Enid Blyton - keeping up appearances / VIDEO: Enid 2009 trailer

Enid is a 2009 British biographical television film first broadcast on 16 November on BBC Four. Directed by James Hawes it is based on the life of children's writer Enid Blyton, portrayed by Helena Bonham Carter. The film introduced the two main lovers of Blyton's life. Her first husband Hugh Pollock, who was also her publisher, was played by Matthew Macfadyen. Kenneth Darrell Waters, a London surgeon who became Blyton's second husband, was portrayed by Denis Lawson. The film explored how the orderly, reassuringly clear worlds Blyton created within her stories contrasted with the complexity of her own personal life.

Helena Bonham Carter on being Enid Blyton

"Appealing and appalling." Helena Bonham Carter talks about how she was drawn in by the writer’s creative fire – and her dark deeds.

By Serena Davies

4:06PM GMT 13 Nov 2009

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/6562811/Helena-Bonham-Carter-on-being-Enid-Blyton.html

There is a scene in Enid, the BBC’s new biopic of Enid Blyton, where the children’s author, played by Helena Bonham Carter, is asked by a radio journalist how she maintains the balance between work and motherhood.

“Of course children need their mothers,” she replies, before the camera cuts away to show her two neglected daughters at home, listening to the broadcast in a state of sombre bemusement. “Mothers are the heart of any household. I try to spend as much time with my children as I possibly can while also fulfilling my professional duties. It is tricky, but I think I manage it.”

Bonham Carter chuckles as she quotes these lines in our own interview in a London members’ club. She has something of an affinity for Blyton and thinks these words will do as her personal response to the same question. Although, she concedes, her six-year-old son Billy may beg to differ: “Bill threw my script to the opposite end of the room just before I started filming, saying, ‘I like you but I don’t like what you do ’cos it takes such a very long time.’”

It’s a coup, of course, that the BBC has persuaded a film star of Bonham Carter’s standing to appear in a low-budget biopic. “I did it for the money,” she says with a grin, in a jest that is almost cruel. The frenetic 15-day shoot suggests otherwise. The 43-year-old actress, a one-time Oscar nominee for The Wings of a Dove, is more used these days to working in the lavish Hollywood productions of her partner, director Tim Burton. She has recently finished work on his Alice in Wonderland adaptation, due for release in the spring, in which she will play the Red Queen.

Bonham Carter is perhaps the biggest name so far to join the honourable list of actors who have starred in these TV one-offs. Ken Stott, David Walliams and Anne Reid are among those that went before her. And coming after Enid, completing a trio of films on idolised British women, will be Jane Horrocks playing Gracie Fields and Anne-Marie Duff as Margot Fonteyn. The salient feature of all these pieces – and the real draw for such quality casts – has been the writing. “It’s sort of ironic,” says Bonham Carter, “but I always find the better the script the less money you have to do it and the less time.”

Blyton’s is a corker of a story, and this is the first time it’s been turned into a straight drama, after a drama documentary in the early 1990s. The film’s director, James Hawes, is adamant that his feature is, “Neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job”, although the woman that scriptwriter Lindsay Shapero has created here would strike most as first and foremost a vindictive egotist.

Early and sudden fame in the 1920s (“She was the JK Rowling of her day – and then some,” says Hawes) went quickly to Blyton’s head and she soon lost interest in her downtrodden publisher husband, Hugh Pollock (played here by Matthew Macfadyen). She struggled to bond with her younger daughter, Imogen, whomshe left to scream in her cot. “She put the baby in a cupboard and carried on writing and it all fell apart,” as Bonham Carter neatly summarises.

Although both parties were adulterous Blyton persuaded Pollock to take the rap when they divorced, on the promise he would have unlimited access to the children – then refused to let him see them again, telling everyone her second husband, surgeon Kenneth Waters, was their father. She then contacted the major London publishers and used her literary clout to get Pollock blacklisted, so destroying his career. She also pretended her mother was dead because she hated her so much. There’s more, but too much will spoil the story.

The film was made in consultation with Blyton’s main biographer Barbara Stoney and Imogen, the surviving daughter, and the essential facts are easy to corroborate. It doesn’t even venture into the terrain of her possible lesbian affair, which received press attention a few years ago when Pollock’s second wife Ida went public with her own version of why Blyton’s first marriage collapsed.

But just as over the decades public opinion of the literary skills of the creator of Noddy, the Famous Five and around 750 further titles has yo-yoed, so Blyton can’t be painted only as unpleasant. The biopic encourages our sympathy through its depiction of Blyton’s difficult childhood: her father, a cutlery salesman, abandoned the family when she was 13. Her uterus stopped growing at the same age and, at the time, it was thought that this could prevent her having children. The parental trauma is a key reason why Bonham Carter herself finds the author “appealing as well as appalling”.

“Her writing was possibly a response to her father leaving her,” she explains. “That sort of painful encounter with reality meant that she wrote a world that was much more comfortable. My father fell really chronically ill when I was 13 and that’s when I phoned up an agent and started to act. So I had a very similar response and have always had great comfort from living imaginatively.”

But surely all Blyton’s deceits regarding her own family – she once pretended her dog was still alive when it wasn’t; she eulogised her womanising father – they’re not living imaginatively, they’re pathological fantasy? “Yes, her fantasy was so divorced from reality she was virtually insane,” says Bonham Carter. “It is very hard to have that creative force married to a totally sane brain.”

Bonham Carter couldn’t be more different from Blyton in real life. Demonstrating her customary disregard for fashion, the flouncy, lacy, multilayered get-up she wears for the interview includes bloomers, while her hair is a bird’s nest of a quality that any member of the Famous Five would be proud to discover. She looks about 25 and engages with candour with nearly every subject thrown at her. She says she only read a little Blyton growing up “but I’m reading Noddy to Billy now whether he likes it or not,” she laughs (she has another child, Nell, but she’s too young even for Blyton).

