Author Archives: Ellen Hawley

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About Ellen Hawley

Fiction writer and blogger, living in Cornwall.

Exporting segregation: Black G.I.s in Britain during World War II

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The best-known stories about American G.I.s in Britain during World War II involve white soldiers, who the British liked to say were over overpaid, overfed, oversexed, and over here. Not long ago, I met someone who quoted that to explain why he didn’t know what part of the US his American grandfather came from. 

But there’s another story about U.S. soldiers in Britain: over the course of 3 years, some 240,000 Black U.S. soldiers passed through Britain and their situation was complicated, not because Britons didn’t welcome them but because they did. 

Screamingly irrelevant photo: The river Something or Other, flowing through Canterbury’s city center

 

The segregated army

Let’s back up. Hang around here long enough and you’ll get used to that. The US Army was segregated until 1948, three years after the end of World War II, so during the period we’re talking about Black and white soldiers served in separate units. They had separate barracks or camps along with separate hospitals or wards, blood banks (yes, seriously), medical staff, and recreational facilities. 

The US military didn’t consider Black soldiers fit for combat, so they were limited to support roles. They drove, cooked, cleaned, built roads and buildings and air bases, unloaded supplies, dug ditches, and worked as mechanics, generally under white officers. The few Black soldiers who did become officers could only command Black troops, and Black soldiers faced all the harassment you’d expect–and depending on how low you set your expectations, probably more.

In case anyone needs it, here’s the ten-second summary of US segregation: America’s southern states were segregated by law. Blacks and whites had separate drinking fountains, separate schools, and separate pretty much everything else. And whatever was for white people got more money–a lot more money–than what was for Black people. Those laws were enforced not just by the police and the courts but by terror. To cross the line that separated Black and white was to risk your life–at least if you were Black. This is what the federal government was carrying over into the armed forces. 

But segregation wasn’t just about separating the two groups, it was about enforcing inequality. By way of example, unlike white soldiers, Black soldiers weren’t allowed to marry women they formed relationships with overseas, which added to the number of children abandoned by their G.I. fathers.

Now we get to the contradictory–which is to say the interesting–part: for all that Britain brought segregation to its colonies, it had no color line at home. That doesn’t mean it was free of racism. When the US first proposed bringing over Black troops, Anthony Eden, the secretary of state, objected on the grounds that Black people weren’t suited to the climate. 

Britain had some 8,000 identifiably Black citizens at the time, and they seemed to survive the climate well enough, but never mind that. Sometimes you grab the first argument that flits past, and after that there’s nothing to do but keep a straight face and repeat it. 

 

A quick interruption

What does identifiably Black mean? Over the course of several centuries, a lot of Britons with Black ancestors were absorbed into an overwhelmingly white population and no longer counted as Black. Many of them wouldn’t have known of any reason not to count themselves as white. So we’re talking about whoever was visible. 

By way of contrast, in the US at the time, the one-drop rule held that if you had any Black ancestry at all (“one drop of blood”)–and of course if anyone knew about it–you were considered Black. 

 

The two systems collide

With that out of the way, let’s go back to the British government: it was a reluctant host. James Grigg, the secretary of state for war, wrote in a memorandum labeled “to be kept under lock and key, ”that “the average white American soldier does not understand the normal British attitude to the colour problem, and his respect for this country may suffer if he sees British troops, British Women’s Services and the population generally drawing no distinction between white and coloured. . . . 

“This difference of attitude might clearly give rise to friction. Moreover, the coloured troops themselves probably expect to be treated in this country as in the United States, and a markedly different treatment might well cause political difficulties in America at the end of the war.”

Why was that kept under lock and key? Probably because Britain was in no position to object to an American plan. It depended on the US to fund the war effort. So while Grigg chewed on his fingernails, the US brought its soldiers over, and it brought US-style segregation with them.

Where Britain did manage to draw the line was at enforcing segregation: that would be up to the US. On occasion, that left Britain trying to keep segregation from being imposed on Black soldiers from British colonies.

Isn’t it interesting how something starts out looking like it’ll be clear but turns out to be murky as hell?

Black American soldiers were generally welcomed by the local population, most of whom had never met a Black person before. As George Orwell put it, “The general consensus of opinion appears to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes.”

Orwell may have been making a political point there, but people with no name recognition at all are quoted (anonymously) saying roughly the same thing. A West Country farmer said, “I love the Americans, but I don’t like those white ones that they have brought with them.” And when white G.I.s gave the landlady of a pub grief for serving Black soldiers, she’s reported to have told them,”Their money is as good as yours and we prefer their company.”

Some businesses, however, did refuse Black customers for fear of losing white soldiers’ business. So the picture wasn’t unmixed. 

Before I go on, let’s be clear: Britain wasn’t free of racism. A cricketer from the West Indies who lived in Britain in the 1920s said that “personal slights” were “an unpleasant part of life in Britain for anyone of my colour.” At the end of World War I, a race riot kicked off over fears that demobilized troops from the empire would take white Britons’ jobs. And at the end of World War II, when Black people from the West Indies moved to Britain in large numbers and looked for places to live, they found signs saying, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs.”

But during the war, the British generally welcomed Black soldiers, and the raw racial hostility that white troops brought with them seems only to have made that welcome more pronounced. 

An element of nationalism probably fed into that as well. Britons didn’t want to be pushed around by the US–the rising imperial power.

 

So what happened?

Not every white G.I. in Britain was a racist, but those who were were outraged by what they found, which turned everything they’d taken for granted on its head. Not only were Blacks occupying spaces they expected to be exclusively white, they were dancing with white women and going out with white women. For a segregationist, this was the ultimate horror–the thing segregation was supposed to defend against: a Black man with a white woman.  

No, seriously. Within living memory–mine, since you ask–the question that was supposed to demolish any white support for the civil rights of Black Americans was, “Yeah, but would you want your sister to go out with one?”

Gasp, wheeze, end of argument. How could anyone accept that?

If the situation in Britain was a pressure cooker, it blew that little valve on the top more than once, with violence sometimes being set off by white soldiers, sometimes by military police, and at least once by Black soldiers marching into the nearby town that was off limits to them but not to white soldiers. 

In Bamber Bridge, Lancashire, white troops tried to establish a color line in the village and locals responded by putting “Black Troops Only” signs outside the village’s three pubs. 

Maybe you have to be as old as I am, as well as from the US, to be tickled by the quiet genius of local people saying, Fine, you want a color line? We’ll draw it here and you’re on the wrong side. 

In June 1943, still in Bamber Bridge, an argument started between MPs and a Black serviceman outside a pub. Local people and British servicewomen took the side of the soldier. Somebody brandished a bottle. An MP (that stands for military police, by the way, not member of parliament) brandished his gun. The MPs drove away, gathered reinforcements, and later that night ambushed the Black soldiers. A melee broke out, fought mostly with billy clubs, bottles, and cobblestones, but one Black soldier was shot, after which 200 Black soldiers gathered and confronted their white officers. The unit’s only Black officer had calmed the situation until a dozen MPs showed up with jeeps and a machine gun, at which point the Black soldiers seized most of the available arms and fought the MPs for several hours. 

