Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Drama, History

Lateral Thinking Drama & Whodunnit: The Caryatids

LATERAL THINKING DRAMA: PUZZLE CONUNDRUM

TAKING a deep breath, Oliver James knocked on his father’s office door and went in.

“Ah, there you are, m’boy.” At 6ft Cameron James was just a little shorter than his son, but where Oliver was trim, his father had the broad power of a man who’d spent most of his life handling large amounts of stone and brick. “Come in, come in. Jacob and I were just discussing ornamentation for the Southwell building. Thought maybe you could lend a hand.”

Oliver winced, and braced himself. Cameron still hadn’t come to terms with his son’s preference for architectural design over actual construction, and the lectures about his future were getting tediously frequent.

“Do you remember Pick & Sons, Oliver?” Now in his forties, Jacob York had been his father’s right-hand man for as long as Oliver could remember. He at least was on Oliver’s side regarding architecture.

Oliver nodded.

“Cruz has a line on a couple of Roman statues at a very good price,” Cameron said.

“Maybe too good,” Jacob added.

“Maybe, maybe,” said Cameron. “But if not, they’d fulfil Southwell’s requirements for the frontispiece and then some, considerably under budget as well. You’ve got a good eye, Oliver. I thought maybe you’d give us your opinion on the matter.”

A relieved Oliver said he’d be delighted to help.

“Pull up a seat,” Cameron said, waving at the pile of paperwork on his desk.

A pair of Diocletian caryatids.

Oliver sat down and ran his eye over the details. According to the papers, the statues were a matched pair of elegant caryatid columns from the region of the Roman emperor Diocletian, in surprisingly good condition. The date of construction was clear, since the sculptor had marked the bases with his own name, Emperor Diocletian’s full titles, and the year, AD 302. That year marked the start of the emperor’s bloody persecution of the Christians, during which every Roman citizen was compelled to offer sacrifices to the Greek gods. Some venues had undoubtedly been constructed for the purpose, and caryatids – supporting columns in the form of a woman – while not common in Roman times, were not unheard of either.

From the pictures that had been included, the statues looked as if they were made from marble. There was some wear and tear – it would have been miraculous if there hadn’t been – but even so, the pieces could quite easily have been in a museum.

Oliver looked up. “Where did Pick find them?”

“He got them from a Turkish fellow,” Cameron said. “The man said that they’d been sold to him by an Ottoman pasha who’d fallen on hard times, having had them in his family since the time of the Seljuks in the 13th century.”

“There is some supporting documentation,” Jacob said.

“Well, it’s not totally impossible for a couple of Diocletian pieces to have survived in private collections,” Oliver said. “Diocletian was in Antioch for several years, up to AD 302 at least. I can see temples being raised in his name, and then statuary being purloined later, as the empire shrank. In this case, however, I feel comfortable saying that those pieces are absolutely and definitely fakes. Sorry, father.”

How can Oliver be so sure?

Standard
Arts, Books, Britain, History, Second World War

Book Review – Arnhem: The Battle For The Bridges, 1944

REVIEW

This book, written in Beevor’s inimitable and gripping narrative style, is about much more than a single dramatic battle. It looks into the very heart of war. And, why, the Battle of Arnhem was so very wrong from the outset.

EVERY time a paratrooper in Britain’s airborne regiments goes to the stores to pick up his parachute as a prelude to going into action, it’s handed over with the same old corny gallows-humour banter – ‘Bring it back if it doesn’t work and we’ll exchange it.’

You could apply the same logic to the Parachute Regiment’s most famous World War II mission: the abortive attempt to capture from the Germans the bridge over the Rhine at the town of Arnhem in the north-east of the Netherlands in the autumn of 1944.

It spectacularly did not work – and, once it got under way, there was no chance of exchanging it for one that did.

In ten days of blood-letting battles along a 65-mile axis, thousands of men needlessly died, were wounded or taken prisoner, while afterwards, the Dutch people, who aided the British, were savagely punished by their Nazi occupiers with summary executions and deliberate starvation of the entire population.

