French exiles, royal and presidential in Worcestershire

Look up a list of pretenders to the thrones of Europe and you will find that France has three: from the Bourbon; Orleanist; and Bonapartist lines of succession. Each of these royal houses ruled France at different times in the 19th Century. When not in power, the senior members of each house would go into exile, often in England and, in a few cases, in Worcestershire.

The royal exile first to reach our county was Lucien Bonaparte, Prince Français. He was a younger brother of Napoleon and played a key part in the latter’s rise to power. But he lost out in palace intrigue, and was exiled to Italy. In 1809, he decided to flee to the USA, but his ship was intercepted by the Royal Navy. Once in England, Lucien seems to have been treated with great civility, and was allowed to buy a house in Worcestershire, although he was kept under close surveillance and his mail was intercepted. The house, called ‘Thorngrove’, is in a secluded part of Grimley Parish not far from the River Severn, and was built in the 18th Century. It has large landscaped gardens and is Grade 2 listed. Lucien eventually left Thorngrove in 1814, although not before one his sons, Louis Lucien Bonaparte, was born in the house. Thorngrove House is not open to the public, and so, although it is only a few miles from my home, I have never visited it.

After the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, France became a republic almost by default. Although monarchists won the elections for the National Assembly, the three competing royal houses could not agree on an acceptable candidate for the throne.

The next royal exile in Worcestershire was the Duc d’Aumale, one of the sons of King Louis-Philippe, who ruled France between the two revolutions of 1830 and 1848. The Duc bought Wood Norton Hall near Evesham in 1872 as a hunting lodge. On his death in 1897, the property passed to Prince Philippe, Duc d’Orleáns, who was the official pretender for the throne on behalf of both the Bourbon and Orleanist royal houses. Philippe rebuilt Wood Norton Hall as a splendid stately home in a wooded setting overlooking the River Avon. The house became an important social centre, with a royal wedding for the Bourbon family in 1907 (the bride was the grandmother of the current King of Spain). Philippe had an active social life too, being cited as a co-respondent in a divorce case and having an affaire with Dame Nellie Melba.

Philippe died in 1926 and the house eventually passed to the BBC for use as an emergency broadcasting centre in the Second World War and in the Cold War (with a nuclear bunker added), a staff training centre, and the location for some early Doctor Who episodes. A few years ago, I had a superb meal at Wood Norton Hall, followed by coffee and petits fours in a dark lounge lit only by an oak fire. The building is now a luxury hotel and worth visiting for its food, its setting and its history.

The next important French exile in Worcestershire was a future president rather than a would-be king or emperor. After the defeat of France in 1940, General de Gaulle created the Free French Army. In 1942, he set up training school for officer cadets in Ribbesford House near the beautiful riverside town of Bewdley. Although not based there, he visited the House and the town before the School closed in 1944 and its newly-trained officers joined in the liberation of France. Half of them were dead before the end of the War.

Ribbesford House probably dates from the 16th Century but has been much enlarged, partially demolished and restored since then. It is not open to the public, but can be seen from the nearby parish church. It is perhaps a little reminiscent of a French country chateau, standing in front of a wooded hill, facing fields leading to a long winding river. The river flows past villages and towns to join the great ocean where all rivers meet. 

Fire my light

Joseph Chamberlain became mayor of Birmingham in 1873, and took urgent action to deal with the City’s shambolic gas and water supply. Two rival gas companies dug up the City’s streets seemingly at random, while the water supply was intermittent, polluted and spread fatal diseases. Under his leadership, the City bought out the private companies and radically improved the service. The profits from the new municipal gas enterprise helped fund schools, libraries, parks, swimming pools, and what would now be called ‘social housing’. This policy was sometimes called ‘municipal socialism’, but Chamberlain was a successful industrialist and certainly did not see his actions as part of a war on capitalism: rather, they were  practical steps to ensure that the City received an efficient set of public services, and that the profits from these enterprises would benefit all its citizens.

In the last thirty years, Chamberlain’s policies have gone into reverse. Public services have been sold off to large international corporations, the whole process being managed by a process of ‘contracting’ that involves millions of pounds of public funding for lawyers, accountancy firms, and management consultants. Utility companies have to be bribed with further tax receipts to provide essential public services: local authorities are being encouraged by government to pay BT to install high-speed broadband in rural areas; while central government will soon commit £100 billion capital expenditure to update the water and electricity networks. Why do the public have to pay? Because long-term investment in infrastructure does not generate the short-term profits needed to maintain corporations’ share prices.

Private contractors for public services are regulated on behalf of the public by a set of QANGOs. These can be active. In the last year, EDF have been fined £4.5 million for mis-selling electricity and gas to vulnerable customers, Npower was fined £2 million for breaching regulations on handling customers’ complaints, while British Gas was fined £1 million for lying about the amount of electricity it generated from renewable sources. Still pending is action over the cartel used by the major gas suppliers to jack up the prices paid by consumers.

