office over ordinary business suits (which is how you usually see British mayors)

Guildford invites other mayors from jurisdictions within Surrey to join the fun, too.  Their showy chains seem a bit nouveau next to Guildford’s smaller, finer version. Mayors are of course welcome to come and go from each other’s towns like anybody else, but if they visit in their capacity as mayor of another jurisdiction, they must apply to the local mayor for permission to wear their chains. There might have been serious issues of protocol and insult at one time, but these days the custom is just a courtesy, and saves the embarrassment of having some mayor open the newspaper and find that something official had happened in the area (the British might say on their patch) without their knowing.

A group of aldermen

The aldermen, in red robes, follow the mayors.  Alderman is also a title conferred by the Borough Council as an honor; it’s usually given to former mayors or councillors for their long service.  These councillors themselves follow, in black robes, and are in turn followed by couple of local magistrates in modern business clothes.  (Like the councillors, aldermen, freemen and Surrey mayors, they’re all invited to participate, but they don’t all participate every time.)

Bringing up the rear, you can just see the blond head of Civic Secretary Kate Foxton, to whom I’m very grateful;  Kate looked over my photos to identify all the people for me, which would have been an even longer task at one of the other two civic processions of the year; in October, the procession for the opening of the judicial year includes all the judges and magistrates, and in November, in the procession for Remembrance Day, officers, soldiers, and cadets march as well.

The last few borough councillors, followed by magistrates and, barely visible, Civic Secretary Kate Foxton–my apologies for not having a better photograph!

With Old(e) World(e) pageantry like this on my doorstep, why would I need much travel to the continent? Besides, people here don’t think European travel is exotic, but those trips I make to the US every year or so, now—that’s what my neighbors call real travel.

My thanks to Civic Secretary Kate Foxton, Guildhall tour guide Jill Buist, Borough Hospitality Officer Charles Robinson, and Guildford Museum staff member Mary Alexander.

The photos are mine; the map of civic parishes in the Borough of Guildford is taken from Wikipedia and used under the Creative Commons license.

Supreme Court 3: JCPC

When is the Supreme Court not the Supreme Court?  When sitting as the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC).  This post on the JCPC wraps up the series sparked by my recent visit to the Supreme Court building in London.

Court 3 in the Supreme Court building, where the Justices hear JCPC cases. When in use, the little flags--just there to give visitors an idea of the countries which bring cases here--are removed, and a full-sized flag from the country whose case is to be discussed hangs from a full-sized flagpole.

The USA’s judicial system is a streamlined modern marvel compared to Britain’s—unsurprisingly, since the American version was planned and instituted so recently, something over 200 years ago. The British system has evolved over at least ten centuries,  accruing bits as the world modernized and the British empire grew, dropping bits as the colonies became independent, obliged to take into account all kinds of ancient rights and privileges.  The upshot is that the Crown-in-Council—that is, the monarch, aided by advisers called the Privy Council, which was the ultimate appellate court for the Empire—has been left with the final word on cases from a surprising mishmash of jurisdictions, including some in foreign countries.

Today’s Privy Council has 600 members, and all of those who are judges are technically on the Judicial Committee, the body that hears Queen-in-Council cases.  In practice it’s almost always Supreme Court Justices who sit as the JCPC in Court 3 of the building (the first two courtrooms are described here).  These come from some deliciously named lesser-known courts, the most archaic-sounding being the Court of Admiralty of the Cinque Ports, which deals only with naval law as administered along a certain stretch of the south coast.  And the JCPC hears appeals from other military courts, such as those in Sovereign Base Areas, though there are only two of those left, and they’re on Cyprus.  Then there are prize courts, for cases concerning ships or other spoils seized legally (ahem) in wartime; I don’t know when such a court last convened, much less referred a case to the Queen-in-Council, but it must have been a while ago.

The 19th century (but Tudor-inspired) front door.

A few ecclesiastical courts can still send cases: the Church Commissioners, who handle investments and real estate of the Church of England; and the Chancery Court and the Arches Court, which handle disciplinary matters among English clergy. The Chancery Court of York covers the northernmost third of the country; the Arches Court of Canterbury in reality covers the rest although theoretically it has authority over only the Archbishop of Canterbury’s London peculiar—a peculiar being an area not subject to the bishop of its local diocese.  (This particular peculiar consists of 13 parishes in London.)

