stuff 'n other stuff

I was idly surfing the web the other day and I came across a report in the Irish Times where the Prime Minister admitted erroneously claiming that Lenin had visited Ireland in the company of Michael Collins.

Lenin of course did no such thing. The thing which interested me was the claim that Lenin spoke English with a ‘Rathmines accent’.

Nothing wrong with that. Just unexpected. Following his long exile in Switzerland I would have expected his English to be German accented if anything. However the idea of Lenin speaking with a Dublin accent has clearly intrigued others as this excellent and well researched post shows.

It is of course, not impossible that Lenin had an Irish accent. What’s intriguing is that if it’s so no one seems to have mentioned it. For example, Arthur Ransome recounts a number of conversations with Lenin in 1919, but doesn’t mention his accent ( or indeed what language they spoke together) …

Have you ever tried to buy envelopes recently?

It’s a lot harder than you would expect. I’ve written before about the death of the letter, but this took me by surprise. I needed to but some plain envelopes. Most times if I need to send a letter I just use one of the prepaid ones you can get from the post office in packs of ten – I write so few letters these days that a pack of ten lasts me at least a couple of years.

However, this time I needed a plain envelope. An ordinary plain letter sized envelope. The sort you used to be able to buy just about anywhere. Nothing special about it.

So I went to the campus stationery store. Nope. None to be had.

Time was when they carried a choice, letters home to mum, letters to girlfriends and boyfriends, letters overseas, letters applying for jobs, scholarships and the like. Not any more. Mum’s on Facebook, and skype and IM are just so much more immediate …

The post office of course only sold prepaid ones, but could sell me lots of padded bags to send things to people. No plain envelopes. No market for them.

The conclusion is that people no longer write letters – or when they do its to send something which can’t be emailed and that that’s a pretty rare event ….

As I’ve said before, one of the defining features of the British colonies in South East Asia was their small population size compared to the local population. For example in 1911 the European population of KL was under a 1000 while the combined Malay and Chinese population was in excess of 50,000 – and that was the colonial capital where you would expect a concentration of the colonial population.

So how small was small?

Well, as with so many things Wikipedia is your friend if a trifle imperfectly.

• Asia
  • Myanmar 0.1% – may have been higher in 1948
  • Malaysia 0.2% – may have been higher in 1956
  • Singapore 1.3%
• Africa
  • Kenya 0.7% – at independence in 1963
  • Rhodesia 5.4% during UDI
  • South Africa 9% – current estimate

The trend is quite clear – the former British colonies in Asia have (and probably had) tiny whilte populations while those in Southern Africa were larger.

The interesting one is of course Kenya. Given its history one might have expected it to be more like Rhodesia, but no, the white population was never much more than 60,000, but this was with a backdrop of an increasing and land hungry indigenous population.

The other thing as we’ve seen before, is that the small size of the population met that the same people were continually flung together, and so might explain some of the excesses of the white population in Kenya in colonial times.

Rhodesia and South Africa were the only ones to have a significant (and urban) white minority, making them much more than just a gaggle of farmers, administrators and hangers on, and who could either be bought out, as in Kenya, or who (mostly) had no stake in the country as was the case with the populations of the Asian colonies.

In the course of my background reading about things colonial including the Proudlock murder I kept coming across the name Bruce Lockhart.

You don’t forget a name like that – and a couple of minutes with wikipedia shows him to be the same Bruce Lockhart who was a British agent in post revolutionary Russia and possible implicated in the Fanya Kaplan plot, and also helped Arthur Ransome’s (he of Swallows and Amazons fame) lover Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina who was Trotsky’s secretary leave Russia.

Tangled – from a murder on  verandah in colonial Malaya to the Lake district by way of the murder of Nicholas ii and a failed assasination attempt on Lenin …

As part of my background reading about Myanmar, which is rapidly turning into an informal unstructured study of British colonialism in Burma and South East Asia I’ve been reading, end enjoying immensely, Beth Ellis’s An English Girl’s First Impressions of Burmah which is truly a little gem of late Victorian travel writing. (Besides the UK Kindle edition and various paperback reprints there is also a US Kindle edition and a free version from Project Gutenberg).

