Oliver Cromwell's Fundamentalist Queen

The Fundamentalist Queen, a Radio 3 documentary I've produced, is broadcast tonight at 6.45 pm, and will thereafter be available on the Radio 3 website. Official blurb as follows:

Samira Ahmed explores the extraordinary rise and fall of the Lady Protectress Elizabeth, wife of Oliver Cromwell - a commoner who became "queen" in the 1650s.

Elizabeth lived through an extraordinary time - for women as well as men - as the country was divided by a decade of civil war in the 1640s. In the new regime that followed the execution of Charles I, Elizabeth found herself a consort like no other, an ordinary housewife elevated to Lady Protectress.

But the Protectorate, and its efforts to forge a new kind of state power based on strictly Puritan grounds, lasted only a few years. In 1660, the monarchy was restored, Oliver's allies were executed as traitors and his own dead body was dug up and hanged in chains. The widowed Elizabeth, scorned and taunted, was forced to beg Charles II for mercy.

So why is so little known about her? Helped by leading Cromwell scholars and tantalising historical documents - including a satirical cookbook - Samira goes on the trail of the fundamentalist queen, from the church where she married and her kitchen as the young wife of an MP in Ely, to the extravagant gifts that came to her Puritan court and the secrets that may lie within her anonymous grave. With Louise Jameson as the voice of Elizabeth Cromwell.

Presenter Samira Ahmed. Producers Simon and Thomas Guerrier. A Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 3.

Samira has written her own blog about the documentary, wrote a piece about Elizabeth Cromwell for the BBC's online magazine, and discussed her on the Robert Elms show on Wednesday (1 hour 9 minutes in; and she's followed by an interview with my chum Dick Fiddy from the BFI and the amazing Paddy Kingsland of the Radiophonic Workshop). The documentary is also one of BBC History Magazine's picks of the week's TV and radio.

Samira makes the point, too, that the documentary came about because I researched the life of Oliver Cromwell for a Doctor Who audio - The Settling. Grateful thanks to Gary Russell, the director-producer who commissioned me, on the condition that I'd do the reading. (Researching the prospect of the documentary also led me to look round Ely, which in turn led to the setting of another Doctor Who story - Home Truths.)

It's been a joy to make the documentary, and that's all down to the generosity of the people with whom we made it. Thanks to Samira for her faith in me and brother Tom, and to David Prest and everyone at Whistledown for so patiently shepherding us through the process. Thanks to John Goldsmith, formerly of the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon, Traci Bosdet and Tracey Harding at Oliver Cromwell's House in Ely, and Diane Corbin at St Giles Cripplegate, and to Jane and John Trevor for letting us look round their home. Thanks to our experts: Professor Laura Gowing at King's College London, Professor Peter Gaunt of the University of Chester and the Cromwell Association, and Dr Patrick Little of the History of Parliament. Thanks to David J Darlington for assistance with bringing the 17th century vividly to life (just as he did with The Settling). And thanks to Louise Jameson for bringing Elizabeth to life.

Mary Queen of Scot's skull watch?

I'm having a lovely time working on Horrible Histories magazine at the moment, writing poo jokes and investigating stupid deaths. Today, I've been on the trail of an unusual gift apparently given by Mary, Queen of Scots, to her maid, Mary Seaton.

Search the web and you'll find plenty of sites referencing Mary Queen of Scot's skull watch. They seem to link back to a post on This Write Life from October 2012, but I'm struck by the three images of the watch in that post, reproduced below:

The first image is clearly not the same watch as the other two.

A bit more searching, and the second image appears to be cropped version of one from the Victoria and Albert Museum - an engraving from 1820-35 by Charles John Smith.

The third image, of the same watch in a distinctive holder with a hole in the top, seems to match one in the collection of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers. There are three images of this particular skull watch on the Bridgeman images site. But the description for each of these says it is not the watch given by Mary Queen of Scots to her maid; it's an 18th century copy made by "Moysant, Blois".

The This Write Life site - and plenty of others that repeat the same information with the same pictures - claims the skull watch to be the work of "Moyant A. Blois (1570-90)". Surely Moyant A. Blois must be related to Moysant, Blois - but is this clockmaker from the sixteenth or eighteenth centuries? Does the original skull watch still exist? In fact, did Mary Queen of Scots really give such a gift, or is it the invention of a later century?

I shall continue to search… But here's a description from an 1894 book that says it wasn't a "watch" as we understand it anyway, but more of a table decoration:

A MEMENTO-MORI WATCH.

The curious relic, of which we herewith give an engraving, was presented by Mary, Queen of Scots, to her Maid of Honour, Mary Seaton, of the house of Wintoun, one of the four celebrated Maries, who were Maids of Honour to her Majesty.

"Yestreen the Queen had four Maries,
The night she'll hae but three;
There was Marie Seaton, and Marie Beaton,
And Marie Carmichael and me."

[Illustration [++] Memento-Mori Watch.] [SG: I assume this is a version of the Charles John Smith engraving.]

The watch is of silver, in the form of a skull. On the forehead of the skull is the figure of Death, with his scythe and sand-glass; he stands between a palace on the one hand, and a cottage on the other, with his toes applied equally to the door of each, and around this is the legend from Horace "_Pallida mors æquo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas Regumque turres_." On the opposite, or posterior part of the skull, is a representation of Time, devouring all things. He also has a scythe, and near him is the serpent with its tail in its mouth, being an emblem of eternity; this is surrounded by another legend from Horace, "_Tempus edax rerum tuque invidiosa vetustas_." The upper part of the skull is divided into two compartments: on one is represented our first parents in the garden of Eden, attended by some of the animals, with the motto, "_Peccando perditionem miseriam æternam posteris meruere_." The opposite compartment is filled with the subject of the salvation of lost man by the crucifixion of our Saviour, who is represented as suffering between the two thieves, whilst the Mary's are in adoration below; the motto to this is "_Sic justitiæ satisfecit, mortem superavit salutem comparavit_." Running below these compartments on both sides, there is an open work of about an inch in width, to permit the sound to come more freely out when the watch strikes. This is formed of emblems belonging to the crucifixion, scourges of various kinds, swords, the flagon and cup of the Eucharist, the cross, pincers, lantern used in the garden, spears of different kinds, and one with the sponge on its point, thongs, ladder, the coat without seam, and the dice that were thrown for it, the hammer and nails, and the crown of thorns. Under all these is the motto, "_Scala cæli ad gloriam via_."

