Sergeant Randall

My father wrote nothing and said little to me about his activities in the Great War. My understanding is that at its outbreak in August 1914 he was working as a clerk in the Company Secretary's office in the City of London Electric Lighting Company (CLELCO), joining it on leaving a small Quaker boarding school in the Cotswolds at the age of 16.

I remember him talking approvingly of John Braithwaite, a stockbroker, descendant of a John Braithwaite, a seventeenth century Cumbrian farmer and one of the earliest Quakers. The official history of the firm Foster & Braithwaite describes its founding after Waterloo and how later in the century it took a role akin to that of a merchant banker today in promoting new companies, especially in the burgeoning electricity supply industry. One of these companies was CLELCO, of which a Braithwaite was Chairman until nationalisation of the industry in 1948. It must have assisted the career of an ambitious young man to have the same faith as the chairman of the company.

When Great Britain went to war with Germany many young Quaker men were uncertain about what part if any they should play in it. The Society of Friends had from its outset held pacifism as one of their central tenets, but this war seemed to be different from any other. To hold back entirely and have nothing whatsoever to do with the conflict seemed to many to be an inappropriate.

Philip Baker was the most prominent young Quaker of his generation, having been President of the Union at Cambridge and a finalist in the 1500 metres in the 1912 Olympic Games. He was chosen by a group of senior Friends to propose a middle course between pacifism and belligerence; this he did in a letter published in the periodical The Friend on 21 August 1914. In it he suggested that "young men Friends should form an Ambulance Corps to go to the scene of active operations, either in Belgium or elsewhere": the full letter Is shown at the bottom of this post.

My father was one of the young men who responded to this call and I think that he joined others at a camp organised by Baker at Jordans, a Buckinghamshire village with a Quaker Meeting House where William Penn, the founder of Philadelphia "the City of Brotherly Love", is buried. It was at Jordans, half a century later, that Julia and I married each other.

It seems that there was concern that if the unit went to Belgium it would be too heavily involved with the command structure of the British army, and so it was proposed that it went to Serbia, at that time being invaded by Germany's ally Austria-Hungary. The Serbian situation was precarious, however, so this plan too had to be abandoned. Baker told the men to return home and await events.

It seems my father did not want to wait and that he therefore enlisted in the non-combatant Royal Army Medical Corps. The sole hard evidence I have of what happened next is the inscription in a full morocco-bound edition of Milton's verse on my book shelves.

Sargeant [sic] Randall
A token of appreciation of the hard and very efficient work done as section commander of J Section T Coy RAMC
J Gordon Fleming
Lt RAMC
Llandridnod Wells, May 7th 1915
Best wishes for your welfare on active service

The choice would not have been accidental. As a gift to a young man of half-formed literary tastes and austere spiritual cast of mind, a book including an epic poem which sets out to "justify the ways of God to men", by a contemporary of the proto-Quaker George Fox, was singularly appropriate. Today though, almost a century later, it is difficult for us to envisage any officer giving any NCO a book of verse before his departure on active service to Afghanistan.

Sergeant Randall did not serve on the Western Front: he was sent to the Mediterranean theatre. The photograph shows him after he had been commissioned. Sometime and somewhere out there he concluded that stitching soldiers up so that they could fight again was morally no different from fighting oneself, so he abandoned his non-combatant status and enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps.

What happened later

John Braithwaite served with the Friends' Ambulance Unit, became Chairman of the London Stock Exchange in 1949 and was dubbed Sir John Braithwaite in 1953.

Philip Baker led the first Friends' Ambulance Unit to Belgium late in 1914 and was adjutant of the Unit in Italy 1915-1918. He won a silver medal in the 1500 metres at the 1920 Olympic Games, assisted in the forming of the League of Nations, entered parliament as a Labour MP and, as Philip Noel-Baker, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959.