“And he does like it,” she adds. “All the things people criticise her for, such as repetitive language, he loves it, it makes it really easy to read.” She points out that all the racism that so bothered detractors during Blyton’s critical nadir in the Seventies has been taken out these days, and the sexism doesn’t seem too bad.

“When you write for very young children what they want is something familiar and safe and stereotyped. They want to know where they are… Lots of subtle and very intelligent friends of mine say, ‘Thank God for Blyton, she brought me up.’”

Blyton, whose books still sell around 8 million a year, is having a resurgence generally at the moment. Last year a survey found her Britain’s most popular author. The ex-Children’s Laureate Anne Fine recently made a Radio 4 programme in her defence. So she’s not the hate figure she once was. Enid comes out at an apposite time then, although, despite Bonham Carter’s defence of her, the film is unlikely to further endear the author to the nation.

 New TV drama reveals Enid Blyton as a barking-mad adulterous bully …

by Lisa Sewards for Mailonline

13 November 2009

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1227422/New-TV-drama-reveals-Enid-Blyton-barking-mad-adulterous-bully.html

On paper, the world of Enid Blyton was one populated by happy, carefree children whose idea of bliss at the end of an adventure-filled day was a slice of plum cake washed down by lashings of ginger beer.

The setting was an idyllic Britain, one of thatched cottages and lych gates, a fairytale time, in an age of innocence.

But the creator of Noddy, the Famous Five, the Secret Seven and Malory Towers was in truth a cold-hearted mother and a vindictive adultress who set out to destroy her former husband.

Barking mad: Enid Blyton will be played by Helena Bonham Carter (right) in a new television drama

The darker revelations, which will dissolve the image of Blyton conveyed by her 753 much-loved books, are part of a brilliant new television biopic, starring Helena Bonham Carter as the author.

At first glance, Blyton's life seems unlikely material for gripping drama, as much of it consisted of her sitting at a desk, knocking off 10,000 words a day. Her books sold 600million copies around the world and made her extremely rich and famous. Her works still sell eight million copies a year.

But Blyton's home life at her cottage, Old Thatch, near the Thames at Bourne End, then at Green Hedges, a mock-Tudor house in Beaconsfield, was nothing like as idyllic as the picture she tried to create.

In spite of the children's nursery, crumpets for tea, Bimbo the cat and Topsy the dog, all foisted on the public in convenient photocalls to project the Blyton brand, the truth was more conflicted.

Enid Blyton pays a visit to Victoria Palace in 1958 to meet some of the young artists who will portray her characters in Noddy In Toyland

Fairytale time: The author pays a visit to Victoria Palace in 1958 to meet some of the young artists who will portray her characters in Noddy In Toyland

Children's favourite: Blyton's Famous Five books are still delighting young readers across the world

'Enid's self-awareness was brilliant and she was incredibly controlling, too,' explains Bonham Carter. 'I was attracted to the role because she was bonkers. She was an emotional mess and quite barking mad.

'What I found extraordinary, bordering on insane, was the way that Enid reinvented her own life. She was allergic to reality - if there was something she didn't like then she either ignored it or re-wrote her life.

'She didn't like her mother, so let her colleagues assume she was dead. When her mother died, she refused to attend the funeral. Then the first husband didn't work out, so she scrubbed him out.

'There's also a scene in the film where her dog dies, but she carries on pretending he's still alive because she can't bear the truth.'

Emotionally, Blyton remained a little girl, stuck in a world of picnics, secret-society codes and midnight feasts. It acted as a huge comfort blanket.

Many of Blyton's obsessions can be traced to her father, who left her mother when Enid was 12. She then seized up emotionally and physically.

'It was my job to understand how she became like this in the first place, not to judge her,' explains Bonham Carter.

'When Enid consulted a gynaecologist about her failure to conceive, she was diagnosed as having an immature uterus and had to have surgery and hormone treatment before she could have children.'

Cold-hearted mother: Blyton with her daughters Gillian and Imogen

The irony was that when she finally did have two daughters, Gillian and Imogen, with her first husband, Hugh Pollock, she was unable to relate to them as a normal mother.

She loved signing thousands of letters to her 'friends' the fans, encouraging them to collect milk bottle tops for Great Ormond Street Hospital to help the war effort, and even ran a competition to name her house, Green Hedges.

But her neighbours said Blyton used to complain about the fearful racket made by children playing.

She was distant and unkind to her younger daughter Imogen and there was clear favouritism in the way she privileged her elder daughter Gillian, who died two years ago aged 75.

Imogen Smallwood, 74, says: 'My mother was arrogant, insecure and without a trace of maternal instinct. Her approach to life was childlike, and she could be spiteful, like a teenager.'

Although Imogen prefers to remain private, she did visit the set to advise Bonham Carter. 'We had email correspondence before Imogen visited the set. We agreed that I wasn't going to try to impersonate her mother because this is a drama,' says Helena.

'Imogen is sensitive, but was very supportive and gave me a few tips, such as how her mother did everything at immense speed because she was ruled by the watch. Enid's domestic life was seen as an interruption to her writing, which was her escapism.'

There is a poignant scene in the film where Blyton holds a tea party at home for her fans, or 'friends' as she preferred to call them. But her daughters are banished to the nursery.

'Enid is one of the kids at the Famous Five tea parties - the jelly and ice-cream are as much for her as they are for her fans,' explains Helena.

'It's also significant that when her daughters go to school, a large mannequin of Noddy - her new child - arrives in the hall to take the place of the children.'

Blyton's first husband, Hugh, called her 'Little Bunny' and adored her. He helped launch her career after they met when he was her editor at Newnes, the publisher.

Blyton's first book, Child Whispers, a collection of poems, was published in 1922. She wrote in her diary soon after meeting him: 'I want him for mine.'

They were married for 19 years, but as Enid's career took off in the Thirties, Hugh grew depressed and took to nightly drinking sessions in the cellar while Enid managed to fit affairs in between writing.

