Psychologically this was reasonably effective, and at university I was flattered when friends—especially girls—said they did not think of me as disabled. It also led to a certain lack of realism on my part, culminating in a frankly insane US road trip in the summer of 1980.

Having taken a year off work to write a book, I had spent a tax rebate on a trip to Mexico, where my friend Ed was working. The cheapest way at the time was to fly Laker to New York, and then take a Greyhound 2,000 miles to the Mexican border. Mexico itself was cheap, and £300 supported me for six weeks as far as the Yucatan. I headed back north in early July, travelling on Mexican buses and trains with Ed, who was flying back to the UK from Houston.

‘The immigration officer was clearly near the end of his tether but he cheered up at the sight of our British passports. I wished him happy Independence Day. “You want this country back? You take it!”’

Texas and the central plains were suffering a murderous heat wave, with noon temperatures exceeding 100°F (38°C) every day from late June to early August. In the first couple of weeks of July, the temperature sometimes reached as high as 119°F (48° C). Some 1,700 people died of heat stroke that summer.

We arrived at the US customs post at Laredo early on the sweltering morning of the Fourth of July, joining the back of an immigration queue with several thousand Mexicans. Ed went up to point out that I was disabled, and (to my surprise) we were invited to jump the queue. The immigration officer was clearly near the end of his tether, but he cheered up at the sight of our British passports. I wished him happy Independence Day.

“Independence Day? You want this country back? You take it!”

Once across the border, I had to decide how to get back to New York. I had $36 in my pocket, a third of the Greyhound fare. Ed offered to lend me the money, but, in the grip of some Kerouac-ish fantasy, I opted to hitch-hike instead. Ed bade me farewell, I stuck out a thumb and about 10 am got my first lift, also to Houston.

Laredo in the 1970s: Travellers crossing into the US, are instructed to leave contraband (Photo by William Albert Allard/National Geographic/Getty Images)

This ride was with five cheerful Mexicans in a battered old Buick whose air-conditioning unit had given up the ghost. Because two of them were illegal, they were avoiding the Interstate Highway, which would have brought us to Houston in four or five hours. Our route lay cross-country on the single carriageway Highway 59, with the windows open to the hot dust of the south Texas plains. It took us nine desperate hours to reach the outskirts of Houston, at which point the Mexicans decided to risk the elevated freeways across the city.

None of us knew where we were going, but my compadres were eager to help me. I had planned to take Interstate 10 out of Houston along the Gulf Coast, and when the driver saw the exit sign for I-10 East he screeched to a halt in the right hand lane. “Adiós hermano! Vaya con Dios!” they chorused as I clambered out with my satchel. As the Buick grumbled off, I realised I was standing on the edge of a six-lane elevated road. There was no pavement, and I perched on the crash barrier, with a 30-foot drop behind me. Cars and trucks roared past my knees, and, though traffic was not heavy at that time of the evening, it was clear no one was going to stop. I waited for a lull and began to leg it down the off ramp. Each time I heard a vehicle behind me I hopped back on to the crash barrier. In this way I made it down in three or four goes.

I was thirsty, tired and rattled. It was early twilight. The area below the freeway was a poor black neighbourhood of low wooden buildings. I needed a cold drink. I walked along a street away from the freeway. Old black men sat silently on their porches. I must have cut an odd figure—a sweaty young white man on sticks—but I was past caring. Two or three blocks along I came to a bar and went in and bought a Coke. I felt reasonably welcome: no one stared at me, or challenged me. While I drank my Coke, I examined the jukebox. To my delight it contained a great deal of blues: I had thought it unlikely that black Americans still listened to the blues in 1980. I put a dime in and played a Buddy Guy number. As I walked back towards the freeway, several of the previously silent old men greeted me courteously.

Several short lifts took me across east Houston. Night fell, but it remained very warm. One young man detoured to show me Baytown, the huge Exxon refinery, lit up for five miles of crackers and reformers and distillation columns. He seemed lonely. At one stage he showed me the pistol he kept in the glove compartment, but there was no harm in him.

The next lift, around midnight, came from a couple of skinny old guys who wanted me to know exactly where to place them: “We’s good ole boys!” One was from Oklahoma and the other from the Texas Panhandle, but they both worked as deckhands on merchant ships out of Corpus Christi, or “Co’pus”. They were on their way to enjoy a private all-night barbeque at some picnic site off the Interstate. They urged me to join in, assuring me that they had food for all. Or, as they kept repeating, “a whole gang of meat comin’ outta our assholes”. I was tired and hungry, but tempted as I was by hot food and cold beer, it dawned on me that these were two elderly redneck gays. It seemed unwise to accept their hospitality in some dark roadside halt, and I got them to drop me—a little unwillingly on their part—at an open gas station.

I stood for the rest of the night without any luck. The gas station’s diner opened at 7 am, and I ate a good breakfast for a dollar. Another short hop took me to a classic truck stop where none of the truck drivers even acknowledged my existence when I asked them for a lift. As I stood by the Interstate with my thumb out—illegally, of course—two Texas state troopers glided alongside.

“Where you goin’ boy?” drawled one.

“New York City, sir,” I replied.

“New York City?” he spat incredulously. “Well good luck boy!” And they drove off. They were not wishing me luck so much as showing contempt for anyone so stupid as to drag his sorry hide from the great state of Texas to the Yankee Gomorrah of New York.

I had had no sleep for more than 24 hours and the sun was already unbearably hot. The day passed painfully, and I can recall only one lift, around the Texas-Louisiana border in the late afternoon. This was from a very drunk man named Calvin Pugh, sipping from a bottle of cheap pink wine called Cold Duck. He talked incessantly and weaved slowly along the Interstate. I was too exhausted to ask him to let me off. After an hour or so he was pulled over by the police. As we waited for the policeman to walk over, he asked me urgently whether I had a raw potato, which he believed would disguise alcohol on the breath. I did not have a potato, but I offered him my toothpaste instead, which he rubbed desperately on his teeth. The policeman ordered us to follow him to a police station just off the Interstate. This all seemed very odd, as it must have been clear to the cop that Mr Pugh was unfit to drive. At the station he told me to wait while he went in. He returned after 10 minutes and we set off. I asked what had happened.

“I paid the county and I paid the damn officer too,” he explained.

At about 7 pm he dropped me at a large Days Inn near Baton Rouge. As I walked into the cool motel lobby I caught sight of myself in a mirror. I was wearing a black collarless shirt that was now caked grey with salt. My hair was matted, my eyes hollow and my skin peeling. The price of an average room was $25 a night, a big piece of my remaining change.

“Have you got anything cheaper?”

“Well, we have a trucker’s rate at $17 with breakfast,” replied the matronly lady at the desk.

“Ma’am, I have been trucking for two days,” I said, and she took pity on me.

In the room I showered three times before sleeping for 12 hours.

The next day is again hazy in my memory. Various lifts took me along the Gulf Coast until I turned north into Mississippi on I-59. I had run out of rolling tobacco, and one of my rides took me to a country store where I bought a pouch of Bull Durham, which was too dry for my taste. The driver seemed concerned for my safety, so I decided to show him the vicious switchblade I had bought in Mexico. He immediately turned off the road and ordered me sternly to throw the knife into the bushes.

“But I’ll bet you’re carrying a gun,” I said.

“Damn right I am, and the police wouldn’t care if you had one too. But the moment they find you with that knife, they will lock you up and throw away the key.”

He was right: it was a stupid and childish thing for me to possess, and in any case I could hardly have used it to defend myself.

At some point I fell in with a 17-year-old boy trying to get home to northern Alabama. In the early evening we approached Birmingham just as the heat was broken by a colossal thunderstorm. Our driver, a nice schoolteacher who had explained that he was unlikely ever to visit another country because the US had more than enough for him to see, dropped us at an interchange on the northern side of the city. For two or three hours the kid and I were forced to shelter from the storm under a freeway bridge. We emerged about 10 pm to find that the storm had knocked out the power in Birmingham, and we were hitching in pitch dark up I-59 on a hillside just out of the city. The boy was exhausted, so I let him take a nap by the roadside while I stuck out my thumb.

‘He held up the largest revolver I had ever seen in my life. “This was pointing at your chest, and I was going to blow you away if he had tried anything,” my driver explained.’

Around midnight a black Camino pickup slowed down to look at me, and stopped 50 yards further on. I walked up the road, and, while talking to the driver, became aware that the boy had woken up and was running up from behind. A rather tense conversation ensued: the Camino was essentially a two-seater and the driver wanted to take only me, but I persuaded him to let the kid lie in the back under a tarpaulin, as he was only 50 miles from home. The driver himself was heading for Front Royal in the Shenandoah Valley of northern Virginia, 700 miles to the north-east, and only 250 miles from New York.

As we set off, the driver remarked that I should be more careful in future.

“When I was talking to you through the window, I thought you were alone. Then I saw that guy running up out of the dark and I thought you might be the decoy in an ambush. That’s why I had you covered with this.”

He held up the largest revolver I have ever seen in my life, a long-barrelled 357 Magnum—a Dirty Harry weapon.

“This was pointing at your chest, and I was going to blow you away if he had tried anything,” my driver explained. “You really ought to be more careful.”

Phil turned out to be a decent sort, despite the artillery. He even relented so far as to drive the exhausted boy to the door of his parents’ house.

Phil was an engineer from Front Royal who had been working on a project in Louisiana and wanted to get home by the following afternoon. He needed me to talk to him, and I tried to oblige until sleep overcame me somewhere near Chattanooga. Phil then turned on his CB radio, and I awoke occasionally to enjoy some extraordinary exchanges between third parties on the road.

The best was between a woman in a car (a “beaver in a four-wheeler”) and a truck driver. They had been flirting for some time when the driver began to sing a song about truck-driving to the tune of “The Wabash Cannonball”. He had a fine baritone voice. The only lines I can remember were the end of a verse:

“. . . but I’ll be feeling all right again when I take that little white pill . . .”

“Driver, you’re headed the wrong way,” said the woman, “you ought to be going towards Nashville!”

“Why, thank you ma’am!”

After 700 miles, Phil dropped me around lunchtime at the top of an Interstate ramp outside Front Royal. This part of the country was familiar, and within striking distance of New York. I was cheerful as I took my hitching position half way down the long ramp. But no one stopped, except for a Virginia state trooper. The electric windows came down, and he looked at me through mirror shades.

“You can’t stand there.”

I explained to him that I had no money, that I had to catch a flight from New York, and that it would be next to impossible to get there on back roads.

“It is illegal to hitch-hike on the Interstate highway. Go back up the ramp and choose another route.”

The trooper waited in his car while I retreated. As soon as he had driven off, I walked back down. I was well aware that hitching on the Interstates was illegal, but other people did it, and no one had bothered me until now. Even the terrifying Texas troopers who had talked to me outside Houston were merely curious.

Again, no one picked me up, and once an hour the same state trooper returned and laconically ordered me off the ramp. At about 4 pm he pulled up again. Again the window came down.

“Y’all get into the vehicle.”

I did as I was told. He began cruising slowly northwards up I-81. He was a man of few words, and I had no idea what to say to him. His hat and his shades were firmly in place.

“I am going to take you to a place where you can use the Interstate system to your advantage.”

“Thank you sir.” I had no idea what this might mean. We continued in silence for a while, but I had the impression he was pondering a weighty matter.

“Hitch-hiking on the Interstate is extremely dangerous as well as illegal.”

“Yes sir.”

“Last year, there was a boy, just like you, 20 or 21. I told him he should not be hitch-hiking, but he did not listen to me.”

“Sir?”

“Next morning they found him in a ditch in Tennessee, two bullets in his head.”

There was no adequate response to this information, and I stifled the inclination to say “golly”.

“That’s terrible,” I replied. We resumed our silent journey, until, after perhaps 25 miles he pulled his car up the off ramp and halted at the top.

