Kauto Star

With the National Hunt season firmly underway this November, today's result from Haydock Park was truly heart-warming. Kauto Star ridden by Ruby Walsh returned to form with a brilliant display of jumping prowess, bravery and determination  to win the Grade 1 Betfair Chase by 8 lengths over his nearest rival and last years Gold Cup winner, Long Run.

The many fans and supporters attending Haydock Park wearing the same silk colours of Kauto Star are a clear sign that he's loved by the racing public, perhaps in a once-in-a-lifetime way not seen since Desert Orchid in the late 80's or Arkle of the 60's. There were emotional scenes as the winner returned to the ring to a hero's reception of loud cheers. Uniquely, Kauto Star, now aged 11,  has been versatile as a chaser to be champion at different race-distances and the only horse to have ever regained the Cheltenham Gold Cup for owner Clive Smith. In a racing career now spanning over 5 years, he's also won the blue ribbon of the Xmas season, Kempton Park's King George VI chase four consecutive times. 

I'm All Right Jack

John and Roy Boulting's  I'm All Right Jack (1959)  is a hilarious satire on society and industrial relations in post-war Britain. With a script full of witty dialogue and with consummate skill, the Boulting brothers portray all levels of a once rigid British society, greatly assisted by the cream of British actors of the time. The star-studded cast of I'm All Right Jack includes Ian Carmichael, Peter Sellers, Terry-Thomas, Richard Attenborough, Dennis Price, Margaret Rutherford, Irene Handl, John Le Mesurier and Liz Fraser. 

The comedy begins when affable but naive upper-class Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael, above) is finally obliged to embark upon a career. His uncle finds him employment in a missile factory where he meets pseudo-Bolshevik trade Union leader Mr. Kite (Peter Sellers). Stanley quickly accepts Mr. Kite's offer of accommodation upon sighting his glamorous daughter (Liz Fraser, above) who works at the ammunition  factory as a so-called 'spindle-polisher'. 

The collective British work-force are depicted in  I'm All Right Jack as intent upon doing as little work as possible and ever eager upon the slightest pre-text to strike. The humour is subtle but effective. When on strike, after a morning of playing cards and darts, the lunch-bell sounds. "Blimey, it's all go today, mate" declares one worker. The power of the Trade unions, led by the fanatical and ideologically-blinkered trade union leader Mr.Kite is shown in a most unfavourable light. In a role which won Peter Sellers a British Academy Best Actors award, Mr. Kite's rigid adherence to supposed Bolshevik principles is fatally flawed. He's never travelled to Russia and is ignorant of the true human cost of the 'Glorious Revolution' and its consequences under Stalin. When Kite's wife herself decides to go on strike, withdrawing all home labour, leaving him to live alone, he soon sinks into utter domestic squalor. In the meantime, Kite's one-time lodger Stanley Windrush refuses to strike and continues attending work. The media applaud his strike-breaking and crowds throng  outside the home of his aunt Dolly, (Margaret Rutherford) calling out his name and hailing him a National hero. The  film's denouement occurs at a  live TV debate hosted by Malcolm Muggeridge. With his eyes finally open to international business corruption within his family, Stanley Windrush declares money to be the only source of interest and motivation to all concerned. Opening a suitcase full of bribery money he casts handfuls of bank-notes into the air. A mad scramble among members of the TV studio audience ensues. 

Although it's a film over 50 years old,  Roy and John Boulting's social satire retains its relevance. Indeed such was the film's success that its title lives on in common parlance as a cheeky quip of self- interest and complacent indifference to the circumstances of others. I'm All Right Jack  also questions dubious aspects of British culture and morality; the Boulting brothers primary target being the notorious ineptitude of British management which is portrayed as corrupt at all levels. At the heart of the film lies the under-stated question about the moral integrity of manufacturing and export of military weapons, an export which effectively contributes no small percentage towards Britain's GDP today. Filmed after the Suez crisis of 1956 which demoted Britain's place in the world, the character of Mr. Mohammed, a Fez-wearing diplomat engaged in acquiring a large shipment of missiles, takes on a more than stereotypical role in the comedy, hinting that Britain even sells weapons to its enemies, as indeed it does. The  rise of the media and its power, along with youth culture in the form of a skiffle-based theme music and the vacuous intellect of matinee glamour girl Cynthia (Liz Fraser) are also featured. But above all else, as with all good satire, the Boulting brother's film clearly highlights moral decline, in particular the relatively new trend of self-interest in British society. 


Fifty years after I'm All Right Jack was first screened, the less privileged members of British society, that is, the vast majority, are now suffering the consequences of corruption and greed in high places as humorously depicted in I'm All Right Jack. Nevertheless although its hard to imagine there's much of a joke or comedy to be made from the present-day economic crisis facing Europe, its worth remembering that humour and laughter are good medicine for difficult times.    