Others you might also like:

. Book Review: ‘Secret Pigeon Service’ 

. Book Review: Birth of the RAF (& Gallery)

Arnhem – codenamed Operation Market Garden – was never the partial victory that deluded and self-serving British top brass, headed by the vainglorious Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, always claimed it to be. It was a military disaster and had been one in the making from its very inception.

The idea was to catch Hitler unawares by invading Germany through the back door. But the plan was so full of holes that, like a defective parachute, it was never going to float.

 

THERE was much heroism, narrated in this absorbing new account of the battle with the eye for telling personal detail that we have come to expect from Antony Beevor. A British soldier hurls himself from the first-floor window of a house on to a German tank in an attempt to drop a grenade into the turret, but is shot down in mid-air.

There is much poignant suffering, too, endured bravely. A teenage recruit croaks the opening bars of God Save The King as he lies dying in hospital and those around him try to stand to attention in their beds until he falls silent.

At Arnhem bridge itself, where the advance party of Paras – outnumbered and battered by German tanks – hung on for four days in the vain hope of a relief column arriving, one soldier’s jet-black hair turned white with stress.

And there is much horror, epitomised by an officer in the thick of it who saw ‘Mervyn with his arm hanging off, Angus clinging to the grass in his agony and a soldier running across an opening, the quick crack and the surprised look as he clutched his neck and then convulsed as more bullets hit him.

‘I only hope the sacrifice that was ours will have achieved something – yet I feel it hasn’t.’

He was dead right. It all proved pointless. As Beevor scathingly makes clear, this was not just ‘a bridge too far’, the much-quoted epithet about Arnhem which suggests laudable over-ambition. This was a campaign that should never have been launched in the first place. One can understand the mood that encouraged it. Since D-Day, there had been months of hard fighting in Normandy before, in August, the Allied forces broke out and raced through France, with the Germans in full retreat.

But over-enthusiasm allied to war-weariness should have given way to good military sense and probably would have done if Monty had not felt slighted by the ascendancy of Eisenhower and the other American generals and been determined to put on his own tally-ho show.

With Allied forces massed in southern Holland, he proposed a dramatic thrust to the north-east, dropping airborne troops – consisting of parachutists and soldiers in gliders – behind enemy lines to seize strategic bridges and hold them until the tanks and land troops advancing overland caught up with them.

With Arnhem (the furthest away) under their belts, they could spill out into Germany itself. Next stop Berlin and goodbye Hitler.

But there was a basic flaw, as the Dutch Prince Bernhard, knowing the geography of his own country, warned Monty. It could take for ever to get those tanks 65 miles up a narrow road with water meadows on either side, rather than the two days Monty thought possible, leaving those paratroopers up ahead at risk of being stranded. The prince was ignored, as were all the other naysayers. Optimism (and Monty’s egocentricity) triumphed over reality.

It might just have succeeded if every component of the plan had worked. But, in practice, blunder after blunder compounded the original conceptual error.

The fundamental concept defied military logic, Beevor writes, because it made no allowance for anything to go wrong, nor for the enemy’s likely reaction.

Yet, as the operation collapsed into ignominy, surrender and retreat, stuffed-shirt British generals such as Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning looked round for excuses and shamefully criticised a Polish brigade to divert attention from their own failings.

It was typical of the arrogance behind the whole unfortunate Arnhem episode.

Casualty figures were colossal. Of 12,000 airborne soldiers who went into battle, 1,500 were killed and 6,500, many of them badly wounded, were taken prisoner. Only a third made it home.

In some units, the attrition was even greater. The 4th Parachute Brigade started out for Arnhem with more than 2,000 soldiers and returned with just nine officers and 260 other ranks.

Strong men wept when they saw how many of their comrades were not coming back – all the more so when they realised how little, if anything, had been gained by their sacrifice.

This, indeed, was a case of lions led by donkeys. As for its consequences, it was not just that the mission failed dismally in the boast of its instigators that it would shorten the war by six months. Hardest of all to swallow is that it worsened the fate of the people of the Netherlands, who were subjected in the aftermath to Nazi vengeance.

