favourite U.K suffragette: Leonora Cohen

Police court summons and photo, Nov 1911

Photo credit: Leeds Museums & Galleries

Leonora Throp Cohen (1873–1978) was born in Leeds to Canova & Jane Throp. Her father was a stone carver but died in 1879 when Leonora was only 5, after he devel­op­ed TB of the spine. This left her widowed mother to raise the 3 young children. Her seamstress mother worked to provide for the family, especially difficult since Leonora also developed TB

Leonora apprenticed as a milliner and while she was working as a mil­l­inery buyer, she met Henry Cohen. He was a jeweller's assistant in central Leeds and the son of Jewish immigrants from Warsaw. Married in 1900, the couple's first child Rosetta died on her first birthday but thankfully in 1902, they had a healthy son Reginald. For the next nine years, the small family enjoyed a peaceful life as Henry's business as a jeweller and watchmaker flourished. 

Because her mother Jane had been a widowed seamstress struggling to raise the children alone, it was obvious to Leonora that her mum had few rights as a woman living in Britain. Life was hard because women had little control over their own lives. So it was her mother's lack of empowerment that had radicalised the young woman. 

At the time of Cohen's first job as a milliner, there was a campaign for better working conditions for women. This affected Cohen and her view of the treatment of women in the working world. Thankfully husband Henry was supportive of her fight for women's rights. 

Cohen later donated her scrapbook, many papers, craftwork, photos and other momentos to Abbey House Museum Leeds. Her scrapbook provided an insight into what inspired her to become a suffragette and indicated her interested in current affairs via an article about Nurse Edith Cavell's death

One cabinet from the Leonora Cohen section of Abbey House Museum.

The green dress is covered in Suffragette symbols, and the logo of the Women’s Social & Political Union

In 1909, she joined Leeds branch of Women's Social & Political Union/WSPU, founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903. Later, Cohen was in The Bodyguard to Mrs Pankhurst.

In 1911, Cohen joined in a rally that was packed out with support­ers. And the mounted police. When she protested by throwing a rock at a government-building window, she was promptly arrested and placed in Holloway Prison for seven days. Spending time behind bars only in­creased her passion to fight for women’s right to vote. She de­fend­ed herself in court and even though found guilty, the authorities re­leased her. As Cohen began to take bolder steps as a suffragette, her family supporting her allegiance.

In 1913 Cohen took more vigorous action. At a protest at the Tower of London, she followed a group of school children inside, acting as a teacher. Hidden under Leonora’s coat was an iron bar, taken the night before and filed off for the purpose. Leonora used this bar to smash a glass showcase containing in­signia of the Order of Merit in the Tower’s Jewel House. She tied a note to the bar: My Prot­est to the Government for its refusal to Enfranchise Women, but continues to torture women prisoners. Deeds Not Words. 100 years of Constitutional Pet­ition, Resolutions, Meetings & Processions have Failed. Lenora Cohen 

Cohen was re-arrested, but decided to make a stand by going on a hunger strike, & not speaking out in anger. Because of the Cat & Mouse Act, Cohen was released from prison after a few days to allow her to recover from her hunger strike.

In 1913 suffragettes Annie Kenney & Flora Drummond asked for WSPU members to speak to leading politicians David Lloyd George and Sir Edward Grey at Westminster. The delegates described the terrible pay and working conditions that they suffered and their hope that a vote would enable women to challenge the status quo. Voting women would have power to demand higher wages, just as men had done.

During WW1 Leonora threw herself into the war effort, without other distractions. She worked in a munitions factory where she set up a trade union branch for women workers and defused strikes. She also established a charity, raising money for surgical appliances for women who had been injured in munitions factories.

A coalition government passed the Representation of the People Act 1918, enfranchising all men, and women over 30 who met minimum property qualifications. The Conservative gov­ernment passed the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928, giving the vote to all women over the age of 21 on equal terms with men. 

Cohen, a dedicated trade unionist, became the Leeds district org­aniser of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers and served a term as president of the Leeds Trades Council. By 1923, Cohen became the first woman president of the Yorkshire Federation of Trades Councils. In 1924 she was appointed a magistrate, one of the first women appointed to the bench and a JP for decades. In 1928, she was awarded the Order of the British Empire.

Blue Plaque on Leonora Cohen's home 

Leeds, Wiki

Suffragette Memorial honoured those fighting for women's suffrage,

unveiled in 1970

in the Christchurch Gardens, London

Leonora Cohen retired to north Wales. In 1970, she attended the unveiling of the Suffragette Memorial in London, along with other famous suffragettes and Labour politicians. Since Cohen lived to 105, long enough to become a role model for the 1970s feminists and Coh­en was brought back into the public eye. Brian Harr­ison inter­viewed 200+ people, including Cohen, as a part of his project Oral Evidence on the Suffragette and Suffragist Movements.

Before she died in 1978, Cohen donated all her mem­orabilia to Abbey House Museum, Leeds. The Times newspaper pub­lished her obit­uar­y, covering The Tower Suffragette’s imprisonment and hunger strike, and long career as a trade unionist and magistrate. She was seen as a regional act­ivist who was willing to be gaoled for the cause. And that later she became a very important trade unionist and magistrate

Great Emu War Australia 1932 - not a joke!

A flock of 20,000 hungry emus

WA, 1932

photo credit: Footnoting History

 

In the years following WW1, the Australian Government struggled to find work for their ex-servicemen to do on returning home. From 1915 a Soldier Settlement Scheme began to be rolled out across all states, and event­ual­ly it saw c5,030 ex-soldiers given plots of land to con­vert into working farms, primarily to cultivate wheat and sheep. By Sep 1920, the government had purchased 90,000 hectares for the ex-servicemen but still needed more. So they started placing returning soldiers in marginal areas of Perth in W.A, even though setting up a successful farm with little experience in a good area would not have been easy. Plus the ex-servicemen struggled even more when the Great Depression hit in 1929, as wheat prices plunged. Alas the government’s promised subsidies for wheat never came.