It’s amusing, witty, and paints a quietly fascinating picture of the minutiae of colonial life. It should definitely be better known.

However there are two puzzles.

Beth Ellis refers to the hill station she visits as Remyo, though no such placename can be found by googling or on wikipedia. She visited before the railway line as complete but describes the railway having been pre built awaiting the arrival of the line. We also know that it was somewhere near Mandalay and took two days to get to using a combination of horse riding and carriage. We also know that you could look out onto the Shan State hills.

We know that Beth Ellis visited in 1897/8 and that the railway through Maymyo to Lashio via Hsipaw was under construction at that time which, given the distance travelled make Maymyo the most likely location being 70km from Mandalay, but up in the hills.

Maymyo was established as a military post in 1896 on the site of an existing Shan village and named after a Colonel May, the first British commander of the military post. My guess is, and it is only a guess, that the original name of the village of Remyo, and when Ellis visited the previous name was still in use and the name Maymyo came into use shortly afterwards. Certainly a railway map from 1900 shows the town as Maymyo. However Ellis describes the town as being in the process of being laid out with vacant blocks being marked out so it is perfectly possible that the town had not yet been renamed.

The other puzzle is just who was Beth Ellis. She turns out to be even more enigmatic that W G Burn Murdoch. Looking at the British Library catalogue page for her works we can see that she wrote several books and that she lived from 1874 to 1913, making her 23 when she visited Burma.

Other than that she seems to have left no trace. In fact to add insult to injury the NLA catalogue confuses her with the American storyteller Elizabeth Ellis ….

A few days ago I tweeted a link to Mary Kilcline Cody’s work on the Ethel Proudlock case in colonial Malaya. (There’s also an earlier news item for the curious)

The case has everything, obsession with status, high drama, murder, and more. It’s all on wikipedia if you’re interested but in essence the story goes something like this.

A young man, Proudlock by name, secures a school teaching post at the Victoria Institute in Kuala Lumpur in the early years of the twentieth century. At that time the European community in KL was under a thousand strong, but the school prospered by offering a British public school style education to the sons of British community in colonial Malaya, without the tiresome and expensive business of having to send the children back to school in England.

Proudlock is diligent, works hard, and along the way marries Ethel, who is described as Eurasian – ie someone who had a parent of European descent and one of Asian descent. This in itself is slightly odd as one would have expected someone like him normally to acquire a British wife and not someone ‘second class’, which people of mixed parentage were most definitely classed.

In the small colonial community of KL his choice of options was probably limited, and probably having an Asian mistress, while acceptable in a rubber planter up country was probably not quite proper for a respectable school teacher. And of course he may genuinely have fallen in love with Ethel.

Anyway, despite his marriage to a non-European his career continued to prosper and he eventually got the opportunity to be acting headmaster while the headmaster was overseas on leave.

At this point everything goes wrong in the most dramatic way possible. While he is out one evening, his wife has a visitor, a rubber planter. Ethel shoots the rubber planter, and as he staggers, bleeding, onto the verandah, she continues to empty Proudlock’s revolver into him.

Ethel later claims that her visitor tried to rape her and she shot him in self defence.

However, she goes on trial for murder. It’s claimed that her visitor was in fact her lover, and she killed him in a fit of passion on being told that he was abandoning her for another woman. It’s also been claimed that a European was seen swimming fully clothed in the Klang river behind the house at this time, and it’s been suggested that this man was another of Ethel’s lovers.

Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe the Malay watchman who spotted him was confused as to the time, or maybe the man in question was visiting another house for some purpose, heard the disturbance, and had reason to make himself scarce.

Ethel is arrested, tried and sentenced to death. There is a massive outcry about the injustice of this and eventually her sentence is commuted by the Sultan of Selangor.

Ethel and Proudlock promptly leave the colony – Proudlock’s career is in ruins and Ethel, wel people will talk you konw.

Ethel eventually moves to Florida. Proudlock eventually turns up teaching at a British public school in Argentina, without Ethel. They appear to have kept in contact, but have led separate lives after the Malaya incident.