“Y’all can get out here.”

I got out and thanked him. He pointed across the intersection to the top of the down ramp.

“And y’all stand over there.” He drove off without another word. I was mystified until I saw the sign on the other side of the road: Welcome to West Virginia. That was what the Virginia trooper had meant by a place where I could use the Interstate system to my advantage: it was out of his jurisdiction. He had bent the rules and done me an act of great kindness.

An eccentric-looking Rambler station-wagon appeared from a westerly direction. All the windows were open, and inside were two men, two women and a mass of baggage and camping equipment. “Where you headed?” they shouted.

“New York City.”

“Well, you better climb in.” My four companions were all New York City high-school teachers. The grey-bearded driver was in his fifties, but the others were all close to my age. They were on their way home from the annual gathering, in a West Virginia forest, of the Rainbow Family. They explained this to me as a kind of white Indian tribe that met for a week a year. Later the driver, Tom, said that the origins lay in a 1968 happening in San Francisco, and that it was dedicated to non-violence, non-commercialism and all forms of spirituality. Recreational drugs were welcome, but not alcohol. In other words, the Rainbow Family was a kind of semi-organised hippiedom.

I myself had drifted away from that sort of outlook, which had been important to me in my teens. But I was charmed by my new friends. They were the most cosmopolitan types I had encountered since Mexico, and asked me many questions about Britain, and especially the punk movement. As we drove in golden afternoon light through the rolling green country of southern Pennsylvania, they began to think about beer, which had been banned from the Rainbow Gathering. We pulled up at a bar near Gettysburg. I was feeling light-headed, and wasn’t sure I needed anything to drink. But then I noticed bottles of Rolling Rock, a brew that my friends and I used to drink when we were teenagers, regarding it as a kind of virtuous boutique ale (from these very Pennsylvania hills). I drank a couple and fell asleep on the bar.

The Rainbow people poured me back into the Rambler, and I dozed all the way to the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. It was now nearly midnight, and one of the girls, Rebecca, offered me the spare bed in her Brooklyn apartment. Journey’s end, and 14 hours’ sleep. Two days later I was back in London.

I never hitched again. In retrospect it was an insane adventure. But it made sense at the time. And despite the difficulty and danger and strangeness, I encountered many good people who took trouble to help me—people who in their different ways represented the heart of America. 

“The Jack Kerouac of the Vale of Health” (a putdown by a later girlfriend’s former boyfriend), safely back on Hampstead Heath, 1980 (© PATRICK HEREN)

The post On the road appeared first on Standpoint.

Tradition is important to Wagner, as guide and inspiration drawn from the great cloud of witnesses who preceded him in the Western canon. But, unusually, he had thought his Flowering Tree an original concept — until he visited the Roman church of San Clemente in Laterano and saw a 12th-century mosaic version in the apse. Here Christ hangs on a crucifix sprouting leaves, with the river running down to succour deer, sheep and wildfowl. “As a hind yearns for rivers of water, so mysoul yearns for you Oh God,” as the psalmist put it (in Wagner’s own translation).

“I’ve never been more astonished” said Wagner. “I thought I’d been completely original, but I found they’d anticipated me by a thousand years.”

Roger Wagner’s father was Sir Anthony Wagner, Garter Principal King of Arms, the senior herald of the College of Arms, and he grew up in an atmosphere where tradition was a living force. On an early family holiday, he was deeply impressed by Fra Angelico’s frescoes in the monastic cells at San Marco in Florence: he had not thought it possible to depict biblical scenes so naturalistically.

After reading English at Oxford, he studied art at the Royal Academy Schools. His determination to learn 16th-century painting techniques puzzled one of his tutors: wasn’t it like a contemporary dramatist trying to write in blank verse?

The answer, of course, is that it depends what the artist or dramatist does with the technique: it is vital to avoid mere pastiche.

“The Flowering Tree” at St Mary’s, Iffley.

Wagner was acutely aware of the challenges that have faced Christian artists since the beginning of the 20th century. Cezanne, who held true to the great tradition of Western art, had said: “I take my painting and place it next to a God-made object like a tree or a flower, and if it clashes it is not art.” But for Picasso and Braque, Cezanne’s immediate successors, the clash between a cubist work and a God-made object was deliberate. Ever since there has been, at least at the cutting edge of modernism, a tendency to disdain the past, setting up an apparent opposition with the tendency of all religions to look backwards at their own narratives. But, as Wagner says, if you scrape away the “surface froth” of progressive art theory, the energy, invention, techniques and playfulness of modernism are as available to religious artists as to anyone else.

He was equipped with faith, talent and growing technique. But he needed to find a style, and perhaps more importantly a forum. Clearly, his work would never be considered for the Turner Prize. Challenged to remain true to the modern world, in the early 1980s he painted and printed extensive scenes of the old industrial East End of London before the docklands redevelopment took hold. Some of the woodcuts made their way into In A Strange Land, a hand-printed translation, by Wagner, of Psalm 137: “By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept . . . How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” There followed a remarkable series of painted landscapes of industrial decay with their implied human suffering — and, always, the promise of redemption through Christ’s sacrifice.

Steeped in the Bible, Wagner holds the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, in special reverence. On his regular train journeys between Oxford and London, the looming presence of the Didcot power station impressed itself on his consciousness. One day he saw a huge umbrella-shaped cloud condensing and tumbling over the six cooling towers and one tall chimney, and an idea began to form. First came Surely He Has Born Our Griefs (1989), a deposition scene, with the mourners round Christ’s body wearing concentration camp stripes and the star of David.

“Menorah”, 1993 (ALL WORKS ©ROGER WAGNER)

Four years later he painted Menorah — the Didcot plant interpreted as the seven-branched candlestick which burned eternally in the Jerusalem temple before its destruction. The three crucifixes are set before the Didcot towers which belch smoke as if they were the ovens of Auschwitz. In the foreground, bathed in apocalyptic light, grief-stricken Jews comfort each other. Menorah was acquired by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and is currently on public view at St Giles’ Church nearby.

Wagner’s most influential — certainly his most reproduced — painting may be The Harvest is the End of the World and the Reapers Are Angels. The eschatological scene has a powerful effect on most viewers, struck by its matter-of-fact immediacy: the end is not just nigh, it is happening because God has sent his angels to make it happen. The title comes from chapter 13 of St Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus explains the parable of the tares (or darnel) to his disciples:

He that soweth the good seed is the Son of man; The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels. As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world.

The theme first occurred to him when still an undergraduate. In one of his Fire Sonnets, published in 1984, Wagner wrote:

I saw the cherubim one summer’s night
Reaping, it seemed, a field of endless wheat
I heard their voices through the fading light
Wild, strange and yet intolerably sweet.

Stylistically, The Harvest shows the influence of Samuel Palmer, but achieves an effect that is all Wagner’s own, especially the subtle geometrical composition. In bright late afternoon light slanting across a cornfield framed by an oak tree and sycamores, three angels are devotedly scything, raking and gathering sheaves. They are utterly intent on their work. In the middle distance more angels are at work on the next field, while the sky beyond is already dark and thunderclouds are forming. It is at once deeply mysterious and shockingly clear.

While continuing to paint over the next 20 years, Wagner’s deep biblical reading, his poetry, scholarship and gift for languages were also combined in The Book of Praises, an edition of the Psalms. He taught himself Hebrew in order to make his own translation, and the three volumes (of five) so far published were hand printed. Each psalm is presented in parallel English and Hebrew text and illustrated with wood engravings and, in the second and third volumes, small jewel-like paintings.

Some directly illustrate subjects or scenes within the particular psalm, while others are more allusive. Psalm 60 contains the line beloved of generations of schoolchildren “Moab is my wash-pot”; but Wagner chose the next verse “To Edom I cast my sandal,” and painted a view of the lower Jordan valley  dominated by an enormous angel looming over the horizon, the cast sandal spinning towards the viewer. By contrast in Psalm 61, a grief-stricken exile acknowledges God as his refuge and prays, “Let me stay in your tent forever, taking refuge in the shelter of your wings.” Wagner illustrated this with a pastoral scene of Abraham sitting outside his tent with three winged angels, and Mount Lebanon in the background.

He had painted two scenes of Abraham and the angels (Genesis 18) some years earlier: one set in a Syrian landscape with a huge smoking cement works in the background, and a second in Minsmere, Suffolk, with the Sizewell nuclear power plant looming beneath a crescent moon.

Landscape is central to Wagner’s art. His parents had a cottage at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, and this gentle low-lying country has always been important to him. But the Holy Land, which he visited in 1998, and Oxfordshire, where he lives, are also powerful presences in his work.

“It has always seemed natural to me to paint pictures in which contemporary landscapes and biblical stories occupy the same space,” Wagner said in a 2012 lecture, “Marching To An Antique Drum”. He observed that John Constable, a Suffolk man, saw landscape as God’s own work and was motivated to present it as truly and freshly as possible.

“Brightwell Barrow III”, 2012

His “pure” landscapes, without angels or obvious biblical narratives, are yet profoundly imbued with God’s presence. In 2012, for instance, he painted four large views of Brightwell Barrow in Oxfordshire, a conical hill near the Wittenham Clumps, so often drawn by Paul Nash. Each takes the same viewpoint, with a low hedge in the foreground framing the tree-topped hill beneath a huge energetic sky. The cloudscapes and light effects on the diagonal furrows of the hill vary radically across the four works. The high degree of formality suggests there is more going on here than a simple depiction of landscape. The unearthly light on trees seemingly poised between heaven and earth suggests the immanence of the divine. However one sees them, these stunning English landscapes are profoundly spiritual works.

Roger Wagner would be a remarkable artist in any age. He is a painter, printmaker, stained-glass maker, poet, art theorist and theologian. His work is informed by the great tradition of Western art, and depends to an uncommon degree on the crafts and skills developed over many centuries. Yet there is nothing old-fashioned about these paintings and prints. In the 21st century they speak to us directly of things that modern art largely ignores: beauty, our relationship with God, and God’s plan for the world.

T.S. Eliot is a strong influence on Wagner, and these lines from “Little Gidding” speak to his task in reconciling religious tradition with modernist art:

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

“Walking On Water III” by Roger Wagner, 2005.

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Wilfred Owen hoped to survive the bloody campaign of autumn 1918 that brought the German army to its knees. In the year since he had been sent back from the Somme to recover from shellshock (PTSD), he had flowered as a poet, his work speaking with a passionate intensity of the horrors of the war, and the suffering of the men who fought. The first, posthumous edition of his work appeared in 1920, edited by his friend Siegfried Sassoon. It carried the famous preface that Owen himself had written in anticipation of publication:

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

The Preface shows that Owen was eager to see his poems in print. He was also excited by the prospect of literary fame: during and after his convalescence he had met H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Robert Graves, Osbert Sitwell and numerous other literati who had recognised his talent. Post-war life would have been exciting for a young man who had found his vocation in the trenches and was determined that the bellicose hypocrisy of politicians and jingoists would never again send millions of young men to be slaughtered in mud and squalor.

Owen’s poetry speaks for itself, and after his death helped to change the British public’s understanding of war. Arguably, it also altered British military policy, which in the Second World War was notably more sparing with the lives of its men. However, the story of his short life is told not in his poetry but in 673 surviving letters which constitute a vivid epistolary autobiography. Remarkably, most of them were written to his mother Susan Owen, who was not spared terrifying details of life and death on the western front.

Wilfred Owen was born at Oswestry in 1893, the eldest of four children. His father Tom was an assistant stationmaster at Birkenhead and Shrewsbury, and money was always short. Wilfred grew up an intelligent, sensitive boy with wide interests. He shared his mother’s strong evangelical faith. More importantly, he began to write poetry.  Having failed to win a scholarship to Reading University, in 1913 he took himself off to Bordeaux to teach English. He remained in France for two years, working mostly as a private tutor. He also met the poet Laurent Tailhade, who encouraged him to persist with his poetry, and impressed him also with his rejection of religion.