Aust­ralian emus had been a protected native spec­ies up until 1922 when they started to destroyed the fences around wheat farms and ate or trampled the wheat. Thus they were officially reclas­sified as vermin. In summer 1932, a flock of 20,000 6’, hungry birds migrated from the coastal regions to inland regions, looking for food and to breed. By late 1932, they were wreaking havoc on the marginal wheat farms owned by the ex-servicemen.

A group of local ex-soldiers were sent to speak with the Minister of Defence. These farmers had no access to the nec­essary ammunition, so they called on the Aust­ralian military to act and soldiers were sent to the region with mach­ine guns!! Being ex-mil­it­ary, the farm­ers were very aware of how eff­ect­ive mac­hine guns would be.

Led by Major GPW Meredith, 7th Battery of Royal Austr­al­ian Artillery, the army set out in Nov 1932, certain to gun down birds in one district. The soldiers moved in formation behind the birds, and the birds immediately scattered in all di­r­ect­ions - emus cannot fly but they can run VERY quickly. 2 days lat­er, hidden gunners sighted 1,000 emus nearby and waited patiently for them to arrive. The soldiers open fired at short range, killing 10-12 emus, while the others re-scatt­ered. The media noted: Each emu mob has its lead­er, always an en­or­mous black-plumed bird standing fully 6’ high, who kept watch while his fellows busied them­selves with the wheat. As soon as he gave the signal, the leader always remained until his followers reach­ed safety.

WW1 Lewis machine gun

used against the emus in W.A

credit: Wikimedia Commons

On 8th Nov 1932, it was reported that Maj Mered­ith’s party had used 2,500 rounds of ammunition (25% of the all­otted total) to destroy 200 emus. The Australian House of Repres­entatives discussed the military operat­ion and following the humiliating negative coverage of the Emu War in the local media, the army withdrew the military personnel and machine guns! Instead the government decided to prov­ide the ammunition that the locals need­ed to take care of the problem th­emselves, and 57,034 emus were killed over six months. The Journal of Aus­tr­al­ian Studies suggested it could have been a pro­p­a­ganda exercise to show that the government was supp­orting its strugg­ling war heroes. But I would have been more worried about physically and psychiatrically damaged WW1 soldiers being given machine guns again ☹

Australian coat of arms

starring the kangaroo and the emu

 

The emu still takes its place of pride on the Australian coat of arms with our other native, the kangaroo, having had its status as a protected animal reinstated. The emu population across Australia is c600,000-700,000+, not in danger of dying out. But conservation­ists are working to save several specific populations greatly at risk, especially in NSW.

Emus are very large, flightless birds and the massive number of emus was causing concern to local farmers. I have no doubt that the West­ern Australian farmers were facing hard times with their crops foll­owing the Great Depres­sion, and their difficulties greatly in­creased with the arrival of c20,000 emus migrating inland in their breeding season. But these birds are in­digenous to Australia, prot­ected and importantly symbolic. So the Great Emu War of Australia was both underst­and­able and unforgivable! At least they could have given the emu meat, which is both healthy and tasty, to families starving during the Depression.

The birds still remain plentiful in the areas outside Perth, so in some sense the War was also futile. Conservationists were clearly unhappy and hoped that problematic wildlife management would never involve machine guns again! So I am pleased to note that, although in the following years farmers requested assistance from the army again, the government did refuse!

Wilsons Promontory National Park, Victoria, 2010

Wikimedia Commons

history of British public telephone boxes

Before 1876, communication over distance was often by telegraphy. The General Post Office/GPO, governmental till 1969, had the monopoly on UK’s telegraphic communication. The telephone was a marvellous technical innovation but very costly; use was limited to wealthy homeowners and businesses. And there wasn’t a single unified system; it was owned and operated by private companies operating local exchanges to which homes and businesses subscribed. In 1884 the GPO relaxed the rules that limited exchanges, meaning that the first public telephone network began with only 13,000 phones nationwide.

As technology improved, more services emerged. The GPO started with Jubilee Concession, installing a kiosk in all c8,000 towns with a Post Office. Acts of Parliament unified National Telephone Company/NTC and GPO services.

A UK telephone network division came pre-WW1 when NTC assets were acquired by the GPO, effectively nationalising the telephone network. With the combined staff and assets of two separate organisations, the GPO looked at equipment regulation, but WW1 put kiosk development on hold.

London’s First Telephone Box K1, 1921 
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In 1921 Britain's standard kiosk K1 was introduced by Post Office. Its design was conservative so many of the phone box designs were protected by trademark registrations, held by British Telecommunications. K1, made of concrete, was not initially well-received. 14 K1 boxes remain, 7 registered by Historic England.

In 1923, two independent schemes were established to test design alternatives to K1. The Metropolitan Boroughs Standing Committee ran a competition to design a new national kiosk. And Birmingham Civic Society produced independent proposals for a new national kiosk, which they submitted to the GPO. This caused the newly established Parliamentary Royal Fine Art Commission (1924) to examine questions of public service and art value. The red telephone box emerged from a design competition.

 

K6

The public telephone box was designed by noted architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was in cast iron. Their distinctive red colour made them easily recognisable. From 1926, the kiosks displayed a prominent crown symbolising the government.

8 kiosk types were introduced by the GPO between 1926-83. The K6 was designed by Scott to mark the Silver Jubilee of King George V coronation in 1935. c60,000 examples were installed across Britain, explaining why the K6 became THE red Telephone Box. 11,000+ K6s remain. More stream-lined than the K2, the K6 was deployed widely by 1940, despite initial resistance to its red colour.

Scott’s design was like the K2, but smaller and cheaper to produce. The K6 was made of cast-iron sections, bolted together, standing on a concrete base. Its general design was a 4-sided rectangular box with a domed roof. The door was of teak, with a metal cup handle. Set into the slot was an illuminated telephone sign, with serif capital lettering on opaque glass. The pediments had a moulded Royal crown. 

Motoring organisations, Automobile Association/AA and Royal Automobile Club/RAC, enjoyed the benefits of a telephone network for members in a network of sentry boxes. Because cars were expensive and were prone to breakdowns, the motoring clubs employed patrolmen men to shelter in the boxes and to provide motorists with roadside aid. The Police Service also grew a network of kiosks, allowing officers to keep contact with their station. Metropolitan Police Service introduced Police boxes in 1929.

