Farewell, Edward of Wickham

 Most people will think of Jeremy Bulloch in his role as Boba Fett, but I remember him best as the leader of the village of Wickham and ally of the outlaws in Robin of Sherwood.

He's just died, aged75.

His son Robbie played Edward's son Matthew of Wickham.

He also appeared in Doctor Who - in the Time Warriors (the story that introduced Sarah Jane Smith) and, even earlier, in The Space Museum with the First Doctor. 

They Seek Him Here....

 They seek him there,

Those Frenchies seek him everywhere....

I'd been aware of the existence of the 1950s TV series of The Scarlet Pimpernel for some time, but I'd never got round to watching it before.

Well, I've now seen the first episode, and it is a delight!

I'd been a bit worried it would be very mannered and stage-y, but the cramped sets actually make the sword fighting more believable, and the acting is first rate all round.  

Marius Goring makes an excellent Pimpernel, and it was a bonus to discover that Robert Shaw is playing his friend and lieutenant Sir Anthony in the first episode.  He was great fun in The Buccaneers as a pirate captain trying to live a more honest life.  Even better, the Prince of Wales is played by my favourite Friar Tuck, Alexander Gauge!

Patrick Troughton turns up in the second episode, as another of the Scarlet Pimpernel's friends, Sir Andrew Ffoulkes.

At the end of the first episode, Sir Percy kisses the girl he's rescued.  Since he worshipped the ground his wife Marguerite walked on in the books, I don't think he would have done that if she'd been around for the TV series, so I can only conclude that Sir Percy is single for the moment.

Darth Vader is Dead

 RIP Dave Prowse, Sith Lord and Green Cross Man.

Here he is rehearsing the light saber battle with Obi Wan Kenobi (and I think it's delightful that Alec Guinness is wearing slippers here!):

Destruction at Stonehenge

 I'm disappointed in the headlines from the Observer today:

"Druids face defeat as bulldozers get set for Stonehenge bypass: Ancient artefacts will be lost when tunnel for A303 is built near site, campaigners claim."

First of all, it isn't just druids who have been opposing the proposed tunnel for the A303.  It's archaeologists.  Professor Mike Parker Pearson is a member of Highways England's independent A303 scientific committee, and he has been vocal with his opposition to the scheme on archaeological grounds for years.  He's an expert on the landscape surrounding Stonehenge, where he's been working for many years, and the new bypass will cut a swathe of destruction through that landscape.  He likens the destruction to burning ancient manuscripts - once gone, all the information that could have been gleaned from the area destroyed by the road building is gone forever.

In June this year, a giant Neolithic structure was discovered nearly 2 miles from Stonehenge, close to Amesbury.  It was previously unknown, and consists of a series of huge shafts, each more than 5m deep and 20m across.  They had previously been dismissed as natural features or dew ponds.  The circle of shafts is centred on Durrington Walls, one of England's largest henge monuments - and all of this is part of the same prehistoric landscape that includes Stonehenge.  They are not individual sites - they are part of a greater whole.

Another opponent of the tunnel scheme is the Chairman of Amesbury Museum and Heritage Trust, Andy Rhind-Tutt.  

The Unesco World Heritage Committee, which designated Stonehenge (and the surrounding area) a World Heritage Site, also oppose the scheme.  They are concerned that the road scheme will impact adversely on the Stonehenge landscape because the tunnel is too short.

And it's not just "ancient artefacts" which will be lost - it's all the evidence of archaeology along the length of the new dual carriageway.  Professor Pearson says that the rescue archaeology (which has to take place in advance of new construction) will only be expected to retrieve 4% of the artefacts present.  He estimates half a million artefacts will be machined off without being recorded.

Disappointingly, one of the supporters of the tunnel scheme is Anna Eavis of English Heritage, who makes the point that the present road is "noisy and smelly and looks awful".  This is probably true, but the tunnel scheme is not necessarily the best way of tackling that problem.  She also claims that any archaeology which will not be preserved in situ will be recorded - which is emphatically not what Professor Pearson claims.

In the next week, the tunnel scheme may finally get approval from Transport Secretary Grant Shapps.  It may help road congestion, when it's finally finished in five or more years time, but it will harm an important part of English archaeology, and World Heritage, forever.

Sean Connery has Died

 

He wasn't just Bond, of course. 

He starred in some of my favourite films, including Robin and Marion, The Name of the Rose, and The Man Who Would be King with Michael Caine. 

He was Spanish in Highlander, Irish-American in The Untouchables, and Russian in The Hunt for Red October (and he'd been Russian before, in Anna Karenina for the BBC).    

He was Indiana Jones' dad. 

He sang in Darby O'Gill and the Little People. 

He wore high boots and a red loincloth (and not a lot else) in Zardoz.

He had a fight on the roof of a steam train carriage in The First Great Train Robbery.

He was a cop in space in Outland, a prisoner in a military prison in The Hill, and a truck driver in The Hell Drivers.

That's quite a range for an actor who will mostly be remembered as James Bond.

Jill Paton Walsh has Died

 I first knew about Jill Paton Walsh through her children's books, especially A Parcel of Patterns, which is about the village of Eyam that sealed itself off to stop the spread of the plague (quite a topical subject now).  Another I enjoyed was Fireweed, set during the Second World War.

She also wrote detective novels with the main character of Imogen Quy, so she had experience in the detective fiction genre when she came to continue the Lord Peter Wimsey series of novels, from the notes that Dorothy L Sayers had left.  Opinion in Sayers fandom is divided on these, but I enjoyed them, even if some people do see them as a form of fan fiction.

She was 83.

Raffles, starring David Niven

 I first encountered Raffles through the 1970s series starring Anthony Valentine, who I adored in the role, and which led me to reading all of Hornung's original short stories.

But I was unaware that there was a film of Raffles, starring David Niven, until recently.

