Killers of the Flower Moon – David Grann

Killers of the Flower Moon is now a blockbuster movie starring Leonardo Di Caprio, and this image from the film is on the cover of the edition I read. But I wonder if it gives a fair representation of the book? A movie in which DiCaprio, a handsome white man, marries an Indian bride to steal her share of the tribe’s oil rights is grist to the Hollywood mill. There are so many ways to bring in sex, seduction and violence.

But the non- fiction account I read is a drier affair, concerned mostly with the facts of several key murder cases, and the possible motives of different suspects. David Grann occasionally explains how the Indian victims might have felt, but rarely puts them at the centre of dramatic and exciting events. Yet there are so many incidents in this book that could be dramatised for cinematic effect: Indian houses blown up or set on fire so as to obliterate their owners; Indians plied with drinks until they are unconscious, then shot, execution style, in the back of the head; Indians fed poisoned alcohol, their death appearing to be accidental. Filmed in the saloons and bars of Osage County Oklahoma in the 1920s, then the richest place in the world, there would be nodding donkey oil pumps, plenty of wild characters, western sheriffs brought in to root out the corruption, and outlaws living rough in the fag end of the wild west. Bootleggers too! So much drama.

But the murders that match the tone of the book involve the slow administration of poison, or corrupt doctors, slowly betraying a diabetic. No one was sure if the Shoun brothers, both doctors, were really administrating insulin, or something a little more lethal, or if many other mysterious deaths were poisonings, and that’s the case in the whole of this book. William Hale was convicted of several Indian murders, and Ernest Burkhart coughed up in the end, wracked by guilt. But there was much more to the murders than this. So many remained unsolved, and so many deaths that might have been murders were overlooked, that we are left not with a Hollywood ending – death or redemption or whatever Scorsese chose to give us. Instead there are only unanswered questions, and sadness.

A glance at the cast tells me there’s not even a place in the film for Tom White, the Texas ranger brought into Osage County to sort out the truth from the lies peddled by corrupt politicians and local businessmen on the lookout for a quick buck. The film must contain nothing of this, or of White’s connection with J Edgar Hoover, who used these unsolved murders as a way to extend the power of the FBI at a time when the law was implemented by local officials, and might not always provide justice.

Of course Killers of the Flower Moon is a book about racism, about Indians driven from pillar to post, and left rot in the most desolate, least fertile part of Oklahoma. Only that turns out to be the wealthiest spot on the earth because it’s on top of massive oil fields. And because the Osage bought the land from the government it’s theirs, and so is the oil – though many are labelled as drunken savages, too weak to manage their riches and given only pocket money by their guardians.

Killers of the `Flower Moon was definitely worth reading – but don’t expect it to be anything like the film. The book is a leisurely, thoughtful and detailed account in which Grann deals honestly with the events, piecing them together like a true detective. He explores the history of the Osage tribe, and the impact of the murders on those who are alive today, and he shares their story with tact and sensitivity, not with Hollywood drama.

If that sounds interesting, this book might be for you.

Manchester Unspun – Andy Spinoza

There is a photograph of my class at Elysian Street infants school taken in about 1955. I am the one at the right hand side of the back row, head tucked forward as if taken by surprise. I am looking smart in one of my mother’s home knits. Behind me there is a railing, and behind that the corrugated roof of a chemical factory that made dyes for Manchester’s cotton mills. Both my grandfather and his father were labourers in chemical factories like this: one worked in an alum works, and the other for Halls, dyers, on Mansell Road.

Fast forward sixty five years, and the brown field site behind Elysian Street school is part of Manchester City’s Etihad Campus. Premier League fans, European cup millions and the Arabs’ black gold pay Mancunian wages these days. The cotton mills are silent, and the warehouses have been turned into flats, but every winter weekend thousands of visitors pour their hard earned cash into Manchester’s hotels and bars, turbo charging the city’s economy. One week they wear the blue of Manchester City, and the next United’s red. They come for the football, eat at the restaurants, fill up the pubs and probably drop by Salford Boys Club, or some other icon of the Manchester music scene, for a snapshot.

When I left Manchester in 1969 I never really went back. Though the city owns my metropolitan heart, I didn’t witness the music scene in the 1980s, or the huge transformation afterwards. But in 1979, when the threads that held me to the city were being stretched to breaking point, Andy Spinoza, author of Manchester Unspun, arrived at Manchester University ready to fill in the gaps. From 1983 Spinoza edited City Life, an alternative guide to Manchester’s entertainment scene. He moved onto the Manchester Evening News, then formed his own PR company, which was employed by the movers and shakers, people like Tony Wilson, founder of the infamous Haçienda nightclub, and key political figures, such as Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein.

