Monthly Archives: June 2018

Arts, Books, Britain, First World War

Biographical Book Review: Reverend Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy

WOODBINE WILLIE

Selfless: The Reverend Studdert Kennedy

Intro: The Army chaplain who handed out almost a million cigarettes as WWI troops lay dying

AMID the carnage of the trenches, the Reverend Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, offered spiritual and practical succour to injured and dying troops.

And at a time when an estimated 96 per cent of soldiers smoked, one of the ways the clergyman helped them was to hand out cigarettes.

The British Army chaplain’s generosity in giving Woodbine to men on the front line to boost morale earned him the sobriquet of “Woodbine Willie”.

Official records also show that he regularly ventured – unarmed – into No Man’s Land, often under heavy machine gun and artillery fire, to give dying troops one last cigarette.

Clutching his Bible for protection, the “Battlefield Saint” would whisper the Lord’s Prayer and hold their hands until the end.

Reverend Kennedy’s selfless bravery during the First World War, particularly at the Battle of Messines, earned him a Military Cross.

Now his biographer has calculated that he spent most of his wartime wages handing out nearly one million cigarettes to Allied troops, returning home virtually penniless.

Dr Linda Parker said he sacrificed his family’s financial future to safeguard the emotional wellbeing of the men in his care.

“Studdert Kennedy was one of the First World War’s true heroes – a courageous and selfless Christian who gave away everything he had for the benefit of others,” she said.

“With the exception of his family’s annual living expenses, he spent the rest of his salary – his family’s entire income, really – on the men he took under his spiritual wing. He did, in almost complete certainty, spend virtually everything he owned. He filled his backpack with Woodbines, Bibles and a great deal of love.”

Book Cover: A Seeker After Truths by Dr Linda Parker

Troops were issued with two ounces of cheap rolling tobacco with their rations, but supply was irregular. Woodbines, which were strong and unfiltered, were not widely available on the Western Front and were like gold dust in the trenches.

Dr Parker – the author of A Seeker After Truths: The Life and Times of G A Studdert Kennedy (‘Woodbine Willie’) 1883–1929 – estimates he gave away 864,980 cigarettes at his own expense. She reached the figure by calculating the total number of men Studdert Kennedy is likely to have met between December 1915 and September 1918, the smoking rate among troops at the time, and his propensity to offer one or more cigarettes to “every man he met”.

She believes that over the course of nearly three years, he spent the equivalent of £43,249 in today’s money – every spare penny of his Army’s salary. This is based on a packet of five Woodbines costing 1d, which equals 25p today. His grandson, the Reverend Canon Andrew Studdert-Kennedy, team rector in Marlborough, Wiltshire, and an honorary chaplain to the Queen, agrees with Dr Parker’s findings.

“Anecdotes about my grandfather’s generosity are part of the annals,” he said. “My grandmother allegedly came home one day to find him dragging their mattress downstairs to give to someone in need, and another time he gave his coat away.

“I’ve no doubt whatsoever that he did everything within his financial means to help those men on the front line.”

Before the war, Studdert Kennedy served as a vicar in a poor parish in Worcester. When war was declared against Germany he enlisted as a temporary chaplain.

In December 1915, he was stationed at a railway station in Rouen, France, where he held communion with the troops, wrote letters for the illiterate, and prayed with young soldiers. When they left for the front line, he gave them copies of the New Testament and, to the 96 per cent of soldiers who smoked, one or more Woodbines.

News of Studdert Kennedy’s kindness and generosity spread, and by early 1916 he was known as “Woodbine Willie”.

His fame spread further when he was sent to the trenches of the Somme, Ypres and Messines. He routinely prayed with dying soldiers and was awarded the Military Cross after running through “murderous machine gun fire” at Messines Bridge to deliver morphine to men screaming in agony in No Man’s Land. He was gassed at the Battle of the Canal du Nord in 1918 and sent home on sick leave.

After the Great War, Studdert Kennedy became a pacifist, social reformer, author and poet. He was also made personal chaplain to King George V. When he died in 1929 aged 45, ex-servicemen sent a wreath with a packet of Woodbines at the centre to his funeral in Worcester.

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Health, Medical, Society

New medical guidelines for dementia patients

DEMENTIA

DOCTORS have been instructed to recognise the “human value” of patients with dementia as part of a major overhaul of care.

Dementia patients should be treated as individuals, have a say in their care and not face discrimination for their age or the severity of the illness, new guidelines say.

While there is currently no cure for dementia, the guidelines stress the importance of diagnosis so that patients and their families can prepare for the future and start treatments to slow its advance. This includes giving patients a controversial spinal tap when doctors are unsure whether they have dementia.

