& PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. TRANSACTIONS OF THE … · Transactions of the Leicester Literary & Philosophical Society. I have been thinking of writing a paper on Dr Shaw's challenge

TRANSACTIONS OF THE LEICESTER LITERARY & PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY.

VOLUME 100 DECEMBER 2006

THE LEICESTER LITERARY & PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETYFounded in 1835

OFFICERS AND COUNCIL

President: Dr M.G.F. Crowe, M.A., M.B., B.Chir, F.R.C.G.P.

Life Vice-Presidents

Dr T.D. Ford, O.B.E., Ph.D., B.Sc., F.G.S.Mrs H.A.E. Lewis, J.P., M.A.

Vice Presidents

Professor D.P.S. Sandhu, M.D., FRCS (Ed. UROL),FRCS (Glas)M. Kirk, O.B.E, F.C.A.

Dr D.P. Bethell, C.B.E., LL.D., D. Litt, D.Ed (Deceased Dec 2005) Canon Michael Wilson, M.A.,M.B.A.

Hon. Secretary: Dr Mary Hamill M.B., B. Chir., F.R.C.P.C.H., B.A.O.91 Kingsway Rd, Leicester, LE5 5TU

Hon. Membership Secretary: Mrs P.L. Silver (Deceased Oct 2006)49a Kent Drive, Oadby, Leicester, LE2 4PQ

Hon. Programme Secretaries: Dr D.G. Lewis, M.A., M.D., F.R.C.A. and Mrs H.A.E. Lewis J.P.,M.A.,3 Shirley Road, Leicester, LE2 3LL

Hon. Treasurer: B.D. Beeson,The Hollies, Main Street, Frolesworth, Leicester, LE17 5EG

Hon. Transactions Editor: Professor J.H. Holloway, O.B.E., B.Sc., Ph.D., D.Sc., C.Chem., F.R.S.C.The Garden House, 5 Hall Gardens, Uppingham, Rutland, LE15 9HG.

Independent Examiners: Keith Smithson, F.C.I.B., M.I.Mgt., F.R.S.A.Mr P.E.K. Fuchs, M.A.

Members of CouncilS.A. Ashraf, M.A.

Professor P.J. Boylan B.Sc., Ph.D., F.G.S., F.M.A., F.B.I.M., F.R.S.A.D.E. Kendall Clark, O.B.E., B.Sc.

Professor I.M.T. Davidson D.Sc., Ph.D., C. Chem., F.R.S.C., F.R.S.A.,Mrs A.Dean, B.A.

J. Dickinson B. Sc. C.Eng, F.I.M.M.M., F.G.S.Professor M.A. Khan, B.Sc., Ph.D., F.R.A.S., F.R.S.A.

L. Lloyd-Smith, J.P., Dip.Arch., F.R.I.B.A.Mr G. K. Pitches, M.A., A.R.I.B.A.

Dr E. Raven B.Sc., Ph.D., M.R.S.C., C.Chem.Professor P.H.A. Sneath, F.R.S., M.A., M.D., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.

Dr D. Thurston, B.Sc., Ph.D.The Vice Chancellor of the University of Leicester

The Vice Chancellor of De Montfort UniversityOne representative of the Geology Section

One representative of the Natural History Section

Geology Section Hon. Secretary:Ms Joanne Norris, 208 Milligan Rd, Aylestone, Leicester, LE2 8FD

Natural History Section Hon. Secretary:Mrs Sue Walton, 29 School Lane, Huncote, Leicester, LE9 3BD.

A Philosophy for the Twenty-first Century

Henry VIII and Early–Modern Literature

Shipman – (Trial), Inquiry and Aftermath

Dramatic Censorship in the 19th Century

Solutions for a Threatened Planet

Fun with Chemistry

The Sweet Smell of Clean Chemistry

The British Library

Changing the Way we see News

Psychological Profiling

What Henslow taught Darwin

Annual Reports








Fun with Chemistry


The British Library




Annual Reports


VOLUME 100 • DECEMBER 2006

CONTENTS

A PHILOSOPHY FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYPresidential Address by Dr Michael Crowe ........................................................................ 2

HENRY VIII & THE REINVENTION OF EARLY-MODERN LITERATUREProfessor Greg Walker ........................................................................................................ 8

SHIPMAN - (THE TRIAL), THE INQUIRY AND THE AFTERMATHProfessor Richard Baker.................................................................................................... 10

NAUGHTY BUT NICE: DRAMATIC CENSORSHIP IN THE 19TH CENTURY The Venerable Dr. T. Hughie Jones.................................................................................... 14

SURVIVING ARMAGGEDON: SOLUTIONS FOR A THREATENED PLANET Professor Bill McGuire...................................................................................................... 25

FUN WITH CHEMISTRYDr Alan G. Osborne ......................................................................................................... 29

THE SWEET SMELL OF CLEAN CHEMISTRYProfessor Andrew Abbott .................................................................................................. 30

MYTHS AND REALITY IN PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILINGDr Julian Boon.................................................................................................................. 32

THE BRITISH LIBRARYDr John Ashworth ............................................................................................................. 33

THE INTERNET: CHANGING THE WAY WE SEE NEWS

Mr Keith Perch.................................................................................................................. 33

THE ORIGIN OF THE ‘ORIGIN’: WHAT HENSLOW TAUGHT DARWIN.Prof J S Parker ................................................................................................................... 38

PROGRAMME AND ANNUAL REPORTS ......................................................................... 41

Cover picture: Aftermath of the Tsunami, Boxing Day 2004 (cf. Professor McGuire Lecture)

Colour versions of this picture and the other illustrations in this Volume are available in theonline edition of these Transactions (www.leicesterlitandphil.org.uk)

© Copyright 2006 The Leicester Literary & Philosophical Society,

c/o Leicester Museum, New Walk,

Leicester, LE1 7EA

ISSN 0141 3511

2 Volume 100 • 2006

Transactions of the Leicester Literary & Philosophical Society.

I have been thinking of writing a paper on Dr Shaw'schallenge since 1952 when suddenly our family lifewas blown apart by the sudden death of my elderbrother in a flying accident. He was 19. He was asuperb chap, handsome, intelligent, full of energy,great sense of humour, excellent artist - yet he wasnever able to achieve his full potential. After hisdeath, the family gathered at home in a state of shockand disbelief. I was 16, my younger brother 14. Whatwas the meaning of existence? Life seemed so unfair.The same feeling of the unfairness, of being cut downin one's prime, relates to the thousands of young menand women who have been killed fighting in the warsfor their country. The only rational explanationseemed to be that there could be some sort of lifeafter death and even reincarnation so that souls couldhave more than one chance to prove themselves.

These were views that very few people took seriouslyin those days which is why I have taken so long to getround to discussing them.

A major change in society is the attitude towardsdying. Perhaps because there was so little anyonecould do in the final stage of life, it was the norm forpeople to die at home. Pneumonia was the old man'sfriend; a relatively painless deterioration into comaand then the end of life. Now it seems that mostpeople expect every possible technique to bedeployed to keep the individual alive for as long aspossible even when their quality of life is close tozero.

Last year, among many excellent lectures to theSociety, we had two quite exceptional presentationsdealing with subjects at the opposite ends of thespectrum of knowledge with regard to time andspace. One on the mind-blowing vastness of theUniverse from the presumed big bang and on into thefuture; the other on the almost impossibly smallnanotechnology showing us how the basic structureof muscle cells work, using techniques giving farmore detail than that possible with an electronmicroscope.

An article in the Daily Telegraph of July 20 2005 takesus even further, with scientists in Birminghammanaging to remove a single atom of mattermeasuring about a tenth of a millionth of a millimetreacross.

Both those lectures were descriptions of the verylatest information from the cutting edge of research,but neither was able to answer the questions of howand why?

The more we try to understand how plants andanimals originated, the more complex the picturebecomes. It is still almost unbelievable that each oneof us started from the fertilisation of a minute egg bythe one lucky sperm among many thousands of othersswimming alongside which managed to hit the secretportal leading to the ovum's nucleus. Both cells arefar smaller than the head of a pin.

A PHILOSOPHY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Presidential Address by

Dr Michael G F CroweDelivered on 3 October 2005

The Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society was founded in 1835 by Dr George Shaw and his friend AlfredPaget. The population of Leicester at the time was 45,000; it was 30 years after the battle of Trafalgar and 6years before the railway line to London was built. Dr Shaw's first address was on “Life and Mind”. In 1884,Dr Shaw was elected President again for the 50th anniversary of the Society. He gave a masterly treatise andobserved of Charles Darwin, whose book “On the origin of species by means of natural selection “had beenpublished in 1859, “assuming the doctrine of evolution to be true, there is still a mystery in the origins of lifeand of living types. Darwinism may be the chief or main agent in developing life, but the inherent nature oflife is still unknown neither is it known how consciousness became associated with living matter.”

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Once that fertilised ovum starts to divide to formmore cells, usually the embryo develops into onehuman being. Complications arise in about 10% ofcases and these are rejected by spontaneousabortion. A number develop into identical twins oreven triplets. Others for a variety of reasons fail todevelop normally which is why we see defects suchas cleft palate; extra digits on fingers or toes; holes inthe heart such as in Fallot's Tetralogy etc.

Really detailed studies of human development arebeing done by Dr Zernicka-Goetz's team at theGordon Institute in Cambridge [Daily Telegraph08.06.05]. Curiously she feels that once the embryohas developed into a 100 cell size, you end up witha “person.”

Nobody quite knows how that first cell isprogrammed to change into the millions of differentspecialised cells that make up our bodies.

During the early stages of development, the embryois programmed to pass through various phases thatreflect our evolutionary path towards the final design.There are identifiable fishlike gill precursors thatsubsequently change form to for instance becomethyroid glands.

The process in simplistic terms may be likened to thecreation of a motor car. Once the production line hasbeen started, all the essential components aresequentially created based on the computerisedblueprint of the designer - the equivalent of our DNA.The engine is bonded with the chassis; body workattached; wheels bolted on and the whole looksincreasingly like a motor car - but, until it gets to theend of the assembly line, it is not capable of passingits quality control, health and safety checks. Eventhen, the car cannot move out of the womb of thefactory, so to speak, until a driver gets in; switches onthe engine; presses the accelerator and starts to steerthe car out along the road ahead.

I use this analogy deliberately because I suggest toyou that the car and driver may have a similarrelationship to our own body and soul.

The Oxford Dictionary definition of a soul is “theprinciple of thought and action in man, commonlyregarded as an entity distinct from the body. The

spiritual part of man in contrast to the purelyphysical.”

Many people feel that there is no such thing as a soul,that at death life as we understand it ends and thatthere is no possibility of any other existence. Dust todust, ashes to ashes.

Just for this evening, let me ask you to put aside thatpoint of view and consider a number of examples ofexperiences that do not fit comfortably with thephilosophy of no after life.

Increasingly, society is choosing cremation to copewith the very real problem of the bodies of the dead.

Up until quite recently, most people have chosen tobe buried which is in keeping with the traditionalprospect of resurrection.

What happens at the moment of death? As a GP Ihave been present at a large number of deaths. It isalways an emotionally charged situation andphysicians are expected to do their dispassionate bestfor the patient.

60 years ago there was no attempt at resuscitation. InLife Saving Training we were taught the HolgerNeilsen technique which expanded the lungs a bitbut was pretty useless. Now external cardiac massageplus mouth to mouth resuscitation have become thenorm - techniques that anyone can use with successuntil a defibrillator is available to shock the heartback into a normal rhythm.

Some of the saddest deaths that I have been called torelate to sudden collapses out of doors where no onepresent knew what to do. The chance of saving a lifemight be said to have been squandered because ofignorance.

The moment of death nearly always takes one bysurprise. One minute the person is struggling to keepalive, the next life has gone and we observe thechange from warm breathing human being to acooling, pale, motionless body. There is often a reflexgasp for breath even after the heart has stopped, butthe whole impression is that the person has come toa halt in the same way that a car becomes lifelesswhen you switch off the engine.

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If you accept the possibility of body and soul or spirit,then, I put it to you, that then is at the moment thatthe soul leaves the body and passes on to some otherexistence.

An increasing number of people have reported “outof body experiences”. Lord Robert Winston in hisrecent book “The human mind and how to make themost of it” states that you can stimulate one part ofthe brain in a patient and they will report an out ofbody experience. It is a fascinating book and as ascientist, he limits his explanation to the anatomy andthe physiology; what can be measured in time andspace, At no time does he indicate that there is a soulor spirit that can be conscious of that “out of body”sensation.

However there is one exception where he quotesfrom Schachter who studied religious hermits whospeak of “the Master Soul whipping Brother Ass, thebody, into obedience.”

If you think of a computer, there are many parallelswith the brain, but in each case some unique force,spirit, soul, self, person has to decide when to switchon the computer; what questions to ask and whichsearch programme to use. A person can be definedas the combination of body and soul; horse and rider;car and driver. Imagine a puppet on strings, thepuppet master controls the position and movementand supplies the voice and story lines. If you havefollowed me this far then I congratulate you. You cansee how difficult it is to talk about this whole area oflife.

A further example of how like our brains are tocomputers can be seen in how our eyes work. Thebasic design is very similar to a digital camera, agadget that nearly everyone seems to have these days.Basically each has a lens to focus the view upsidedown onto the back of the camera or eye. The lenscan be focused; brightness controlled by the iris; lensprotected by eye lids or lens cap and mostimportantly, the picture recorded on hundreds ofthousands of tiny photosensitive sensors called rodsand cones in our eyes; pixels in the camera ormemory chip and then stored at the back of ourbrains. The digital camera can only capture one briefmoment at a time, but our own vision and memorycombination can recall in amazing detail the movingscenes before us. In the computer storage is on a hard

drive or a disc; does the back of brain have a similarsystem? How does it work?

You can be very aware of your body even withoutsight. Just for a moment let me ask you to stretch outyour arms in front of you then shut your eyes, thenbring the end of your right index finger quickly downto touch the end of your nose. Now open your eyes,how many of you scored a direct hit? The instructionto move your finger was the result of your ownunique self or spirit initiating that movement usingthe information gathered by your positional sense, orproprioception.

To come back to my main theme, I suggest to you thatthere is a strong possibility of the essential you or soulleaving the body at death to go on to somewhere inthe supernatural. When someone leaves on a journey,you can only watch them until they pass out of sight,you have no idea what lies ahead for them. I have noidea what happens next; or what our eventualdestination may be.

I have no concept of God despite extensive readingand debate and a discussion on these issues isbeyond the scope of this talk.

The next question must be when does the spirit orsoul arrive in the body? It is a matter of opinion as towhether the soul has had previous lives or not. Somepeople will say the soul arrives at conception whenthe egg is fertilised; others when a viable baby isborn, that is, one that breathes at birth and is notstillborn. Others again feel it is only when the baby'sbrain function is mature enough.

If the soul arrives at conception, then there are anumber of difficult problems to resolve. Does afertilised egg that subsequently develops into twinshave a divided soul or do two arrive? The mostfamous Siamese conjoined twins had very differentpersonalities and went on to have families bydifferent wives.

Does a foetus have a soul that is aborted or held incold storage for possible IVF [in vitro fertilisation] orallowed to develop in the laboratory to a stage whereparts of the foetus can be used for research? Does ababy that is stillborn have a soul, what about clonedbabies?

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Not many people seem to have considered theseproblems. Society as a whole has accepted areduction from the old upper limit for therapeuticabortions from 28 weeks to 24 and now there is amove to bring it down to 22 weeks or less. Thissuggests that most people accept the point of viabilityor survivability as being the critical time when afoetus becomes a person, not the 100 cell stagementioned before.

The birth of a baby is always a thrilling, memorableand dangerous time. Will the baby breathe as itemerges from a fluid environment into the air? Sadlyour first grandson was a stillbirth. The majority of thepeople I have asked believe that the soul enters andtakes control of the body when a living baby is born.Dr Shaw's consciousness becoming associated withliving matter to become a “person”.

Paul Broks in the Health and Happiness Section ofthe Times on 20th September reaches a similarconclusion: “by 23 weeks, the foetus possesses aviable nervous system. Everything is in place for theemergence of a thinking, conscious human being.But there is no capacity for self awareness. Thehardware is functional but the requisite software hasyet to be installed.”

It follows that we should not be too upset if thepotential human being dies before birth or evenshortly after if at birth the baby is too immature to livelong. Our Victorian ancestors were quite used tobabies dying young, often calling the next baby bythe same name as the one that had recently died.

We have been lucky enough to have three sons. If yousaw photographs of them each aged three, you wouldbe hard put to tell them apart, that is the result of thealmost identical blueprint from our genes, but each ofthose boys has a unique and very differentpersonality. Their souls, living in almost identicalbodies, have made very different life pathwaydecisions. Our souls all come into this world aloneand leave alone.

What evidence is there that there is another form ofexistence either in this life and, or after death?

I am not allowed to go into any detailed religiousanalysis, but it is interesting that almost all religionshave a concept that there is a life after death.

The Egyptian pharaohs believed in an after life anddeveloped mummification and elaborate tombs filledwith artefacts to help them in the next world.

Socrates is quoted as saying “I am confident that theretruly is such a thing as living again - that the livingspring from the dead and that the souls of the deadare in existence.”

Inexplicable experiences

Over the years I have been collecting first handaccounts of the inexplicable things that havehappened to ordinary sensible people like you andme. They each give glimpse into another realm ofexistence - a hint of there being more to come afterdeath. These episodes come under a large number ofheadings and I will only have time to touch on a fewtonight.

• Conviction that you have been to certain placebefore.

• Out of body experiences

• Premonition when you see an event some timebefore it actually happens.

• Telepathy.

• Predestination.

• Statistically almost impossible coincidences.

• Dreams.

• Unexplained smells associated with past events orpeople.

• Visitations from people who have died.

• Messages via mediums.

• Poltergeists and ghosts..

• Guardian Angel syndrome.

• UFOs

Smell

My own most extraordinary episode relates to smell.I was staying with my wife at her parents' house inDevon in about 1965 at a time when her grandfatherwas dying in hospital. Audrey asked me to comeupstairs to the bedroom that he had been occupying.On the stairs I seemed to be enveloped in an invisiblecloud of old fashioned ladies perfume. I remarked onthis and found that both Audrey and her mother hadnoted the same smell and they identified it as the

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normal perfume used by the grand mother who hadpredeceased her husband. It did not last long, but weall smelt it, without prompting, and could not findany rational explanation for it.

Dreams

How many of you have noted down the details ofyour dreams when you have fully woken up? I havebeen taking a careful note over the last year, oftenjotting a description down in the middle of the nightwhile I can still remember the detail. They are alwaysin full colour and sound. The story lines arebelievable, in fact it is only after one is fully awakethat one realises that it was a dream. They rarelyrelate to a scenario that I might have experiencedbefore and remembered, for example:-

One dream related to a brilliant virtuoso performanceby a xylophone player with stereophonic sound andaudience applause at the end; another watching twomen walking across the sand dunes of a golf coursecarrying a small wooden coffin; another attending achildren's party in a French restaurant with the babiesin prams and the band of three in blue and golduniforms; another looking closely at a futuristicmultiple media control device unlike anything I hadseen before or since.

Where did these “visions”, dreams or thoughts comefrom? None seemed to be variations of my ownmemory bank. Were they put into my mind bysomething outside myself. I do not need to remindthis audience how often dreams and theirinterpretations feature in the Bible.

Song writers have occasionally experienced asituation where a new song has come fully fashionedinto their minds. What is the explanation for Mozart'samazing talent as a young boy?

Memory

How is it that a network of brain cells can retrieveitems of information from as far back as ourchildhood? Brain cells are believed to be the same aswe had at birth but where can they store the hugevolume of information that we are able to recall andhow? It is understandable that many of those braincells cease to function in old age and that we becomeprone to mental breakdowns. The comparison with

the computer again seems relevant certainly mycomputer is prone to viruses and loss of memory.

These examples suggest to me that there is anotheraspect of existence besides the one we all take forgranted in terms of time and space. They give usglimpses into something “supernatural”.

Those who still doubt that this could be so, may liketo ponder the gist of a talk given at evening assemblyat school in about 1954.

The speaker got us to imagine that we were fishswimming off the pier at Yarmouth. As fish who couldonly experience living in water, we could have noidea that there were people walking about on the piernearby, breathing air and eating crab sandwiches.And yet you and I know that this really does happen.

The moral was for us to keep an open mind about ourfutures.

Destiny

I have often felt destined to be at a certain place at acertain time to have the opportunity to do or saysomething significant.

I have been active in Medicopolitics since 1969 andhave helped move ideas and policy forward forinstance in:-

The 1974 BMA Division campaign to persuade aLabour Govt to give Leicestershire its fair share ofNHS resources.

HIV testing for pregnant women;

adding ovary donation to the list on the donor card;

Penalties for inappropriate doctor patientrelationships;

In July 2005 we sent the following motion up to theBMA's Annual Meeting: - “that this Meeting proposesthat it become a right for every adult human being,when in extremis, to have access to a sociallyacceptable, dignified means of ending their own life.”

The Meeting in fact decided that it was up to societyand the government to decide on end of life issues.

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This was a change from the previous policy of fierceopposition to physician-assisted deaths. Interestingly,this decision was reversed in this year’s Meeting inBelfast.

A recent opinion poll in the Daily Telegraph showedthat 87% of the sample population agreed with thestatement that “people who were terminally ill shouldhave the right to decide when they want to die and toask for medical assistance to help them if they areunable to end their own lives.”