The watch is opened by reversing the skull, and placing the upper part of it in the hollow of the hand, and then lifting the under jaw which rises on a hinge. Inside, on the plate, which thus may be called the lid, is a representation of the Holy Family in the stable, with the infant Jesus laid in the manger, and angels ministering to him; in the upper part an angel is seen descending with a scroll on which is written, "_Gloria excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonæ volu----_" In the distance are the shepherds with their flocks, and one of the men is in the act of performing on a cornemuse. The works of the watch occupy the position of the brains in the skull itself, the dial plate being on a flat where the roof of the mouth and the parts behind it under the base of the brain, are to be found in the real subject. The dial plate is of silver, and it is fixed within a golden circle richly carved in a scroll pattern. The hours are marked in large Roman letters, and within them is the figure of Saturn devouring his children, with this relative legend round the outer rim of the flat, "_Sicut meis sic et omnibus idem_."

Lifting up the body of the works on the hinges by which they are attached, they are found to be wonderfully entire. There is no date, but the maker's name, with the place of manufacture, "Moyse, Blois," are distinctly engraven. Blois was the place where it is believed watches were first made, and this suggests the probability of the opinion that the watch was expressly ordered by Queen Mary at Blois, when she went there with her husband, the Dauphin, previous to his death. The watch appears to have been originally constructed with catgut, instead of the chain which it now has, which must have been a more modern addition. It is now in perfect order, and performs wonderfully well, though it requires to be wound up within twenty-six hours to keep it going with tolerable accuracy. A large silver bell, of very musical sound, fills the entire hollow of the skull, and receives the works within it when the watch is shut; a small hammer set in motion by a separate escapement, strikes the hours on it.

This very curious relic must have been intended to occupy a stationary place on a _prie-dieu_, or small altar in a private oratory, for its weight is much too great to have admitted of its having been carried in any way attached to the person.

Edward Fillingham King, Ten Thousand Wonderful Things (1894).

Some items of interest pertaining to Sherlock Holmes

First a review of The House of Silk, and then some other items of Sherlockian interest...

The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz is a thrilling, richly drawn new Sherlock Holmes adventure, that gets Holmes, Watson and their world pretty much perfectly right. It's a gripping read, and even though I was ahead of Holmes with several of the clues, it kept me guessing till the end. Yet, it left me disappointed. Why?

The edition I read included a bonus feature: "Anthony Horowitz on Writing The House of Silk: Conception, Inspiration and The Ten Rules". It's fascinating to read the rules Horowitz set himself when writing the book - such as "no over-the-top action", "no women", and "no gay references either overt or implied in the relationship between Holmes and Watson". But including those rules is also surely a challenge to the reader: how would you write Holmes?

Horowitz's rules seem largely to do with not repeating the mistakes or attempting to emulate over iterations of Holmes, and to stick closely to the canon of stories written by Conan Doyle. But they didn't explain my misgivings with the book.

Horowitz is keen to slot his book seamlessly into the canon. I found the constant references to other, canonical cases a bit wearing. One rule - "include all the best known characters - but try and do so in a way that will surprise" - struck me as odd. Yes, he's got Mrs Hudson, Lestrade, Mycroft, Wiggins, and even an appearance by someone Holmes hasn't yet heard of - a fact that, to fit with the canonical stories, requires some awkward contriving:

"You must swear on everything that is scared to you that you will never tell Holmes, or anyone else, of this meeting. You must never write about it. You must never mention it. Should you ever learn my name, you must pretend that you are hearing it for the first time and that it means nothing to you."

Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk (2011), p. 260.

But are these characters' roles surprising? As Horowitz admits,

"In each case, I added very little to what was known about them simply because it seemed to be taking liberties."

Ibid., p. 404.

Where he does develop the world of Sherlock Holmes. As Horowitz says, in Doyle's stories,

"Victorian London is economically sketched in".

Ibid., p. 397.

Horowitz digs a little deeper: there's an insight into the kind of awful existence lived by the Baker Street irregulars when not engaged in cases for Holmes; there's a visit to one of the prisons to which villains are dispatched when Holmes has caught them. In both cases, Watson seems surprised by the oppressive conditions, as if a practising doctor in London would not already know. But I liked the attempt to explore the world Holmes lives in and furnish extra depth.

That depth is partly the result of the length of the book.

"My publishers, Orion Books, had requested a novel of between 90,000 and 100,000 words (the final length was around 94,000) - big enough to seem like value for money on an airport stand. But actually, this goes quite against the spirit of Doyle's originals which barely run to half that length".

Ibid.

Horowitz's solution is to have Watson recount two cases, not one - a trick also used in the later episodes of the TV series starring Jeremy Brett, where they blended Doyle's stories.

All of which, again, I cannot fault. And yet, these two aims - to fit The House of Silk perfectly within the canon, and to explore the world of Holmes - also also what left me dissatisfied. In the latter, the world we explore is murky and cruel, with corruption reaching so high into the establishment that even Myrcroft is powerless to act.

One of the mysteries that Holmes exposes is particularly vicious - and of a kind Doyle himself could not have published in his own time. It's not the crime but the way it fits Horowitz's general character of Victorian London that makes it so affecting: Holmes might stop what's happening, but only in this one instance.

On top of this, in fitting this adventure into the canon, Horowitz also seeks to reconcile a continuity error in Doyle about when exactly Watson married. Some Sherlockians have conjectured that Watson was married twice; Mary Morstan - who Watson married at the end of The Sign of Four - must have died at some point and Watson remarried. Horowitz confirms this hypothesis, with Mary mortally ill.

That the whole book is narrated from after Holmes has died only adds to the bleak feeling. For all his rules, Horowitz has missed a key ingredient of the canon: the element of joy. Holmes might walk through the mire of crime, but the stories celebrate his brilliance. The Final Problem, in which Holmes meets his match, is affecting and extraordinary precisely because it's so unlike the norm - and, in The Empty House, even the great detective's death turns out to have a solution.

That's what The House of Silk sadly misses: Sherlock Holmes is not about awful problems but the ingenious answer.

I think the current run of Sherlock on BBC One has got the mad, thrilling flavour of Doyle just right. I adored The Sign of Three last week, but my chum Niall Boyce was bothered by the central wheeze: that a victim would not know they'd been stabbed because of the tightness of their clothing. Niall's an editor of the medical journal, the Lancet, so tends to spot these things.

In fact, just such a killing has a precedent - and from Doyle's own time. Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, was murdered in September 1898:

The assassination of Empress Elisabeth of Austria,
via Wikipedia.

"After Lucheni struck her, the empress collapsed ... Three men carried Elisabeth to the top deck and laid her on a bench. Sztaray opened her gown, cut Elisabeth's corset laces so she could breathe. Elisabeth revived somewhat and Sztaray asked her if she was in pain, and she replied, "No". She then asked, "What has happened?" and lost consciousness again...

