Number One Millbank

This being notice of the book at reference 1, first noticed as a result of a chance encounter at reference 2. A book about the Church of England’s disastrous adventures in the property market in the second half of the 20th century. 

The author, Terry Lovell, was a journalist, but he seems to be more or less invisible on the Internet. Perhaps he valued his privacy. From a northern obituary: ‘… formerly an investigative reporter and northern news editor of ‘The People’…’. 

A book which is not very well written; an avalanche of names and facts, all a bit breathless, all a bit hard to follow. I did not make it all the way to the end and it would have been improved had it been edited a bit more thoroughly – and pruned. But interesting nonetheless.

Digging in the online archive

It took a little while, perhaps half an hour or so, to dig up the original, whistle blowing article in 1992 in the Financial Times, reference 3, with the Financial Times online archive only going back to 2000. But Bing – or perhaps Google – did turn up a successor article at reference 4. And from which I learn that the Church, thirty years after the events in question, looks to have put its investment arm at least, back into good order.

A bit more digging and I get to the Internet Archive at reference 5, which offers me a facsimile of the newspaper for the day in question and a slightly garbled version of the text, presumably derived by computer from the facsimile. The first page of the facsimile is included above.

The next page is headed the ‘Unholy saga of the church’s missing millions’.

Finding out about the church and about debates about same in the House of Commons – with the late Frank Field taking a leading interest – was much easier. Field was, inter alia, a committed and active member of the Church of England.

Some background on the church

Much of the business of the Church of England used to be devolved onto the Church Commissioners who used to operate out of rather grand premises on Millbank, No.1 Millbank, now sold off. Front door, bottom left in the snap above. Sloping windows illuminating a grand staircase?

I learn that the name of this road is taken, rather appropriately, from a mill which once belonged to Westminster Abbey, demolished to build a fancy house in the early part of the 18th century. The present, rather exuberant building mostly went up around the beginning of the 20th century.

The establishment of the established church was expressed in various acts of Parliament from mid-19th century to mid-20th century, including one called the Enabling Act of 1919, which more or less empowered the church to do its own thing, without much need to consult Parliament. That said, the doings of the church were thoroughly mixed up with those of the state at large, a mixing up which was reflected in the presence of a lot of former civil servants, some retired permanent secretaries and the like - few of whom had any prior experience of managing investments, never mind property. Sitting ducks for the sharks of the outside world. As it were.

You can read all about this enabling act in the centenary piece at reference 6. Where, in the snap of the Church Assembly included above, I liked the way that the chairman, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is busy with his papers rather than with whatever it is that the speaker, the doyen of the assembly, might be saying.

At the time of the present story, the management structure of the church was pretty hopeless, not at all well-suited to managing anything much, never mind a rather risky foray into the property market. Things have got a good deal better since.

And at the beginning of the story, the church depended on its endowments to provide much of its income, managed centrally by the Church Commissioners (of whom there were far too many). The root problem was that there were very few if any new endowments and the income was not matching need. The church was tempted to be more adventurous with its endowments, to try and stretch things out a bit. More adventurous with its financing generally…

To jump ahead, it is all looking much healthier now, near thirty years later, with a healthy return on a total which has grown perhaps by as much as a factor of ten. The snap above being taken from reference 7.

Some background on pensions

Adapting the truth a little, the church, having thought to introduce pensions rather than having their parsons die in harness, then thought to pay them from the income generated by endowment fund, a fund which had been built up over the centuries, a lot of it in land, but which was attracting little if any new money. A closed fund. Participants in the pension scheme did not contribute, either through their employers’ wage bill or their own wages.

The civil service used to pay its pension bill out of current income. A proportion of current income is thus used to meet the costs which had been accumulated in the past. No contributions and no big fund – apart from the Consolidated Fund that is.

Most modern pension schemes are funded by putting aside a suitable amount of current income, which might be described as employers’ contributions, employees’ contributions or as a mixture of both.

Generally speaking, it is thought best these days that accumulating pension rights are held by the prospective pensioner himself in one form or another. Private pension pots; private property. This avoids the problem of trust – the prospective pensioner no longer has to trust his employer to do the right thing – which some of them can’t or don’t – and makes it easier for the pensioner to move around. But also reflects a shift from the defined benefit sort of pension (which I have) to the rather less attractive but much less expensive defined contribution sort of pension.

