Une Petite Escapade a Paris

            

Notre Dame spire on fire
April 2019

Montmartre, looking towards Sacre-Coeur,
visited by David.

I have just returned from a very short trip to Paris treated by my son, David, as a Mothering Sunday present! I had longed to visit Notre Dame in this first year of its re-opening after the disastrous fire in April 2019, so our two nights there gave us plenty of opportunities not only to check out Our Lady of Paris, [‘Notre Dame] but also to indulge in our much-loved strolling along the boulevards in true flaneur fashion. Nothing feels quite so francais as wandering along les avenues observing passing life, before choosing a table at one of the many outdoor cafes’ seating areas for a glass or an ice. It is always cheaper to drink at the bar inside but frankly, to be seated outside to view and be viewed is worth that little extra!

David had done well to find a super place in Montmartre, light, lots of glass and space, a lift [so necessary at nearly 91 for a room on the fourth floor!]  and in an area awash with many bars, cafés, bistros and brasseries. The Metro [used only twice] was conveniently close as were bus stops though it must be said that we did lots of walking which is a bit of an effort with flagging energy and two walking poles. Determination and plenty of time are the essentials in being a sedate, but successful, nonagenarian flaneur! Plus, of course, a patient and kind companion/guide/problem-solver!

We were lucky in almost effortlessly, finding perfect places to eat; the definition of ‘perfect’ being conveniently close when hunger is noticed; stylish interior if possible; chic outside area with one or two available tables; friendly waiters; easily understood menu with desirable dishes offered at reasonable prices. And of course, ultimately, excellent food and service.

Walking between sights-to-see was fine but when the distance was too far for frailty, we used available transport nearby, my total favourite being a sort of three-wheeled cycling taxi under the good-humoured guidance of Adam. He took us on a half hour tourist trail, passing many of the well-known places of interest which he accompanied by an explanatory tourist guide chat, much enjoyed by his two 

Velo-taxi, Paris, on the tourist trail in May 2025

passengers. I particularly liked him always calling me Maman and I so enjoyed the ride with a slightly nervous eye-closing at certain intersections, but imperious as we passed slower travellers and presidential as we swept into empty stretches of street and forged magnificently ahead. I secretly longed for an admiring audience for our slightly rocky ride, but one can’t have it all!!

Much of the spire was made of wood
covered by layers of lead.

Hommage sauveteurs
Plaque honouring the vast subscriptions which
poured in immediately after the fire.
Displayed outside the Hotel de Ville.

The stated objective of our entire trip being to appreciate the restored Notre Dame, we did exactly that and it WAS magnificent. Impossible to believe that the inferno had destroyed so much of the mediaeval framework and the roof but most of the famed French Gothic architecture stands where it has stood since the  twelfth century with its breathtaking stained-glass windows, elaborate stone carvings and soaring spires, evidence, as its name suggests, of its sacred place at the heart of France, integral to its history and enduring Catholic faith. Indeed, its magnificence and enduring presence inspire reverence and awe in all those who behold it. The catastrophic fire which engulfed Notre Dame in April 2019 causing extensive damage, left the world in shock and mourning and inspired an outpouring of support and contributions for the cathedral's restoration. Within twenty-four hours, £520 million had been promised by huge

Notre Dame in all its restored glory

international corporations and companies followed by countless millions of smaller amounts regardless of faith, nationality or creed. The U.S. was the second largest contributor at $62 million. Macron’s short but heartfelt speech touched the world, and the major restoration project was launched with the hopeful, possibly unachievable, date for reopening set at December 8, 2024, over five years ahead..

Another view of the breathtaking restoration including
one of the three original Rose windows

West facade of Notre Dame today

An Original Magna Carta

 

Magna Carta 1215 [detail]

Exciting recent news from British researchers, Professor David Carpenter, Professor of Mediaeval History at King’s College, London and Professor Nicholas Vincent, Professor of Mediaeval History at the University of East Anglia. Both men are experts on mediaeval England, and their recent combined study of a copy of the Magna Carta, owned by Harvard Law School, shows that it is not a later copy as formerly believed, but it is in fact one of the seven scripts surviving, from King Edward 1’s 1300 issue of this incredibly important document.

Magna Carta on display in Salisbury Cathedral

The Magna Carta is considered a key step in the evolution of human rights against oppressive rulers and has formed the basis of constitutions around the world. It was influential in the founding of the United States informing an array of rights from the Declaration of Independence to the framing of the U.S Constitution and the subsequent adoption of the Bill of Rights.

