Reading list for December 2013

Here are the books I finished last month.

Agemoglu, Daron and Robinson, James A: Why Nations Fail. The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (2013). A good span-of-history book, which asserts the importance of political institutions in explaining why some countries are rich and others poor. The authors show how countries are impoverished by kleptocratic rulers who steal their countries’ resources on a massive scale and obstruct local enterprise by allocating monopoly to their families and other cronies. The authors also note how several states (such as Columbia) fail at their most basic task of maintaining control over their territory, and how others (such as Argentina) have systematically looted the savings of their ordinary citizens. However, the authors do not discuss how democratic political institutions can themselves become corrupted such that wealth is increasingly concentrated in elites who become secure from taxes or effective regulation.

Armstrong, John: In Search of Civilisation (2009). This is a short but engrossing discussion of the meaning of civilisation. Armstrong is able to put philosophical ideas into simple language, illustrated by poetry, literature and history. I would have liked some discussion of how civilised ways of life can co-exist in the same society with gross barbarity.

Galbraith, Richard: The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013). This is a tremendous thriller, written by JK Rowling. There is a wide range of loathsome suspects, each of whom typifies a different aspect of the corrupting wealth of London society. The detective is at first presented as the cliché of the man with integrity who has failed in his personal and work life. His new temporary secretary appears empty-headed. But the reader’s understanding of both of them is transformed as the book progresses. This is the best murder mystery I have read.

Goudsblom, Johan and Mennell, Stephen: The Norbert Elias Reader (1998). I dipped into this book, which summarised the work of the great sociologist Norbert Elias. Unlike most of his kind, Elias knew that a good understanding of history is essential in understanding social stability and change. His work was highly-regarded by such eminent historians as Eric Hobsbawm. I read one Elias book in November, and will tackle others later this year.

Lyman, Robert: Japan’s Last Bid for Victory. The Invasion of India 1944 (2011). This book filled a gap in my knowledge of the brutal campaign in Assam, when Japan began an invasion of India in the hope that this would set off a popular uprising against British rule. Each stage of the campaign is described in details, including the appalling siege of Kohima, when the British and Japanese fought without a break for days across opposite sides of a tennis court. The staggering brutality of the Japanese army is described, and how this strengthened the determination of the British. If you knew that the Japanese killed all their prisoners, then you never surrendered. 
                               
Suchet, David: Poirot and Me (2013). This was a Christmas present from my daughter Rosemarie. It was signed by David Suchet at the Chepstow Literary Festival. Rosemarie met the great man, gave him a picture of Poirot she had drawn, and then burst into tears. The book is an engaging read, and illustrates how a great character actor works hard to understand the character he plays. 

There was also one book I began but did not complete:

Schama, Simon: The Story of the Jews, Volume 1 (2013). This is a fascinating subject, but proved frustrating to read. Schama seems uncertain of his readership. It would have been helpful for those of us who are not Jews to have had more background information about Jewish religion and customs. The main problem, however, is that Schama is not a narrative historian, and that the book was developed from a television series. As a result, the book seems oddly episodic.

Thinking about the Good Samaritan.

The parable of the good Samaritan appears in Chapter 10 of the Gospel of St Luke. Jesus was posed a question by a lawyer, as follows:

    Behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested him, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind, [Deuteronomy 6:5]; and your neighbour as yourself [Leviticus 19:18].” He said to him, “You have answered correctly. Do this, and you will live.” But he, desiring to justify himself, asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbour?”

    Jesus answered, “A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he travelled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, and gave them to the host, and said to him, ‘Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.’ Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbour to him who fell among the robbers?”

    He said, “He who showed mercy on him.” Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Like many such parables, the story of the Good Samaritan can be interpreted in several ways. The simplest reading is that Jesus commended giving time and money to strangers who are in desperate need. It is the opposite, in other words, of the common statement that ‘charity begins at home’. This interpretation of the parable is exemplified by the organisation called the ‘Samaritans’, which recruits volunteers to answer phone calls from people confronting despair and contemplating suicide. The effectiveness of the Samaritans is shown by the suicide rate in the UK, which is among the lowest in Europe.

The parable of the Good Samaritan also says something important about the nature of love. Love is not just an emotional state or ‘feeling’, but an emotion expressed in action. To be saved, therefore, Jesus proposed that a person must both love God and directly help those in distress. Just loudly proclaiming that you are ‘born again’ is insufficient. Note too that the command expressed in Leviticus also requires us to love our neighbour as yourself. In other words, we are unlikely to effectively express love for others (even strangers) if we despise ourselves.

