It’s the most wonderful time of the year. It’s mince pie season …

It took me a while to convert my Swiss-raised daughters to the thick sweet gloop of candied fruit in a pastry case, but, by the time they were in their early teens, we were a dedicated trio of enthusiasts.

I once carried six boxes of mince pies back to Switzerland to share with my class of thirteen year-olds at the Steiner School. They were not only revolted but baffled that English people would choose to eat something so very strange at Christmas time.

In our family there used to be an unwritten rule that no ‘mint spies’ (as Lucy called them) could be eaten before December 1^st. This served to make the first ‘spy’ a much anticipated event and added to its overall deliciousness. Last year, however, we broke the tradition, having agreed that mince pie season is brief and we needed to ‘seize the day’.

In recent years we have all three been in collaborative pursuit of the best pie money can buy. Personally, I am not a fan of the fully-lidded version – too much pastry and no opportunity to examine the filling. Although I’m up for a little variation – a new spice, extra zest, some crushed nuts – I avoid contrived flavours like chocolate and orange, salted caramel or, this year’s outlandish deep-fried mince pie.

Our straw poll produced a clear winner – Prêt a Manger.

The Prêt piecrust is buttery and rich and sits in a brown waxed paper cup. I imagine a Victorian kitchen somewhere full of bonnets and aprons and silver spoons measuring candied goop into pastry cases. The signature star on the top always looks a little bent out of shape, as if a bunch of pre-school children with cookie cutters had punched them out.  Then there’s the snow shower of powder sugar that makes the Prêt spy so unique.

On Tuesday morning I went into the Epsom branch of Prêt in search of our first mince pies of the year.

I could see only four in the cabinet.

‘No worries’, said the friendly barista, ‘I have more’.

He pulled down a cardboard box from a high shelf and removed several large plastic trays of bald-looking pies.

‘How many do you want?’ he enquired.

‘But, where’s the snow?’ I mumbled.

‘No worries’, he said again, plunging a sieve into a large plastic bag of powder sugar and sprinkling it … rather carelessly I thought … over the mince pies.

I can report that they are as delicious as they ever were and I was able to share them, fresh out of their plastic trays and recently dusted, with Polly and Lucy that same afternoon.

The Bernese village of Adelboden sits on a terrace at the end of a long valley. It is surrounded on three sides by mountains and overlooks a deep gorge. For more than 600 years the only way in and out of the village was over the mountains. Life was hard, people were poor and by 1900 the population was in decline.

In 1902 Adelboden had a stroke of great good fortune when Henry Lunn, a Methodist minister from Lincolnshire, arrived in the village. Lunn had made several visits to Grindelwald as part of the annual English church leaders’ conference and, in the winter of 1902/03, he brought 400 visitors to Adelboden.

He subsequently founded the Alpine Ski Club, which marked the beginning of the British trend to combine health with winter sports.

The Swiss of course didn’t need an Englishman to teach them how to ski – they used their skiis all the time in order to travel from A to B. However, the concept of climbing a mountain and skiing down it, purely for amusement, was not something that had occurred to them.

Twenty years later, in the neighbouring village of Muerren, Henry Lunn’s son, Arnold organised the first downhill slalom race and, in 1931, the first world championships. He was knighted for his services to British skiing and Anglo-Swiss relations.

Early visitors to the Swiss Alps were predominantly members of the British aristocracy with time on their hands and money in their pockets. As downhill skiing grew in popularity, the well-to-do guests needed appropriate accommodation and this prompted the construction of what are today known as the Belle Epoque hotels.

The Nevada Palace in Adelboden was built by the Richert brothers in 1911 for CHF 200,000 and advertised itself as “The Glorious Winter-Beauty. The Fountain of Eternal Youth”. The seven-storey hotel boasted a ‘resort doctor’ and an outdoor swimming pool, designed to offer guests a Mediterranean experience (sand was imported from Marseille) alongside magnificent mountain views. During the winter, outdoor areas were transformed into skating rinks.

In the mid 1930s my mother and her friends went skiing in Adelboden on day trips from their hometown in Biel. My parents later moved to the village for a winter season with the intention of offering combined courses in English and skiing. Unfortunately the only applicant was an English lord whose interest lay in skiing rather than learning English.

I was christened in the 14^th century church and, every year until I left home, my family spent Christmas in Adelboden.

The outbreak of WWII ended the era of the grand hotels and visitors disappeared practically overnight. In 1943 the government announced that all foreign troops, captured on Swiss soil, were to be interned.  Adelboden served as the first internment facility and, over the next two years, more than five hundred US airmen were sent to live at the Nevada Palace.

Apart from a night-time curfew, the Americans were free to walk the hillsides, attend church services and visit neighbouring villages. The men installed a woodworking shop and a dark room in the cellars of the Palace. They formed their own ice hockey team, played baseball, took up skiing and learnt German. Every morning they met for coffee at the Alpenrose cafe where they charmed the Adelbodener women by calling them ‘Sweetie’ and ‘Darling’.

As serving members of the US government, the men continued to receive military pay which, much to the delight of local shopkeepers, they spent on watches and sports equipment. Markus Klopfenstein sold so many cameras to the Americans that his supplier, Zeiss suspected he was trading in the black market and sent a representative to investigate.

Ernst Oester of Oester Sport recalled that the young American GIs declined to use his changing rooms, preferring to strip down to their underwear in the shop. “They wore jockeys, which were unknown in Switzerland at the time and they stood there, bare-chested and hairy-legged. It was too much for one farmer’s wife who was so shocked by what she saw that she walked backwards out of the shop.”

