An ancestor who published Cinderella

Yesterday, I wrote about my great-grandfather William Skyvington, who must have spent a particularly nasty period of six months in a notorious London prison. Even to be able to lie down there on something looking vaguely like a bed, you had to have friends on the outside with money, to purchase that privilege… otherwise you spent the night sitting around with crowds of poor inmates on the freezing muddy floors of the jail's stinking rat-infested cellars. And that was just over a century ago, in the grand capital city of the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, my great-grandmother Eliza Mepham, aged 34, was dying of tuberculosis behind the façade of this posh little house at 16 Marriott Road in northern London.

As for my future grandfather Ernest Skyvington, cared for by his Mepham aunts in another house, he carried on going to school in Woodstock Road, probably unaware that his father was in jail.

He once told me that his constant dream, at that time, was to get aboard a cargo ship of the kind on which his uncle William Mepham was a captain, and to sail away to the Antipodes… where he would be able to ride a horse through the bush. In 1908, the 17-year-old lad finally found such a ship, the SS Marathon, whose master was a colleague of Captain Mepham.

The SS Marathon reached Sydney six weeks later... which meant that it was quite a rapid vessel for that epoch. Ernest Skyvington set foot in Sydney on Christmas Day 1908, and William Mepham and his wife Gertrude Driscoll were waiting on the wharf to welcome the young man to his new land. The Mephams lived at Rushcutters Bay, which was the site at that time of Australia’s best-known boxing stadium. The fighters Tommy Burns and Jack Johnson were to meet here on Boxing Day 1908 (an ideally-named day) for the world heavyweight title. That Saturday, Ernest woke up on Australian soil for the first time in his life, and it so happened that he was rambling around in sunny Rushcutters Bay at the moment that Burns and Johnson arrived at the stadium. But the boy from London did not yet have enough money in his pocket to pay for a seat at such a boxing match.

WARNING INSERTED IN NOVEMBER 2016

I was recently informed by a friendly English fellow that the rest of this blog post is totally erroneous. My ancestor John Harris [1756-1846] certainly existed, but he had nothing to do with another individual, of the same name, who published the Cinderella stuff. I hope that true descendants of the publisher will forgive me for this silly blunder.

Today, as an outcome of lengthy Google searches, I discovered a lot of interesting stuff about a Londoner in the ancestral line of my paternal grandmother. I'm speaking of John Harris [1756-1846], who was my 4xgreat-grandfather. He was a publisher, specialized in children's books, with a bookshop alongside St Paul's Cathedral, seen here:

I was thrilled to learn this afternoon that he had published a wide variety of high-quality works, many of which can be downloaded today from the Internet. One of the nicest publications I found was his Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper (John Harris, London, 1827), which contains beautiful hand–colored woodcuts.

The Cinderella story is so familiar that we can more-or-less figure out what's happening for each of the following woodcuts:














These splendid illustrations remind me of the celebrated Epinal images created in France by Jean-Charles Pellerin [1756-1836], who was a contemporary of John Harris. I have spoken already of this famous French tradition of simple and colorful graphic work in my article of 6 March 2007 entitled Epinal images [display] and in my article of 17 May 2007 entitled Upside-down world [display].

Food for the Antipodes

I found these reproductions of old-fashioned French-language publicity cards on the web. These charming images were designed to sell Liebig meat extract to Australians.



I couldn't find any mention of dates, but the Liebig brand—designed for the marketing of the famous meat-extract product—came into being in 1865. The inventor of this stuff was a German chemist, Justus von Liebig. The illustrations evoke a colorful land of adventure, with Aborigines shown wearing bright garments in the style of Pacific Islanders. It's hard to say whether Liebig's graphic artist had ever set foot in Australia… but I don't think so. In view of the distinctly rural themes, I'm wondering what kind of potential customers they had in mind. Did they imagine that they might feed their meat extract to the Aborigines, or to Outback bushmen? Now, if only they had been advertising Vegemite, I'm sure they would have achieved more spectacular business results. Maybe a Liebig specialist, reading my blog, might tell us whether this advertising campaign was successful.

Justus von Liebig won fame, above all, as the "father of the fertilizer industry". No, that doesn't mean that surplus stocks of their meat extract were spread out over the fields to grow better vegetables and crops. It evokes the inventor of the so-called Law of the Minimum, also known as Liebig's Law, which states that plant growth will diminish as soon as a single required nutrient is missing, even if all the other nutrients are present. He likened the situation metaphorically to a wooden bucket with a stave that's too short, causing a lot of yield potential to be lost.

It's amazing, the sophisticated notions you can come up with when you start out making soup.

