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Letter One (of 5)
Markyate 11th Oct 2000 Dear Mr Coogan, A friend of mine bought me Wherever Green is Worn a few weeks ago. I am glad that I did not fork out any money for it. It is one of the worst books I have ever read. I became so irritated by it that in the end I decided to sit down and write this letter. I have never come across a book with so many glaring factual errors. And, quite apart from any ideological animosities which one would have towards your barstool republicanism, you are an extremely bad writer. I nearly lost count of the number of pages where you have written sentences which simply do not make any grammatical sense. A few of the more egregious errors: Introduction, page xiii: You state that “it is estimated that 38 million of the 43 million Americans who gave their ethnic origin as Irish are of Catholic origin”. This is simply not true. About half of that 43 million consists of the descendants of Protestant Irish. Of the roughly 22 million of Catholic Irish descent, a large proportion have by intermarriage, become Methodists or Baptists or Episcopalians, and a large proportion in the North East who are still Catholics will have intermarried with the other Catholic ethnic groups, such as the Italians and Poles. The number of people who are (a) Catholics, and (b) of wholly or mainly Irish origin in the U.S. is probably about 12-14 million. There was a very good article in one of the English papers a while ago by a New Yorker called Flynn who made these and other points, comprehensively demolishing the myth of the 43 million Irish Americans. Page 27: Your command of French grammar and usage would seem to be as shaky as your grasp of English. By “traison des clerc “, I think you mean “Trahison des clercs”. Page 55: You say of the Irish in Germany that they are “one step ahead of the tax and emigration services”. I assume you mean “immigration services”, and in any case, since both countries are in the E.U., what would they have to fear from such authorities? Page 82: “Many of the professors had imbued Jansenist doctrines during their training in France.” I presume you mean “imbibed” or “were imbued with.” Page 83: “The era also marked the ending of the papacy as a papal power.” \\’hat the hell does this mean? Page 121: “At roughly 1.5%, the Irish are the largest ethnic group in England.” I would have thought that the English were the largest ethnic group in England. Page 125: You discuss Tony Blair’s mother’s Donegal origins at some length. Why do you not mention the obvious and salient fact that she was a Protestant? Page 165: You refer to the “Bridgewater three case” as “a miscarriage of justice involving black British defendants.” I assume that you are referring to the three who were convicted of the murder of Carl Bridgewater in the mid seventies. All three of them are white, or at least they seemed to be the last time I saw them on T.V. One of them, indeed, is called Vincent Hickey. Page 171: “My book, Ireland Since The Rising, gave my generation their first insight into the formation of the Irish state.” What an extraordinary piece of arrogance! I am sure that some Irish people had at least some insights into the subject before you enlightened them. If Ireland Since The Rising contains as many errors as Wherever Green is Worn, I suspect that they might have been better off with a different primer. Page 202: “The Police are suspected by the Irish community of being responsible for the desecration of the Irish memorial in Moston Cemetery, a National Front area”. Do you have any evidence to back up this suspicion? If not, why make such an assertion? And how can a cemetery be a National Front area? Page 203: You refer to Manchester as Britain’s second city. It is not. Birmingham is. Page 286: You refer to Robert Wagner as the last Irish mayor of New York. I think you will find that he was of German origin, as his name would suggest. Page 305: “the famous Irish ghettoes of Jamaica, The Bronx.” The last time I visited New York, Jamaica was in the borough of Queens. Or were you trying to say “the ghettoes of Jamaica and the Bronx?” Sometimes your grammar is so bad that it is genuinely difficult to grasp what you are attempting to convey. Either way, I do not think that Jamaica, Queens could ever have been described as a ghetto, Irish or otherwise. It was and is a pleasant lower-middle class area full of semi detached houses, inhabited by Jews, Italians, Poles etc – and these days, Indians, Chinese, Koreans etc – as well as Irish. Page 306: The last mayor of New York was called Dinkins, not Dinkens, Page 333: You state that George Seawright was shot by the I.R.A. I think you’ll find it was the INLA or one of its splinter groups which accounted for Mr Seawright – not that he was any great loss to the community, whoever got him. Page 359: You refer to Bugs Moran of Chicago as an Irish gangster. I think you’ll find that he was of Polish extraction. Page 112: Re the discussion between Aidan Hennigan and Sir Robert Mark: I cannot see any evidence of anti Irish hostility in Sir Robert’s remarks. I suggest you read Mark’s autobiography In the Office of Constable, in particular, his generous attitude towards Brendan Behan, whom he once arrested. His wife’s maiden name was Mary Kathleen Leahy. As far as anti-Irish prejudice in the Police generally is concerned ... well, the Commissioner is called Condon. And the last commissioner of the City of London Police was called Owen Kelly. And the Chief Constable of Kent is called Michael O’Brien. And the last head of the Flying Squad was called O’Connor. “Attitudes within the Police force also have a bearing on the fact that the Irish have the highest rate of stop and search by Police.” I note that you do not provide any source for this assertion, which I would have thought was