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Patrick in Parliament

The Mosaic of Saint Patrick in the Palace of Westminster

This feast of St Patrick marks the hundredth anniversary of the mosaic of Saint Patrick in the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament. At the heart of the Palace of Westminster, four great arches include mosaic representations of the patron saints of the home nations: George, David, Andrew, and Patrick.

The joke offered about these saints and their positioning is that St George stands over the entrance to the House of Lords, because the English all think they’re lords. St David guards the route to the House of Commons because, according to the Welsh, that is the house of great oratory and the Welsh are great orators. (The English, snobbishly, claim St David is there because the Welsh are all common.) St Andrew wisely guards the way to the bar (a place where many Scots are found), while St Patrick stands atop the exit, since most of Ireland has left the Union.

The mosaic of Saint Patrick came about thanks to the munificence of Patrick Ford, the sometime Edinburgh MP, in honour of his name-saint. Saint George had been completed in 1870 with Saint David following in 1898.

Sir William Raeburn MP commissioned the artist Robert Anning Bell (depicted right) to design the mosaic of Saint Andrew in 1922, which so impressed Patrick Ford that he decided to commission the same artist to depict the patron saint of Ireland.

Anning Bell had earlier completed the mosaic on the tympanum of Westminster Cathedral from a sketch by the architect J.F. Bentley. Following his work in Central Lobby he also did a mosaic of Saint Stephen, King Stephen, and Saint Edward the Confessor in Saint Stephen’s Hall — the former House of Commons chamber.

In the mosaic, Saint Patrick is flanked by saints Columba and Brigid, with the Rock of Cashel behind him. As by this point Ireland had been partitioned, heraldic devices representing both Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State are present.

On St Patrick’s Day in 1924, the honour of the unveiling went to the Father of the House of Commons, who happened to be the great Irish nationalist politician T.P. O’Connor, then representing the English constituency of Liverpool Scotland (the only seat in Great Britain ever held by an Irish nationalist MP).

“That day,” The Times reported T.P.’s words at the unveiling, “in quite a thousand cities in the English-speaking world, Saint Patrick’s name and fame were being celebrated by gatherings of Irishmen and Irishwomen. Certainly he was the greatest unifying force in Ireland.”

“All questions of great rival nationalities were forgotten in that ceremony. From that sacred spot, the centre of the British Empire, there went forth a message of reconciliation and of peace between all parts of the great Commonwealth — none higher than the other, all coequal, and all, he hoped, to be joined in the bonds of common weal and common loyalty.”

T.P.’s remarks were greeting with cheers.

The Most Honourable the Marquess of Lincolnshire, Lord Great Chamberlain, accepted the ornamental addition to the royal palace of Westminster on behalf of His Majesty the King.

March 18, 2024 1:40 pm | Link | No Comments »

Articles of Note: 13 March 2024

Articles of Note
Wednesday 13 March 2024
■ I consider myself a reasonably aware person when it comes to church architecture, but I was blown away when I first visited the Church of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs and St Ignatius at Chideock in Dorset.

My then-flatmate was getting married the next day and much pottering-about sorting things was required but the idiosyncratic beauty of this building captured my imagination — part Norman, part Moorish. I was almost insulted that I hadn’t come across it in any of my bookish explorations.

The historian Edmund Harris covers Chideock in his lusciously illustrated post on Recusancy in Dorset and the ‘other tradition’ of Catholic church-building.

■ Generations ago it was said that the three institutions no British politician dared offend were the trade unions, the Catholic Church, and the Brigade of Guards. In 2020s Britain there is only one caste which must always be obeyed: the ageing, moneyed homeowners.

Not only do these “NIMBYs” (“Not In My Back Yard”) jealously guard their freeholds, they do whatever they can to prevent more houses being built to guard the value of their prize possessions, vastly inflated by a combination of lacklustre housebuilding and irresponsible leap in migration. As old people vote and young people don’t — and when they do, vote badly — few sensible people can find a way out of this quagmire.

It might be worth looking to the Mediterranean, where Tal Alster tells us How Israel turned urban homeowners into YIMBYs.

■ It’s disappointingly rare to see intelligent outsiders give a considered impression of the current state of play in the Netherlands — that’s Mother Holland for us New Yorkers. Too often commentators in English are either rash cheerleaders for the hard right or bien-pensant liberals eager to castigate and chastise. Both rush to judgement.

What a rare diversion then to read Christopher Caldwell — the only thinking neo-con? — attempt to explore and explain the success of Geert Wilders in the recent Dutch elections.

■ One in ten of Lusitania’s inhabitants are now immigrants, and this discounts those — many from Brazil and other former parts of the once-world-spanning Portuguese empire — who have managed to acquire citizenship through various routes.

Ukrainian number-plates are now frequently be seen on the roads of Lisbon, as far in Europe as you can get from Big Bad Uncle Vlad.

Vasco Queirós asks: Who is Portugal for?

■ Speaking of world-spanning empires, in true andrewcusackdotcom fashion, we haven’t had enough of the Dutch — but we have had enough of their wicked wayward heresies.

Historian Charles H. Parker explores the legacies of Calvinism in the Dutch empire.

■ The City of New York itself is the best journalism school there is. Jimmy Breslin dropped out of LIU after two years, eventually taking up his pen. Pete Hamill left school at fifteen, apprenticed as a sheet metal worker, and joined the navy.