The incident ended with one man dead, several injured, and a hefty number of Black soldiers (32, I believe) convicted of everything from ignoring orders to mutiny. Still, Historic UK counts it as a “turning point in handling racial tension within the military.” Specifically, “A subsequent overhaul led to the removal of racist officers from the trucking units and the introduction of black officers into the MP units.” 

There were also violent confrontations in Launceston, Cornwall; Tiger Bay, Wales; and Leicester. You can ask Lord Google for details if you want them. In the meantime, we’ll jump to what happened at Combe Down, Somerset, where Leroy Henry, a Black soldier, was accused of rape, found guilty by a court martial, and sentenced to death 

That might’ve been the end of it, but a local baker was shocked by the lack of evidence against the man and started a petition, which 33,000 people from the area signed. A national newspaper picked up the story. This was just before D-Day and southern England was packed with troops. It wasn’t a good time for a scandal, and General Eisenhower overturned the conviction. Leroy Henry returned to his unit–and survived the war.

 

So was James Grigg right?

You’ve forgotten James Grigg already, haven’t you? The secretary of state for war who said (among other things) that seeing a country without a color bar might cause political trouble when Black soldiers returned home. Well, around a third of the leaders of the US Civil Right Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s were World War II veterans. That doesn’t say they all spent time in Britain and it doesn’t say they needed to stand on British soil to imagine a life free of segregation. But the experience of Black soldiers in Britain surely added a few drops of water to the rivers that–help! my metaphor’s in danger of going wrong here–rose so powerfully in the postwar US, washing away segregation’s legal structure. 

That flood didn’t solve all our problems, as you will have noticed if you live there or follow US politics at all, but it did move history forward by an inch or three.

*

I’ve relied heavily here on a BBC TV documentary, Churchill: Britain’s Secret Apartheid. If you can find it, it’s well worth your time.

Sewage, patents, and post-truth politics: it’s the news from Britain

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In these days of post-truth politics, it shouldn’t surprise me that someone paid a polling company to ask what percent of the British public thinks one of our many former prime ministers, Boris Johnson, was telling the truth in his memoir. It shouldn’t surprise me but it does. Just when I think I’m cynical enough to keep up with reality, something like this comes along.

What did they learn? For the sake of simplicity, let’s focus on two questions: only 25% of the people polled believed Johnson’s claim that Buckingham Palace asked him to convince Prince Harry not to leave the UK and 31% believed his claim that Britain was able to get Covid vaccines faster because it had left the European Union. 

A baffling number of people gave answers that fell in the probably zone, saying a claim was probably true or probably false. I understand that they didn’t have inside information, and some of the questions asked what they believed Johnson believed, which leads us onto wobbly ground indeed. But come on, people. I wouldn’t believe the man if he told me today was Friday. 

In fact, as I write this, it’s not Friday. It will post on Friday, and you’ll read it on whatever day you damn well please, if at all. I’m typing it, though, on Monday and editing on Tuesday. You see how slippery truth can be? Muddy the waters enough and everyone will stop caring what’s true–or so the theory goes. Still, no matter what day of the week Johnson tells me it is, I’ll check my phone or today’s newspaper. 

Or possibly my phone and today’s newspaper. 

Irrelevant photo: An azalea blossom

If you get past the list of questions, the poll offers some hope for people’s political sanity: 72% of Britons describe Johnson as untrustworthy. True, that’s down from the 76% when he was just about to slither out of office, and I’m not sure Johnson would consider their low opinion a problem–he’s built a career out of convincing people that whatever he gets up to is cute–but it does let me think three-quarters of the population is paying some minimal attention.

I’d love to tell you who paid for the poll and why, but I have no idea. What I do know is that no poll–yea, no breath–gets taken without somebody paying for it.

 

Okay, we know politicians lie. Private companies tell us the truth, though, right?

Of course they do, dear. Now go to sleep or Santa won’t bring you any presents.

*

If the kids, having despaired of ever getting a straight answer, are asleep, let’s tell secrets: Britain’s privatized water companies cheated on thousands of pollution tests.

Did I mention that they got to monitor themselves on those tests? Because all that red tape we used to have was bad for us. 

How’d they rig the tests? They stopped the outflow of effluent–a polite name for liquid waste or sewage that gets discharged into rivers or seas–when they were about to test the outflow. And guess what: everything was fine! Isn’t that wonderful? Then they opened the taps and the sewage poured forth.

Britain has a serious water-pollution problem. To quote the BBC, “The amount of raw sewage spilling into England’s rivers and seas doubled in 2023, with 3.6 million hours of spills compared with 1.75 million hours the year before.”  A different BBC article says just 14% of Britain’s rivers are in good ecological health, and the problem comes not just from untreated waste (we have a lot of that) but also from sewage that’s only partially treated. The final stage of treatment, sand filtration, is optional. (See above for how red tape is bad for us.)

Meanwhile, in the 2021/22 financial year, water companies paid their shareholders a total of £965 million and their CEOs took home £16.5 million. Thames Water, the biggest of the water companies, was almost £15 billion in debt as of last March. In July, it asked the regulator to increase annual bills by 23% between 2025 and 2030. Since then, it’s said it needed to raise them by 53%. 

Pay up, folks. You get what you pay for–with sewage on top.

There’s talk of renationalizing Thames Water, but that will stick the government with its debt (it just got a £3 billion loan that will help it survive past Christmas), along with its other problems. I think I see why the government’s hesitating.

 

Yes, but what’s Britain really like?

Well, you can tell a lot about a country from its patent applications. Here are a few inventions Britons patented in 2023:

  • A flatpack coffin
  • A robot dog that vacuums and can go up and down stairs
  • A computer table that lets you lie under your desk and work looking up (it can also work as a conventional desk)
  • A plywood cow–useful if you want to practice lassooing cattle
  • Smart gloves that record a goalie’s performance data
  • Cheese made of potatoes
  • Shoes that can be worn on either the left or right foot 

and most practical of all

  • A machine that vibrates the mucus out of your nose

What does this tell us about Britain? I’m at a loss. You tell me.

Church and state in medieval England: Thomas Becket and Henry II

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Medieval England had two mutually dependent centers of power, the church and the state. The state relied on the church for legitimacy. It was church ritual that turned a proto-king into a real one–someone who people believed had a god-given right to rule. And the church? It held land and riches, it had a near-monopoly on education and literacy, and people believed in it. All that gave it massive political clout. But it relied on the state’s network of laws and law enforcement.

So, two mutually dependent centers of power, and predictably, they didn’t always line up neatly. Take the tale of Thomas Becket and Henry II.

A rare relevant photo: the pulpit in Canterbury Cathedral

 

First, let’s get the name straight

When I first heard of Becket, he was called Thomas a Becket, which turns out not to have been his name. When he was born, he was called Thomas Beket. Spelling was a liquid back then. Somewhere along the line, he picked up a stray C. It looked good and he kept it. As Archbishop of Canterbury, he was known as Thomas of Canterbury. As a saint, he was (and I guess is) called Saint Thomas.

