KEEPING TIME

 

I remember a proverb that says opportunity knocks only once. That may be true, but it is also true that having heard the knock you still have to open the door. And, in one of the most amazing twists of history, when the scientists at the Royal \Observatory at Greenwich, England heard that knock they were mightily annoyed. So they pawned off the job of dealing with the disturbance to one of their servants. He turned that disturbance into a career. In fact he made three careers out of simply telling the time. The Royal Observatory was founded by Charles II in 1765 as part of his restoration and “re-scientific-ication” of government after the religious fanaticism of that great Puritan villain Oliver Cromwell. The observatory was to use the stars to perfect “the art of navigation.” But the builders, despite going over budget by all of twenty pounds, went cheap on the materials, and the observatory, which was to house the most accurate telescopes of the day, was constructed 13 degrees out of alignment. The Royal astronomers, like the NASA astronomers dealing with the deformed mirrors on the orbiting Hubble telescope, have had to make mathematical adjustments from that day to this.
But besides powerful telescopes, the scientist at the Greenwich observatory also needed accurate clocks. In order to say a particular star was at a particular point in the sky at midnight, they had to know precisely when midnight was. So they also installed two pendulum clocks, built by Thomas Tompion, each accurate to within seven seconds a day. By 1833 (sixty-four years later) the observatory had done its job so well that ships’ captains and navigators had come to rely on the precise time provided by Greenwich to follow the charts provided by Greenwich. That year the observatory began a practice they follow to this day.At exactly 12.55 p.m., (they do it then so as not to interfere with the weather observations made at noon) a large red “time ball” is raised half way to the top of a mast erected atop the observatory. At 12.58 the time ball is pulled all the way to the top. And then at 1:00 P.M., exactly, the ball quickly falls to the bottom of the mast. (If you have ever wondered why they use a ball to mark midnight on New Years Eve in Times Square, New York City, this is it.) Any ship’s captain waiting in the Thames River to set sail could now coordinate their shipboard watches and clocks with the official time as they set off from the “prime meridian” or “longitude naught” - "0" degrees, "0" seconds and "0" minutes east/west, because Greenwich is where longitude starts - and time.Two years later, in 1835, the observatory got a new boss, George Biddle Airy. He figured his primary job was to perfect the astronomical observations for those ships, and he hired more “computers”, which in the 19th century were actually men who did the dull and boring math required to confirm and correct the stellar charts used to navigate on voyages to the far flung corners of the empire. So when the London merchants appealed to Mr. Airy to share in the time service he saw them as an annoyance. He asked one of his assistants, a man not qualified to be a “computer”, Mr. John Henry Belville, to handle the problem.Airy gave Mr. Belville a pocket watch to use. It had been originally owned by Prince Augustus Frederick, the Duke of Sussex (above), the sixth son of George III, the favorite uncle of Queen Victoria and the man who gave her away at her wedding. The watch had been made by Mr. John Arnold & Sons in 1794 and it was accurate to within one tenth of a second per day. Each Monday John Henry (he rarely used his last name because of the anti-French public bias in post Napoleonic war Britain)  would present himself and “Faithful Arnold”, the watch, to a clerk at the observatory time desk. The clerk would set the watch and then hand John  a certificate asserting to the watch’s accuracy for that day. Then John Henry would make his way by carriage and rail to London, where he would literally deliver the time to some two hundred customers; shops, factories and offices. He charged for the service, of course.  For most of the people in London, John Henry Belville was the face of official time, and he was earning four hundred pounds a year doing it when he died in 1856.After John’s death his widow, Maria, still had a daughter to support. She begged the observatory to allow her to continue the time service as a private business, and they agreed. By now (1852) Charles Shepherd had designed and installed a “Galvano-Magnetic” clock (above) at the Observatories’ gate (now called Shepherd’s Gate) where anyone could get the time at any time day or night, for free. But still the London merchants continued to pay for Maria’s direct door service. Every Monday she strode up the observatory hill, watched while Arnold was synchronized with the official time, and then went on her rounds by rail and on foot. To those who saw her trudging across the streets of London, she became known as the Greenwich Time Lady.Maria retired in 1892, and her daughter Ruth now took over the employment (above), carrying the tool of her trade, Faithful Arnold, in her handbag. By now (1884) 25 countries had agreed to set their watches by Greenwich time, and every clock at every railroad station in England was connected directly via telegraph lines with the Royal Observatory. And still, the time delivered by Ruth Belville was just as accurate, if slightly less convenient.Beginning in 1924 the BBC Radio began broadcasting “pips” before each hour announcement and in 1936 the Royal Observatory set up a “talking clock” which anyone with a telephone could dial at any time to get the correct time to within a hundredth of a second. And still Ruth Belville was making her rounds, still serving more than fifty paying customers over a hundred years after her family business had begun.Finally, in 1940, Ruth celebrated her 86th birthday and decided to retire. In America we would have long since replaced her with newer technology. But the English have more respect for keeping what works, particularly if it is a living person. On her retirement, Ruth agreed to pose for a photograph (above), looking a bit like a visitor from another time in 1940's London. And , since she had no one to pass the task on to, when Ruth retired the Belville family work was finally completed.