The autopsy was performed the next day by Golay, who discovered that the weapon, which had not yet been found, had penetrated 3.33 inches (85 mm) into Elisabeth's thorax, fractured the fourth rib, pierced the lung and pericardium, and penetrated the heart from the top before coming out the base of the left ventricle. Because of the sharpness and thinness of the file the wound was very narrow and, due to pressure from Elisabeth's extremely tight corseting, the hemorrhage of blood into the pericardial sac around the heart was slowed to mere drops. Until this sac filled, the beating of her heart was not impeded, which is why Elisabeth had been able to walk from the site of the assault and up the boat’s boarding ramp. Had the weapon not been removed, she would have lived a while longer, as it would have acted like a plug to stop the bleeding."

Wikipedia: Empress Elisabeth of Austria - 10. Assassination

Niall also provided me with two snippets of Sherlockian interest from the Lancet archives, which he's kindly allowed me to share. First, here's Conan Doyle weighing in on the case of George Edalji - the case that's the subject of the novel Arthur and George by Julian Barnes, which I blogged about in 2007.

Niall also tweeted this later contribution from Doyle's son, "Was Sherlock Holmes a Drug Addict?", in 1937:

You may also care to note that I passed Doyle's house in South Norwood a couple of months ago. And, if you've not already discovered it, John Watson's blog - written with some assistance by m'colleague Joseph Lidster - has been especially good this series.

Why you'd name a cow

The Village has not exactly been known for its laugh-a-minute joyousness but there was a good joke in episode 3. Having learned that the rich people have names for their animals, we see dour working-class farmer Middleton (John Simm) with his six cows - which he can tell apart. If you want to see for yourself, it's at 23:00...

MIDDLETON:
(POINTING TO A COW) She was my first.

NORMA GREAVES:
You should give her a name.

MIDDLETON:
(BAFFLED) She's a cow.

It raised a rare smile and, for a character not given to expressing his feelings, let us see some of his view of the world. Yet, watching Michael Wood's Christina: A Medieval Life on Sunday, it turned out it might not be quite right. 12:20 in, Chris Baldwin, a farm manager, tethers two cows to a plough and explains their importance to the medieval peasant - and also why they had names.

CHRIS BALDWIN:
This is Grit and Graceful - single-syllable nearside, double-syllable offside so that when you're working the two of them they know who you're talking to.

Should have thought of that for my cats.

Three milk churns in Berkhamsted

These are the old milk churns in which were found rolls and rolls of film of ordinary people larking about, shot by Mitchell and Kenyon a century ago. The churns stand to one side in the reception of the BFI archive at Berkhamsted, which opened its doors to a select clutch of visitors yesterday, including yours truly.

It's a treasure-trove of fascinating things. Next to the milk-churns was the blood-red costume worn by Ingrid Bergman as Paula in Gaslight (1944) - looking in good nick for its 70 years. Facing that was a costume worn by Greta Garbo. As we made our way round the building, we saw continuity photos from Star Wars, the Academy Award won by Cecil Beaton for Gigi, an invitation to Peter Sellers' first birthday and Derek Jarman's scrapbook from filming Jubilee. 

Having nosed round and worked in a number of archives, and nattered to curators and experts in a variety of fields in a variety of pubs, what struck me more than the splendid artefacts was how well organised the tour was, with a good range of material covered and engaging people to talk to us. They answered our questions and kept to time, while sharing their expertise in a way I could understand. That is no mean feat.

As well as the special collections of props and paperwork, the tour covered the BFI's efforts to preserve old film and TV. We saw a two-inch tape machine, like the ones on which programmes such as Doctor Who were once recorded. The tapes, at £400 in the early 60s, cost more than the cast were paid for a week, so the tapes were reused and episodes were wiped... We saw the wet-gate process and how it vanishes the cracks and damage on old film. We even got to handle film strips and poke our noses round the vast stacks of film cans with alluring titles...

Most fascinating to me (chiefly because I already knew a fair bit about telly preservation) was the discussion of silver nitrate film stock. It's not just highly flammable; as it burns it creates oxygen so can't be put out. Our guide told us of a safety demonstration where burning film had been placed in a bucket of water and then, when it was removed, had reignited. The burning film also releases noxious gases such as cyanide.

So there's a reason there are so few Art Deco cinemas survive - they burned down. Now you need a specific licence to run silver nitrate film in a projector. The BFI have the two licences, and also the largest collection of nitrate films as most other archives have transferred their stock to safety film (which has its own problems with mould and vinegar syndrome) and destroyed the dangerous stuff. We got to nose round the chilly, concrete bunker where rooms of the dangerous nitrate are stored.

There are those who argue that silver nitrate is better than subsequent formats, though one of our guides suggested this was because it tended to be struck from the original negative, rather than being a later-generation copy. Nitrate also used to be cheap: its use was as much about cost as its quality.

It was a grand day out, and thanks to my chum K for letting me tag along after her.

The man who invented the bank holiday kept a pet wasp

Caricature of John Lubbock
from Punch, 1882,
via Wikipedia.

Heritage! The Battle for Britain's Past is available on iPlayer for a limited time and well worth catching while you can. It details the nineteenth-century heroes who realised something must be done to stop the destruction of our old buildings and green spaces, and led to the establishment of the National Trust.

Among the heroes was John Lubbock MP (1834-1913), who I'd not heard of before. A pupil of Darwin's (having grown up near Down House), Lubbock later named an insect after him. Lubbock also introduced the first bank holiday, kept a pet wasp, got insects drunk to see if they recognised each other and claimed to have taught his dog to read.

He coined the terms "neolithic" and "paleolithic" and bought the site of Avebury to save the ancient stone circle there from destruction. Many of his prehistoric finds are on show in Bromley Museum, which I shall now be making a trip to.

Later, Lubbock became the first Lord Avebury - and his grandson sits on the Liberal Democrat benches in the House of Lords.

On finishing a notebook

Last night I finished a notebook I've kept since 29 December 2011 (when I was in Egypt). I've kept notebooks since I was in my teens, and find them very useful to refer back to – pinching ideas from my past to pitch anew to unsuspecting bosses. It's not a diary, but flicking through this latest volume reminds me what I was working on and having ideas about, and what preoccupied the insides of my head.

There are the day-to-day notes as I wrote one novel, 10 plays and three short films, marking down new clever wheezes or things I'd need to go back and fix. There are pitches for yet more plays, films and comics, notes on what I was reading or watching (much of it later blogged here), fragments of conversation – real and imagined – and turns of phrase or interesting words or ideas.

As an insight into the terrible mess of my brain, here is a selection:

21/1/12

Lord Wallace of Tankerness is asked if he knows of a case of suicide in a young offenders' institution and responds, “I associate myself with expressions of regret” - [House of Lords, 24/1/12; col. 987.]

