Category: Politicians Page 1 of 2

Grigoris Lambrakis – Zei

On May 3, 2026

The Old Theatre lay at the heart of the LSE: forum for the larger undergraduate lectures, arena for visiting speakers, and stage for febrile student union meetings. But on Thursday evenings politics ceded ground to culture when Film Soc. screened its weekly offering. And it was there, with singular surprise, that I first encountered applause in response to a film. In the provinces of my childhood, we had always hastened to exit the cinema before the credits rolled to avoid the then ubiquitous playing of the National Anthem. Free from that constraint a more leisurely exit prevailed but I had never witnessed an audience remaining seated, engaged in prolonged clapping long after the screen went blank.

The plaudits came from a group seated together near the front of the theatre. “It’s the Greek students,” my companion apprised me. It was 1970 and the film was Costa-Gavras’ “Z,”released the previous year.

“Z” began with an arresting content warning: in lieu of the habitual disclaimer, it informed the audience,

Toute resemblance avec des evenements reels, des personnes mortes ou vivantes n’est pas le fait du hazard,

And in case this lacked sufficient clarity it confirmed the intentional similarity to real events with determined capitalization,

Elle est VOLONTAIRE.

The film was based on the political novel of the same name by Vassilis Vassilikos published in 1967, an account of the murder of Grigoris Lambrakis and the subsequent investigation into his assassination.

Grigoris Lambrakis (1912-1963) was born in Kerasitsa, a village in the Peloponnese, and studied medicine in Athens. He was a champion athlete, holding the Greek record for long jump for twenty-three years, winning gold medals in the Balkan Games, and participating in the controversial 1936 Olympic Games.

During the Axis occupation of Greece, 1941-44, he worked in his brother’s clinic where they sheltered partisans and supplied them with false identities. During the famine of those years, he set up the Union of Greek Athletes who held competitions to raise money to fund food banks for the starving population.

Throughout the Civil War years which followed the withdrawal of the Axis powers Lambrakis treated the wounded on both sides of the conflict. For this he was accused of “anti-national activity” by the conservative, monarchist government and spent six months in the Goudi prison in 1948.

During the 1950s while specialising in gynaecology and endocrinology, Lambrakis operated a free weekly clinic for patients unable to afford medical care.

So far, a clever, talented, decent man living his life and doing what good he could along the way, principled and with a certain courage. Then in the 1960s came a significant shift in focus: Lambrakis became committed to radical social and political change.

Something had been rotten in the state of Greece since the mid-1930s: an unpleasant amalgam of domestic dictatorships and foreign oppression. In 1935 the monarchy had been restored by a rigged plebiscite. George II then facilitated the fascist dictatorship of Metaxas. Between 1941 and 1944 the Axis occupation, the collaborationist government under Rallis, and the British blockade reduced the country to starvation. More than 200,000 people died in the famine.

In 1944 it was understood that the Communist EAM/ELAS, whose members had been at the heart of national resistance against the occupying powers of Nazi Germany and Bulgaria, would be given a significant voice in the new government, and that the collaborationist Security Battalions would be put on trial. This did not happen. Instead, Churchill, who combined hysterical anti-Communism with a crazed desire for British hegemony, sent troops under General Scobie to escort the Greek government in exile home from Egypt.

Back in Athens, Scobie ordered the EAM/ELAS forces to disarm, while supplying the anti-Communists with ammunition. A mass protest in central Athens was met with police opening fire and in a savage assault killing twenty-eight people. The Battle for Athens, thirty-seven days of fighting, ensued with the British troops and right-wing nationalists ranged against the Communists. The defeat of the latter when the British flew in extra troops was followed by the White Terror of 1945-6 with arrests, torture, exile and murder of leftists. The Greek Civil War continued until 1949 with an estimated 150,000 dead.

Throughout the 1950s, repressive right-wing regimes were funded and supported by America, where a morbid fear of Communism ran even deeper than in Britain. These successive governments connived with the extravagantly funded monarchy to maintain a stranglehold on the constitution. Former partisans and dissidents were sent to re-education camps on remote islands; censorship was rife; the power of trade unions was limited and trade unionists imprisoned; the power of the army and police went unchecked.

Against this background Lambrakis stood for the Hellenic Parliament in 1961 as an Independent member for Piraeus under the umbrella of the United Democratic Left (EDA), the only legal left-wing organisation since the civil war. His platform was one of peace and democracy, his aim to eliminate all trace of fascism at home and to free Greece from the foreign presence supporting it.

In his pre-election address he told his audience,

Dear friends we are running for election with two pursuits: peace and democracy. We want peace so that no missile bases will be established on Greek soil and we can have friendly relations with our Balkan neighbours. We want real democracy… to put an end to arrests, forced exile…and to have the most beautiful achievement of the Greek people finally recognised: our heroic national resistance against Italian and German fascists and their local collaborators.

Lambrakis opposed Greek involvement with NATO and reliance on American economic aid, sought to close the US missile base near Thessaloniki, and fought the establishment of nuclear bases in Crete. He established the Committee for International Détente and Peace in Greece and attended international pacifist meetings and demonstrations.

In April 1963 he joined the march organised by CND from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Aldermaston to London. The Bertrand Russell Youth Committee for Nuclear Disarmament led by a law student, Michael Peristerakis, planned another march from Athens to Marathon later that month, differing from the marches in western Europe in that it was a demonstration for social change, democracy, and the right to freedom of expression as well as disarmament. In a perfect, though undoubtedly unintended, illustration of the need for these reforms the Karamanlis government and the police banned the march. Despite a display of intimidation thousands of marchers ignored the official ban; 2,000 were arrested and three hundred injured. Only Lambrakis, claiming his parliamentary immunity, was able to reach Marathon, walking alone holding the same banner he had carried at Aldermaston bearing the nuclear disarmament symbol and the word “Greece.” But when he tried to complete the return march, parliamentary immunity failed him and he too was arrested.

For Lambrakis the battle for the release of political prisoners was part of the same struggle as that for pacifism: peace and civil rights were inexorably linked. Over 1,000 political prisoners arrested at the end of the Civil War remained incarcerated. Antonis Ambatielos, a trades unionist and member of the Greek resistance had been arrested and sentenced to death in 1947, his sentence later commuted to life imprisonment. To draw attention to his case and that of other political prisoners, Lambrakis made a statement to the British press during a visit there by Queen Frederica. Pointing to the undemocratic and unconstitutional interventions of the reactionary queen in parliament and government, and her resistance to the desire of the Greek people for democracy, freedom, and the release of political prisoners, he issued a prescient warning,

I wish to warn the queen that with her attitude she is leading the throne to a sure demise.

