History

Central heating, commander’s quarters, Hadrian’s Wall.

One of the more affecting spectacles from my time in England was visiting a small Roman excavation site on a B-road; it was a villa that had only been partly extracted relatively intact. The part that particularly snagged me was the note that the villa had been stripped of the lead from its lead and guttering, which was apparently usually woven into the thatch of Britons’ houses.

It was, I think, on of the sadest images as a decline of a civilisation; Roman Britain had houses with plumbing, even central heating in some cases. When they left, as the Empire crumbled, the remaining Britons were unable to maintain Roman technology, prefering to scavange well-appointed stone housing for houses made of wood and mud.

Reading Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Trilogy has reminded me of this; it’s theme, of course, is the decay of the post-Roman Britons in the face of Saxon invaders, but the loss of knowledge is explicitly referenced throughout the novels; the Romans, his Guinevere notes archly at one point, had the technique of keeping warm, but it has been forgotten. Similar observations are dotted throughout the books.

When people suggest the inevitability of progress I am put in mind of that little villa; social structures, technology; these can all be lost, easily, for for a long time. It is a lesson we’d do well to remember.

Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II; tens, hundreds of millions dead. The Holocaust. The first use of atomic weapons. The total destruction of cities across the globe: Hiroshima, Dresden, Coventry, to name a few. The downfall of the Western European empires that had spanned the globe; the rise of the US and Soviets in their place.

You wouldn't know it if you glanced at a newspaper in New Zealand yesterday.

In the village of Muslyumovo, a local physician’s personal records from 1993 indicated an average male lifespan of 45 years compared to 69 in the rest of the country. Birth defects, sterility, and chronic disease also increased dramatically. In all, over a million Russian citizens were directly affected by the misadventures of the Mayak Chemical Combine from 1948 to 1990, including around 28,000 people classified as “seriously irradiated.”

How the Mayak Chemical Combine screwed Russians worse than Chernobyl.

“…there, in a small cage, was a gorgeous little lion cub. We were shocked. We looked at each other and said something’s got to be done about that.”

Harrods, it turned out, was also quite keen to be rid of Christian, who had escaped one night, sneaked into the neighbouring carpet department - then in the throes of a sale of goatskin rugs - and wreaked havoc.

The store, which had acquired the cub from Ilfracombe zoo, happily agreed to part with him for 250 guineas. So began Christian’s year as an urban lion.

Christian the lion. I can’t help but feel riding around in a Roller sounds cooler than hunting for dinner.

One memo found at Kew, written in August 1946 by a senior civil servant working with the British military government in northern Germany, makes clear how this programme worked. “Usually an NCO arrives without notice at the house or office of the German and warns that he will be required. He does not give him any details of the reasons, nor does he present his credentials. Some time later the German is seized (often in the middle of the night) and removed under guard.

“This procedure savours very much of the Gestapo methods…”

…three members of a six-strong Bios team, which included representatives of Pears Soap, Max Factor and Yardley, had called at the home of an elderly woman whose family firm manufactured 4711 eau-de-cologne, a famous brand, and attempted to bully her into handing over the recipe. When she was taken ill the team threatened to call a prison van to take her to a prison hospital. Next day they telephoned to try again.

“Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you.”

Older West Germans still recall with pride the dramatic speech of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in July 1957, when he brandished a banana at the Bundestag podium and hailed the fruit as “paradisiacal manna.” Adenauer had just returned in triumph from a four-day filibuster in Rome, having finally gotten “Protocol Number 10”–which guaranteed West Germans tariff-free bananas in unlimited quantities–written into the founding Treaty of the European Economic Community (EEC), predecessor of the present-day EC.

It turns out that banana politics bears deeply on the issue of German identity, reflecting Teutonic tensions both within and outside reunited Germany.

I alluded to the book 1421 in an earlier post; today bought me a local angle I hadn’t been aware of: apparently the author believes the Chines colonised New Zealand before the Maori. Such belief is, according to real historian Michael King, a steaming mound; it came to my attention via Russell Brown’s discussion of the nutbar elements of ACT attempting to recruit Chinese as pre-Maori colonists of New Zealand.

(It’s both funny and depressing that the likes of ACT and United Future can get so much mileage in the public arena out of painting the Greens as a dangerous fringe, because going on their track records, those two parties are truly the fruitloop havens of New Zealand politics.)

Well, it kind of seems to me that irrespective of the dubious authenticity of book and shiny new map, it seems to have eluded anyone in newsrooms to point out that the people who would become the native American tribes had already located it some time before. Five minutes with the Internet would have gotten a list of claims about subsequent discoveries ranging from the preposterious (Ancient Egypt) to the more credible (short-lived Viking colonies).

One might also note that the Chinese penchant for claiming to have invented and discovered everything sounds not dissimilar to the old Soviet Union or the US, if a little more backed by evidence.

(Besides, what’s the point of discovering something if you don’t do anything useful with it? There’s a reason that New Zealand was a British, rather than Dutch, colony; similarly, it’s all very well to note that the Vikings, or Chinese, or whoever, were the first bunch to happen on the Americas in modern history, but they didn’t do much with it, did they?)

Brian Martin, the factory’s race team manager, had established a sound record of success with his small and highly efficient competition department[…] Martin’s budget limit was cancelled and BSA’s senior designers formed a committee to build the best motocross machine the world had ever seen.

Neither Martin nor double world champion Jeff Smith were consulted about the new world-beater…

An interesting Motorcycle USA article on one of the great faux pas of the British motorcycle industry, the BSA Titanium.