Oliver in the park

Moment of undiluted content, sharing fallen leaves with my grandson in Handsworth Park; these from our plane trees, broad and brown; heaped up they're good for falling on, being buried amid and shuffling all over the place. By the pond, willow leaves like little blades are strewn, yellow and curved, to be picked up in a bunch and thrown above our heads, spinning as they fall, winning, from our child, shrieks of pleasure and surprise. Down by the water's stoney edge, under the intense guardianship of eye and hand, Oliver sits by the bank as, across the grey city water, we're approached by hopeful fowl - Canada geese, coot, duck, moorhen, two married swans like galleons with their cygnets - no longer ugly ducklings. Oscar dog stands on an outcrop and earns open-beak hisses from cob and pen, but Oliver and I are treated as benign, at least non-combatants; allowed to stare.

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First thing in the morning I'd cycled to Aston station, taken the train to Blake Street and cycled about three miles in car-land to Aldridge Parish Church…

Car-land on the way to Aldridge from Blake Street

Aldridge Parish Church

…to give a talk about the Founding of Handsworth Park to over fifty members of the Probus Club of Aldridge. Nearly 15 years after I wrote a history of how Handsworth Park was invented in the 1880s its story has  taken more secure form in my mind. Good. When I asked how many of this audience, men of my age and older, had visited Handsworth Park, over two third raised their hands. Yet to me Aldridge feels so different from my Handsworth I'm apprehensive at the prospect of explaining how much I love the place and how much I've learned about it these last twenty five years.
"Our park was not, like many fine city parks, a gift from a philanthropic landowner. It had to be paid for by local ratepayers in what was then the rich and salubrious village of Handsworth in rural Staffordshire, at comfortable remove from the the smoke, noise and mess of the great working city of Birmingham. But Birmingham was spreading. Relentlessly."
I quote what I and others have written:

Birmingham’s expanding population sought new living space, leaving only the poorest in the insanitary courts of the city centre and even these were soon edged away by the Corporation Street “improvement scheme” initiated in 1875 and finished in 1882 at a cost of over £1½ million. A familiar idea of “inner city” was not so much when the poor increased but when they no longer lived so close to the unpoor. In addition there were houses closer to the city centre, such as the Jewellery Quarter, whose artisan owners were converting them into workplaces and setting up home further away while still working in the city. Handsworth, many of whose residents had a special connection to Hockley and St.Pauls, was only one of the outlying parishes of Birmingham to undergo a process of transformation to “suburb”: 'While it was going on, the process gratified landowners, developers, builders and the occupants of the new suburbs, or at least continued to lure them with the prospects of profits, status, and happiness, but pleased practically no-one else. Contemporary social and architectural critics were fascinated and appalled by the mindless, creeping nature of the sprawl ... The ceaseless activity of the builders, the alarming rapidity with which they turned pleasant fields into muddy, rutted building sites, the confusion of hundreds of building operations going on simultaneously, without any discernible design, the impression that little schemes were starting up everywhere at once and were never being finished, were in themselves frightening portents of disorder and chaos…' Thompson, F.M.L. (ed.) (1982) The Rise of Suburbia (Leicester:University Press) pp.67-68.

The talk went well. Nervousness aside I enjoyed myself. Over coffee, one old man - my age - said "I wonder if some of those people you quoted, when the case was being made for a park in Handsworth, would have believed their words were being quoted all these years later?" It was a lovely thought. I'd read from some of the conscientiously reported transcripts of local leaders arguing for the park, debating with sceptics and people downright opposed to having their rates spent on a park in what was still countryside…and especially the concerns of the Vicar of St.Mary's Church, Handsworth:

Dr. Randall rose amid the uproar to make what the Handsworth News reporter, with irony, called the speech of the evening: “I will answer for myself. Allow me to say that from my heart I am the last man in the parish to stand between any object which is for the welfare of the people of the parish. It is because I don't think it is for the well-being that we should have the park that I lift up my voice against it. We have an agricultural parish, and we have some of the finest air in the kingdom, and I believe that the park will be more for the benefit of the roughs of Birmingham.” (a perfect howl of dissent, uproar for at least a minute and cries of “shame” followed by alternations of groaning and cheering)  Dr. Randall spoke of people leaving the parish because of the heavy rates. (“hear, hear” and applause) He thought the Local Board had erred through jubilee zeal or some other zeal.(laughter) The vendors had taken advantage of that zeal to raise the price. (clamour) “I will state on my honour and word that the same land including the house has been offered to me even a few months ago, first at £7000 and then at £6000. If on no other ground I will oppose the purchase because it is above the price at which it has been offered to a private individual.” (great cheering and interruption, Babel itself was not in it with the confusion of sounds that then ensued)..p.16 of my history, drawing on unnamed reporters for the Handsworth News and the Handsworth Gazette, 19 Jan 1887

The long campaign for the recovery of contemporary Handsworth Park required the construction of a political narrative (helped in our case by access to far wider reference*) as robust as that which persuaded our ancestors. Reading the words of contemporary reporters of the 1880s I'm even more aware of how astutely argued was the case for the financial value of the park, its utility for a fast-growing urban incursion - effectively an expanding 'Birmingham suburb', a 'lung' for the city assuring the 'vigour and health' of the new population in their tiny-gardened workers' terraces with hardly room to 'swing a bat'. I said to the Probis members "I love this park, my family love it. I see it dew filled on spring mornings, its tranquillity to be enjoyed alone as much as its bustling crowds on summer afternoons. And as for the fun of visiting it in the snow!"