When I looked it up, I found that the co-star was Olivia de Havilland - two of my favourite Hollywood actors, so why had I never heard of it?

I sent off for a VHS video.

I can see why I'd never heard of it before - it's a pretty low budget production, and Olivia de Havilland and David Niven are the only actors I've heard of in it.  The plot updates the original 1890s stories to 1939, and most of the action is set over one country house weekend, where Raffles plays cricket by day and tries to steal his hostess's necklace by night.

Bunny Manders is sidelined in favour of his sister Gwen (Olivia de Havilland), who puts the clues together to work out who the Amateur Cracksman is.  This Raffles seems kinder than the original, too - showing concern for the kitten he uses in a jewellery shop break in, arranging for a retired actress he admired to collect reward money for a stolen painting, and planning to steal the necklace to help out Bunny, who has money problems.  But the film does stop rather abruptly, leaving the police inspector waiting for a rendezvous out in the rain, and no clear conclusion as to what will happen to Raffles next.

Still, it's always worth watching David Niven and Olivia de Havilland in anything.

I understand now that there is an earlier film starring Ronald Colman - and John Barrymore was in a silent version in 1917!

The Avengers - The Hour that Never Was

 I remembered this episode as soon as they got to the abandoned airfield - it's the one with the milk float and Roy Kinnear as a tramp.  There's also a bonus Gerald Harper as Steed's old friend at the airbase.

The Man-Eater of Surrey Green and Silent Dust

 In honour of Dame Diana Rigg's death, I brought out my complete box set of The Avengers again.  I've been watching it a bit at a time, in order, and by chance I had reached Series 4, Disc 4, and a couple of delightful Emma Peel episodes.

In The Man-Eater of Surrey Green, Steed and Mrs Peel are up against an alien plant that can control minds, which gives a lovely excuse for Emma to fight Steed.  A plot twist is that the plant cannot control deaf people, so there are three deaf people in the episode.  The first is a horticulturalist, and boyfriend of one of the mind-controlled scientists.  The second is a fertiliser merchant who Emma meets in the local pub, and the third is an elderly lady scientist who is brought in to analyse the alien plant specimen.  To protect themselves from the mind control, Emma and Steed wear hearing aids to get close to the control room where the growth of the plant is being regulated.

Fertiliser is also involved in the next episode, Silent Dust, but this time the formula went wrong and produced a pesticide that wipes out everything it touches.  The bad guy in this episode is William Franklyn, most famous for the "Shh - You Know Who" Schwepps adverts - here he's a keen country sportsman, and very involved in the local hunt when he's not trying to hold the government to ransom by poisoning the whole of Dorset.  I found it interesting that hunt protestors carrying placards were shown in 1965.  Also, Steed gets shot with no blood or marks on his jacket whatsoever - but it does lead to a very funny hallucination scene.

Tonight I'll be finishing off the disc with The Hour that Never Was, which I have no memory of whatsoever, and Castle De'ath, which is one of my favourites.

Dame Diana Rigg has Died

 

This is how I best remember her, as Emma Peel in the Avengers.  I wanted to be like her, when I was six.

But she was a brilliant actress in so many roles - the only Bond girl to marry Bond (just a pity it was George Lazenby - and that she died just after the wedding), a nun in In This House of Brede, and Mrs Bradley in The Mrs Bradley Mysteries, for instance.

More recently, she played the villain in the Doctor Who episode The Crimson Horror, which had been specially written for her and her daughter Rachel Stirling by Mark Gatiss, and of course she was the Queen of Thorns, Oleanna Tyrell, in Game of Thrones.

She did Shakespeare, and the Morecambe and Wise Show, and she will shortly be seen in the new series of All Creatures Great and Small (returning to her native Yorkshire) and as another nun, Mother Dorothea, in Black Narcissus.

I was lucky enough to hear her rehearsing, once.  I was on a coach tour in Scotland with my gran, and we were looking round the Church of the Holy Rude in Stirling.  Diana Rigg was in the pulpit, rehearsing a speech - there was no mistaking the voice.  I was thrilled, and wanted to stay to listen, but my gran wasn't terribly sure who Diana Rigg was, and wanted to go and have a cup of tea before we had to get back to the coach.  I see from her Wikipedia page that she had an honorary degree from the University of Stirling, where she was also Chancellor for a time.

She also collected a book of theatrical reviews called No Turn Unstoned.

I know what I'll be watching later this evening....

Spider Woman's Daughter by Anne Hillerman

 I've read a few of the Tony Hillerman mysteries set around the Navajo Nation.  When I read a mystery novel, I'm less interested in the whodunnit aspect, and more interested in the background details, especially if the setting is a place or way of life I'm unfamiliar with.  Reading about the Navajo Nation from the point of view of two Navajo police officers has been fascinating, even though Tony Hillerman was not Navajo himself.

When Tony Hillerman died, his daughter wrote a new novel in the Lt. Leaphorn and Officer Chee series, so I was interested to see how she carried on the story.  Anne Hillerman was already a journalist, but this was her first novel.

Well, the first thing she did was almost kill off one of her dad's main characters!  Retired Lt. Leaphorn is shot, and Sergeant Chee and his wife, Officer Bernie Manuelito, have to solve the mystery.  So this story is from Bernie's point of view.

As an ex-archaeologist, I was very interested in all the details about Navajo pottery and the various archaeological sites in the plot, and as someone with an interest in fibre arts I was interested in the details about Navajo rugs.  Bernie's mother was a weaver of Navajo rugs, so that's one meaning of the title.

Anne Hillerman continued the series, and is now on her sixth novel - I'll be interested to read more of them.

The Feathered Serpent

 I have quite clear memories of watching The Feathered Serpent when it was first on TV in 1976.  Diane Keene, who played the Princess Chimalma, also starred in The Cuckoo Waltz, a sit com in which Bodie from the Professionals was the lodger with a young couple, and the mother-in-law (I think it was the mother-in-law) "knew how many blue beans made five".

