Sisson

The book at reference 1 was an interesting if not always easy read. 

A short book of some 160 pages of text, which I had been prompted to buy by reading the book noticed at reference 2, itself the result of a chance encounter in the Bugle of Brading. My copy from Hertford College Library of Oxford, a second edition, via Abebooks. It turns out to have been something of a standard text in the years after it was written, say the 1960s. A pity I had not come across this book fifty years ago when it might have made a difference! I got no further than Antony Sampson of reference 4, all the thing when I was young.

So I now know that there were at least four classes of civil servant: administration, executive, clerical and industrial. With examples being under secretary, the grade where Sisson landed, senior executive officer, clerical officer and postman. Plus people with typing grades, hostel keeping grades, statistical grades and all manner of other specialisms. With the first three of these classes reminding me of officers, sergeants and other ranks in the army. Not to mention their ladies, wives and women. I dare say that this has all been modernised since.

Sisson makes a good deal of the principal business of administrators being to have a story and to be able articulate that story to their Minister, who can then go on to sell it to his colleagues in Cabinet, to the MPs in Parliament and to the public at large. It being understood that under our regime it has to be possible, at least nearly all the time, to express a policy in language and in terms that the public at large can understand, be the policy in question ever so complicated. Which might mean that you do not always get that policy right – but that is better than getting into the habit of getting on without regard to what the public might think. Bearing in mind that it is easy enough to get the policy wrong for all kinds of other reasons.

In this, it is not a question of an administrator being right or clever about the subject matter, rather that he can come up with a compromise between the various conflicting interests which first satisfies enough people and second works well enough. It would be unusual for him to have to deal with a question on which everybody was agreed as to what should be done; there will nearly always have to be compromise. It would also be unusual for him to come up with anything new; to misquote Ecclesiastes, there is very rarely anything new under the sun.

I associate to the phrase invented by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott to cover the child’s need for good enough parenting. People are not perfect, but they can be good enough.

At the Treasury in the 1990s, we had a Ministerial Correspondence Unit which dealt with Ministers’ voluminous correspondence. With treatment depending, to some large extent, on from whom the letter had come: the Prime Minister; some other ministerial colleague; a member of parliament – lords or commons; some important member of the public; or, some other member of the public. Some letters would be replied to by the minister himself (at least nominally), some by his private secretary or perhaps by some other civil servant ‘whom the minister had asked to reply on his behalf’. Some would be just filed away. And correspondence campaigns – perhaps in the form of pre-printed postcards – would be dealt with by daily weigh-ins. But in the round, Sissons is spot-on: processing this correspondence and preparing replies is an important part of what administrators do.

While at OPCS, back in the 1970s, the daily Hansard was in circulation, and it was quite normal for quite junior administrators, even quite junior statisticians, to turn the pages, particularly when one of their chaps was taking questions in one of the houses. At that time also, the broadsheets carried quite extensive coverage of parliamentary proceedings – which is not the case now – with lots of people now thinking that debates in the house are a bit of a waste of time and effort – which even parliamentarians do not take very seriously. Which is not good. I don’t look at Parliament on television, but I doubt whether that is much good either. Never mind all that stuff on social media.

One might get the idea from all this that Ministers are rather reactive, responding to stuff arriving in their in-trays rather than promoting initiatives or policies of their own. But this would not be fair. Initiatives and policies have to come from somewhere, usually not from the Minister himself - and as soon as people get the idea that the minister is sympathetic to this or that cause, all kinds of campaigners will be beating a path to his door with proposals for action. There is unlikely to be a shortage of correspondence.

Sisson is a bit scathing about the penchant for management and management consultants in the US, but he gives a lot of space to the rather different arrangements for administration in Europe, particularly in France and Germany. And while he is not scathing, I think he is a touch smug; perhaps at a time when the second war was not that long over, this was understandable. Perhaps now, the differences are not so great and given the various pickles we get ourselves into, another look at what others get up to would not come amiss.