Amy and Guy and the dogs in Handsworth Park

Christmas day 

Summer evening

Simmer Down Festival 2012

I would have argued for its aesthetics and in consequence would have had none of the impact of those shrewd local politicians who'd made their case for popular support with demographic statistics and the language of efficient accountancy; such calculation raising for the new park the largest single loan then known to the district…I quote from one of the crowded public meetings held in the Council House off Soho Road seeking popular permission for a park in Handsworth... 

"...If the park is established I feel sure that in a very few years houses will be built in the locality which will render no extra rate necessary to support the park” (laugher and cries of “no, no”). Mr. Lines sits down and Mr. Wainwright rises to reply:
He was commendably brief, but exceedingly earnest, and his short fiery speech was admirably adapted to secure his purpose. Every word told, and the promise that the Board would, if the resolution were carried, do all their promised work without raising the rate, and throw in the park as well, seemed to produce the desired effect. Having concluded his speech, Mr. Wainwright put the resolution, and hands having been held up on either side, he declared that..
IT WAS CARRIED,
..much to the disgust of many on the platform. Mr.Jacobs loudly protested that the proposition was lost and demanded a poll. Mr.Cooper offered to place in the hands of the clerk or the chairman a cheque sufficiently large to cover the expenses of a poll. Mr. Ellis fumed and Dr. Randall looked disconsolate. But the clerk explained that the Board had no power to arrange for a poll of the ratepayers and the malcontents had to satisfy themselves with empty protest and not too polite observations as to the chairman and his manner of conducting the proceedings. Meantime, Mr. Wainwright, with radiant face and beaming eyes, left the platform, being heartily congratulated by his friends and supporters, and as we elbowed our way out of the still crowded room, we felicitated ourselves on the fact that the vexed question of a public park for Handsworth had been set at rest, with every appearance of the settlement arrived at, being a final and permanent one. Handsworth News, Jan. 22 1887 (pp.16-17 my account)

Even so in the final paragraph of my account (and in all my talks about the creation of Handsworth Park) I conclude 

They did not pursue such an idea simply out of expediency or to raise the value of their properties. Such self-interest was present - used unashamedly to strengthen their case among the practically minded citizens of Handsworth and more covertly to mitigate social conditions that might spur political unrest - but opposition to the Park from some of those who would be paying for it was at times so intense that calculative motives alone would not have carried the project through.

'...its tranquility to  be enjoyed alone…' A 19th century postcard

*for instance The Economic Value of Protected Open Space or a much circulated Japanese study on the link between longevity and walkable green space.
*** *** ***
After a visit to town - coffee with Phil Crumpton to discuss Black Patch Park at Yorks Bakery on Newhall Street - I take my usual journey home, Oscar running in front, beside and behind, on the canal towpath - Gas Street, from the top of Farmer's Locks where narrow boats are moored, some with their generators running, dim lights showing through curtained windows, the whiff of coal and wood smoke from their stove pipes; onto the Birmingham Mainline, then sharp right onto Soho Loop, my eyes unable to make out the way I wheel the Brompton under the flat rail bridge, Oscar a lighter smudge in the gloom….

Dudley Road bridge over the Soho Loop canal

Soho Loop towpath by Clissold Street

…then with him back in his pannier, I exit the tow path through a gap in the railings to join Clissold Street with its speed bumps, All Saints Street, free-wheeling down Goode Avenue wary of turning cars, into narrower Crescent Avenue, across South Road and up the slope of Claremont Road that turns into Richmond Road - a cul-de-sac - at the end of which I cross at the traffic lights on busy Soho Hill onto Hamstead Road, cross the Villa Road, turn right on Radnor Road, then left down Wycliffe Road which continues into Beaudesert Road and home.
**** **** ****
We have our passage booked for Greece - a flight to Venice, then by sea along the chill Adriatic to the ugly port of Igoumenitsa, then, in late afternoon, a ferry crossing to Corfu. In our dear village, in Ano Korakiana - 'The first seeds of Winter' - the liturgy for St.Barbara in the church of Our Lady in Mougades, at the west end of the village. The festive cycle of winter begins:

Τα πρώτα σπερνά του Χειμώνα

«Βαρβαρίτσι, Νικολίτσι κι Άη-Σάββας μες τη μέση…» και κατά πως ορίζει το γνωμικό αυτό, ξεκινάει και ο φετινός χειμωνιάτικος εορταστικός κύκλος, με τη Λειτουργία της Αγίας Βαρβάρας στην εκκλησία της Παναγίας στην κορυφή της Μουργάδας.Σε αντίθεση με άλλες περιοχές της χώρας,το πρωινό είναι ηλιόλουστο και η μικρή εκκλησία δεν θα αργήσει να γεμίσει από κόσμο και μάλιστα κάθε ηλικίας: από τις δεσποσύνες Αγγελική και Μαριέτα, έως την κυρά Χρυσάνθη, από την ανηφόρα της Πλαγιάς.Κάθε είσοδος στο ναό συνοδεύεται από προσκύνημα στη μεγάλη εικόνα της Παναγίας, που δεσπόζει σε κεντρικό σημείο και στη μικρότερη της Αγίας Βαρβάρας, ενώ κατά την έξοδο, ένα σακουλάκι με σπερνά αναμένει τους πιστούς, φτιαγμένα «δια χειρός» Δημήτρη και Ελένης Απέργη, που έχουν εφέτος τη σχετική επιμέλεια.

*** ***
…and on the 24th November the website of the village describes a meeting there with William Gladstone.

Ο Γλάδστων 1859

I find the piece beyond my ability to translate, and I want badly to read this - a village record, probably unknown to history, of a local discussion with one of our greatest statesman, dispatched down the wintry Adriatic by his rival Disraeli, in part to get him from England, in part to see if the great man could resolve an intractable problem among the seven islands of  Britain's troublesome Ionian Protectorate. Gladstone, in his diaries, wrote later of being utterly absorbed 'in the affairs of these little islands...'The complexity of the case is inversely (so to speak) as the extent of the sphere.' (31 Dec 1858). And complex it is; even embarrassing; certainly politically sensitive to this day, not least because Gladstone a strong friend of Hellenic independence found, on touring Corfu, that union with mother Greece was not to the liking of many of the islanders he met. This, I hasten to insist, was not through love towards, or even friendship with the English - tho' that did exist for a variety of motives - but through apprehension among the more politically sophisticated, not about Enosis-Ένωσις - as such, but at too close a union with the political corruption associated with government from Athens, and indeed reciprocal anxiety in Athens at the prospect of being united with the radical intelligentsia of Corfu, Zakinthos, Levkas and Cephalonia. The British - ever 'perfidious Albion' - 'handed us over to Athens" I've heard said by neighbours in Ano Korakiana ' because through those corrupt corridors they could have more influence over the affairs of Greece than by struggling to preserve their unwelcome foothold on the Ionian Islands":

Ο Γλάδστων στην Κορακιάνα του 1859

27 Ιανουαρίου (1859): Υπήγεν η Α.Ε. Γλάδστων μετά των υπασπιστών του εφ’ ίππων εις το χωρίον Κορακιάνα, διότι προ ημερών οι χωρικοί τον επροσκάλεσαν και αυτός δια να τους ευχαριστήση υπήγε. Και άμα έφθασεν, κατέβησαν όλοι οι χωρικοί, προεστός και λοιποί, δια να τους υποδεχθούν. Τους συνόδευσαν εις το χωρίον και άρχισαν να τους περιγράφουν όλα. Όταν ήτο έτοιμο το γεύμα (εν γεύμα μεγαλοπρεπές και πλουσιοπάροχον), επροσκάλεσαν την Α.Ε. με τους οπαδούς του, οίτινες ήλθον και εκάθησαν εις το μέσον του τραπεζίου. Διαρκούντος του γεύματος οι πρόκριτοι του χωριού τους έκαμαν διαφόρους ομιλίας, λέγοντες ότι « είμασθεν καλλίτερα υπό την Τουρκίαν παρά υπό την Αγγλίαν, διότι τότε εχαιρόμασθεν πολλά δικαιώματα, τώρα δε όχι». «Διατί (τους απάντησεν ο Γλάδστων) δεν είσθαι ευχαριστημένοι με την τωρινήν Κυβέρνησιν;». Και ότι: «Προ καιρού επεριφέρετο μία γραφή (ανακοίνωση-δήλωση) περί αποικίας, όντες υπογεγραμμένοι κάμποσοι από εσάς». «Μάλιστα (είπον αυτοί), το εκάμαμεν αυτό δια να εκβάλωμεν άλλο έξω, το περί Ενώσεως.Δηλαδή εσπείραμεν και θέλει έλθη καιρός να θερίσωμεν», «Και πώς (τους είπεν ο Γλάδστων) δεν σας αρέσουν οι μεταρρυθμίσεις τας οποίας επρότεινα εις τηνΒουλήν; Τέτε θέλει είσθε καλύτερα και θέλει χαίρεσθε πολλά δικαιώματα», «Όχι» του απάντησαν αυτοί «ότι κάμνουν οι Αντιπρόσωποί μας, καλά καμωμένα» Σ.Σ. στο έντονο αίτημα της πλειονότητας των Επτανησσίων για «Ένωση με την Ελλάδα» τη δεκαετία του 1850, η αγγλική προστασία απάντησε με ένα σχέδιο μεταρρυθμίσεων, προσπαθώντας να κερδίσει χρόνο.Στα τέλη δε, του 1858 ο Γλάδστων έφτασε στα νησιά προκειμένου να διαπιστώσει το κλίμα που επικρατεί εκεί. Το Γενάρη λοιπόν του 1859 οι Κορακιανίτες προεστοί τον κάλεσαν στο χωριό, όπως φανερώνει η παραπάνω αναφορά των «Καθημερούσιων Ειδήσεων» του Σαμαρτζή. Εκεί αυτός, μάλλον έκπληκτος, αντίκρυσε όπως φαίνεται αρνητικό κλίμα και υποχρεώθηκε να υπενθυμίσει ότι αρκετοί από τους παρόντες στη συνάντηση είχαν προ μηνών υπογράψει ανακοίνωση «περί αποικίας». Πιθανότατα η αναφορά αυτή αφορά το περιβόητο χαρτί που υπέγραψε μερίδα Κορακιαντιτών και άλλων, ενάντια στην ένωση και υπερ της παραμονής υπό την αγγλική προστασία. Υπάρχουν δε μαρτυρίες ότι στην ίδια (;) επίσκεψη ο Γλάδστων ομίλησε στους χωριανούς στις Μουργάδες, έξω από την οικία Μαρτζούκου (Άη Νικολόπουλος), αλλά αυτοί δεν έπαυαν να επαναλαμβάνουν το αίτημα «Ένωση αν’ όρος» (δηλαδή, «Ένωση άνευ όρων»)….