Manchester Unspun traces the modern history of the city in a series of chapters describing the different aspects of Spinoza’s career, and his interactions with Wilson, Leese and Bernstein. Spinoza presents a series of reminiscences that tell the story of the city thematically, but the focus is on what he saw. He does not try to disentangle the contributions of the key players, or provide an overview of the city’s development.

The anecdotes give some interesting insights about the Haçienda and the characters that populated it. Manchester was notorious for its gangs and shootings, and there are stories about the drug fuelled dancing, and the invention of Madchester. I knew very little about gang leaders or characters like Tony Wilson, who broadcast on Granada TV, though it’s clear that his personality and the philosophies he adopted were significant in developing the music scene, and creating the Manchester we know now. A key moment was the Sex Pistols’ appearance on Wilson’s show, So It Goes in September 1976, when they performed Anarchy in the Uk.

But let’s not succumb to the Great Man theory of history. Granada TV was groundbreaking in the 1960s, before Wilson became prominent, and Manchester was always a radical force. Look at Peterloo, and Manchester’s historical connections with Engels and the suffragettes. The Manchester Guardian, now just The Guardian, is a testimony to the deep roots of left wing politics in the city. My old school was visited by the queen, had neatly trimmed lawns and a cricket square that bred an England captain, but morning assemblies included John Cage’s Four Minutes and Thirty Three Seconds, and rabble rousing speeches from John Steinbeck. We were presented with Mother Courage, Malcolm Muggeridge and Anouilh’s Rhinoceros and left to think about what they meant to us. That was Manchester in the 1960s.

I enjoyed Manchester Unspun but it did not give me the kind of insights I had hoped to find, because Spinoza is not that interested in what I wanted to know. I would have liked to discover more about the music and lyrics, perhaps find a comparison of the styles and approaches of different groups, but Spinoza is not that into poetry. He does write about Wilson’s counter cultural philosophy, touching on the ideas that drove him and groups like The Smiths and The Happy Mondays, but the music and lyrics are not explored in detail.

Spinoza witnessed the political wrangling in the city, and the way that the Labour council got in bed with Thatcher’s public /private enterprise philosophies, but he does not set out to deal with that as an issue either, it just bubbles upon every now and then as he tells us his story . He explains how the grants they gained set the city on the road to its current prosperity but makes few comments or judgements on the impact of the policies on ordinary Mancunians. The few relatives I have left in the area seem to have gained little: the city I last saw was like a dart board, its centre a high rise bulls eye surrounded by empty spaces, derelict terraces and boarded up shops.

Spinoza does draw some political threads together in a final summary but I would have liked to see more of that kind of political analysis, a more incisive examination of the way that Manchester exchanged its industrial and trade union roots for of a mess of skyscrapers, cheap hotels and football stadiums.

How to be an ex Footballer – Peter Crouch

It’s the third of Crouch’s books exploring the hinterlands of his footballing life. I enjoyed the first, How to be a Footballer, and the second, I Robot, and found this one was ok – a relaxing and easy read.

I doubt there’ll be another- it’s pretty clear by the end that Crouch has squeezed all the juice out of this particular orange. How to be a Footballer was brim full of gossip about the crazy escapades Crouch and his colleagues got up to as young men. Many of them were well known figures – and I’m nosey enough to be interested. And some of the tales – like the one about Stephen Ireland’s pink Range Rover – appealed because they were players from my club. The book was fresh and up to date.

In How to be an ex Footballer Crouch and his ghost writer Tom Fordyce have had to dig a little deeper. There’s a short bibliography of newspaper articles used as sources, and a few old pros that Crouch knew from his early days of football have chipped in by giving interviews and offering advice. There’s still plenty of entertainment, lots of anecdotes accompanied by Crouch’s usual pithy descriptions of footballing characters. He’s good at telling a joke, preparing the reader for the punch line or sizing a character up in a few precise and well chosen words, and the whole thing is light hearted, sure to buoy you up, and take you to a better place if life is getting you down. Caricatures and stereotypes abound, as in the first of these volumes, and that’s partly what makes them such an easy read: everything fits nicely into your preconceptions.

As before, the chapter headings group together different types of post football career – Manager, Pundit, Actor, Grafter and so on – and it’s interesting to see how these men, many of them quite familiar to soccer fans – ended up. By the way, they are all men!