Then came Henry VIII, Anne Bolyn, England’s break with the Catholic Church, and all that stuff, and since Becket had thrown his weight behind the church and against a king when they came into conflict, he went decisively out of fashion. So in 1538, Cromwell (Henry’s brains as well as his tough guy) decreed that Saint T was to be known as plain old Bishop Becket.

In 1596, another Thomas, Thomas Nashe, a satirist and poet, added the a to Becket’s name.

Why’d he do that? It slotted in nicely with names in the Robin Hood legend (think Alan a Dale), which was popular right about then, and it made him sound like some rural bumpkin. In other words, this was the Anglicans making fun of the Catholics. 

The name stuck and by the 18th century the nifty rhythm of the a Becket form was clattering around after Tom Beket like a cluster of tin cans tied to his belt. Because regardless of its original intent, it does sound nice.

These days, people seem to have gone back to Thomas Becket, and in the interest of high-minded neutrality we’ll call him that. 

 

Henry and Becket

Becket was born in 1118 to Norman parents, and this was soon enough after the Norman invasion for that to place him among the elite. Ah, but his parents were merchants, so he was a long step below the elite of the elite, the aristocracy. He got an education (not a given back then), and after a detour as a city clerk and accountant went to work for Archbishop Theobald. 

Before we go on, though, a warning: you’ll want to keep your archbishops separate from your archdeacons in this paragraph, because it has an excess of arches. Becket pleased Theobald (the archbishop) well enough that he was appointed archdeacon of Canterbury. That’s not as good as being an archbishop, but even so it brought him both power and money. Three months after that, he became Henry’s chancellor and confidant. That was in addition to being archdeacon, so Becket now held two posts, both of them important. 

Becket was, according to the accounts I’ve read, skillful and energetic and gifted at getting people to like him, although he does seem to have neglected the less glamorous work of archdeacon in favor of his job as chancellor, best buddy, and right arm to the king. 

He showed himself to be the king’s man when the church and state came into conflict over something called scutage, which was part of that impenetrable knot of relationships that defined feudalism. Basically, it was money that the holder of a fief could pay instead of sending knights to fight for the king. The church held fiefs that had to produce knights or money, and Becket, taking the king’s side, charged the church a high rate.  

To make this more sensitive, this was a period when the church was pushing for greater power relative to kings, who’d previously had considerable control over the church. This is called the Gregorian Reform, and I never heard of it either. Henry was holding out against the changes, claiming what he considered his ancestral rights. And Becket backed him. He was very much the king’s man.

 

Then it all went sour

When Theobald died, what could make more sense than for Henry to make Becket the new archbishop? He’d be the king’s man inside the church.

Henry tried to persuade Becket to accept the post and Becket tried to persuade the king hat the story wouldn’t end well if he did. Becket lost the argument and was duly made archbishop, at which point he stopped being the king’s man and became the church’s, taking its side in conflicts with the king–first in a disagreement over tax, later over the issue of whether the church or the state would try clerics who were accused of crimes. 

In Europe–and in England before the Norman conquest–the church tried clerics, and their punishments were generally lighter than lay people faced. No death penalty, no mutilation. 

Becket’s argument was that the church already punished clerics and they shouldn’t be punished twice for the same crime. Henry’s was that clerical crime was rife and encouraged by church protection. Basically, though, this was about power.

The conflict came to a head in 1164, with the king claiming several of what he considered his traditional rights. He forbade the excommunication of royal officials and any appeals to Rome. He claimed the revenues of vacant church sees the right to influence the election of bishops.

Becket, having initially accepted this, then registered his disagreement and appealed to the pope, who–no surprise here–took the church’s side. 

Henry’s next move was to summon Becket to a trial. By a state court. And guess whose side it would be on. Becket, being no fool, fled to France, where he lived for six years. By way of spitting in Becket’s and the pope’s collective eye, Henry had the archbishop of York crown his son crowned as co-king, although the archbishop of Canterbury traditionally had the right to crown the king. 

Becket responded by excommunicating a bunch of people.

England, by this point, had more or less withdrawn from obedience to the pope, and in case this isn’t confusing enough I should mention that in addition to a pope, the church had an antipope–a kind of spare pope in case the original went flat. 

Sorry–I thought that was funny but it’s not accurate. Both pope and antipope claimed to be the one true pope. Let’s say it was a messy period in church politics and leave it there.

The pope backed Becket’s excommunications, and excommunication was serious stuff in the middle ages. It could cut a person or an entire nation off from church functions. Since we’re talking about a nation, it meant churches could be closed, people refused the sacraments, and churchyards closed to burials. It meant a country full of people who couldn’t take the sacraments, so they’d believe they were being denied their trip to heaven when they died. This is just the kind of thing that can trigger rebellions. 

So the king allowed Becket to return to Canterbury, but beyond that nothing was settled, and Becket excommunicated a few more people, including the archbishop of York, and refused to re-communicate the ones he’d already excommunicated. 

Henry had what’s known in high academic circles as a runnin’ hissy fit and said– 

Well, he said something. According to the Britannica, “He berated his household for being a pack of ‘miserable curs and traitors’ who stood idly by while a ‘low-born priest’ treated their king with contempt.” But according to Edward Grim, who was an eyewitness to Becket’s killing although not to the hissy fit, Henry said, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric!”  

We’re not done yet, though. According to Peter O’Toole in the 1964 movie Becket, he said, “Will no one rid me of the meddlesome priest?” Or maybe that’s “turbulent priest.” Go watch the film yourself if you want to get it right. It’s clearly the authoritative version, but I can’t be bothered. 

Whatever Henry said, four knights trotted off to Canterbury, where they killed the archbishop. 

 

Becket’s afterlife

No, not that kind of afterlife. We’re talking about the verifiable kind:

Within days, people were making pilgrimages to Becket’s tomb in Canterbury cathedral–or so says the Britannica, although I have trouble believing anyone constructed a tomb that quickly. Let’s not fuss over details, though. Miracles were quickly attributed to him. Pilgrims came. 

Henry (wisely) swore he never wanted Becket killed, and the next year he–that’s Henry, not Becket–showed up in Canterbury, allowed himself to be whipped by bishops while he prayed for forgiveness, and was duly absolved. His decision to do that might’ve had something to do with a revolt led by his sons and backed by France, which he claimed was a result of Becket’s killing.

And the knights who did the deed? They were excommunicated but asked for forgiveness and were sent to fight in the Crusades for fourteen years. 

Three years after Becket’s death, he was made a saint and people believed that the spot where his blood was spilled would heal the sick, and Canterbury remained an important goal for pilgrims until Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church and had Becket’s tomb taken down, his bones burned, and his name erased from the service books.

A service book, in case this is all as foreign to you as it is to me, is “a book published by the authority of a church body that contains the text and directions for the liturgy of its official religious services.”

For all that, he wasn’t fully erased. These days, the cathedral burns a candle where Becket’s tomb once stood, and his name is engraved on the floor to mark the spot where he was killed.