Family-history shock

For the last 24 hours, I've been trying to analyze a surprising item of genealogical information that dropped out of the blue when I was playing around with the web in order to clarify some London data. I noticed that the Central Criminal Court of England has a good online website providing information on old court cases (up to 1913). Almost out of fun, I wondered what might come up if I used my own surname as a search argument. Here's what I got:

Now I definitely hadn't planned on this, because I'd always considered naively that my paternal line consisted of God-fearing law-abiding English citizens. And who was this 26-year-old William Skyvington condemned to six months' hard labor (no doubt in the notorious Newgate Prison) for fraud? I compared the details with my archives. Shit, it was my great-grandfather! Through the few facts I'd obtained about him, I'd always held him in high esteem. How on earth could he have been tempted to turn to crime?

The archaic courtroom of the Old Bailey looked something like this when William Skyvington was tried:

The prison (demolished in 1902) was located alongside the Old Bailey:

It was a place of terror. Up until 1868, public hangings were carried out in front of Newgate Prison, and Londoners paid big sums of money to watch the spectacles from neighborhood windows. Inside the overcrowded prison, once described by Henry Fielding as a "prototype of hell", lack of ventilation and hygiene brought about the death of countless inmates. Charles Dickens was fascinated by this foul place, and wrote of it in Barnaby Rudge, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations.

Here is a photo of William Skyvington with his wife Eliza Mepham and their son Ernest, my future grandfather:

I've found a lot of basic facts concerning this William Skyvington, up until about the time that this photo was taken, around 1892. But he then disappears from the scene, and we know nothing more about him. In particular, I've never succeeded in finding his death certificate. So, when I learned yesterday that he had been thrown into prison in 1898, I immediately imagined that he had probably died a miserable stealthy death at Newgate. That idea started off a chain of reflections in my mind and, by the end of the evening, I had ended up—through a purely cerebral activity of reasoning—with a rich set of plausible speculations… which I shall now outline.

First, if he had indeed died in prison, then it was very strange that the authorities had made no record of that death. In my Australian research concerning convicts and bushrangers, I discovered that individuals in these categories are among the most highly documented folk you could imagine, for obvious reasons. So, I soon concluded that it was unthinkable that William Skyvington might have died during his short stay at Newgate without leaving behind a death certificate.

Next, the aspect of this crime and imprisonment that annoyed me the most was the fact that my grandfather in Australia had never, at any moment, told us that his father had run into trouble of this kind. Why had he decided to keep this sad affair secret? Little by little, I found this idea, not only annoying, but frankly unlikely. If my grandfather had never told us about the imprisonment of his father, the most likely reason was that he himself had never been aware of this event. In other words, when he arrived in Australia as an adolescent in 1908, not only had my future grandfather lost his mother to tuberculosis, but he was no doubt totally unaware of events in the life of his father, including the fact that he had been in prison. At that moment, an important question jumped into my mind. Could William Skyvington have in fact abandoned his son, and established another family, with a new wife?

No sooner had I asked that question than I searched through my archives (collected over a quarter of a century) looking for an individual with a similar name and age, but associated with a new wife and family. Sure enough, I soon came upon such a situation… down in Cornwall, far away from London. Everything started to fall into place rapidly and convincingly. By the end of the evening, I was convinced that I had discovered, for my great-grandfather, a plausible "second life"… which he had probably started to lead straight after his release from prison.

It will take me a while to obtain all the necessary records, to confirm my speculations. But I'm sure I'm on the right path.

In other words, just as I was shocked yesterday to learn that William Skyvington had been a criminal, he too might well have been sufficiently shocked by that experience to abandon his son and start out on an entirely new life. In fact, the word "abandon" must be relativized, in that Ernest Skyvington had been cared for perfectly by his late mother's Mepham family, with whom he remained in contact after he settled in the Antipodes. But he reached Australia as if he were the last of the Skyvingtons. And everybody tended to believe him. As of yesterday, for the first time ever, I'm convinced that this was not the case. Both his father and his Skyvington grandfather were surely still living in southern England.

Wet world

When I look out my window of a morning and see the Cournouze shrouded in mist, it doesn't take much imagination to realize that the landscape is wet, if not water-logged.

It's not the same dampness as in Brittany, caused by a constant delicate drizzle. Here, the humidity seems to be present in the earth and rocks, and it has to escape upwards into the sky. Just as it's said that an Eskimo has many specific words to designate all the different varieties of snow, I think there should be a linguistic distinction between the various kinds of wetness. I must meditate upon that theme...

The nearby cliffs of Mount Barret, seen through my bedroom window as soon as Sophia wakes me up of a morning, are a kind of barometric litmus paper.