What I hadn't realised when I first watched the series was that the evil priest was played by Patrick Troughton, so I thought it would be interesting to re-visit it with this knowledge in mind.

I had imagined, when I first saw the series, that I was learning something about the Aztecs and Toltecs, but it quickly became apparent that this was not the case.  All the Aztec and Toltec stuff was really window-dressing for a very basic plot where the good king wants to marry his daughter to the Prince of the neighbouring kingdom to bring peace and the evil priest wants to thwart this and increase his own power.  There's also a lot of sneaking around in secret passages.  I also remembered the Princess being paralysed by poison and having to lie still without blinking for long periods.

Patrick Troughton is wonderful, of course, in a dark, glittery robe and occasionally a head-dress with a black skull.  He also seems to be the only member of the cast who wears anything on his feet - everyone else is barefoot, even the Emperor.  He does a wonderful job of manipulating the other characters, quickly changing his story when it seems they don't want to go in the direction he's leading them. 

"You know the Toltecs are famous for sorcery, don't you?  That's what must have happened, or why could the Prince defeat you so easily?" he murmurs in the ear of the the General who is the rival for the hand of the Princess, when his honour will not allow him to launch a surprise attack on the Toltec camp - for which they clearly had no budget whatsoever, so it all had to be done by suggestion and off screen.

There's also an incredibly convenient eclipse of the sun at the climax of the story.

Poor Princess Chimalma is the only woman in the cast with a speaking part - a serving girl is glimpsed in two scenes, and that's about it.

Still, it's all great fun, and the plucky boy hero, Tozo, is very good - it's the sort of part that could have been annoying, but he was very convincing, despite having to wear a pale blue mini skirt and bikini top.

Thinking of costumes, the big gold head dresses do have a certain Time Lordly look to them.  And, my goodness, the eye makeup!

I was also surprised to recognise the name of the composer of the music for the series, David Fanshawe.  He's most famous for his album African Sanctus, which he did a couple of years before The Feathered Serpent - and when I looked him up, I saw that he had also composed the music for Flambards, with it's distinctive whistling theme.

Wakanda Forever!

 The King is dead.

I woke up this morning to the shocking news that Chadwick Boseman has died of colon cancer.  He was only 43.

He was an impressive lead in the film Black Panther, and part of the ensemble cast in other Marvel movies - and T'Challa is the only role I know him from.  He also played James Brown and Jackie Robinson, a black baseball player who was the first to play in the Major League  (I know nothing about baseball).

He was also a writer and director.

Paper Art

 I'm very pleased with myself.  I haven't really tried anything like this before, but at the moment I have time to experiment.  I saw a picture of a stag made up of lots of little pieces of scrap paper, in an old copy of Big Issue, and I thought I could do something like that.  Then I combined that idea with the style of an old picture book of the life of St. Patrick that I'd admired when I worked at the Children's Bookshop, and I came up with this:

Paper Art: Crowley in black with black wings on a red swirly background, and Aziraphale in cream with newsprint wings, holding a green book, on a background that looks like planking.

I did Aziraphale first, and got a bit more ambitious with Crowley.

I'm thinking of doing Inspector LeBrock and Billie from the Grandville novels by Bryan Talbot next.

 

Mr Punch

 I've been reading Christopher Fowler's blog for a while now (at www.christopherfowler.co.uk) and enjoying it, so I thought it was about time I read one of his Bryant and May mysteries, about two elderly coppers in the Peculiar Crimes Unit.  The first one I found was Bryant & May and The Memory of Blood, which I think is quite late in the series.

It concerns Mr Punch - or at least a series of murders on a Punch and Judy theme, which leads Bryant into researching the history of the Punch and Judy show.

I was already fairly familiar with the history of Punch and Judy - Mr Punch is the villain in the first Rivers of London book by Ben Aaronovitch, and turns up here and there in the later books of the series, though in the Bryant and May book no real magic is involved.  I was surprised, though, that in all the discussions of the traditional characters and puppets used in Punch and Judy shows, the crocodile was never mentioned - I remember the crocodile very clearly from when I used to watch the Punch and Judy show on Blackpool beach.  The booth was built into the back of a van that drove up and down the sands, stopping at intervals to do the show:

This is what I remember - the picture was taken in 1963.

 There are digressions into the history of the building used by the PCU - once used by Alistair Crowley, and with a fairground booth automaton of Madame Blavatsky in the attic, and theatre history, as the suspects are all part of the cast and crew of a new play at a recently re-opened London theatre, and that was all fascinating.  I tend to be more interested in the background details of a murder plot, rather than the whodunit aspect.  There's also a B-plot which starts off as something quite commonplace (woman has troublesome neighbours) and ends up being a lot more sinister, and personal to Bryant.  There were also some very funny moments, mostly involving Bryant.

I'm going to be looking out for more Bryant and May stories now.

Organization for Transformative Works Elections

 I first became aware of AO3 (Archive of Our Own) last year, when I started dipping my toes in the shallows of some of the fan fiction I was most familiar with.  

Then there was the wonderful moment during the Hugo Ceremony at DublinCon when AO3 won the Hugo for Best Related Work, and the lights went up on the audience so that everyone who had written fan fiction on the site or been involved in AO3 stood up - because this Hugo was for all of them.

After that, I started writing fan fiction again, after a break of many years (I used to write Star Trek fan fiction for fanzines like Starship Excalibur, when the original 79 episodes were all the Star Trek that existed).

I've been having fun - I changed the ending of The Flashing Blade, which has been bugging me for nearly 50 years, so the hero chooses the right girl; I turned Lord Peter Wimsey into Lady Petra and wrote about her experiences in the Great War; and I tried to make sense of The Saint's timeline in the Roger Moore series.