The script in Harvard Law School Library [labelled as HLS MS 172] was bought by the library in 1946 for the sum of $27.50, according to the library’s accession register. The auction catalogue [also in the library] described the manuscript as a “copy made in

Auction catalogue extract

1327……. Somewhat rubbed and damp-stained”. It had been purchased a month or so earlier by the reputable London bookdealers, Sweet & Maxwell, via Sotheby’s, from a Royal Air Force war hero for a mere £42. Professor Carpenter described HLS MS 172  as “a remarkable testament to a fundamental stage in England’s political development” and as “one of the world’s most valuable documents.” This is a fantastic discovery, “he said. “Harvard’s Magna Carta deserves celebration, not as some mere copy, stained and faded, but as an original of one of the most significant documents in world constitutional history, a cornerstone of freedoms past, present and those yet to be won.”

Professor David Carpenter

Professor Carpenter had been studying unofficial later copies of the Magna Carta when he came across the digitised version of HLS MS 172 on the Harvard Law School Library website and realised it might just be an original and not a copy. He began to compare it with other originals to establish its authenticity and teamed up with Professor Vincent to try together to investigate its provenance. Professor Vincent described Magna Carta as “a totem of liberty, central to our sense of who we are: a freedom-loving, free-born people. It is an icon both of Western political tradition and of constitutional law. The provenance of this document is just fantastic…given present problems over liberties, over the sense of constitutional tradition in America, you couldn’t invent a provenance that was more wonderful than this!”

In establishing the authenticity of the manuscript, the professors noted that its dimensions at 489 mm X

Magna Carta in its original glory

473 mm are consistent with those found in the other six originals as is the handwriting with a large capital ‘E’ at the start in ‘Edwardus’ and the elongated letters in the first line. Carpenter and Vincent believe the document was issued to the former parliamentary borough of Appleby in Cumbria circa 1300. It was then passed down through an aristocratic family of the 18^th century, the Lowthers, who eventually gave it to Thomas Clarkson who was the leading slavery abolitionist of the day. In the early 1800s Clarkson retired to the Lake District where he became a friend both of William Wordsworth, and of local landowner, William Lowther, hereditary lord of the manor of Appleby. Through Clarkson's estate,

Professor Nicholas Vincent

it was bequeathed to Air Vice-Marshall Forster ‘Sammy’ Maynard, a WWI flying ace who ended up as commander of the airbase in Malta at the start of WW2 and who inherited the archives of  both Thomas and John Clarkson. The provenance of the document is as extraordinary as its long survival although there is little evidence of its exact whereabouts from the 14th century to the 18th, but, given that the original was issued to the borough of Appleby in Cumbria in 1300 it seems likely that was where it might quietly have bided its time over the centuries. 

The Huntington copy of Magna Carta

The professors also collated the seven originals with each other and discovered that a new text of the original Magna Carta had been prepared when the clerks were ordered to keep to the format then designed. This was a high bar for the newly found script but using ultraviolet light and spectral imaging, the researchers discovered that HLS MS 172 passed muster, with its text perfectly matching up with that in the originals. Professor Carpenter suggested that this exacting uniformity also provided new evidence of the importance of the high status of Magna Carta in the eyes of its contemporary world. The text was so important that it had to be correct in every detail.

Thomas Clarkson
An important person in the Magna Carta
 story and leading slave abolitionist of his day.

Magna Carta means 'the Great Charter' and it represented a triumph of tenacity for the barons in curbing the tendency of King John to accrue all power to the monarch. It forced King John to share power with the barons in 1215, thus changing England's government from an 'Absolute Monarchy' to a 'Limited Monarchy' because it placed legally enforceable limits on his power.  The document made clear that the King, like everyone else, was subject to the law, not above it. It is believed that the King had little intention of keeping his promises but events, and history, favoured the reformers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Echoes of The Thirties?