He is not keen on the rather big role for lawyers in administration (particularly) in France. I do not suppose he would have much cared for the way that lawyers here seem to have accumulated (fee earning) jurisdiction in all kinds of matters in which they would not, in the good old days, have had any footing.

Nor do I think he was keen on reading a subject called administration at university, preferring candidates with a good general education. His own being English and Philosophy, followed by spells in France and Germany. He was also a poet, I believe quite a good one.

A rather inward book, mainly about administration of affairs in this country. Little if any space is given to dealing with the outside world – or to our declining importance in it. Or to all the complications of international relations and the complicated web in which we have to make our way. Sending a battleship or two over to intimidate some upstart is no longer an option – at least, not for us. Perhaps he would have argued that foreign affairs are not that different from home affairs, at least in so far as their administration is concerned. The administrators’ job remains weighing up the pros and cons and coming up with a story. I think I would argue that foreign is different, not least because it is physically scattered all over the globe. High speed communications notwithstanding – and they were not very high speed in Sisson’s day.

I suspect this book is a bit dated in other ways, but nevertheless, it remains a good introduction to the subject, to the balance of powers at the top of our governing heap. I shall give it another go in due course.

PS 1: the snap above is taken from Amazon. I guess the spine has been bleached by the light from red to a matt yellow, but that does not explain why my copy is red panel on blue dust cover, rather than the other way around. Faber’s way of distinguishing the first edition of 1959 from the second edition of 1966?

PS 2: on page 154, we get the thought from Bagehot that: ‘… the Queen was dignified; that meant she was for fools to google at … estimated the number of those who were not fools as being … less than ten thousand. These read the Economist…’. Even more dated!

References

Reference 1: The Spirit of British Administration – C H Sisson – 1959. A copy is to be found at https://archive.org/details/spiritofbritisha0000chsi/page/168/mode/2up. 

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/church-two.html. 

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._H._Sisson. 

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Sampson. I had expected rather more.

Featherblade two

Following the chance purchase of featherblade from Waitrose noticed at reference 2, I thought I would try some bespoke from Ben the Butcher. Not only could he do this, it even featured on his bags.

Weighed in at 1.562kg which I thought was probably a bit much for two, so I divided the meat into two portions and popped one in the freezer for another day.

Much the same drill as before. Aiming for 13:00, started the coarsely sliced meat in some melted butter at 11:25. Added the finely chopped onion at noon. Some celery and a little water, maybe as much as half a pint, half an hour later. Drained off the liquor at 12:25 and put the meat etc aside. Made gravy with the liquor. Partially cooked the mushrooms in the gravy, adding gravy and mushrooms back to the meat at 13:00. Ready for the off at 13:05, five minutes late.

In the margins, I had prepared some cabbage, cabbage which looks a bit like chou pointu in this snap.

Meat ready to go.

On the plate. Spot of Corona visible top right. BH still on the wagon.

I had fancied stewed apples for dessert, and I had thought that under my close supervision the apples would come out entire, as they used to be when bottled when I was small. But I did not fully succeed, partly through failing to sit and watch them cooking, partly because cooking apples, that is to say Bramleys, do tend to go to mush. Much easier to get entire apples when one uses eating apples. But they tasted well enough. Complemented the heavy meat nicely.

Enough left the following day, certainly when augmented with some miniature maize from India. Hand picked, so the packet from Waitrose informed us. Rather good, if a touch dear for a third vegetable.

What was left of the stewed apples was, indeed, a touch mushy. But still entirely edible and entirely suitable.

Part two followed a few days later, adding up to something of a festival of beef, what with cow chop in Vauxhall and special mince for the girls. Special in the sense that BH had been instructed in the matter of additives like onions, which were not allowed. She got away with a few orange lentils though. Probably best not to draw attention to them.

It is actually session two of part two snapped above, the give away being the piece of left-over potato sneaked in at the front.

References

Reference 1: https://www.bensbutchery.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/a-new-cut.html.

Trolleys 751 and 752

The first circuit of the day did not yield any trolleys. But I did come across extensive gardening action on the Sainsbury's perimeter at Kiln Lane. With a large stash of shrubs in the top corner to which old trolleys used to be retired.