I also wrote a story that brought together all the fictional jewel thieves in Europe with The Champions, set Liz Shaw and Kate Stewart on a new path to keeping the Earth safe after UNIT was defunded, and wrote a few little Aziraphale and Crowley scenes (they are such fun to write!).

I've also read some awesomely good fan fiction, and some that might not be technically very good but which was obviously written with love (I'd put some of my own fiction in the 'technically not very good' category - the main thing for me was having fun writing it), and I've started following some of the authors on Tumblr.

And, since I was using the site, I sent a couple of small donations when they asked.

So I was delighted to be eligible to vote in the elections for new Board members.  Reading the bios of the candidates, I learned a lot about what goes on behind the scenes to keep the site running.  There are hundreds of volunteers organising, translating, tag-wrangling, dealing with legal issues, and more.

AO3 is part of the Organization for Transformative Works, which also covers Fanlore, Transformative Works and Culture, Fanhackers and Open Doors.

It's nice to be able to vote for something positive.

More of Adam Adamant

Damn you, Guy Adams!

I was left so traumatised by the end of the first volume of Big Finish episodes of Adam Adamant Lives! that I had to find out what happens next!

Will Georgina escape The Face?

Will Adam ever find happiness?

So I've just pre-ordered Volume 2 from Big Finish, which promises a bank robbery by highwaymen and a show down between Adam Adamant and The Face, among other things.

Guy Adams has also written these three episodes, and also plays Simms, Adam's manservant.

I fully expect to be traumatised by the excellent writing and acting again, but this time I'll have a stiff drink ready....

Olivia de Havilland, Screen Legend

She was the last of the great stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and her most famous roles have her looking serene and beautiful in period costume, such as Gone With the Wind, above, and The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn (who once said that his ideal woman was a mix of Olivia de Havilland and various dusky maidens....). She co-starred with Errol Flynn several times - including the Western Dodge City, and she first appeared with Errol Flynn in Captain Blood:

Another early film role was as Helena in the Hollywood version of Midsummer Night's Dream.

But she wasn't always glamorous on screen - another famous role was as the star of The Snake Pit, where her character was in a mental asylum:

Off screen, she challenged Warner Brothers in a lawsuit over her contract with the studio, (they wanted to add to the original seven year contract) and won. The ruling is still called the De Havilland Law.

On TV, she appeared in Roots: The Next Generations as Mrs Warner, the wife of a former Confederate officer played by Henry Fonda (I'd completely forgotten this until I looked it up - I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the white characters when I watched the series).
I did know she was related to the de Havillands who built aeroplanes - the founder of the de Havilland aircraft company was her cousin.
She died at her home in Paris, aged 104.

John Saxon has died

John Saxon appeared in all sorts of TV programmes when I was young and square-eyed. I started noticing that a show or a film might be low budget but he would always be good in it. I particularly remember Planet Earth, a pilot for a series that never happened, with a cast made up of many actors who had worked with Gene Roddenberry (who wrote it) before.

And then there was Enter the Dragon, where he was one of Bruce Lee's rival martial artists.

He was 83, and died of pneumonia.

Earl Cameron, Actor

I just heard that Earl Cameron has died, at the age of 102. He came to the UK from Bermuda as a sailor, at the beginning of the Second World War, and quickly became involved with the London stage. He went on to have a film and TV career which included Doctor Who. In The Tenth Planet he was the first black actor on film or TV to play an astronaut.

He also read Brer Rabbit stories for Jackanory, and appeared in Thunderball with Sean Connery, which gives an idea of the range of parts he played.
The Earl Cameron Theatre in Hamilton, Bermuda, is named after him.

Annette Brock Davis, Sailor

I came across a picture of the sailing barque L'Avenir:

The comments with the picture mentioned a Canadian woman called Annette Brock Davis who, in 1933, became an apprentice on the ship and learned to sail.
There were several hurdles she had to overcome that male apprentices did not, though. To start with, she had to pay double the amount that a male apprentice paid and her contract did not guarantee her a job at the end of the apprenticeship, as it did for the male apprentices. Also, she had to get her father's permission, even though she was 23.
By the end of the training voyage, though, she was offered the position of ordinary seaman with the Erikson Line, which owned the ship. This offer was withdrawn when they discovered that she had got married
She wrote about her experiences in My Year Before the Mast.

Trowelblazers: Dr Sada Mire

I'm still looking for British women archaeologists who are black. I haven't succeeded yet, but I have found someone with a local connection.

Dr Sada Mire was chosen by Hay Festival in 2017 as one of their Hay 30 international thinkers and writers. Onstage at the Festival she talked to Rageh Omaar and Mary Harper (who was the Africa Editor at the BBC World Service) on Somaliland: the African miracle you've never heard about. Also in 2017, New Scientist magazine chose her as one of their list of Inspiring Women in Science.
Dr Mire is the only working Somali archaeologist, and she is described in the programme notes as Swedish-Somali, as she was an asylum seeker who ended up in Sweden after fleeing Somalia with her twin sister Sohur as unaccompanied child refugees. Sohur went on to become a medical doctor. Their father was a police criminal investigator who was murdered when they were twelve.
She is an art historian as well as an archaeologist, and she is a visiting professor in the department of archaeology at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. She also holds a PhD from UCL's Institute of Archaeology, London.
In 2007 she led a team of fifty people to Somaliland, where they discovered prehistoric rock art at almost one hundred locations. At least ten of these are likely to receive World Heritage status, according to her Wikipedia entry.
As a result of her work on the rock art, she founded the Horn Heritage, a non-profit organisation to fund her work. She was also involved with the establishment of Somalia's Department of Tourism and Archaeology. She is also active in campaigns to protect Somali archaeological sites from looting and destruction.
Her latest book came out this year, and is called Divine Fertility: the continuity in transformation of an Ideology of Sacred Kinship in North-East Africa.

