Stockbridge Gardens Open for the Church 2020

Stockbridge Parish Magazine July 2020 

Stockbridge opens its gardens for the Church each year, with the east and west ends taking it in turns.  Tea can be taken on the lawn in front of the church.  The event, which is organised by David Barnes, raises substantial funds. In 2020 it was the turn of the east end to open their gardens.

Sadly, this year the gardens could not be opened to the public because of the virus restrictions, but everyone who's gardens should have been shown was happy to have them photographed, and some of the photos appeared in the July issue of the Parish Magazine.

A complete set of photos can be found here:

Becky Ferris - https://flic.kr/s/aHsmPiQDoj

Jill Ferris - https://flic.kr/s/aHsmPiWUiV

Tony and Carole Cullen - https://flic.kr/s/aHsmPiXaL3 

Hugh and Margaretha Northam - https://flic.kr/s/aHsmPiR85r

Briar Phillips and Mikey O’Neil - https://flic.kr/s/aHsmPjWj6R

Stephen and Karin Taylor - https://flic.kr/s/aHsmPjWtLs

Pamela Marples - https://flic.kr/s/aHsmPjWUxr

Neil and Sarah Romain - https://flic.kr/s/aHsmPosVZX 

Di Maxwell - https://flic.kr/s/aHsmPoy82q

Marjorie Rose - https://flic.kr/s/aHsmPoqx43 

Robin and Chrissie - https://flic.kr/s/aHsmPoA1V4 

Kim and Frances - https://www.flickr.com/gp/herry/i92LoN 

Herry Lawford - https://flic.kr/s/aHsmPoAHnr

Allotments - https://flic.kr/s/aHsmPouBHW 

 

Atlantic Empress collision with Aegean Captain 1979

Atlantic Empress

On 19th July 1979, the Atlantic Empress, a VLCC of 128,000 grt, fully laden with crude oil from Ras Tanura, was sailing at full speed northwards towards Beaumont, Texas, when she was in an almost head-on collision with the Aegean Captain, another fully laden VLCC sailing from Aruba to Singapore, 18 miles east of Tobago. The collision occurred in heavy rain and thick fog and the two ships did not sight each other until they were 600 yards apart*. Aegean Captain changed course, but it was too late; the two ships collided, with the Empress tearing a hole in the Captain's starboard bow. Large fires began on each ship which were soon beyond the control of the crews. On the Atlantic Empress 26 men died, and one on the Aegean Captain. The master of the Atlantic Empress jumped off the stern of the ship into the flaming sea and survived after spending almost two years in a hospital in Houston recovering from his burns. 

The Atlantic Empress eventually exploded and sank on 3rd August, having spilled 287,000 tons of oil into the sea, the largest spillage of oil from a ship ever recorded. The Aegean Captain spilled almost 10,000 tons of oil but was taken into Curacao where her remaining cargo was off-loaded. Salvors Smit International and Bugsier attempted to salve the Empress and managed to get a line onto her to tow her further away from land, but could not save her.** 

The huge pool of spilled oil threatened both Tobago and the Windward Islands and pollution equipment and defences were flown to the area and deployed, though to little effect. Very fortunately, however, the winds and currents carried the oil away from land and it was broken down by the sea and no pollution occurred. The Empress's remaining cargo solidified at the bottom of the ocean and similarly caused no pollution thereafter.

At the outset, I had appointed Richard Shaw, then of solicitors Elboune Mitchell (and soon after, Shaw & Croft) an experienced Admiralty lawyer, to act for the Empress, while my colleague John Jillings appointed Rob Wallis of Hill Dickinson to act for the Captain. A game then ensued to establish jurisdiction for the claims between the two ships, which were enormous - in excess of $100m, I appointed Alan Ballie and John Kimball of Healy & Baillie to act for the Empress in the United States as it was likely that jurisdiction would be founded there, given that the cargo on the Empress was owned by Mobil, who's claim, for $60m, was the largest. Mobil's cargo underwriters appointed Ralph Evers of Clyde & Co to act for them. A considerable legal battle then ensued, in which much turned on the judgment given in a celebrated collision case by Henry Brandon. 

Under US law, the 'Both to Blame' collision rule applied which gave cargo interests an almost automatic 50% of their claim, and so Mobil's claim was settled by the 'Empress' for $30m, which I arranged to be paid through Richard Shaw's fledgeling office, a transaction which he said 'kept his bank manager quiet for the rest of his career'.

