Tag: History

Oct 23 2014

Book review: Pompeii by Mary Beard

For a change I have been reading about Roman history, in the form of Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town by Mary Beard.

Mary Beard is a Cambridge classicist. I think it helps having seen her on TV, jabbing her figure at a piece of Roman graffiti, explaining what it meant and why it was important with obvious enthusiasm. For me it gave the book a personality.

I imagine I am not unusual in gaining my knowledge of Roman culture via some poorly remembered caricature presented in pre-16 history classes at school and films including the Life of Brian, Gladiator and Up Pompeii.

Pompeii is an ancient Italian town which was covered in a 4-6 metre blanket of ash by an eruption of nearby Vesuvius in 79 AD. Beneath the ash the town was relatively undamaged. It was rediscovered in 1599 but excavations only started in the mid 18th century. These revealed a very well-preserved town including much structure, artwork and the remains of the residents. The bodies of the fallen left voids in the ash which were reconstructed by filling them with plaster.

The book starts with a salutatory reminder that Pompeii wasn’t a town frozen in normal times but one in extremis as it succumbed to a volcanic eruption. We can’t assume that the groups of bodies found or the placement of artefacts represent how they might have been found in normal daily life.

There are chapters on the history of the city, the streets, homes, painting, occupations, administration, various bodily pleasures (food, wine, sex and bathing), entertainment (theatre and gladiators) and temples.

I’ve tended to think of the Roman’s as a homogeneous blob who occupied a chunk of time and space. But this isn’t the case, the pre-Roman history of the town features writing in the Oscan language. The Greek writer Strabo, working in the first century BC wrote about a sequence of inhabitants: Oscans, Etruscans, Pelasgians and then Samnites – who also spoke Oscan.

Much of what we know of Pompeii seems to stem from the graffiti found all about the remains. It would be nice to learn a bit more about this evidence since it seems important, and clearly something different is going on from what we find in modern homes and cities. If I look around homes I know today then none feature graffiti, granted there is much writing on paper but not on the walls.

From the depths of my memory I recall the naming of various rooms in the Roman bath house but it turns out these names may not have been in common usage amongst the Romans. Furthermore, the regimented progression from hottest to coldest bath may also be somewhat fanciful. Something I also didn’t appreciate was that the meanings of some words in ancient Latin are not known, or are uncertain. It’s obvious in retrospect that this might be the case but caveats on such things are rarely heard.

Beard emphasises that there has been a degree of “over-assumption” in the characterisation of the various buildings in Pompeii. For instance on some reckonings there are huge numbers of bars and brothels. So for instance, anything with a counter and some storage jars gets labelled a bar. Anything with phallic imagery gets labelled a brothel, the Pompeiian’s were very fond of phallic imagery. A more conservative treatment brings these numbers down enormously.

I am still mystified by the garum, the fermented fish sauce apparently loved by many, it features moderately in the book since the house of a local manufacturer is one of the better preserved ones, and one which features very explicit links to his trade. It sounds absolutely repulsive.

The degree of preservation in Pompeii is impressive, the scene that struck me most vividly was in The House of Painters at Work. In this case the modern label for the house describes exactly what was going on, other houses are labelled with the names of dignitaries present when a house was uncovered, or after key objects found in the house. It is not known what the inhabitants called the houses, or even the streets. Deliveries seemed to go by proximity to prominent buildings.

I enjoyed Pompeii, the style is readable and it goes to some trouble to explain the uncertainty and subtlety in interpreting ancient remains.

Once again I regret buying a non-fiction book in ebook form, the book has many illustrations including a set of colour plates and I still find it clumsy looking at them in more detail or flicking backwards and forwards in an ereader.

Sep 21 2014

Book review: Falling Upwards by Richard Holmes

fallingupwardsI read Richard Holmes book The Age of Wonder some time ago, in it he made a brief mention of balloons in the 18th century. It pricked my curiosity, so when I saw his book Falling Upwards, all about balloons, I picked it up.