I wrote asking Aleko for help and within hours he replied.

Dear Simon and Linda. Here is the translation, done quite quickly, so please excuse mistakes!! My Greek lessons this year at Sally's are going very well. I now have two groups, beginners and an advanced group, all done on the same day, Tuesday 11 to 12  and 12.30-1.30.  Have many new people, a total of 18 now! Please get in touch when you come back to Corfu and we will arrange some meeting. In the meantime a VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU BOTH and a VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR! with love,  Aleko

GLADSTONE IN KORAKIANA IN 1859 

On the 27th January 1859 His Excellency Lord Gladstone, with his aides on horseback, went to the village of Korakiana because some days before, the villagers had invited him. In order to please them he accepted their invitation and went. When he arrived all the villagers and dignitaries from the village came to welcome him. They accompanied him and his entourage to the centre of the village and started to relate to them everything about their village. When the dinner was ready (a memorably rich and grand feast) they invited His Excellency, with his followers, to sit at the centre of the table. While the dinner was under progress the village dignitaries delivered some speeches with their focal point being:

“We were better off under the Turkish rule than under the English, because then we enjoyed many privileges which we don’t now”

“Why” answered Gladstone "are you not happy with the present government…A while ago there was a declaration concerning colonies and indeed many of you have signed to join them”

“Yes indeed” they replied. “We did this in order to bring up another point - the point concerning the Union of our island with Greece…In other words we have sowed the seeds and are now waiting for the harvest…”

“And why” said Gladstone "do you like these reforms which I suggested to the Parliament? You would all be much better off and would enjoy many privileges”

“No” they answered “Whatever our representatives do are WELL DONE and WELL RECEIVED”

P.S. This request by the majority of the Ionians to join Greece during the 1850s was answered by the English Protectorate with many reformation plans in order to gain time. Towards the end of 1850 Gladstone arrived at the islands in order to find out what the general feeling was all about. In January 1859 Dignitaries from Korakiana invited him to the village, as written in the report of the Daily News by Samartzis. When Gladstone arrived at the village he noticed a very negative attitude so he was compelled to remind them that many present in this meeting had signed many months before a statement concerning ‘Colonies’. It is very possible that this signed document is the well known document signed by a certain section of Korakiana villagers OPPOSING the union of the Ionian Islands with Greece and who were pro the English Protectorate. There are testimonies that Gladstone spoke to some villagers at Mourgades, outside the house of Martzoukos (Saint Nikolopoulos). They never ceased to repeat the request : “Union under NO conditions”.

Protectorate or possession?

I was delighted to accept Richard Pine’s invitation, to give a chat at the Durrell School in Philhellene Street in a few weeks - Wednesday 3 February. In Richard's words "7.30 glass of wine, 8pm talk, finish by 9pm".

I'm delving into the varying characteristics of different Lord High Commissioners of the Ionian Islands between 1815 and 1864, relying on sorties in the National Archives at Kew, on the early chapters of Diana Markides and Robert Holland The British and the Hellenes and, of course, on Eleni Calligas’s brilliant 1992 thesis – unpublished - that has brought together rich information about personalities in the Ionian political classes during the British Protectorate.