The marriage deteriorated and Hugh moved out. She mocked him in later adventure stories, such as The Mystery Of The Burnt Cottage, as the clueless cop, PC Theophilus Goon.

After a bitter divorce, she married surgeon Kenneth Darrell Waters, with whom she had a fulfilling sex life.

Although the drama shows Blyton's flirtatiousness - she entertained servicemen to dinner at the house while her husband was away at war and found them and their attention attractive - directors chose to omit some aspects of Blyton's apparently sensual side, such as visitors arriving to find her playing tennis naked and suggestions of a lesbian affair with her children's nanny, Dorothy Richards.

But the drama, which has been given the thumbs-up by the Enid Blyton Society, does highlight the author's cruel streak. When Hugh remarried, as she had done, Blyton was so furious that she banned her daughters from seeing their father.

According to Ida Crowe, who later married Hugh, Blyton's revenge was to stop him from seeing Gillian and Imogen, and to prevent him from finding work in publishing. He went bankrupt and sank into depression and drinking.

Ms Crowe, 101, is using her memoir, Starlight, published this month, to break her silence on her feelings towards Blyton, whom she portrays as cold, distant and malevolent. Ms Crowe confirms that during her first marriage, Blyton embarked on a string of affairs, including a suspected relationship with nanny Richards.

Yet Blyton could never forgive Hugh for finding happiness of his own when their marriage ended.

Rosemary Pollock, 66, daughter of Ida and Hugh, says: 'My father. was an honourable man - not the flawed, inconsequential one which was the deliberate misconception perpetuated by Enid.'

Ida and Hugh met when she was 21 and he was 50. In her memoirs, she describes him as 'shatteringly handsome' - tall and slim with golden hair and blue eyes.

After Ida narrowly escaped death in an air raid, she says, Hugh asked for a divorce and Enid agreed. The memoirs claim, however, that Hugh agreed to be identified as the 'guilty' party in the divorce in return for an amicable separation and access to their daughters.

But Rosemary says: 'This agreement was a sham because Enid had no intention of allowing him any kind of contact with either of the girls. She even told Benenden, the girls' boarding school, that on no account was their father, who was paying the bills, to be allowed near them.'

Ida and Hugh married within days of the divorce being granted in October 1943. Gillian and Imogen were 12 and eight. Rosemary got in touch with her half-sisters after Enid's death in 1968, at the age of 71.

Rosemary says: 'Gillian said the last time she saw her father was when they were walking to Beaconsfield station and she had this awful feeling she was not going to see him again.

'She said that on her wedding day, she looked around the church and hoped her father would turn up. My father said he was devastated not to have been invited to Gillian's wedding.'

Rosemary has also accused Enid of wrecking Hugh's literary career. 'Enid was capable of many vindictive things and she didn't want her former husband occupying a prominent position in London publishing, a world she dominated.

'My father had to file for bankruptcy in 1950 because he couldn't find work. She also put out a story that he was a drunk and an adulterer, and that he had made her life a misery.

'Incredibly, Enid even wrote to my mother three years after they had both remarried, saying: "I hope he doesn't ruin your life as he did mine."

'My father did drink, but it was in order to numb the pain. I never heard him criticise Enid. He would praise her remarkable talents.'

Certainly, Blyton is enjoying a renaissance. Disney UK is planning a new, animated feature called Famous 5: On The Case, in which the children of the original Five, and a dog, enjoy some new adventures.

She was also named Britain's best-loved author in a poll last month.

Imogen attributes her mother's success to the fact she 'wrote as a child with an adult's writing skills'.

Despite her private life, no amount of detraction will diminish Blyton as one of Britain's great writers who shaped millions of childhood imaginations. Although it may be harder for the adults they grew into to imagine what the creator of Noddy got up to in real life.

On 28 August 1924 Blyton married Major Hugh Alexander Pollock, DSO (1888–1971) at Bromley Register Office, without inviting her family. Pollock was editor of the book department in the publishing firm of George Newnes, which became her regular publisher. It was he who requested that Blyton write a book about animals, The Zoo Book, which was completed in the month before they married. They initially lived in a flat in Chelsea before moving to Elfin Cottage in Beckenham in 1926, and then to Old Thatch in Bourne End (called Peterswood in her books) in 1929.

Blyton's first daughter Gillian, was born on 15 July 1931, and after a miscarriage in 1934, she gave birth to a second daughter, Imogen, on 27 October 1935. In 1938 Blyton and her family moved to a house in Beaconsfield, which was named Green Hedges by Blyton's readers following a competition in her magazine. By the mid-1930s, Pollock – possibly due to the trauma he had suffered during the First World War being revived through his meetings as a publisher with Winston Churchill – withdrew increasingly from public life and became a secret alcoholic. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he became involved in the Home Guard. Pollock entered into a relationship with a budding young writer, Ida Crowe, and arranged for her to join him at his posting to a Home Guard training centre at Denbies, a Gothic mansion in Surrey belonging to Lord Ashcombe, and work there as his secretary. Blyton's marriage to Pollock became troubled, and according to Crowe's memoir, Blyton began a series of affairs, including a lesbian relationship with one of the children's nannies. In 1941 Blyton met Kenneth Fraser Darrell Waters, a London surgeon with whom she began an affair. Pollock discovered the liaison, and threatened to initiate divorce proceedings against Blyton. Fearing that exposure of her adultery would ruin her public image, it was ultimately agreed that Blyton would instead file for divorce against Pollock. According to Crowe's memoir, Blyton promised that if he admitted to infidelity she would allow him parental access to their daughters; but after the divorce he was forbidden to contact them, and Blyton ensured he was subsequently unable to find work in publishing. Pollock, having married Crowe on 26 October 1943, eventually resumed his heavy drinking and was forced to petition for bankruptcy in 1950.