extraordinarily unlikely. Afro-Caribbeans have a stop and search rate about six times higher than the national average, and I think it unlikely that Irish rates could be higher than this. “Irishwomen were 80% more likely to be the victims of crime than other ethnic groups.” Sources? Evidence? Which other ethnic groups? All other ethnic groups? This type of thing is typical of the lazy, sloppy, not terribly meaningful statements which permeate the book. And if Irishwomen are more likely to be the victims of crime, has it ever occurred to you that a large proportion of it was probably inflicted by Irishmen, and alcohol fuelled? The sheer volume of solecisms makes you want to scream after a while: The SAS ambush at “Loughall”. The U.S. “emigration” authorities. The Irish kid in New York who was murdered by a “mafiosa”. What is the matter with Random House [your publisher] these days? Don’t they have fact checkers? Or proof readers? Or editors? You say at one point that you wish the exodus of Protestants from the North would cease, and that they would come back home. But it seems fairly clear that you do not actually mean this. Elsewhere, you celebrate (prematurely, I suspect) the expected “overwhelming” of the Unionist majority in Northern Ireland by “the sheer energy of the Celts.” The Celts? The “Celts” called Adams and Hume and Morrison and Hartley and Hendron will overwhelm the non Celts called McMichael and Campbell and O’Neill and McCrea and Maginess and McGimpsey and McCartney? Apart from the sheer propagandistic untruth involved in such a statement, what would Random House have said if a similar piece of chauvinist ethnic triumphalism had been written by, say a Croat or a Serb or a Kosovar Albanian? Or a Hutu? Or a Tutsi? But then, you are a propagandist rather than a serious historian. The thing is, you are not a terribly good propagandist. Re your comments about Ruth Dudley Edwards and Sean O’Callaghan: I would suggest that O’Callaghan showed more physical and moral courage than you are ever likely to in your wildest dreams. You are not fit to carry his jockstrap. Would you have preferred the semtex to have got through and killed another three or four or five hundred innocent civilians? And if Ruth Dudley Edwards wishes to consider herself British and Irish, why should she not? If that is one more diaspora identity, why should it be an illegitimate one? A digression: you mention the National Front a few times in your book. The British loony right can be accused of many things, but anti-Irish animosity is not I think one of them. They are extremely anti-republican, but that is not quite the same thing. As I am sure you are aware, Oswald Mosley protested against the atrocities committed by the Black and Tans, and was congratulated by Michael Collins for doing so. His right hand man was William Joyce. The NF was led for a while in the seventies by a chap called O’Brien, and I have it on good authority that John Tyndall, the current leader of the BNP, had a grandfather who was a (Catholic) officer in the RIC, although I cannot confirm this. The BNP has as its symbol the Celtic cross, and frequently looks to Celtic history and imagery for inspiration. For the avoidance of any misunderstanding on your part, accidental or deliberate, this does not betoken any sympathy or support on my part for such parties. They remind me too much of Sinn Féin. I merely mention these things in passing in order to make the points that (a) most Englishmen, even those on the far right, do not really regard the Irish as foreigners and (b) the bloodlines of the English, Irish, Scots and Welsh have been so thoroughly mixed up over the last thousand years that they cannot be disentangled. Now, I don’t know much about Newfoundland or Rwanda or Argentina, and I have never visited Liverpool or Manchester, but if the number of lazy errors which you have made about those places is in proportion, then the number of howlers in your dreadful book must be vast indeed. Add to this your lack of discipline, your solipsism, your inability to keep to the subject, your propensity for meandering away on irrelevant digressions, and your spiteful, dog-in-a-manger attitude towards those who are considered to be insufficiently nationalistic for your liking, and you have the recipe for a truly terrible book. . I have read several of your previous works – I thought they were pretty poor too – and after I had read them, my main reaction was one of puzzlement. Puzzlement that anyone who seemed not to understand the basic rules of English grammar, and who repeatedly employed such leaden clichés, and who recycled the same anecdotes time after time – I think that I have now read the story about the machine gun and the otters about four times – could end up as a published author and the editor of a national newspaper. And then in one of your works, I came across a footnote in which you revealed that your father was a TD. And, as it says in the Good Book, the scales fell from my eyes. People like you, the Nomenklatura, effectively had those positions reserved for you in Irish society, no matter how talentless you were. You lot did well out of that illfare state known as the Irish Republic. You were about the only group that did, except for the priests. Everyone else, including my parents, had to fuck off to England to get a job. I remember reading the Irish Press in the seventies and eighties. I don’t remember you ever investigating Haughey’s business dealings, or the other sordid goings on in the ranks of the Soldiers of Destiny. But then, to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davis, you wouldn’t, would you? And, I must say, I found it somewhat ironic that you should do such a hatchet job on De Valera when you had been taking his family’s money for so long – not that he did not deserve a hatchet job. Like a lot