William Deresiewicz argues that a dose of working-class realism can save journalism from groupthink.

■ The New Yorker tells us how a Manchester barkeep found and saved a lost (ostensible) masterpiece of interwar British literature.

■ Our inestimable friend Dr Harshan Kumarasingham explores David Torrance’s history of the first Labour government on its hundredth anniversary.

■ And finally, one for nous les normandes (ok, ok, celto-normandes): Canada’s National Treasure David Warren briefly muses that the Norman infusion greatly refined Anglo-Saxon to give us the superior English tongue we speak today.

March 13, 2024 9:55 pm | Link | 2 Comments »

Cambridge

There’s a Dutch vibe to Cambridge that I rather like — but also a lingering Protestant Cromwellianism that I don’t. These two factors are not unconnected, and the highway that once was the North Sea is not so far away.

It is not a bad town. It’s like they took Oxford apart, put it back together again in not quite the same way, and added a lot of Regency infill. Oxford is more mediaeval, Georgian, and neo-mediaeval, whereas Cambridge is mediaeval, Tudor, and Regency.

The Cam is slower, quieter, and more peaceful than the Isis, which again gives it the quality of a Hollandic canal. I suspect the punting is better — or at least easier — here than at Oxford.

And of course it is rather more spacious than Oxford, which is hemmed in by geography in a way that Cambridge isn’t.

But it is also eerily quieter. A smart restaurant on a Thursday night was dead by half ten, and the staff refused our plaintive request for a second round of Tokay. (Protestantism.)

March 9, 2024 3:00 pm | Link | 3 Comments »

La Bougie du sapeur

Lo, the Twenty-Ninth of February is upon us, which means another edition of the French newspaper La Bougie du sapeur. The printing of a newspaper is not often news itself, for most are dailies and some are weeklies. That rara avis, the fortnightly is — like the monthly — more common amongst magazines. But La Bougie du sapeur is unique in the world as it only comes out on this date, the once-every-four-years leap day. (Or, as the French foppishly put it, bissextile.)

This is the twelfth number of La Bougie, an amazingly indolent feat for a newspaper that began in 1980. Perhaps they take their inspiration from the venerable and beloved Académie française, which was given the task of drafting the dictionary of the French language back in the 1680s, and finally reached midway through the letter “E” in 1992.

The paper’s name translate as the Sapper’s Candle (for those outside of Angledom, “sapper” is another word for a soldier in the engineers). The soldier in question is Sapeur Camember, a stock character of French comic strips popularised by “Christophe” (Marie-Louis-Georges Colomb) in the pages of Le Petit Français illustré between 1890 and 1896.

Camember was born on 29 February and thus had only celebrated four birthdays by the time he enlisted in the army. Every leap year thus adds another candle on the sapeur’s birthday cake. The character seeped into the French mind, and there is even a statue of him in Lure.

The newspaper was born in 1980 as a bit of an in-joke between two friends, Jacques Debuisson and Christian Bailly, and Jean d’Indy (pictured above and below) is currently at the helm as editor and director. (His day job is working for the French body responsible for flat racing and steeplechases.)

Ever with an eye on expansion, La Bougie began to print a Sunday supplement in 2004, to appear even more rarely whenever 29 February falls on a Sunday. The next issue of the Dimanche supplement is expected in 2032. This year marks the advent of their sports supplement, La Bougie du sapeur – Sportif.

The tone of La Bougie is satirical, mocking, and politically incorrect — but not without a heart. For example, the profits from the 2008 edition were donated to a charity working amongst autistic adolescents.

Our French readers (we hope they are plural) will want to head out to the kiosk to purchase a copy today, lest they have to wait for the next edition. (more…)

February 29, 2024 11:45 am | Link | No Comments »

Messing About in Old New York

In the collections of the New-York Historical Society there is a photograph deposited amidst the archives of the Seventh Regiment Gazette.

The scene is the Appleton Mess of the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue, where Company B of the “Silk-Stocking Regiment” was celebrating its one-hundred-and-thirty-fourth birthday.

It was May 1940. The other side of the Atlantic Ocean, British troops were evacuating from Norway, sparking the debate in the House of Commons that would lead to Winston Churchill being appointed Prime Minister.

But on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, all was still peaceful and calm.

With a packed calendar of events, the social life of B Company was as much of a whirl as any other in the Seventh Regiment.

“The members of the Second Company greeted the onrushing spring with a cocktail party and dance on the afternoon of February 11th,” the Gazette reported. “The time-stained rafters of the Veterans Room echoed back as melodious a medley of sweet, swing, and hot as these old ears have heard in many a year.”

“The spaghetti lovers are still meeting down at Tosca’s on Tuesdays,” the Gazette continued. “All members who drop in on this crowd are warned beforehand to eat fast and keep an eye on their plate. A darting fork awaits all unwatched portions and men have been known to sit down to a full dish of Italian cable only to arise half famished.”

Company B’s Entertainment Committee also found time for a Supper Dance at the end of March that year: “When Charley Botts heard ‘In The Mood’ he gathered up the jitterbugs and sent them scampering around in a breathless Big Apple, much to the delight of the wiser and unbruised amongst us who resisted his wiles.”

“Several of the more energetic members closed the evening by visiting that well-known late spot, the Kit-Kat Club, and are now offering mortgages on the family homestead to settle future bills.”