Captain Laurence Oates on Scott's 1912 Antarcticexpedition to the South Pole is a hero of mine. Inorder to give his companions a greater chance ofsurvival he walked out into a blizzard to die saying “Iam just going outside and may be gone some time.”.I wonder how many of us would have had thecourage to do that?

To summarise this version of a 21st CenturyPhilosophy, the canvas I have tried to paint for you inliterary terms is unfinished and is very much in thestyle of an impressionist.

The picture that I wanted to share with you is that Ithink that our unique souls take over control of ournew bodies on the birth of a viable baby. That we aregiven the chance to make the most or worst of ouropportunities during life on earth and that our soulsleave our bodies at death and move on to some otherspiritual existence taking with them that lifetime'sexperiences.

Conclusion

In conclusion, here are a few practical suggestionsbased on this Philosophy.

Make a “Living Will” while you are still mentallycompetent to do so, so that when you becomedoubly incontinent and mental senility is overtakingyou, your loved ones can know how you would wishto be treated with regard to heroic resuscitation -drips; tracheotomies; peg feeding or other existenceprolonging procedures. You can obtain forms fromthe Voluntary Euthanasia Society or the TerenceHiggins Trust.

Sign a donor card or Email your wish to donate yourorgans to the central Register. The Government isabout to propose changes in the Human Tissue Act toallow more organ transplants to take place.

Do a First Aid Course or at least read the Manual.

Make a decision about cremation or burial and letyour next of kin know.

The latest eco-friendly, economical method beingdeveloped in Sweden that is replacing cremation is tohave the body freeze dried then powdered and madeinto tree mulch. [Daily Telegraph 28.09.05.]

Update your own will - too many people die intestateor leaving cash bequests that have been overtaken byinflation.

None of what I have said should conflict with yourpresent religious beliefs - but I hope that I have givenyou some food for thought about the relationshipbetween body and soul; consciousness and livingmatter.

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In the 1530s many of the assumptions about thenature and purpose of public literature that hadunderpinned the work of late-medieval poets,playwrights and prose-writers broke down under thepressure of political events. As King Henry set hisgovernment on a course of confrontation with Rome,the English Church, and with conservative forces inthe kingdom as a whole, antagonistic social energiespreviously kept in check were given newfoundfreedom, prompting contemporary observers to talkof new and terrifying social divisions: of a furiousschism loose in the realm. And the King, rather thanlistening to those people who were horrified by thesedevelopments, intimidated, imprisoned, or executedhis critics in steadily increasing numbers, whilelegislation made even the use of words such as'tyrant' and 'schismatic' treasonable. Writers wereconsequently faced with a stark choice. They couldeither promote the King's divorce and Reformation(or, if that was repugnant to them, cease writingaltogether), or they could find new ways to write andnew forms in which to address the situation. Someundoubtedly chose the first course. But others tried toturn literary creativity to new uses, or to new formsthat made the old uses effective again. From a culturein which the natural assumption was that all writing

was in one way or another writing for the King,whether for his own consumption or to educate hissubjects in his name, England moved in the space oftwo decades to a point where the most urgent publicliterature was no longer 'royalist' in any obvioussense. By the early 1540s the natural supposition of aThomas Wyatt, a Henry Howard, Earl Surrey, or anevangelical like the dramatist and prose-writer JohnBale, was that the sort of directly political literaturethey were creating was not - and indeed should notbe - for the King. Theirs was writing about the King,despite him, and in many ways against him. Englandwas learning the art of writing under tyranny.

The experience of living and writing under tyrannyprompted men such as Thomas More, Thomas Elyot,Bale, Wyatt, and Surrey to explore alternative formsand modes of writing. The speculum principis ('mirrorfor the prince'), the panegyric, and the exemplaryallegorical narrative gave way to the satire, the lyric,and the biblical paraphrase as the most vital literaryforms, and the public, petitionary stancescharacteristic of the late medieval poet were replacedby the more inward-looking, self-generating posesnow seen as characteristic of 'Renaissanceindividualism'.

HENRY VIII & THE REINVENTION OFEARLY-MODERN LITERATURE

Professor Greg Walker, Professor of Early-Modern literature,University of Leicester.

Lecture Delivered on 17 October 2005

Greg Walker's lecture, based upon the findings of his forthcoming book Writing Under Tyranny: EnglishLiterature and the Henrician Reformation, argued that 'the long 1530s' from the summoning of theReformation Parliament in 1529 to Henry VIII's death in 1547, witnessed a revolution in English literaryculture, a radical rethinking of the forms and ends of vernacular poetry, drama, and prose in response to theunprecedented demands placed upon writers by the King's divorce, the Royal Supremacy and their aftermath.What, he asked, did court writers do when faced with the increasingly oppressive demands of their king? Ina culture in which the conventional course for an author wishing to protest about the state of the nation wasto offer supplication or counsel to the king, how did such men react to the realisation that Henry VIII was notsimply unsympathetic to such complaints but actually the source of the problem? In the course of theHenrician Reformation, Walker suggested, a confident, seemingly well-established, literate community wasforced to reassess fundamental assumptions about its own position. Writers had to invent - or rediscover - newways of writing about politics and public life, and in so doing reinvented themselves and the role of the authorin English culture. The result was the birth of many of the forms and features of writing - and of poetry inparticular - that are now perceived as central to the English literary tradition.

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Drawing his examples primarily from the work ofWyatt and Surrey, but referring also to that of Elyotand More, Professor Walker's lecture stressed thecrucial importance of the 'long 1530s' to thesubsequent development of English poetry inparticular. The sonnet, the strambotto, the metricalpsalm and the verse satire, blank verse, terza andottava rima, and Poulter's Measure, were all invented,rediscovered, or imported into English, developedand popularised in the short intense period ofHenry's Reformation, as poets sought ways of writingof and for 'this realm of England' that did notnecessitate and presuppose a sympathetic royalreader. So too was that 'inwardness' seen as soaxiomatic a part of the Renaissance sensibility forgedfrom the pressures of living through Henry'sSupremacy. Far from being a joyful embracing ofRenaissance optimism about the infinite potential ofhumankind, Wyatt and Surrey's adoption of thisdistinct subjectivity was an anxious politicalexpedient. It was an expression of what Colin Burrowhas called their sense of 'being at odds with the restof the world' (and, we might add, of not knowingquite how to express and respond to that experience).Political necessity was the mother of their prolificliterary invention.

To identify the Henrician period as a crucial period inEnglish literary history is not in itself new. The literaryhistorian George Puttenham, writing in the reign ofHenry's daughter Elizabeth I, famously singled outthe innovations of Wyatt and Surrey as the means bywhich the spirit of the Continental Renaissance wasimported into England, and by which English poetrywas reborn. 'In the latter end of [Henry's]…reign', heclaimed, there sprang up a new company of courtlymakers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt th'elder andHenry, Earl of Surrey were the two chieftains, who,having travailed into Italy and there tasted the sweetand stately measures and style of the ItalianPoesy…greatly polished our rude and homelymanner of vulgar Poesy.

In Puttenham's view, it was the Italianate innovationslearned chiefly from the Petrarchan tradition thatWyatt and Surrey brought home from Italy that set theagenda for all future English poetry. What ProfessorWalker's lecture argued was that Wyatt and Surreyrediscovered the inwardness of Petrarchan lyricismand gave it a new spirit and function in England, notbecause they had travelled to Italy and imbibed it ad

fontes, but precisely because they had stayed athome. Surrey never visited Italy, and Wyatt did soonly once. Each absorbed his Petrarchanism atsecond hand, largely through French intermediariesand the earlier experiments of Chaucer. The impetusfor their innovations came from the fact that theywere Englishmen, subjects of Henry VIII, andsubjected to the events of the 1530s. They developedthe characteristic 'Renaissance' lyrical voice soamenable to later generations in reaction to the socialand cultural pressures of the Supremacy andReformation.

10 Volume 100 • 2006


In Professor Baker's lecture he looked at the Inquiryand the aftermath. He began by comparing MoriPolls between 1983 and 2005 which estimated thegeneral trust the public had in doctors, professors,politicians and the police. These polls demonstratedthat, on a 0 -100 scale, not only were doctors themost trusted at around 82-93, but they weresignificantly more trusted than Professors at 70-80,politicians at 57-64 and the police at 46-55. Afterconducting a survey, another market researchcompany had concluded that the person regarded asmost trustworthy by people in Britain was a generalpractitioner (the characteristics of being female, abrunette, wearing spectacles and having a Yorkshireaccent increased perceptions of trustworthiness).

In setting up the Public Inquiry Professor Bakerexplained that Dame Janet Smith would preside overa process involving witnesses providing statementsand being subject to questioning and seminars whichwould incorporate presentations and focuseddiscussion. The Inquiry would be open to the publicand there would also be a videotape of itsproceedings and a web site. The terms of referencewere in three phases:

1. The inquiry would consider the extent ofShipman's unlawful activities; how many patientswere killed by him, the means he used and theperiod over which they took place.

2. It would examine the actions of statutory bodiesand responsible individuals involved in theinvestigation of deaths of Shipman's patients. Andwould also look at the performance of bodies withresponsibility for monitoring primary care,including the use of controlled drugs.

3. It would consider what steps should be taken toprotect patients in the future.

The Inquiry's deliberations and recommendationswere published in a series of reports between July2002 and January 2005. The first covered deaths ingeneral practice, the second the police investigation,others covered death certification, the regulation ofcontrolled drugs, the handling of complaints againstgeneral practitioners and, lastly, the deaths ofShipman's patients at Pontefract hospital and somecases from his time at Hyde which the Inquirybecame aware of after the publication of the firstreport.

Concerning issues surrounding controlled drugs, theInquiry recommended that a medical practitionershould in future be entitled to prescribe such drugsfor the purposes of 'actual clinical practice' in whichhe or she is engaged but, where a need was notobvious, justification should be required whenapplying for a special controlled drug prescriptionpad. It should also be a criminal offence for a doctorto prescribe such drugs for his or her own use and it

SHIPMAN: (THE TRIAL),THE INQUIRY AND THE AFTERMATH

Professor Richard Baker, Department of Health Sciences,University of Leicester

Lecture delivered on 7 November 2005

Following his arrest in August 1998, the trial of Harold Shipman for the murder of 15 patients by lethalinjection began on the 11th October 1999 at Preston Crown Court. The judge handed out 15 life sentencesand told Shipman that he would recommend to the Home Secretary that he never be released. Shipman begana life sentence at Frankland Jail, Co Durham in January 2000. Professor Richard Baker carried out a clinicalAudit for the Department of Health in which he concluded that Shipman had been responsible for the deathof at least 236 patients, mostly elderly women who died in their homes. In 2002 a public inquiry, chaired byDame Janet Smith, opened in Manchester. This was given the task of looking at what went wrong and wasasked to come up with recommendations about changes that needed to be made. On Tuesday the 13thJanuary 2004, Shipman died after being found hanging in his cell in Wakefield Prison.

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should be unacceptable for a general practitioner(GP) to prescribe such drugs for an immediate familymember. Where such prescribing was made, it shouldbe declared on the prescription that the recipient wasa family member. It was also recommended that theGeneral Medical Council (GMC) should make it clearthat it would be regarded as professional misconductif a doctor prescribed controlled drugs to anyone withwhom there was no professional relationship, andthat any practitioner convicted or cautioned inconnection with a controlled drug offence should beunder a professional duty to report this to the GMCwho should report the facts and any action it hadtaken to the practitioner's employer or primary caretrust (PCT). The Inquiry also recommended that theGovernment should commission an independentreview and audit of the way in which the GMC andPCTs restrict the rights of practitioners guilty of drugoffences and ensure that those who need to know,such as pharmacists, are informed.

New procedures over the dispensing of controlleddrugs were also suggested. The pharmacist shouldknow the name and address of the collector, recordtheir form of identification, and sign the back of theprescription. If identification was not supplied thepharmacist should have the discretion to withholdthe drugs. The Controlled Drugs Records ofpharmacists should be kept for 7-10 years (rather than2) and electronic records should be permitted.Patients and their representatives should also beformally advised to return unused drugs to thepharmacy. All these changes would lead to a moresecure audit trail for controlled drugs, enabling drugsto be tracked from being prescribed and dispensed toeventual use or disposal. It would then be much moredifficult for the rare, criminal health professional todivert these drugs for illicit use.

The Inquiry recommended significant changes indeath certification, in particular that there should bea single, two form, system of death certificationapplicable to all deaths whether the death is followedby burial or cremation. Form1 would confirm death.Form 2, completed by the doctor who had treated theperson during the last illness or the GP, wouldsummarise the deceased recent medical history andwould provide an option to opine as to the cause ofdeath. A major reform of the Coronial Service wasalso suggested. The Service, independent ofGovernment and other sectional interests, would take

responsibility for certification of death and whetherfurther investigation was necessary and be the focusfor all post-death procedures. Form 2 would bereviewed by a coroner's investigator afterconsultation with the deceased's family. Medical orjudicial coroners would provide a second tier ofinvestigation and monitoring, review, audit (includingrandom checks) and education in regard to thesematters. In general, where a medical or judicialcoroner was involved he or she would seek toestablish the cause of all deaths with a high degree ofconfidence. These new arrangements would improvesurveillance of cause of death and help ensure thatproper investigations are conducted if there is anydoubt about the true cause of death.

The handling of complaints was also the subject of ahost of recommendations. There should be a 'singleportal by which complaints and concerns could bedirected or redirected to the appropriate quarter. Allcomplaints should be reported to the PCT and wouldbe subjected to an assessment by an appropriatelytrained member of the PCT’s staff (the first 'triage')who should try to assess whether the complaint arisesfrom a purely private grievance or raises clinicalgovernance issues. Where a governance complaintarose, this should be referred to a second 'triage'involving two or three people who would investigatewhether it should be referred to the police, the GMCor the National Clinical Assessment Authority. Wherethere was an inconclusive report the case should bereferred to the Healthcare Commission. Therequirement was that objective standards by whichcomplaints could be judged should be established.These arrangements would enhance the powers ofPCTs, and provide a unified record of complaints(PCT, GMC) which could be monitored.

In the aftermath of the Inquiry the GMC, which hadbeen criticised for 'looking after its own,' announcedin March 2005 a review of issues surroundingrevalidation, medical regulation and the constitutionof the GMC. This was to include a new system ofrevalidation of doctors, speeding up the complaintsprocess, and ensuring there were 14 lay people onthe Council's 35 member governing body. However,this revalidation as planned by the GMC was not inaccordance with the 2002 amendments to the 1983Medical Act (an assessment of fitness to practice),appraisal generally did not constitute an assessmentof performance and the new procedures appeared to

12 Volume 100 • 2006


put expediency before principle. Commentary in thepress on elements of the GMC's plans was critical.Dame Janet Smith was also not happy with progress.She commented: re. Paragraph 26.177 (revalidation),'It does now appear clear that it is the intention ofboth the GMC and the DoH that revalidation will notcomprise an evaluation of the doctor's fitness topractise. As I have said, appraisal as currently carriedout for GPs cannot provide such anevaluation,'……..re. Paragraph 26.205 (revalidation),'the public cannot properly have confidence that adoctor who has been revalidated is up to date and fitto practise'. On another occasion, revalidation wascompared with the MOT test for vehicles. Paragraph26.185 (revalidation), 'The MOT vehicle test is anobjective test to the roadworthiness of an individualvehicle. ……. The only threshold by which the doctorcan ultimately fail to be revalidated is, as I have saidabove, a very low one indeed. The point is that formost doctors the process is not a test at all and bearsno resemblance to the MOT vehicle test.' Paragraph25.357 (revalidation), 'The change of direction wasnot slight; nor could it be described as a refinementof the former proposals. In my view, that change indirection was substantial and it was made for thereasons of expediency and not for reasons ofprinciple.' Paragraph 26.67 (revalidation-the April2003 scheme), 'What seems clear is that there was tobe no routine lay involvement in the decisionwhether to revalidate an individual doctor. In short,there has been a retreat from the earlier commitmentto active lay involvement in the process.' Paragraph25.357 (the new Fitness to Practise procedures), 'Theresult of all the changes to the draft Rules is that thenew procedures are much like the curate's egg: theyare good in parts and not good in others. …. Theprocess of change has been tortuous and piecemeal.It is discouraging, as it indicates to me that, even now,at the start of a new era, there is no real commitmentto the underlying principles of good regulation. Inshort, I am not convinced that the leopard haschanged its spots or ever will.' Paragraph 19.259(operation of old fitness to practise procedures),'thereseems to have been an ethos of early closure, whichwas, in my view, indicative of an unwillingness togive complaints against doctors the considerationthat they deserve. The balance between protectingpatients and being fair to doctors was weightedtowards the interests of doctors. In my view, so longas members of the GMC are elected by theprofession, there will always be a danger that their

'judicial' decisions will be subconsciously biasedtowards the interests of their electorate.' The questionfor doctors was: how to respond to the charge ofexpediency before principle?

The principle is well established: 'As a doctor youmust make the care of your patient your firstconcern' [The duties of a doctor. GMC, 1995].Indeed, patient-centred professionalism, a UK, USand Canadian collaboration, is now well embeddedin the health care professions in these countries andincorporates education and training and sharedregulation rather than self regulation. However asFriedson pointed out in 2001, 'When they (theprofessions) do defend themselves they rely primarilyon a rhetoric of good intentions which is belied bythe patently self-interested character of many of theiractivities'. What they almost never do is spell out theprinciples underlying the institutions that organiseand support the way they do their work and takeactive responsibility for their organisation.' Or as GB Shaw put it 'All professions are a conspiracy againstthe laity' and so Professionalism needs reviewing. Itmust be based on moral principles. There is a list ofdesirable values but one must ask 'are they lived byevery day, either by the individual professional or theorganisations of professionals that are responsible formaintaining professionalism?'

The phenomenon of expediency before principle isnot confined just to the GMC, it is a characteristic ofthe professions that needs continuous reform andpolitics. However in the book The Doctors' Tale,Professionalism and Public Trust by Donald Irvine,immediate past President of the GMC, he wrote: 'I feltat the time that (the Health Secretary whocommissioned the Inquiry) Alan Milburn's approachwas all part of a wider political game. This involvedthe government's broader thinking about professionalregulation, about getting more control over generalpractice, about cutting the over-mighty doctors downto size and shifting the spotlight away from the NHS'srole in the Shipman affair.'

In Eliot Freidson's book , Professionalism Reborn,Chapter 11, The Centrality of Professionalism toHealth Care he writes:-….'a desirable healthcaresystem must be based on trust in professional workerswho are free to exercise discretionary judgement.' So,how could we take this forward, using the GMC as anexample, in such a way as to ensure professionalism

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that fully deserves public trust and enablesprofessionals to exercise discretionary judgement inpatients' best interests? The foundation would be astrengthened compact between the GMC (theprofession) and this public. To achieve this, one couldappoint a citizens' jury or panel that couldpronounce on key policy decisions. Their debatescould be published. The GMC could retain the rightto overrule the jury, but it would have to explain itsdecisions in full. This shared regulation would haveexplicit standards designed to improve consistencyand fairness and improve public confidence.

The following tables show the kind of criteria andactions that might be established and used.Standard/guideline development methods could bedevised within NICE via a Standards DevelopmentGroup that could document principles, search forevidence, consult stakeholders and produceconsensus methods which could be piloted and

updated at appropriate intervals. The stakeholderscould consist of patient groups and these could beapproached formally by way of surveys, focus groupsor as citizens' panels. One could by such meansproduce a compact for patient-centredprofessionalism. The result would be explicitstandards governing professional practise.

In summary Professor Baker said that he hoped hehad shown how the Inquiry had through its processand recommendations, paved a way towards arevised professionalism, perhaps not only for doctorsbut for other professionals too.

Principle before Expediency was the key toProfessionalism in the 21st century.

ACCEPTABLEPRACTICE

UNACCEPTABLEPRACTICE

SERIOUSLY UNACCEPTABLEPRACTICE

CRITERIA The doctor consistentlyassesses the need for promptaction, and respondsaccordingly

The doctor occasionally fails toassess the need for promptaction, and/or fails to takeprompt action when this isindicated

The doctor consistentlydisregards the duty to assessthe need for prompt actionand/or fails to take promptaction when necessary

ACTION None assess competence, re-trainingas required

Fitness to practise should beconsidered

ACCEPTABLEPRACTICE

UNACCEPTABLEPRACTICE

SERIOUSLY UNACCEPTABLEPRACTICE

CRITERIA The doctor does not abusedrugs

The doctor has dishonestlyobtained drugs for abuse bywriting prescriptions in thename of a patient, but used thedrug personally.

ACTION None Full investigation and hearingby fitness to practise panel,leading to erasure

Health procedures vs. Fitness to practise

14 Volume 100 • 2006


In introducing the theme of censorship in the theatrein 1832, it will suffice, before this audience, to goback in time as far as 1737, when an act was passed8

regulating theatres. The act, resulting indirectly fromWalpole's reaction to Gay's 'Beggar's Opera',produced some nine years earlier, and directly fromanother political satire, 'The Golden Rump', offeredfor Walpole's inspection in 1737, attempted to securethe safety of ministers of the Crown and their likefrom such productions. Lords Chamberlain and theirminions were to protest in the following century(perhaps too much for conviction) that 'Walpole'sAct' gave them no powers which they, or theirpredecessors had not already enjoyed, but there is nodoubt that the Act, by regularising and defining thosepowers, gave practical impetus and incentive to theirenforcement which was to last for more than twocenturies, and the impact of which is with us still.