Trowelblazers: Tabitha Kabora

I found it quite difficult to find details about any black British women archaeologists. American women archaeologists are much easier to find online - Black archaeologists in the United States have formed the Society of Black Archaeologists, but there's no similar body in the UK.
Then I found an article about a seminar on racism in archaeology, and the chair of the debate was Tabitha Kabora.
Dr. Kabora did her doctoral thesis at the University of York on the utility of the long-term perspectives of archaeological and environmental studies, in order to understand the effects of human-environment interactions on agricultural systems. Her research formed part of the Archaeology of Agricultural Resilience in Eastern Africa Project (AAREA).
Her BSc and MSc degrees were from the University of Nairobi, in Environmental Sciences and Conservation Biology. So she's actually Kenyan, and came to the UK for further study.
At the moment she's working on the Europe's Lost Frontiers project while employed by the University of Bradford as an Environmental Modelling Research Assistant. Her work is on Doggerland, the sunken area in the North Sea which used to be a land bridge between the British Isles and the Continent. She has been developing palaeo-ecological models of Doggerland during the early Holocene period to incorporate into computer simulations.

Roma Archaeologists: John Henry Phillips

I was following a Twitter conversation the other day about types of racism, prompted by the Black Lives Matter campaign. Someone mentioned an academic journal in which an article stated that there were no Roma archaeologists. At least three Roma archaeologists commented on the thread, so there are probably more out there.

This is John Henry Phillips, who specialises in Second World War archaeology, though he's also dug on sites of many different periods across Europe. He appeared in the TV documentary No Roses for a Sailor's Grave, and has been a guest on various BBC programmes. He's also a diver.

Scipio Africanus

In St Mary's churchyard in Henbury, near Bristol, is the grave of an enslaved eighteen year old African, who was named Scipio Africanus by his owners - he was born into the household of the Earl of Suffolk. The original Scipio was a Roman general who won victories against the Carthaginians.
He died in 1720, and the two gravestones that mark his grave are beautifully decorated, brightly painted and with black cherubs. That is, they were beautiful, until someone came along and smashed them a few days ago. A message was left in chalk nearby: "Look at what you made me do. Put Colston's statue back or things will really heat up."
So there seems to be no doubt that the vandal who smashed the headstones is a supporter of Edward Colston the slave trader, whose statue was toppled during the recent protests in Bristol. The statue has since been fished out of the river, and will be installed in a local museum, along with placards from the protest.
An archaeologist, Richard Osgood, set up a JustGiving page to raise £1,000 towards repairing Scipio Africanus' grave, and has actually raised more than £3,400.

The inscription on the footstone reads:

I who was Born a PAGAN and a SLAVE
Now Sweetly Sleep a CHRISTIAN in my Grave
What tho' my hue was dark my SAVIORS sight
Shall Change this darkness into radiant light
Such grace to me my Lord on earth has given
To recommend me to my Lord in heaven
Whose glorious second coming here I wait
With saints and Angels Him to celebrate

Bilbo Baggins has Sailed into the West

I was sorry to hear of the death of Sir Ian Holm, aged 88. His death was related to Parkinson's disease.

For me he was the perfect Frodo Baggins, in the BBC radio series of Lord of the Rings, and he was also the perfect Bilbo Baggins in the Peter Jackson films.
But there was far more to his career than that - I think I first became aware of him as an actor in Jesus of Nazareth in the mid 1970s, where he played one of the Sadducees.
He also had a busy and varied film career. He played Ash in the first Alien film, Jonathan Pryce's boss in Brazil, King John in Robin and Marion, and many more. His last film role was as the older Bilbo in The Battle of Five Armies, in 2014.
He did a lot of Shakespeare on stage and on film, including Polonius in Mel Gibson's film of Hamlet and Fluellen in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V.
He was knighted in 1998 for his services to drama.
He was married four times, and had five children.

Black Archaeologists: John Wesley Gilbert

It's been quite a long time since I did a post about archaeologists. Usually I've been looking for women archaeologists, but other minorities get overlooked too. So this time I thought I'd take a look at John Wesley Gilbert.

His archaeological career was short, but he was the first black man to attend the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, where he worked on the dig at Eritrea with John Pickard, and helped to produce the first map of the ancient city. He won a scholarship from Brown University to go, and the work he did there contributed to his Master's degree - the first awarded by Brown University to a black student.
There's a fascinating and detailed account of his time in Greece at https://nataliavogeikoff.com
He was also one of the first ten black students to attend Brown University, and the first black professor at the Paine Institute, which he had also attended as a student. He taught Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French and German.
In 1911, he went to the Congo with a Methodist mission, where he spent time translating the Gospels into the local Bantu language, Tetela. He also contracted an illness from which he never really recovered.
He was born in 1863 to enslaved parents in Georgia, and died in 1923 as a respected educator. During the early 20th century he was focused on improving the education of African Americans. He was critical of textbooks that were written for white students, without considering the contributions of black people throughout history. He also advocated for interracial co-operation and harmony, though his ideas were criticised by some other black intellectuals of the day.
His wife Osceola was also a teacher, and they had four children.

Few African Americans have followed a career in archaeology, but in 2011 the Society of Black Archaeologists was formed to address the treatment of African material culture and to encourage African Americans to enter the field.

