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museum

LAISSEZ FAIRE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read367 views

‘Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.’ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.

 

I am contemplating, in the Walker Art Gallery,

Liverpool, the statue of William Huskisson, once

the city’s Tory MP and sometime President of the Board of Trade

but much better known as the world’s first railway fatality

at the opening of the line to fetch cotton quickly and cheaply

from the Mersey’s docks to the mills of South East Lancashire.

(He died at Eccles, where the cakes come from).

His widow paid for the sculpture. He holds a scroll

and is dressed as a Roman senator. He is a tad

more lithe than in later life – or death – and his thinning hair

has been carved to indicate maturity rather than age.

(The vandalised statue was removed from his mausoleum

in St James’ Cemetery). He was hit by Stevenson’s Rocket,

while ingratiating himself with Wellington, the Iron Duke

and old Etonian, famous for the observation

that  Waterloo ‘was won on the playing fields of Eton’.

 

The gallery is part of a vast piazza-type space

of splendidly grandiose late Victorian constructs –

civic society made manifest in stone – Museum,

Library, Assizes, St John’s Gardens, St Georges’ Hall,

St George’s Plateau, Lime Street Station, inspired by local,

civic pride, funded by the Atlantic slave trade’s proceeds.

 

More or less round the corner is Scotland Road – the centre

once of working class migrant diversity: Irish, Welsh,

Scottish, Italian, German, Polish, English – its MP

until 1929, an Irish Nationalist –

its male workforce pre-dominantly dockers.  Post war

the river began to empty. Citizens of Liverpool’s slums

were scattered through Cheshire to places where

manual labour was needed – for a time. There their off-spring languish.

 

On St George’s Plateau, in 1911, was announced

a national seamen’s strike, which became a national transport strike.

Churchill telegrammed the King that the end of Empire was nigh.

The Hussars entered stage right, opened fire.

Two strikers died, both Catholics: John Sutcliffe, a carter,

shot twice in the head, Michael Prendergast, a docker, twice in the chest.

Working class men killing working class men so public school boys

could play in safety and nouveau riche tycoons

make dynastic fortunes for their children.

 

 

 

WHO LAUGHS LAST

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read439 views

At Tatton Park, Cheshire – where herds of red and fallow deer

graze studiously beneath the take-off path

of Manchester Airport and are seemingly deaf

to climbing Airbuses and 737s – the so called Tenants’ Hall

was previously the last Lord Egerton’s private museum,

its four walls adorned with mounted heads of,

for example, wildebeest, giraffe, black rhinos, lions –

all killed by Maurice himself.

 

In the ‘20s, with the Tatton rents keeping the jackals,

as it were, from the door, he settled permanently

in Kenya’s Central Highlands.

 

He settled for the game, the social life, the deferential servants

and the perfect climate for agriculture,

with its plentiful rain, clement days, cool nights –

something the unsurprisingly resentful Kikuyu had known

for the many generations they had been settled there.

 

He founded the Egerton Farm School – for white youths keen

to till and own the African earth – now Egerton University

for black, mostly affluent, students.

 

He was a natural member of the Happy Valley Set –

that well-bred, well-heeled, history-free and somewhat

unhinged club of cocktail racists, profoundly deaf to irony.

 

He built a six bedroomed house and invited his – to this day,

seemingly unknown – English fiancée. She decried the place as

‘small as a chicken coop or a dog’s kennel’.

 

Over the next sixteen years – 1938 to 1954 –

he built the fifty three roomed Egerton Castle

with imported stone, oak panelling and tradesmen

and invited her (apparently the same one) again.

And still she spurned him – ‘a museum.’

 

He was eighty. From then, all women, chicken and dogs

were forbidden, literally on pain of death, irrespective

of class or ethnicity. Notices were posted, on appropriate trees,

to that effect.  He dined alone – and continued to play tunes

by Vivian Ellis and Ivor Novello on the Steinway grand

in the castle’s unpeopled hall for his remaining four years.

 

Heirless, he left the castle and the school to the Colonial Office

and his Cheshire estates to the National Trust and the county council.

Perhaps he realised the game, as it were, was up – despite

the brutally illegal suppression of the Mau Mau  –

and saw the empire and all its varied works as finished.

As usual, he would not have been wholly wrong or entirely right.

 

Egerton Castle is now a wedding venue – like Tatton, where,

for all such events, floor-to-ceiling net curtains

are drawn across the stuffed, severed heads.

 

 

 

‘A WINDY DAY’ & ‘A CALM MORNING’

 

A WINDY DAY, J.M.W.TURNER Tabley, the seat of Sir J.F. Leicester

They bought up land, made marriages, dispossessed

tenants and built their fortune on rents.

These commissions mark their zenith. Since then,

the estate has been sold off acre by

acre, piece by piece – one Turner remains,

the other hangs in another museum.

Some things are unchanged: in the distance,

the house’s palladian exterior

in local sandstone, the round turreted

folly on the small island in the lake – an ancient

Cheshire mere. Gone are the fishing boats

tacking on the choppy water or anchored

in the pink stillness just after dawn.

Whatever fishes thrive are largely

unmolested and aircraft rise from Ringway

five miles or so to the north. But England

continues – consuming, class ridden.

A CALM MORNING, J.M.W.TURNER