The section on actors of course includes Cantona, one of the great characters of the modern game – and I say that as a Manchester City fan. And then there’s the serious side: stories about players like Lee Hendrie of Aston Villa, who lost all his money to cheats and hangers on, details about lives spent as plumbers or builders that show that it’s not all glamour and glory. To be frank some of these sections were a bit flat, and it seemed that Crouch, running out of ideas, was padding the final chapters out with well meaning but fairly banal comments about the dangers facing young players entering the game, and the problems faced by those whose careers are coming to a close.

I suppose the footballer who achieved the most when his professional career was over was George Weah, who became President of Liberia, but the ex-player who intrigued Crouch the most was Gavin Peacock. Crouch watched him from the stands as a teenager, and played on the same team as him at QPR. Later Peacock went on to become a pastor at Calvary Grace Church in Calgary, Canada, and Crouch devotes a whole chapter to him and other footballers who lived out their Christian faith in one way or another. He is clearly intrigued, dipping his toe into the water of religious faith. There’s a little less sarcastic humour here, and a definite respect for the choices these men have made, so let’s hope Crouch takes the next step.

The Anarchy – William Dalrymple

The history of the East India Company is relevant today because its story is a damning insight into human cruelty and greed. The Anarchy can teach us a lot about that. But Dalrymple claims the East India Company is especially significant in our world of multi-national corporations, powerful enough to dictate national polices on issues like taxation and the environment, because it was the first of its kind to gain that kind of power, the first company to become more powerful than a country. It gained that power by corrupting governments and individuals, and went on to devastate the environment and control the economy of the whole of India. In this respect it was the canary in the coal mine, a forerunner of the tobacco and oil companies of today, which cross national boundaries, avoid paying taxes, and pollute the national debate with lies and half truths about global warming and pollution.

Dalrymple begins in Elizabethan England, an impoverished outcast on the edge of Europe. A motley crew of investors from different social backgrounds gather to ask the queen’s permission to invest in a boat to trade with the Indies. He describes the traders’ first tentative steps, referring to a Mughal painting that shows the British King James as a minor and irrelevant figure begging at the court of the all powerful emperor in Delhi. As late as 1687 European troops bearing pikes were no match for the Mughal’s Indian armies, but rapid developments in tactics and weaponry during the wars of the eighteenth century gave European soldiers a significant advantage over the Indian forces. In 1746. Joseph-François Dupleix, Director General of the French Compagnie des Indes, seized Madras from the British without bothering to consult the local Indian rulers. He refused to hand it back to them, preferring to keep it for the French, and when Mahfuz Khan objected, Dupleix defeated Khan’s 10000 strong army with just 700 troops.

The writing was on the wall: it was around this time that an English soldier of fortune said it would be easy to conquer the whole of the sub-continent, and that India would be at the mercy of any ruthless and well organised European army.

The rest, as they say, is history. The French and English were at war for much of this period: the Austro-Hungarian War of Succession lead to a short time of peace, but British and French colonial ambitions created a rivalry that erupted in violence around the world, including Canada, and its effects were even more significant in India. The rivalry was intensified during the Napoleonic and Revolutionary wars at the turn of the century, and by the end of them the fate of India was sealed: it was in the hands of the British.

But it was not just the Europeans who were squabbling, murdering and cheating for the sake of money and power. India had been ruled since the 1400s by Moslem descendants of Timur the Lame – himself a notorious builder of empires. But during the eighteenth century a series of internal rivalries fractured his descendants’ empire, and Persian invasions, organised for the sole purpose of looting the Mughals’ vast wealth, further damaged their power.

Dalrymple gives a blow by blow account of the Machiavellian machinations of British French and Indian rulers during the whole of this period. It is dense and detailed, but Dalrymple does a good job of moving from one theatre of war or diplomatic conflict to another without losing the reader’s interest, whilst keeping the main threads of the narrative clear. The pen portraits of each of the main characters at the front of the book are helpful in this respect. They divide the dramatic personae into several key sections, of which the British, French, and Mughals are perhaps the most well known. There are also the Nawabs, who took over Bengal in 1740 in a military coup financed by Indian bankers, the Rohillas, soldiersof the last Mughal emperor Shah Alam, who in the end betrayed him, and the Sultans of Mysore including the famous, Sultan Tipu who created a prosperous and well organised kingdom but had to cede half of it to Lord Cornwallis and the British. (You might know Cornwallis better as the general who lost north America to the yanks!) Finally, there were Marathas from the Deccan plateau who were a perpetual thorn in the Mughal emperor’s side.