The Americanization of British English and the Anglicization of German

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The British (generalization alert here) love to blame America for corrupting their culture. Already the US has inserted trick-or-treating into Halloween and Americanisms into the language.  

Or maybe I should say “we’ve inserted,” since I’m American. And also British, but my language is American, so yeah, if you want someone to blame–and it’s so satisfying to personalize these things–I’m available. My reach isn’t long enough for me to be responsible for even a small part, of that, but accuracy isn’t big in public life these days, so don’t worry about it. Picture me sitting on my couch right now, corrupting the language. 

I am a dangerous person.

But while we’re doing maybes, maybe I should’ve said “the English,” not “the British.” I’ve lived in Britain for more than 17 years and still struggle with what characteristics to file in which national folder. So until clarity whacks me on the head, let’s say it’s the British and wait for someone to correct me. And if I’m wrong, please do. Hearing from people is what makes writing this thing worth the effort.

Semi-relevant photo: The white cliffs of Dover, guarding England against an invasion of foreign words

 

What Americanisms are we talking about? 

A 2017 article from someplace deep inside Cambridge University (is that authoritative enough for you?) lists the use of guy, was like, and I’m good as having increased considerably. The use of closet (the British for that is wardrobe; you’re welcome), season (for TV shows), and right now had also increased but not as much. Annoying business-speak words and phrases like going forward and touch base showed–mercifully–no clear growth. 

What do I have against American business-speak? Two things: it uses words to say nothing and  it makes me want to throw things at people. But hey, life’s full of these small hazards. We struggle onward.

Less authoritatively, assorted British speakers mention the creepage of stores replacing shops, leaving British English with convenience stores and department stores even though people still talk about going to the shop. As a neighbor explained the difference to me, a store is still where you store things and a shop is where you shop for them. That’s the reason our village shop didn’t end up having the small used book store I wanted to set up. Instead it has a small used book stall, which isn’t a shop because it’s outside, in a weather-proof box, unattended, a bit like those little free libraries that have popped up around the US and Canada and can be found but not as often in other countries.   

I’ll admit to seeing logic in the shop/store distinction, but I still do my own shopping at a store. Or at least I think I do. Other people will have different opinions. 

An Americanism that doesn’t seem to be making much headway but that’s around enough to make a subset of British speakers shudder is the word gotten. To me, it’s such an invisible word that before I moved here I couldn’t have imagined anyone getting emotional about it, but I worked briefly with a purist who objected to my use of gotten, weighting her objections with such heavy doses of right and wrong, educated and ignorant that I created for extra spots to drop gotten into my sentences. 

 

Purity

To be clear: I’m not saying the British are a nation of disapproving pedants. As far as I know, you’ll find purists in any culture, along with the kind of people who drive them crazy, and there seems to be a balance between the two. In Britain, that means enough people adopt Americanisms to keep the purists satisfyingly upset. It’s hard to guess at the numbers, though. Dictionary-thumpers are over-represented in places where people comment on new and impure words. It’s their natural habitat. They list. They make their arguments. They shake their heads to indicate despair. The opposition? Most of them ignore the arguments and adopt the words they like, which is why no amount of sniping will ever convince a language to stay pure. 

And that, at long last, brings us to the reason why I mention German in my blog title. While I’ve been busy corrupting British English, purists in Germany are blaming the English language–pure users and impure ones alike–for what they call the idiot’s apostrophe.

The what? Well kidlets, I don’t know German, so this is all second hand, but from what I’ve read, the way German tells the world that someone’s in possession of something isn’t to add an apostrophe and an S to the someone, it’s to, ahem, decline the word for that someone. In other words, they change the ending of the word in a more intricate way–one that doesn’t involve apostrophes.

But Anglecisms have been creeping into German for some time and now the Council for German Orthography has decreed that as of 2025 it will be acceptable to use an apostrophe. Small businesses are already doing it, giving the world Andi’s Imbiss (Andi’s restaurant) and Kim’s Kiosk. And purists are having fits. One argued that relaxing the rules makes German more complicated by saying several different things can be correct at once. 

Can more than one thing be correct at once? Umm, I’d say so. It depends on time, place, and circumstance, but it’s not out of the question. 

Is this the beginning of the end of the German language? Possibly. If it is, will that destroy the world as we know it? Probably. Forget our overheating planet. Forget genocide and the rise of fascism. The end of the world is being brought to us courtesy of the humble apostrophe. 

Britain’s blue plaques–or how to make history snooze-worthy

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Britain isn’t short on history, and it isn’t short of the impulse to celebrate it. Or at least some of it. The part of it that fits the dominant narrative, whatever that is at the moment. One of the least effective ways it’s found is the blue plaque scheme, which attaches–yes, you guessed it–blue plaques to walls commemorating people you may or may not have heard of. 

To learn more about this fascinating project, let’s quote Historic England, one of the assorted organizations that run the scheme: It “celebrates people from all walks of life who have made a significant contribution to human welfare or happiness; and/or have made an exceptional impact in their field, community or on society at large.”  

English Heritage, on the other hand, which runs the scheme in London, has it celebrating “the links between notable figures of the past and the buildings in which they lived and worked.”

We won’t get in between those two explanations. They can settle their differences in whatever way they find fitting.

Irrelevant photo: The Bude Canal on a (rare) sunny day. Apologies for the photo quality. It seems to be a WordPress problem that’s cropped up in the last few weeks.

The scheme

In British, scheme doesn’t imply anything scheming or underhanded. A scheme’s a plan–something systematic, and this particular scheme has been around for a while. The first plaques were put up in 1867. Since then, the London part of it has been handed from one organization to another. Unless you work for one of them, I’m reasonably sure you don’t care which they are. The national scheme is run by Historic England. But smaller cities don’t have to feel left out: they can find some local group to put up their own blue plaques.

The plaques say things like, “________ lived here from _______ to ___________.” Some of them say what the person did. A few don’t–you’re expected to know. Either way, the focus is on the here-ness of it all. It’s a low-key way of saying, Listen, dunderhead, you’re on a historic site. Be impressed.

Or something along those lines. Maybe they’re really saying, We’re so rich in history that all we need to do is put up a small blue plaque to commemorate it. Eat your heart out, foreigners. 

It’s all in the interpretation, isn’t it?

I’ve seen a Charles Dickens-related plaque that commemorates a house that used to stand someplace near where the plaque now is. It struck me as a bit forlorn.

Not all the plaques commemorate English or British figures. One of the earliest commemorates Napoleon III, who lived in exile in London, where he slotted himself neatly into high society. 

The people they commemorate are also not all famous. Commemoratees include a theatrical wigmaker, the woman who taught ju-jitsu to the Suffragettes, a bare-knuckle boxing champ, a homing pigeon, and Dolly the Sheep–the first animal to be born by cloning.

 

Unofficial plaques

But nobody gets to set a limit on blue plaques, and it’s possible–even legal–to put up unofficial ones. 

