First Tunnel Under the Thames Opened to the Public for Two Days – Video Inside

Oh man do I wish I had been in London for this once in a lifetime event. The Thames Tunnel built by Isembard Kingdom Brunel (coolest name ever) – also known as the first tunnel under the River Thames – was opened to the public for two days.

The tunnel is being refurbished as part of the modernization of the East London Line on the London Underground and the public were given the chance to tour the tunnel for the first time in 150 years – and probably the last time as well.

The event was incredibly popular – I hope they open it up again.

Here’s a cool video from ITN News all about it.

National Trust Releases Awesome Free iPhone App

I’m a huge fan of the National Trust. For those of you not familiar with it – the National Trust is a non-profit ogranization that runs many country homes and historical sites throughout Britain. It was very common for aristocrats to donate their houses to the Trust to avoid inheritance taxes.

Their defining motto is:

“The National Trust works to preserve and protect the coastline, countryside and buildings of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. We do this in a range of ways, through practical caring and conservation, through educating and informing, and through encouraging millions of people to enjoy their national heritage.”

So, it was only a matter of time until they jumped on the iPhone bandwagon. It’s been a long time in the making but well worth the wait and this is a free iPhone app that every Anglophile needs to download.

The app features a map of Great Britain and it allows you to zoom in a see pinpoints of all the site under their control. You can tap into each one and find out critical data – what is it, pictures, opening times, what you can do there, costs, etc. It’s very useful and thorough information.

My only complaint about the app is that it’s constantly asking to use your location, while useful if your in Britain, if you’re in Chicago like me, it’s not that useful. But if you happen to be in Britain you can use the ‘locate me’ function to find out what sites are near you. This would have been incredibly useful on our trip last November!

You can also see a list of all their properties and do a search. It’s really a perfect little iPhone app.

You can download it here:

A Pint of Bitter: Michael Foot, 1913-2010; writer, minister, leader

I know I usually write about the political controversies and manoeuverings of the day: matters such as the taxes of Lord Ashcroft and the return of Labour in the polls do matter. But some things matter more, and I want to devote my words on this occasion entirely to the life and ideas of Michael Foot, who died this week aged 96. He was well known here in Britain as a politician from the 1950s to the 1980s, when he led the Labour Party, and as a writer. He’s a particularly English figure, less well known abroad: but no understanding of our politics especially since 1980 is complete without considering his career.

Foot was born in Plymouth in 1913, into a family of Liberal Methodists, and the roundhead tradition of radical Christian dissent was a key influence on Foot – though he became a convinced atheist. His father was also an obsessive book buyer and reader, habits that rubbed thick on to young Michael, who steeped himself in the English romanticism of Byron and Shelley and who in later life wrote serious studies of Swift and H. G. Wells. He was an unusual, exceptionally literate and intellectual politician of a kind rarely seen. At Oxford he was first a left-wing Liberal, but became a socialist in the early 1930s. This was the time of the marked decline of the Liberal Party; socialism in all its forms had recently emerged, in Soviet Communism (which Foot rejected both then and throughout his life) and with the coming of Labour government in Britain in the 1920s. He was far from the first Liberal radical to join Labour, which must have seemed the “happening” party, as we’d now put it, for a young and passionate radical anxious for social justice, for peace and to oppose fascism.

He was a journalist for Tribune (for whom George Orwell also wrote, later) and then editor of the Evening Standard; during the war the short book Guilty Men, which he co-wrote in a few days with two colleagues, caused something of a sensation with its indictment of the pre-war appeasers – Chamberlain, Baldwin, Halifax and the rest. Then in 1945 he was elected to Parliament for Plymouth Devonport, which he held for ten years. During the 1950s Foot was a prominent “Bevanite”: a supporter of Aneurin (“Nye”) Bevan, the charismatic Welsh ex-miner and leader of the left who had established the National Health Service as health minister after the war but who had fallen out with the Labour leadership first over prescription charges, then the H-bomb. Foot was vehemently opposed to Britain’s adoption of nuclear weaponry and felt shocked and bewildered when Bevan famously drew back from outright unilateral disarmament in 1957. But he still revered his mentor; and when Bevan died in 1960, Foot re-entered Parliament at the resulting Ebbw Vale by-election. And used his time in opposition to write the first volume of his biography of the great man, arguably his most important literary work, completed in the early seventies after a period spent as Labour’s most prominent backbench critic under the first government of Harold Wilson.

Foot then surprisingly embarked upon an career as an ultra-loyalist minister in the 1970s under  Wilson and then Jim Callaghan, first as employment minister, then negotiating with the Liberals to keep the Labour government afloat. But it sank in the end; and in the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s rule, Labour turned sharply left – and began to tear itself apart. Tony Benn was the most prominent and controversial figure on the left, an austere, calculating figure, inspiring to some and sinister to others. The rise of Benn, and the resulting shift in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament and left-wing, anti-European policies enabled Foot to become leader. But he faced  constant internal opposition from Benn who, having welcomed Foot’s leadership, tried to both use and destroy it, and to capture Labour for his own ends. To much of the moderate left, Labour was no longer home, and Foot failed to prevent some MPs leaving to form the Social Democratic Party, now long gone but which can be seen as a forerunner of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” vision. Foot had failed to keep Labour united: and it went down to its worst, most notorious defeat in the general election of 1983.

