On Ernest Cole

Over at The Futures Company’s blog I have a short end-of-year piece on the South African photographer Ernest Cole. It seemed a good idea to share a version of it here.

I thought I knew the political and cultural history of the anti-apartheid struggle well, having followed it closely during my teens and twenties. But I realised at the Barbican’s sprawling exhibition of ’60s and ’70s photography that I knew nothing of Ernest Cole, the black photographer who was the first to document the petty humiliations and the institutional cruelty of South Africa’s legalised racism. Cole changed his name and his history to qualify as “Coloured” rather than “Black” under South Africa’s Pass Laws, which gave him the freedom to travel. In the early ’60s he became the country’s first black freelance photographer, filming – often illicitly – life under apartheid; his work was published as a book, House of Bondage, in 1967.

The image at the top of this post, of Africans having to risk their lives crossing railway tracks to board their poorly signed and vastly overcrowded trains, is described by a commentator in the exhibition as being the single photograph which expresses the ugliness of apartheid.

Speaking truth to power comes with a price: the book was banned in South Africa and by the time it came out Cole had exiled himself in the United States, where he died in poverty in 1990, living just long enough to see Mandela released from jail. But thanks to his white South African contemporary, David Goldblatt, also represented at the Barbican exhbition, many of his originals have been rescued from the vaults.

On a related theme, I fulfilled a small ambition this year to make a video of Robert Wyatt’s version of Peter Gabriel’s song ‘Biko’. It’s on YouTube.

The Ernest Cole picture at the top of this post, ‘Train Staton’, came via the blog (Notes on) Politics, Theory and Photography. It is used with thanks. There is more (and some great links) at Colin Penter’s excellent blog, and is used with thanks. The exhibition, ‘Everything was moving‘, is at the Barbican in London until January 13th.

The last rotten borough in England

One of the virtues of Occupy at St Paul’s was that it shone a welcome light on the workings of the City of London Corporation, which is the last rotten borough in England. As the poster – photographed in the City recently – demonstrates, the City of the London Corporation is the only place in the country where people get an extra votes because of where they work, and businesses get to vote as well. Of course, when the rest of the country’s electoral system was reformed in the 19th and 20th centuries, for some reason the City of London was excluded so that its ancient Saxon electoral system (opens pdf) could be preserved.

And of course, the City Corporation has other privileges, including its own police force, its own ‘observer’ at the House of Commons, and exemption from the Freedom of Information Act. Sounding awfully Starbucks it insists that “it abides by all laws and publishes all accounts and decisions it is required to.” Of course. At least in this coming election a group has been created to challenge the way the Corporation works. (The City maintains the fiction that everyone stands for election as an independent; the City Reform Group is offering support to candidates who are willing to sign up to a series of promises for more openness.)

As a colleague said to me, we’ve given the City its own government, its own police force, its own lobbyist, its own laws, everything it’s asked for, and all it’s done in return is bankrupted us. As with other demanding and selfish children, it’s probably time to put some limits in.

The picture at the top of this post is taken by Andrew Curry and is published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

Ahkmatova’s Requiem

It’s impossible to be in St Petersburg for any length of time, as I was recently on holiday, without engaging with Anna Akhmatova’s long poem Requiem. It was written out of her experience of Stalin’s arrests and purges of the 1930s, and in particular of going to the Kresty prison, where her son Lev was detained, in the hope of getting food to him.

As she writes in her own preamble to the poem,

One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’. On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear (everyone whispered there) – ‘Could one ever describe this?’ And I answered – ‘I can.’ It was then that something like a smile slid across what had previously been just a face.

Requiem was mostly written between 1935 and 1940; one sequence is dated later. In the climate of the times, it was impossible to publish such a poem in the Soviet Union, and in fact it was too dangerous even to be found with drafts or fragments of the manuscript. (Akmatova’s first husband was shot in 1921, her second arrested several times and eventually died in the gulag.) Her rooms were bugged by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, after 1946. So Akhmatova would be visited by an actress friend, and the poet would write lines of the poem in the margins of a newspaper, while making small talk. These she would pass across, and as the actress memorised each one she would write another to be remembered. And then, before the end of the meeting, the newspaper would be burnt in the stove.

This reminded me of the “human books” that are part of (small spoiler alert) Ray Bradbury’s story Fahrenheit 451.

And of something else. The picture of women petitioning authorities, in many countries, for information about relatives who have been arrested or disappeared is a defining image of the 20th century, in Chile, in Argentina, in Russia. Akhmatova was writing of the USSR and Stalin, but the story she told in Requiem – as with so much of her work – is a universal one.