In Norfolk, the Common Lot theatre group discovered that only 25 of the city’s 300 blue plaques commemorated women and set out to remedy the imbalance, commemorating rebel women of Norwich. Their women they commemorate include:  

  • The 16-year-old Emma de Gaudar, who’s said to have held Norwich Castle against a siege by William the Conqueror
  • The butterfly collector Margaret Fountaine
  • Suffragette Mabel Clarkson, who became a lord mayor of Norwich and a city councillor before women achieved the vote
  • Dorothy Jewson, the first female Labour MP, who attended Norwich High School for Girls
  • Women thrown out of a Quaker meeting house for being profane and opinionated for talking about women’s rights
  • And the former location of a ducking stool for women accused of witchcraft

In Hull, Alternative Heritage set up a plaque saying, “Our brand of mavericks and creatives decided to celebrate Hull’s history, whether factual or fictitious.”

I could get to like these people.

They go on to say, “Official English Heritage plaques can only be commissioned for a proposed recipient 20 years after their death, through strict criteria. But what about the living legends and stories that make our city special today? Here at Drunk Animal Creative Studio, we designed a series of our own plaques, fittingly titled ‘Alternative Heritage.’

“Our plaques celebrate our history, from Hull’s charismatic folk to lore spread in playgrounds. Whether factual or fictitious, the contents of the plaques come straight from the heart of Hull.”

So what have they put up? One plaque says, “Goodbye, 2020. You won’t be missed.” Another says, “On this spot, 1918. Alf hugged his wife for the first time in four years. He was lucky – thousands across the country never got to hug their loved ones again.”

Their site includes a map of plaques around the city and a form you can use to propose a plaque.

 

The Liz Truss plaque

The reason I got started on blue plaques is that someone’s put up a blue plaque outside the shop where the lettuce that outlasted Liz Truss was bought.

What am I talking about? Liz Truss is Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister. In less than two months, during 2022, her bare-knuckle budget proposed doing everything Conservative politicians had talked about but hesitated to do in any unrestrained way: slash taxes and spending without worrying about how the numbers would add up. In next to no time at all, the country was teetering on the brink of recession. The pound tanked. The markets had multiple nervous breakdowns. The cost of government borrowing shot up. Mortgage deals fell through. People who ran pension funds–or who had pensions in those funds–came unglued.

Headline writers, on the other hand, had a field day. 

Truss’s popularity fell so low they had to dig trenches in the newsroom floor. Then some genius at one of the newspapers bought a head of lettuce, dropped a blond wig on it, and trained a live cam at it, asking who’d last longer, Liz or Lettuce.

The lettuce, famously, won. And is now commemorated with a highly unofficial blue plaque of its very own. Truss, meanwhile, is promoting a book about how to save the West. The rest of the world, presumably, isn’t worth bothering with.

How well is it selling? In its first week (I haven’t found more recent data), it was 70 on the bestseller list, behind an air fryer cookbook and RuPaul’s memoir, with 2,228 copies sold. Given the name recognition you get as a former prime minister, that’s not great, although I’ll admit it leaves my novels in the dust. On the other hand, I’m not followed by pictures of lettuce the way she is.

Skara Brae and neolithic Britain

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Every last one of us was born too late to visit neolithic Britain. Sorry. Most of us wouldn’t handle it well anyway. But we can get a surprising glimpse of late stone age life from the island of Orkney, off the northeast coast of Scotland. 

These days, Orkney’s located almost exactly in the middle of nowhere, at least if by nowhere you mean a lot of water, but back then it seems to have been the center of a civilization, if for no other reason than that it was a midway point between northern Europe and Britain. For that, being in the middle of a lot of water is useful.

Not much is known about stone-age boats, but we can pretty well guess that traveling in one made a stop on a long voyage welcome. The break would’ve let people indulge in a neolithic cultural exchange, which I’m going to guess involved food, fresh water, alcohol, gossip, songs, gifts, and possibly an era-appropriate ritual or three.

I tossed in the rituals because Orkney’s rich in sites that hint at them, and every one of them involved an immense amount of labor. You don’t do all that if they don’t matter to you and if you don’t have time and energy to spare. 

Irrelevant photo: hemp agrimony

Skara Brae

Around 5,000 years ago, a group of people built a village on Orkney that’s now called Skara Brae. What they called it is anyone’s guess. A lot can get lost in 5,000 years, including a name. The people who lived there farmed, hunted, and fished.

The village is older than Stonehenge, older than the pyramids, and older than me. It was inhabited for something along the lines of 650 years and abandoned for reasons we can only guess at, but for us what’s significant about it is that at some point it was covered over by sand, which preserved it until a storm swept the sand off in 1850, uncovering an archaeologist’s dream.

The village is a circle of stone-built, single-room houses linked by roofed passages, with one larger building that according to one article might’ve been a workshop, although I can’t help wondering if it wouldn’t have been a place for everyone to gather. The walls were made of two layers of stone with insulation in between and the roofs were slate. Each house had a hearth, two beds outlined by stone slabs, which would have kept the bedding in place, and what are called dressers because–well, they have to be called something. To me, they look more like stone bookshelves, although this was a bookless, writingless world, so let’s stick with dressers. It’s chilly up there. People would’ve worn clothes, although that might not have been what they stored on them. They could’ve stored useful stuff, beautiful stuff, things they didn’t want to step on in the dark–say the neolilthic equivalent of Lego pieces.

For some fabulous photos, follow the link.

The houses also had tanks set into the floor. One house had an indoor toilet, although since plumbing was still a long way in the future that might not have been a great idea. I wasn’t there, so I can’t know.

Around the settlement, archaeologists have found dice, jewelry, tools, carved stone objects (objects here meaning things that are mysterious to us), and pottery in a style that spread to mainland Britain, supporting the argument that Orkney was an important site in the culture–a place that led the way. What hasn’t been found is weaponry, and the village wasn’t in an easily defended spot, arguing that this was a time and place of peace.

Not far from Skara Brae are two stone circles, The Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness; a chambered tomb, Maes Howe; and an assortment of unexcavated sites that hint at being ceremonial, burial, and settlement sites. The places that have been excavated show evidence of feasting–lots of feasting.

I won’t try to take you through the details of the excavations. I wouldn’t trust myself to get it right anyway. Follow the links if you want to know more. You’ll find lots of measurements and layouts. Or else settle for knowing that a lot went on in this seemingly isolated spot. 

So, did this important cultural center contribute the Stonehenge altar stone that’s recently been spotted as having come from somewhere in northeast Scotland or the Orkneys? It would make sense. They built similar monuments, but no. Orkney’s been ruled out and the search for the source of the altar stone goes on.

What tea bag makes the best cup of tea, and other British dilemmas

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Every year, Britain’s consumer champion, the oddly named Which?, does a blind test of the nation’s teabags and picks a winner. Because, folks, this is important. You’re a consumer. You need the experts’ opinion on this before you wander cluelessly into a supermarket and buy the tea you, in your ignorance, think you like.

Besides, Which? gets some free publicity out of it. 

This year, in what one headline called a “shock result,” a budget tea, Asda’s Everyday–the cheapest of the contestants–came in first. The high-end Twinings was in joint last place with it doesn’t matter who. What does matter is that Twinings’ tea bags cost four times more than Asda’s. 