The story of Shah Alam is especially tragic – the last Mughal emperor, a mere puppet on the throne for most of his life, kept in place by ever shifting alliances of British, French and Indian forces, cruelly blinded by a rebel from his own court, and subject to the whims of whatever breeze blew past his former stronghold in Delhi. The conquests of Clive of India, who committed suicide, and the story of the Black Hole of Calcutta are well known in England, but there is so much more to The Anarchy. Dalrymple, a resident of India, provides a balanced view of these epoch defining events, and many more, acknowledging different perspectives and often quoting large sections directly from the original source.

The Anarchy is not a book for the casual reader. The lack of detailed maps exemplifies this as much as anything: there are only three, so I had to make frequent references to Google to find out what was going on.

I really recommend The Anarchy, but you will probably need to read it twice, with an atlas of India open on your lap, to absorb even a small proportion of the detail Dalrymple includes. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m going to find time for that.

British Naval History

If you ever want a step to reach a high shelf I have a couple of mighty tomes idling away on my bookshelves that might help. The first is The Command of the Ocean, A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815, written by N.A.M. Roger, published in 2004, and covering a specific and important period in British history. The second, Empire of the Deep – The Rise and Fall of the British Navy by Ben Wilson, which was published in 2013, takes a broader view, considering England over a period of a thousand years, an island state, likely to be put to the sword by any shipbound geezers with an axe to grind, be they Vikings, Spanish, French or Dutch in origin.

For Wilson the sea was the womb that gave birth to our island nation, shaping the attitudes of its citizens and the politics of its governments. He sees the British Isles not as a fortress, but as a playground for invading forces. The blue rivers stretching into the hinterland meant that no one was safe from the Viking longboats, and Alfred had to counter their incursions by fortifying inland towns, and forcing pitched battles. Throughout this book Wilson offers informed and detailed accounts of England’s ships and of the state of the navy, looking at the limitations and possibilities of naval warfare, and the development of tactics. The opening section offers an account of Viking incursions, and the battle to defeat them, focussing specifically on the naval aspects of the war.

Wilson claims the Anglo-Saxon kings were seamen first and foremost, maintaining control through the use of the navy, and supported by expertise provided by their Danish allies and relations. But the Battle of Hastings put paid to that. The Normans secured their hegemony with a land based army, and the navy took a subsidiary role. There was a need to protect trade, and during the Middle Ages control of the Cinque Ports, and their equivalent on the coasts of France, became the main focus of the navy’s attention. But it was dangerous to allow the navy’s ships to fester and decay, as sometimes happened, and in the 1200s Norwegian ships returned to British seas, taking control of the Isle of Man and the Western Isles. A weakened navy meant a weakened England.

Trade with Europe was crucial to prosperity in the middle ages. Wool was a currency in itself, not gold, but almost. Wine came from Bordeaux to England in vast quantities, though the journey was hazardous, and plagued by pirates from Brittany. Ships from rival ports engaged in battle, attempting to protect their trade by gaining mastery of the seas. After one incident King Edward was ordered to explain himself to his feudal overlord, the King of France. In order to avoid this confrontation Edward’s lawyers came up with a fiction that would have a significant impact over the centuries that followed: the English King was Lord of the English sea and the islands therein: he could do what he liked!

By the time of Henry 8th the role and purpose of the navy had not changed much, but Edward’s bold claims had set the scene for a dramatic convulsion in world affairs, and the birth of the British (or English?) Empire. Henry’s reformation put the Tudors in direct conflict with the Catholic church and the Spanish Empire, and England was too poor to defend itself. But if England was master of the seas, an English Queen could licence pirates to attack Spanish ships, and the treasures they brought back to London and Plymouth were beyond belief. Of course Wilson covers all of these events in significant detail, following Drake around the world and into the Caribbean. There are descriptions of battles across the globe, and of the Spanish Armada’s ill-fated attempt to land an army in England. From this point in the book Wilson begins to pay close attention to naval tactics, using maps and drawings, and describing the armaments and ships involved in sumptuous detail.

The influence of Samuel Pepys in shaping the British navy, and providing coherent systems and policies to organise it, is described, and Wilson goes on to write about the impact of different approaches to managing the navy, and the slow improvements that came about in provisioning and looking after the sailors. The sea battles that created the British Empire are covered, with maps and diagrams, and there is history of British admirals, and each is evaluated and rated. Of course Nelson turns out to be the best of them all, though he was clearly as mad as a frog, falling in love with Lady Hamilton at Leghorn, and showing cavalier disregard to his own safety by having various bits of his anatomy blown away or mutilated. Kiss me Hardy!!