. See also Research reveals a healthy diet helps to stave off dementia

Charities have welcomed the care blueprint but warned that substantial investment would be needed to implement the measures, which include appointing dementia “champions” to advise patients and their families on the care available.

A spokesperson from the Alzheimer’s Society, said: “It’s encouraging to see the steps it’s taking to ensure the needs and rights of people with dementia are met. However, the guideline is just a starting point. What we need now is support to implement these recommendations.”

Recent figures suggest a million Britons are living with dementia. This is expected to double by 2051 due to the ageing population and obesity, which raises the risk of the condition.

Health watchdog NICE drew up the new advice – the first changes to healthcare guidance in a decade – to improve the postcode lottery of care on the NHS following concerns that dementia patients were being failed across the UK.

Ofsted-style ratings carried out in 2016 found that 57 per cent of health boards were giving patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s inadequate care.

Officials found some patients were never diagnosed with dementia, while many of those who were did not receive a check-up for 12 months. Last year, a major study found hundreds of thousands of Britons had dementia but did not know because they were never given a formal diagnosis in case it made them anxious.

For the first time, the guidelines urge doctors to carry out a spinal tap – using a needle to extract spinal fluid from patients whose diagnosis is unclear. However, the procedure is uncomfortable, sometimes painful, and can cause side-effects such as severe headaches and infections.

Other changes include a recommendation for more training for staff such as carers at home, in care homes and GPs to better support people living with dementia. The guidance says people with dementia and their carers should be assigned a health or social care professional to co-ordinate treatment, rather than being left to navigate the options themselves.

Initial assessments should include recording a history – including cognitive, behavioural and psychological symptoms – and how it affects daily life.

This should either come from the patient or a spouse, loved one or carer who knows them well, it recommends.

Alzheimer’s Research UK said: “We’re very happy to see the NICE guidelines give additional attention to how health professionals can help people with dementia get involved in research.”

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Science

Questions of Science: Plant poser

Q: Did all the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere come from photosynthesising plants? If not, where did it come from?

WITHIN the Earth’s crust, oxygen combines with all the most common atoms to form water, rock, organic compounds and almost everything else around us. Spontaneous free oxygen is about as likely as finding round rocks perched on steep slopes. Such rocks would imply that something had pushed them uphill more strongly than they could roll downhill.

Similarly, any free oxygen about us has been torn from its compounds with more than its bonding force. And that is a lot of force that only a few things are able to produce. Ionising radiation, such as X-rays, can do it, but there is little of that about. Visible light does it laboriously, step-by-step through photosynthesis, the only process that could release the level of oxygen that we see about us. That amount is calculated to be in region of 10¹⁵ tonnes.

How much oxygen plants actually produce is another matter entirely. The chloroplasts used by plants to photosynthesise are thought to have originated as symbiotic cyanobacteria. So, in effect, all our oxygen came from photosynthesising bacteria. Hence, practically all the atmospheric oxygen is of biological origin – and is not from plants but cyanobacteria.

These single-cell organisms, which were present on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago and pre-date plants, were initially responsible for all oxygen production and are still responsible for more than 60 per cent of current oxygen production.

Cyanobacteria come in many varieties and are sometimes called blue-green algae, although they are not really algae. A species of cyanobacteria present in the ocean, Prochlorococcus marinus, is both the smallest photosynthetic organism known and the most abundant of any photosynthetic species on the planet. It was only discovered in 1988.

Previously Questions of Science: Free the atoms

Science-in-motion: a series of short articles following topics in science.

. Biodiversity

This measures how much variety there is between all the different species of life on Earth, from single-celled bacteria through insects to blue whales, the largest known animal ever to have existed. Biodiversity also describes the genetic diversity within a single species, or even the diversity of ecosystems like wetlands and forests.

Around 1.75 million species of living organisms have been identified on Earth so far, mostly small ones like bacteria and insects, and estimates suggest the true number could be as high as 100 million. But in recent centuries, there has been a rapid increase in the rate of species extinctions due to human activities such as habitat destruction for farming.

Between 1500 and 2009, international organisations documented more than 800 species becoming extinct, including the Javan tiger that died out completely in the 1980s, but the vast majority of disappearances probably go unnoticed. Conservationists grade the vulnerability of species according to a continuum scale that runs from ‘extinct’ to ‘least concern’.

Biodiversity is of huge significance. The development of new medicines, for example, is inhibited during rainforest destruction, of which many tiny organisms are either destroyed or not even previously discovered.

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