Raymond Chandler at Dulwich College
Posted on June 19, 2009
Filed Under 100 American, Crime Fiction | Leave a Comment
Some time ago now I was sent a pamphlet entitled A College Boy: Raymond Chandler at Dulwich College, 1900 to 1905. The pamphlet was written by Calista Lucy, the archivist at Dulwich College, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Chandler’s death and to mark the renaming of the college’s Lower School Library the Raymond Chandler Library.
A College Boy adds quite a few new snippets of information to the early Chandler biography as well as looking at his writing from a Dulwich point of view. The college’s ledger of Entrance and Tuition Fees, for example, apparently shows that in 1900, when he enrolled at the college having just arrived in England, Chandler lived at Whitefield Lodge, 77 Alleyn Park; he and his mother are later listed in the 1901 census as living at Mount Cyra, 110 Auckland Road, Upper Norwood. As Calista Lucy points out, there is no blue plaque: there should be. There is also information about the books he borrowed from the library–Thackeray, Lamb, and Mark Twain feature–and the news that Chandler returned to Dulwich as a substitute teacher in 1910, from the start of the Michaelmas term that year through to July 1911. This was the period in which his literary ambitions were foundering through lack of money. The job apparently paid him a total of £53 6s, around a sixth of a regular Dulwich College master’s salary at the time.
Chandler the teacher is a tantalising prospect. He was probably a charismatic figure in the classroom, but I suspect there was a lot of ‘telling’ in his teaching style. He was helped into the teaching job by an old master of his, Henry ‘Teddy’ Hose (1876-1967), with whom he kept up a correspondence and friendship that included sending monthly food parcels in the years when food was rationed after World War II. He also did this for another ‘Old Alleynian’, McCulloch Christison.
Besides this kind of information, where the pamphlet is also interesting is in it’s highly suggestive speculations about the influence of the school on Chandler’s later life. For example it seems that in 1903 G.F. Watts’s painting of Sir Galahad (left) was hanging in the school library during Chandler’s time there. It also turns out that the cornflower is the school flower and Lucy makes a link here with the cornflower in the lapel of Lindsay Marriott in Farewell, My Lovely, and Eileen Wade’s cornflower blue eyes–’a rare colour’–in The Long Good-Bye.
These connections might seem tenuous at face value, but Chandler stayed in contact with several people from the school and clearly saw his time there as a major influence on his later life. Lucy notes that Bill Townend, another Dulwich old boy, met Chandler in San Francisco in 1913 and found he was wearing a straw ‘boater’ with the cornflower blue Dulwich ribbon round the brim. This corroborates other evidence that Chandler’s first place of residence in California was the Bay Area, rather than the environs of Los Angeles. For example, Chandler’s mother Florence seems to be listed in a 1912 passenger manifest of the SS Merion with a final US destination of ‘Berkeley, San Francisco’.
More on the discrepancies in Chandler’s early biography here, and on Loren Latker’s Shamus Town site.
Daily Telegraph on Cains Brewery Revival
Posted on June 18, 2009
Filed Under Cain's, History, Liverpool | Leave a Comment
On Tuesday The Daily Telegraph published a strange little piece on Cain’s brewery and the aftermath of the company’s collapse last year. I say strange because I’m not quite sure what the point of it might be for the paper. From the point of view of the brewery it floats the new, healthy-sounding turnover of £30 million–no mention of profits though–and the idea that the brewery is finally back on the road to recovery, which is good news. To me this feels more like a marketing pitch than a news story, but there is also a small personal insight into what the Dusanj brothers went through in the days after they were sent home by the administrators:
“The Olympics started the next day on 08. 08. 08. I’ll never forget that. I watched most of it,” he says. But his enforced bout of TV watching proved cathartic.“I listened to all these stories about sportsmen who get big knock-backs but they believe in what they have and come back,” he explains.
He and his brother Ajmail decided to give things another go and bought much of Cains from Pricewaterhouse- Coopers, its administrator, later in the summer.
Today the group is smaller and humbler than it was. It has just nine pubs and fewer staff. A number of old customers are gone, but many have stood by the company and there are new ones too. Turnover this year should be £30m, just over half of what it was but still a sizeable amount.
Here’s the link to the Telegraph piece again. And speaking of marketing pitches, there’s a lot more about Cains and its fascinating 160-year history in my book Cains: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint.
Norway: Shed Capital of the World
Posted on June 15, 2009
Filed Under Sheds | Leave a Comment
I spent part of last week in Oslo and discovered that Norway is arguably the shed capital of the world. I’ve posted two sets of photographs on my photoblog, Ingrahap, of waterside huts from around Oslo Fjord here and here. Shed week starts on July 6th this year. Go and vote for your shed of the year, right here. I’m backing Bletchley Park hut 6.
