Society

Cordovan is the name given to a rich burgundy colour. It gets its name from the city of Cordoba in Spain, where many workers in leather had their businesses.

Workers in leather, originally meaning workers from Cordoba who worked in goatskin, were known as a cordewans, then cordewaners, and now in English as cordwainers. Cordwainer is an alternative word for a shoemaker, mostly used in connection with a guild.

The distinction is more than academic. Cordwainers make new shoes: In contrast, cobblers repair shoes. Since the Middle Ages, craftsmen have formed guilds to regulate their trades by allowing only members to work in that field.

By having the law recognise that only guild members can carry out the work, they protect the quality of their wares and services, and their prices. Guilds also train apprentices and support members who have fallen on hard times.

The Worshipful Company of Cordwainers continues today, based in Mincing Lane in London. Although the word cordwainer refers to a maker of shoes, the guild encompasses workers in fine leather as well as shoemakers.

The term ‘worshipful’ denotes a guild as a livery company, which marks out the Cordwainers as having special status. The term ‘livery’ refers to the clothing that guild members were entitled to wear to show their status, and as of today there are over 100 livery companies in the City of London.

Senior members of livery companies have rights over the civic life of London, with local government powers. One of their special powers concerns the election of civic leaders.

Behind the scenes, the senior liverymen elect the City’s sheriffs and approve the candidates for election to the office of Lord Mayor of London.

I am readingTravellers In The Third Reich by Julia Boyd. It is a book full of contemporary accounts by various people of their impressions of Germany from the period from after the First World War to the beginning of the Second World War.

The kaiser’s table is a minor footnote I will describe here for its oddity. One thing, though, that I have gathered from the book is that the reparations forced by France and the United States were doubly hated. They were hated because the Allies took over the means of production. They took over the coal fields of the Saar Region and the heavy industry regions of the Ruhr.

Therefore, felt the Germans, they were required to pay reparations without the means to earn the money to pay them.

The reparations were also hated because of the long period of uncertainty between the end of the war in 1918 and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1920.

Another thing I read repeatedly is the observation that Germany was clean and well tended. That is not so surprising given that the battlefields of Europe were in France and Belgium, and the countryside of Germany escaped comparatively unscathed.

Still, it’s an observation I made when I first travelled to Germany when I was fourteen. On the return journey by bus up the A1 in England to Leeds, I saw for the first time with new eyes how dismally untended the road verges and the central reservation were. It was an eye opener.

For the moment though, I just want to record here one of those little footnotes of history – about the Kaiser’s table at this castle residence, no longer occupied by him after the war.

The Kaiser’s Table

On Page 72 of Travellers In The Third Reich there is an extract from a letter that Lady Rumbold, wife of the British ambassador to Germany wrote to her mother.

She wrote after the Duke (later King George VI) and Duchess of York’s visit to Berlin in March 1929 en route to the wedding of Prince Olaf in Germany.

The extract from the letter:

The Duke and Duchess were given a private tour of the Kaiser’s former residence.

Even his tiny bedroom which is never shown, and which looked rather tragic lumbered up with: things, and wall paper very dilapidated. It was quite small and dark looking on to a courtyard, with a tiny dressing-room next to it.

In his study is the famous table on which he signed the order for the mobilisation of the Army on 1st August 1914.

This writing table is made out of wood from The Victory, and the huge inkstand is a model of it, with the famous Nelson signal ‘England expects etc.’ in coloured flags. Curious isn’t it?

The Trafalgar Campaign was a series of fleet manoeuvres by the French and Spanish fleets working together to force a passage through the English Channel, and thereby allow the French to invade England. The Battle of Trafalgar was the culmination of that campaign, ending in victory for the British.

HMS Victory was Lord Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. In 1922, the ship was moved to a dry dock at Portsmouth, England, and preserved as a museum ship.

So one wonders who made the writing table made out of wood from The Victory, and by what route did it come into the possession of the Kaiser.

In Donald Maclean’s British Foreign Policy Since Suez 1956-1968 he discusses Britain’s relationship with Europe and the United States. He charts the changing fortunes of Britain and the history of the uneasy straddling of Europe and the United States that Britain has been pursuing since the Second World War.

Part of that relationship concerns the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan.

I knew that the pursuit of a viable weapon was a joint British and US effort. I thought, though, that the decision to drop the bombs rested solely with the USA.

What I learned from Maclean’s book was that there was an agreement between Britain and the United States that the bomb would only be used with the consent and agreement of both countries. In plain English, Britain gave approval to the use of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I found a 2013 article in Japan Times which said that according to papers recently declassified by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Britain supported the use of atomic bombs by the United States against Japan in World War II and did so about a month before the first one was dropped on Hiroshima.

This corroborates what Maclean wrote. On page 53 of British Foreign Policy Since Suez 1956-1968 he writes:

The presence of U.S. nuclear bases on U.K. soil and other aspects of the Anglo-American alliance exposes Britain to the risk of nuclear counter-attack should the United States use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. This remains true whether the US. fires its first salvo from British bases, from a Polaris submarine in mid-Atlantic from the United States or from some other quarter.

For an official account of the conclusion of this agreement, and its text, see Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945. London. 1964. pp. 164-171 

From the point of view of the British sponsors of the alliance, the logic of this situation requires that there should be a binding overall agreement that the United States will not in any circumstances use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union without British consent. Washington has not been willing to tie its hands in this way, but, besides the guarantees relating specifically to the use of bases in Britain, gave unofficial assurances of a wider character.

At the earliest stage of Anglo-American co-operation in nuclear matters—during the manufacture of the first, wartime, atomic bombs—such a binding agreement existed and was applied. From the signing of the Quebec Agreement by Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1943 until its disavowal by the Truman Administration at the end of the war, both countries had a clear-cut obligation, set out in the second clause of the Agreement, not to use nuclear weapons against third parties without each other’s consent. This clause was strictly complied with before the American atomic attack on Hiroshima.

The hiatus was subsequently partially filled by personal assurances from the President to the Prime Minister, given orally and requiring renewal with each change of President.

Harold Mcmillan, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom speaking in 1957, famously said the following:

You will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime – nor indeed in the history of this country.

Indeed let us be frank about it – most of our people have never had it so good.

Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime – nor indeed in the history of this country.

What is wrong with that? What is it that gets people’s backs up when they hear You’ve never had it so good repeated today?

What is it that gets my back up? It is this:

In the early days of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, the conditions under which the workers worked were terrible. Adults and children worked in conditions that literally killed them.

Today, their descendants work in much better conditions. But to say that people have never had it so good is to miss the question that should be asked.

The question should be, how good could things be?

If those who profited from those terrible conditions had not done so, then the capitalists of today would not be where they are.

They live off and are the heirs of those terrible conditions. If they wanted to redress the wrong, they would share. They would give back what their predecessors took from the ancestors of those working people who in 1957 ‘never had it so good’.

There is a counter-argument that the Great Leap Forward of the Industrial Revolution could only have happened with the imposition of those terrible conditions.

That is the argument put by the interrogator in Darkness At Noon.

Perhaps. But while we will never know what would have been lost, we know the human cost that reverberates today.

The State promised and the State failed. The State promised to take over from the family and the community. It promised to support whenever someone needed support, and it failed.

The plunderers took control of the State, and if history teaches us anything, it is that once in power, plunderers cannot help themselves.