When there's lots of humidity in the air, the primary hues of the rocks—the creamy limestone, the brownish ferrous patches, and the vast dark-gray surfaces of weathered rock—all become more intense… as if I had turned up the contrast level with Photoshop. Incidentally, in that last photo, there's a glimpse of a recipient that I obtained a few days ago from my ex-neighbor Bob: a galvanized steel water trough for the donkeys.

Curiously, the donkeys rarely seem to want to quench their thirst. Their relationship with water is strange, quite unlike that of a horse. A donkey won't normally wade through a shallow creek. They seem to be afraid of a flowing hose that's being used to fill up a trough, as if the jet of water might hurt them. On the other hand, they get a thrill out of dragging an empty hose far from its normal position, and they like to use their powerful jaws to drag plastic troughs and turn them upside-down, emptying any water.

The other day, Bob and I were amused to see that Mandrin had invented a new game. A flexible plastic water container was held in place by two long steel rods, passing through handles on its rim, and hammered into the ground. In this way, the donkeys couldn't simply knock it over, or drag it away. But the container could still be raised vertically along the rods. Well, Mandrin got involved in a weight-lifting exercise. He would drag the container as far up along the rods as he could, and then he would let it drop, creating a big splash. He seemed to be proud of his invention. It was funny to see him repeating this exercise until nearly all the water had splashed out of the bucket.

The other day, I erected a makeshift support for half-a-dozen tomato plants, alongside the little fig tree.

Now, guess what this is:

It's my strawberry patch… but it's in urgent need of weeding, as soon as the ground is not quite so wet. (I like to crawl around on my hands and knees when I'm weeding.)

By far the best barometer at Gamone, to determine whether the wetness is likely to hang around for a while, is the visual aspect of the end of the valley.

As you can see, there's little doubt about the answer. It's going to stay wet.

Absolute morality

It's impossible to trap Richard Dawkins with a fuzzy loaded question about so-called "absolute morality".



He was speaking in Australia on 8 March 2010.

Bill Maher on Islamic extremists

I've always appreciated Bill Maher, an American stand-up comedian.

Bill Maher Slams 'Extremist' Muslims On HBO's Real Time

Posted to mediaite by Mediaite TV on April 30, 2010

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Garden progress report

The first tiny rose has bloomed in my garden at Gamone.

It's a French classic: the Manou Meilland, created in 1979. Meanwhile all four tree peonies have now bloomed.





The aromatic plants are coming along well, too. Besides lots of parsley and mint, I'm pleased to see that sage and thyme are flourishing here.

Insurance, God and Dawkins

It's not an everyday habit of my lovable no-nonsense aunt Nancy Walker [married name Smith] to get involved in conceptual meditations. She's a strictly down-to-earth wise and common-sense lady, who lives at one of the nicest spots in the universe (St Ives, Sydney) and is presently driving through the wilderness with her husband Peter Smith to participate in a golfing tournament out beyond Wagga Wagga. [When I told Nancy on the phone that I intended to talk about her on my blog, she pointed out that it's important—for reasons I didn't fully seize—to include the second element in place names such as Woy Woy and Wagga Wagga.]

In our British-based culture, insurance contracts generally make reference to so-called "acts of God". This expression designates catastrophic happenings that lie beyond the bounds of situations covered by the insurance. Nancy raises the following interesting question concerning my intellectual hero: Would Richard Dawkins be prepared to sign such an insurance contract?

Aussie gangster worship

Ever since I was a child, I've realized that one of the surest ways of being admired in Australia, particularly posthumously, is to become a celebrity gangster. Our celebrated bushranger Ned Kelly surely established this fashion:

At about the age of 25, he was captured after a police shootout.

This photo show him a day before his execution in Melbourne:

There's an etching of his hanging:

Today, Ned Kelly's handmade armor is proudly displayed in an Australian museum:

This Aussie fascination with grand criminals goes all the way back to our convict system, since it's a well-established fact that many of the unfortunate individuals transported to the Antipodes, often for petty offenses, were inoffensive, often fine, individuals.

Be that as it may, there is still, in Australia, a certain fascination with big bandits... who are rarely models of humanity. We see here the gold-plated coffin (Michael Jackson style) of an underworld figure, Carl Williams, who was recently bashed to death inside a prison.

Ridiculous outpourings from his wife Roberta allege that Carl killed for nice personal reasons. Carl only mowed down Melbourne rivals because he loved his family and wanted to protect them. These stupid statements are being placarded disgustingly across the Aussie press.

Every society ends up with the gangsters it deserves. Right down to his fat little daughter, treated as a celebrity, Carl Williams is Australia's ideal dead gangster. He's set to become, like Ned Kelly, a hero.