By the act there was created an 'Examiner of Plays',and a Deputy Examiner, whose task was to carry outthe duties assigned to the Lord Chamberlain. It isclear from testimony in the four reports underconsideration tonight that other officials of the LordChamberlain's staff were also involved in themechanics of the business. The duties of the Lord

Chamberlain in this context were twofold: to licensebuildings in a changing geographical area of Londonand its environs (which for the greater part of thenineteenth century was co-terminous with themetropolitan jurisdiction) in which drama could belegitimately performed, hence the widespread use ofthe expression 'legitimate stage' and its cognates; andto license for production in such theatres new drama.

Two points worthy of later repetition may be notednow in passing: it was the production on stage ofdrama, not its printed publication, which the LordChamberlain licensed; so that the submission ofscripts to the Examiner of Plays and the payment ofthe fees which will figure in our story , were theresponsibility not of the author, but of the theatremanager: secondly, the dual licensing authority of theLord Chamberlain led to a Gilbertian anomaly whichwas not noted by that usually astute playwrightduring his passage of arms with the censor in 1873;namely , that if an unlicensed play were performed inan unlicensed theatre, the practical consequence wasimpunity from penalty because the house, andtherefore the activities in which it engaged, weretechnically non-existent.

NAUGHTY BUT NICE: DRAMATIC CENSORSHIP INTHE NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISH THEATRE

The Venerable Dr. T. Hughie Jones, Archdeacon Emeritus of Loughborough

Lecture delivered on 21 November 2005

'I think there ought to be no more control over the purchase of amusements than over the purchase of thecommon provisions of life, provided we take care, in the provision of amusements, that what is given iswholesome, as we take care in the case of food that what is bought is wholesome; by law, no butcher isallowed to sell bad meat, or a baker bad bread'.1 So spoke that literary charlatan, John Payne Collier, beforethe 1832 Select Committee of the House of Commons ( 'Bulwer Lytton's Committee, as it came to be known),'Appointed to inquire into the laws affecting dramatic literature'.2 The Committee's work has beenmeticulously written up by an American scholar, Dewey Gansel,3 but of the three areas of concern exploredby the twenty-four man group - the monopoly enjoyed by the two 'Patent' theatres, Covent Garden and DruryLane; the censorship exercised by the Lord Chamberlain and his officers; and the lack of dramatic copyright;the second, censorship, receives scant treatment in Ganzel's paper, although he rightly estimates the value,for the history of the theatre, of the testimony given and preserved.4 It is the intention of this paper further toexplore the material relating to censorship in the 1832 Report, and to link it to three similar reports presentedto the House of Commons in the nineteenth century - those of 18535, 18666, and 1892.7

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It is now time to turn to the 1832 Report, and toCollier's evidence, from which our opening extractwas taken. During the summer of the preceding year,Collier had acted as deputy to the then Examiner ofPlays, the former playwright and reformed rake,George CoIman the younger. CoIman had takenoffice in 1824, on the death of his predecessor, JohnLarpent, and it is to CoIman's execution andinterpretation of his office that much of theapparently uniform practice of the Victorianexaminers must be traced. Hear Collier on CoIman'sinstructions, by which, as a temporary aide during theExaminer's holiday in France, he very properlyconsidered himself bound:

'.. .I did not exercise (at any rate in that degree whichotherwise I should have done) my own discretion.His (i.e, CoIman's) instructions to me were those thatI should have given myself under similarcircumstances, to strike out or object to anyprofaneness, immorality, or anything political, likelyto cause commotion.'9

Just what discretion Collier would have exercised ifleft to himself may be inferred from a piece of logic-chopping which displays, in one paragraph, almostall the pretension to clarity and real confusion whichbedevilled both the practice and the discussion ofcensorship throughout the Victorian age and, indeed,until its demise in 1968.

'I distinguish between the moral and the morality of aplay. . . the word morality is to be taken withreference to the age in which we live; that which waslegitimate in Wycherley's time is still properly calledlegitimate , but it would not be an allowed drama, onaccount of its immorality: the taste of the publicwould, I think, prevent its being acted with success.At the same time, I doubt whether the legitimatedrama ought to be acted without a certain amount ofcontrol; I do not think the state of the stage, if it werethrown open, would be such as by any means todispense with that check which is at presentexercised over the drama; on the contrary, it is myopinion that some control would be more necessarythan ever then, for more licence than usual wouldthen be attempted.' 10

Note, among recurring themes in the story of stagecensorship, the reminder of changing standards -autres temps, autres moeurs; the confidence in public

taste as a check on stage depravity - a confidencewhich is, however, withdrawn in the next sentence -and the prophecy of doom consequent upon thewithdrawal of censorship (a prophecy still uttered - oris it fulfilled?- today).

When Colman himself gave evidence, it soonbecame clear that Collier had in truth understoodaright his master's wishes in the matter of censorship.

Question and answer passed across the table likepieces in an opening gambit at chess:-

'What do you conceive to be serving His Majestyfaithfully as to the examination of plays?' - 'To takecare that nothing should be introduced into playswhich is profane or indecent, or morally or politicallyimproper to the stage'.

'What do you consider “palpably objectionable”'[thephrase is Colman's] 'I allude to political and personalallusions, downright grossness and indecency , oranything that would be profane, which any candidman could not but say was improper, about whichthere could not be two opinions.' 11

Colman's bland assumption that there are issues, andthat impropriety is one of them, about which 'therecould not be two opinions' , is matched only by histouching faith in 'any candid man', who finds histwentieth-century counterpart, in a relatedcontroversy , in Lord Devlin's 'Man on the Claphamomnibus' . What emerges already is the Examiner'sbelief, not without foundation, that there was, at anyrate among those who mattered, a consensus ofopinion concerning morality, indecency andimpropriety, which it was quite easy for an Examinerof Plays to translate into the granting or withholdingof the Lord Chamberlain's licence.

Colman did not have it all his own way. (As Ganzelhas pointed out,12) the Select Committee was BulwerLytton's bid for fame in the House in which he wasstill a political neophyte, and the following exchangeis a neat response by Lyttton to the sound of 'Satanrebuking sin':

'What would be the result of using ordinary oaths,such as “Dammee “, or anything of that sort?' - 'Ithink it is immoral and improper.'

16 Volume 100 • 2006


'How do you reconcile the opinion you have justgiven with your making use of those terms, such as“Dammee“, or any of those small oaths which yousay are immoral and improper, to say nothing of theirvulgarity, in some of your own compositions whichhave met with great success on the stage?' - 'If I hadbeen the Examiner I should have struck them out, andwould do so now; I was in a different position at thattime, I was a careless immoral author, I am now theExaminer of Plays. I did my business as an author atthat time, and I do my business as an examiner now'.13

His business he certainly did, and to some profit.Much of the testimony given by Colman and hisassociates is elicited in an attempt to ascertain theemoluments which accrued to him, and by what righthe received them. It is not germane to our ownenquiry, except that it does throw light on oneinteresting aspect of nineteenth-century theatricalcensorship, namely, the indeterminate status of thosedramatic productions which included a musicalelement. It was obviously thought by hisinterrogators, and theatrical historians have repeatedthe suspicion, that Colman profited inordinately, andperhaps illegally, from his office. The evidenceoffered is important in its own right, and adds to ourknowledge of how Colman read his brief theinformation that, for whatever reasons, he sought,with at least partial success, to bring religiousoratorios under his Purview. Certainly, his practice,challenged and bitterly resented by theatricalmanagers, of charging a separate fee for each songsubmitted as part of a theatrical performance, as wellas for the total production, can be established, andmay account for the only paragraph in the actualreport from the 1832 Committee to deal with thecensor:

'With respect to the licensing of plays, YourCommittee would advise, in order to give full weightto the responsibility of the situation, that it should beclearly understood that the office of the Censor isheld at the discretion of the Lord Chamberlain,whose duty it would be to remove him, should therebe any just ground for dissatisfaction as to theexercise of his functions. Your Committee wouldrecommend some revision in the present system offees to the Censor, so (for instance) that the Licenceof a Song and the Licence of a Play may not beindiscriminately subjected to the same charge; andthis revision is yet more desirable, in order to

ascertain whether, in consequence of the greatnumber of plays which, by the alterations proposedby Your Committee, would be brought under thecontrol of the Censor, some abatement in the feescharged for each might not be reasonably made,without lessening the present income of theLicenser.'14

One of the thirty-nine witnesses before the 1832Committee may be laid under tribute for his evidenceconcerning the licensing of plays - the actor, CharlesKemble, then co-proprietor of Covent Garden, anddestined in four years' time to succeed Colman asExaminer. The trend of the Committee's enquiry maybe judged from the form of the question:

'Do you think the English stage at present wouldbecome licentious, seditious or blasphemous, if therewas no licencer?' - 'As to becoming licentious, I haveno doubt it is perfectly safe in the hands of thepeople; for such is the improved state of education,and the moral and religious feeling, that in anytheatre I do not think the audience would sufferanything that was licentious to be said on the stage. Ihave frequently seen things, for instance, that havebeen suffered to pass by the licencer, that have notbeen suffered to pass by the audience, which is a verystrong proof that they are perhaps better guardians oftheir own moral and religious sentiments thananybody can be for them'.

'Do you not think it probable that plays would be fullof political allusions if there were no licencer?" - 'Yes,I think there that it would be necessary that thereshould be a supervisor'. 15

Let the final exchange taken from the Report bebetween Lytton and Colman. Whatever personalanimus, if any, inspired the chairman, will nowpossibly never be known. His own dramas were notwritten until Colman's successor wielded theExaminer's pencil, but he who runs may readsomething other than dispassionate seeking after truthin the following questions, and more than a faintawareness of persecution in Colman's replies:

'Is your appointment for life, or at will? - 'Iunderstood for life, unless I misbehave myself.'

'Has the Lord Chamberlain power to remove you?' -'I do not know how far the Lord Chamberlain's power

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extends, but it has always been considered the nextthing to a patent place.'

'How does the appointment specify it; is it from yearto year?' -'No.' 'Is it during pleasure?' - 'No, it doesnot say so.'

'Is there a fresh appointment on every new LordChamberlain?'

'No. There is in every new reign.'

'There is no fresh appointment on the change of LordChamberlain?'

'No, I am turned over to the next.'

'Suppose he did not wish to continue you, could hedisplace you?'

'No, I should demur to that; I do not know whatpower the Lord Chamberlain has to displace me;such a thing was never thought of.'

Ganzel has already been quoted with regard to theimportance of the 1832 Report as a source oftheatrical history in general, and theatrical censorshipin particular. The same degree of importance does notattach to the 1853 Report,17 but it is still worthy ofnotice. At the mid-point in time between two Reports,the 1843 Theatres Act18 had brought to an end themonopoly in legitimate drama enjoyed by the PatentTheatres and, among other and varied provisions, hadattempted the difficult definition of a 'stage Play',made necessary by the frequently employed devicesto evade licensing regulations; such as the constantaccompaniment of a play by piano music, whichturned it into a musical performance, needing nolicence (Colman had died in 1836!). The definition isponderous but interesting, not only for the categoriesit itemises, but for its incidental reminder that theLord Chamberlain's jurisdiction did not run toprovincial entertainments other than in theatres, Forthe licensing of these other entertainments the localjusticiary was responsible. The definition reads: . . . Inthis Act the words 'stage play' shall be taken toinclude every tragedy, comedy, farce, opera, burletta,interlude, melodrama, pantomime, or any otherentertainment of the stage , or any part thereof:provided always, that nothing herein contained shallbe construed to apply to any theatrical representation

in any booth or show which by the justices of thepeace, or other persons having authority in thatbehalf, shall be allowed in any lawful fair, feast, orcustomary meeting of the like kind.19

Comprehensive though it seemed (it was, in fact,based on the terms of the Examiner's warrant ofappointment), the definition did little to lessen theevasion of licensing, and the twin questions 'When isa theatre not a theatre?' (Answer - 'When it is aliterary institution or an opera-house); and, 'When isa play not a play?' (Answer - 'When it is a tableau, orwhen the actors wear no make-up') continued to vexthe powers that were, as did other, moresophisticated evasions. Small wonder that theefficient operation of the censorship, albeit arbitraryand unaccountable, seemed the only bulwark againstthe evils, real or imagined, of a free-trade in dramawhich already included, horror of horrors, a flood ofFrench plays. Of these, a Comptroller of the LordChamberlain's department would say, in 1866, 'Themodern French drama is almost entirely immoral.20

The 1853 Committee was chiefly concerned with theextent, territorially, of the Lord Chamberlain's writ,and its relation to the jurisdiction of the magistracy.Factually, the magistrates were responsible forlicensing premises outside the metropolitan area,with the exception of a very few theatres whichoperated on dubious patents or special licencescentrally, or even royally, granted. The LordChamberlain had de jure oversight of plays, whereverperformed in England and Wales; de facto, what theeye did not see, the heart did not grieve over, and theevidence of George Gray, one of the fifty-eightwitnesses called by the Committee, is valuable asdemonstrating the inability of the Examiner of Playsto enforce his writ in the provinces, for there is noreason to think this example of flouting in any wayunusual. The economic aspects of the situation willnot go unnoticed either.

Gray described himself as 'a manager, inventor andgeneral director of spectacular performances oftheatres, concert-rooms and other places ofentertainment. I might more shortly describe myselfas author and manager.' 21

He claimed some thirty-five years of theatricalexperience, mostly in the provinces, and came to theCommittee hearings from Manchester.

18 Volume 100 • 2006


' . . . I am a dramatic author myself, and I labourunder this difficulty, that my pieces have beenobliged to be performed without the LordChamberlain's licence, in consequence of theenormous expense of getting them licensed. Thepayment that I, as an author, receive for writing forprovincial theatres, is so small, that if a manager iscompelled to pay the Lord Chamberlain for licensing(it will be remembered that it was the responsibility ofthe manager, not the author, to apply for a productionlicence) and pay me as the author, the piece wouldnot be represented. In many instances which I canmention, the Lord Chamberlain's fee for a licencewas more than I should get as the author.'

'Will you, as an author, give this information, as towhether, whenever you have produced a piece, youhave submitted it to some officer of the LordChamberlain's office to inspect that piece, and onwhich you have to pay the fee?" - 'I once submitted apiece to the Lord Chamberlain's office, and it wasrejected.'

'Do you believe by law you are required to submitany production of yours of a dramatic kind to someinspector or officer of the Lord Chamberlain?' - 'I am.'

'And that you have a very heavy fee to pay onreceiving his licence be performed?' - 'That is so.'

'Do you speak within your own experience of havingsubmitted a piece once to the Lord Chamberlain'soffice, and which was not allowed to be performed?'- 'That is so; I have experience also in anotherdirection applied to that point, that I have incurredresponsibility also in consequence of the expense. Ihave had my pieces acted without having the LordChamberlain's licence. I have in one or twoinstances been obliged to go without payment;because the managers, after they have acted them,have told me, “We know that your piece is notlicensed by the Lord Chamberlain, and you have noclaim in law”; and that took place in Manchester.'

'Can you state to what extent the Lord Chamberlainhas jurisdiction over these productions of authors; ishe confined to judging of the moral character of thepiece, or does he criticise its general merits?' - 'No,not its general merits; the Lord Chamberlain simplyhas the power of saying whether, aye or no, this pieceshall be represented.' 'But is he not obliged to say it

has an immoral tendency?' - 'If he considers it has animmoral tendency he withholds his licence; he doesnot sit in judgment on the merits of the piece.'

'If a piece is refused, it is because the tendency of thepiece is bad?' - 'He thinks so'.

'Do you think it is necessary to have some person toinspect these performances before they are given?' -'I do not."

'On what do you rely for performances not beinggiven...which have a very immoral tendency?' -'Public opinion, and there is the common law uponthe subject. If a party commits a nuisance in thatdirection, punish him as you would any otheroffender; and if the present law is not sufficient, makeit more stringent.'

'Do you think that is a sufficient check without anycensorship, or any public officer inspecting them?' -'I do, and I go one step further. I say there is anothercheck, that no proprietor would get performers to actin any piece that they know to be immoral orindecent. 22

The mechanics of theatrical censorship wereexplained and a new factor revealed, in the evidenceof Norman MacDonald, superintendent of the LordChamberlain's department. After reaffirming that nodramatic production of any kind could be performedin this country without the licence of the LordChamberlain, 23 he continued:

' . . The form of proceeding is this: the stage play issent to the Lord Chamberlain's office, not by theauthor, but by the manager of a theatre, for thelicense is given for the performance, not to theauthor, but to the recognised manager of a theatre.'

'For which this production may have been written?' -'Yes. It is then submitted to a gentleman who is calledthe Examiner of Plays, and if upon examination hesees nothing objectionable, the licence is granted, asa matter of course, by the Lord Chamberlain."

'What is the character of the censorship of theExaminer of Plays; does it extend to the merits of theplay, or is it confined to its moral tendency only?' -'Entirely to the moral tendency.'

'Then the purpose of this censorship, or examination

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of such productions, is to prevent anything beingrepresented having an immoral or perhaps anirreligious tendency?' - 'An immoral, irreligious orseditious tendency; perhaps the more properexpression may be, politically offensive.'

'Anything having a political tendency is not allowed?'- 'That might fairly be considered as having anoffensive political tendency, especially when tendingto personality .'

'Does the Lord Chamberlain indicate to the Examinerupon what principle he is to proceed in hisexamination?' - 'No, there are no specified rules; butthe understanding is perfectly clear, that unless thematter is excessively or extravagantly offensive, thatthe licence is not to be withheld.' 24

MacDonald went on to identify the current Examineras John Mitchell Kemble, son of the former actor,Charles Kemble, and himself a leading Anglo-Saxonscholar.

He had earlier acted for his father and by 1853 hadhis own deputy, William Bodham Donne, of whommore in a moment. Statistics for the three yearsleading to 1853 revealed that out of 683 scriptssubmitted, only 8 were rejected. There was noindication, of course, of the number in whichexcisions were made or changes required.MacDonald explained the rejections - '. .one wasrejected from the very gross and monstrous nature ofthe incidents that were introduced into it, that werequite unfit to be put on any stage.'

'Immoral in their character?'- 'Grossly immoral; twowere rejected at the time of the excitement respectingCardinal Wiseman, on account of their intending tointroduce very offensive allusions to the RomanCatholics; and two of them were French plays, whichhad had a good deal of success in Paris, but were stillthought not very desirable to produce here.' 25

The reference to Cardinal Wiseman recalls that on the29th September, 1850, the Papal Brief was issuedrestoring the English hierarchy, and on the 3rdOctober of that year, Wiseman received the red hat.

The French plays were identified as 'La Dame auxCamélias', always a red rag to a bull for Victoriancensors, although as the opera 'La Traviata' it washappily produced and enjoyed: and 'La Tour deNeslé', now sunk in deserved oblivion.

MacDonald revealed that the ballet was technicallyunder the Examiner's rule, though in practice it wasthe spoken word which made a play. He added thatthe Examiner attended rehearsals to check that hiswishes were being respected; that pantomimes, withtheir large ad lib element, were a tricky category ofproduction to supervise, and that the only appealfrom the Examiner was to the Lord Chamberlainhimself. To him all plays were submitted which it wasproposed to reject; such appeal occasionally issuingin the grant of a licence which the Examiner alonewould have refused. Never, it was claimed, did theLord Chamberlain refuse a play which the Examinerhad accepted - largely because he would rarely seethe script. Confirmation was added (to Gray'scomplaint) that the fee charged for examinationmight well exceed the fee paid to the author,particularly in the provinces. As the normal fee wouldbe three guineas or less, this is, perhaps, anotherpointer as to the general calibre of Victorian drama.Some interesting revelations concerning the "pennygaffs" conclude MacDonald's evidence and, for ourpurposes, the testimony of the 1853 Report.

As far as the operation of censorship is concerned,little had changed, either in principle or practice,since 1832. The three traditional canons still obtained- the politically, morally or religiously offensivematerial was to be expunged from dramatic scripts.The same glib use of the vocabulary of censorship,without definition or justification, still characterisedthe chief protagonists - words like "offensive","undesirable" and "improper” were freely used on theassumption that all would agree on their meaningand application. Perhaps most to be wondered at inthe twenty first century, there was little articulateopposition to the whole business, whether fromactors, managers, authors or dramatic critics. Theminutiae of operation might be questioned, therapacity of a Colman or the prudery of a particularexcision challenged, but that, despite the glowingtributes paid to the right-minded, proper, moralEnglish public, that same public, or some section ofit, needed protection from itself, and that the LordChamberlain and his staff were the men to offer thatprotection - these assumptions seem to have beengenerally acceptable to those who discussed thematter in 1853.

In 1866 the third Select Committee of the House ofCommons met to consider theatrical licences and

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regulations. Like its predecessors, this Committee hadother interests than the censorship of stage plays, itschief concern being the relationship between thetheatres, of which some thirty or more now offeredlegitimate drama in London alone, and the music-halls, which were seeking permission to add drama totheir already varied programme of entertainment.Some of tonight's assessment of the censorshipmaterial in the Report was anticipated and richlyillustrated in a Victorian Studies article by JamesStottler, of the University of Illinois.27 He drawsheavily on the evidence submitted by the thenExaminer of Plays, William Bodham Donne andillustrates the censorship decisions reached byDonne from the day-books of the Lord Chamberlain'sdepartment for the period, in which the record ispreserved of the alterations and excisions made inscripts. It would be gratuitous to reproduce thematerial, but the anecdote deriving from Donne'sgrand-daughter, though probably apocryphal, is toogood to pass over. It is alleged that a visitor to theDonne household found the Examiner and hischildren all over the study floor, each with a script.'Father, Father', shouts one, 'Here is God again' - 'Cutout God, my dear, and substitute Heaven as usual.'Fully documented is Donne's refusal to license'Camille' in 1855; his prohibition of a crucifix on thestage in 'The Actress of Padua'; and his solemnassurance that double entendre was a species of witvery nearly extinct; 28 Incidentally, in 1899 Donne'ssuccessor permitted the Haymarket theatre to displaya crucifix in the French law-court scene from 'AMan's Shadow', because it was a realistic stage prop.