In the first and the last instances, large sums of money are tied up in investment funds. Investment funds which might be constrained to not to pay attention to the ethical concerns of the day and not to speculate in risky ventures, to play it safe. Which last, from the point of view of the economy as a whole, might result in not enough money being available for said risky ventures. You have to speculate if you want to accumulate.

All this would probably less important in a world where the number of employees and the number of pensioners were not changing through time. In a static world.

Some further thoughts

Two hundred years ago, the wealth of the church was probably a lot more in relative terms than it is now. A big institution, perhaps the biggest employer, perhaps the biggest holder of land in the land, perhaps after the Crown. But the church is now in decline, and as a business, smaller than plenty of big companies and corporations.

In the olden days, if you were a successful baker, you might branch out and open a few branches in neighbouring villages. In time, you might grow to be a substantial chain of bakers. But continued growth would depend on continued success, success which paid for the organic growth.

However, in a society where there is surplus value, where wealth accumulates & concentrates and where there is money, it is open to the holders of said pots of gold to use some of that gold to fund the expansion of a promising baker. A speculation which might be based more on appearances than on sustained performance in a growing business. I have, for example, read that plenty of fine dining experiences have foundered after the founders sold out and when the money men piled in.

The sorry story

Against all this background there is not much story to tell.

But it starts in the 1960s when the church was still holding lots of agricultural and residential land, some of which holdings dated back to the Middle Ages. Some of the residential land was in the form of a large and rundown estate in Maida Vale, near Paddington in London, and the Church attracted no little opprobrium for the way it ran down this estate in favour of higher paying property. This at a time when Rachman was operating, on a rather smaller scale, in nearby Paddington, on property of much the same sort.

The church decided to move into commercial property and had some early successes with shopping centres and other ventures. It then piled into shopping centres, here and in the US, some of this with borrowed money, with rather mixed results.

 This included an expensive and well publicised speculation in a large parcel of agricultural land to the southeast of Ashford in Kent, around Mersham, to the southeast of the southern by-pass, with the idea that, with the arrival of the channel tunnel, this land would suddenly become very valuable. Unfortunately, the relevant council refused planning permission for some years and the project collapsed. The only people who got rich were the professional property people who had battened onto the church and as far as I can see the land remains agricultural land.

Clearly a big railway junction, well before the tunnel was thought of.

In parallel with all this, there was a big row about the Church investing in shares in companies with links to South Africa, a row which went as far as one bit of the church going to law with another bit. With the point at issue being the extent to which a pension fund should take into account ethical considerations.

The upshot being that the lawyers upheld the church investment people who did not want to disengage from all the companies, some very large, with involvement in South Africa. Many people in the church found this very unsatisfactory: an organisation like a church with holy ends ought to be able to be more holy in its behaviour than appeared to be the case.

All this while the church was moving into creative accounting of a sort which would be illegal in a public company and into speculating with borrowed money – to the tune of £500m. A downturn in the market caught them, as it were, with their pants down and they took big losses on forced sales.

This prompted a flurry of reports and a major reorganisation, it having become clear that management arrangements were woefully inadequate to the needs of the day. The good news is that this reorganisation appears to have worked, and the church’s finances are in much better shape – in part because the centre has delegated to the periphery. And with the periphery making a much bigger contribution to the pot than it had been previously. Being a little careless with the truth, the men and women in the pews ended up paying the fancy bills run up at HQ by the church’s professional advisors.

Trivia

In the eighties, I may have organised a conference at Church House,  the Westminster HQ of the Church of England, possibly to do with something which was then called SSADM. At that time, Church House had one of the bigger venues available for hire in central London. I remember that the young ladies with whom one had to deal were very nicely spoken, probably the product of very nice girls’ schools.

Then in the early nineties, I was acquainted with an economist at the Treasury who had been seconded to Church House. She reported that it was a regular hotbed of intrigue and goings-on, not very holy at all.

While in the early noughties, I was taken to lunch in a fancy place in Millbank a couple of times, a place which I remember as having been carved out of a very fancy atrium. Lots of space, pillars and fancy detailing. Sadly, this now appears to have been No.4 rather than the No.1 Millbank of present interest.

