Chromosomes reveal the truth

Initially, Old Bailey was the name of a London street...

Four years ago, in a blog post entitled Family-history shock [display], I described my chance discovery of this record of a trial at London’s Central Criminal Court, better known as the Old Bailey.

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The trial had taken place on 24 October 1898. A man named William Skyvington, said to be 26 years old, had been charged with

feloniously forging and uttering an endorsement on an order for the payment of one pound, three shillings and eleven pence, with intent to defraud.

The accused man had pleaded guilty, and he was sent to jail for six months’ hard labour.

Here’s an old photo of one of the courts at the Old Bailey where criminal trials for London and Middlesex were held.

The accused individual was placed in the dock on the left. The jury was seated in the box on the far side, below a pair of large windows. On a throne beneath the wooden canopy on the right, alongside a sword of justice, an alderman (sometimes the lord mayor himself) represented the city of London, whereas the judge, sheriff and trial recorder were seated at plain desks in the far corner.

I wondered immediately if the criminal might have been my great-grandfather William Jones Skyvington [born in 1868, and therefore almost 30 years old at the time of the trial].

Four months ago, in a blog post entitled White lies of men in love [display], I explained that an English lady named Nicola Courtenay had sent me an e-mail indicating that her grandfather William Courtenay [who had died in 1959] often used “Skyvington” as if it were one of his given names. Since this “Skyvington” name is rather uncommon (resulting from a 19th-century spelling mistake that replaced a letter “i” by “y”), I was greatly intrigued by Nicola’s news of somebody having, as it were, “borrowed” our surname and used it as an aditional given name. The story simply didn’t add up. Above all, several clues in Nicola’s tale evoked authentic details associated with my great-grandfather. So, I was automatically tempted to speculate that Nicola’s grandfather and my great-grandfather might have been one and the same individual.

Well, to cut a long story short, a Y-chromosome test carried out on a DNA saliva specimen from a living male member of the Courtenay family has just proved scientifically (with no room whatsoever for doubt) that this was indeed the case. In other words, after vanishing from the northern-London context in which his son—my future grandfather Ernest Skyvington [1891-1985]—was born, William apparently decided to adopt the “Courtenay” surname, invent a fictitious identity (in which he claimed to be a member of the ancient and noble family of the Earl of Devon from Powderham Castle) and raise a large family.

Insofar as this Courtenay Affair provides us with specimens of William Skyvington’s apparent tendency towards mythomania, I am now convinced that the individual convicted at the Old Bailey in 1898 was indeed my great-grandfather. Besides, I had reached that conclusion prior to meeting up with the Courtenay Affair purely through the perusal of genealogical archives.

This morning, I retrieved a document from the National Archives designated as a calendar of prisoners, which mentioned the trial and imprisonment of William Skyvington. Here is the cover page:

An index includes the name of William Skyvington followed by the letters NL, meaning North London:

For the moment, I’ve been unable to determine (while awaiting clarifications from the National Archives) whether this means that William came from North London, or that he was now detained in a jail in North London. Further on in the document, we find the actual reecord of the trial.

It contains several interesting elements of information that did not appear in the Old Bailey record that I found 4 years ago. William was a “traveller”: that’s to say, a commercial traveler or salesman who moved around to contact customers. The term “well” means (as explained on the cover page) that William could read and write well. Above all, I learnt that he was jailed in Pentonville Prison in Islington (North London).

That’s to say, William Skyvington was placed in a prison just to the south of the family home in Evershot Road, not to mention Finsbury Park, his son’s vast playground. Star-shaped Pentonville was thought of as a “modern” jail, because it had been designed in the early 1840s by skilled carceral engineers.

But it was surely a nasty place.

Besides, William had been condemned to so-called hard labor, which meant that he had to toil daily at heavy manual tasks. Amazingly, we have here a photo of such inmates at Pentonville:

Then there’s a ballad sung by Pete Waters, with a catching refrain:

I was sent off for trial at the Bailey

And remanded to Pentonville Jail

The situation is funny (weird). For ages, I had concluded that, if I wanted to enhance my family-history writing with melancholy ballads about the hardships of a convict's existence, it was in New South Wales that I would find such stuff, in the context of my maternal ancestors from Ireland... and certainly not in the refined English context of the Skyvingtons.

Today, I must admit that the tables of my genealogical temple have been upturned. And I can't even blame Jesus...

Moped Facebook

My son François Skyvington told me on the phone this morning that his moped road movies are currently being aired on the Arte channel at a rate that often rises to four 30-minute programmes a day. Apparently the producer has set up a Facebook page here.

The problem is that my son, like me, is not a regular Facebook user. So, the situation is likely to be a bit frustrating for people who might wish to communicate with my son through Facebook. On the other hand, I have the impression that, if you click around, this Facebook page offers you various extracts from the series.