All the faces, the mode of dress — it’s a picture of a vanished New York, a year and a half before the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Incidentally, December 7, 1941 was also the day Col. Cusack — aka ‘Uncle Matt’ — was baptised.)

On another level, it looks just like the Seventh Regiment Mess I knew from my childhood, when it was in the firm but welcoming hands of Linda MacGregor.

The building has been restored physically but since the military was kicked out it is a beautiful but lifeless hulk, preserved as if in formaldehyde and reduced to being a mere “venue”.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

February 21, 2024 10:40 pm | Link | No Comments »

St Mary Overie in Lent

The days are getting longer and Lent is already upon us.

Here in Southwark I nipped in to Evensong in the late twilight of a winter’s day. They do it very beautifully with a full choir at the Protestant cathedral — old Southwark Priory or St Mary Overie to us Catholics, St Saviour’s to our separated brethren.

As it is the penitential season, the Lenten Array is up at Southwark Cathedral, theirs apparently designed by Sir Ninian Comper.

What is a Lenten Array? Sed Angli writes on the Lenten Array in general while Dr Allan Barton has written on Southwark Cathedral’s Lenten Array specifically.

And of course our friend the Rev Fr John Osman has one of the most beautiful Lenten Arrays at his extraordinary Catholic parish of St Birinus — a stunning church previously mentioned.

(The photograph of our local array is from Fr Lawrence Lew O.P.)

February 19, 2024 8:24 pm | Link | No Comments »

Die kleine dorpie Betlehem

JA JA JA, ons onthou: die Amerikaanse Episcopaalse biskop Phillips Brooks was nie ’n bolwerk van ortodoksie nie. Hy het die ryk van gevoel bo die waarheid verhef, maar nie noodwendig teen die waarheid nie — hulle het in die negentiende eeu nog ’n bietjie politesse gehad.

Soos R.R. Reno geskryf het: Brooks “het geen moeilike teologiese kwessies gedink of enige nuwe intellektuele grond gebreek nie.” In Nieu-Engeland was hy “heeltemal afgeleide en uiters invloedryk”.

Reg genoeg… en vandag leef ons in Brooks se nawêreld. Maar hy het ’n klein geskenk aan die wêreld gegee, en sy klein geskenkie was ’n lofsang — ’n Kersfees liedtjie.

Die wysie wat in Amerika gebruik word, is sakkarien. Maar die Britse een — “Forest Green” — is melodieus en goed. (’n Video hieronder, en Engels, gesing deur die koor van St George’s in Windsor-kasteel.)

Die kleine dorpie Betlehem
lê rustig daardie nag,
terwyl dié wonderwerk gebeur
waarvoor die wêreld wag.

Want diep in daardie donker nag
verskyn ’n nuwe dag
vir almal wat in nood verkeer
en op sy redding wag.

Toe God se Seun gebore is,
was daar geen plek vir Hom;
so word ’n donker dierestal
’n helder heiligdom.

Want soos voorspel en lank verwag,
verskyn ’n Koningster,
wat ewig lig en vrede straal
na mense wyd en ver.

O Koningskind daar in die krip,
U kom hier by ons woon.
Net U versoen ons sondeskuld
en maak ons lewe skoon.

Die engele bring blye eer,
want U kom ons herstel.
O Vredekoning, God met ons,
U is Immanuel.

February 15, 2024 3:45 pm | Link | No Comments »

Kings, Horse Brands, and Town Seals

The Influence of James II on the Present-Day Municipal Sigillography of Suffolk County, L.I.

THE KEEN STUDENT of town and municipal seals, when perusing the emblems of some of the towns on Long Island, will be intrigued by the curious presence of seemingly inexplicable letters on those of Brookhaven and Huntingdon. Their origin is an intriguing and somewhat surprising one.

The great state of New York takes its name from our late and much-lamented monarch, James II (viz. here and here), who was given the province while still Duke of York during the reign of his brother Charles II. This was a little bit cheeky as the land wasn’t actually Charles’s and was happily occupied by our Dutch forefathers of old, who had every intention of keeping it within the merry garth of their seabound empire.

Nonetheless, a few English ships were sent over and the mercantile population persuaded old peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant not to lose his other leg as they generally thought the prospect of New Amsterdam being shelled and burnt to the ground was not an altogether welcome one and what difference does it make which side of the North Sea one is governed from.

The Province of New York was a proprietary colony of the Duke of York, who promulgated an initial set of regulations known as “the Duke’s Laws” to aid the good administration of the colony. Somewhat eccentrically, rather than proceeding by rank of importance, the Duke’s Laws were arranged alphabetically — e.g. under headings Absence, Actions, Administration, etc.

Under ‘H’ came ‘Horses and Mares’ which provided:

That every Town within this Government, shall have a marking Iron or flesh Brand for themselves in particular to distinguish the Horses of one Town from another, besides which, every Owner is to have, and Mark his Horse or Horses with his owne Particular flesh Brand having some distinguishing mark, that one mans Horses may be known from anothers.

An appendix to the Laws provided that these town horse brands would take letter form, starting on the far end of Long Island with ‘A’ for East Hampton and ‘B’ for Southampton and moving all the way along to ‘Q’ for ‘Utricht’ (New Utrecht) and ‘R’ for Gravesend in Brooklyn on the western end of the island.