And then, while composing this post, I was in bed trying to get to sleep and the toy boat problem drifted into mind: perhaps a rather grand term, but a problem which my mother had introduced to me as a child. The problem being to say ‘toy boat’ several times in rapid succession and one almost invariably ends up with ‘boyt’ to rhyme (as it were) with ‘toy’. With practise it can be done properly, at least up to a point, but one does have to concentrate. I learned later that the vocal apparatus has great trouble with switching back and forth between the two vowel sounds. The present point being that I was trying this out silently, under the bed covers - and it was still a problem, even though my lips were sealed. So at least part of the problem starts with the part of the motor apparatus which lives in the brain. While ‘toy coat’ did not seem to present a problem; one seemed to need the intervening ‘b’ as a catalyst.

Gemini correctly identifies 11th July 1992 as a Saturday. Which agrees with the Internet Archive and a number of other sources. I suppose I could have used the Microsoft Excel function which does the calculation, but I have not yet bothered to turn it up.

Conclusions

Yet another interesting digression, albeit one which took a good bit out of quality time, something of a scarce resource these days.

With one take-away being the reminder that it is hard to be ethical when large sums of money are involved. Or even decent: think of all the unpleasantness that can be generated in families by unwanted or unexpected provisions in wills.

References

Reference 1: Number One Millbank: The financial collapse of the Church of England – Terry Lovell – 1997.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/01/piano-98.html.

Reference 3: Unholy Saga of the Church's Missing Millions – John Plender, Financial Times – 1992. 11th July 1992.

Reference 4: Church of England delivers divine returns: John Plender analyses the remarkable investment success of the religious endowment – John Plender, Financial Times – 2017. May 21st 2017.

Reference 5: https://archive.org/. 

Reference 6: The cry for self-government: 100 years of the Enabling Act - Jeremy Morris, Church Times - 2019. December 6th 2019. To be found at https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2019/6-december/features/features/the-cry-for-self-government-100-years-of-the-enabling-act. 

Reference 7: Enabling Christ's Thriving Church: The Church Commissioners for England Annual Report 2023 – The Church Commissioners – 2023. Presented to Parliament pursuant to section 12(2) of the Church Commissioners Measure 1947. Looks very like the sort of (usually anodyne) annual report you might get from a government department. I note that the size of this report has inflated from 1.4Mb in 2016 – admittedly a weak year – to 11.7Mb now.

Housing

[Only 53.2% of Saudis living in Riyadh own their own home, according to census data © Jeremy Suyker/Bloomberg]

Interested to read this morning that Saudi Arabia has trouble with housing, just like large chunks of the western world, with the system failing to meet the popular demand for housing. Perhaps the royal family is salting away too large a proportion of all the oil money pouring in. Perhaps the Saudis have got to learn to love to live in flats, if they want to live in big towns, like most of the rest of us.

I am not clear whether all the units occupying the upper left diagonal in the snap above are units for families, extended families or small blocks of flats.

Perhaps evidence of a tendency, evidenced in most complex societies, for stratification or pyramidisation. For the population to rapidly sort itself into a pyramid of wealth and power, with a few at the top and a lot at the bottom - this however hard the founding fathers try to set things up in a more modest and egalitarian way. Just think of the conspicuous wealth and greed at the top of our heap.

I am reminded that about half the 40m people who live in Saudi Arabia are not citizens. An arrangement which will no doubt cause them trouble in the years to come.

I am also reminded that sociologists used to say that in societies of old, the rulers got a third, the priests got a third and the rest got the rest. With Ancient Egypt being a favourite example. Which leads me to wonder what proportion the priests in Saudi Arabia manage.

References

Reference 1: Riyadh’s property boom puts home ownership beyond reach of many Saudis: Property price surge in the capital has rendered house and apartment prices unaffordable for average citizen - Ahmed Al Omran, Financial Time - 2025.

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

Reference 3: http://jeremysuyker.com/. Lots of arty snaps to be found here.

Useful weight

A useful half kilo weight from York, picked up on a short circuit around the block. Now doing service as a weight to hold a book open in the study when I am trying to read two at once. Or something of that sort.

Weighed in at 525g on our kitchen scales, so perhaps a weight training weight rather than a measuring weight, properly certified by the weights and measures people.

