Rain

We are surrounded by mist, thunder, and the pleasant sound – for us who trust our roof – of rain pattering, occasionally drumming, on the tiles, flecking the windows, drops dribbling at random down the pane, water streaming from the gutters down the paths to the drains. I get up with a light heart to do easy routines – restarting the stove until it roars merrily, wearing my long raincoat to rescue a lineful of washing from the garden, spinning it and hanging it to dry on a frame by the stove, bringing in wood kept covered and dry and feeding the fire that is no longer smoking, cleaning a pan that had soaked overnight in the kitchen, making myself porridge topped with dark sugar and cream, and calling Lin to wake for a mug of coffee. There’s a Bal Masque for in the Agricultural Co-op tonight on the lower road. We’d seen chairs being delivered. Natasha showed us her costume as we chatted over the fence yesterday. Then on 14 February there will be Carnivali in the village.

Yesterday Lin and I started work filling in the staircase in preparation for closing it altogether from the room through which it passes which we are making into a bedroom. The room next to the kitchen is to be a downstairs dining room, conveniently next to the kitchen and cooler in hot weather.

* * *

Lee Southall at Handsworth Park has circulated a nice poster advertising one of my history tours of the Park on Sunday 21 March. I fear he and his colleagues are under terrific pressure to make and take big cuts in their budgets, and their own jobs. I've written to local councillors across Handsworth and Perry Barr:

Dear Councillors and friends

Handsworth Park under threat from new

proposals for re-organising Ranger Services

These proposed changes to the management of Birmingham’s treasured parks – in particular Handsworth Park - are very troubling, especially as they include reduction in the Ranger Services.

As someone involved in writing the history of Handsworth Park and, with many others, campaigning for its restoration since the 1980s, I learned a lot about the contribution of parks to city life – especially their indirect contribution to health and education and the resulting contribution to community safety. It did not take long for my researches to catch up with something that the public has long known, that you cannot realise the public good of parks without park keepers – now the Ranger Service. Crime, like fire, prevented is very difficult to measure, thus the peacekeeping role of the Rangers in all our parks cannot, in a time of desperate purse tightening, be accurately assessed against the cost to the city of their wages. That failure in accounting practice will bear very directly on all who have come to enjoy what for the last 10 years has seen a renaissance in public parks.

As an almost daily visitor to Handsworth park before and after the Rangers arrived about ten years ago I, and others in my position, can attest to the 1001 incidents that might have gone from petty to serious which have been nipped in the bud merely by the presence of a ranger patrolling, let alone their many direct interventions that have prevented crimes in the park. In addition, our Rangers, in liaison with teachers, local police and community support officers, have participated in a whole range of actions with schools designed to catch potential problems long before they become those that once allowed our public parks to deteriorate into spaces from which the larger public – young and old - were barred by crime and anti-social behaviour.

We hope very much that local councillors and our MPs will be able to come together to press for damage limitation, especially as it was understood as part of the Heritage Lottery Fund grant for the restoration of Handsworth Park that revenue for its continued maintenance and staffing was guaranteed for at least 10 years from the time of the grant. There are still still a few years to run, By cutting back on services especially the ranger service in Handsworth Park the Council may be acting contrary to its agreement with the Heritage Lottery Fund. Can councillors please make urgent enquiries this and make appropriate representations?

I would also appreciate knowing whether we must anticipate any collateral impact on the opening and managing of the new Victoria Jubilee Allotments next to Handsworth Park. Best wishes, Simon

* * *

My talk at the Durrell School about relations between the British and the Ionians in the 19th century went well mainly because an indulgent audience of friends put up with me struggling to cover more information than needed for a 20 minute talk about Lord High Commissioners and the British Protectorate. I managed to cover all but Gladstone, whose role was well filled in during questions by Richard Pine who'd invited me to do the talk. Despite my detours we had a good hour of discussion about character and motives of quite a few of the participants in that 48 year episode in which the Ionians hoped they'd got a Protectorate while the British, with notable exceptions (Nugent, Seaton, Gladstone) assumed they had a colonial possession, getting down to why the British were here in the first place and whether the British, when they left in 1864, were pushed or chose to jump, and the shrewd politics of the Ionian Radicals about whom I’ve learned so much from Eleni Calligas’ work