Both sides were gearing up for a huge and expensive battle in court in the United States to deal with liability for the collision and the remaining claims, including the total loss of the Empress, when we managed to arrange for both parties to meet in our boardroom at International House and settle the case on 'private terms', saving many hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Richard Shaw and Norman Baptist, who was the Empress's insurance and claims man in London, remained very good friends, and we used to hold an annual lunch to remember one of the largest and most significant cases we and the Club ever handled. Sadly, both Richard Shaw and Norman Baptist have now died. But the case remains in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest ever spillage of oil from a ship.

*A tropical rainstorm can be so heavy that it blanks out a ship's radar.       

**Under the terms of the standard Lloyd's Open Form Salvage Contract, the salvors agreed to perform their services on the basis of 'No cure; no pay' and so as the Empress had sunk, they were entitled to nothing. However, the Empress was entered in the UK P&I Club and the Directors were asked to make an ex-gratia payment to the salvors of $1m under the Club's Omnibus Rule, which they agreed to do. This manifestly unfair system was eventually modified through the work of Terence Coghlin, and payment to salvors for the protection of the environment was made possible with the addition of a SCOPIC clause to salvage contracts. 

 

  

Seawise University (1972)

 

Seawise University ablaze

The Seawise University was the renamed former Cunard liner RMS Queen Elizabeth, which at the end of her cruising life was sold to the Hong Kong shipowner (and father of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong CH Tung)  CY Tung whose dream it was to convert her into a floating international university.

Sadly, just before the conversion work was completed in January 1972, the ship caught fire, burned, and sank in Hong Kong harbour. There she was an obstruction to the container berths and a danger to shipping and the Marine Department ordered her to be removed. As she was entered in the UK P&I Club, the task of removing her fell to the Club, and the then senior partner, Sidney Fowler, found a salvor in Australia, Sir John Williams*, who was contracted to do so. He employed a team of Korean divers, led by salvage master Jock Anderson, who worked on the enormously complicated hulk in the dark waters of the South China Sea for almost four years, cutting her down for scrap. They were proud of the fact that none of the divers died during the difficult and dangerous work.

The cost of the removal was $10m, then the largest claim ever paid by any of the P&I Clubs, and settled under the 'Wreck Removal' Rule and contributed to by the London Group of Clubs through the Pooling Agreement and reinsuring underwriters at Lloyd's. 

The case was handled by Terence Coghlin and Francis Frost, and investigated by Bob Crawford of Ince & Co, and Richard Sayer supported by consulting engineers Binnie and Partners, fire experts Dr. Bougoyne and Partners and Dr. RF Milton. The investigation was able to show that the fire had been started deliberately, probably by the conversion crew who may have wanted to prolong their work. Fires had been set in a number of different places and the fire doors jammed open - a typical sign of arson. 

As a consequence, we argued that the whole loss fell on the ship's war risk underwriters (at Lloyd's)  as 'malicious damage' and they eventually agreed to contribute $7.5m towards the settlement of the claim.

Francis Frost had worked particularly assiduously on the case and was rewarded by the partners by being sent on a cruise to New York on the QEII with his wife Lies, one of the rare cases of anyone in the firm receiving a 'bonus'.

*Sir John Williams had worked with Sidney Fowler on the removal of the New Zealand ferry 'Wahine', which sank in Wellington Harbor in 1968. 

See also 'Memories of Seawise University' 

  

  

John Keats - On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer (1816)

 

Rembrandt - Aristotle With A Bust of Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
    And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
    Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
    That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
    Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Favourite Gardens - Old Bladbean Stud Garden Sept 2020

 

Old Bladbean Stud Garden is a most unusual place, created by one woman from a rough smallholding on ground high on the Kent downs from 2003 onwards, and without a gardener. It's a deeply felt place where the creation of each internal garden and the placing of every plant is the result of philosophical as well as botanical enquiry. Carol Bruce's written guide to her garden is a meditation on the usually hidden forces of artistic expression as she aligns them with nature. A fascinating garden, even in the dog days of summer, that I will return to in spring or summer to see it as intended. 

For more photos, click here 

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Is the Church of England Intent on Killing Off the Parish Church?