The supposed benefit of privatisation is of course that competition generates efficiency and hence low prices. But the British people now pay well above the median pre-tax prices in Europe for gas and electricity, and our rail fares are the highest in Europe. What competition does generate successfully is a multitude of tariffs and fares. Go to a price-comparison website and enter details of your electricity ‘supplier’. Then check the box of your tariff. You will see dozens of choices, some time-limited, some pre-paid, all confusing. This is bewildering because each supplier is selling an identical commodity. Electricity does not vary between EDF, Npower or Eon - no ‘supplier’ has some magic ingredient in their electricity. It all comes through the same supply lines and does exactly the same thing whoever charges you for it. The latest government initiative is to force ‘suppliers’ to place their customers on the cheapest tariff. But this intervention only proves that the whole paraphernalia of market competition, contracts and regulation fails to work for the benefit of the public.

What would Joseph Chamberlain do? He would realise that high power bills cause hardship to many families and impede business success. His initial step would therefore be to set up a corporation to buy electricity from the various generating companies on behalf of the public. This would charge a few simply-understood tariffs, but would use its monopoly purchasing-power to push down prices. In the case of the railways, he would probably take over the companies running main-line services and scrap the whole crazy franchising system that means that one set of companies run the trains, another set own the rolling-stock and another one owns the track.

These are not a particularly radical steps: they are what happens in most of Europe. One of the strange features of the operation of privatised public services in the UK is that most of the private suppliers of public services are foreign-owned, in some cases owned by foreign governments. The power ‘supplier’ EDF is mainly owned by the French government. The German government is the controlling shareholder of DB, which owns Arriva Trains, Chiltern Railways, Cross-Country, Grand Central Railway, Tyne and Wear Metro, and the main UK railfreight company DB Schenker. The prices EDF, DB and similar foreign-owned companies are allowed to charge in their own countries are significantly lower than in the UK, which means that the profits they make in our country cross-subsidise our European neighbours. Next time you catch a train owned by DB or buy fuel from EDF, take pleasure in the fact that part of the inflated prices you pay is helping keep taxes down in Germany and France.

Thanks to The Observer Business Leader for 18th November 2012, page 44. 

See also http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/meet-new-boss-same-as-old-boss.html

Private morality and public morality

A long time ago, on a train to Edinburgh, I was approached by two Mormon missionaries. As usual, these were Americans in business suits, speaking in the friendly outgoing way that is such an attractive part of their culture. They told me that becoming a Mormon would confer many advantages for my career. Mormons, they said, had such a reputation for honesty that Howard Hughes recruited only Mormons to run his business interests in Las Vegas. I pointed out that Howard Hughes was running a vast gambling enterprise in that city, which was also a major centre for (legal) prostitution. The missionaries were used to rejection, but found my point puzzling. They saw no problem in combining morality in their private life with the promotion of mass corruption in business.

I was reminded of this encounter by the recent presidential election in the USA, in which another Mormon (Mitt Romney) managed to combine a strict personal morality with a political campaign that involved a startling sequence of dishonest statements, bewildering changes of opinion on the most fundamental issues, and a set of policies that would drive millions of the poorest people in his country to even greater misery. Like the Mormon missionaries on the train to Edinburgh, he drew a clear distinction between two quite different moral standards: private morality (how we behave with our family and friends) and public morality (how we behave with everyone else).

This distinction is not of course found among Mormons alone, and is much older than the Mormon religion. The idea that we should be compassionate with our families and cruel to others probably dates from the earliest human history: we co-operate with and trust members of our own tribe, but arm ourselves against other tribes. In warfare, honest and peaceful men come together to kill strangers. The justification for distinguishing our private and public moralities is therefore that members of other tribes can not be trusted, and that our relations with them are a matter of actual or potential warfare. It is a simple matter for some people to extend this principle to the operation of politics and economics: whatever moral standards we apply to our family lives, it is assumed that survival in political and business affairs necessitates fraud and double-dealing. 

The trouble with living with this distinction is that it confirms the evils of the world. Advances in human life have come about when people have chosen to apply the ethics of their private morality to public affairs. In his great book Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild gives the example of the English sea captain John Newton. In 1748, he experienced a spiritual conversion (we would say he was ‘born again’), which led him eventually to become ordained in the Church of England and to write several hymns. The most famous of these, Amazing Grace is often mistakenly categorised as a ‘negro spiritual’. This is particularly ironic since Newton made his living by captaining ships bringing slaves from Africa to the North American colonies. Newton was apparently able to reconcile his conversion with an active role in the most brutal and cruel of all trades. Even after leaving the sea in 1754, he continued to invest in the slave trade and said nothing against it for another 34 years.

But during that time, the campaign to abolish the slave trade gathered strength. This was at first led by Quakers, who were joined later by evangelical Christians and political radicals. The campaign at some point must have produced great soul-searching in Newton, and eventually in 1788, by now a prominent Anglican clergyman, he published a forceful pamphlet denouncing the slave trade and describing the horrors he had seen as captain of a slave ship. He later became a star witness before Parliament on behalf of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and lived to see the success of the campaign with the passing of the Slave Trade Act in 1807.

So if Newton could eventually apply the principles of his private morality to his public morality and have such a positive influence on mankind, there must surely be hope even for Mitt Romney.