June | 2012 | Modern Lives Modern Landscapes

The founder of the Welfare State visits North Uist, 1919

Posted on June 26, 2012 at 9:59 am.

‘Wasn’t there a famous Beveridge?’ Barbara asked me. ‘I think he was here’.

Barbara Maclean of Sollas, who recently passed away just short of her 92nd birthday, grew up on the intertidal island of Vallay which lies off the north coast of North Uist. Her father was the farm manager for Erskine Beveridge (1851-1920), the linen baron, archaeologist and photographer who built a mansion on the island and which still stands today as an enigmatic ruin.

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For fifteen years, I have been slowly scraping away at the story of this house and its inhabitants. When I interviewed Barbara back in 1998, I wondered if what she called ‘the famous Beveridge’ might turn out to be Lord William Beveridge – author of the Beveridge Report, the architect of the British Welfare State and one of the giants of applied social science.

I was doubtful. It took me altogether too long to work out that he was, in fact, a cousin of Erskine Beveridge; and that, yes, he had holidayed there in the summer of 1919 – albeit over 20 years before he wrote his famous report.

Last month, I went down to the archives of the London School of Economics to sift through the papers of William Beveridge and discovered a modest treasure trove of correspondence that provides new insights into the Erskine Beveridge family and their island home.

The story of the then Sir William’s trip to Vallay House is itself fascinating. It was here he penned his inaugural lecture to the LSE whose Directorship he took up later that year.

He wrote to his parents about the unhurried pleasures of travel in the islands. While waiting for the tide to allow him cross the sands to Vallay he stopped in at the Post Office in Malacleit ‘for an hour or two with a very welcome fire and tea and whisky’.

He finally arrived at Vallay in the early hours of the morning ‘where we found cousin Erskine sitting up for us’.

Also surviving from this trip is a holiday snap of the family group. ‘Will’, as he was known to his cousins, is in the middle. Erskine Beveridge, of whom very few photos exist, is in sombre Edwardian fashion. Standing in front of Will is Erskine’s youngest son Charles (wearing a cap) and another adult son, George, wearing plus fours with his regimental Balmoral.

Within in a year, Will would be taking one of the coffin cords at cousin Erskine’s funeral. George, who inherited Vallay, later drowned in the ford.

This is, of course, just a tiny episode in a full life. Although born in India and having lived and died in England, William Beveridge was came from a Fife family that maintained close links with Scotland.

This all seems worth remembering now that William Beveridge’s legacy is being systematically unravelled and with such muted protest.

The family of Erskine Beveridge had sorrows aplenty, to which the crumbling Vallay House still testifies. The present ruin of the Welfare State is a tragedy of an altogether different order.

__________________

A narrative essay, The Ruins of Erskine Beveridge, is forthcoming in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

On the ruins of St Peters Seminary

Posted on June 18, 2012 at 10:58 pm.

Written by frasermacdonald

On Saturday 9^th June, I donned some stout boots and a hard hat to visit a Catholic citadel. The trip to St Peters Seminary in Cardross was certainly an education – though not perhaps in the ways its founders might have anticipated. St Peters is one of Scotland’s iconic Modernist buildings; it is also a splendid ruin.

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It was a glorious day spent ‘botanising on the asphalt’, to use Walter Benjamin’s memorable phrase, picking over the detritus of utopian architecture and a monastic ideal. And, appropriately enough, it was the botany that moved me most. A seminarium is, after all, a seed-bed – a plot for nurturing our knowledge of creation and Creator.

While the ‘seminar’ is one of the familiar rites of modern university life, we are apt to disavow its religious provenance. Here, in the often dank confines of St Peters, the strained kinship of seminar and seminary were reunited under the avowedly secular auspices of The Invisible College – an AHRC-funded project convened by academics Hayden Lorimer, Ed Hollis and Michael Gallagher together with Angus Farquahar at NVA.

Completed in 1966, St Peters was designed by the architects Gillespie, Kidd and Coia – a piece of monumental Modernism that now enjoys category A listing.

St Peters embodies a familiar paradox: that the building has found greater favour as a ruin than it ever did when it housed the diminishing supply of priests in training. It is now a place of pilgrimage for urban explorers; it surely won’t be long before it acquires that ultimate hipster accolade of being featured on Fuck Yeah Brutalism.

It is, for all that, a remarkable place – not just the seminary itself but the many other ruins on the estate, which once featured Kilmahew House, a large Baronial pile that dates from the mid-nineteenth century. Ruins are heaped upon other ruins.

One of my tasks of the day, as a member of The Invisible College, was to do a little digging through this palimpsest. I was dispatched to the former greenhouses of the old walled garden of Kilmahew House where, not unexpectedly, I found a lot of broken glass.