of revolutions, the Irish one brought down one corrupt, incompetent, and self serving hereditary elite and put into power another corrupt, incompetent, and self serving hereditary elite. But the thing which really offends me about your turgid, flabby tome is your account of your attempts to secure the release of Joe Doherty in New York with that cadaverous old fraud Sean MacBride. What did you do afterwards? Get pissed and sing rebel songs and put $10 in the kitty to buy semtex to bomb my home town? Incidentally, I notice that you did not see fit to mention MacBride’s other prize [he received the Nobel Peace Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize]. Did you mention it in front of the judge? I have lived all my life in London, and hardly ever encountered any anti-Irish prejudice. On the contrary, I have usually found English people to be friendly and well-disposed towards the Irish. I went to a Catholic school. Most of the kids there were second or third generation Irish, and many of them are now British soldiers and policemen. And many more of them are making vast sums in the City, or running their own companies. I can hardly remember any of them complaining that anti Irish prejudice had ever held them back. I think you spent too much time in London listening to whingers and professional ethnic minorities like O’Mucker, or whatever he calls himself. I did however come within five minutes of being blown up by the Chelsea Barracks bomb of 1981, which maimed twenty Irish Guardsmen and killed a widow in her fifties and a teenager called O’Leary. And the uncle of one of my classmates, a Royal Marine and a Catholic, had his leg blown off by a Provo car bomb. And I spent an afternoon frantically searching Hyde Park in 1982 for a friend of mine after the bomb there went off, only to find him safely ensconced in a nearby pub, unaware that there had been an explosion. And the likes of Peter King and the rest of the slack jawed oafs in the Bronx were at least in part responsible for those atrocities. You make me want to puke. And, as for Peter King, I was going to give you my opinion on him, but being the well brought up lad that I am, I can’t bring myself to put it into print. Yours sincerely P.S You briefly mentioned Brendan O’Neill, the chairman of ICI. You may or may not be interested to know that Brendan O’Neill’s grandfather, Richard O’Neill, and his brother in law, Patrick Cronin, were RIC officers who were hounded out of Ireland in 1922, and ended up in the colonial police in Singapore. They were my great uncles. |
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Letter Two (of 5)
Markyate Dear Mr Coogan (Hah!) I wrote to you a while back concerning Wherever Green is Worn. I presume you got my letter. I never did get a reply, but then I was not really expecting one. I was re-reading it the other day. It’s rather like gazing upon a particularly horrific road accident – you know you shouldn’t look, but it exerts a certain morbid fascination. A few more points for the erratum slip, which by the look of it is going to be nearly as long as the original book: Page xii of the introduction: “The British began passing laws to contain Irish ‘vagrants’ shortly after the Normans arrived in Ireland in the Twelfth Century. The irritation of the British with the Irish question had begun.” The “British” did no such thing, for the very good reason that the concept of “British” did not exist at that time, and neither did a country called Britain. The French-speaking Anglo-Norman ruling class passed those laws. Page 229: You refer to the 825,000 Protestants in the Six Counties. According to the 1991 census, the population of Northern Ireland was 1,688,000, of whom approximately 42% were Catholics. By my reckoning, 58% of 1,688,000 equals 979,040. Page 415: Your reference to the “sacking of Trim”: I suggest you read The Black and Tans by Richard Bennett. It is hardly a sympathetic account of that not so fine body of men, but points out that the “sack of Trim” was actually a sacking of one shop, belonging to Mr and Mrs Chandler, a Unionist couple. As I said in my last letter, you are a propagandist, rather than a serious historian. A few further comments: you refer to the “pogrom” against the Catholics in Belfast in the early twenties. Well, if it was a pogrom, it was a two-way pogrom, since the Catholics were giving pretty much as good as they got. Secondly, it was not the only “pogrom” going on at the time. There were a couple of others happening in South Armagh and in West Cork, which you do not see fit to mention. Did you ever ask your old buddy Tom Barry about the latter? I suggest you read The I.R.A and its Enemies by Peter Hart if you have not already done so. Re your comments on the atrocities committed against the rebels by the Protestant yeomanry in the 1798 rebellion. I cannot find any reference to the part played by the largely Catholic militia in that episode. Nor can I find any reference to the massacres of Protestant civilians which occurred in the course of the rebellion. I must confess to deriving a certain schadenfreude from Ms Dudley Edwards’ litigation, the story of which I have been following with interest and no little amusement. Personally, I don’t think £25,000 is very much these days. Had I been in her shoes, I would have looked for a nought on the end of that. Finally, a correction of my own. In my last letter, I stated that I had information that John Tyndall, the leader of the BNP, had a grandfather who was a Catholic RIC officer. This was incorrect. It was his father, and he was a Protestant: a District Inspector, no less. His uncle was apparently a Church of Ireland bishop! It’s a funny old world, as someone once said. The reason I know this is that a lawyer acquaintance of mine used to have to defend Mr Tyndall on a regular basis on charges of inciting racial hatred. A task as thankless as that of your editor at Random House. Yours sincerely J.F. Cronin |