Slides for my talk - pause the film to read the small writing; click on the image to get full screen on YouTube

Paul came with Lula. There were at least two other Greeks in the audience, which was good, as well as Irish. I felt I’d traversed some mined ground unscathed with kind remarks from a full house on a chilly winter’s evening. The thing is the honour of being invited to give such a talk after being here only a few years. The subject gets richer as I learn more about it. On the way back to our car in the Spaniada we heard a Scops owl hooting right over our head in one of the trees that line the esplanade. Lin, to my relief, said “That wasn’t too bad. I could've kicked you when you went off on one of your diversions.”

Afterwards Richard took us for a meal. “Nothing special. Just basic” “Suits us” Lin sat in a corner by a shuttered window onto Theotoki Street. “That's where Lawrence Durrell used to sit” said Richard. A French tourist had once thrust a copy of Prospero's Cell through this window and asked the author to sign it. We had beef and potatoes, chicken and chips and the local red. “So what of the economy?” I asked.

“Papandreou, having consulted with Samaras, spoke to the country on TV last night. ‘We are in for very tough times. We must all work together otherwise – the abyss.’” We realized the biggest cuts must be in the Hellenic public sector. “KKE won’t buy this. They have significant seats in parliament.” “So?” With a left unwilling to back a one nation response to the problems of the economy there'll be demonstrations. The EU watches; the Greek diaspora too. I mentioned my concern at the news that Birmingham City Council is to make big cuts in its Park Ranger Service. “Well they’ve done that in California...and without rangers the state might close Yosemite National Park”.

* * *

DEMOCRACY STREET AS SHARED SPACE

On main roads people drive fast, tailgate, overtake on bends and hoot to hurry up dawdlers, yet when Lin stops the car on Democracy Street, in a spot even narrower than the rest of the road through the village , above the steps down to our house so we can unload before she goes on to a parking space, other drivers who happen to come along – in either direction - will invariably wait politely. All along Democracy Street, as it winds through the village, drivers have learned just where to give way (wider spots we now know), wave another car on or proceed themselves, making judgements about width, sometimes folding in their mirrors to clear a wall, yet very seldom inconveniencing those on foot. Democracy Street, along with the narrow sinuous main streets of other villages is a shared space – an idea about roads being laboriously recovered in settings where for decades politicians and professionals have favoured the view that roads are for cars and sidewalks or pavements for those on foot – building in traffic lights and occasional crossing spaces to allow pedestrians to enter, at least briefly, a space separated off for people in cars. Thus it is on Corfu’s main roads and indeed on their pavements where despite prohibitions drivers, who would noisily resent a similar encroachment by walkers on their space, will often park their cars. In the middle of many villages here there are often no pavements. Network of narrow streets are often plaka’d to remind visitors that the space between houses are to be shared by everyone on foot, cycle, scooter, car, truck and bus; that indeed walkers are also ‘traffic’ - a word that in the years of the combustion engine has defaulted to exclude cyclists, horses, donkeys and people on foot, moving, sitting or leaning on walls. Everyone can own the street and it generally works, with opportunities for regular acts of civility as people negotiate their way through. Civility that is the essence of this process is largely abandoned on main roads. The human-to-human negotiation of Democracy Street is replaced by automatic regulation of the highway. It was long ago discovered that you can’t use eyes to engage politely with another human once both of you are likely to be passing each other above a certain speed – about 15mph maximum. Thus is the shared space of the village abandoned to the individualised space of the open road. Human eye and the repertoire of non-verbal language that lubricated social interaction was replaced by traffic lights, warning signs, designated crossings, barriers and remote surveillance by camera. What was worse, though it hasn’t happened in many villages here, is that the so-called ‘open road’ instead of just running between communities, was often forced through them, and motorised traffic was encouraged to speed through newly widened and straightened roads between demolished homes, getting their drivers more swiftly from A to B but blighting those settlements that lie between (see: community severance and shared space). * * * * Lin, unable to sleep in the early hours, rose and watched the dawn. That very bright light on the Albanian shore had been out for several days but is there again now.

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.