Nelson Lee, manager of the City of London theatre,dealt gracefully in his evidence with the doubleentendre issue:

'They have double entendres sometimes on yourstage, do they not?'

- 'Yes, but the audience are too refined to notice it.'

'I suppose you have a select few in the boxes who dounderstand?'

- 'I am very careful in that particular. I do not havemany.' 29

The ambiguity of the latter answer conjures up adelightful picture of the City of London audience

being vetted for insensitivity before being issued withtickets. While the weight of opinion, from all quarterscanvassed, expressed a Panglossian approval ofcensorship in general and the reigning censor inparticular it would not be ungenerous to suspect thatsome of the sentiments expressed reflected theknowledge that no substantial changes were going tobe made, and that there was little point inantagonising Donne, to whom one might, the nextweek, be submitting another script in the hope ofacceptance.

Charles Reade the novelist, who declared himself aplaywright manqué, driven from the stage by theextreme narrowness of the market and, above all, thecompetition of the stolen goods from the French,under circumstances specially unfavourable todramatic inventors,30 made a telling point in favour ofthe censorship:

'I cannot agree with those gentlemen who put a playon the very same footing as a book. . .I draw twomain distinctions: a play reproduces a story in fleshand blood; it realises the thing in a different way to abook entirely. I do not find it very easy to make thatclear; but things might be described in a book whichcould not be presented in a play , and which couldnot be even indicated without doing perhaps veryconsiderable harm. Then another thing is, that a playdoes not creep gradually before the public as a bookdoes. The theatre is thrown open to 2,000 people atonce, and it is a pity that 20,000 or 30,000 people,who might happen to see the play, should see or hearthe piece before we began to do anything to stopwhat was seditious or wrong.' 31

John Hollingshead, dramatic critic, was one of thefew dissentient voices; and chapter and verseillustration was given in support of his contention thatthe most powerful deterrent against theatricalimpropriety was not the censor, nor even the public,but the fourth estate:

'..I do not think the censorship has had that effect i.e.,the elevation of dramatic literature. Take, for instance,the drama produced at the Adelphi on Saturday,which is a most objectionable French drama; verylittle care being taken to adapt it to English ideas ofright and wrong. It is offensive in action and full ofvulgarities in dialogue, and ending with a parody ofthe judgment of Solomon; also having a most

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objectionable Holywell Street title - 'The Fast Family'.Now that play has passed the censorship of the LordChamberlain and the play will be performed for aconsiderable time. I have been dramatic critic foreight years to the Daily News, the London Review,the Express and occasionally for Punch. I think thatthe censorship of the press is always in advance of thecensorship of the Lord Chamberlain, and is constantlyfound making objections to the morality of pieceswhich he passes as being correct and decent.' 32

The whole of Stottlar's paper is of direct relevanceand value to our theme, and must be prescribedreading for students of the mid-Victorian theatre. OfDonne, the censor, your lecturer intends to writemore, in which Donne's sensitivity, sense of humourand complete integrity will be demonstrated. Thoughhe described himself in his role as 'The devil'sarchdeacon',33 many would have agreed with thesentiment expressed at his deathbed by his lifelongfriend, Edward Fitzgerald, 'Ah, there is a man withouta fault - the least selfish man I ever knew.' 34

One more Select Committee commands ourattention, that of 1892.35 The theatrical climate wasvery different from that of a quarter century earlier,and drama was beginning to escape from domestictrivialities and sensational bloodcurdlers. Shaw andIbsen were beginning to be known - the latter largelythrough the translations and championship ofWilliam Archer. It may have been Archer's failure inthe previous year to obtain the Examiner's nihil obstatfor Ibsen's 'Gengangere' ('Ghosts') which colouredthe views he was to express.

The Committee's major interests were the safety oftheatres as public buildings; the territorial extent ofthe Lord Chamberlain's writ; and the hardy annualrelations with the music-halls. In the actualrecommendations of the Report, the censorshipstatement of the 1866 Committee was lifted entireand reproduced without comment:-

We consider that the censorship of plays has workedsatisfactorily, and that it is not desirable that it shouldbe discontinued; on the contrary, that it should beextended as far as practicable to the performances inmusic-halls and other places of public entertainment(Report, Committee of 1866).36

Two witnesses alone will be called, of the thirty-fourwho appeared before the Committee - Edward F.Smyth Pigott, the then Examiner of Plays, and WilliamArcher, dramatic critic. Pigott, who preferred hisofficial title of Examiner to that of 'censor' ('...whichto many minds represents the Star Chamber and theInquisition'37) offered his philosophy of his task inresponse to a series of questions thus tendentiouslyintroduced:

'. . assuming that, for the sake of public order anddecency, to say nothing of public morality andmanners, it is expedient that some preventive controlbe exercised over representations on the stage " bythe State. . . '38. By 1892 there were fewer people inthe world of the theatre prepared to make suchassumptions or to allow others to make them withoutquestion. The traditional and expected judgmentswere illustrated and expounded: for religion, thebanning of the play 'God and the Man' (the play wasall right; it was the title which was objectionable):39

for politics, an approving reference back to one ofDonne's judgments in 1873 - that concerning W .S.Gilbert's 'Happy Land'. This case is of interest in that'Happy Land', co-authors Gilbert and , confusingly,Gilbert à Becket, is a burlesque of 'The WickedWorld', which was Gilbert's own composition of thesame year, 1873. A prefatory note to the publishedversion of 'Happy Land' reads: “This book containsthe EXACT TEXT of the piece as played on theoccasion of the Lord Chamberlain's official visit tothe Court Theatre on the 6th March 1873 three daysafter the opening . Those who will take the trouble tocompare the original text with the expurgatedversion, as played nightly at the Court Theatre, will bein a position to appreciate the value of the LordChamberlain's alterations. THE AUTHORS”.

The alterations affected the appearance, in theburlesque, of three 'earthlings' translated to fairyland(the 'Happy Land' of the title) and named as 'Mr.G',

'Mr.L', and 'Mr.A.' Audiences were helped in theirnot too difficult task of identifying the three by make-up and clothing which unmistakably revealed Mr. L.to be Robert Lowe, Chancellor of the Exchequer andauthor of the controversial match-tax; Mr.A. to beA.S. Arton, Commissioner of Public Works from1869-73; while Mr. G. was, of course, the Grand OldMan himself.

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Gilbert was furious at the ban on portrayal of thesethree, and wrote a letter of protest to the stage paper,'The Era', which the editor printed below one fromthe Examiner himself, whose gentle spirit had beenwounded by the abuse consequent on his action.Gilbert's final paragraph is all that time permits to bequoted here, but it suggests the sense of the whole:'...I may have done Mr. Donne an injustice, but I havealways accounted for his objections on the theorythat the existence of his office depends on hisshowing that it is of some practical value, and if he isunable to "return" a satisfactory number of revisions,the Censorship of Plays will run some risk ofabolition. I have no particular desire to bring aboutthis catastrophe, but at the same time, I am unwillingthat it should be averted at my expense.'40 Half-a-dozen questions from the 1892 Committee advertedto this incident, which had been introduced into theevidence by Archer, and the Examiner, Pigott,declared his agreement with the principles accordingto which his predecessor had acted. Pigott hadsubmitted a lengthy memorandum to the Committeeand his evidence is, in part, extended reference to itand amplification of some of its points. Speaking ofthe Censor, he said:

'...it is his business and duty...to administer thoseclauses of the Act which concern his department inthe most liberal spirit, with the discernment anddiscrimination which belong to a wide knowledge ofthe world, and that cultivated sympathy withliterature and the arts, which is equally regardful ofpublic morality and decency, and of the freedom anddignity of a liberal profession and a noble art. Hedoes not profess to be an arbiter of taste or, as he isjestingly described, a censor morum. It is only at thepoint where public manners affect public morals thathis responsibility begins...what is sometimes ratherinvidiously called censorship is nothing in effect butthe kindly and perfectly disinterested action of anadviser who has the permanent interest of the stage atheart. . . as a servant of the Crown he preventsscandals of which public opinion would otherwisedemand a rigorous repression...The principles onwhich the Examiner of Plays consistently acts, are

1. To eschew even the faintest semblance of afrivolous or vexatious interference with managers ;

2. Not to fritter away official influence upon details;

3. To act as much as possible by personalintercourse, or confidential correspondence with

managers, and, in some cases, unofficially, withthe authors of plays;

4. In short, to avoid all unnecessary friction...

Some scandals, however, I have been obliged andenabled to prevent. For example,

1. The dramatisation at a provincial theatre of arecent murder, whilst the murderer was actually inthe condemned cell awaiting execution;

2. The suppression of a notoriously indecent dance,imported from abroad;

3. The proposed representation of the Oberammagaupassion play at a London theatre;

4. The placarding of the town with the title of asensational drama offensive to the religousfeelings of the public.'

The proposed importation of the Oberammagaupassion play was a cause of great offence to many inLondon, and no Examiner could at that time haveauthorised its production with impunity. Thesensational drama with a religiously offensive titlewas 'God and the Man', already mentioned. Pigott'ssummary of the whole matter is this:

'...the authority of the Crown over representations ofthe stage is sustained by immemorial tradition andancient usage; it has never operated injuriously to thelargest expansion of dramatic literature and art;extending as it does, under the sanction ofParliament, to every theatre in Great Britain, it isentirely foreign to any question of local or municipaljurisdiction; its creation and maintenance has beenan act of public policy and expediency; its abolitionhas never been called for; and even if it can be fitlydescribed as an anomaly, it is an anomaly that hascontinued to work well.'41

We may link our final witness with the previous oneby allowing Pigott to qualify the statement that theabolition of dramatic censorship had never beencalled for, in the following words:-

'...the only assailant of my office that I have seen thathas come before the Committee is Mr. Archer. I knownothing of him at all (interesting admission for anExaminer of Plays!) but I find he has had anexperience of fifteen years. Well, for a man of my ageI am sorry to say that is a very limited experience.

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(Archer was at this time thirty-six years old; Pigott inhis sixties. That is not a long experience of thestage or a very wide one. Of course, Mr. ClementScott (fifty-one year old dramatic critic of the DailyTelegraph and playwright), who, I am happy to find,is on my side, represents a much longer period, andfor every reader that Mr. Archer represents, herepresents a thousand.'42

The name of Archer was obviously anathema toPigott, and his parting broadside was fired at Archer'ssponsorship of Ibsen, in a series of statements whichmust, surely, diminish Pigott' s critical stature, thoughnot his alone:-

'...all I can say is this: I have studied Ibsen's playspretty carefully, and all the characters in Ibsen's playsappear to me morally deranged. All the heroines aredissatisfied spinsters who look on marriage as amonopoly, or dissatisfied married women in achronic state of rebellion against not only theconditions which nature has imposed on their sex,but against all the duties and obligations of wives andmothers; and as for the men, they are all rascals orimbeciles.'

'Have you not passed some of Ibsen's plays?' - 'Yes,but I have not seen that they have kept the stage orput a penny into anyone's pocket. I make allowancefor Mr. Archer because he has some interest in theplays; he is a translator of Ibsen's plays and thereforeI suppose has some interest in their being produced.'

'But although the plays and writings of Ibsen comeunder that very severe criticism, you have not thoughtthey were sufficiently injurious to the public moralsto intervene?' - 'No, too absurd altogether.' 43

As has been stated, Pigott had, in fact, banned aproduction of 'Ghosts' the previous year, and it waslittle wonder that Archer came to the 1892Committee breathing fire and slaughter. Eight of theeleven members present during his hearingquestioned him, and he took full advantage of hisopportunity. A summary of his evidence is given inthe index to the Report,44 with an indication of histwo-pronged attack on the institution of censorship.

First, censorship does not do what it sets out to do, inthe preservation of decorum; for excisions arerestored, additional lines are added to the script after

licensing, and only the observation of everyperformance of every production, which is manifestlyimpossible, could ensure adherence to theExaminer's wishes. Secondly, the exercise ofcensorship in an arbitrary and unjustified way mustbe, and demonstrably is, to the detriment of dramaticcomposition. While admitting the special plea forgovernmental interference in productions whichmight be offensive to neighbouring countries, Archerdefended the right of dramatists to make serious and,if necessary, adverse comment on the affairs andpersonalities of the day. Lip service is paid to theefficiency of Pigott, as it was to all the Examiners intheir turn, though it must have cost Archer dear to say'. . . in my opinion, and in the opinion of everyonewho has studied the question, the censorship hasnever been better administered than at present.' 45 Itwas, however, a tactical admission, for if thecensorship was intolerable under so benevolent anExaminer as Mr. Pigott, a fortiori . . . .

Archer's evidence commands extended reference,such as cannot be given in this paper, and is perhapsthe most lucid expression of that change of heart, andit was of heart rather than of mind, which found itincreasingly difficult to reconcile the fin de sièclemoral daring and desire for the theatre to exploreseriously the concerns of the day, with the institutionof censorship, which Archer described as 'ananomalous historical survival'.

Survive it did, however, for another seven decades,and although an increasing body of opinion was builtup and found articulation for its growing resentment,it remained true in 1892, as it has been shown to betrue in the earlier years of the nineteenth century, thatthe institution, anomalous, inconsistent and ill-defended as it may have been, was nonethelessthought to be a necessary adjunct to the theatricalscene.

Critical literature specifically devoted to the subjecthas been scarce, though the source material presents,as must now be clear, an embarras de richesse.Archer himself included an essay on 'The Censorshipof the Stage' in a volume of his wiork published in1886.46 Fowell and Palmer wrote a standard history,now difficult to obtain, in 1913,47 while most of theleading critics and dramatists had something to sayon the subject . Shaw , who included an essay on TheLate Censor in Our Theatres in the Nineties,48 also

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wrote in response to a request to contribute an articleon censorship to a projected encyclopaedia of thetheatre:-

'..what you ask is out of the question. I have no timeto write over again what I have already written inseven volumes. You can quote as much as you like;but not another word will you get from me on asubject that I have exhausted and a problem that Ihave definitely solved.' 49

(The preface to 'Widowers' Houses' was one place inwhich he had treated the topic). The subject was, ofcourse, not exhausted, nor was the problem solved.

A later Select Committee, that of 1909, whichmercifully lies beyond our frontier, devoted itselfentirely to the consideration of dramatic censorship,but as no statutory effect was given to itsrecommendations,50 more than half a century wouldelapse before a fascinating chapter in the history ofour theatre, like this selective and inadequate surveyof one aspect only, had 'Finis' written to it.

Notes

1. Report of the Select Committee of the House ofCommons on Dramatic Literature, 1832.Parliamentary Reports (1831-32) VII.2. Question 279.(Hereafter reference will be to the “832 Report", thenumber following, unless otherwise indicated, beingthat of a question and/or answer given in evidence.Similarly for the later reports.

2. 1832 Report.

3. Ganzel, D. Patent Wrongs and Patent Theatres: Dramaand the Law in the early Nineteenth century. PMLA 76(1961) 384 - 396.

4. Ganzel: op. cit. 385.

5. Report of the Select Committee of the House ofCommons on the System under which Public Houses,Hotels, &c., and Places of Public Entertainment aresanctioned and regulated... Parl. Pap. (1852-53XXXVII1 “1853 Report".

6. Report of the Select Committee of the House ofCommons on Theatrical Licenses and Regulations.Parl. Pap.(1866) XVI.1. "1866 Report “.

7. Report of the Select Committee of the House ofCommons on Theatres and Places of Entertainment.Parl. Pap.(1892) XVIII.1. “1892 Report.”

8. 10.Geo.II.c.28.

9. 1832 Report, 341.

10. ibid.328-329.

11. ibid.844, 851.

12. Ganzel, op. cit. p.384.

13. 1832 Report, 858, 860.

14. ibid. Report, para.5.

15. ibid. 708-709.

16. ibid. 976-982.

17. See Note 5, above.

18. 6& 7 Vict. c.68.

19. ibid., sec.23.

20. 1866 Report, 389.

21. 1853 Report, 7640.

22. ibid. 7643-7756, passim.

23. ibid. 8115.

24. ibid. 8126.

25. ibid. 8129-8130.


27. Stottlar, J.F. A Victorian Stage Censor: the theory andpractice of William Bodham Donne. VS.XIII.2 (March1970) 253-282.

28. 1866 Report, 2496.

29. ibid. 5014, 5017.

30. ibid. 6725.

31. ibid. 6743.

32. ibid. 5244.

33. Johnson, C.B. (ed.): William Bodham Donne and hisfriends. Methuen 1905. The statement was made in1870.

34. Hannay, N. C. & Johnson, C.B. (eds.): A Fitzgeraldfriendship. Faber & , 1932. Faber Introduction.


36. 1892 Report, General recommendations, final para.

37. ibid. 5178.

38. ibid. 5179.

39. ibid. 5184.

40. The Era, 14 January 1873, p.12.

41. 1892 Report, 5183-5184, passim.

42. ibid. 5184.

43. ibid. 5227-5229.

44. ibid. Index, sub. Censorship of Plays, 2. Objections.

45. ibid. 3952.

46. Archer, Wm. About the Theatre: essays & studies.London 1886; essay The Censorship of the Stage.

47. Fowell, F. & Palmer, F.: Censorship in England: thehistory from the fifteenth century . London 1913.

48. Shaw, G.E.: Our theatres in the nineties. London1932. vol.I, 48-55. essay, The Late Censor.

49. Private letter. Quoted in Downs, H. (ed. ) : Theatre &Stage, Pitman 1951. vol.I, p.48.

50. Downs, op. cit. p.50.

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These two events, one fact, one fiction, triggeredcontrasting reactions that are hard to reconcile in anylogical manner. On the one hand, the Indian Oceantsunami has been likened by many to a completelyunexpected bolt from the blue, while on the other,the BBC has been charged with scaremongering, bysome at least, for highlighting the terribleconsequences for the world of a future volcanicsuper-eruption in Wyoming's Yellowstone Park. It ishardly surprising that we are caught napping byextreme geophysical events, if attempts to educateand inform about the threat they pose attractaccusations of doom mongering and hyperbole.Nevertheless, whether we ignore them or not,geophysical phenomena far more lethal anddestructive than the Asian tsunami are on their way.Volcanic super-eruptions, asteroid and cometimpacts, and ocean-wide tsunami large enough todwarf the Boxing Day waves, have left their imprintson our planet's surface throughout its 4.6 billion yearhistory, and they are not going to hold back simplybecause we have arrived on the scene. Furthermore,we are making the situation far worse, with thisrelatively limited threat portfolio now likely to bejoined by hazardous events associated with a climateundergoing abrupt change due to human activities.These include a dramatic slowdown or shutdown ofthe Gulf Stream and associated ocean currents,leading to bitter winters in Europe and eastern NorthAmerica and possibly more widespreadramifications, and a rapid rise in sea levels inresponse to the catastrophic melting of one or both ofthe Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets.

Although hardly a justification, the Asian tsunami'slegacy is far from all bad. In concrete terms it iscontributing to the establishment of tsunami earlywarning systems, not only in the Indian Ocean itself,but also in the Atlantic Basin and Caribbean, therebydramatically raising chances of survival during asimilar, future event. Equally importantly, the Asiancatastrophe has focused attention upon othergeophysical hazards capable of having a severeregional or global impact. Notwithstanding somescepticism, primarily amongst elements of the press,global geophysical events (GGEs) or Gee-gees - suchas the BBC's Yellowstone - have successfully madethe transition from sci-fi to sci-fact. Broadly speaking,they are now recognized for what they are, extremenatural events with probabilities of occurrence farbelow one percent in any single year, but rising to100 percent in the longer term. By forcingindividuals, the media, governments, internationalagencies and disaster managers to recognize that theadvent of a natural disaster that affects the entireplanet is only a matter of time, the Asian tsunami hashelped substantially to raise awareness of the gee-geemenace. This, however, is only the beginning. Weneed to know far more about the nature of thepotential threats, about their effects andramifications, and about how often they can beexpected to occur. Most importantly, we need toknow if we can act to prevent or avoid a future globalcatastrophe or, at the very least, mitigate or managethe worst consequences.

With emotions and thoughts instilled by the Asiantsunami still fresh in many hearts and minds, perhaps

SURVIVING ARMAGEDDON: SOLUTIONS FOR ATHREATENED PLANET

Professor Bill McGuire, Director, Benfield Hazard ResearchCentre, University College, London

Delivered on 5 December 2005Drawing a line between science fiction and science fact, or between scaremongering and informing, can benotoriously difficult, and never more so than when dealing with those rare but certain cataclysmic eventscapable of tearing our comfortable, cosy world apart. The awful episode of Boxing Day 2004, which saw morethan a quarter of a million lives lost in the space of a few hours, provided a glimpse of the reality, while thelandmark BBC television drama, Supervolcano, aired barely a month later, presented us with a taster of whatwe might have to face in the future.