To his credit, Foot had successfully faced down Tony Benn and he started the campaign to root out  “Militant”, an extraordinary Trotskyist sect that was attempting to take Labour over from within.  I thought then, and still think that Foot was wrong on all the big issues in the 1980s. I now realise though that Labour’s wasted years were less his fault than the fault of others. I can see that Foot and Bevan had a good case in the 1950s against Britain’s testing and making the bomb. But the 1980s would have been the wrong time to adopt unilateral nuclear disarmament and remove US bases. The United States and NATO had adopted a tough stance to Moscow’s increasing militarism, and unilateral desertion of that strategy by Britain would at best helped Kremlin hardliners delay their own disarmament. On Europe, to withdraw immediately, less than a decade after our joining, after the voters had decided overwhelmingly to stay in and without consulting them further, would have been a foreign policy disaster. Yet it was Labour’s policy under Michael Foot.

Even so, I think he has important things to teach us. He consistently wanted international control of nuclear weapons, and their ultimate abolition – admirable aims, and in my view it is right for Britain to support Barack Obama now in his efforts to move us just a few short steps along that road. And perhaps now it is finally right for Britain to ask whether it is right to remain a nuclear weapons state. On Europe, all but a few on the Labour side have now abandoned Foot’s thinking, and I would certainly not argue for Euroscepticism. But he reminds us that Euroscepticism is not an intrinsically Conservative attitude and that liberal internationalism does not require support for all the works of Brussels. Michael Foot was a sturdy romantic whose passion and idealism deserve our respect, and whose writing will remain rightly admired. His was a very English strain of radicalism, and I don’t think it’s right to assume his ideas are dead. Foot’s thinking represents a strong underlying current of independence and dissent that you can still find among some Tories as well as in green, libertarian and anti-capitalist circles. I expect it to attach before long to some new great movement – and for Foot to be rediscovered and referenced in a generation to come. if you’d like to know more, listen to this excellent Radio 4 programme about his life.

Barring the death of some other political giant, normal service will be resumed next time.

Dispatches from the North: A Journey from Hartlepool to America

I was reading the local paper the Hartlepool Mail last week and came across this fascinating story. Anyone who has seen Titanic (which is just about everyone in the world, right?) knows that Liverpool and Southamptom were major shipping and transport hubs in the late 19th and early 20th century. What many people don’t know is that Hartlepool also used to be one of Britain’s biggest shipping ports. This story from the Hartlepool Mail reports the discovery of a century-old diary detailing a journey from Hartlepool to New York in 1881:

The journal was written in 1881 by a William Shirley Day who was setting out on a journey on the Elpis ship from West Hartlepool to New York in the USA.

The iron steam ship was built at the town’s William Gray and Co shipyard in 1878 for Ropner and Company.

It was launched in 1879, but reported missing at sea in 1903. Chris, a 56-year-old teacher and keen historian who lives in Reading, said the diary covers a journey from Hartlepool to New York and then overland to Texas.

To read the full story “From Pools to New York in 1881″ in the Hartlepool Mail, click here

It reminded me of a story I heard from a friend of mine, Fred. Fred is soon approaching his 85th birthday and has lived in Hartlepool his whole life. Before I passed my driving test in October Fred used to give me rides to choir practice and during these rides he would always tell me the most fascinating stories from his life. One that sticks in my mind was a story he told me about when he was working for one of Hartlepool’s shipping companies. As a young man he worked in the records office of the shipping company and his job was to run from ship to ship collecting fees.

He told me an interesting tale about going through some old record books from the late 20s and early 30s while at work one day and he discovered that during prohibition in the United States that this Hartlepool-based shipping company had a fleet of ships in the Great Lakes, all which had been aprehended and seized in the act of bootlegging and bringing alcohol illegally from Canada to locations all over the Great Lakes. It is amazing that he remembered this one detail from perusing record books so long ago and that at the time it was interesting enough for him to remember it, not knowing that one day he would meet a young lady from the very place those ships were operating in. Being from the Great Lakes region I grew up hearing tales of bootlegging all throughout the region and the unique role that Metro Detroit and Chicago played in the prohibition era and Fred’s story really brought those local legends full circle for me.

I would love to do some research and find out more about the transport routes between Hartlepool and America and also about other links between the Hartlepool shipping industry and the US. Sadly, I think much like this story many of the details were probably written down in old ledgers that are long since lost and these stories may only live on in the oral tradition of Fred’s generation.

Anglophile Blogs: The Tudor Tutor

Occasionally I like to highlight fellow Anglophile blogs that are worth a mention and this one certainly is. It’s called the Tudor Tutor and it’s dedicated to everything Tudor – by far one of the most fascinating eras of English history.

It’s interesting, irreverent and provides a modern twist on something many of us Anglophiles know very well.

Here’s a example of a recent post:

A Quickie with Catherine Howard

How does Henry VIII’s fifth wife fit in among the rest? Catherine Howard has the reputation of having been a young and pretty hussy, and dumb as a box of rocks. But he was smitten with her right away, the old scamp, and married her in July of 1540.

There were loads of activities that summer to celebrate the new girl on the block (who seemed to have already been around the block a few times, but that’s another quickie). Every day she was lavished with sumptuous dresses and jewelry, and spent lots of time dancing around. Paris Hilton for the 16th century, if you will.

Read the rest here and check out this awesome Anglophile blog here.

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