12/5

Page 21 of A Bullet in the Ballet (1937) refers to “con. men” - NB the full stop.

Undated

Do we know what we vote for? Have we read the manifestos, interrogated the data and understood the arguments? Generally, no; we are lazy. We buy newspapers and follow Twitter accounts that confirm our opinions. We avoid complex or counterintuitive issues and the testament of evidence in favour of the glib and easy. We elect a smile, a soundbite, a cipher, not a problematic and uncertain truth. Rule so we don't have to think about it – that is your mandate, nothing more.

10/6

Doctor Who - The City in the Clouds ([Rough idea for a Companion Chronicle set in Season 1, but beaten to it by clever Jonny and his Voyage to Venus)

In space, maybe on zeppelins linked together to create a city in the temperate zone on Venus – a city in the clouds.

All a bit Dan Dare (which Ian has read, confiscated from his pupils), and they realise that this futuristic world is in the early 17th Century, the same time as Galileo is on Earth recording the phases of Venus for the first time.

Barbara falls in love and Ian has to take her back to the TARDIS (he uses her mum Joan to convince her to leave). Her lover will think she died.

They have to get down to the planet's surface – the hottest place in the Solar System – to recover the TARDIS. Need local people's help. They don't use money there, it's all about reputation and respect – like crowdsourcing, or your number of followers on Twitter. So the Doctor and Susan etc. have to be storytellers, scientists, busking their way in the society, getting themselves known – and only for the right reasons. Loss of face can ruin everything. That's where we meet them at the start of part one, the Doctor as a Punch and Judy man.

[Before I knew about Jonny's story, I realised that was too much like Patrick Troughton's role in The Box of Delights before I knew Matt Smith would do some Punch and Judy business in The Snowmen.]

21/8

Video going round of a guy mocking iPhone users for taking photos of their food. We're often fooled into thinking we're part of something because we consume it. There are all the tweets and fan activity involved in watching a TV show (a passive experience), or the adverts that sell the idea that by eating a burger or drinking a fizzy drink we're part of the Olympics.

21/10

After the accident, people would say to him, 'Do you dream you'll walk again?'

And he would consider – as if it were the first time he'd been asked – then say, 'No, only of being able to fly.'

14/11

We used to tease her

That in the freezer

Below the croquettes and fish fingers and peas

She kept the bodies of one or two geezers

Who thought they'd got lucky

When she invited them home.

But we were very wrong -

It wasn't one or two.

Something inside her

Moved like a spider

Spinning them in and dispatching them

Then cooking them up for her guests

Despite her reservations that these men

Could be counted as fair trade.

She liked the big-boned ones

Who made lewd remarks

And promised not to treat her respectably.

Their steaks were good for marbleising

And she saw putting them on the menu

As a service to women her age.

27/12

Rewatching The Snowmen. Why does Madame Vastra look a bit different from how she did in A Good Man Goes To War? She's a lizard and sheds her skin, so looks a little different after each shedding. (Also, it's considered rude to point that out.)

4/1/13

Billy Connolly, interviewed by Mark Lawson, describes “middle class” as “the kind of people who had dressing gowns as children”.

7/1

Michael Rosen on Radio 4's Word ofMouth investigating stenography and Hansard (in the Commons). Stenography machines are phonetic and you press keys simultaneously. Need 200+ words a minute to be accurate and keep up with speech. Some stenographers are certified to 250 words. The quality is “down to a price, not up to a standard”.

"Lunacy" and the Bride of Frankenstein's Mum

The Dr has been much absorbed by the second most festive of her Christmas presents, Inconvenient People - Lunacy, Liberty and Mad-Doctors in Victorian England by Sarah Wise (2012), a history of mental health institutions with lots of horror stories worse than what happened to the first Mrs Rochester.

The book, says the Dr, debunks a lot of myths: men were much more likely to be incarcerated, and people were often locked up because they were an embarrassment to their families or because of disputes over money and inheritance. She was particularly pleased to show me this account following the introduction of the Lunacy Act 1890, by turns amazing and chilling:

"The first major case for the new law came in 1895. Edith Lanchester was the epitome of the New Woman of the Nineties: educated to degree level, she was a white-collar worker, a Socialist, a feminist, and determined to spend the rest of her life with her lover, James Sullivan, a railway clerk, in their Clapham Junction lodgings, without marrying. Her father, a wealthy architect, was having none of this, and on the evening of Friday 25 October 1895, he and two of Edith's brothers dragged her to a carriage, tied her with rope, and deposited her at The Priory, Roehampton. It was all very old-fashioned. 

An 'urgency order' had been written by Dr George Fielding Blandford [...] Blandford's rationale for authorising Lanchester's detention sounded decidedly quaint in 1895, and indeed there was some sniggering when his diagnosis became public: 'She says she is going to live with a man below her in station because marriage is immoral. This she argued in a wholly irrational manner.' Blandford stated that certification would have been unquestioned if Miss Lanchester had threatened suicide; as it was, she was threatening 'social suicide', which had justified his saving her from 'utter ruin... She had a monomania on the subject of marriage, and I believed that her brain had been turned by Socialist meetings and writings, and that she was quite unfit to take care of herself.' 

Coincidentally - and fortunately - just two days later the Commissioners in Lunacy turned up at The Priory for a statutory visit; and as her father had not yet had time to obtain a magistrate's order and a second lunacy certificate, they immediately freed Edith. She was brought back to Clapham in triumph by her comrades from the Social Democratic Foundation, who helped to keep the tale of 'The Socialist Romance' in the newspapers for weeks. Fresh from his destruction of Oscar Wilde, the Marquess of Queensbury - atheist, divorcé - wrote James Sullivan a supportive letter offering to pay any legal costs: 'I should like to shake you and your wife [sic] by the hand... You have a chance now of making a public protest, as everyone's attention is attracted. What is their idiotic [marriage] ceremony?' (Lanchester and Sullican never married and lived together until James's death in 1945; their daughter, Elsa, went on to be the Hollywood star of Bride of Frankenstein - a different kind of horror story.) 

The Lanchester case had shown that the new lunacy system seemed to be working, as the victim had been speedily freed. However, some things clearly hadn't changed. The Commissioners refused to take any action against Blandford or the Lanchester family. Her counsel also warned Edith not to go ahead with a private prosecution, as it would be an expensive failure to try to prove in court that malice - rather than a genuine mistake - lay behind the attempt to have her certified."

Sarah Wise, Inconvenient People - Lunacy, Liberty and Mad-Doctors in Victorian England (2012), pp. 377-8.

(The Dr's most festive present was of course Paul Preston's The Spanish Holocaust).