Wiki-Link -  Boulting brothers

Boston Stump

Although Noel Coward once wittily declared, 'Very Flat Norfolk', in fact large tracts of Norfolk are slightly undulating in landscape and even downright hilly in places. Surely the much-loved Norwich poet and performer Timothy Sillence (1944-2002) conveyed a much deeper understanding of the intimate and mystical nature of the Norfolk landscape when humorously writing-  

Norfolk

is a flat land

within easy reach 
of the Himalayas.

Recently on a rare excursion out of the county of  'bootiful Norfolk', I had the pleasure to travel through the Fens, the geographical region of England which is definitely 'Very Flat'. The Fens are a vast expanse of fertile agricultural land situated predominately in the counties of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. Travelling through the many square miles of low-laying land effectively drained and reclaimed from the sea by Dutch engineering in the seventeenth century, one senses how much the Fen landscape with its huge domed skies must have affected the psychology of its inhabitants. This thought is reinforced once arriving at Boston in Lincolnshire and viewing the enormous tower of Saint Botolph's. Long known as Boston Stump or just The Stump, the medieval architects of the extraordinary Perpendicular style tower utilized the flat landscape of Lincolnshire to make their House of God into a bold, enduring statement. Like the so-called 'Ship of the Fens', Ely Cathedral, Boston Stump dominated the landscape during the Middle Ages and was visible from great distance.

The 202 steps and 83 metres which lead up the Boston Stump collectively and discreetly enquire  upon one's assumed fitness, but the views are well worth  the effort !

The windmill (centre) was working with its sails rotating. Its said that from Boston Stump with good visibility and powerful binoculars one can  see the back of one's head ! ( Actually it's claimed one can see over thirty miles from the tower).

The river Haven stretches into the distance. Boston was a thriving sea-port during the Middle Ages until access to the port silted-up over the centuries. As with much of Fenland, Boston is home to a network of rivers, canals and  inter-connecting drainage conduits.

Wiki -link   St. Botolph's Church Boston 

Norfolk Chalk Reef

Photo:Rob Spray

The ancient coast-line of East Anglia, once the furthest extent of retreating glaciers during the last Ice Age, continues to reveal astounding evidence of early man's activities and prehistoric nature. The North Norfolk coast-line in particular is a rich source of geological and archaeological wonders. These include the Cromer Ridge, a terminal glacial moraine formed during the last Ice Age; the discovery of a fossilised skeleton of a steppe mammoth approximately 600,000 years old in the cliffs of West Runton in 1990, and  a circular arrangement of over fifty split oak tree trunks, an early man-made ritual monument named  Seahenge, dated circa 2100 BCE, which was first exposed at Holme-next-the-Sea in 1998.

It's recently  been announced that the world's longest chalk reef, over 20 miles in length, stretching from Cley to Trimingham along the Norfolk coast, complete with massive two metre high arches and deep gullies has been discovered.  So far three species never recorded before have been found in the Chalk reef including the Leopard Spotted Goby, two rare anemones and an obscure purple-coloured sponge.  The Chalk Reef was the subject of a BBC regional TV  programme which was spectacular in viewing. Here's the link for a 3 minute filmed dive through the Norfolk chalk Reef . The discovery of the Chalk reef was made by Rob Spray who runs the Marine Conservation Society survey project with a team of volunteers.

Even during my hedonistic and ecstatic summers of youth, swimming, sunbathing and reading on the  beach, I never dreamed of a submarine world some 300 million years old just half a mile out from the shore and  just eight metres below  the surface of the North sea.

However, the seventeenth century doctor and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne did dream of submarine worlds. His miscellaneous tract   Museum Clausum  or Bibliotheca Abscondita  identified by W.G. Sebald  in his Rings of Saturn  (1998) as a  curious minor masterpiece of the imagination,  includes among its inventory of lost, rumoured or imagined books, pictures and objects-

9. A Sub Marine Herbal describing the several Vegetables found on the Rocks, hills, Valleys, Meadows at the bottom of the Sea, with many sorts of Alga, Fucus, Quercus, Polygonum, Gramens and others not yet described.

The world of the submarine must have been of great interest to Browne as included in his miscellaneous tract under the entries of  pictures, one reads the worthy doctor dreaming of -

3. Large Submarine Pieces, well delineating the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, the Prairie or large Sea-meadow upon the Coast of Provence, the Coral Fishing, the gathering of Sponges, the Mountains, Valleys and Deserts, the Subterraneous Vents and Passages at the bottom of that Sea ; 

A Cryptogram deciphered

The opening sentence of Thomas Browne's Urn-Burial challenges the reader to look beyond mere surface appearances towards the unseen and hidden.

In the deep discovery of the subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some enquirers.

