TWENTY MEN WITH A PAST
Precedented people Vol. 2
BY WILL COE
Twenty men of today assessed by those who preceded them.
A selection of articles published during 2011 in Egopendium.
TWENTY MEN WITH A PAST
Precedented people Vol. 2
by WILL COE
A Wilcooperative publication
Published in Great Britain 2011
by Wilcooperative Publishing
59 Crow Lane
Husborne Crawley
Bedford
MK43 0XA
UK
Smashwords edition
ISBN 978-0-9570025-3-1
Copyright Will Coe 2011
The right of Will Coe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
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TWENTY MEN WITH A PAST
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Julian Assange by Thomas Paine
Chapter 2: David Beckham by Adonis
Chapter 3: Silvio Berlusconi by Garibaldi
Chapter 4: Harold Camping by Nostradamus
Chapter 5: Simon Cowell by PT Barnum
Chapter 6: James Dyson by George Stephenson
Chapter 7: Chris Evans by Alvar Liddell
Chapter 8: Colin Firth by Emil Jannings
Chapter 9: Bill Gates by Charles Babbage
Chapter 10: Bob Geldof by William Wilberforce
Chapter 11: Damien Hirst by Caravaggio
Chapter 12: Boris Johnson by Dick Whittington
Chapter 13: Nelson Mandela by Toussaint Louverture
Chapter 14: Peter Mandelson by Niccolo Machiavelli
Chapter 15: Paul McKenna by Franz Mesmer
Chapter 16: Rupert Murdoch by Randolph Hearst
Chapter 17: Vladimir Putin by Lavrentiy Beria
Chapter 18: Nicolas Sarkozy by Napoleon Bonaparte
Chapter 19: David Walliams by Will Kemp
Chapter 20: Mark Zuckerberg by Karl Marx
Chapter 1: Julian Assange by Thomas Paine
Tom Paine assesses Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame
When you upset the world order, as I did and the editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, is emphatically doing, the thickness of your skin is fully measured.
Dermatologically speaking, you need to be an insensitive freak to be a proper revolutionary. You’ll make an igloo of friends but an arsenal of enemies.
Look what happened to me - ‘Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred’, is how Bob Ingersoll, ‘The Great Agnostic’, summed up my life. Six people came to my funeral in New York even though the late President, John Adams, had said, “Without [Tom Paine’s] pen, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” The lesson being that reputations are hard earned and easily lost.
I was looking to Julian for a bit of a revival in my reputation. Because, even though it’s come round to my way of thinking, posterity hasn’t treated me much better than my contemporaries did.
The English rescued my bones from a sorry American grave and then managed to lose every one of them from cranium to metatarsus. So you would think me immune to criticism. Not quite. Not when it comes from someone you’d expect to revere my memory. Betrayal by a fellow traveller always hurts. When Julian Assange characterised me as a ‘hidden curse’ in the headline of an article he wrote, my soul recoiled.
‘You as well, Julian?’ I sighed.
Happily, it was just a literary device to encourage readership (Julian’s better at hacking computers than writing articles). His real purpose was to support my contention that, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
To judge from the hysterical reaction of the US government, Julian’s Wikileaks organisation is certainly threatening to do that. Their reaction upsets me. From free-speaking anti-colonialists to censorious imperialists in a couple of centuries. So much for the First Amendment. It seems Julian’s policing that now, and it doesn’t make for an easy life.
We share a fundamental belief, that man is above country.
Julian is rootless. His home is his suitcase and his front door is his passport. His country, Australia, officially despises him, has considered trying him for treason and cancelling his passport. Without success, because unofficially he’s something of a ‘bonzer bloke’. Whether he can escape other jurisdictions is in the balance.
If he is in my image, the omens are not favourable. England, where I was born, charged me with seditious libel for penning ‘The Rights of Man’, forcing me to flee to France. Always an excitable destination, France took me to her bosom as the only member of the French National Convention who had hardly a word of French. Then, within the year, she had me in a Parisian jail waiting only for the chalked cross on my door to confirm my day of execution. Fortunately, Robespierre died before I could be intimately acquainted with the promiscuous Mme Guillotine.
Time front cover
The Swedes have it in for Julian on the grounds that he is an over-insistent lover, not a charge ever levelled at me. I had not previously regarded Swedes as devious conspiratorial puppets of the CIA but this (and, of course, the books of Stieg Larsson) has brought their national characteristics into question. Julian has taken refuge in the country of my birth, perhaps believing that my countrymen are a fair-minded, incorruptible lot. ‘Perfidious Albion’ is obviously not a term familiar to the world of hackers and leakers which he bestrides.
It is with some distress that I find the Americans to be the real Assange hunters. I helped construct their Constitution thinking that I could engrain the right of all men to freedom in their hearts. It seems that I was better at making corsets than framing American minds. America, who vanquished oppression, is now the engine of global repression.
How much of myself is there in Julian? We both tilt at windmills like Don Quixote but perhaps Julian is short of a Sancho. I had Ben Franklin - a highly superior Sancho - to point my lance. He has a small team of “dedicated and overworked” staff, as well as 800 part-time volunteers and thousands of supporters. No Sanchos unless you count Vaughan Smith, sustainable farmer, elegant restaurateur and dashing war correspondent.
No disrespect, but if Vaughan and Swedish justice was all that lay between me and extradition to the States on espionage charges, I’d be worried that I wasn’t even going to get a funeral, let alone more than six mourners.
Tom Paine’s opinion was interpreted in July 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: Assange poster, anorak.co.uk
Photo: Paine statue, bbc.co.uk
Photo: Time cover, fyash1229.wordpress.com
****
Chapter 2: David Beckham by Adonis
Adonis assesses archetypal metrosexual, David Beckham
Very occasionally, someone’s life can be a question mark. David Beckham’s life poses the question that I was meant to answer. Can vanity ever be deserved?
