“PRAETORIA PHILADELPHIA” — Pretoria of Brotherly Love — was the formal name for the paramount of South Africa’s three capital cities. Pretoria, the jacarandastad, is home to the Executive; Cape Town, die moederstad, is home to the Parliament, and Bloemfontein, the “City of Roses”, is home to the High Court of Appeal. While the politics of government take place in Cape Town, its actual administration takes place in Pretoria, and all that flows forth from the stately Union Buildings that preside over the city from atop Meintjieskop. The Uniegebou is composed of two wings that come together in a semicircular amphiteatre, symbolizing the coming-together of Briton & Boer in the Union of South Africa. Designed by Sir Herbert Baker, Lutyens’ lieutenant in the building of New Delhi, some believe it to be his finest work.

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I recently discovered that we receive the television channel Russia Today in our humble little flat here in Stellenbosch, and have spent the past few days enjoying it. They are shockingly truthful (almost nasty) in their reporting of international relations, in so far as the truth — for the moment — tends to favour the Russian case in world affairs, and make NATO look like a bunch of ninnies. Saturday — May 9 — was Victory Day in Russia, in which the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War is commemorated and celebrated. RT showed many minutes of splendid highlights from the great parade in Red Square, and I just sat and enjoyed it.

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Loyal commenter Steve M. sends word that Kaiser Wilhelm II (currently of Doorn, the Netherlands) has written an open letter to His Excellency President Barack Obama of the United States.

His Imperial Majesty objects to the current practice of appointing “czars” to deal with the various crises at hand, and offers a few alternative suggestions of his own.

Our readers will, no doubt, recall the Kaiser from his previous appearances on his blog here, here, and here.

A FAVOURITE POSTER of mine combines a number of the things I love: newspapers, architecture, and the Netherlands. Arthur Goldsteen designed this handsome poster to advertise the daily newspaper De Volkskrant in 1950.

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Sometimes something rather interesting is right under your nose and you never even notice it. I read the Catholic Herald — the premier Catholic newspaper in the English-speaking world — every week and have been reading it since university days, but I have rarely read Stuart Reid’s “Charterhouse” column on the back page. A few recent perusals have exposed my foolishness for neglecting it. They are presented for your reading here.

(Of course, there has never been a columnist as brilliant as Peter Simple, whose works we have shown you in a series of installments.)

Charterhouse
by STUART REID

Everyone needs a secular hero or two, and one of mine is Rian Malan. In the Sunday Times at the weekend he had a very nice diary, in which he said that he liked Jacob Zuma, because the president-elect of South Africa had “old-fashioned views on stuff like law and order”.

Malan also said that it was a good time to be a Boer: “…as South Africa staggers towards its destiny, it’s white Left-liberals who are wailing about our government’s shortcomings. The Boers never expected any better, so we are generally immune to the gloom.”

The diary made my heart go out, once again, to the Boers. They are brave, honest, hard-working, courteous, old-fashioned and often God-fearing, with a weakness for the bottle. Plus they were on the right side in the Boer War and their women – sometimes their men too – are beautiful.

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Not even the peaceful hills and dales of the Hudson Valley were left untouched by the liturgicalism of the Oxford Movement

SUCH WAS THE influence of the nineteenth-century “Oxford Movement” in the Church of England that it engulfed the great preponderance of the Anglican Communion. It is surprising when you consider that Anglican priests and even a bishop were jailed in England for such scandalous acts as calling the Communion service “the Mass”, wearing vestments, and putting candles on the altar; these are now so widespread in the Church of England to be commonplace. But the Oxford movement also spilled out into other Protestant groups as well. The liturgical movement changed the Church of Scotland in the 1900s, and many of the Kirk’s medieval church buildings that had been converted into pulpit-centered preaching halls were reordered in a way emphasizing the “Communion table” that was an altar in all but name. (Those who can find before & after shots of the ‘Toon Kirk’ of Holy Trinity in St Andrews, Fife will notice this marked contrast).

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The Cuban Army polo team visits New York in 1939. How different the Americas might be had Fidel Castro preferred the polo of his patrician background to the baseball he is known to be fond of. If only he had attended the Cavalry School instead of the Universidad de la Habana!

When it comes to newspapers, the visual element is all-important to an extent that shockingly few in the powerful parts of the industry comprehend. In the county of Westchester — my home turf — there is a monopoly when it comes to the newspaper as a means of local information delivery, and that monopoly belongs to the Gannett chain. Gannett newspapers are among the ugliest in the country, but then most American newspapers are abominations when it comes to design. The glory days of newspapers were, of course, the 1920s & 30s, and Stephen Fry’s film “Bright Young Things” — a rejigged dramatisation of Waugh’s Vile Bodies — highlights, as many Waughvian tales do, newspapers as a central plot instrument.

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On returning from America

I have spent the past two weeks in the United States, not working but travelling on my own account, revisiting some favourite places and coming up for air. It remains an exhilarating and beautiful place, wrongly sneered at by too many British people who simply haven’t experienced enough of it to know how good it can be, and how much worse off we would be if it weren’t there. But it is also a foreign country, not some kind of special friend – but a foreign country to which we have unique access because we speak a similar language. Only fluent French or German speakers could ever know as much about those countries as any British visitor can swiftly learn about the USA – if he wants to.

Rather than re-immerse myself in the small-scale squalor of British politics, which seems even less appealing or interesting than it was when I set out, I thought I would muse a little on what an English person experiences in the great republic, and what it means (or might mean) for us.