Caroline Church, Setauket
1729, named after Queen Caroline, the wife of George II

‘Seatalcott’, or Setauket as we now call it, was assigned the letter ‘D’. Setauket and Brookhaven were basically interchangeable names for the same place, and Brookhaven eventually won out as the town’s official cognomen.

The town seal was authorised by Governor Thomas Dongan — later the 2nd Earl of Limerick — who in 1686 ordained that “the said trustees of the freeholders and commonality of the Town of Brookhaven do, and may have, and use a common Seale”.

It features the town’s horse brand letter alongside a lance and harpoons signifying the whaling trade which was so prominent in this and many English towns here and further up the Atlantic coast.

Huntington, meanwhile, was assigned the letter ‘E’ for its horse brand and as the fifth town also included five dots alongside the letters HVN representing, (with ‘V’ for ‘U’ in the Latin manner) the town’s name. The rope surrounding the town seal represents the shipping that moved the agricultural products grown in the interior to the shore and on towards their final markets.

The town must have been one in which unsound thinking was rife, as it is believed to be named after the genocidal king-murderer Oliver Cromwell’s home town. Worse, much later the town adopted a coat of arms that was modified from Cromwell’s.

Luckily, wiser counsels have prevailed in more recent times. For the town’s 350th anniversary in 2003 it was decided to stop using the Cromwellian arms and rely solely on the town’s seal.

Huntington’s motto — THE TOWN ENDURES — has an almost cryptic quality. The town church — “Old First” — was founded in 1658 and when its second building was finished in 1715 it acquired a bell from England. Sometime during the Revolution, it was carried away by loyal troops and ended up on HMS Swan, where Huntington native Zebulon Platt noticed it while being held prisoner.

If legend is to be believed, one Nathaniel Williams arranged the return of the bell and had it recast in 1793, including the phrase ‘THE TOWN ENDURES’. This may reflect the 1773 town resolution which provided money for the purchase of a parsonage for the church “to lye forever for that purpose as long as the town endures”.

February 6, 2024 9:35 pm | Link | No Comments »

Whitechapel Library

There are precious few suitable uses for former church buildings.

At the worst end of the spectrum is nightclub, though bar or restaurant often doesn’t fall terribly far behind either. To my mind, I can hardly think of a more suitable use for an elegant and beautiful former church than to be turned into a library.

An example: the former Anglican parish church of St Philip, Stepney, in Whitechapel. Designed by Arthur Cawston, of whom I know little, it reminds me of J.L. Pearson’s Little Venice church for the eccentric “Catholic Apostolic Church”.

St Philip’s was declared redundant in 1979, at which time the neighbouring London Hospital still had its own medical school. This has since merged with that of St Bartholomew’s into “Barts and the London” or “Barts” or “BL”, under the auspices of Queen Mary University of London.

As St Philip’s sat pretty much smack dab in the middle of the campus of the London Hospital (augmented to the Royal London Hospital from 1990) and the college was surviving in cramped accommodation, it was decided to restore the fabric of the church and convert it to a library and study centre. The crypt of the church was adapted to house computer, teaching, and storage rooms as well as the museum of the Royal London Hospital.

Rather than preserve it in aspic, the medical school decided to keep this as a living building by commissioning eight new stained-glass windows to replace plain glass. They are completed along rather forthright German modernist designs and are dedicated to such themes as Gastroenterology and Molecular Biology. They will not be to everyone’s taste, but it is admirable for a medical school to commission stained glass windows at the turn of the millennium.

The Survey of London’s Whitechapel Project has a typically thorough entry on QMUL’s Whitechapel Library / the former church, including these applaudable photographs the Survey commissioned from Derek Kendall.

January 31, 2024 11:40 am | Link | No Comments »

City Hall Post Office

New York’s Lost Second Empire Gem

The Second Empire as an architectural style in America has always bad rap. The most prominent example in the New World is the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House in Washington, D.C. — formerly known as the State, War, and Navy Building after the three government departments it housed in the days of a slimmer federal state.

The OEOB was designed by Alfred B. Mullett, a Somerset-born architect who had immigrated to the United States when he was eight years old. Mullett trained as an apprentice under Isaiah Rogers who was Supervising Architect of the U.S. Treasury Department. In practice, the Treasury’s architect designed all the American federal government’s office buildings across the Union, and Mullett inherited the job in 1866.

At that time, the ever-expanding city of New York was desperately in need of a new post office, having occupied the former Middle Dutch Church since 1844. Congress approved funds for a new building, and an architectural competition attracted fifty-two entries. Instead of choosing one of the entries, five leading contenders were selected to collaborate on producing a single design.

Mullett criticised the joint design as too expensive and called in the job to his own office so that he could design the building himself.

Mullett’s Second-Empire design provided for a post office open to the public on the ground floor, mail sorting rooms below it, and space for federal courtrooms as well as offices for federal agencies in the floors above the postal facilities.

The original design (above) called for only four storeys but during the design process the need for more space to serve the growing city moved Mullett to slip another floor in beneath the mansard roof. (more…)

January 17, 2024 10:20 pm | Link | 1 Comment »

A Cape Dutch Garden at Chelsea

Jonathan Snow at the 2018 Flower Show

I’m ashamed to say I’ve never been to the Chelsea Flower Show, the most florid event on London’s social calendar. It is a delight flâneur-ing around the neighbourhood the week of the Show as many of the pubs, restaurants, and businesses in the vicinity pull out the stops in terms of their own floral displays.

