stuff 'n other stuff

Having read Bruce Lockhart’s autobiography I’m now about halfway through Clifford Kinvig’s military history of the British intervention in post 1917 Russia.

It’s a sorry tale of how what started as an effort to stiffen the Kerensky government’s resolve to continue Russia’s participation in the first world war morphed from a straightforward military assistance mission into a badly thought out and under resourced effort to support the White forces in the post revolutionary civil war, principally Denikin in the south and the pro-SR pro-Menshevik government in Archangel.

While Britain did lend support to the provisional government in Omsk and to Kolchak after his coup support was on a much smaller scale, and essentially confined to military and political advisers. The Americans, Canadians, and of course the Japanese were much more involved as they had easier geographic access to Vladivostok, which was the only way of sending supplies to the Omsk government.

One of the other themes to emerge is the mutinous state of some of the British soldiers – war weary and expecting to be demobbed they were less than charmed to be shipped off to somewhere far away, hostile, and in the case Archangel, cold. Ben Isitt details similar rebelliousness on the part of the Canadian forces in the east.

The other real themes are that the British never really reached an internal consensus as to why they were in Russia and what they hoped to accomplish

Initially it was to stop valuable supplies falling into the hands of the German forces after the treaty of Brest Litovsk. Somewhere it turned into first protecting these supplies from the Bolshevik government and then into something more than tacitly supporting the White forces.

Supporting the White forces was in itself problematical as there was no coherent opposition – Russia had fractured into a set of polities and armies with changing allegiances. Of the opposition, the Omsk government looked the most plausible but even then they lacked a coherent plan. Bernard Pares, who was attached to the British mission to the Omsk government was more than a little scathing about their organisational abilities, or their ability to cope with the new realities

The incoherence of the opposition is what of course allowed the Bolsehvik government to prevail – not only did it control the two largest cities, and consequently industrial centres, they managed to build an army, hold on to a degree of popular support, and manage to pick off the opposing polities one by one.

Trotsky once said that during the revolution power fell into the streets. The Bolshevik achievement was putting an end to the chaos.

There are implications for the wars and civil wars of our time. In Afghanistan we see a government ridden by factionalism, unable to maintain order and reliant on foreign forces for its existence. In the Middle East we see governments unable to govern and opposition factions unable to maintain even a facade of unity.

I’ve just finished reading Bruce Lockhart’s autobiography.

It’s a moderately entertaining read, but it is remarkable for what it doesn’t say. As a witness to great events as the unofficial British representative in Moscow during 1918 he was uniquely placed to report on the machinations around the conclusion of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the reaction to the murder of the tsar and his family, and the allied intervention.

And yet there is almost nothing.

Instead a self portrait of a slightly bumptious individual emerges, eager to justify his importance by saying who he met rather than what he discussed.

One imagines that his official reports back to London had rather more detail. Lockhart obviously felt himself bound by official secrecy when he wrote his autobiography.

What is interesting is the description of the first days of the Bolshevik government and its initial incoherent and chaotic nature, and his conclusion that compared to everyone else, it was the Bolshevik government that was most likely to win out, as they had at least half a plan, compared to the SR or any of the ‘white’ opposition groups – something at variance with the opinions of his lords and masters in London….

As part of the colonial history theme I’ve been reading Barbara Crossette’s ‘Great Hill Stations of Asia’.

Like me, she has been charmed by Beth Ellis’s An English Girl’s First Impressions of Burmah… and was equally puzzled about Beth’s referring to Maymyo as Remyo.

One other interesting little snippet was that the lake at Maymyo was dug by Turkish prisoners of war during World War One – something that at first seems surreal, but actually has a bizarre logic to it.

The Mesopotamian campaign was run by the British colonial command in India, not from Whitehall, using in the main Indian troops. So of course, when they had a large number of prisoners their natural inclination ws to ship them off to a prison camp in India, rather than Egypt or the Sudan. And Burma was of course governed as part of British India …

What the Turks made of being shipped to upcountry Burma is anyone’s guess …

It wasn’t just the Mesopotamian Campaign. Much of Britains involvement in the Gulf was run from India in colonial times with the Trucial States – the precursor to today’s UAE – initially being governed from Delhi and using Indian rupees as currency, as did the early British settlements in Kenya – purely because it was geographically convenient.

One also sees the converse today, with the US using vraious of the Gulf States as staging posts for shipping troops to Afghanistan and with the Taliban opening an office in Qatar as a precursor to possible peace talks …

I came across this little snippet this morning:

For a BBC program in 1954, Sir Mortimer Wheeler tasted a reconstruction of the Tollund Man’s last supper, which turned out to be a tasteless mush. This led him to announce: “I believe that the poor chap of Tollund committed suicide because he could stand his wife’s cooking no longer!”

having once had girlfriend who was pursuing a PhD in Ethnobotany, and more to the point liked to experiment with what we’ll call exotic food plants I could only sympathise with Sir Mortimer.