Blue people

When I was out in Western Australia with my son François, in 1987, at the time of the fabulous America's Cup regattas, we collected various trivial souvenirs… including three Louis Vuitton bags and a stock of Moët Hennessy champagne that were awarded to me as a prize for my having predicted (with the help of software I wrote specially for my Macintosh box) the winner of the cup for contenders. A classy trophy was a sky-blue wind-jacket as worn by members of Bruno Troublé's organizing committee. François had picked this up from one of his girlfriends employed in this committee. Since it wasn't the sort of jacket he wished to wear around Fremantle, François promptly gave it to me… as is often the case with corny clothes he picks up. (That's how I acquired a fabulous yak-wool jacket from Siberia. I once created a sensation by wearing it to a meeting of local folk in Choranche… and that, I believe, is how I came to be respected, if not feared, in this one-horse cowboy village. You've got to be careful when you're dealing with a guy in a yak-wool jacket. Thanks, François.)

Well, getting back to the Louis Vuitton yachting jacket, I once wore it to an outdoor concert at the Jacques Brel festival in the Dauphiné village of St-Pierre-de-Chartreuse, where I was settled for three months in the summer of 1993. A vicious Parisian stand-up comic named Merri was in search of a victim for his next act: "Hey, I need a volunteer up here on the stage. How about that guy down in the middle of the tenth row, the Schtroumpf." [In English, the exotic term Schtroumpf is rendered by a duller invention: Smurf.] I realized immediately that, thanks to my fine sky-blue Louis Vuitton jacket, it was me, the Schtroumpf. So, I schtroumpfed up onto the stage and allowed Merri to make a fool of me. The following morning, I tossed that jacket into the trash can alongside the ancient church in the middle of the village. I didn't wish to be recognized as Merri's Schtroumpf for the rest of my stay at St-Pierre-de-Chartreuse.

Recently, Schtroumpfish blue skin and four fingers (unless you're a hybrid avatar, retaining five fingers) have become quite fashionable.

On the other hand, people have said that this extraordinary movie gives certain viewers the blues (weak pun intended). A Romanian woman has even claimed that her daughter committed suicide after seeing James Cameron's masterpiece. Maybe the kid was depressed when she realized that she would never be able to look like lovely Neytiri, and romp through tropical jungles floating in the clouds. For me too, after watching that movie in a cinéma at Romans, it was a letdown to get back into my old Citroën and drive home to Gamone.

A few days ago, I saw an intriguing article about a Californian fellow, Paul Karason, who's a victim of an ailment called argyria. His skin turned blue because of his use of colloidal silver as a dermatological product. If, like me, you did not know that silver was once used as a medical agent, then click here.

This story rung a bluebell in my childhood memories. At a pharmacy in South Grafton, in the 1940s, one of the employees was a blue man. As a child, I was intrigued by this phenomenon, but I never learned exactly what had produced this strange situation… apart from "health problems". A few days ago, when I brought up this topic with my sister Anne Skyvington-Onslow (who's an expert on all things weird and wonderful in our birthplace), she informed me that this man had been a patient of the great local physician and statesman Earle Page, who was a surgeon and gynecologist with his own private hospital in the heart of South Grafton.

Out in Australia in 2006, I took a photo of the miraculously-surviving glass panel with the name of this obstetric clinic in Through Street, South Grafton, where Earle Page (a future prime minister of Australia) had given birth to my mother Kathleen Walker in 1918.

If I understand correctly, Earle Page had removed a diseased lung from the South Grafton pharmacist. Bravo! Apparently, the patient was treated with colloidal silver, as an antibiotic, which explains why he developed argyria and turned blue. A recent distinguished commentator (the Australian academic Carl Bridge) suggested that this blue-skinned pharmacist in South Grafton served as a constant colorful reminder, to customers, of the surgical excellence of Earle Page. Today, I would prefer to consider that this poor blue man was a living monument to an age of archaic medicine.

As I pointed out to my sister Anne, that same blue pharmacist once sold me a little brown-glassed bottle of silver nitrate, enabling me (at the age of eleven) to test a hobbyist formula for the production of photographic paper. Happily, I never posed any industrial threat to Kodak and Ilford… and I washed my hands well after my experiments. So, I'm still basically white… or pinkish in summer.

Some people would say that blue is a rather unnatural color, because it doesn't occur very often in nature. But Christine tells me that neighbors in her Breton village are growing blue-skinned potatoes. And there are a couple of marvelous lines in a poem, Le Dormeur du Val, by Arthur Rimbaud [1854-1891].

Un soldat jeune bouche ouverte, tête nue,
Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu.

A slain soldier lies open-mouthed, naked-headed, and his neck is shrouded in crisp blue watercress. The color of that watercress has intrigued generations of literary critics.

Finally, the major evangelist of blueness was surely the painter Yves Klein [1928-1962], for whom it was a fetishistic hue… long before our discovery of the people on the planet Pandora.