Women Warriors: La Mulâtresse Solitude

This is Solitude. Her mother was brought from Africa, possibly Sierra Leone, and she was born in Guadeloupe in around 1772 as the result of her mother's rape on the slave ship. I've found several different accounts of her life, but most of them seem to agree on this.
In 1794, the French abolished slavery in their colonies after the Haitian slave revolt, and she joined the Maroon community of La Goyave on Guadeloupe. This was a group of free Africans, from the French word meaning "fugitive".
In 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte re-enstated the institution of slavery in the French colonies. Solitude and her followers from the Maroon community joined Louis Delgrès, who had been a military officer in the Revolutionary Army, to fight for freedom. Their last battle against the French Napoleonic Army was on 28th May at Matouba, where the remaining freedom fighters ignited their gunpowder supplies, committing suicide while taking as many of the French with them as they could.
Solitude survived the battle. She was pregnant at the time, so was imprisoned by the French until she had her baby. In November 1802, a day after she had given birth, she was hanged.
Slavery was finally abolished on the island in 1848.
Solitude is now remembered as a heroine on Guadeloupe.

Women Warriors: Faye Schulman, Jewish Partisan and Photographer

I haven't done one of these for a while, but I came across the story of this fascinating woman recently.
Faye Lazabnik was born in 1919, and when the Germans arrived at the village where she lived in the Lenin ghetto in Poland in 1942, all of her family were killed, along with most of the rest of the inhabitants. She was spared because of her photographic skills - the Germans wanted her to develop their photos of the massacre. She had helped her brother Moishe with his photographic business before the War.
She managed to escape during a partisan raid, and joined the Molotava Brigade, a group of mainly Soviet Red Army escaped prisoners of war. She had some knowledge of medicine because another brother had been a doctor, and she served the group as a nurse for two years, along with a vet who was their doctor.
She managed to retrieve her photographic equipment during a raid on Lenin, and documented the partisan group with her photographs. She wanted to show that the Jews had not gone passively to their deaths, but had fought back.

Here she is with some of the Russian partisans - the picture has been colourised.

After the War, she married Morris Schulman, another partisan, and they emigrated to Canada in 1948, where she still lives in Toronto. She wrote a book about her experiences called A Partisan's Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust.

James Arrowsmith, Publisher and Erector of a Certain Notorious Statue

I almost never see my surname mentioned in history, so it was a bit of a surprise to be reading down a Twitter thread about the Colston statue in Bristol to find out who had been responsible for erecting it - a local publisher called James Arrowsmith!
JW Arrowsmith Ltd. was the company responsible for publishing famous works like Three Men in a Boat, Diary of a Nobody and Rupert of Hentzau. James was a friend of WG Grace. The company also published a lot of books on Bristol history.
And James was almost single-handedly responsible for the erection of the statue to Edward Colston, which he tried at first to fund by subscription. With a lot of effort, the committee eventually managed to raise only half of the cost of the statue, but it was put up anyway, and unveiled on "Colston Day", a local public holiday.
In 1920, Arrowsmith published a book on Edward Colston by HJ Wilkins, which detailed Colston's involvement with the Royal Africa Company, which transported slaves to the Americas. Colston was the Deputy Governor of the company.

NASA recruitment film with Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols and astronaut Al...

Ravens Fly South

I've just uploaded my latest story onto Smashwords - it's quite short, at just over 18,000 words, but it finishes off Owain's story from Raven's Heirs.
It should be available tomorrow.

Who Opened Blackpool Tower?

In the Adam Adamant episode where they visit Blackpool, Georgina enthusiastically points out Blackpool Tower as they travel along the Golden Mile in an open top tram. "Oh, yes," Adam says casually. "I opened it." And then adds: "It rained all day."

I rather think John Bickerstaffe would have something to say about that, though of course Adam Adamant may have been present at the opening ceremony. John Bickerstaffe was the Chairman of the Tower Company, so on 14th May 1894 he was the obvious choice to cut the ribbon and allow all the holidaymakers who had paid their 6d into the Tower Building. It was 6d extra to get in the lift to the top of the Tower, and an extra payment for the Tower Circus, which also opened for the season that evening.

In his early days, according to his obituary in the Lancashire Post, he was a member of the local lifeboat crew "and participated in several exciting sea rescues", which makes him sound like the sort of person Adam Adamant would have got on well with.
He made his fortune as the licensee of the Wellington Hotel, got onto the local council and became an Alderman and later, the Mayor of Blackpool. As Mayor, he was responsible for the building of Victoria Hospital, and after that he was Chairman of the Fylde Water Board for 28 years. He was also involved in the local Territorial Army, and recruited men locally for the First World War.
He was knighted for his services to the development of the town of Blackpool and the Conservative Party in 1926, but he seems to have been the sort of old school Tory who believed in public service, who wanted to improve the lives of all the people of Blackpool. He wanted every child to have a decent education and a chance in life, and was also involved in the building of several local schools.
When he died in 1930, at the age of 82, the flags at all the public offices in Blackpool, and the Tower and Winter Gardens, were flown at half-mast.

Adam Adamant Lives!

Recently on Twitter, @archivetvmus71 (Archive TV musings) posted a couple of clips from the 1960s series Adam Adamant Lives! which were amusing enough to give me a desire to watch an entire episode.
The DVDs of all the episodes that still survive are eye-wateringly expensive, but I still have a video machine, and I was able to pick up a video of two episodes for under a fiver.
As it turns out, I got the first two episodes of the series, A Vintage Year For Scoundrels and Death Has a Thousand Faces.
The first episode gives Adam Adamant's backstory - how he was captured by an arch-villain in 1902, frozen in a block of ice, and revived in 1966, where he is found by Georgina Jones, who can explain the strange new world of the 1960s to him. He, in turn, can help her against the villainous woman running a protection racket threatening the disco where Georgina works.
There's an amusing scene where Adam has been allowed to stay the night in Georgina's flat, and she admits to other men having stayed overnight, so he assumes that she is a prostitute, and he wishes to save her from her fallen state. But really, Tony Williamson's script could have been better (but he was also the script editor, so had overall responsibility for the quality of the scripts) - the woman Adam loves in 1902, Louise, really should have had more lines, especially when he was declaring his undying love for her, for instance.
Also involved were Sydney Newman and producer Verity Lambert, who had also been involved in the creation of Doctor Who. The concept of an Edwardian gentleman taking a satirical look at the Swinging Sixties was a good one but - well, there's a reason the Avengers was more popular and lasted better, and I think it's in the writing, despite the occasional witty scene. Of course, it might have improved as the series went on.