The town of Arnhem was evacuated at gunpoint, its entire population forced to leave on foot with what little they could carry, before it was looted and reduced to rubble and ashes.

In Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the other major cities, food supplies were withdrawn, and the population lived – or, rather, died – through the harsh winter of 1944-45 on a diet of sugar beet and thin air.

Emaciated bodies lay in the streets as the death toll rose to 20,000. Thousands of resistance fighters and hostages were executed in a vicious security clampdown. This was the unseen cost of Arnhem and the author counts it out with unconcealed dismay.

But there is inevitably a noticeable change in tone from his previous much-acclaimed World War II histories on Stalingrad, D-Day and the fall of Berlin.

The uplifting drama of these was their part in the Allied road to victory. It put the undoubted horror in a sort of perspective; made some sense of the slaughter.

This time, though, he turns his adept craft as a military historian to a subject of not just defeat, but dunderheaded stupidity.

It will likely leave most readers horrified and deeply downhearted at the unnecessary waste of it all.

– Arnhem: The Battle For The Bridges, 1944 by Antony Beevor is published by Viking for £25

Standard
Arts, Books, Britain, Government, Legal, Politics, Society

Book Review: An Inconvenient Death

REVIEW

Dr David Kelly

July 15, 2003. Microbiologist Dr David Kelly during questioning by the Commons select committee, in London.

Intro: Fifteen years on from the apparent suicide of Dr David Kelly, a government scientist and weapons expert, we still don’t know the truth. Did he really kill himself? Or did he suffer a heart attack under interrogation by our own secret service? A new book reveals startling inconsistencies.

NATURAL conspiracy theorists are in abundance, but I’m not one of them. Maybe some might suggest that this is a weakness – an indication of being willing and ready to accept the official version of events and not to see evil plots lurking in the background.

Nevertheless, after reading Miles Goslett’s masterful book about the apparent suicide of the weapons expert Dr David Kelly in 2003, I am more persuaded than ever that the authorities have not told us the whole truth about this tragic case.

American and British forces invaded Iraq in March 2003. A few months later, Dr Kelly was a source – possibly not the primary one – of the BBC’s Andrew Gilligan’s explosive disclosure that the Blair government had “sexed up” the September 2002 dossier, which wrongly asserted that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction”.

It raises the question as to whether Gilligan himself may have sexed up what Dr Kelly had told him, since the government scientist went to his death still believing these weapons might exist. Whether that’s true or not, the journalist’s essentially accurate allegation caused angst, panic and fury in official circles. Alastair Campbell, for one – Tony Blair’s spin doctor and media manipulator – strode into the Channel 4 News studio to denounce and heavily criticise the BBC.

Dr Kelly soon admitted to his superiors that he had spoken to Gilligan. In one of the most disgraceful episodes in a shameful saga, a meeting chaired by Blair effectively authorised naming the weapons expert to the Press. The scientist immediately became the centre of a media frenzy.

Just two weeks later, on the morning of July 18, Dr Kelly was found dead in an Oxfordshire wood, a few miles from his marital home. He had supposedly taken his own life, having gone for a walk the previous afternoon. His left wrist had been reported cut, and he had taken co-proxamol tablets.

Some newspapers blamed Blair and Campbell for hounding him to death. But did he kill himself?

An Inconvenient Death painstakingly assesses a vast amount of evidence.

 

GOSLETT is no loopy conspiracy theorist. He never says Dr Kelly was murdered. Instead, he exposes the authorities’ many contradictions and inconsistencies – and urges there should be a full inquest into the scientist’s death. For the extraordinary thing is that there has been no such inquest.

Within hours of Dr Kelly’s body being found, the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, had set up an official inquiry with miraculous speed. Falconer was an old friend and former flatmate of Tony Blair, who at that moment was in the air between Washington and Tokyo.

The legal effect of the decision to ask a senior judge – the elderly Establishment figure of Lord Hutton – to chair an inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death was to stop the inquest in its tracks.

But, as Goslett points out, neither Hutton nor his leading counsel James Dingemans QC had any experience of a coroner’s duties. And whereas in an inquest evidence is taken on oath, it wasn’t in the Hutton Inquiry.