The role of the navy in the Napoleonic Wars and the development of British power in the 19th century is explored: it seems after the development of the paddle steamer there was no major world capital that the British navy could not reach and obliterate. Finally Wilson traces the decline of Britain’s naval power to and including the first world war, and beyond, explaining the demise of the battleship as a key source of naval power, and the development of the submarine. He emphasises the importance of a book called The Influence of Seapower Upon History, 1660-1783. It was published in 1890 by an American sea captain, Alfred T Mahan, and promoted the idea that all successful empires depended upon naval power. The book provoked the Kaiser and other national leaders to challenge the supremacy of the navy, and in the end it became impossible for Britain to maintain its hegemony over the seas. It had lost its technological edge, and there were too many competitors.

Wilson’s book is a tour de force, a detailed account of British history from a naval perspective, that gives a detached and rather sympathetic account of the development of Empire, focussing on technological and naval achievements rather than the consequences of British imperialism.

Rodger’s The Command of the Ocean sets itself different limits. Here the writer focuses on a much shorter period of time. The details of battles and naval tactics, and the explanations of the development of the navy and the improvements in organisation are as detailed and thorough as Wilson’s. The difference is in the time that Rodgers gives to social history. He presents each period in two or three different sections, only one of which deals with military conquests and naval battles. Rodgers is the one you need to read if you are interested in the men and officers, the way they lived, the food they ate and the way in which life for seamen changed over the centuries.

I would recommend both of these books to anyone with an interest in the topic, and with plenty of time to spare. Neither gives attention to any kind of postcolonial reckoning, though to be honest on many occasions it is not hard to imagine, or deduce, the impact of Britain’s naval prowess on the people living on the edges of the world’s oceans. It was not all bad of course, but it is a history of brutal violence and financial exploitation.

Goodbye to All That – Robert Graves

It’s hard to believe that I’ve got this far without reading Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That. The book is a great testimony to the British class system, and to the privileges it endows on those fortunate enough to be its favourites. Graves’ family was not especially wealthy, and he was obviously a gifted student and writer, arriving at Oxford via a series of preparatory schools, and a scholarship to Charterhouse school. But as the grandson of the Bishop of Limerick, the son of a school inspector, and the great nephew of a German historian he was not really short of money, and his background, dripping culture and education, gave him many advantages.

Graves ran through preparatory schools like a tramp emptying the bins: they were all rubbish. The scholarship to Charterhouse let the rest of the kids know how (relatively) poor his family was, and Graves’ interest in poetry made him even less popular, but at least it meant the relationships he made were based on shared interests. Things improved when he learned to box.

Graves’ early years sound like a distillation of the first lines of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. He experienced a cosmopolitan European culture that was extinguished by the war, and is inaccessible to us now: a kind of utopian dream, or a nightmare if you prefer. Winters spent skiing in the Alps and summers idling in his German family’s castle. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aust Litauen, echt deutsch.

His German blood, and the name Robert von Ranke Graves, meant that he was taunted and distrusted in the army, but that did not stop him donning an officer’s uniform and enjoying all the class privileges that went with it. Goodbye to All That is most famous because of the sections on the war, and they were the reason I chose to read it. They did not disappoint, giving a detailed account of the failings of the British high command and the chaos they caused. There are many interesting personal details and anecdotes, and Graves portrays himself as a conscientious officer, sympathetic to the situation of the common soldier, not too brave, but brave enough.

My grandfather was in the Welch regiment along with Graves and I wondered if Goodbye to All That might give me any clues about his life. Grandfather died in 1932 as a result of damage to his lungs caused by being gassed in the trenches, and by the polluted air in industrial Manchester where he always lived. The gassing took place in 1916, about a month before the Somme offensive which inspired Graves to write his famous poem, A Dead Boche, set in Mametz Wood. The book did not tell me much about the regiment that I did not already know, though there were many echoes of grandfather’s experiences: the long train journey from Le Havre, the trenches, and finally the posting in Ireland at the end of the war, a last desperate act of colonialism.

Grandfather was not keen on going back to his grandmother’s native land, and went AWOL for 2 weeks. He finally turned up missing a pair of boots, a symbolic act of defiance. The first words he addressed to an officer on arriving at the camp in Ireland resulted in a further period of detention and was followed by an impressive list of misdemeanours that showed that he had had enough of the war. Who can blame him?

Things were probably a bit easier for Graves, who was able to spend his army leave walking in the Welsh mountains behind the family’s holiday cottage in Harlech, and hobnobbing with Siegfried Sassoon amongst others. Graves moves through the post war years in a miasma of Oxford acquaintances and literary figures and it’s hard not to accuse him of name dropping. But for a student of English like me it was an interesting insight into the incestuous nature of the literati, and of the closed shop that was the ruling classes of the time.