I can’t imagine cases come up often; I’ve just included all of this because I thought that bit about the peculiar was so wonderfully…peculiar.  The bulk of the JCPC’s caseload comes from Crown Dependencies, British Overseas Territories, and former colonies.

Each Crown Dependency has a different legal relationship to the Crown, but in general they recognize the Queen’s authority and depend upon her for defense and such, but they are not part of the United Kingdom.  The best-known are the Isle of Man and the Bailiwicks (a bailiwick being the jurisdiction of a bailiff) of Jersey and Guernsey, two little clutches of islands off the coast of France.  It remains to be seen whether anyone will take seriously the 2008 claim by the (putative) owner of Forewick Holm that this Shetland island, which he’s renamed Forvik Island, is a Crown Dependency and therefore not subject to laws passed by Parliament.

And here's another door, an interior one, leading to... the coffee shop. This has to be the most elegant coffee shop entrance in London. I peeked in at first, unsure whether I was really allowed to open it. Odd that the only place I felt might be off-limits, and wasn't sure I was welcome, was the coffee shop; that just points up how open and welcoming the Supreme Court is about its work.

British Overseas Territories range from the British Antarctic, inhabited only by researchers, to the British Indian Ocean Area, the world’s largest marine reserve.  (It has no civilian inhabitants except fish, because the UK evicted all the civilians for military reasons, alas.)  There are twelve other British Overseas Territories, all of them small islands: Pitcairn, Montserrat, and so on.

And then there are several independent countries that find it useful to appeal cases to the JCPC rather than to fund and run their own ultimate appeals courts.  On any given day, the JCPC may hear cases from Jamaica (in the Caribbean), the Falklands (off the tip of South America), Mauritius (off Reunion Island, which is off of Madagascar, which is off of Mozambique, in case you need reminding), or Kiribati (32 South Pacific atolls plus one honest-to-goodness island, which I’m tempted to say are in the middle of nowhere except that they are really quite close to the intersection of the International Date Line and the equator, which is—in cartographical terms, anyway—probably the antithesis of nowhere).

It may no longer be valid to say that the sun never sets on the British Empire, but at one time—presumably when India and Canada participated—one quarter of the world could appeal cases to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.  Even drafting in senior judges from the countries involved to help, Justices still had to grapple with legal niceties of (here I can’t do better than quote from the JCPC’s website):

• Roman Dutch law from South Africa, British Guyana and Salome
• Spanish law from Trinidad
• pre-revolutionary French law from Quebec
• the Napoleonic code from Mauritius
• old Sardinian law from Malta
• Venetian law from the Ionian islands
• medieval Norman [French] law from the Channel Islands
• acts of the Oirwachtas from the Irish Free States
• Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu law from India
• Ottoman law from Turkey, Cyprus and Egypt
• Chinese law from British courts in Shanghai
• tribal law from Africa

This is the lawyer's suite, where lawyers can confer and prepare. The room seats over 30 lawyers who are in the building for cases at either the JCPC or the Supreme Court, and sometimes there are that many involved in a single case.

Though some countries listed have now withdrawn from the British system, that’s also not a complete catalog.  It leaves off Brunei, for example, even though the JCPC hears cases for the Sultan from time to time as a courtesy, reporting back to him rather than reporting, as is usual for the Privy Council, to the Queen.

Lastly, in one more improbable legacy of history, appealed cases from the Disciplinary Committee of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons go to the JCPC.  (There must be a good story—possibly a shaggy dog story—of how that came about.)

All of these can have their cases heard in Court 3 by right. The Committee cannot refuse such appellants; unlike the Supreme Court, the JCPC doesn’t get to chose which cases are worth tackling, and there are a lot of cases to get through.  Almost half the cases the Justices of the Supreme Court heard last year were JCPC cases from other countries.