The importance of our parish churches to their communities seems to be under attack in several ways but particularly, though shortfalls in funding. 

The issue has been brought into the open by an article in the Church Times by Rev'd Stephen Trott on 10th July 2020. He argues that the decision of the Synod in the 1970's to 'centralise' the funding of parish churches has lead to a withering of the centrality of the parish church in the life of the community in favour of the diocese. 

The explanation of what has been happening cames a great surprise to many who had scarcely appreciated the danger, and it might have remained of minority interest before the issue was taken up by Canon Giles Fraser in a fine piece in the Daily Telegraph:

This, in turn, was followed up in a more explicit piece by Giles Fraser in Unheard on 6th August in which he argues that: 'The ancient institution has been asset-stripped by an expanding bureaucracy of management-speak types'

Finally, Jason Goodwin has spoken up strongly for the parish churches in a powerful piece below

Ignore parishes at your peril

St Carantoc built one as instructed by a dove. Another was raised at the spot where St Wulstan’s faithful oxen drawing his funeral bier stopped. They were built in places where people thought miracles had happened, or were blessed by spirits or where holy water bubbled out of the earth, in wastes and on pagan shrines, by the sea and by rivers, in the hills and on the plain. They were constructed where people congregated, in villages and towns and, eventually, in the heart of industrial cities.

Saints built them, sinners built them; improvers and committees; barons and crusaders; wool merchants and kings. In Christchurch, Dorset, the final timber was dropped into place by a stranger supposed to be the Lord himself. They were built for the people of Britian. They are the glory of our island: our parish churches.

In consequence, a lot of us took their closure in the spring as an affront. For the first time since the general papal interdict placed on King John in 1208, our parish churches were shut at Easter. We have had plagues, invasion scares, civil war: but at Whitsun, the churches were all closed too. Time was when the priest stayed with his flock and the church was a place of refuge and support. Instead we were enjoined to phone in or watch on Zoom.

I duly watched the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter address. My attention slipped as he went on but my wandering eye fell on no memorials to the dead, nor watched the play of coloured light on stone. The Archbishop was in his kitchen and I was at home. Every now and then, his sermon was interrupted by a video and, after a cut-away to a talking head, I noticed that someone appeared to have sneaked in to take a Magimix from the kitchen counter.

It struck me that an archbishop who thinks his kitchen is as good a place to preach from as Canterbury Cathedral may possibly think too much of his own gifts and too little of what has been bequeathed over the centuries. Churches serve believers and non-believers at various stages of their lives: at funerals (which were banned), or holy days (see above) and on Sundays (closed). Churches are places of withdrawal, for prayer and private worship – until they’re shut down.

I suspect the Church of England views parish churches as a burden and a nuisance. The diocesan bureaucrats would rather do the things the rest of us have no idea they do, such as providing strategic oversight of a growing mission area where energised parishes cluster around a resourcing church. Renewed, released, rejuvenated!

It will come crashing around their ears, like the tables of the moneylenders in the temple. The higher-ups ignore parishes at their peril. As they set about polishing their inclusivity templates, like buffoons in a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, people of faith and of no faith, people looking for something and people looking for escape, to connect with the landscape, or reconnect with their past are criss-crossing the land.

They are going to the woods and the wastes, the wells and the holy places, to the churches and chapels built by their forbears. I think it may be their experience that endures long after the corporate mission statements have been forgotten. You can lock up the parish church and turn the awkward and ungainly people away, but our churches are never quite empty, even when there is nobody in them.

Jason Goodwin

Many articles later - mostly about Bishop Dakin and the Winchester Diocese - but this piece by Giles Fraser in UnHeard shows how far we've now come from the church we all grew up with 

PS I have played a very small part in this debate by raising an idea in the Daily Telegraph that arises from the arrangement that exists at my church as the result of a benefactor deciding to adopt an ancient solution to the problem of funding the parish priest. It appears that this solution has since been discussed with approval at higher levels within the clergy. 

