Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)

Another Christian (and I use the word advisedly) gentleman is memorialised just round the corner from Brick Lane - Dietrich Bonhoeffer was pastor at St. Paul's German Evangelical Reformed Church from 1933-1935. The dates are as always significant. He left Germany in late 1933 after opposing the Deutsche Christen who wished to appoint the Fuhrer as head of the German Church and assisted in setting up the rival Confessing Church. St. Paul's Church was bombed in 1941 and the site is now part of London Metropolitan University. Trying to find an exact date I found the rather scary http://bombsight.org/ which maps the sites of bombs falling on London during the Blitz and gives and impression of what the population of London underwent at this time. Dietrich Bonhoeffer however had returned to Germany despite being aware of the Nazi party and the possible, even probable consequences for him of returning. The Confessing Church which also had as a member Pastor Niemoller , he of the poem - First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. highlighted the gap between Chrtistian behaviour and the tendency of the church to be bound up with the state - particularly the Nazi state. Cue the oft quoted belt buckle of the SS - "Gott mit uns" - God is with us which they wore while committing their atrocities. One thing that I think the US have got spot on is the requirement to separate church and state - the House of Lords - particularly those members of the Lords Spiritual have to my mind a way too much influence on this end of the pond. In 1935 Bonhoeffer returned to Germany, heading a seminary in Findenwande, in modern Poland. After the Gestapo closed the seminary in 1937 Bonhoeffer travelled, creating a seminary on the run. The Confessing Church opposed the persecution of Jews and the Nazi euthanasia programme - a silent Holocaust which prefigured the Nazis final solution to the "Jewish Question". The Church assisted the concealment of Jews - promoting non-violent resistance to the vile regime and Bonhoeffer became involved in the organised anti-Nazi resistance through the Abwehr, German military intelligence which had a significant anti-Nazi element. As he was required to enlist he left for the US in 1939 but, haunted by regret returned to Germany before the war started thinking that he could only assist from within. He joined the Abwehr, aiding the resistance by acting as a courier. He travelled to Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland as the resistance attempted to engage in dialogue with the Allied powers. He was arrested and imprisoned in Tegel prison by the Gestapo on 5th April 1943 where he continued to his religious work. In September 1944 after the Stauffenberg plot against Hitler's life the Abwehr's anti-Nazi activities became known to the authorities and Bonhoeffer was transferred to the SS Reich Main Security Office in Prinz Albrecht Strasse, a road that we visited a couple of years back when we visited Berlin. In February 1945 he was transferred to Buchenwald and later to Flossenburg concentration camp where on 8th April 1945 two weeks before the Americans liberated the camps he was condemned to death. He was hanged the day afterwards although accounts of his death are now questioned as the witnesses, all Nazis, sought to minimise their culpability. His legacy however can be noted in religious opposition to unjust government - particularly that of the Civil Rights movement in the US.

Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1st Baronet

Nearly 2 years, how did that happen; actually I know exactly how that happened. Last years study of 2 small courses taking over the summer is how it happened. This year however I get a summer, hard to believe looking out the window on the longest day but yes it is the summer. Time to chillax with my housies, take a breath before starting it all over again in October. And so a visit to the big smoke was embarked upon, M elected to indulge in retail therapy in Westfield while I tubed it to Liverpool Street to meet up with Wayne who was up for a wander around an area of London that he didn't really know. We settled on Whitechapel - an area that I know fairly well. M and I had done one of the excellent London Walks - http://www.walks.com/ a year or two ago focusing on the few remaining relics of Jack the Ripper's London and I'd taken mum on another one focusing on the East End and its Jewish heritage - a heritage that has left its mark on the area. Given this I decided to print off a DIY walk that I found on the web - probably a mistake but hey...a focus for our meanderings. Looking at the gentrification of the area now it is a world away rom the warren of tiny alleys that contained a million or so Londoners in the nineteenth century - many of them immigrants - particularly those fleeing pogroms in the East. But it is there - they may have a new coat of paint but the soot-stained high terraces are still there - lurking. And in this squalor there was found a philanthropism that seems entirely lacking for modern political life - a fact brought home by those outnumbered by the police there to shepherd them gathered to protest against the latest round of austerity cuts handed down by the rich and brainless. This was slightly to my discomfiture aligned along a religious axis. I point you towards Sir Fowell Buxton commemorated at Truman's Brewery on Brick Lane, home of some of the best curry houses in the capital - a legacy of later immigrants - those from Bangladesh. Sir Fowell Buxton's mother was a Quaker a religious sect that I have a great deal of time for having met a few on various demos in the past and who seem rather more focused on improving the situation down here rather than saying to those who have not "never mind, you'll get your reward in heaven". He was however not involved in the temperance movement - being a director of what was then Truman, Hanbury and Company who were the largest brewer in the world in the mid-19th century. He financially supported the local weavers who had been effected by mechanization and cont4ributed to Elizabeth Fry's campaign for penal reform. He was elected to Parliament in 1818 and continued to work for penal reform, fighting to abolish the death penalty - although this wasn't achieved in his lifetime the number of capital punishment offences were decreased to 8 from over 200. He was also a founding member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824, an event also commemorated in plaqular form. His do-gooding (and when was it that "do-gooder" became a slur to be levelled at someone?) however did not stop there. In 1823 he founded the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery, taking over the stewardship of the issue from William Wilberforce who retired from public life in 1825. Buxton introduced a bill to Parliament calling for the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire calling it - "repugnant to the principles of the British constitution and of the Christian religion". Further to this he lobbied for treaties to be made with African leaders to outlaw the trade feeling that slavery should be replaced with legitimate trade - a precursor of the modern call for fair-trade. For his efforts he was made a Baronet in 1840. He died in 1845 disappointed though having failed to effect this change in policy.

Sri Aurobindo and the coming of winter

Yes I'm afraid that it won't be long before the clocks go back and the weather closes in - this is accompanied by the start of my Open University course so I've got a week of John Donne and then the composer John Adams - so a mixed week. Our last visit to the capital was to witness the wonder of the Duckworth-Lewis Method at what will forever be (at least as I'm concerned) the Shepherds Bush Empire. We actually managed to time it for the annual Open House Day which we combined with a visit to the British Museum. Being just down the road we moseyed down Southampton Row and visited the temple to Art Deco that is the United Grand Lodge of Freemasons and then a trip across the road to Lincoln's Inn Fields to the Royal Society of Surgeons and the Hunterian museum with its collection of anatomical unpleasantnesses - the skulls of the syphilis sufferers in particular causing a fist in mouth moment. We tubed it out to Goldhawk Road and did a quick reconnoitre and found the plaque to Sri Aurobindo - Indian nationalist,philosopher, poet and Cambridge graduate. St Stephens Road is not perhaps where you would expect to find an Indian revolutionary but there his plaque was. It marks his residence from 1884-1887. He had been sent to England to get his Indian Civil Service examination which in turn required an English university education - Sri Aurobindo Ghosh went to King's College Cambridge but deliberated sabotaged his Indian Civil Service exam however he found employment through contacts with the Maharajah of Baroda. It was at this point that he became involved in politics and was imprisoned by the british authorities for his writings which endorsed a Gandhist campaign of non-violence. During his imprisonment he experienced a mystical relevation and developed a new method of spiritual practice of Internal Yoga. He founded an ashram near Pondicherry at Auroville which is still in existence - he died in 1950.

Ben Franklin, Jeremey Bentham and the American visitors

Well we managed a weekend to ourselves after visitors large and small - firstly my first cousin Emily and her fella Josh who had spent the previous few weeks doing the Eurail thang - they seemed rather knackered - the sign of a good trip I say but we managed a perfomance of Richard III in St Johns College gardens and a trip to london which coincided with London bike day which made things interesting. Our visitors decied that theyd like so see the London palaces as fortunately the bus dropped us on Park Lane - after a brief pause at the Hard Rock Cafe for Josh to buy a t-shirt for Josh towards Buckingham Palace and across St James's Park where we encountered a Green plaque to Jeremy Bentham the father of utilitarianism of particular interest with regards my reading of Hard Times (Bentham BTW is preserved at University College where he has been taken to College Councils where he is noted to be present but not voting)We wandered down to Westminster Abbey wheer we baulked at the rather hefty £18 entry fee and then detoured down Whitehall which we rather cheekily called half a palace as it was designed originally to be one. We ended up in Trafalgar Square for the obligatory photo shot before heading to Covent Garden via Craven Street and the home of Benjamin Franklin - founding father, author, printer, political theorist,scientist, musician, inventor, statesman, diplomat and all round smartarse. We supped a the wonderful Stamfords bookshop after the required visit to the Tintin shop where a barbecue apron was purchased. Because of the visitors and also our restricted travelwe didnt have a whole lot of time but the peeps seemed happy enough with their London day.