Scott’s winning design, chosen by the Royal Fine Art Commission, featured a classical style with a dome like John Soane’s. Scott was Director of the Sir John Soane Museum at the same time he was working on the telephone box design. The kiosk was ideally to be constructed from cast-iron with a per-unit price c£40. Three kiosks were installed behind London’s National Gallery in 1925.

Without a cost-effective kiosk used nationwide, GPO reverted to K1 with larger windows and revised signage. This was an interim solution, and by 1928 the GPO commissioned Scott to produce a cheaper kiosk made of pre-cast concrete. The GPO was not content with the K2 they had been working on, so they planned a new kiosk which could incorporate a stamp machine and post box; a mini-Post Office. 

Telephone and post office facilities

Atlas Obscura

In 1929 Scott introduced K3, a similar design to the K2 but made from reinforced concrete for nation-wide use. The K3 was cheaper than the K2 but still more expensive than the K1. See a rare surviving K3 kiosk at the London Zoo.

The K4 was an enlarged version of K2, designed by GPO’s Engineering Dept. In 1927 the K4 model included a post box and stamp vending machines. But only 50 K4 kiosks were produced. The GPO planned for a low cost kiosk. Introduced in 1934, K5 was a metal-faced plywood work, designed to be portable and used at exhibitions, but never completed.

In 1937 the Tercentenary Concession celebrated GPO's 300th anniversary and 1,000 more kiosks were installed for local authorities paying low subscriptions. In 1939 a tougher version was introduced. In 1949 Royal Fine Arts Commission got re-involved, allowing rural examples in different colours. Post-war c60,000 examples lived, and of the 8 kiosk types introduced by the GPO, the K6 heritage legacy remains best.

Post-war, the 1951 Festival of Britain was held on London’s South Bank. The Festival was a tonic to Britain then, showing the recovery from austerity. It demonstrated skills in the arts, architecture, industrial design, science and technology. And a crown motif with Queen Elizabeth II.

Lending library in unused kiosk

In 1959 the GPO invited submissions for a new kiosk from leading architects. After considering 6 experimental designs, K7 kiosks were designed by Neville Conder and installed in 1962. Ahead of its time, the K7’s use of aluminium was only adopted much later. So the GPO opted for a design by Bruce Martin; he proposed aluminium, not the trusted cast-iron. K8 kiosk arrived July 1968. 1969 predicted the end of GPOs kiosks. Since its inception, the GPO was nationalised, but as a Government Dept. By 1981 the Post Office was split into two businesses, privatising telecommunications Ap 1984.

In a year British Telecom announced a £160 mill modernisation scheme: installing modern kiosks in the public network. But historical groups & progressive London boroughs highlighted the kiosks’ plight. Statutory protection was given to 2,000 key kiosks by English Heritage.

AA and RAC kiosks also worsened. Reliable vehicles allowed patrolmen to travel in their own vans and telephone equipment could be housed in smaller pedestals. And the Police kept in touch via personal radios. As British Telecom was left with unprofitable kiosks to maintain, the company created an Adopt a Kiosk Scheme, demonstrated the strength of local communities in preserving and maintaining their heritage. Local authorities adopted unused kiosks for £1, with the community accepting responsibility for maintenance. Organisations took these boxes for other uses eg some counties’ K6s became a community libraries after their mobile library services discontinued. Or a defibrillator.

Defibrillator in unused kiosk

The iconic design of the red telephone box found a place in parts of the world, eg U.S, Australia, New Zealand, where they have been preserved in historic sites. But the red telephone box is a beloved symbol of British heritage and their cultural significance endures. The red telephone box is an artwork, history and national identity, one of UK's favourite design icons in 2006!

Thank you to The Historic England Blog which you may enjoy reading.

Year that changed English literature: 1922!

The World Broke in Two: the Year That Changed Literature by Bill Goldstein, 2017 wanted to cover the intellectual achieve­ments and personal dramas in the life of famous British writers, Virginia Woolf, T.S Eliot, E.M Forster and D.H Lawrence, throughout 1922. These 4 writers were not unknown at that stage but the literature world was chang­­ing. This was the year straight after James Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (published in English 1922) shocked the public. Goldstein included Proust because he’d had a vast impact on Woolf and EM Forster!

The World Broke in Two: the Year That Changed Literature
by Bill Goldstein

The History Reader

1922 was the birth year of modernism! It was a great year in which Woolf started one of her very popular novel Mrs Dalloway and Forster started one of his great successes, A Passage to India. Lawrence wrote Kangaroo, his Australian novel, and Eliot wrote his well respected The Waste Land.

Yet I started Goldstein's book with concerns. If 1922 ushered in a new English modernist lit­erature, would that down­play the value of my beloved late Victorian and Edwardian Liter­ature? What if Goldstein analysed and over-glorified The Rise of Modernism? As NPR explained well, Goldstein neatly avoided a dutiful chronicling of anything so weighty. He cleverly sacrificed historical depth for more intimacy.

It certainly was a year of new and exciting literature, but would we describe it as the invention of literary modernism? Bill Goldstein called them literary geniuses with interconn­ecting lives. Forster and Eliot lived in London and socialised with each other. And the Woolfs lived in London until 1919. The Joyces lived most of the 1920s in Continental Europe.

These writers might had ev­oked a nostalgia for a time when prec­is­ion and introspection were the guiding principles of liter­at­ure. No shock there, but there were great ex­cerpts from their own letters and their own diaries. So often their words were witty, gossipy and often critical. And not just their own diaries. Read the letters of poor Frieda Lawrence who struggled to live with her self-absorbed husband.

The problem was that 1922 was a huge year in world history. The War To End All Wars had ended in tragedy, young men were dead or wounded, economic catastrophes were created by the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, Gandhi was arrested in Bombay for sedition and gaoled, and Joseph Stalin became Gen­eral Secretary of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee.

We need to know the inspirations, self-doubts, financial strug­gles, love affairs, mental illness and personal rivalries between 4 important writers. But what I needed more was important historical context eg please ack­­now­ledge that the terrible influenza epidemic that swept Brit­ain just before 1922 had a very real and personal impact on our writers.