The resulting publicity resulted in the cause of the Greek prisoners being taken up by British Labour MPs and an international conference calling for an amnesty of all Greek political prisoners was held in Paris.

In May 1963 Lambrakis attended an anti-war meeting in Thessaloniki despite having received death threats. In full view of a large police and military presence a pickup van drove towards him and a passenger in the back of the truck delivered blows to his head. Five days later he died of his injuries.

Over half a million people attended Lambrakis’ funeral despite attempts by the government to limit the turnout. The letter “Z,” an abbreviation for the Greek “Zei,” He Lives, appeared on buildings and hoardings in Greek cities.

The Investigating Prosecutor, Christos Sartzetakis, was pressured by the government to return a risible false narrative of a traffic accident. He refused, emphasising the culpability of high-ranking police officials, members of the paramilitary and of the repressive para-state apparatus who initiated the attack.

The assassination contributed to the fall of the Karamanlis government, and the electoral victory of Papandreou’s Centre Union in November brought some reforms with the release of political prisoners, wealth redistribution, economic liberalisation and education expansion.

In 1964 a new political organisation, the Lambrakis Democratic Youth, was formed with Lambrakis’ friend Theodorakis as its first president.

Yet change was limited, and after King Constantine engineered a split in the Centre Union Papandreou resigned heralding political instability, and a series of short-term weak governments. Nonetheless in the elections scheduled for May 1967 the Centre Union confidently expected to emerge as the largest party and to be able to rule in coalition with the United Democratic Left. But precisely four years after Lambrakis’ march to Marathon, on April 21^st, 1967, the military Junta seized power claiming instability (nothing new) and the threat of an anarcho-Communist takeover (from the Centre Union?) as justification… Both the monarchy and the CIA have always denied that they lent their support to the coup.

Leading politicians and political activists were arrested, the constitution suspended and martial law declared. Political opponents were imprisoned and tortured. Amnesty International estimated that over 10,000 people were arrested and imprisoned within the first few days of the regime, and six months on more than 2,000 had been subject to torture. Political parties were suppressed, military courts established, civil liberties collapsed, freedom of assembly outlawed, surveillance introduced, the press censored.

The Investigating Prosecutor who had identified the agents responsible for Lambrakis’ death found himself in prison, while all charges against the perpetrators were dropped. Against this background Vassilis Vassilikos published “Z.” It was promptly banned in Greece as was the subsequent film with soundtrack by Theodorakis who was exiled. Even possession of Lambrakis’ scientific papers became an offence.

At the end of the film before the credits there is a list of some of the things banned by the Junta, they include: long hair for men, miniskirts, Sophocles, Tolstoy, Chekov, Pinter, new maths, the peace symbol, Sociology, the letter “Z.” The absurdity amused us, but must have appeared less than humorous to the Greek students.

The Junta fell in 1974 under the impact of internal splits, student protests, and the ill-fated attempt to invade Cyprus. The country transitioned by free vote to a Presidential Parliamentary democracy, the Hellenic Republic, with an independent judiciary, press and trade unions.

Since 1982 the Athens Classic Marathon has been dedicated to Grigoris Lambrakis.

Grave of Lambrakis, the First Cemetery, Athens

The quotation on the grave is from Yiannis Ritsos, Poet, Communist, and Member of the Greek Resistance.

Ritsos’ poem Epitaphios was inspired by the photograph of a mother weeping over the body of her son who died when police opened fire on a peaceful demonstration of striking tobacco workers in Thessaloniki in 1936.The poem was publicly burned during the Metaxas dictatorship. Theodorakis set it to music. It was sung in the streets following Lambrakis’ funeral. Ritsos was sent to a prison camp by the Junta.
(Photograph from a Greek newspaper, Rizospastis, May 10 1936 unknown author).

The bronze on Lambrakis’ grave portrays a dove of peace, Lambrakis bearing his CND banner on his march to Marathon, and his profile. There is a famous photograph of him with the banner. It is copyright but you can see it on Wikipedia if you google Lambrakis.

Alfred and Ada Salter: Political Triumph and Personal Tragedy

By Gravedigger

On March 22, 2026

In Medics, Politicians

I am fond of Rotherhithe; it is a comfortable walking distance from Tower Bridge but just far enough east to discourage most tourists… apart from those who congregate at the Mayflower Inn from where a grumpy bunch of Protestant separatists may have sailed in 1620.

There is the little Brunel Museum located in the engine house designed by Marc Isambard Brunel as part of the infrastructure of the Thames Tunnel; the scant remains of Edward III’s Manor House; a few cobbled streets around St. Mary’s church, and somewhere in the graveyard the remains of Christopher Jones, the ship’s master on the Mayflower; St. Mary’s Free School, established 1613 to educate the children of impoverished seafarers, and bearing two statues of the charity children in their blue uniforms; and a Swedish, a Norwegian and a Finnish church.

Memorial to Christopher Jones, Saint Mary’s churchyard, Rotherhithe. The Saint Christopher figure looks back to the old world, and the child forward to the new.

Saint Mary’s Free School, now a private house

Figures of charity children in their blue uniforms

Otherwise, Rotherhithe today is a comfortably ordinary sort of place, its massive docks and wharfs long gone, but I envy those who live in the warehouse conversions along the river and drink in the Angel, a cosy 1830s pub built out over the Thames on wooden posts. From its balcony there are stunning views upriver to Tower Bridge and the jostling skyscrapers of the City.

The Angel marks the boundary between Rotherhithe and Bermondsey, both part of the Metropolitan Borough of Bermondsey between 1900-1965. In an open space beside the pub is one of my favourite memorials: Dr. Salter’s Daydream.

Alfred Salter (1873-1945) entered Guy’s Hospital Medical School on a scholarship at the age of sixteen. He garnered prizes, first class honours, and gold medals. With his star burning so brightly, it was expected that he would assume a Harley Street practice, a consultancy, or a prestigious research post; Lister had invited him to join the British Institute of Preventative Medicine.