A Dead Boche – Robert Graves

To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)
“War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:

Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

The Long Affray – Harry Hopkins

Harry Hopkins claims the British working classes were liberated not by industrial trade unions, but by thousands of nineteenth century poachers whose flagrant breaches of the game laws undermined the authority of the aristocracy. Finally, in 1908, the Liberal government introduced a land tax that made it harder for great landowners to pamper game birds at the expense of the rural population, but it had been a bloody war. The French Revolution was over in a few years: Hopkins argues that the century long poaching wars that were waged to preserve rich men’s game caused just as much bloodshed, and that their impact was just as revolutionary.

Hopkins begins with the executions of two poachers, Charles Smith and James Turner, who were hung at Winchester in March 1822. The first of these was convicted for wounding a gamekeeper, or watcher, named Robert Snellgrove on the country estate of Lord Palmerston, just outside Romsey. Nearby, in the village churchyard of North Baddesley, Smith’s grave is marked by two different epitaphs. The first, placed in 1822 by local people, states that Smith suffered……for resisting with firearms…. when he was found on Palmerston’s land.

Hopkins claims that for Smith, and many others, poaching was indeed a kind of resistance.

About eighty years later a descendant of Palmerston added the second epitaph which states: Charles Smith .. was convicted ...of “attempting to murder” Robert Snellgrove.. having fired at close quarters the whole of his gun into Snellgrove’s body. But Hopkins claims Snellgrove was wounded in the leg whilst trying to stop Smith escaping, and not in the body. Smith was not trying to murder him, and the epitaph is a lie.

The game laws divided society and the two contrasting epitaphs reflect that division. On one side were the ruling classes, the landed gentry, who were the only ones allowed to shoot game. It was the land owner’s pheasant or partridge, and any one caught taking it without his permission would be severely punished. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the landed gentry were the only people who could become MPs, so that law was not going to change. But it was not really that simple, because how can you really own a grouse or a pheasant? After all, they are wild animals. What happens if you come across one on the road, or it wanders onto a field of turnips, nips out all the growing shoots, and bankrupts the farmer? Or when game birds are fat and pampered, but farm labourers are starving?

It had reached that state by the end of the century, though poachers had the sympathy of the rural classes and inhabitants of small towns like Romsey, long before that. The courts might treat wild animals as the property of the landowner, but that didn’t ring true when they were wandering the streets and perched on the farmer’s gatepost. It was morally indefensible- a law that just made no sense, and that the people did not support.

No one would “peach” on Smith, and Snellgrove’s written statement used to convict him was given under duress. Shooting was the preoccupation of the upper classes, and the people of Romsey had no interest in finding the culprit: a petition was sent to Palmerston asking for the prisoner to be spared.

Using the shooting of Snellgrove as a starting point, Hopkins traces a hundred years of attempts to protect landowners’ rights by improving the game laws, and describes the bloody conflict caused by enforcing them. It’s an agricultural history of the nineteenth century and a political history of England that I knew nothing about before I picked up this book. It was worth reading for that.

Hopkins is good on detail and on the legal niceties. He brings the story to life with well chosen and dramatic stories, but he is a little wordy. He doesn’t make it easy to follow the chronology, drifting from one event to another and drawing in examples from earlier in the book to illuminate points he makes later, which can be confusing.

I chose to read The Long Affray because from 1830 to 1900 one branch of my family earned their living as gamekeepers. Henry Barnard was beaten about the head by a poacher, and the use of a gun barrel to do that meant that he ended up in Norwich hospital. But Henry was probably being a little over enthusiastic in the pursuit of his duties- according to the defence council he apprehended the men on a public road. Nevertheless they were convicted and spent six months in jail.

The Book of Trespass – Nick Hayes

Badger, Fox, Dog, Sheep, Cow, Spider, Pheasant, Cockroach, Hare, Toad and Stag. Nursery book animals that epitomise the English countryside and provide Nick Hayes with the eleven chapter headings he uses to explore our relationship with the land, and to examine the relentless progress of private property.

Badger in Kenneth Graeme’s The Wind in the Willows states that all of his friends have the right to walk freely in the countryside. Nick Hayes explores this concept with reference to the mass trespass on Kinder Scout in the 1930s which led to the foundation of the Peak District National Park, and the right to roam there. He looks at the development of property law and the concept of trespass. Fox engages with the legal concept of ownership and considers Locke’s definition of property. This might seem dry stuff, but Hayes finds illuminating anecdotes and colourful examples that bring the concepts to life.