An ardent enquirer questing for fresh insight into Browne's esoteric creativity would do well to cast their eye upon the curious word which heads Browne's discourse - HYDRIOTAPHIA and ponder awhile.The six syllable word has a touch of theatricality about it, its sonority arrests the ear as if a magician's abracadabra or medical mantra. Although its a word which is commonly assumed to be an alternative title to Urn-Burial in fact is not followed by the word 'or' as with Browne's various alternative titles to his 1658 diptych Discourses and its often printed with a differing letter size and/or font  in most modern publications as in the original frontispiece.

Ostensibly meaning an empty tomb, it's just possible that the word HYDRIOTAPHIA is also an anagram. Browne's era was one in which all manner of word-play flourished, including the devising of anagrams. Such word-play occurred not only among literate academic circles, but also in the spheres of  military and political communication.  During the English civil war coded writing, as in the form of a cryptogram, was of extreme importance in maintaining military security when defeat or victory could be decided by the deciphering of the enemy's communications. However the construction of secret codes was not exclusive to the military, Anne Geneva noted of the wide-spread engagement in word-play throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  

'the seventeenth century was able to draw upon a long tradition of cryptography, dozens of ciphers surviving from the sixteenth century alone, although Sir T.B. was the first to use the word in English'.[1]

Browne was one of many learned and leisured gentlemen throughout seventeenth century Europe  who took an interest in secret codes, ciphers and anagrams. Of greater import Anne Geneva also recognised crucially that-  'Alchemy in particular seems to have thrived upon anagrams.'

With his penchant for the secretive, along with his deep-rooted interest in the esoteric, Sir Thomas Browne is a prime candidate for having anagrammatic inclinations; he not only possessed almost every major esoteric author associated with coded writing, including those by the Abbot Trithemius, the Italian polymath Della Porta and the Frenchman Blaise de Vignere [1] but also knew that both  the Polish alchemist Michel Sendivogius [2] and the Oxford antiquarian Elias Ashmole had published alchemical literature under anagrammatic pseudonyms.[3]

In many ways Browne is the archetypal alchemist, he possessed an 'elaboratory' where he conducted numerous experiments, many of which are recorded in his encyclopaedia, including an experiment in which he suspended a magnetic pendulum above a circular table with an alphabet marked out around its circumference. He also experimented with various acids including Vitriol and was doubtlessly familiar with the near commonplace advisory derived from the initial letters of the word V.I.T.R.I.O.L. -  Visita Interiorem Terrae Rectificandoque Invenies Occultum Lapidem  which  can loosely be translated as advice to -

Visit the interior of the earth and rectifying, you will find the hidden stone.

an aphorism which bears close comparison to the opening sentence of Urn-Burial.

By rising to the challenge of the cryptic and acknowledging that the hidden world beyond appearances was a vital preoccupation of Hermetic philosophers such as Browne, essential clues can   be acquired assisting deciphering the cryptogram HYDRIOTAPHIA; when deciphered it not only highlights fundamental themes of the diptych discourses, namely death and birth, but also reveals a rare utterance from Browne's alter-ego persona.

If one heeds the literary critic Peter Green's observation that,  'Sir Thomas is his own most fascinating subject of study, and knows it’ one may with confidence extract the letter I , the most frequently used word in the English language, to begin constructing a full sentence. Having identified our subject we next need an active word such as a verb or adverb.

The opening dedicatory address in Urn-Burial to his patron, the Norfolk landowner Thomas le Gros, provides further clues to deciphering the second word of the anagram. Remembering that it was the discovery and unearthing of several burial urns at Walsingham, North Norfolk, which was the inspiration for the composition of the Discourse, the critic Joan Bennett described the physician's excitement at this 'hit of fate' and archaeological discovery which fired his imagination, scholarship and creativity thus -

'he must have rejoiced when, ten years after he had completed his magnum opus, the discovery of the Urns at Old Walsingham offered him a subject so appropriate to his interest and gifts'.[4]

Browne describes the archaeological find as a 'hit of fate' and considered the unearthing of  the Saxon-era  urns to be opportune, prompting him to contemplate time and antiquity. The initial spark of an archaeological discovery kindled Browne's imagination and  fired-up the full force of his literary creativity  to write upon the themes of  time, mortality and eternity.

Consulting Browne's contemporary, the seventeenth century lexicographer and dictionary-compiler Henry Blount's Glossographia  assists ones enquiry further. Blount includes the words 'seasonable', 'opportune',  'appropriate'  'timely' and 'tidy'  to describe a singular, lucky or unlucky event . Indeed, a miniature Dictionary published circa 1900 in the author's possession has under the entry Tidy, the definitions seasonable, clever, neat, spruce. Although the English language has altered considerably in three and a half centuries, the word 'tidy' retains its original  'hit of fate' meaning as in the phrase, 'a tidy sum of money'. Placing our ‘hit of fate', adverb as descriptive of Browne's own  'hit of  fate' we now have an opening sentence of  ' I tidy.........'