But during his time at Guy’s, Salter had become familiar with Bermondsey and Rotherhithe. I would not have envied the inhabitants in those days. Alongside the docks and the factories processing leather and hides, Salter visited courtyards where one water closet and one standpipe, operating for only two hours per day, served twenty-five houses. The dwellings were damp and cramped, with verminous walls, their occupants half starved. Jacob’s Island, made notorious by Dickens in Oliver Twist, lay in Bermondsey. Salter decided that this was where he would work.

He went to live in the Bermondsey Settlement which provided health and education services for one of the worst slums in London. Fenner Brockway, in his biography of Salter, describes a romantic figure bursting with life and energy, “known as the Settlement firebrand – militant Republican, militant Socialist, militant Agnostic, militant Teetotaller, militant Pacifist.” In these years Salter was also a member of an international organisation which assisted political refugees, Anarchists and Socialists fleeing oppressive regimes, and landing clandestinely from incoming ships at Rotherhithe docks.

At the Settlement, Salter met and married Ada Brown (1866-1942), a social worker. They bought a house in Jamaica Road in Rotherhithe where they lived above his surgery. Under Ada’s influence the former militant agnostic joined the Society of Friends, whose values accorded with the pacifist and ethical socialist beliefs which he and Ada shared.

Salter, who became known as “the poor man’s doctor” began by charging 6d for consultations but waived his fee if people were unable to pay, which did not endear him to fellow GPs. Later he introduced a mutual health insurance scheme in Bermondsey, described as “an NHS before the NHS.” He placed great emphasis on preventative medicine and education, promoting health centres and showing health propaganda films. His practice grew, and he took on four partners who shared his principles and worked on a co-operative basis.

In 1903 Salter was elected to the Borough Council and in 1922 he stood for Parliament as an Independent Labour (ILP) candidate. Having expounded the ideals of socialism, in his closing speech on the eve of the poll he told the electorate:

If you want a member of parliament who will vote for cheaper beer, you will elect one of the other candidates. If you want a member of parliament who will vote for an army and navy to defend Britain and the Empire, you will elect one of the other candidates… I will vote for prohibition. I will vote against all credits for the armed forces.

Most of his audience were drinkers and most of the men had served in the forces during World War I. His agent, horrified and fearing he was losing votes with every word, phoned the committee room begging them to send an urgent message calling the doctor to a life and death case.

Yet when the results came in next day, Dr. Salter had won and West Bermondsey had been captured for Socialism. In his maiden speech Salter introduced a motion in favour of a minimum living wage for all workers and condemned the fabulous dividends paid to shareholders. With a rare literary flourish he quoted Russell Lowell,

Have ye founded your thrones and altars then,

On the bodies and souls of living men,

And think ye that building shall endure,

Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?

In his constituency Salter worked for better housing, free school meals, nursery schools, and playgrounds, recognising that these were as essential as medicines in improving public health. He understood that improvements in nutrition and the environment were vital to bring down deaths from tuberculosis. Under his guidance the council encouraged the use of tuberculin tested milk; the first municipal solarium in Britain was established to prevent and treat not just TB but also rickets and skin diseases; swimming pools, public baths and wash houses were built.

Salter himself bought Fairby Grange, an old mansion in Kent with twenty acres of grounds, and presented it to the Council to serve as the first convalescent home in Britain.

In 1929 he resigned his medical practice believing it was more important to focus on his political work removing the causes of sickness through help for the unemployed, adequate pensions, and recreational facilities.

Meanwhile Ada Salter had been elected as Mayor by the Borough Council, and the Labour majority replaced the union jack over the town hall with a red flag bearing the borough arms, fulfilling a prediction – “The red flag shall fly over the town hall” – which Ada had made when she was the only Socialist among fifty-six councillors. Ada also declined to wear the mayoral robes and chain of office. The Tory press was scandalised. But these were symbolic gestures, and she was soon introducing changes of greater social significance.

Campaigns against air pollution, pushing for the establishment of a green belt and promoting urban gardening, were at the heart of her work. Over two years nine thousand trees were planted in the borough. Thousands of cuttings from flowering plants at Fairby Grange were transported for summer bedding. Old gravestones were move to the walls of churchyards and the graves covered with flowers. Public buildings and lampposts were adorned with window boxes and hanging baskets. Bulbs, seeds and seedlings from Fairby were given to anyone in the borough with space to plant. In Southwark Park, which had been little more than a stark open space, flowerbeds and benches were laid out specifically with the elderly and mothers with young children in mind.

Both Salters dreamed of turning Bermondsey into a Garden Village. In Wilson Grove back-to-back slum dwellings were replaced with council owned cottages with gardens, drawing admiration at home and abroad. But a change in national government in 1924, and problems of space for rehousing the dense population, meant that elsewhere in the borough blocks of flats replaced the slums. Yet under the Labour Council gardens were built around the flats and tenants encouraged to grow plants on their balconies.

It was not easy. Fenner Brockway wrote:

For two years the planting of flowers was a complete failure. The children trampled on them and tore them up…the Housing Committee was coming to the conclusion that the gardens would have to be replaced by concrete yards. Then in the third year a daffodil broke through the earth –and the children were taught to guard it as though it were a fairy. The victory of the flowers was won. Adults and children now take pride in them.

The Salters had always been pacifists: both worked with the No Conscription Fellowship in World War One, and Alfred’s 1914 pamphlet Faith of a Pacifist had been translated and clandestinely distributed in Germany. In the 1930s he had spoken out in Parliament against arms sales and profiteering from war preparations. Both he and Ada worked for the Peace Pledge Union. He opposed the bombing of civilian areas in Germany despite the damage inflicted by the Luftwaffe in his own constituency. His last speech in Parliament in 1942 was a plea for peace reasoning that it was a terrible fallacy that ends justify means:

We cannot believe that any new or righteous order of society will be achieved by evil means, by overcoming evil with greater, more potent and more effective evil

His last political act was to join a two day fast to draw public attention to famine and starvation in Greece; under the combined impact of the Nazi occupation and the British naval blockade 30,000 people had died in the winter of 1941-42. Churchill’s government reluctantly lifted the blockade in February 1942.

The Salters chose cremation and have no gravestones. In 1949 Fenner Brockway wrote that the Borough of Bermondsey, despite its war time devastation, was Salter’s monument.