T.S Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Vivienne Eliot

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My longest blog posts are 1000 words, so I cannot say I know anything about the creative process for people writing com­plete books. Thus it was very interesting to read how Woolf, Eliot, Law­r­ence and Forster approached the writing process in very diff­erent ways. Goldstein closely described the process for each of these writers. Virginia Woolf was my type of woman! She allocated two hours every morning as sacred writing time, boosted by walking and journal writing. In fact each of the four writers nominated sacred times and sacred places to clear their minds and to boost their creativity.

The sharing of ideas while reading and discussing each other’s work was also important, with individuals or in writer groups. EM Forster admitted that he learned a great deal from reading Virginia Woolf’s writing.

That these clever writers had to overcome incapacitating phys­ical and mental illnesses was an anxiety-provoking part of the book for me. What happens if locking oneself in a study for hours on end damages all writers’ mental health and threatens their marriages? Eliot suffered from both anxiety and depress­ion, and his editor had great problems in getting Eliot to de­liver his poems in time for publication. Forster spent the year broken from grief over the death of his lover in Egypt. And the reigning theme of the book, according to The New York Times was writer’s block, treated as an anthropological constant. I'm fortunate; academics may not even know what writer’s block means.

Hogarth Press, the publishing house founded in 1917 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, succeeded. Still, Virginia & Leonard would not publish Joyce’s Ulysses. Large volumes were difficult for such a small press and worse still, they probably thought the book would be banned, leading to Hogarth Press being shut down. Neither DH Lawrence nor Virginia could read Ulysses!

Joyce with his loyal publisher Sylvia Beach,

12 rue de l’Odéon Paris, 1922

Los Angeles Public Library

 
DH Lawrence was very fortunate that travel did not disrupt his ability to write. Some of Lawrence’s books were banned in the UK, so instead of facing the obscenity laws at home, he saw his time abroad as voluntary exile. I will only mention two trips. In Feb 1922 Lawrence and his wife visited the famous patron of the arts Mable Dodge Luhan in New Mexico, from 1917 on. Copying Gertrude Stein’s cultural salon in Paris, Lawrence expected to socialise with influential artists and poets. Later that year Lawrence and wife went on a very successful tour of Australia for 3 months in 1922, then his novel Kangaroo was published.

Eliot and Forster were regulars at Virginia & Leon­ard Woolf’s home, but it was more personal than it was glitterati. And sometimes it was too personal; Gol­dstein let the 4 writers use their own witty, gos­s­ipy & cranky words. Woolf emerged as a patrician gossip, Forster a tragic romantic, Eliot formal and pretentious and Lawrence an irritant.

Were the main participants in this literary revolution highly conscious of being part of a shared enterprise? Prof John Mullan said yes; this was their historical moment. The alliances and rivalries between individual writers gave literary modernism a unique self-consciousness. A web of influences, friendships and sometimes collaborations was necessary to their literary innovations.

A Passage to India

by E.M Forster

Open Library

Fred Astaire, sister Adele & Ginger Rogers

Adele (1896-1981) and Frederick Austerlitz (1899–1987) were born in Nebraska, children of Johanna and Fritz Aust­er­litz. Johanna was born in the U.S to Lutheran Ger­man imm­igrants from East Prussia and Al­sace. Dad was born in Linz Austria to Jewish parents, and later the whole family converted to Cath­ol­icism - he arrived in New York in 1893, then found brewery work in Omaha.

Adele became a dancer-singer, and alth­ough Fred refused dance lessons, he eas­ily copied his sister's dancing and learned 3 musical instruments. So mum started a brother-sister act, common in vaudeville then, for her children.

When Fritz suddenly lost his job, the family moved to New York in 1905 to launch the child­ren’s show business careers. Adele and Fred began train­ing at the Alviene Master School of the Theat­re and Acad­emy of Cult­ural Arts. Their mother suggested they change their name to Astaire, as Austerlitz sounded too German. Did Fred mind that he was a] Germanic on both parents’ sides and b] Jewish on one side? Did he know that Fritz’s brothers Otto and Ernst remained in Austria and were soldiers during WWI? Apparently there was a tacit family agreement to mention neither.

Fred and Adele Astaire in 1921 

Adele and Fred were taught dance, speaking and singing, prepar­ing to develop an act. Their first act was Juvenile Artists Presenting an Electric Musical Toe-Dancing Novelty. In Nov 1905 their act debuted in Key­port New Jersey.

Their father's salesmanship rapidly landed Fred and Adele a major contract, playing the Orpheum Circuit of vaude­ville and cinemas in cities across the U.S. Even though Adele was older and taller, Fred wore a top hat (to appear taller) and the team was billed with Fred’s name first (to make him seem old­er). But eventually they decided to take a break from show business.

The career of the Astaire teens restarted with more polish, as they began to incorporate tap dancing into their routines. And they learned the tango, waltz and other popular ball­room dances from vaude­ville dancers. Then they appeared in Mary Pickford’s 1915 film, Fanchon, the Crick­et.

Young Fred was directing their music in 1916, just at the time he met George Gershwin who was working for the music pub­lisher Jerome Remick. Fred had been hunting for new music and dance ideas, so their meeting was a blessing to both their careers.

The Astaires had their first Broadway success with Over the Top (1917), a revue created for U.S and Allied troops. They did more shows eg The Passing Show of 1918 where fans loved Ad­el­e, owing in part to Fred's good choreo­graphy. But by this time, Fred's dancing was beginning to sparkle as well.

In the 1920s, they appeared on both Broadway and the Lon­don stage. And whilst in London, Fred was keen to study piano at Guild­hall School of Music. As Astaire's tap dancing was recognised by then as among the best in the world, he was certainly multi-talented.

Eventually Fred and Adele enjoyed stage succes­s­es. In fact, London gave them a bigger welcome than New York, but it was in Lon­d­on in 1924 that they heard of their father’s illness. Their mother ret­urned to America and soon, during the London run of Stop Flirting, their father died.

They won popular acclaim in theatres on both sides of the At­l­antic for Jerome Kern's The Bunch and Judy (1922), George & Ira Gersh­win's Lady, Be Good (1924) and Funny Face (1927) and later in The Band Wagon (1931). Fred went on to star in 10+ Broad­way and West End mus­ic­als, making 31 musical films and recordings.