The internees formed a swing band and invited the Adelbodners to dances in the Palace ballroom. At Christmas they arranged a screening of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves for the children. Nobody in Adelboden had ever seen a motion picture before; neither had they tasted chewing gum or used a biro. With the aid of dictionaries, love affairs blossomed and some of the local girls married airmen. In 1946, young women like Irma McLaughlin and Doris Scott followed their husbands to America in what came to be known as the ‘Bride Ships’.

The Nevada Palace never fully regained its former glory. WWII bankrupted the Richert  brothers. Henry died and Jacques ended his days as a waiter in an Interlaken cafe.

In 1996 a major fire destroyed the hotel’s upper floors. Charred and abandoned, it was finally torn down in 2001. There was talk of building a family hotel, in keeping with the character of the village. Instead the land was sold to The Pearl of Kuwait Real Estate Group, which went bankrupt a few years later.

The Nevada Palace Hotel has gone but the views across the valley, to the Engstligenalp and the Wildstrubel, are still there, just as they were in the 13^th century when the first settlers arrived.

Reference:

American internees in Adelboden, Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (SRF Dok)1991

Adelboden, Berner Oberland Ed. Klopfenstein, 1992

Bieler Tagblatt, ‘Geblieben sind Ruinen’, August 2001

Last night I watched a documentary about the life of Canadian actor, John Candy*. All I really knew about Candy was that he was a large man, who died at the age of forty-three. However, Trains, Planes and Automobiles is one of my favourite films so I decided to give it a go.

Candy was raised Catholic and, on one of many return visits to his former high school, he said to the assembled students “My success is simply rooted in the values, discipline and respect for others that I was taught at Neil McNeil Catholic High School.”

In September Thea started at St. Peter’s Catholic Primary School, where both her father and her uncle were pupils. Last week we received an invitation to Grandparents’ Day. Two hundred and ten grandparents showed up, posing an unanticipated challenge and creating a scramble for extra chairs. It all got resolved and we were amply compensated with home-made cake.

The head teacher began with a prayer for grandparents – meaning us, but also our own grandparents, who may have played an important role in our lives as we were growing up.

Thea was proud and pleased as punch to walk us around her classroom. She showed us the lion’s head, which is her allocated spot at carpet time, the outside play area with real rabbits, the reading corner and the altar space. She pointed to the three prayers they say each day – the Morning Prayer, the Lunchtime Prayer and the End of Day Prayer. “I can’t remember all the words” she explained “and I can’t read them yet either.”

The O’Connells have not been practicing Catholics for four generations, but I find myself deeply pleased that Thea and her sister, Lyla will be educated at a Catholic school. I appreciate the prayers, not all the words necessarily, but the idea of being truly faithful to something, not every now and then, but every day.

Children, who will one day become grownups, are encouraged to develop qualities such as sharing, caring, gratitude, truthfulness  and integrity.

John Candy will have had other defining influences in his life but clearly “the values, the discipline and respect for others” that he was taught during his years at Neil McNeil Catholic High School in Toronto, informed who he became, how others saw him and how they remember him, thirty-one years after he died.

*John Candy: I Like Me, 2025

Blog – The Banished Children of Adam and Eve, June 12^th, 2022

Einstein is credited as saying “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

In 1965 my father gave me a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Unusually, there is no dedication. Instead, in wobbly handwriting are the words “Sunday May 23. Suseli from Papi.”

Dad gave me a lot of books as I was growing up and he often wrote something pithy and poetic on the fly leaf. His words went over my head but I never asked him to explain them because, well, I didn’t want to appear stupid. Sixty years on and that book still sits on my bookshelf. Printed in Czechoslovakia and illustrated by the German Expressionist painter, Josef Scharl, it contains 210 stories and concludes with a folkloristic commentary by Joseph Campbell.

There is nothing about Scharl’s illustrations that seem appropriate for a six-year old. The faces of kings, trolls, devils and witches are terrifying and the anguished expressions of fishermen, bridegrooms, sisters and servants, imply a world of worry and trouble.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born in Kassel, Germany in the late eighteenth century and their stories are collected from local farmers, weavers, tailors and grandmothers. The Grimm brothers sought not beauty but accuracy – “from mouth to ear to page”.

I was once asked about my favourite childhood fairy tale. The one you choose, apparently, is a reflection of how you see your own life.

I was obsessed by The Singing Ringing Tree, (based on Hurleburlebutz by the Brothers Grimm). It was first shown on the BBC in 1964 as part of the “Tales from Europe” series. Das Singende, Klingende Bauemchen was an East German production and the German dialogue would play simultaneously with the voice of the English narrator. This conflicting jumble of voices and language only served to amplify the sinister quality of the characters, who all looked as though they had walked off an Otto Dix painting. Even the good-prince-transformed-into-a-bear-by-the-wicked-dwarf looked weird and scary. But … it was impossible to look away. The whole thing was utterly compelling.

My parents were still at work at 4.00 in the afternoon and so I would watch The Singing Ringing Tree by myself. I used to worry that one day they’d walk in, switch off the television and forbid me from watching it ever again.

Joseph Campbell writes about the visionary rather than the descriptive quality of fairy stories. “The ageless tale of human destiny, recognised, for all its cannibal horrors, as a marvellous, wild, monstrous, irrational and unnatural wondertale. This is the story our spirit asks for; this is the story we receive.”