It looks like a another tale of illicit sex passion and murder in the colonies – and hardly unique – for example there was an equally celebrated case in Happy Valley in colonial Kenya, and an example of what can happen when a community is isolated and closed in on itself.

Besides wikipedia, the Victoria Institute website also has a good account with some extra information on Proudlock and Ethel after they moved on from KL.

There’s also an obvious resonance with Orwell’s Burmese Days with its obsession with status and undertones of racism..

What’s clear is that these colonial societies were hothouses of people trying to establish themselves and climb up the greasy pole – in the main they were young men of comparatively humble lower middle class origin and a job in the colonies gave them a chance to be more than insurance clerks or minor local authority officials. This is different from somewhere like Shanghai in the interwar years, as Shanghai attracted people on the make, fraudsters, disposessed Russians and the rest in the way that colonial Malaya or Burma did not.

The other significant point about colonial Malaya or Burma is that they were small societies, and therefore ones in which it was easier to cut a dash, and being quiet backwaters, ones weher it was easier to have bad behaviour overlooked as along as the government in Delhi or London was happy.

These societies were not settler societies. They were ones in which people went out to to do a job with every expectation of being transferred elsewhere or eventually retiring back to England.

This meant that they tended to have a disproportionate number of young men. And of course young men (and young women) naturally want to have sex. Not surprisingly in a colonial society with an excess of men this results in a tendency both for men to have native mistresses and also for what the Victorians would have called ‘moral indiscipline’ where those who were inclined to have affairs did so.

Nothing of course is surprising here. All closed societies tend to have features of this. It’s what lies behind the myth of universities being hotbeds of passion and intrigue. Put people of opposite genders together in a constrained and enclosed society and things happen. Sometimes explosively, as in the case of Ethel Proudlock.

It’s not surprising that such high octane happenings form the genesis of any number of murder mystery stories set in universities, reasearch groups, archaeological digs and the like – sex, intrique, and that little peculiarly English frisson caused by the (perceived and would be) upper classes behaving badly.

Not surprisingly the Proudlock case has been fictionalised, in this case by Somerset Maugham as the Letter, which was at first a short story and later a play and a movie.

Maugham’s story and play predate Orwell’s Burmese days by several years. While I’m sure that Burmese days is drawn from his own experiences one does wonder if Maugham’s story inspired Orwell …

Urban foxes are well known in the UK. On visits to London I’ve seen foxes out in the daylight in London playing along the railway line that runs out to Hampton Court.

But Canberra?

We know there are foxes about – you see enough dead ones on the Parkway to know there are foxes living in the pockets of bush around Lake BG and we have seen one in the nature reserve on top of the hill above our house.

But until last night I never really thought there were urban foxes in Canberra. Now I’m not so sure.

Yesterday was J’s birthday and we’d been out for dinner to celebrate. Coming back about 10.30, just after I’d turned into our street I had to brake suddenly for an animal running across the road. At first I though ‘cat!’ and was worried it might be our cat as he’s ginger coloured. So I took a second longer look at the animal and no, it was a pale coloured fox running along the nature strip.

First time I’ve seen a fox actually around where humans live. The question is, was this a one time interloper or are they starting to move down into suburbia?

And now for a change of theme – we tried something different for dinner last night – Beetroot Carpaccio.

The genesis of this was that when we were in Harrietville for a few days  at the end of summer we went out for dinner at the Poplars restaurant in Bright.

We shared a starter – the aforementioned beetroot carpaccio, and thought that’s rather good we can do this ourselves, not realising that there was a recipe out there and the carpaccio was not just something invented by the restaurant.

We had a couple of false starts – bought the beetroot, used it for something else, forgot about it etc, but on Saturday we managed to buy both the beetroot and some firmish goat cheese at the same time.