In Dog we get a brief history of the wandering Egyptians, and the problems that arise when the freedom to roam conflicts with the rights of property owners. The extermination of the right to camp and of rights of way is made easier by laws which favour landowners. There are examples of farmers decimating protected trees and eliminating footpaths with barbed wire. And there is Hoogstraten, determined to keep the riff raff off his land, including the public footpath that crosses it. If legal costs, running into thousands of pounds were needed to keep that small path open, what chance do we have with the rest?

Sheep concerns land enclosures that placed more and more of the British countryside into the hands of fewer people: land seized from the common weal on the grounds that it could be put to more profitable use if fenced off and left to the sheep. The peoples’ right to chop wood, fish, graze and roam sacrificed to profit. A Cow is a chattel, and if you can own an animal why not a human being? The great estates of England were built on the blood money of the slave trade: slavery was legitimised by the laws of property, and allowed immense wealth to accumulate in the hands of just a few men – men whose descendants still own that land. Spider: everything beyond the pale – errant women at Greenham Common, witch trials and fences, both literal and metaphorical.

Pheasant, the shooting thereof – and other sports which epitomise the landed gentry; stories of hunts and saboteurs, the Gamekeeping Wars, the monoculture of the grouse. Should landowners be free to burn the moors, or valley dwellers free from the flooding it causes? Cockroach: foreigners and immigrants. Hare: Alternatives, crazy festivals and medieval fairs that threaten the rules – radical, communal uses for the land. Toad: absurd rules about river navigation, rights granted by the Magna Carta now lost to the “noble” art of angling. Tory cabinet ministers earning fortunes from renting out stretches of rivers, their vested interests in maintaining the status quo. Stag: Prince Albert’s enclosure of Windsor Home Park so he can skinny dip alone, the Sheffield tree fiasco, and ways to fight back. Alternative systems – access to land in other European countries, and the Scottish model. An encounter with a conservative MP: don’t bother looking for a solution there.

Nick Hayes covers a lot of ground in this book! He’s very well informed and exceptionally good at finding ways to dramatise this story about the theft of our rights, as citizens, to walk across the fields of England. He sugars the pill of factual detail by describing trips across forbidden boundaries, often at the dead of night. These sections are well written and evocative, but repetitive at times. They are at their best when Hayes moves from romantic descriptions of nature to personal encounters with gamekeepers and landowners whose very words reveal the deep roots of property injustice.

Website: The Right to Roam

Website: Who Owns England

Who Owns England – Guardian Book Review

The Amur River – Colin Thubron

Colin Thubron was eighty when he began this journey by horseback, trekking over swamps and through forests close to the source of the river Amur to the north of Ullanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, and on to the coast. The Amur River runs from Central Asia for nearly 3000 kilometres until it reaches the Pacific Ocean, north of Japan. For long stretches it forms the border between Russia and China.

There were no roads here, and it was not long before Thubron was nursing broken ribs and a damaged ankle, having fallen from his horse and trapped his foot in the stirrup. But that did not deter him. The next stage of the journey involved a 4×4 and a driver who took him across the Russian border. Trains, boats and cars carried Thubron along the water’s edge, or across mountainous terrain where the river was not accessible, into China, then northwards to the cold Okhotsk sea at the edge of the Pacific.

This is a journey which Thubron brings to life with beautiful descriptions of rivers and mountains. There are potted histories of the places he passes on the route, and potted biographies of the people he meets. And all along the Russian border there is the unfolding political story of the river as a border between east and west, between two competing empires: a story of savagery and betrayal, of bitterness and exploitation. And then there’s Russia 🇷🇺: the tsars and the Cossacks, Stalin and the Revolution.

This is a story of racism- of the “hairy” Russians, who resent the enterprise and the financial muscle of the Chinese. Of illegal Chinese traders who hide behind Russian shopfronts, of treacherous treaties signed under duress ceding the Amur watershed to aggressive Russian expansionism. There are Cossack forts annihilated to a man and thousands of ethnic Chinese thrown into the boiling waters of a river gorge.

The Amur is a vast river tracing a line across the Siberian tundra. Thubron relies on the kindness of strangers, hooking up with Chinese labourers and drunken Russian fishermen who take him past the industrial pollution of Chinese tributaries pouring in from the south, and into a cold and desolate north – a Siberian frontier once seen as Russia’s west, but cold and empty now.

Cossacks, Russians, Chinese and local tribal groups- the river’s story is one of exploitation and dispossession. It is a story of greed, European expansionism, and failed policies and ideologies. The Amur River never lived up to its promise – to link Russia with the Pacific Ocean and open up Siberia to international trade. The area is cold, the sea icy and the river estuary a maze of ever changing shoals and shallows, difficult to navigate. Instead of Nikolaevsk-na-Amure, Vladivostok became the Russian Pacific outpost.