And chain saw action down the alley leading to the footbridge. Are they taking down the small trees on the bank in favour of shrubs? And if so, why? Some of the small trees in question being snapped above - with the chain saws hidden behind. I await my next visit with interest.

Then down Blenheim Road, poking around the First Line Recovery front yard, I was asked my business by a young man from First Line, a young man who, as luck would have it, seemed to know all about registration plates. I learned, for example, that you could not attach any old plate to any old car. There were rules and regulations. Furthermore, he seemed to think it very unlikely that I was ever going to find a No.39, my next number - although I did not think to ask why No.38 was different. His own plate was something to do with the football club he supported, but I did not think to make a note of the details, now forgotten.

He also explained that while trailers had neither their own registration plates nor MOTs, there was some kind of inspection regime for large and complicated trailers, the sort of trailer that sports the sort of control panel noticed at reference 3. Plus, I know from the time I have spent sitting on my cycle behind them, lots of trailers carry all kinds of complicated references and identifiers. All part of asset management as it came to be known during my days in the world of work.

The afternoon circuit was more productive, with the first trolley being a B&M trolley, picked up from the Town Hall car park, not a place I visit very often.

And the second trolley being another from B&M, picked up from the Kokoro Passage.

From there to take in the trolley scene at Wetherspoon's. 

I did not like to poke around for a maker's badge, but I did learn from my telephone that the trolley people, Wanzl, also make all manner of furnishings for the retail scene. Maybe they do the fine new cupboards that Sainsbury's are installing in their store at Kiln Lane?

PS: will the blue paint on our water meter hole - to be seen at reference 3 - wash off before Thames Water are back to deal with the leak? More than three weeks now. While they managed the rather more serious leak under the pavement outside Pullingers (for art supplies) in town the next day. At least, there is still a hole, but no longer a leak. At least not one that can be seen.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolleys-747-thru-750.html.

Reference 2: https://youtu.be/2YC6_YTQ1bk. Lifted from the Wanzl site, the source of the snap above. Imagine making a career out of making stuff like this.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/thames-water.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Churchy

Not Richard Church who has got a few mentions lately, rather a visit to a church, fitted-in in the course of a visit to London, a visit undertaken with neither rollator nor seat, just a stick.

A mild day, but overcast and dull. So the equipment was short raincoat, heavy sweater and folding umbrella.

Left the tube at Bond Street to ask in Steinway about the piano at St. George's Cathedral, noticed at reference 2. I was passed on to a very pleasant young lady - who also appeared to be very serious about selling her wares. She was not able to help, although she thought that her concert pianos generally had the Steinway name on the side, as at the Wigmore Hall. She also got in some remarks about the new Bechstein Hall up the road being delayed. I was slow enough not to think of showing my her snap of the piano in question - from which she might well have been able to adjudicate.

Next stop the Wigmore Hall to recover my dropped senior rail and bus passes. It took the young lady a few seconds to work out what I was on about, but when she got there she could put her hand on it fast enough - in a neat white envelope with my name on it.

At Hinde Street I found that Bullingdons are not all the same as far as fixing walking sticks to them is concerned, with there being a number of different configurations behind the saddle. Bootlaces did the business though. Bullingdon snapped above at Ashley Place after they had been taken down again.

From Hinde Street, I had rolled down to Hyde Park Corner without fuss, then into a rather blocked up Grosvenor Place, possibly because of a broken down bus. Took a pit-stop at Westminster Cathedral where I took in a good part of the regular midday mass, held in the body of the church rather than in a side chapel. No singing and no organ, but we did get a reading and a (quite a decent) sermon and there was a good bit of duet between the priest and the congregation, perhaps between 100 and 200 people. I found it all rather impressive, particularly visually, with what seemed at my distance like a very small priest, highlighted in the middle of a rather large space. But somehow he had the measure of it. I think both his assistants were ladies.

