"Yea, I put eyes to see/ Into the face of fire, and gave to him/ A fount of vision that before was dim."

A few of my posts recently have noted men who were of the classicist scholar-warrior tradition. On a break today I read a review of John Lewis-Stempel's Six Weeks: The Short but Gallant Life of the British Officer in the Great War, from which I take another example of the typology. Apparently when the future British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was seriously wounded at the Somme, where he was shot in the left thigh and pelvis, he took refuge in a shell hole for three days until rescued. Whilst there he read, in between bouts of unconsciousness, the pocket edition of the Greek text of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound he had been carrying in his tunic, a work he found 'not inappropriate to my position...' I've read elsewhere that it was actually only a day reading Aeschylus in a slit-trench, which I think only slightly diminishes the story.

I've taken the title from the play. These words of Prometheus make the claim that he was responsible for awakening man's higher instincts. I'm not sure it's the most appropriate extract of the play for this entry, but there's something about it that I like. The full passage is as follows:

"Fulfilment bear; I read the inward mind
Of the unintended word and the stray sign
Met by the road. . . .
Thus man to knowledge came of things to be,
Deep hid before. Yea, I put eyes to see
Into the face of fire, and gave to him
A fount of vision that before was dim."

Richtoffen cobblers?

This picture is of one of the fur boots worn by Manfred von Richthofen, the ace German fighter pilot of the First World War known as The Red Baron. It’s one of my favourite objects in the Australian War Memorial, a place I’ve been visiting quite often since I returned to Australia a few months ago. It’s in a cabinet with a few other souvenirs taken from the dead body of von Richtofen: the brass compass that was mounted on von Richthofen’s Fokker Triplane; a piece of one the plane’s struts painted in the red paint that gave him his nickname, described by a contemporary as being ‘the colour of dried blood; also the control column of the Fokker he was flying, which eyewitness accounts say that his lifeless hands had to be prised from.

The Red Baron is said to have taken these boots himself from a British pilot that he shot down. I’ve recently tried to find the source of this story, as I’m not sure whether I quite believe it or not. The closest I could find is the suggestion that L.G. Hawker, the British VC-winning ace pilot both pioneered the knee-high fur flying boot and was a victim of von Richthofen.  Von Richthofen talks about his defeat of Hawker in his 1917 autobiography, where although there is no mention of any such fur boots, there is a claim that '[Hawker's] machine gun was dug out of the ground and it ornaments the entrance of my dwelling.' I found this statement abated slightly an ongoing pang of sympathy I felt when standing in front of the AWM tableau of objects associated with him, a sympathy for a dead man whose bleeding and lacerated corpse was  stripped of his possessions by souvenir hunters whilst his body was still warm. Elsewhere in the biography there is an account of MvR travelling by car to see a British plane he had shot down earlier, so the provenance of the fur boots is possible. 

There is, however, another story about the Red Baron's  footwear that I'm convinced is actually a load of old cobblers. When I first arrived in Oxford several years ago, I was told repeatedly - both by reputable individuals and by websites that shouldn't always be trusted - that The Red Baron had been a student at Lincoln College, Oxford, who had his shoes made at at Ducker and Son, a shoe maker that still stands opposite Lincoln on The Turl. The story suggested that he  returned to Germany when war broke out in such a rush that he left his account there unpaid until a descendent was lured into the shop years later and presented with the bill. 

There are many reasons to like Ducker and Son. It is the last remaining independent shoe maker/ seller in Oxford out of the twenty there when it opened in 1898 and, in this, is a reminder that once English towns once had independent retailers in every business and trade, rather than high streets made up solely of multinational and chain shops. Indeed, I saw the evidence of this over my years there: the last antiquarian bookshop on the High Street closed two years ago, to be replaced by a brand-spankingly new store called Ye Olde Sweete Shoppe, seemingly with no irony whatsoever; four independent music shops in town closed over the same years, as well as the huge Virgin on Cornmarket; the ironmongers Gill and Co., who moved to Chipping Norton last year after five-hundred years (!) of trading in the same location, tucked down an alley off The High. And so on, and so it goes, as Bob Ellis' chorus goes. Enough! Enough about the inevitable tide of human progress on the English high street and back to the Baron v.R!

So, over the last few years my wife and I bought several pairs of shoes at Ducker. On our last trip there, since we were now repeat customers I thought myself able to ask whether I could see Richthofen's famous entry in the the leather-bound ledgers kept in the back of the shop (seen on the right here), into which every new customer is still entered, even customers like ourselves who fall far short of being able to afford bespoke rather than ready-to-wear shoes. The appropriate volume was pulled down and the page found. Richtofen, in the years just before war broke out, Lincoln College, an order for several pairs including patent leather shoes and a pair of "Beagling Pumps", presumably shoes suitable for wearing with the traditional green coat and white stocking of the beagler over fields in the middle of winter, following dogs intent on ripping apart a hare...

However, this account isn't for The Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, but his cousin, Baron Wilhelm von Richthofen, a German Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1913, who gave an interesting 'to those that could follow him' defence of German foreign policy to the Oxford Union the following year. WvR was, apparently courting officials at the German embassy in London in the 1920s, it seems he was unemployed and fishing around for work. His 1927 publication, Brito-Germania: Europe's Salvation suggested that a sickly European political landscape could only be ameliorated by the political union of the two nations, although Germany was to take a subservient role to Britain in this arrangement. According to the British Library catalogue, he's also W. Freiherr v. Richthofen who wrote Zurückgehaltenes und Unterdrücktes aus vier Kriegsjahren, in which he describes his military career as an officer in the Great War. 

It's an understandable mistake, seeing as the German title Freiherr can be held simultaneously by several family members, unlike the equivalent anglophone Baron. And, incidentally, one that the official Ducker website doesn't make itself, as it advertises "Baron von Richthofen" as one of its significant customers over its long history. 