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an appropriate place to start in any rummage throughthe gee-gee portfolio is with a closer examination ofthe mega-tsunami threat. The statistics of the BoxingDay tsunami are truly astounding: more than aquarter of a million dead or missing, 500,000 injured,410,000 buildings destroyed, and close to eightmillion people displaced, impoverished and/orunemployed. How can waves have such acatastrophic impact? The reason lies in the uniquebehaviour of tsunami. As happened off the coast ofSumatra, most tsunamis are generated by the near-instantaneous uplift of a huge area of sea bed inresponse to an earthquake. The movement imparts ajolt to the ocean above causing it to oscillate andsend waves hurtling away from the source of thedisplacement. Unlike wind-driven waves, tsunamisinvolve the entire water column from surface to seafloor, and are capable of travelling at speeds of 800-900 km an hour in deep water - about as fast as ajumbo jet. Their wavelengths - the crest-to-crestdistance - is measured in hundreds of kilometres,rather than a few tens of metres for the storm wavesthat crash onto the UK coast. This means that atsunami floods in as a wall of water, rather like a giantSevern Bore, which keeps coming for several minutesbefore taking just as long to retreat. Earthquake-triggered tsunami may be more than 10 m in height,and estimates from Indonesia's Aceh province, whichbore the brunt of the tsunami, suggest that waves heremay have been more than 30 m high. Mega-tsunami,on the other hand may be at least ten times higherwhen they strike land. Rather than being formed byearthquakes, they arise either due to a comet orasteroid impact in the ocean or, more commonly, as aresult of a giant submarine landslide or the collapse ofan island volcano. Around 7,000 years ago, waves upto 30 m high inundated parts of the Shetlands, NEScotland, Iceland and Greenland, in response to thecollapse of a mass of sediment bigger than the Isle ofWight from the Norwegian continental shelf and ontothe floor of the North Atlantic. Going back further intime, tsunami deposits found an extraordinary 400 mabove sea level on the flanks of Hawaii's Kohalavolcano are testament to a massive landslide fromneighbouring Mauna Loa. On average, it seems thatsuch giant collapses occur in one ocean basin oranother every 10,000 years or even less, and we maynot have to wait long - geologically speaking at least- for the next one. During an eruption in 1949, thewestern flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on theCanary Island of La Palma, detached itself from the

rest of the edifice and dropped four metres seaward.A mass of rock up to a third the size of the Storeggalandslide remains poised like a Damoclean swordover the north Atlantic, and is expected at some timein the future - perhaps next year, maybe severalthousand years from now - to catastrophicallycollapse into the ocean. A worst-case scenarioenvisages tsunami in excess of 100 m devastating theneighbouring Canary Islands with waves still 20 m ormore in height closing on the Caribbean and the eastcoast of North America between six and twelve hourslater. Even the south coast of the UK can expect toexperience tsunami on a scale similar to thosegenerated in the Indian Ocean in 2004. Without priorevacuation, the resulting death toll could bemeasured in millions, with massive physical damageto the coastal cities of the US bringing the national,and hence global, economy to its knees.

While the knock-on economic consequences will befelt across the world, even the collapse of the CumbreVieja volcano will not have the ability to physicallyaffect the entire planet. The same cannot be said,however, for the biggest volcanic blasts of all - the so-called super-eruptions that punctuate Earth historyevery 50,000 years or so. Thanks in part to a recentpopularized documentation of the event by SimonWinchester, the great 1883 eruption of Indonesia'sKrakatoa volcano is probably the best known of all.Compared to a super-eruption, however, this titanicexplosion, which killed more than 36,000 people, islittle more than a fire cracker. The last super-eruptiontore the crust apart in New Zealand's North Islandaround 26,000 years ago, ejecting over a thousandcubic kilometres of ash and debris - more than 50times that blasted out at Krakatoa. Barely fiftymillennia earlier, one of the greatest explosiveeruptions in Earth history, at Toba in Sumatra, ejectedclose to 3,000 cubic kilometres of volcanic debris -sufficient to bury the entire UK to a depth of 4m. Suchgargantuan eruptions are regionally devastating, withground hugging pyroclastic flows of incandescentmagma and gas, and metres thick piles of falling ashcovering many hundreds of thousands of squarekilometres. The last super-eruption at Yellowstone,around 640,000 years ago, buried half the US. Even1,500 km from the eruption, ash lay a third of a metredeep and has been found by geologists as far afield asLos Angeles in California and El Paso in Texas. Thereason why a super-eruption qualifies as a gee-gee,however, is nothing to do with the debris or ash;

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instead it is a consequence of the huge cloud of gasthat is released during the event. Sulphur-rich gasesare generated in all volcanic eruptions. In the largest,enormous volumes combine with water vapour highin the atmosphere tiny droplets - or aerosols - ofsulphuric acid. Stratospheric winds quickly transportthe aerosols across the planet, forming a veil that ishighly effective at reflecting and absorbing incomingsolar radiation. The result is a rapid and dramaticcooling of the troposphere (the lowest 10 km or so ofthe atmosphere) and the surface itself - a so-calledvolcanic winter. After Toba, temperatures fell rapidlyto near or below freezing across much of the planet,and remained there for perhaps five or six years.Conditions for our ancestors must have beenappalling, so much so that some anthropologists havelinked the event to a human population crash thatmay have reduced our race to a few thousandindividuals.

Volcanic super-eruptions are not the only geophysicalevents capable of triggering dramatic falls in globaltemperatures. By hurling enormous quantities of finedust into the stratosphere, collisions with large bodiesfrom space are also charged with the same effect, thistime leading to a so-called cosmic - rather thanvolcanic - winter. The threat from impacting cometsand asteroids has been recognized for some years,and plans to find out more were galvanized byobservations in 1994 of the collision between planetJupiter and the 21 fragments of the disrupted comet,Shoemaker-Levy. Spectacular images of impact scarslarger than the Earth in the planet's gaseous envelopefocused minds wonderfully with respect to the effectsuch an event would have on our own planet, andfunding of sky surveys to identify objects that mightthreaten our world at some time in the futuresuddenly and miraculously became available. Duringthe course of its annual passage around the Sun, theEarth regularly has close encounters with asteroids;chunks of rock ranging upwards in size from a fewtens of metres up to several kilometres. Collisions,however, are fortunately extremely rare. The lastconfirmed impact occurred at Tunguska, Siberia in1908, where an asteroid 40-50 m across broke upand exploded 10 km above the Taiga. Despite beingbarely half the length of a soccer pitch, the blastflattened more than 2000 square kilometres of forest,and would have obliterated everything within theM25 motorway, should it have struck central Londonrather than the Siberian wastes. Collisions with

objects of this size probably occur every severalcenturies, and while locally devastating the rest of theplanet is unaffected. With ever greater impactor size,however, the effects become ever more widespread.A one kilometre object, for example, will obliteratean area the size of England, Japan or California orgenerate ocean-wide mega-tsunami should it impactin the ocean. A two or three kilometre object - thejury is out on the critical diameter - will load theatmosphere with sufficient dust to cause a plunge inglobal temperatures and the onset of a cosmic winterthat could last for several years. A resulting worldwidebreakdown in agriculture could see a death toll of abillion people or more before the planet starts towarm up again. In relation to these larger impactevents, however, some good news has beenforthcoming in the last couple of years. The frequencyof collisions with one kilometre objects has beendowngraded from 100,000 to 600,000 years, whiletwo kilometre asteroids are now expected to strike theEarth only every few million years.

One of the most imminent gee-gees is also one of theleast addressed; the next major earthquake to strike atthe heart of the Japanese capital - Tokyo. Home tomore than 30 million people - a quarter of thecountry's population - and to the headquarters of two-thirds of Japan's industrial giants, a major quake isexpected to cause widespread mayhem anddestruction sometime in the next century or so. Whilethe physical effects will be highly localized andconfined primarily to the Tokyo-Yokohama region, thecost of rebuilding is forecast by some to have thepotential to bring the global economy to its knees.The last time the Japanese capital was struck by amajor earthquake was in 1923, when buildingcollapse and post-quake conflagrations conspired totake up to 140,000 lives and reduce the city torubble. Next time, due mainly to far higher buildingstandards, the death toll is forecast to be lower -around 60,000. The economic cost, however, ispredicted to be astronomical, with estimates rangingfrom 3.3 to 4.4 trillion US$. Up to 44 times greaterthan the cost of the 1995 Kobe (Japan) earthquake -the costliest natural catastrophe so far - it is widelyexpected that such a loss will result in a worldwideeconomic collapse along the lines of 1929 Wall StreetCrash. This led to the closure of more than 100,000businesses in the US alone, and to enormouslydepressed stock markets that did not fully recoveruntil the 1950s.

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In terms of the next gee-gee we have to face,however, accelerating climate change may be theprovider. Top of the list is a dramatic slowdown orshutdown of the Gulf Stream and associated currentsthat ameliorates the western European climate andprevents UK winters being more akin to those ofLabrador. Just a few years ago, such a scenario wasenvisaged in some climate change models as havinga small probability of occurrence a few centuriesdown the line, given continued warming. Recentobservations indicate, however, that changes to thepattern of circulation in the North Atlantic are alreadyhappening, while new climate models predict a verygood chance of a weakening of the Gulf Streambefore 2100. One model predicts a 45 percentchance of weakening with a three degree Celsiustemperature rise, while another forecasts that thismay occur with a rise of just two degrees C. As newresearch suggests that the global temperature rise bythe end of the century may well be substantiallyhigher than 2 or 3 degrees C, then the chances seempretty much even that we will lose the warminginfluence of the Gulf Stream before Big Ben chimes inthe new century. It may be counterintuitive for globalwarming to lead to regional cooling, but theunderlying mechanism is quite straightforward. TheGulf Stream and associated currents carry warm, saltywater from the tropics northwards to the margins ofthe UK and Europe, where they keep temperaturesseveral degrees C warmer than they would otherwisebe. As the warm waters reach the Arctic seas, theycool, and because they are saltier than thesurrounding ocean - and therefore more dense - theysink and return to the tropics along the sea floor.Accelerated melting of Arctic ice, elevated levels ofprecipitation and increased flow from Siberian riversinto the Arctic Ocean, are already, however, leadingto dilution of the salty tropical waters. If thiscontinues, they will eventually be reduced in densityto the extent that they will not sink. The return flow ofwater to the tropics will, as a consequence closedown, and the circulation will stall. Without thewarming effect of the Gulf Stream, a recent study bythe UK Met Office has shown that the entire northernhemisphere will cool, with the largest temperaturefalls recorded around the North Atlantic. Within sixyears, winters are predicted to return to those of themedieval Little Ice Age, with sea-ice clogging theChannel and North Sea, and temperature frequentlyfalling to minus 20 degrees C and below.Furthermore, as the North Atlantic currents form just

one element of a global system of ocean circulationknown as the ocean conveyor, the effects may stretchmuch further afield, leading - for example - to failureof the Asian monsoon and to widespread drought.

Well so far, so bad. But is there nothing we can do toavoid such global catastrophes, or at the very leastmitigate or manage the worst of their effects? Withrespect to any major weakening of the Gulf Stream,prevention is not now an option, however much wecut back on greenhouse gas emissions. If it happens,we must simply adapt as best we can to the changedcircumstances, modifying our energy, transport,agriculture and health policies as best we can to copewith bitter winters and shorter growing seasons.Somewhat surprisingly, combating the impact threatmay actually prove easier, and given advancewarning of perhaps a decade or two, we already havethe technology to give an asteroid with our name onit the small nudge required to translate a possiblecollision into a certain miss. Prior to the Shoemaker-Levy impacts on Jupiter in 1994, the business oflocating and tracking potential Earth impactors wasregarded - even within the astronomical community -as a little akin to train spotting, while the number ofscientists involved in the field was described by oneas 'smaller than the workforce of a McDonaldsrestaurant'. Boosted by greater respectability andhigher funding, a number of sky surveys - mainly USbased and funded by NASA - have now identifiedmore than 3,000 so-called Near Earth Asteroids(NEAs), whose orbits bring them dangerously close toour planet, including more than 750 with diametersin excess of one kilometre. By 2008, NASA expects90 percent or so of all NEAs more than 1 km acrossto have been identified and their orbits projected farinto the future to see if they have the potential forstriking the Earth. Just in case one is found that does,then a group established by Apollo 9 astronaut, RustySchweickart, is already making plans to test out asystem for nudging threatening asteroids off course,and hopes to demonstrate its capability of a'harmless' asteroid within the next 15 years. Copingwith volcanic super-eruptions and ocean-wide mega-tsunami is more problematic. Despite suggestions tothe contrary by enthusiastic amateurs who frequentlycontact me on the subject, we can't burrow into avolcano primed for a super-eruption to allow it to 'letoff steam', the energies stored within are simply toogreat. Neither can we remove the unstable flank of LaPalma's unstable volcano bit by bit to prevent if

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collapsing into the North Atlantic. I once calculated,in response to just such a suggestion, that assumingan open truck can carry away 10 cubic metres of rockat a time, it would require between 15 and 50 billionjourneys to remove the unstable mass. Even with aloaded truck leaving every minute of every day, thiswould take somewhere between 10 and 35 millionyears, and doesn't even take into account the timetaken to extract the material, nor the fact that a goodpercentage of the slide is underwater. We can at leastmanage the next great volcanic blast or ocean-widemega-tsunami, but only if we can ensure that wehave some advance warning. Although there arearound 3,000 active and potentially active volcanoes,we are only monitoring a hundred or so, while theunstable flank of the Cumbre Vieje volcano currentlylacks any surveillance at all. If we are to cope withthe worst excesses of a volcanic winter, it is likely thatwe will need years to prepare; stock-piling food andestablishing frameworks for maintaining a stablesocial fabric during the expected period of bitter coldand failed harvests. There is no chance of preventingmassive damage to coastal communities when theCumbre Vieja eventually collapses, but monitoring ofthe slide may provide the advance warning neededfor mass evacuation in good time.

In broader terms, we need to recognize that globalcatastrophes are certain to feature in our future. At thevery least we need to be aware of the nature of thethreats and their potential ramifications and we needto plan for how - both as individual states and as aglobal community - we are going to cope. We needto look at ways of making the planetary economymore resilient to financial mayhem arising from thenext Tokyo quake or something even more disruptive,and we need to develop a framework for developedcountries to help low and medium income statesthrough the worst of any future global catastrophe.While on a smaller scale, the Asian tsunami hasprovided us with a taster of what might have to facewhen the next gee-gee occurs. It has also opened awindow of opportunity during which nationalgovernments and international agencies have achance to think in the longer term and to addresshow they will cope with something far bigger.Memories are short, however, and other priorities willsoon come to the fore. The window is already startingto close. Let's make the most of it before it's too late.

FUN WITH CHEMISTRY

Dr Alan G. Osborne, Department of Biological Sciences,Essex University

Lecture for Schools sponsored by The Leicester Mercury Delivered on December 14 2005

Dr Osborne, after preparing demonstration experiments for much of the day before, lectured in the Universityof Leicester's Rattray lecture theatre, which was packed with an excited young audience. He carried out awide range of chemical experiments, some with the help of volunteers picked from the audience. Theseexperiments were greeted with such enthusiasm that we were left in no doubt that one could have 'Fun withChemistry'. However, underpinning the fun was a message that chemistry impinged on our lives perhaps morethan any other science.

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Each year about half a million tonnes of volatileorganic compounds (VOCs) are put into the loweratmosphere from solvent use alone and many of thesebecome involved in the ozone cycle. Conventionalliquids consist of small neutral molecules that haveonly weak intermolecular forces between them. As aresult, it is relatively easy for individual molecules toescape into the gas phase i.e. these liquids arevolatile. This loss of VOCs used as solvents is thelargest single source of anthropomorphic compoundsin the atmosphere.

Thus, there has been interest in finding non-volatilesolvents as replacements. In this regard there are twoapproaches that can be used; firstly choose a volatilematerial that is non-toxic and present in theenvironment or choose a compound that is notvolatile but biodegradable.

In the first category there are not many candidatesthat are liquid and naturally available other thanwater. One compound that is finding significant useas a solvent is carbon dioxide. You might think that itis a gas and therefore cannot dissolve anything butunder moderate pressure it becomes a liquid or withheating and pressure it becomes what is called a“supercritical fluid” which has properties that areintermediate between those of a liquid and those of agas. While the use of high pressure gases may soundquite fanciful and not particularly applicable it issurprising how widespread this technology is,particularly with consumer products. The advantage

of using supercritical CO2 with products that we willuse or potentially eat is that when the fluid isdepressurised none of the CO2 is left as a residueinside the product. One of the biggest uses of carbondioxide is in the production of decaffeinated coffee.A large number of other products are also extractedusing CO2, including perfumes, vegetable extractsand fish oils. Almost no beers are brewed using hopsnowadays, most use hop extract which is obtainedusing CO2. Two large producers of VOCs in theatmosphere are solvent cleaning and paintmanufacture. Some dry cleaning franchises now useCO2 in place of perchloroethylene while several largecompanies now use CO2 for spray painting products.

The second category of solvent is salts, which havenegligible vapour pressure. Salts also have theadvantage that they are non-flammable, which makesthem safer to work with as solvents. While the use ofsalts as solvents sounds counterintuitive because theyare solids, they have, in fact, been used for centuriesand metals such as sodium, magnesium andaluminium can only be extracted using salts in theirliquid state. Salts are excellent solvents when they aremolten as they have large potential fields around theions, which interact strongly with a wide range ofsolutes. This is why you put salt on a red wine stain asthe sodium and chloride ions coordinate to thetannins in wine and stop them interacting with thefibres in the cloth. The major problem with thewidespread use of salts as solvents is that mostcommon inorganic salts tend to have very high

THE SWEET SMELL OF CLEAN CHEMISTRY

Professor Andrew Abbott, Department of Chemistry, University of Leicester

Lecture delivered on 9 January 2006

The public perception of Chemistry is one of chimneys belching out black smoke and polluted water supplies.It only makes the news when there is a spillage of dangerous chemicals on a motorway. Yet the true value ofchemistry in terms of the state of our economy or the improvement to our health or standard of living is largelyoverlooked. So too is the fact that chemists have worked tirelessly over the past 20 years to decrease thetoxicity of compounds that they use and to make active ingredients more effective. The subject of GreenChemistry is defined as “The invention and application of chemical products and processes which are designedto eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances”. At the University of Leicester one of our mainfocuses of research is the removal of hazardous solvents from processes. The new processes being developedwithin the Chemistry Department are largely “benign by design” - that is we design the solvents for theapplication and use the most environmentally compatible materials possible.

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melting points. This is because the interactionsbetween ions are high and ions can easily organisethemselves into stable lattices; in order for a salt tobecome liquid these lattices need to be broken up. Toa first approximation, the melting point of an ioniccompound is related to the size and charge of theions; the larger the ions and the smaller the chargethe less energy is required to break the lattice.

At the extreme, salts of organic cations e.g.quaternary ammonium halides (R4N+)X, have weakinterionic foces and hence much lower meltingpoints than their alkali metal analogues; e.g.tetrabutylammonium bromide melts at 104oCwhereas sodium bromide melts at 747oC. Thesymmetry of the ions is also important; non-symmetrical ions are more difficult to fit into a latticeand hence the lattice energy and melting point willbe lower.

Perhaps the most studied ionic liquid is 1-butyl, 3-methyl imidazolium hexafluorophosphate, which isvery fluid at room temperature and in fact onlyfreezes at - 40oC. These types of ionic liquids havebeen studied for a wide range of syntheticapplications. They are, however, quite difficult tomake and so still very expensive, and their toxicityhas also not yet been ascertained, factors whichcurrently limit their wide-scale use. In many casesionic liquids can be used more than once and mayeven be recycled, however ultimately there will besome waste and it is important that this is of lowtoxicity and/or biodegradable.

An alternative approach developed at the Universityof Leicester to make large non-symmetric ions is totake a simple organic salt and to complex the anionwith something that will form a hydrogen bond. Thecomplexing agent interacts with the anion increasingits effective size. This in turn decreases the interactionwith the cation and so decreases the freezing point ofthe mixture. This can be done with many quaternaryammonium salts and a wide variety of amides,amine, carboxylic acids and alcohols. The liquids aresimple to make: take two solids, mix them togetherwith gentle heating until they melt and when theycool down they remain liquid.

Work to date has focused on choline chloride as thequaternary ammonium salt which is vitamin B4 andfound in large amounts in the body. It is produced on

the megatonne per annum scale as an additive forchicken feed and a wide range of other applications.Hence it is not only cheap and easy to make, but it isrelatively non-toxic and even biodegradable. So thesesolvents have the potential to be used on a largescale.

One simple hydrogen bond donor that has been usedis urea {(NH2)2C=O}, which is a common fertiliser.Urea mixed with choline chloride in a 2:1 ratioproduces a colourless liquid that freezes at about12oC, which is remarkable given the melting pointsof the constituents (choline chloride is 303oC andurea is 134oC).

The lowest melting point of these mixtures (termedthe “eutectic composition”) occurs when the ratio ofsalt to hydrogen bond donor is 1:2. The depression offreezing point and the eutectic composition changeswith the nature of the hydrogen bond donor e.g.oxalic acid (HOOCCOOH): choline chloride has aeutectic composition of 1:1 and a depression offreezing point of 212oC.

The phenomenon of mixing two solids to make aliquid is not new; every winter this principle is usedwhen salt is added to ice. With deep eutecticsolvents, however, the magnitude of the freezingpoint depression is over ten times greater than withice and salt. This approach works best if both the saltand the hydrogen bond donor are solid at ambienttemperature. Since the formation of the liquid isendothermic, the driving force for the formation isentropy - taking two highly ordered solids andmaking them into a liquid causes a large increase inthe degree of disorder of the system.

Probably the most exciting aspect of these solvents isthat a whole host of applications are availablebecause of the ease of manufacture andenvironmental advantages. They dissolve a widerange of solutes in high concentrations as bulksolvents they could be used in applications likecleaning. They can also dissolve a wide range ofmetal ores (see figure 1) due to their high chloridecontent and are being used to recycle metals fromwaste products.