A few key strokes and Bing confirms that this is indeed the case, offering lots of images and reference 1. Probably once part of a 20kg dumbbell set, something I do not think I have ever used. Bricks, hot or cold, were more my thing, six or seven of them to the stretch. Eight for showing off. It sticks in my mind that they were sometimes delivered hot from the oven, but maybe that was bags of cement. Delivered on flat bed wagons, well before the invention of pallets and shrink wrap. Long time ago now

References

Reference 1: https://yorkfitness.com/.

Consone

A fortnight ago to the Wigmore Hall to hear a couple of quartets from the Consone Quartet, a quartet I had heard a couple of times previously at St. Luke's, as noticed at references 2 and 3. A young, period instrument quartet.

On this occasion a quartet from Haydn (Op.76 No.2) and the A minor quartet from Czerny, a pupil of Beethoven, an eminent and prolific musician of the first half of the nineteenth century. Curious how one who was eminent then was invisible to me now and he is apparently best known now for the music he wrote for teaching purposes.

To Ewell West in the first instance where I paid for the day's parking without fuss, to find as we arrived at the station that our train had been cancelled and there was a prospect of further cancellations. Rather than going back to Epsom and parking in the NCP there, which might have been the best thing to do, we opted to drive to Sutton, by which time it was rather wet. I managed to drop my woolly hat in a puddle.

I then got confused about who the car park operator was, with the RingGo options not seeming quite right. Eventually I found my way back to Apcoa which worked rather better. But then the ticket machine at the back entrance to the station was not working properly and refused to give us Travelcards for the day and we had to settle for day returns to Vauxhall - which seemed rather an odd option for the machine to land on. In any event, they got us into the station and served us well enough for the rest of the day.

Confusion continued when we managed to board what turned out to be a No.38 bus rather than a No.36 bus at Victoria, which dropped us somewhere near Hard Rock rather than somewhere near Selfridges. A place we have visited occasionally in the distant past, a place which has survived the vicissitudes of casual dining fashion. Which left us with a rather longer walk than we had bargained for and not enough time.

Past a serious crane in Berkeley Square where they were probably dismantling some elaborate New Year decoration. A Bronto Skylift from Sunbelt, people that seem to be getting everywhere since I first  noticed, back during lockdown, outside what was soon to be the Lidl HQ in Jubilee Way. See reference 6 for the sky lifts - and I must look out for the six axle job snapped above.

Don't think you would find me in this snap or anywhere near it. Presumably the long blade top left is some artefact of the small camera carried by a small drone.

And so to Hedonism, another place I have not visited for a while. I remember once leaving them with a couple of bottles in a bag hanging round my neck on a piece of sisal I happened to have in my cycling bag, and then cycling back down to Victoria so encumbered. A least probably Victoria. Vauxhall or Waterloo would have been a bit far.

The Running Horse, another establishment we used to visit occasionally, may have got lost inside a development. Left in the snap above? Street View not yet caught up with things.

In the event, we made it with just seconds to spare, the first time that has happened for a very long time, as we usually allow plenty of time, liking to get seated and settled in good time, without fuss.

Pretty full for a good concert, with Czerny sounding more Schubert than Beethoven. A short encore, something fugal from Haydn. Possibly Op.50. Which Bing and Hyperion tell me may have been the final fugue from Op.50 No.4.

Out to spot what I thought was a modest white car with registration 270, 27O, 220 or 22O. The letter works if the number does not, giving me a white BMW model 13 or a Porsche Macan GTS S-A of unknown colour. I settle for the BMW as the more likely option.

Into All Bar One for a modest lunch where they did not get the order of delivery quite right, with the hummus turning up at the same time as BH's bean salad bowl. Hummus a bit fancy and flatbread a bit flat, but it served well enough.

Followed by a focaccia burger with chicken, cheese (of a sort) and bacon. A bit dry, but again, it served well enough. Bring back the paella!

Downstairs, for the first time, at least for a while, I noticed how close the tube was. At least, you could certainly hear the trains rumbling through somewhere underneath. Presumably on the way to or from Warren Street.

We at first thought that we ought to try the tapping in and out experience on the tube, foregoing our senior discount, but in the end settled for a No.390 bus to Victoria. - which turned up five minutes or so after the one that we just missed.

