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Satirist and author Jonathan Swift |
Michael Foot on trail of Irish satirist and author Jonathan Swift
IT was a leather-bound collection of the radical pamphlet The Examiner that first set Michael Foot on the trail of the Irish satirist and author Jonathan Swift.
The 1754 collection was given to him by his father Isaac, with the inscription: “To my son, as a token of consolation on his defeat in the 1955 general election.”
Isaac, who was a Lib Dem MP, added: “I recall defeats at Totnes, Plymouth, Bodmin, St Ives, and Tavistock. On the whole, these defeats were more honourable than my five victories.”
Former Labour leader Michael, said Isaac was loath to give away his books – he owned 60,000 – but perhaps the wrench was made easier as it was one of his shrewder purchases.
“My father bought it for me from a bookseller who thought the edition was incomplete,” Michael told me at his Hampstead home.
“But he knew more about Swift than him.
“He knew that changes in the palace had forced Swift to return to Ireland at the time. So the few pages missing from the collection were not missing at all – they never existed. He got it on the cheap because he knew more about Swift than the bookseller.
“I would never have written the Pen and the Sword without that edition – it excited me to write.”
The pamphlets were sold in a sale of more than 200 books – Michael’s entire Swift collection – to the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.
The £55,000 sale was handled by Brian Lake, a family friend, who runs the booksellers Jarndyce in Museum Street, Bloomsbury.
Beastly treatment for a soldier on the run
from D-Day on Normany beaches
THE court verdict this week on the “beasting” of a squaddie at an army training camp in Wiltshire reminded me of my cousin David.
Etched into my childhood memory is the day David seemed to loom up from nowhere, standing in front of me in the narrow, dark hallway of my home. I, pressed against a row of coats and jackets, stared up at him as he told me what happened to him the day he landed in Normandy on D-Day. Looking back I was a kind of Pip, and he Magwitch from Great Expectations. At the time the guns of the Second World War were still clattering away.
Suddenly, he told how he had got the fright of his life when a German soldier appeared out of nowhere. He didn’t say what happened next, though I suppose he either shot the German or simply fled. The latter is more likely because, on leave back in Manchester, he went AWOL. Perhaps he would never have been found if two fearsome Red Caps (military policemen) hadn’t turned up at his mother’s home and frightened the life out of her.
Trembling, she blurted out that he was upstairs in the attic.
He was given a two-year sentence to be served at the most notorious military camp, or “glass house”, in Britain at Colchester. There he spent much time running around the square with kit-bags filled with sand strapped to his back.
I don’t know what the punishment was known as in those days in the late 1940s but, today, something similar was described as “beasting” at Winchester Crown Court.
David got over his treatment. He went on to raise a family, run a business, and spend a lot of money on his great passion, gambling. He died from a heart attack in his 60s, but, to me, he will always be remembered as my cousin David who landed on D-Day, and didn’t like what happened to him afterwards.
Growing calls for tree tribute to political campaigner Rose Hacker
A LOUD cry of assent rang out yesterday (Wednesday) in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, when it was suggested a tree should be planted in memory of that original political thinker, writer and campaigner Rose Hacker, who died earlier this year at the age of 101.
More than 200 campaigners had gathered to remember the men, women and children who died when the US dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Rose was one of the few, if not the only person who had never missed the annual ceremony since it started 41 years ago.
It was in the square where, to my astonishment, I first heard Rose make a 15-minute, unscripted speech at the age of 100 about the dangers of a nuclear weapons. Within weeks we had persuaded her to write a column for this organ – to become the oldest columnist in the world.
A friend of Rose, Bernard Miller, asked the crowd: “How many of you have been to every one of these? I’ve missed two – Rose never missed any. Perhaps we should have a tree to commemorate Rose.”
His suggestion was welcomed by Islington MP Jeremy Corbyn as well as Tony Benn and Holborn MP Frank Dobson.
Green man Michael Buckley gave a little extra
I USED to take my son to the beautifully choreographed adventure playground in Parkhill Road, Hampstead – and at the time found it to be one of the best-designed in London.
I should have asked myself: Who designed this charming oasis?
I knew the council were responsible for it – and that’s as far, sadly, my enquiring mind went.
So, I was saddened last week to read a report in this organ of the inquest into the death of the man, Michael Buckley, whose creative mind gave birth to Parkhill.
The point is that Mr Buckley was employed by Camden Council in the 1970s and, as a committed civil servant with a sense of public duty, obviously went about setting up Parkhill with the inspired enthusiasm of a painter attacking his canvas.
Far too often we simply enjoy an amenity provided by civil servants without thinking too deeply, if at all, about who actually created it.
At one level, you could say they were just doing their job. And you’d be right. But you can tell just by looking at a park, an adventure playground or the way a library looks whether someone has put a lot of themselves into the creation.
And it’s that which sets one amenity apart from another and allows Mr Buckley to emerge as a public servant.
Glorious Gloria Lazenby's birthday
I DIDN’T meet any Labour bigwigs in the crowded front room of Gloria Lazenby’s home on Saturday – but I wasn’t surprised.
Did I really expect them to raise their glasses to Gloria at her 80th birthday party? Not really.
She had always proved too much of an awkward customer over the many years she served as a Labour councillor in the 1980s and 90s.
Even after her expulsion over a refusal to support a cull by Labour of Camden’s libraries, Gloria almost regained her old seat in Camden Town as an independent.
And anyone who knew her could have predicted what would happen after Labour closed down the Camden Town Neighbourhood Centre three years ago – that she’d turn her own front room into a substitute centre.
It was there the toasts rang out for the kind of radical eccentric political parties are too short of.
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