To make the carpaccio we:

• topped tailed and sliced a beetroot thinly
• marinaded it in a mixture of one quarter balsamic / three quarters white wine vinegar
• after twenty minutes realised that wasn’t going to quite work so zapped the beetroot plus vinegar in the microwave for a minute
• let the beetroot (still in the marinade) cool
• once cool lay on a plate, dress with 10c coin sized bits of goat cheese and a good quality olive oil
• garnish with a salad of endive, radicchio and lettuce (or use a good mesculun salad mix)
• serve, along with some greek style lamb sausage
• enjoy

and pretty good it was too!

When I was on holiday in South Australia I was much struck by the impact of the Corninsh community in South Australia, and how you could come across towns like Burra that look as if a bit of St Just had been mysteriously transported to the otherside of the planet.

My original idea was to develop and expand the idea that Australia is a patchwork of various migrant histories, not just the Irish and English shipped as convicts, or the Chinese who came in search of gold, but of small communities like to Cornish, who came to mine copper, and who came because of economic depression at home and how they had a valuable skill in hard rock mineral mining.

But that’s not the post I’m going to write. If you’re interested in the Cornish experience in South Australia you can find a remarkable amount of information on wikipedia.

I’m not going to write that post because the other thing that struck me about the marginal grasslands of South Australia was the number of abandoned narrow gauge rail lines. Now I admit to being a bit of a geek about old trains and have never quite got over my fascination with nineteenth century railways.

These railways are not just ‘there’. They were built for rational economic reasons to get wool, grain and minerals to the coast for export, in just the same way as there is a network of rail lines in WA running from various ports out into the desert to transport iron ore to be loaded onto ships for export.

However unlike today’s mineral lines in WA these railways also provided a passenger service, which meant that a copper miner in Burra could have bought a train ticket to the coast and found passage back to Cornwall, or vice versa.

And this is my point, these were modern societies. Travel was possible, even moderately comfortable. They could write letters to family still in Cornwall and have a reasonable expectation that the letters would get there.

They could order books from London, they could even subscribe to the London Times – there are stories of the migrant gentry getting their copy of the Times sent by sea and sitting down and reading them in strict order, one a day, albeit with an offset of three months (this story does not just apply to Australia, I’ve come across variants of the same story told about the white community in Malaya and Burma).

And of course, because they could do these things, they did and in the process documented their life and their society, and it is this documentation which makes it possible to tell their story.

There is of course a degree of handwringing going on at the moment about how future historians won’t be able to tell stories because of the death of letter writing. I also used to think that would be the case but, I am less convinced.

Yes, people no longer write letters, but they blog, post pictures on Flickr and the like. I am certain that Adam of Usk and both Francis Kilvert and WG Burn–Murdoch would have blogged had they had the technology. And Isabella Bird would most certainly have done – her ‘Unbeaten tracks in Japan’ was written as a sequence of letters and reads like a blog, in much the same way as Beth Ellis’s rather breathless account of her journey to Burma at the end of the nineteenth century reads like an enthusiastic travel blog.

And not everything survived. The only letters we have are those that survived. Like J’s great^3 grandfather’s work book, he must have had more than one but only one has survived. The other probably lit fires or worse in the course of the intervening 150 years.

More importantly, some of that which survives is useless due to its lack of context – we may have the letters, we may roughly know when they were written, but to whom, or by whom can often be a complete mystery.

So, to draw this to some sort of a conclusion we could say that the material is still extant to tell stories, in the forms of flickr collections, facebook posts, emails and blogs, our real question is what happens to these after the owners of that material dies – is there enough with enough context to tell meaningful stories.

The other thing to say is that this is also a golden age to tell stories based on people’s correspondence, as both so much is available from the nineteenth century, and in digital format.

I’m currently about halfway through William Dalrymple’s Last Mughal. In the introduction he tells a little story of how he’d manage to gain access to the State Archives in Yangon and how amazingly they had all Zafar’s prison records scanned and indexed online and were able to burn him a cd of the documents.

Now we might not all aspire to write the story of the last pre-Empire ruler of India, but this little story is telling – information is increasingly easier to find and to search for because of the changes in technology make it so much simpler.

Strange to find that the technology of the second technological revolution is helping us document and record the first …

After the Flinders Ranges we were moving on to Kangaroo Island, an island off the Fleurieu Peninsula south of Adelaide.