Ruth received a pension from  “The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers” guild , where "Faithful Arnold" was also granted a rest and a place of honor. Ruth retired to a home in Croydon. One night not two years later, during one of the night bombing raids of London, Ruth turned her bedside gas lamp down low to save fuel.  The flame sputtered out, produced carbon dioxide, and Ruth Belville suffocated in her sleep.In effect, she ran out of time.

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AVENGING ANGEL Bombing As Terror

 

I would suggest that Quincy Gillmore (double L’s) was simply frustrated. His mathematical and precise mind recognized that by any logical application of the rules he had won. But the rebels simply refused to admit his victory and surrender the city of  Charleston, birthplace of the American Civil War. Perhaps Gillmore (above) should have remembered the Massachusetts newspaper writer who described secession minded South Carolina as “…too small for a nation and too large for an insane asylum.”

Gillmore had proven the power of his logic at Fort Pulaski (above), whose massive brick walls guarded the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia. Gillmore’s advantage at Fort Pulaski was the Parrot Gun, the invention of the precise and logical mind of Robert Parker Parrott, who ran the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, New York.

Mr. Parrott’s invention was to rotate a cast-iron cannon barrel while applying a band of hot wrought-iron around the breech (or base end), which would clamp solid as it cooled. 

This band offered additional strength, allowing for larger powder charges and thus increased range. However, Parrott guns tended to explode with overuse. 

But as the sad faced Mr. Parrott (above) explained, “I do not profess to think they are the best gun in the world, but I think they were the best practical thing that could be got at the time.”

Gillmore carefully arraigned his 36 Parrott guns against the rebel fortress and opened a long range fire on 10 April, 1863. The fort surrendered at 2:00 pm on 11 April. Savannah itself still held out, but rebel supply ships and blockade runners could no longer get in.  

With that success Gillmore (above) had been promoted to Major-General of Volunteers, and was ordered to do to Charleston what he had done to Savannah.

On the southern shoulder of Charleston’s inner harbor loomed Fort Sumter, where the Civil War had begun in April of 1861. The Washington Republican newspaper waxed poetic when describing Gillmore's technical attack upon this birthplace of the rebellion. “From well-known mechanical laws, ...the penetration of the 24 pound shot at 3,500 yards…in brickwork, is six inches. The penetration of the 10 inch projectile will therefore be between six and seven feet of the same material…equal to the united blows of 200 sledge hammers weighing 100 lbs each, falling from a height of ten feet and acting upon a drill ten inches in diameter.” It could have been lifted from General Gillmore’s notebooks, and probably was.