Bells of joy, bells of pain

When I was a child in Grafton, nobody ever talked to me about the churches of London. (These days, I’ve made up largely for the lost information.) But all the children of Australia were familiar with the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons.

We were bewildered about the curious final lines of the nursery rhyme:

Here comes a candle to light you to bed.
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

But we had fun in playing the game of Oranges and Lemons, and bringing down our arms to encircle the child who was consequently “caught out” at that moment.

Only later would I hear about public executions in London. The warder would carry a candle and ring a handbell in the early hours of the morning to wake up a condemned man.

The nursery rhyme mentions the church of St Leonard’s Shoreditch where my great-great-grandmother Sarah Jane Harris [1812-1889] was christened on 14 February 1812.

For several years in Paris, in the 1970s, I worked daily alongside Pierre Schaeffer [1910-1995], inventor of musique concrète and founder of the research service of the French Broadcasting System (the context that enabled me to create TV documentaries in the USA, Britain and Sweden).

Pierre had taken the personal initiative, on the evening of the liberation of Paris (Thursday 24 August 1944), of broadcasting a radio message asking priests in the churches of Paris to ring their bells.

A century ago, on 1 August 1914, the front pages of newspapers were covered with the story of the assassination of Jean Jaurès (the subject of my previous blog post, here). Later on in the day, the walls of France were covered in posters announcing a general mobilization.

France was henceforth preparing for war. Over the next 4 years horrendous happenings that would lead to the deaths of 1.4 million French soldiers and a third of a million French civilians.

At 4 o’clock in the afternoon of 1 August 1914, the bells of the nation rang out a grim tocsin, warning that there were terrible events on the horizon.

This afternoon at 4 o’clock, the same tocsin will be rung throughout all the cities, towns and villages of the nation, to commemorate the centenary of the start of the participation of France in World War I.

Why did they kill the founder of socialism ?

Napoleonic cavalryman on moped

This week, the latest series of moped movies starring François Skyvington has been showing on the Arte channel. Sensing that they’ve created an exemplary TV style, with a finely-dosed blend of form and content, the production team has respected scrupulously the approach developed throughout their two previous seasons, which gave rise to a total of 40 half-hour documentaries (which are being aired by Arte on the same afternoons as the new series). The general idea is that François—wearing a yellow helmet and an orange scarf—continues to take advantage of his archaic orange moped to crawl around picturesque byways, where he meets up with all sorts of friendly and interesting individuals, generally in most spectacular places.

To fit half-a-dozen such encounters into a 30-minute documentary, and to maintain the smooth rhythm of each road show, the production people are obliged to condense events and to take constant shortcuts. Viewers are expected to accept the principle that François simply “runs into” all these fascinating people, places and situations. There is no time in the documentaries for didacticism or dreary explanations, which would of course be fatal for the harmony and entertainment value. Ordinary viewers are not likely to examine these moped documentaries with a view to planning their forthcoming family vacations. On the other hand, each programme comes across as an inducement to travel and an element of touristic motivation in the sense that TV viewers are brought in contact immediately with the essence of such-and-such a site and its people. François and his primitive old two-wheeled vehicle take us directly to the heart of the subject and put viewers in immediate contact with the spirit of place.

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The 5 programmes aired this week dealt with Corsica. Not surprisingly, the man on his moped soon met up with the world of Napoléon Bonaparte in Ajaccio. Down in the street in front of the house where the future emperor was born, François was received by an honor guard.

Images on the screen were then metamorphosed magically, as TV viewers stepped inside the splendid Salon napoléonien in the city hall of Ajaccio. The emperor's marble gaze did not appear to be unduly disturbed by the arrival of one of his cavalry officers on a moped.

As for the awestruck expression on the face of the cavalryman, it suggested that his mechanical steed rarely brought him into such prestigious settings.

He wondered whether it was appropriate that a humble moped man such as himself should be attired in such a fine outfit, and surrounded by vestiges of Corsican imperial splendour.

Why not? He would have time enough, later on, to get back to his faithful vehicle and his yellow helmet and orange scarf on the rural roads of France. For the moment, he could savour calmly this exceptional situation.

Besides, there was no time for dreaming. Much was happening out on the battlefields, and the cavalry officer was obliged to adopt a firm tone of persuasion when discussing certain life-and-death military matters with his senior commander.

It wasn’t long before François left this imperial setting, and the yellow helmet reappeared on the macadam of the rugged roads of Corsica.

Dangers of the didgeridoo

Our gloriously narcissistic Rolf Harris—an almost Australian of the year—has finally been caught out and condemned heavily for ancient sexual offences involving underage females. What this means is that a hugely popular Aussie guy such as our Rolf might have a right to tie his kangaroo down, but he mustn’t allow the beast to raise its ugly tail and go groping around in the undies of young girls.