In 1915, Owen returned to England, joined the Artists’ Rifles, and was sent for officer training. He wrote to his mother:

The Army as a life is a curious anomaly; here we are prepared — or preparing — to lay down our lives for another, the highest moral act possible, according to the Highest Judge, and nothing of this is apparent between the jostle of discipline and jest.

In June 1916 he was commissioned into the 5th battalion Manchester Regiment, based near Guildford. He found it, he confessed, stranger than when he had arrived in Bordeaux.

It is due to the complete newness of the country, the people, my dress, my duties, the dialect, the air, food, everything . . . The generality of the men are hard-handed, hard-headed miners, dogged, loutish, ugly. But I would trust them to advance under fire, and to hold their trench.

 
At the beginning of 1917, he was shipped off to France and posted to the 2nd battalion Manchester Regiment. This was a regular battalion, a distinction that Owen greatly prized:

It is a huge satisfaction to be going among well-trained troops and genuine “real-old” officers . . . here is a fine heroic feeling about being in France, and I am in perfect spirits. A tinge of excitement is about me, but excitement is always necessary to my happiness.

The real war soon tempered his enthusiasm. On January 16 , 1917 he wrote to his mother:

I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last 4 days. I have suffered seventh hell. I have not been at the front. I have been in front of it. I held an advanced post, that is, a “dug-out” in the middle of No Man’s Land.

He went on to describe the mud, the shelling, the machine gun bullets, the inevitable casualties. The 2nd Manchesters endured extreme cold for several weeks, moving in and out of the line. In mid-March Owen fell into a deep dug-out while doing his rounds in the dark, and was sent to hospital suffering concussion and exhaustion. Returning after three weeks, he took part in a bloody but successful assault at Savy Wood. As he wrote to Susan:

Twice in one day we went over the top, gaining both our objectives. Our A Company led the Attack, and of course lost a certain number of men. I had some extraordinary escapes from shells and bullets. Fortunately there was no bayonet work, since the Hun ran before we got up to his trench . . . Never before has the Battalion encountered such intense shelling as rained on us as we advanced in the open . . . The reward we got for all this was to remain in the Line 12 days . . . A big shell lit on the top of the bank, just 2 yards from my head. Before I awoke, I was blown in the air right away from the bank!

A few days after the battalion was finally relieved, his colonel noticed that Owen was behaving oddly, and he was returned to hospital with what was labelled neurasthenia. He enlarged on the horrors of “the Stunt” at Savy Wood to his sister Mary:

You know it was not the Bosche [sic] that worked me up, nor the explosives, but it was living so long by poor old Cock Robin (as we used to call 2/Lt Gaukroger), who lay not only near by, but in various places around and about, if you understand. I hope you don’t.

His brother Colin received a long and extraordinary letter dated May 14, 1917:

The sensations of going over the top are about as exhilarating as those dreams of falling over a precipice, when you see the rocks at the bottom surging up to you. I woke up without being squashed. Some didn’t. There was an extraordinary exultation in the act of slowly walking forward, showing ourselves openly. There was no bugle and no drum for which I was very sorry. I kept up a kind of chanting sing-song: Keep the Line straight. Not so fast on the left! Steady on the left! Not so fast! Then we were caught in a Tornado of Shells. The various “waves” were all broken up and we carried on like a crowd moving off a cricket-field. When I looked back and the ground all crawling and wormy with wounded bodies, I felt no horror at all but only an exultation at having got through the Barrage.

The second part of this letter consists of a lengthy cod-Biblical litany, a sort of satire on the evangelical Christianity in which Owen no longer believed. In a letter to his mother, he points out the hypocrisy of Christians of all nations who support the war and think God is on their side.

I am more and more Christian as I walk the unchristian ways of Christendom. Already I have comprehended a light which will never filter into the dogma of any national church: namely that one of Christ’s essential commands was: Passivity at any price! Suffer dishonour and disgrace . . .  Christ is literally in no man’s land. There men often hear his voice: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life — for a friend. Is it spoken in English only and French? I do not believe so.

Owen was repatriated to Britain. At the Craiglockhart hospital outside Edinburgh, he slowly began to recover under the imaginative care of Dr W.H.R. Rivers. The arrival of Sassoon a month later transformed his life, and helped him to raise his poetry to new heights. It was here that he processed his experiences and sharpened his poetic technique, working and re-working masterworks such as “Anthem for Doomed Youth”.

He resumed light duties with a training battalion at Scarborough and enjoyed social life in London with poets and writers. Although only four of his poems had been published, he had arrived and, to his great delight, was admired and liked by his peers.

The first half of 1918 saw the British army nearly broken by the German spring offensive, but by late summer the tide had turned and Owen was sent back to the war. He was back with the 2nd Manchesters in mid-September.

On October 1, the regiment attacked the German line at Fonsomme, gaining all its objectives and capturing 210 prisoners but at great cost. Owen was awarded an immediate Military Cross, having taken command of his company when its commander and all but one of the other officers became casualties. As usual, he spared his mother none of the details:

I lost all my earthly faculties and fought like an angel . . . I am now commanding the company, and in the line had a boy lance-corporal as my Sergeant Major. With this corporal who stuck to me and shadowed me like your prayers, I captured a German machine gun and scores of prisoners . . . My nerves are in perfect order. I came out in order to help these boys — directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their suffering that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can. Of whose blood lies yet crimson on my shoulder where his head was — and where so lately yours was — I must not now write.

The Germans repeatedly counter-attacked Owen’s fearfully exposed position, but he held it until relieved by a fresh battalion. The other surviving officer, Lieut Foulkes, MC, wrote later:

This is where I admired his work — in leading his remnants, in the middle of the night, back to safety. I remember feeling how glad I was that it was not my job to know how to get out. I was content to follow him with the utmost confidence.

The war was clearly coming to an end, though the Germans resisted ferociously. The Manchesters moved up to the line of the Sambre Canal in anticipation of an assault crossing. On  October 31, Owen wrote his last extraordinary letter to his mother:

. . . So thick is the smoke in this cellar that I can hardly see by a candle 12 ins. away, and so thick are the inmates that I can hardly write for pokes, nudges & jolts. On my left the Coy. Commander snores on a bench: other officers repose on wire beds behind me. At my right hand, Kellett . . . radiates joy & contentment from pink cheeks and baby eyes. He laughs with a signaller, to whose left ear is glued the Receiver; but whose eyes rolling with gaiety show that he is listening with his right ear to a merry corporal, who appears at this distance away (some three feet) nothing but a gleam of white teeth & wheeze of jokes. Splashing my hand, an old soldier with a walrus moustache peels & drops potatoes into the pot. By him, Keyes, my cook, chops wood; another feeds the smoke with the damp wood. It is a great life. I am more oblivious than alas! Yourself, dear Mother, of the ghastly glimmering of the guns outside, & the hollow crashing of the shells. There is no danger down here, or if any, it will be well over before you read these lines. I hope you are as warm as I am: as serene in your room as I am here . . . Of this I am certain: you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here. Ever  Wilfred  x

At 0545 hrs on November 4 the attack commenced on the heavily defended canal. The bridge-building engineers were all killed or wounded, and the Manchesters took what cover they could. New attempts were made to cross using duckboards, and it was as he moved around encouraging his men that Owen was killed. The Manchesters’ attack was a bloody failure. Only two platoons got across the canal before the duckboard bridge was destroyed by shelling. One other officer and 22 other ranks were also killed. Three officers and 81 other ranks were wounded, 18 other ranks missing. The canal was crossed a mile or two away by another regiment and the advance continued. A week later came the ceasefire; on the same day Susan Owen learned of Wilfred’s death.

The profound friendship that Owen reveals in his letters goes a long way to explain how these troops could advance into such murderous peril, though they knew the wretched war was nearly over. There was also discipline and, after four years of slaughter, dogged professionalism to carry them on. English poetry may not yet have been fit to speak of them, but Wilfred Owen’s last letter, and their own actions on the Sambre Canal, spoke most eloquently.

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Exxon Mobil is the most notable of the great oil companies that provided the bulk of the Rockefeller fortune. It was formed from the merger 20 years ago of Standard Oil New Jersey (Exxon, or Esso) and Standard Oil New York (Mobil), the two most powerful legacy companies to emerge from the breakup of Rockefeller’s original Standard Oil Trust in 1913. Its leaders had certainly resisted the pressure felt by all oil companies to acknowledge the claims of climate scientists. Unlike other oil companies, they did not pay lip service to environmentalism, and continued  to run their affairs much as before. In public, Exxon Mobil championed climate scepticism. But as a company it reoriented its industrial activities away from oil and towards natural gas, which omits much less CO2 than coal or oil. Its response to the Rockefeller divestment was laconic and pugnacious: “It’s not surprising that they’re divesting from the company since they’re already funding a conspiracy against us.”

Conspiracy is a strong word, but across the US in particular activists are looking for ways to sue oil and coal companies. They see the oil industry denying scientific evidence of climate change in the same way that big tobacco denied the inks between smoking and cancer.

In January, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city was suing the world’s five largest publicly-traded oil companies — BP, Shell, Chevron, Conoco Phillips and Exxon Mobil — for damages related to climate change and the supposed threat to New York. He said:

“We are seeking billions of dollars in damages to protect us against extreme weather and rising seas and to fortify New York City against future storms. For decades big oil ravaged the environment and big oil copied big tobacco. They used a classic cynical playbook. They denied and denied and denied that their product was lethal. Meanwhile they spent a lot of time hooking society on that lethal product, and think about how cynical and dangerous that is knowing the damage that was being caused, having all the evidence in the world, and yet using all the tools at their disposal to deepen the crisis for their own profit.”

De Blasio went on to announce the city would start to divest its five pension funds, which held shares worth $5 billion in fossil fuel companies.New York’s action is the first outside California, where San Francisco and five other authorities have also sued a group of fossil fuel companies for damage related to climate change. None of these legal actions, citing “public nuisance”, have progressed much beyond the press release stage, but they are symptomatic of the increasingly aggressive tactics deployed by American environmentalists.

If the legal attacks do not look particularly threatening to the fossil fuel companies, the divestment movement seems, on the face of it, to be gathering momentum. Around the world, institutions worth up to $6 trillion have pledged themselves to divest all or part of their oil, gas and coal holdings. These are mostly publicly-owned pension funds or academic institutions. In the UK more than 60 universities, including Edinburgh, Bristol and Durham, have announced they are divesting, partially or completely. But the bigger names are holding out.

The University of Cambridge has come under particularly heavy pressure from students and staff to divest its £6.3 billion endowment fund. One of the British campaigning groups, People and Planet (those with long memories may recall its first incarnation as Third World First), says £370 million of the university’s money is invested in fossil fuel companies. The university receives research funding from BP, Shell, Exxon Mobil and others. The university’s governing body decided to divest, but, unprecedentedly, was overruled by its council, which sets policy. A divestment working group has been set up and is yet to report its final conclusions — despite being urged to come down on the side of divestment by such luminaries as Dr Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, and Professor Noam Chomsky, the eternal leftist theoretician.

The University of Oxford has adopted a subtler policy in dealing with the pressure from students and academics. It has divested from coal and tar sands — generally regarded as the worst of a bad lot — while maintaining its no doubt rewarding investments in oil companies. And it emphasises its commitment to renewable energy research as well as to investment in green energy companies.

The divestment movement on both sides of the Atlantic generates a great deal of heat but the actual effect on the companies concerned is negligible at best: the shares sold for idealistic reasons are bought by someone else, presumably of a less fastidious cast of mind. For the time being at least, divestment is unlikely to restrict the flow of capital into the targeted companies. And some more thoughtful environmentalists argue that divestment actually reduces their movement’s influence on companies. If you are not a shareholder, you cannot hold management to account, or engage them on future strategy.