By midsummer Gillmore’s Parrott guns had reduced Fort Sumter to “a shapeless and harmless mass of ruin.” Yet Charleston still held out, because defending the outer harbor on Morris Island was Fort Wagner, situated directly astride the channel blockade runners still used to reach Charleston. 

Fort Wagner’s low packed sand and timber walls simply swallowed whole the explosive shells from Gillmore’s Parrotts, and punished the 54th regiment when they tried a direct ground assault (above - from the movie "Glory"). In his frustration Gillmore came to the logical conclusion that the Confederates would surrender when faced with the correct application of the power of his guns.

On the morning of 16 July 1863, Gillmore ordered English born Colonel Edward Wellman Serrell (above) of the engineers to find a spot for a new battery within range of Charleston itself. Col Serrell and an aide spent the day wandering across the salt marshes “…carrying a fourteen foot plank…Where the inundation would not bear them they sat on the plank and pushed it forward between their legs. When the soil appeared stiffer, they carried the plank until they reached the soft mud once more.” (Battles & Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. 4, Underwood et al, The Century Co. 1884) 

By evening this method had located a rectangle of more or less solid ground, just big enough for a single gun,  about 8,000 yards from Charleston, at the maximum range of an 8 inch Parrott Naval rifled gun., firing a 200 pound shell. The artillerists named their weapon "The Swamp Angel" - as in an avenging angel. 

It took a month to build a battery (above) among the muck, and on 21 August, 1863  Gillmore sent a note to General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the rebel commander of Charleston.  Gillmore warned that if the Confederates did not at once surrender both forts Wagner and Sumter, Charleston would be bombarded with “Greek fire”.  However, the note did not arrive until 10:45 p.m., and General Beauregard had gone to bed. And in any case the note bore no signature. The offended gentlemen of the Confederate headquarters returned the offensive note for signing. The 19th century industrial revolution had just run up against 18th century social graces.

While this farce was being played out, at 1:30 a.m. on 22 August, 1863  the “Swamp Angel” opened fire. 

The exploding shells were loud and frightening. But with so few people on the streets at that hour,  no one was killed.  Worse the reputed  “Greek Fire” shells, failed to start any fires. As the brilliant writer Bruce Catton noted, “This had very little to do with winning the war. It was simply an exorcise in the application of violence.” (Never Call Retreat, p. 215 Washing Square Press, 1965)

The amended note re-arrived at Beauregard’s headquarters at 9:00 the morning of 23 August, and Gustave Toutant Beauregard responded in his best Southern aristocratic outrage. “It would appear, sir, that despairing of reducing these works you now resort to the novel measure of turning your guns against the old men, the women and children, and the hospitals of a sleeping city.” 

In response Gillmore gave the Confederates a truce of 24 hours to evacuate Charleston before the Swamp Angel would continue its bombardment until the city was in ruins. In fact. the Swamp Angel  had slid out of position after 16 shots and it would take hours of work to move the 8 ton cannon back into place, on a sturdier platform.

As darkness fell the Angel opened fire again. But this time, as the barrel heated up the shells began to show a nasty tendency to explode in the barrel, and the breech band expanded so that the shells also  started to slide around in the breech. Colonel Serrell wisely had a second lanyard tied to the first, to give his men more distance when they fired the damn thing.  

After another 13 shots, as the Swamp Angel let go her 38th attempt at burning Charleston to the ground, the gun exploded, blowing off the breech band, cracking the breech itself, blowing three feet off the end of the barrel, and landing the cannon atop her own battery (above)). This exercise in the application of violence was finished, for the moment.

Not that Gillmore was about to give up. The methodical bombardment of Fort Wagner had converted that post into an open wound through which the defenders were slowly bleeding to death. And since it was now evident they were no longer protecting Charleston from bombardment, 2 weeks after the Swamp Angel blew up, on 7 September 1863, Beauregard pulled his troops out of town.