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Letter Three (of 5)
Farnham 19th Feb 2001 Mr Coogan It’s me again, back with another bumper crop of howlers culled from the pages of your magnum opus. I just can’t keep away from it. Page 6: We find the Ulster Regiment launching a frontal attack on the “famous Schwabben redoubt.” during the Battle of the Somme. Presumably this should be Schwaben, the German for Swabia. Page 7: The “Connacht Rangers.” Oh God. You actually spell it right further down. Page 14: The “fiercesome” Irish infantry charge. Fearsome, presumably. Page 25: You refer to “the British attempts to gain control over the Irish Church during the reign of Henry II.” As I keep trying to explain to you, no such country as Britain existed at the time in question. Page 38: “There was no University in Ireland, and the monasteries had been suppressed since the fourteenth century, therefore Irish clerics and scholars had been enrolling in Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna, Salamanca, Alcala de Henares, Valladolid, Cumbria, and Cologne.” Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Firstly, I was taught in primary school that the dissolution of the monasteries occurred under Henry VIII, whose reign was in the sixteenth century. Secondly, how the hell could any openly Catholic student, let alone a seminarian for the priesthood, have been studying at Oxford or Cambridge during penal times? Thirdly, although we in the U.K. have recently been going through an unprecedented expansion in tertiary education, so that these days virtually any dunce can put B.A. Hons after his name, there is not yet, as far as I am aware, any such establishment as the University of Cumbria. There is however a town in Portugal by the name of Coimbra (pronounced queembra) which contains an ancient and prestigious college. Could this be the place you had in mind? Page 41: “An Irish exhibition, L‘imaginaire d’lrelande, opened in Paris in 1996”. The French for Ireland is Ir1ande, not Irelande. And this literally means “The imaginary of Ireland”. Some mistake surely. Page 45: “The Irish College in Paris was a refuge for Polish clergy who had survived Dachau. Amongst these was the present Pope John. Paul II.” Pope John Paul was never in Dachau. Page 50: You state that the GAA was heavily influenced by the German Turnvater Jahn movement. There was no such thing as the Turnvater Jahn movement. There was, however, a chap by the name of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a German patriot of the nineteenth century who, among other things founded the Turnverein movement (gymnastic club) in Germany, and invented many of the modern gymnastic exercises, such as parallel bars, pommel horse etc. Because of this, he became known as the turnvater, or father of gymnastics. I assume that he was the person you had in mind? Page 126: You refer to the “Wanders Rugby Club” in Dublin. Wanderers, presumably. Page 133: You refer to the “bad years for the Irish in Britain” after the Tories came to power. A few pages later, you are talking about the huge wages that Irish construction workers were making in the Thatcher boom years. Make your mind up. Page 145: You quote the Commission for Racial Equality’s report that: “There are high levels of anti-Irish hostility routinely encountered by Irish people in Britain … experiences during the last 50 years (!!) recounted by interviewees reinforce the idea that anti-Irish racism is endemic in British society … all aspects of Irish people’s lives are affected by racism, which carries the potential for discrimination. Particularly serious consequences may arise when state institutions are involved. For example, 25% of those interviewed reported negative responses from the Police.” At the start of the chapter, on page 109, you quote the Bradford University Survey of 1994 as saying: “Overall the survey suggests that whatever historical and contemporary problems there have been or are, the British are favourably disposed towards the Irish. They hold positive images of Ireland, and of the characteristics of the Irish. They reject the idea of the Irish born in Britain as foreigners, and instead see them much as they see one another … the Irish have much goodwill to draw upon in Britain.” Has it not occurred to you that they can’t both be right? Page 275: The mid 19th Century Tammany Mayor of New York, Boss Tweed, was not Irish, but of pure native Yankee stock. I suggest you refer to Imperial City, A History of New York, in which Tweed is referred to as “the last vulgar white Protestant” to hold the office of New York City mayor. Incidentally, his first name was not Michael, but William. Well, I think that’s about it. However, I have not gone through the African, Caribbean or Asian bits of the book in great depth, and I daresay there are a few more howlers lurking there somewhere. But I think I will go cold turkey for a while now, and try to get on with my life. Having perused your book, the word which comes to my mind is scandalous. It is scandalous that someone like you could ever have become a published author in the first place. It is scandalous that Random House could ever have published such a piece of garbage. It is scandalous that there are probably people in Chicago or Melbourne or Johannesburg who think that you are a serious scholar and historian rather than the Irvingesque falsifier and propagandist and mountebank that you are. Actually, I take that back. Irving is a propagandist and falsifier, but he’s actually quite good at it. In your introduction, you state: “There are vast areas of the world still unreported – India, China, Russia … I would have attempted these had the publisher’s deadlines allowed.” I must say, my blood ran cold at that bit. I am not sure if the world is yet ready for Tim Pat’s Adventures in Moscow, Kiev and Vladivostock: “And then I sez to Yeltsin, Boris, I sez, ye’re a sound man”, as we simultaneously fell off our respective barstools …” However, I was relieved to see the next sentence: “They remain for another book or another writer.” They sure do. There certainly is a book to be written about the Irish contribution to those countries. However, it might be a good idea if the task were left to someone who could write. Yours etc J.F. Cronin .. P.S. You may be interested to know that an anagram for “Wherever Green is Worn by Tim Pat Coogan” is “Wince, gnash, at very poor gombeen writer.” |