Is he as beautiful as I was? Is he as accomplished at football as I was skilled at hunting? If the answer to both is yes then he is someone all women can love beyond reason and all men envy without resentment.
I don’t think he’s quite there yet. If he knows anything about me, he won’t ever want to get there. The lesson of being loved by all is that you become the payback for other people’s crimes and passions. You end up dead way before your time.
I have no expectation that David has ever considered whether he and I are alike. I don’t mind that he probably doesn’t know anything about me. For him, the classical texts are likely to be found in the Marvel comics not Robert Graves’ ‘Greek Myths’. No matter, I was not revered for my intellect either.
There’s nothing I can teach him.
It’s not that he’d be a slow pupil, it’s just that you can’t learn your way out of fate’s clutches. I might be able to help him understand what has happened, what is happening to him, but perhaps it is better for me to help other people to understand him rather than he try to understand himself. When a legend grows around you like a glorious climbing rose it’s best not to worry at the prickles that protect the flowers. They cause bleeding, of which I do quite enough for the both of us (I’m responsible for the colour of roses and anemones, if you too haven’t read your Greek myths).
When a person looks like you and has the same effect on other people as you did, it doesn’t have to mean that they’re the same in every way. I can’t run away from the fact that I’m a bit of a god clouded in myth while David is all gorgeous flesh and blood.
There’s no mystery about David’s birth. He’s the son of Sandra, a hairdresser, and David “Ted” Beckham, a kitchen fitter. There was nothing unusual about Sandra’s confinement. My beginnings are far more remarkable. I came out of a tree and they say my daddy was not only a god but also my grandpappy. Of course, it’s not how you come into the world it’s what you do when you’re there.
David Beckham plays football very well. How significant is that to his fame? Measured in sporting terms, David was never the best footballer in the world. Or anywhere near. Measured in terms of column inches in the world’s press, David is the most famous footballer in the world. Other sportsmen only come close when infamy intrudes on their fame (OJ, Tiger, Zizou - need I go on?).
Can you see what I’m driving at?
You can’t define David Beckham as a footballer. He’s much more than that. He is a legend. Like a Greek god. But not a Greek god because the world has too many of us already and because he doesn’t show any of the of the character weaknesses and flaws you come to expect from a Greek god. In that respect, he’s very like me. Being without obvious faults, I was a very atypical and short-lived god.
But most of all, David resembles me because he is becoming a female fantasy figure more than a male one.
Aphrodite and Victoria Beckham compare attributes
Please let me explain. David wouldn’t be an Adonis figure if Victoria hadn’t muscled in on the act. She may be stick thin but you won’t find many more powerful women. She’s up there with the women in my life, Aphrodite and Persephone. You don’t get many heavier hitters than the goddesses of sex and death, yet Victoria seems to be in their league.
When David was transferred from Manchester United to Real Madrid a much more important transfer took place. David ditched the man who had started the Madrid ball rolling, his long-time agent, Tony Stephens of SFX Europe, and bedded down with Simon Fuller and his company 19 Entertainment which already managed Victoria’s career. That was when Victoria took over his life entirely and turned him from a boy who kicked a ball into the archetypal metrosexual, a kind of work-in-progress god for both sexes.
She called him ‘Goldenballs’. ( A name once given in Latin form to Richard Orescuiltz, Lord of Sharnecote. She should have stuck with Aureis Testiculis, less derogatory, somehow.)
I don’t think irony was intended because Victoria has ensured that he lives up to his name.
He is now the lucrative icon much sought after by clothing designers, health and fitness specialists, fashion magazines, perfume and cosmetics manufacturers, hair stylists, exercise promoters, and spa and recreation companies. He’s even become a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF’s Sports for Development programme and a government propaganda tool. He is wheeled out to boost troop morale in Afghanistan or to persuade foreigners about Britain’s suitability for any grossly expensive international sporting event.
If I wasn’t above envy, I’d be quite jealous.
Adonis’s opinion was interpreted in October 2011
Image attribution
Photo: David Beckham, mty.co.uk
Photo: Adonis, Wiki Commons
Photo: The Callipige Aphrodite, art-prints-on-demand.com
Photo: Victoria Beckham, danielatamayo.com
****
Chapter 3: Silvio Berlusconi by Garibaldi
BERLUSCONI IS NOT WOUNDED, ITALY IS.
Revolutionary, Giuseppe Garibaldi, assesses Italian PM, Silvio Berlusconi
When your legacy is a nation you are in limited company. Qín Cháo in China, Alfred in England and Bismarck in Germany certainly belong to that band. I say it with all humility; my name is among them too. Do we all share the same pride at what has happened to our legacy? Wen Jiabao is no warrior leader but China is a remorseless power under him. Cameron is not in the mould of Gladstone or Disraeli, both of whom I knew well, but England's head is not yet slumped upon its shoulders. Merkel is a woman, which might offend Bismarck more than it does me, but her country prospers. Berlusconi is...I cannot write the words for the tears that stain them.
A century ago, when the world thought of Italy, it thought of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Now when the world has to turn its mind to Italy, it sees Silvio Berlusconi. No more than a preening penis. Should I just weep and let my soul sleep fitfully on in Caprera? Or should I take some responsibility and ask modern Italians to rally to a flag that is not fouled by Forza, mafiosi, media manipulation, bribery and prostitution?
I can accept that responsibility is not a burden that dies with you. Geographically, Italy remains the shape I fought to make it. Spiritually, it has returned to a state that the Borgias and Medici would recognise.
A great historian remarked that "Garibaldi is the only wholly admirable figure in modern history." I cannot criticise Berlusconi and take that as truth. Only Jesus has been wholly admirable. My faults were those of any man - pride, folly and lust. It was my image that rose above my frailties and guided Italy through some dark hours. Therefore it is the image of Berlusconi that I despise more than the man. The image takes over when your name gathers associations. I am not talking about biscuits or moustaches. There is a nursery rhyme still sung today. It's called 'Garibaldi is wounded'. When I saw Berlusconi's face pulped by a marble and lead statuette I wondered if he had staged it himself and it was my blood, my stigmata he wanted to echo. Italy did not feel Berlusconi's wounds because there was too much pain from the injuries he had done to her.