But Dr. Salter’s Daydream, the bronze memorial beside the Thames, remembers not just Alfred and Ada Salter’s medical and political achievements, but their private tragedy. For they had a daughter, Joyce. Unlike other middle-class parents, they did not send her to a boarding school outside the borough, for they did not believe that any child should have privileges denied to others. She attended a local school and made friends with local children. Her parents reserved a room in their home for Joyce and her friends. There everything was washable, and the toys and furniture regularly disinfected. Nonetheless when she was eight years old Joyce caught scarlet fever for the third time.

The Salters did not draw their blinds as was customary following a death. “She was our sunshine,” said Ada. “Why should we shut out sunshine?” Joyce’s portrait hung in their study, and to the end of her life Ada decorated it with flowers every day.

Portrait of Joyce with her father.
Image source: wikimedia creative commons, licensed under CC by 4.0 international license

Dr. Salter’s Daydream, bronze designed by Diane Gorvin, 1991.
Dr. Salter, remembering happy times with his daughter, looks towards the Thames, where Joyce leans against the wall.

Ada Salter with her gardening spade, her left hand is designed to hold the flowers which are often left for her.

As can be seen from the photograph above, Joyce was a beautiful child. Unfortunately the bronze of her is not so successful as those of her parents.

Joyce’s cat poised on the wall above her. In the background Tower Bridge, and modern skyscrapers in The City.

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The information reproduced here about the work of Alfred and Ada Salter comes largely from Fenner Brockway, Bermondsey Story, the life of Alfred Salter, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1949.

Bookcover by Arthur Wragg. Dr. Salter always cycled to Parliament on the old bicycle illustrated here.

Lynn Morris of the Journeyman Theatre wrote and performed Red Flag over Bermondsey about the life of Ada Salter in 2016.

Myles Hobart, Parliamentarian: a Moment of Glory eclipsed by a Runaway Coach

By Gravedigger

On August 31, 2025

In Politicians, Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

Myles Hobart was the Member of Parliament for Marlow in Buckinghamshire for a very short time:1628-29.

I love seventeenth century history, not least because at this time the English language reached its apogee, so that every Act of Parliament, every Petition and Protest, is couched in the most eloquent and elegant English, as much a work of lucid literature, as a dry document. But in the seventeenth century the business of Parliament never was dull or mundane. On the contrary, acts of high drama were leading slowly but inexorably to the demise of absolute monarchy and the genesis of a Parliamentary democracy. Myles Hobart had a walk on part in one such drama.

Charles I, like his father, had an elevated view of his status as God’s chosen appointee. He ran an extravagant household, had a bloated army…and expected other people to pay for his amusements. In 1626 Parliament refused to grant the taxes he sought. Charles promptly dissolved Parliament and raised money through forced loans, imprisoning without trial those who refused him. Billeting his soldiers in private homes, he obliged people to feed, clothe and accommodate them.

But as increasing numbers of people faced prison rather than “lending” him money, he was compelled to call another Parliament in 1628. The Members were ready for him. Edward Coke had drawn up the Petition of Right confirming that there should be no taxation without Parliamentary consent, no imprisonment without trial, and no forced quartering of soldiers in private houses. As a condition of their voting taxes Parliament demanded the King’s formal assent to the Petition.

Charles attempted to fob them off with a verbal consent. The Parliamentarians were not impressed; they sought written guarantees:

Not that I distrust the King but that I cannot take his trust but in a Parliamentary way,

observed Edward Coke wryly.

Charles then tried to add a proviso stating that the terms of the Petition prevailed through his grace, and not as of right, hoping through this expedient that in future disputes the Petition would have no force of law. But Parliament was packed with men who had legal training, they knew the power of words, and they stood firm. Reluctantly Charles gave his formal assent to the Petition in June 1628.

But he then prorogued parliament, and had the Petition of Right rewritten so that it could only be enforced “according to the laws and customs of the realm,” a loose phrase which he could interpret to suit himself. He proceeded to collect the indirect taxes of Tunnage and Poundage* without seeking authorisation and to prosecute merchants who refused to pay.

When Parliament reconvened in January 1629 and took issue with this illegal levy, the Members anticipated that another adjournment would presage a dissolution. As they expected, in March, on instructions from the King, the Speaker rose to announce an adjournment. Immediately Denzil Holles and Benjamin Valentine pushed him back into his chair and held him down ** while a furious debate ensued as angry members defied the king and his supporters in the House. John Eliot thundered,

Mr. Speaker there never was the like of this done in the House…It is the fundamental liberty of this House that we have ever used to adjourn ourselves.

When the King sent his messenger, the ludicrously named Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, to order Parliament to disperse, Myles Hobart had his moment of glory: he locked the door and pocketed the key leaving an impotent Black Rod standing outside. John Eliot then read out the declaration which he had prepared. After condemning Charles’ actions, he sought and secured assent for the Three Resolutions anathematising anyone levying or paying Tonnage and Poundage without the consent of Parliament, or promoting Popery or Arminianism (the religious groups supporting the king). Anyone breaching the Resolutions was declared

a capital enemy of the Kingdom and Commonwealth…betrayer of the liberties of England and an enemy of the state.

In short, such people would be guilty of treason. Having completed their business, the Members then voted for their own adjournment.

Charles’ response was swift. Nine of the leading protagonists, including John Eliot and Myles Hobart were arrested and imprisoned in the Tower.

Some few vipers that did cast the mist of undutifulness over most of their eyes,

spat Charles, inaccurately, for a majority in the House were firmly behind Eliot. As the MPs had foreseen Charles then dissolved Parliament. He ruled as an autocratic, absolute ruler for eleven years raising money by royal prerogative…but he was to get his comeuppance in 1649.

Meanwhile Eliot died in prison. Myles Hobart was released in 1631 but was fatally injured a year later when his carriage overturned on Holborn Hill.

He was buried in All Saints Parish Church, Marlow, where a monument, situated too high up for comfortable viewing, features a bust of Hobart resting on a cushion. An admonitory homily references his youth; he was only thirty-four when he died,

Wryte not a daye this spectacle thee charms,

Death from thy byrth doth claspe thee in her armes.

Youthful as he, thou mayest be, yet he’s gonne

And thou must followe, no man knows how soone

Learn this of hym, prepared thou be to dye

Then shalt thou lyve, though through mortality.”

