Dirty Old Town

I was originally going to post the Pogues' version of this song but this version from the songwriter presented instead. I wrongly had thought that the song was about Dublin but of course it's about Manchester, England. I like the juxtaposition of optimistic love and grimy realism:

If At Day's Dawn Dies...

If at day's dawn 


My dear love dies, 


Tell not the day, 


Lest the laughing eyes 


Of the day grow dim 


And the bird-song cease. 


Until eventide 
Let her lie in peace.

If at day's death 


My dear love dies,

My own hands 
Will close her eyes,

And the rising moon 
And the stars shall shed 


Their silver tears 
Round her white death-bed.

____________________
Captain Ivar Campbell,
1st Seaforth Highlanders
Died of wounds received in action,
8 January 1916, aged 25,
No known grave

Letters From Their Eleventh Hour: Ivar Campbell (1891-1916)

Captain Ivar Campbell wrote this while fighting in the trenches of France:

France, 1915: 

The sputter of shrapnel, the red squeal of field guns, N.E.; the growl of the heavies moving slowly through the air, the cr-r-r-r-ump of their explosion. But in a bombardment all tones mingle and their voice is like machinery running not smoothly but roughly, pantingly, angrily, wildly making shows of peace and wholeness. 

You perceive, too, in imagination, men infinitely small, running, affrighted rabbits, from the upheaval of the shells, nerve-wracked, deafened; clinging to earth, hiding eyes, whispering "O God, O God!"  You perceive, too, other men, sweaty, brown, infinitely small also, moving guns, feeding the belching monster, grimly, quietly pleased. 

But with eyes looking over this land of innumerable eruptions, you see no line. The land is inhuman. 

But thousands of men are there; men who are below ground, men who have little bodies but immense brains. And the men facing West are saying, "This is an attack, they will attack when this hell's over," and they go on saying this to themselves continually. 

And the men facing East are saying, "We have got to get over the parapet. We have got to get over the parapet--when the guns lift." 

And then the guns lift up their heads and so a long, higher song. 

And then untenanted land is suddenly alive with little men, rushing stumbling--rather foolishly leaping forward--laughing, shouting, crying in the charge... 

There is one thing cheering. The men of the battalion--through all and in spite of that noisy, untasty day; through the wet cold night, hungry and tired, living now in mud and water, with every prospect of more rain to-morrow--are cheery. Sometimes, back in billets, I hate the men--their petty crimes, their continual bad language with no variety of expression, their stubborn moods. But in a difficult time they show up splendidly. Laughing in mud, joking in water--I'd "demonstrate" into Hell with some of them and not care. 

Yet under heavy shell-fire it was curious to look into their eyes--some of them little fellows from shops, civilians before, now and after: you perceived the wide, rather frightened, piteous wonder in their eyes, the patient look turned towards you, not, "What the blankety, blankety hell is this?" but "Is this quite fair? We cannot move, we are like little animals. Is it quite necessary to make such infernally large shells to kill such infernally small and feeble animals as ourselves?" 

I quite agreed with them, but had to put my eye-glass fairly in my eye and make jokes; and, looking back, I blush to think of the damnably bad jokes I did make...

__________________________
Captain Campbell was killed in action in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), January 8, 1916, aged 25 years. Prior to his service, he had been educated at Eton and at Christ Church College, Oxford, and had traveled to America.  I blogged another letter of his last year as part of a series "Letters From Their Eleventh Hour" in remembrance of 11/11/18. Link

Campbell's family published an entire series of his letters posthumously.  This one came from a collection of British soldiers' letters called "War Letters Of Fallen Englishmen." More about this remarkable book here. Link

Rumford, Soddy, and The Crash

Frederick Soddy (1877-1956)

Despite years of formal education in chemistry, I'd never really heard of Frederick Soddy until I started reading about the early days of radioactivity. He wrote a book called The Interpretation Of Radium (1909) which is available free online here.  The book so influenced H.G. Wells that he dedicated his book, The World Set Free (1914), to Soddy.