I used to live in Chelsea but escaped to Southwark and there are some delightful gardens in our vicinity. But I’ve never regretted avoiding the Chelsea Flower Show more than when I discovered Jonathan Snow’s delightful entry of a Cape Dutch garden in the 2018 exhibition.

Snow and his wife had been on holiday in the Cape a few years before and the beautiful fynbos captured the designer’s imagination. The architecture must have too, for Snow topped his garden off with a pocket Cape Dutch house that ties it all together.

I can well imagine taking a morning koppie koffie on that stoep — and perhaps either a stiff gin-and-tonic or some ice-cold vin de constance as the sun goes down.

An excellent effort that makes me pine for the Cape.

(more…)

January 10, 2024 11:50 am | Link | 1 Comment »

Articles of Note: 6 January 2024

Articles of Note
The Epiphany – 6 January 2024
■ It is well-known that ‘Welsh’ means ‘foreigners’, whereas Cymraeg, the Welsh word for ‘Welsh’ means ‘fellow-countrymen’. As the linguist Danny Bate muses upon, this is not quite the case. Wales, walnut, Walloon, and Wallachia all have the same etymology, Bate explains.

■ I had the great privilege of studying French Algeria under the knowledgeable and congenial Dr Stephen Tyre of St Andrews University and the country continues to exude an interest. The Algerian detective novelist Yasmina Khadra — nom de plume of the army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul — has attracted notice in Angledom since being translated from the Gallic into our vulgar tongue.

Recently the columnist Matthew Parris visited Algeria for leisurely purposes and reports on the experience.

■ While you’re at the Spectator, of course by now you should have already studied my lament for the excessive strength of widely available beers — provoked by the news that Sam Smith’s Brewery have increased the alcohol level of their trusty and reliable Alpine Lager.

■ This week Elijah Granet of the Legal Style Blog shared this numismatic gem. It makes one realise quite how dull our coin designs are these days. I don’t see why we shouldn’t have an updated version of this for our currently reigning Charles.

■ Meanwhile Chris Akers of Investors Chronicle and the Financial Times has gone on retreat to Scotland’s ancient abbey of Pluscarden and written up the experience for the FT. As he settled into the monastic rhythm, Chris found he was unwinding more than he ever has on any tropical beach.

Pluscarden is Britain’s only monastic community now in its original abbey, the building having been preserved — albeit greatly damaged until it was restarted in 1948. The older Buckfast is also on its original site but was entirely razed by 1800 or so and rebuilt from the 1900s onwards. (Pluscarden also has an excellent monastic shop.)

■ An entirely different and more disappointing form of retreat in Scottish religion is the (Presbyterian) state kirk’s decision to withdraw from tons of their smaller churches. St Monans is one of the mediæval gems of Fife, overlooking the harbour of the eponymous saint’s village since the fourteenth century, and built on the site of an earlier place of worship.

Cllr Sean Dillon pointed out the East Neuk is to lose six churches — some of which have been in the Kirk’s hands since they were confiscated at the Reformation, including St Monans.

John Lloyd, also of the FT, reported on this last summer and spoke to my old church history tutor, the Rev Dr Ian C. Bradley. More on the closures in the Courier and Fife Today.

What a dream it would be for a charitable trust to buy St Monans and to restore it to its appearance circa 1500 or so, available as a place of worship and as a living demonstration of Scotland’s rich and polychromatic culture that was so tragically destroyed in the sixteenth century. You could open with a Carver Mass conducted by Sir James MacMillan.

■ And finally, on the last day of MMXXIII, the architect Conor Lynch reports in from Connemara with this scene of idyllic bliss:

January 6, 2024 2:10 pm | Link | 1 Comment »

Old Church, Paarl

Edward Rowarth, Old Church Paarl
oil on canvas, 19½ in. x 60½ in.;
Private hands
(formerly in the KWV Collection)

The church in die Paarl is the third-oldest NGK congregation in South Africa, after the Groote Kerk in Cape Town and the Moederkerk in Stellenbosch. It is often known as the Strooidakkerk (straw-roof church) for obvious reasons.

This part of the Drakenstein was first settled by Huguenots, where the dominee Pierre Simond preached in French from the foundation of the church in 1691 until he returned to Europe in 1702.

More than two-and-a-half centuries later, its preacher was ds. Jacobus Johannes ‘Siebie’ Sieberhagen, who became one of the most formidable leaders of the domestic mission in the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (NGSK) for members of the Coloured (mixed-race) community in South Africa.

(In their typically racially minded way, there was also the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa [NGKA] as the corresponding church for black Africans.)

January 4, 2024 7:00 pm | Link | No Comments »

Regnum, Ecclesia, Studium

The threefold division of the world

Though he was an Eton-and-Balliol man, Lord Grimond (1913-1993) — sometime leader of the Liberal party in this realm — was born in the Scots university town of St Andrews.

As such he might be expected to have ideas about the idea of a university, and he wrote about them in The Spectator in August 1983.

Mister Grimond (as he still was then, only just), suggested those interested in the subject “might turn to a lecture by Ronald Cant, sometime Reader in Scottish History in the University of St Andrews”:

[…]

Cant draws attention to the belief in a threefold division of the world held by some long-dead Scottish sages. There was the regnum, the realm of secular affairs and temporal government, the ecclesia, or realm of spiritual concerns, and the studium or realm of intellectual issues.