Berlusconi wounded, me preparing to wound
Il Cavaliere, as he loves to be known, is the second longest-serving Prime Minister of Italy. He entered politics to express his support for "freedom, the individual, family, enterprise, Italian tradition, Christian tradition and love for weaker people" and his intention to combat the fiscal, judicial and bureaucratic oppression of Italians. He has acquired breathtaking freedoms for only one individual, Silvio Berlusconi, and his family. He has turned commercial enterprise into a synonym for political manipulation. He has revived those most Italian and unchristian traditions of corruption, bribery and extortion. He expresses his love for weaker people by persuading underage women to dance naked with him in the newly adopted custom of bunga bunga. He has fiercely combated fiscal, judicial and bureaucratic oppression of one particular Italian by spending 174 million euros on lawyers' bills to resist 789 prosecutors, 577 visits by police and 2,500 court hearings.
If I had the power to do it, I would rise up and remind people of what the Italian tricolor stands for: the fertile green of the country's plains and the hills; the pure white of the snow-capped Alps, and the red, red blood spilt in the Wars of Italian Independence. I would don the redshirt of i Mille again and ask even those who worship i Rosoneri of Berlusconi's pet football team to hound the man from office.
Giuseppe Garibaldi’s opinion was interpreted in Jan 2011.
Image attribution
Photos: Berlusconi, m24digital.com, and dailymail.co.uk
Image: Giuseppe Garibaldi, freemasonry.bcy.ca
Image: Garibaldi with flag, dressspace.com
****
Chapter 4: Harold Camping by Nostradamus
Nostradamus assesses Harold Camping’s rapturous predictions
Harold Camping doesn't appear to comprehend that it's not prophetic to foresee something that doesn't happen.
He is a disgrace to the trade that brought me fortune and everlasting fame. Well, I think he is. I'm not doing him down definitively because at the back of my elastic mind is the thought that he might just be cleverer than the rest of us seers put together. Which would make him really, really clever. I'll come back to that thought but, for the moment, let's take things at face value and explain why Harold, the 'Rapture' man, is obviously an idiot.
Harold's hooked into the Rapture idea that, at the End Time, the few will get transported to heaven while the many are obliterated. That's sounds a winning formula for conning money out of vulnerable people until you put a precise and proximate date on the End Time.
When Judgment Day didn't occur on 21 May, 2011 as he had augured, any more than it had when he'd opted for 7 September, 1994 and 21 May, 1988, you'd expect Harold Camping to be universally dismissed as daft. Happily for those in the future trade, listeners to the 150 outposts of his Family Radio station still regard him the sanest person alive.
Elsewhere, the probity of forecasters in general is suffering from Harold's constant backtracking.
For the sake of the men and women who earn their comfortable living from their psychic powers, I feel that it's up to me to tell him what he's doing wrong. I think I am best qualified to do that. After all, among my 6,338 prophecies are the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler, the atomic bomb and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. Which, for those of you unschooled in history, all came about.
Harold has approached the Bible as predictive text. That's a sound beginning. I've read some of it myself and found it brilliantly confusing. I drew on it for many of my own prophecies. The point is that a lot of it doesn't make sense, which is the perfect starting point for the practice of auguring. Harold Camping has used numerology to clear up all this confusion. A bad move. Since nobody has yet been able to even define Pi with numerals, it's farfetched to think you can use Biblical digits to divine the precise date of the Rapture, or Beginning of the End of the World (BEW).
The rapture wrongly predicted by Camping, the disaster rightly predicted by me
In my opinion, being precise about his sort of thing is a major mistake and likely to invite ridicule. Not even Bishop James Ussher, who famously placed creation at 4004 BC and the Flood at 2348 BC, put a date on BEW. Harold was on firm ground when he contradicted Ussher by declaring that the start of it all was 11,013 BC and that the very damp year was 4990 BC. No one in their right mind could argue about something that occurred millennia before they were born. In contrast, it was unhinged of him to use the same methodology to predict an imminent BEW.
He should take his cue from people like Drosnin who use Equidistant Letter Sequences to show how the Bible has predicted known events. That's cute because you can't be proved wrong about something that has verifiably happened, like Rabin's assassination in Israel. They don't use the Bible Code to say what's around the corner because they say they don't have enough information to input into the search software. Enter 'rapture' and you'll throw up a Google-sized number of ELSs. The weakness of the Bible Coders is that they can't prove if you entered 'Napoleon 14 June 1800' into a software program trawling the Collected Works of Shakespeare you wouldn't come up with an ELS spelling out the recipe for Chicken Marengo. Or argue against John Safran's contention in his Australian tv show that ELS tuning techniques could find "evidence" of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in Vanilla Ice's lyrics But, hey, they've sold a hell of a lot of books and booked out a whole load of lecture halls.
The point I regularly make to apprentice seers is never to get too precise about the future. Always aim for the clarity you get from a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, stuffed inside an enigma. I hid my predictions inside quatrains using a form of syntax that would have baffled Virgil. To add confusion to mystification, I threw in a mixture of Greek, Italian, Latin, and Provençal words. You can read what you like into them. A tsunami engulfing Alabama, Bin Laden being canonised, a Briton winning Wimbledon - if they ever happen, you'll find I said it would be so in one of my quatrains. If you look hard enough.
Evidently, Harold Camping hasn't worked out the importance of being imprecise if you want to win an 'America's got prophets' tv show.
Which brings me back to the nagging doubt at the top of this article. Maybe getting it precisely wrong over and over again is the real point. It brings the business philosophy of deadlines to his money making empire. If he convinces you that the end of the world is nigh upon you then there's no sense in sending him a $10 a month, tax deductible donation. You might as well give him everything you own right away. As Eileen Heuwetter’s aunt, Doris Schmitt, did.