 

Family group, 1942/3

 I have only recently looked again at the details of that decade in which I was born, the 1930s, which was not a peaceful period! It was marked by a global economic crisis, the rise of populist leaders, extreme nationalism and declining international cooperation, all of which laid the groundwork for World War 11. I do remember quite a lot of that war, albeit from a child’s perspective. I remember my brothers, almost a generation older than I, two in uniform; brother Jack in the Grenadier Guards in France; brother Joe in the Sherwood Foresters, in Italy while brother Horace, protected from fighting, continued serving as a nationally important fire-man or stoker, later an engine driver, on the railways; and brother Reg, quickly invalided out of the Army due to latent brain damage following an horrendous car crash, and his return to the peacetime pursuit of bricklaying and posing as a 'man-about-town'!. I also remember the American Army camp eventually established on what we had called ‘the Top Field’ where my little sisters and I had played but which then became out of bounds to children for their former Cowboys and Indians games.

I keep reading that Donald Trump has frightened Americans with his admiration for strongmen like Putin; his contempt for restraints on his exercise of 
power; his demonisation of minorities and foreigners; his expansionist tendencies [he is still threatening that Canada, that neighbour and old friend, will be the U.S. fifty second state, and pronouncing the U.S. security need to annexe Greenland, incidentally, a fellow NATO member.] A strong global fear is that he truly threatens to establish fascism as he seeks to severely restrict U.S. immigration policies, pondering whether citizenship should be based on ancestry and race only. This causes a shudder of apprehension with its echoes of the fascist ideologies of the Thirties. Certainly, his immigration policies including banning citizens from certain Muslim countries and his strenuous efforts to deport millions of immigrants without due process; people he describes as a

‘threat’ (no proof needed) demonstrate isolationist and chauvinistic tendencies. He had, in his first term, withdrawn from international agreements like the Paris Climate Accord; the Iran Nuclear Deal thus strengthening the position of Iran in political and nuclear arenas; and the World Health Organisation. Despite Joe Biden’s attempts to cancel or reverse some of the worst Trump legislation, his, Trump’s, nationalistic rhetoric remains deeply embedded in U.S. policy and further, largely appeals to the extreme chauvinism and conservatism of swathes of American society.

Although Nationalists were established in power in Europe in the Thirties, they were not, in the U.S. But one powerful man, Senator Huey Long, Governor of Louisiana, a state he ruled as his own personal fiefdom, was immensely popular in the Thirties and would probably have made it to the Presidency had he not been fortuitously assassinated in time. Long’s devotees loved his economic populism and his slogan, “Share Our Wealth” appealed strongly to those who had lost their jobs and could not find a replacement; those whose wages had been eroded; those who felt lost out and left behind. Long went over the heads of the hated press, communicating directly with the voters through a medium he could completely control, his own private newspaper, The Louisiana Progress [founded March 1930]which he had delivered by the Highway Patrol. He forced State employees to subscribe and also to deliver copies and State agencies to buy advertising space. He stoked the fears of popular xenophobes; directed hostility to Roman Catholics from eastern Europe; and supported Lindbergh and his America First movement. All of this in the depths of America’s Great Depression. 

Long’s personal abuse of his political opponents, often mocking recipients’ physical characteristics; his tirades targeting judges for whom he seemed to harbour a particular ire; his loud distrust of the press; all of this made for his widespread popularity and is reminscent of Trump now with his Truth Social and his massive political campaigns with current anti-Woke proclamations. Long’s hugely popular following and his xenophobic publicity do find strong echoes in Trump today with his policies aimed primarily at altering the demographic and social composition of the United States to favour conservative groups and traditional white populations. 

The two periods provide very different contexts, however. Then, the Great Depression. Now, the huge power of technology and much greater global economic interdependence. Let us hope these differences will be critical. Interesting to note that Huey was stopped when he was murdered by the son-in-law of a judge, he had publicly reviled and whose dismissal he had engineered. The latest attempt on Trump’s life was unsuccessful but speaks of a similar anger and despair in some of the population.

Trump on the campaign trail.

July 2024. Latest attempt at Trump assassination which
provided excellent publicity shot.
Another example of a sadly inadequate sniper.

  

Sheku Kanneh-Mason

 

Sheku Kanneh-Mason

I am now not entirely sure when I first heard of Sheku; perhaps it was the programme in 2018 on the story of the entire Kanneh-Mason family from Nottingham. The fact that Nottingham has always been ‘my town’ even though I was born fourteen miles away in the much more prosaic Mansfield, might have been the aural spur to listen originally to the Kanneh-Mason story. I subsequently bought Sheku’s first C.D. ‘Inspiration’, (2018) and immediately loved the sublime playing of his cello. Yesterday, I heard, by delighted chance, the latest This Cultural Life on Radio 4 when John Wilson interviewed Sheku about his musical and personal life. One answer illuminated the extraordinary effects national success in one area, can have on a person’s life. After his televised performance at Harry and Megan’s wedding, he said how much his fame, and requests for concerts, seemed to have increased and his latest appearance in the Last Night of the BBC Proms, televised around the world from London’s Albert Hall, can only have served to increase his fame.

Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason;
cellist and pianist, respectively.

His parents are Stuart Mason, a luxury hotel business manager of Antiguan descent and Dr. Kadiatu Kanneh from Sierra Leone, a former lecturer at the University of Birmingham and author of the 2020 book, ‘House of Music: Raising the Kanneh-Masons.’  He was born in April 1999, the third of seven siblings in an intensely musical family with each child expected to learn to play a classical instrument. The parents were very musical though not professionals and they worked hard and creatively to ensure their children could develop both artistically and personally. He was taken every week for cello lesssons at the Royal Academy's Saturday School and his Nottingham state school "was full of music" according to Sheku, with opportunities to learn to play bass guitar and trumpet As Dr. Kanneh writes in her book, “Playing music was an organic part of family life, rooted in the routine of every day. We didn’t decide at the beginning that our seven children would become musicians and pursue professional music careers.”

Sheku was already well-known as Young Musician of 2016, when he was chosen to play his cello at the wedding of Prince Harry and Megan Markle in 2018. Still a teenager, his faultless musicianship impressed the world! He played Gabriel Faure’s Après Un Reve; Maria Theresa von Paradis’ Sicilienne and Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria. He became the first black person to win the BBC Young Musician of the Year [an annual event since 1973] in 2016 when he gave a passionate performance of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto. This triumph was closely followed by a documentary about his extraordinary musical family and demands arrived, nationwide for him, and increasingly, his pianist sister, Isata, to perform in concerts.  He made several recordings including Carnival with his family and Muse, with sister Isata. In 2018 his Classical No. 1 solo album, Inspiration was followed in 2020 by Elgar which reached No.8 in the Official UK Album Chart, making him the first cellist in the history of the UK Charts to break into the Top Ten. His newest recording in 2023, Song, extends his repertoire far and wide, from Bach, Mendelssohn, Beethoven to folk, jazz and pop. Many pieces have arrangements by the cellist himself, and every track reflects Kanneh-Mason’s joy in the instrument he began playing when he was six. One piece, Myfanwy calling up his Welsh grandmother, is played on three cellos with all three played by him with the sounds, over-dubbed. In his interview with John Wilson [This Cultural Life] Sheku says how spontaneous and creative he was able to be in Song, “recording in different ways and picking things which meant a lot to me. It’s very much like a portrait of who I am up to now while also looking forward to what I’m interested in exploring further.”

He appeared on Last Night of the Proms from 2017 to 2024 but when he was asked on Desert Island Discs in 2024, if Rule Britannia should appear in the finale, he promptly answered, 'No!' In his debut book, 'The Power of Music" he recounts his horror at the unexpected huge reaction to his answer. "My truthful and understated remark ... was greeted with an uproarious wave of censure and horror against me in the media, and an unguarded uprising of racist bile on social media."  He describes the song as 'deeply troubling ....... born as it was in Britain's burgeouning slave trade and at the height of its thundering imperialism.'. He immediately received widespread support, particularly from other musicians and found solace, as ever, in playing his beloved cello.  A young British composer, Edmund Finnis, wrote five preludes for Kanneh-Mason and in an interview, Sheku pays tribute to Finnis. “He is very interested in subtle and detailed things in the sound which is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about and exploring. The collaboration works well because of that. He’s a very sensitive musician and sensitive to the aspects of music that I care about like harmony and melody, sound and subtlety and the vocal qualities of the cello.”

Sheku in 2021, with his prize
'Ex-Goritzki' cello, 1700

As one of the most exciting musicians of his generation, Sheku Kanneh-Mason has been blessed by the foresight and generosity of donors. He was given his priceless, perfect cello, the outstanding ‘Ex-Goritzki’ by Matteo Goffriller, made in Venice in 1700, thanks to a syndicate of wealthy sponsors introduced through the Florian Leonhardt Fellowship, for his sole use for the rest of his life. This wonderful gift was a supremely uplifting event for him in 2021, both for Sheku and his audiences and the music continues.