A vital aspect of this tripartite organisation, as Cant says, was that each should serve and support the other. But the studium, while interacting with the regnum and ecclesia, must maintain its independence.

It was certainly the business of the studium to advance knowledge, but that was not to be the end of the matter. Knowledge was linked to public service. The learned man had a duty to the community as well as a right to pursue his intellectual quarry. In fact he pursued the quarry on behalf of the community.

The tripartite division of the world, although old-fashioned, seems to me a useful concept, emphasising that government, morality, and higher education are separate but intertwined.

It seems to me that if we expel the regnum and the ecclesia utterly from the world of the university we shall end up paradoxically with universities totally dependent upon the state… but as subservient as those in Rome.

The liberal spirit gave birth and sustenance to universities; if its progeny does not foster it in the regnum they may indeed end up as purely vocational colleges.

Food for thought. — A.C.
December 28, 2023 4:50 pm | Link | No Comments »

Unfinished Business at Audubon Terrace

One of the little tragedies of New York urbanism is that when Archer Milton Huntington was transforming a block of upper Manhattan into an acropolis of culture he failed to buy the entire block.

Huntington named his complex Audubon Terrace in honour of the artist and ornithologist John James Audubon whose home, Minniesland, overlooked the Hudson at the western end of the block. His failure to obtain Minniesland meant that the remainder of the block was snapped up by developers instead of incorporated into his campus.

In the 1910s, the speculators built apartment buildings that turned their rather rude and unadorned backs to Audubon Terrace, terminating the vista from Broadway. When you imagine the potential prospect all the way to the river, it is all the more tragic.

The crass posterior of these apartment blocks naturally dissatisfied the members of the American Academy of Arts & Letters, whose building sits on either side — and indeed beneath — the part of the terrace immediately adjacent to them.

McKim Mead & White had designed the first phase of the Academy’s handsome building facing on to West 155th Street, which opened in 1923, and Cass Gilbert was chosen to design the auditorium and pavilion which would complete the body’s portion of the site.

The Academy used the pavilion for art exhibitions and other events, with the terrace in between serving as a useful spot for springtime drinks parties for the academicians and their many guests.

The infelicitous nature of their neighbours clearly irritated the Academy, and in 1929 they had a conversation with Cass Gilbert about designing some sort of screen to satisfyingly terminate the vista down Audubon Terrace and block the view of the apartment buildings.

Gilbert sketched out a plan to build an arched screen connecting the pavilion to the main building across the terrace, topped off by a sculptural flourish.

There is a danger its scale may have overwhelmed the space, but that seems a preferable struggle to face when compared to the problem of the rude neighbours.

Events, as they so often do, intervened. The Wall Street Crash badly affected the American Academy’s finances, and Archer Huntington was forced to increase his already generous subsidy to the body even more just to make ends meet.

Gilbert’s final completion of Audubon Terrace was not to be.

The Academy was founded as a bastion of the old guard against the avante-garde, but in recent decades it has let its hair down a little, and leans more towards the modern than the traditional.

All the same, its current president is an English-public-school-and-Cambridge-educated philosopher from one of the most aristocratic families in Ghana, so it’s reassuring they’re keeping a bit of the old with the new.

The terrace is often used as a filming location for cinema and television, given the high quality of its architecture and the fact that it is visually not well-known even among New Yorkers, so can be deployed as a foreign setting.

The HBO programme ‘Boardwalk Empire’ used the American Academy’s terrace as an Italian port, using green screens (instead of a Cass Gilbert monumental arch) to transform the piazza.

Audubon Terrace and its surviving institutions — the expanding and renovating Hispanic Society, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and the Church of Our Lady of Esperanza — are an intriguing hidden gem of upper Manhattan, well worth a visit.

I don’t imagine anything like Cass Gilbert’s screen will ever be built, but every time I drop in to this neck of the woods I can’t help but thinking there’s some unfinished business.

December 21, 2023 5:00 pm | Link | 1 Comment »

Crisis Averted at Chartres

The rather garish and invasive plans to renovate the parvis of Chartres cathedral, turn it upside down, and install a museum underneath — previously reported on here in 2019 — have been radically revised in an infinitely less offensive direction.

The City of Chartres has released the final approved designs which show the esplanade of the cathedral renovated but left largely in place.

Instead of the original plan up reversing the grade of the parvis upwards away from the cathedral, the entire museum will be kept underground and out of sight. (more…)

November 15, 2023 12:10 pm | Link | No Comments »

Horseshoe for Quebec’s Salon bleu

Refit will change seating plan in Quebec’s parliament chamber

An upcoming renovation to the Hôtel du parlement in Quebec City will also bring a change in the seating plan of the Assembly’s parliamentary chamber. Deputés agreed a moderate alteration to the current Westminster-style seating plan: a horseshoe shape will replace the crowded back two rows of desks with a curved arrangement.

The original clerks’ table designed by the building’s architect, Eugène-Étienne Taché, in 1886 will also be returned to centre-stage in the Salon bleu (formerly the Salon vert) of Quebec’s National Assembly. The room is also, I believe, the only parliamentary chamber to feature in a film by Alfred Hitchcock.