I never thought of that ruse but if Harold Camping should become the richest man in the world before he becomes enraptured on October 21st this year, it's spelt out somewhere in one of my quatrains.
Nostradamus’s opinion was interpreted in June 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: Camping, pokerknave.com
Photo: Nostradamus by Cesar, Wikipedia Commons
Photo: World Trade Centre, frogview-gallery
Etching : Rapture by Jan Lutyens, Wikipedia Commons
****
Chapter 5: Simon Cowell by PT Barnum
THE FREAK FACTOR
PT Barnum assesses the X-factor in Simon Cowell
I honestly did not say it, but it is a sentiment which is supposed to have filled my coffers and is doing much the same for Simon Cowell more than a century later. "There's a sucker born every minute." As damn true now as it was then.
Suckers spend a lot of bucks, not always wisely. Is it wrong to take their money without improving their lot or sharpening their minds? I didn't have a conscience about it and if Cowell's hiding any guilt it must be under those hitched up pants, because it sure don't show on his face. Every sucker on the planet has a right to be amused and I've never come across one that finds Shakespeare a laugh. Barnum and Cowell give them what they want. The Greatest Show on Earth. Uncomplicated amusement. No thinking hats required. Where's the harm in that?
I can't make up my mind whether Simon and I are criticised because we serve people with what they like or because we somehow infected the general public with a lack of discernment, as if that's some kind of tuberculosis of the mind. I wasn't clever or devious enough to do that and I doubt Simon is either. We rely on the freak factor to draw people in, I admit it, though Simon might not. What we don't do is introduce the freak factor into anybody's life. It's already there. Everybody is fascinated by freaks. The majority will happily raise their hands to that. A minority will deny it - the type that covers their eyes but sneaks a looks through the cracks in their fingers. They never visited my museums, circuses, aquariums or rogues galleries. Not without their homburgs pulled right down over their faces, anyway. The same applies today. No one claiming more than a dozen brain cells owns up to an addiction to 'Pop idol', 'X factor' or '(Some country)'s got talent'. They dispute that with a conviction which would've made Judas proud.
You can trace a lot of Simon's ideas back to me. Take just a couple.
1. From my General Tom Thumb, it's no giant leap to the Cheeky Monkeys and all the other child acts Cowell's given screen time. Children acting like grown-ups has always wowed the audiences. It doesn't take genius to spot that. You'll say it's exploitation but I say talk to little Charlie Stratton about the life Phineas Taylor Barnum gave him. The Cheeky Monkeys will say something similar.
2. I gave you the 'Feejee' mermaid, the traditional Native American dancer, fu-Hum-Me. the Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng, and Commodore Nutt. Not dissimilar to Stavros Flatley, Jedward, Brenda isaacs and Edelweiss Warby, which have been among Simon's more remarkable contributions to international culture.
When you take a man's dollar or dime, you should always look at both sides of the coin.
Swedish song bird, Jenny Lind, Scottish songbird, Susan Boyle
What would the suckers have missed without PT Barnum and SP Cowell? Jenny Lind and Susan Boyle are the obvious answers (but not the only ones). Who would have believed sixty thousand culture shy New Yorkers would have turned out to greet an unpretentious, shy, and devout Swedish nightingale with a wistfully clear soprano voice? PT Barnum, that's who. It's no less incredible that Simon Cowell is behind the unpretentious, shy, and devout Scottish nightingale with a wistfully clear soprano voice, Susan Boyle. And that you feel the better for it. Neither of us were making suckers of you then, were we?
The more I look at Simon, the more I see of myself. He doesn't keep all his money to himself any more than I did. Tufts University wouldn't be where it is today without my help. If you doubt that, don't ask why Tufts students are known as Jumbos (could it have anything to do with the very famous elephant shown to the world by the Barnum and Bailey Circus?). Simon is doing his bit for hospices and animal welfare. Neither of us are trying to buy a place in heaven that we don't deserve.
What I applaud most of all is that Simon tells it like it is. When people put themselves forward for stardom on his shows, he doesn't hold back. I like the cruel humour of rebukes like:
“If your lifeguard duties were as good as your singing, a lot of people would be drowning.”
I wasn't that different in spite of being crowned 'Prince of Humbugs'. There's a gulf between hype and fraud which I never crossed. I ran my life according to two principles.
1. “Without promotion something terrible happens... Nothing!"
2. “Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.”
Simon Cowell wouldn't argue, would he?
PT Barnum’s opinion was interpreted in Mar 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: PT Barnum, Wikipedia Commons
Photo: Simon Cowell Wikipedia Commons
Photo: Jenny Lind, Wikipedia ommons
Photo: Susan Boyle, Wikipedia Commons
****
Chapter 6: James Dyson by George Stephenson
Railway inventor, George Stephenson, assesses James Dyson
James Dyson’s hero is a great railway engineer. Sadly it’s not me.
In name let alone reputation, a plain George could never measure up to an Isambard Kingdom. Consequently, James will not value my comments on his life as much as he would Brunel’s. Yet he seems a charming man and I’m sure he’ll respect what I have to say.
Particularly since we have what you might call a romantic attachment. We’re not just fellow inventors of some international note, we’re connected by family name.
A Miss Hindmarsh became very dear to the pair of us, providing both comfort and guidance.
In 1968, James married Deirdre Hindmarsh. He was twenty-one, with no secure job. She is his anchor in the very turbulent sea that has been his life. At times, she was the only breadwinner.
When I was that age, I wooed Elizabeth Hindmarsh secretly in her father’s orchard. She was to become my rock. The coincidence is not precise because I didn’t marry Betty when I was a young man and neither did she provide financial support at any time during my inventive life. Farmer Hindmarsh thought a lowly miner like me entirely unsuitable for his daughter’s hand. It took twenty years and a considerable upturn in my fortunes for him to relent.