Doctor Who references in non-Doctor Who books

"It seemed to him, as he idled across the channels, that the box was full of freaks: there were mutants – 'Mutts' – on Dr Who, bizarre creatures who appeared to have been crossbred with different types of industrial machinery: forage harvesters, grabbers, donkeys, jackhammers, saws, and whose cruel priest-chieftains were called Mutilasians; children's television appeared to be exclusively populated by humanoid robots and creatures with metamorphic bodies, while the adult programmes offered a continual parade of the misshapen human by-products of the newest notions in modern medicine, and its accomplices, modern disease and war.”

Saladin Chamcha watches The Mutants in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988), p. 405.

"A collection of movie monsters are posed all along the top of the bookshelf. On instinct, I pick up the one that looks like an upside-down dustbin with rows of studs down the side. As I do, it says 'Exterminate!' and I nearly drop it. The head comes right off. There's a bankie of dope inside. And it's quality, if I'm any judge of substances. And I am."

Zinzi December fails to recognise a Dalek in Lauren Beukes's Zoo City (2010), p. 113.

"This man was wearing what looked like a Smurf hat and what I recognised as an Edwardian smoking jacket - don't ask me why I know what an Edwardian smoking jacket looks like: let's just say it has something to do with Doctor Who and leave it at that."

The first hint Peter Grant is a fan in Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London (2011), pp. 22-3.

"Tardis fanny n. A deceptively spacious snatch. A disappointing cathedral when one was expecting a priest's hole."

From Viz presents Roger's Profanisaurus Rex (2005), p. 299.

"The twins watched copious amounts of television (Julia joked that they had to learn the language somehow), but tonight they seemed to be making a point of sitting down to watch a particular programme. It turned out to be Doctor Who.
   Elspeth hovered above them, lying on her stomach, chin resting on folded arms. Isn't there anything else on TV? She was a snob about science fiction and hadn't seen an episode of Doctor Who since the early eighties. Eh, I suppose it's better than nothing. She watched Julia and Valentina watching the television. They are their soup slowly from mugs and looked keen. Elspeth happened to glance at the screen in time to see the Doctor walk out of the Tardis and into a defunct spaceship.
   That's David Tennant! Elspeth zoomed over to the television and sat herself a foot away from it. The Doctor and his companions had discovered an eighteenth-century French fireplace on a spaceship. A fire burned in the hearth. I want a fire, Elspeth thought. She had been experimenting with warming herself over the flames of the stove on the rare occasions that the twins cooked anything. The Doctor had crouched down by the fire and was conversing with a little girl in Paris in 1727 who seemed to be on the other side of the fireplace. Is it sad to fancy David Tennant when you're dead? This is a very strange programme. The little girl turned out to be the future Madame de Pompadour. Clockwork androids from the spaceship were trying to steal her brain.
   'Cyber-steampunk or steam-cyberpunk?' asked Julia. Elspeth had no idea what she meant. Valentina said, 'Look at her hair. Do you think we could do that?'
   'It's a wig,' said Julia. The Doctor was reading Madame de Pompadour's mind. He put his hands on her head, palms enclosing her face, fingers delicately splayed around her ears. Such long fingers, Elspeth marvelled. She placed her small hand on top of David Tennant's. The screen was deliciously warm. Elspeth sunk her hand into it, just an inch or so.
   'God, that's weird,' said Valentina. There was a dark silhouette of a woman's hand superimposed over the Doctor's. He let go of Madame de Pompadour's face, but the black hand remained where it was. Elspeth took her hand away; the screen hand stayed black. 'How did you do that?' said the Doctor. Elspeth thought he was speaking to her, then realised that Madame de Pompadour was answering him. I must have burned out the screen. What if I could do that with my face? She tucked her entire self into the TV and found herself looking out through the screen. It was wonderful inside the television, quite warm and pleasantly confining. Elspeth had only been in there for a second or two when the twins saw the screen go black. The TV died."

A ghost excited by The Girl in the Fireplace, in Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry (2009), pp. 132-3.

Illustration by BH Robinson of "Electro-Magnetic Waves", from David Carey, 'How it works': Television, (1968) p. 21.

"During an interview for Rolling Stone in November 1973, Bowie launched into a disquisition on song's place in his planned Ziggy Stardust stage production: 'The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I've made the people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on stage ... Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes "Starman", which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch onto it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village.' Bowie's affinity with home-grown science-fiction permeates much of his work, and he has always enjoyed this Quatermass-style juxtaposition of the fantastic with the banal, of the mystical with the homely, of black holes with Greenwich village. Remarkably, this account of 'black-hole jumping' and of Ziggy's ultimate fate ('When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world') is identical to the storyline of the BBC's tenth anniversary Doctor Who special The Three Doctors, a high-profile reunion of the show's lead actors which had been broadcast a few months earlier, while Bowie was in London recording Aladdin Sane."

The origins of the song "Starman" in Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie - Expanded and Updated Sixth Edition (2011), p. 236. (It's not the only reference to  Doctor Who in the book.)

Any more? Ideally, with page references, please...

Care of Sean McGhee of stylish pop band Artmagic:

"'This is it', says Chris. He tells us about his 'really good dream' last night. 'I was in Dr Who and the drawings on the carpets were satanic messages. It had chases and everything.'"

Pet Shop Boys Versus America (1994), p. 196.

David Bryher reminds me of this one (which nicks from descriptions of the fourth and fifth Doctors in the works of the all-mighty Terrance Dicks):

"[The Pirate Captain's] years of staring at the ocean had given him a nice even tan, and when asked to describe himself in letters to pen friends he would tend to note that he was 'all teeth and curls' but with a 'pleasant, open face'."

Gideon Defoe, The Pirates! in an Adventure with Communists (2006), p. 4.

Ian Farrington supplies this one:

"Inside were long rows of blue teleportation booths. Their shape and color reminded me of Doctor Who's TARDIS."

Ernest Cline, Ready Player One, p. 73.

The actor Anthony Keetch provided the above, from a strip in the 1981 Shiver and Shake Annual, pp. 90-6.

Paul Scoones sent in a frankly outrageous four spots:

"‘We waited for a minute but ... nothing. The Encephalovision simply showed static. But then, Daphne suffered an overload of sensory input, and her buffer started to fill. We started receiving pictures a minute after that. These are the first images ever of the Dark Reading Matter!’ Tuesday flipped a switch, and the playback began. At first it was difficult to make out anything at all, but soon shapes started to form on the screen. Strange creatures that looked a lot like pepper pots with bumps all over their lower body, a domed head and a sink plunger sticking out in front. ‘What are they?’ I asked. ‘We think they’re called Daleks,’ said Tuesday, ‘an early type.’ ‘You’re saying the Dark Reading Matter is populated by Daleks?’ ‘No – we believe this might be a lost Doctor Who episode, from one of the master tapes wiped in the seventies.’ ‘Wiped because they didn’t have room to store it?’ ‘Probably because it wasn’t very good,’ said the Wingco. ‘It’s possible the Dark Reading Matter might contain all forms of lost or discarded storytelling endeavour.’ ‘Or Daphne has a Dalek fixation. You know how obsessive dodos can be.’ ‘All too well,’ said Tuesday, looking across at Pickwick, who was on the floor attempting to sort dust particles into their various colours, ‘but it wasn’t only Daleks. Watch the rest.’"