Einstein declared that the gift of fantasy meant more to him that any talent for abstract, positive thinking.

2025/2022

In 1982 I graduated from the University of Reading and began a six month internship with Herman Hall, an educational psychologist in New York. Herman worked in private schools in the Carnegie Hill district of Manhattan. Having subsequently spent several years in inner-city schools in London, it struck me that, whether financially privileged or socially deprived, children often face comparable challenges and present with similar difficulties in the classroom.

Herman believed that every child had unique talents and that none were without promise. “Grown-ups are always telling kids that they need to work harder” he used to say. “What kids really need to do is to work smarter, but they can’t do that if they don’t know what their problems are.”

His premise was that all children want to succeed. “Kids either can’t or won’t do what’s required of them.” In other words, something beyond their understanding or control is holding them back. He was non-judgmental and never lectured a child. Instead he asked open-ended questions that made them think or provided an opportunity for deeper conversation: ‘So, your Mom and Dad aren’t getting along too well at the moment?’ or ‘Your Dad’s a busy man and is away a lot?’. He always allowed the child to confirm or refute his observations. There was something about naming the underlying suffering, as opposed to talking about a poorly-written essay or a low Maths score, that generated a rush of gratitude and a release of suppressed emotions. Young people felt recognised and understood.

I experienced Herman as unfailingly kind and curious, with a deep respect for children and an ardent desire to help those most at risk of being marginalised, either academically or socially.

He also taught me the importance of never judging parents, no matter how calamitous their parenting style appeared to be. The most important skill I learnt from watching him at work was to state facts rather than voice opinions; to recognise that the other person had a point of view and a set of skills that could complement and contribute towards a good solution. He approached everyone with the understanding that they were being the best possible version of themselves they knew how to be, and that setting himself up as an adversary was unhelpful. He recognised the need to win the trust of parents and teachers so they could all work together to improve the life of the child. By accentuating the positive, by listening and asking questions, Herman Hall subtly managed to lead the child, the teacher and the parents to the bigger picture.

He believed strongly that praise was best offered intermittently. If you applaud children for everything they do, they feel they have to be the best and the brightest and, each time they fall short, their anxiety levels increase. This was the model in my own family – either you were a success at something or you were a failure.

Herman was clearly very proud of his two adult sons, Rick and Doug, but he neither overly praised nor excessively criticised them, choosing instead to recognise their individual strengths and weaknesses and his own contribution to the development of their personalities.

On my first day at St. Bernard’s School, Herman sat me down in his office and said he was going to talk to me ‘like a Dutch uncle’. I had no idea what that meant but I have never forgotten what he said to me: “You can please some of the people some of the time, but you cannot please all of the people all of the time.” Herman himself, although he was respected, appreciated and loved by many, was also criticised by those who resented the idea that someone who had not gone to Harvard, did not have a PhD and was unpublished, could maintain such consistent success over so many years.

There was a world of difference between Herman Hall’s own background and the elite schools and Ivy League colleges he advised for more than 40 years. He was born in 1917 in Springfield, Massachusetts. Following the death of his parents when he was a small child, Herman was sent to The New England Home for Little Wanderers, an orphanage in Boston. He liked to joke that he was ‘just a barefoot farm boy’ but these early experiences clearly shaped his gentle, sensitive and intuitive value system.

During his high school years Herman worked as a typesetter at night to save money in order to go to college. Forced to drop out of Clark University when he could no longer pay the fees, he took a job as a moulder in a foundry. The men he worked alongside were skilled craftsmen but most of them were uneducated and, at the age of 25, Herman was invited to head the union. When America entered WWII in 1941, Herman enlisted in the Navy where he took the medical and psychological histories of Marines returning from duty in the South Pacific.

After the war, he worked as a travelling salesman for Blue Cross. He returned to college and earned a BSc and a Masters in Education, became a teacher and subsequently moved into a career as a guidance counsellor.

I returned to England at the end of my internship in the spring of 1983. I had been offered a position at Rye Country Day School in Connecticut but, having consulted an immigration lawyer, I was told that the chances of my getting a visa were slim.

Herman and I stayed in touch. We would meet for lunch at his favourite diner in New York or at his home in White Plains. Sometimes I would fly to France when he was visiting Paris or Aix-en-Provence to consult with students at the American University.

In September 2001, shortly after returning from a trip to Europe, Herman was hospitalised for a heart condition. He was eighty-four years old, still working in schools and in the process of being interviewed for a book about his life.

On the morning of September 11^th, when two passenger planes hit the Twin Towers, his son Rick, who worked in the South Tower as a senior Vice President at the Aon Corporation, was killed. One hundred and seventy-five Aon employees died alongside Rick that morning. Herman died just eight days later on September 19^th, 2001.

His widow wrote to me: “Keep Herman in your heart, Suseli, and remember that he had a truly happy life with his family and friends and chosen profession, which he loved.”

The Herman and Richard Hall Scholarship Fund for graduates of White Plains High School was set up in 2002. In the same year, Aon established an education fund to provide post-secondary school financial assistance to the dependent children of Aon employees killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre. Herman would have been pleased to know that his grandson’s college education was secure and that Christopher would never have to work nights or drop out of college because he couldn’t afford to pay his school fees.