Because I married into the Hindmarshes long before he did, I consider myself a kind of great uncle to James. I’ve always wanted to pass on avuncular wisdom, even when I didn’t know what it meant.
The point I’m making about our wives is that men who create fame and fortune by tinkering in their sheds with technical drawings, metals and plastics can have romantic and loyal souls. We may be obsessive men. We may not make good drinking or shopping companions. We may not be renowned for giving up space in our lives to other people. We may not always have the quietest of temperaments. We can still be fine husbands.
The other reasons why I feel an affinity towards James Dyson are perhaps more predictable.
It is the lot of inventors to struggle. I don’t want to make too much of the obstacles I had to overcome. Molehills to James’ mountains, really.
At eighteen I was an illiterate engineman at Water Row Pit, Newburn. I paid to go to night school, worked my way up to Black Callerton colliery ‘brakesman’ and had to cobble shoes and mend clocks to make ends meet. My first wife died before we reached our fifth anniversary leaving me with a son to bring up. It wasn’t until I was thirty, that events began moving more in my favour.
At eighteen, James was self-confessed Norfolk bumpkin who had a bit of a Dick Whittington moment when exposed to the delights of London art colleges. He made his mark very quickly.
The Sea Truck, Dyson’s first product, was launched in 1970 while he was at the Royal College of Art. His next product, the Ballbarrow, was a modified version of a wheelbarrow using a ball to replace the wheel. He formed Kirk-Dyson with this brother-in-law to manufacture it and assigned the patent to the company rather than himself. A mistake he learnt not to repeat when he was booted out of the company for having unmarketable ideas like bagless vacuum cleaners.
My 'Rocket', Dyson's air multiplier
‘Blucher’ and ‘Locomotion’ weren’t the only steps on my way to ‘Rocket’, but that hardly compares to the five years and 5,127 prototypes it took before James was satisfied with his dual cyclone cleaner. Even then, his trials were only just beginning. Although I didn’t invent the steam locomotive - that was down to Richard Trevithick in 1804 - I was the first to attach a passenger car to one. I was in at the beginning of a new world while James was a century behind the world’s first vacuum cleaner. He invented something the world didn’t know it wanted; another vacuum cleaner. Only the Japanese were impressed. A bright pink £2,000 upright vacuum cleaner, being the last thing a Japanese house needed, was the perfect status symbol. Nevertheless, it was the start he needed.
I found the Americans very accommodating. The first ‘iron horses’ all came from my workshops. By the time James came to dealing with them, they were less easily impressed by British technology and marketing prowess. His experiences with devious US companies mirrored my own problems with London businessmen who tried to prove that my safety lamp, which was keeping Newcastle coalminers alive, was a copy of the Davy lamp. After expensive lawsuits, both of us won through in the end.
When it comes to running his company, James puts the same kind of faith in the family as I did. It was my son Robert who did most of the work on the ‘Rocket’ and the Dyson empire is totally owned by James, Deirdre and their three children.
One of the great ambitions James has is to turn the company name into a verb. He wants the world to dyson their living room, not hoover it. I can’t see that happening. You need to be first. I was the first to realise that railways lines had to be the same size so that they could eventually join up and the Stephenson gauge, a rather comical four foot eight and a half inches wide, is still the world’s standard. They also say the men of the north east are called ‘geordies’ because of my safety lamp.
Maybe James will get a type of cyclone named after him… ‘a force 12 dyson hit the Caribbean last night’.
George Stephenson’s opinion was interpreted in Oct 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: James Dyson, shanghaist.com
Photo: George Stephenson, Wiki Commons
Photo: ‘Rocket’, lookandlearn.com
Photo: air multiplier, lightstalkers.org
****
Chapter 7: Chris Evans by Alvar Liddell
THE BBC. NOW AVAILABLE IN GINGER.
Archetypal announcer, Alvar Liddell, assesses BBC presenter, Chris Evans
Today Chris Evans represents the British Broadcasting Corporation much as I did in the 1940s and 1950s. That is not his fault any more than it was mine.
Except for the BBC being our paymaster, there is little to connect Evans with me. Evans and I are worlds apart. In upbringing, personality, career, wealth and style there is a chasm between us. I won’t comment on our respective looks, since that would seem either vain or an attempt to ghettoise people with red hair and glasses.
I cannot criticise Evans. To do so would be to deny that times and attitudes have changed beyond my understanding. I can express dislike of the frenetic pace of his delivery, the rude populism of his content and the poor modulation of his voice. That would be a predictable and justifiable viewpoint but not valid criticism.
The objections I have to Chris Evans are not about him as a man but as a symbol of a once-worthwhile institution.
I was proud to work for the BBC. In my early days there I was happy to abide by the rules of the then Director General, John Reith, that radio announcers should wear dinner jackets after 8pm and be completely anonymous.
I doubt that Reith would have allowed Evans into the BBC and I’m sure Evans could not have been told what to wear if he had been let in by Reith. Although both might have agreed on a Nazi uniform, one as a sign of respect and the other as a door to mischief.
It was only after Reith was long departed from the BBC that anyone in Britain knew my name. To an extent the cult of personality on which Chris feeds began with the words, “Here is the News, and this is Alvar Lidell reading it”.
This was not a sign of the BBC relaxing its prescriptive approach to ‘improving’ Britain. It was a response to the German propaganda machine which was filling the airwaves with bogus BBC news items describing how Britain was crumbling under the heroic onslaught of the Third Reich. My name, my voice, was the sign that this was the real BBC. This was the news you could trust.
With hindsight, I have come to the sad conclusion that the decline of the BBC as an institution beyond censure began when I announced myself before the news. The BBC was no longer anonymous and irreproachable, no more a firm but loving ‘Aunty’. It had ceded control of its reputation to the ‘names’ that fronted it. From Alvar Liddell through Kenny Everett to Chris Evans is a short journey in years but an epic one for the Corporation.