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Return to William Tyndale - the Translator of the Bible 

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Old Swan House Garden in August 2020

 

The summerhouse is the focal point of the garden and at the same time provides one of the best viewpoints. It is also the main spot for tea or an early drink. It took some time to acquire its present colour. For some years it was painted the usual blue/grey, but I grew tired of that 'safe' shade and taking my inspiration from a friend's garden in which he had installed a Chinese bridge, I decided to follow the ancient rule that a garden should always contain a building in red. Getting the right colour was tricky as I wanted the shade used in Japanese temples such as Fushimi Inari, and of course, I wasn't able to find it as it's a closely held secret, but this was the closest I could have mixed. This winter I will have it varnished in marine varnish, both to preserve it - as the colour is now 'settled' - and to bring out a richer and a slightly more orange hue closer the Inari temple red.

The main lawn has come back well after all the rain, and everything's looking lush. The vine has arched over the path to envelop the quince. The Raphael seat though has stubbornly resisted all attempts to get it to age quickly, despite being covered at various times with seaweed manure, pond silt and yoghurt. I'll just have to wait for nature to take its course! 

This bed - the lower drive border - suffered worst during the exceedingly wet winter and took a long time to recover. I had dug out the old euphorbia wulfenii in the autumn and replanted some new ones but they were still small and I had hoped to rely on large plants like the archangelica to provide interest - but it was killed off and its replacement got caught up in the chaos of the closure of the garden centres and the scramble in the nurseries to catch up when they reopened. So the new plant didn't arrive until June and is even now only about the height of the rest when it should be towering above. Fortunately, though, the trusty nepetas and alchemillas, along with, sedum, stachys, rosemary and some euphorbia martini, saved the day. And Penny Burnfield has just given me a lovely plant - Succisella inflexa 'Frosted Pearls' that complements the verbena and the self-seeded dill.

 The box walk after rain - with the armillary sphere presiding. Hydrangea seemanii is doing well on the wall in the corner and the newly planted erigeron is doing predictably well.  

The two sedums in the grass garden are both strong reds and stand out against the pale gravel. Plants that are absolutely no trouble and always look good are a joy!

Another view of the lower drive border showing the mass of verbena (though I would love more) against the rosemary with stachys and sedum at its base

Hydrangea 'Annabelle' has been grown in a pot for several years because it hides and old tree-stump at the back of the wild-flower garden. It's the only version in this garden, though it provides many gardens with a huge display.

Perfectly trimmed box (by the sainted Bruce Williams) in the grass garden backed by one of the dark red sedums, calamagrostis 'Karl Forester' and perovskia 'Blue Spire' 

Allium spherocephalum seedheads in the grass garden 

A moody sky frames my neighbours' catalpa and the magnificent Scots pine. Invisible in the darkness is the spire of St Peter's. 

The first flush of hazelnuts brings out the squirrels who bury those they don't immediately eat and in the lawn

My early morning view down the garden with a cup of coffee from the window in the scullery while checking what's changed in the night. 

Another view of the box, sedum and perovskia, overseen by 'Karl Forester' but also showing the relationship with the rose-covered west wall. 

'Annabelle' gets another look in in this photo of the wildflower garden, with the base of rose 'Wedding Day' (which already reaches the top of my neighbours' yew tree) and a newly planted euphorbia stygiana that will one day dominate. The whole area (except of course the euphorbia and the begonia) will be cleared in September, and partially regrow, before dying down in the winter. 

One of my favourite views taken from the summerhouse at tea-time, though the lavender to the alchemilla, the pheasant grass and the mass of eryngiums and echinops below rose 'Compassion' on the West wall

One of the box balls leads the eye through the brick piers towards the deckchairs where tea is taken on hot days, as the hazel casts a lovely cool shade. The pelargonium is 'Pink Capricorn' originally introduced by Gillian Pugh 

The box from another angle, with the pheasant grass (anemanthele lessonia) 

and a potted euphorbia 'Arctic Blue'. 

The is what the garden is all about. Places to sit and eat, or drink, or just read a book while cocooned by tall hedges to keep out the wind, and given a panorama of plants to look at. Here the table is backed by perovskia and miscanthus 'Prof Richard Hansen', the tallest of he grasses.   

The view from the Lutyens bench on 'Venky's Terrace', though the orchard towards the summerhouse and the grass garden. The closest tree is an apple - 'James Grieve' - that has a trachelospermum jasmine trained up it. The plum tree on the right has rose 'Felicite et Perpetue' trained onto it. 

I have a love/hate relationship with this echinops, here at its best showing its gorgeous mauve/purple globes, but otherwise too much of a 'thug', pushing everything else out of the lower wall border. 