Today is the 24^th anniversary of Herman’s death and he remains an enduring presence in my life. He taught me to look for the sweet spot, even in those who are most oppositional. He taught me to work in the best interests of the child, which included listening to and respecting anxious parents. He was endlessly patient and generous with his time. He liked to go to sleep early but, as his son, Doug recalls, “he would get out of bed to talk to a concerned parent on the phone if there was an emergency and, he would do so without complaint.”

Herman managed to simplify rather than magnify problems and I remember feeling immensely grateful for his nuanced understanding of my own inner struggles. In all the years I knew him I never felt judged or criticised.

In his final years he would sometimes say that he had lost faith in the educational system but he never lost faith in young people. In the words of Joan McMenamin, Head of the Nightingale Bamford School between 1971 and 1992.

“I will always think of that dear man with gratitude, both for what he did for Nightingale and for me, but above all for the lessons he kept before all of us of what education is and can do when practiced by a person of Herman’s intellect and kindness. Our schools are richer for what he taught us, and he blessed us in all he helped us to be.”

Herman W. Hall     April 6^th, 1917 – September 19, 2001

Richard B. Hall       April 30^th, 1952 – September 11^th, 2001

Capturing the Essence by James Shapiro  pub. 2004

The Absent Prince by Una Suseli O’Connell  pub. 2020

Thea has an enduring interest in names. She knows the name of the postman (both her own and ours), the Tesco delivery man, the bin man, the waitress at the local cafe and, since, Sunday, the names of the Italian waiters at L’Artista in Letchworth.

I am ashamed to admit that Dan and I have been eating at L’Artista for almost two decades and we know the names of just three people who work there – Roberto, Adam and Daniele. As Thea asked her question there was initial puzzlement, followed by surprise and subsequently delight. I was struck by how sharing something as personal as your name with an interested stranger changes the dynamic of the exchange between you. Suddenly and all at once, Moussa and Nino and Nick became more than just familiar faces in a public space.

Thanks to our four-year-old granddaughter, we now know the names of not only the waiters at L’Artista, but also of the chef and the barman (Francesco and Gerardo). There’s even a Thea who works there. Unfortunately Sunday is her day off.

Two-year-old Lyla has begun to imitate her sister. If a stranger catches her interest, she will often ask  ‘What’s her name?’

Our names are important. They are given to us by our parents and they belong to us throughout our lives. And beyond.

Thea and Lyla have a great many relatives – aunts, uncles and cousins, across three generations. Thea can tell you all their names and assemble them in the correct family group. She also knows the names of my parents and grandparents/her great and great-great grandparents.

In February 2011, The Ancestor Effect by Professor Peter Fischer was published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Fischer proposed that thinking about our genetic origin can provide us with a positive psychological resource. Many of our ancestors succeeded in overcoming great adversity: reminding ourselves of human beings who are genetically similar to us can strengthen our sense of identity and self-esteem.

To test his theory Fischer, together with scientists from the Universities of Graz, Munich and Berlin, recruited 80 students who were asked to spend five minutes thinking about their 15^th century ancestors, their great-grandparents or a recent trip to the shops. The students subsequently underwent a range of intelligence tests.

The scores of those who had spent five minutes thinking about their ancestors were elevated to 14 out of a maximum 16, compared with 10 out of 16 in the rival group.

Thea is currently a little too shy to take up what her great-grandfather referred to as ‘the ping-pong’ of social conversation. I have suggested to her that when a person answers her question, she could reciprocate with: ‘And … my name’s Thea’.

After we’d finished our pizza on Sunday, Thea asked me for a piece of paper, torn from my notebook. Then, very carefully she wrote her name on the page and silently handed it to Daniele as we were leaving. He pinned it on the L’Artista noticeboard.

Then, it was on to the Turkish supermarket, where Thea and Lyla made the acquaintance of security officer, John and cashier, Nasrin.

Reference:

The Ancestor Effect: Thinking about our Genetic Origin Enhances Intellectual Performance. European Journal of Social Psychology (February 2011)

Peter Fischer, Anne Sauer, Claudia Vogrincic, Silke Weissweiler

Earlier this week, our 4 year-old granddaughter told us, in a tone of great earnestness, that there was something she really wanted but she didn’t think her parents would agree to it. We imagined something brightly-coloured and made of plastic, another princess doll perhaps, so we were both surprised to hear that she wanted …. a balcony.

I thought about her request: Polly and Mike are planning to extend and renovate their house (some day), so perhaps they could include a balcony. That way, Thea would be able to ‘stand on it and look out at the view’ which is the vision she has for herself.

Many years ago, when Polly and her sister were small, there was something I really wanted too: a ranch house in Arizona. Rather like Thea’s balcony, I realised that it wasn’t something that could be realised immediately, or even any time soon. I didn’t mind, not really, and in some odd way I quite relished the idea of working slowly towards my dream.

At that time, we lived in Switzerland. I decided to start saving for my house in Arizona and I put aside every two franc coin that came my way. Five years later we moved to England and the two franc coins became fifty pence pieces. Polly and Lucy even bought me a savings tin in the shape of a letter box and, every once in a while, I would deposit the money in my ‘Arizona’ savings account.

It’s thirty five years later and I don’t own a house in Arizona, although I do still collect 50p coins.

As the German composer, Richard Wagner, said Joy is not in things. It is in us. The joy for me was in my imagination. I had no real understanding of landscape or logistics or what it would mean to own a house in a faraway desert. Arizona was a symbol of hope and redemption, something that was uniquely mine and a wild and precious dream that I held lightly, but seriously too.