The most listened to voice on BBC radio today, engaging almost 10 million listeners, is that of a poorly educated, one-time Tarzanogram who first made his mark on the BBC with innuendo-laden features like ‘Honk Your Horn’ and ‘In Bed With Your Girlfriend’.
Presumably, Chris’s shows are consonant with the ‘Public purpose’ of the BBC, which is described in its most recent Charter as mainly to:
1. sustain citizenship and civil society
2. promote education and learning
3. stimulate creativity and cultural excellence
4. represent the UK, its nations, regions and communities
5. bring the UK to the world and the world to the UK.
How does the dominance of a ridiculously rich business entrepreneur with a passion for Ferraris and an undisclosed BBC salary fulfil the commitment to those public purposes?
I hope you don’t hear jealousy in my voice when all I feel is sadness.
A couple of years before my death, I rounded on my previous employer for the deteriorating standards of speech apparent in many of its broadcasters. I should have been dismissed as a pompous old fart. Instead the BBC took me seriously enough to set up an inquiry. What I had done was remind the Corporation of what it wanted to be, not what it was becoming, or indeed what it should be. Which is representative of nation’s current values.
The BBC still sees itself as emblematic of an older, better Britain, alongside Big Ben and red buses. It is most comfortable in an empyrean realm of social, cultural and moral superiority, above the stresses of commercial and political give-and-take, providing uplift to the mass of citizens. ‘Dammit,’ the BBC bosses say, ‘the Royal Charter means we’re still the organ of the nation.’
If that’s the case, it’s my contention that the monkey not the organ grinder is calling the tunes.
Sorry, Chris, it’s not personal.
Alvar Liddell’s opinion was interpreted in August 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: Alvar Liddell, uk.ask.com
Photo: Evans, marketingweek.co.uk
****
Chapter 8: Colin Firth by Emil Jannings
CAN’T SPEAK - GIVE HIM AN OSCAR!
Original Oscar winner, Emil Jennings, assesses Colin Firth
Colin Firth is just an actor, ja? He is not a star. Emil Jannings was a star. Ein filmstar. I was honoured by Goebbels as Künstler des Staates, Artist of the State. Firth does not tread my footsteps. I was the first. Die erste Oscar. Many huge stars have won since me. Bogart, Brando. Cooper, Tracy, Wayne. I would be happy to dine, tell stories with any of them. Not Schell, even though he was Austrian. Not a true star. Not a star whose name was first - und grōsste- on the poster. In now times, stars do not win. The British do not know how to be stars. I would not dine with them.
Am I angry when the Oscars happen now? Naturlich, jedes jahr. I would not have thought about Firth but Marlene made me. The coincidence was amusement to her. I won my Oscar without speaking. Firth wins because his part cannot speak. “82 years on, and they’re still giving the little man to people who murder their language, Emil.” She is jealous that I am the only German actor to win an Oscar. Sehr eifersüchtig. She never liked me for supporting Herr Hitler. I tell her she was nothing without Sternberg and that they do not give das kleiner mann to director’s toys, spielzeug. She growls.
Does Firth deserve an Oscar? Nein. Pretty boy, character actor. Never bigger than his part. Das is nicht Hollywood. Why do I care? What did Oscar do for Emil Jannings? Nichts.
Have you seen the film which made me an Oscar winner, the first of Hollywood’s greats? I know your answer. It’s no, nein. ‘The way of all flesh’ has gone the way of all flesh. The only ‘Best picture’ you’ll never see again. Burnt, ‘denazified’, to spare embarrassment. How does that make me feel? Ein schwarze Schafe.
Firth should listen to my story. The little man is not a good luck charm. I did not attend the first Academy Award presentation brunch at the Hotel Roosevelt on May 16, 1929. Nor the party at the Mayfair in the evening. $5 for the ticket to that was money well spent, so I heard later. Though my wife would have made sure I did not enjoy it too much. Today, I would not miss either for the world, frau or no frau.
Then, I had already been sent home, fired by Paramount because I was a highly paid German star and the new talkies spoke English. Mr Mayer gave me the little statue months before the ceremony and wished me ‘ behazlaha’. Jüdische krokodil. The winners were already known in 1929. The presentations took five minutes, funf mintuten!, and the winners were not allowed to speak. It was the organisers, Mayer, de Mille and their cronies, who bored the audience. My name was clapped, my films of 1928 applauded, my absence was not questioned. I never appeared again in a Hollywood movie though I was its Best Actor.
Best picture, best actor, 1929. Best picture, best actor, 2011.
Think about that, Firth. You are not Hollywood. You are British. It is only good fortune that you speak the language of Hollywood. The British have not given Hollywood what the Germans gave. It was Germans who brought their sense of theatre to Hollywood. The POV style, Kino Wahrheit (cinema verité before the French thought of it), the unchained camera technique of mixing tracking shots, pans, tilts, and zooms - all German ideas. We were comfortable with publicity too, with stardom, while the English are always embarrassed by such things. I returned to the Third Reich to make Der blaue Engel with Marlene. It did not seem a bad career move. I did not expect Germany to lose a world war. Very few Germans did.
So, Colin Firth, your peers in the Academy think you besten der besten. Geniessen Sie es. They are fickle. In their hearts, they want their stars back. Do not compare yourself with all who have gone before you because many of us had star quality. It is harder to be ein filmstar than an actor. I doubt you will ever be a star because you do not rise above the parts they give you. If you want to do that, you could learn from the films of Emil Jannings. I had no voice to earn the Oscar. No attractive English speech defect. I owned the cinema screen with my expressions, my movements, my presence. I did not have other people’s words to read. I was me, Emil Jannings, the star.
Emil Jannings’s opinion was interpreted in Mar 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: Colin Firth, judyhalone.com
Photo: Emil Jannings, out of copyright
Photo: Film poster, fair use under US copyright laws
Photo: King’s speech poster, Weinstein & Co
****
Chapter 9: Bill Gates by Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage assesses Bill Gates’ contribution to computing
Everyone knows that my Analytical Engine was the first machine computer, don’t they? Before me (Before Babbage, BB, I like the ring of it), a computer was a living person who did difficult sums and more than occasionally got them wrong.