I have a portrait of Thomas Maitland, the graceless aristocrat, who in 1817 wrote a constitution for the Ionian Islands that made them more an English possession than the Protectorate, intended and agreed, in 1815.

There’s one of his successor Frederick Adam, whose statue stands outside the Protectorate's seat of government - The Palace of St Michael and St George at the head of the Liston - a man more congenial to Ionians, married to a Greek, he oversaw the building, for her, of a delightful neo-classical house, Mon Repos, in lovely grounds a mile south of the Commissioner's Palace.

I’m missing a picture of Alexander Woodford, acting Lord High Commissioner for part of 1832. I have found one of the whig intellectual Lord Nugent, keen to implement the liberal principles of his party, who became vexed when the Ionian politicians to whom he’d granted greater freedoms failed to observe his wishes.

Andrea Mustoxidi

I’ve also found one of his successor Sir Howard Douglas who sparred with a new class of Ionian parliamentarian in Andrea Mustoxidi - Ανδρέας Μουστοξύδης - intellectual, scholarly, politically astute, back from Italy enthused by republican ideas of liberty and equality brewing across the rest of Europe, by the outcome of the Greek War of Independence, the founding of the Hellenic nation and the idea of Ionian autonomy - these last two being visions that became contentiously separate in the following decades.

I’ve also a sketchy portrait of James Stewart-Mackenzie, and far better painting of his notable successor - an older portrait - of the exceptional John Colborne, Lord Seaton, a radically inclined Tory who at last dissolved Maitland’s colonial constitution and replaced it with ‘the Seatonian’, acting on the principle that power should be linked to the wishes of the electorate rather than of the Palace of St.Michael and St.George. For Seaton, Maitland’s style of government, far from being justified by Ionian venality and incompetence, was in large degree its cause. He was unique among commissioners in seeing economic problems at the heart of social discontent in the islands - exploited by many years of Venetian mono-cropping (olives in Corfu, currants in Zakinthos and Cephalonia).

Giuseppi Momferrato

The Tory in Seaton saw that by opening government to the parliamentarian liberali, he strengthened the Protectorate and undermined the campaigning zeal of the emerging radicals, the rizospastai, pressing for the departure of the British and the creation of a sovereign Ionian Republic – a political movement driven from Cephalonia – one of its leaders, the zealous and principled Elias Zervo in alliance and friendship with Giorgio Lunzo and Giuseppe Momferrato and others whose names and character I have yet to learn.

Elias Zervo

Seaton’s policies were harmed by the personality of his inherited resident, kept on instructions from London, on Cephalonia – Selwyn D’Everton - whose views on the readiness of Ionians for self-government were out of harmony with Seaton’s.

The irony of Seaton’s tenure as Commissioner was that his efforts to strengthen the hand of the liberali added to the momentum of the rizospasti who were not as distinct from the liberali as he might have hoped. The first outbreak of violence on Cephalonia in 1848 was, as Seaton recognized, a reaction against oppression and poverty imposed by local landowners, but it was used by the radicals to argue a philosophical case against the British. By enforcing the law on behalf of the signorini the British pushed Ionians enfranchised by Seaton’s reforms into the camp of the radicals.

The Rizopastai

I’m missing a picture Sir Henry George Ward, successor to Seaton, keen to continue reforms that favoured the wishes of the liberali, but faced with the murder by peasants of two landowners' employees on Cephalonia, Ward ordered military intervention resented to this day as a violent overreaction – a reminder of the fist in the glove that could be wielded by the British on behalf of the Ionian ruling class in whom they often recognized their strongest allies. There were hangings and floggings on Cephalonia – the latter penalty unfamiliar to Ionians and therefore additionally a focus of horror and widespread contempt and loathing for the Lord High Commissioner across the islands. There were good newspapers; many radical. News spread far more quickly along the islands than between London and Corfu.

Nonetheless Ward’s repression may have been a winning card for those British politicians and diplomats preoccupied with maintaining strategic power in the Eastern Mediterranean via influence on Greece. The dominant voice of the rizospasti, Elias Zervos, was silenced first by banishment to Orthoni, just off the north west coast of Corfu, but then by far more distant exile to Kythera, the southernmost of the Ionian islands, below Methoni in the Peloponnese.

Constantinos Lombardo

A way was cleared for the rise of Constantinos Lombardos from Zakinthos, a more opportunist politician who focused the energies of the rizopasti not on republican principles like Zervos, but on enosis - the transfer of the islands to the young kingdom of Greece.

I’ve a portrait of Ward’s successor Sir John Young. He was perhaps the most direct victim of the fact that Ionians were not restricting their political energies to the region. Islanders had come in delegations to London complaining directly to British ministers and MPs about the conduct of the Lord High Commissioner and his agents, cultivating support in London, and indeed the rest of Europe. There was a long tradition of Greek and British political intermingling, distinguished exemplars being Ioannis Kapodistria and later Giorgos Theotokis, who were able to navigate shrewdly amid the differences of opinion on Greece in the British political classes.