This afternoon, as we pulled into a multi storey car park, Dan asked Thea where she would like to park. ‘At the very top’, she replied. He circled through the levels until we reached the open air where there were no other cars. We walked over to the concrete wall and, up there on the 5^th floor, Thea and her little sister stood looking out over the trees and buildings of their town.

‘It’s lovely’ said Thea.

‘It is’, agreed Dan. ‘It’s a bit like having your own balcony’.

The following morning,  Mike was taking the girls to nursery. As they drove past the multi-storey, Thea looked up and said quietly: ‘There’s my balcony.’

The Hertfordshire town of Letchworth entered my vocabulary in 1971. I was twelve years old and my father thought it would be a good idea to send me to boarding school – either to one in the United States, which was his first choice, or to one in the UK, a three hour drive from where we lived in Folkestone. Massachusetts seemed a long way to go but I was intrigued by the idea of St. Christopher in Letchworth. My mother was strongly against my going to boarding school in either country and so, after much debate, I stayed home and became a day pupil at Ashford School for Girls.

St. Christopher School, founded in 1915, was inspired by the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti, an Indian mystic and philosopher whose book, Education as Service, was published in 1912.  Krishnamurti believed that man “could only find truth through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.”

In The Angry Island, Hunting the English, the writer and journalist, A.A. Gill, describes his alma mater as ”hippy-alternative, non-competitive, vegetarian and organic before ecology was a word”. He was a student at St. Christopher in the 1960s and describes it as “a weird and unconventional place with a high proportion of Quakers, many of whom wore sandals all year round and one of whom wouldn’t speak on Wednesdays in memory of those killed in Hiroshima.”

In 2000 we decided to send our own daughters to the school. Polly and Lucy’s years at St. Chris were pretty much how I had imagined my own might have been. They enjoyed their schooldays and made lasting friendships.

Once they left to go to university, however, we debated whether to move somewhere else – back to London or the south coast. My husband, Dan however, is from Chicago, and Letchworth, he says, reminds him of where he grew up. We decided to buy a house, put down roots and, twenty-three years later, this is the town we call ‘home’.

When I told other parents, who like me, had moved to Letchworth to avoid boarding the children, they were confounded. “What …  you’re not going back to London?! But what will you do here?”

I had moved around a lot in my life and I was looking to settle, plus Dan had a point: why start a new life elsewhere when we had a fine one right here in the Garden City?. It’s a 30 minute journey into London and Cambridge on the train; we can meet friends, have dinner, see a play and be home before midnight.

Letchworth is the World’s First Garden City and, according to A.A. Gill, this makes it “one of the most important and influential places ever built – as inspired as Wren and Hooke’s plans for post-inferno London or Haussmann’s Paris, as revolutionary as Niemeyer’s Brasilia and more practical and longer-lasting than a Frank Lloyd Wright millionaire’s weekend home.”

The town was founded in 1903, not by a town planner or a wealthy industrialist, but by Ebenezer Howard, a middle-aged shorthand clerk from London. At the age of 21, he went to the United States to start a farm in Nebraska. When his venture failed, he moved to Chicago and found work as a stenographer.

In 1871, the year Ebenezer Howard arrived in the United States, The Great Chicago Fire ignited on the west side of the city. It burned for two days and destroyed more than 17,000 buildings. Howard was living in the city during its reconstruction and reformation and Chicago’s motto, ‘urbs in horto’ (city in a garden) was to influence his ideas around the creation of a Garden City.

Ebenezer returned to London four years later and took a job as a parliamentary reporter in the House of Commons. Over the next twenty years he developed a strong interest in social issues that stemmed from, what he believed to be, over-crowding, urban poverty and poor city design.

In 1898, at the age of 48, Ebenezer Howard published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform in which he advocated the creation of a Garden City movement. The book was translated into French, German, Russian and Japanese.

His idea was to offer an alternative to urban living in the form of inexpensive, yet attractively–built homes and workplaces that would combine with green spaces in new communities. Unlike the new industrial towns, Port Sunlight and Bournville, which were built by factory owners for their workers, the garden cities were to be self-governing and run for the benefit of all.

In 1903, his dream was realised when the Garden City Association founded Letchworth, the World’s First Garden city. Brothers-in-law Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, who had a reputation for designing good quality working-class homes, were appointed as the town’s planners and architects.

Howard decided to learn Esperanto as a way of promoting international understanding through a universal language. “Esperanto and the Garden City” he said, “are both bringing about new and better conditions of peace and agreement.”

His close neighbour and friend, George Bernard Shaw, described Ebenezer as “one of those heroic simpletons who do big things whilst our prominent worldings are explaining why they are Utopian and impossible.”

In 1905 the Cheap Cottages Exhibition showcased 125 cottages of different shapes and sizes, each one built for a maximum of one hundred and fifty pounds. Over a three-month period 60,000 people visited Letchworth to see the exhibition.

The architecture of the Garden City was strongly influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement which focussed as much on social reform as on the aesthetics of design. “The root of all reform lies in the individual, and the life of the individual is shaped mainly by home and surrounding.” wrote Gustav Stickley in The Craftsman Home in 1909.

Houses were built of plain brick, pebble-dashed and white-washed, with gables and sweeping, steeply-pitched terracotta rooflines. The open-plan living areas offered both space and sunlight. Attention was paid to small details such as hinges and door handles.