Renovations are scheduled to begin in January of next year, when deputés will start convening in the Salon rouge that formerly housed Quebec’s Legislative Council, abolished in 1968. (Quebec was the last Canadian province to abolish the upper house of its parliament.)

“The Salon bleu has a strong symbolic value for the Quebec nation,” claims Éric Montigny, professor of political science at Laval University (founded 1663).

“We must respect this tradition and evolve in a very, very gradual manner,” Professor Montigny told the Journal de Québec. “A parliament is not trivial.”

The Assembly numbered only sixty-five members when Taché’s edifice was completed in 1886, while today 125 deputés have to fit into the parliamentary chamber.

The new arrangement would make room for as many as 130 legislators, plus the Président in the speaker’s chair. It will also allow for a good number of the historic desks in the chamber to be retained.

Other potential arrangements were considered and rejected, including introducing a half-moon hemicycle akin to Paris, Washington, and other republican legislatures.

Prof Montigny dismissed claims that semicircular arrangements lead to more collaborative dialogue and constructive work between government and opposition parties:

“It’s an argument that is raised regularly, but I don’t know of any studies that will support this theory.”

The most significant change to the chamber in recent years was the removal of the crucifix from above the président’s chair, first installed in 1936 by the giant of Quebec politics, premier Maurice Duplessis.

That crucifix, and its 1982 replacement, were removed in 2019 and are now displayed as historical artefacts in an ancillary part of the parliament building.

[NDLR: I wrote about the crucifix back in 2008.]

The horseshoe seating plan seems a happy compromise: Westminster-style parliaments — even those that are unicameral like Quebec’s — are honest about the antagonism between government and opposition, and the horseshoe preserves the antiphonal arrangement conducive to this, while rounding it off with a curve at the end.

For my part, I will be happy to see the removal of the arbitrary trapezoid of the modern clerks’ table (below) and its replacement by its historic predecessor.

September 21, 2023 1:44 pm | Link | No Comments »

‘The first great commercial people’

From A Cultural History of the Modern Age by Egon Friedell.

[…]

THE DUTCH ARE the first great commercial people of the Modern Age. They recall the Phoenicians in their hard matter-of-fact materialism, their crafty and unscrupulous acquisitiveness, and their turbulent decayed oligarchy. Like the Phoenicians they owed their economic supremacy to the circumstance that they were ahead of other nations in the developing of the mercantile idea.

And it was for this same reason that they were unable to maintain that supremacy: for all its busy tenacity, their effort lacked a higher inspiration and, therefore, real vitality. Numerically, too, they were too few to be able for long to subdue and batten on half the world. It was the same maladjustment which turned Sweden’s taste of world-power into an episode: the national basis was too small.

There is no doubt that the cultural level was at that time higher in Holland than in the rest of Europe. The universities enjoyed an international reputation. Leyden in particular was accounted supreme in philology, political science, and natural philosophy.

It was in Holland that Descartes and Spinoza lived and worked, as also the famous philologists Heinsius and Vossius, the great jurist-philosopher Grotius, and the poet Vondel, whose dramas were imitated all the world over.

The Elzevir dynasty dominated the European book trade, and the Elzevir publications — duodecimo editions of the Bible, the classics, and prominent contemporaries— were appreciated in every library for their elegant beauty and their correctness.

At a time when illiteracy was still almost universal in other lands, nearly everyone in Holland could read and write; and Dutch culture and manners were rated so high that in the higher ranks of society a man’s education was considered incomplete unless he could say that he had been finished off in Holland, “civilisé en Hollande”.

The colonising activities of the Dutch set in practically with the new century, and fill the first two-thirds of it. They quickly gained a footing in all quarters of the world.

On the north-east coast of South America they took possession of Guiana, and in North America they founded the New Amsterdam which was later to become New York: centuries afterwards the Dutch or “Knickerbocker” families still constituted a sort of aristocracy.

They spread themselves over the southern-most tip of Africa, where they became known as Boers, and imported from there the excellent Cape wines.

One whole continent bore their name: namely, New Holland — the later Australia — round which Tasman was the first to sail. Tasman did not, however, penetrate to the interior, but supposed Tasmania (which was named after him) to be a peninsula.

The Dutch were also the first to land on the southern extremity of America, which was named Cape Horn (Hoorn) after the birthplace of the discoverer.

Their greatest acquisitions, however, were in the Sunda islands: Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Celebes, and the Moluccas all came into their possession.

Extending out to Ceylon and Further India, by 1610 they had already founded their main base, Batavia, with its magnificent trade-buildings. In fact they ruled over the whole Indian archipelago. For a time they even held Brazil.

With all this, they never, in the true sense of the word, colonised, but merely set up trading centres, peripheral depots, with forts and factories, intended only for the economic exploitation of the country and the protection of the sea routes.

Nowhere did they succeed in making real conquests; for these, as we said before, they had not the necessary population, nor had they, as a purely commercial people, the smallest interest in doing so.

Their chief exports were costly spices, rice, and tea. To the last-named Europe accustomed itself but slowly. At the English Court it first appeared in 1664 and was not considered very palatable — for it was served as a vegetable. In France it was known a generation earlier, but even there it had to make its way slowly through a mountain of prejudice.

Moreover, its consumption was limited by the Dutch themselves, who, having a monopoly to export it, raised the prices to the level of sheer extortion. This was in fact their normal procedure throughout, and they did not shrink from the most infamous practices, such as the burning of large pepper and nutmeg nurseries and the sinking of whole cargoes.