Let’s just say that the traditional Inca potatoes were a fun addition to dinner but that ground-elder must have been a significant contribution to the end of the western Roman empire – a tasteless chewy spinach like green gluck.

However it did get me thinking about mental experimentation, the art of trying to think yourself as living at another time or in another culture – and what it means for digital preservation.

The obvious use for mental experimentation is in historical fiction. The past is a different country, where not only do they do things differently but also one we can never visit. We can guess, we can re-enact, we can experiment, but we can never visit.

We can read the literature of the time but we can never quite put ourselves in the same place as someone who lived at the time, no matter how much barley mush and ground elder we eat.

The reason for this is disruptive change. I’ve written previously about how life the Victorian era was quite different from life fifty years previously, due to the disruptive changes caused by large scale industrialisation and the impact of steam ships, railways, the penny post in changing the nature of communication.

So it s with our own time. The postal service is dying, communication is via the internet and more and more our life is going digital. We may not realise it but we are living through a period of disruptive change much as the Victorians did. Because we now do things differently. Our workflows may still be the same but techologies used have changed immeasurably.

And that creates a discontinuity.

There are those who can remember how things were and those who can’t because they were never there.

For example, I can remember pounds shillings and pence, eight inch floppy disks, steam trains, punched cards. I remember Wordstar. I even taught it. I remember when international calls were shockingly expensive and the fax machine was the latest in cutting edge communications technology. I even remember thinking Modula-2 was cool.

No one under thirty five will remember such things. And indeed why should they.

But this does create an interesting problem for writing history (or indeed historical fiction). Before 1980 most documents were either handwritten or typescript, and most books were printed. Despite all the changes and disruptions of the twentieth century the world worked more or less the same in 1960 as it did in 1880. Governments may have changed, empires disappeared but the mechanics of daily life were similar, which made the interpretation of documents simpler as we were operating on the same set of assumptions. It also means that we can read them.

To explain the importance of shared assumptions take this example:

Australian post boxes are red because once all post boxes in the British Empire were red. In Laos, despite the Indochinese wars and nearly forty years of the People’s Democratic Republic they’re blue. Because once all post boxes in France and the French colonies were blue, even though now in France they are yellow. Thus if some one talks about ‘putting something in the big red box’ you know they mean posting a letter if they’re in Australia or the UK. If you were in Laos it might mean something completely different.

Today, documents are almost universally written using Word, and are either emailed or come on a USB stick. We have an expectation that we can read any recent document. And if they aren’t AbiWord or Open/Libre Office can open them. In other words we can probably recover documents written in the last few years, or if we can’t we can use OCR to recover the text from a scanned version.

However, that’s not the case with legacy data.

I was recently trying to recover some data from the 1990’s. The data was tables of numbers and the documentation that described which column contained what was written in TeX.

Fortunately, someone had had the sense to copy everything to CD sometime around the end of the nineties so recovering the information was a simple matter of installing OzTeX and generating a PDF. And we could read it because the media was a type that was still in common use and hadn’t changed during the intervening decade and a half.

If it was still on an IoMega Zip drive it could have been a problem. Same is true of the box of floppy disks we all have in our garages. Or indeed the three inch Amstrad disk cartridges from the late eighties. The media could well still be readable, but with what?

The reason being that in the eighties and nineties we had a period of disruptive chaotic change during the widespread adoption of information technology.

Wordprocessing applications came and went. First it was Wordstar, then WordPerfect and finally Word, with AmiPro getting in on the act. Media formats equally changed. Single sided to double sided, from eight inch through five and a quarter to three and a half inch disks. Macs of course used an 800k rather than 720k format etc etc.

For example, in the mid eighties I project managed a number of small ecological surveys, that would give species abundance data for then. At the time we were concerned with the impact of acid rain and what it might have done to the relative abundance of various species compared to earlier surveys stretching back to the nineteenth century.

Nowadays we are more interested in global warming than acid rain, but the data collected in the nineteen eighties would still be valuable. Except we took the survey sheets and typed the species data into a set of flat data files on a CP/M based machine. We did upload the files to a Vax for statistical analysis but we deleted them to save space, keeping the primary files stayed on a set of five and a quarter inch disks. I have no idea if the disks still exist.

The implication is that documents written and data collected during these decades will be difficult to recover even if we have the original files and media. And as such we have lost part of the story of how we got from there to here …

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 …