Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Drama

Whodunnit: ‘The Necklace’

Issue No. 6 in the Whodunnit series. Tap into your inner detective by explaining how Inspector Parnacki believes he knows who the thief is in this case.

IT was past 9pm when Inspector Parnacki arrived at the home of Jackson and Isabella Stone. The snow that had been falling all day had finally stopped a couple of hours earlier, so the journey hadn’t been too unpleasant. He was met at the top of the driveway by a chilly-looking police officer. Parnacki showed the policeman his badge and asked for a report.

. You might also like ‘Whodunnit: The Logician’

The officer began, “An extremely valuable diamond necklace belonging to Isabella Stone was stolen from the house an hour ago, sir. Mr and Mrs Stone are entertaining longstanding friends this evening, a couple named John and Kathleen Acosta. None of the four report noticing anything suspicious until Mr Stone discovered that a ladder had been placed against the side wall, leading up to the window of the main bedroom. The group searched the house and he found that the necklace had been stolen. I have personally verified that the intruder is not anywhere to be found at the scene. He must have climbed in and out and made his escape before anyone noticed. Everything was in order when the Acostas arrived at 5.30pm, but the crime could have taken place anytime between then and 8.30pm, when the theft was discovered.”

Inspector Parnacki thanked the officer and asked to be shown the ladder. He was then led round the front of the house to the side. The snow was a mess of footprints, both around the house and to and from the small garden shed. The ladder had been placed carefully against the side of the building, reaching up to an open window. Was that something flapping? Parnacki took hold of the ladder and squinted up at the window, flinching slightly as the ladder sank into the snow. The flapping turned out to be just a piece of curtain blowing around in the breeze.

“It came from the shed?”

The officer nodded. “Jackson Stone positively identified it.”

“I should have a word with the Stones and Acostas,” Parnacki said.

The two men then went inside the house and into the sitting room, where the four friends were gathered. It was a pleasant room, neatly furnished and tidy, comfortable rather than prosperous.

After the introductions, Parnacki asked the four to give him their accounts of what happened.

“We didn’t realise anything had happened,” said Isabella Stone. “Not until it was all over, anyway.”

“Yes,” said Jackson Stone. “I went to the bathroom a little before 8.30 and spotted from the window that the ladder was resting against the wall. I couldn’t make sense of it, so once I was finished I popped outside to check, and there it was, out of the shed and running straight up to the bedroom window. So, I came back inside and raised the alarm.”

John Acosta nodded in agreement. “Jack rushed into the room looking most alarmed and told us there might be an intruder in the house. He and I immediately checked to make sure we were safe, while the ladies telephoned the police. I searched downstairs, while Jack looked upstairs. I was quite relieved to discover that no knives appeared to be missing from the kitchen.”

“That’s when I discovered that Isabella’s necklace was missing, and the thief with it,” Jackson said.

“We checked everywhere, inside and out,” said Kathleen Acosta. “No sign of either the necklace or the thief. It’s quite alarming.”

Inspector Parnacki nodded thoughtfully. “And I suppose the four of you have been together all evening?”

“Of course,” said Isabella. “In pairs, anyway. Kathy and I have made a couple of trips to the kitchen.”

“I see,” Parnacki said. “I should remind you, Mr Stone, that insurance fraud can carry a very significant prison and custodial sentence. I trust that the necklace will be found dropped in some suitably convenient location.”

Stone paled, and the other three gasped.

“Good evening,” Parnacki said, and sauntered out.

 

Why does Inspector Parnacki think Jackson Stone is the thief?

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Arts

‘Setting Standards’

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was a statesman, an inventor, a publisher, a musician, a postmaster, a scientist, a civic activist, a Founding Father of the United States – he was a real over-achiever!

The key to getting so much done may have resided in a notion of his called the 13 Virtues. In an effort to be the very best person he could possibly be, Mr Franklin drew up a list of things he ought to aspire to. And he checked his progress on them every day.

They included moderation in eating and drinking, letting all aspects of his life have their place and time, not spending money unless it was to do good for himself or others, wronging no person, thinking innocently and justly, and imitating Jesus Christ in humility.

Did he succeed? Not always. His increasing girth in portraits show that moderation in food and drink was a struggle, for example. But did he benefit from trying. Undoubtedly!

If we set ourselves high standards we will, inevitably, fall short. But we will still rise higher in the attempt than if we had set no standards at all.

. See also Quantum Leaps: Benjamin Franklin 

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Arts, Books, Britain, History, Society

Book Review: Hearts And Minds

SUFFRAGISTS–SUFFRAGETTES

Smashed windows, lobbed bombs and underhand tactics. A fascinating new book in this 100th year of the suffragette movement casts new light on the bitter rivalry between the women who fought for the vote. The war between the sisters.

A USEFUL mnemonic for remembering the difference between suffragists and suffragettes is ‘Millicent: non-militant’.

Millicent Fawcett and her suffragist crowd were the peaceful ones who trundled around Britain in horse-drawn caravans, waved embroidered banners, dropped leaflets from hot-air balloons and used the art of gentle persuasion.

The suffragette Pankhurst and her troupe were the ones who went around smashing shop windows, bombing pillar-boxes and slashing paintings in the National Gallery.