From Hawker we drove south through Quorn, another former railway town shrunk in on itself to Port Augusta where we joined the main road from Adelaide to Perth and Darwin – the two split slightly to the west of the town.

Due to the previous day’s rain in the desert the car was covered with what can best be described as orange clag, a thin dried on hard coating of desert mud. We managed to find a coin operated jetwash without too much difficulty – coming back onto a major trucking route had some advantages and cleaned the car down as best we could.

Turning back onto the highway we set off towards Adelaide over fairly featureless dry scrubby plain overtaking and being overtaken by roadtrains.

We soon tired of the highway and as soon as possible turned off to head through Clare and the Barossa valley to Adelaide, rejoining the line of the old Main North Road (which incidentally ran up through Burra) to reach Adelaide.

We were staying in a hotel in the centre of Adelaide. Here Samantha came into her own, guiding us quickly and accurately to the hotel, even when we took a wrong turn at an intersection and started heading west rather than east.

We’d chosen the hotel because it had a secure underground carpark and was within three or four blocks of a couple main restaurant areas, meaning we should have been able to find somewhere decent without difficulty.

Unfortunately we’d failed to take account of it being Saturday evening, and didn’t try calling ahead to make a reservation, which meant that we ended up eating somewhere not quite as good as we’d intended.

We’d also naively thought that we would be able to do some shopping on Sunday morning before checking out, but Adelaide sleeps later than Canberra with a lot of places not opening until 10.30 on a Sunday morning.

So, we checked out early and drove down towards the Fleurieu peninsula and Cape Jervis, which is where you get the Kangaroo Island ferry.

On a whim we stopped in Aldinga, and not only discovered an excellent bakery, but also the Vine cafe which served a superlative breakfast, more a brunch, which more than made up for the previous night’s indifferent dinner.

Then on, meandering down the road to Cape Jervis – due to our aborted shopping plans we were ridiculously early, and stopped at Foodworks in Yanakilla to buy supplies for our time on the island, as we’d been warned that supplies were expensive and that shops were few and far between away from the populated end of the island around Penneshaw and Kingscote.

Being us, we of course were headed to the far end of the island to stay in a cottage at the edge of the national park.

Despite our best efforts we were still ridiculously early for the ferry and were reduced to playing ‘I spy with my little eye’ to pass the time while we waited.

As it was winter the ferry was on a reduced service which meant it didn’t leave until four o’clock, and that meant the sun was setting as we drove off onto the island.

As we drove off it gently began to spit with rain which gradually intensified. What we had failed to appreciate is just how big the island was – our cottage was 125km from the ferry terminal on the fairly uninhabited south west end of the island.

As the sun dimmed the rain started to come in short intense squalls, and after we passed the township of American River we seemed to be the only car on the road.

Certainly the wildlife thought so as we had to brake several time to avoid various hopping things including wallabies and small kangaroos.

The cottage was up a dirt road. 8km up a wet muddy dirt road. It seemed longer in the rain, but we found it (One good thing about South Australia is that rural properties all have to display their block number on an official government sign at the end of their access – the sign is a very simple reflective black and white sign, but it did make spotting the gate for block 837 straight forward.

The cottage was remote and on the edge of the national park. So remote that the gas was bottled gas and electricity either came from solar panels on the roof,  or from the backup generator. No TV, mobile phone or internet.

The access key was in a key safe, the sort real estate agents use. After fumbling the combination a couple of times in the rain and the dark we manged to open it and get the key and let ourselves in.

The lights came on, flickering as the backup generator built up speed, and the gas heater lit, and the owner had laid a fire for us in the wood stove.

We were there, we were warm, we had light. After a simple pasta dinner we sat and listened to music while the rain continued to beat on the roof in fierce squalls out of somewhere in the Southern ocean.

Kangaroo Island is so named because when the explorer Matthew Flinders reached it in 1802 he found large numbers of kangaroos, some of which he promptly shot for supplies. More importantly for the history of the island, when a few days later he encountered the French explorer Nicolas Baudin’s expedition ship in Encounter Bay off the Fleurieu peninsula, he told Baudin of the island.