My favorite, Yorkshire, wandered in somewhere between the two. 

What qualities do the experts judge tea on? Color. Aroma, Appearance. Taste’s on the list somewhere. Ability to boot you into consciousness first thing in the morning isn’t.

Irrelevant photo: Last week’s post also had an irrelevant picture of Fast Eddie, but surely it’s not possible for a childless cat lady (who’re you calling a lady, asshole?) to post too many cat pictures. So here’s Fast Eddie in slow mode.

The advice column

If you’re in the market for free advice, allow me to offer you this: never try to communicate in an accent or dialect you didn’t come by honestly. I mention this because a local council–in non-British English, that’s a governmental body–tried to use the local dialect for an anti-littering campaign and got it wrong. In very large type.

The North Yorkshire Council put up signs–hundreds of the beasts–urging people to “Gerrit in’t bin’” 

Oops. That should’ve been “Gerrit in t’bin.”

What’s with the “t’”? It’s short for the and it’s a Yorkshire thing. 

Why? 

Why not? There’s no arguing with accents or dialects. They are what they are and they do what they do. 

But let’s not take anything for granted: “gerrit” means get it. “Bin”? It’s what I grew up called the garbage can–that thing you throw trash in. But that’s a Britishism, not Yorkshire’s own invention

To be fair to the council, I don’t know that they’re not from Yorkshire. They may just be people who had some apostrophes to spare and got caught dropping one in the wrong place. As I understand the apostrophe process, we’re born with a certain number and the instructions about how to use them were written by Ikea. So as the years go by, some people get desperate, and they drop theirs in any spot that looks likely. Or if not likely, possible.

It’s not entirely their fault.

A lot of the posters were put up in tourist sites on the theory, no doubt, that visitors would be charmed by a bit of local color, but whether the visitors are looking at the original version or the corrected one, 76.3% are locked in place while they try to unscramble the letters and think, What????

 

The ghost of prime ministers past

Fifty-six days after he became Britain’s prime minister and moved into his new office, Keir Starmer had a portrait of a former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, moved out. Apparently short of things to get outraged about, Conservative Party leaders pitched a fit.

But since I’ve been making fun of people’s apostrophe use, I should be careful about this: if multiple people do that thing I just mentioned, do they pitch a single collective fit or multiple individual ones?

Either way, they accused Starmer of being vindictive and petty, of spending his time rearranging the furniture instead of governing, and of appeasing the left wing of his party. 

To which the left wing of his party said, “If only.

That kept the news cycle fed for nearly a day, but when the nation failed to rise up in arms the outrage machine went into sleep mode, during which it appears to be doing nothing but is in fact searching the internet for new and surely more popular sources of potential outrage.

 

The Ig Nobels

A winner of this year’s Ig Nobel Awards, Saul Justin Newman, from University College Lonon, reports that the claims about extreme aging–living past 110–are, to be scientific about it, mostly bullshit. 

“I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world,” he said. “(The other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.”

To be clear: he only looked for death certificates for the people believed to be dead. The ones who were still alive? It’s pretty much expected that they wouldn’t have one yet.

A lot of the over-110s are concentrated in blue zones, where a startling number people are said to live past 100. “For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.”

But in a 2010 review by the Japanese government, “82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.”

Don’t have anyone else register it either.

Okinawa, which was supposed to be a hotspot of extreme aging, turned out to have the worst health in Japan. The best way to find concentrations of super-agers in Okinawa super-agers is to figure out where the halls of records were bombed during World War II. 

“If the person dies [in the bombing], they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.”

As for hotspots in Italy and Greece, “By my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases. . . . [In Greece], over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 ‘living’ pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.”

In England, several low-income areas–”the worst places to be an old person”–have a high number of people over 100 but surprisingly few 90-year-olds. Unfortunately, if you’re going to live to 100, one of the requirements is that you have to live through your 90s first, even if there’s no glory in it.

So will getting an Ig Nobel get people to take his research seriously? 

“I hope so. But even if not, at least the general public will laugh and think about it, even if the scientific community is still a bit prickly and defensive. If they don’t acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I’ll just get someone to pretend I’m still alive until that changes.”

The fun hasn’t gone out of British politics yet

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Once Britain’s Conservative government was booted out, it looked like the grownups, in the form of a shiny new Labour government, were in charge at last. In other words, it looked like the fun had gone out of politics, but have hope: humanity’s most absurd qualities haven’t been banished. 

This is admittedly gossip and rumor, but it’s credible enough for a responsible paper, the Guardian, to have trusted it: low-level guerilla warfare is going on inside 10 Downing Street between Sue Gray, the prime minister’s chief of staff, and Morgan McSweeney, who was his election strategy wizard and is now his head of political strategy. 

The plan was for McSweeney’s desk to sit outside the prime minister’s office, since he would be in and out of there more than Gray, but apparently Gray has moved McSweeney’s desk away from the prime minister’s door. Twice. Which implies that he’s moved it back at least once. She’s also (allegedly) tried to block his access to a secure computer system that would let him get security briefings.

There’s hope for humanity yet.

A nearly relevant photo, but you’ll have to read to the end to find out why. This isn’t the cat in the news but our own Fast Eddie in the foliage.

 

Exit Liz Truss, pursued by a head of lettuce 

Admittedly, though, the Conservatives were more fun. Watching them run the country was kind of like watching a classroom full of six-year-olds try to make a pie from scratch after the adult’s been called away: a lot to laugh at, but now that their parents have taken them home and, we hope, washed their clothes, there’s a real mess to clean up.

I’m not on the clean-up crew, so allow me to call your attention to Liz Truss, who was prime minister for 49 days. During the final stretch, disaster was so clearly headed her way that a newspaper put a livecam and a blond wig on a head of lettuce and asked if it would last longer than Truss.

Or maybe she was in office for 45 days. Or 50. For reasons that I won’t try to understand, different sources are coming up with different numbers. Whichever one we pick, she still holds the record for the country’s shortest-serving prime minister and the lettuce outlasted her, but that hasn’t stopped her from publishing a book, Ten Years to Save the West–an ambitious goal for a politician who couldn’t save her own premiership. And more than a quarter of that first year is gone already. 

Modesty prevents me from making fun of anything more than the title since I haven’t read it. 

The reason she’s back in the headlines is that she walked out of her own book event in August, which must also set some kind of a record. A crowd-funded group called Led by Donkeys had installed a hidden banner above the stage. When they lowered it by remote control, it read, “I crashed the economy.” Inevitably, it included a picture of a head of lettuce. 

Truss said, “That’s not funny,” and walked off stage. End of event. She has since accused Led by Donkeys of stifling free speech, although nothing they did kept her from speaking and a banner can also be considered speech. In fact, interrupting someone can be considered free speech. 

Led by Donkeys calls itself an accountability project and says the new government will inevitably “disappoint us in some, if not more, respects . . . so it’s inconceivable that we won’t turn our attention in a really direct way to what the government is doing.”

I can hardly wait.

 

What’s it worth to be booted out of office?