When Whales Walked the Earth
Posted on May 22, 2009
Filed Under History, Ideas, Monsters | Leave a Comment
This week Melvyn Bragg’s excellent In Our Time radio programme has as its subject ‘The Whale’, a favourite topic of mine. The enthusiastic discussion between Steve Jones, Eleanor Weston and Bill Amos on the evolution of the whale made my train journey this morning a lot more pleasant and interesting. The programme is available on the BBC’s ‘Listen Again’ service until the end of the current series, and is downloadable as a podcast. Get it while you can:
Of all the whales in literature, among the most famous is Moby Dick described by Herman Melville:
“Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded and went out of sight”.
Melville’s story is one of drama and grim portent, but far more extraordinary is the story of the whale itself. For the manner in which the whale has evolved is among the finest exemplars of the changes evolution can bring to bear upon life on Earth.
Malcolm Lowry Centenary Events
Posted on May 22, 2009
Filed Under Liverpool, Liverpool University, Writers | Leave a Comment
Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano, was born in 1909 on the Wirral peninsula, just across the Mersey from Liverpool. To mark his centenary there are many events going on in Liverpool and around Merseyside over the next six months, including an exhibition and literature events celebrating his life and work running from 25 September to 22 November. In September Liverpool University Press is publishing Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World edited by Brian Biggs and Helen Tookey. From the blurb:
Malcolm Lowry described Liverpool as ‘that terrible city whose main street is the ocean’. Born on the Wirral side of the river Mersey, Lowry’s relationship to the Merseyside of his youth informs all of his writing and Liverpool itself continued to hold tremendous significance for him, even though he never returned.
The book includes writing by Gordon Bowker, Ailsa Cox, Colin Dilnot, Annick Drösdal-Levillain, Michele Gemelos, Mark Goodall, Ian McMillan, Nicholas Murray, Cian Quayle, Alberto Rebollo, Robert Sheppard and Michael Turner.
And there’s more. Helen Tookey is also running a short course about Lowry and his work at the University of Liverpool in September and October. The course is open to everyone. Details will be available from the department of Continuing Education later in the summer.
For information about the book, visit the publisher’s page.
Information about Lowry events in Liverpool is available from The Bluecoat.
More on Literary Tourism
Posted on May 13, 2009
Filed Under Writers | Leave a Comment
Following on from the Robert McCrum piece in the Observer about George Orwell and Barnhill, Randy Malamud has an article in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education [original link has now died, download a pdf of the article from here] about literary tourism, commenting on the ‘ownership’ aspect of pilgrimages to writers’ houses but in the end drawing a positive conclusion:
Arriving in London for the first time many years ago, I hadn’t shaken off my jet lag before heading directly to London Bridge, where I walked with the morning crowds (”so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many”), and, fixing my eyes before my feet, “flowed up the hill and down King William Street, / to where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.” Following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot’s dreary commute to his tedious job at Lloyds Bank, a path memorialized in the lines of The Waste Land, I engaged in what has since become a part of all my travels: literary tourism.
[Link (pdf)]
George Orwell, Jura, and Nineteen Eighty-Four
Posted on May 10, 2009
Filed Under Jura, Writers | 2 Comments
Last summer we spent our family holiday at Barnhill, where George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. In today’s Observer newspaper Robert McCrum has a long piece about George Orwell’s stay on Jura which gives some interesting background on Orwell’s time there. Staying at Barnhill was a rather special experience, though as it happens not really because of Orwell. I’ve been reluctant to write about it until recently, but by chance I have been making some notes about it this week; here are some of my thoughts. For the record I would disagree with McCrum’s point that Barnhill is ‘not large’. I guess it depends on your point of view and on the context, but I wouldn’t want to try to heat anything larger.
Cowlick
There are some experiences so significant it seems wrong to speak of them even if you are four years old and can’t stop talking. We have a secret code for Barnhill, the house on the island of Jura where we stayed for a week in the wet summer of 2008. We call it ‘Cowlick’ because while we were there the car we left by the roadside miles away became an impromptu scratching post and salt lick for a herd of cows. The code was devised by our daughter because hearing the name of the place itself, and not being there any more, made her feel sad.
Sixty years before, in 1948, George Orwell completed Nineteen Eighty-Four at Barnhill. It is a good-sized farmhouse four miles from a road and about a mile from its nearest neighbour. It probably ranks among the most isolated dwellings in the British isles. In the summer, swallows nest illegally under the eaves and sea eagles balance above the bay. As a house Barnhill is no great beauty in itself, but it fits the place perfectly, like a white rock exposed in the landscape by thousands of years of weather.
Orwell’s move to Barnhill in 1946 was partly to do with his health. As it turned out later he was tubercular and the air quality in London in the 1940s was atrocious and making him ill. But the year he chose to move to Jura happened to include one of Britain’s hardest winters. He was also intending to farm the land and establish a degree of self-sufficiency. Living on Jura would put him out of reach of the government spooks he believed were watching him and it was also far enough from London, he thought, to escape the worst effects of an atom bomb. But for the most part he was seeking an escape from the distractions of the city. He wanted to write his novel away from all the noise and the busy-ness of his work as a journalist.