There are two further questions we can ask about this parable. The first is why Jesus specifically mentions a priest and a Levite (a tribe which had priestly functions). It may be that Jesus specified these respected members of Jewish society as a dramatic contrast with the Samaritan. But another reason may be that both priests and Levites at that time would be concerned with maintaining their ritual purity, which would have been lost if they had contacted a dead or ‘half-dead’ man. Jesus (despite the behaviour of many of those who claim to be his followers) was never critical of Judaism, but was a religious reformer. In particular, his parables and sayings emphasise that we judge people’s actions by their intent and consequences, and that this takes priority over adherence to religious law.

The second question is why the benevolent person in the parable is specifically a Samaritan. The Samaritans are a religious group (which still survives in Syria), with patterns of belief similar to Judaism. At the time of the parable, there was intense and violent rivalry between these two religions, similar to that today between some Sunni and Shia Muslims, or, in the recent past, between Protestant and Catholic Christians. So the audience for the parable would have viewed a Samaritan as an enemy. So much so, that the lawyer can not bring himself to say the name ‘Samaritan’ when Jesus asked him the question at the end of the parable.

So Jesus argued that all people - even strangers - even our enemies - are our ‘neighbours’, and therefore deserve our love. Throughout history, no words of Jesus have been betrayed as much as these. The last two millenniums have been a grim record of genocide between people from different factions of Christianity, or by Christians against people from different religions, against people who speak different languages or salute different flags, and against people with allegiance to rival ideas of how society should be organised. One example will suffice. The First Crusade, in which European Christian warriors captured Jerusalem, began with the slaughter of 8000 Jews in Germany and concluded with the mass murder of 70,000 people all religions in Jerusalem. The victorious knights literally waded in blood up to their knees on the way to church to celebrate the man who told them to love their enemies.

Fireworks in Vancouver

There are moments in your life when your senses are especially acute and which always remain in your memory. One such moment for me was sitting on a beach in the dark in West Vancouver in 2000. That summer, I attended an international academic conference in Seattle. I brought my wife and children with me to expand the conference into a family holiday. We found cheap flights to Vancouver, hired a car, and explored the Vancouver area before driving South of the border to stay in the University District of Seattle. After the conference, we returned North via a ferry to Sidney on Vancouver Island, travelled up the Island and then returned via the Sunshine Coast to Vancouver. This was followed by a circular tour around a small part of the Lower Mainland.

But the first part of the holiday coincided with the Celebration of Light - an international firework competition held every year in Vancouver. We watched from one of the beaches (Dundarave Park or Millennium Point?) on the North Shore. In the dark, we could just see other spectators, all quietly sitting and watching the fireworks on the other side of the dark waters of English Bay. While we watched, we heard a vast freight train, half a mile long, slowly rumbling out on the railway line behind us. We then saw it in the flashes of the fireworks. The train was heading from the City’s docks, going West so that it could go East. After passing West Vancouver, it would have headed North past the Coast Range, past Whistler, and by daylight would have reached the rail junction at Prince George. From there, it might have headed on Canadian National tracks East to Winnipeg and Chicago, carrying the good of the Orient across the continent.

Doomism and the doomists

The greatest change in politics in my lifetime has been the replacement of hope and fear by gloom and despair. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, there was fear of imminent nuclear war. But set against that was a hope that a better society could be created, with a comfortable life for all people, free from the fear of poverty and free from the cruelty and humiliation suffered by many. This idea that people could hope for a better world was a creation of the 19th Century. Before then (and still in some parts of the world today), the lives of most people were short and hungry, at the mercy of the powerful, and with the probability of watching half your children die. Not surprisingly, most people believed that their only hope for a better existence would be after their death.

Yet despite living in an appalling century of war and mass murder, many people in Europe in the middle of the 20th Century voted for political parties that held out hope. This was true of the right as well as the left. The left held out the promise of personal security against illness and poverty through the creation of a welfare state, government action to maintain full employment, and restraining the economic power of the wealthy. The right promised to achieve more or less the same aims by facilitating home ownership and rewarding economic enterprise. One side emphasised social solidarity: the other personal responsibility.

Both these routes to a better world now seem blocked. It is proving increasingly difficult to fund the welfare state because of population change. Most people now join the labour-force five or six years later than was the case in the 1960s, while greater life-expectancy has produced an increasing proportion of elderly in the population. As a result, there are fewer people in work to fund a comfortable retirement for the elderly, whether this be through public provision (taxation or social insurance) or private means (personal savings or annuities). The right-wing promise of a property-owning society is also threatened. Rapid rises in house prices make purchase out of the reach of most people, particularly since many young people are also paying off student loans.

This has led to two typical responses. One is to abandon politics altogether and resort to fantasy. The fantasy is that wealth and happiness will be achieved by winning the lottery, being recognised as a new singing star on the X Factor, or having a son talented enough at football to be signed for the Premier League. An alternative fantasy is that the purchase of some new consumer good will transform your personality and very identity. This is exploited by advertisers, who now offer mystical experiences or at the very least utter bliss as the result of buying a new car. Driving a BMW or an AUDI has now become the modern equivalent of attending mass.