An apparently more sophisticated actuarial argument is based on fossil fuel reserves becoming stranded assets. What does it matter if Exxon has 21.2 billion barrels of proven oil reserves if the global shift to zero carbon technology will not allow these reserves to be monetised? The pitch is thus: “Get out of these shares before they lose their worth.”
This reasoning is closely linked to the decisions of COP-21 taken at Paris (“The great climate change boondoggle”, Standpoint January/February 2016.) The principal ambition enshrined in the agreement was “to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognising that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.”

In their public pronouncements, environmentalists assume as a matter of course that the Paris targets can and will be met. For them it is a matter of morality, for sure, but also, because 186 nations signed up to the agreement, a matter above all of cast iron policy. The world has said it will do it, and therefore it shall be done, whatever inconvenient truths there may be about global economic growth and concomitant increases in energy demand. They speak in terms of carbon budgets as if there is a sort of global green treasury which will order a halt to energy-related carbon dioxide emissions.

One need not be unduly cynical to see that the Paris targets won’t be met by posturing, transnational dirigisme and (let us not forget) the called-for $100-billion-a-year wealth transfers from North to South. But action taken by sovereign nations, companies and individual consumers is already changing the balance between carbon-neutral and carboniferous energy sources. In 2017, for instance, renewables accounted for 40 per cent of new generating plant installed around the world. As the noted analyst Kingsmill Bond of TS Lombard has said: “If you believe in marginal economics, then you had better wake up to the fact that renewables are now the marginal source in power generation.”

It is a fact little acknowledged by the green commentariat, obsessed as they are by President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement, that the United States has seen the largest reduction in CO2 emissions in recent years. This is partly due to the encouragement of renewables at state rather than federal level: in 2017, for instance, the oil state of Texas generated 18 per cent of its electricity from wind and solar. It was greatly helped by its huge indigenous natural gas supply, which was always on hand to balance intermittent renewable production. And that points to the decisive factor in US CO2 abatement: cheap and abundant shale gas has largely replaced coal in thermal power generation. Gas emits less than half as much CO2 as coal.

Coal is the fossil fuel most vulnerable to the transition to renewables over the coming decades. But coal is cheap and abundant, and in many countries its role as a major employer gives it political clout. While China is expected to replace much of its coal capacity with gas and renewables, India — which despite signing the Paris agreement insists that the burden of reducing emissions must fall on the old industrial nations — will expand its coal-fired power stations enormously.

Recent experience in the coal industry shows that attempts to write it off have had unexpected effects, which may foreshadow what will happen in the oil industry in future decades. Big coal producers had scaled back their investment in new mines for “prudential reasons” related to the reduction in coal demand in the US and Europe. But Asian demand has continued to rise, causing the market price to double in less than two years. The prime beneficiaries of the environmentalists’’ war on coal have been the shareholders in mining companies.
Hitherto, power generation has been the energy sector most amenable to decarbonisation. As the global economy grows by 3-3.5 per cent over the coming decade, electricity will take an increasing share of the overall energy mix. This will be driven by rapidly increasing urbanisation, especially in Africa and Asia, with 2 billion more people living in cities by 2040. But even with renewables taking an increasing share of generation, rising by 7 per cent a year, gas use will continue to grow strongly for some decades. Coal is expected to maintain its current production as its share of the overall cake declines.

But other sectors, especially transport and industry, are likely to remain strongholds of fossil fuel use — though there will be a gradual shift from oil to natural gas (again reducing carbon intensity). BP’s most recent Energy Outlook shows oil demand rising until 2035 before reaching a plateau. Natural gas use will almost equal oil’s by 2040, while the dramatic increase in renewables may still leave it in fourth place behind coal.

Transport is the big one. While humans continue to drive diesel and petrol vehicles, and to fly in airplanes that burn jet kerosene, the oil industry has little to fear. BP’s forecast, even if taken with a pinch of salt, dramatically illustrates oil’s transport market dominance. The forecasts for electricity are based on a rapid increase in electric vehicles, but from a low base.

One area where that might change is in shipping. Although statistics for fuel consumption in this sector are notoriously unreliable, it is safe to say that they account for about 7 per cent of global oil demand. Three quarters of this is heavy fuel oil, the dirtiest end of the oil barrel, and the rest marine diesel. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) pledged recently to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at least 50 per cent by 2050, compared to 2008 levels. One way of doing that would be to switch from oil fuel to liquefied natural gas (LNG), of which there is a rapidly growing supply, thanks in part to US shale. That of course would be an enormous job, a process lasting many years, involving the complete replacement of the current world cargo fleet. LNG emits about 30 per cent less CO2 than oil fuels, and to get to the 50 per cent figure some calculate that it would be necessary to blend in biogas to the LNG. The bottom line is that none of this will happen in a hurry.

Should the fossil fuel industries be concerned about divestment? And should investors be concerned about the value of their oil, gas and coal holdings? In both cases, the answer is a cautious “no”. It is argued that oil companies should begin to scale back investment in new production, and return more cash to shareholders. But barring a technological silver bullet — cheap, easy and large-scale battery storage, for instance — the realities of global economic growth combined with the relatively low cost of oil, gas and coal, mean that the old dinosaurs have a few decades to flourish yet before they too become fossils. Although they will be grazing alongside the renewable energy mammals of the future.

And John D. Rockefeller? A ruthless capitalist, he was also a devout Baptist who used his immense wealth largely for philanthropic purposes. He might not entirely disapprove of his descendants’ turn away from fossil fuel. As he once said: “If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.”

The post No need to sell your oil shares just yet appeared first on Standpoint.

You have probably wondered, when reading a news article on a subject familiar to you, on which planet the author lives. The inhabitants of Fordwich, Kent, England’s smallest town, are smarting from two egregious examples of that loathsome type of metropolitan journalism, the restaurant review. In January, the Guardian and the Telegraph both arrived to sample the food at the Fordwich Arms, which had recently been taken over by an excellent chef who previously worked at a Michelin-starred restaurant in London.

Both reports read as if written by acolytes of Private Eye’s Glenda Slagg. The Telegraph writer’s companion started checking property prices before they had got out of the taxi from Canterbury West (and its high-speed link to St Pancras). The Guardian’s Grace Dent was also checking property prices. And she addressed us in print as “you poor Fordwich bastards”. At least she liked the food (10/10).
My fellow townspeople are incensed. To tell the truth, some of them were already disgruntled by the upscaling of the Fordwich Arms, which under the previous landlords had served large helpings of excellent home-cooked food of the kind — steak and kidney pud comes to mind — that appeals to the men and women of East Kent. But we shouldn’t complain: the food is still fabulous, just different, and that little bit more expensive.

No, what upsets us is that our gorgeous and historic town is being noticed by the ghastly metropolitan elite for the most piffling of reasons, that one of its two ancient pubs is now serving “sweetcorn panisse — thick chips hewn off a stiff, carb-a-licious corn batter that’s alive with tarragon — perched on a corn chowder with a wobbly confit duck egg yolk”.

So let me tell you about Fordwich, England’s smallest town, which lies on the right bank of the Great Stour, two miles downstream from Canterbury. With fewer than 400 inhabitants, it qualifies as a hamlet, but history and geography long ago elevated it to municipal status. Fordwich lies at the highest point of navigation on the Stour, which by default made it the port of Canterbury from Roman times until the coming of the railways in 1830. Before that all heavy cargo destined for Canterbury came up river from Sandwich and was discharged at Fordwich, which accordingly became a little place of some consequence.

The name is first recorded in 675 AD: Fordewic was simply the village by the ford. But there is a separate reference to St Mary’s Church in about 620, which places it within a generation of the arrival of St Augustine, the Roman abbot sent by Pope Gregory to bring Christianity to King Ethelbert of Kent. St Augustine succeeded triumphantly with Ethelbert, and there is a theory that the church stands by the river at Fordwich because it was the spot at which the people of Kent were baptised by mass immersion in the Stour.

In Domesday (1087), Fordwich is described as a small burgum, one of only eight boroughs, or towns, in Kent.

The most notable cargo handled by Fordwich was the Caen limestone imported by the Normans when they rebuilt Canterbury Cathedral. This was a lengthy process, which began in 1070 and continued for three centuries, punctuated by fires and an earthquake (1382). The stone was cut and dressed to order in Normandy, so that the blocks were ready to use as soon as they reached the cathedral site.

All through this period, the port of Fordwich was controlled by Canterbury’s other large ecclesiastical organisation, St Augustine’s Abbey. Cathedral and abbey had both been founded by Augustine shortly after his arrival from Rome in 597 AD. Both were houses of Benedictine monks. But when it came to business, no quarter was given, and the port dues paid to the abbey by the cathedral were a significant part of the stone’s total cost. The cathedral tried to develop its own port, 200 yards downstream, but it is recorded that in 1280 a serious brawl took place in Fordwich between the lay brothers of the abbey and the cathedral. A compromise saw St Augustine’s lowering its charges in return for the cathedral abandoning its own port. Today the only relic of this episode is a house called Monk’s Hall, built to house the cathedral’s lay brothers. 

Although the abbey owned the manor of Fordwich, it did not control the townspeople, who, unlike the cathedral, managed to run their own port operations alongside the abbey’s. Numerous privileges accumulated during the early medieval period, and Fordwich became known as a Liberty, that is, a place which had a large measure of autonomy within its boundaries. It had a town council and a mayor, elected every St Andrew’s Day, supported by 11 “jurats”, or councillors. The use of the term resulted from Fordwich’s affiliation as a limb, or dependency of Sandwich in the Cinque Ports — the group of south-eastern ports which, in return for providing men and ships for the Crown, enjoyed freedom from taxes and duties.

The connection was natural, as Sandwich stood at the mouth of the Stour, and all cargo passed through it en route to Fordwich. The link goes back to Saxon times, but was formalised about 1218, when Fordwich adopted a “custumal” based in many respects on similar documents at Sandwich and the other Cinque Ports but with some features unique to Fordwich. In particular, Chapter 1 is a copy of the Merchant Gild Charter granted by King Henry II in 1184:

Wherefore, we will strictly command for us and our heirs that the aforesaid men of Fordwich and their heirs for ever have all the liberties before written as is aforesaid and all the laws and customs which they more fully had of the Kings Edward, William the First, the Second and King Henry our grandfather.

Henry II intended here, as he did in many other places, to tidy up the clutter of ancient customs that marked local government in England. The Gild Charter confirmed the power of the mayor and jurats to regulate the monopoly of trade enjoyed by the town, and strengthened its hand in disputes with St Augustine’s Abbey, and its local port manager, the Abbot’s Bailiff. The procedures for electing the mayor and jurats are carefully set out, as is the extensive legal authority enjoyed by the town within the bounds of the liberty.

This included capital punishment, for which drowning in the river at a deep point known as “Thefeswell” was prescribed. Lesser punishments included being drummed through the town with a board round her neck, reserved for “scolds” — in most cases women who had annoyed men with their chatter.

The dissolution of St Augustine’s Abbey in 1538 strengthened the town council’s grip on the Liberty of Fordwich. The new town hall was built in 1544 by the river, with a crane house that embodied the council’s control of river trade. The council chamber — still in use today — was also the criminal court room, and featured a bar at which prisoners were forced to plead. On the ground floor there was a prison cell, last used in the 1850s to punish a couple of men caught poaching fish in the river.

Fishing is another important part of the Fordwich story. St Augustine’s controlled the fishing for seven miles downstream, but as the centuries passed, the rights fell to the mayor and jurats, which naturally encouraged poaching. The Stour has always teemed with fish, achieving wide fame in 1653 when, in chapter four of the Compleat Angler, Isaac Walton wrote:

There is also in Kent, near Canterbury, a Trout called there a Fordidge Trout, a Trout that bears the name of the town where it is usually caught, that is accounted the rarest of fish, many of them near the bigness of a Salmon.