The siblings split in 1932 when Adele married Lord Charles Cav­en­d­ish, 9th Duke of Devonshire’s son. Fred achieved suc­cess on Broad­way and in London with The Gay Divorcee, while consid­er­ing a Holly­wood future. But the end of the long family part­ner­ship was difficult for Fred.

His greatest dancing par­t­nership was with Virginia Ginger Rogers (1911-95), with whom he co-starred in ten Hollywood musicals! Among their most not­able films, where As­taire took the genre of tap danc­ing to a new lev­el, were Top Hat (1935) and Shall we dance? (1937). Their final film together was The Barkleys of Broadway, released by MGM in 1949.

Astaire was reluctant to become part of another team! How­ever RKO noted the public appeal of Fred’s choreography and of Astaire-Rogers dancing, which helped make dancing a key element of the film musical. Rogers maintained a busy theatre schedule, performing the title role in Hello Dolly! from 1965 on and took Mame to London audiences in 1969.

Now working with Claire Luce, Fred created a dance duo for Cole Por­ter's Night and Day. Luce stated that she had to help him to take a more romantic approach. The success of the stage play, and the film version, The Gay Div­or­cee, ushered in a new era in dance. Recently found footage of Astaire per­form­ing in Gay Divorce in 1933 survives!

RKO lent him to MGM in 1933 for his Hollywood debut in the succ­essful musical film Dancing Lady, dancing with Joan Craw­ford. On his return to RKO, he was with Ginger Rogers in Dolores del Río’s Flying Down to Rio (1933). Ginger and Fred were so thrilling toget­her, they made 9 films at RKO, including The Gay Divorcee (1934), Roberta (1935), Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), Swing Time (1936), Shall We Dance (1937) and Care­free (1938). Most Astaire–Rogers musicals became subs­t­antial money-makers for RKO.

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in Top Hat (1935)

Fred in Top Hat, 1935

Instead of using dance as a mere spec­tacle as others had done, Astaire was determined that all song and dance routines in a film be integral to the plotline. Ast­aire films usually included a solo performance by Astaire; a comedy dance routine for two; and a romantic dance duo.

In 1933 Fred married Phyllis Livingston Potter, after Phyl­l­is’ div­orce; they went to Hollywood tog­ether, had 2 children and lived happily until Phyllis’ death from lung cancer. Ginger Rogers married 5 times, but never had any children.
 
I am very grateful to The German Way & More.

The Edwardians: Age of Elegance Exhibit

The Edwardian era was always my favourite to read and write about. Health care services improved, mortality declined, literacy spread widely, women’s rights were debated, New Zealand & Australia women were enfran-chised, trade unionism increased and the arts and sports were now widely available. Canada federated progressively, while Australian & South African states unified.

Royal portraits and coronation cloaks

Visit London

So I was keen to see what The Edwardians: Age of Elegance Exhibition in 2025 in King’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace focused on. The exhibition went back into late Victorian era to examine the patronage of Albert Prince of Wales/King Edward VII & wife Alexandra of Denmark. The couple married in 1863, soon after Queen Victoria was widowed and withdrew from public life. Thus the young royals were leading taste-makers in society, well before 1901.

Winterhalter portraits of Edward and Alexandra, 1864

the year after their wedding.

jennifereremeeva

Queen Victoria’s son reigned on her death but unlike his very elderly mother, he died too soon 1910. Edward’s son King George V & wife Mary of Teck reigned from 1910-36, but the Edwardian Era will be labelled thus until the Golden Age ended with WW1 carnage. Thank you to Visit London & jennifereremeeva.

Court pageantry was seen in fine art eg Danish Laurits Tuxen’s Garden Party at Buckingham Palace 1897-9 and Family of Queen Victoria at her 1887 golden jubilee. The theme then focussed on the lavish court world. Note the opulent coronation robes of George & Mary and jewels.

Edward and Alexandra were patrons of leading artists: HE owned works by popular Victorian artist Frederic Leighton, while SHE collected art by Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne Jones. Alexandra also supported Minton’s Pottery Studio in 1870s, patronising women artists. And Alexandra, like many upper-class Victorian women, was a keen photographer.

Laurits Tuxen, Family of Queen Victoria, 

1887, Historian About Town

Global royal patronage was regular. Alexandra’s Danish heritage was seen in Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Co. art, including a huge porcelain cabinet with an ornamental roof. And objects were also collected on visits and in diplomatic exchange with the colonies: India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Africa. In the late C19th, better travel networks made the world closer, so the royal family travelled further and more often. These visits played an important role in Britain’s imperial identity eg in 1875-6 Edward toured India, producing an array of diplomatic gifts.

In 1871 Waverley Ball commemorated the 100th anniversary of Romantic author Sir Walter Scott and raised funds for the Scott Memorial in Edinburgh. Guests were dressed in costumes inspired by Scott’s Waverley literature. Edward went as Lord of Isles, titular character of an old poem, while Alexandra went as Mary Queen of Scots in the novel The Abbot. Emperor Pedro II of Brazil also attended

Edward and Alexandra hosted a Fancy Ball at Marlborough House in 1874. Actors, artists, aristocrats, musicians, politicians and bankers, called The Marlborough House Set, were invited. Named after their Pall Mall home, they were arbiters of fashion and taste, embracing new movements eg Art Nouveau & Arts and Crafts. Artist Godefroy Durand made a watercolour of the event, which showed Edward in fancy dress as Charles I, with Alexandra in Venetian costume.

A great party was the Devonshire House ball to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee 1897. 700+ invitations went out and James Lafayette photographed the guests. Edward was dressed as a Knight of Malta and Alexandra went as the C16th French queen Marguerite de Valois. Daughters Victoria and Maud, together with Maud’s husband, Prince Charles of Denmark, wore the costumes of her courtiers. And an early royal garden parties was at Buckingham Palace in 1897, marking Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, quickly becoming part of the royal calendar. While keeping strict dress codes, the Prince & Princess of Wales surrounded themselves with fashionable society figures.