Jasper Fforde, The Woman Who Died A Lot (2012), pp. 267-8. 

"‘And you are here now … because?’ ‘Landen said he’d videotape Dr Who for me, and the Daleks are my favourite.’ ‘I’m more into the Sontarans myself,’ said Miles. ‘Humph!’ said Joffy. ‘It’s what I would expect from someone who thinks Jon Pertwee was the best Doctor.’ Landen and I stared at him, unsure of whether we should agree, postulate a different theory – or what. ‘It was Tom Baker,’ said Joffy, ending the embarrassed silence. Miles made a noise that sounded like ‘conventionalist’, and Landen went off to fetch the tape. … ‘Here it is,’ said Landen, returning with a video. ‘Remembrance of the Daleks. Where did Thursday go?’"

Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels (2007), pp. 137-8. 

"How was he supposed to put across to them that art was observation, art was the captured stuff of life? They thought they had eyes but they didn't. They saw nothing. Back at the end of the previous term, he thought that he'd struck a glimmer of understanding in one or two; he'd set the class to draw from memory an old-style telephone box, of which there was one right outside the gates. They passed it every day. Some of them had probably even vandalised it. But nobody could get the shape of it, or get the windows right. One boy even put a light on the top of his, like the police box in Doctor Who."

Stephen Gallagher, Nightmare, With Angel (1992), p. 36.

"‘If he kept his answers short and pertinent. it was still more than possible to pass. So far, so good. What would be slightly trickier was cramming a whole month's revision into minus thirty-five minutes. Thirty-five minutes was hard enough, but minus thirty-five minutes - well, you'd have to be Dr Who.’"

Grant Naylor, Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (1989), p. 80.

Paul also sent a link to an archive of a column in his fanzine TSV, where readers sent in Doctor Who references.

M Owczarski points out that Mary Robinette Kowal admits to sneaking Doctor Who into the regency:

"Look for him on Page 144 in the hardcover [of Glamour in Glass]. Starting with the line, 'Before Jane could decide on the merits of this argument, voices and footsteps in the hall announced the arrival of the doctor, a tall, slender fellow, with a shock of dark hair.'"

Alexander Wilkinson sent me this exhaustive list of references to Doctor Who in Star Trek.

Writer Jonathan Morris sent this, on the subject of Conan Doyle and the Cottingley fairies:

"But he was being stupid, too, because if you look at the pictures you can see that the fairies look just like fairies in old books and they have wings and dresses and tights and shoes, which is like aliens landing on the earth and being like Daleks from Doctor Who..."

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, p. 112.

Simon Curtis looked this review of The Android Invasion part two:

"Saturday, 29 November [1975]I saw the TV news. 'Dr Who' gets more and more silly. Bruce Forsyth too ill to do his 'Generation Game' so Roy Castle took it over. He is marvellous. Can't understand why he's never become a big name, he's got talent, looks & technical brilliance ... lovely person."

Russell Davies (ed.), The Kenneth Williams Diaries (1994), p. 503.

Writer Piers Beckley, a connoisseur of such things, provided this:

"Down by the river, she had been so entranced by the naked man that she had paid only cursory attention to his scattered clothing. But now, his strange outfit intrigued her.
   What she had taken for a jacket was in fact a long Edwardian frock coat in black crushed velvet, which he wore with grey trousers, a black and grey striped brocade waistcoat and a wing-collared shirt than was unfastened to show his chest. Slung around his neck was a rather mangled length of heavy grey silk which appeared to be the remains of a cravat. The whole ensemble was crumpled and dusty - especially the shirt - and there were grass stains on the grey cloth of his trousers, but he still projected a picture of forlorn elegance. He couldn't be a New Age traveller. He looked more like an escapee from the Victoria and Albert museum, or a Tussaud's mannequin, touched by God and come to life."

Portia Da Costa, The Stranger (1997), pp15-16.

Stephen Elsden sent this assessment of The Underwater Menace part four, dated Sunday, 5 February, 1967:

"On Saturday I was watching an episode of Dr Who and spotted a little boy in that called Frazer Hines. So I rang Willes up and told him. He said, 'My word, you are going to enjoy yourself on this production, aren't you?' He said he's spoken to Routledge. And he thought he'd probably get on to Bob Stephens as well. They are going to do it in August."

John Lahr (ed.), The Orton Diaries, p. 79.

My esteemed editor, Jacqueline Rayner, sent this:

"'Hi, Dad.' Ben scarcely turned his head. He was deep in Doctor Who." (cont.)

Dorothy Simpson, Last Seen Alive, p. 10.

The horrific Mark Morris couldn't remember the Doctor Who references in his own books, but offered up:

"Then we went home to watch 'Doctor Who'. It was good, only Jim got all excited about watching the giant maggots chase Doctor Who and nearly had to go to bed."

Ramsay Campbell, "The Man in the Underpass", in the collection Alone with the Horrors (1994), p. 84.

The following led to Matthew presenting a documentary on the DVD of The Talons of Weng-Chiang about this very subject:

"[Thomas Burke's disavowal of the image of the Limehouse opium den as "another story for the nursery" did not stop its prevalence in popular culture.] Nor did it present these sinister visions being projected back on the nineteenth century, to generate retrospectively - in sources as various as academic work on Edwin Drood, film adaptations of Conan Doyle and episodes of Doctor Who - a Victorian East End populated by divan-sprawled dope-fiends."

Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (2001), p. 91.

My friend Camilla R found two references from the same book:

“The scores of in-jokes and shared history and special knowledge I couldn’t imagine having with anyone ever again, not without a Tardis to whisk me back to being twenty.”

Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me At Hello, p. 82. 

“The grimy exterior gives way to a grimier interior, a basement with bar stools and a big Wurlitzer-style jukebox, like a super-sized garish toy or leftover Doctor Who prop. The lighting is set to ‘gloaming’, the air perfumed with an unmistakable acidic base note of unclean latrine.”

Ibid. p. 240.

I found these ones:

"Which 'doctor' travelled through time to help the Greeks at Troy? (Clue: He gave them the idea about building a wooden horse.)