Walton’s spelling of the town’s name reflects the historic pronunciation, but since universal education arrived in the late 19th century, people have tended to pronounce the “w”. The Fordidge Trout was probably a sea trout, which still occasionally spawn in the river. And the trout features in the town’s arms.

The port of Fordwich carried people as well as cargo. We tend to forget how important water transport was before the coming of the railways: 400 years ago, for instance, a journey on foot from London to Canterbury would have taken at least three days over muddy roads vulnerable to footpads. How much easier it would have been to take ship in the Pool of London and, with the right tides, arrive at Fordwich in less than 24 hours.

William Shakespeare and his company, the King’s Men, would have travelled from London to Canterbury via water, disembarking at Fordwich. We can be sure of this because the council’s accounts record numerous instances of payment to the King’s Men and other theatre companies to play in the town. These payments usually coincided with well-documented visits by the same players to Canterbury. This was during the first golden age of English theatre, between about 1560 and the beginning of the civil war in 1640. Amusingly, from about 1610, an increasingly puritanical Canterbury city council began paying the actors to go away, which merely gave Fordwich an opportunity to cash in. After all, it was only half an hour’s walk for any Canterbury resident keen to see the latest plays from London. The plays were probably put on in St Mary’s church, which in those days would not have had pews.

In 1943, Fordwich featured prominently in A Canterbury Tale, the remarkable and mysterious Powell and Pressburger film. Starring Sheila Sim, Eric Portman and a genuine US Army sergeant, John Sweet, it explores the nature of wartime England, with a romantic emphasis on both continuity and social change. Michael Powell was born three miles away at Howlett’s Farm (now one of the Aspinall zoos), and schooled at King’s Canterbury. In the film, Fordwich was renamed Chillingbourne, but the Town Hall and other buildings are instantly recognisable. Powell had set significant scenes inside the Town Hall, but the size of the film cameras then in use, as well as the danger of fire from the arc lights, meant that the interior had to be faithfully recreated at Denham Studios.
Notable inhabitants of Fordwich include Sir John Finch, later 1st Baron Finch of Fordwich. A lawyer by training, Sir John was MP for Canterbury before becoming Recorder for the city. In 1625 he made the loyal speech to King Charles I during his visit to Canterbury, was knighted and made speaker of the House of Commons. There in 1629 he fell foul of the House by trying to leave to discover the King’s wishes during a dispute over the Crown’s right to levy duties, and was held down in his chair (an episode jocularly re-enacted today at the election of a new speaker).

The brothers John and Gregory Blaxland, probably the earliest non-convict English settlers of Australia, were born and raised in the Manor House, since renamed Watergate House. Encouraged by Sir Joseph Banks and the future Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, they set off in 1806 for Botany Bay with their families, servants and farm animals. In 1813, Gregory, the younger brother, found the route over the Blue Mountains which allowed the British colonists to expand into the outback. He was rewarded with a grant of 1000 acres that he named Fordwich Farm, and is credited with planting Australia’s first wine grapes.

Today the population of Fordwich is little larger than in its heyday as a medieval port. The only significant growth has come with the construction of two small housing estates on what used to be water meadows across the river from the core of the old town. St Mary’s Church, while still consecrated, is cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust. It has become England’s most popular “champing” site. Champing, for those who have not tried it, is the practice of sleeping in an old church overnight, for which one is rewarded with a cooked breakfast in the morning. Fordwich Farm, mentioned in Domesday, gave up agriculture in 2001, and, with all its farm buildings, has become private housing.

But the biggest change is the road traffic. There is only one road in and out of Fordwich, and it is used as a rat run by Canterbury commuters and much illegal lorry traffic. There are plans to build a relief road closer to Canterbury, but, as we all know, Britain generally does infrastructure too little and too late.

Fordwich, however, is determined to move with the times. The court room of the Town Hall is accessed by a steep staircase, which makes it impossible for most disabled or elderly people to reach it. After some years of wrangling, English Heritage reluctantly approved a plan to attach a lift to the outside wall of the building: to its credit it was “particularly influenced by the degree to which continuity of the existing use contributes to the building’s significance and the desirability therefore of securing the continuation of that use for the future”.

Continuity can also be seen in the town’s relations with its “head port” of Sandwich. The mayor of Fordwich (from 2011-2016, your correspondent) has a secondary role as mayor deputy to the mayor of Sandwich, and every July affirms his allegiance at the Sandwich Guildhall in resounding Elizabethan language. He also pays over three shillings and four pence as “ship money” to help defray Sandwich’s maritime obligations. As befits old friends, the town sergeant of Sandwich slips the money back to the mayor deputy for use the following year.

After nearly a thousand years, the Town Council still meets monthly and debates matters of importance to the citizens: traffic, parking, fishing rights, litter and planning. Although legally recognised as the council of a “small town”, it is effectively a parish council with attitude. Unlike its medieval forerunner, it has little if any real power, and can only advise Canterbury City Council and Kent County Council of its wishes. There are times when we would like to lock inconsiderate drivers into our small and slightly noisome jail cell, at least for an hour or two, or even dip them in the river on the ducking stool still lovingly preserved in the town hall. But these are kinder, if more toothless, times.

A town that has preserved its identity for 1,400 years (it is older than Liverpool or Leeds), has hosted Shakespeare, sent explorers to the other side of the world and starred in one of the great British films, has nothing to fear from an invasion of metropolitan gourmets. We ask only that they arrive by boat or train, and leave their Teslas in Islington.

The post The little town that just won’t lie down appeared first on Standpoint.

Opec in and of itself is a most ineffective cartel. Its market power principally resides, as it has always resided, in Saudi Arabia’s swing production — the ability to raise or lower output in order to defend a particular oil price. This is a role the Saudis have always regarded with a reluctance bordering on distaste. Two years ago they abandoned it altogether in favour of maintaining a steady level of production that did not commit them to maintaining the high prices required by their non-Opec competitors (principally major oil companies and US shale drillers). That policy helped cut the price from $110 to as low as $40.

It is worth emphasising that not only do other Opec members not share Saudi Arabia’s swing ability, but over the years most of them have proved themselves incapable of sticking to production quotas agreed, invariably with great media fanfare, at ministerial meetings. Not to put too fine a point on it, most Opec members are inveterate cheats. Two of the most important, Iran and Iraq, are rebuilding their export capacities after many years of warfare and embargo, so will not stick to any number they may have put their names to at Opec. As for Russia, which allowed itself to be flirted with by Opec, any idea of oil export cuts is laughable.

Any sharp increases in the oil price — say to $75 or more — will be short-lived. That is because the US shale industry has adapted adroitly to the challenge posed by lower prices and can now produce profitably at $40/bl. And the US has lifted export controls (originally imposed after the first Opec challenge of 1973/74) allowing American crude to flow into the world market.

By unlocking the vast riches trapped in shale rock, fracking has changed the nature of the oil industry. Shale oil and gas are essentially manufacturing businesses with well-defined resources and costs. Because the resource is well understood, the process is largely de-risked, especially compared to the traditional risk-based exploration and production business. Producers make swift decisions based on costs and prices. Currently it is confined to North America, but it must inevitably spread to other regions as well.

President-elect Donald Trump has said he will do everything possible to encourage further shale oil and gas development to make his country fully energy-independent. His chief energy advisor is Harold Hamm,  chief executive officer and majority  owner of Continental Resources, a US shale oil producer.

 That is the new reality that Saudi Arabia and its unreliable comrades in Opec have begun to face up to. They can produce to a certain price, but they no longer have the ability to push it beyond the marginal cost of shale oil in the United States.

The bottom line is that, absent major supply disruptions (war in the Middle East or North Africa, for instance), the oil market is likely to settle around $50 (+/- $10) for the foreseeable future.

The post Reality Check For Opec appeared first on Standpoint.

Some years ago a British friend of mine commanded the UN forces in Kosovo. I asked him what his mission was. “To instil respect for the rule of law!” he barked. And how far did he get with that in his year there? “At least one quarter of one per cent,” he returned with a grin. “Merely another four centuries to go.”

A similar air of unreality pervades Leif Wenar’s Blood Oil, a good-hearted programme for weaning the West off reliance on oil and other resources sold by dictators, tyrants and hereditary monarchs, in the process turning these benighted nations into models of democracy and fair wealth distribution. However, unlike my friend the soldier’s appreciation of Balkan brigandage, Professor Wenar appears not to recognise the realkommerz of global resource trade.

Wenar is Professor of Philosophy and Law at King’s College London. He argues that the norms of international trade rely on an imperfectly upgraded version of the Westphalian rules which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648. These rules recognised absolute national sovereignty and the legal doctrine of effectiveness: that within a country’s borders, might makes right. This means that the default position in international trade recognises the right of whoever rules in any particular country to sell that country’s resources on the international market and spend the proceeds as they wish.

This leads to the uncomfortable realisation that the oil in your tank may come from Equatorial Guinea, further enriching its president, the murderous kleptocrat Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Or that your smartphone only works because of the tantalum capacitors derived from coltan ore mined by oppressed villagers in the anarchic Democratic Republic of Congo. Wenar often returns in the course of his dialectic to these two particularly appalling examples. Equatorial Guinea actually accounted for only 0.3 per cent of global crude oil production in 2015, though of course that doesn’t excuse the president. The DRC, on the other hand, produced nearly a fifth of the world’s newly-mined coltan in 2013. Here are two particularly horrible examples of the Resource Curse, where strategic resources from undeveloped countries enrich only corrupt elites who then spend their money on luxuries and properties in the West, where they know they will be safe.

Wenar extends his condemnation to many more “resource-cursed” countries, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, some of whose citizens fund global jihad via IS and al-Qaeda. But while these countries are ruled by hereditary despots, they do spend much of their wealth on their own populations, including (absurdly) subsidising petrol prices. And while the fact may disturb decent Western liberals, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are genuine strategic allies of the West.

In international trade, the law of effectiveness means that once a commodity has been sold, even by a really beastly government, it belongs entirely to the purchaser and is legally the same as a commodity which has been ethically sourced. The only exceptions are where, usually for strategic reasons, the US and/or the UN applies sanctions to particular producers: Iran for instance, or Sudan.

To force the issue, Wenar poses some hypothetical situations. Suppose the state of New York declares “might makes right” for goods in New Jersey, encouraging anyone who can seize goods in the Garden State to sell them with full legal title in New York. Not only would this be immoral, it would encourage “crime kings, syndicates, turf wars, fraud and grand theft — similar to what we see on a larger scale in resource-disordered countries today”. (Devotees of The Sopranos may feel this situation already exists in New Jersey.)

In the West, though, we live between our history and our principles. The doctrine of effectiveness has been superseded in many areas of our lives by more humane imperatives. The shining example is the abolition of slavery, begun 200 years ago by British Christians and enforced over 60 years by the Royal Navy. And in many other areas of human rights we would not tolerate imported cruelty. If, today, a gay man condemned to death in Iran were to escape to Europe or America, he would be safe: there would be no question of Iran’s oppressive laws being effective here.

What Wenar describes as “counter-power” — the extension of human rights and intolerance of oppression in all its forms — has already changed the way we in the West interact with the less-developed world. But to deal with effectiveness and the resource curse, he proposes a more radical policy. Each major importing nation should pass a Clean Trade Act which would require resource producers to be free, democratic and economically distributive. When (as seems inevitable) the despots simply sell their oil to the Chinese or another unsentimental power, the enlightened Western nations would set up Clean Trade Trusts, funded by import duties on (say) Chinese manufactures. The money would be held in trust against the day the downtrodden and resource-cursed inhabitants were liberated.

One does not need to be unduly cynical to see that this won’t work. The Chinese, or the Indians, or whoever else is not quite up to our standards of probity, would find ways to retaliate — possibly rather violently. And competition among the coalition of the decent would also skew the system. As my first boss, the late Jan Nasmyth, used to say: “It is in the nature of oil to flow.” A more promising solution than Clean Trade Acts would be for every Western country to join the US in fracking for oil so that we no longer need rely on the resource-cursed.