Also at Ashley Place. A new-to-me municipal van. A higher grade street cleaner?

After that, I pulled the same Bullingdon (as it happened) and headed across Vauxhall Bridge and parked up outside the Gail's Bakery opposite Travis Perkins. And so to the Estrela where I took a very decent oxtail soup followed by cow chop, aka Costeleta de Vaca. Salad off snap to the right. Three thirds of Sagres lager from Portugal - seemingly a member of the Kingfisher family. See reference 5. For once I was unable to finish off either the chips or the salad, although I did have a fair go at them. Had to pass on dessert.

Not worth taking a Bullingdon, so strolled along to Vauxhall for a train to Epsom. Stopped over at Raynes Park but nothing there. View of the bank not changed much either.

PS 1: further to reference 1, checking the map in preparation for this outing, I found that Oxford Street counts as the A40, which runs from there down to St. Paul's, where it gets lost - on both gmaps and Ordnance Survey. And maybe it is subsumed in the A5 in the stretch from Marble Arch to Edgware Road. Or maybe it cut north a bit to the east, before Edgware Road was laid out.

PS 2: I read this afternoon at reference 3 that HS2 was told to do work for rare bats which costed £100mn. Which must amount to a lot of pounds to the bat. Perhaps it is about time we had a debate about how much we are prepared to spend on that sort of thing. Time to rein in the heritage people a bit? And a bit out of season for a poisson d’avril - a nice French locution I was reminded of recently.

A slightly less futuristic impression. Both impressions coming from the flashy HS2 website.

Reference 4 suggests that this is indeed a rare bat, but it is found across a wide swathe of Europe and it is fairly low down in the extinction pecking order. Perhaps named for some bat-loving, renegade member of the Bechstein piano family? The people bringing us the Bechstein Hall No.2 mentioned above?

PS 3: for the avoidance of doubt, the bat shed has not yet been built. It is not clear whether it has been started or how much money is already spent or committed. But a piece in Friday's Guardian suggests to me that the whole scheme will now collapse in a cloud of ridicule.

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-matter-of-roads.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/morley-college.html.

Reference 3: HS2 spent £100mn on tunnel to protect rare bats: Kilometre stretch of steel mesh one of many planning requirements that has driven up costs, says project chair - Philip Georgiadis, Jim Pickard, Gill Plimmer, Financial Times - 2024.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechstein%27s_bat.

Reference 5: https://kingfisherdrinks.com/brands/sagres/. 'Smooth and moderately rich with a pleasantly bitter taste'. Almost a proper bitter.

Steers

This being notice of the book at reference 1, ‘Cattle Kingdom’, a book bought on the strength of a kind mention in a review of something else in the NYRB, for which see reference 5. The true story of the birth of the cowboy legend.

The back of the book says the author spent most of his fifteen years on Wall Street as president of Knowlton Brothers, Inc., an investment management company. Somebody who might therefore know about starting companies and how they raise money – subjects which get some attention in this book. But neither Bing nor Google turn up a company answering this description, nor does it get mentioned at reference 3, where he is presented as journalist and writer. Odd.

A book built in part around the careers of three wannabee cattle men: Moreton Frewen (English gentleman, married US money), the Marquis de Morès (minor French aristocracy, married US money) and Theodore Roosevelt (was US money). And one long serving cowboy, Teddy Blue Abbott, who ended up as a farmer.

Cowboys were all about the cattle boom of the second half of the nineteenth century. A commodity boom which kicked off with the moving of huge numbers of cattle up from their Texas pastures to feed the hungry cities of the north after the civil war. A boom which started with the near extermination of the bison which came before the cattle and ended with then wide-open ranges of the mid-West not being so open. The mostly short-lived cattle towns – for example, Abilene, right in the middle of the map above - which play a large part in the legend were market towns where the cattle met the railway at a stockyard. Towns full of all kinds of businessmen and speculators – and cowboys who had been paid off after perhaps months on the trail. And newspaper men and literary types who between them worked up the legend for consumption back east.