The chapters of Falling Upwards cover a series of key points in the development of ballooning, typically hydrogen balloons from the last couple of decades of the 18th century to the early years of the 20th century. One of the early stories is a flight from my own home city, Chester. Thomas Baldwin recorded his flight in Airopaidia: Containing the Narrative of a Balloon Excursion from Chester, the eighth of September, 1785. The book does not have the air of a rigorous history of ballooning, it introduces technical aspects but not systematically. It is impressionistic to a degree, and as a result a rather pleasant read. For Holmes the artistic and social impact of balloons are as important as the technical.

In the beginning there was some confusion as to the purposes to which a balloon might be put, early suggestions included an aid to fast messengers who would stay on the ground to provide but use a small balloon to give them “10 league boots”, there were similar suggestions for helping heavy goods vehicles.

In practice for much of the period covered balloons were used mainly for entertainment – both for pleasure trips but also aerial displays involving acrobatics and fireworks. Balloons were also used for military surveillance.  Holmes provides chapters on their use in the American Civil War by the Union side (and very marginally by the Confederates). And in the Franco-Prussian war they were used to break the Prussian siege of Paris (or at least bend it). The impression gained though is that they were something like novelty items for surveillance. By the time of the American Civil War in the 1860’s it wasn’t routine or obvious that one must use balloon surveillance, it wasn’t a well established technique. This was likely a limitation of both the balloons themselves and the infrastructure required to get them in the air.

Balloons gave little real utility themselves, except in exceptional circumstances, but they made a link to heavier-than-air flight. They took man into the air, and showed the possibilities but for practical purposes generally didn’t deliver – largely due to their unpredictability. To a large extent you have little control of where you will land in a balloon once you have gone up. Note, for example, that balloons were used to break the Prussian siege of Paris in the outbound direction only. A city the size of Paris is too small a target to hit, even for highly motivated fliers.

Nadar (pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), who lived in Paris, was one of the big promoters of just about anything. He fought a copyright battle with his brother over his, adopted, signature. Ballooning was one of his passions, he inspired Jules Verne to starting writing science fiction. His balloon, Le Géant, launched in 1863 was something of a culmination in ballooning – it was enormous – 60 metres high but served little purpose other than to highlight the limitations of the form – as was Nadar’s intent.

From a scientific point of view Falling Upwards covers James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell’s flights in the mid-nineteenth century. I was impressed by Glaisher’s perseverance in taking manual observations at a rate of one every 9 seconds throughout a 90 minute flight. Glaisher had been appointed by the British Association for the Advancement of Science to do his work, he was Superintendent for Meteorology and Magnetism at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. With his pilot Henry Coxwell he made a record-breaking ascent to approximately 8,800 meters in 1862, a flight they were rather lucky to survive. Later in the 19th century other scientists were to start to identify the layers in the atmosphere. Discovering that it is only a thin shell – 5 miles or so thick which is suitable for life.

The final chapter is on the Salomon Andrée’s attempt to reach the North Pole by balloon, as with so many polar stories it ends in cold, lonely, perhaps avoidable death for Andrée and his two colleagues. Their story was discovered when the photos and journals were recovered from White Island in the Artic Circle, some 30 years after they died.

Falling Upwards is a rather conversational history. Once again I’m struck by the long periods for technology to reach fruition. It’s true that from a technology point of view that heavier-than-air flight is very different from ballooning. But it’s difficult to imagine doing the former without the later.

Sep 27 2013

Book Review: Georgian London–Into the Streets by Lucy Inglis

GeorgianLondonI saw the gestation of Georgian London: Into the streets by Lucy Inglis, so now it is born – I had to buy it!

Lucy Inglis has been blogging about Georgian London for much of the last four years, and I have been reading since then. Her focus is the stories of everyday folk, little snippets from contemporary records surrounded by her extensive knowledge of the period.