I do not denigrate this book, which is readable, intelligent and thought-provoking. For a work of practical philosophy it is written in a lively style, and it is not, in the main, naive. Wenar relies as much on the Sermon on the Mount and St Augustine as on Marx and Engels. He understands the huge benefits that oil and global markets have brought to the human race. He wishes, as we all do, that these benefits could be extended to those not fortunate enough to live in the OECD. He outlines with power and clarity the ethical challenges we live with, and, if he does not to my mind provide a practical solution, he has left me in no doubt that we have to find one.

The post There Will Be Blood appeared first on Standpoint.

The Proms’ original home was the Queen’s Hall in Langham Place, but the orchestras were scratch affairs, often poorly rehearsed. Speyer set up the Queen’s Hall Orchestra as a limited company with himself as chairman and Newman as manager. The orchestra was put on a professional footing. He largely paid the costs himself, persuading leading performers and composers of the day to appear. He kept ticket prices to a minimum, and it was possible to buy a season ticket that worked out at fourpence per day. Henry Wood continued as principal conductor, and was overwhelmed by Speyer’s generosity: when, for instance, Wood lamented the absence of a decent first oboe, Speyer whisked him off to the Paris Conservatoire to audition and hire the best in France.

Edgar Speyer was the scion of a prominent German Jewish merchant banking family from Frankfurt, originally wealthier than their neighbours the Rothschilds. By the middle of the 19th century there were branches in New York, Frankfurt and London. In 1886, Edgar himself took over Speyer Bros, the London branch housed at 7 Lothbury, an extravagant Venetian Gothic building behind the Bank of England; he became a British citizen in 1892 at the age of 30. His brother James ran the New York bank and brother-in-law Eduard Beit von Speyer oversaw Frankfurt. The three branches cooperated on a global scale, investing in major trade and infrastructure projects, while maintaining substantial domestic businesses. Edgar was thus part of the pre-war cosmopolitan elite, sophisticated, cultivated and philanthropic.

Speyer rapidly integrated into British life, taking British citizenship in 1892, joining the Church of England and becoming a member of the Liberal Party. As a friend of the Liberal leader Herbert Asquith, he was created baronet in 1906 and appointed to the Privy Council in 1909 — a signal honour for a man of German Jewish origins, and one that would return to plague him.

In 1902, at the age of 40, Speyer married the German-American violinist Leonora von Stosch, with whom he had three daughters. He knocked together 44 and 46 Grosvenor Street in Mayfair and commissioned the fashionable architect Detmar Blow to build the imposing Beaux Arts mansion that still stands there today. The heart of the house was a music room dominated by John Singer Sergeant’s portrait of Leonora. Among the guests who performed there were Elgar, Debussy, Grieg, Richard Strauss, Percy Grainger and Henry Wood.

Speyer was an active and daring financier, and became heavily involved in the development of London’s first deep Tube lines using electric traction. Of undoubted probity himself, Speyer had to rescue the tangled affairs of the Underground Electric Railway Company following the death of its founder. This was an immensely expensive undertaking, and though in the end it made Speyer even richer, for several years the issue — and the fortunes of the bank — hung in the balance. Londoners owe the existence of the Northern, Central, Piccadilly, Bakerloo, Circle and Metropolitan lines to the success of his intervention. To provide the electricity, Speyer built the Lots Road power station in Chelsea, then Europe’s largest, and only decommissioned in 2002.

The rescue and establishment of the deep Tube lines was perhaps his greatest business achievement, demonstrating his financial genius, strength of purpose and public-spiritedness. But he should be honoured too for his extraordinary philanthropy.

In addition to rescuing the Proms, Speyer was a major benefactor of the  Whitechapel Art Gallery, of which he became a trustee in 1900. The gallery was close to his heart because it made art accessible to London’s labouring poor.

In the medical field he was chairman of the Nervous Diseases Research Fund, and president of Poplar Hospital in the East End of London. He visited the accident ward at Poplar every week, and, if a patient was a breadwinner, supported their families. He gave £25,000 (equivalent to around £2.5 million today) to the King Edward’s Hospital Fund. Today known as the King’s Fund, it channelled money to London’s voluntary hospitals before the establishment of the NHS in 1948.

In 1904 Speyer gave £5,700 to replace the losses suffered by investors in a failed penny savings bank in Suffolk. And from 1909 he was honorary treasurer of Robert Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition, donating £1,000 and taking responsibility for the £40,000 balance still required. One of Scott’s last letters, found on his body, was to Speyer: “I thank you a thousand times for your help and support and for your generous kindness.” Mount Speyer in Antarctica is named after him.

By the summer of 1914, Speyer was at the peak of his wealth, power and influence. He and Leonora seemed to lead a charmed life. In the months before the assassination at Sarajevo, they gave opulent balls at Grosvenor Street, took the waters at Karlsbad, dined with the German ambassador Prince Lichnowski and attended a musical soirée at Downing Street with the Prime Minister and Mrs Asquith. Speyer approved the design of the Scott monument, and William Orpen’s portrait of him was exhibited at the Royal Academy’s summer show. Leonora played the violin at recitals in Grosvenor Street, accompanied by the composers Gabriel Fauré and Richard Strauss.

As Europe slid towards war, the Speyers decamped as usual in high summer to their house at Overstrand on the Norfolk coast. The adjoining cottage was rented by their friends Winston and Clementine Churchill. In late July Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, left Overstrand for London to make naval dispositions, and the Speyers pressed Clementine to make full use of their telephone to keep in touch.

In his book Banker, Traitor, Scapegoat, Spy? (2013), Anthony Lentin records that Edward Marsh, Churchill’s private secretary, visited the Speyers at Overstrand. Marsh found Speyer on the terrace listening to his daughters recite poems — “a perfect little picture of simple patriarchal German domesticity . . . they were the last Germans I spoke to for many years.”

War swept away such Gemütlichkeit. The onrush of events transformed the public mood. Germans invaded neutral Belgium and soon British troops were heavily engaged: by early September the army had suffered 20,000 casualties, and by the end of November the total exceeded 100,000, half of them dead or missing.

Reports of German atrocities, often exaggerated at the time, were widely believed. In fact, the Germans did behave appallingly, murdering some 6,500 Belgian civilians in retribution for usually imagined acts of resistance.

The British government introduced stringent controls on enemy aliens, beginning with the Defence of the Realm Act and the Aliens Restrictions Act. The 65,000 Germans and Austrians residing in Britain faced immediate restrictions, with growing calls for internment or expulsion. Fear and suspicion of strangers was not new, although in the years before the war the focus had been on Russian and German Jews. Powerful forces in politics and the press moulded opinion in what was by today’s standards an extraordinarily patriotic nation. The radical Right embodied a wide range of nationalist and imperialist opinion, and was strongly represented in the Unionist wing of the Conservative party. Lord Northcliffe’s papers — The Times, Daily Mail, Evening News and Weekly Despatch — led the Fleet Street pack.

The sudden hatred of Huns affected Germans of every rank, including the Royal Family: as is well-known, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha became Windsor, and Battenberg became Mountbatten.

The eminent military historian Professor Sir Michael Howard told me that his family, the Ehrenburgs, had been in England for 50 years before the outbreak of the war. Immensely wealthy, they had a house in Eaton Square, were received in the best society and were notable for their charitable giving. “By the beginning of October 1914, we had not a single friend left.” Unlike the Speyers, they managed to cling on, though changing their name to Howard. As a young man, Sir Michael was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards and won a Military Cross fighting the Germans in 1944.

At the other end of the social scale, my great-grandfather, Anton Friedrich Heren, moved to London from Rhineland-Palatinate in about 1870. A painter and decorator, he married an English girl and raised a large family in the East End. His son Anton Robert, a regular soldier, was mortally wounded at Mons; he succumbed to his injuries at Brighton, reputedly the first Tommy to die on home soil in the Great War. Another son, my great-uncle Lou, was blinded at Passchendaele, aged 17. Anton Friedrich was spared deportation on account of his age, his marriage to an Englishwoman and the fact that most of his sons were in the army. Nevertheless, the Heren family collectively rebranded itself: by the 1920s they had decided that they were of French Basque origin (ostensibly from Bayonne, rather than Bayern).

Sir Edgar Speyer, although a naturalised British citizen, a baronet and a Privy Councillor, was under no illusions about the gravity of the situation. On August 12 he wrote to his brother-in-law Eduard Beit von Speyer, the director of the German branch, ending their partnership: “This war has altered everything. It is like a tremendous hurricane which uproots trees.”

The first attack came from William Boosey of Chappell & Co, who had lost out to Speyer when he took over the Queen’s Hall Orchestra in 1902. Under the headline “Highly Placed Spies”, Boosey wrote to The Times warning of:

The paramount position of many Germans in our world of finance, often with their necessary and attendant purchased titles . . . The position and sympathies of these Germans here needs defining. In some instances they exercise an almost exclusive control over some of our railways and other means of locomotion. It is impossible to imagine Englishmen occupying similar positions in Berlin at this moment.

This was a thinly-veiled direct attack on Speyer.

Chappell cancelled Speyer’s lease on the Queen’s Hall, and tried to ban the performance of German music. Speyer nevertheless continued to finance the remainder of the 1914 Proms season. The attempt to ban German music was defeated by Sir Henry Wood and many prominent musicians.

At this stage Speyer clearly thought British common sense and generosity — as well as his connections — would allow him to stay. He subscribed £38,000 (nearly £4 million in 2016 money) to the first British war bond. But his brother James, director of the New York branch Speyer & Co, continued to do business with German banks and industrialists such as Krupp. The US was neutral in 1914, and this trade was legal there, but it led to the firm being blacklisted in Britain. Furthermore James was a close friend of the German ambassador to the US, Count Bernstorff, whom he entertained lavishly shortly after the outbreak of war. Bernstorff actively sought to influence American opinion, and funds earmarked for propaganda purposes were deposited with Speyer & Co.

As events unfolded Sir Edgar carried on as best he could, dealing with financing challenges connected with the Underground Electric Railway Company (UERC). He also continued to socialise with the Asquiths at Downing Street. In October the Speyers dined at Number 10 with the Churchills and others. Shortly afterwards it was alleged in the press that at the dinner Churchill had discussed naval dispositions which Speyer could have passed to the German admiralty. He had already been fancifully accused of signalling to the German fleet from his house at Overstrand.

Speyer was deeply wounded by the allegations. He resigned from the UERC, from the boards of all his charities, and withdrew his three daughters from their schools. In public he maintained what he thought of as a dignified silence, but which was regarded by his enemies as Hunnish arrogance.

On May 7, 1915, the Germans sank RMS Lusitania, killing 1,198 passengers and crew. The playwright Sir Arthur Pinero called for prominent naturalised Germans to write “loyalty letters”. Sir Ernst Cassel, Sir George Henschel, Sir Karl Meyer and Sir Felix Schuster complied, but Speyer refused. Instead he wrote to Asquith to ask for his baronetcy and Privy Council membership to be revoked:

Nothing is harder to bear than a sense of injustice that finds no vent in expression. For the last nine months I have kept silence and treated with disdain the charges of disloyalty and suggestions of treachery made against me in the Press and elsewhere. But I can keep silence no longer, for these charges and suggestions have now been repeated by public men who have not scrupled to use their position to inflame the overstrained feelings of the people. I am not a man who can be driven or drummed by threats or abuse into an attitude of justification. But I consider it due to my honour as a loyal British subject and my personal dignity as a man to retire all my public positions. I therefore write to ask you to accept my resignation as a Privy Councillor and to revoke my baronetcy.