The list of its errors and omissions is mind-boggling. A huge number of important witnesses who might have thrown doubt on the theory that a severely depressed Dr Kelly had killed himself were not called.

These included Sergeant Simon Morris, the Thames valley police officer who led the original search for Dr Kelly, and his colleague, Chief Inspector Alan Young, who became senior investigating officer.

Also never questioned was Mai Pederson, a translator in the American Air Force, and a very close friend of Dr Kelly. She later alleged he had a weak right hand, which would have made it more difficult for him to sever his left wrist.

Moreover, the knife he often carried with him – and was said to have used in the suicide – had a ‘dull blade’. She also claimed he had difficulty swallowing pills.

Dr Kelly’s friend and dentist, Dr Bozana Kanas, was also not examined. She discovered on the day his death was reported that his dental file was missing from her Abingdon surgery. This file was inexplicably reinstated a few days later. Police tests revealed six unidentified fingerprints.

Dingemans seemed intent on establishing that Dr Kelly had been downcast once the Press knew his name.

Yet according to the landlord of a local pub and several regulars, on the night the weapons expert discovered from a journalist that he was about to be identified, he happily played cribbage in the Hinds Head.

But neither the landlord nor Dr Kelly’s fellow players were called by Hutton to give evidence. This is particularly strange since at the very time he was said to be in the pub, he was, according to his wife’s evidence to the inquiry, with her in a car on the way to Cornwall, escaping from the media attention. There were other anomalies in her evidence which Goslett details, though he offers no theory to explain them.

Nor did the inquiry grapple with the oddity that in the early hours of July 18 a helicopter with specialist heat-seeking equipment spent 45 minutes flying over the land around Dr Kelly’s house, passing directly over the site where his body was discovered a few hours later.

 

ACCORDING to an official pathologist, Dr Kelly was already dead at the time of the flight, yet the helicopter did not locate his still-warm body. Might it have been moved subsequently to its final position in the wood? Hutton did not examine the pilot or crew.

Perhaps most striking of all was the inquiry’s failure to investigate conflicting medical evidence.

A volunteer searcher who discovered the body at 9.20am on July 18 testified that it was slumped against a tree, and there was little evidence of blood.

Yet police issued a statement asserting that the body was lying ‘face down’ when found, while the post mortem recorded a profusion of blood.

After the inquiry, a group of distinguished doctors expressed concern as to its conclusions. They doubted the severing of the ulnar artery on Kelly’s left wrist could have been responsible, as such an injury would produce relatively little blood. Goslett’s point is that a competent coroner would have picked up on this and the many other inconsistencies.

A properly constituted inquest would also have registered that Dr Kelly’s death certificate didn’t give a place of death. It states he died on July 17, though July 18 is equally plausible. Maladministration or conspiracy? It’s impossible to say. Despite having gathered all this evidence, which he presents in a gripping way, Goslett for the most part resists speculation to a degree – given his enormous accumulation of facts casting doubt on the official version of events – that is almost heroic.

At the very end, he airs the question as to whether Dr Kelly (who according to the post mortem had advanced coronary disease) might have suffered a heart attack under interrogation.

Is it conceivable that undercover intelligence agents panicked and dumped his body in an Oxfordshire wood?

This book by James Goslett does journalism a great service. The author’s forensic skills put the then government’s legal counsel to shame.

In a spirit of even-handedness, it should also be pointed out that it is incorrectly stated that Robin Cook resigned and demitted office as Foreign Secretary days before the invasion of Iraq. He was actually Leader of the House, having been replaced as Foreign Secretary two years earlier. Nevertheless, this is a formidable, and disquieting analysis. We should hope it has the effect of reigniting calls for an inquest. If our rulers believe in justice, they would surely sanction for the establishment of a full inquest with due haste and speed.

Yet, a future coroner would admittedly face a serious handicap: that Dr David Kelly’s body was recently mysteriously exhumed and, according to reports, secretly cremated.

–  An Inconvenient Death by Miles Goslett is published by Head of Zeus for £16.99

Standard