Earlier in August the allium spherocephalum was still at its dark red best against the grasses, delicate beside the powerful urnin pressed brick. 

Another favourite view - looking towards the wildflower garden with the lower wall border flanking the path with teucrium and echinops competing with the eryngiums. Teazle and wild carrot stand guard at the gate into the wildflowers.In the grass garden, perovskia hasn't yet achieved full wattage and the alchemlla is still fresh.

There are now mnay shades of echinacea - and I have forgotten which this one is....

The black bamboo is doing well against the west wall, and has a tower of reclaimed bricks for company. 

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The 'other' red sedum in the grass garden, not as vibrant as the other but softer against the perovskia 'Lacy Blue'

There are teo kinds of perovskia in the grass garden and this one, 'Blue Spire' is perhaps oo big (and has been somewhat flattened by heavy rain). But it makes up for its size by its incredibly strong colour.  

Another classic view - this one from my 'reading chair' in the shade of the orchard. The grass garden pays homage to the great Scots pine in the background. 

This is not a fake! The perovskias really are as bright as this, and now compete with the helenium 'Moreheim Beauty' and the echinacea

A complete contrast with all the colour at the other end of the garden; a calm green oasis of lawn and clipped box. 

Verbena, angelica, dill and stachys backed by rosemary in the lower wall border

The view under the hazel through the brick piers towards the house. The Portuguese laurel looks like a huge variegated box ball

Another view of the grass garden looking west to the Scots pine. 

Euphorbia 'Arctic Blue' in an urn in the grass garden

The teazel and wild carrot self-seeded and making sure no one gets in our out of the wildflower garden.

The wild carrot ages beautifully

The orchard now has some decent specimens. Greengage in the foreground and Mirabelle on the left.  

The wildflower garden is fenced with out-of-scale estate fencing that is rusting beautifully. The urn contains sage.

This wide-angle view is dominated by the self-seeded wild carrot and the somewhat wild sky.

A favourite view enhanced enormously by the 'borrowed landscape'. 

On Society in an Age of Populism - Edmund Burke

How did Burke get it right about the ultimate course of events in France — and, by extension, so many subsequent revolutions that aimed to establish morally enlightened societies and wound up producing despotism and terror? The question is worth pondering in light of two main ideological currents of today: the tear-it-all-down populism that has swept so much of the right in the past five years and the tear-it-all-down progressivism that threatens to sweep the left.

At the core of Burke’s view of the revolution is a profound understanding of how easily things can be shattered in the name of moral betterment, national purification and radical political transformation. States, societies and personal consciences are not Lego-block constructions to be disassembled and reassembled with ease. They are more like tapestries, passed from one generation to the next, to be carefully mended at one edge, gracefully enlarged on the other and otherwise handled with caution lest a single pulled thread unravel the entire pattern. “The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity,” Burke wrote. “And therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature, or to the quality of his affairs.

Burke’s objection to the French revolutionaries is that they paid so little attention to this complexity: They were men of theory, not experience. Men of experience tend to be cautious about gambling what they have painstakingly gained. Men of theory tend to be reckless with what they’ve inherited but never earned. “They have wrought underground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. They have ‘the rights of men.’ Against these there can be no prescriptions.”

“The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us …. They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”

Burke’s understanding of the centrality of manners to norms, of norms to morals, of morals to culture and of culture to the health of the political order means that he would have been unimpressed by claims that Trump had scored policy “wins,” like appointing conservative judges or cutting the corporate tax rate. Those would have been baubles floating in befouled waters.

Trump’s real legacy, in Burke’s eyes, would be his relentless debasement of political culture: of personal propriety; of respect for institutions; of care for tradition; of trust between citizens and civil authority; of a society that believes — and has reason to believe — in its own essential decency. “To make us love our country,” he wrote, “ our country ought to be lovely.”

Then again, Burke would have been no less withering in his views of the far left. “You began ill,” he said of the French revolutionaries, “because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.”

For Burke, the materials of successful social change had to be found in what the country already provided — historically, culturally, institutionally — not in what it lacked. Britain became the most liberal society of its day, Burke argued, because it held fast to what he called “our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties,” handed down “as an inheritance from our forefathers.” Inheritance, he added, “furnishes a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement.”

Bret Stephen - New York Times August 2020