John Elkington

Went along to an event at The Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, this evening, not knowing what to expect.  Found myself featured in a 116-page ‘Big Black Book’ – the Evening Standard‘s version of ‘London’s 1000 Most Influential People‘.  Among the people I caught up with was Koy Thomson, now CEO of the London Cycling Campaign, whose full-page photo (cycling across Tower Bridge with a phalanx of other cyclists) graces the page opposite my entry.  Love what they do.  Merited or not, it’s great to be in such distinguished company, though something of a shock to see my age listed as 59. Again, some part of the brain protests, some mistake surely?  

Still, much better than the ‘Blue Book’ that the wretched John Birch Society used in the heyday of the McCarthyism to pillory those suspected of Communism or unduly left-wing sympathies.  Read their Wikipedia entry and they seem almost benign, but during the Vietnam War they were vicious.  I remember visiting one man who had ended up in the Blue Book when Elaine and I were on our ‘honeymoon’ in the Pacific Northwest, having finally decided to get married after five years together to ensure cheap flights to the US.  This was Professor Giovanni Costigan, a lovely man who made us completely at home.  One of the people I wish I could have bottled, in the positive sense.

In St. Louis, during 2002, Patrick Van Der Tuin began memorializing bicyclists killed or injured by motorists with white-painted bikes. He dubbed his project ‘Broken Bikes Broken Lives’. (Photograph courtesy of Carrie Zukoski)

Haven’t yet seen one in the flesh, but am mightily impressed by a very different take on white bicycles, the viral campaign splashed over two pages in today’s Observer.  Starting off in the US, it uses skeletally white-painted cycles to mark the spots where cyclists have been killed or injured.  Given that a young woman cyclist was killed by a bendy bus just around the corner from our London office a week or two ago, and having been left three times unconscious over 35 years of cycling in London, twice with three broken ribs, the ghost bike movement is one I whole-heartedly support. 

Zeppelin over fleet

One of the things my father’s mother Isabel left us was a collection of diaries – and a couple of weeks back I was reading one from late 1916.  At the time she was working as some sort of designer at the Admiralty, so it is written in a pale covered notebook, standard Admiralty issue she admits part way through. 

Among many things that leapt out for me was her diary entry for Thursday, October 5.  “Where can I begin?” she began – and the tale she told led me to an exploration of Britain’s ‘First Blitz’, a story told in the book I subsequently bought and read while flying to and from the US this week, Neil Hanson’s extraordinary First Blitz: The Never-Before-Told Story of the German Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918 (Doubleday, 2008).

The day began, once she was at work, with the sight of the French Republican Band playing in Horse Guards.  Then she had lunch with her Aunt Jess and Vera (unknown) at the Lyceum, later seeing a concert featuring Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.  Then dinner at Pinoli’s, after which one of her stable of boyfriends – the one she dubbed ’17’, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy – took her home.  “The Zepps were on the way,” she recalled, “and the trains were dark and unreliable, and we found everyone on the doorsteps looking for Zepps, so we went through to the garden to see them better.”

The airships seemed to work a strange aphrodisiac effect.  “And then he made love to me – what could you expect? – most unreasonable – time – place – everything – but then when was love reasonable – and such love too.”  The tale goes less well from there, but that’s another story.  What struck me was her account of those bombed out of their homes – and her outrage at the looting that sometimes followed raids.

That led me to First Blitz.  I knew that there had been Zeppelin raids over the southern parts of the country, particularly over London.  I also knew that there had been raids by Gotha and Giant bombers, but I simply had no idea of the scale of those raids, nor of the physical, psychological and social impact they had.  Substantial elements of the population teetered on the edge of panic as the raids built during ‘The Blitz of the Harvest Moon’.

Hanson’s book was an eye-opener in multiple dimensions, not least in terms of the lessons learned by England in terms of air defence, lessons that stood us in good stead when the second Blitz hit.  Isabel, my favourite grandmother and a woman I always associate with London (where she lived in Pont Street and Lennox Gardens during the time when I knew her best, although I first remember seeing at her home in Dulverton), was in the city for the second time round during WWII, though I haven’t seen diaries from that era.  One thing I do remember, though, is that once when she went down to stay on the south coast, at Hayling Island in 1940, she contrived to see my father, her only son Tim, shot down, but that’s a story I’ve told elsewhere.

In any event, the Zeppelin raids of October and November 1916 persuaded the Germans that the losses would be too great – and they then switched to winged aircraft, particularly the Gothas, whose exploits form the core of Hanson’s book.  But one of the most interesting sections of the book deals with the use of fire in warfare, from the time when the Syrian Kallinicus came up with ‘Greek Fire’ in AD 660, a deadly weapon said to have saved Constantinople on many ocasions.  It was squirted from siphons, as in modern flamethrowers.  And the tale then goes on to the German plans to destroy as much of London as possible by triggering a successor to the Great Fire of 1666.

Those who feel Germany were complete innocents in the art of putting cities to the torch, that the WWII raids on cities like Hamburg and Dresden came literally out of the blue, should read the story of the ‘Fire Plan’ – and of just how hard the Germans tried to get the jump on Britain in the WWI fire department.  Thank the heavens, or whomever, that by the time the Germans found an effective incendiary weapon, the Elektron, the war was in its closing stages.  Indeed, the description of the last-minute interruption of the England Squadron’s first mass use of the Elektron is like something from a Buchan novel. 