Soddy seems to have had two careers--first as an accomplished physical scientist (Chemistry Nobel in 1921) and then as a sort of social scientist, but more accurately as a social activist during the Great Depression. In this way he was a prototype Linus Pauling, who won both a Chemistry Nobel and a Peace Nobel for his activism.

Soddy was a chemist by training but today he'd be called a radiochemist. He must have seen or heard firsthand many of the key discoveries in nuclear physics in the late 19th and early 20th century, first at Oxford and then as graduate student with Lord Rayleigh. Afterwards, Soddy moved to Canada around the same time Ernest Rutherford did and the two joined forces. Together they discovered the natural transmutation of elements. Soddy's Nobel Prize citation reads:

for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances and his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes.

His isotope work came later.

Recall that Count Rumford first paid attention to the heat given off boring cannon and thereby converted our notions of energy.  Like Rumford, Soddy first realized how much heat and energy radioactive decay gave off--orders of magnitude more energy than burning fossil fuels did and it was also seemingly inexhaustible. Soddy was so prescient regarding how much energy was locked inside uranium, radium, and thorium that he warned Britain's government about the dangers of "atomic" bombs during the First World War.

The notion of cheap and abundant atomic energy crested in 1954 with Lewis Strauss' famous too cheap to meter statement, though it appears that he was referring to hypothetical hydrogen fusion reactors.

Soddy died in 1956 in relative obscurity. This (from the Wiki bio) is intriguing:

In four books written from 1921 to 1934, Soddy carried on a 'quixotic campaign for a radical restructuring of global monetary relationships', offering a perspective on economics rooted in physics—the laws of thermodynamics, in particular—and was 'roundly dismissed as a crank'. While most of his proposals - 'to abandon the gold standard, let international exchange rates float, use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy tools that could counter cyclical trends, and establish bureaus of economic statistics (including a consumer price index) in order to facilitate this effort' - are now conventional practice, his critique of fractional-reserve banking still 'remains outside the bounds of conventional wisdom'. Soddy wrote that financial debts grew exponentially at compound interest but the real economy was based on exhaustible stocks of fossil fuels. Energy obtained from the fossil fuels could not be used again. This criticism of economic growth is echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.

How the past gets Bury'd

I love stories like this one about the man who first noticed and explained what's behind my Rime of the Ancient Elements:

...an alternative proposal was put forth in 1921 by Charles Rugeley Bury (1890-1968), who was a lecturer at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. The scheme that he described succinctly in a mere seven pages is essentially the scheme to be found in modern introductory textbooks of chemistry and physics. He deduced from the chemical evidence that the electrons are arranged in successive layers containing 2, 8, 18, and 32 electrons. He gave a clear discussion of the electronic arrangements in the actinides and lanthanides, and even made some predictions (inevitably but not quite correct) for the transuranic elements.
Bury's scheme was reproduced in The Electronic Theory of Valency by Nevil Vincent Sidgwick (1873-1952); this was an important book that first appeared in 1927 and which interpreted the chemical behavior of the elements in terms of their electronic configurations. Sidgwick acknowledged the important contribution of Bury, but almost all subsequent accounts have failed to do so and Bury's name is now almost entirely forgotten.

~Keith J. Laidler, The World Of Physical Chemistry, Oxford University Press: New York, 1993

I can't even find a photo of Bury on the Internet. :(

Conversations with Henry about another Henry

Henry: Henry Moseley really convinced everyone that atomic numbers were real. Atomic number was just Bohr's theory until Henry Moseley proved it true.

Me: Moseley's Law?

Henry: Yes. A theory becomes a law when it gets tested beyond disproof. He proved the atomic number using X-rays.

Me: How come Moseley never got the Nobel Prize like you did?

Henry: He was killed--took a Turkish bullet in the head at Gallipoli in 1915--the same year I was born.
 ___________________________
 

Henry Moseley (1887-1915)

At the link, Isaac Asimov is quoted: "In view of what he [Moseley] might still have accomplished ... his death might well have been the most costly single death of the War to mankind generally."