At peak there were maybe 40,000 cowboys, a lot of whom were former Confederate cavalrymen. A trade for young men; young men who might be tempted away from the drudgery of life on farm or in factory – by the idea of the freedom of the wide-open spaces. But the work was hard and not particularly well paid. There was lots of illness and lots of accidents – and a very modest amount of firearm violence. The gold rush towns were worse than the cattle towns as far as that went. 

A trade which shared something with that of seaman – a trade which tempted plenty of young men from seafaring countries like our own.

I wonder this morning whether more cowboys appeared in films in the twentieth century than ever rode the range in the nineteenth.

Lots of fortunes were made and lost during the boom. A boom which sucked in a lot of capital from Europe, particularly the UK. A lot of which capital must have ended up in the pockets of various US-grown middlemen.

With the coming of refrigeration, some of this beef ended up in the UK, to the consternation of our cattlemen. Their return on their land was not going to be as good as it had been. First grain, then beef. Was there no end to their troubles?

A good read, albeit one which got a bit repetitive and which tailed off a bit towards the end of its 350 pages.

PS 1: this morning I noticed that the northern railroad in the map above crosses the Mississippi. It struck me that this must be, have been, a substantial bridge – essential for feeding the stockyards of Chicago. Bing and reference 6 soon confirm this to have been the case, with the first bridge finally completed in 1865. More than a kilometre of it.

PS 2: a short-barrelled shotgun was a far more effective weapon for a gunfight than a six shooter. Which last, incidentally, was a rather expensive item for a cowboy who might prefer to spend his hard-earned dollars on clothes.

PS 3: Word is very keen on my hyphenating locutions like ‘hard-earned’. Irritating blue underline if I don’t. Plus, I am not sure that this is a proper use of the word locution. Webster’s supportive but not conclusive.

References

Reference 1: Cattle Kingdom: The hidden history of the cowboy west - Christopher Knowlton - 2018.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/denham-two.html. A previous mention.

Reference 3: https://www.christopherknowltonauthor.com/. 

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_range. 

Reference 5: Mythic Chaps: Two recent exhibitions in Denver reveal how many legends and surprising realities coexist in the idea of the American cowboy – Carolina A. Miranda, NYRB – 2024.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Railroad_Bridge. The snap included here is actually five snaps. Very clever.

Trolleys 747 thru 750

The trolley that I had abandoned a couple of days previously was, in the event, still there, tucked behing the old sycamore tree at the entrance to the Screwfix passage.

Before that, the view down Blenheim Road made me think that the Ford people had somehow managed to get the First Line Recovery people out of their face, blocking their parking of trucks by parking their own cars. But this turned out to be an error. The Ford people had indeed parked their cars outside the near half (in the snap) of their frontage, but First Line had simply moved back to the far half.

Deposited the trolley at Sainsbury's, then back into town, where I captured the first M&S trolley of the morning by the side of the Rio Grill, the place that used to be a quite decent chipper.

Two more followed from the Kokoro Passage. Along the way I had called in Waterstones, vaguely thinking that I might buy the Timothy Snyder book about freedom, advertised in a recent number of the NYRB. A historian who made his name with a book called Badlands - about the killing grounds between Europe and Russia - and who has since wrote a number of short books of popular history and reflection. Waterstones had a couple of them, but I did not like the look of them much, and they did not have the book in question. So I ended up buying the book above, some of which is about George Orwell and his first wife, by one Anna Funder, whom I had come across before. Rather surprised this morning to find that this was more than ten years ago, but noticed at reference 4. I had forgotten the Toller angle. And I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that Orwell had two wives, the second only arriving rather late in the day. And I had thought that I knew all about the chap. BH now busy with this second book.

While the afternoon stroll produced another yet trolley from the M&S food hall. Which I took from an older lady who was just taking her shopping out, prior, I imagine, to heading off to the railway station. I think she thought I was being a bit pushy and unnecessary. The bay in the council car park opposite the station might well have been a designated trolley return spot.

Three quarters of the way to the lifetime target of 1,000 trolleys.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolley-746.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Snyder. A rather different sort of snyder, turned up by Bing in first preference.