So Fort Wagner, which had resisted a year of bombardment and a night attack by the brave 54th Infantry,  was finally captured. The Parrott guns had reduced Sumter to harmless rubble. And still Charleston resisted. 

And the frustration that drove General Gillmore’s precise and logical mind to accept such violence was shared by much of the nation, who cheered the wonder and the power of Gillmore’s Parrott guns and their punishment of the birthplace of the war.

In far off New York City, Herman Melville, a man who knew something about the dark effects of obsession on the human heart, was inspired to put pen to paper; “There is a coal black Angel, With a thick African lip, And he dwells (like the hunted and harried), In a swamp where the green frogs dip. But his face is against a City, Which is over a bay of the sea, And he breathes with the breath that is blastment, and dooms by a far degree…Who weeps for the woeful City, Let him weep for our guilty kind; Who joys at her wild despairing – Christ, the Forgiver, convert his mind.”

And a century later, Bruce Catton, reviewed the entire bloody affair and wrote, “It would hardly be worth mentioning except that it showed how war had hardened men’s emotions, so that things that would have been horrifying in ordinary times horrified no longer…Good men even rejoiced in it…When good men could talk so they consented to terror.” (ibid. p 217-217)

You can see that what is left of that terror, now mounted on stones in Cadwallader Park in the city of Trenton, New Jersey. 

It has preserved as a memento of one of humanities’ early attempts at a logical application of terror. And, no, it didn't work. And not merely because the weapon failed to endure the effort, Terror, be it flying planes into buildings or mass bombing of cities or even nuclear missiles,  may shock briefly. But it never delivers victory.  Never. Ever.

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YOU CAN'T KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN. George Lyon and his sperm

 

I believe we all know people who have clearly chosen the wrong profession; doctors sickened by the sight of their patients, bartenders opposed to public intoxication and politicians with an unhealthy reverence for the truth. But it is hard to imagine a man who applied himself for so long to a profession for which he had less talent, whose career path was more pockmarked with failure, an individual with more of a supplementary destiny for disaster than Mr. George Lyon, from the little English village of Up Holland, Lancaster.  George called himself the “King of the Robbers”. But although George made his living as a thief, he was a natural born lover. He just never figured out how to make a living at it.

The village gets its name from the same source as the nation of the same name. In the middle ages a “holland’ was a bolt of cotton cloth, and during the 18th century the rolling hills and plains of Lancashire, in northwest England, were one of the world’s great cotton growing regions, along with the western section of what would become the Netherlands.

So wealthy did one cotton growing Lancashire family become that they took the name “de Holland”.

The de Hollands are known as an “ill-fated” family primarily because of Robert de Holland who established the village of Up Holland on a ridge, midway between the towns of Wigan and Skemersdale, in 1307. 

In a power play between the vacillating King Edward III and the bold and decisive Earl of Lancaster, Robert initially sided with Lancaster. But Edward unexpectedly acted decisively and Lancaster uncharacteristically dithered and so Robert switched sides just before the Battle of Boroughbridge, on March 16, 1322 - at which Lancaster was killed. The King won but he never fully trusted Robert again and had him thrown into jail. Robert stayed there until 1328 when somebody did the King a favor and chopped off Robert de Holland’s “ill-fated” head.

By the time George Lyon was born on a back street in Up Holland in 1761, the cotton plantations of Lancashire were feeding the birth of the industrial revolution. Initially weaving was a home business, where working families bought a hand loom on time for two pounds , usually from the same employer who bought the finished cloth from them. For the rest of his life, when asked to give a profession, George always said “Weaver”, but it is likely he worked at it only as a child, “…carding and spinning cotton… until I became of sufficient size and strength for my father to put me into a loom”, as William Radcliffe explained from his own life.

In the late eighteenth century there were as many as 75,000 hand loom weavers in Britain. Then in 1785 the Reverend Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom, which could be operated by children, and the income of weavers began to plummet.