Thubron’s book traces the history of sino-Russian relationships, which is increasingly relevant, considering the current rapprochement between the two countries. Can there ever be mutual trust? He has a worrying night when he hears the two powers are having combined military manoeuvres in the neighbourhood, expecting to find himself in trouble with the local constabulary. But he drives across the border with ease, passing row upon row of empty Chinese tents as if despite claims to the contrary it is all just a sham. There are no soldiers there at all.

The Amur River is definitely worth a read but it’s a dark exploration of inhospitable territory and broken promises. Wear a warm coat and a hard hat.

Superinfinite – Katherine Rundell

Superinfinite takes us back to the Reformation, and the life of English poet and preacher John Donne, younger than Shakespeare but of an age to have seen him perform at the Globe Theatre. Donne was from a Catholic family, an outsider, and probably considered a potential threat by Elizabeth’s spy masters. Superinfinite traces his life from the secret priest holes of Elizabethan England to Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, revealing the influences that shaped him and the way that these found expression in some of the most original and challenging poetry ever written in the English language.

Donne’s ancestors included Catholic martyrs, so the roots of that religion must have gone deep. A brother was jailed for harbouring a Jesuit priest at a time when the aim of the Catholic Church was not just to save English souls but to overthrow the government. The young boy, Henry, was full of idealism and passion but died in prison, brought down by the fetid and poisonous air of the jail. This must have been a traumatic experience for Donne as a young man.

Donne’s Catholic faith excluded him from the court and restricted his ability to earn a living and to make the kind of connections needed to prosper. Rundell explains that Donne was sent to Oxford when quite young so he would not be forced to swear allegiance to the Crown as head of the church. This avoided drawing his Catholicism to the attention of the authorities, and any crisis of faith that would have precipitated. He went on to Lincoln’s Inn Fields where he joined others learning about the law, and getting to know the ways of the world. There were a couple of not very successful adventures, including a trip to Cadiz with the English navy in piratical and marauding mode. Back in England Donne managed to gain a post as secretary in the household of Thomas Egerton, but fell in love, and eloped with Egerton’s seventeen year old daughter. The author quotes from letters Donne wrote after the event, trying to explain away this exceedingly romantic but very foolish step. It didn’t help his career.

Donne struggled for a while after this. He was forced to live in the country and so was separated from any opportunity for advancement. There were several children but Donne was not really the paternal kind. He found the round of nappies and runny noses quite boring.

From his days at Oxford Donne had written poems and paradoxes which were passed from hand to hand among groups of like minded enthusiasts. The love of poetry was common amongst the educated elite in Renaissance England. Donne’s poems were never published in his life, but he had an enthusiastic following. Many of the early poems were concerned with love, and Rundell explores these, considering whether Donne really was the wild and promiscuous lover they might suggest. She thinks it unlikely – the hyperboles he uses suggest he is a rake, but it is more likely a form of bravado.

I was disappointed to find Rundell did not explain why Donne adopted the Protestant attitude to faith and personal salvation. Was it just a career move? It seems unlikely. Donne became a brilliant and convicted preacher, and came to the attention of King James. There was a diplomatic trip to Germany, which was a failure, and he was finally awarded the post of Dean at St Paul’s.

Superinfinite is an interesting but quite challenging read. Thankfully it is presented in brief chapters which make it easier to digest. Donne’s faith was inspirational and this book has encouraged me to consider looking at some of his sermons – though they too would be challenging. Throughout this book Rundell selects apt examples from the poems and sermons, using them to explain this or that aspect of Donne’s life and psychology in ways that are very insightful, but there are times when, despite the explanations I am still confused. It is not just the vocabulary that makes Elizabethan language so hard at times: some grammatical constructions are no longer in use. Donne is always pushing the boundaries of language and metaphor, making his constructions super difficult to understand. He disregards the typical Elizabethan patterns of poetry, breaking his lines into jagged rocks that shipwreck sense. You need to learn how to read Donne, but it is worth the effort. Look at the broken lines of Donne’s opening in this famous poem, as he and his mistress rouse themselves from sleep:

Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,…..

It is resolved in this concluding stanza and the rhythm of the final couplet suggests confidence and ease as Donne tells the sun:

….Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

The bravado of his imagination, and the super infinite nature of the imagery is stunning in this love poem, as it also is in the Holy Sonnets:

At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall, o’erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes,
Shall behold God, and never taste death’s woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
For, if above all these, my sins abound,
‘Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good
As if thou’hadst seal’d my pardon with thy blood.

No one else can match Donne in his range and the bravery of his ideas. God bless him.