Memorial, Myles Hobart, All Saints Parish Church, Marlow

The cause of his death is not spelled out but illustrated by the charming carving of a runaway coach.

I was disappointed that despite the monument having been erected by vote of Parliament in 1647 there was no reference to the day Hobart locked Black Rod out of the Commons. But I sent him a silent word of thanks for his theatrical contribution to the long fight for Parliamentary democracy.

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*If you have forgotten your school history, Tunnage and Poundage were respectively the indirect taxes charged on each tun of wine imported and on other goods imported or exported as determined by weight.

**There is a wonderful painting of the incident by Andrew Garrick Gow in the Parliamentary Art Collection see https://artuk.org >discover>artworks>House of Commons 1628-29, Speaker Finch held by Holles and Valentine.

Time to Send the Marbles Home: Melina Mercouri (1920-1994)

By Gravedigger

On January 5, 2025

In Activists, Actors, Politicians

You can almost hear the cicadas. With the vivid cerulean sky and the intense light, the pines and cypresses, there can be no doubt where this grave lies. Here, close to the entrance, in the most prestigious section of The First Cemetery of Athens, lie the wealthier and more known of her citizens. The grave stele by the sculptor Andreas Panagiotakis rises above the tomb of the Merkouris family, prominent politicians during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; one name stands out, for her fame eclipses that of her ancestors.

Grave of Melina Mercouri, Athens First Cemetery

The faux Doric Temple behind and above the tomb of the Mekouris family is that of Schliemann (another story)

When the impossibly glamorous, smoky-voiced, Melina Mercouri died in 1994, theatres and cinemas closed. On the day of her state funeral, schools, shops, and government offices followed their example as the cortege, with 300,000 people walking behind, made its way to the cemetery.

After working in Greek theatre in the 1940s and 1950s, Mercouri had established her role in Greek cinema with Stella (1955), a retelling of the Carmen story, but it was with Never on Sunday (1960), written and directed by Jules Dassin, that she sprang to international fame. The story of Ilya, a prostitute in Piraeus, and Homer-Thrace, an American tourist and classical scholar, part romantic comedy, part asseveration of a joyful, carefree epicureanism contrasted with stagnant, patriarchal conformity, won Mercouri best actress at the Cannes Film Festival. Its theme tune by Manos Hadjidakis introduced western audiences to the bouzouki. Never on Sunday is even credited with stimulating the Greek tourist boom of the 1960s.

Mercouri went on to make films in Greece, America, and France, including Phaedra and Topkapi, before returning to a stage career on Broadway and in Greece.

Then in 1967 a right-wing military coup brought the regime of the colonels to power in Greece. For seven years, first under Papadopoulos, then under Ioannidis, the Greek Junta attacked civil liberties, ending freedom of the press, dissolving political parties, prohibiting political demonstrations, producing an index of prohibited songs, music, literature, and films. Ultra nationalistic and deeply anti-Communist, they imprisoned, tortured, and exiled their opponents. Politicised by the coup, Mercouri, who had been working in America, spent those years travelling around the world raising awareness of Greek politics and campaigning for the removal of the junta. The colonels responded by revoking her Greek citizenship and confiscating her property. Her response was succinct:

I was born a Greek, and I will die a Greek. Those bastards were born fascists, and they will die fascists.

Returning to Greece after the fall of the junta, she was a founding member of PASOK, the centre-left, Panhellenic Socialist Movement, which she represented in the Hellenic Parliament from 1977-1994. During the PASOK government of 1981-85 she became the first female Minister for Culture and Sports, and in this capacity introduced the European Capitals of Culture scheme, with Athens the first city so designated in 1985. The scheme raised the image and visibility of the cities involved, celebrating the richness and diversity of European cultures, and in its wake bringing not just cultural and social benefits, but economic benefits too with increased tourism and urban regeneration.

But there are other actors, other activists, other politicians, and Mercouri is most remembered for her battle for the return of the Elgin marbles to Greece.

Between 1801 and 1812 agents acting for Thomas Bruce, 7^th Earl of Elgin, then Ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Athens, removed more than half of the surviving Parthenon sculptures, and others from the Erechtheion, the Temple of Athena Nike, and the Propylaea. Elgin took possession of twenty-one statues, fifteen metope panels, and seventy-five metres of Parthenon frieze. To facilitate their carriage from Ottoman Greece to his private museum in Britain, the metopes and frieze were sawn and sliced. Byron, in no doubt that this was an act of vandalism and looting, wrote in Child Harold’s Pilgrimage:

Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
By British hands, which it had best behoved
To guard those relics ne’er to be restored.
Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,
And once again thy hapless bosom gored,
And snatch’d thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!

The poet was not alone in his outrage, but in Britain in 1816 a Parliamentary Enquiry ruled that the sculptures had been acquired legally, authorised by a firman from the Ottoman government; the questionable right of an occupying power to exercise such jurisdiction was conveniently ignored. Elgin was able to sell his glypotheque to the British government and the sculptures passed to the trusteeship of the British Museum.

Following requests for their return to an independent Greece in 1836, 1846, 1890 and 1927 by ministers and representatives of the city of Athens, academics and lawyers returned to the exhaustive discussion of the legality of their removal from Greece, and the arguments roll on in the tradition of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, where questions of right and wrong are lost in a minefield of legalistic niceties.

Meanwhile the main defence for Elgin’s action focused more on the claim that the marbles had never been cared for prior to his arrival: as early as the sixth century CE the Temple of Athena Parthenos had been turned into a church and its metopes defaced by Christians eager to remove images of pagan deities. Under the Turks there was similar debasement when it was used first as a mosque, then as a gunpowder store. In 1687 Venetian artillery ignited the gunpowder leading to an explosion and extensive damage, and portions of fallen marble were removed for use as building material. Moreover, weathering and pollution took their toll, so that the marbles in the British museum were soon in a better condition than those which had been left behind, notwithstanding the damage caused by early cleaning methods using acid, oil, lard, scrapers, and silicon carbide – all accepted techniques of their time.