The photograph at the top of the post, of the image of Ahkmatova outside of her former house, now museum, in St Petersburg, was taken by Andrew Curry. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence.

‘Up from the depths’

I’ve been reading Vassily Grossman’s book The Road, a collection of stories and reportage. Grossman may have been the finest war correspondent of the Eastern Front, a Soviet Jew whose mother certainly died at the hands of the Nazi Einzatzgruppen in the Ukraine.

This fragment of ‘The Old Teacher’, a story from The Road, seemed to be worth sharing here. The moment: The German army is 20 kilometres away and is likely to arrive in the village in only a day or so.

The night was dark from because heavy clouds had shut out the sky and covered the light of the stars. And it was dark from the darkness of the earth. The Nazis were a great falsehood, life’s greatest falsehood. Wherever they passed, up from the depths rose cowardice, treachery, murderousness, and violence against the weak. The Nazis drew everything dark up to the surface, just as a black spell in an old tale calls up the spirits of evil. That night the little town lay stifling, gripped by something foul and dark. Something vile had awoken; stirred by the Nazis’ arrival it was now reaching towards them. The treacherous and the weak-spirited had emerged from their cellars and gullies and were ripping up letters, Party cards and books by Lenin; they were tearing down portraits of their own brothers from the walls of their rooms. Fawning speeches of disavowal were taking shape in the hearts of the poor in spirit. Thoughts of revenge – for some chance word or some market place quarrel – were being conceived. Hearts were being infected by callousness, pride and indifference.
… And so it was in every town – large and small – where the Nazis set foot. Murk rose up from the beds of lakes and rivers; toads swam up to the surface; thistles sprang up where wheat had been planted.

The picture of The Road at the top of this post was taken by Andrew Curry. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence.

Spies and danger

Eric Ambler’s critical reputation seems secure – several of his novels are published as Penguin Modern Classics, and both Graham Greene and John le Carré paid tribute to his influence – but his popular reputation seems to have faded, at least to judge from bookshop shelves. I was reminded of Ambler by an endnote in Andy Croft’s rollicking verse novella 1948, where he acknowledges that he borrowed one of his characters, Tamara Zaleshoff, from the thriller writer, and since then I have read a couple of his pre-war novels, Epitaph for a Spy and Uncommon Danger (US: Background to Danger).

Ambler set out to subvert the thriller genre when he started writing:

I intended to make fun of the old secret service adventure thriller as written by E. Phillips Oppenheim, John Buchan, Dornford Yates and their cruder imitators; and I meant to do it by placing some of their antique fantasies in the context of a contemporary reality.

Indeed, in his introduction to Uncommon Danger, Thomas Jones of the LRB observes of the thuggish Mailler in Uncommon Danger, the nastiest character in the book by a good margin, that “it’s tempting to see him as a satirical portrait of the archetypal hero of the moribund thrillers that Ambler was so determined to supersede, unmasked and revealed for the cryptofascist brute he really is”.

In the place of the firm-jawed heroes of Buchan and Yates, Ambler’s stories instead feature ordinary men (mostly men) who find themselves caught up in events outside of their control which they don’t fully understand. As Tom Watson puts it an engaging blog post,

There is always a moment in the Ambler novels when the dupe – a novelist, a salesman, a teacher and the like – realizes with sinking fear that they’re not in a movie or an Agatha Christie tale; that the danger is real and outlook fairly grim.

In Ambler’s world, both crime and politics (and there is always politics) is a dirty business. And as his central characters try to work out what to do, they are often wrong. As they stumble through, they find themselves used, but try to do the right thing nonetheless.

All of this may make them sound a little earnest, but Ambler’s plotting is precise, if sometimes as complex as Chandler’s, his judgment of pace exact, his cliff-hangers frequent, his writing a pleasure. (Mailler, for example, is introduced as being “at one time the only professional strike-breaker in America with an English public school education”.) Several of his books were made into films, and Ambler worked in Hollywood after the war.

And his surprises are many, for Ambler is usually one step ahead of both his readers and his central characters. In Uncommon Danger Kenton, wanted by the Austrian police, spends much of a coach journey as he runs for the Czech border by turns patronising and being dismissive of the English salesman Hodgkin, who is also on the bus. At the last moment (small spoiler alert) Hodgkin points Kenton at the path for the border, before listing all the mistakes he’s made during the day that could have been his undoing.