Among the more interesting vestiges of the greenhouses in their glory days were the self-propagating epiphytes that have now colonised the crumbling walls. These are bird’s nest ferns (Asplenium nidus), originally from Asia and Polynesia, but naturalized in Britain as a glasshouse stalwart in the era of high Empire.

To inhabit these spaces is to enter another age – one which, for me, also has a family connection. A neighbouring ‘Big Hoose’, comparable in grandness to Kilmahew, can still be found across the Vale of Leven at Overtoun. Alas, the walled gardens and greenhouses of Overtoun House have since been demolished. My grandfather, James Salmond – from whom I acquired my modest gardening knowledge – grew up there as the gardener’s son. He was doubtless familiar with the setup at Kilmahew. Gardening on a grand scale was all my grandfather knew – at least until he became another child soldier in Europe’s imperial war.

The Salmonds, like other branches of my extended family, were originally Presbyterian. Which brings me to a question: why was it Catholicism that favoured Modernist architecture? It is actually hard even to imagine the words ‘Scottish Presbyterian’ and ‘Modernism’ in the same sentence.

The easy explanation is that Presbyterian expansion was largely a nineteenth century affair. But as I wrote in a paper (1mb PDF) a decade ago, the theology of protestant architecture is oddly aligned with the principles of Modernism: a stripped down aesthetic that gives primacy to function; and a worship space shorn of ornament, so as to emphasise the centrality of the Word.

As film footage of the St Peters chapel shows, similar principles found a welcome home in the post-Vatican II Catholic church. It is interesting to note that the construction phase of St Peters (1961-1966) closely parallels the duration of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), even if the Catholic affinity for Modernism is clearly much older.

A stencilled graffito at the current entrance to the St Peters site – a well-used gap in the perimeter fence – approvingly quotes Sir Herbert Read from his 1934 Art and Industry

‘The machine has rejected ornament and the machine has everywhere established itself. We are irrevocably committed to the machine age’

As the ruins of the machine age are now encased in ivy, this uncompromising sentiment now seems slightly quaint. It is the living ornament that so often has the last word.

Capital by John Lanchester

Posted on June 13, 2012 at 2:28 pm.

Written by frasermacdonald

Everyone should read this essay, Marx at 193, by John Lanchester. Really. Everyone.

It is almost impossible to say anything original about Marx but somehow he manages it.

His new novel, Capital – that’s a good title – is also utterly brilliant. Here’s a trailer.

Ray Bradbury and the pioneers of American rocketry

Posted on June 6, 2012 at 10:10 pm.

Written by frasermacdonald

Ray Bradbury died today. He may well have been the greatest sci-fi writer of the twentieth century. I really can’t say as I haven’t read his work. You read that right; and it is an ignorance that also extends to the rest of science fiction. I do at least have the decency to recognise this as a failing. Despite my interest in rocketry, sci-fi is just not a genre that moves me. I have resolved however that the next time I’m in the National Library of Scotland, I will dig out Bradbury’s ‘R is for rocket’. The title alone is a triumph.

My passing interest in Bradbury was kindled a few weeks ago coming across a letter that he wrote to Frank Malina, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who remains the primary focus of my own book. Malina is not exactly a household name but he certainly should be: he designed and oversaw the construction of the world’s first successful sounding rocket, the WAC Corporal.

Robert Goddard has carried the acclaim for the first liquid fuelled rocket. It rose to a height of 41 feet. Malina’s rocket, by contrast, was the first American rocket to reach space. And when it was grafted on to a V-2 to form the BUMPER WAC Corporal, it became, in 1949, the first human artefact to reach into extra-terrestrial space – an astonishing altitude of 244 miles, eight years before Sputnik.

Bradbury knew all this. He visited Malina in Paris in 1980, just a year before he died. They must have been reminiscing about the early days at JPL in Pasadena, and certainly talking about Malina’s colleague Jack Parsons. (A self-taught chemist who perfected a castable solid rocket fuel, Parsons is perhaps better known for his libertarian writings and devotion to the Thelema occultism of Alesteir Crowley).

In Bradbury’s letter, he writes that on returning to his hotel he had a sudden memory of being at a Los Angeles Science Fiction Society meeting in 1939 or 1940 listening to a young scientist talk of rockets and the future. In an instant he realized that this young man was in fact Parsons. ‘I was stunned and touched’ wrote Bradbury, ‘to think our lives almost touched, so long ago’.

In closing he wrote to Malina that

There is a ‘long and glorious history behind you, one that will have changed the destiny of people on Earth forever, and this is not said idly. A million years from tonight, when future historians speak of the most important years in the history of the thinking beasts, your name will be there with von Karman’s and the rest. What a glad knowledge to have of yourself’.

In the intervening thirty years, Malina is known to a comparatively small community, mostly historians of science and – given Malina’s art practice – historians of art. But Bradbury’s prediction may yet be proved correct.

Monthly Archives: June 2012