Blyton and Darrell Waters married at the City of Westminster Register Office on 20 October 1943. She changed the surname of her daughters to Darrell Waters and publicly embraced her new role as a happily married and devoted doctor's wife. After discovering she was pregnant in the spring of 1945, Blyton miscarried five months later, following a fall from a ladder. The baby would have been Darrell Waters's first child and it would also have been the son for which both of them longed.

Her love of tennis included playing naked, with nude tennis "a common practice in those days among the more louche members of the middle classes".

Blyton's health began to deteriorate in 1957, when during a round of golf she started to complain of feeling faint and breathless, and by 1960 she was displaying signs of dementia. Her agent George Greenfield recalled that it was "unthinkable" for the "most famous and successful of children's authors with her enormous energy and computer-like memory" to be losing her mind and suffering from what is now known as Alzheimer's disease in her mid-sixties. Blyton's situation was worsened by her husband's declining health throughout the 1960s; he suffered from severe arthritis in his neck and hips, deafness, and became increasingly ill-tempered and erratic until his death on 15 September 1967.

The story of Blyton's life was dramatised in a BBC film entitled Enid, which aired in the United Kingdom on BBC Four on 16 November 2009. Helena Bonham Carter, who played the title role, described Blyton as "a complete workaholic, an achievement junkie and an extremely canny businesswoman" who "knew how to brand herself, right down to the famous signature".

Do you want to play “Vintage second hand” shopping from Bruce Boyer’s Wardrobe?

 

 Do you want to play “Vintage second hand” shopping from Bruce Boyer’s Wardrobe?

 

“The Bruce Boyer Collection” on eBay.

 

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_dkr=1&iconV2Request=true&_blrs=recall_filtering&_ssn=balearic1&store_cat=0&store_name=balearic1&_oac=1&_nkw=bruce%20boyer&mkcid=1&mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&siteid=0&campid=5336852872&toolid=11800&mkevt=1

 

“Remember that each new round of auctions goes up every Thursday. They run for ten days and end on Sunday evenings. The last round of auctions will be going up on March 30^th “

 

From:

https://putthison.com/shop-from-bruce-boyers-wardrobe-2/

Parlez Vous Français ? French activists launch legal case over English-only translations at Notre Dame / Boycotting English: France’s Reaction to a Linguistic Invasion

 

French activists launch legal case over English-only translations at Notre Dame

 

Group says Paris landmark contravenes laws requiring public buildings to translate signs into at least two other languages

 

Kim Willsher in Paris

Wed 22 Mar 2023 12.46 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/22/french-language-activists-sue-over-notre-dame-signs

 

A group of French-language activists has launched a legal action over signs at Notre Dame Cathedral being translated only into English and not any other language.

 

The association, which won a similar case brought against the Eiffel Tower, believes failing to include other foreign languages leads to the increasing global domination of English.

 

Louis Maisonneuve, a spokesperson for the Défense de la langue française (Defence of the French language), said the legal complaint was lodged with the Paris court on Monday, the Journée internationale de la Francophonie (international French-speaking day).

 

 

While campaigners are more generally opposed to the use of English words and terms in French documents, communications, signs and advertisements – among others – they say the signs at Notre Dame and other public buildings contravene the 1994 regulation requiring all public buildings to translate their signs and information into at least two other languages.

 

“The law protects French because it promotes linguistic pluralism,” Maisonneuve told AFP.

 

The 1994 Toubon law requires the use of French in official government publications, all advertising, in workplaces, commercial contracts and all state schools. It also requires a “double translation” of public signs and translated official documents into two foreign languages, usually English and one other in order to promote multilingualism.

 

The association points out that certain information boards explaining the work to repair the cathedral, devastated by fire in 2019, are in French and English only. Its legal complaint cites Gen Jean-Louis Georgelin, who was appointed by the culture ministry to oversee the Notre Dame repair work.

 

Maisonneuve said the association had persuaded Paris city hall to add a Spanish translation to signs at the Eiffel Tower last November. “We threatened to take them to court. It took a year … in the end they changed them all to include Spanish,” he said.

 

It has also complained to 20 other public bodies over their use of English, including in an advert by the national postal service La Poste for its banking service with the title “Ma French Bank” instead of Ma banque française.

 

Legal action is also being taken against the Bouches du Rhône authorities for their “Pass my Provence” visitors’ scheme, the Sorbonne for describing itself on its website as a “business school”, the EPF engineering school for its sign “Creating the future together” and Charles de Gaulle airport for using bilingual signs in French and English.

 

The Académie Française, the “official” defenders of the French language founded in 1634 and with 40 members known as “Immortals”, is famous for its long campaign against the creep of Anglicisms into French.

 

Its latest edition of “Dire-ne pas dire” (say-don’t say) list includes dark as in “Dark Ages” – use “sombre, obscur, inquétant” it says – wishlist, fake, Crazy Monday, sticker, Trojan horse, mass event, millénial, game, gamer and loser.

Boycotting English: France’s Reaction to a Linguistic Invasion

Anna Posted by Anna

November 22, 2013

https://www.languagetrainers.com/blog/boycotting-english-frances-reaction-to-a-linguistic-invasion/

 

English as today’s lingua franca can be a double-edged sword; not only does it make it easier for me personally to travel and communicate with people from different countries, but it makes it easier for people of all nationalities to do so, safe in the knowledge that wherever they go, someone somewhere is bound to speak a little bit of English.  However, this also places the spotlight on the hegemony the English language has over the rest of the world, bringing with it an un-asked for cultural invasion as our products, movies, and advertising goes global.

 

It’s common knowledge how European countries like Germany and France are using English words in their own vernacular, ex. le weekend.  In some Middle Eastern countries, Arabic is verging on a second language, with educated youths switching back and forth in conversation between English and Arabic (the hybrid language they call Arabizi, a combination of Arabic and Inglizi).  The Politecnico di Milano, one of Italy’s oldest and most esteemed universities, has declared that, starting in the fall of 2014, all their graduate-level courses will be taught solely in English.  Scholars and linguists have argued that diplomacy and international relations are unfairly balanced toward the English-speaking crowd, and that this causes misunderstandings, discrimination, and worse.