The town planners incorporated allotments and spinneys (extended areas of woodland bordering back gardens) and residents were encouraged to grow their own fruit and vegetables and raise chickens. Letchworth was the first town in England to have a green belt and 100,000 trees were planted with a different species chosen for each street, including oak, elm, locust and staghorn sumach.

It is the Broadway, a wide boulevard, framed by mature trees, that reminds my husband of Chicago, specifically the Midway, a one-mile stretch of parkland on the south side of the city. Dan grew up in the western suburbs, near Oak Park, home to the world’s largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed private residences. The Arts and Crafts style homes mirror many of the architectural features of Letchworth Garden City.

In 1910, the Spirella Corset Company, founded in Pennsylvania in 1909, established its first overseas operation in Letchworth. The Spirella motto was ‘Healthy Happy Workers are the World’s Best’. The factory had large windows, good ventilation and a garden setting.  Workers were offered baths, a library, free eye tests and a bicycle repair department (for those who suffered punctures on their way to work). The company paid 50% of its employees’ medical bills and subsidized their dental treatment.

Sir Laurence Olivier, who spent his childhood in Letchworth, used corsets produced at Spirella in his 1957 production of The Prince and the Showgirl, starring Marilyn Monroe.

The Garden City became a magnet for artists, including potters, weavers and furniture designers. It also attracted socialists, suffragettes, vegetarians and teetotallers (there were no pubs in the town until 1974). Men wore embroidered smocks, knickerbockers and sandals and women wore tea dresses – the most radical refused to wear corsets, hats and even shoes.

George Orwell, who lived in neighbouring Wallington, mocked Letchworth in The Road to Wigan Pier, describing its citizens as “that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.”

Day-trippers visited from London and two German ladies declared, on leaving, that they were “… awfully disappointed. We were assured that the people at Garden City were only half-clothed and that they all went bare headed and wore sandals, and we have not seen one person of that sort.”

Early pioneers of the town were undaunted by the critical and ill-mannered remarks. Hope Rea, a leading Theosophist, moved to Letchworth in 1907 and established the Garden City Theosophical School (now St. Christopher).

Annie Lawrence, born into a wealthy London family, was inspired to build an ‘open-air’ school in Letchworth, dedicated to “stimulating and encouraging young people to think for themselves as to the meaning of life and what their attitude to it should be.” She commissioned the building of The Cloisters, a grey stone structure, reminiscent of a medieval castle with turrets, battlements, fountains and a campanile staircase. Students slept in canvas hammocks, slung from the vaulting and classes included boot and sandal-making, weaving, bookbinding and carpentry. Annie also offered lectures, conferences and summer schools, as well as theatrical performances and organ recitals.

The town’s spirit of inclusivity attracted people of different faiths, including Liberal Catholic, Orthodox Jewish, Congregationalist, Pentacostalist, Spiritualist and Quaker. Today there are also Buddhist and Sikh temples and an Islamic Society.

A second Garden City in Welwyn, 14 miles south of Letchworth, was built in 1920 and the Garden City movement spread across Europe, North America, Australia and South Africa.

In 2003, John Prescott, secretary of state for transport, announced plans for a new town in Barking Reach on the Thames, prompting Guardian journalist, Jonathan Glancey to write  “They don’t make them like they used to … Letchworth had good homes, churches, libraries and a corset factory. Today’s new towns don’t even get a railway.”

More recently, in an interview for the podcast Reasons to be Cheerful and titled Reasons to be Letchworth, Katy Lock, Director of Communities at The Town and Country Planning Association, said that flourishing lives must be integral to democracy. “We have lost the vision in both planning and policy. We have lost the positive view of how we want to live together and how to make the places we design sustainable and stand the test of time. The current development model is creating the slums of the future.”

So what remains of the early Garden City philosophy? In terms of bricks and mortar the answer is – ‘a lot.’  121 of the 125 Exhibition cottages exist as residential properties across the town. In 2006, each one, including our own, was issued with a plaque in recognition of its historical significance. The Cloisters has been occupied by the Freemasons since 1948 and the factory floor at Spirella is now a concert and lecture venue. The Art Deco cinema, the Lido and the Library (all built in the 1930s) form an integral part of the local community.

Apart from its kerb appeal, Letchworth is, admittedly, a little short on things that are important to some people – gift shops, gourmet restaurants and boutique hotels. For these you need to travel 5 miles south to the market town of Hitchin.

During the years Polly and Lucy were at St. Christopher School there was an annual ‘Rice Day’. Lunch was a bowl of rice and the money saved on feeding the 350 pupils was donated to a local charity. There were also sponsored ‘Sleep Outs’ on campus to focus on the problems of homelessness. One year, Lucy’s class was studying the effects of climate change on the Arctic. A pupil, dressed in a polar bear suit, walked into the local supermarket and asked to buy a fish as a way of highlighting lost habitat and access to food sources.

In 2006, William Armitage, a governor at St. Chris, and one of the founders of David’s Books and Music (1963) on Leys Avenue, was given an MBE for services to the community. In 2018, David’s was voted runner-up in the UK Independent Bookshop of the Year Award.

Vutie Beets, a vegan cafe in town, offers supper club charity nights using rescued food from The Best Before Cafe. It also provides family support through free cooking lessons and hosts community clean up.