Their home production, too, dominated the European market with its numerous specialities. All the world bought their clay pipes; a fishing fleet of more than two thousand vessels supplied the whole of Europe with herrings; and from Delft, the main seal of the china industry, the popular blue and white glazed jugs, dishes, and table implements, tiles, stoves, and fancy figures went forth to all points of the compass.

One Dutch article that was in universal demand was the tulip bulb. It became a sport and a science to breed this gorgeous flower in ever new colours, forms, and patterns. Immense tulip farms covered the ground in Holland, and amateurs or speculators would pay the price of an estate for a single rare fancy breed.

The get-rich-quick people threw themselves into the “option” game: that is, they sold costly specimens, which often existed only in imagination, against future delivery, paying only the difference between the agreed price and the price quoted on settling day. It is indeed the Dutch who may claim the dubious honour of having invented the modem stock-exchange system with all the manipulative practices that we know today.

The great tulip crash of 1637, which was the result of all this bubble trading, is the first stock-exchange collapse in the history of the world. The shares of the Dutch trading companies, in particular the East Indian (floated in 1602) and the West Indian (1621), were the first stocks to be handled in the stock-broking manner (their par value speedily tripled itself, and the dividends rose to twenty per cent and higher); and the Amsterdam Exchange, which ruled the world, became the finishing school for the game of “bull” and “bear.”

Then, too, during the first half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch were Europe’s sole middlemen: their mercantile marine was three times as big as that of all other countries.

And although — or indeed because — the whole world depended on it, there arose a bitter hatred against it (contrasting strangely with the extravagant admiration accorded to their manners and comforts) which was intensified by the brutal and reckless extremes to which they went in maintaining their advantage. “Trade must be free everywhere, up to the gates of hell,” was their supreme article of faith.

But by free trade they meant freedom for themselves — in other words, a ruthlessly exploited monopoly. This was also the kind of freedom that Grotius meant when in his famous treatise on international law, Mare liberum, he stated that the discovery of foreign countries does not in itself give right of possession, and that the sea by its very nature is outside all possession and is the property of everyone.

But as the sea was in fact in the possession of the Dutch, this liberal philosophy was no more than the historical mask for an economic terrorism.

In this wise the “United States” became the richest and most prosperous country of Europe. There was so much money that the rate of interest was only two to three per cent.

But although naturally the common people lived under far better conditions than elsewhere, the great profits were made by a comparatively small oligarchy of hard, fat money-bags, the so-called “Regent-families” who were in almost absolute control — since they filled all the leading posts in the government, the judicature, and the colonies — and looked down on the common man, the “Jan Hagel,” as contemptuously as did the aristocrats of other countries.

Opposed to them was the party of the Oranges, who by an unwritten law held the hereditary town governorships; their aim was indeed a legitimate monarchy, but they were nevertheless far more democratic in their ideas than the moneyed class, and were therefore beloved of the people. The best talent, military and technical, gathered about them. The first strategists of the age were on their staff. They nurtured a generation of virtuosi in siege warfare, privateering, artillery, and engineering science. The water-network created by them, which covered the whole of Holland, was considered a world marvel. They were masters, too, of diplomacy. …

Digitised here at archive.org
September 13, 2023 4:30 pm | Link | No Comments »

Wayside Shrine in Transylvania

Wayside Shrine — Northern Transylvania, 1940.
[Source: Fortepan]
August 10, 2023 12:10 pm | Link | No Comments »

Fortress London

What could be more mundane than the Country Bus Services Map? Not when you put the design in the hands of Max Gill. Younger brother to the more famous (but controversial) Eric Gill, Lesilei Macdonald “Max” Gill was a polymathic artist: cartographer, designer, sculptor, painter, and letterer.

In 1914, Frank Pick, inventor of the London Underground brand, hired Max Gill to create the Wonderground Map. Each Underground station had a copy of this map with its inventive and amusing illustrations, such as the two figures hurling hams at Hurlingham. As one newspaper said when it was introduced, ‘People spend so long looking at this map – they miss their trains yet go on smiling.’

The Country Bus Services Map dates from 1928 and depicts London as a great crammed and crowded fortress city from which bus services flow forth to allow the citizens to escape its walls and experience the rustic beauty of the surrounding countryside.

St Paul’s Cathedral looms large between shields depicting the arms of the City and County of London, with the Monument, the Port of London Authority, and the Tower cuddling up to it.

Lambeth Palace and the Oval at Kennington are the only features south of the river that make it into Gill’s walled metropolis.

London (After Max Gill) by Adam Hayes

In more recent years, the designer and typographer Adam Hayes decided to issue a cheeky update entitled ‘London (After Max Gill)’ (available as a print as well).

Choked by smoggy traffic, the Shard now looms large, while a cheese grater represents the Cheesegrater. Tree stumps are joined by fussy signs instructing NO THIS and NO THAT and CCTV cameras are omnipresent.

‘Wonderground’ and the Country Bus Services Map were not the limits of Max Gill’s work for London Underground. The London Transport Museum holds many examples of his work within there collection, some of which have been digitised and are viewable online — though irritatingly not in any sufficiently zoomable detail.

July 26, 2023 1:10 pm | Link | 1 Comment »
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