D Kendall

Vaccinated, I decided to risk a visit to a charity shop at Boländerna, on my to visit list for a long time. I fantasise that the quality of donated books in this most academic of cities must be quite something but I was disappointed – I am evidently not the only book black hole here – they don’t easily escape my clutches. I did find a couple of treasures hidden among the froth: Barrons 501 Hebrew verbs and Lost Beauties of the English Language by Charles Mackay.

Realistically it will be a while before I can tackle Hebrew – I need to get to grips with Bengali, Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Welsh and Provencal first so there is a queue  and for health reasons only a limited quantity of languages are allowed to enter my brain at one time (Mephistopheles are you paying attention……?).  But I am not going to feel properly educated until I at least have an idea of how Hebrew works and in the meantime, it’s cheerful to catch a glimpse of my book of Hebrew verbs alongside my Yiddish dictionary (as competitors at least in Israel, they probably regard it as philistine that I’ve bundled them together like this).

I was quite excited about the Charles Mackay book which is a long list of fine archaic words. It’s a strange volume though, obviously a reproduction of a book from long ago but it contained no details of either author or the book’s history apart from the publishers name Bibliophile Books and that Mackay had an LL.D.

My interest quickened when I saw that Amazon knew about the book and wanted 53 US dollars for it, considerably more than the 25 kronor I parted with for my copy. Looking up Charles Mackay on the net revealed his dates as 1814 to 1889 and the original date of publication of my book as 1874. However, his list of works published included his authorship of the three volume Memoirs of Extremely Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds  as well as a number of works on disparate topics.

His collection of archaic words in “Lost Beauties” was fine but the etymological details are often sparse.

I thought he was possibly an intellectual shipwreck (this is really a case of the pot calling the kettle black,,,,). I decided to give him the benefit of doubt and make a list of some of his words that obviously had Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian origins and then check to see whether I could find these words in my big Webster. And lo and behold most of them were there appropriately clad in etymological detail.

I have been fascinated by words of Scandinavian origin which are English dialect words and have perhaps always been local or else dropped out of the national tongue at some point. I have fantasies about trying to make a long list of dialectical equivalents of Swedish words (for example, “garth” in Northern English (gård) and “grice” in Shetland dialect (gris) and see whether I could construct communications understandable on both sides of the North Sea.. I have dictionaries of the Orkney, Shetland and Yorkshire dialects which should be useful for this project but I think it has to wait until I isolate for a year or so in the next pandemic

I now also have Charles Mackay’s assistance in this project. Here are a few examples of my additions (perhaps not so enlightening for those that don’t understand Swedish):

brant (steep)

fleck (spot, Mackay)

mirk (dark)

moldwarp (mole)

neve (fist)

queme, quem (pleasant)

skelly (squinting)

skink (pour out) (waiter, Mackay)

spae-wife (female fortune teller)

speer (follow a track)

sweer (hard, difficult) (Mackay) reluctant (Webster)

swike (deceive, Mackay)

thig (beg)

thigster  (beggar, Mackay)

tholeable (endurable)

thorp (village)

thrall (slave)

toom (emptied)

toten (peep, Mackay)

wad (wager or bet)

wale (choice)

wanhap (mischance)

There were other words in Mackay which I liked but where I didn’t see an obvious Scandinavian connection:

noonscape (escape from work at noon)

snool (to dispirit by constant chiding)

spoffle (to make oneself very busy over a matter of little consequence)

tanglesome (quarrelsome)

thoughty (pensive)

ugsome (ugly)

ungentleman

wanhope (the waning and disappearance of hope)

These words I shall give an airing to from time to time and try to rescue them from Wordhalla.

I probably won’t go as far as painting them on the side of commuter trains but I’ll do whatever I can that is compatible with my dignity as a double blipping 70 + silver top.

I’ve just finished David Kynaston’s fluently written “City of London. The History”.  It was an exciting read for me dealing with a period I know well but from the perspective of the City of London, It’s based on broad reading; at times I thought the big picture got buried under individuals and details of events. For natural reasons (the focus on the City); the industrial sector tended to be mentioned en passant. To really understand the history and development of British capitalism, I would need to read a book that integrated the industrial and the financial sectors at a higher level of analysis. But there was still a great deal to think about on the topics that interest me.