The book starts with some scene settings, in particular the end of the Restoration (1660), the Plague (1665), the Great Fire of London (1666) and the Glorious Revolution (1688). These events shape the stage for the Georgian period which covers the years 1714 to 1837, named for the succession of King George’s who reigned through the period marked by the death of William IV (don’t ask me).

London is then covered geographically, using John Rocque’s rather fabulous 1746 map as ornamentation. What is obvious to even those such as myself who are broadly ignorant of the geography of London is how much smaller London was then. Areas such as Islington, which I consider to be in the heart of London were on the edge of the city at the time, rural locations with farming and so forth. The period saw a huge expansion in the city from a population of 500,000 at the beginning of the period to 1.5 million by 1831 which much of the growth occurring in the second half of the 18th century.

Georgian London is somewhat resistant to my usual style of “review” which involves combining the usual elements of review and a degree of summary to remind me of what I read. Essentially there is just too much going on for summarising to work! So I will try some sort of vague impressionistic views:

It struck me how the nature of poverty changed with urbanisation; prior to a move to the city the poor could rely to some extent on the support of their parish, moving to London broke these ties and, particularly for women supporting children, this led to destitution. Men could easily travel to find work, either back home or elsewhere – a women with a child couldn’t do this.

The role of the state was rather smaller than it is now, when the time came to build Westminster Bridge, there was no government funding but rather a series of lotteries. The prize for one of these was the Jernegan cistern, a wine container made from quarter of a ton of silver with a capacity of 60 gallons! Another indicator of the smaller size of the state was that in 1730 a quarter of state income was from tax on alcohol, much of it on gin. Currently alcohol duties account for about £10billion per year which is about 1.5% of the total government spending.

Businesswomen make regular appearances through the book, for example such as Elinor James who was the widow of a printer, Thomas James but published under her own name. She was both a speaker and a pamphleteer, working at the beginning of the 18th century. At the end of the century, the younger Eleanor Coade, was running a thriving business making artificial stone (Coade stone). She’d first come to London in 1769, with her mother, also Eleanor following the death of her father.

At the same time that a quarter of all government revenue came from alcohol duties, a quarter of all gin distillers were women. Alcohol caused many social problems, particularly in the second quarter of the 18th century, as recorded by Hogarth’s “Gin Line”. The vice of the upper classes in the second half of the 18th century was gambling.

The Tower of London housed exotic animals for many years, providing a money-raising visitor attraction through the Georgian period, only losing it status in 1835 on the creation of London Zoo in Regent’s Park. A few years earlier, in 1832, the Tower of London hosted 280 beasts of varying types but it was becoming clear it was an unsuitable location to keep animals. The British were also becoming more aware of animal cruelty, with animal baiting becoming less popular through the Georgian period – culminating with the Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment in 1822, and the formation of the RSPCA a couple years later.

It seems useful to know that London’s first street numbers where introduced in 1708.

The voice of the book is spot-on, conversational but authoritative, providing colour without clumsiness. There are no footnotes but there are extensive notes at the end of the book, along with a bibliography. For someone trying to write a blog post like this, the index could do with extension!

It’s difficult to write a review of a book by someone you know, all I can say is that if I didn’t like it I would have not written this. Don’t just take it from me – see what the Sunday Sport thought!

Jul 25 2013

Book review: The Subterranean Railway by Christian Wolmar

large-the-subterranean-railwayTo me the London underground is an almost magically teleportation system which brings order to the chaos of London. This is because I rarely visit London and know it only via Harry Beck’s circuit diagram map of the underground. To find out more about the teleporter, I have read The Subterranean Railway by Christian Wolmar.

London’s underground system was the first in the world, it predated any others by nearly 40 years. This had some drawbacks, for the first 30 years of its existence it ran exclusively using steam engines which are not good in an enclosed, underground environment. In fact travel in the early years of the Underground sounds really rather grim, despite its success.