Baudin and his team spent several months there, surveying the island, with the result that many of the capes and headlands have French names, and describing the wildlife, including the kangaroos, the Australian sea lions and a now extinct species of dwarf emu, which they mistook for a sort of cassowary, with the result that there is now a ‘Ravine des Casoars’ on the island.

After Baudin left a group of American sealers set up camp at American River, where they built themselves a second boat and harvested the seals and sealions of the island. There was no formal settlement of the island until the 1830‘s, and even then it clustered around Kingscote and Penneshaw leaving most of the west end unsettled and uncleared.

Even now there are very few people living on the south and west of the island.

When we woke the next morning the rain was still coming in squalls, meaning that we had a slow start, but drove down to Seal Bay in the national park. Seal Bay is a major breeding and residential site for the now critically endangered Australian sea lion.

National park wardens offer guided tours of the sea lion colony. It was cold, it was wet, it was windy and we were the only people there.

The consequence was the rangers gave us a great tour, especially once they realised that we were not only genuinely interested and actually knew about wildlife. taking us on a tour of the dunes where there were sealions huddling in hollows to escape the wind and out onto the beach, deserted save for a couple of animals hauling out.

Sealions tend to stay faithful to the location in which they were born, meaning that when the sealers attacked them in the nineteenth century they tended to wipe out whole colonies, however somehow the Seal Bay colony survived, perhaps because the rocks and skerries at the entrance to the bay made it too dangerous for men in wooden boats.

The result is that the Seal Bay colony is one of the largest remaining colonies -it is quite a humbling thought to realise that we probably saw around five percent of the remaining world population in a single afternoon.

The weather the next day was no better so we contented ourselves with a drive around the island. Typically, the next, our last day was better, so before we left to catch the afternoon ferry we drove down to Flinders Chase national park to photograph the fur seal colony at admiral’s arch and take a look at the Remarkable Rocks – strange mad wind sculpted rocks above a stormy point over the ocean.

We of course spent too long at the national park and had a mad dash the length of the island to catch the ferry, but we made it in time for a rough and stormy crossing.

This dumped us back on the mainland  mid afternoon. Rather than drive back to Adelaide we dog-legged cross country to Hahndorf, a little town on the freeway out of Adelaide, originally settled by Lutheran settlers from Germany in the late 1840‘s. Hahndorf retains its German heritage in a slightly kitschy way, with  German style pubs and pub food, not to mention some wonderful apple strudel.

Due to it’s German-ness Hahndorf was placed under martial law during the first world war and renamed Ambleside until sometime in the 1930‘s. The railway station never changed its name back, and was till Ambleside until it closed in the 1960‘s.

We’d chosen Hahndorf as it was on the freeway as we had a long drive to Ballarat in Victoria the next day – in fact we had a longer drive than we intended as we turned off the main highway after Tailem Bend to drive across the Cooryong salt lagoon country – hordes of pelicans and seabirds before turning off at Kingston SE – where we picked up some fresh crayfish sandwiches for lunch to head cross country through Penola – notable as the place where Mary Mackillop – Australia’s only Catholic saint – began her work teaching the children of the poor, and then to Hamilton in Victoria, through the Grampians past Dunkeld – you can tell from where the original European settlers came and all to Ballarat, the site of Eureka stockade where the gold miners rebelled against what they felt was excessive government regulation and restriction.

All this took longer than planned meaning that we arrived after dark, and after dinner collapsed in bed.

The next day it was still cold and windy and we had a late start. We’d originally had plans to visit the art gallery but instead drove up to Daylesford and Trentham before driving down to stay with J’s relatives in Mornington. It was not only Friday but the start of a long weekend with the result that the highway was clogged and it took us much longer than planned.

After a day in Mornington we drove back to Canberra – stopping off to allow J to have a look at Eltham where she lived when a girl including taking a look at her parents old house which is still there and then rejoining the freeway.

All in all we’d done around 5000km in two weeks and seen a lot of the country -truly an excellent adventure.