The Startoffizier is just about to wave the squadron’s aircraft into the night sky for the raid when suddenly, “through the darkness a car came racing … It was as black as night, its paintwork shining softly in the starlight, but the fluttering pennants it carried showed it bore an emissary of the High Command.  It sped across the airfield, bumping and rattling over the rutted ground, driven flat out.  Each Gotha, momentarily caught in the glare of its lights, loomed ghostly grey out of the darkness, then faded to a shadow as the car roared on.”

London and Paris were spared untold grief when Ludendorff cancelled the mission – and tens of thousands of Elektron bombs ended up being dumped into the River Scheldt.  But incendiary bombs went from strength to strength in the following decades.  Happily, just as in WWI, some WWII incendiaries failed to explode.  We discovered that some years back when Elaine was ordered by a somewhat panicked policeman to get out of the house – without stopping for anything.  It turned out that a stick of bombs had stalked down our road, in search of a nearby munitions plant, and that one had been sitting unexploded and undetected in a neighbour’s garden for some 60 years, about eight feet from where we still do the washing up.

And the truly extraordinary thing about Isabel’s diary?  As I said to Gaia earlier today, it is as if she is talking to you, from 92 years ago, a modern voice, very self-aware, inquisitive, someone I often devoutly wish was still here to continue the conversations we had about so many things, but, sadly, never once about the aphrodisiac effects of danger and of Zeppelins.

Gothas

  Sunset 1: View from my room

Arrived in Naples, Florida, late on Tuesday, after a flight from Gatwick via Charlotte, NC.  Hurricane country – and when I got to the beachfront Ritz-Carlton in Naples, there was a warning that work would begin at 09.00 Wednesday morning on hurricane hardening of the hotel.  It did, right on the dot.  But before that, I arrived in my room to find the most spectacular sunset in progress, after a number of storms that has passed through earlier in the day.

Was in Florida to speak at a conference organised by Novo Nordisk, a company that I have worked alongside since 1989 – and which I enormously admire.  Apart from anything else, they are one of the leading global champions of the triple bottom line, a fact around which I built my presentation for their US sales people on Wednesday. 

But the high – or at least most memorable point – in the trip was on the Wednesday evening, when the conference participants split into four separate groups to get involved in community projects.  I elected to take part in the repainting of a sheltered housing complex, partly because one of the other speakers — Flemming Junker —  was part of that group.  He was an employee-elected Director of Nordisk at the time of the merger with Novo Industri and he and I had met many moons ago when SustainAbility was helping organise and run early stakeholder engagements sessions in Denmark.

Turned out that a bus ride that I had been told would take around 30 minutes took closer to an hour, which might well have put me off had I known what to expect – I have antibodies to buses, from childhood.  But the journey did give me a chance to see more giant egrets and herons than I have seen in a very long time.  And the speed at which our group of some 50 folk repainted rooms at the Immokalee Friendship House was amazing.  See my post Repainting Poverty in Convivial Yellow on the Volans site.

Then back home, via Philadelphia, and in to the office with a day alongside Sam, pondering the way in which the invitations to speak are now piling in – in part, perhaps, because we have featured our activities in this area on the Outreach part of the Volans website.  Then home to a cold house, because Elaine is off with Hania at a film festival in Dinard.  Tired.

Sunset 2   Sunset 3   Sunset 4   We are one

Campbell’s Soup I: Tomato, by Andy Warhol (1968)

Elaine in high excitement because her verdict on Warhol’s Tomato soup image appears in today’s Times 2, page 5.  “For me as an adolescent,” her entry admitted, “buying a can of this favourite soup was like buying the key to another glamorous world which I knew existed elsewhere and which I desperately wanted to be part of.”  She concluded: “Warhol understood human nature and its pitfalls.”

 confess I never very much liked tomato soup, Campbell’s or anyone else’s.  They tasted clonal.  But there was something about the very clonal quality of Warhol’s work that tickled my fancy, in the same way that the current clonal pink figures (mainly self portraits) painted by Yue Minjun do.  But they both also speak to an underlying malaise, to a deep unease, to the diseases of consumerist cultures and, ultimately, to existential angst. 

Oddly, I hadn’t realised until I Googled Yue Minjun that he had done at least one version of Francis Bacon’s papal imagery, which I have long seen as some of the most profound art of the last century.  Yue Minjun riffs on Bacon, but – to me eye at least – doesn’t take things much further forward than a cartoonist might, let alone quantum jumping the deep meaning of the imagery as Bacon did when he riffed off Velazquez.

Yue Minjun goes papal

Last week, Elaine and I went to the Bacon exhibition at the Tate Britain.  Three highlights, for me, were the painting of Pope Innocent X which the artist apparently disowned for many years (shown below), the small triptych of Bacon, head and shoulders, as you left the gallery, and the atelier area brimming over with his sources, sketches and refuse. 

A lot of Bacon’s work has the rancid flavour of old bacon rind and once again had the same sort of effect on my aesthetic sensibilities as lemon juice does on live oysters.  Still, underneath it all is something that I suspect will help Bacon’s work and reputation live for another 500 years.  Velazquez, after all, painted his Innocent in 1650, some 400 years before Bacon followed not so gayly in his wake.

Bacon study after Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)