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Letter Four (of 5)
Farnham 14th Feb 2001 Mr Coogan I sent you a couple of letters a while back cataloguing some of the more atrocious errors in Wherever Green is Worn. I never did get a reply. I have been re-reading you magnum opus over the last couple of days, and have decided to put another missive together. I know, I know, its starting to become obsessive, but, having perused the book again, I realise now that I was only scratching the surface in my last letters. There are so many howlers that you just cannot count’em all. Let’s have a few more to be going along with. Page 35: “By 1770 Vatican diplomacy had come to recognise that the policy of attempting to control the Irish Church through Catholic monarchs in England, initiated under Nicholas Breakspear, was ceasing to pay dividends.” I would have thought that even the most obtuse Vatican diplomat would have recognised this, since by 1770, England had not had a Catholic monarch for over eighty years. Page 54: You refer to the Francis Stuart controversy: “Stuart, then in his nineties, and living in a nursing home, benefited under the Irish government’s scheme of assistance to writers and artists. Despite his age, Conor Cruise O’Brien and Maire MacEntee tried to get his benefit withdrawn.” The scuts. It would take a heart of stone not to weep. You do not see fit to elucidate the reasons why they did this. I suppose that you hope that your readers in south Boston or Melbourne or wherever will just assume Cruise O’Brien and the missus were doing this to some poor old geezer out of pure badness. I have half a mind to send a copy of this passage to the good doctor, in the hope that we might see some more fun and games in the libel courts. Also page 54: “Sabina Hertz who lectures at the Celtic Department of the University of Berlin told me that from one hundred students, attendance at classes had dwindled to eighteen. Sabina attributes the lack of funding to the Germanization of German society in which Celts don’t fit.” I have read this paragraph several times, and still do not have a clue what it means. Page 58: You refer to protests by the natives against English and Irish construction workers in the German town of “Madjebur Saxon Anhalt” (sic) in the north of the country. I have consulted my trusty Greater London Council School Atlas of the World, (Geography Prize, St Mary’s Junior Boys, Brixton, 1976) and have looked in a couple of other reference works, and have had a good trawl around on the World Wide Web, but have been unable to locate any such town as Madjebur Saxon Anhalt. There is, however, a city called Magdeburg, which is situated in a German province, or Land called Sachsen-Anhalt, (or Saxony-Anhalt in English) which happens to be in the east of the country, not the north. Could they be in any way related? Page 58 again: Coogan on the Irish experience of right-wing extremism in Germany: “the Irish finding on the threat of fascism tends to be that while it is “not absent” and has to be a cause of concern, neither is it present.” Yep, I’ve read it again, and that’s what it says. Page 58: further down: Michael Spillane is described as a “Trinity-born statistician.” Does this mean he was born within the precincts of the college? Or that he is a member of the Holy Trinity? Or what? Page 65: You refer to the ruler of the “Spanish lowlands.”. Presumably this is supposed to be “Netherlands”? Or is it referring to the plain in Spain where they get the rain? . Page 111: The conviction of Danny MacNamee for the Hyde Park bombing was “one of the worst miscarriages of justice of the entire troubles.” Hmm. I suggest you read Bandit Country by Toby Harnden, especially pages 330-335. I am not sure which I find more offensive, your rancid culchie barstool republicanism or the horrific violence which you repeatedly visit upon the English language. There are so many candidates for the title of worst piece of writing in the book, but after due consideration, I have decided to give first prize to the following passage from page 131, which I quote in all its horror: “Fitzgerald had been to a dinner in Dublin a little earlier, at which the prominent Dublin socialite and charitable fund raiser Norma Smurfit had lectured him on what was befalling young Irish people in London. Like a snooker ball impacting on the other balls on the table, the energy of the Smurfit lecture began to take effect and McGuinness had drawn a selection of the beautiful people to his Notting Hill Gate home. For most of the evening, Mary wondered what she was doing in such company. Speaking of the evening, and of another similar occasion, she made a very significant point which goes to the root of Irish insecurities in Britain.” All I can say is that your editor deserves to have his balls on a table for letting a paragraph like that ever see the light of day. Page 167: “As Liz Curtis has pointed out, British colonists, be they Norman, Elizabethan, or Victorian, argued in justification of their campaigns that the Irish were a culturally inferior race, in need of English civilisation.” The Norman colonists were not “British”. They were