Thought about buying some the nice looking figs on offer at the station, but declined at £6 for 200g, which seemed a bit strong. Subsequently, in Epsom, I was only able to find the half dried figs which I do not much like - Grape Tree, Waitrose and M&S - so maybe I should have taken a few grams here. Maybe a visit to Turkish store at Clapham Junction is called for?

And so to Sutton without further incident, from where BH drove us home, again without further incident. I wondered, not for the first time, about a side trip to Sutton to collect some of the Wellingtonia we keep passing but not scoring.

References

Reference 1: https://www.consonequartet.com/.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/a-near-thing.html. At St. Luke's, with harpsichord.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/a-near-thing.html. At St. Luke's, for quartets.

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

Reference 5: https://cafe.hardrock.com/london/.

Reference 6a: https://brontoskylift.com/.

Reference 6b: https://brontoskylift.com/product/bronto-s-hla-truck-mounted-access-platforms/.

Early morning

It being rather early on Friday morning, I thought I would take a look at the New York Times, an online newspaper to which I pay a modest subscription, but have not actually looked at for some weeks.

From where I got to reference 1, all about TikTok, an app of which I am dimly aware but which I have never knowingly used -  but it seems that near 200 million people in the US do - and they can't all be children. The US is set to ban it in days, it being OK for Musk to own a social media platform - but not someone from China. A ban which, it seems, will mean that the app is removed from the Google and Apple app stores. What else it will mean in the free world is less clear.

From where Bing fairly rapidly led me to a sensible article at reference 2.

And from there to reference 3, which I have not read, beyond noting that the subject is one Johann Hari, a clever expatriate from Glasgow, the author of several best sellers, one of which is advertised above. At which point I started worrying about my own attention span and decided to call it a day.

I have also decided that banning TikTok is a rather crude response to a real problem. But it remains a product which I have not used.

PS 1: the basic TikTok format seems to be a short video clip rather than a short bit of text , what used to be called a tweet. With plenty of help provided to help you create click-catching footage. Said to be very addictive.

PS 2: a last word... It now seems that Hari is rather controversial as well as clever. See reference 4.

References

Reference 1: For TikTok Refugees, a Wry Welcome on a Chinese App: In their mass migration to the Chinese app RedNote, social media users make a gleeful mockery of the American government - Amanda Hess, New York Times - 2025.

Reference 2: Has TikTok made us better? Or much, much worse: The case for and against TikTok as a cultural force - Rebecca Jennings, Vox - 2025. To be found at https://www.vox.com/culture/23660355/tiktok-ban-cultural-impact.

Reference 3: How Capitalism Is Killing Our Attention Spans: Johann Hari, author of ‘Stolen Focus,’ discusses the many ways in which tech companies are siphoning our attention for profit - Current Affairs - 2025. To be found at https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/03/how-capitalism-is-killing-our-attention-spans.

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

Lithic studies (bone branch)

I have been trying to get to grips with the book at reference 1 by Zoltan Torey, a getting to grips which has already spawned a number of digressions and a number of posts, as can be seen by searching for ‘torey’, with the most recent, reference 2, being about an Australian who is interested in ancient artefacts, particularly those which are not tools.

What I am attempting is to see what, if anything, the goings on in the prehistoric world can tell us about the state of human consciousness now. Not so much how consciousness comes to be at all, as quite a lot of animals appear to be conscious, albeit in a limited way, more what it is that makes human consciousness special. Is consciousness responsible for our success as a species, or is it merely a by-product, a bit of froth floating on the top of the brew?

In what follows I use the word ‘hominin’ to mean early humans, after the divergence from the great apes, the chimpanzees and the bonobos. With hominins having been around for a few million years, following the figure above, say five. With the serious record not starting until not much more than fifty thousand years ago, just a thin slice of the right-hand column in the timetable above. Two alternative timetables are offered at reference 2 and there is yet another below.

To this end one can look at certain extant languages as a proxy for the languages spoken in the distant past. What does that tell one about what might have been going on in early consciousness? One can also look at the stuff left behind by the hominins, with the present interest being bone tools as opposed to stone tools, with a lot of effort being put into making bone branch a respectable part of lithic studies, a sub-discipline of paleo-archaeology. This last being what comes before archaeology, which is concerned with not much more than the last ten thousand years or so. What happened when the sun came out after the ice ages.