For Melina Mercouri however these arguments were secondary to cultural considerations. As Minister for Culture, she began an international campaign in 1981, formally requesting the return of the sculptures and listing the dispute with UNESCO. In 1983 she took part in a televised debate with David Wilson, then director of the British museum, which was a PR disaster for the latter. The cultural importance of the sculptures for Greece became more widely understood, as did the morally dubious nature of any legal arguments for their retention. At the Oxford Union, in 1986, Mercouri argued passionately that the Marbles were more to Greece than just works of art: that they were an essential element of Greek heritage, which tied directly into cultural identity:

You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us. They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are our noblest symbol of excellence. They are a tribute to the democratic philosophy. They are our aspirations and our name. They are the essence of Greekness.

In government again in 1989, she initiated an international architectural competition for the design of a new Acropolis museum to display all the artefacts from the Acropolis excavation and to provide a suitable designated space for the Elgin marbles, thus invalidating the popular justification for their retention in the British Museum, and reasoning that not only would there be a worthy place for them but that they would be better appreciated in a unified display with the other Parthenon antiquities.

Work on the new museum began in the 1990s but was halted due to the discovery of sensitive archaeological finds, and the competition results annulled. Meanwhile Mercouri died in 1994. But in 2001 a new competition was announced, won by the new York architect Bernard Tschumi in collaboration with the Greek Michael Photiadis. Construction began in 2003 and was completed in 2009. Built in glass, steel, and reinforced concrete, the new Acropolis Museum stands opposite the Theatre of Dionysus, from its top floor there are panoramic views of the Acropolis. The exhibits behind the huge glass windows are integral with the landscape. The whole space is flooded with that intense Greek light. The surviving sculptures are arranged as they originally stood on the Parthenon, the frieze in its original orientation and within sight of the Parthenon.

Welcoming people at the opening ceremony of the new museum Antonis Samaras, the then Greek Minister of Culture, reminded them:

(It is) 188 years since the declaration of the Greek Independence… and 27 years since the campaign of Melina Mercouri, a duty is fulfilled, and a dream is realized!

But the dream is only half realised, for plaster copies represent the sculptures still retained in the British Museum. In 2021 UNESCO declared that the British government had an obligation to return them.

The British Museum is free to everyone, the Acropolis Museum is not; while 1.5 million people visit the Acropolis every year, six million visit the British Museum; in the British museum the sculptures can be viewed within the context of other major ancient cultures, and there is a fear that the return of the marbles would set a precedent undermining the collections of all museums of world culture. Nonetheless, public opinion has swung increasingly in favour of the return of the sculptures. Resistance by the British government and the British Museum has begun to sound a little desperate as Parliament argues that the decision is the responsibility of the trustees of the British Museum, while the latter claim that their hands are tied by the British Museum Act of 1963 which forbids them to dispose of their holdings, and only Parliament itself can amend the Act.

I am wary of Mercouri’s seductive hyperbole, and I do not believe that the sculptures belong to the Greeks, any more than they ever belonged to the British, the Turks or any other national group. But I do believe that they belong in Greece. Surely no one who has visited the Acropolis Museum and the Duveen Gallery where the Elgin marbles are housed in the British Museum can doubt this.

I have never been able to enter the Duveen Gallery without experiencing a dispiriting chill. It is, to be frank, a depressing space. A skylight runs the length of the gallery, but it is a weak, grey light which filters through; the solid masonry of the walls is oppressive; the sculptures are prisoners in this environment with all the drab, listless, lethargy of the forcibly incarcerated.

Artificial light is needed to supplement the weak, grey, natural light.

sculpture from the east pediment… all trapped in a bleak place.

Part of the East Pediment, imprisoned in gloomy surroundings.

Contrast this sterile, soulless environment with the light filled Acropolis museum. The building’s glass facades facilitate a visual connection with the Acropolis, to which it is linked via the pedestrianised street of Dionysios Areopagitou. On the top floor the rectangular hall of the Parthenon gallery mirrors the form and proportions of the original temple. Oriented directly towards the Acropolis, skylit, glass enclosed, drenched in the ambient natural light, it is irrefutably the most fitting locale for sculptures intended for the sun suffused Acropolis.

(My photographs of the Acrpolis Museum do not do it justice, so have a look at https://www .archdaily.com >Projects>categories>cultural architecture>museums>Greece)

It is time to realise Mercouri’s dream and send the Parthenon sculptures home.

If you ask me will I be alive when they come back, Yes, I will be alive. And if I’m not alive, I will be reborn.

Melina Mercouri, 1988

William Cobbett and the Great Need for Parliamentary Reform

By Gravedigger

On September 29, 2024

In Politicians, Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries, Writers

Of course I did not have high expectations of the new government. Labour in name only now, the party has moved, save for brief anomalies under Michael Foot and Jeremy Corbyn, steadily further towards the right since the post war years of the Atlee government. Blair jettisoned the party’s socialist past when he rewrote Clause Four, ending the historic commitment to common ownership of industry, passively accepting the results of Margaret Thatcher’s contemptible sale of shares in privatised utilities. With equal passivity the Starmer government has accepted the results of the 2016 referendum on the EU despite the lies told by the Johnson administration to promote Brexit. There is little sign of any attempt to tackle inequalities of wealth and income, save a half-hearted commitment to end the use of offshore trusts to avoid inheritance tax. Blair lied in Parliament and to the public, claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, to justify his decision to invade. The current Labour government has been at best equivocal over Gaza: in an early interview Starmer argued that Israel had the right to cut off necessities of power and water in Gaza. 146 countries recognise the existence of Palestine – Britain is not one of them. 137 member states of the United Nations recognise Palestine – Britain is not one of them. Instead, Britain is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council apart from the USA not to support Palestinian membership of the UN. Starmer was even slow to join countries calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and will not suspend arms exports to Israel. Indeed, arms sales around the world continue to be a pivotal part of the British economy as much under Labour as under Conservatives. In relation to asylum seekers Starmer voices the same “stop the boats” rhetoric as his recent Tory predecessors, only choosing to send them to Albania instead of Rwanda for “processing.” It was not anyone’s enthusiasm which brought this government to power but antagonism to fourteen years of Tory rule, a low turnout, the collapse of the SNP in Scotland, and Farage’s Reform Party taking votes from the Conservatives.