Harry Randall rejoined CLELCO on demobilisation in 1919. More incidents in my father's life will be told soon. Stories in draft form are
How my father shot himself down
How my father built the Tate Modern

Sergeant Hill

On 29 November I wrote that a member of our boat syndicate had the diary of an uncle killed in the Great War which she was willing to lend me. I wrote

I've been wondering whether such a fragment could possibly be built up into a mini-biography, if there are no other papers or records about him. I believe it could, if there was sufficient of interest within the diary. It could, perhaps, be done at three levels: the campaign, within the context of the war on the Western Front as a whole; the regiment, and the training of troops; and the battle, and the death.

I have now been able to read the diary of Sergeant Hill of the 4th Waikato Squadron of the Auckland Mounted Rifles. The British army had used mounted infantry extensively in the South African War to try and deal with the elusive Boer commandos; presumably the AMR was one of the Imperial regiments raised between 1899 and 1902.

The diary is prefaced with "In the event of my being killed, I wish this diary to be sent to Mother.
Mrs. Geo. Hill, …, Opotiki, Auckland, New Zealand".

The first entry in the diary is on 10 October 1914, barely two months since the war had started: "at 3 pm … we stepped off New Zealand into the boat". The convoy of ten troop ships reach Tasmania on 21 October, where they spend a day route marching ashore, and a week later they join 28 ships carrying Australian troops in Western Australia. On 30 October "the General arrived and after having a look round us inspected the ship and was very well pleased with everything, at least he said he was". The convoy continues to Ceylon, where the troops stay a couple of days, and after a hot and sweaty voyage up the Red Sea, they reach Alexandria on 4 December.

The Sergeant is now active in training his squadron at their camp in the desert , with the occasional visit to Cairo and jaunt up the Nile. "19 January. We had our usual Regimental Training today and the General was umpire and lectured Officers and N.C.O.'s on day's work."

The General is Sir Alexander Godley, whose early army career had been spent as a polo-playing subaltern in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. The DNB describes him as a "tall, spare, publicly reserved man, […] seen by his troops as stuck up, distant, and unfeeling". His wife, a hard-hunting Irish woman, accompanies him to Egypt where she too is unpopular. Observing the troops training in the heat and sand, she is reputed to have commanded her husband: "Make them run again, Alec!"

Training continues through the first four months of 1915, then there is the first mention of an ominous name, the Dardanelles. "2 May. Apart from the usual work we had a very quiet day. I stopped in camp all day. We have been hearing today all sorts of awful news of our forces in the Dardanelles but there is nothing definite as yet." On 5 May it is confirmed that they will be going there, "without the horses". On 9 May they embark at Alexandria and on 12 May they disembark: "all the while we were landing the noise of the guns would almost deafen one."

The Dardanelles campaign was intended to knock Turkey, an ally of Germany, out of the war. This strategy was conceived by Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. The original plan was that a squadron of obsolete battleships would be able to force their way through the Dardanelles, the narrow channel between Europe and Asia, penetrate the Sea of Marmara and bombard Constantinople into submission. This attempt failed, so a parallel land campaign was launched, using Anzac (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) troops stationed in Egypt.

It is now 22 July 1915.
Owing to lack of energy and time I have not written a word here for over two months but as I have a little more time now I intend to make a start again and hope to be able to keep it up. [Summary of what has happened since May]
23 July. […] The Turks are very quiet today, hard on shooting. […]
24 July […] A very quiet day. […]
26 July […] Very quiet.
30 July […] A very quiet day, nothing doing at all. […]
2 August. Our Squadron is Injury Picquet and went up the hill. A very quiet day, but awfully hot. Lydsten to hospital.
3 August. We arrived home about 8am this morning and spent most of the day lying about. Norman and I went out for water to the Outpost about ½ mile and the heat was very severe, because having to keep to the trench all day you get no breeze. Stokes and Saxby went to hospital.
4 August. A few fatigues today but nothing to make a song about. A lot of Troops landed last night but I don't know how many.
5 August. Ordered this morning to get ready to move out to take part in the big advance. Paraded at 8:30pm and forwarded to No. 2 Outpost where we slept.