 

In France, a country notoriously proud of their language, organizations for the preservation of French culture and language are taking up arms against this English intrusion.  Former president Jacques Chirac once led a walkout of his fellow Frenchmen from an EU summit after one of them made the social blunder of speaking in English.  More recently, the French government has urged nationals to abandon the use of such English words as email, blog, hashtag, supermodel, and takeaway in favor of French replacement terms.

 

Michael Serres, a French philosopher, is urging his compatriots to take it one step further and actually boycott all instances of the English language they see.  He states, “There are more English words on the walls of Toulouse than there were German words during the Occupation,” and is calling for the French to refuse to buy products advertised in English, or to go see Hollywood movies that aren’t translated.  Many are hailing Serres for championing the French language in the face of a relentless juggernaut, pointing out that the flood of English in their country goes even deeper than pop culture.   In 1997, 40% of documents at the European Commission were written in French, while 45% were written in English; last year those statistics were 11% French and 72% English.

 

"Prueba tu Español"...

 

While many are dramatically terming the influx of English as an “Anglo-Saxon ploy” and “planned assassination of the French language,” accusing President Nicolas Sarkozy as scheming to make France a completely bilingual country, others are applauding increased use of English as the way of the future.  International companies in particular, knowing that increased use of English will give them an advantage in the business playing field, are pushing for documents and meetings to be written and conducted in English.

 

In my own personal experience—that being which it’s very rare to meet an educated person who doesn’t have at least a conversational level of English—I’ve found that French people of my generation are more likely to speak as their second language Spanish, German, Italian, anything except English.  Is this wave of Anglophobia the last heroic defense of an endangered cultural identity, or is it backwards thinking in the light of changing times?  (Remember, the term lingua franca used to be literal.)  Various English-speakers have suggested we could follow suit and cut French words out of our language: coup, haute couture, malaise, and so on, engaging in a language war that could lead down many a dark and difficult path.

 

What do you think about boycotting a specific language?

There is a Portuguese fifteenth-century Padrão boxed since 2019 in a port in Namibia./ Roger Crowley - Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

Germany to return Portuguese Stone Cross to Namibia

Published

17 May 2019

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48309694

 

The Stone Cross was placed by the Portuguese in 1486 and features the country's crest

 

The German Historical Museum has announced it will return a 15th century monument to Namibia after it was taken during the colonial era.

 

The Stone Cross is a Portuguese navigation landmark placed on the southwest African coastline in 1486.

 

But when the area was under German colonial control in the 1890s, the cross was taken and moved to Europe.

 

Namibia asked for its return in 2017 and on Friday, the Berlin museum formally agreed to the request.

 

Germany has pledged to return artefacts and human remains to its former colonies.

 

At a ceremony, German Culture Minister Monika Grütters said it was a "clear signal that we are committed to coming to terms with our colonial past".

 

Namibia's ambassador to Germany, Andreas Guibeb, called it "important as a step for us to reconcile with our colonial past and the trail of humiliation and systematic injustice that it left behind".

 

A museum press release said the cross would be returned in August.

 

Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão first placed the 3.5m (11ft) stone cross - featuring the country's coat of arms - on Africa's southwest coast during one of his expeditions.

 

It became so well known it featured on old maps of the area.

 

But a German naval commander took the cross in 1893, during the country's control of what became Namibia between 1884 and 1915.

 

The German Historical Museum foundation's president, Raphael Gross, wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the cross represented "the slow beginning of colonial rule in present-day Namibia".

 

A number of African nations have in recent years called on European museums to return artefacts taken away during the period of colonial control.

 

‘Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire,’ by Roger Crowley

 

By Ian Morris

Jan. 15, 2016

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/books/review/conquerors-how-portugal-forged-the-first-global-empire-by-roger-crowley.html

 

Afonso de Albuquerque died 500 years ago, after spending a dozen years terrorizing coastal cities from Yemen to Malaysia. He enriched thousands of men and killed tens of thousands more. Despite never commanding more than a few dozen ships, he built one of the first modern intercontinental empires. And this was just the beginning: The next step, he said, was to sail up the Red Sea, destroy Mecca, Medina and the Prophet Muhammad’s body and liberate the Holy Land. Perhaps, he mused, he could destroy Islam altogether.

 

The 18 years between December 1497, when Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and December 1515, when Albuquerque died off the Indian coast, were a pivotal point in history, and in “Conquerors” Roger Crowley tells the story with style. It is a classic ripping yarn, packed with excitement, violence and cliffhangers. Its larger-than-life characters are at once extraordinary and repulsive, at one moment imagining the world in entirely new ways and at the next braying with delight over massacring entire cities.

 

Crowley’s craftsmanship comes through most clearly in telling this story of relentless, one-sided slaughter without glutting the reader with gore. At Mombasa in 1505 the Portuguese killed 700 Muslims with a loss of five of their own men. At Dabul on the last day of 1508 “no living thing was left alive.” At Goa in 1510 Albuquerque killed so many people that the city’s infamous crocodiles could not eat them all. And on the conquerors went, year after bloody year; but Crowley, the author of “1453” and other works of history, handles this grim tale with aplomb, keeping a fast-moving narrative in the foreground while nodding just often enough toward bigger questions in the background.

 

The biggest of these is surely how a handful of Europeans managed, for good and ill, to do so much. Crowley does not give us an explicit answer, but he provides more than enough information for readers to make up their own minds. Some historians have suggested that Albuquerque owed his success more to divisions within India than to any European advantages, but Crowley makes it clear that infighting among the Portuguese was even worse. The king’s court in Lisbon was a snake pit, and Albuquerque’s captains repeatedly refused to serve under him; in 1514 an attempt was made to poison him.