The second typical response is ‘doomism’. This is the belief that our current way of life will end catastrophically within our lifetimes, and that only a few will find shelter in some distant retreat. There have, of course, always been people who predicted the imminent end of the world based on their reading of the Bible, with survival in paradise available only to the select few who joined their particular version of Christianity. While awaiting the apocalypse, believers often gathered in Godly communities here on earth, perhaps so that they could be easily identified when the end came. They attempted to make their Godly communities very models of the just society or heaven. Some became cruel habitations of conformity. But others, like Rhode Island or Pennsylvania, became tolerant and progressive societies.

Belief in an imminent apocalypse is still strong in parts of the USA, but in Europe it has been supplanted by a new secular doomism, based on the belief that the natural life of the planet is fatally imperilled by over-population, pollution or, alternatively, by the excessive consumption of natural resources. Doomists attribute these problems either to capitalism (now labelled as ‘Thatcherism’ or ‘neo-liberalism’), or just to the innate greed and stupidity of human beings. For this kind of doomist, shelter is found in small self-sufficient communities away in the hills. And so they gather to await eco-doom in towns like Totnes, Stroud, and Machynlleth. Like the earlier religious doomists, they try and implement their ideas, in this case with local currencies, community gardens, recycling exchanges and cycleways. In the process, they turn their shelters into some of our most desirable and innovative communities.

Tadeo Cumella: the great all-father

Doing family history when you have an unusual surname should be a bit of a doddle. There have never been many people called ‘Cumella’ living in the UK, and all of them, as far as I can tell, are descendants of one man, Tadeo Cumella. Tadeo was a native of Barcelona and ‘Cumella’ is a Catalonian name, although it is also found in Western Sicily. This probably results from migration during the centuries in which Sicily and Catalonia were united under the Kingdom of Aragon. Most people called ‘Cumella’ in the Americas seem to be descendants of migration from Sicily.

The name ‘Tadeo Cumella’ is a shortened version of the rather more splendid ‘Tadeo Joseph Torebso Cumella y Alsina’. The ‘y Alsina’ suffix, in common with the usual Spanish custom, adds the maiden surname of his mother. If our family had followed this practice, I would be called by the less splendid name of ‘Stuart John Cumella and Smith’.

There is the usual information about Tadeo from censuses and other public records, but one unusual source is his application in 1874 to be naturalised as a British subject. This is now kept in the National Archives in Kew, and includes a summary of his life to that date, together with testimonials from various ‘natural-born British subjects’, and a statement from the Chief Constable of Liverpool that during his time in this country Tadeo “has borne a good character and moved in a respectable position in life”.

The biographical details on the application reveal that Tadeo was born in Barcelona on 16th April 1836, and worked from 1861 as a storekeeper to the engine room on a Spanish ship called the ‘Tajo’, which plied between Spain and England. He was married in June 1863 and in February 1865 finally settled in Liverpool. The application does not give the name of his wife, but other records identify her as Matilda Jane Davenport. The application notes that his wife was English and that they were married in St Brides Church in Liverpool. A marriage in the Church of England suggests that Tadeo had dropped any allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church by this time. This is in line with what I know of my family, who are not noted for their spirituality. By the time of the application, Tadeo and Matilda had five children: Tadeo Robert Hugh; John William; Ezra; Daniel; and Matilda Jane.

Tadeo’s first job on land was as a shipsmith with Caleb Smith & Co. But in November 1868, he went into partnership with a Basque living in Liverpool named ‘Juan Bautista Marcelino De Abaitua’. Their firm was known as ‘Abaitua and Cumella’, described as ‘shipwrights’. 1874 was an eventful year for Tadeo. After the naturalisation process was completed, the partnership was dissolved and Tadeo set up in business independently as a ships’ chandler. His wife and his son John William both died, but a new daughter, Ruth Davenport was born. It is possible that his wife died in childbirth, but I will need to get copies of death certificates to confirm whether this was the case. Tadeo married again, to Hannah Roberts, in 1877. They had one child, John Cumella, who was my paternal grandfather. Tadeo died on the 21st May 1900, and Hannah in 1904.

Beyond these records, I have little information about the Cumella family. My father was born after both his paternal grandparents had died, and I was born several years after the death of John Cumella. There was therefore no opportunity for the fruitful discussions across the generations that can take place between grandparents and grandchildren. I must therefore rely on any other records I will find in future.

I would like to thank the compiler of the de Abaitua family history on Ancestry.com for the photograph of Tadeo Cumella. I would also like to thank my son Andrew for gathering material at Kew and finding the de Abaitua website.