One such topic is how the financial sector represented by the Stock Exchange articulated and promoted its interests in relation to the UK state (among other things, how coherent these interests were). The pattern that emerges from Kynaston’s book is that the City of London was more effective/cohesive when dealing with relatively short-term threats such as imposition of taxes considered unfavourable and externally imposed tighter regulation but very much weaker at developing long-term strategy for the City/financial sector as a whole. And while there was widespread support for a strategic goal such as the eventual return to the gold standard some time after the First World War, this was based on incorrect assumptions about the ability of the UK economy to cope and unrealistic hopes about how this would restore the pre-First World War predominance of sterling (and thereby the City). The City did revive spectacularly some time after the Second World War but on a different basis to its previous standing. Important for the revival was the Eurodollar market based, among other things, on avoiding the tighter regulation of Wall St and the desire to keep dollars outside the US. A shaky long-term basis as easing of regulations on Wall St could weaken the City of London’s advantages.

In its internal organisation, the City was conservative until the Big Bang under Margaret Thatcher’s government enabled stockbroking and jobbing to take place in the same organisation and restrictions on the international movement of capital were largely removed. Again, while the Big Bang worked more or less as planned at the level of organisational detail, the UK finance sector did not have a strategic vision of its weaknesses or attempt to assess the realism of possible remedies. US capital moved in in earnest and took over almost all of the old merchant banks that still existed (less, for example, Barings!) with a few owned by major European banks. The small UK firms active on the Stock Exchange were no match for the deep pools of capital available to the US banks and finance companies (Here I’m straying beyond Kynaston’s book but his book did confirm much of the picture I have from other reading)..

Unlike the situation in Germany, the British joint stock (high street) banks have been much less involved in financing industry; they had the size (capital) but not the expertise and their attempt to move into the Stock Market was largely unsuccessful. The City of London still exists but, while a number of former UK owners of merchant banks became very rich and many Brits work there, a substantial proportion of the key decisions are made in board rooms in the US.

Kynaston’s book made me reflect on the history of capitalism in the UK. Even though the landowners were supplanted in the nineteenth century by the rising industrial bourgeoisie, aristocratic values lived on in the pre-Second World War Stock Exchange with its relaxed working hours, club-like atmosphere and substantial restriction to the upper echelons of society with its sense of intrinsic worth unrelated to its actual track record. It worked as long as the Stock Exchange was able to operate in a protected environment but crumbled once those conditions no longer applied.

There was much else of interest – the concealment of statistics prior to 1964 so that the situation of the UK economy was much direr than the incoming Wilson Labour government had been led to believe (and reflections about the lack of realism of the social-democratic project even in its highly diluted form). And not just of interest but also of horror at some of the descriptions of casual and not so casual anti-semitism mixed with aristocratic snobbery that flourished in the Stock Exchange environment.

Kynaston’s book is worthy of a second read, a plod read rather than a Wagnerian gallop. I shall try to take notes, which I’m not good at despite having lurked around books for an awful long time. But I shall struggle – the proverb that “old dogs can’t learn new tricks” is ageist (chronochauvinist).

It was a pleasant surprise that Uppsala university library, Carolina Rediviva got hold of “Jerome His Life, Writings and Controversies” by J.N.D. Kelly, London (1975) so quickly so that I could read it while my mind was on the patron saint of translators

I have a much better grasp of Jerome’s life now. The location of his birthplace (Stridon on the border of the then Dalmatia and Pannonia) has not been determined exactly but was then in the Roman sphere of influence in perhaps what is now Bosnia. His education took place in Rome and he was later in Antioch and Constantinople and finally in Bethlehem for many years.

I knew before that he had a reputation for being cantankerous but had a very vague notion of what he was cantankerous about. He certainly grasped the nettle when he undertook to produce a translation of the Old Testament, going back to the Hebrew source to produce a new or at least extensively revised Latin translation, the Vulgate as he thought that there were many problems and distortions with the existing Latin translation from the Greek.

His project met resistance as many wished to defend the long-used traditional text originating from the Septuagint produced by 72 translators who were supposed to have produced identical versions (to the best of my knowledge and belief, this experiment has not been successfully replicated).

This was a very tumultuous period for the Christian church after Constantine had made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. From having been an oppressed clandestine group with many local variations, it was now able to set up institutions and to define what was regarded as orthodox and what was heretical.

Jerome was deeply involved in this process and many of his writings address different positions in the Christian church. His approach was often vituperative, frenetically ad hominem, even against people whom he had long been friends with such as Rufinus; he made many enemies. He was a very profilic writer and Kelly has great admiration for him but points out that Jerome often made mistakes under pressure of time and that considerable portions of his commentaries were recycled from other thinkers (for example, Origen) without the source being stated.

Christianity strikes me as resting on fragile foundations with the Virgin Birth, the resurrection and the divinity of Jesus creating particular problems, giving rise to endless disputes when trying to produce a coherent and credible narrative.  But the period after Constantine was even stranger with feuds developing on, for example, whether the Devil could be rehabilitated and whether the soul had always existed independently of the body. Not to mention the development of ideas among the Gnostics, who, as I understand it, rejected the material world as being the product not of a creator God but of an inferior demiurge.