Answer: Doctor Who in the 1980s British television series. (Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise also popped back to Troy in an episode of Star Trek, but Kirk decided not to interfere. Troy must have been full of time travellers and their machines. Strange that Homer didn't mention them in his poems!)"

Terry Deary, Horrible Histories: Groovy Greeks, (1996 [2001]), 2007 edition,  p. 100.

"He had another cup of coffee as he walked [through Edinburgh], dispensed from a kiosk that used to be a blue police box, a Tardis. It was a strange world, Jackson thought. Yes, sirree."
Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn (2006), p. 272.

Three Footnotes from Cosmos

Thanks to lovely Abebooks, I'm now the proud owner of a battered paperback of Carl Sagan's Cosmos and a battered hardback (without dust jacket) of James Burke's Connections – and both for less than a fiver, including P&P. Bargain.

I've been working my way through the TV version of Connections on Youtube and will blog about it more when I get to the end (at my current rate, sometime towards the end of the century). But for a flavour of its style and confidence, you can't beat this extraordinary piece to camera:



I've not seen all the TV version of Cosmos but a lot of the material was covered in my astronomy GCSE, so reading the book has been a bit of a refresher course. It's a history of science, similar to The Ascent of Man, but focusing on our knowledge of astronomy.

It's striking how much has been learned and achieved in the 30 years since the book came out. Sagan details Voyager's exciting new discoveries about the Galilean moons but can only guess at the nature of Titan. He enthuses about the possibility of sending roving machines to explore Mars. He speculates on the causes of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (which wiped out the dinosaurs), but doesn't mention the possibility of a large meteorite hitting the Earth. That's especially odd given that elsewhere he talks about the probabilities of large meteorite impacts, such as in Tunguska in 1908.

Sagan packs in fascinating titbits and detail, such as Kepler's efforts to save his mum from being tried as a witch. Excitingly, it's got footnotes instead of endnotes (and an index – so top marks all round), which means plenty of extra nuggets of fact to explode your brain.

For example, Sagan talks at one point about the scale of the Solar System, reminding us that, in terms of our ability to traverse it, the Earth was once a much bigger place. And then he drops in another striking analogy:

“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries you could travel from Holland to China in a year or two, the time it has taken Voyager to travel from Earth to Jupiter.* 

* Or, to make a different comparison, a fertilized egg takes as long to wander from the Fallopian tubes and implant itself in the uterus as Apollo 11 took to journey to the Moon; and as long to develop into a full-term infant as Viking took on its trip to Mars. The normal human lifetime is longer than Voyager will take to venture beyond the orbit of Pluto.”

Carl Sagan, Cosmos, p. 159. 

Like James Burke, Sagan is good at making a connection between two apparently disparate things to create a sense of wonder. But I like how the last sentence of the following footnote so lightly declines to impose or invent a reason:

“The sixth century B.C. was a time of remarkable intellectual and spiritual ferment across the planet. Not only was it the time of Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras and others in Ionia, but also the time of the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho who caused Africa to be circumnavigated, of Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius and Lao-tse in China, the Jewish prophets in Israel, Egypt and Babylon, and Gautama Buddha in India. It is hard to think these activities altogether unrelated.”  

Ibid., p. 206.

And, again like Burke, Sagan is good at accounting for chance and circumstance in the slow, steady progress of science through the ages. He uses a Tlingit (Native American) account of meeting the French explorer Count of La Pérouse when he “discovered” Alaska in the 1780s to discuss what first contact with an alien culture might be like. But, explaining that La Pérouse and all but one of his crew died in the South Pacific in 1788, Sagan notes:

“When La Pérouse was mustering the ship's company in France, there were many bright and eager young men who applied but were turned down. One of them was a Corsican artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. It was an interesting branch point in the history of the world. If La Pérouse had accepted Bonaparte, the Rosetta stone might never have been found, Champollion might never have decrypted Egyptian hieroglyphics, and in many more important respects our recent history might have changed significantly.” 

Ibid. p 334. 

Three short asides, additional to the main narrative, and you could base a science-fiction novel on each of them. Yet the thing that's stayed with me most since I finished the book earlier this week is his reference to the 1975 paper “Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence” by James W Prescott:

“The neuropsychologist James W. Prescott has performed a startling cross-cultural statistical analysis of 400 preindustrial societies and found that cultures that lavish physical affection on infants tend to be disinclined to violence ... Prescott believes that cultures with a predisposition for violence are composed of individuals who have been deprived – during at least one or two critical stages in life, infancy and adolescence – of the pleasures of the body. Where physical affection is encouraged, theft, organized religion and invidious displays of wealth are inconspicuous; where infants are physically punished, there tends to be slavery, frequent killing, torturing and mutilation of enemies, a devotion to the inferiority of women, and a belief in one or more supernatural beings who intervene in daily life.” 

Ibid., p. 360.

I'm fascinated by this, but can't help wondering if that conclusion isn't too much what we'd like to believe to be true. There's something chilling, too, in the lightness with which he seems to suggest that organised religion is a symptom of childhood neglect.

H for themselves

The Dr sometimes accuses me of tumbling through life as if a guest on QI, where points are scored for top facts and dodging cliche. A while back, for my own entertainment, I came up with my own QI questions, complete with the cliches that set off a klaxon and lose you 10 points. The "H" series was on at the time.

Heiroglyphics
Which profession is a baboon the god of?

X Actors
X Politicians

Thoth – as a baboon – was god of writers and scribes in ancient Egypt. The thinking is that baboons chattered and babbled like humans, which was a sign of intelligence. And baboons throw poo at each other and bear their bottoms, which is like a lot of writers. The ancient Egyptians also used baboons as police dogs.

Huxley
Who else died the same day as John F Kennedy?

X Lee Harvey Oswald
X A bodyguard
X Liberal America

Well, lots of people also died on 22 November 1963 – including the writers Aldous Huxley and CS Lewis. Huxley famously experimented with hallucinogenic drugs such as mescaline and LSD, and at his own request was injected with LSD while he was dying.

Holy Days
Why do most of us get Sundays off work?

X It's the sabbath
X The Bible says so

Edward VI's father Henry VIII split with the Roman Catholic Church and formed a (Catholic) Church of England. Two acts under Edward VI sealed the split. The First Act of Uniformity in 1548 introduced an English prayer book, imposed penalties for non-observance and ordered the suppression of images and Latin primers. It was the first time religious practice in this country was proscribed by a secular authority. The Second Act of Uniformity in 1552 required every subject to attend church on Sunday at one of the rechristened services or morning prayer, evening prayer or the Lord's supper. It was the beginning of keeping Sunday's special, and accompanied by an act for the control of alehouses – the first time liquor began to be licensed. So, strictly speaking, keeping Sunday holy is an anti-Catholic measure.