But if all this is enough to drive the iron into anyone’s soul, it is sometimes the relatively trivial which leaves us spluttering with incoherent rage. Having pledged to run a government of high standards, and end cash for access scandals, the Prime Minister, his wife, the deputy prime minister and the chancellor have been accepting freebies from the Labour peer Waheed Ali (appointed a life peer by Blair in 1995). It began with “Passes for Glasses” when Waheed was revealed to have unrestricted access to Downing Street after buying the prime minister £2,485 worth of spectacles. Then followed revelations of £107,145 spent by Waheed on Starmer’s wife’s clothes, £40K on tickets for him to watch the Arsenal football team, and £4k for tickets to a Taylor Swift concert…Starmer declares all this to be perfectly legal since he declared the gifts, albeit belatedly, but even his own MPs have found it morally questionable. Nor did it help when he whined that the security issue meant that he would never be able to go to an Arsenal game again unless he accepted corporate hospitality in a private box. But the utterly risible last word (or probably not) came from Foreign Secretary David Lammy suggesting that the freebie clothes were justified because the Starmers sought to look their best when representing the UK on the world stage.

Anyone incensed by this level of hypocrisy and political idiocy, can do no better than to spend a little time in the empathetic company of the furious, irascible William Cobbett (1763-1835). For no one does splenetic fury like Cobbett, he is never rendered speechless with indignation. Cobbett had little interest in politics beyond England, he was no citizen of the world, but he more than made up for his narrowness of focus with the passion he brought to bear on the question of rural poverty. By the time he published his Rural Rides in 1830 he could not write a paragraph without a vitriolic outburst expressing his utter contempt for those responsible, most notably successive Whig and Tory governments, for the proletarianization of agricultural workers.

William Cobbett did not begin life as a radical. Indeed, as a young man he was conservative to the point of being reactionary, and his later views developed in an idiosyncratic, unsystematic way. The son of a farmer and publican, he received little formal education and began work as a ploughboy before, desiring to see the world, he joined the army and found himself between 1784-1791 in New Brunswick, Canada. He used the time to study English and French grammar. Seeing his senior officers appropriate some of the pay of the common soldiers, he began to question authority, and on his return to England published his first pamphlet exposing their peculations and charging the officers with corruption. In The Soldier’s Friend he described the low pay and harsh treatment of the enlisted men. Then, fearing that he was about to be indicted and imprisoned in retribution, he fled to the USA. And during this period the most unattractive side of Cobbett emerges. He became a rabid British loyalist, an anti-Jacobin critical of Jefferson’s support for the French revolutionary government, a supporter of war against the Franco-American alliance. He denounced democracy and reviled his radical compatriot, Tom Paine. Cobbett was unashamedly xenophobic and bigoted, critical of any country which rivalled Britain, outrageously antisemitic, with a deep-seated loathing of Irishmen and of abolitionists like Wilberforce. When his writing came to the attention of the Tory Prime Minister, William Pitt, he was welcomed back to England, and in 1800 Pitt offered to subsidise his writing as an apologist for the Tory government and a polemicist against radicalism. How then did this monster come to be admired by Karl Marx, Michael Foot, EP Thompson?

Well, he changed: while many people move politically to the right as they grow older, Cobbett moved the other way. At first supporting Pitt, he was nonetheless incorruptible, refusing Pitt’s offer, and publishing his own views in his one-man weekly paper, The Political Register*, produced from 1802 until his death in 1834. And those views became very antiestablishment as Cobbett looked around him at the state of England in the early nineteenth century and saw corruption, cruelty, venality, and injustice. The Register, dubbed Cobbett’s Twopenny Trash by his detractors, a designation which he enthusiastically embraced, became increasingly critical of the war with France, the military, the church, big landowners, rotten boroughs – the “Accursed Hill” as he refers to the notorious rotten borough of Old Sarum – and, the spawn of those rotten boroughs, the Parliament and government at Westminster.

For his pains Cobbett found himself in Newgate prison between 1810-12 after being convicted of sedition. Between 1817-19 he fled to the USA again to avoid a further incarceration as radicals like himself were rounded up. This was a very different Cobbett from the man who had vilified Tom Paine, and when he returned to England, he brought Paine’s bones with him. Paine, once a hero in the USA, had become an outcast on account of his negative views on organised religion. He died in poverty, and his grave had been neglected until Cobbett sought to make amends for the injustice, he had done him. Cobbett wanted to build a mausoleum and memorial for Paine with money raised by public subscription, but Paine’s bones met with the same lack of respect in England as in the USA and the appeal failed. Cobbett kept the bones until his death when they were lost.

Meanwhile Cobbett’s radical beliefs coalesced around the plight of agricultural workers and small farmers. Cobbett loved the rural England he had known in his childhood and youth. He yearned for a golden age when every farmer brewed his own beer and fattened his own hog; when farmers lived, worked, and ate alongside their labourers. But Cobbett was no mere nostalgic dreamer, for alongside his journalism he was a practising farmer. His knowledge of agriculture, crops and soil was encyclopaedic. And between 1821-1826, travelling on horseback round the counties of southern England, he built up a portrait of rural life. He studied the farms, the fields, the crops, the animals, he talked to the farmers and the farm labourers. He visited the markets and fairs. Cobbett published his findings in Rural Rides. He had an emotional link to the countryside and his vivid prose is lyrical and romantic, but it hard hitting too. For Cobbett did not like what he found.

Farm workers had sunk into poverty, their families were starving. Who was to blame? Cobbett was a good hater, a one-man protest movement, and he turned the full force of his anger on those whom he held responsible.

The Enclosures, begun by kings seeking to extend their hunting grounds, and completed following the 1801 General Enclosure Act, which enabled big landowners to enclose land without a Parliamentary Act, left agricultural workers deprived of common lands and grazing. Small farmers could no longer afford to pay their labourers properly.

Then came the “tax-eaters”: after the Napoleonic Wars, Parliament abolished income tax, replacing it with increases in indirect taxes to pay the interest on the national debt. These taxes fell on necessities for which there was an inelastic demand: salt, hops, malt, tobacco, sugar, beer, and tea, shifting the burden of taxation from the middle classes to the poor, with small farmers paying proportionally more tax than higher economic groups and unable now to pay their labourers at all. Their fields were neglected, and crops went ungathered. The decline in production caused higher prices for food. Small farmhouses and labourers’ cottages, whole hamlets, and villages, fell into disrepair. Big “bull-frog” farmers gradually swallowed up the smaller ones. Rapacious landlords evicted tenants. The “bullfrog” farmers, unlike those of old, no longer fed and lodged their workers, for it was cheaper to pay them wages: wages which were inadequate for their basic needs. And such former agricultural labourers who were now unable to find work on the land at all were employed by the parish at stone breaking to build new roads for the benefit of those big farmers and landlords.