Thus, amid the accelerating trajectory of his career as one of England’s most distinguished statesman, William Gladstone, came on an extraordinary mission to Greece and the Ionian islands, convinced that most of the problems of the Protectorate lay with British policies that had blocked the emergence of a mature democracy there.

This didn't mean he came with the intention of abandoning the British Protectorate. To understand why the British government held so keenly to the Ionian islands I must recognise the motives of every power that has relied on Corfu as a military base.

Stand, on a clear day, on the summit of Angelocastra, (see this in another blog) above Paleokastritsa, from where Linda and I have gazed across fifty miles, maybe more, of the southern Adriatic – defended for three centuries by Venice, coveted in the mid-19th century by the Austro-Hungarian empire, linked in a conflux of Balkan contracts that policy-makers in Whitehall and the clubs off Pall Mall referred to as ‘The Eastern Question’, calculating whether to guard our interest in the Eastern Mediterranean via fledgling Christian states or a declining Ottoman Empire, whether, part quoting John Delane, influential editor of The Times, ‘to protect a cradle’ or ‘watch over a tomb’. Look eastward and you see a hundred miles of the mainland coast of Greece stretching south to Levkas - once Santa Maura - and Ithaka and the long contested sea marches between the Turkish Empire and Christian Europe.

Gladstone favoured the cradle. A fervent Philhellene, steeped in English classical scholarship, he came to tell the Ionians he supported reform of their constitution but not the ending of the Protectorate. Like Seaton, Gladstone doubted the quality of their government under the Protectorate, not the quality of the Ionians. He fell half in love with the Orthodox Church, famously banging heads with the Archbishop of Corfu as they bowed to one another simultaneously.

Had events taken a different turn; had Ilias Zervos and his followers from Cephalonia not been rendered ineffectual by exile, unable to present a serious challenge to the fervent politics of enosis pressed by Constantinos Lombardos and his Zantian followers, there might just have been a sovereign Septinsular Democracy along the western shores of Greece – an Ionian polity treated by the great powers as separate from their preoccupations with the Eastern Question, less subject to the machinations of hi-politics that dog Greece to this day (Would heads at the ECB ponder excluding Greece on the grounds of her weakening influence on the €? Possibly. Would France and Germany exclude Greece, or any of the PIIGS from the EU on mere economic grounds? Inconceivable – except among journalists ill-briefed by marginal politicians). Gladstone’s new constitution, improving even on Seaton’s, was rejected by the Ionian Parliament as soon as he’d left for England, leaving the last Lord High Commissioner, Henry George Storks, to apply all his political talent to ensuring that Whitehall’s decision to surrender the Protectorate to enosis looked like a grand gift to mother Greece from Queen Victoria, so that our people could depart amid guns fired in salute, much bunting, flag waving, kisses, embraces - even tears - on both sides.

To those cynical enough to believe in Albion perfidy two things would be apparent. Britain reserved a robust military foothold in Malta, and more important, as Ilias Zervos realized, greater influence at Athens than would be tolerated henceforth in the Ionian Parliament, having ceded the Ionian Islands as a quid pro quo for for the Greek Assembly's unanimous election of the young King George of the Hellenes. The Hellenic governing classes could rejoice, with some reservations, at this further enlargement of their kingdom; continuing to nurture that ill-fated dream of recovering Constantinople – the name for Istanbul displayed on the concourse of Thessaloniki Railway Station to this day. From Corfu History Forum:

THE UNION WITH THE EYES OF A MONK (translated)

Archives of the monastery of Myrtidiotissa, Catastico 1, p. 168r

During the year 1814, the English conquered Corfu, and their occupation lasted until 1864, when the Union with the rest of Greece took place. It would be better if the earth were torn apart and swallowed us all alive. Three times damn, according to the Triode*, to Bishop Athanasios who made (sic) the Union and doomed the Ionians. In the times of England everything was good, and when the Greek nation came, God’s rage came with them, and all the expensiveness and all the great blasphemy. I remember, when I was a little schoolboy, in 1888, that my father – God rest his soul - used to tell me that at the time that the English were in Corfu, in the village of Synarades only two men used to utter profane oaths, a Stathes P. and another Petros, son of A, and no one else. And the Greek nation brought all the sins to the Ionian Islands.**

* Certain feasts of the Lord in the Orthodox Church will have a canon composed of three odes, called a Triode, chanted at Compline on each day of the Afterfeast.

**Extract from the book of Spyros Karydes Αμβροσίου Μοναχού Χρονικά Σημειώματα, η Κέρκυρα των αρχών του 20ου αιώνα μέσα από τα μάτια ενός μοναχού, 2004, p. 107

** ** **

Yesterday and today we have sun. We did gardening, washing and sawing firewood and going about in the village visiting, observing at close hand work proceeding on older houses - flooring, roofing, repairing down to conscientious details.