I have understood that Jerome was cantankerous but that that did not just concern translation but broader issues of Christianity. It is fascinating that so much of his writing has been preserved so that we can read 1,700 years later about his attitude to translation, literal translation v paraphrase and the additional problems posed by the source text being regarded as revelation (my customers don’t generally go quite this far).

I understand now why Jerome was so popular in the period 1400-1500. He was not only a superb Latin stylist (according to Kelly, my credentials as a judge of Latin style are flaky) but he also had a grasp of the Latin classics, Virgil, Cicero, etc. This struck a chord with renaissance thinkers eager to relate to the classical world but still operating in a Christian environment where the influence of the church was great.

These Renaissance thinkers created their own Jerome myth – the historically incorrect cardinal’s clothing but also the very many paintings of Jerome as a hermit in the desert. In fact, his period of isolation in the Syrian desert was fairly short and truncated by ill health. And later, although he lived in relative poverty in Palestine, he was hardly cut off from the rest of humanity, being accompanied by the wealthy Roman convert Paula and others. The pictures of Jerome in his study are those that most accurately reflect his life, as his works of translation and commentary on the Bible were perhaps the most typical activities of his life (I also much prefer these pictures to the others).

The book was also interesting for the connections between Greek philosophy, Neo-platonism and Christianity. It increases my desire to re-read some basic text about the history of philosophy.

On a personal level, I wish that I had had some of this knowledge when my parents drove me away unwillingly to confirmation classes with the local priest (I realised that I couldn’t incorporate Christianity into my view of life at a relatively early age). What a nuisance I could have made of myself with discussions about the nature of the Trinity, the filioque controversy and all the rest of it. I could have surfed out of confirmation classes on a wave of heresy. Instead, I sat through these sessions in mute resistance and eventually let myself be trundled away to the local church for the bishop to lay his hands upon my head. In response to the bishop’s words that we would remember the day for the rest of our lives, I made great efforts to forget the day, so great that I still remember which month it was.

To do my parents justice, they at least admitted later that they thought it had been a mistake.

It takes me a while to settle down after travelling. And I have been reading four books at the same time which adds to my distraction – Norstedt’s Swedish history 600-1350, David Kynaston’s City of London, David Kitchen’s “The political economy of Germany 1895-1914” and Kelly’s Jerome.

In the last few days, I’ve got a grip on myself and have finished the volume on Swedish history.

I read about Swedish history early on in my stay in Sweden but this was a long time ago now and I want to refresh my knowledge now that my grasp of the Swedish language and other things Swedish is so much better. Reading the first volume of the history series was a very satisfactory experience allowing me to view what I’d learnt about Uppsala, not least the mounds and the stories about St Erik, in a broader context.

My reading plans are always over-ambitious. It feels as if one ought to be able to relax a bit and enjoy life when coming up to 76. And while I do enjoy life, I also live with a nagging feeling of discontent because I don’t always or even often fulfil my plan. I am going to try to use time more efficiently by organising it better – a couple of days a week dedicated to serious projects (those focusing on the state of the world), a couple of days on more escapist pursuits (permissible when one is over 70, a silver bonus…), and a couple of days for commercial activity and household work and other banalities.

Not as a rigid iron law but as a general guide for the direction of travel to make better use of time by concentrating activities.

At the moment, in the run up for Hieronymus day (aka Jerome, the patron saint of translators), I’m spending time sorting my Hieronymus pictures (I have collected about 90 reproductions of art work). I was originally thinking of putting them up in a corner of my flat.  However, as I have pictures of Dorset churches from my Dorset church architecture project, introducing Jerome would give visitors the impression that they were entering the home of a devout Christian, which would sit very uneasily with my self-image. I’m also not at all keen on the numerous pictures of Jerome (Hieronymus) as a penitent or hermit in the desert. I find hermits unappealing and pathological – the self-torture and austere existence. I could live with the pictures of Jerome in his study in his (inaccurate) Cardinal’s kit beavering away with translation but not the pics where he is half-naked or equipped with a grubby off-white cloak with stone at the ready to beat his sinful breast.

And the more you read about a subject the more complicated it gets. I read that Jerome’s library was destroyed by the Goths. If I’ve understood the text correctly that was at Stridon, Jerome’s birthplace (the location is disputed but it was in Italy at the time, on the border of the then Dalmatia, possibly in present-day Bosnia). But Jerome is supposed to have broken with his parents and spent most of his time elsewhere in Antioch, Constantinople and above all Rome. And he is also supposed to have had his library with him in his cave in the Syrian wilderness. Did he move his library around all the time like an early version of David Kendall? Or did he leave his classics behind in Stridon and have the new collection of Christian literature with him. Perhaps further reading will throw more light on this.