The General is meanwhile putting the finishing touches to his plans for "the big advance" to capture The Nek, an easily-defended narrow stretch of ridge on the Gallipoli peninsula which separated the Anzac troops in the south from the British troops due to be landed at Suvla Bay in the north on 6 August.

6 August. A very quiet day all getting ready for the attack at 9pm. I may not write any more of this Diary but whatever happens I hope to do my duty and trust for the best.

Picked up by Corporal E.J.Jones, 7/501, 1st Canterbury Mounted Rifles.

The Battle of the Nek became known as "Godley's abattoir". Sergeant George Hill was just one of the many New Zealanders slaughtered there.
* * *
This is a summary of something that could perhaps be developed into something bigger along the lines of the second paragraph. My initial feeling is that it could be, but that I as an Englishman am not the right person to do so. Gallipoli is so central to the national myth of both New Zealand and its sister dominion that an outsider could not do it justice. I need to discuss this, and other practical considerations, with Sue during the Christmas vac.

Quaker biography

I am on the e-mailing list of the library of Friends House, the Quaker headquarters in the Euston Road, following some brief research I did a couple of years ago on the origins of the Friends Ambulance Unit which my father had joined at the start of the Great War.

By an extraordinary chance, the two meetings described in the e-mail below take place

• Half an hour after the end of our Tuesday tutorials
  
• At a location on a bus route halfway between my professor's workplace and my daughter's house
  

I noted that space will be limited, so I e-mailed back to enquire whether they would object to my placing a notice of these meetings on this blog. Qui tacet consentit, so this is another of my draft posts that, with my term paper finally out of the way, I can now complete.

From: Friends House Library Newsletter [mailto:libnews@quaker.org.uk]
Sent: 17 November 2009 10:14
Subject: Quaker Centre Quaker History group

Dear Friends

We would like to invite you to the first meeting of an informal Quaker history group that will meet in the Quaker Centre, Friends House, 173 Euston Road, London NW1 2BJ on Tuesday 26 January 2009 from 6.00 to 7.30.

You are invited to meet and mingle in the café of the Quaker Centre from 6pm. The Library will stay open until 6pm that day in case you want to combine extended study with attending the meeting.

At 6.30 Gil Skidmore will talk on ''Looking at 18th century Quaker networks through the life of Catherine Payton Phillips 1727-1794" followed by discussion.

Because space is limited in the Quaker Centre, it would be helpful if you could reply to this email at quakercentre@quaker.org.uk to let us know that you are coming. This is a free event and open to all.

We hope that this will be the first in a series of informal meetings aimed at those with an interest in Quaker history to enable sharing of knowledge and exchange of ideas. We are planning that these meetings will normally take place on the last Tuesday every month.

At the February meeting (Tuesday 23rd) Jordan Landes will be talking about "London Quakers in the Atlantic world before 1725".

We look forward to seeing you at our meeting.

Amanda Woolley, Quaker Centre Manager
Beverley Kemp, Head of Library and Archives, Library of the Society of Friends
Gil Skidmore, Independent scholar
Simon Dixon, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies, Queen Mary, University of London
Peter Daniels, Freelance researcher, editor and publisher

Gil Skidmore, who is a Quaker, has spent many years researching the lives and writings of early Quakers. Her publications include Turning Inside Out: An Exploration of Spiritual Autobiography (1996), Dear Friends and Sisters: 25 Short Biographies of Quaker Women (1998), Dear Friends and Brethren: 25 Short Biographies of Quaker Men (2000), Strength in Weakness: writings by eighteenth century Quaker women (2003) and Elizabeth Fry: A Quaker Life (2005). She is clerk of Friends Historical Society and co-clerk of QUIP (Quakers Uniting in Publications) and is currently working on a biography of Catherine Payton Phillips.