The second episode takes Adam and Georgina to Blackpool, at the height of the popularity of the Golden Mile, before holidaymakers started going on cheap package holidays to Spain. To give them credit, they really did go to Blackpool to film, with scenes along the Golden Mile and on the beach, as well as travelling on an open top tram. I was also delighted to see them walk past a stall selling Pablo's ice cream - we bought ice cream from that very stall, and it was delicious! In 1966, I would have been a small child playing on the beach at Blackpool, and I'm certain I saw the Illuminations that year, which play a large part in the plot - which actually doesn't make a lot of sense. The idea of hiding plans in a stick of Blackpool rock was a good one - but why did they need to when all the conspirators knew each other? And why had the man who stole the plans gone to London, apart from being a plot device to alert Georgina and Adam to the villainous scheme?
Once again, the main villain is a woman - I don't know if this continued as a theme - and once again Adam throws villains off high buildings to their deaths.
The episode also introduces William Sims, a Punch and Judy man who becomes Adam's servant. I can only assume that Adam's bank account had been quietly gathering interest over the 64 years he was frozen, because he seems to be independently wealthy with no visible means of support. By the second episode he has managed to buy a penthouse on top of a multi-storey car park (his original home having been knocked down ten years before) and he's learned to drive a Mini, with the number plate AA 1000. He also manages to pull the wool over the eyes of the man at the planning department of Blackpool Town Council while looking for information, so he's not helpless in the modern world, though he does suffer from flashbacks to the night he was betrayed and frozen every time he gets drugged or hit over the head, poor chap.
On the whole, I think the first two episodes have sated my desire to see the whole series, but I understand Big Finish had done some audio adventures which might be fun.

Goodbye to The Virginian

I grew up in the era where one of the main genres of TV show was the Western. I loved Bonanza, the Big Valley, High Chaperral - and The Virginian, starring James Drury.
James Drury has just died, aged 85. I've been looking at his screen credits, and he was in a lot of Westerns, but I hadn't realised that he also appeared in Forbidden Planet as one of the crewmen of the C-57D.
The article in Variety says that, in recent years, he toured Western events, talking about the Old West and cowboy values.

Cathy Gale has Died

I just looked at Twitter, and Honor Blackman is trending. She's just died aged 94.
In The Avengers (the UK 1960s version, that is) Steed had other partners before, but the series really found its feet when he teamed up with Cathy Gale. She was a great character, independent, no-nonsense, and able to throw a man across a room, often doing her own stunts.
Then she went on to be one of the best Bond girls as Pussy Galore.

And here she is, still being badass at the age of 87 in Cockneys vs Zombies!

According to imdb, apart from her acting, she was involved in the Fairtrade movement.

Arab Saddles

My characters are visiting a Middle Eastern kingdom, and Owain has been invited out for a ride in the countryside. I needed to know what an Arab saddle looked like, and I came upon the perfect picture for the horse being ridden by his host the Amir.

I found this picture on the blog Blind to Bounds (thinkloud65.wordpress.com), posted back in 2012, where they say it is a Moroccan saddle.

Writing in a Time of Enforced Idleness

I'm sitting at home twiddling my thumbs. I have entertainment of various kinds - I listened to a podcast episode of Breaking the Glass Slipper yesterday, and I'm in the middle of Francis Pryor's fascinating book about the excavations at Flag Fen - but I also want to be doing something creative with my time.
So I read the Mah Jongg oracle cards the other day, and they told me I should be doing more writing.
It occurred to me that I'd intended to write a sequel to the very first story I'd put up on Smashwords, way back in 2012, but then I moved on to other stories instead. Since I made the story (Raven's Heirs) free, more than 700 people have downloaded it, which is very gratifying.
I can't find the notes I made for the sequel now, but I have a rough idea of what I was planning, and today I sat down and immersed myself in that world again.
I'm feeling quite enthusiastic about getting back to work on it - and it'll keep me out of mischief for the duration.

Smashwords Sale

Because of all the people stuck at home at the moment, Smashwords decided to hold a special sale for a month. I decided to put all my stories in the sale for free - and more people have downloaded them in the last week than in the previous 5 years! Which is lovely, and I hope they enjoy reading them.

Rain by Mary and Bryan Talbot

I've been collecting Bryan Talbot graphic novels for some time now - the Grandville series (Inspector Le Brock the badger), Alice in Sunderland, the Tale of One Bad Rat and The Adventures of Luther Arkwright.
I've also got two of the graphic novels that Bryan and Mary Talbot collaborated on - Sally Heathcote: Suffragette and Dotter of Her Father's Eyes (and Kate Charlesworth for Sally Heathcote: Suffragette).
So I was very pleased with my birthday present, Rain by Mary and Bryan Talbot - and my Young Man had got me a signed copy!
It's about a flood in a Yorkshire town, and the grouse moors above the town, and the clash between environmentalism and profit, as seen through the eyes of a young couple - one of whom lives in Yorkshire, and the other in London. It also brings in the Zone Rouge - battlefields of the First World War in France which are still dangerously contaminated - and the Bronte sisters, and fracking, and climate change protests.
It sets out the facts clearly, and shows the different points of view on the subject, and the story is bookended with scenes from Alexander von Humboldt's life. He's a scientist who should be better known, as he was the first person to look at human activity and its effect on the wider environment - around the year 1800. Even then it was evident how deforestation, irrigation and pollution were affecting the climate.
Highly recommended.