He wrote so much that we know quite a lot about him, even his thoughts about the clumsiness of direct translation and the need for paraphrases (complicated when the original text is supposed to be the word of God; my Swedish customers don’t go this far). But the patches that are dark are very dark as we are after all reading about events more about 1,700 years ago.

And as well as reading about him, it’s fascinating to study the development of paintings of him, his traditional attributes and the historical distortions (his supposed status as cardinal and pics of him, hob-nobbing with the Virgin Mary, for example).

Not to mention how the simple statement that he greatly improved the quality of the bible translation by going back to Hebrew rather than translating the OT from Greek becomes complicated when you start to look at what has been accepted as being part of the bible at different times and how he treated these various parts.  

The project easily becomes huge and I want to continue it but I need to set a ceiling on the amount of time I devote to it (as I do for my Dorset church architecture project).

Had the scrambled egg at my Copenhagen hotel been just a bit runnier, I would have agreed with the  Booking.com reviewer’s “awesome” . It was all in all a pleasant surprise after an increasingly Dickensian walk through the tatty surroundings of the station.

I appreciated the breakfast as I was too tired last night to go out and eat after tussling with the most difficult part of my journey from Berlin to Uppsala, the underdimensioned Danish railcars from Hamburg to Fredericia, where every vestibule brought associations with the Grapes of Wrath with its uncomfortable heaps of humanity and piles of possessions.

My head is still full of images and memories of Berlin. I realised the other day that it’s 50 years since I first visited the city, arriving somewhere along Ku’damm between Bahnhof Zoologischer Garten and the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedächtnis church, bleary eyed after hitchhiking all night from the Ruhr, part of the journey made as helmetless pillion passenger on a fast motorcycle (this must have been before I reached Helmstedt). Once in Berlin, I went to Bernauerstrasse in Wedding early in the day to look over the wall and wonder at the strangeness of it all.

I spent the night at a commune in West Berlin although I don’t remember how I made the contact. I remember lying on the floor in my sleeping bag, half awake when the police banged on the door in the middle of the night purportedly in search of some mislaid teen. And rattling away on the S-bahn the following day somewhere around Westkreuz  in eager discussion with one of the commune dwellers.

I don’t remember where I slept after that but the next day I went to GDR Berlin, walking in some ordinary residential district close to the centre.

There have been many more trips since then. I often made a detour when I travelled overland from the UK to Sweden, to visit Berlin. I was fascinated by being able to move from one social system to another by a short journey on the S-bahn from Zoo bahnhof to Friedrichstrasse. I was depressed by the heritage of Stalinism which eventually crushed the hopes for a new Germany but relieved by the virtual absence of advertising, the feeling of natural adequacy when objects were products for use and not for profit, the serious bookshops full of classics (I had no problems with shortage of things I wanted to buy, only a shortage of GDR marks).

And fascinated by the quirks arising from making borders between municipal districts into a national frontier. I walked long distances along the border, inspected it more closely from the West as visual access from the east was often shielded. And visited semi-exclaves like Steinstücken where you could wave at people in the East who waved back, as you looked down on the border which was in a ditch at one point. However, I never travelled with the farmer whose tractor was apparently accompanied by the border police to some isolated field in the GDR that belonged to west Berlin. Or with allotment owners whose plots were in the east and who had to ring on a bell on a gate in the wall to be let through, safe in the knowledge that their cucumbers were protected from filchers by umpteen divisions of the Soviet army.

And amusing episodes such as standing on Friedrichstrasse after leaving the border facility when a border guard came running towards me at full speed. Even though I take the little songs about stone faced border guards with a lorryload rather than a pinch of salt, it was still unnerving. The border guard came to a halt before me and handed over various papers and whatever else it was that I had forgotten on his shelf when searching unsystematically for my passport. And then left me with a shy smile.

And another time when a car stalled and wouldn’t start in a street with administrative buildings but few people in central Berlin. And I helped the driver push start his vehicle. I liked the idea of me getting the machinery of the GDR into motion – it’s not often that I feel like Hercules so I have to savour and preserve these moments well.

Later there were more trips to Berlin when I was pretending to do a PhD and even more when one of my children lived there and now again to see friends.

I enjoy the freedom to visit Berlin’s surroundings (just recently to Greifswald) and the city still interests and attracts me but I am nostalgic for what has been lost as well as gained. I felt closer to the old working class Germany in the GDR, the Germany before the horrors of the 1930s and the Nazis and before the American veneer. I was also fascinated by the glimpses of a life that could be organised differently from our western dance around the golden calf or rather timeless dance around the black hole of capital, glimpses of an everyday life without the profit motive that could be seen despite all the distortions of Stalinism.