This was fatal to any chance that Speyer might recover his reputation. It was in any case futile as there was no mechanism for withdrawing honours, and King George refused to contemplate doing so. Asquith repeated his strong personal support in a letter that was also published in The Times, but the Speyers had had enough. On May 26, 1915, they sailed to New York to see out the war in America. Neither their departure, nor their subscription of a further £27,000 (£3 million today) to the British war bond, lessened the stream of vitriolic attacks.

As the war continued its bloody course, anti-German feeling in Britain became deeper and more bitter. Around the time of the Speyers’ departure, Asquith had bowed to pressure and increased the round of internments and repatriations of “enemy aliens”. Quasi-legal tribunals dealt with both sanctions, and, from the number of exemptions granted, appeared to have been reasonable, if not exactly lenient. This did not satisfy the jingoists, who forced through parliament further measures to penalise “enemy aliens” including those who were naturalised.

Meanwhile Edgar and Leonora remained in Boston, the most English of American cities, and spent their summers in Bar Harbor, Maine, a suitable substitute for Overstrand. Brother James (whose attitude to his own contribution to the damage to his brother’s reputation is unrecorded) remained in New York, trading with Germany until America’s entrance into the war in 1917. He then retreated to his country estate, Waldheim — though he had the sign with the name taken down.

In London, the knives were still out for Edgar. MI5 was asked to dig for dirt on him, although its initial efforts were not encouraging: the Washington embassy reported only that Speyer had lent moral support to Karl Muck, the chief conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under pressure to resign as a German.

The end of hostilities brought no relief. In 1921 the Home Office’s Certificates of Naturalisation (Revocation) Committee met in camera to consider a number of charges. It was a treason trial in all but name. Sir Edgar travelled from America to attend in person, but did little to defend himself. He made it clear he thought most of the questions were without merit, and he resisted his own counsel’s attempts to draw out his record of financial support for the British war effort, as well as much war-related charity. He seemed to think such special pleading to be bad manners. Although, to a modern eye, there is little of substance to be held against Sir Edgar, and certainly no evidence whatever of treason, the committee decided that he had

1) . . . shown himself by act and speech to be disaffected and disloyal to His Majesty, and

2) . . . during the war in which His Majesty was engaged, unlawfully communicated with subjects of an enemy State and associated with a business which was to his knowledge carried on in such manner as to assist the enemy in such war.

The Home Secretary, Sir Edward Shortt, ordered his certificate of naturalisation to be revoked, and that his wife and three daughters cease to be British subjects. Urged on by Sir Almeric Fitzroy, his Germanophobic private secretary, King George V ordered Speyer’s name to be struck from the list of Privy Councillors, though he refused to wield the pen himself.

The four officials most closely associated with this process — Mr Justice Salter, Sir Edward Shortt, the Attorney General and the Solicitor General — had each lost a son in the trenches.

The Speyers returned to New York, where they bought a fine house on Washington Square, appropriately enough for people who might have been characters from a late Henry James work. In Britain, meanwhile, E.F. Benson put them into his anti-Semitic novel Robin Linnet, barely disguised as Sir Hermann and Lady Aline Gurtner:

Sir Hermann had lately built an enormous house in Curzon Street, and had furnished it with anything in the way of tapestry, lacquer, Louis XV, and old oak that was expensive enough. There was no taste of any sort exercised over his purchases; the only point was that they should be extremely costly, and in consequence the whole house resembled a museum. He spoke German with an English accent, French with a German accent and English with a Yiddish accent. But he spoke all three sparingly, for he had nothing much to say in any of them.

Why should we care, a century later, about these wealthy minor casualties of a war in which 20 million people died? They continued to live luxuriously, and to indulge their artistic and philanthropic interests. Sir Edgar — he retained the baronetcy — died in Hamburg during the course of a routine nose operation in 1932.

Leonora won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1927 and lived to 1956. Her poem “The Ballad of a Lost House” imagines a painful supernatural return to the mansion on Grosvenor Street. Recently set to music by the composer David Lawrence, it was performed at the Grosvenor Chapel during a concert in honour of Speyer:

On with the tale and on to a door
Where a man had passed to pass no more:
A quiet man with a quiet strength,
And over the threshold his shadow’s length
Lay like an answer for Time to weigh;
And the dust from his feet spread thick and gray.
And I thought: Well shaken!

All three of her daughters returned to Britain. Pamela Speyer married an Austrian aristocrat, Count Hugo Moy de Sons, in 1926, and died in Sussex in 1985. Leonora the younger lived with the concert pianist Maria Donska and died in Kent in 1987. Vivien, ironically, returned in the Second World War as a member of the US Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

Natural justice should oblige the 21st century British — and in particular the BBC — to acknowledge the Proms’ debt to the Speyers. This year Crossrail has been named the Elizabeth Line in honour of our great Queen, the latest in a 300-year dynasty of German monarchs: Transport for London could do more to celebrate the achievements of the man who made sure London’s deep Tube lines were financed, built and powered with electricity.

But there is more at stake here. The Speyers’ disgrace was the most personal manifestation of the wave of hatred for Germans and Germany that was one of Britain’s principal legacies of the Great War. The truly evil nature of the Nazi regime in the subsequent conflict cemented a popular view of Germans as militarists with a hysterical streak. Yet Germany has utterly transformed itself since then: despite our pivotal role in rebuilding Germany after 1945 (for which the Germans are profoundly grateful) it is the British who remain stuck in a century-old groove, giggling reflexively at jokes like “don’t mention ze var”.

With the European Union in crisis, Germany has once again emerged as the continent’s leader. Luckily, it is now a peaceful, generous and quixotically liberal nation, as demonstrated by its decision to accept a million refugees, not to mention its radical energiewende policy. As the UK ponders a future outside the EU, it is more important than ever that we should draw culturally closer to Germany — that we should stop thinking of Germans as the enemy.

The tale of Edgar and Leonora Speyer shows us how closely Britain and Germany were once intertwined. We need to re-forge those bonds, not necessarily within the EU, but culturally, recognising what our forebears knew, that Britons and Germans are cousins.

The definitive account of the trials of Sir Edgar Speyer is Banker, Traitor, Scapegoat, Spy? (Haus, £12.99) by the historian Antony Lentin. He bases much of the book on the previously unpublished transcripts of the quasi-judicial tribunal that in 1921 found Speyer guilty of disloyalty and trading with the enemy during wartime. That judgement led swiftly to Speyer being stripped of his British citizenship and membership of the Privy Council.

Lentin is at pains to be impartial. Speyer’s position was in some respects ambiguous. He felt personally loyal to Britain, supported the war effort by subscribing generously to war bonds and always made it clear that Britain had no choice but to go to war with Germany. Yet during the course of the war he communicated with friends and relations in Germany, using the networks available to him as an international banker and, crucially, evading British intelligence. In this respect, and perhaps also in the imperious way he had written to Prime Minister Asquith to renounce all his honours, Speyer may have seemed too loftily detached from the bloody struggle in which his adopted country was engaged.

Beautifully written, Banker, Traitor, Scapegoat, Spy? is unlikely to be surpassed as an account of Speyer’s life. “There is tragedy in the fall of a great benefactor of English musical and artistic life, who had basked in the approval of Edwardian society; but that individual tragedy reflects the wider tragedy of a war in which few in the land were untouched.”

George W. Liebmann’s The Fall Of The House of Speyer (I.B. Tauris, £25) widens the focus to the last half-century of the family banking network. His account of Sir Edgar’s misfortunes owes much to Lentin’s work, but the tale of the Speyers’ far-reaching investments in railways and other infrastructure projects in the 40 years before 1914 is original and illuminating. The New York branch under James Speyer was for a time the third largest US investment bank, though it was always implacably opposed by the leader, J.P. Morgan. Before the first war it brought European investment into the US, and after the war American capital into central Europe. James was a prickly man and, despite his many charities, had few friends in American society. Like Edgar, he had no sons, and the rise of Nazism in Germany, combined with the depression in the USA, meant that the House of Speyer could not survive his death in 1941.

Liebmann also uncovers the tale of James Speyer Kronthal, a relation by marriage of James and Edgar, who was an early member of the OSS, forerunner of the CIA. Apparently involved in efforts before and after the war to retrieve art works looted by the Nazis, he killed himself in 1953.

An exhaustive survey of British Germanophobia is The Enemy In Our Midst, by Panikos Panayi. This shows signs of having begun life as a PhD thesis, but is nevertheless an indispensable resource for anyone interested in this extraordinary episode.

The post The Tragic Disgracing Of A Good German appeared first on Standpoint.

More than 40,000 delegates, politicians, scientists, green lobbyists, self-publicists and journalists (10 per cent of the total) crammed into a purpose-built complex at Le Bourget, the old aerodrome outside Paris now used, ironically, for private aircraft only. The French government, which hosted COP21, is coy about the cost of this monstrous boondoggle: one estimate puts it at $1.1 billion, and that is without factoring in the carbon bigfoot-print of all those air flights.

COP21 sounds like a Philip K. Dick novel, but it actually stands for the 21st meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 Rio Framework. Rio was the first held under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. UNFCCC signatories agreed in principle to limit climate change by reducing the output of carbon dioxide, which in practice meant reducing the use of oil, gas and coal.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol set out legally binding emissions reduction targets for developed countries but not the poorer nations. The United States did not ratify it, and China, the world’s emerging industrial superpower, ignored it. Nevertheless the conceptual framework was accepted by the European Union, which began a major shift in power generation to subsidised renewable energy.

In the 12 years between Kyoto and Copenhagen in 2009, the popular mood in most of the developed world moved firmly in favour of carbon reduction. Al Gore’s powerful but meretricious film An Inconvenient Truth typified the propaganda that held centre stage during these years. Large parts of the media, including the BBC, began to treat the theory of man-made climate change as revealed truth. It was nearly impossible for politicians to question the theory or to avoid implementing the mitigation strategies demanded by environmentalists. But COP15 at Copenhagen was a colossal failure, with attempts to impose a top-down solution falling apart in a series of hysterical late-night meetings.

Paris was supposed to be different, relying on voluntary agreements and a great deal of good faith now and far into the future. Each country was invited ahead of the meeting to submit an Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC — this process is one of the all-time great acronym generators). By the opening of the Paris conference 158 INDCs had been submitted. All express the required pieties but none commits unequivocally to the kind of radical action that would be needed — according to the high priests of climate science — to restrict global warming to a range of 1.5-2.0°C above the pre-industrial level (itself a matter of uncertainty).

Developing nations — and China includes itself in this category — do not see why their future prosperity should be restricted without the material assistance of the nations who grew rich by exploiting fossil fuels in the 19th and 20th centuries. The deal, such as it is, will depend on the rich countries agreeing to limit and reduce their own CO2 emissions, and to transfer enormous sums of money via a Green Climate Fund to developing countries to assist their CO2 reductions while not impairing their economic development. The worthy recipients of this largesse meanwhile recognise:

The importance of promoting, protecting and respecting all human rights, including the right to development, and the right to health, the rights of indigenous peoples, climate induced migrants, refugees and internally displaced peoples, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations with due respect to sovereignty and territorial integrity of states, as well as promoting health, gender equality and the empowerment of women, while taking into account the needs of local communities, intergenerational equity concerns, and the integrity of ecosystems and Mother Earth, when taking action to address climate change.

I will spare readers more of this stuff. The utopian system encapsulated in the COP21 agreement is intended not only to reduce carbon dioxide emissions but also to transform the global economy on international socialist lines, starting with a massive transfer of wealth from developed to developing world.