Amanda Woolley
Quaker Centre Manager
020 7663 1041

Week eight: Christmas lunch

We agreed that we would not eat out expensively at a restaurant for our last gathering of the term, but rather come bearing dishes and bottles for a convivial lunch in Jane's flat. Not only the five of us on this year’s course came but also some from earlier years and Sue Brown who, before we all tucked in, talked about the biography she has recently written about Joseph Southern.

Southern is principally known as the artist friend of Keats who looked after him during his final illness. He accompanied him on the stormy voyage in the autumn of 1820 to Italy where the poet was seeking respite from his tuberculosis. The publisher's blurb, on the Amazon page where you can buy her book, has this to say.

This biography of Joseph Severn (1793-1879), the best known but most controversial of Keats's friends, is based on a mass of newly discovered information, much of it still in private hands. Severn accompanied the dying Keats to Italy, nursed him in Rome and reported on his last weeks there in a famous series of moving letters. ... This book offers the first full assessment of his work and of his turbulent spell as British Consul in Rome from 1860 to 1871. Keats was not Severn's only famous friend. For most of his adult life Severn was at the heart of the large, lively British community in Rome welcoming amongst others Gladstone, who became his most important patron, Ruskin, Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Turner, Samuel Palmer, David Wilkie, and many more.

* H I C * E S T * M A G N A * L A C U N A *

We proceeded to eat, drink and be merry, so merry, in fact that I left behind my clipboard of notes when finally our academic revels ended. My only regret was that my diffidence stopped me from hugging RFCG, as our ways parted and she goes walkabout Down Under, to thank her for her ongoing words of encouragement about this blog of mine.

Crisis? What crisis?

Julia read my post Perilous poems in draft before I published it and ruefully remarked "You've never written me a poem!"

She forgets. On one of a pair of Georgian wine glasses in the cabinet in our front room I had this couplet inscribed about thirty years ago:

A richt guid wine, man's gleefu' for a day
But wi' a richt guid wife, for e'er and aye

"But that's frivolous! What about something serious?" As I left the table to go to my office she said to our granddaughter Izzy, newly-arrived from South Africa, "He's gone upstairs to write something!" Within moments though I came back with a poem typeset by me in Bembo, dated 25.12.98, signed AGR pro JMR scripsit and unromantically entitled The Battle of Maldon: a retrospective.

She could not recall my showing or giving it to her; I cannot recall why I wrote it; judging from the last four lines something was going badly wrong and I needed something to stiffen both our backbones. Most of the poem is a rewriting in verse of an English prose translation of the incomplete Anglo Saxon poem about the battle fought in 991 between the Englishmen of Essex and a marauding Viking host. My verse ends thus:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . Then Byrhtwold, the earl's old friend,
To raise our flagging hopes before what might be the end
With axe aloft moved towards the battle's closest press
And to us few remaining cried, Yet, as our might grows less,
Our will shall be the harder; our heart the keener,
Our valour greater: such shall be our troop's demeanour!

Ten centuries later you and I find ourselves at such a place,
But armed with knowing what our forebears did. Your grace,
Your grit, your strength – my friend, my lode-star and my bride –
Ensures our final vantage, sanctioned at this Christmastide.

But what was this place in which we find ourselves? What is the crisis? There had been some fairly serious health problems, but surely these had been overcome by then; on the business front I was continuing to try to make money from web-based language-learning software, but the losses I was incurring were not crippling; our daughters were all alright. We are both baffled.

I tell the story to demonstrate a problem of biography-writing about which I have seen nothing written in my background reading on this course: what if the interviewee can't remember? Imagine that I'm faced with an earnest young American PhD student and he shows me this document and asks me to explain its significance. Am I going to say I've forgotten, indicating I'm going gaga? Or am I going to make up something plausible? I suspect I'd do the latter.

Post script
Of course, it just could be that the dreaded Alzheimer's really is taking hold, but as long as I can remember the first name of the good doctor I'm OK. It was … It was … Alois! And I didn't even have to google it!