It’s increasingly hard to see the physical differences between the former West Germany and the GDR. The tone felt different in smaller, less affluent towns like Wolgast on the Baltic but the shops in Greifswald and even more in Potsdam are as plush as those in the old West. An architect could see the still abundant prefabricated buildings, the “plattenbau”, but the tell-tale semi-ruined buildings where ownership is disputed are becoming fewer and fewer in number. And now you have to be in your thirties to have any memory of life in the GDR.

I am reading, working and making some progress but it all feels rather “staccato” just now, difficult to get up to “cruising speed” and feel confident of where I am going.

Most satisfying just now is Norstedt’s Sveriges Historia 600-1350 (Swedish History). Some time long ago in the dawn of my Swedish pre-history, I read through a multi-volume of Swedish history. I’ve felt for some time that it was time to repeat this exercise now that I both know Swedish and Sweden much better. The first volume has been very satisfactory as it takes up and evaluates the sources of, for example, the myths around Gamla Uppsala, which I’ve wondered about. And critically analyses the use made of the thin sources to construct a desired history of Sweden based on doubtful assumptions.

I am struggling with Bengali. I have made progress with the alphabet although the joined consonants, the conjuncts, are a sting in the tail which is going to take time to master. I am impatient to get on to the section of the book which is more focused on conversation so that I can string together some of the Bengali words I’ve become familiar with.

And, as a minor project, I am making good progress with the German cult novel Albert Vigoleis Thelen’s Die Insel des zweiten Gesichts. My German is not good enough to read such a complicated novel but I have it in English too “The Island of Second Sight”. If I read a couple of pages in English and then read the German, it works well for me, although I realise that I need to go through the section a third time to make a note of some of the new words. The translation seems good but at times rather free in a way that I don’t always grasp the justification for.

Being in the UK for six weeks has helped me to adjust to a freer existence now that I am fully vaccinated. I am still being careful but now use public transport more and not just very early in the morning. It does feel rather hard to go back to using the commuter (pendel) trains to get to Stockholm after months of luxuriating alone in first class on the regional trains. As I suspected travelling first class rapidly felt like the minimum acceptable standard but I’d better wean myself off this.

Hopefully the small signs of returning normality do mean that we are in the end game of the pandemic although it’s hard to be sure.

 I was pleased to see that Uppsala’s best second hand bookshop “Röda Rummet” has opened for visitors again. I couldn’t resist buying a small pamphlet from 1920 published in German in “Kleine Bibliothek der Russischen Korrespondenz, “Drei Kundgebungen aus dem Jahre 1918” by N. Lenin, including among other things a letter to the US workers and an open letter to Woodrow Wilson. It fascinated me as it was published so early after the Russian Revolution. It uses, for example “N. Lenin”, which was the abbreviated first name that Lenin used when using his “false name”´(this was before he became so well-known that Lenin by itself was enough to identify him). It seems rather odd that the Russian revolutionaries should have used such names not just within the party but when wanting to be clandestine in the wider society as one would think that names like “Stalin” (man of steel), “Molotov” (hammer) and Lenin (leonine???) would attract unwanted attention. Trotsky’s adoption of an ordinary Russian surname seems safer.

At the end of the pamphlet, it advertises other works in the series by Bukharin, Radek and Trotsky, later purged and killed by the stalinists, among others whose fate I am unaware of.

What made the pamphlet even more interesting was that it had been owned and was signed by Signe Sillén, the wife of Hugo Sillén, leader of the pro-Comintern fraction who expelled Karl Kilbom in 1929 (who formed a new party, later called the Socialist Party, and eventually moved back to social democracy). According to some sources, there were serious doubts in the party about Sillén’s capacity as a leading cadre but he couldn’t be dislodged as Stalin favoured him, suspecting that Kilbom would make common cause with Bukharin (the two fractions in the CP had been named after Sillén and Kilbom although Sillén was not actually in a leading position in the party at the time). The pamphlet has probably emerged now as the Silléns had a daughter who lived to a ripe old age (90 something) and died not so many years ago. She had presumably inherited some of the Silléns’ library, which was then sold or donated to Röda Rummet.