The Champions - The Bodysnatchers

I finally gave in to temptation and bought the boxed set of The Champions - I only had a few random episodes on video before. This is the 1960s series starring Stuart Damon, Alexandra Bastedo and William Gaunt, secret agents with enhanced physical and mental powers.
I wanted to watch an episode I didn't remember first, just to see if I would really enjoy it, or if my enjoyment was influenced by my happy memories of watching it before.
So I chose the episode The Bodysnatchers. I didn't remember it, and as a bonus it was set in Wales, and written by Terry Nation.
There is only one Welshman in the entire episode - Talfryn Thomas, who plays a garage mechanic. Craig and Sharon needed some excuse to travel on a picturesque Welsh steam train, so their car breaks down. The stock footage is lovely, and I think includes Lake Bala. At one point Sharon wakes up from a doze at a station and asks "Where are we?"
Craig starts to answer, and then just points at the station sign. "There," he says.
Later, Sharon pronounces all the Welsh names perfectly. However, it was a great disappointment to see her standing around in the big fight scene while Craig and Richard were enthusiastically punching everybody in sight. At least she got to beat up one of the guards and take his machine gun from him earlier in the episode.
The villain of the piece was a very menacing Bernard Lee - M from James Bond! There's a journalist snooping around the place, and when Bernard Lee catches him, he takes great pleasure in killing him horribly (and fortunately off screen). He had kidnapped/bodysnatched a US General, hoping to cryogenically freeze him and then revive him to tell his military secrets.
The episode just about passes the Bechdel Test, as Sharon talks to the young Englishwoman who runs the Prince of Wales pub/hotel, where they're staying. The cryogenic scientist is also a young woman, giving Richard someone to charm and be kind to while trying to find out what's going on at the remote clinic.
So I had great fun watching the episode, and I'm looking forward to re-visiting some of my favourites now.

The Maria Assumpta

Today, a customer came into the shop wearing a sweatshirt with a picture of a square rigged sailing ship on it.
I recognised it instantly, because I used to have one just like it.
In 1990, I was working in Norwich on the Castle Mall excavation as an archaeologist, with my partner, and one weekend we decided to have a day out in Great Yarmouth. Just by chance, there was a tall ship in harbour, and it was possible to go aboard and look round. The ship was the Maria Assumpta, then the oldest square rigged sailing ship still sailing, and it was there I bought the sweatshirt.
The chap in the shop told me that he had been in the crew, and that they were sailing round to the Netherlands. He even remembered that the weather had been bad - it was a very grey day when we visited. When I was picking out my sweatshirt from the table with all the merchandise on it, the crew were sitting round a table nearby having lunch - he must have been one of them!
He told me that he stayed in the crew until the ship was wrecked, about five years later. I remember hearing about it on the news - they were coming into Padstow harbour when the engines failed and the ship struck rocks. Three of the crew were drowned.
He said that he was also an artist, and that he had carved the memorial to the ship and his lost crew mates that is now in a Cornish church. I looked it up, and it's St. Enodoc's Church in Trebetherick, which also has a memorial to Sir John Betjeman.

The Goddess of Second Hand Books

I seem to have created a goddess, almost by accident!
On Twitter, someone was asking which god or goddess you would like to be, so I replied I would be the goddess of second hand bookshops, and I could be summoned by someone gently polishing a leather bound book.
Then I found this picture:

This is obviously what a goddess of second hand books would wear when she manifests herself.
So I was asked what the name of the goddess would be - and really, it has to be Libra.

So there you are - if anyone happens to be gently polishing a leather bound book in future, they may find themselves being visited by a lady wearing a dress like this.

Rob Roy

Well, that was a darn sight better than Braveheart!

I'd only seen clips of the 1995 film starring Liam Neeson, specifically the climactic duel between Rob Roy and the evil Archie Cunningham. The fight arranger was William Hobbs, who was mentioned admiringly by Peter Morwood in the panel on screen swordplay at WorldCon this year.
It was the sword choreography in that duel that made me want to see the rest of the film, so now I know just what bad blood was between Rob Roy and Archie, who really had no redeeming features whatsoever. It was also obvious that the Marquis of Montrose, played by John Hurt, knew that there had been some underhand dealings - suddenly, Cunningham could pay his tailor's bills, and where could that money have come from if it were not the cash that Montrose had loaned to McGregor, and which had been stolen from him?

The film was shot entirely on location in Scotland. I was a bit dubious about all the long shots at first, but it was worth it to show off all that magnificent scenery.
There's also a scene at a Highland celebration where a woman sings a song in Gaelic - I see from Wikipedia that the soloist was the lead singer from Capercaillie, Karen Matheson.
Oh, and Rob Roy's little brother Alistair was a complete idiot.

Shadow of the Past - Big Finish

Dr Liz Shaw has always been one of the lesser known Companions of the Doctor, spending a season with the Third Doctor and then disappearing as Jo Grant is introduced.
I rather liked her - sensible, scientific, and taking no nonsense from the Doctor.
Sadly, Caroline Johns (who played Liz Shaw) didn't do much for Big Finish - but I've just finished listening to Shadow of the Past, and if it was all to this standard then what she did do was very good.
The story is part of the Companion Chronicles, and it's a two hander, with Caroline Johns as Liz Shaw and Lex Shrapnel as the young UNIT soldier who accompanies her.
She's been called in, as an older woman, to the opening of a UNIT vault that was sealed in the 1970s, which leads to her telling the story of the crashed space ship in the vault to the young soldier accompanying her.
The story is by Simon Guerrier, and nicely catches the tone of the Third Doctor's UNIT days, and he's placed it between Doctor Who and the Silurians and The Ambassadors of Death - so the Doctor's relationship with the Brigadier is quite strained at this point (after the Brig blew up the Silurian caves).
I shall be getting more Big Finish stories with Liz Shaw, I think.