Jeez, there are things I don’t understand. Rolf wasn’t even a serious musician/entertainer, let alone an ordained priest! In cases like this, I can’t help wondering whether the innocent young victims, before running up and sitting down naively in Rolf’s enticing lap, had been wisely and sufficiently instructed by their parents about the terrible and ever-present dangers of the didgeridoo. Click here to start learning.

Detained for questioning

This morning, about an hour ago, the French ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy was detained for questioning over alleged influence peddling.

These days, whenever we see photos of the former French president, he seems to have stopped shaving for several days.

First two victims

Exactly a century ago, on 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was visiting Sarajevo—the capital and largest city of Bosnia and Herzegovina—with his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg.

They were a nice couple, who might have gone on to worldly glory at the head of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  

Instead, they were cut down by the bullets of an assassin.

They might be thought of as the first two victims of the ensuing First World War. Their killer, Gavrilo Princip, was a fervent Serbian nationalist who belonged to a movement named Young Bosnia, which hoped to separate Bosnia from the Austro-Hungarian empire and unite it with the Serbian kingdom.

In the years that followed, millions would die in the senseless butchery of the so-called “Great War”. And much water would flow under the lovely Latin Bridge of Sarajevo where the act of an enraged 18-year-old student had plunged the planet into a time of mindlessness from which the nations of the Old World are still striving to emerge.

White whale

This amazing creature—a white whale—is both rare and well known in the waters of eastern Australia. He even has an Aboriginal name: Migaloo.

Experienced whale-watchers know that, at this time of the year, Migaloo always heads off northwards on his annual holidays.

Biting artistically the dust

The Italian artist Sandro Giordano offers us a fascinating series of 15 photos on the theme of falling artistically onto (or often into) the ground. The series bears the title In extremis, and Giordano’s subtitle states explicitly that the various fallen bodies were “with no regret”. So, all’s well that ends well. Click here to view this series of delightful photos, presented by the French weekly Nouvel Observateur.

In the following photo from the series, the dog is wagging its tail with joy:

To my mind, this proves clearly—if need be—that no innocent animals were hurt or even distressed in any way whatsoever during the production of this set of artistic photos.

Magnificent France

The Unesco world heritage list includes 39 French sites. They are presented here by a series of excellent photos within a French-language article. The most-recently elected member of this prestigious list is the cavern at Vallon-Pont-d’Arc (Ardèche). Located 25 metres beneath the ground level on a limestone plateau, this fabulous site will never be opened for ordinary tourists. Instead, starting next spring, people will be able to wander around inside an elaborate replica, constructed by experts in a natural setting close to the real cavern.

Elements of my future pizza oven

Throughout winter, the elements of my future wood-fueled bread oven were stored in my cellar, because I had once imagined that I would actually install the oven in a corner of my stone cellar. But I changed my mind at that level, finally deciding that it would be a much better idea to install the oven out in the open, at the southern end of my house, at a spot where a wood-fueled bread oven had once existed, long ago. So, today, I decided to bring all the 14 elements out onto the lawn, alongside the place where they will soon be assembled.

To move the heavy elements, I used the simple two-wheeled device that’s known in French as a diable (devil).

Now that the weather is sunny at Gamone, it’s a pleasure for me to work outside. In the immediate future, before thinking about assembling the elements of the oven, I first have to erect the base on which the oven will be installed. For me, this is likely to be quite a demanding project (I’ve never built such a structure before), but there’s no reason why I can’t do it.

To Beyonce or not to Beyonce

Truly, the actress Nina Millin has elevated the words of Beyonce to a transcendent level, and she's offering us Hamlet. All that's missing is a skull in her outstretched hand.

Accommodation for remains

Microsoft built a thing called Bing, which would probably like to catch up with Google. Click here to use this tool.

Apparently Bing has the courage to get involved in the dangerous domain of language translation. Here’s a French-to-English specimen (slightly edited, to make it readable) that I found this morning:

Readers might well be intrigued by the translated line at the bottom of the tweet: “a reworking or art to accommodate the remains”. Are we talking of human remains? Maybe this has something to do with the idea of creating artistic accommodation to house deceased humans. I was reminded immediately of the fantastic Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo in Sicily, which have been offering excellent high-style accommodation for corpses, of a most artistic kind, for several centuries.

In the beginning, the lodgers were exclusively deceased monks. But the idea caught on at the level of the local population, and posthumous accommodation was soon being offered to all and sundry. One of the most charming inhabitants of this extraordinary home for the dead is a two-year-old girl named Rosaria Lombardo, who took up residence here in 1920. Her calm appearance is such that an onlooker might imagine Rosaria as a sleeping child who only moved into the catacombs quite recently.