In Nico and Sophia's house where ambitious restoration is nearing completion, I had the honour to be introduced to George Poplis a Greek craftsman from Albania who has taught himself - from the internet - the art of wood graining adding to many other fine touches in one of the finest houses in the village.

Across the road, Mark's brother, Paul has a few months more work to do on the house he and Jacinta have moved to from Bermuda (having lived over 15 years ago on Vido). Next door an old house, long up for sale, has been bought by a Dutchman and is being properly re-roofed and set up for residence. We heard of another restoration further down that has not gone so well -woeful workmanship paid for in advance; the half-completed house now up for sale. Up steps above Nico's place is Sally and Mark's house coming along fine with much of the work done by Ian, who was laying a magnificent oak floor yesterday morning. Sally told us that there's a new carpenter's shop opened at the bottom of Ano Korakiana. I couldn't have felt more satisfied at these signs of renewal, enjoying the muffled noise of drills, sanders and angle grinders carried on the breeze drying people's washing, including ours.

Kanun and the public law of Europe

'a country in sight of Italy is less known than the wilds of America'

D'Anville quoted by Gibbon c.1788 Photo: Stephen Sommerhalter

'Different cultures, different behaviours. Two months ago, Albania lodged its formal application for EU membership and suddenly the two ends of Europe fall into place...'

Richard Pine, Director of the Durrell School in Corfu, has written in the Irish Times* about something new to me. His intriguing 'letter from Corfu' reminds me of a frequently repeated 18th century observation** that Albania, though visible from Italy, was less known than the interior of America:

Oh we're back in the Balkans again

Back to the joy and the pain

What if it burns or it blows or it snows?

We're back to the Balkans again.

Back, where to-morrow the quick may be dead

With a hole in his heart or a ball in his head

Back, where the passions are rapid and red

Oh, we're back to the Balkans again.

Preface of the 1908 book 'High Albania'

Kulla by Melanie Reimer ~ 'read High Albania by Edith Durham' and Lin has given me a present of Edward Lear's Journals of a Landscape Painter in Greece & Albania

So Club Méditerranée have withdrawn from Kakome Bay, a few miles north of Saranda on the Albanian coast. A part of me thought that local villagers protesting against Club Med might have had an environmental agenda, but it was a long running complicated and divisive dispute over whether local families or the state had the right to profit from the sale of the land to build a resort, with Club Med agents unclear whether to deal with locals or the state Agency for the Restitution and Compensation of Property...

Drini Çano argues in stilted and stultifying Euronglish legalese that Albania’s incomplete property restitution process, under way for the past 20 years,  has violated the nation’s constitution and jeopardized its effort to attract foreign investments and accede to the European Union. To make his case, the author focuses on the Albanian Property Restitution and Compensation Agency (PRCA). Instead of a team of “administrative judges”, this is a board of potentially corruptible political appointees, a phenomenon that reflects on micro-scale the many pathologies of post-Communism. 

As we approach important Albanian elections, on 28 June, the Prime Minister, Sali Berisha, speaks of flytipping and sewage problems damaging his country's formal application to join the EU.

To join the EU my colleague Gill Bentley tells me...

...applicant countries have to accede to the acquis, and meet the Copenhagen criteria, which includes such things as the stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, respect and protection of minorities, a functioning market economy and capacity to cope with competitive pressures and market forces, and ability to take on the obligations of membership, including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union (see).

Albania has various 'enlargement' projects in train, but see this, for example, on Tirana:

...estimated to be one of the most polluted cities in the world, behind New Delhi and Beijing...deaths due to illnesses caused by pollution have increased by 20% in Tirana in the past two years... respiratory system diseases came third on the list of causes of death last year. As Albania gears up to join the EU, pollution troubles get in the way. Albania is facing a humanitarian catastrophe due to growing pollution, 10 times above the tolerance level set by the World Health Organizations (WHO)....(ref)

Less public attention and equally, if not more problematic, is a different kind of pre-Islamic left-over that requires an understanding of Albanian - even Illyrian history - before the Ottoman Invasions of Europe - the lethal phenomenon of kanun. Uninformed outsiders may ask innocent questions about the stone towers - kullas - dotted around the country, unaware they were built as sanctuaries for the potential targets of blood feuds legitimated by the Code of Lekë Dukagjini five and half centuries ago - the basis of another Balkan 'big idea' - via the Kosovo connection.

I was intrigued on looking further into this to find young Albanians (Shqiptarët), in our wired world, had continued the spirit of the kanun as hip hop, and I've just been told about the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, who's novel Broken April I've ordered.