Jane Robinson’s lively new book on the subject, published in this 100th anniversary year of the Representation of The People Act of 1918 – that, at last gave women the vote – is an excellent source of reading for fleshing out those spare bits of general knowledge.

Suffragists, Robinson tells us, were rude about suffragettes, calling them a “dictatorship movement of the sort that drives democracy out”. Suffragettes were rude and curt back, saying that suffragists were “staid, so willing to wait, so incorrigibly leisurely”.

The author of this book brings all these straight-backed Edwardian ladies to life, telling the story of the centrepiece of the suffragist movement: the Great Pilgrimage of 1913, in which thousands of suffragists walked all the way to London from far-flung corners of Britain for a mass rally of 50,000 in Hyde Park.

The aim was to drive the world’s attention (and that of stubborn prime minister Herbert Asquith) to the growing swell of opinion in favour of the women’s vote – and to prove women had the ability to turn the world upside down without violence.

 

THEIR peaceful protest proved to be the prototype for others, from the Jarrow march of 1936 to the Greenham Common peace camp of the 1980s.

Did the pilgrimage do any good? Well, trying to get Asquith to change his mind was like banging your head against a brick wall, and it would take a four-year World War to bring about the Act of Parliament for which the campaigners yearned.

But it was their suffragist training that gave women the confidence to step into men’s jobs when the war started; and by their war efforts in factories and hospitals they “worked out their own salvation”, as Asquith himself put it.

On a sunny morning in June 1913, the Great Pilgrimage began – the Watling Street Pilgrims setting off first, for their five-week walk from Carlisle.

It was thanks to a sensible piece of sartorial advice for the pilgrims – that skirt hems should be taken up four inches to prevent them getting caked in mud – that skirt lengths began their slow progression up the leg from that moment on.

Some pilgrims wore their smart new Burberry raincoats (“airy, light and porous … the ideal coat for the Pilgrimage”, according to Burberry’s own advertisement). Lady Rochdale, carrying her rolled umbrella, strode out side-by-side with Emily Murgatroyd, a weaver at a cotton mill since the age of ten. In those class-ridden days, this pilgrimage was the first coming-together of women from all walks of life – though the wealthier ones did enjoy the luxury of posting their dirty laundry home and picking up parcels of nice clean blouses en route.

The Land’s End Pilgrims started next, then the Great North Road Pilgrims, then the North Wales Pilgrims, and so on, until the Brighton and Kentish Pilgrims stepped out in the final week, all fixing their compasses on Hyde Park.

One of the less literate pilgrims spelled “suffrage” wrong in her diary – “sufferage”. Robinson coins this spelling mistake as a useful word to describe how some of them suffered for their cause. Vast swathes of the public couldn’t tell a ‘gist from a ‘gette, and classed them all as “pantomime villains” who deserved to be beaten up or pelted with rotten tomatoes, stones and rubbish.

In Birkenhead the Pilgrims were pelted with coal – not by disaffected men, but by women and children, reminding us that there was vociferous female as well as male “antis”, who believed that women should shut up and (as one poem went) be satisfied with “The right to brighten earthly homes / With pleasant smiles and gentle tones”.

To a woman, they picked themselves up, dusted themselves down, rearranged their sashes, and started all over again. They wore body armour in the form of pieces of cardboard which they moulded to the body in the bath and then allowed to dry, so they fitted snugly. The more “sufferage” they endured, the stronger their sense of sisterhood grew.

 

LUCKILY, there were just as many kind and supportive locals across the country who gave them hot baths, as well as crumpets for tea and beds for the night. By the day of the Hyde Park rally on July 26, the atmosphere in London was celebratory.

From the gates at all four corners of the park, thousands of pilgrims poured in. Seventy-eight speakers stood up on platforms, announcing that the “tide had turned”. An hour later, bugles sounded, and the resolution was proposed: “This meeting demands a Government measure for the enfranchisement of women.” It was passed unanimously.

A page later, Asquith’s pompously anticlimactic reply to the suffragists’ post-rally letter demanding that he take notice will have many readers banging their heads against a brick wall. “I feel bound to warn you,” he wrote, “that I do not see my way to add anything material to what I have lately said in the House of Commons as to the intentions and policy of the Government.” In other words, “Nice try, but no cigar.”

The suffragettes continued with their usual business of window-smashing and raiding Downing Street – all of which, the suffragists believed, did more harm than good to “the cause”, blackening the reputation of campaigners. Everyone was so busy smashing things up or not smashing things up that none of them noticed that “the war to end all wars” was creeping up behind them.

During that cataclysm of a war, women really proved their worth. By 1915, the slogans on their banners had changed to: “Shells Made by a Wife may Save a Husband’s Life”. And indeed they did.

Suffragists and suffragettes alike did astonishingly demanding war work, including running hospitals on the Western Front.

The great suffragist Katherine Harley – who had come up with the idea of the Great Pilgrimage – was killed in 1917 by a shell while caring for refugees in Serbia.

“We can’t give these suffragists and their militant sisters much in return,” Robinson writes, “except a promise to use the vote they fought so hard to win and, wherever it’s necessary, to keep on fighting.”

– Hearts And Minds by Jane Robinson is published by Doubleday for £20

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