Cobbett was not convinced of the need to service the national debt, and he loathed the stockbrokers and jobbers, bankers, financiers, and fundholders, parasites who took everything and produced nothing. Moreover, he noted that taxes were also being used to support the “deadweight”, the “half timers”, army officers on half pay but with no duties, and the standing army which in peace time was used, not against a foreign threat, but against impoverished people seeking redress as at Peterloo:

One single horseman with his horse costs 36s. a week…that is more than the parish allowance to five labourers’ families at five to a family…so the one horseman and his horse cost what would feed twenty five of the distressed creatures… take away the army which is to keep distressed people from committing acts of violence and you have, at once, ample means of removing all the distress and all the danger of acts of violence.

Adding to the “deadweight” were the tax gatherers themselves, the sinecurists with their government jobs, and Anglican parsons. Cobbett did not care for parsons, “sponging clergy”: they took the revenues of their livings, subsidised with tithes and the rent from glebes, but were absentee clergymen, not even living in the parish. Nor did he care for those who issued religious tracts “which would if they could make the labourer content with half starvation.”

And then there were the Corn Laws, restrictions on importing corn and other foodstuffs to protect landowners’ interests, raising the price of bread for an already impoverished population. Potatoes, cheaper than bread under the impact of the Corn Laws, were a particular anathema to Cobbett, as was tea, replacing beer as cottage brewing declined. Potatoes were in Cobbett’s view “debilitating fare” and “soul degrading.” Tea was “a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and a maker of misery for old age.” His own preference was for the traditional three Bs – bread, beer, and bacon, and he would regularly set off on his rides with a bacon sandwich in his coat pocket for breakfast. Frequently the bread and meat would be handed over to a hungry soul whom he met along the way.

The Trespass Act and Game Laws, protecting the hunting rights of landowners, also raised Cobbett’s ire. For they forbade the “poaching” of wild animals, even rabbits, on the landowners’ estates thus depriving the local community of food they desperately needed. Moreover, mantraps were set to catch the “poachers” and punishments included imprisonment and transportation.

Cobbett hated the middlemen too, the dealers and shopkeepers who had replaced the old country fairs and markets, and who produced nothing but added to the cost of living.

He yearned for a return to cottage technology independent of wage labour and the capitalist market which saw the accumulation of capital in ever fewer hands. Big farmers and landlords were “conspirators against labour,” capitalist agriculture had proletarianized the farm workers,

Is a nation made rich by taking the food and clothing from those who create them and giving them to those who do nothing of any use? Why should the people work incessantly when they now raise food and clothing and fuel and every necessity to maintain five times their number?

While the poor creatures that raise the wheat and the barley and the cheese and the mutton and the beef are living upon potatoes, all the good food is conveyed to the tax- eaters in the Wen!

In Cobbett’s view London was a sebaceous cyst, a Great Wen, which along with lesser wens was encroaching onto the countryside, and he detested it.

But above all Cobbett hated the Establishment, “The Thing,” which presided over all this, the political, economic, military and church elites, taking the surplus value of the countryside and manipulating the markets to their own advantage. Misgovernment, the unreformed Parliament was the ultimate source of all evil. In the end he hated the Whigs even more than the Tories because their hypocrisy was the greater.

William Cobbett warned that rural poverty would lead to riots, and he defended agricultural labourers who organised public protests. He endorsed the rick burning and machine breaking of the Swing Riots in the 1830s. For why should the near starving labourers “live on Damned potatoes while the barns are full of corn, the downs covered with sheep, and the yards full of things created by their own labours.”

But whilst fully supportive of direct action, Cobbett worked for Parliamentary reform as the ultimate remedy for economic problems: he advocated the abolition of rotten boroughs and the extension of the franchise, so that radicals could be elected to Parliament where they could raise wages, repeal the Corn Laws, lower taxes, and reverse enclosures.

Following the Great Reform Act 1832, Cobbett was elected to a newly created seat in industrial Oldham. His support for the Reform Bill had been a compromise because it still left his beloved agricultural workers without the vote. In Parliament he sought to represent both his northern constituents and the southern agricultural workers. Sympathetic to the Luddites and deeply appalled by the Peterloo massacre, outraged by conditions in the factories, he nonetheless thought that the best recourse was a return to the land and self-sufficiency within an agricultural economy. And if this sounds a little odd today, we should remember that rural workers in 1835 were still the largest occupational group in England.

Cobbett, along with Hume and Wakley, maintained agitation in Parliament, first for the release and then for the pardon of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. He fought the brutal 1834 Poor Law Amendment which replaced outdoor payments with indoor relief: to save money all financial support for the poor was withdrawn and they were discouraged from seeking any help since their only recourse under the new system was to the workhouse, where children were separated from their parents and wives from their husbands.

But his time in Parliament was short lived; he died in 1835 and was buried in St. Andrew’s churchyard in Farnham, the Surrey town where he was born. The following year John Russell announced an official pardon for the Tolpuddle Martyrs. The Poor Law system was not officially abolished until 1948.

Located in St. Andrew’s Churchyard, Farnham, Surrey

It may be impossible not to smile at Cobbett’s dyspeptic outbursts against tea, potatoes, and the Great Wen. And he was no revolutionary, he had no problem with hierarchy so long as workers were fed, accommodated, had their fairs, sports, and harvest homes; his belief in noblesse oblige sits a little uncomfortably today. In the words of GDH Cole, “he was a conservative in everything except politics,” but what a magnificently angry, opinionated, choleric thorn in the side of the self-serving establishment he was.

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From 1803 Cobbett was also the first person to collect and publish all parliamentary debates in Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates. His printers were Luke Hansard and his son Thomas, who also did work for the House of Commons. In 1812 Cobbett, overwhelmed with fines for seditious behaviour, sold the publication to the Hansards who renamed it. “Hansard” remains the title of the official record of parliamentary proceedings although the family connection ended in 1889.

Memorial to Luke Hansard, Many Years Printer to the House of Commons, St. Giles in the Fields, London

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William Cobbett, Rural Rides, Penguin Classics, 2001. First published 1830.