[see Tanya Mangalakova's paper for the International Centre for Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations (IMIR) THE KANUN IN PRESENT-DAY ALBANIA, KOSOVO, AND MONTENEGRO and this image and text]

As well as the EU, OSCE will presumably continue to give attention to creating and maintaining government in Albania' no doubt discussing her EU candidacy at the meeting in Corfu next weekend a hundred and fifty years after that twelve week visit to Greece by William Gladstone, a 19th century colossus of British politics. I’m studying his engrossment with the ‘public law of Europe’ via his extraordinary mission to the Ionian islands in 1858-59, seeing, in a biographer's words, ‘the Ionian microcosm' as 'a task worthy of macrocosmic devotion’. Richard Shannon wrote ‘it is possible to deduce much at large about Gladstone immersed in this small episode’, and I suspect it may be possible to find ‘much at large’ about Corfu immersed in what, for the Ionians, was a large episode in their 19th century history. 'In many ways, it seems to me, Gladstone's interlude as High Commissioner in the Ionian Islands encapsulates as well as anything his urge to hold the world in Peelite tutelage. ' (response to a review of his two volume biography of WEG). Gladstone, in his famous diaries, wrote of being utterly absorbed 'in the affairs of these little islands...The complexity of the case is inversely (so to speak) as the extent of the sphere.' (31 Dec 1858)

A very recent and welcome acquaintance, a scholar on Corfu, wrote to say 'He was like Durrell - a philhellene paid to do a brit's job - keep the islands safe from the Greeks, even though you know in your heart that enosis is the right path.'

This is going to be fascinating.

* * * I got news by phone on Saturday that Liz England has died. I dug out a photo (c.2001) of Liz - in the maroon raincoat on the right - when, as Chair of the Handsworth Park Association, she along with Dick Pratt and John Richfield, led our successful 12 year lobby for the park's restoration.

On the far left is Hilary Taylor of Hilary Taylor Landscape Associates who advised on Birmingham City Council's bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund and after its success oversaw the improvement work giving advice and making recommendations. The man centre left is Adrian Rourke, manager of Birmingham City Council's Landscape Practice Group who, over six years, co-ordinated the work of restoring Handsworth Park from preparation of the successful funding bid to the park's re-opening in summer 2006. I'm at the back, in a yellow top, chatting to a ministerial minder. In the red coat is the minister. I'm embarrassed that I cannot recall her name - her tenure was so brief. Liz, after being ill for the last year, died on 15 June 2009. She was a local hero, stalwart campaigner, politically astute, a friend and a good person. Her funeral will be at 1.00pm at West Bromwich Crematorium on June 30.

* * *

Εκτός από τισ τυφλέσ δυνάμεισ τησ φύσησ,

τίποτα δε κινείται σε αυτον τον κόσμο

το οποιο δεν είναι Ελληνικά στην καταγωγη

Meantime in Athens, sublime, wonderful, the opening of the New Athens Museum, another step in restoring the narrative of the contest between Athena and Poseidon.

The place it honours I knew from childhood schooling, on which I gazed on in 1957 through the small window of Yiayia's loo in her flat in Kolonaki after a train journey from London and on whose almost empty stone floor I walked that same April on a grey rainy day with my half brother George and Nigel Greenhill, son of the diplomat. As a paeon for Greece I know Maine's words are compromised by their context but they ring for me:

This quote is from Henry Maine's 1875 Rede Lecture - The Effects of observation of India on Modern European Thought - aimed at impressing upon a Cambridge audience the richness of India's contribution to world thought, through drama, comparative philology and mythology and the possibility that 'it may yet give us a new science not less valuable than the sciences of language and of folk-lore.' So Greece was a means, including the backhander - 'results far greater than any exhibited in Greece itself' - for Maine to talk of Britain's role in India.

[*I read Richard Pine's piece a week before it was published. A message from another informant suggests I learn about 'Arvanites and Qameria'. I am reminded of the scale of my ignorance. Yes I had heard of Chams but... ]

[Back to the future: see 'Albania: short on homework for joining the EU 15 July 2009]

[**This comment of Gibbon's was, so far as I can find, first quoted by James David Bourchier in the piece on Albania he wrote for the celebrated 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. It's in footnote 23 in Part 1 of Chap 32 of the fourth volume of History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire (click footnote 23; search for 'Ambracia'). Gibbon relates a comment on Albania by the great 18th century cartographer Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville in his Memoires de l' Académie, tome xxxii, p. 513 - 528, illustrating the Gulf of Ambracia,

‘but he cannot ascertain the situation of Dodona. A country in sight of Italy is less known than the wilds of America.’

The Ambracian Gulf is by Preveza well south of Corfu. Dordona is level with Corfu but deep within Epirus. The reference to 'sight' refers to the view, on a clear day, from Italy, fifty miles over the fearsome Strait of Otranto to the 4000 feet mountains of the Karaburan Peninsular]

The Straits of Otranto from a map by Jean D'Anville (1697-1782) who instead of the inventions inserted by many earlier mapmakers would leave blank those areas that remained unknown to him

[26 July 09: See the Balkan Peace Park Project and Robin Hanbury-Tenison praising Albania on YouTube and again on Sandy Toksvig's Excess Baggage BBC R4]

[5 August 09: See an account of the Corfu Channel Incident in October 1946]