Because the solvents are ionic they are goodconductors of electricity and as such find use inelectrochemical applications. They are currently

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being developed for the electroplating of chromium,which is a multi billion pound worldwide industry.The current process uses chromic acid, which is notonly extremely hazardous to operate but it is alsovery inefficient. The work to date shows that thick,adherent and crack-free chromium can be obtainedfrom ionic liquids using significantly less electricity,and a much less toxic chromium compound; thisprocess is currently being scaled-up.

Ionic liquids are also being applied to theelectropolishing of stainless steels. Currently amixture of sulphuric and phosphoric acids is used.Superior surface finishes can be obtained with ionicliquids and the current efficiency of the process isalso significantly improved. Figure 2 shows someexamples of pieces of cast stainless steel that havebeen electropolished in an ionic liquid.

Ionic liquids are in their infancy but they have

generated a huge amount of academic interest overthe past decade and are beginning to yield someindustrial potential. There are an almost limitlessvariety of liquids still to be discovered with a widerange of possible applications. Thus, for ionic liquidsthe future is bright and the future is green.

Figure 1: Dissolution of a range of metal ores in ionic liquids

Figure 2: Cast stainless steel pieces before (left) and after(right) electropolishing in an ionic liquid.

MYTHS AND REALITY INPSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILING

Dr Julian Boon, Department of Psychology, University of LeicesterLecture delivered on 6 March 2006

Dr Boon kindly stood in at short notice to give a fascinating and powerful presentation on psychologicalprofiling and its application in apprehending criminals and combating potential crime. In the course of hislecture he drew attention to a number past criminal cases and to certain psychological conditions commonlyassociated with criminality. He also commented on our abilities to bring about cures for some of theseconditions.

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THE BRITISH LIBRARY

Dr John Ashworth, Former Chairman of the Boardof the British Library

Lecture delivered on 23 January 2006Dr John Ashworth came armed with a large number of slides, most of which related to the new building inEuston Road about which there was so much comment whilst it was building. He gave a “son et lumière”address whilst showing us the slides and slipped in comments on the purpose, history and operation of theLibrary as he went. There was no text and certainly it would be difficult to convey a sense of the talk with atext. Indeed a text would convey a quite erroneous impression.

At the conclusion of the evening the audience was encouraged to visit the building in Euston Road (perhapswhilst waiting for a train?) and for those who wish to learn more about the building or the Library there areexcellent books of all sizes available in the Library bookshop.

Currently there is a fascinating free exhibition “London: A Life in Maps” which can be visited until 4 March 2007which, along with the coffee shop and café, might well mean that you find yourself wishing to catch the trainafter the one for which you were waiting…………………..

THE INTERNET: CHANGING THE WAY WE SEE NEWS?

Keith Perch, Director & Editor, Northcliffe Electronic PublishingLeicester Mercury Lecture delivered on 6 February 2006

In this lecture I am going to look at the impact of the Internet on news and where we get it from, particularlyin relation to the printed newspapers, both national and local. I have spent the past 28 years working fornewspapers, starting as a trainee reporter on the Grimsby Evening Telegraph and working my way up. Mostrecently, I have been editor of a couple of daily titles: the Derby Evening Telegraph, and the South Wales Echo,the biggest newspaper in Wales. I also worked for a short period here in Leicester, helping to set up and edita national news agency for the regional press, UK News. Its role was to supply the national news needed bylocal newspapers, a snapshot of what was going on in the rest of the UK. I consider myself a specialist onwhere news comes from and how to get it. But five years ago, I moved across to run the digital side ofNorthcliffe's publishing business.

Northcliffe is a subsidiary of DMGT, a companymany of you will be familiar with through its manyproducts, but particularly its newspapers. DMGT'stwo main publishing businesses are Associated andNorthcliffe, and NEP, the company I run, is asubsidiary of Northcliffe. Associated is the nationalpublishing arm of DMGT, best know for the national

newspaper titles, The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sundayand London's Evening Standard. Northcliffe is theregional publishing business.

In all, we have about 20 evening titles ranging fromAberdeen in Scotland, down through the North Eastof England to Hull and Grimsby, through the

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Midlands, where we have papers in Derby, here inLeicester, Nottingham and Stoke, to Bristol, Walesand the South West of England. In total, these paperssell about a million copies a day. We also have threeregional morning papers in Scotland and the SouthWest of England, and we publish numerous free andpaid-for weekly titles.

The core business of Northcliffe Electronic Publishingis to build websites for all of these newspapers. All ofthe sites are branded “this is . . .” (for example, “thisis Leicestershire”, the website of the LeicesterMercury) and, in total we have 24 newspaper sitescovering areas roughly matching the circulation areasof our newspapers.

The short history of the Internet has already seenboom and bust, the dotcom bubble came and went innext to no time, but there is little doubt that the WorldWide Web is now here to stay. The doomsayers havepredicted for a while now that the Internet would killoff newspapers, by making editorial content availablefor free and tempting advertisers out of the limitedand expensive space of the newspapers' printedcolumns into the unlimited and relatively cheaprealms of cyber space. It is easy to see the argument:there is virtually nothing you can find in print that youcannot find free of charge on the web, but those of uswho have worked in the newspaper industry for moreyears than we care to remember have heard it allbefore.

Radio was going to kill newspapers, and when thatdid not do it, television was definitely going to finishthem off. And then there were free newspapers - whywould anybody buy the Leicester Mercury when theygot papers delivered for free through theirletterboxes? And then along came desk toppublishing; suddenly everybody could producepublications at next to no cost …

But the Mercury is still here. I would guess that likemost local evening newspapers, it sells more copiesin Leicester every day than all the nationalnewspapers added together and that on any givenevening almost one in two adults in the city read thepaper. So, will it be any different this time?

Nick Carter, the editor of the Mercury, and I havedebated this subject more than once in recent yearsand believe me, this time, the changes and the threats

are fundamentally different. There are three essentialdifferences between the Internet and all traditionalforms of media:

Firstly, the sheer scale of it: the advances in computertechnology have been so great in the past few yearsthat there is almost limitless space out there to houseevery bit of information that you can imagine, usingtechnology that makes it almost instantly available toanybody.

Secondly, anybody can publish, easily and cheaply.A completely new website can be set up by acomplete novice at absolutely no cost and in lessthan five minutes; millions of people are alreadydoing it on their blogs, personal websites that allowpeople to publish whatever they want to.

And finally, there has been a complete reversal in thesupply of news and information. In all forms oftraditional media, big companies have their editorsdeciding what news you need and sending it to you.

Of course, you do not have to read it. You do nothave to buy the Leicester Mercury, you never havehad to, but there was virtually no other source ofnews about the city available.

But now, all that has changed. A quick search forLeicestershire news on Google returned more than 2million results - noticeably the top two were bothversions of the website we run with the LeicesterMercury, but the rest of the list includes everythingfrom the BBC to any individual who chooses topublish.

The result of this explosion of news sources is that thereader can now decide what news they read; they nolonger have to wait for an editor to push news tothem, they can go and find the news they want, whenthey want it.

Of course, all three are heavily intertwined anddependent on each other, but let us look at the firsttwo as the scale has largely been created by the factthat it is so easy for anybody to publish.

In 1989, it is thought that there were about 50 peoplesharing pages over the internet.

Just 15 years later, it has been estimated that more

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than 950 million people in the world had access tothe Net. It is thought that well over 30 million haveaccess in the UK alone.

It is impossible to say how much information is outthere, how many pages are available; any figure yousee is likely to be wildly inaccurate as so many pagesare added every day, while relatively few are takendown. Our own statistics show an amazing growthin the number of people looking at our websites andthe number of pages they are looking at.

Two and a half years ago, we had about 700,000different people looking at our websites every month.Last month, January, that figure had risen to 1.7million different people. The number of pages thatthey are reading on our sites has also jumpeddramatically. Again, back in the middle of 2003, theylooked at fewer than 10 million pages; last monththey called up more than 41 million.

The most amazing thing about this growth is that wehave done so little to promote it; it has a momentumall of its own. It is the sheer size of the web thatdrives its usage.

Information that has previously been impossible tofind is now available almost immediately and in farmore depth than it might ever have been before.

I am going to give you one really simple example ofhow difficult that can make things for traditionalmedia. Let us look quickly at the Burton JuniorFootball League. Most of you will not have heard ofthis league - as the name suggests, it is based inBurton and runs football for children. Who would beinterested in this league? Well, it has about 200teams in it, maybe 2,000 players (much of the footballis 7-a-side) who are presumably interested, plus theirparents, grandparents and friends; probably up to10,000 people. It draws teams from Staffordshire,Leicestershire and Derbyshire. Traditionally, wherewould those 10,000 people have got theirinformation on the league. If you wanted to findresults or read match reports, where would you havegone?

National media, TV, radio or newspapers: never.

Local media, TV and radio: never, or at best once ina blue moon.

Local newspapers, including the Leicester Mercury,Derby Telegraph and Burton Mail: weekly.

In fact, each of these papers ran the same report,which was produced by the league itself, was 200words long and was run in the papers in their footballeditions, six days after the matches took place; 200words mean that there was just about one word perteam; the chance of reading any information aboutany individual player was almost nil.

But now the league has its own website, constantlyupdated. Every result appears within hours of the endof the games, updated league tables appear on thesame day and most teams upload match reportsshortly after the end of the games.

The end result is that the league's website has farmore information, far more quickly than any of thenewspapers. But, of course, the big question iswhether anybody actually wants this information.Well, I can tell you the answer to that is that the sitehas been visited more than 280,000 times in the past15 months. We have gone from a situation where thelocal papers were the only place to get information toone where they come a very poor second.

And it is not just small organisations like the BurtonJunior Football league; virtually every body now hasa web site, which is an issue for traditional media.

A very high percentage of news stories appearing in anewspaper come from the major institutions withinits locality. Councils, the police, fire brigade, localhealth services, the local professional football club …and all of these now have their own websites,publishing their own news and views.

In the past, the only way that those sorts oforganisations could get news out was passing itthrough the local media, particularly the localnewspaper.

Take a particular story on “this is Leicestershire”.Remember its content comes from the LeicesterMercury and is published online at the same time asit is published in the paper. But the same storyappears on Leicester City Council's website and onthe County Council's website.

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Consider the traditional treatment of a bit of news tocome out of our local council. They have writtentheir press release and got it approved so, onMonday, they put it in the post to the local media,including our newspaper. If we are lucky, and theRoyal Mail does what it says it will, the press releasearrives on Tuesday morning. It is not startling news,it is not going on the front page and because most ofthe other pages in the paper are written the daybefore they are published, it does not go into thepaper until Wednesday.

It has always worked like this; most of the news iswritten the day before and less and less is written onthe day of publication. In fact, many evening papersnow print their first editions at the same time asmorning papers and some do not have any editionsprinted on the same day that they publish. In thepast, on a local paper, it has not mattered much as thelocal radio and TV stations run so few stories that theyare unlikely to pick up on this sort of story; nobodysees it until it is in the newspaper.

But now, things have changed. The press release isstill prepared and put in the post on Monday; it is stillreceived on Tuesday and published in the newspaperon Wednesday. But now it is published on thecouncil's website on Monday, two days earlier. Theend result is that the traditional newspaper has gonefrom being the only source of local news andinformation in most instances to being one of manyand, because of its traditional methods, by no meansthe fastest. One Editor I spoke to about this inScotland calculated that 80% of his material hadappeared somewhere else before it was in hisnewspaper.

That is the effect of the first two fundamentaldifferences of the internet that I spoke about earlier;the sheer scale and the fact that anybody can publishinformation relatively easily and cheaply. I am goingto refer to the third fundamental difference as editingthe editors.

Traditionally, large companies have paid editors tochoose the news we see and that is the news we get.But now, there are far more people editing the news;they don't tend to source the news, but they pull ittogether in packages, giving people a choice andgiving you somewhere to go where you can see lotsof different sources pulled together.

When terrorists flew two planes into the World TradeCentre on September 11th four years ago, whichnews site do you think was the most popular forupdates in America? The big TV networks, NBC, Fox,the big, trusted newspapers, the New York Times, orthe Washington Post? No, it was none of these. It wasa site run by a single person, a man called MattDrudge. He makes a living by trawling around thenews sites of the world and pulling together a singlesite with the news that he thinks is interesting andfinding that a lot of people agree with him. Every dayhe records on the site how many how many times ithas been visited for an update. I took these figures offit this morning: 11.5 million in the past 24 hours; 289million in the past month. That is one man, editingthe editors. But the technology is moving on soquickly now that it is actually very easy to edit theeditors yourself.

On my PC I have my personalised Google searchpage, which is free, and easily set up. It pullstogether the things that I am interested in on to asingle page that is constantly updated with anychanges on any of the websites that I have selected. Itshows me my email, with alerts from various websiteskeeping me up to date with changes, and it also hasa live search of Google news; every 10 minutes, itgoes off and searches Google for any news articleappearing on any news site on any topic I choose.You can see how I am building my own 'newspaper',pulling together only the news that I want. I get itmuch more quickly and in much more depth thanany printed newspaper could ever give me. All of thismight seem to be on the difficult side, but believe me,it is simple technology that is getting simpler everyday and I believe that it is the way the Internet isheading.

I want to talk about one final thing that I think isdriving the usage of the Internet and that is the waythat it allows an expression of the collective wit andwisdom of the population at large. Many websites,including all of ours, allow readers of the site tocomment on the articles and literally thousands ofpeople do; they often add insight that was missingfrom the original article or add information that theyhave. The Internet drives comments from the publicat large and it is often very quick and very incisive.

Of various examples from the world of sport, myfavourite from last year's European championship is

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of England football captain David Beckham talking toEngland rugby hero Johnny Wilkinson; it appearedalmost immediately after Beckham had put a penaltyover the bar to knock England out of the tournament.

By now, you are probably thinking that I am one ofthose doomsayers who believe that the Internet willkill newspapers. But I do not believe that that it will.A recent survey of newspaper readers shows that

75% are reading the same, 13% are reading more,and 12% are reading less. Of these, only 5% arereading less because they are getting theirinformation from the Internet.

However, I do believe that the Internet isfundamentally changing the way we find our newsand the role of the newspaper within that will have tochange … and while that is the challenge facingeditors like Nick Carter here in Leicester, it is afantastic opportunity for us to find a far more diverseand reflective source of news.

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John Henslow was born in Rochester in 1796 andwas drawn to natural history. During his school dayshe was directed by his art master towards entomologyand to its illustration. Family holidays providedopportunities for zoology; specimens of marineanimals he collected were deposited in the BritishMuseum. Henslow was admitted to St. John'sCollege, Cambridge in 1814 and graduated inmathematics. While an undergraduate he developeda keen interest in mineralogy and began a lifetimefriendship with Adam Sedgwick, who later becameProfessor of Geology. Henslow carried outgeological studies himself, including the geology ofAnglesey published in 1822 in Volume 1 of theTransactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.The idea for this Society came about during a tour ofthe Isle of Wight with Sedgwick in 1819; it provideda forum for all sciences in Cambridge.

Following graduation, Henslow taught mathematicsand demonstrated for the chemist James Cumming.In 1822, Henslow was appointed to the Chair ofMineralogy and delivered his first lecture course ayear later. He continued with his zoological interestsand, from 1821, the serious study of botany. With hisCollege friend Leonard Jenyns - whose sister Harriethe married in 1823 - they resolved in 1821 to start adried plant collection of the whole British flora.Henslow's intention, however, was very differentfrom Jenyns. Where Jenyns was a committed andavid collector of everything in natural history,

Henslow's collecting was focussed on addressing themajor question of biology - the nature of species.Henslow approached this through variation,gathering plants which he arranged with the intent ofdisplaying the variation present within and betweenpopulations. Henslow's British specimens are amajor component of Cambridge UniversityHerbarium. To date 3709 sheets have beendiscovered which carry over ten thousand plants.

The death of Professor Thomas Martyn in 1825 leftthe Chair of Botany at Cambridge vacant. It wasconferred on Henslow in October 1825. At age 29Henslow held two Chairs but after two years, herelinquished Mineralogy and remained Professor ofBotany until his death in 1861.

Henslow developed his herbarium through his owncollecting in Cambridgeshire and Kent, the efforts ofhis family at home and on holiday, through friendsfrom Cambridge such as Leonard Jenyns, and by anetwork of countrywide collaborators. The main wasWilliam Wilson, who later became the leadingbryologist in Britain. Wilson covered Lancashire andCheshire but also Snowdonia and the Cairngorms.The growth of Henslow's herbarium can beuncovered due to his meticulous annotation ofsheets: species name, place of collection, date ofcollection and name of collector in a set order.Where plants were obtained from different places, orat different times from the same population, numbers

THE ORIGIN OF THE 'ORIGIN': WHAT HENSLOWTAUGHT DARWIN

Professor J.S.P. Parker, Director, University of Cambridge Botanic Gardens

Lecture Delivered on 20 March 2006The history of science is punctuated by great figures who have come to represent their disciplines as if theywere the single originators. Thus genetics is embodied in Gregor Mendel, and his 1865 paper - garden peas,inbred lines, dominance and recessivity, uniformity of F1 hybrids, segregation. All this, however, Mendelgleaned from a paper of 1799 written by Thomas Andrew Knight of Downton near Ludlow. Similarly, Darwinstands for evolution, revealed on his voyage on HMS Beagle. The reality is far different. Darwin embarkedwith a deep appreciation of the nature of species, of hybridity, of the search for laws governing nature, givento him by his Cambridge professor, mentor and life-long friend, John Stevens Henslow. In this lecture weexplore the science of Henslow to gain an understanding of Darwin's intellectual heritage and its influenceon his path to the 'Origin of Species'.

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were added to the sheet and its label to identify them.He combined these collections, using the limits ofvariation to define species, in a practice he referred toas 'collation'. Collated sheets, show variation in size,leaf shape, branching patterns and so on, and areunique. No other leading botanist carried out'collation' and it is not a practice employed since.

Henslow's herbarium was a research tool and led toa publication in 1829 - 'A Catalogue of British Plants,arranged according to the Natural System'. This wasused by Henslow's students to gain knowledge ofBritish plants. Darwin used this list in 1829, 1830,and 1831 each time he attended Henslow's 5-weekcourse in the summer term. In 1829, 266 livingBritish plants were demonstrated in the practicalclasses of the course. A printed list of these wasprovided by Henslow.

Henslow's collated sheets most frequently showcontinuous variation in plant size. He was fascinatedby sudden changes of form within species, what hetermed 'monstrosity', due to major mutations ordevelopmental abnormalities. For example, seeds ofEschscholzia californica he obtained from SouthAfrica gave plants with two sepals, very different fromthe typical 'dunce's cap' form of sepals. Henslowmade a herbarium sheet including an illustration of atypical plant. Henslow published papers on naturalmonstrosities in Adoxa, Reseda and Acer seeking 'thelaws that govern nature'. Further insights weregained from the study of hybrids. Indeed, Henslow'sdefinition of species was the twentieth century oneknown as the 'biological species concept' based onbarriers to breeding. Henslow's studies included adetailed analysis of a sterile spontaneous hybridDigitalis and its parents, held up as a model byHenslow's contemporaries. Subsequently, Henslowproposed that studies of 100 different hybrids andtheir parental species would probably reveal the lawsof heredity.

In research and teaching Henslow used his artisticability to great effect. When he became Professor ofBotany in 1825 he found little to help him withteaching. Professor Martyn had received from hisown father, also Professor of Botany, about 2,500herbarium sheets. These he sadly neglected.Henslow inherited a decayed collection from whichhe rescued only 500 plants. Illustrations wereequally poor, so Henslow contacted W J Hooker in

Glasgow to send him all he could spare. He also setabout preparation of 70 elephant-folio drawings toillustrate his lectures. Henslow's first lecture coursein 1828 was greeted with enthusiasm due to his logicand clarity and the excellence of his illustrations.Henslow's course so inspired William Darwin Foxthat he wrote to his cousin Charles Darwin describingthem and advising him that these were lectures not tobe missed. Charles took Henslow's course threetimes - the only lectures he attended in hisCambridge career. Some of these illustrations werediscovered a few years ago in Cambridge. Forty-fiveartist's folios were found, containing published floralillustrations, Henslow's own paintings and drawings,and fully-labelled foolscap sheets of plant detailsHenslow compiled in preparation for his elephant-folio drawings.

The genus Primula was particularly important toHenslow's understanding of varieties and species. Inthe region around Cambridge three species arefound: P. vulgaris (primrose), P. veris (cowslip), and P.elatior (oxlip). In addition hybrids known as falseoxlips occur occasionally. Henslow considered allthese a single species (P. veris) with three varieties.The occurrence of individual plants with bothprimrose-like single flowers on long stems andoxlip/cowslip-like umbels indicated to him that theywere varieties. He also reported changes from one tothe other in his garden cultivation experiments.Attempts to experimentally determine the specieslimits using Primula occupied Henslow for manyyears and were published in 1830 during Darwin'ssecond year of botany. Darwin repeated Henslow'sPrimula experiments 20 years later, as he developedthe botanical evidence for the instability of species hepresented in 'Origin of Species'.

During 1826 Henslow observed that both cowslipsand oxlips were found in two flower-forms, nowreferred to as 'pin' and 'thrum'. On 8 April 1826 hedrew these flower forms in P. elatior and ten days laterin P. veris. Both sets of drawings were found in theHenslow folios. This was later 'discovered' byCharles Darwin in 1860, who recalled having beenshown this by Henslow during his student days. Hemay have been recalling these very drawings sinceHenslow never published these remarkableobservations.