Nadezhda Popova (1921-2013)

While scouting the weeks Obits in The Independent I was struck by Tuesdays column which lists Nadezhda Popova - Garth Ennis recent Battelfields series featured the exploits of the 588th Bomber Regiment albeit in a fictionalised form. Anna Kharkovas falling foul of the political bureaucracy of the then Soviet Union certainly dont seem to have been mirrored by the life of Nadezhda Popovas who retired with rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and having been awarded The hero of the Soviet Union, The Order of Lenin and 3 Orders of the Red Star. She eurvived multiple forced landings and survived 852 missions from mid 1942 to 1945. Initially her all female squadron was given antiquated Po-2 bombers - biplanes fit for the scrapheap. The pilots used to cut their engines and drift in silently to bomb the German forces who nick named them Die Nachthexen (The night witches). They were so successful that three further squadrons were formed. They were however looked down on by their male counterparts and were subject to sexual harrassment and their living conditions were primitive in the extreme - this on top of the dangers of combat. Interesting to note that the (in my experience) extremely chauvinistic Russians embraced females working not only in the military but also in combat - a sign of the kind of desperation that the Great Patriotic War inspired.

Carol Reed (1906-1976)

213 Kings Road is adorned with the blue plaque to the director Carol Reed. He was the illegitimate son of Herbert Beerbohm-Tree, whose blue plaque was also recently spotted close by at the excellently named Rosary Gardens. He was also the the uncle of Oliver Reed (who'd a thought it!) He went to school at Kings Canterbury of which Pat Leigh-Fermor was also an alumnus. He is I guess best known for his work in the late 1940s - My fave being the Third Man most recently seen at the Burg Kino in Vienna. Its post-war amorality - the companion piece to the American Noirs reflects the shattered state of Europe at the time and his broken Vienna and its faded glories show a jaundiced eye. Thats not to say that theres not moments of humour there - the ridiculous joint administration of post-war Vienna giving him a rich vein of comedy. We in addition to the Burg Kino also took the obligatory ride of the Riesenrad that Harry and Holly view the antlike citizens - sadly the Vienna sewer tour was timed such that we couldnt partake which M I suspect wasnt too upset about. There are very few identifiable exteriors in the film - we visitied the Central cemetery and there are also a few fleeting glimpses of church towers but the nightmare shadowed streets are ubiquitous (and I suspect deliberately so - becoming every European city - harry every spiv selling whatever they could get there hands on and nary a thought for the consequences. So another inhabitant of the heart of swinging London - The Kings Road.

Joseph Losey (1909-1984)

The last of our trio of American refugees is Joseph Losey - commemorated in Royal Avenue one of the unfinished Wren works originally meant to lead the eye to the Chelsea hospital. Losey was one of all too many leftists caught up in the HUAC witchhunt in the 50s. He had joined the Communist party in 1946 feeling that being useless in Hollywood, that he had "been cut off from New York activity and I felt that my existence was unjustified. It was a kind of Hollywood guilt that led me into that kind of commitment. And I think that the work that I did on a much freer, more personal and independent basis for the political left in New York, before going to Hollywood, was much more valuable socially." After Howard Hughes took over RKO had instigated a purge of leftists. He left the States unable to work and made a home in London where he made some strangely English films - notably The Servant (1963) and The Go-Between (1971) both collaborations with Harold Pinter and both nuanced, subtle pieces redolent with the hidden, the unobvious. This psychological darkness maybe reflects Losey's exile.It must be quite horrific to be barred from your home country - even voluntarily. His Royal Avenue home is situated just off of the Kings Road - a centre of 60s swinging London - a location that may well have to be revisited in this years Open House London in September. The walk also took in Brompton cemetery - another one of the magnificent seven municipal cemeteries that the Victorians initiated - sadly there was little time to investigate - I did spot Richard Tauber and some truly OTT monumenst to Britains imperial past - sadly however I didnt see Peter Rabbett - or any other of Beatrix Potters inspirations - she herself is memorialised just around the corner - yet another reason to return as I missed the rather picaresque plaque dedicated to her