The context for the foundation of the Underground was the burgeoning British rail network, it had started with one line between Manchester and Liverpool in 1830 by 1850 the country had a system spanning the country. The network did not penetrate to the heart of London, it had been stopped by a combination of landowner interests and expense. This exclusion was enshrined in the report of the 1846 Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini. This left London with an ever-growing transport problem, now increased by the railway’s ability to get people to the perimeter of the city but no further.

The railways were the largest human endeavours since Roman times, as well as the engineering challenges there were significant financial challenges in raising capital and political challenges in getting approval. This despite the fact the the railway projectors were exempted from the restrictions on raising capital from groups of more than five people introduced after the South Seas Bubble.

The first underground line, the Metropolitan, opened in 1863 it ran from Paddington to Farringdon – it had been 20 years in the making, although construction only took 3 years. The tunnels were made by the cut-and-cover method, which works as described – a large trench is dug, the railway built in the bottom and then covered over. This meant the tunnels were relatively shallow, mainly followed the line of existing roads and involved immense disruption on the surface.

In 1868 the first section of the District line opened, this was always to be the Metropolitan’s poorer relative but would form part of the Circle line, finally completed in 1884 despite the animosity between James Staats Forbes and Edward Watkin – the heads of the respective companies at the time. It’s worth noting that it wasn’t until 1908 that the first London Underground maps were published; in its early days the underground “system” was the work of disparate private companies who were frequently at loggerheads and certainly not focussed on cooperating to the benefit of their passengers.

The underground railways rarely provided the returns their investors were looking for but they had an enormous social impact, for the first time poorer workers in the city could live out of town in relatively cheap areas and commute in, the railway companies positively encouraged this. The Metropolitan also invested in property in what are now the suburbs of London, areas such as Golders Green were open fields before the underground came. This also reflects the expansion of the underground into the surrounding country.

The first deep line, the City and South London was opened in 1890, it was also the first electric underground line. The deep lines were tunnelled beneath the city using the tunnelling shield developed by Marc Brunel, earlier in the 19th century. Following the first electrification the District and Metropolitan lines eventually electrified their lines, although it took some time (and a lot of money). The finance for the District line came via the American Charles Tyson Yerkes, who would generously be described as a colourful character, engaging in financial engineering which we likely imagine is a recent invention.

Following the First World War the underground was tending towards a private monopoly, government was looking to invest to make work and ultimately the underground was nationalised, at arms length, to form London Transport in 1933, led by the same men (Lord Ashfield and Frank Pick) who had run the private monopoly.

The London underground reached its zenith in the years leading up to the Second World War, gaining its identity (roundel, font and iconic map) and forming a coherent, widespread network. After the war it was starved of funds, declining – overtaken by the private car. Further lines were added such as the Victoria and Jubilee lines but activity was much reduced from the early years.

More recently it has seen something of a revival with the ill-fated Public-Private Partnership running into the ground, but not before huge amounts of money had been spent, substantially on improvements. As I write, the tunnelling machines are building Crossrail.

I felt the book could have done with a construction timeline, something like this on wikipedia (link), early on there seems to be a barrage of new line openings, sometimes not in strictly chronological order and to someone like me, unfamiliar with London it is all a bit puzzling. Despite this The Subterranean Railway is an enjoyable read.

May 25 2013

Book review: Empire of the Clouds by James Hamilton-Paterson

EmpireOfTheCloudsEmpire of the Clouds by James Hamilton-Paterson, subtitled When Britain’s Aircraft Ruled the World, is the story of the British aircraft industry in the 20 years or so following the Second World War. I read it following a TV series a while back, name now forgotten, and the recommendation of friend. I thought it might fit with the story of computing during a similar period which I had gleaned from A Computer called LEO. The obvious similarities are that at the end of the Second World War Britain held a strong position in aircraft and computer design, which spawned a large number of manufacturers who all but vanished by the end of the 1960s.