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Daniel François Malan, fourth Prime Minister of South Africa, is seen here taking breakfast with his family on the verandah at Groote Schuur, the official residence of the PM. (At right, the same view today). Groote Schuur — literally “great barn” — was purchased by Cecil Rhodes and transformed into the paragon of the South African style of architecture by his architect Sir Herbert Baker. Foolishly, the office of Prime Minister was abolished in 1984, when the ridiculous 1984 tricameral constitution was adopted. Groote Schuur continued as the Cape residence of the State President of South Africa under P.W. Botha and F.W. De Klerk but when Nelson Mandela was elected he decided to make the neighbouring Westbrooke his official residence, renaming it Genadendal (“Valley of Grace”) after the oldest Moravian mission in South Africa. Groote Schuur is now a museum open by appointment, and unlived in.

“Stick of Doublemint, mijnheer?” “Oh, very well…”

With apologies to Thomas de Keyser

Writing about the latest changes over at the International Herald Tribune, the Guardian‘s media blog “Organgrinder” linked to our “remarkably comprehensive” post covering the subject in depth. I’m slightly embarrassed to say I’ve never seen any of Jean-Luc Godard’s films, something I will have to rectify through the DVD collection at the French Institute’s Haskell Library when I’m back in New York.

Meanwhile, Erik Zenhausern, the IHT’s former Operations Director for the Americas, corrects some errors on my part and gives us an inside look at NYT-IHT operations [boldface mine]:

Cheshire heraldry expert Martin Goldstraw stumbled upon this creative ad for Guinness while stumbling through some old copies of The Coat of Arms, the journal of the Heraldry Society. [Mr. Goldstraw’s image modified by yours truly].

Among the heraldic terms employed in the text:

The Annual Ball of the Old Guard of the City of New York, Commodore Hotel, 1949.

Flipping through a military journal from early 1956, I stumbled upon a rather depressing note announcing the Seventh Regiment’s plans for celebrating its 150th anniversary. A reunion of old comrades on Thursday May 3, then a grand review the following day, and topped off by a formal ball on the evening of Saturday May 5 at the regiment’s beautiful armory on Park Avenue at 67th Street.

Why should such a splendid celebration spark dour thoughts? Chiefly because, having survived over a century and a half since the unit was founded amidst pints of ale in the Shakespeare Tavern on the corner of Nassau and Fulton, the Seventh Regiment was abolished before it could celebrate its 200th anniversary in 2006. The Seventh was deactivated as a regiment in 1993, though its “lineage” was transferred to the 107th Corps Support Group, which in 2006 was “consolidated” into the 53rd Army Liaison Team. The regiment’s unique collection of historical artifacts — the legal property of the Veterans of the Seventh Regiment — was seized by the State in an act of highly dubious constitutionality and its armory, built without a cent of public money from the pockets of the regiment’s members in the 1880s, was also taken and transferred to a conservancy to run it as an events & performing arts venue, over protests from both veterans groups and the local community.

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While naturally relieved that Labour are no longer in charge, one of the few objections I have to the current SNP government in Scotland is that they changed the name of the Scottish Executive to “the Scottish Government”. The new name is just so damned boring. Every country, region, town, and borough has a “government”; it’s the dullest word you can come up with. But “the Scottish Executive” had such a nice ring to it. Listening to the evening news on Radio Scotland, one heard the newsreader speak of “the Scottish Executive” and immediately thought “Ah yes, that’s our part of the government!” Now one hears the sultry phrase “The Scottish Government today announced new measures…” and thinks “Oh, the government. Nobody likes the government.”

To add to this lamentable change, they even dumped the Scottish coat of arms as the visual identity of Scotland’s authority (as seen above, in the Executive days) and replaced it with an exceptionally dull saltire-flag logo that can be seen on the Scottish Government’s website.

Premier Salmond, give Scotland back her heraldry!

The Pope sends New York a genial, beer-swilling man of an archbishop

The Most Rev. Timothy Michael Dolan, the newly installed Archbishop of New York, has a reputation as a genial beer-swilling giant that will doubtless serve him well as he takes possession of his new see. With a Ph.D. in Church History, Archbishop Dolan formerly served as Secretary to the Nuncio in Washington, D.C. before becoming Rector of the Pontifical North American College in Rome — the “West Point” of the Catholic Church in Anglo-America. Having improved the NAC’s reputation both in studies and in orthodoxy, Msgr. Dolan was then sent by the Holy Father to be an Auxiliary Bishop in the Archdiocese of St. Louis. From there, our man was given the charge of see himself, that of Milwaukee.

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The New York Times offered a little sidebar on the heraldry of our new ecclesiastical boss in its coverage of Archbishop Dolan’s installation, and Fr. Selvester offers his commentary as well.

Travelling down the east side of False Bay, through the happy town of Rooiels, past Pringle Bay, and around Cape Hangklip sits the little village of Betty’s Bay. Nudged between the waters of the Indian Ocean and the rugged mountains of the Kogelberg, this is one of the most beautiful corners of the Cape. At the same time, it is just sixty miles (as the crow flies) from die moederstad itself — Cape Town. In days long since past, Betty’s Bay and the surrounding area of the Overberg were the hiding places for runaway slaves, sailors deserting their vessels, and smugglers of every kind. The Overberg takes its name because it is over the Hottentots Holland mountains from Cape Town — just outside the immediate purview of the earnest authorities in that swarming port, the “tavern of the seas”.

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