I haven’t made notes on words that have come my way with one exception. I became curious about the etymology of the word “hectoring”  which is defined as talking in a bullying way, a hector being a braggart or a bully. The explanation I have seen is that it originates from the name of a youth gang in  late seventeenth century England, who presumably adopted their name (Hectors) from the ancient Greek warrior and went around bullying people and getting Hector a bad name. There seem to be quite a few similar such groups through history both earlier and later. There ware also the Mohocks in the seventeenth century who attacked and mutilated men and sexually assaulted women and the Damned Crew. These groups apparently attracted some young men who were of aristocratic origin. They make “Hooray Henrys” seem benign.

What shocked me about Yeovil was that the town had no museum open to the public. The Museum of South Somerset closed about ten years ago and its collections were put into store, available for inspection on request but not to the casual visitor. I could not imagine that this would still be the case ten years later but it is so. It’s depressing that a town of 45,000 people, large by Somerset standards, should have so little interest in its history (that sentence requires unpacking, of course, – who has so little interest, which politicians, which sections of the population and what history?).

With tough government cuts to local government finance, the ruling local politicians clearly did not regard the history of the town as so important as to spare it from the axe. And lean local government, doing what it is bound to do by statute and leaving other responsibilities to the private sector has been the spirit of the age. I’ve not been aware either of popular unrest at the lack of a museum. although I’m sure that I’m not alone in deploring it.

Museums haven’t disappeared altogether – there is a motor museum at Sparkford not far away, a museum on the history of the naval air force at the Yeovilton air base. And various museums of rural life and those attached to country houses such as Montacute. But these are private businesses, perhaps of good quality but giving only a partial, specialised view of the past. However, they seem to thrive and to have captured the public’s interest in the way that the public local museum’s dutiful plod from the artefacts of pre-history through the various local industries does not. The development reminds me of the waning and disappearance of the old department stores and their replacement by small specialized shops.

Even the museums that are open worry about lack of interest in their collections and how to increase footfall (and revenue). It’s not hard to understand the temptation to attract the public by more aggressive marketing and to make the museum into entertainment. But I think this road is full of pitfalls and I don’t like it. The chatty circulars even from the venerable British Library make me cringe. I hope very much that the wonderful Victorian room at the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester with Thomas Hardy’s study will survive the makeover. But reading about the tour of Dippy the Dinosaur while the museum was otherwise closed and looking at the bookshop, a shadow of its former self, with a justified selection of Hardy’s novels on display together with  a heap of anywhere items, doesn’t make me feel optimistic. Hopefully, it will be better when the Covid-delayed move back is completed.

Yesterday, I went by train on the fine country branch line from Yeovil to Dorchester, across the river valley and then into the limestone hills through Yetminster, where you change for Ryme Intrinseca and through Maiden Newton for Cerne Abbas with its scanty monasterial remains and the chalk giant on the hillside, once visited by women of the tract wanting to improve their fertility (not sure whether the giant worked for men as well but I kissed my then wife while looking at it and have four children in all, one pre-giant and three post-giant so there may be something in it).

Dorchester is the county town and also the cultural centre of the county with its records office and museum which has a good library of Dorset books. I wanted to check what they had on church history, especially on the ambitious programme of rebuilding in the nineteenth century (after eighteen century neglect, the authorities were perhaps eager to promote the church as a means of social control against the background of the French revolution and the expressions of discontent about the suffrage).

I found a few interesting books but there wasn’t as much as I’d hoped. Nineteenth-century church restoration does seem to be something of a gap to be filled by research. Perhaps the diocesan (church) library at Salisbury would offer more.

I have to think, however, about how much time and effort I’m prepared to devote to this subject. My aim is to have a living relationship with Dorset and to be able to understand what I’m looking at/reading about. I like to be able to dip into Dorset from time to time but don’t want the study of Dorset to close over my head so that there is no room for other things that interest me. I now feel that I know enough about Dorset churches to have a framework for further visits and thought but I should probably move on to another topic rather than becoming engrossed in the equivalent of a PhD. Among other things, I’d like to look at the large houses of the county, their architecture, of course, but also their effect on the community around them, on enclosure, agriculture and on landholding over the past couple of hundred years and up to the present.

Again up to a certain level without getting bogged down so I shall probably decide to read about this for a definite period.

After I’d done the serious stuff, I started browsing through the rest of the museum library’s collection. Surprisingly they still have a card index. The Museum obtained a large amount of lottery funds for an extensive rebuilding and extension. Their move back into the building was probably seriously delayed by covid so they had not really settled down in their refurbished quarters. I’m very nervous about the rebuild as I fear that the process of making the museum more “community-friendly” may damage some of the things I loved about the old museum, but that’s a long topic for another blog post.

I found some information about my great great grandfather in an old book of reminiscences about my ancestor’s village Marnhull published by the Women’s Institute in 1940, reproduced below. It’s not the most flattering story but I think that my popping up in St Gregory’s Church in sackcloth and ash to make an official apology on behalf of the latter day Kendall family for their nineteenth-century loose chatter might be overdoing it a bit.