 

The theory that Christian civilization was simply superior to Muslim and Hindu cultures seems equally unconvincing. As Crowley describes it, Lisbon was less a model of Renaissance reason than a precursor of the Wild West, and most Portuguese were so ignorant about India that it took them years to work out that Hinduism was a religion in its own right, not a provincial version of Christianity. When the Europeans did finally grasp this, many also concluded — as one Italian merchant put it — that India’s cultures “are superior to us in infinite ways, except when it comes to fighting.”

 

Fighting — or more precisely ships, guns and ferocity — does seem to be what it came down to. Portuguese sailors learned to build ships that could plunge into the uncharted Atlantic in search of winds to carry them around Africa’s southern tip, all the while dying in droves from dysentery, scurvy and thirst. But getting to India was merely a sufficient condition; without devastating guns, the Europeans would have accomplished little.

 

Ships and guns gave Europeans command of the seas, but even when Indians bought or copied European weapons and hired European advisers — as they did by 1510 — they still could not compete with what Crowley calls the Portuguese “berserker fighting style.” From the humblest foot soldier up to Albuquerque himself, the Europeans were simply ferocious, throwing themselves at their enemies with reckless courage. Sometimes indiscipline brought on disaster, but often Africans, Indians, Arabs and Turks turned and fled.

 

Portugal’s leaders were deeply flawed, but they had strategic vision. By 1505 King Manuel understood that a few Europeans could control the Indian Ocean’s spice trade by seizing choke points at Aden, Ormuz and Malacca, and in 1510 Albuquerque saw that Goa could anchor the whole enterprise (“If you lost the whole of India you could reconquer it from there,” he told Manuel).

 

Manuel and Albuquerque came close to pulling off the biggest strategic coup in history, converting Portugal from the most backward fringe of western Eurasia to the center of a global empire. It is only when we ask why they failed that Crowley’s story perhaps fails too. But maybe that will be the subject for Crowley’s next book; and if it is as good as this one, it will be worth waiting for.

 

CONQUERORS

How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire

By Roger Crowley

Illustrated. 368 pp. Random House. $30.

 

Ian Morris’s latest book is “Foragers, ­Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Val

Maria Manuela Peleteiro / PUBLICO comment

“We do not agree with his idea that the request for the restitution of the Standard could be seen as a colonial nostalgia, but rather as a demonstration of enormous respect for the unbridled courage and determination that led the Portuguese to explore the African coast. We would like you to count on us and on our opinion of Portuguese admirers of Namibia and its People but also of our Past, not the colonial but what led us with a unique dynamic and boldness, to face the Unknown. If you are aware of any Movement in Portugal that supports this idea, we will certainly be available to be contacted.” Lisbon, July 1, 2018 Maria do Céu Fialho Maria da Conceição Peleteiro Maria da Luz Fialho Maria Manuela Peleteiro

 

OPINION

The Padrão of Diogo Cão

 

The restitution of museum objects from the former colonies is of course a complex problem.

 

Francisco Bethencourt

19 June 2018, 06:05

https://www.publico.pt/2018/06/19/culturaipsilon/opiniao/o-padrao-de-diogo-cao-1833997

 

The Museum of German History in Berlin organized on June 7 a day of debate on the pattern erected by Diogo Cão in 1486 at Cape Cross, a territory of present-day Namibia. The pattern had been removed from its site by a German warship in 1893, during German colonization, having been preserved first in Kiel and then in Berlin, belonging since 1946 to the collection of the Museum of German History. This meeting was prompted by the official request for restitution of the standard, submitted by Namibia last year.

 

Government members, ambassadors, academics, journalists and members of heritage associations were invited, mainly from Namibia but also from other African countries. Present and speaking were the Minister of Culture of the German Federal Government, Monika Grütters, and the Ambassador of Namibia Andreas Guibeb. Panel discussions on the legal and philosophical framework of the restitution of museum pieces, oral literature and forms of anti-colonial resistance in Namibia, museum policies and international relations followed. I would like to highlight here the interventions of Ellen Ndeshi Namhila, from the University of Namibia, on the fascinating diaries of Hendrik Witbooi, from the early twentieth century, and Winani Kgwatalala, from the National Museum of Botswana, on the policy of restitution of objects.

 

I did the inaugural session on "Colonial objects: imposition, appropriation, exchange", in which I analyzed the logic of patterns as forms of identification of exploration trips, claim of precedence and declaration of intention of occupation. I tried to place them in the wider context of political communication and the fate of European objects, particularly statues, in the post-independence period. I approached the collection of objects from other continents, in many cases adapted to European taste, such as ivories from West Africa, Indo-Portuguese furniture, Japanese lacquer objects or Chinese porcelains, which came to populate European curiosity cabinets along with minerals and plants. I also spoke of the logic of museums, given the transformation of the last 40 years: European national and colonial collections for the purpose of imperial affirmation have become places of contact and involvement of the communities originating from ethnographic objects, open to the regeneration of memory and knowledge of the cultures of the world.

 

Namibia's request is part of a process of reflection on the colonial past and is supported by several institutions of memory, such as the Namibian Association of Museums, National Archives and Citizens' Associations. It is part of a complex process of negotiation between the two governments over compensation due for the genocide of the Herrero and Nama by German colonial troops between 1904 and 1908 (it is estimated that 70% of these populations were exterminated). Descendants of these ethnicities, meanwhile, have filed a lawsuit against the German government in a New York court. The German government, which at first paid little attention to this private initiative in absentia of the Namibian government, had to constitute a defense lawyer given the threat of kidnapping its properties in the United States.

 

The atmosphere in which the meeting took place was extremely cordial, with the participation of German and Namibian academics of excellent level. The German head of the German-Namibian bilateral commission Ruprecht Polenz was also a speaker. The president of the German History Museum, Professor Raphael Gross, was available for the restitution of the standard. He intends to revise the exhibition of the permanent collection, as several sections are frankly dated and ideologically biased; the section on German colonialism in Africa does not even mention the genocide of the Herrero and Nama in Namibia.