The remaining letters in the word Hydriotaphia  form a word utterly pertinent and central to the 'twin' Discourse's themes of death and rebirth -  PHARAOH .

In Urn-Burial Browne condemns all monuments to the dead as vain-glory including those built by the Egyptian Pharaoh's. The Pyramid is however one of the primary 'conjoining' symbols of the Discourses, for in The Garden of Cyrus the Pyramid is alluded to on several occasions as an example of the eternal, Platonic shapes and evidence of intelligent design in art and nature. The Garden of Cyrus also attempts to define several archetypes,  'the wise ruler' notably in its titular hero but also Augustus, Alexander the Great, Moses and many others are cited as examples of this archetype, including the earliest 'wise ruler'  of all, the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, who despite their folly of building  pyramid mausoleums for themselves were also 'thrice-great' rulers of Egyptian society, holding the combined office of  High Priest, Military leader and Law-giver.  

The significance of the hidden sentence within the word Hydriotaphia in context of the welter of esoteric literature published during the Protectorate of Cromwell cannot be ignored. Browne was a devoted Bibliophile who kept well-abreast of the latest in book publications. He was both a modest and self -effacing  physician who knew himself to also be a colossus of knowledge of European stature with the fame of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Observing the plethora of esoteric literature published in  the decade of the Protectorate, Browne may well in his intellectual pride believed himself  to be the opportune or  'tidy' Pharaoh of all  those who purported to be privy to Hermetic wisdom.

The hidden anagram sentence - 'I, tidy Pharaoh' - may have been inspired by Browne's knowledge that the antiquarian Elias Ashmole  had published his Norwich acquaintance Arthur Dee's alchemical collection Fasiculus Chemicus in 1650 under the anagram pseudonym of James Hassole (by subsitution of the letter J which is non-existent in Latin for I). The frontispiece of Fasiculus Chemicus  announced that Ashmole elected himself as 'the English Mercurius' and perhaps either as a gentle, playful rejoinder to Ashmole, or in a rare outburst of alter-ego, Browne proclaimed his own status in the Hermetic art under cover of an anagrammatic retort.

But perhaps in the final analysis it's the relationship between those who invent anagrams  to their subject which is the most revealing to study. The ingenuity of devising phrases to describe someone from an exterior arrangement of alphabet letters.There certainly are some remarkable examples of anagrams made from famous names and Wikipedia offers  an  interesting history of the anagram and many amusing examples.

Browne himself was made the subject of an anagram, 'made and sent to me by my ever honoured friend Sir Philip Wodehouse'. Sir Philip Wodehouse ingeniously extracted from the latin of the name Doctor Thomas Brouenis the phrase, Ter Cordatus bonus homo which roughly translates as -  'the three-fold great man'.

Wodehouse's anagram is a brilliant allusion to alchemy's  'thrice-greatest' founding sage, Hermes Trismegistus, connecting the Norwich physician to Hermetic philosophy as well as illustrating the high esteem  in which his contemporaries held him.

Of course, we'll never know absolutely for sure whether or not Browne coined the word Hydriotaphia as an anagram. Unless of course new evidence should surface. Nevertheless  it's possible to extract a three word sentence from this curious word which  makes allusion to a favourite study of Browne's, namely ancient Egypt and to fundamental themes of the discourses namely death and birth. It is also a bold statement made with characteristic humour of an alter-ego alias .

HYDRIOTAPHIA  or  I TIDY PHARAOH

Although this proposed deciphering of an anagram can never be fully proven, one is none the less reminded of Browne's observation-

'The Hand of Providence writes often by Abbreviatures, Hieroglyphics or short Characters, which...are not to be made out but by a Hint or Key from that Spirit which indited them'. [6]

Notes
[1] Anne Geneva - Astrology and the seventeenth century mind  Manchester University Press 1995
[2]  Examples of coded writing author's in Browne's library include Trithemius Polygraphia S.C. p.30  no. 17 and Blaise de Vigenere Tract du Feu & du Sal  S.C. page 32 no.22
[3] 'Another kind of verticity, is that which Angelus doce mihi jua. alias Michael Sundevogius, in a Tract De Sulphure, discovereth in Vegetables...' Browne in Bk 2 chapter 3 of P.E.
[4]  When Elias Ashmole published the alchemical writings of Browne's Norwich acquaintance, Arthur Dee, son of the elizabethan magus John Dee, he wrote under the anagrammatic pseudonym of James Hasholle (by substition of the inter-changability of the  letters I/J )
[5] Joan Bennett   Sir Thomas Browne    Cambridge University Press    1962
[6] Christian Morals Part  I  Section 25