“Jimmy Kendall, who kept the Crown Inn, was the leading man in running the old Marnhull Club fete and prepared the dinner on Club Day. he was talking to an excise officer outside the Crown Inn, when Harry Cressy passed, driving a [horse-drawn] van with a relative beside him. Jimmy passed a remark to the excise officer, whether the van was licensed to carry women.  The excise officer made enquiries and in due course a summons was issued against  Harry Cressy. This resulted in a local bad feeling against Jimmy Kendall. A short time later an effigy was found hanging from an elm tree in “Bowling Green” (just below the Crown). It remained there a few days, was then taken down, put in a coffin and a procession of “mourners” paraded the village.  When outside the Crown, the coffin was let drop with a bump on the road. There was a “widow” dressed in white in the procession, which proceeded to the field “Wood” (opposite the “Blackmoor Vale”) where the “burial” took place.

This was known as “Jimmy’s Fete” (? fate).

This reminds me of the custom of the Skimmington Ride which Hardy refers to in the Mayor Casterbridge, where villagers stage a noisy mock serenade directed at someone who had outraged what the villagers regard as public decency (perhaps in cases of adultery).

The pub where my great great grandfather, James Kendall, was the publican was portrayed in Tess of the D’Urbervilles as the Pure Drop Inn I believe the date when he (and later his wife) managed the pub more or less coincides with the presumed date of the events in Tess.

I’m very happy about this Dorset connection with Hardy and Marnhull.

I also found out a bit more information about my great grandfather, Christopher Kendall. I knew he was a carpenter but he was apparently, more particularly a wheelwright, like his son Harry Kendall, my grandfather who died in 1895.

It’s amusing when there is a chink in the curtain of forgotten history providing information about long veiled ancestors. I must attend to my archive so that it doesn’t get forgotten again!

There used to be another manor in Marnhull called Kentlesworth, the location of which is unclear. I believe the surname of our family may derive from this name. I found an etymological explanation of the name Kentlesworth. The latter part is from the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) word “weorp” (the p I suspect is a misunderstood Saxon “th”) meaning farm or enclosure. The Kentle is said to originate from the sixth-century Anglo-Saxon name Caentel, so that it would be “Caentel’s Farm”:If this is correct, the family surname originates far back in history and long before the Conquest from an Anglo-Saxon called Caentel.

There are a number of other place names in West England where Caentel forms part of the name. This is, of course, speculative but it seems not unreasonable.

There is also an important Cornish-Welsh poet with a name resembling Kendall, whom I made efforts to appropriate as an ancestor but as the evidence was non-existent (I couldn’t prove a link between Marnhull and Cornwall), I reluctantly have to regard this as less likely). There are also villages in the area with “Caundle” as part of their name from the River Caundle, which is another possibility but I think that when adopting a surname, it would seem intuitively more reasonable for a person to be named as being of a manor than of a river, though “of Caundle” as one of the villages would be a more convincing candidate.

More evidence could perhaps be obtained if I brushed up my Latin and mediaeval clerk’s latin and consulted the manorial records to see what the history of surnames was like in the area (were there were many “Kendalls” in the Caundles, for instance).

My journey to West England began with a taxi driver who wasn’t up to speed with the road closures around Waterloo. We orbited round the station for a while before making a successful landing (decently, he reduced the price). Then our train had to make a lengthy detour because of a broken rail at Winchester. We became so late that the next train caught up with us and they turfed me off the train before my final stop so that they could send it back to London. Sensible in normal times but a dubious step during a pandemic. I managed to avoid the crowds and the unmasked but at the expense of sitting close to a family with a young child offering a broad range of turbulence services. Having had four children, I’m tolerant towards them in trains but on this occasion, I hoped fervently at every stop that they would get off but, of course, they accompanied me all the way to the seaside at Weymouth, where I missed the connection to my final stop, Yeovil in Somerset. But these tribulations were only a minor dent in the good mood, almost dreamy euphoria, that I always feel when returning to the area that is home for at least 30 per cent of me.

