The end of a populist Prime Minister

Posted on 6th June 2022 by Ian

Anyone who cares to read The Great Outsider: The Life of David Lloyd George, Roy Hattersley’s account of the life of the last Liberal prime minister, is led to the unmistakable conclusion that Lloyd George was not a pleasant man. His years seemed to have been marked by a single-minded pursuit of what he wanted, whether in politics, or in his succession of relationships with women.

Lloyd George’s tactic was not to argue on the basis of philosophy or policy, but to launch personal attacks on anyone who opposed him, even if they were within his own party

Single-mindedness brought profound reform, including the groundbreaking introduction of old age pensions, but also brought the destruction of his party.

At the end of the First World War, Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George, anxious to retain his position at the head of a National Government, threw in his lot with the Conservatives, splitting his party but retaining the premiership in a coalition.

In the previous, pre-war, General Election, the Liberal Party had won 272 seats against 271 for the Conservatives. In 1918, Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberals won just 127 seats, while 36 more were won by Liberals opposed to the Coalition  – a net loss of more than a hundred Liberal seats.  By contrast, the National Conservatives, led by Andrew Bonar Law won 332 seats with a further 47 seats being won by Tories opposed to the Coalition.  From a pre-war situation of parity, the Liberals slipped to one of huge numerical inferiority; a decline from which they have never recovered.

By 1922, there was increasing disquiet within Tory ranks about involvement in the Lloyd George led Coalition Government.  The combined Tory Parliamentary strength was 313 members in the Coalition and 65 opposed; Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberals were down to 120 seats, with a further 35 non-coalition Liberals in the House.

On 19th October 1922, Conservative MPs met at the Carlton Club to debate their support for Lloyd George.  The vote against the Coalition continuing was 187-87.  Andrew Bonar Law was invited to form a government and immediately went to the country.

In the General Election of November 1922, the Conservatives, now united, won 344 seats, the Liberals, still divided won 115, the former opponents of the Coalition gaining 62 while Lloyd George was reduced to having a parliamentary bloc of just 53 seats.

There were to be elections in the two subsequent years, the Liberals staged a minor comeback in 1923, when the Conservatives won 258 seats, Labour 191, and the reunited Liberal Party 158.  However, a year later, the end of Liberal politics was complete. On 29th October 1924, the Conservatives won 412 seats, Labour 151 and the Liberals a mere 40.

Through subsequent elections the Liberal Party remained a peripheral party, even the collapse of the Labour Party in 1931 did not allow a Liberal revival.  By 1945, they were reduced to twelve seats and slipped into single figures in the 1950s and 1960s.

Perhaps the decline was inevitable, perhaps the rise of the Labour Party in the 1920s left no room for the Liberal Party, but their long decline dates from involvement in a Coalition government, an involvement prompted by a man for whom politics was about himself.

In some ways he seems not dissimilar from the current occupant of Number Ten. A man in whom the 1922 Committee have been losing their condidence.

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Run down

Posted on 5th June 2022 by Ian

Somewhere, there is a photograph of me on a French Mediterranean beach in early- August 1989.

It was the height of summer, the autoroutes that brought us from the Channel port had been filled with traffic moving at walking pace. The beach was a place with barely space to spread out a towel.

Under the Languedoc sunshine, I am sat on a towel, wearing T-shirt and shorts, I have a large towel pulled tightly around my shoulders. I still remember the feeling of cold as I sat there. Beginning a holiday, my health had immediately plummeted.

It was a pattern that was to be repeated. I developed doctor-diagnosed flu on holiday in Brittany in 1995.

Perhaps I should have been more wary about the impending end of year.

Teaching ended Friday week ago, and I set off to Marseille the next morning.

The rugby final was a trip to which I had been looking forward for months. It wouldn’t have mattered who was playing. The flight to Lyon, the TGV journey south, the game at the Stade Velodrome, each moment was to be a memorable finale to the year.

However, there was a feeling of indifference, a sense of overwhelming tiredness. Returning for the in house exams last week, attempts at cheer were difficult. Moments were heavy.

Even writing my blogs became a chore too many. For the Fainthearted has been online for eighteen years. There were times when I would still write a new post even if I hadn’t got home until after eleven o’clock. Last week, none of it seemed worth the effort.

Perhaps there was the onset of some existential crisis. Perhaps the black dog that has been warded off all through the winter months had taken the opportunity of the arrival of the summer days to unexpectedly pounce.

Through the past days there has been a nagging pain in my left shoulder. Sometimes the nagging would become a stab. Having no memory of lifting anything heavy in the past week or wrenching a muscle, the cause of pain was baffling.

This morning, a neat rash of red blisters had appeared on the skin covering my shoulder, the source of the sharp stinging sensation was evident.

It is some thirty-odd years since I last suffered shingles. It had arrived in June, after the final year of training for ordination. A time that should have been buoyant had ended flatly.

The consolation of being run down is that the curve can only turn upwards.

 

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A magical mystery Tor

Posted on 1st June 2022 by Ian

My friend thinks Glastonbury is a magical place, she is not alone in her opinion.

The walls of a circular room at the county museum in Taunton are inscribed with comments on Somerset and its people. Quotes from famous writers include words that are pejorative as well as ones more complimentary, words from unexpected sources appear, among them a comment from John Steinbeck, who stayed in the east Somerset town of Bruton in 1959:

The other night, I discovered that fifty feet from our house, through a break in the trees, you can see St Michael’s Tor at Glastonbury.  There is no question that there is magic here, and all kinds of magic.

“You should have come to High Ham, instead,” I thought, “you wouldn’t have had to go fifty feet from your house.”

When a blanket of mist comes down over the Levels, if you look north-east from the village, the Tor, that had caught the eye of John Steinbeck, rises like an island from a sea of white fluffiness.