Eric Ambler was a leftist, and his pre-war books are overlaid by the rise of fascism across Europe. In his world, unlike Buchan’s, capitalism, or at least capitalists, were likely to be at odds with democracy. As Jennifer Howard writes of his novels in a good introduction in Boston Review,

They can also feel alarmingly contemporary, especially when they tackle the dangers of mucking around in other countries’ political affairs—cautionary tales for their own age that haven’t lost their relevance in ours.

Unlike the black and white world of the earlier secret service thrillers (or of some of the Cold War thriller writers who followed him), Ambler’s novels are permeated by shades of grey tinged with darkness. As Kenton reflects in Uncommon Danger, as he ponders going to the police,

It was all very fine to say that Right triumphed in the end, that Justice sought out the guilty and punished them. In actual practice, Right and Justice were far from infallible. Stupid, honest and blind, they blundered in pursuit of their quarry. The innocent sometime crossed their paths.

Or again:

The Foreign Ministers of the great powers might make the actual declarations of their Governments’ policies; but it was the Big Business men, the bankers and their dependents, the arms manufacturers, the oil companies, the big industrialists, who determined what those policies should be. Big business asked the questions that it wanted to ask when and how it suited it. Big Business also provided the answers.

Thomas Jones writes of Ambler that he “was simply several years ahead of his time”. As we lurch into another era where business interests decide on politics while politicians play populist games, he seems further ahead than ever.

I borrowed the picture from an excellent post on the subject of Ambler’s writing at Tom Watson’s blog, and it is used with thanks.

Heroes and villains

Earlier this week I facilitated a workshop for a company in their ‘Lennon’ meeting room. Lots of companies have such room names – they’re easier to remember than say, 1G, and are supposed to convey some sense of inspiration at the same time. Although I can’t help but think that I haven’t come across many ‘Lenin’ rooms, which is maybe surprising when you think how much the modern corporation obsesses about ‘focus’, ‘execution’ and ‘delivery’.

The best story I heard about such room names came from someone who worked for the subsidiary of an American company in London. Someone had decided to call one of their meeting rooms after the American diplomat Henry Kissinger. (When Kissinger shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in ending the Vietnam war the satirical singer Tom Lehrer said that political satire had become obsolete.) “The trouble is that half of the company don’t know who he is”, I was told. “And the half who have heard of him think he’s a war criminal”.

The image at the top of this post is “The Connections (Kissinger)” by the Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi, whose work “explores the intersection between politics and popular culture”. It is used with thanks. You can find out more about the work and the artist at Artspace.

The song of John Ball

I’ve been listening to Chris Wood’s version on his Trespassers CD of the song ‘John Ball’, written in 1981 by Sydney Carter (who also wrote ‘The Lord of the Dance’) to mark the 600th anniversary of the Peasants’ Revolt in England. Ball was a radical Lollard priest who had been expelled from the priesthood and jailed for asking questions about equality in the eyes of God, and he gave the sermon to the peasant army as it was camped on Blackheath, overlooking the City of London.

His sermon started with these words:

“When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”

This sentiment would have chilled the beneficiaries of England’s hierarchical and feudal society. After the revolt had been put down – its leader, Wat Tyler, tricked into negotiations – Ball was arrested and hanged, drawn and quartered as a traitor.

But the phrase, and the radical idea embedded within it, has echoed down the centuries, to the Diggers, to Tom Paine, to the Chartists, to William Morris, even, it seems, to the Occupy Movement. We still remember him, more than 600 years on, and have long forgotten those who had him killed.

The picture at the top shows John Ball addressing the rebel Peasants on Blackheath. It is published by Wikimedia Commons and is used here with thanks.

Going Dutch

I went on the ‘Go Dutch’ Big Ride demonstration organised by the London Cycling Campaign a couple of weeks ago, which, despite the rain, was billed as the largest cycling demonstration ever to take place in London. The ride went from Park Lane to the Victoria Embankment, all on roads specially closed for the duration, taking in Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square and Whitehall as it went.
The theme – you might have guessed this by now – was that if conditions for London’s cyclists were a bit more like those in the Netherlands, more people would cycle and the government and the Mayor might hit their cycling targets.
So I was amused to read a few days later, in Bella Bathurst’s eclectic but entertaining Bicycle Book that when Holland plays Germany Dutch football fans chant at the German supporters ‘Give us back our bicycles’. Beating the Germans is something of a special occasion for the Dutch, especially at football, as Simon Kuper relates in his book Football Against The Enemy.
And sure enough, this chant dates from the war years, by Bathhurst’s account. In 1942, during the German occupation, the Nazi authorities confiscated Dutch bicycles both to stop the Resistance from using them to get around, and because they were running out of transport.
“No other German enactment has called up such bitterness in all ranks of society”, wrote a German officer. “The Dutchman, who is practically born on a bicycle, views the seizing of that bicycle as practically the worst thing that can happen to him.”
Of course, the London Cycling Campaign is right. Dutch-style cycle facilities in London would improve the city’s cycling numbers. But culturally, we have a little way to go just yet.