 

I must stress the openness of the German authorities, which seem to be in line with the best international museum practices of liaison with the communities of the places of origin of the pieces. I had the opportunity to talk with Professor Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which manages the main museums, archives and the National Library in Berlin. Investment in the recovery, restructuring and development of museums is overwhelming, involving a financial effort of six to seven billion euros that will be extended until the 2030s. The German federal government's bet on changing the face of Berlin is bearing fruit, with the affirmation of the German capital as one of the great points of attraction of international tourism. The critical attitude towards the colonial past certainly benefits cooperation with the countries of Africa and Asia.

 

Portugal has never submitted any claim for restitution of the standard. At this point, such a request would be seen as colonial nostalgia by the international community. The request of the Namibian government is understandable, as its population has a project of reflection on the colonial past, in which the pattern can represent one of the focal points. The inventory of the museological and documentary heritage existing in Germany related to Namibia was also discussed. I pointed out as a possible model the Rescue project, which has been developed with microfilming and massive digitization of Brazilian documentation in Portugal and eight other countries. The restitution of museum objects from the former colonies is of course a more complex problem. The international consensus, expressed by Nicholas Thomas's latest book, is that a single rule is not possible; the decision should be taken on a case-by-case basis between the institutions involved, taking into account interests that can be accommodated by various modalities of loan, long-term granting, reply or return.

 

HERITAGE

There is a Portuguese fifteenth-century Padrão boxed since 2019 in a port in Namibia.

 

Marco that Diogo Cão left on the Skeleton Coast was in Berlin and arrived in Walvis Bay four years ago, but remains in storage. Negotiations with Germany concerning the colonial era continue.

 

Lucinda Canelas

20 March 2023, 07:20

https://www.publico.pt/2023/03/20/culturaipsilon/noticia/ha-padrao-portugues-seculo-xv-encaixotado-desde-2019-porto-namibia-2042866

 

For those who have memories of the Indiana Jones films, it's almost impossible to hear of a 500-year-old pattern arranged in a wooden box in a port warehouse without thinking about the final scene of The Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which a man pushes a wheelbarrow down the center aisle of a huge warehouse where dozens of crates with the "top secret" seal are stacked.  containing articles which should be kept closed under lock and key.

 

Now, the pattern Portuguese which for four years has been boxed in a customs house in the port of Walvis Bay, Namibia's second largest city, is not an imagined object, like the one that gives its name to Spielberg's film, and so his story is far from fiction.

 

Left by the navigator Diogo Cão in 1486 in a region that is now known as "the Skeleton Coast", this huge stone landmark with the shield Portuguese – it measures 3.5 meters high and weighs more than a ton – was taken to Berlin in the nineteenth century, when Namibia was part of the German colonial domains, and has remained there ever since.

 

Until, in May 2019, the German History Museum, to whose collection it belongs, announced that it would return it, in a solemn session in which the then ambassador of Namibia to Germany, Andreas Guibeb, spoke of the restitution of this territorial landmark that was also an aid to navigation as a decisive step in the movement of rapprochement between the two countries. Namibia and Germany share a past marked by episodes of extreme violence, within the framework of the German colonization of that African territory. "The origin of the column is inseparable from the history of Namibia," said the diplomat, quoted here by Deutsche Welle, the German public broadcaster.

 

Guibeb thus placed the pattern – symbol of the Portuguese Expansion removed from Namibian territory by another European colonial power – on the lot of cultural property that Germany was to return to Namibia as part of a reconciliation process between the two countries, which had already involved the restitution of works of art and human remains in the custody of several German museums.

 

The Berlin museum fulfilled the promise made and, that same year, used a company specialized in the transport of works of art, as sent by international manuals of good practices, to send the Diogo Cão Pattern to Walvis Bay, by sea, Daniela Lange, press officer of the German History Museum, confirmed to PÚBLICO.

 

"The Cape of the Cross standard is currently in a Namibian port. It has been prepared by a museum expert in stone conservation so that it can be rebuilt on site," Lange said.

 

"The date of the official handover is being coordinated between the [German] Federal Government and the Government of Namibia," added this technician from the Berlin museum, referring any further clarifications to the Minister of State for Cultural Affairs, whose spokesman, Jens Althoff, PÚBLICO tried to contact, without success.

 

Why is the standard closed for four years in a port warehouse waiting for an official refund? Who should return it to the Namibian state? And what will be your fate as soon as it is delivered?

 

PÚBLICO sought to hear from Esther Moombolah Gôagoses, from the Namibian Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture, but this director of heritage was not available to provide any clarifications until the closing time of this edition.

 

On the ground, a source close to the process who preferred not to be named attributes the delay in return to a rush by the Berlin museum, which reportedly sent the pattern to Walvis Bay without properly learning of the state of the reconciliation program involving the two countries, and without listening to other stakeholders.

 

Assuring that the more than five-century-old landmark has been "safe" for four years in a customs warehouse paid for by the German museum, the same source reports that its ownership has not been officially transferred to the Namibian Government – "the Berlin museum still owns the standard" – and that the two governments are looking for a legal solution that allows for formal restitution.

 

"The standard is from the museum, not the German state, but the Namibian government wants the state to return it. How can the state return what is not its own? Both countries are working on a solution." For when? It is not known.

 

Two patterns instead of one

The pattern that gave its name to the cable where it was placed – Cabo da Cruz – is a limestone landmark surmounted by a cube with a cross. On one side of the solid is engraved the shield Portuguese, already with the changes dictated by D. João II Portuguese. According to a text released by the Berlin museum in 2018, when it held a congress there on the standard, in Portuguese current we would say that it is written: "It was the creation of the world of 6685 and Christ of 1485 the excellent enlightened King D. João II of Portugal ordered to discover this land and put this pattern by Diogo Cão knight of his house."

 

Cape Cross is a small peninsula located 120 kilometres north of Swakopmund, capital of the Erongo region. A city of sun and beach, strongly marked by German colonial architecture.