In another strange twist, even though Britain doesn’t have the death penalty, the JCPC rules on points of law which can mean life or death for appellants from countries that do.  In one of the last cases to come from Belize, the Justices decided that a judge there had acted unlawfully in the way he applied the death penalty, and as a result a condemned man’s sentence was converted to life in prison.

There are fewer countries participating all the time; Belize withdrew from the system last year, and before that New Zealand left in 2004.  But even without them, and even without obstinate priests and obstreperous soldiers, dubious veterinarians and debatable spoils of war, it’s unlikely that the Justices will be idle.  Even though the British like to accuse the US of being excessively litigious, plenty of British people do turn up in court. I reckon there’ll be enough homegrown cases to keep the Justices in business for a few more centuries.

Supreme Court 1: The Court and its Building

A school group crosses in front of the Supreme Court Building in Parliament Square, London

One of the paradoxes of the UK is the way that some things stay the same for centuries and other things change at the drop of a hat.

Men in Abbotts Bromley in Staffordshire have danced their peculiar Horn Dance every year since 1288, the Ceremony of the Keys has closed the Tower of London every evening for over 700 years, and my friend’s local (the pub near your house where you go all the time is your local) has walked a horse through the building on Christmas Day for so long no one seems to know when the tradition began.

But governments can change fundamental public systems at lightning speed, and in 2009 lawmakers changed the shape of the judiciary by creating a Supreme Court—just like that, without the public seeming to take much notice.

The statue outside the Supreme Court building is of Abraham Lincoln, but not for any justice-related reason; the statue has been there since the 1920s, one of several statues of statesmen (and they are all men) in Parliament Square. The most recent addition to the lineup is Nelson Mandela.

Last week I  toured the Supreme Court building, and couldn’t have been more impressed.  It’s not just that you’re allowed to go in; it’s that everything about the place is designed, purposely, to get you to come see what happens inside, from the welcoming doorman who kept trying to invite me in even though I was way too early for my tour, to the…well, I’ll get to all the rest.  In fact, I’ll get to all the rest in two different posts, there’s so much.

When it was about time for my tour, I passed by the statue of Abraham  Lincoln (see photo for explanation), and a pair of stone benches inscribed with the poem written for the first Supreme Court by then-Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, and let the smiling doorman sweep me through the beautiful faux-Tudor doors.  On the other side of the security checkpoint my group, members of the Friends of the British Library, were gathering for a little good-natured grousing about what had set off the metal detectors.  (In my case it was a pocket torch, that is, a flashlight.)

The main staircase, with its copper handrail. The stained glass shows the arms of various sheriffs of the county of Middlesex, leftover from when the building was the Middlesex Guildhall.

A video came first, in which Lord Phillips, President of the Court (rather than Chief Justice, as in the US) emphasized how welcome we were and how much they all wanted us to come back when we could hear the Justices discussing cases.

When we do we must be sure, said Lord Phillips (on the screen), to pick up free leaflets at the front desk that explain what the cases are about, prepared each day so the public can understand what’s going on.  A staff member later told me it’s rare to have so many spectators that they fill the courtroom; when that happens, they set up folding chairs in the lobby for the overflow, so they don’t have to turn people away.  (Somehow, I don’t see that happening at the US Supreme Court.)

Court 1, from behind the solicitors' chairs

Courtroom 1 used to be the debating chamber of the Middlesex County council when the building was the Middlesex Guildhall, Middlesex being one of the counties that was re-organized out of existence a while back in one of those changes I find astonishing.  (Can you imagine the outcry if the US government decided, for example, to merge New York and Pennsylvania, or to divide Texas?)  The room has no witness box (US: witness stand); just as in the US, the Supreme Court considers points of law and does not hear witnesses.  The room is set up for discussion, with a curved table for Justices and a curved table for barristers (lawyers), facing each other across an oval space.  Behind the barristers sit the solicitors (a different kind of lawyer; that’s a topic for another time) and behind the Justices sit their assistants, young lawyers who would be called clerks in the US.  The public sits behind the solicitors in seats like church pews, and in an elevated gallery (US: balcony), as well.

In Courtroom 1, looking up. The portraits are those leftover from Middlesex Guildhall days, the large one here showing the Duke of Wellington.