The book starts with the 1952 Farnborough Air Show crash in which 29 spectators and a pilot were killed when a prototype de Havilland 110 broke up in mid-air with one of its engines crashing into the crowd. Striking to modern eyes would be the attitude to this disaster – the show went on directly with the next pilot up advised to “…keep to the right side of the runway and avoid the wreckage”. All this whilst ambulances were still converging to collect the dead and wounded. This attitude applied equally to the lives of test pilots, many of whom were to die in the years after the war. Presumably this was related to war-time experiences where pilots might routinely expect to lose a large fraction of their colleagues in combat, and where city-dwellers had recent memories of nightly death-tolls in the hundreds from aerial bombing.

Some test pilots died as they pushed their aircraft towards the sound barrier, the aerodynamics of an aircraft change dramatically as it approaches the speed of sound, making it difficult to control and all at very high speed so if solutions to problems did exist they were rather difficult to find in the limited time available. Black box technology for recording what had happened was rudimentary so the approach was generally to try to creep up on the speeds at which others had come to grief with a hope of finding out what had gone wrong by direct experience.

At the end of the Second World War Britain had a good position technically in the design of aircraft, and a head start with the jet engine. There were numerous manufacturers across the country who had been churning out aircraft to support the war effort. This could not be sustainable in peace time but it was not for quite some time that the required rationalisation was to occur. Another consequence of war was that for resilience to aerial bombing manufacturers frequently had distributed facilities which in peacetime were highly inconvenient, these arrangements appeared to remain in place for some time after the war.

In some ways the sub-title “When Britain’s Aircraft Ruled the World” is overly optimistic, although there were many exciting and intriguing prototype airplanes produced but only a few of them made it to production, and even fewer were commercially, or militarily successful. Exceptions to this general rule were the English Electric Canberra jet-bomber, English Electric Lightning, Avro Vulcan and the Harrier jump jet.

The longevity of these aircraft in service was incredible: the Vulcan and Canberra were introduced in the early fifties with the Vulcan retiring in 1984 and the Canberra lasting until 2006. The Harrier jump jet entered service in 1969 and is still operational. The Lighting entered service 1959 and finished in 1988; viewers of the recent Wonders of the Solar System will have seen Brian Cox take a trip in a Lightning, based at Thunder City where thrill-seekers can play to fly in the privately-owned craft. They’re ridiculously powerful but only have 40 minutes or so of fuel, unless re-fuelled in-flight.

Hamilton-Paterson’s diagnosis is that after the war the government’s procurement policies, frequently finding multiple manufacturers designing prototypes for the same brief and frequently cancelling those orders, were partly to blame for the failure of the industry. These cancellations were brutal: not only were prototypes destroyed, the engineering tools used to make them were destroyed. This is somewhat reminiscent of the decommissioning of the Colossus computer at the end of the Second World War. In addition the strategic view at the end of the war was that there would be no further wars to fight for the next ten years and development of fighter aircraft was therefore slowed. Military procurement has hardly progressed to this day, as a youth I remember the long drawn out birth of the Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft, and more recently there have been mis-adventures with the commissioning of Chinook helicopters and new aircraft carriers.

A second strand to the industry’s failure was the management and engineering approaches common at the time in Britain. Management stopped for two hours for sumptuous lunches every day, it was often autocratic. Whilst American and French engineers were responsive to the demands of their potential customers, and their test pilots the British ones seemed to find such demands a frightful imposition which they ignored. Finally, with respect to civilian aircraft, the state owned British Overseas Airways Corporation was not particularly patriotic in its procurement strategy.

Hamilton-Paterson’s book is personal, he was an eager plane-spotter as a child and says quite frankly that the test pilot Bill Waterson – a central character in the book – was a hero to him. This view may or may not colour the conclusions he makes about the period but it certainly makes for a good read, the book could have been a barrage of detail about each and every aircraft but the more personal reflections, and memories make it something different and more readable. There are parallels with the computing industry after the war, but perhaps the most telling thing is that flashes of engineering brilliance are of little use if they are not matched by a consistent engineering approach and the management to go with it.