Bon Viveur II and biography

The tutorial this week clashed with the AGM of the boat syndicate we belong to, so I went to the former and Julia to the latter.

The picture above shows the boat, Bon Viveur II, completed in 2006, which lives on the Canal du Midi in the spring and autumn and the Canal de Bourgogne in the summer. The syndicate comprises a dozen couples who jointly own the vessel, with each couple having the entitlement to use it for the same specified period each year: we have the first cruise of the year, in the first fortnight in April.

The annual general meeting this year was more upbeat and positive than in previous years, primarily because the boat builder and sponsor of the syndicate had finally ended his connection with it. The responsibility for ensuring that the vessel was ship-shape at the beginning of the season had not been properly established at the outset, which resulted in our misfortune last year in going on board, in the evening and at a mooring in a remote village, to find that neither the water system nor the electrics were working. But, as they say, worse things happen at sea.

The syndicate management could now organise things on a properly business-like basis and the agenda was dealt with briskly and efficiently. At lunch afterwards Sue Hill, our redoubtable Hon. Sec., knowing that I was absent because of the course I am doing, told Julia that she has the diary of a great-uncle of hers in which the last entry records his premonition that the following day he would meet his death: he did.

Sue said that she would be happy to lend the diary to me. I've been wondering whether such a fragment could possibly be built up into a mini-biography, if there are no other papers or records about him. I believe it could, if there was sufficient of interest within the diary. It could, perhaps, be done at three levels: the campaign, within the context of the war on the Western Front as a whole; the regiment, and the training of troops; and the battle, and the death.

Now, if this were something that a dutiful kinsman would like to see produced as a limited edition, using on-demand printing, for circulating to other relatives, then this is something that I could consider doing as a preliminary 20,000-word thesis since it would provide a personal example to illustrate my major thesis, The Impact of New Technology on the Creation of Biography. I'll e-mail Sue about this tomorrow.

Maybe I'm running the risk of biting off more than I can chew: but "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

History, Mystery & Myth: 2

Read something about the conference at which these papers were given here.

Describing a boat race, Baroness Ouida is alleged to have written, "All rowed fast, but none so fast as Stroke". The same may be said of the papers which were contributed to this conference. For reasons of space and time, however, I am selecting just six out of sixteen about which to write in telegraphese, primarily as an aide memoire to myself about those that particularly interested me.

Rebecca Pinner (University of East Anglia):
How to Make Saints and Influence People: Biography, Myth and Memory in the Cult of St Edmund
Protagonist most mythic of all those featured in conference – all that's definite is (i) AS Chronicles of 870 ("Last year King E [of East Anglia] slain by Danes") and (ii) handful of coins – next (known, written) account c.987 (Abbo of Flury Passio Sancti Edmundi) based on report by E's ancient armour-bearer – next c.1090 (Archdeacon Hermann De Miraculis Sancti Edmundi) based on "confiding testimony of living persons" (what? after 200 years? – Ed) – next c.1150 (Geoffrey of Wells De Infantia Sancti Edmundi) based on tales told by monks associated with Bury St E – myth is the slow accretion of stories. Myth still has potency – recent campaign to replace foreign (fictitious?) St George as England's patron by native St E (but what about St Alban? not E/Anglish – Ed) – superstition about not crossing certain Norfolk bridge when going to get married.

Leo Klein: Biography or Pornography?
Concern about motives for her writing biography of UK's (almost) last public hangman, Albert Pierrepoint – conflict between her abolitionist/ liberal views and central topic which "emits the strongest of all the stinks" (R West on Nuremburg Trials) – problem about paucity of material about AP – pain at interviewing some of AP's acquaintances – inability to confront AP's "equipment" (the tools of his trade, kept under the marital bed, about which his wife never enquired) – writing about some he hanged (WW2 German spies, traitor Amery, halfwit Bentley, lover-killer Ellis) and reading last letters – current project not dissimilar (women, esp. mothers, in Broadmoor [asylum for criminally insane]).