A group of artists were portraying members of the set. Philip de László was renowned for his glamorous and natural portraits. In one painting of Princess Andrew of Greece-Denmark/Alice of Battenberg, George V’s cousin, he depicted the Princess in an elegant pose. A highlight of C20th royal portraiture was a striking painting of Queen Alexandra by François Flameng in 1908. In her mid-60s, she was presented as a fashion leader, promoting Cartier choker-necklaces. The best-known society portraitist of the era was by John Singer Sargent who painted Edward’s brother Arthur, Duke of Connaught & wife Duchess Louise 1908. And depicted folds of the Duchess’ dark silk and chiffon sleeves.

The social season also included sporting events eg horse racing during Royal Ascot week in June. The royal stables produced some important racehorses in the 1890s, including the famed Persimmon who won the Epsom Derby and the Ascot Gold Cup. And note the yacht racing at Cowes Isle of Wight. A small seal, enamelled in royal racing colours, marked 1896 when Britannia won 14 yacht races! And the exhibition revealed the royals’ loved dogs!

Fans and jewels

King's Gallery

Visit London

Edward and Alexandra watched theatre goers, actors and musicians in their social set. A bronze inkwell self-portrait by actress Sarah Bernhardt was in Edward’s Marlborough House study. Alexandra was a skilled pianist and Puccini's opera La Fanciulla del West of 1910 was dedicated to her.

For the royal family, and everyone, the age of glamour abruptly ended in WW1. By then Edward’s son, King George V, was on the throne. Both George and his wife Queen Mary visited the battlefields of Northern Europe to meet troops and boost morale, the first time a monarch had visited a warzone in over a century. The art collected by the royal family in this wartime period reflected a solemn purpose. George V collected military relics and images of the Western Front, including the bleak landscapes by photographer Olive Edis, Britain’s first female war photographer. She recorded the devastation caused by bombing and artillery to the buildings of France and Belgium

The monarchy which emerged after WW1 ended in late 1918 displayed a strong sense of duty. See Frank Salisbury's image of the first ceremony at the Whitehall Cenotaph Nov 1920, where King George V led the nation in collective mourning.

international gifts to the royals

todaytix

Philip de Laszlo, Hungary's finest portraitist! Spy?

László, Portrait of Franz Joseph I

in hussar field marshal's uniform, 1899

Hungarian National Museum

Philip de Laszlo: His Life and Art is a 2010 biography by Duff Hart-Davis, based on the artist’s papers, letters, press cut­t­ings and diaries. Hart-Davis was qualified to do the writing; he was related to King George III and to two of my favourite historians Duff Cooper and son John Julius Norwich. The author’s connections to royal, ar­is­tocratic and literary circles were clear, even in art history. The 145 plates in his book were fine examples of de Laszlo’s portraits.

Fulop Laub (1869-1937) was born in Budapest to a Jewish tailor. Due to hard work and talent, he joined Hungary’s Nat­ion­al Academy of Arts, then studied in Munich and Paris. Once he'd converted to Catholicism in 1894 and Hungar­ianised his name to Philip de Laszlo, royal commis­s­ions arrived eg Aust­rian Emperor Franz Joseph, Pope Leo XIII, Kaiser Wilhelm II, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. And Presidents Theodore Roosevelt & Calvin Coolidge. His career matched the final peak of Europe’s last great royal courts!

Crown Princess Cecilie of Germany, 1908

Prussian Palaces and Gardens, Berlin

Wiki

In 1892 he met Lucy Guinness, from the wealthy Ir­ish Protestant bank­ing family. They married in 1900, built a refined house in Pest, had 6 children, raised into the Hung­arian nobility by Emperor Franz Josef, convert­ed to An­g­lic­anism and moved to Vienna.

Eventually he needed a bigger stage: Britain. From 1907 on, when he was based in London and joined the Royal Society of Brit­­ish Art­ists, de Laszlo’s career boomed. But the tim­ing was problematic. As war with Germany and ally Austro-Hungary approached, de László needed to become a British subject to protect his sons from con­scription into Hungary’s army. Citizenship came in 1914!

In Berlin, outbreak of host­il­ities in Aug 1914 saw wild demonst­ra­t­ions against for­eigners. And in return, spy fever generated by WW1 placed many imm­igrants in Britain und­er sus­pic­ion. In May 1915 a German U-boat sank the Lusitania off Ireland’s SW coast, kil­ling 1200 pass­en­gers and crew. The Times demanded internment of Bri­tain’s c9,000 nat­ur­alised aliens, children excluded from schools and property taken. Thankfully P.M Asquith prot­ected naturalised Brit­ons.

de László was concerned for his family in Budapest, who depended on him for financial support. The Dutch Minister for Foreign Affairs in London suggested he use the Dutch diplomatic bag because all ordinary post to Holland was censored. Although neut­ral, the Dutch were con­sidered pro-German and closely monitor­ed.

MI5 knew who was going in and out of de László’s studio, and they in­tercepted his mail. The case against him became more serious in July 1917 when a report, attributed to de László, revealed British maritime los­ses and mine product­ion; that the king wanted the war to end; and that Alsace-Lorraine wasn’t worth fighting for. It suggested that de László was desperate to have his Hungarian nationality restored! Above all, they found, de László was a con­vert­ed Jew with a wide social circle that included an entrée to British and German courts.

de László was grilled by Basil Thomson (Special Branch) and Ver­non Kell (MI5) in Aug 1917. If MI5 couldn’t intern de László for pacifism, they might convince people that he’d abused the diplomatic bag, creat­ing secret cont­acts with the en­emy. So they sent de László to Brixton Prison in Sept 1917, until a nervous breakdown saw him freed.

The attitude to aliens in Britain worsened. In July 1918, Evening News called it "Enemy Alien Week"; a rally was held in Tra­f­algar Square; vigil­an­te groups hunted for Ger­man spies. And negative attitudes to natur­al­ised Britons didn’t al­ter with war’s end in Nov 1918. A news­paper editorial demanded to know what MI5 had un­ear­th­ed on de László. & the case was debated in the House of Lords, May 1919! None­­theless the case against the art­ist was still brought before the Denatur­al­is­ation Comm­ittee. His 5-day hearing took place in June 1919. The pro­s­ecution in­c­luded Att­or­ney General Sir Gordon Hewart while De László’s defence team included ex-Home Secr­etary, Sir John Sim­on. The 3-man committee took merely 15 minutes to dismiss the case.