Despite its isolation Barnhill now draws a surprising number of day trippers. Orwell knew that the best spies are recruited from friends and neighbours and he would probably not have been surprised to find that many of Barnhill’s visitors are prepared to slip through the closed gate into the garden to peer in at the windows, invading the private spaces of the house in their search for something of him. In fact not much remains of Orwell at Barnhill now. The house looks much the same from the outside, though it is better maintained than in Orwell’s day. There are traces of the work he did in cultivating the garden: fragments of iron fencing, the faint ghost of a path to the front door, a solitary azalea. Inside it is much more comfortable than he would have remembered.
Writers’ houses are big business now of course. The Beatrix Potter industry, centred on her farmhouse, Hill Top, brings thousands of tourists to the Lake District. Visitors swarm over the houses of Dickens and Wordsworth, Ruskin, James and Woolf, to name only a few. In an age when most people can read and write perhaps they want to know what it is that makes this writer’s work so special, or that writer’s work so celebrated. Maybe the answer is among the bri-a-brac and the antique furniture, if only you look hard enough. Except it isn’t. Writers’ houses promise to tell us something about the writers who lived in them, but it is mostly an illusion. In any case by the time the curators and the tourists get there the writer is long gone.
The connection with Orwell is partly what drew us to Barnhill, but what we took away was not much to do with him. A week at Barnhill is not like a week in the wilderness—far from it—but it is enough for nature to let you to know where you stand in the order of things. It is long enough to fall into a rhythm of light and dark, of what needs to be done not because of the time, but because it needs to be done. Maybe that’s why it appealed so much to a four year-old; that and the claw-foot bath. Barnhill is a very special place and part of its specialness comes from that connection with Orwell and his extraordinary book. But mostly Barnhill is special because of where it is—the sea, the rocks, the deer on the ridge, the seals in the bay—and because of what it lets you see and keep to yourself.
Here’s the link to Robert McCrum’s article again.
Poet Rebecca Goss on Woman’s Hour
Posted on May 5, 2009
Filed Under Liverpool, Poetry | 1 Comment
Liverpool poet Rebecca Goss, whose work I admire, is to be interviewed on Woman’s Hour on Friday this week helping to raise awareness of congenital heart disease. She writes:
To mark the start of Children’s Heart Week which begins on Saturday, I will be on Woman’s Hour this Friday, May 8th, BBC Radio 4 at 10am.
I’m hoping to raise awareness of congenital heart disease by reading some of the poems I’ve written about my daughter Ella. Ella was born with a severe heart defect in 2007 and I’ll be talking about her short but incredible life.
There will be a Children’s Heart Federation appeal on Radio 4, on Sunday May 10th: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00k7qy8
Thank you for listening if you can.
A number of my Ella poems are available to read in the latest issue of Shadowtrain magazine.
Children’s Heart Federation
1 in every 133 children is born with a heart defect. Our vision is of a society in which all children with congenital heart disease can live life to the full because their medical, educational and social needs have been met. Charity Registration No 1120557 http://www.childrens-heart-fed.org.uk/
The programme will be available for on ‘listen again’ for seven days from Friday and as a podcast.
Dulwich College to Name Library in Honour of Raymond Chandler
Posted on April 30, 2009
Filed Under Crime Fiction | Leave a Comment
The archivist at Dulwich College, where crime writer Raymond Chandler attended school from 1900 has been in touch to say that on May 5th 2009 the Lower School Library will be renamed the Chandler Library to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. The ceremony will be conducted by Tom Rob Smith, a more recent ‘Old Alleynian’ and author of Child 44, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008. Dulwich already has a ‘Wodehouse Library’, in honour of the creator of ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ who preceded Chandler at the school. I wonder if the remaining Junior School library will eventually be named for C.S. Forester, author of The African Queen, who attended Dulwich College after Chandler and also lived and wrote in California.
Meanwhile, more information is emerging about Chandler’s life in the United States before he moved to England. Chandler researcher Loren Latker has uncovered evidence of Chandler attending school in Plattsmouth, Nebraska in 1895 and 1896 and this, combined with Nebraska census records showing he and his mother were resident in Plattsmouth in 1900, suggests that he did not move to the UK in 1895 as has been commonly thought. It seems more likely that he and his mother crossed the Atlantic in June 1900 so that he could begin his studies at Dulwich.
More on Chandler’s early life here [Updated]
Shedworking and Weeds in the Vegetable Patch
Posted on April 24, 2009
Filed Under Gardening, Sheds | 1 Comment
I’ve just spent half an hour digging up an area of the garden where I’m planning to plant some peas and while I was doing it I caught up with BlogTalkRadio’s interview with Alex “Shedworking” Johnson. I’m an enthusiastic shedworker and it was great to hear Alex explaining the advantages of small garden buildings dedicated to work. He does a fine job of promoting shedworking as a way of life. I was particularly interested to hear him talking about ‘balance’ and how shedworking enables him to see more of his kids. Lots of people will identify with that. All the links are available here. Well worth a listen.
Elsewhere, the aforementioned garden features in a lovely, funny, touching piece on the Brocante Home blog: The Lady Who Thought She Was a Car.
keep looking »
Subscribe