Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books

Golden Man Booker Prize: ‘The English Patient’

BEST BOOKER PRIZE IN 50 YEARS

The English Patient

Set at the end of World War II, this novel explores the lives of four very disparate people who find themselves holed up together in a ruined villa north of Florence as the war retreats around them. The author was awarded the 1992 Booker Prize for this book.

THE ‘English Patient’ has been crowned the best ever Man Booker prize winner.

The novel by Michael Ondaatje was chosen by the public as the recipient for the Golden Man Booker prize, a one-off accolade to mark its 50th anniversary.

All 51 previous winners of the prize were considered by a panel of five judges, each of whom was asked to read the winning novels from one decade of the prize’s history, before the books faced a month-long public vote.

The panel judges were journalist Robert McCrum, who chose In a Free State by VS Naipaul for the 1970s; poet Lemn Sissay, who chose Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively for the 1980s; novelist Kamila Shamsie, who chose the English Patient for the 1990s; broadcaster Simon Mayo, who chose Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel for the 2000s; and, poet Hollie McNish, who chose Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders for the 2010s.

Speaking about why she had chosen The English Patient, Miss Shamsie said: “The English Patient is that rare novel which gets under your skin and insists you return to it time and again, always yielding a new surprise or delight.”

The novel – written by Sri-Lankan born Ondaatje in 1992 – tells of the entanglement of four people in an Italian villa, including an English burns victim, as the Second World War ends.

It was adapted into a multiple Oscar-winning film in 1996 starring Kristin Scott Thomas, pictured.

Baroness Helena Kennedy, chairman of the Booker Prize Foundation, added: “The English Patient is a compelling work of fiction – both poetic and philosophical – and is a worthy winner.” The winner was announced at a ceremony at the Southbank Centre in London.

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Arts, Books, Legal, Literature, Scotland

Book Review: Conan Doyle For The Defence

SCOTLAND: TRUE CRIME

Fox

Conan Doyle For The Defence by Margalit Fox

Intro: How the creator of Sherlock Holmes unravelled a real murder and deeply troubling miscarriage of justice

ON JANUARY 25, 1925, a prisoner was released from Peterhead jail. Concealed beneath his dentures, so the prison authorities could not find it, was an urgent note from a fellow convict.

It included a message for one of the most famous men in the world – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Oscar Slater, the man who sent the message, had already spent 16 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.

In 1908, an 82-year-old spinster, Marion Gilchrist, was living in a large flat in a prosperous neighbourhood of Glasgow. On the evening of December that year, her maid popped out to buy a newspaper. She was gone for just 15 minutes, but when she returned she found her mistress bludgeoned to death.

“Miss Gilchrist,” reports Margalit Fox in this gripping account of the murder and its aftermath, “had been beaten so savagely that autopsy photographs depict a face that looks as though it had never been human.”

Oscar Slater, whose real name was Oscar Leschziner, was born in Germany in 1872. He had lived in New York, London, Paris and Brussels as well as Glasgow. He moved in a dodgy underworld of chancers and semi-criminals, but he had no record of violence.

There was not a single link between him and Miss Gilchrist. Almost certainly, he had never heard of her before he was accused of killing her.

Unfortunately, the police were looking for a suspect. In Slater – a gambler, a foreigner, a Jew and a less than solid citizen – they found an ideal candidate.

His pawning of a brooch similar to one stolen from Miss Gilchrist brought him to their attention. It was not Miss Gilchrist’s brooch but this scarcely mattered. The police wanted him found guilty. In what Conan Doyle later called “a disgraceful frameup”, they made sure he would be.

Witnesses had seen a man leaving the scene of the murder.

In an identity parade, dark-haired, olive-skinned Slater was placed among 11 pale, pink Scotsmen. As a journalist later wrote, it was “like attempting to conceal a bull-dog among ladies’ poodles”. Unsurprisingly, the witnesses picked out Slater.

All evidence in Slater’s favour was either ignored or suppressed. At his trial, the judge gave a summing-up that was outrageously biased against him.

He was found guilty and sentenced to death. He had always been fascinated by machinery, but Slater surprised his warders by taking an interest in the gallows that was being constructed to hang him.

However, he was not to become too intimately acquainted with it – his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

In the words of a writer at the time, he was “held to be too guilty to be released, yet not guilty enough to be hanged”.

It was at this point that Conan Doyle became involved. With his big build and walrus moustache, he looked more Dr Watson than Holmes. But, Conan Doyle had a track record for reversing miscarriages of justice. Using observation and logic like his world-famous creation, he had already cleared the name of George Edalji in as bizarre a case as any Holmes had faced.

 

AN ANGLO-Indian solicitor living in the Midlands, he had been convicted of a series of animal maimings. Conan Doyle demonstrated that the man could not have been responsible.

Conan Doyle’s first efforts for Slater were unsuccessful and the convicted man continued to suffer in prison for years. Margalit Fox quotes extensively from his moving letters to his family back in Germany, which show he was very far from the unfeeling monster that had been described in court.

When Conan Doyle received the tiny note from the dentures in 1925 (it still exists in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow), he was inspired to try again. Times had changed, and Slater had so obviously been the victim of official dishonesty and incompetence that finally, after 18 years inside, the work of Conan Doyle and other supporters had its reward.

Slater was released from Peterhead prison on November 14, 1927. The rest of the story is not always a happy one.

Conan Doyle and Slater, who only met once face-to-face, fell out over money.

Slater was granted compensation of £6,000.

Conan Doyle thought he was honoured-bound to reimburse some of his supporters’ expenses. But Slater didn’t. The two men never communicated again.

And after 20 years of freedom, Oscar Slater died at his home in Ayr in 1948.

Nobody knows for certain who killed Marion Gilchrist. The only certainty is that it wasn’t Oscar Slater, who suffered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Scottish legal history.

Margalit Fox’s engrossing book brings his case back to vivid life and highlights the part played in it by the creator of the world’s most famous detective.

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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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