In June 2020, the year of the pandemic, The Letchworth Settlement, a centre of learning and creativity since 1920, announced it was closing. As the centre received no grants, the situation looked hopeless. Within days, however, a ‘Save the Settlement’ appeal was launched and the citizens of Letchworth raised £28,000. Government grants followed and the 100 year old Settlement was saved.

Ebenezer Howard would have been proud. The people of Letchworth, it seems, still have the ability to “do big things” as opposed to “explaining why they are impossible.”

Reference:

A-Z of Letchworth Garden City by Josh Tidy

Arts and Crafts in Letchworth by Josh Tidy and Aimee Flack

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In the Footsteps of a Thousand Years by Una Suseli O’Connell, May 21^st, 2023

Today is a Bank Holiday in the UK, often referred to as the ‘late May’ or the ‘Spring’ Bank Holiday. This distinguishes it from the ‘early May’ Bank Holiday and the August ‘Summer’ Bank Holiday.

My American husband once asked me why all our public holidays are referred to as ‘Bank’ holidays and, quite honestly, I had to look it up. “The Bank Holiday Act of 1871 was introduced in order to allow banks to close on certain days without incurring a penalty”. In 154 years, it seems, no one has conceived of a better name, a worthier name, to mark any one of the eight bank holidays we celebrate in this country every year.

Dan now refers to them as ‘Blank’ Holidays.

In America there are eleven federal holidays, celebrating, amongst others, Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, Washington’s birthday, Juneteenth (the emancipation of enslaved African Americans), Independence Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day and Thanksgiving Day. It’s all in the name.

Today is Memorial Day in the United States. Originally known as Decoration Day, it has its origins in the aftermath of the Civil War when communities honoured their dead and decorated their graves with flowers. A federal holiday since 1971, Memorial Day is a day of reflection as well as celebration. The American flag is flown at half-mast until noon. Many Americans visit cemeteries and memorials and take part in parades.

This morning, to my great surprise, I learned that this day, this late May Blank Holiday does in fact have a name. Since 2022 it has been known as ‘Celebration Day’. It is neither government-inspired nor approved, although I don’t imagine that any politician would think to criticise the vision behind Celebration Day.

Introduced three years ago by a small group of friends, their website explains that the day is about “honouring and celebrating the lasting impact of those who have inspired and shaped us – whether through personal connections, history, or culture – and whose influence continues long after they’ve died.”

That’s great and I’m all in favour of celebrating lasting legacies and remembering those who have had a positive influence on our lives. It is, however, slightly burdened by a marketing gimmick – I can buy a pin badge to show that I’m part of the movement that celebrates the dead (the proceeds do go to charity and that’s a good thing) and, of course, I am encouraged to share lots of memories about my dead parents, teachers and friends on social media.

The death of those we loved may not be entirely straightforward; our emotions, even years later, may still be complex and confused. Death needs to be spoken about regularly, the death of others but also the prospect of our own death; emotions need to be unpacked slowly. Celebration Day runs the risk of confining these emotions to a single day and encouraging us to express them in up-beat sound-bites and pictures.

In 2004, the Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz, launched the first Cafe mortel/Death Cafe in Neuchatel, Switzerland. He wanted people to talk freely about the difficulties surrounding death. He wanted them to come together in a physical space, accessible to all.

Traditionally the Cafes mortels took place in restaurants and bistros where people gathered to eat, drink and talk. Wine and cheese were provided and no financial donations were accepted. “There are already too many issues surrounding money and death” he said.

Crettaz wanted to help people better manage their grief and better face what, sooner or later, lies ahead for all of us. “Death” he said, “is a lesson in life”.

Antarctica and the Moon have long existed as magical places in my imagination. Empty, desolate and far away, no nation has successfully laid claim to either one. There are no settlements on the Moon and only research stations and field camps at the South Pole.

Antarctica is the highest continent on the planet, as well as the driest, the coldest and the windiest. It covers one tenth of the earth’s land surface and ninety percent of the world’s ice. It is both a cold hell and a place of unfathomable beauty. Beyond the reach of most of us, it is unpredictable and unconquerable.

In the spring of 1950, my father was commissioned by an American publisher to write a piece about Edward Wilson. Although not as well-known as Scott and Shackleton, Wilson was widely-regarded as the most deeply-loved and admired of all the polar explorers. He died, alongside Scott on their journey back from the Pole in 1912.

As part of his research Peter was introduced to Sir Raymond Priestley, the only man to have served under both Scott and Shackleton. 75 years ago today, on April 21^st, they met for lunch at the American Embassy in London. In his diary, Peter wrote:

“Sir Raymond was only too willing to share his experiences with a keen listener and it proved to be a long and fascinating lunch. I was enthralled by firsthand accounts of the  expedition and of the men I know so well, but only from books. He described Wilson as ‘a splendid scientist, a fine artist, a perfect gentleman, a loyal friend and a Christian first, last and all the time.’”

In 1950, Priestley was Vice Chancellor of the University of Birmingham and Peter was a History teacher at a boys’ prep school in Hampshire. The day after they had lunch, Priestley wrote to Peter enclosing the transcript of a talk he had given at Binton Parish Church in Warwickshire the previous week. Peter responded with an invitation to visit Highfield to  talk to the students. Unfortunately, an epidemic of mumps swept the school the week he was due to visit and the talk was cancelled.

Reading Priestley’s lecture notes I am struck by his humility. He never exaggerates his relationship with Scott but gives him full credit for an experience that “coloured” and “moulded” his life.