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Henslow was an experimental botanist, and wasconcerned to provide living material for studentpractical work and for botanical research. Somecame from nature but extensive collections in abotanic garden would provide greater scope forinvestigation. A University Botanic Garden had beenfounded on a 5-acre site near the centre ofCambridge in 1762 by Thomas Martyn. It was aphysic garden for medical students but fell intoacademic disuse. When Henslow became Professorhe inherited a run-down Botanic Garden 'unsuitedfor modern experimental botany'. Henslow arguedfor a new Botanic Garden on a much grander scale.He identified a 40-acre site south of Cambridge anda design was drawn-up in 1830.

This new Botanic Garden was structured around acomprehensive tree collection. Many of the originalspecimens have been lost but sufficient remain todeduce the ideas behind the plantings. The threethemes which characterise Henslow's herbarium -variation, monstrosity and hybridisation - are allrepresented by tree groups. The central axis of theGarden, the Main Walk, is composed entirely ofconifers. Here, extreme variants of Pinus nigra areplanted opposite each other presenting an oddlyunbalanced pair: P. nigra ssp nigra, a densely short-needled form from central Europe, opposite themuch-branched long-needled P. nigra ssp salzmanniifrom Spain. A group of three specimens of Fagussylvatica illustrate monstrosity - a standard tree, aweeping form, and a fern-leaved beech F. sylvaticavar. asplenifolia. Hybrids and parent species arerepresented in Platanus and Quercus. We can onlyspeculate about lost trees, but we know that ninevarieties of Juniperus communis were present in 1850and persisted until at least 1922.

Darwin came to Christ's College, Cambridge in 1828to read theology after a year reading medicine atEdinburgh University. His undergraduate passionsincluded hunting, eating and collecting beetles.Darwin's cousin, William Darwin Fox, recommendedthe lectures of Professor Henslow. Darwin enrolledin 1829, with repeats in 1830 and 1831. The coursewas supplemented by walks Henslow led aroundCambridge. During these walks Henslow expoundedon 'everything worthy of note in natural history'.Darwin, a constant attender, was known to somedons as 'the man who walks with Henslow'.

Henslow was impressed by Darwin and sent him inthe summer of 1831 with Adam Sedgwick to gainexperience of field geology in Snowdonia. Darwinreturned to his home in Shrewsbury via Barmouthwhere he collected three specimens of Matthiolasinuata for Henslow's herbarium. Henslowsubsequently 'collated' this material. At home,Darwin was greeted by a letter from Henslowinforming him that he was about to be offered aposition on board HMS Beagle as naturalist.Henslow stated that he deemed Darwin to be themost suitable naturalist he knew to undertake such atrip, while warning him that he was not yet 'a finishednaturalist'.

Darwin embarked with a complete theory of thenature of species given to him by Henslow. ThisHenslovian view revolved around the relationshipbetween varieties and species, exemplified byHenslow's work on Primula. During the voyage,Darwin began to move this position from speciesstability towards species instability; 'varieties' thusbecome incipient species.

This shift towards an evolutionary view wasparticularly influenced by his visit to the GalapagosIslands. He collected many plants (including'monstrosities') for Henslow, who had lectured on thefloras of islands and their endemic species. Darwin'splant records are meticulous - name, date, location -just as Henslow had demonstrated. This contrastswith his Galapagos bird specimens, most of whichwere not localised. These plants were a present forhis creationist mentor Henslow. For us, theyrepresent a clear example of the evolutionaryradiation of species on isolated oceanic islands.

The intellectual development which Darwinunderwent at Cambridge under Henslow gave himthe mental framework for approaching the naturalworld, through observation and through experiment.The interaction between Henslow and Darwincontinued until Henslow's death in 1861, soon afterthe publication of the 'Origin of Species'. Theinfluences of our youth are profound and, as ahistorian of Cambridge science remarked, 'had therebeen no Henslow at Cambridge, there might havebeen no Darwin'.

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October 3 2005A PHILOSOPHY FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYPresident's AddressOpen meeting followed by a social gatheringThe Lord Mayor was present.

October 17 2005HENRY VIII & THE REINVENTION OF EARLY-MODERN LITERATUREProfessor Greg WalkerProfessor of Early-Modern Literature, University of Leicester(Sponsored by University of Leicester Bookshop)

November 7 2005SHIPMAN - (THE TRIAL), THE INQUIRY AND THEAFTERMATHProfessor Richard BakerDepartment of Health Sciences, University ofLeicester

November 21 2005 NAUGHTY BUT NICE: DRAMATIC CENSORSHIPIN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISHTHEATREThe Venerable Dr T Hughie JonesArchdeacon Emeritus of Loughborough

December 5 2005SURVIVING ARMAGEDDON: SOLUTIONS FORA THREATENED PLANETProfessor Bill McGuireDirector, Benfield Hazard Research Centre,University College, London(Joint Lecture with the Geology Section)

December 14 2005 (Wednesday)LECTURE FOR SCHOOLSFUN WITH CHEMISTRYDr Alan G. OsborneDepartment of Biological Sciences, EssexUniversityHeld in the Rattray Lecture Theatre (Sponsored by Leicester Mercury)

January 9 2006THE SWEET SMELL OF CLEAN CHEMISTRYProfessor Andrew Abbott,Department of Chemistry, University of Leicester (Sponsored by The Royal Society of Chemistry)

January 23 2006THE BRITISH LIBRARYDr JM AshworthRetired Academic & Former Chairman of the Boardof the British Library

February 6 2006THE LEICESTER MERCURY LECTURETHE INTERNET AND ITS IMPACT ONNEWSPAPER PUBLISHINGKeith PerchDirector& Editor, Northcliffe Electronic Publishing(Sponsored by the Leicester Mercury)

February 20 2006RESEARCH AND PRACTICE IN SUSTAINABLEDESIGNProfessor Alan ShortDepartment of Architecture, University ofCambridge(Sponsored by De Montfort University)

March 6 2006MYTHS AND REALITY IN PSYCHOLOGICALPROFILINGDr Julian BoonDepartment of Psychology, University of Leicester(Sponsored by the British Association for theAdvancement of Science)

March 20 2006ORIGIN OF THE ORIGINS: WHAT HENSLOWTAUGHT DARWINProfessor JSP ParkerDirector, University of Cambridge Botanic Garden(Joint lecture with the Natural History Section)

April 24 2006 (7.00 p.m. start)ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING Followed by a recital by Cantamici (Wine was served in the interval)

PROGRAMME FOR THE 2005-2006 SEASONExcept where indicated all lectures were held in the Art Gallery of the New Walk

Museum, Leicester, on Mondays at 7:30 pm

42 Volume 100 • 2006


Ladies and Gentlemen of the Leicester Literary andPhilosophical Society, my year in office has been fullof interest; incident and delicate negotiation. YourCouncil has had three daytime meetings in additionto the pre-lecture meetings. We tried to cut down onthe number of evening Meetings of the Council sothat we could socialise more with the Members, butthe sheer weight of business has forced us to resort tobrief business debate before each of talks in recentmonths.

Most of the reasons will be familiar to you. TheCouncil Room, where we have met for many years,was refurbished during the year and we are delightedwith the elegant transformation that has beenachieved. Unfortunately, the display of pictures andphotographs of past Presidents stretching back to1835 has been taken down and we are still innegotiation with the Museum experts to find the bestway of preserving them and making them available toMembers. In the meantime, they are safely stored inthe Museum.

Discussions with the Museum Team have alsocovered the storage of past editions of theTransactions and the distribution of extra copies ofpast Transactions. Closer co-operation overExhibitions, notably the “Lewis Chessmen”Exhibition, and the superb extra Partnership lectureby Irving Finkel in February have been rewarding,and we have been exploring other ways in which theMembers and the Museum might work together.

The imminent phasing out of slide projectors has ledus to explore the possibilities of better PowerPointprojectors and we are liaising with the AudiovisualDepartment at the University of Leicester to find areasonably priced hire option.

Prof Aftab Khan has masterminded our launch of theLit and Phil Website which features all aspects of theSociety, with links to the Geology Section and theNatural History Section. There is also a close link tothe Leicester Museum Website. Our website recentlyacquired a new address:

www.leicesterlitandphil.org.uk

We also widely distributed the Publicity Leaflet aboutthe Society and have attracted a number of newMembers as a result.

We have had a varied and interesting LectureProgramme this year, although it had more than itsfair share of crises with three cancellations at shortnotice. We are most grateful to Prof Richard Baker, DrHughie Jones and Dr Julian Boon for rescuing us withexcellent replacement lectures. We are also gratefulto the Leicester Mercury, De Montfort University,University of Leicester Bookshop, The Royal Societyof Chemistry and the British Association for theAdvancement of Science for their continuingsponsorship of our Lecture Programme.

The Geology and Natural History Sections of theSociety have had very full and interestingprogrammes during the year.

Tonight is my opportunity to thank people for theirhelp during the current session. Particular thanks goto Dr Mary Hamill, our Hon Secretary, who has beenabsolutely fabulous. She has forced me tocommunicate by Email and has ensured thateverything has gone so smoothly. Her quietpersistence and tactful timing have beeninspirational. Thank you very much.

Hilary Lewis has somehow solved all the crises thatwe have had with speakers in addition to planning amost interesting programme for the year. She andGeoff are a formidable combination and we all owethem a deep debt of gratitude.

Alwyne Dean is one of those tireless workers whosomehow ensure the smooth negotiations with theMuseum regarding the Partnership and PeachLectures and the other matters that are underdiscussion; many thanks.

My thanks also go to David Beeson for beingTreasurer, for guiding our financial discussions, andfor agreeing to be President for 2006-7; also to hiswife for organising our refreshments next door.

Others most deserving of my thanks are: Prof AftabKhan for the Website (do keep hitting the site(www.leicesterlitandphil.org.uk) for the latest Lit andPhil information); Mrs Silver for the dedication to therole of Membership Secretary; John Holloway forbeing Editor of the Transactions; all the Members ofthe Council; and all the Museum Staff and Officerswho have looked after us.

THE PRESIDENT'S ANNUAL REPORTPresented at the Annual General Meeting on 24 April 2006

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Finally, in the words of the Master of Ceremonies atthe Leeds Music Hall, a very big thank-you “toyourselves.” You have all been a great support withinteresting and lively conversation and feedback. Iwas very apprehensive when I was installed byDavinder back in October 2005; but it has been

surprisingly enjoyable, and the last lecture onHenslow was the perfect subject as it linked in to myown discussion of the link between “Body and Soul”.

Dr Michael G F Crowe.

Officers 2004/2005

Honorary Life President: Dr Bob KingHonorary Life Vice-President: Dr Trevor Ford O.B.EChairman: Mark EvansSecretary: Joanne NorrisTreasurer: Eileen JohnsonField Secretary: Dennis GamblePublicity Officer: Dr Mark Purnell'Charnia' Editor: Graham StocksStudent Representative: Lara Blythe

Committee

Dennis McVey Co-opted: Robert TrippHelen Jones Dr Roy ClementsMargaret East Kay HawkinsAndrew Swift

This is my first report to the Section as Chairman, andbefore getting down to business, I must thank mypredecessor, Andrew Swift, for his years of service asChairman. It will be a tough act to follow.

Once again, we have had a very successful year. TheSection's activities for this session started with thesummer programme of field meetings. Our first trip,lead by John Hudson, was to the LincolnshireLimestone of Clipsham and the surrounding area.Our weekend excursion this year was to the Isle ofPurbeck and East Dorset, and was led by DaveMartill. It was an excellent meeting, despite wetweather on the Sunday, and I would also like to thankSteve Etches of Kimmeridge for showing hisunrivalled fossil collection to the group. In June wehad an evening meeting at Barwell to mark thefortieth anniversary of the fall on the eponymousmeteorite, while July and August saw visits to GriffQuarry (Nuneaton) and Wren's Nest (Dudley)respectively. In September we had a joint meeting

with the Warwickshire Geoconservation Group toexamine the Pleistocene deposits of Warwickshire,and investigate the watertightness of the concept of“Lake Harrison”. This has been Dennis Gamble's lastseason as field secretary after nine years, and I wouldlike to thank Dennis on behalf of the Section for allhis hard work.

In October we reconvened our winter programme inour new adopted home of the Ken Edwards Building,and had what I think was an excellent series of talkson a wide variety of geological topics. I wasespecially pleased by the size of the audience: wetopped fifty on several occasions, and I would like tothank all members for their support of the Sectionover the last year. We started with a report on somestrange fossils of the Wenlock Limestone, followed byvolcanism, more strange fossils from China and SouthAfrica, and a somewhat frosty assessment of thetheory of “Snowball Earth”. Pliocene ostracodscompleted our first set of Wednesday night talks.

Once again, our Parent Body lecture was given by aleading light in British geology. This year ProfessorBill Maguire, who some may remember from our“Dangerous Earth” Saturday School a few years ago,set out our odds on surviving a plethora ofgeohazards from asteroid impacts to tsunamis. Ourlast meeting of 2005 was our annual ChristmasMeeting held at New Walk Museum. The somewhatselect group in attendance contributed to anadmirable spread of both festive nibbles anddivertissements. The New Year saw us pick up wherewe had left off with lectures on some exquisiteGerman fossils, the latest on the Barwell meteorite,“Geodiversity”, and the breaking news on Devoniantetrapods. The annual Members Evening at theMuseum saw four talks on a range of topics fromsome of the “elder statesmen” of the Section, and waswell supported in somewhat makeshift

ANNUAL REPORT OF THE GEOLOGY SECTION

44 Volume 100 • 2006


accommodation. I look forward to next year'smeeting in the newly refurbished meeting room.

This year's Saturday Seminar, “Fire, flood, droughtand deep-freeze: the turbulent geological evolutionof Leicestershire, Rutland and surrounding areas”,built on the success of last year. Once again we heldthis meeting in the Ken Edwards building, andorganised it ourselves. As we had close to 100 peoplein attendance, we wouldn't have been able to fiteverybody into our old venue at Vaughan College. Imust thank Andrew Swift, who convened themeeting, and the subcommittee and helpers whomade it all possible. I hope that you will agree thatthe decision to run these meeting independently ofthe Institute of Lifelong Learning has been shown tobe the right one.

Our internet website, www.charnia.org.uk, continuesto be a font of information on the Section and itsactivities, both past and present and future. We arenow the top-ranking search result if you enter“charnia” into the Google internet search engine,which is a tribute to the efforts of our webmaster,Dennis McVey. If you haven't found it yet, I urge youto do so. You never know, you may find a photo ofyourself out there in cyberspace! Our earthboundnewsletter “Charnia”, of course, also continues withits mix of articles, programme items and editorials,although unfortunately we lost an issue this year. Thisis the point of contact for many of our members, andcan never be replaced by the new-fangled electronicmedia, and I wish it well for the future. This year wasthe first in which subscriptions were renewed inOctober rather than March, and we had a fewteething problems with our new arrangements. I amconscious that some members may not have seendetails of the winter programme until they receivedtheir membership cards in October. However, armedwith this experience, we will overcome this hiccupfor this coming year. Thank you for your support ofthe Section over the past twelve months, and I hopeto see you all in the session of summer and wintermeetings.

Finally, on behalf of the Section I would like to thankall the Officers and Committee for all their hard workover the past year, particularly Joanne Norris in herrole as Secretary.

Mark Evans

Summer Programme 2005

Saturday May 7th.

Quarries of the Stamford area: Bullimore'sQuarry, Clipsham; Medwell Quarry, StrettonQuarry and Ketton.Leader: Prof John Hudson (Dept of Geology,Leicester University)

Friday June 3rd - Sunday June 5th.

Weekend field trip to Swanage. Leader: Dr Dave Martill (University of Portsmouth)

Wednesday June 29th.

Barwell Meteorite, Barwell. Leaders: Andrew Swift (Dept of Geology, LeicesterUniversity) and Prof. Jack Meadows(Loughborough University).

Saturday July 23rd. Griff Quarry, Nuneaton. Leader: Dr John Carney (BGS, Keyworth)

Sunday August 20th. Dudley Museum and Wren's Nest. Leader: Dennis Gamble (Leicester)

Sunday September 18th. Does Lake Harrison hold water? Field excursion toWood Farm quarry, Waverley Wood Pit and FennyCompton. Joint trip with the WarwickshireGeological Conservation Group. Leader: Dr Martyn Bradley (University ofWarwick).

Winter Programme 2005 - 2006

2005Wednesday October 5th

Dr Liam Herringshaw (University of Birmingham):Weirdoes of the Wenlock Limestone.

Wednesday October 19th

Dr David Pyle (University of Cambridge):Volcanism in the Earth System: Past, Present andFuture.

Wednesday November 2nd

Prof. Dick Aldridge (University of Leicester). Therise of the chordates: new evidence fromexceptionally preserved fossils from China andSouth Africa.

Volume 100 • 2006 45


Wednesday November 16th

Dr Conall Mac Niocaill (University of Oxford). TheNeoproterozoic glacial world: defrosting some ofthe myths.

Wednesday November 30th

Dr Adrian Wood (Coventry University). A Plioceneworld as seen through the eye of an ostracod.

Monday December 5th

Parent Body Lecture, New Walk Museum, Leicester

Prof. Bill Maguire (University College, London).Surviving Armageddon: solutions for a threatenedplanet.

Wednesday December 14th

Christmas Meeting, New Walk Museum, Leicester.

2006

Wednesday January 11th

John Nudds (University of Manchester).Exceptional fossils from southern Germany.

Wednesday January 25th

Professor Jack Meadows (LoughboroughUniversity). The Barwell meteorite: 40 years on.

Wednesday February 8th

Members Evening, New Walk Museum, Leicester.

Wednesday February 22nd

Dr Murray Gray (Queen Mary, University ofLondon). Geodiversity: an important new conceptfor the earth sciences?

Wednesday March 8th

Dr Jenny Clack (University of Cambridge).Evolution of the four-legged fish - new views of anearly tetrapod icon.

Saturday March 11th

Annual Saturday School, Ken Edwards Building,University of Leicester, 9.30 am - 5.00 pm

Fire, flood, drought and ice: the turbulentgeological evolution of Leicestershire andRutland.

Wednesday March 22nd

Annual General Meeting, and Chairman's Address

Mark Evans (New Walk Museum, Leicester). TheGreat Sea Dragons: plesiosaurs of the EarlyJurassic.

Fire, flood, drought and deep-freeze: theturbulent geological evolution of

Leicestershire, Rutland and surrounding areas

Annual Saturday Seminar of the Geology Section,11 March 2006

Ken Edwards Building, University of LeicesterConvened by: Andrew Swift

And Organising committee: Andrew Swift, Joanne Norris, Eileen Johnson, Mark Evans,

Programme9·00 am Assemble

9·35 am Opening of meeting and welcome

Andrew Swift, Convenor, LLPS Geology Section

The morning session chaired by Mark Evans

46 Volume 100 • 2006


9·40 am Building Leicestershire's crust - updates on the geology between 600 and 400 million years ago

Dr John N. Carney, British Geological Survey, Keyworth

10·40 am The mineralization associated with intrusions in Leicestershire

Gill Weightman, Weightman Associates

11·00 am Break

11·20 am Lower Carboniferous rocks of Leicestershire

Dr Keith Ambrose, British Geological Survey, Keyworth

11·50 am Upper Carboniferous

Dr Neil S. Jones, British Geological Survey, Keyworth

12·20 pm Triassic rocks of Leicestershire

Dr Keith Ambrose

1·00 pm Lunch

The afternoon session chaired by Dr Roy Clements

2·10 pm Uppermost Triassic (Penarth Group, Rhaetian). A whiff of the sea

Andrew Swift, Digitimage, Leicester

2·30 pm Jurassic rocks of the East Midlands

Professor John D. Hudson, Department of Geology, Leicester University

3·15 pm Coffee break

3·35 pm The Quaternary ice age in the East Midlands

Professor David H. Keen, Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham

4·20 pm The Holocene in Leicestershire

Dr Jan A. Zalasiewicz, Department of Geology, Leicester University

4·40 pm Discussion and Closing Remarks

Building Leicestershire's crust - updateson the geology between 600 and 400million years ago

Dr John N Carney, British Geological Survey,Keyworth, Nottingham NG12 5GG

Part One:

The 3.5 km exposed thickness of the CharnianSupergroup is mainly composed of tuffs andvolcaniclastic rocks exhibiting the classic features ofmedial to distal turbidites. Clues to where thevolcanic centres lay are found in the variety ofmassive, andesitic to dacitic rocks in the north-west.There also, the abundance of bouldery volcanicbreccias suggests a style of highly explosivevolcanism, with the effusion of voluminous

pyroclastic block flows of the type recently witnessedon Montserrat. Precambrian fossils in CharnwoodForest include the World-famous Ediacaran fauna,but there are also much more primitive - andenigmatic - impressions, 2 km lower down-section,which could represent some of the oldestmacrofossils yet to have been found.

There is continuing speculation about the absoluteage of the Supergroup, and whether some of thestrata may significantly pre-date the maximum age of580 Ma currently favoured for the Ediacaran fauna. Afurther complication is that argillaceous strata at thetop of the Charnian sequence (Brand Group) containtrace fossils indicative of a Lower Cambrian age.

The epizonal (greenschist facies) metamorphism ofthe Charnian rocks has commonly been attributed to

Abstracts

Volume 100 • 2006 47


a Precambrian event but new 39Ar/40Ar dates,obtained on micas defining the cleavage, reveal anoverwhelmingly dominant Acadian imprint. Thefinding has considerable implications for unravellingthe tectonic history of the East Midlands basement.