If I am ‘the father of computing’, a title often granted me, then I suppose I have to acknowledge Bill Gates as one of my sons. I cavil at doing so partly because I find him boring and also because there’s a small if in my last sentence. The iffiness is about me not about Gates. I am not too proud that I won’t admit to it. In spite of plans being drawn up in 1835, they didn’t finish building my Analytical Engine until 1991, sixteen years after a tiresomely young and unhealthily thin Bill Gates set up a company called Micro-Soft with Paul Allen. That probably gives Bill every right to ask. ‘Who’s the daddy then?’.
So, even though it is undisputed that I am far more interesting, it would be ungentlemanly of me to argue that I am also much the more important. Can I propose a compromise? I’m happy to stand as the father of the idea of machine computing, accepting that Pascal and Leibniz might have a word or two to say about that, while allowing Gates some claim to paternity of the PC, (though ‘in loco parentis’, after the likes of Stibitz, Shannon and Zuse stepped aside, might be a better description). It makes it easier for me to be objective. I would be uncomfortable criticising anybody whom I might have actually sired, even in an analogous way.
I can’t deny there are connections between us, some of them bizarre. A couple amuse me.
1. We are both relaxed about the value of a university education. Gates went to Harvard but never bothered to complete his studies. I was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge but never found the time to give any lectures.
2. One of my numerous inventions was an arcade version of tic-tac-toe. Gates’ first computer program was an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against their computer.
I like the child in him but I wish I could find more joy in the man.
He would not have been welcome at my soirées, to which the most farsighted and influential thinkers in Europe would come in their droves. Too one dimensional. Ben Franklin reincarnated he is not. I see him more as the Genghis Khan of the computer kingdom, aggressively seeding his rather barbaric approach to the beautiful world of code across all nations. Yes, he conquered the globe at an incredibly early age through the single minded viciousness that is excused as ‘hard-nosed business’. Now the Khan has retired to his earthen palace beside Lake Washington, yet the Microsoft hordes continue to ravage far and wide. There are signs of retreat, though, aren’t there? Computing in the cloud, that could bring some of the romance back. I would love that.
My analytical engine makes Gates look a computing slouch.
I lived in a mechanical world when numbers were mystical , long before Shannon made them digital. We weren’t in control of numbers, we were under their spell and wanted to understand their magic. My steam-driven Analytical Engine was designed to have more than fifty thousand moving parts so that it could remove human error from mathematical calculations. I wanted to make numbers perfect because I knew of nothing more beautiful.
And, for a poignantly short number of years, I had Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, to make them even more enchanting (why can’t all programmers look like her?). She has every claim to be ‘the mother of computer programming’, and I don’t think she’d be any more keen than I to acknowledge Gates as her son.
Gates deals in codes not numbers because his world is electronic. He skipped maths classes to experiment with programming, a sure sign that he has no affection for numbers. He has worked towards his goals with a passion I can only marvel at. I thought I was fixated on my Analytical engine but I could sidetrack sufficiently to:
a. pioneer lighthouse signalling
b. invent the ophthalmoscope
c. advise Tennyson on his poetry
d. propose ‘black box’ recorders
e. suggest the use of tidal power
f. design the cow-catcher for the front of locomotives as well as a ‘hydrofoil’.
If I say it myself, that puts me about as far away from what you now call a nerd as the abacus is from the Apple. Bill didn’t have anything to do with the Apple, did he? That might have made him interesting.
All he’s done is make himself rich and the world a lot drearier. Has anyone ever been enchanted by what a Microsoft program does for them? Has anyone ever counted the minutes in their lives lost to Microsoft load times or Microsoft crashes? Add them all together and you’ll probably find a sum equivalent to the annual output of China.
Who’s the daddy now, Bill?
Charles Babbage’s opinion was interpreted in May 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: Bill Gates, thesun.co.uk
Photo: Charles Babbage, Wikipedia Commons
Photo: Analytical Engine, science-museum.org.uk
Photo: Bill Gates, windows8italia.com
****
Chapter 10: Bob Geldof by William Wilberforce
Anti-slaver, William Wilberforce, assesses Bob Geldof
I had the better singing voice and I never used profanities. I would like to make that clear. Those differences apart, Robert Geldof is at least my equal.
It lightens my heart to say so. My sons, Samuel and Robert, made immodest claims for my achievements in their biography of my life. It is hard to chastise sons for glorifying their father but I feel unworthy of the place in history they fashioned for me, and embarrassed by the grandeur of a Westminster Abbey grave.
I welcome the chance to sing the praises of Robert Geldof and, by comparing what he has accomplished with my own efforts, I hope to convey a more graceful and measured humility than my sons foisted upon me.
Affinity of purpose is what draws me to him, for there are few ways in which we are alike, even allowing for the passage of two centuries. Robert cares passionately about humanity and reminds me of my own words, “If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.”
How did we both arrive in the same place?
Robert was born in Dublin and began adult life as a slaughter man, road navvy and pea canner in Wisbech. I was born in Hull - arguably a more dour place than Dublin - but, at 21, I was one of the richest undergraduates at Cambridge. The religious diet of Blackrock College tasted sour to Robert and his commitment to Christianity is far less fervent than mine yet his work has been no less godly. I came to evangelism firstly through my Aunt Hannah and later through my mother and sister while Robert’s faith was sorely tested by the traumatic loss of his mother when he was only seven. This became the wellspring not only of his empathy but also of the anger that has driven him so powerfully. I did not feel that kind of anger and can only wonder whether, with it, I might have brought a sooner end to slavery.