We filed out of Court 1, walking on carpet of a pattern used throughout the building, designed by pop artist Peter Blake, famous for the cover for the Beatles Sgt Pepper album.  It shows the four emblems of the countries in the United Kingdom: the leek for Wales, the rose for England, the thistle for Scotland and the flax flower for Northern Ireland (not a shamrock because the shamrock symbolizes all of Ireland, and the British Supreme Court has no jurisdiction in the Republic).

The emblem of the UK Supreme Court dominates Court 2. The Tudor rose symbolizes England; the thistle, Scotland, the flax--the little blue one--for Ireland, and all are connected by the leaves of the leek, a symbol of Wales. The medallion of flowers is surrounded by the Greek letter omega, meaning the end, as the Supreme Court has the final say in the legal cases it decides.

Those four flowers (well, the leek is only represented by leaves) make up most of the crest of the Court, an emblem that dominates Court 2 (see photo).  Court 2 is double height, sleek and modern, with huge windows (one side looks out onto Westminster Abbey).  It’s light and airy, and said to be the Justices’ favorite court room.

The glass back wall of Court 2

The back wall is glass, as are several walls in the building, designed to emphasize the idea that the Supreme Court’s work is open to everyone.  Most of the new artwork in the building takes the form of quotations etched into glass walls; the one in the back of Court 2 reads “Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.”  Appropriately, it’s etched into the glass twice: once facing in and once facing out.  And who said it?  Eleanor Roosevelt.

The middle and upper floors of the library.

Quotations come thick and fast in the Supreme Court’s library, which isn’t ordinarily open to the public (but the magic of being with a group from the Friends of the British Library is that the doors of a lot of private libraries will open to you sooner or later).  In fact, the books have already outgrown the library, and bits of the collection are housed in nooks and crannies all over the building.  Those in the Library itself make a beautiful display, with the glass wall showing quotations from prominent people from Aristotle to Martin Luther King.  (They’re listed at the end of this post.)

Middle floor of 3-story library, looking down to the lower floor, with quotations etched in glass

And that was the tour—if you don’t count stopping for a cup of tea.  Yes, there’s a cafe in the building, and that’s open to the public, too.  It’s run by Costa—a local chain that competes with Starbucks.  If you’re in London, you can just stop in to the Supreme Court for a cappuccino, as long as you don’t mind going through security.

Costa cafe on a lower floor. Next time you're in London you can drop into the Supreme Court for coffee

The way out is through the final glass wall, which is inscribed with phrases from the oath that UK judges at all levels swear or affirm.  New judges who elect to swear can swear by Almighty God (for Christians and Jews), by Allah (for Moslems), by Gita (for Hindus) or by Guru Nanak (for Sikhs), but all of them pledge to “do right by all manner of people, after the law and usages of this realm, without fear or favour, affection or ill will.”

The glass walls stand for the transparency of the judiciary, that is, for a system in which—in a phrase often used by British public figures—justice is not only done, but is seen to be done.  That is one of the reasons Parliament created the Supreme Court.  But I’ll go into that, and into the use of the third court room, in the next post.

The final door: "to do right by all manner of people, after the law and usages of this realm, without fear or favour, affection or ill will."

Finally, here are the quotations, chosen by the original panel of 12 Justices, for the library:

• ‘Law is order and good law is good order’ - Aristotle
• ‘He who commits injustice is ever more wretched than he who suffers it’ - Plato
• ‘These having not the law are law unto themselves’ - Romans 2:14
• ‘Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable web of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects us all indirectly’ - Martin Luther King
• ‘The first duty of a man is the seeking after and the investigation of truth’ - Cicero
• ‘Justice is truth in action’ - Disraeli
• ‘Where is there any book of law so clear to each man as that written in his heart?’ - Tolstoy
• ‘Justice is far from being a natural concept. The closer one gets to the state of nature, the less does one find’ - Megarry
• ‘Man is a little thing while he works by and for himself but when he gives voice to the rules of love and justice he is godlike’ - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• ‘It is in justice that the ordering of society is centred’ - Aristotle
• ‘Laws were made to prevent the strong from always having their way’ - Ovid