My original plan was to stay in Dorchester to use the libraries there and continue with my Dorset church project. But this year, the English, barred from everywhere else except South Georgia, Tristan da Cunha, Ascension Island and Dubai, are flocking to the traditional seaside resorts and the coastal strip was fully booked. But it’s not bad to be inland, close to where I lived as a teenager in a town full of memories; standing in a telephone kiosk with my mother wondering at the ancientness of the place as she dialled the operator to be connected with an aunt in a village not 10 miles away. That aunt worked from home stitching parts of gloves together for local firms. And sitting on the fine old green Southern National double decker to Martock, seeing another bus to the village of Tintinhull in front of us and associating it with the word tintinabulations, the ringing of bells that I’d picked up somewhere. It was a wonderful place for a boy from the more mainstream, almost suburban Sussex coast. And later, after we’d moved to the west on my father’s retirement, as a teenager in a Yeovil cinema in my pyjama jacket which I’d persuaded myself looked chic, disturbed at my companion’s reasonable reaction that I was wearing a pyjama jacket. I didn’t repeat this sartorial experiment. The past is a strange place – they (and me) do weird stuff there.

Yeovil is also a fine name, “the vil” probably being misunderstood by the Normans as being like “ville” which they would have been familiar with. In fact, it probably comes from a Celtic word meaning a fork in a river. The Anglo-Saxons seem to have taken the word over and “gaffel” today means “fork” in Swedish. It’s interesting that the Anglo-Saxons took over so few Brythonic Celtic words but they did use a lot of Celtic river names and here even a word associated with rivers.

I’ve mostly worked translating a contract since I got here and tomorrow I have a company’s interim report to do. But after that I’m free for the rest of the week. Thoughts about restoring old buildings have been floating through my mind. I must get hold of some material about the restoration of Notre Dame in Paris. It’s interesting because some of the parts destroyed in the fire were not ancient but the nineteenth century work of Viollet-le-Duc (the spire). I wonder how or whether they will replace these, as well as how they will deal with the really ancient wood trusses that were destroyed and played a part in the ease with which the fire spread. They will presumably be replaced by something more modern and safer, but how will they (or have they) put that on top of ancient masonry not built to bear greater loads. There are differences in French approaches and attitudes to restoration/extension of old buildings. According to my prejudices, the French are less sentimental, more prone to making an elegant modern statement attractive by contrast. I shall be interested to see where they have landed and will search for articles when I get back to base in ten days or so.

Thursday, 1 July 2021

Waking up in a chill English hotel room, it takes me a while to extricate myself from the confused jumble of the Financial Times, hearing aids, spectacles, my Pradaxa necklace and other existential flotsam and jetsam on the bed where I’d thrown myself after an intensive day helping a paralysed friend get a computer to the repair shop.

It was complicated to start with as we didn’t understand which button to press to lower the wheelchair to avoid decapitating my friend on the roof of the not altogether suitable vehicle. But once on our way, weaving across Hertfordshire from Borehamwood to Watford, it was smooth enough, even enjoyable.

The computer repair man was kindness itself, coming out to our vehicle and explaining how all might not be lost on the hard disk despite the computer’s reluctance to start.

I’ve hardly met anyone new for the past year while my friend has met lots of carers but not been out of the care home so we are both diversely dazed. But I’m impressed as well by meeting so many people who probably aren’t paid that much with poor working conditions who could easily respond to the direness of life grimly or bureaucratically but who were instead prepared to help someone who needed a break.

I didn’t like Borehamwood to start with. I found  it run down, suburban, tatty without much architectural or other interest. But it’s growing on me – there are many odd shops, stores selling Romanian, Bulgarian and other East European foods, which I fear may fade away post-Brexit but which are a welcome change from the bland sameness of modern retail. There’s also the Elstree film studios, with hopeful clusters at the side of the approach roads looking for a glimpse of famous figures unknown to me. It all makes for a quirky mix although I wouldn’t want to live here.

And later  today, I’ll travel down to Islington to meet other later friends. London has become a city of shades and memories for me, where old friends have died or moved on in life and not been replaced as I am not involved in any social activity  here. But I enjoy being there and meeting those that remain, although the bad air and general bustle overpower me now.

In a couple of days time, I will resurrect another old friend, my west country self, when I travel down to Dorset to round off my Dorset church project. I am going to spend time in the libraries of Dorchester and see what they have to offer on nineteenth century church restorations. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing about this – the development of neo-gothic, architectural and aesthetic aspects, the impact, positive and negative on historic buildings, the details of the building process (where did the stone used come from, etc., which builders, architects were involved),the influence on restorations of ideological developments within the believer community (and the social composition of the Anglicans and relationship to non-conformism and the latter’s neo-gothic buildings), the response to the wave of restorations and growing resistance. This would be good to round off my project but this plan is too massive, too much of a time swamp if done well when I want to shift focus to other projects. I think therefore that I will make a preliminary study of how such a study might be written, its components/structure/important issues and what material is available and where but not actually produce it; as much as I can achieve in a week, to be continued in small spurts when I feel I want to think about Dorset but not so much that Dorset closes over my head and gets in the way of other work that is important for me.