Robert entered geopolitics through the medium of music while I took the more conventional route of buying a seat in the House of Commons. We didn’t find our causes, our cause found us. Robert was incredibly moved by a BBC documentary on famine in Ethiopia and became a whirlwind of activism which shames my more timorous embrace of the African enterprise. My involvement was less wilful. When the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade sought a voice in parliament. William Wilberforce was not their first choice. Charles Middleton, MP for Rochester, was. He declined, suggesting me as an alternative.
The Society’s second choice became the voice for Africa, as Robert has so many, many years later. My voice was polite, well modulated and not short of fine phrases. It nagged like a respectable but unlovely wife for decades in the House of Commons and through the printing presses. Eventually, it was heard. Compare that with the curse-laden, rough cadenced voice of Robert Geldof and how it immediately echoed into almost every corner of the world. I have and I feel humbled.
19th century slave ship. 20th century famine.
The man has the Irishman’s easy delivery of the English language which he combines with a profound turn of phrase. In 2008, a survey showed that nearly a quarter of British people confused passages from the Bible with speeches made by Robert. Even though I accept that my countrymen’s acquaintance with the Bible can now be best described as ‘nodding’, I find that a remarkable judgment not only on what he has said but the way he has said it.
Robert has backed his voice with tireless action. I backed mine with my wealth and parliamentary oratory, which was easy for a rich MP to do. But he has not done it alone. And nor did I. Thomas Clarkson was the drive and organisation behind the Anti-Slavery Society, the man who put the public behind abolition. Robert has been supported, at first by Midge Ure, and later by Bono.
He knows as well as I did, that they have helped him be heard.
As much as Robert is an echo of my success, he is testament to my failure.
God set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. Robert Geldof has not been knighted by the Queen for his gentle politeness or his gracious manner.
I suppose one out of two wasn’t bad.
William Wilberforce’s opinion was interpreted in July 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: Geldof, collider.com
Photo: Wilberforce, Wikipedia Commons
Photo: Famine, philadelphiaproject.co.za
Photo: Slave ship, Wikipedia Commons
****
Chapter 11: Damien Hirst by Caravaggio
CON BRIO, CON TECNICA, CON ARTIST?
Renaissance man, Caravaggio, assesses Brit art’s Damien Hirst
From the most talked about artist of his day to the most talked about artist of today, I salute you. The dark soul of Caravaggio lurks manically in your works, Damien, and I rejoice in your vulgarity. You are a man I would drink and brawl with gladly. We are what artists should be. Loud, mad and bad. Not demented like that burino, Van Gogh.
We show the world like it is not how the world would like it to be. No artist should conform because then we would be imitators. If you do not live beyond the boundaries you cannot paint beyond them. Arrests, death warrants, banishments, quarrels and trials are as much the measure of an artist as the price of a canvas.
That’s why we are great artists.
Great artists ache for vicious criticism. How else can we know we are not just being noticed, we are being felt? A cardinal’s secretary once said of my work that it is nothing “but vulgarity, sacrilege, impiousness and disgust…”. I am jealous of what the ignorante say about you because what that secretary said about me is mild in comparison. Didn’t New York public health officials ban your ‘Two Fucking and Two Watching’ because of fears of “vomiting among the visitors”? Magnifico.
Forget the Colonnas and the Alof de Wignacourts, forget the Charles Saatchis, controversy is our greatest patron, isn’t it, Damien?
It might seem that it was very easy for me to be controversial as a painter not just as a man.
All I had to do in order to upset the Michelangelo-loving cretinos was to paint from life and make exaggerated use of chiaroscuro. Realism was seen as unacceptably vulgar in Renaissance Italy. Unbelievable, si? Art has taken many wild strade since then and you have had to court controversy with much more bravata. Yet the gulf between my ‘Saint Matthew and the Angel’ and your ‘Away from the Flock’ is not great. The philosophy of realism inspired both.
We have our different themes. Mine was life. Why should the Blessed Virgin not look like the seductive courtesan who modelled for me? Why should Cupid not look like Cecco, the Roman street urchin sat in my studio?
Renaissance realism vs Brit Art realism
Your theme is death, constantly echoing your student-placement days in the mortuary. The way you play with death seems to keep it at bay. It is ironic that I died young for my art, poisoned by the lead in my paints, while you, the most famous of the Young British Artists, threaten to grow old.
I hope you do though jealousy is beginning to get the better of me. An artist who shatters convention should die young. A man who puts a cigarette in the end of his penis for the benefit of journalists should die young and be welcome nowhere. Instead, you are your country’s richest living artist and renowned wherever you travel.
Where we differ most is in the practice of our art. A Caravaggio was a Caravaggio. A Hirst is, well, it could be a Hawkins or a copy of someone else’s idea. You’re very relaxed about the quality and extent of your own input. I would not have been happy to admit, “The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel”. I was a genius while you have a genius for masquerading as a genius.
If I had employed the factory system favoured by you and many of my contemporaries I might not have died of lead ingestion at only 38, there would be many more of my paintings and my pupils would have carried my reputation into the next century. There were Caravaggisti like Orazio Gentileschi but they were followers of my style not pupils of my school.
In contrast you rely unashamedly on your assistants to produce the volume of work that carries your signature. I only ever signed one of my paintings but the autograph of Damien Hirst abounds in galleries and private collections around the globe. You justify your lack of shame by insisting that the real creative act is the conception, not the execution, and that the progenitor of the idea is always the artist.
Everything you do has style, it is done con brio. Technically, you are accomplished, con tecnica. Yet above all you aspire to being the consummate con artist. Did you not say, “I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it.”?
Are you there yet? Perhaps you are because your 2008 collection, which you staged yourself, sold for nearly $200 million. Not bad for an artist who can say of his work, “… there’s fuck all there at the end of the day.” Benissimo.
Caravaggio’s opinion was interpreted in August 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: Hirst, supertouchart.com
Photo: Caravaggio, museumsyndicate.com
Photo: Cecco, archive.com
Photo: Virgin Mother, wirednewyork.com
****
Chapter 12: Boris Johnson by Dick Whittington
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