Normans. They had conquered the Anglo-Saxons only a century or so earlier. And I think it unlikely that they ever felt the need to justify their conquests anywhere, and I think it equally unlikely that they were spreading English civilisation, since they spoke French, and were assisted mainly by Welsh, Flemish and Breton mercenaries. I doubt that there was a single man on Strongbow’s expedition who could speak the English language. Also, can you name any campaigns of colonisation waged by the Victorians in Ireland? I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Page 218: You say of that nasty Norman Geraldus Cambrensis: “There is a statue to him in the shadow of Llandaff cathedral, commemorating his preaching of the crusade from that site. Contemporary Arabia has as little reason to honour him as have the Irish.” I was under the impression that the Crusades took place in Palestine, not Arabia. Page 245: Irischenfrage should, I think, be Irischefrage or Irenfrage. Irische means Irish in German, and Ire means Irishman or Irish person. Page 304: “As Father Campbell and I chewed our hamburgers in the mundane setting of an Irish bar in Lexington Avenue, I felt for a moment that a curtain had been drawn back on a vista of lives lived in a welter of hell and hypocrisy because of some genetic implant.” Actually, I’ve now changed my mind about the “balls on table” passage being the worst in the book. Page 319: The American trade unionist George Meany becomes George Meaney in the next paragraph. Page 323: You say of a litigant in the Pennsylvania Molly Maguire trials: “… his side lost, largely because that great American lawyer, Charles Darrow, used the Molly Maguire episode to eviscerate him in court.” Wow. I’ve negotiated with U.S. lawyers in my time, and some of them were pretty tough, but that seems a tad excessive. Page 349: “As someone who was close to the subterranean negotiations of those days, I can testify to the fact that if the views of senior Dublin politicians and diplomats involved in the Irish Peace Process at the time had been made known, the classrooms of New York would have resonated to a view of a London toad under the harrow of a Unionist plough which would have occupied the letter writing efforts not only of ambassador Kerr, but of the entire embassy staff than did the Pataki affair.” Actually, I’ve changed my mind again about the worst passage in the book. Page 533: The G.A.A. stadium at “Corke Park”, Dublin. Oh Lordy. Well, that’s all I’ve been able to find today. I’ll pick up the book again in a week or two and no doubt you’ll be getting a fourth letter soon after that. Yours etc J.F. Cronin |
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Letter Five (of 5)
Farnham 17th March 2001 Dear Mr Coogan Guess who? I was told a while back by a friend of mine who once trained as a psychiatric nurse that the fifth letter was showing signs of compulsive-obsessive disorder, and that I ought to stop writing to you for Lent. I have so far tried to keep to this, but as we know, the Paddies have a special papal dispensation to relax their Lenten observances on St Patrick’s day. Or so I am told. So, back to the howlers. Page 19: “…one will encounter legends of Brendan coming ashore in Florida, Newfoundland, and even in Mexico, where in some tales he takes the place of Quezecotal. The contemporary German city of Brandenburg was originally named after him.” Firstly, Quezecotal should presumably be Quetzalcoatl. Secondly, I remember when first I read this passage, thinking it extraordinarily unlikely that Brandenburg and St Brendan could have any etymological link. I looked it up, and none of the textbooks or encyclopeadias which I came across mentioned it. On the other hand, I could not find any evidence that it was not true. Like most places in eastern Germany, Brandenburg was originally a Slavonic settlement, which went by the various names of Branibor, Brenneburg, etc, as it passed back and forth between the Teutons and Slavs. Then I looked up on the net a tourist’s guide to Brandenburg, which contained the following passage: “Brandenburg ist der alteste Stadt der Mark und wurde bereits 948 erstmalig urkundlich erwahnt. Der Slawische Stamm der Haveller waren die ersten Bewohner der Stadt “Brennaburg”, war soviel bedeuten mag, wie die auf einer Brandrodung errichtete Burg.” So there. Incidentally, Brandrodung means “clearing (as in forest clearing) made by burning”. It also translates more loosely as “slash and burn” which is sort of appropriate given your methods of research and scholarship. Page 137: “The psychotherapist remarked on the high incidence of repressed sexuality she encountered among her Irish patients. This characteristic, as we shall see, had a horrific impact on the AIDS issue.” Eh? There are lots of ways of acquiring the AIDS virus, but repressing one’s sexuality would not, I think, be one of them. And I must say I have not noticed any mass outbreak of HIV on Kilburn High Street recently. Page 138: The building contractor in London who “gave chapter and verse about how he had lost contracts through Orangism … that sort of thing went-on a lot, especially under Major.” Now, if this was Glasgow we were talking about, I might give the story some credence, but in London? I have lived all my life in London and environs, and have only once knowingly met an Orangeman – a Ghanaian law student who seemed perfectly pleasant – and apart from trips to Scotland have never seen an Orange Lodge. I doubt if there are more than about seventeen of them (Orangemen, that is, not Lodges) in the whole of the south east of England. Sometimes, I wonder whether you have ever actually visited London. If you had, you must surely have noted that virtually every construction contractor’s truck in the metropolis is painted green and has Murphy or McNicholas or Cronin or Durkan