On looking more closely into the wonderful work of Bing, we find that the original French-language tweet from the investigative website Mediapart concerns a minor ministerial shakeup (“remaniement”) in the Greek government, reflecting the victory of the extreme left wing in the European elections of 25 May 2014. The French expression “accommoder les restes” designates the familiar home-kitchen theme of grabbing all the left-overs lying around in the refrigerator—after a couple of major meals, for example—and blending them together intelligently and harmoniously (whence the word “art”) with the aim of creating a new meal. Personally, I’ve always done this automatically and relatively skilfully, which means that I almost never throw out fragments of good food. In the Greek political context, the journalist was suggesting that the Greek prime minister grabbed various credible survivors of the electoral calamity and made an artful attempt to blend them together into a new and edible, if not tasty, government.

Clearly Bing is as dumb as they come. But so what? It has provided us with an opportunity of going on a tiny virtual trip to a strange place in the centre of the fabulous Mediterranean world.

Bees are toiling non-stop at Gamone

Long ago, when I was working at IBM headquarters in Paris, a friendly but loud-mouthed French colleague, whose first name (if I remember correctly) was Michel, used to amuse us greatly by his regular phone call, every afternoon around 4 o’clock. He was young, and had not been married for long. Jewish, he liked to enhance his conversation by throwing in bizarre Yiddish exclamations, which only our elegant and brilliant young French-Moroccan colleague Jacques Cohen-Rothschild seemed to understand and appreciate. The subject of Michel’s phone call was always the same: “Darling, what are you cooking for dinner this evening?”

Whenever visitors are due to arrive at Gamone, my first and foremost question is: “What am I going to give them to eat?” That’s not all that surprising because, at Gamone, it’s not as if I can step out rapidly to a nearby shop to buy foodstuffs, or even decide that we might eat in a nearby restaurant. What I mean to say is that there are few nearby shops and restaurants.

Knowing that my swarm of bees would be moving in at Gamone the day before yesterday, I asked myself the same question: “What are they going to eat?” Well, it appears that there’s no problem whatsoever. My property includes about a dozen giant linden trees, which are all in bloom at present.

I can’t actually see the bees in the trees, because they’re probably attracted by flowers in the upper branches, warmed by the sun. But, whenever I stroll beneath one of my linden trees, I detect buzzing in the branches above my head. I’ve got into the habit, since Sunday, of standing for long periods of time near the narrow takeoff and landing zone at the front of the hive, and watching the fascinating movements of the tiny aircraft. This morning, at dawn, I noticed that all the bees entering the hive seemed to be wearing thick yellow woollen socks. It’s linden-blossom pollen, of course, caught up on their hind legs. I’ll try to obtain photos of this delightful scene, but I don’t want to get so close to the hive (protected by my beekeeper's costume) that I might upset the insects. They’ve got a lot of work to do in the near future, building cells on the 5 empty frames in the hive and then starting to use these new cells either to make and store honey, or maybe to create a maternity ward for new bees. It’s all extremely mysterious, enthralling and indeed awe-inspiring: a very Dawkinsian environment.

People more shocked by art than by warfare

On 29 May 2014 (a week before the gigantic D-Day commemorations in Normandy), the Luxembourg artist Deborah de Robertis created a sensational but profoundly poetic happening in the Parisian Musée d’Orsay by calmly sitting down on the ground beneath the celebrated painting of Gustave Courbet [1819-1877] entitled L’Origine du Monde, drawing up her skirt, spreading her legs apart, and showing startled but generally appreciative onlookers a hairy real-world specimen of the anatomical place where human life originates and emerges.

I am the Origin.

I am all Women.

You have never seen me.

I want you to recognize me.

Virgin like Water.

Creator of Sperm.

Once upon a time: an English friend in Paris

It’s weird to be googling around casually on the off-chance of finding out what might have happened to an old friend, and to run into an obituary [access], indeed an old obituary.

Anthony Richard Sutcliffe [1942-2012]

In the years 1963 to 1965, Tony was an assistant English teacher at the Lycée Henri IV in the Latin Quarter. That’s to say, we were colleagues.

Whenever I think of Tony, who had what you might call a quietly-spoken Oxfordian personality, I remember his excitement concerning the birth of the Beatles phenomenon. He talked of them often, and his enthusiasm intrigued me. During a short holiday break, he returned to England and attended a Beatles concert (one of the group's first-ever big events). At that time, to my mind, the Beatles were nothing more than a group of new kids on the block, as it were. And I simply couldn’t understand why Tony seemed to take them so seriously, as if they were about to create a pop-music revolution. I soon learnt, of course, that Tony’s tastes were spot on.

Tony spoke excellent French. Meanwhile, he looked like a typical young English gentleman, always attired in a tweed coat with a necktie.