See also: Antoni Cumella: the greatest Cumella of them all

Planning in Wonderland

Last week I went to a seminar on neighbourhood planning organised by our local Conservative MP, Harriet Baldwin. Like her previous seminar on rural broadband, it aimed to promote the achievements of the Government, but also revealed a great deal about how decisions are really made in our country.

The first speaker was John Howell, the Conservative MP for Henley-on-Thames and the man who had developed his party’s proposals for neighbourhood planning and ‘localism’. He told us that, thanks to the Localism Act, the top-down planning associated with the previous Labour government had been abolished. Thousands of pages of detailed planning guidance had been replaced by the 60 pages or so of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). Districts councils were no longer bound by the targets for new house building in each district set out in the Regional Spatial Strategies drawn up by civil servants. Instead, each district council can now specify the numbers of houses it needs, based on its own estimate of population growth. These are then written into the district council’s local development plan. Any neighbourhood plans within the district have to conform to the strategic objectives set out in the district’s plan, but can vary the details. They can, for instance, change the recommended locations for new housebuilding.

After a few more speakers enthusiastically promoted neighbourhood planning, the seminar ended with Councillor Paul Swinburn, also a Conservative and the Deputy Leader of Malvern Hills District Council. I suspect Paul has never been a fire-breathing radical, but he spoke with a polite sort of anger about the real world of planning as experienced in our district. Our version of the district development plan has been developed in co-operation with two other district councils and is called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan (SWDP). After an elaborate series of consultation meetings, it has been forwarded to the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) for an assessment by a planning inspector. A planning inspector is a civil servant acting in a ‘quasi-judicial capacity’ (ie he pretends to be an independent arbiter). The planning inspector will oversee an even more elaborate consultation process, until the SWDP is finally approved in about a year’s time. Paul said that while this process is underway, Malvern Hills and the other two district councils are receiving numerous planning applications from developers who propose to build houses on sites not specified in the SWDP. When the district councils turn down these applications, they are approved on appeal by a planning inspector on the grounds that the district council has failed to identify an adequate ‘five year land supply’.

The NPPF requires each district council to identify a ‘five year land supply’ (ie sites which have been approved for housing development sufficient to meet the estimated need for new houses over the next five years). But who decides the number of houses needed for the next five years? The planning inspectors could use the detailed estimates in the SWDP which, although not finally approved, has been agreed by the elected representatives of over 286,000 people in South Worcestershire. But the decisions of our elected representatives count for little with planning inspectors, who are continuing to use the higher figures from the old Regional Spatial Strategy, even though these have (allegedly) been abandoned by the Government.

Clearly, there are two worlds of local planning: there is reality, as experienced by the residents of South Worcestershire, in which housebuilding corporations can build what they like where they like; and there is the Wonderland of triumphant localism inhabited by some members of Parliament.

See also: How green was my village
Confessions of a parish councillor

Dampened spirits

Last Saturday, I helped man the Parish Council stall at the Village Fete (called the ‘Horticultural Show’ in our village). Both the day before and the day after were warm and sunny, but on Saturday there was a cold wind and a hint of rain. Our stall comprised a collapsible gazebo with a banner tied to it. The banner acted as a mainsail, and the gazebo was soon blown over. Large tent pegs and lines were then used to hold it in place. A gazebo, unlike a tent, has no side panels and so gave us little protection against the weather. We sat at our table, hunched against the wind, trying to stop our paperwork blowing across the field. The gazebo, bought for the occasion, began to tear and buckle. One metal rod snapped after a particularly fierce gust.

Elsewhere on the field, there were stalls organised by the Women’s Institute (cakes), the Horticultural Society (plants), the Geological Society (rocks), the local history society (old photographs), as well as horse-riding, community games, old vehicles, a car boot sale, a dog handling show, music, a barbecue, second-hand books, hand-made jewellery, and a little tourist train. Inside the village hall, there was tea and sandwiches. The whole event was a sign of the remarkable ability of people in English villages to organise themselves, and their determination to carry on in adverse weather. Nevertheless, we all agreed that attendance was lower than last year, and that the predominant mood was one of endurance rather than enjoyment.

It was therefore irritating to read in the local paper that “Despite gloomy weather on Saturday, spirits were not dampened in Martley, near Worcester, when villagers turned out in their hordes to enjoy this year’s village show”. The ‘spirits not dampened’ cliché was used over and over again in the dreadful BBC commentary on the Royal Jubilee procession along the Thames last year. It was an insult to our intelligence then and it remains so now. Of course our ‘spirits’ were ‘dampened’, but we carried on stoically and made the best we could of the experience. In my case, this included several interesting discussions with the people who visited our gazebo, and eating a really good cake from the Women’s Institute.