It would not have been hard to imagine how Steinbeck had looked across a nocturnal landscape and thought it had a certain undefinable quality.

A Nobel laureate, John Steinbeck was a writer who captured a sense of 1930s America, the years of the Great Depression. His novel The Grapes of Wrath describes lives lived in the context of grim realities, not much magic of any sort. Why would a writer remembered for detailed depictions of people’s struggle for daily existence talk in terms of a place possessing “all kinds of magic?”

“Magic” is always a subjective quality attributed to a place or experience by a person; where one person saw a stone tower, John Steinbeck saw something else.

It does seem, though, that some places are more likely to be ascribed ethereal qualities, that some places possess a capacity to inspire the imagination. Perhaps it is the accumulation of custom and tradition, perhaps it is the passing on of stories and folk tales, that imbue locations with qualities that cannot be photographed or measured.

Glastonbury Tor is not magical, instead it is the focal point of centuries of storytelling, what Steinbeck saw was not magic, but a great mass of interwoven tales and traditions. Places now prosaic might become magical for those of generations to come.

 

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French lessons with Laurelle and Jean

Posted on 29th May 2022 by Ian

Travelling from Lyon to Marseille on a Saturday afternoon had been a delightful experience.

I had never travelled on a TGV before and sat in the top deck of a carriage watching the Provençal countryside pass by. The end of May and the cornfields seemed ready for harvest. Wondering why we seemed only to be rolling along through the Saturday afternoon sunshine, I opened the web page that was home to the train’s Wifi system. It included a live map that allowed you to track the progress of the train and showed the current speed. We were ‘rolling’ along at 296 kmh, 24 kmh short of the maximum operational speed of 320 kmh.

It had been such a delightful experience yesterday that I had looked forward to this morning’s return journey. The train was due to depart from Marseilles at 0810. Who would want to be catching a train to anywhere at such a time on a Sunday morning?

The queue for the train was rather longer than it had been yesterday. Looking at my ticket, I saw the seat was ‘bas’ rather than ‘haut’, the view would not be as good. I also noticed that it said ‘famille’, I wasn’t sure what this meant. When booking in March, I had just accepted whatever seats I had been allocated, travelling alone, what did it matter where I sat?

Finding seat No 38 in Carriage No 17 on the train which had the final destination of Mannheim in Germany, I found it was indeed a family seat. Beside me was a young mother with a baby, opposite her sat her husband, and opposite me sat Laurelle.

I struggled along in my schoolboy French until the mother revealed she had studied engineering at an English university, at which point I thought I could stop my destruction of the language . Laurelle, however, wanted to continue in French because Laurelle was six years old.

‘Apprends tu l’anglais?’ she asked me.

‘Mais, oui,’ her father laughed.

‘Je parle anglais,’ I replied, ‘Et toi?’

Laurelle was just beginning to learn English at school. It was refreshing to discover that she had not grown up on a diet of English language television.

Laurelle told me about her school and about her teacher, whom she liked. She told me that she liked living in Marseilles and asked me what Dublin was like.

She asked me my name, ‘Ian, I replied, ‘en francais, Jean.’ Thereafter she prefaced each question with, ‘Jean.’

‘Jean, quel age as-tu?’ She thought sixty-one was a very old age to be.

She told me about the red plastic Disney figure she carried with her. I had no clue to the name of the character in English, so would have had no chance of identifying it in French. She showed me her Disney colouring book and offered a lengthy explanation as to why she was colouring the tree trunks in one picture purple.  I muttered ‘oui’ at what seemed to be appropriate moments, hoping that I was not saying that I hoped her character would be eaten by a dragon or run over by a spaceship.

An alarming moment came. Laurelle’s mother had gone with the baby in one direction, her father then stood up and went in the other direction. I was riding in a train at one hundred and eighty miles per hour with a six year old French girl who greatly overrated my ability to understand what she was saying.

Then there came a realisation that this was probably one of the greatest achievements to which I might ever have aspired. Parents prepared to entrust their six year old daughter  to the supervision of ‘le professeur.’ (I love the way the French accord their teachers such a title). To be a complete stranger and to be thus trusted brought a smile.

Laurelle appeared not to notice the absence of her parents. She explained in detail the colour scheme she was going to use for one of the Disney pictures. There was to be a lot of ‘marron’, brown, I think. I wondered why there had not been more brown used for the trees.

We pulled into Lyon and went our separate ways. I wished them well as they walked towards the platform where a train bound for the Gare de Lyon in Paris stood waiting.

Never before in my life have I attempted to speak so much French. It was a lesson, if one were needed, that immersion is far more effective than classroom lessons

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A tradition of quackery

Posted on 27th May 2022 by Ian

Do you get those emails offering you patent medicines at knockdown prices? The ones that offer you a cure to conditions you never had? And even conditions you could not possibly have?

Quackery is nothing new. The 19th Century was a great age for “patent cures”, few of which were efficacious in anything other than parting gullible people from their money, but maybe the problem lies not with the quacks, but with those persuaded the need a cure.

The opening page of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat is very funny. Published in 1889, it captures a sense of those who might be ready to spend money in the belief that such expenditure was a matter of vital necessity:

It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.

Lest such thinking be thought peculiar to the 19th Century, look at how many websites now deal with symptoms of every imaginable illness (and some unimaginable ones); look at how many are dedicated to providing ‘health care advice’ and how many offer ‘alternative’ remedies at discount prices.

Science does not come into it; there is a deep-rooted human need to feel ill and to believe that a remedy beyond the wit of doctors is available to whoever is ready to pay for it.

Three men in a boat went on a holiday – a bit of exercise, a well-known cure for many a malaise.

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