Marek Pawlicki (Jagiellonian University, Cracow): Writing about the 'happy never-returning time': truth and manipulation in autobiography
The narrator and the protagonist – the teller of the story and who the story is about – one and the same in Autobiography? Yes, but. Time has elapsed between the incident and writing about it – the former about a child, the latter by an adult, as in Tolstoy's anecdote (in trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth) of failing to be able to read out poem on babushka's Name Day – authority given to story by writing in First Person, Past Tense. Compare this with J M Coetzee's tale (Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life) of failing a Boy Scout test – written in Third Person, Present Tense – the writer thereby throws off the authority of the author. This becomes (using JMC's neologism) an autrebiography.

Kirby Joris (Université Catholique de Louvain): Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries (2007-): When Myth Becomes His-Story
GB has written 3 out of projected 9 whodunnits with OW the sleuth – attempt by GB to give accurate depiction of OW via fictional incidents in his life – these interposed within real incidents, e.g. visit to USA, Paris &c – narrated by third person, the real Robert Sherard (OW's friend and first biographer), writing fictionally – "I kept a journal … I was there: I was the witness" – supposed journal embargoed (c.f. last week's tutorial) for 50 years. GB claims "tried to be as accurate as possible" – yet Vol 1 starts with traditional disclaimer: "Any resemblance … purely coincidental".

Amber K. Regis (Keele University): Definitive Lives? Portraits of Vita Sackville-West
Biography's "primal scene" (as described by KH in opening address, as when the trunk in attic creakingly opened and dusty bundle of letters finally reveals The Truth) of VSW's memoirs being found in slit-open Gladstone bag in tower of ancestral Sissinghurst – prefaced by family tree of VSW m. Harold Nicolson, begets Nigel, begets Adam – each writes different (but overlapping) accounts of different aspects of VSW's (and others') relationships – 50 lesbian lovers (one Virginia Woolf [v briefly], hence overlap with Bloomsbury outpourings), yet a happy marriage, claims NN – "It's like a family of butchers, you know, butchers chop up pigs, we write books", states AN – and see his interview on identitytheory.com - and remember the various TV shows. The story/ history/ biography becomes a palimpsest (parchment/ vellum erased and overwritten, but old text still detectable) – R Holmes' conclusion: "definitive life a Chimera". Plea from floor not to forget marginalised/ demonised Violet Trefusis.

Catalina Botez (University of Konstanz) Primo Levi's The Periodic Table or the Story of a Carbon Atom
PL distinguished chemist, Italian Jew, Auschwitz survivor, eventual suicide, wrote autobiog with chapter named after an element, starting with Argon (inert) and ending with Carbon (life prerequisite). Enchanting tale unfolded by delightful lady but (like, alas, others, esp. Chair of this session) auricular sense challenged: next time, please, microphones or pre-conference instruction to speak up.

History, Mystery & Myth: a UEA Conference

A Bauhaus-inspired building of the University of East Anglia was the venue yesterday for a postgraduate conference for researchers in biography and related fields, enticingly entitled "History, Mystery and Myth". I arose before dawn and pointed the prow of my Renault Clio towards the rising sun: when in the spring we reluctantly parted company with our ancient RAV4, the Scarlet Whizzer, I thought a car named after the Muse of History and painted in sober academic black would be appropriate for someone considering enrolling on the Buckingham Biography course.

I arrived in Norwich in good time for the opening address by Kathryn Hughes, convenor of the University's Life Writing course. Her underlying theme is that in biographical writing the cradle-to-grave saga is in itself no longer enough, even if during the twentieth century these sagas increasingly included the crumpled sheet and the psychiatrist's couch. Readers of biography these days want more than just the facts, referring to W H Auden's sonnet "Who's Who".

A shilling life will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day;
Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,
Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea;
Some of the last researchers even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.
With all his honours on, he sighed for one
Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;
Did little jobs about the house with skill
And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still
Or potter round the garden; answered some
Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.