Princess Beatrice, 1926

Royal Collection

Wiki

King Umberto II of Italy, 1928

private collection

Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother), 1925

Royal Collection Trust

Unbelievably Philip’s career was not destroyed. In the 1920s-30s, this international, multi-lingual man was invited all over Europe and North America to paint the portraits of important royals, nobles and church leaders. Consider a few examples: Lord Richard Percy and Lady Diana Percy (1922, 1924); Queen Marie of Romania (1924); Princess Helen of Greece and Denmark (1925); Lord Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma and Lady Edwina Mount­batten (1925); U.S Presid­ent Calvin Cool­idge (1926); Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canter­b­ury (1926); King Alfonso XIII of Spain (1927); Prince Louis II and Princess Charl­otte of Monaco (1928); George Bell Bishop of Chichester (1931); Andrew Mellon (1931); and Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury (1932).

Archbishop of Canterbury, 1937

Lambeth Palace, London

He was widely respected, and elected president of Royal Society of British Artists in 1930. So see the portraits, cat­alogue and exhibitions in the de Laszlo Archive.  And perhaps read Giles MacDonogh, To Frame a Painter | History Today, Feb 2021.

 

Remembering WW1 in Queensland

ANZAC Day dawn service, 2022

    

After years of pandemic lockdowns, crowds were again free to at­t­end Anzac Day dawn services & ex-servicemen marches on 25th April 2022. And thousands did!! 

But ANZAC/Australian & New Zealand Army Corps Day may have ch­anged over the decades; critical debate and political controversies are being raised now. The divisiveness is about the compulsion to be pa­t­riotic and stand by the historical massacres at any cost. Many think we sh­ould commemorate Armistice Day instead, when world peace was dec­lared at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month. Note however that Remembrance Day never had the nation-building dimension in Australia that Anzac Day has.

The memorials erected in or after WW1 became Austr­al­ia’s first monum­ents, recording the devastating impact of WW1 on a young na­tion. Australia lost 60,000 from only 4 million people. Even before the war ended, memorials became a vis­ible expression of national grief. To those who created them, they were as sacred as grave sites i.e graves for the Austral­ians whose bodies still lay in European and Midd­le Eastern battle­fields. Brit­ish policy decreed its bodies were to be bur­ied where they fell and never taken home.

The Melbourne Shrine was very big and impressive, taking years to complete, and it wasn't officially dedicated until 11th Nov 1934 by the Duke of Gloucester. 300,000 people met to watch that 1934 event, and there was a commitment that the shrine would al­ways have an unimpeded and uninterrupted view from the city.

What about Queensland?  The most prominent building is the circular Shrine of Remembrance and the Eternal Flame which stands proudly and solemnly at the top of the Gardens. It is 10 metres in diameter and consists of a Grecian Doric circular colonnade of 18 columns representing the year of peace, 1918. Written around the top of the structure are the names of the major battles in which Australian units figured prominently such as ANZAC, Cocos Isupoli and Villers-Bretonneux.

Shrine of Remembrance in Anzac Square, Brisbane

Boonah War Memorial (pop 2000) was in a town in South Qld where the foundation stone was laid in May 1920; it was unveiled in July 1920 as part of the visit to Boonah by the Prince of Wales-later King Edward VIII. The marble and granite memor­ial was designed/made by Ipswich masonry firm Williams & Co, honouring local men who served in WW1.

The £600 cost was raised by public subs­crip­­t­ions, organised by a mem­orial committee. Memorial Park in Boonah was enclosed by a brick and wrought iron fence, with wrought iron gates at the front and rear cor­ners, flanked by pillars with ball fin­ials. A central con­crete path led to the memor­ial which was surround­ed by tier­ed garden beds. A flagstaff was located on the south western side. The specifically des­igned memorial park and fence were opened on Anzac Day 1922 by war hero-politician Capt Arnold Wienholt.

ANZAC Day Service, Boonah Memorial, 1924.
State Library Qld.

Australian war memorials were distinctive in that they commemorated the dead lads AND also the survivors. Australians were proud that their first great nat­ional army, unlike other battling armies, was composed ent­ir­ely of vol­unt­eers, men worthy of honour. Many memorials honoured those who served from a local area, providing valuable evidence of community in­volvement in the war. [In my generation, conscription for the Vietnam War was hated].

WW1 soldier statue, 

Boonah Qld

Australian war memorials also displayed imperial loy­al­ty; the skills of local stonemasons, metalworkers and architects. In Queensland, the soldier statue (above) was the pop­ul­ar choice of memorial, whereas the obelisk (below) prevailed in the south­ern states, ? because of Queensland's larger working-class pop­ulace. The soldier embod­ied the ANZAC Spirit and the qualities of the ideal Austr­alian man: loyalty, courage, youth, informal­ity.

Immediately following the 1918 Armistice, a grateful Com­mon­wealth Gov­ern­ment brought captured machine guns to Aust­ralia, and distributed them to towns and cities. A local display of captured weapon­s was esp­ecial­ly import­ant for this young country, far removed from the Europ­ean battle fields. It was also a nation that had suffered the highest per capita casualty rate of any combatant nation in WW1! After a long public debate, the State War Trophy Committee dec­ided that troph­ies would be allocated on the basis of population, rather than on enlist­ments. For Queensland, this meant that only lar­g­er towns could apply for larger, more valuable guns. Note the Commit­tee believed Boon­ah’s popul­ation to be too small to apply.

Trophy gun from WW1, 

Boonah Memorial park

Great War guns trad­ed on the open market would have been a controver­s­ial process back then, when emotions were still raw and when the dist­rib­ution of war trophies was strictly controlled by State and Commonw­ealth agencies. Thus Boonah be­came the only Australian town ever to buy a privat­ely-owned trophy gun on behalf of community.