Part Two: Caledonian intrusions

Prior to the Charnwood deformation, a number ofgranodiorite and quartz diorite batholiths wereemplaced within the East Midlands crust. Some ofthese are exposed, as at Mountsorrel and at Croft.Others, although concealed at shallow depths in thecrust, are revealed by their magnetic response andsome have even been encountered in deepboreholes. The intrusions were generated above asubduction zone at a time when much of easternEngland was a tectonically active mountain belt.These events occurred during the late Ordovician(Caradoc), contemporaneously with volcanic arcmagmatism in Snowdonia and the Lake District, andat a time when 'Avalonia' was migrating towards itseventual place of docking along the Iapetus suturezone.

The mineralization associated withintrusions in Leicestershire

Gill Weightman, Weightman Associates

Basement igneous intrusions and basinal sedimentsare identified as potential sources of metals,pathways for mineralizing fluids and hosts formineralization. Faults, ductile shear zones andTriassic river valleys (wadis) cut into the basementrocks are identified as important conduits formineralizing fluids at the Triassic unconformity.

Copper, vanadium with minor Pb, Ag, Au and zeolitemineralization occurs across the Triassicunconformity between basement rocks and overlyingred bed sediments. The basement rocks are of varyingage and include volcaniclastic metasediments,andesites, diorites, granitoid and dyke intrusions.

The weathering and diagenetic alteration ofsediments in Triassic times provided sources of Cu formineralization. Some of the Cu and V mineralizationcould be related to the inversion of the HinckleyBasin in the Tertiary, which caused the expulsion offluids from basinal sediments. Reducing mineralizing

fluids migrated through basin margin faults and zonesof deformation in the basement rocks, causing theremobilization of Cu from the propylitic basementrocks. The V mineralization is precipitated in cleavagenetworks, both the Cu and V mineralization areprecipitated at redox fronts close to the unconformity.

Field and literature evidence suggests that lowtemperature hydrothermal mineralization: minor Au-Ag-Cu, Hg, kaolinite, brucite and zeolitemineralization coincide with fault networks, intrusivedykes and unconformable Triassic sediments. In theseareas, there is a discordant drainage pattern ofstreams cutting hard basement rocks that someauthors consider may be related to the localizedmelting of ice. Is there a link?

Lower Carboniferous rocks ofLeicestershireDr Keith Ambrose, British Geological Survey,Keyworth, Nottingham NG12 5GG

Rocks of Dinantian age form a series of 5 small inliersin north-west Leicestershire and have also beenproved extensively at depth in the Vale of Belvoir inthe north of the county as a result of oil exploration.BGS also drilled a stratigraphic borehole at Ticknallon another Dinantian outcrop nearby in SouthDerbyshire. At outcrop, almost all of the rocks havebeen heavily dolomitised making preciseinterpretation difficult. We see rocks of two distinctages: the earliest are of Early Chadian age and areseparated from younger rocks by a majorunconformity, the Main Breedon Discontinuity. Theseyounger rocks are of proven Chadian to Brigantianage. The Early Chadian rocks have been correlatedwith the Milldale Limestone of north Derbyshire. Theyounger rocks have been divided into twoformations, the Cloud Hill Dolostone, of ?Holkerianto Asbian age and the Ticknall Limestone ofBrigantian age.

In north Leicestershire, five formations are recognisedrepresenting deposition in deep water basin(Widmerpool half-graben) and shelf (Hathern andNottingham) settings. It includes a sequence ofvolcanic rocks extruded from several centres alongthe Cinderhill-Fosse Bridge fault line that formed thenorthern margin to the Widmerpool half-graben.

48 Volume 100 • 2006


Upper CarboniferousDr Neil S. Jones, British Geological Survey,Keyworth, Nottingham NG12 5GG

This talk focuses on the Upper Carboniferous(Namurian and Westphalian) deposits that occurwithin and adjacent to the counties of Leicestershireand Rutland. These Upper Carboniferous deposits lieon the southern margin of the Pennine Basin, with thebasin margin defined by the Wales-London-BrabantHigh, which formed a rigid, slowly subsiding block ofLower Palaeozoic and older rocks. Basin developmentbegan in Dinantian times, with tilt blocks and grabenformed by crustal extension. The Namurian is presentover relatively small areas but, where present, consistsof two main units: the Edale Shale and the MillstoneGrit groups. The Edale Shales comprise a relativelydeep-water group of facies and represents the infillingof the graben bathymetry by turbidites and marinemudstones. Shallow water deltaic systemspredominate in the succeeding Millstone Grit Group.

The Westphalian comprises rocks of the Pennine CoalMeasures and Warwickshire groups. Rocks of this ageinclude important coal deposits, which occur in 3coalfields in the area: the South Derbyshire, theLeicestershire and the Vale of Belvoir coalfields.Approximately 20% of the counties of Leicestershireand Rutland are situated either on one of the exposedcoalfields or on their subsurface continuation. Boththe Leicestershire and South Derbyshire coalfieldshave an important history of coal mining over 2centuries. However, all deep mines are now closedand only opencast extraction of coal is now carriedout. More recently mining occurred at Asfordby,although only limited coaling operations took placebefore its closure in 1998.

The stratigraphy of the Pennine Coal Measures Groupis based mainly on the occurrence of named coalseams, widespread marine flooding deposits (termedmarine bands) and non-marine bivalve bearingmudstone beds. This allows subdivision into PennineLower, Middle and Upper Coal Measures formations.Sedimentologically all the coalfields show similarfeatures and indicate deposition occurred on anextensive low-lying waterlogged plain marked bynumerous extensive freshwater lakes. Sedimentinfilling of the lakes occurred by the progradation ofsmall lacustrine delta systems, fed by distributarychannel systems. Extensive peats accumulated on

infilled, abandoned sediment surfaces and, followingburial and compaction, gave rise to coal seams.Igneous rocks form an important component of theNamurian and basal Westphalian deposits of the Valeof Belvoir Coalfield. These comprise basic intrusions(high level sills) and extrusive basalts. Recent studiesin the area have revealed new information on theoccurrence and composition of these rocks, whichwill be discussed.

The latter part of the Westphalian shows a change inthe sedimentary style of the succession, with better-drained conditions forming as a result of climatechange (humid to semi-arid), brought about by therain-shadow effect of the continuously rising Variscanmountain chain to the south. Red-bed successions ofthe Warwickshire Group are present in both SouthDerbyshire and the Vale of Belvoir and restunconformably onto older Westphalian. This can belinked to localised uplift on the margins of the Wales-London-Brabant High.

Triassic rocks of LeicestershireDr Keith Ambrose, British Geological Survey,Keyworth, Nottingham NG12 5GG

The Triassic rocks of Leicestershire show a four-foldsubdivision comprising the basal Hopwas and MoiraBreccias, the Sherwood Sandstone, Mercia Mudstoneand Penarth groups. Lying close to the equator, therocks were deposited initially in a semi-aridenvironment that became progressively more arid. InEarly Triassic times, Leicestershire and much ofEngland was crossed by a major river system thatflowed from northern France, depositing sands andgravels. The Sherwood Sandstone Group isrepresented by the Polesworth Formation in westernLeicestershire and the Bromsgrove Sandstone aroundCharnwood Forest and in the north of the county. Thiswas succeeded in the Mid and Late Triassic by desertconditions with wind blown dust being the mainsource of sediment. This formed the Mercia MudstoneGroup. Throughout all of this time, Charnwood Foreststood out as a mountain range, with Mountsorrel,Breedon Hill, Cloud Hill and Barrow Hill standing upas inselbergs. All of these were progressively buriedby the Triassic sediments. In the latest Triassic, thewhole area was subjected to a major marineincursion, which deposited rocks of the PenarthGroup.

Volume 100 • 2006 49


Uppermost Triassic (Penarth Group,Rhaetian). A whiff of the seaAndrew Swift, Digitimage, Leicester LE2 8FD

One of the most remarkable environmental turnoversin the British geological record was recorded by thedeposits of the latest Triassic, previously known as theRhaetic, now as the Penarth Group(lithostratigraphically) or Rhaetian(chronostratigraphically). After an interval stretchingfrom the Carboniferous over 110 m.y. earlier, atransgression re-introduced marine depositionaround 210 m.y. ago after a long period of hot aridconditions represented by the mid-late TriassicMercia Mudstone Group. The progress of thistransgression during the Rhaetian was irregular andthe deposits of the Penarth Group show both marineand non-marine facies. Only in the early Jurassic wasa true open ocean established. It was the fluctuatingconditions that led to the Penarth Group's varied andunusual facies, a thin development previously wellseen in Leicester and surrounding area. The talk willbriefly describe the main facies and illustrate whatcould be seen of the Penarth Group in the past andwhat remains exposed today.

Jurassic Rocks of the East MidlandsProfessor John D. Hudson, Department of Geology,University of Leicester LE1 7RH

In Jurassic times a shallow sea covered most of theBritish Isles, and sediments, with fossils, accumulatedon the sea floor. However certain areas were eitherland or exceptionally shallow, subsiding little andthus receiving little or no sediment. These serve todivide the marine area into natural regions. One ofthe larger “positive” areas was the London Landmass,with a westward extension towards Oxford; anotherwas centred on Market Weighton in east Yorkshire.Between these was the East Midlands Basin. In theearly Jurassic (Lias) it subsided more slowly thaneither the Weald - Wessex basin to the south or theCleveland Basin of north Yorkshire, though the wholearea was marine. In the Middle Jurassic theCleveland Basin was unusual in receiving thick non-marine sediments, deposited on deltas or coastalplains, with fossil plants and dinosaur tracks, whilethe south continued to be part of a warm shallow sea.The East Midlands Basin shows alternations of these

two types of sediment, having both oolitic limestonesand the marsh deposits that yielded the Stamforddinosaur. In the later Middle Jurassic the sea re-invaded the whole region, and ammonites,belemnites, plesiosaurs, pliosaurs and ichthyosaursdisported themselves in the richly-productive seas.

Subsequently, the region escaped the deep burialunder younger rocks that affected both the northernand southern basins, one reason why we have someof the world's best preserved Jurassic rocks andfossils, a rich resource for both industry and science.The gently rolling scenery, fertile soil and localbuilding styles make the Jurassic outcrop an epitomeof lowland England at its best.

County boundaries have no relevance to the Jurassic,so this account will stray into Warwickshire forLiassic rocks and cement manufacture,Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire for buildingstones, and Cambridgeshire for marine reptiles andbricks; though Ketton Cement Quarry, undoubtedlythe star locality, is safely in the right county.

The Quaternary ice age in the EastMidlandsProfessor David H. Keen, Institute of Archaeologyand Antiquity, University of Birmingham B15 2TT

Both glacial (cold climate) and interglacial (warmclimate) deposits were identified in the East Midlandsearly in the history of Earth Sciences in the middle19th century. However a clear stratigraphy for thesedeposits was not produced until the second half ofthe 20th century. This scheme followed the work ofF.W. Shotton in the West Midlands and was builtaround a large glacial advance (the Wolstonian),which was succeeded, by a small number oftemperate episodes during which river terracedeposits were laid down. This succession was thoughtto have occupied about 250000 years of Middle andLate Pleistocene time.

In the 1980s it became apparent that this sequence,with a relatively small number of climatic phases anda short timescale, could not be reconciled with thedetailed stratigraphy of the ocean floors or with therecord of the long cliff sections of the East Angliancoast. So a revision of the older sequence becamenecessary which pushed the Wolstonian back in time

50 Volume 100 • 2006


to correlate it with the Anglian glaciation of easternEngland. Detailed examination of the stratigraphy ofthe Midlands and East Anglia also identified a majorpre-Anglian sediment body, which was deposited bythe now-lost Bytham River which flowed fromWarwickshire to the North Sea. The post-Anglianriver terrace record is also now thought to be far morecomplicated than thought earlier.

The talk will describe these events and also give briefcomment to recent re-interpretations of the LowerPalaeolithic archaeology of the Midlands.

The Holocene in LeicestershireDr Jan A. Zalasiewicz, Department of Geology,University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH

The Holocene is but the latest in a long succession ofQuaternary interglacial phases, yet geologically it hasthe status of a full epoch (equivalent to, say, theMississippian of the Carboniferous, that spanned inexcess of thirty million years). This status is accordedbecause of the precise stratigraphy now possible(down to annual level) and because of itscoincidence with, and influence by, an evolving andexpanding human culture.

The beginning of the Holocene is now taken as ca.10,000 years before the present, the present beingtaken as 1950; this translates into 11,500 calendaryears. This coincided with a rapid warming, a well-nigh catastrophic collapse of the Devensian ice-sheets, a concomitant rise in sea level, and thechange from the British peninsula to the British Isles.The environment in Leicestershire changed from thetundra of the Younger Dryas (the 'Loch Lomond Re-advance') to the beginning of the spread of theextensive mixed/oak forests of the early Holocene,that covered virtually all of the British landmassbelow the tree-line (at about 500 m).

From the mid-Holocene, the Neolithic farmers beganto systematically clear the forests to create, for thefirst time, a human-influenced landscape. By thetime the Domesday Book was written, tree cover inLeicestershire would have been reduced to perhaps15% of its original extent.

The most substantial Holocene geological depositscomprise the river alluvium deposits that underlie the

flood plains of the present-day rivers and streams;that of major rivers such as the Soar may be hundredsof metres across. The Holocene alluvial strips aremade up of the laterally stacked point bar deposits ofa meandering river, and are locally flanked bytopographically higher and earlier Quaternary(Devensian) river terrace deposits laid down by cold-climate braided rivers. The soil and underlying soilcreep deposits accumulating on slopes are alsolargely Holocene. Just to the east, the Fenlandrepresents some 4000 square kilometres of ancientreedswamp, saltmarsh and mudflat environments, thedeposits of which enclose some remarkablearchaeological sites.

We now live in a landscape that is almost entirelyaltered from its early Holocene 'natural' state and,particularly since the Industrial Revolution, havebeen creating substantial new geological deposits (an'Urban Stratum') of our towns, cities, roads andairports. There have even been suggestions - at firstfacetiously made but now sometimes more seriouslyvoiced - that we are no longer living in the Holocene,but in a new geological time period, theAnthropocene, in which earth surface processes aredominated by human action, both direct and indirect.Time and the future course of human developmentwill determine the reality and scale of this newconcept in stratigraphic classification.

Volume 100 • 2006 51


ANNUAL REPORT OF THE NATURALHISTORY SECTION

OFFICERS

President: Miss J E Dawson

Chairman: Mr R Iliffe

Vice Chairman: Post Vacant

Hon Treasurer: Mr P Thompson

Hon Secretary: Mrs S Walton

Hon Minutes Secretary: Mrs D Thompson

Hon Winter Programme Secretary: Miss J E Dawson

Hon Editor: Mrs M Frankum

Committee

Dr R Ellis Dr W R Morris

Mrs M Gillham Mr I Pedley

Mrs A Gregory Mrs R Smith

Mrs W R Heighway Mr P Wilkinson

This year's two committee meetings have been wellattended, with some constructive discussion as to thefuture of the Section. We would like to get moreinvolved with the recording of Leicestershire naturalhistory, liaising with local specialist groups and theLeicestershire Biological Records Centre.

Jean Cooper has resigned as our representative on theParent Body Committee and we need to find areplacement. We thank Jean for her commitmentover the years. Gill Ball has resigned as our HonSecretary after seven years of sterling work. SueWalton has taken over the post and we wish her wellwith this demanding job.

The Summer Programme was devised by a sub-committee of Richard Iliffe, Doreen Thompson, SueWalton, Monica Gillham, Pat Heighway and AlisonGregory. There was a wide variety of venuesprovided and a good turn out of members at mostsites. Thanks are due to Jan Dawson for her WinterProgramme of very interesting speakers. The NaturalHistory Forum was a new departure, with Sectionmembers putting questions to a team of our ownexperts. Thanks also to Doreen for her work inminuting these meetings.

After 23 years, Doreen has resigned as Hon Editor ofthe Newsletter. Hers has been an outstandingcontribution and much appreciated. MaggieFrankum has taken on the job and her first Newsletterwas very well received, especially the inclusion ofphotographs to illustrate the text. As ever, she will bepleased to receive articles and pictures for futureissues.

We also thank Alan Bevington for looking after ourwebsite and Dorothy Phillips for her work in co-ordinating our on-going projects, surveying two ofthe local Wildlife Trust's reserves. We are keen to getmore members involved in project work - thosealready contributing have found it rewarding - andnew initiatives would be welcomed. We are alwayslooking out to recruit new members and theCommittee would be most interested in any ideashow to achieve this.

Finally, we thank Pat Heighway and Alison Gregoryfor the refreshments after the indoor meetings andJean Cooper for providing us with the splendid buffetfollowing the AGM.

Sue Walton & Jan Dawson

52 Volume 100 • 2006


Winter meetings were held at fortnightly intervals to hear the following speakers:-

January 5th The Natural History of Croft Hill Carl Baggott

January 19th For Plants, For People, For the Planet Plantlife

February 2nd A Natural History Forum

February 16th The Other Rain Forest Jeff Best

March 2nd Disease - The Role of Insects in its Spread Dr Ray Morris

March 7th Joint Meeting with the Parent Body

Is Spring Getting Earlier? Dr Tim Sparks

March 16th AGM, Social Evening and Demonstration (The average attendance was 37)

The Summer Programme of outdoor meetings was as follows:-

April 22nd Cossington Meadows N R Chris Hills

May 7th Titchmarsh N R Sue Walton

June 4th Grantham Canal near Stathern Michael Stanley

June 18th Bloody Oaks Quarry N R Jenny Harris

June 29th Narborough Bog N R Sue Walton

July 16th New Lount N RMonica Gillham

July 30th Ufton Fields N R Doreen Thompson

August 13th Great Merrible Wood N R Andy Lear

August 24th Fosse Meadows Nature Park Richard Iliffe

September 17th Market Bosworth Country Park Richard Iliffe

October 1st Thornton Reservoir Richard Iliffe

October 16th Beacon Hill Country Park - Fungus Foray Richard Iliffe

Joint Meeting with Leicestershire Fungus Study Group

Winter Meetings began again on October 12th with a Members' Slide and ExhibitionEvening, followed by:-

October 26th The Natural History of the Red Fox Derek Warren

November 9th Tibet; Plants from 'The Most Beautiful Valley on Earth' Hazel Kaye

November 23rd Thirty-third Sowter Memorial Lecture

Fascinating Fungi Ray Woods

December 7th Local Links between History and Natural History Graham Walley








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THE LEICESTER LITERARY & PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETYFounded in 1835

OFFICERS AND COUNCIL

President: Dr M.G.F. Crowe, M.A., M.B., B.Chir, F.R.C.G.P.

Life Vice-Presidents

Dr T.D. Ford, O.B.E., Ph.D., B.Sc., F.G.S.Mrs H.A.E. Lewis, J.P., M.A.

Vice Presidents

Professor D.P.S. Sandhu, M.D., FRCS (Ed. UROL),FRCS (Glas)M. Kirk, O.B.E, F.C.A.

Dr D.P. Bethell, C.B.E., LL.D., D. Litt, D.Ed (Deceased Dec 2005) Canon Michael Wilson, M.A.,M.B.A.

Hon. Secretary: Dr Mary Hamill M.B., B. Chir., F.R.C.P.C.H., B.A.O.91 Kingsway Rd, Leicester, LE5 5TU

Hon. Membership Secretary: Mrs P.L. Silver (Deceased Oct 2006)49a Kent Drive, Oadby, Leicester, LE2 4PQ

Hon. Programme Secretaries: Dr D.G. Lewis, M.A., M.D., F.R.C.A. and Mrs H.A.E. Lewis J.P.,M.A.,3 Shirley Road, Leicester, LE2 3LL

Hon. Treasurer: B.D. Beeson,The Hollies, Main Street, Frolesworth, Leicester, LE17 5EG

Hon. Transactions Editor: Professor J.H. Holloway, O.B.E., B.Sc., Ph.D., D.Sc., C.Chem., F.R.S.C.The Garden House, 5 Hall Gardens, Uppingham, Rutland, LE15 9HG.

Independent Examiners: Keith Smithson, F.C.I.B., M.I.Mgt., F.R.S.A.Mr P.E.K. Fuchs, M.A.

Members of CouncilS.A. Ashraf, M.A.

Professor P.J. Boylan B.Sc., Ph.D., F.G.S., F.M.A., F.B.I.M., F.R.S.A.D.E. Kendall Clark, O.B.E., B.Sc.

Professor I.M.T. Davidson D.Sc., Ph.D., C. Chem., F.R.S.C., F.R.S.A.,Mrs A.Dean, B.A.

J. Dickinson B. Sc. C.Eng, F.I.M.M.M., F.G.S.Professor M.A. Khan, B.Sc., Ph.D., F.R.A.S., F.R.S.A.

L. Lloyd-Smith, J.P., Dip.Arch., F.R.I.B.A.Mr G. K. Pitches, M.A., A.R.I.B.A.

Dr E. Raven B.Sc., Ph.D., M.R.S.C., C.Chem.Professor P.H.A. Sneath, F.R.S., M.A., M.D., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.

Dr D. Thurston, B.Sc., Ph.D.The Vice Chancellor of the University of Leicester

The Vice Chancellor of De Montfort UniversityOne representative of the Geology Section

One representative of the Natural History Section

Geology Section Hon. Secretary:Ms Joanne Norris, 208 Milligan Rd, Aylestone, Leicester, LE2 8FD

Natural History Section Hon. Secretary:Mrs Sue Walton, 29 School Lane, Huncote, Leicester, LE9 3BD.






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& PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. TRANSACTIONS OF THE … · Transactions of the Leicester Literary & Philosophical Society. I have been thinking of writing a paper on Dr Shaw's challenge