or O’Rourke written the side of it. And what are we to make of the statement that this “sort of thing went on a lot under Major?” That John Major is a member of the Orange Order? That his administration conspired to put Catholic building contractors out of business? And that this nefarious activity ceased the moment Tony Blair came to power? This is one of the most bizarre passages in the book. You must have been in every lounge bar in Kilburn High Street by the time you wrote that one. I have half a mind to send a copy of the page to Mr Major c/o his constituency office in Huntingdon. I’m told he’s the litigious type: he sued a couple of hacks a few years ago for suggesting that he was having it away with his housekeeper. Page 363: “Jack Kelly, father of the actress Grace Kelly, won a gold medal in the 1920 Olympics, having been earlier debarred, through anti-Irish prejudice, from sculling in the prestigious British event at Henley.” Now I have heard this anecdote several times, and depending on the teller, he was banned from Henley (a) because of anti-Irish prejudice, or (b) because he was a working man, or (c) both. Indeed, I seem to remember my poor oul granny wiping away a tear as she related it to me when I was a nipper. It’s a great story, encapsulating snobby Brits, Irish athletic prowess, the triumph of talent over prejudice and class privilege, blah blah blah. The thing is, it is not actually true. Having nothing better to do the other day, I moseyed on down to Farnborough library, and took down from the shelves a copy of Princess Grace, Her Life and Loves, by Jane Ellen Wayne – a bit Mills and Boony for my taste, but quite readable if you like that sort of thing. In it, I came across the following passage concerning Kelly pere: “The real reason for his rejection was a feud between his sponsors and Henley stewards, but he preferred the original version of class discrimination – the poor Irishman who worked with his hands, versus England’s conception of a “gentleman”. In later years, he admitted the truth to reporters.” Then I had a quick look at another tome: Princess Grace by Steven Englund. (By this time the lady librarian was giving me some very strange looks – normally all I ever get there are rugby almanacs, Ed McBain thrillers and car maintenance manuals) and in that equally sugary confection, I came across the following: “In 1920, Kelly’s rowing club, the Vesper Boat Club, was rejected in its efforts to compete in the most prestigious competition, the Henley Diamond Sculls. At the time, and for years afterwards, Jack Kelly used to claim that Henley had forbidden him to enter because the snobbish Brits would not let the presumably brawnier working class to compete against “gentlemen.” In fact, according to Roger Ansell in the New Yorker, Henley had long since lifted its ban on rowers who did manual labour by 1920. It was not directed personally at Jack Kelly. Rather the Vesper club team was not admitted due to a fifteen year old dispute over how to define the amateur status of its members.” But, as you say later on in the book when discussing The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “when the legend becomes truth, print the legend.” The problem is that you seem to be taking this injunction as your motto throughout the book. Page 205: Your informant tells you: “Manchester is far better than Liverpool for tolerance. I wouldn’t wear my pioneer pin in Liverpool, but in Manchester they gave me the key.” The key to what? As with countless other sentences in your magnum opus, it is difficult to work out what the hell you are on about. As I said in my first letter, I have never had the misfortune to visit that benighted city on the Mersey, and I am told that sectarian animosities still exist in some of its less salubrious suburbs. (Incidentally, Netherfield, “the Shankill of Liverpool” becomes Netherfields a couple of pages later.) But I find it extraordinarily hard to credit that any Liverpool Orangeman would (a) have eyesight good enough to spot a pioneer pin, (b) have the perspicacity to recognise it for what it was, and (c) would, as a result of spotting said article, offer physical violence to its wearer. Page 353: John Wayne was not christened Marian Morrisson, but Marion Morrison. “Ford made him a star in his 1939 classic, Western Stagecoach”. I presume you mean to say “his classic western, Stagecoach”. A bit pernickity, but there you are. Page 457: Ned Kelly and the Jereldie Letter. Jerilderie actually. Page 663: “... most people in England blamed Sinn Fein for the collapse of the Belfast Parliament.” Oh dear. The I.R.A. have sappers these days? Page 512: “As the historian Basil Davidson has pointed out, Africa had had a trading relationship with the capitalist system of Europe and America which began before 1500.” I am sure Basil Davidson said no such thing. He is a proper historian. Page 598: Maurice Bishop, the former ruler of Grenada, was “overthrown and murdered along with his wife during the American invasion of the island.” Er, no he wasn’t actually. He was murdered, presumably by followers of his rival Bernard Coard, a week before the U.S. invasion. Indeed, his murder was the main reason, or at least pretext, for the invasion. I wonder if this counts as a libel against the U.S. government of the day, and the G.I.s who were on the mission? I have half a mind to send a copy of this page to ex-President Reagan, c/o whatever rest home they have him in. I know Ronnie’s not entirely compos mentis these days, but maybe Nancy could pass it on to a few members of his cabinet. I’m told that Caspar Weinberger was the litigious type. Page 599: Istabrak, the Cheltenham winning gee-gee, should presumably be Istabraq. Well, I think that’s about it. I daresay there are plenty more, but those are all the ones that I have been able to spot. What a book! Every work on history and politics will have some errors, or questionable assertions, or incorrect figures, but Wherever Green is Worn is simply in a different league from anything I have ever come across before. There are whole passages where you just seem to be making it up as you go along. Gosh, I feel like Gibbon after he had completed the Decline and Fall. What am I going to do with myself now? I know – I am told that your last book The Troubles was a pretty poor effort as well, so maybe I’ll take a look at that next – but not until after Easter. Yours etc J. F. Cronin P.S. You never got back to me about the book signing. c.c. Sue Freestone, Publishing Director, Hutchinson. |