But George was not qualified to claim he was the victim of economic displacement because he had already established a career as an inveterate thief. In 1786, at the age of 25, George was arrested for mugging a man on the Kings Highway in Wigan. This was a hanging offense, but instead of death, George was sentenced to be lugged, or “transportation”, to the American colonies.

Perhaps as many as 50,000 convicts a year were shipped to America in chains, most being sold into indentured servitude for seven years. That would make convicts the single largest source of emigrants to America in the century leading up to the revolution. Mostly this heritage has been whitewashed out of the history books, but it does explain Doctor Samuel Johnson’s 1769 description of Americans as “…a race of convicts (who) ought to be content with anything we may allow them short of hanging.”

But although George was sentenced to seven years in the penal colony of America, there is no record he ever made it transoceanic. However, I am of the opinion that he did, and that at the end of his term George was forcibly returned to England as an undesirable, even in a convict nation, leaving a trail of his genes behind him.

In 1793 the officials of Up Holland were unpleasantly surprised to see George Lyon in the flesh, returned from exile and free as a bird. There had been expectations the reprobate would be scalped by a Red Indian or an offended husband or at least drowned at sea. 

The primary complaint does not seem to have been that George was a master criminal so much as a legendary local Lothario. He was married, but according to a May 1809 letter by Miss Ellen Weeton, “In two houses near together, there have been in each, a mother and daughter lying in (giving birth), nearly at the same time; and one man (the notorious George Lyon) reputed to be father to all four!”

Branded as a serial fornicator, George Lyon indisputably ever was. But his reputation as a highwayman rests on a single escapade, when he and two partners decided to hold up the mail coach which carried cash for the Maypole Colliery. One afternoon George and his two accomplices rendezvoused at the Bull’s Head Pub in Up Holland and drew attention to them selves. At an opportune moment they slipped out to the barn, mounted their rented horses and were waiting at the Tawd River Bridge as the mail coach bound for Liverpool approached.

The plan was for George to block the road and fire two shots to convince the coachman to stop. Then while George held his third flint lock pistol on the driver the accomplices would take the money box and rob the passengers. Unfortunately George had not taken the weather into account. It was raining heavily, and when George pulled the triggers, the hammers of his two pistols slammed onto wet powder. Unharmed the coachman whipped the horses around George and the coach wheels splashed him as it galloped past.

Having failed as a highwayman George returned to his primary profession, and his hobby as a thief. But I believe it was the official outrage over George’s favorite leisure pursuit which prompted the government’s investment in a professional “thief taker” named John McDonald. By representing himself as a fence McDonald was able to buy stolen goods from George, paying for them with marked money. In October of 1814 George was arrested, and after a brief trial, on 8 April, 1815, he was sentenced to be hanged. The sentence was not unusual for the time. Of the 213 people hanged at Lancaster Castle between 1800 and 1865 only 20% had been convicted of murder. The rest had been sentenced for burglary, lying under oath, arson, or rustling cattle or sheep.

Judgment day for George was Saturday, 22 April 1815, in the hangman's corner of Lancaster Castle (above).  

At about noon, dressed in his best black suit and well shined jockey boots, George was led from the Drop Room by John Higgens, 'The Gentleman Jailer', and delivered into the hands the hangman.  A crowd of 5,000 witnessed as the noose was slipped around George's neck. The trap door was opened on the low platform. George dropped about three feet and then slowly strangled to death. As the Lancaster Gazette recorded, “After hanging the usual time (an hour) the bodies were taken down…and given to their friends for internment.” 

A huge crowd attended the funeral back in Up Holland, a large section of which included George's progeny.  George Lyon, king of the lovers, was dead at fifty-four. He was buried next to his mother, sharing a grave with his legal daughter, Nanny Lyons, and it is her name on the stone that caps their shared grave.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e4xSSaEq04
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lyon_(highwayman)

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