In the year after she stepped down as prime minister, Liz Truss made £250,000 in speaking fees. In one speech, she took in more than most of her fellow citizens earn in a year.

Suella Braverman made £60,000 as a speaker, although I’m not sure about the time period on that. She also made £14,000 for newspaper articles in the Telegraph and accepted an all-expenses paid trip to Israel worth £27,800. A mere nothing, but then she wasn’t prime minister. She never got past home secretary.

The top earner is Boris Johnson, who made £4.8 million in the six months after he stepped down, £2.5 million of which is an advance on some unspecified number of speeches. I haven’t seen a breakdown of the rest of his income, but I’d think twice before paying him an advance on so much as a piece of toast, even if I was looking at both bread and toaster. He got an £88,000 advance (or “a rumoured” £500,000–go figure) in 2015 for a book on Shakespeare.  

What does he actually know about Shakespeare? Indications are, not much. In 2021, a leading Shakespeare scholar was approached to help him with his homework by answering questions for Johnson. “The originality and brilliance, his agent assured me, would lie in Mr Johnson’s choice of questions to ask and in the inimitable way in which he would write up the expert answers he received,” the scholar said when he went public about it.

The book has yet to appear–or from what I’ve read, make its way to the publisher, but that hasn’t stopped him signing a £510,000 deal to write his political memoirs–for a different publisher. 

And I still don’t have my toast.

*

To prove there’s no justice in this world, the lettuce–which, you’ll remember, outlasted Truss–ended up on the compost heap. 

 

Meanwhile, in Cananda . . .

 . . . a totally separate Conservative Party aired a feel-good election ad, full of patriotic hoorah about how much they love Canada. You know the kind of thing: a Canadian father drives through the suburbs, only it turns out that was shot in North Dakota. The kids in school? That was from Serbia. The university student? Ukraine. The kid in the park with her grandparents? London. The two jets on a training mission, “getting ready to defend our home and native land”? Russia.  

And the sunset with the words “we’re home”? Venezuela. 

The ad has been pulled.

 

And in nonpolitical news . . .

. . . Larry Richardson is the author of a dozen academic papers on mathematics that have been cited 132 times. Larry Richardson is also a cat and, disappointingly, his papers are gibberish. 

Larry was boosted into academic stardom by his person’s grandson, a grad student in metascience and computational biology, who had run into the academic trick of getting your papers cited by either writing the papers citing you or paying someone else to do that for you. This matters, because the more a scientific paper is cited, the more important its author becomes. It influences hiring and tenure decisions. If you’re a cat, it gets you headlines.

Not that you care about headlines if you’re a cat. 

The papers that cite you can be gibberish as long as they have a plausible title. In fact, a program, MathGen, can produce them for you if you can’t be bothered writing your own nonsense. And  they can be written by long-dead scientists and mathematicians. 

Ever wanted to have your paper cited by Galileo? It can be arranged. 

The papers can also be written by your grandmother’s cat. You upload them to ResearchGate, let GoogleScholar do its work, then delete them. Or leave them. What the hell, it’s your call. 

GoogleScholar doesn’t sound overly cautious about what it accepts as a scholarly paper. Someone got it to accept a cafeteria menu. The authors are C.S. Salad, P. Pack, B. Noodles, C. Fajitas, and R. Beans. If the hyperventilating comments on Twitter are to be believed, the paper’s been cited multiple times.

R.  Richardson’s goal was to make L. Richardson the world’s most-cited cat. It took two weeks but only one hour of that was actual work.

The cat whose record L. Richardson broke was E.D.C. Willard, whose human was theoretical physicist Jack Hetherington. Hetherington added E.D.C. to a single-author paper because he didn’t want to go back and change all the we’s to I’s. E.D.C.–also known as Felis Domesticus Chester Willard, or Chester to his friends–racked up a mere 107 citations. He went on to drop his coauthor and write a paper and a book chapter under his own name.

R.  Richardson assures the world that L. Richardson–who goes by Larry–has been compensated in some unspecified way for the use of his name. R. Richardson did not comment, but you can find his profile here. 

Are foxhunters an ethnic group?

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A pro-foxhunting group, Hunting Kind, says it’ll be going to court to prove that fox hunters are an ethnic minority, which they’re convinced will protect their hunts from the barbarian anti-foxhunting hordes. The group’s chair argues that people who support foxhunting suffer persecution by animal rights extremists and that their hunts are an extension of natural selection because they only kill the foxes that are old or weak or slower than a pack of dogs. Or who, you know, overindulge in suicidal ideation. 

“I can tell you for a fact [foxhunting] is not cruel,” he said, “because I take no delight in the suffering of an animal.”

Point proven, then. 

The group claims it meets the five qualifications for an ethnic group: 

  • A long and shared history of culture which is distinct from wider society
  • Distinct customs of their own
  • A common geographical origin
  • Common ancestors
  • Common language or literature

Irrelevant photo: a begonia

Where’d the five points come from? I haven’t been able to trace them to any source. The 2021 census says a person’s ethnicity “could be based on” culture, family background, identity or physical appearance. That’s four and sounds kind of tentative.

The Law Society says its “usually been used to refer to long shared cultural experiences, religious practices, traditions, ancestry, language, dialect or national origins.” That’s seven and not what you’d call rock solid.

Basically, ethnicity’s a hazy term. But let’s not get hung up on how many characteristics it takes to solidify a bunch of people into an ethnic group. What’s striking here is that the desire to be one speaks to a longing on the part of a privileged group to be certified as unprivileged so it can claim the privileges of the unprivileged.

Did I lose anyone on the hairpin turns back there? 

Are foxhunters privileged? Well, foxhunting started out as an aristocratic passtime. In its current form, it dates back to the 19th century and was strictly for the upper crust. These days the hunts are marginally more democratic: you don’t have to be an aristocrat but you do need deep pockets. As George Monbiot explains it, “Not everyone who hunts today is a member of the aristocracy–far from it. But this is the way in which you aspire to become one. To look posh you buy a Land Rover, green wellies, a tweed hat and a waxed jacket: the livery of field sports. You buy a house in the country. You get yourself a horse and you join the hunt.”

You can see why they long to be certified as society’s victims.

 

A bit of history

Farmers have long had it in for foxes. They attack some of the smaller farm animals and they have beautiful fur. It doesn’t do to be too beautiful, friends. I’m telling you. In this case, it led to fur envy: the aristocrats could wear that fur themselves and tell themselves they looked foxy in it. But it wasn’t until the 18th century, with the decline of the country’s deer population, that fox hunting turned into a sport. Because, hey, if they could go out hunting deer they had to kill something, didn’t they?

What happened to the deer? Well, history just loves irony. England’s landowners–a rich and powerful class of people–discovered they could make more money by getting rid of those annoying people who lived on the land and farmed it. They enclosed the land, making smaller fields and raising sheep in them. It’s called the enclosure movement. Cue massive displacement and poverty, not to mention political unrest, but never mind all that, there was money to be made.

In enclosing the land, they got rid of the places deer liked to breed. It wasn’t the most important result, unless you’re a deer, but it left a wealthy group of people in need of something to kill. And there was the fox, who had no hand in all this, with its beautiful coat and inconvenient need to eat. 