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What I've recently
But it's not
entirely honest in its subtle pro-Palestinian bias, and therefore needs
to be read in conjunction with an antidote, such as See detailed review +++++
BP's ambitious CEO John Browne expanded it through adventurous acquisitions, aggressive offshore exploration, and relentless cost-reduction that trumped everything else, even safety and long-term technical sustainability. Thus mistakes accumulated, leading to terrifying and deadly accidents in refineries, pipelines and offshore operations, and business disaster in Russia. The Macondo blowout was but an inevitable outcome of a BP culture that had become poisonous and incompetent. However the book is gravely compromised by a litany of over 40 technical and stupid errors that display the author's ignorance and carelessness. It would be better to wait for the second (properly edited) edition before buying. As for BP, only a wholesale rebuilding of a new, professional, ethical culture will prevent further such tragedies and the eventual destruction of a once mighty corporation with a long and generally honourable history. Note: I wrote
my own reports on Macondo +++++
A horrific account of:
More details on my blog here. +++++
After recounting a childhood of convention and simple pleasures in working-class Aberdeen, Mr Urquhart is conscripted within days of Chamberlain declaring war on Germany in 1939. From then until the Japanese are deservedly nuked into surrendering six years later, Mr Urquhart’s tale is one of first discomfort but then following the fall of Singapore of ever-increasing, unmitigated horror. After a wretched journey Eastward, he finds himself part of Singapore’s big but useless garrison. Taken prisoner when Singapore falls in 1941, he is, successively,
Chronically ill, distraught and traumatised on return to Aberdeen yet disdained by the British Army, he slowly reconstructs a life. Only in his late 80s is he able finally to recount his dreadful experiences in this unputdownable book. There are very few first-person eye-witness accounts of the the horrors of Japanese brutality during WW2. As such this book is an invaluable historical document. +++++
This is a rattling good tale of the web of corruption within which the American president and his cronies operate. It's written by blogger Michele Malkin who, because she's both a woman and half-Asian, is curiously immune to the charges of racism and sexism this book would provoke if written by a typical Republican WASP. With 75 page of notes to back up - in best blogger tradition - every shocking and in most cases money-grubbing allegation, she excoriates one Obama crony after another, starting with the incumbent himself and his equally tricky wife. Joe Biden, Rahm Emmanuel, Valerie Jarett, Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Steven Rattner, both Clintons, Chris Dodd: they all star as crooks in this venomous but credible book. ACORN, Mr Obama's favourite community organising outfit, is also exposed for the crooked vote-rigging machine it is. +++++
It is really just a collation of amusing little tales about surprising human (and occasionally animal) behaviour and situations. For example:
The book has no real message other than don't be surprised how humans sometimes behave and try to look for simple rather than complex solutions. And with a final anecdote (monkeys, cash and sex), the book suddenly just stops dead in its tracks. Weird. ++++++
It's chapters are organised around provocative questions such as
It's central thesis is that economic development continues to be impeded in different countries for different historical reasons, even when the original rationale for those impediments no longer obtains. For instance:
The author writes in a very chatty, light-hearted matter which makes the book easy to digest. However it would benefit from a few charts to illustrate some of the many quantitative points put forward, as well as sub-chaptering every few pages to provide natural break-points for the reader. +++++
The author was a member of Britain's V Force, a forerunner of the SAS. Its remit was to harass Japanese lines of command, patrol their occupied territory, carryout sabotage and provide intelligence, with the overall objective of keeping the enemy out of India. Irwin is admirably yet brutally frank, in his descriptions of deathly battles with the Japs, his execution of a prisoner, dodging falling bags of rice dropped by the RAF, or collapsing in floods of tears through accumulated stress, fear and loneliness. He also provides some fascinating insights into the mentality of Japanese soldiery and why it failed against the flexibility and devolved authority of the British. The book amounts to a very human and exhilarating tale. Oh, and Irwin describes the death in 1943 of his colleague my uncle, Major PF Brennan. +++++ Other books here |
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After
48
crackling, compelling, captivating games, the new World Champions are,
deservedly,
England get the Silver,
No-one can argue with
Over the competition, |
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