 

Protected area since the late 1960s, the cape has a hotel unit, a colony of seals and fur seals with more than 100 thousand animals and two patterns: one erected in the nineteenth century by the Germans, with an imperial eagle, and another evocative of the landmark left by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, placed in the 80s.

 

Diogo Cão was already on his second voyage as commander of the reconnaissance ships of the southwest African coast, when he arrived there in 1486. Already in the first of the voyages in the service of D. João II he had begun to use stone patterns to mark the Portuguese sovereignty over the territory (initially they were made of wood) – landmarks that were imposed on the landscape and that, such as their importance as references for navigation, immediately began to appear on the nautical charts used by European sailors.

 

Is it here that the Government of Namibia wants to put the standard when it is officially restored to it? Manuel Coelho, a Portuguese who has lived in Namibia for 61 years and is a permanent member of the Council of Portuguese Communities, hopes that Cabo da Cruz will not be the chosen destination.

 

"If the pattern goes back to the place where it was 400 years, it will most likely be destroyed, or at least damaged, as were many other statues from the time of the Germans that were here in the capital [Windhoek]," says this businessman, who travels the country frequently and who guarantees to know the Skeleton Coast like the back of his hand.

 

Since 2019, Manuel Coelho has been trying to find out from the Portuguese diplomatic authorities in Windhoek and the Namibian Government what can be done to remove the pattern from the warehouse. To no avail.

 

"It pains me to think that a 500-year-old pattern, one of the first left by Europeans on the African coast, has been boxed there for four years without anything being done. I was in Walvis Bay with a representative from the Berlin museum – I saw the pattern in 2019 when it arrived and was arranged in a customs warehouse. I also came with a box where I was told that there were human bones and other objects, but these I have not seen them anymore," recalls now this 74-year-old Portuguese who since the country's independence in 1990 says he wrote to two presidents of the Namibian Republic to ask for the return of the Cape of the Cross standard.

 

"Now I'm asking the governor of Erongo to let me go see him again, with Ambassador Portuguese [Luís Gaspar da Silva], to see if everything is in good condition."

 

Contacted by PÚBLICO, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MNE) in Lisbon naturally distanced itself from bilateral negotiations around a heritage that, being of Portuguese origin, is not Portuguese.

 

"With regard to the Diogo Cão Standard, Portugal is available to evaluate the provision of the support that is possible for assistance in the field of maintenance or restoration of that historical heritage, which may correspond to contact in this sense that may be established by the Namibian authorities, as was done, for example, in the case of the wreckage of the sixteenth-century Portuguese ship found in Oranjemund",  said MNE's official source. "The matter essentially concerns the negotiations on historical reparations that Namibia and Germany have in progress," adds the note sent to PÚBLICO, referring then to the agreement reached in 2021, "which includes the restitution of the Diogo Cão Standard."

 

An agreement in which Germany undertakes to invest a total of EUR 1.1 billion over 30 years, to be distributed among the various cooperation and development programmes already in place in Namibia, but which still seems incapable of guaranteeing the true reconciliation that both sides seek.

 

A genocide

To understand the root of the problem, one must go back in history. In 1884, Bismarck proclaimed that Namibia would become a German protectorate. Nine years later, Gottlieb Becker, commander of a ship anchored off the Cape of the Cross, carried the pattern Portuguese to Germany, where it was offered to Emperor Wilhelm II.

 

The German presence in that territory began to be strongly contested at the beginning of the twentieth century, and ended with tens of thousands of men, women and children killed, tortured or taken to the Calaari desert, where they would succumb to hunger, disease and fatigue in forced labor camps between 1904 and 1908. In this period, troops loyal to the German emperor fought against the Nama and Herero peoples, who rebelled against the colonial power.

 

Negotiations between Germany and Namibia to heal the wounds of this historic past gained intensity in 2015, when then-Foreign Minister Heiko Maas officially acknowledged that German punitive actions against Hereros and Namas should be called "genocide."

 

"Genocide" was also the word used in the joint declaration of the two states after reaching the €1.1 billion agreement to invest in rural and health infrastructure, and in cultural and vocational training programmes, aimed mainly at the descendants of those who survived the massacres of the 20th century, the British daily The Guardian wrote in May 2021.

 

This newspaper also noted that the joint declaration does not speak of "reparations" or "compensations" so as not to set a "legal precedent" capable of leading to similar demands from other countries.

 

In Namibia, the agreement between the two governments led to criticism from the representatives of the Nama and the Hereros, who did not feel represented at the negotiating table and who still insist today on the need to monetarily compensate their communities, in addition to the support programs already stipulated.

 

TNamas and Herero are minorities in Namibia, with the Ovambo being the dominant ethnicity. It is the descendants of the former who oppose an agreement that does not provide, for example, for the restitution of land set aside in the colonial period. And on their side are, unsurprisingly, the opposition parties.

 

An agreement of this nature between the two countries that does not involve the people decimated in what was the first genocide of the twentieth century is as paternalistic and humiliating as colonialism itself, they argue.

 

In the middle of this negotiation is a pattern Portuguese that Namibia has asked for back in Germany numerous times, one of them in the 1990s, with the intention of exhibiting it in its pavilion at Expo-98 in Lisbon.

 

"Until the internal question of who gets the money that Germany will pay is resolved, the standard does not come out of there," says Manuel Coelho. "He was caught in the middle of a delicate domestic political issue and even out there it's not easy. Everything that involves heritage from the colonial era, whatever country it is, is a subject that no one wants to pick up."

 

This businessman Portuguese knows that the standard will hardly make a new trip to Europe, because it is Namibian heritage, but does not deprive himself of dreaming: "What I really liked is that the standard, which is in the middle of this confusion of politics and money, was for Portugal, for the Navy Museum in Lisbon. The Namibian government will not want to spend money to protect it, because it is a symbol of the colonial era."