To turn up the volume a bit, along came the Industrial Revolution, with its improved network of roads and its new network of railroads, making the countryside more accessible to would-be hunters living in towns and cities. For a few days, they could pretend to be country gentlemen. 

Or gentlewomen. 

Awkwardly for anyone who argues that foxhunting is about pest control, the enthusiasm for foxhunting led to a shortage of foxes, which led to huntmasters buying pests for the hunters to eliminate. They were imported from France, the Netherlands, and Scotland, and in England organized gangs stole them from land that happened to be well stocked. 

Does any of that make them an ethnic group? Well, England’s aristocracy is inbred enough to have a common set of ancestors, but we just shifted ground there from foxhunters to the aristocracy as a whole. They have a few words or phrases the rest of us wouldn’t bother using but they’re stuck sharing their basic language, literature, history, and geographic origins with the rest of us. 

Not me, of course. I wasn’t born in Britain, but there aren’t enough of me to make them an ethnic group. 

Stonehenge: the story keeps changing

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Want to change history? You have two choices: do something that changes the future or change the way we see the past. Neither one is easy, but a group of scientists studying the Stonehenge rocks have managed to change the way historians understand late stone age Britain. 

If you read much about Stonehenge, you’ll probably read about sarsen stones first–the uprights and the massive crosspieces that sit on top of them, forming the outer circle. They were hauled a mere 16 miles. On the other hand, they weigh an average of 25 tons, so however hard you worked last week I’m pretty sure you didn’t do that.   

Once you’re done being impressed, you’ll read about the bluestones–the stones that form the inner circle–which came from 140 miles away, in Wales. Before the invention of smartphones, which would at least have let the people who dragged them document the challenge.

Think about doing that without a single online follower leaving a Like. Where’s your incentive?

The bluestones weigh between 1 and 3 tons. 

A rare relevant photo, with thanks to K. Mitch Hodge, who made it available online at Unsplash.

What most of us wouldn’t have read about is the altar stone, but it’s the one that’s making headlines and retroactively changing history. 

In spite of its name, there’s no reason to believe it was ever used as an altar. It’s lying flat and it must’ve reminded someone of an altar. The name stuck, but don’t get carried away with the idea. 

The new information is that the stone traveled something like 500 (or 350, or 800) miles to play its part in Stonehenge–that’s pretending it went in a straight line–from what’s now Scotland, somewhere around the neighborhood of Inverness, John O’Groats, and Orkney. It’s a big neighborhood, but someone will be out there even now working to narrow it down. 

Why does that matter? Because it tells us that late stone age Britain (known to its friends as neolithic Britain) was a lot more connected than anyone knew. And it tells us that whatever function Stonehenge had, it had it for a whole lot more people than any recent residents suspected. 

 

Moving the stones

How did they get the stone from Scotland to the Salisbury Plain? It’s tempting to think, No problem. Just plop that beast on a boat, but we’re talking about a 6-ton stone. In a boat built in the late stone age. That might not comply with health and safety guidelines. Personally, I’d think two or three times before I jumped in and started to paddle.

Information about ocean-going boats in this period seems to be pretty limited, but they’d have been small and a little sticker on the side would’ve said, “Not recommended for the transport of any stone above 1 ton in weight.” 

Evidence of cross-Channel trade between Britain and Europe has been found, and that meant boats–it’s wet out there, people–but the evidence consists of lighter things like pottery, axes, and cattle. 

Okay, I admit, cattle aren’t light. But compared to the stones we’re talking about? You could lift two of them before breakfast.

The experts are still arguing about how the stones were transported. One experiment tried to move the equivalent of the bluestones across the Severn on rafts. They sank. 

The Severn? Most likely body of water on the way from Wales to Wiltshire, currently playing host to some large stones that future archeologists will try to explain in some marginally rational way.

That doesn’t prove it can’t be done, only that it couldn’t be done the way they tried to do it. Neolithic people would’ve had a lot more experience with neolithic boats than even the best modern-day experimental archaeologist. With so little known about late stone-age boats, it’s all guesswork. So we can’t rule out boats.

But there’s another compelling reason to take the stone overland. An archaeologist who wasn’t involved in the study explained it this way: “If you put a stone on a boat out to sea, not only do you risk losing the stone–but also nobody can see it.” 

But if we spend a few years dragging it the length of Britain, people along the route will get involved. Maybe they’ll help drag it a few miles. Maybe they’ll make us a nice cup of–

No, sorry, we’re centuries too early to get a nice cup of tea. Or even instant coffee, and forget about that frothy, expensive stuff folks have fallen for. We might be offered some nettle tea, though. It’s supposed to be good for sore muscles and arthritis. The island’s rich in nettles, and after hauling that stone we’re rich in sore muscles. We’re also building up the prerequisites of future arthritic problems. So whatever it tastes like, drink that tea and look happy. These people are being hospitable.

Most settlements will lay on a feast, or share what they can if it’s been a bad year. They’ll make us feel welcome and speed us on the next leg of our journey. And with each stop, more people will feel involved with the project. They helped pull that stone. They welcomed the people who delivered it. For generations, people will talk about it. 

The stone, the expert said, will become “increasingly precious . . . as it travels south.”

If dragging a 6-ton stone the length of Britain sounds impossible, I refer you to a BBC documentary–sorry, the name sank into the sludge that passes for my memory–about the bluestones. The presenters somehow got an entire class of primary school kids to pull a stone very much like the bluestones using nothing more than ropes and (if my memory isn’t playing tricks on me) a wooden sledge and logs for it to roll across. Maybe thirty ordinary kids, none of them even close to full grown. And the stone slid across the ground as if that’s what it had in mind all along. 

Admittedly, the ground was flat and it wasn’t full of boulders or forests, but it does show what plain old muscle power can do. 

One objection to the land route theory is that it’s hard to coordinate that many people, but teamwork would’ve been an integral part of any late stone-age community. And they wouldn’t necessarily have seen the length of time involved as a problem. They might’ve seen it as something like a pilgrimage. 

Getting places in a hurry is a relatively modern obsession.

The terrain wouldn’t have been easy, but the idea that Britain was wall-to-wall forest is, apparently, a myth. 

One theory holds that the stones could’ve been moved to Wiltshire by the glaciers, but finding a stone from Scotland wrecks this. 

“From Orkney, I can’t see a way that the stone hikes a ride on half a dozen glaciers in the right order to end up on Salisbury Plain,” a geologist said.

But forget about moving the stones. How did they set them upright?

An archeologist who’s raised the 12-ton cap stone on neolithic tomb using wooden levers said it’s easy, 

So if you buy a Stonehenge from Ikea, those are your assembly instructions.

*

If all that doesn’t sound like enough work, Stonehenge was built in several stages, each one involving a different configuration. I won’t take you through all them but it must’ve been like living with someone who insists on moving the furniture every few thousand years, only the furniture is multiple tons of rock and soil. 

We’ll probably never know what went on there or why, but we’re pretty safe saying that whatever it was, it was important. To a lot of people.