Then, poking around in the world of the Neanderthals of western Europe, I came across retouchers, which had me puzzling. Bing turned up reference 3, from which I learn that these can be bits of bone, which can indeed be used to touch up or resharpen flint (or quartzite) blades. Digging, I find that bits of bone can also be used as tools in their own right. And while bone might not last as long in the ground as flint, it does last a long time. Which takes me to references 4 and 5, to which I was attracted by talk of a logical analytical system (LAS).

But bones do present problems. Can you be sure that the bits of bone you are finding, in this case in the floor of caves, got there by hominin rather than other animal action? Hominins were not the only animals to use caves. Then can you be sure that they had been used as tools, rather than just the result of smashing up bones for their very nutritious marrow?

[Part of Figure 8 from reference 3. ‘Retoucher from Noisetier Cave with quartzite grains still embedded and microscopic view of one of these grains…’]

One way into this is to examine the bits of bone, to describe them and then to accumulate them in a database for analysis. With, ideally, everyone using the same method of description and the same database. An example of such a bit of bone, a retoucher from reference 3, is included above. References 4 and 5, are in large part, working towards such a method.

In the beginning, the point of these tools was butchery, the cutting up of the carcases of the large herbivores needed to feed the growing brains of the hominins. A rabbit can be torn apart, while you might struggle with a red deer.

[Victorian Solid Silver Marrow Spoon Scoop Double Ended 1843]

An important part of that butchery was smashing open the long bones, the humeri and the femurs, to get at the marrow within. A hundred years ago, marrow was still something of a delicacy and people with money had special silver spoons, like that one snapped above. Not to be confused with a range of other similar looking instruments and tools, some surgical and some cosmetic. While FIL was a bit cruder about it, and hominins were cruder still. They just smashed the bones open with rocks, perhaps large pebbles, perhaps with a crude flint tool called a chopper. This was apt to result in two end pieces – with the two joints (epiphyses) – and a number of fragments of shaft (diaphysis) from in between. Some of them quite large, like that snapped above.

Eventually the hominins worked out that these fragments could be used, either as they came or perhaps lightly reworked, or retouched. They could be used to rework or retouch flint tools – or they could be used as tools in their own right: cutters, saw or scrapers – tools for working with flesh, hide or wood, all important in the hominin world.

Maybe this learning was the result of play, or at least playing around with the fragments. Then after a while, a hominin just picks a fragment out and starts using it. Perhaps, rather in the way that we might choose a cake from a baker’s display, without much conscious thought about it. Maybe just the result of the action makes it to consciousness, maybe not even that.

Picking out a fragment and then working it up to be a useful tool requires rather more. Somewhere there has to be the knowledge that this bit of bone has tool potential – although whether or not that knowledge makes it to consciousness is another matter. In which connection language would certainly be helpful, but is it necessary?

Logical analysis system

This, to my mind, turned out to be a bit underwhelming, involving a lot of terminology which did not translate very well. The table above, taken from reference 9 is the lithic version, the stone version.

Generations do exist and do explain some of the variation, but to my mind the physical description of the bit of flint explains rather more. The sort of thing, for example, to be found at Table 4 of reference 4.

But, all in all, an attempt to get a grip on the description of flakes of bone – not an easy matter as anyone who has attempted such a thing will know – but well-tried strategy for trying to understand what is going on. Devise an appropriate method of classification (aka analysis), collect statistics – and, from them, hopefully learn something about the processes involved. This cave was different from that cave in this or that (statistical) way.

My stone version, based on the thought that most of the time one is taking lots of flakes, one after the other, off the same core. Usually there is lots of visible debris and lots of not so visible dust – but it can be seen if it catches the sun. Think sunlight coming in through the windows of a dusty shed.

This simple process can be modified by what is called the Levallois technique, invented (in term of the timetable below) during the Middle Palaeolithic, whereby one takes a lot of flakes off a core in order to get a good, big flake, which might then be finished off by retouching, possibly by pressure flaking. Good for the smaller tool – but another layer of planning for our hominin to cope with. In the figure, above this is the role of flaking. Added to which is the method of flaking – one of which is pressure flaking – all of which serves to make for a rather busy diagram.

Bone flaking is much less elaborate.