Reference 4: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/09/tollerfest.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Bishops Wood

Our business with the fine CT scanner at Harefield quickly done, we took a walk around the grounds. Although not before we had taken in the fine two inch copper piping snapped above. Presumably some quirk of the plumbing arrangements meant that this was the best way to heat the corridor - although the only time I have seen such a thing before is in big old churches, some of which have substantial heating pipes in channels running up the nave. Iron, I should imagine, rather than copper.

In the grounds, one derelict big house covered in scaffolding, one lake and one formal garden, perhaps called a healing garden or something of that sort. Plenty of benches and quite mild enough to sit outside, although there were no patients to be seen. All very pleasant - the only other hospital that I know with outdoor facilities being Guy's at London Bridge.

No patients, but there was a working party of young people in the formal garden. I thought perhaps a hug-in for medical students, but there was not a good time to ask.

And apart from the poor grammar, I wondered whether this ticket was overdoing it a bit. If I say you cannot smoke in my garden, it is polite to go along with me, but it is not breaking the law. I suppose I could ask you to leave and then, if you do not, I can call the police to deal with your trespass. Not sure that they would be very keen on helping with such a matter though.

We tried to visit the concert hall, which looked to be a large space above what is now the canteen, a relic of the days when people cooped up in institutions went in for putting on DIY entertainments. While the mental hospital at Exminster ran to a ball room - which may have doubled as a theatre for pantomimes. The former ran to New Year's Eve dances and the latter Christmas pantomimes (put on by the staff) when I knew the place, back in the 1970s. So concert hall locked, but a decent little chapel had been carved out of one end of it. Such places are usually multi-faith in London, but maybe here they had separate provision for Muslims and others. Muslims, presumably, accounting for a large proportion of those wanting such provision.

From there to Harefield village, which sported a large fishing tackle shop, from which we deduce that at least some of the gravel pits to the west  do fishing. Most of those around Epsom have shut in the time that we have been there.

We took a light lunch in the place called 'We love coffee', a place which included at least one patron sporting the distinctive white wrist band worn by patients at the hospital. We did not take coffee and the grub was OK, although the orange juice was watered concentrate and my baguette would have been improved had the filling not involved quite so much goo. Maybe if they had given me a spare baguette to soak up some of the excess filling? I did not think to ask for one.

After which we pushed on to Bishops Wood, a little to the northeast, as described at reference 1. One of the paths out of the car park was protected by a substantial, but horse and dog friendly gate.

Nothing spectacular, but a very pleasant place for a walk just the same, on this occasion with plenty of autumn colour. Google Images, for once, not very helpful on a zoom, but I go for some kind of beech, despite the trunk not being smooth.

A tree with some history.

A good spot for carex pendula.

A fairly serious fence around the telephone mast, if that was what is was. Quite a clutter of stuff around it too. Not like the twin towers at the bottom of Longmead Road at all.

Looped back to Denham on the A412, taking in part of the viaduct precast factory on the way, for which see reference 2.

The viaduct, looking north. Snapped after being removed from the site, as reported at reference 3. Impressive looking lump of concrete now, even if it caused a fair bit of nuisance on the way up.

I wonder today what proportion of the weight is carried by the arching, and what proportion by the stressing cables. At Westway (section 5), there was no arching and it was all in the stressing.

And so back to Denham Grove, followed by a proper Indian meal, the relevant chef being back on duty. Hara bhara kebab and dahi wada to start followed by spinach & potato for her and mild red curry for him. All very satisfactory. The small party of Muslims at the next table, the ladies in dress corresponding, all took fish and chips. We all like a bit of novelty!

PS: I might add that the oranges on offer at breakfast at the hotel were much better than those that we had been offered on the previous occasion.

References

Reference 1: https://www.hertfordshire.gov.uk/media-library/documents/environment-and-planning/countryside-management-service/places-to-visit/bishops-wood-leaflet.pdf.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/denham-one.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/denham-two.html.