Nor are readers looking for an unproblematic mirror of themselves or a concordance of their own lives, whatever publishers may still be thinking. They seek something which transcends "truth", whatever that may be. This something is the "myth". She gives Ann Wroe's book Pilate: the Biography of an Invented Man as one that is nine tenths about the latter and only one tenth about the former (appropriately for the man, one might add, who famously asked "What is truth?"). Others which exemplify this trend (if trend it indeed is) are Lucasta Miller's The Brontë Myth and Sarah Churchwell's The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe

She modestly does not mention her latest biography, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton. The review of this in the Spectator talks of how "the most successful cook-book of the age has long since taken on a symbolic, even mythical status." Long after her physical death while still in her twenties Mrs Beeton was revived by the successive publishers of the many books on household management that bore her name to become the mythic embodiment of the good housewife.

Therefore increasingly the subject of the last chapter of a biography is changing. In the late nineteenth century this chapter was devoted to the death bed: the assembled grieving relatives, the last words, the mournful burial. In the early twentieth century it is increasingly devoted to the posthumous reputation.

The ensuing conference consisted of four papers, written by life-writers from Belgian, German, Polish and Slovenian as well as British universities, being presented in each of four sessions and ended with a round table discussion with four biographers. Much of this was interesting: some was fascinating and illuminating, about which I will be talking briefly at our tutorial on Tuesday.

Proceedings ended getting on for eight o'clock, by which time the reception at the campus residence into which I was booked had closed. After restrained imprecations, "Descend, O Muse!" I invoked, and my Clio bore me back to Buckingham in time for a not too belated bed.

Saturday afternoon in Oxford

I greatly appreciated getting from my fellow student RFCG an introduction to Mary Beard's blog, A Don's Life. Extracts from it have just been published in book form: here is another example of a blog metamorphosing into a book. I latched onto a point raised in a review on it in The Guardian, since it discusses a difficulty I face. Dinah Birch writes "Beard speaks of 'the husband' or 'the daughter' – turns of phrase that suggest both intimacy and distance. Blogs create a disarming illusion of personal communication, while depending on the artful construction of a voice and a point of view. … [This] resolute breeziness of her stream of opinions, calculated to produce an air of demotic informality, sometimes jars."

Indeed, indeed. I am guilty of this in the title of one of my posts, Number Two Daughter, but at least I go on immediately to name her. But I can see one very good reason why a blogger is tempted to do this: it provides immediate identification. On a blog the latest post or entry is displayed first, and is therefore the first piece that new visitors to the site will read: how will they know who Reggie (or whatever Mr Beard's first name) is, without explanation that is unnecessary to regulars? Well, actually, I think there is a way, and I'm using it now. If you really want to know my relationship to the lady named in the next sentence, just click on her name and go to the post which describes what it is.

On Saturday afternoon Julia and I went to see my old chum and new neighbour Paul in the ENT ward of the John Radcliffe in Oxford. He was in good order and looked good, if lop-sided. No wonder: they've removed a number of bits from the side of his throat leaving a long scar and a drain. Only a steel bolt was missing to complete the Frankenstein effect. The tale of the Black Pudding is, however, one like that of the Giant Rat of Sumatra for which the world is not yet prepared.

We went on to the cinema to see An Education, based on the book by Lynn Barber which is on our reading list for week eight's topic, Liberated Women. We had plenty of time before it started so we went to the bookshop next to the White Horse, the pub in which I won the university shove ha'penny championship in 1956 and about which I must one day write the droll story concerning the pub sign and Stubbs' Constitutional Charters (written, incidentally, by the bishop next door in Kettel Hall, where I had rooms when I first went up to Trinity).

Just inside the door was a pile of a new biography about Alan Clarke, whose Diaries I am reading for next week's topic, Political Autobiography. I picked a copy from the pile and resumed an ancient habit of sitting on a step-up to look through a book I had no intention of buying. I started reading the chapter on his Oxford days and, behold, a flash of gold in the stream met the prospector's eyes!