The picture at the top is from the ibikelondon blog, and is used with thanks. There are also images of the day at Ben Brown’s photostream on flickr.

Another country

I’ve had the miners’ strike more on my mind since I went to see the Jeremy Deller exhibition at the Hayward Gallery a couple of weeks ago, because the exhibition includes his famous reenactment of The Battle of Orgreave, when police cavalry charged protesting strikers.

So when The Guardian published some poems from Jubilee Lines, edited by Carol Ann Duffy (she has commissioned a new poem for each of the 60 years of the Queen’s reign) I turned first to the mid-80s. Sean O’Brien, whom I’ve written about here before, a child of the north, had claimed 1985 with a tough and unforgiving poem called ‘Another Country’:

Whenever someone sagely says it’s time to draw a line,
We may infer that they’ve extracted all the silver from the mine.

O’Brien’s poem starts with a epigraph from Auden, ‘Get there if you can’, the title of a 1930 poem. Here’s an extract:

Power-stations locked, deserted, since they drew the boiler fires
Pylons falling or subsiding, trailing dead high-tension wires;
Head-gears gaunt on grass-grown pit-banks, seams abandoned years ago;
Drop a stone and listen for its splash in flooded dark below…

Auden was born in York and brought up in Birmingham, but was fascinated by underground workings and mining machinery. This early poem – not included by him in his Collected Poems – was written on a visit to the north-east of England, where O’Brien now lives and works. It is one of several from the period that dealt with the decaying or lost landscapes of the early industrial revolution.

There are obvious echoes here of the industrial landscape that Britain has lost since Thatcher’s campaign de-industrialise the country (I use the word ‘campaign’ with care here) of which the calculated destruction of the National Union of Mineworkers was such an exemplary part. And echoes too, in O’Brien’s title, of the famous opening line of L.P. Hartley’s novel of loss, and of class antagonism. London, now, is the other country, as it milks the rest of Britain of resources.

But no matter what you do, history doesn’t vanish. (I had this argument once with an uncomprehending career coach who told me I could put the history I was embedded in to one side and simply ‘move on’ in the modern, deracinated, non-place manner. I was uncomprehending too). And this is how Sean O’Brien ends his poem:

Where all year long the battle raged, there’s “landscape” and a plaque,
But though you bury stuff forever, it keeps on coming back:

Here then lie the casualties of one more English Civil War,
That someone, sometime – you, perhaps – will have to answer for.

No matter how hard you try to tramp it down, the dirt insists on coming up through the roots.

The image at the top is a screenshot of Mike Figgis’ film of Deller’s reconstruction of The Battle of Orgreave, from the Bureaux blog, and is used with thanks.

Miles and Robert

Listening to Miles Davis’ record Miles Ahead the other day, I realised with a bit of a start that Robert Wyatt had lifted the opening phrase of ‘The Maids of Cadiz’ for his song ‘Alliance’, on his 1980s record Old Rottenhat. (The Maids of Cadiz is embedded at the top of the post; Alliance can be heard here.)

They’re very different records, of course: Wyatt made Old Rottenhat in the early ’80s in anger about the Thatcherite government and its works, among other things, before moving to Spain for a period of time, although it’s not an angry sounding record. (Actually, it’s pretty much him and a synthesiser, which makes for a very distinctive sound). ‘Alliance’ is a song to the politicians who had left the Labour Party to set up the more centrist Social Democratic Party:

There is a kind of compromise you are master of
Your endless gentle nudging left us polarised
You’re proud of being middle class (meaning upper class)
You say you’re self sufficient (but you don’t dig your own coal)
I think that what you’re frightened of more than anything
is knowing you need workers more than they need you
“A herd of independent minds” Chomsky got it right
Joggling into battle waving old school ties

Of course, he was wrong about ‘knowing you need workers, more than they need you’ – globalisation put paid to that – but that’s a story for another day and probably a different blog.

What struck me here was that musicians and their publishers have ended up in court over far less, but that Wyatt was in a long tradition – going back at least to Bach and Shakespeare – of borrowing something old to start something new. And also that if Miles knew, he’d just smile – or perhaps throw in a quote from ‘Alliance’ the next time he played ‘The Maids of Cadiz’.