The Boona memorial was made of coarse marble, a pedestal surm­ounted by an obelisk and a digger statue, and sitting on a marble base. The columns were surmounted by four marble corner urns, and in the centre of the columns see the marble plates with the names of the 374 local men who served in WW1. The 69 locals who died were named on the front and the rear recorded the names of nurses and chaplains. Projecting from the centre of the pedestal was the tapered marble ob­el­isk, 6 m high. Surmounting the obelisk was the digger stat­ue, the Australian soldier standing at ease with his head bow­ed and his hands resting on his reversed rifle. Queensland War Mem­or­ials provided evid­ence of an era widesp read Australian patriotism & nationalism in WW1.

Boonah Memorial park

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Miracles & Madness in German art Guardian

Nolde's Crucifix, 1912
was in Städtisches Museum in Halle

I’ve not read The Gallery of Miracles & Madness: Insanity, Art and Hit­l­er’s First Mass-Murder Programme by Charlie English, 2021 because I was more interested in the fate of Germany’s degenerate artists than in men­t­al patients in asylums. So here is Kathryn Hughes’ fine review.

In 1922 Heidelberg psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn’s book Artistry of the Mentally Ill fired up the art world. Since the C19th, doctors in asylums pored ov­er the drawings, paintings and sculptures of their patients. Could doctors spot schizophrenia just by looking at how someone coloured in the sky? Could they discern neurosis in an patients who simply painted models with incomplete faces?

But using art diagnostically was not Prinzhorn’s issue. His interest in the patients’ art was aesthetic and philosophic eg when a delusional Ham­b­urg metalworker Franz Bühler produced The Choking Angel, an intense version of God’s messenger with a shining crown and a torturer’s face, Prinz­horn seriously compared the work to Albrecht Dürer’s!

Bühler, Angel, 1909

The Guardian

This was certainly not art to soothe the soul, but of course soul-soothing was not what mod­ern art was about. From the late C19th, Gustav Klimt, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele focused on describing the agony of modern selfhood. Feel the ris­ing tide of madness in Munch’s horrified scream or Schiele’s warped bodies. And it was that madness, a heroic refusal to fall for the easy remedies of civilised soc­iety, that Prinzhorn’s asylum artists easily accessed. While sane art­ists scraped off layers of social condit­ioning and acad­emic train­ing before they could reach Freud’s hidden parts of themsel­ves, asylum in­mates had a shortcut to their unconscious. Rather than being patronised, these artists of the interior were to be revered and copied.

Paul Klee, teaching pictorial theory of form at Bauhaus, greeted the images in Prinzhorn’s book rapturously. In these oddly shattered shapes, with jagged outlines, perspective shifts and incomplete­ness, Klee saw an authent­ic response to all post-WW1 world crises. See his Prophetic Woman (1923), a prim­itive figure in­debted to Lamb of God, a dense geometric pen-ink drawing by an insane banker.

Angel of Suffocation by Franz Karl Bühler, 1909 on book cover of:

Artistry of the Mentally Ill: Psychology and Psychopathology of Configuration

Hans Prinzhorn, Amazon

Among the Surrealists, Prinzhorn’s book also succeeded. Max Ernst drew inspiration from August Natterer, an Upper Swabia engineer who believed he was a direct Napoleonic descendant. Natterer’s intensely detailed, densely coloured works, which came to him in a vision, provided in­spiration for Max Ernst’s 1931 Oedipus. Salvador Dalí borrowed from madmen but, to his credit, tried hard to go insane as a way of improving his own painting, never quite managing it.

Having failed 2 entrance exams to pre-WW1 Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, self-taught art­ist Adolf Hitler scraped a living by copying postcards of pleasant Munich views and selling them in bars. Until he ended up in a Bavarian prison, screaming at the admitting psychologist! A ps­ych­ologist had assessed Hitler as a mor­bid psychopath, with hysteria and an inclin­ation toward a mystical mind­set. Hitler was imprisoned for his part in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, in which he led 2,000 Nazi storm­troopers in a failed attempt to end the Weimar Republic. His fort­unes were about to change and within 10 years he was Chancellor of Germany, but his ideas about art did not change. In fact they hard­ened into a dogma that be­came a founding principle of the Third Reich’s German culture and pure Aryan race.

Hitler’s outrage at modern art focused on abstract, distorted and angry works. This worsened in WW1’s devastating aft­ermath in Germany, exaggerated colours, expressive brush strokes and gory subjects only ex­acerbated Germany’s societal divisions, and econom­ic and political cris­es. For Hitler, on the other hand, Healthy Art was an art that painted exactly what was in front of its nose, plus some ex­tra swagger. People should look like Ary­ans, with firm limbs and rosy cheeks, and land­scapes should resemble the tourist postcards he once churned out. So the Füh­rer introduced legislation to en­sure that painters followed his rules.

Any art that did not follow these rules was Degenerate, seen as a deliberate ploy by the Jewish-Bolsheviks to destroy Germany. To ensure this didn’t happen, Hitler ordered the confiscation of all trouble­some art from Ger­man galleries and museums in 1937. This collected treasure, includ­ing a number of pieces by the Prinzhorn artists Klee, Marc Chagall and Otto Dix, was put on display in the Degenerate Art Exhibit­ion that year. Lat­er iterations of the immensely popular show cont­rasted modern­ist art with art made by the Heidelberg patients, in order to show the conn­ect­ion between biological and artistic degeneracy.

Otto Dix. Storm Troops Advancing under Gas, 1924.

Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf.

By this time the patients were extremely vulnerable. Most profess­ional artists whose work featured in the Degenerate Art Exhib­ition had gone. Klee was in Switzerland, Chagall, Dalí and Ernst were in New York, while Oskar Schlemmer and Dix were in hiding. So there was no-one left to speak up for the asylum artists when, in autumn 1939, Hitler set out to exterminate them.

The rationale was eugenics. Psychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia were heritable, so it made sense to purge the un­for­tunates who “rep­res­ented life unworthy of life”. Actually cost-cutting was possibly the more immediate driver: long-term psychiatric care cost money and, as Ger­many prepared for war with Brit­ain, the money could be better spent on tanks. 30+ of Prinzhorn’s artists were among the 250,000 in­mates put into gas chambers early in the war. The lucky ones got away with forced st­er­ilisation.

Great Exhibition of German Art catalogue cover, 1937. 

ancient, classical, proud

Charlie English’s book was as beautiful as it was bleak. Thank you Kathryn Hughes