“I would not be without the memories for anything anyone could give me: for any reward Fate could provide. It was the Scott expedition that left the greatest mark. I didn’t know Captain Scott intimately for long; nor did I know him very well. I was with his Northern Party and we left the Pole-seekers within a month of landing. But for two years I lived with companions he had selected, and had reason to thank God for the efficiency and foresight with which he had done the job.”

It was not until I read Priestley’s autobiography, “Antarctic Adventure, Scott’s Northern Party” published in 1914, that I learned of his own formidable challenges at the South Pole.

Raymond Edward Priestley graduated from University College, Bristol with a degree in geology. In 1910, at the age of twenty-six, he was invited to join what became known as ‘Scott’s Last Expedition’. In 1911, Priestley and five companions spent the summer doing fieldwork. They were due to be collected by the expedition’s ship, ‘Terra Nova’, but it was unable to make the return journey due to pack-ice.

“Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised.” Apsley Cherry-Garrard “The Worst Journey in the World”

Priestley and his companions survived the long polar winter as a result of ingenuity and  common purpose. They dug an ice cave, measuring 12ft x 9ft and used dried seaweed as  insulation and padding upon which to sleep. They supplemented their limited food rations with seal and penguin and they ate, not only the meat, but also the brain, blubber and liver. They used the oil to light their reading lamps and served seal blood as gravy and boiled seaweed as soup.

Priestley writes:

“Very old seaweed which had lain, probably for a century or so, on the beach well above the high-water mark and a regular highway for seals and penguins, tasted of must and mildew. It is what I should expect a concentrated solution of Old Masters to taste like. If one were to strip the walls of the National Gallery, throw the canvases into a huge cauldron, and boil them for seven weeks, I fancy the resulting soup would have tasted like Evans’ Cove seaweed.”

On one occasion, they caught and killed a seal that had 36 undigested fish in its belly. “We fried them for dinner that night. Never have I enjoyed food more” recalled Priestley.

Winter in Antarctica is lived in complete darkness. The only source of light comes from the Moon. The wind blew, almost without interruption, for 180 days and temperatures dropped to -60C. Taking any form of exercise, therefore, was challenging and would only have served to intensify the men’s hunger.

“During the greater part of this inactive life we were certainly happy. It had shown to all of us, I think, with how little it is possible to be content, and it has been a most decisive proof that in many cases the luxuries of civilization only fulfil the wants they create.” (RP)

In the evenings, the men wrote their diaries and read. During the two winters he spent at the South Pole, Priestley read the complete works of Scott, Dickens and Thackeray.

On Saturday nights, they sang songs, drank a small glass of sherry or port and enjoyed their weekly sugar ration. “No one who has only eaten chocolate at home can realize what the ounce and a half a week meant to us” wrote Priestley.

On Sunday mornings, the men read the New Testament together and sang hymns.

On the last day of the month each man received 35 muscatel raisins. Nothing was wasted, even the stalks were eaten or smoked as tobacco.

When spring finally came, weak and emaciated, they set out on a five week march back to base camp. It was here that they learned of the death of Scott, Wilson, Oates and Bowers.

Priestley returned to England in 1913. Although he stressed that he had no desire to repeat his experience, he did admit to the “Call of the South”, a force he believed was increased rather than decreased by the hardships he and his companions had been through.

“Those very discomforts and privations have only served to convert otherwise commonplace comforts into exquisite pleasures, enhanced by a perfect comradeship. During that long ordeal there was never spoken a cross word. I learned once and for all how little material comfort matters if one has a worthwhile job and good companions.” (RP)

Two of Priestley’s sisters married fellow polar explorers. Edith married physicist, Sir Charles Wright and Doris married geographer Thomas Griffith Taylor. The three friends, therefore, became not only brothers, but uncles to one another’s children.

Men like Sir Raymond Priestley were modest heroes, disinclined to hyperbole and reluctant to promote themselves as men of bravery and courage. The polar explorers of the early 20^th century were motivated, not by the pay (which was small) but by a desire to be part of something they believed in, a cause they considered to be wholly worthwhile.

As Peter, a lifelong teacher and educator, wrote in his diary “This is the kind of spirit that should inform education – not hero worship but the inspiring influence of great characters and noble minds.”

I was in New Zealand last month and was looking forward to visiting the port town of Lyttleton from where the explorers, including Priestley and the crew of the ‘Terra Nova’, left for the South Pole. I imagined myself standing by the water’s edge, with nothing but 4,500 miles of ocean between me and the ice floes of the Great White South. I knew, before I arrived, that the Antarctic Museum, damaged during the Christchurch earthquake of 2011, had been torn down. I was disappointed to discover, however, that the only remaining salute to Antarctic exploration was a bronze statue of a sled dog outside the library.

100 years ago, Lyttleton served as the main departure point for southern exploration. Today, it is the cruise ship capital of New Zealand, capable of berthing vessels a thousand feet long that can carry up to 6000 passengers. The bustling port town that once supplied polar expeditions with food, equipment and animals, now caters to a different kind of traveller – one who breaks the journey at sea in order to visit the coffee shops and gifts stores along London Street.

Sir Raymond Edward Priestley b. 20 July 1886  d. 24 June 1974

“Antarctic Adventure Scott’s Northern Party” by Raymond E. Priestley. First pub. 1914 by T. Fisher Unwin. Reprinted 1974 by C. Hurst & Co

“The Great White South” by Herbert G. Ponting, pub. 1921