Briggs shared a flat – one of the few with telephones – in the Woodstock Road with Nicholas Ridley (later a Tory MP and Minister in Thatcher's government). Alan used to come in from time to time on the pretence of looking for Briggs, but really just so he could ring a girlfriend in New York. This did not go down well, particularly with Ridley, who bided his time, but finally got his revenge, it is said, when he was Environment Minister in the late 1980s. Legend has it that Ridley, having to decide the route of the new Channel Tunnel, instructed his officials to make sure it surfaced as close as possible to Southwood [Clarke's country seat].

Nicholas Ridley's daughter Jane runs this course. Bringing this snippet to her attention in a roundabout way is a bit like a little boy giving Teacher an apple, don't you think?

The Tonks biography

Today the five of us went across to Wendy and Nicky's new home in the little town of Whitchurch for lunch. The others had all been there before: I hadn't. Nicky gave me a quick tour. At the bottom of the garden is a leat of the River Test, perhaps the most famous trout stream in the world, with waters "clear as gin and twice as expensive", so unlike the muddy leat of the Great Ouse leading to the long-demolished Castle Mill opposite our home in Buckingham. Beside it a vegetable garden with friable tilth, so unlike the heavy clays of Julia's allotment.

Returning through the kitchen I saw names on tiles above the work surfaces: VERMEER, CEZANNE, … TONKS. Tonks? Henry Tonks, it transpires, is a forebear of our hostess the watercolourist. Her great friend Sabina ffolkes is the author of a new biography of this neglected artist. Just as my tutor Jane Ridley enjoyed herself hugely visiting Surrey country houses when writing her biography of Lutyens, so the two of them enjoyed visiting grand houses viewing Tonks still hanging where they were placed when first bought.

Lunch was vastly convivial and, though more needs to be written about past and future associations with my hostess (cooking in sunny climes and meeting biographers), my frailty stops me writing more tonight. I post it to my blog now so that anything added later will still bear Sunday's date.

When is a biography not a biography?

Julia and I drove down to Hampshire yesterday morning to stay with our old Richmond friends, Annabel and Adam. At teatime Annabel told us about a book of great interest to her and which she was sure, because of my current studies, would interest me.

They have both been stalwart members of the London Bach Choir since the sixties and over the years became close friends with its longtime conductor. Oxford University Press has recently published a book about him, Sir David Willcocks: a Life in Music.

She and Adam were two of the many people that were interviewed for the book. She said that all the interviews had been transcribed verbatim and the scripts then sent to each interviewee to check for accuracy and to give the opportunity to delete any portion of it.

There was a lively discussion about all this. I told Annabel, from my limited experience of transcribing interviews, how much editing of the spoken word is needed to render the text coherent and readable. She assured me that her interview had been transcribed accurately, as she remembered it, but agreed that she had not compared the text with the tape. Priscilla, another Richmond friend also down for the weekend, suggested that the book was not a biography but a memoir. I did not agree, but couldn't really suggest what it was. Could it really be called a biography, if it did not have at least some editorial commentary linking all the interviews together and if we are not told the criteria for excluding all or parts of the many interviews made?

All of this took place without having a copy of the book to hand or an internet link. Now that I am at home, I see that the exact title is A Life in Music -- Conversations with Sir David Willcocks and friends and that the publishers in the blurb here describe it as "a portrait of a highly gifted musician". Yes, but it is a portrait painted by many brushes, particularly that of the sitter. Without having yet seen the book, I currently think that the term that best fits it is a collage, a picture created from pasting many fragments together. Furthermore I surmise that, insofar as it is a biography, it is likely to resemble more a fulsome and one-sided Victorian biography which bathes the subject in sunlight and brush out its dark shadows, rather than the more rounded picture of a person that we have come to expect today.

Whatever you may call the book, the way that it has been put together and then packaged with a CD containing many of Sir David's recordings, represents a fascinating example of yet another way in which New Technology is affecting the creation of biographies.