And as with many complicated crafts, there is usually more than one way to achieve the desired end. I associate to a childhood anecdote about a carpenter in training who showed off to his colleagues by producing a very small piece (a small box) which he had mainly made with a very big plane (a jointer). It can be done, although there are easier ways.

Noisetier cave

The locale for some of the work described at reference 3. In the French Pyrenees at around 800m and overlooking a tributary of the Garonne. Current indications are of Neanderthal occupation between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago. More background on this cave is to be found at references 10 and 11, with the second of these being referenced at the first.

The main interest here seems to be using bone fragments as a clue to whether the hominins in question were using quartzite or flint for their tools.

All part of a mission to establish bone studies as a respectable adjunct to stone – flint and quartzite – studies in the archaeological world.

• Get to the right strata in the cave (temperate phase of OIS 3; the discovery of two deciduous teeth compatible with the range of variability of Neanderthal teeth allows us to exclude an interpretation of the site as a simple hunting camp – although what exactly the cave was used for by the Neanderthals remains a fairly open question)

• Pull out all the relevant stone and bone. Local chert, imported flint

• Sort out the bones which are the result of animal (wild Asiatic dogs, Cuon alpinus and bearded vultures, Gypaetus barbatus) rather than human action

• This leaves 18 antique bone retouchers (mostly red deer). The ‘A’ sample

• Create 73 new bone retouchers (horses and cows). The ‘B’ sample

• Test the B sample on both flint and chert and work out how the use marks differ between the two materials and other variables, for example freshness. Do some blind testing

• Use the work on the B sample to guess on what materials the A sample were used. Mostly on flint rather than chert – with this last being considered to be an inferior material.

 [A diagram of the cave floor, taken from reference 11]

From which I learn that the French divide up their digs rather like the cells of an Excel Worksheet, with numbers for rows and letters for columns. With detailed work taking place in complete cells. Perhaps we do it too.

Some of the bone fragments showing signs of hominin use as percussion retouchers, also from reference 11.

Experimental bone breaking

Reference 4. Here the authors took 45 long cow bones from a butcher and broke them open with hammerstones as if to get at the marrow. This resulted in 75 fragments which could be used directly and 37 which could be used as blanks for light reworking into usable tools with quartzite pebbles. The work was then to devise and apply a method for describing these tools.

Reference 5. An earlier paper from some of the authors of reference 4. Another experiment with cow bones, but this one involving the use of the resultant tools, followed by examination for use wear – examination which included the use of microscopes. Tool use included scraping hides, scraping wood, sawing wood and processing a carcass.

The motivation being twofold: first to provide a new method for examining ancient bone fragments for use; second to make some assessment of the use value of these bone fragments, lightly retouched or otherwise.

One diversion along the way was the effect of using hydrogen peroxide to clean bone fragments before examining them with a microscope. This appears to have affected their subsequent – rather short – working lives.

Other matters

I have been impressed by the quality of the drawings of flints to be found in the literature – leading me to wonder whether the teams that go on these digs include draughtsmen as well as photographers – as I would have thought that these drawings would be well beyond the average archaeologist. In which connection, see the advertisement at reference 12.

Bone can last a long time in the ground, provided that ground is not acidic. Very little bone is found, for example, on Dartmoor. But there is plenty of bone about which is more than a million years old. I dare say also that there is plenty of bone on the way to being fossilised, to being petrified. Halfway between bone and fossil.

I doubt whether I will make it to one of the flintknapping workshops on offer, but I have started reading reference 7, an accessible and popular book, from which the Old World timetable above – Figure 3.1 – has been lifted. A book which is in part a response to the flintknapping revival – not to say craze – of the 1970s. For me, armchair flintknapping. But I have already learned that the knapping of bone, glass and chert is not that unlike the knapping of flint. Pretty much anything which is amorphous, both brittle and elastic will do. 

One of the key tests here is whether you get conchoidal scars left behind when knapping. As it happens, the edge of the glass top to our sideboard got knocked a few years back and exhibits a clear if small example of same, with the scar rippling out to the left from the point of impact. It is the floor which can be seen bottom right, a paler brown wood than the sideboard. Stained pine as opposed to burr walnut veneer.