'Umble Pie

[I changed the title from "Humbler Pie" to 'Umble Pie because it reminded me of the Artful Dodger]

I guess Steve Marriott is an acquired taste. I'll never forget him as the leader of Humble Pie, the very first rock concert I saw. But he was more than that. He was a defining face (albeit a small one) of the 1960's rock and roll scene in Britain. I did a brief homage to him a year ago: link. But I forgot to mention that he was an uncredited inventor of Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love (well, he along with Willie Dixon).  Listen to this 1966 version of "You Need Loving" and tell me it didn't influence Robert Plant three years later:

Of course both Led Zeppelin and the Small Faces were copying Muddy Waters' 1962 version of Willy Dixon's "You Need Love."  Dixon sued Led Zeppelin in 1985 over copyright infringement and prevailed. He never sued Marriott. In the words of Plant:

well, you only get caught when you're successful. That's the game.

The whole story reminds me of Bob Dylan recording Dave Van Ronk's version of "The House Of The Rising Sun" in 1962 and then being one-upped by The Animal's version a year or so later as told in Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home."

Übertramp

Many years ago, I saw Roger Hodgson in his erstwhile band, Supertramp. At the time, only his distinctive voice stood out and I had no clue that he was the brains behind that outfit. I lost track of his career and work, but he shows up from time to time. I blathered about one of his songs back here. He's still touring, and I wish him all the best. Here he performs one of his old Supertramp songs:

Amba Schooled Me (again)

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859)

While on the topic, the man who built the SS Great Eastern (and the Great Western before her) was Isambard Kingdom Brunel.  There he is, pictured above, in a photo which might have stoked the rage and scorn of Dickensian socialists. Yet today, Brunel ranks highly in polls of "Greatest Britons."

I put this here to celebrate another wealth maker and also to note how Brunel exploited something which Amba schooled me on a few months ago: Surface area to volume ratio.  As a shipbuilder, Brunel understood that the carrying capacity of a ship increases by volume, while the water resistance (friction) only increases with the submerged area of its dimensions. This meant that large ships were intrinsically more fuel efficient, which was very important for long voyages across the Atlantic.

Letters From Their Eleventh Hour: Ivar Campbell (1891-1916)

Captain Ivar Campbell
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders,
Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford.
Killed in action at Mesopotamia, January 8, 1916, aged 25 years.

Campbell survived earlier action in France, to which this letter refers:

France, 1915 

...It is difficult to write things out here. Journalists do it, yet miss the note of naturalness which strikes me. For these things are natural. I suppose we have been fighting a thousand years to a thousand years' peace; they miss, too, the beauty of the scene and action as a whole--that beauty defined as something strange, rarefied; our deep passions made lawful and evident; our desires made acceptable; our direction straight. Such will be the impressions to linger, to be handed on to future generations, as the Napoleonic wars are adventures to us. Here, present and glaring to our eyes in trenches and billets, etc., the more abiding and deeper meanings of the war are readable. 

Here is the scene I shall remember always: A misty summer morning--I went along a sap-head* running towards the German line at right-angles to our own. Looking out over the country, flat and uninteresting in peace, I beheld what at first would seem to be a land ploughed by the ploughs of giants. In England you read of concealed trenches--here we don't trouble with that. Trenches rise up, grey clay, three or four feet above the ground. Save for one or two men--snipers--at the sap-head, the country was deserted. No sign of humanity--a dead land. And yet thousands of men were there, like rabbits concealed. The artillery was quiet; there was no sound but a cuckoo in a shell-torn poplar. Then, as a rabbit in the early morning comes out to crop grass, a German stepped over the enemy trench--the only living thing in sight. 'I'll take him,' says the man near me. And like a rabbit the German falls. And again complete silence and desolation...

______________
*A Sap-head was a smaller trench running forward from and perpendicular to a main trench and was used for spying and for sniping.