 I should add that this by no means diminishes how I feel about Ducker and Son's shoes, how lovely the owners Bob and Isobel are and how you should buy a pair of their shoes if you're in the area. Moreover, that since those ledgers do contain the accounts of writers JRR Tolkein, Evelyn Waugh and others, the lack of MvR there does not mean they are any less important as historical documents. 

NB: there is one pack of Beagles that survives in Oxford, the Christ Church and Farley Hill Beagles. 

"Here was my library on the wall..."

For the last few weeks I've been working in the Petherick Room of the National Library of Australia in Canberra. It really is a great library, one that I've loved at many different points of my life from high school to now.  The café, which didn't exist when I first started coming here years ago, is named with a groan-inducing pun, Bookplate. On its walls are, as you can probably guess, framed Ex Libris from the library's collection. The other day I noticed one belonging to the Australian prime minister Robert Menzies, who declared the country at war with Germany on 3rd September 1939.

At the front is a parchment on which is written Declaration of War. Behind is other expressions of Menzies personality: one of the parliamentary dispatch box that stand sin the Australian parliament (of course), a lawyer's wig (he was a noted lawyer), a caraffe and glass (he was frequently accused of drunkeness by some, sometimes with good reason), bookshelf and a spray of wattle. It was done by the printmaker Sir Lionel Lindsay, brother of Norman Linsday. He was a friend of Menzies who enjoyed his "divine and disordered conversation" and was responsible for his knighthood in 1941, around the time that these bookplates were commissioned.

Lindsay produced a great number of Ex Libris, a genre that enjoyed a widespread popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, when they became less to do with the armorial bearings of book owners and more depictions of their personal interests and traits. Whereas many contemporary artists produced them to supplement their income, Lindsay saw them as personal gifts to friends and family and an escape from his more serious art. (Sir Lionel Linsday Ex Libris, 4-5.)

This Ex Libris for Menzies is fairly similar to some of his other bookplates produced around the same time. In 1940 he made one for the Chief Justice Sir Frederick Jordan, which featured a forground of an open book in front of a decanter and glass, a judge’s wig and a bookshelf. In 1945 he made one for the doctor Clive Fitts with similar themes, although with a lit cigar on an ashtray and without the wig. In the same year Lindsay designed one for the chief  librarian of the NSW Library, John Quinn, which had similar themes arranged in a more casual way. A dog peers from behind a bottle of whiskey; a pile of books is to the right; one is open in the foreground with a paper knife on top of it.

My immediate reaction when I saw this plate was that it was odd for a bookplate to commemorate war. On reflection, I’m not sure why that is. Looking into it briefly, most of the plates I found that mentioned war were, in fact, criticisms of war, such as these two examples from 1914 by Louis Titz (above) and Alan Robbida (below) found here. I particularly like Titz's, with its inscription "Here was my library on the wall" written in the middle of the ruins. This seems to back up my initial suspicion that war is conventionally depicted as destroying books and knowledge and peace as cultivating the arts. 

I did find some other, brief references to war in the bookplates of soldiers: In bello quies (Calm in Action or Peace achieved through war) was the motto of General Birdwood commander at ANZAC and  used in his bookplates; Monty’s bookplate has two soldiers either side of his coat of arms, one dressed as a modern solider, the other as a medieval knight. 

This may be why Lindsay produced a second Ex libris for Menzies in 1942, depicting a boy sitting beside a stream, trying to fish a sceptre out of the water. There's something else beneath the water's surface, too, but I can't quite make it out (the hilt of a sword? An orb? A lobster...?) I can't quite place these themes to any established allegory I know, although if the boy was fishing (unlikely, I know), it would be close to Erasmus' Aureo pisci hamo - To fish with a golden hook, which warns of using something as bait that is more valuable than what you hope to catch. Once again the theme Lindsay chose, that of lost political power, was timely as  Menzies resigned the prime ministership in the previous year.

 

A final note. My favourite of all Lindsay's plates has to be the one he made for the bookdealer John Preece in 1928. In this, an archer aims a bow at flying books, a satchel full of them at his side. A report from that year of teh Ex Libris Society of Australia suggests 'It shows an archer launching his darts not at birds on the wing, but books in their flight from the publisher to the market, and is a charming woodcut.' I'm still not sure whether the archer is meant to be a bookdealer or a critic. I think it's a beautiful illustration that reminds me of something from Rabelais. 

Smite Him Dead! The Day of Justice Will not Ask your Reasons!

Another beautiful representation of a treaty, this time on a bronze medal struck in Germany in 1915 designed by Karl Goetz from the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. It's an allegorical depiction of the Pact of London of 1915, in which Italy left the Triple Alliance (with Germany and Austro-Hungary being the other members) and joined the Triple Entente (France, Russia and Britain.)

It depicts a chimera-like creature, with several heads representing the allies of the Triple Entente: a cockerel and a bear representing France and Russia, two lions representing Britain and Belgium, a dragon representing Japan and the snake for Serbia. Italy is represented by the small boy suckling at its teats below. The legend reads PACT OF MALICE. 

The obverse shows god in judgement, surveying flames on earth below. The inscription is a quotation from the German writer Heinrich von Kleist's Germania an ihre Kinder: "Strike him dead! The Day of Judgement will not ask your reasons!"

See it at the V&A site here. There's a link to a site that catalogues the work of Goetz above, which is really worth a look as this medal is only one of several connected to particular treaties or truces. You can read von Kleist's poem here. Brace yourself, it's hardly a barrel of laughs. As you'd expect, really, from a German writing in 1811 at the height of the Napoleonic Wars who shot himself later that year...