Along the way, I came across the open access ‘Journal of Lithic Studies’, to be found at reference 6, and which stretches a point to include bone as well as stone. I also found an article about riverine deposits in India, reference 8, a useful reminder that it is not all caves in the Pyrenees.

And to close, I was moved to check what ‘burr walnut’ was all about and Google turned up: ‘… the production of wood veneer burr begins with the meticulous selection of trees that exhibit burr formations. These burrs, or burls, are unique growths that occur on the trunks or branches due to stress factors like injury, virus, or fungus. These formations result in highly figured wood with intricate and unique grain patterns. Harvesting the burr wood is carried out with precision to ensure the preservation of the detailed grain, which is essential for creating high-quality veneer…’. So something that happens to a tree, rather than a sort of tree. Although that does not exclude walnut being good for burr. And maybe it should be ‘walnut burr’ (or burl) rather than ‘burr walnut’.

Conclusions

I am satisfied that I now know what a bone retoucher is, which is where I started out.

And I have found that the LAS, while interesting, is very much work in progress. 

References

Reference 1: The crucible of consciousness: A personal exploration of the conscious mind – Zoltan Torey – 1999.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-outsider.html. 

Reference 3: The Mousterian bone retouchers of Noisetier Cave: experimentation and identification of marks - Jean-Baptiste Mallye, Céline Thiébaut, Vincent Mourre, Sandrine Costamagno, Émilie Claud, Patrick Weisbecker – 2012. 

Reference 4: Experimental bone toolmaking: A proposal of technological analytical principles to knapped bones – Paula Mateo-Lomba, Andreu Ollé, Isabel Cáceres – 2023. 

Reference 5: Knapped bones used as tools: experimental approach on different activities – Mateo-Lomba, P., Fernández-Marchena, J.L., Ollé, A. & Cáceres, I. – 2020. 

Reference 6: https://journals.ed.ac.uk/lithicstudies. 

Reference 7: Flintknapping: Making & Understanding Stone Tools – Whittaker, John C – 1994.

Reference 8: Report: Peering into the Prehistoric Past of Bandhavgarh National Park, central India – Akash Srinivas, Nayanjot Lahir – 2024.

Reference 9: The Early and Middle Pleistocene Technological Record from Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain) – Andreu Ollé and others – 2013.

Reference 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisetier_Cave. 

Reference 11: Le site moustérien de la Grotte du Noisetier à Fréchet-Aure (Hautes-Pyrénées) – premiers résultats des nouvelles fouilles – Vincent Mourre, Sandrine Costamagno, Céline Thiébaut, Michel Allard, Laurent Bruxelles, David Colonge, Stéphanie Cravinho, Marcel Jeannet, Francis Juillard, Véronique Laroulandie, Bruno Maureille - 2008. At Downloads\Mourre_et_al_2008.pdf.crdownload. Funny suffix but it opens in Acrobat. One of the references given in reference 11 above.

Reference 12: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/01/only-in-america.html. A relatively recent, but very fancy chert artefact.

Fishy affairs

A change from the Financial Times, that is to say the MIT Technology Review, where the piece at reference 1 is to be found.

It seems that the Chinese eat a great deal of fish, but are very concerned about the decline of fish stocks in their coastal seas. Part of their response is the construction of hundreds of off-shore fish farms, with the large one snapped above being a combination of fish farm, research station and tourist destination. Some of them do power as well. 

With part of what they do being the construction of reefs, seaweed meadows and kelp forests for the fish to live in and the release of large numbers of fish - and other marine animals - into the surrounding sea. 

And then the fish farm operators suck in large subsidies. And the researchers have to tread warily between the operators wanting to make money, the Party Line - the chairman never makes a bad bet - and the truth. Yet another part of the mix is China building up its off-shore technology base. Including lots of robots.

It all works very well with sea cucumbers, which do not move around too much after they have been released. For which see reference 2.

On the down-side, we in the west have had all kinds of problems with fish farming, not least mortality, disease and pollution.

Work in progress.

PS: a fairly new topic for me. I could only turn up references 3 and 4.

References

Reference 1: China wants to restore the sea with high-tech marine ranches: China is the world's top fish consumer and is spending billions on technology designed to restock the oceans. But will this expensive experiment actually work? - Matthew Ponsford, MIT Technology Review - 2025.

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

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/trade-remedies-authority.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/03/river-cobblers.html.