Between now and 2020, the Green Climate Fund is supposed to transfer at least $100 billion a year in support of developing nations’ decarbonisation efforts. Before COP21 opened, the GCF had received pledges of $70 million (0.07 per cent of the total). Undaunted, Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican Marxist academic who is nominally in charge of COP21, now suggests that the developed world should transfer $1 trillion a year. To adapt the late Senator Everett Dirksen: “A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

Never mind the numbers, just think what will happen to the cash. Some will be devoted to supporting the secretariat and subsidiary bodies set up pursuant to Articles 13 and 15 of the Agreement. But once indoor relief for the global chattering classes has been established, the rest of the money will be heading south, literally and figuratively. Most developing nations have problems with corruption and the rule of law. Who will guarantee that GCF money is spent the way the climateers of COP21 intended? It is all very well, heartening even, for the representatives of 158 countries to sign up to this complex and mind-bogglingly ambitious set of worthy aims. But words will mean little once the money starts arriving in Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Zambia and the rest.

Even if corruption were not a problem, the difficulties of operating such a massive system have been amply illustrated by the abject failure over the past decade of the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS).

On paper, this cap-and-trade approach is an intelligent and effective way of rationing carbon and producing a price for CO2. A cap is set on the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted by 11,000 power stations and factories in 28 member states. EU Allowance Units (EUAs) are then auctioned off or allocated for free, and can be traded on the open market. The cap is supposed to be lowered over time. If a factory or power station exceed its allowance, it purchases EUAs on the ETS market. Conversely, if it produces less CO2, it can sell leftover credits. The idea is to find the most cost-effective way of reducing emissions without significant government intervention.

The ETS was undermined from the beginning by an over-allocation of allowances, the number of which is essentially a political decision. In the Brussels horse-trading, each country got more than its share. Having started in 2005 with carbon prices of €10-15 per ton, the market price fell briefly to zero in 2007. The system was further undermined by the recession of 2008-09, which saw a substantial fall in economic activity. This meant that the already comfortable supply of EUAs became overwhelming.

The ETS depends on the EU having the will — and indeed the information — to ration EUAs over time and in ever-changing economic circumstances. So far it has failed to do so. The only country that regularly checks installations to ensure they are actually complying with regulations is, you guessed it, the UK. And even the UK checks only 1 per cent of qualifying sites.

The ETS has raised costs for European industry while failing to produce a serious carbon price which would support low- carbon technology and make fossil fuels uneconomic. To be effective, the carbon price should be of the order of €75 per ton; the current EUA price is €8 per ton. If the EU, composed of 28 advanced economies with reasonably high legal standards, is unable to operate its own system effectively, it is clear that a global system is doomed to fail.

The real challenge for the COPsters comes from China, India and other large developing countries. China is the world’s largest user of energy, 90 per cent of which is fossil-fuel, two- thirds of it coal. China accounts for half of the world’s annual coal burn. It is also the world’s largest emitter of CO2: 24 per cent of the global total in 2014. Chinese economic development plans call for significant increases in energy consumption, including coal, between now and 2030. The proportion of coal in the mix will fall, but only from 66 per cent to 62 per cent in the next ten years; and it will rise in absolute terms. China will increase its reliance on renewables, building on hydro as well as its low-cost production of wind turbines and solar panels; but the overall consumption of coal, oil and gas will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.

As a succinct assessment by the Global Warming Policy Foundation points out, the Chinese government is concerned much more by internal pressures than external opinion. It needs to maintain China’s economic growth. A senior official recently put it this way: “All our policies, measures and actions for addressing climate change are conducive to national development mode transformation and structural adjustment, thus promoting the quality and efficiency of our economic growth. That is an internal requirement for the sustainable development of our country.”

In other words, China will act in its own interests. Internally, that will mean improving energy efficiency, currently one-third the level of the United States. Doing so would reduce CO2 emissions and the energy costs to China’s economy. Externally, China is posing as the champion of developing countries in their climate change negotiations with the industrial world.

Whatever one’s view of climate change, it is impossible that COP21, or anything that flows from it, will hold carbon emissions to the levels and in the manner required by environmentalists. And that is a good thing: why should poor countries continue to be denied cheap electricity and economic development, while richer nations hamstring their own economies?

In the real energy world, the prices of oil, coal and gas have dropped sharply in recent years. This is partly policy — Saudi Arabia’s decision not to support high oil prices by cutting its own production — but mainly it is due to the great advance brought about by fracking for hydrocarbons. This slashed the costs of producing oil and gas, and in America cheap gas undercut coal which accordingly became even cheaper and flooded the world market. The world outside America is still catching up with this fundamental shift, but the fact is that the cost of hydrocarbons has been cut and will not return to historic levels.

Fracking did not come about overnight: work in the field and in the laboratory took 40 years. There is every reason to hope for technological breakthroughs in cleaner forms of energy as well. Given the rate of advance in science generally, and the amount of money being poured into clean energy research around the world, a silver bullet, or a series of silver bullets, must sooner or later transform energy supply. One area of rapid advance is in electric battery research, with the prospect of large-scale electricity storage and cheaper long-range electric cars.

Lower-cost fossil fuel is a benefit to the global economy, and most particularly to poorer countries. Individual nations — and individuals — will continue to make their own decisions about supporting renewable energy, responding to changing costs and evolving technology. But the global initiative represented by COP21 is an expensively overblown irrelevance.

The post The Great Climate Change Boondoggle appeared first on Standpoint.

The Act established a wonderfully British quango called the Committee on Climate Change (CCC). Its statutory task is to advise the government on matters related to the CO2 reduction target, and, in particular, whether the targets should be amended, and why. In fact it does much more than this, policing the energy policy discussion in government and academia.

None of the CCC’s seven members comes from the energy industry or has worked in business of any sort. They are either academics — distinguished ones, admittedly — or superior policy wonks. The chairman Lord Deben, the former Tory minister John Selwyn Gummer, told me last year he wished that the energy industry had spoken up when the CCA and subsequently the Energy Act (2013) were being formulated: “We didn’t always understand the effect of the measures we proposed.”

The CCA was the product of intensive lobbying of a receptive Labour government by environmental groups like Friends of the Earth, with the support of the renewables industry. The public had been primed by relentless global warming propaganda, exemplified by Al Gore’s meretricious film, An Inconvenient Truth. The Conservatives were in on it too. In 2005, Bryony Worthington, the environmental activist who basically wrote the CCA, had spoken to the new Tory leader, David Cameron, who wanted to rebrand his party blue-green. When David Miliband, then at Defra, heard this, he moved swiftly to steal the Tories’ clothes. The bandwagon began to roll. The younger Miliband, Ed, grabbed the reins.

Parliamentary scrutiny of the Bill was negligible. The only MP who actually read the economic impact statement was the former Tory minister Peter Lilley. He pointed out that the government’s basic impact forecasts showed a net effect on the economy ranging anywhere between a positive £52 billion and a negative £95 billion. These estimates did not include transition costs — that is, the costs of infrastructure and other capital adjustments implied by the shift to low-carbon technology — which by 2015 have already run into tens of billions of pounds. Nor did they address trade and competitiveness impacts, which should have been of concern when the UK was taking unilateral action to raise its industrial costs in a global marketplace. Three Tories — Lilley, Andrew Tyrie and Anne Widdecombe — were the only MPs who voted no. The entire Tory shadow cabinet supported the Bill, and Commons debates were notable for mutual congratulation between MPs of all parties. Climate change was — and to an extent still is — a topic which politicians of all stripes feel confident will make them sound disinterested, high-minded and caring: they certainly do not want to sound like greedy despoilers of the earth.

Which is a pity, because the UK’s dogged efforts to implement the CCA are already going some way to despoil the economy, with the heaviest burden borne by the poorest in society.

The CCA’s main mechanism for reducing CO2 emissions is a comprehensive subsidy regime for renewable power generation. When the Act was passed in 2008, all forms of renewable power were more expensive than conventional generation from coal or natural gas. This was reflected in the scale of subsidy, which varied from twice the market price of electricity for onshore wind and solar to three times for offshore wind, and seven or eight times for more exotic technologies such as wave and tidal power.

Supporting the subsidy regime was the presumption that oil, gas and coal prices would continue to rise in a more or less linear fashion, and that, as they rose, the cost of renewable generation would decline.

As anyone who has tried to make a living from commodity markets knows, predicting future prices is folly. That is why commodity markets trade futures contracts, which allow them to hedge. Predicting a particular price, or a particular price growth curve, is worse than folly — it is insane. Yet this is what British energy ministers, from Miliband through to the hapless Ed Davey, have based their policies on. It is true that for a few years the oil price cracked through $100 a barrel, but markets do not reward high prices with yet higher prices for very long. The phenomenal growth of US shale oil and gas increased global output, and Saudi Arabia’s decision to stop acting as the world’s swing producer — i.e., the oil industry’s balancing mechanism — cut prices by more than half during 2014.

Oil prices are unlikely to recover any time soon. Saudi Arabia is sticking to a steady level of production, and Opec is a toothless cartel lacking the means to regulate production. Output growth of shale oil in the US will be tempered but not reduced. Supply will continue to grow elsewhere, including Iraq and post-embargo Iran, while demand, outside China is slowing. With a greater emphasis on efficiency the historic link between economic growth and oil demand has been broken, which means that the global economy can be expected to recover without this translating into higher oil consumption.

This cluster of fundamental changes in the world oil market, and by extension the wider energy market, has taken place over the past three years. Markets are dynamic, and yesterday’s sensible posture is today’s suicidal folly. Even if the CCA had embodied a sensible approach seven years ago — which it clearly did not — its effects are now ridiculous.

It is not yet clear which direction Amber Rudd, the new Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, will steer. After the post has been in Liberal Democrat hands for five years, one might expect that a Tory minister would adopt a more hard-headed set of policies. She has already signalled support for fracking, with all the appropriate safeguards, though one suspects this welcome departure was forced on her by the Treasury. The government says it will discourage the further expansion of onshore wind, while continuing to subsidise much more expensive offshore wind. And she has just announced government support for the insanely expensive Swansea tidal power lagoon. But then Ms Rudd is very much part of the blue-green consensus. DECC itself says the priorities in the Queen’s Speech are: “Keeping the lights on and powering the economy; keeping bills low for families and businesses; and getting a climate deal in Paris this year.”

These priorities are incompatible, though our leaders have proved themselves adept at fudging the issues. You cannot continue to subsidise nuclear and renewables, plus the back-up conventional capacity needed to support them, while keeping prices low — especially when conventional energy prices are low and going lower. As for getting a deal in Paris at the next UN climate change conference in November: it is unlikely that the really large carbon producers, China and India, will commit themselves to restrictions that would level the playing field for our already-hamstrung industries.

If Parliament repealed the Climate Change Act, followed, one hopes, by the Energy Act, the British economy would be freed from a straitjacket that dooms it to paying ever-higher prices. Cured — cold turkey — from their addiction to subsidy, power generators would be free to make rational commercial decisions — which in a competitive market would mean a tendency to drive prices down. Renewable power technologies would be forced to compete properly. The hyper-expensive ones would have to go back to the drawing board, but the cheaper technologies would have an incentive to get their costs down to realistic levels. This is already happening with solar, due mainly to the huge Chinese investment in producing photovoltaic panels. It could happen with wind, though not for a few years. The point is that the progression to a lower-carbon future would not be at the cost of our economy, and it would happen organically and not on the artificial timetable dictated by the CCA and its high priests at the CCC.

This, of course, is unlikely to happen quickly, or even at all. It would take a political reaction as powerful as the terrific green concert party that led us to the CCA 2008 and the world into the interminable global climate negotiations. At present the British public is split, though it is fair to say that the majority accept the reality of man-made global warming and the need to do something about it. However, the minority is a substantial one, and numbers are growing. Their position is similar to that of the Eurosceptics a few years ago: numerous, disgruntled and ignored by the political establishment.

In Britain, the worm may just turn with the launch of shale fracking later this year. Applications by the specialist exploration company Cuadrilla to drill in Lancashire are expected to be approved soon, and the first results should be in by December. The Bowland shale is twice the thickness of the largest American shale reserves. Success would change the terms of the game. A new and abundant source of cheap natural gas — not to mention oil — would force the nation to reassess its priorities.

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