Honorificabilitudinitatibus
What does Honorificabilitudinitatibus mean?

X It doesn't mean anything
X “I'm very clever”

It means “with honour”, and is Shakespeare showing off in Act 5, scene 1 of Love's Labour's Lost:

I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word;
for thou art not so long by the head as
honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier
swallowed than a flap-dragon.

James Joyce then used it in Ulysees. But is that all that it means? In 1910, Sir Edwin Lawrence-Durning pointed out that it's also an anagram “Hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi”, or “These plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world” - which Sir Edwin argued showed Shakespeare's plays were written by Francis Bacon.

Homo
Who's a homo?

X You are
X He is

We all are. All modern humans are examples of Homo sapiens sapiens – note the two “sapiens”, which distinguish us from our late cousins, Homo sapiens idaltu, who died out about 160,000 years ago.

The “homo” bit means “human” or “person”, though “human” derives from the Latin “humanus” - an adjective cognate of “homo”. So the homos came first, then the humans. “Homo” looks like it derives from a Proto-Indo-European word which we now call “*dhǵhem” - that is, “earth” or “soil”. So “Homo” means “Earthman”. Think also of Adam, first man in the Bible, whose name seems to come from “Adamah”, meaning “ground”.

The “sapiens” means “wise”, so we must be especially wise if we're “Homo sapiens sapiens”. But other creatures also have repetition in their names. There's pica pica – the magpie. And my favourite, Meles meles meles – the Eurasian badger.

Monument to certainty

This is the Monument, built between 1671 and 1677 to commemorate the Great Fire of London.


Climb the 311 steps to the viewing platform – as I did on Tuesday – and as well as the nice views you get a certificate. But the Monument is more than just a memorial to the fire. It was built by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke – members of the Royal Society.


This is Hooke in a modern painting by Rita Greer. He deduced the wave theory of light and the law of elasticity – which is named after him. He was a pioneer of surveying and map-making. He wasn't a little guy in science. But it was to Hooke that Isaac Newton wrote his famous remark, “If I have seen further [than others] it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants”.

It's a back-handed compliment: Hooke had come close to deducing – before Newton – that gravity follows an inverse square law and that this explains the movement of the planets. Newton developed Hooke's ideas but – Hooke felt – didn't credit him sufficiently. So perhaps Newton's remark is rubbing Hooke's nose in it: the “giant” Newton was standing on had a stoop and may have been a hunchback.

The remark though, is often seen as a testament to scientific endeavour – scientists and mathematicians building on the work of their peers and predecessors. That's why it's engraved on £2 coins (though perhaps that's not the best example of engineering prowess - the coin also shows a a series of cogs in a circle, but there's an odd number so the machinery would not be able to turn as it would pull against itself). As Jacob Bronowski said in The Ascent of Man,

“Year by year, we devise more precise instruments with which to observe nature with more fineness.”

Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (1973), p. 356.

This is Hooke's drawing of a flea from Micrographia, published in 1665. It was the Royal Society's first major book – and the first scientific bestseller.

Micrographia isn't just about looking at tiny things through a microscope. It includes drawings of distant objects, such as the Moon and the star cluster Pleiades (see below). Large and small, these observations changed our view of the universe and our place in it. Theories on gravity needed more and better data about the stars – that meant better telescopes.

In principle, the mathematics of improving a telescope are simple. A lens defracts the light so when you look through it things seem bigger. Look through two lenses at once and they're bigger still. The easiest way to do that is to place a lens at either end of a tube. Increase the distance between the two lenses and you increase the magnification. So to really study the stars, Hooke needed a really long tube...


The Monument was built as a zenith telescope – one that looks straight up. By looking at a fixed star, Hooke hoped to gain evidence that the Earth moved round the Sun. Maths provided the theory: now Hooke would prove it for certain.


The spiral staircase inside means there's a clear view all the way up to the top of the Monument, where a trapdoor would open to reveal the sky. To make the telescope even longer, Hooke worked down in the small cellar – you can see it through the grill in the floor as you begin your climb.

Sadly, though, the telescope didn't work. The vibration from London's traffic meant the readings were never accurate enough. The mathematics of lenses is simple, but the reality is more complicated.


The Monument was used for other experiments. The steps were designed to be used in pressure studies, and are all exactly six inches high.

Hooke continued to study the stars. He worked on the design of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the first purpose-built research facility in the country. And the more we've discovered since Hooke about space and the position of the stars, the more we come back to the problems that vexed him.


This is me at the 76-metre Lovell radio telescope at Jodrell Bank. It's the third-largest steerable radio telescope in the world. But, like the Monument, size isn't everything. Just beside it is a 38-metre Mark II dish which turned out to be much more accurate and better at listening to higher frequencies.


There's also the accuracy of the observations we make. “Astronomical instruments have been improved,” says Jacob Bronowski.

“We look at the position of a star as it was determined then and now, and it seems to us that we are closer and closer to finding it precisely.

“But when we actually compare our individual observations today, we are astonished and chagrined to find them as scattered within themselves as ever. We had hoped that the human errors would disappear ... but it turns out that the errors cannot be taken out of the observations. And that is true of stars, of atoms, or just ... hearing the report of somebody's speech.”

Ibid., p. 358.

Bronowski called this,

“the crucial paradox of knowledge ... we seem to be running after a goal which lurches away from us to infinity.”

Ibid., p. 356.

Since Newton, we tend to assume that the laws of nature are regular, simple and mathematical, and that any deviation from that regularity in our measurements is likely to be our own error. Mathematics can help clarify our observations.

“When an observer looks at a star, he knows there is a multitude of causes for error. So he takes several readings, and he hopes, naturally, that the best estimate of the star's position is the average – the centre of the scatter.”

Ibid., p. 358.

Johann Gauss (1777 to 1855), sometimes known as the “Prince of Mathematicians”,

“pushed on to ask what the scatter of the errors tells us. He devised the Gaussian curve in which the scatter is summarised by the deviation, the spread, of the curve. And from this came a far-reaching idea: the scatter marks an area of uncertainty.

We are not sure that the true position is the centre. All we can say is that it lies in the area of uncertainty, and that the area is calculable from the observed scatter of the individual observations.”

Ibid.

The folly of the Monument is not that it didn't work as a telescope but that Hooke, looking up through it from his cellar, was looking for certainty, for proof of the mathematical theory. It's not that maths or physics are uncertain, but measurement is. Bronowski described measurement as "personal". Maths doesn't prove with certainty, but it can show the extent of what we don't know.

(Thanks to Simon Belcher, Danny Kodicek and Marek Kukula who looked this over, and Marcus du Sautoy who pointed out the cogs on £2 coins.)