Letters From Their Eleventh Hour: John L. T. Jones (1895-1917)

Captain John Llewellyn Thomas Jones,
3rd London Regiment
Educated at Llangollen Country School,
A member of a printing firm.
Killed in action, Flanders, August 16, 1917, aged 22.

[To his father and family]      France, 4/4/17 

My Dearest Dad, Ethel and Gwen, 

I have written this letter so that, in the event of anything happening to me, I do not go under without letting all you dear ones at home know how much I owe to your loving care and the little kindnesses that go to make life so pleasant and inviting. 

You know what an undemonstrative nature mine is, but my love for you all is, nevertheless, strong and deep, and though I said nothing about these things before I left England, it was just because--I couldn't--my heart was too full. 

One has to face the prospect of getting knocked out, as many other and probably better fellows than I have been. All I can say is that you do not grieve for me, because, although it may sound exceedingly quixotic, how better can one make one's exit from this world than fighting for the country which has sheltered and nurtured one through all life? 

War is cruel and I detest it, but since it was not possible to keep out of this without loss of prestige and perhaps worse, it behooves us all to carry it on to a successful conclusion. Of course, it entails sacrifices, but that is all in the game. I had hoped to be able to return home and take up what little responsibility lay in my power away from your shoulders, and to care for and look after the girls, but if that is not to be, I want you all to remember that though the break may seem unbearable--there are many other homes which have suffered loses. We should rather, I think, thank God that we have we have been a happy and united little family. I know how hard it is, and, as I write, the thought that I may not see you dear ones again in this world brings a lump to my throat and tears in my eyes. I trust that I shall return, but... 

All I can say to you is that I thank God for giving me the best father in the world and two very dear sisters. I cannot write to all, but send my deepest love to....I don't think that I can write any more, so just good-bye and God bless you all and protect you is my fervent prayer.

            With all my fondest love,
                                         Yours affectionately,
                                                                       Llew

Hail Britannic!

It's pretty cool when you realize that the germ of something became something bigger.

I watched Calypso's Search for the Britannic, an episode from The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey. The feature dates from 1977 and tells the story of Cousteau's successful 1975 search for the sunken ship Britannic off the coast of Greece.

HMHS Britannic was built during that brief window of time between the sinking of her older sister Titanic and the First World War. She was launched without fanfare. One disgruntled ship worker said of her: "They just built her and threw her out there."

Britannic was fitted-out with all the features intended to avoid her older sister's fate: double-hulls; water-tight bulkheads which rose to B deck, and of course there were ample lifeboats. Intended to replace Titanic as a luxury trans-Atlantic liner, HMHS Britannic was instead pressed into service as a hospital ship and was sunk by a submerged mine just two years after her launch in 1914.

The remarkable thing about the old TV episode is how it foreshadowed James Cameron's Titanic. Cousteau located one of her few remaining survivors, Sheila Mitchell (then 86 years old), flew her to the Calypso hovered over the wreck, plied her memories of the sinking and then took her down in a submersible to see the wreck -- one last time -- just like fictional character Rose Dawson in Titanic. I seriously wonder whether Cameron watched or was inspired by this 1977 televised episode.

I also couldn't help but marvel at the man Cousteau himself. At age 65, he dons helium-oxygen-filled scuba tanks and freely descends to over 300 feet to explore the wreck--for 9 minutes. The hour long episode (available on Netflix) is as much a lessen on deep-sea scuba diving as it is on the Britannic. Growing up, Cousteau was a hero in our family, no doubt due to my dad's love of scuba diving which I wrote about here.

[added: a cool website on the HMHS Britannic: link]

Facial Expressions

I sometimes write things here to sort things out. This is a perfect example. I've long been confused by two 1960s British bands, The Faces, and The Small Faces. Both groups never really charted well, but the Small Faces did better. Both groups eventually dissolved (The Small Faces became the Faces) and their former members went on to greater things: Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane, Kenny Jones, Rod Stewart, Ron Wood to name a few.

Henceforth I shall always remember that the Small Faces came first because Steve Marriott was short.

Here's an oldie but goodie: