Author: jamescalumcampbell

The Great Train Robber: My Autobiography

The inside story of Britain’s most notorious heist

Ronnie Biggs

(John Blake Publishing, 60^th anniversary paperback edition, 2023)

It’s the sort of book I guess you might find in the “True Crime” book shelf in Waterstones.  But I never look there, and normally have no interest, but I had time to spend in a coffee shop and I’m always interested in the events of 1963, not exactly a slow news year.  August 8^th, 1963.  Ronnie Biggs’ 34^th birthday.  I remember it well – not the birthday bash, but the Great Train Robbery.  A Glasgow to London mail train that happened to be carrying a ton of money in used banknotes was stopped, at Bridego Bridge (Bridge 127) two miles south of Leighton Buzzard, off the B488, and emptied of about £2,500,000, worth over £50,000,000 today.  The money was never recovered. 

What I remember most about the news reports was the response of the public.  The news was greeted with a curious sense of satisfaction, as well as admiration.  A daring heist.  Such audacity!  There was a general sense of vicarious excitement.  A group of men had thumbed their noses at the authorities, at the Establishment, and some people hoped they would get away with it.  My father did not share this sentiment.  Well, he was a policeman.  But I remember him saying to me, “The train driver has suffered a significant head injury.  He has been struck with a cosh.  Is that admirable?” 

Following the robbery, the police mounted a massive manhunt.  Attention turned to Leatherslade Farm, the farmhouse near the scene of the crime which had been the headquarters of the gang.  Prior to the event they played Monopoly to while away the time.  The apocryphal story circulated that they had played with real money.  Then they all scattered, but they were relentlessly hunted down, and twelve out of sixteen were caught, including Ronnie Biggs.  Three were never identified.  They were severely dealt with.  Ronnie’s was a mistrial because the jury had been made aware of his criminal past.  But he was nailed on the retrial, and got 30 years.  At the time, that seemed to most people to be excessive, and there was a general feeling that the Establishment was using the full force of the law to make quite clear who was boss.  This no doubt contributed to the sense of sympathy some people expressed.  Perhaps this sense of sympathy tells us more about the social structures of the time than it does about Ronnie.  If people get a kick out of witnessing Grand Larceny, it suggests they feel they don’t have a stake in the community.  Isn’t it all a scam anyway?  Why shouldn’t these people be in it for themselves, when blatant self-interest is exactly what characterises the Establishment?  Lord and Lady Muck.  If you got one over on them, good luck to you, mate!      

If Ronnie Biggs had gone to jail and been released in 1993, I don’t suppose we would have heard any more about him. But on the 8^th July, 1965, he escaped from Wandsworth Prison in South London.  He was on the run for 13,087 days.  Briefly, he went to Paris to effect a disguise under the care of a plastic surgeon.  Then he flew to Sydney Australia.  When the law got on his trail again, he sailed to the New World, and settled in Rio.  He survived two attempted kidnappings, and various attempts at extradition.  He was pursued and arrested in Rio by a Detective Inspector from the Flying Squad, one Jack Slipper.  What a fantastic name, a name Charles Dickens might have made up for a London sleuth.  But Ronnie slipped through Inspector Slipper’s hands. 

He lived a colourful life, with plenty of wine, women, and song.  Some women are attracted to a “loveable rogue”, and this certainly seems to have been the case with Ronnie.  The great and the good from England passing through Rio would go out of their way to get themselves photographed with him.  Yet despite the nice little earner of the Great Train Robbery, he seemed to have a lot of financial worries, and indeed he apparently put in a substantial amount of time doing an honest day’s work, mostly as a carpenter.  But then, how much of all this should we take with a pinch of salt?  Ronnie could be, by his own confession, economical with the truth.  At any rate, it wasn’t the law, but his own failing health, that made him decide to return to England, on his own terms.  He had suffered a series of strokes.  He knew he would be arrested on his return, and he didn’t think he had much life left in him.  On his return in May 2001, he couldn’t have anticipated that he was going to spend a further eight years inside.  He was eventually released on compassionate grounds, as his health further deteriorated, and he spent his final days between a care home and a hospital, and died on December 18^th, 2013, just over 60 years after the event for which he is best known.  His funeral was held at Golders Green Crematorium on January 3^rd 2014.  It was well attended.

Ronnie’s autobiography was “ghosted” by Christopher Pickard.  I don’t know how much of the narrative can be attributed to author, or ghost.  But it’s certainly a fascinating and a readable book.  Loveable rogue?  Ronnie’s funeral was conducted by the Rev Dave Tomlinson, who got a fair amount of stick for conducting the ceremony.  He said, “Jesus didn’t hang out with hoity-toity, holier-than-thou religious people.  He seemed much more at home with the sinners.  At the end of the day, we are all sinners.” 

That’s true.  And yet, I still think of my father’s remark about Jack Mills, the train driver.  I don’t really understand the fascination some of the London glitterati have for East End gangsters.  It’s not unlike the fatal attraction the entertainment world in the US has for the Mob.  Jesus certainly moved among thieves and vagabonds, but he wasn’t attracted to their world.  On the contrary, he entered their world in order to urge them to repent.  When Justice Secretary Jack Straw at first refused Ronnie’s release on parole, it was partly on the grounds that he had shown no remorse for his crime.  This absence of remorse Ronnie renders explicit in his autobiography.  And this fact seems to me to be the overriding defining characteristic of the book.  It is a colourful tale told by somebody who seems, in this regard, entirely lacking in insight.                                                      

Precipice, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson Heinemann, 2024)

In 2010, I was touring around New Zealand’s North Island in a campervan, and found myself in a “Top Ten” camping site just outside Dargaville, north of the Kaipara Harbour.  I saw a beautiful woman, less than half my age, sitting in the lotus position like a squaw outside her wigwam, her long fair hair in a ponytail, reading a book.  Later, I was titivating my van when she suddenly appeared in front of me and said, with a directness which I came to realise was her defining characteristic, “Where are you going tomorrow?”  I said, Auckland.  She said, “Can I come with you?”  I had the odd notion that if I had said I were going in the opposite direction, to Cape Reinga, she would have said, “Can I come with you?”  I said yes.

She was from the Netherlands.  Call her Kate.  She was a great linguist.  “I am learning Maori.  It is pretty easy.”  Her English was perfect.  She was very fond of English literature.  We even discussed Chaucer, and the Latin tag “Amor vincit omnia.”  I had always thought of that as a benison; two people linked by mutual love would conquer the world.  But to her it had a quite different meaning.  If you were debilitated by love, you would be useless, unable to wage war on behalf of the state.

I thought of Kate’s interpretation of Amor vincit omnia when I read Precipice.  It is always a pleasure to read a new Robert Harris novel.  He writes what are called “intelligent thrillers”, well crafted, intensely readable, often based upon a true historical event.  Walter Scott did the same.  Indeed, Robert Harris won the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction for his account, and imaginative expansion, of the Dreyfus affair, in An Officer and a Spy.  Munich features Chamberlain, Lord Dunglass (Alec Douglas-Home) and of course, Herr Hitler.  The Ghost is a ghost writer writing a biography of, I fancy, a thinly disguised Tony Blair.  Precipice is no exception to this pattern.  Here, the starting point is the correspondence between H. H. Asquith, who was British Prime Minister between 1908 and 1916, and Venetia Stanley, a woman of high caste less than half his age, and a contemporary of Asquith’s daughter Violet, later Lady Violet Bonham Carter. 

But the correspondence is one-sided; we only have Asquith’s letters to Venetia.  Venetia’s letters have not survived.  Therefore Harris has had to make them up.  Yet, as the author says in a brief note, “All the letters quoted in the text from the Prime Minister are – the reader may be astonished to learn – authentic.”  They are quoted verbatim.  They are love letters, deeply passionate.  In the first edition of Roy Jenkins’ biography, Asquith (Collins, 1986), Jenkins rather toned down this aspect of the correspondence out of respect to Lady Violet, who was still alive.  And indeed, in Violet Bonham Carter’s Winston Churchill as I knew him (Eyre & Spottiswoode and Collins, 1965), Venetia is indexed once, and gets a single mention, and barely a mention at that.  But it’s not really the declaration of love that is disconcerting; it is the casualness with which Asquith kept Venetia apprised of the machinations of high government, including the period up to and beyond the start of the First World War.  Venetia knew more state secrets than many members of the cabinet.  Asquith would send her official telegrams received from ambassadors in Paris or Berlin.  He even sent her decrypted copies, known as “flimsies”, of strategic war planning, and naval manoeuvres.  When I read this, I was reminded of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, in which, on the eve of the war, a German spy sits in on a meeting of the Admiralty, committing to photographic memory the disposition of the fleet.  His disguise as the First Sea Lord is achieved not by any elaborate cosmesis, but by the creation of “atmosphere”.  He crops up again in Mr Standfast when, in the persona of Moxon Ivery, he is not recognised, until the terror of an air raid “dislimns” his features, and Richard Hannay will never again be hoodwinked by Herr Graf von Schwabing.

But truth is stranger than fiction.  In the real world, Asquith and Venetia would take a drive, chauffeured around London, discussing the disposition of the fleet, then screwing the flimsies into a ball; and tossing them out of the car window.  Had such documents fallen into the wrong hands, the enemy would have been provided with a ready-made code-breaking key.  The German High Command could have deciphered the British codes, much as the British “Ultra” broke the German “Enigma” in the next war.  I wonder what Winston, then First Lord of the Admiralty, would have made of that.  And I wonder if John Buchan, who to all intents and purposes ran the British propaganda machine during the Great War, had some inkling of it.  He knew Asquith, who he said had every traditional virtue – dignity, honour, courage, and a fine selflessness.  But he was – Buchan’s word – impercipient.  And he knew Asquith’s son Raymond, an Oxford man, very well.  In Memory Hold-the-Door he writes of Raymond, “As a letter-writer he was easily the best of us, but his epistles were dangerous things to leave lying about, for he had a most unbridled pen.”  Clearly, a family trait.  Raymond Asquith was killed in the war.

With respect to H. H. Asquith and the flimsies, one might imagine that such cavalier behaviour from the Prime Minister would not be seen in Britain today, but of course it’s not true.  People are forever leaving folders, marked Top Secret, in taxi cabs and railway carriages.  Politicians carry documents while walking along Downing Street, blissfully unaware of the paparazzi with their telephoto lenses.                       

Thus, in Precipice, the finding of classified information scattered around the streets of London starts a police investigation in which a fictionalised police sergeant in the Special Branch gradually pieces together what is happening.  What is the Prime Minister up to?  Is it mere love-sick folly?  And is Venetia passing on information?  If so, to whom?  Is she a security risk?  Spoiler alert – but now we are firmly in the realm of fiction.

Reading Precipice, fiction apart, one has to be impressed by the Royal Mail of the time.  They were providing four deliveries a day in the early part of the twentieth century.  Now we are lucky if we get four a week.  And the price of a first class stamp (3d, as I recall, when I was a child), is about to go up to £1.65.  They say nobody uses the post anymore.  Everybody’s on WhatsApp.  We think our means of communication have changed, but Asquith’s obsessive correspondence with Venetia is remarkably similar to today’s incessant texting amongst teenagers.  They text “C U L8er”, and Asquith, and his contemporaries also used abbreviations like “yr” for “your”.  

Reading Asquith’s letters to Venetia, a strong sense of vulnerability and neediness comes through.  The relationship seems to have the fragility of those frequently encountered in the short stories of Katherine Mansfield.  It can’t last.  Sure enough, eventually, and abruptly, Venetia married a man in Asquith’s government, Edwin Montagu, and broke the Prime Minister’s heart.  It seems incredible now, that the head of the most powerful empire in the world, in charge of the prosecution of the Great War, was preoccupied, obsessively writing three letters a day to a young woman.  Maybe my Netherlands friend Kate was right.  Amor vincit omnia.

We said goodbye in Auckland.  I said, “You didn’t half take a chance, thumbing a lift from me.”  She shrugged and said, “What is life without chances?”      

Last Thursday I attended, as is my wont, the annual Bowman Lecture at the University of Glasgow, a lecture series devoted to the public understanding of statistical methods in their application to various sciences, and indeed to sundry walks of life.  Last year the lecture was given by the head of MI5.  (I suppose it must be all right now to say so: it was after all a public lecture.)  I remember Prof Bowman saying, “How are we going to follow this?”  Well, this year the speaker was Dr Chris Wiggins, Chief Data Scientist of the New York Times, also an assistant professor at Columbia University.  He gave a talk entitled How Data Happened: A history from the Age of Reason to the Age of AI.  The talk was, in effect, a precis of a book Dr Wiggins co-wrote with the historian Matthew L. Jones, entitled, How Data Happened: a history from the age of reason to the age of algorithms.  That immediately begs the question, is there a close association between “AI” and “algorithms”?  Do Turing Machines think algorithmically?  If this, do that?  I suppose they do, in the sense that everything is reduced to binary code.  We, Homo sapiens, don’t think algorithmically, unless we are forced to do so by our on-line managers and work supervisors.  That way lies mental breakdown, and madness.      

I greatly enjoyed the Bowman Lecture.  That came to me as something of a surprise, because I didn’t feel particularly kindly disposed towards my idea of Artificial Intelligence.  Recently, our erstwhile PM Sir Tony Blair came on the airwaves to wax enthusiastic about the potential for AI to transform the National Health Service.  I wrote to The Herald, twice.  I think I may have mentioned it in this blog.  I well remember the way, around a quarter of a century ago, the predecessor to AI, Information Technology (IT), “transformed” the Health Service.  When the sharp suits closed in on the NHS with their automated systems, I remember thinking at the time that this was not about improving patient outcomes, it was all about power.  Clinicians were not looking for a procedure or methodology with which to solve a clinical problem.  Rather Information Technologists were looking for a field of human activity – health, education, policing – in which a computerised system could be applied, or, perhaps, inflicted.      

But I was disarmed by Chris Wiggins, because as it seemed to me, he had no axe to grind.  He wasn’t peddling a system that might benefit an organisation.  Rather he was recounting the relationship between humanity and data – or enumerated facts – that has developed over the last 250 years.  He didn’t even seem to be particularly impressed by the notion that numerical data added weight to an argument.  Data can be used as a tool or weapon, to argue what is true.  It can be a tool for rearranging, or defending, power.  Data can be created and curated.  The use, or abuse, of “Big Data” becomes an unstable game that can be played among states, companies, and people generally. 

What is “Artificial Intelligence”?  Are these super-computers really “Intelligent”?  It turned out that this was a question of more interest to the audience than to the lecturer, who was more focused on what these machines can, of themselves, achieve.  After all, Alan Turing devised a computer that could break the Nazi Enigma Code, without pondering whether or not his Colossus could “think”.  So Dr Wiggins was less interested in the philosophical questions posed by AI, referred to by an audience member as “epistemological”, as to what these systems might be capable of.  Similarly, he wasn’t preoccupied by the notion that AI might present humanity with an existential threat.  Would AI, asked the Vice-Principal, signal the death of scientific creativity?  Dr Wiggins thought not.  Was AI a good thing?  All he would say was that he thought it was here to stay.

Here to stay indeed.  It’s back on the front page of today’s Herald.  AI hopes for patients with heart failure.  This describes a pilot study led by the University of Dundee, working with an AI company to develop software to scan patient records and patient investigations, such as echocardiography, in order to identify specific patients who would benefit from specific treatments.  AI tech, says the follow-up article on Page 8, could “revolutionise” care for heart failure patients. 

But you see, medicine is not remotely like that.  You don’t start with an investigation and then go looking for a patient.  You start with a patient, and you start with a history.  As a doctor, you don’t just collect data.  You step into the patient’s shoes.  You almost go into a trance.  For a moment, you become the patient.  You try to experience yourself, something of the patient’s experience, and you try to formulate a plan of management that is utterly unique to a specific individual.  It comes at a cost.

One thing is clear; the outcome achieved by the automated perusal of vast amounts of data will only ever be as good as the quality, and validity, of the data itself.  Data in medicine, for example, must always be taken with a pinch of salt.  Death certificate data is particularly suspect.  As to cause of death, in the absence of a post mortem, the doctor usually takes a punt, primarily aimed at facilitating funeral arrangements on behalf of the bereaved.  There is a letter in today’s Herald about Lib Dem MSP Liam McArthur’s Assisted Dying Bill, shortly to reappear in Holyrood, which instructs doctors to issue death certificates recording cause of death as the terminal illness of the deceased, and not the lethal potion that has been taken.  The cause of death is misrepresented.  The terminal illness did not kill the patient; and in the normal course of events, it might never have killed the patient.  This is just one more example of the recording of bad data.  It needs to be resisted.                            

The oft quoted cliché attributed to Mark Twain about lies, damned lies, and statistics, can be taken two ways, either as short-hand for a rapidly accelerating spiral of disinformation, or as a portrayal of a contrast – on the one hand lies and damned lies, and on the other, data as an exemplar of truth.  Even more obscure than Mark Twain, Robert Burns once said that “Facts are chiels that winna ding”, which I think means that truths will resonate with one another, and not be dissonant.  Yet we live in an age of cognitive dissonance, humbug, and fake news.  Pontius Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” is the question of our time.        

Let’s talk about the weather.  (If this were a G & S Operetta, a patter song would follow.)

A glance at the forecast in the Herald says it all.  Cloud will bubble up… heavy rain will push into the northwest…

…Unsettled tomorrow with cloudy skies and heavy rain to start the day…

The pattern seems to have been prolonged rainy days with moments of brief respite in the evening.  It has been dreich, not to say gruamach.  Incidentally, an airline pilot who corresponds with the Herald wrote in (he writes a very good letter) to say that on leaving Heathrow en route – “I think” – for Chicago he had remarked to the passengers that the weather in Chicago was “dreich”.  He was inundated with enquiries as to what he meant.  I was more intrigued by his dubious recollection of the destination.  Perhaps he had announced, “Ladies and gentleman welcome to this BA flight to – I think – Chicago.”    

To say that we here in Caledonia have had an indifferent summer would be a gross exaggeration.  In fact we have elided seamlessly from spring to autumn.  There is general consensus in the farming community in which I live that the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is upon us.  We have been complaining about the rain for weeks, but exactly to whom, or about whom, are we complaining? Surely this is one element of general public dissatisfaction that cannot be pinned upon the Scottish National Party.  Granted climate change is manmade (though many correspondents to the Herald continue to disagree), but we’re supposed to be warming up.  At home, I’ve had the heater on most evenings.  Shouldn’t complain.  I dare say many people who have had to endure a scorching summer in continental Europe would envy us our climate.  And we have not had any startling events of the sort that so tragically sunk a yacht off Sicily within the space of a few moments.   

So we have reached the “auld claes an’ purritch” time of year without really having had an interlude of warmth and sunshine.  The clothes shops, like Burss on Glasgow’s Dumbarton Road, used to sport new uniforms in the window with the mantra “Back to school” – which as scholars we would read with a sinking of the heart.  I have never lost the autumnal “Back to school” mentality.  Time to resume all the activities that have been put on hold.  Back to the orchestra, back to the German class; time to get serious about the three literary projects that are currently lying fallow – an essay, a memoir, an epistolatory novel, of a sort.  Don’t knock it.  Routine is very important.  A reason for getting up in the morning.  I’m sure this was why President Biden was initially so reluctant to pass the torch.  It must be the most difficult thing in the world, one moment to be at the centre of things, the next to be faced with the prospect of an eternity watching daytime TV.  The Germans, as ever, have an expressive composite word denoting the terror of the aged, experiencing the gradual closing down of opportunities, like the shutting of doors: Türschlosspanik.   A centenarian lady on Broadcasting House (BBC Radio 4) on Sunday morning, who happened to be doing a sky-dive for charity, encouraged us all never to give anything up, although she did add a rider…  unless you have to.  Perhaps equally encouraging advice would be to consider taking up something new.      

So I dusted off my viola on Saturday and played with the Antonine Ensemble.  We played Mozart, Grieg, Warlock, and Janáček.  Janáček’s Idyla was unknown to me, reminiscent of Dvořák, very Czech, and very beautiful, but tricky.  And we only have one and a half more rehearsals before we give two performances, one in St Michael’s Linlithgow and one in Dunblane Cathedral.  Still, it’s good to resurrect the muscle memory.  The previous day I’d enjoyed a beautiful lunch – made entirely, I think, out of home grown products – in West Kilbride, home of the world’s tastiest potato.  It was a convocation of musicians.  Somebody produced a bundle of photographs of us all from 50 years ago.  As John Buchan said in Memory Hold the Door, “I have no new theory of time”, but sometimes I have a feeling that time, the passage of time, is an illusion, and that everything that resides in memory remains forever in the present.  But I struggle to express myself. Yet I’m not quite ready to start the Michaelmas Term.  I’ve felt the need to create a little “hiatus”, as American students dub the summer break, in order to start the new academic year with something like recharged batteries.  So in September I’ve arranged to spend a few days in Kraków, and Berlin.  I will come back a new man!  Watch this space.                                      

On Saturday night, I debated whether to tune into Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem at the London Proms (BBC Radio 3), or a documentary on Radio 4, The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski.  Spoiled for choice – something of a First World problem.  I remember being faced with such dilemmas as a child, particularly on the telly, when I really did need to choose one programme and sacrifice the other – no “sounds” or i-player.  I remember saying to my cousin, “Wouldn’t it be marvellous if there was a device, something like a tape recorder, that could record both sound and pictures together, so that we could save programmes and watch them later?”  She raised her eyes to the ceiling.  I was talking science fiction.  Presumably the BBC owned such a device, but even they were profligate with their own productions, constantly tossing chunks of the archive into a skip.  Nowadays, when every picture, or utterance, sane or mad, survives in the cloud for perpetuity, I have no interest.

In the event, I listened to the Bronowski, and then watched the Britten on Sunday evening on television on BBC 4.  I was a great fan of Bronowski’s thirteen part history of science which was first broadcast in the 1970s, and did for science what Kenneth Clark’s thirteen part Civilisation had done for art.  Both series were wonderful.  Was not the BBC more audacious then than it is now?  And more trusting of the audience’s intellect, staying power, and attention span.  Crucially, both series used “background” music very sparingly.  Now, musical gloop fills the airwaves.  Broadcasters are terrified of dead air.

I can’t say I learned much from The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski that I didn’t already know.  For all the immense success of The Ascent of Man, there was, and always has been, an academic backlash against it.  Bronowski was aware of it, and even parodied it.  “It isn’t sound you know, it isn’t sound.”  I dare say there was a certain amount of professional jealousy involved.  Bronowski was a fantastic communicator.  His appearance on the Michael Parkinson show bears this out.  Watch it, and see if I am not right.  He has a beguiling way of pausing briefly before answering each of Parkinson’s questions.  Parkie came as close as he ever did to asserting that this was his favourite of all his interviews. 

It is said that there was a dark side to Bronowski, with respect to his mathematical work during the Second World War.  He was a boffin.  I believe he worked on the destructive power of bombs.  I had hoped that The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski might cast a little light on this, but the documentary was thin on detail.  No doubt Bronowski, rather like the occupants of Bletchley Park, was sworn to lifelong secrecy.  So we are left with the rather unsatisfactory thesis that it was some internal sense of guilt that drove Bronowski to step into a pool at Auschwitz, and to let the ashes of his ancestors run through his hands.  This was the culmination of Part 11 of The Ascent of Man, Knowledge or Certainty, a little masterpiece.  There is some kind of unspoken innuendo here that I don’t understand.  You could as easily imply as much about Barnes Wallis, or Johnnie von Neumann, or R. J. Mitchell, or Frank Whittle, or Enrico Fermi, or Richard Feynman.  Or indeed, Werner Heisenberg, or Wernher von Braun.  Maybe there’s something in it.  Once you chuck your hat into the ring, once you take sides and get involved, you cannot avoid sharing your part in a collective guilt.  (Talking of hats, somebody has just bought Indiana Jones’ fedora for about half a million pounds.  He must be off his head.  I digress.) Benjamin Britten’s contribution to the war effort could be said to have been more oblique.  He had pacifist views, and was in the USA in 1940.  He accepted a commission then from the Japanese Government to compose his Sinfonia da Requiem, a wonderful work, which the Japanese politely declined to accept apparently because of its Christian connotations.  Britten returned to the UK during the war.  He visited Wormwood Scrubs to entertain the inmates, one of whom was Michael Tippett, another pacifist.  At the end of the war he persuaded Yehudi Menuhin to let him be his accompanist when he visited a newly liberated Belsen concentration camp.  So, like Bronowski, Britten had a desire to confront humanity’s darkest manifestation.  The War Requiem deals with the pity, and futility, of war.  It was composed in 1961-62, to commemorate the rebuilding, and consecration, of Coventry Cathedral following its destruction by the Luftwaffe in 1940, in Unternehmen Mondscheinsonate (Operation Moonlight Sonata.  If Beethoven had known, I think he would have obliterated the title superimposed upon his Op. 27, No. 2.)  It was blitzed, or “coventrated” (koventrieren – Dr Goebbels’ term, I believe.)  At the time, Coventry Provost Dick Howard wrote the words “Father forgive” on the ruined walls of the cathedral, and he rather got into hot water for it.  He was sent to Coventry.  The War Requiem was an attempt to put into words and music Wilfred Owen’s message that all a poet can do is warn.  The solo voices in the first recording, conducted by Britten, were English, German, and Russian, Peter Pears, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Galena Vishnevskaya.  That recording has become something of a touchstone, but the performance on Saturday under Sir Antonio Pappano was a revelation.  I had always chiefly devoted my attention to the settings of Owen’s poetry, but on Sunday it was the text of the Latin mass that gripped me.  I’m not usually much of a fan of hellfire and damnation, but in this context the mass really became a depiction of the manmade hellishness of war, and also, vividly, an expression of Britten’s anger in the face of its futility.  Sadly, the work remains as relevant to us as it ever was.  We don’t seem to have captured the knack of turning swords into ploughshares.                                            

One late night sometime in the early 1980s, I was standing with a young lady, with whom, to use an archaic expression, I was “walking out”, on a platform in Edinburgh’s Waverley Station.  I can’t really remember the occasion, or whether we were coming or going, but I remember glancing across to the platform from which the London sleeper was about to depart, and seeing Eric Liddell bid somebody farewell, and board the train.  Perhaps he was going down to the White City to take part in the 100 yard dash.  To be clear, it wasn’t really Eric Liddell; it was Ian Charleson, who played the Scottish athlete in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire.  Who does not recognise Vangelis’ music to the opening credits of that film, against the backdrop of athletes in training running along the sands of St Andrews?  Nigel Havers is mud-bespattered, and looks as if he is enjoying himself.  The scene is supposed to be set in Broadstairs, Kent, but everybody recognises the view from St Andrews’ Old Course.  I once met an athlete who had been a film extra on that set, running along the beach, and taking part in subsequent scenes.  He told me that Ben Cross, who played Harold Abrahams, had natural athletic ability, but not Ian Charleson.  Still, Eric Liddell was not a pretty runner, but, with his arms flapping and his head held back, he could achieve extraordinary speeds. 

Eric Liddell featured yesterday in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Worship, on the last day of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.  The programme came from Liddell’s old church at “Holy Corner” in Morningside.  Of course he was famous for his appearance in the Paris Olympics a century ago in 1924, when, as a devout Christian, he refused to run in the sprint, because the heats were to take place on a Sunday.  He switched to the 400 metres, which he went on to win.  The 100 metres was won by Harold Abrahams.  The story in Chariots of Fire is built round the progress of these two athletes towards their respective Olympic finals.  Liddell had to resist pressure from the British establishment, including Lord Birkenhead, and no less a figure than the Prince of Wales, the man who was to succeed to the throne, as Edward VIII, in 1936.  Abrahams had to endure anti-Semitic barbs from his masters at Cambridge, who disapproved of his thoroughly modern, scientific approach to sport.  Of course they thought his coach, Sam Mussabini, was common as muck.  “Your approach, Mr Abrahams, is altogether too plebeian.”  And before his final, the Prince of Wales said to him, “Do your best, Abrahams.  It’s all we can expect.”  At least, so the film has it. 

Back on the Waverley platform, I think I amused my old friend by hamming up my Scottish accent and quoting from the film: “Of course we’ll go to China.  But Jenny, I’m fast, and when I run, I feel God’s pleasure.”  She also rather liked my rendition of a line from a film of similar vintage, the cold war drama The Tamarind Seed, in which Omar Sharif said to Julie Andrews, “Group Captain Patterson, was he a good lover?  Did he please you?”  Forgive these idle reminiscences. 

Sunday Worship concentrated rather more on Liddell’s subsequent career than on the 1912 Olympics.  He did indeed go to China, to become a missionary.  But then the Japanese invaded China, and Liddell found himself in an internment camp.  His ability, and devotion, to help people in the direst of circumstances, reminds me of Viktor Frankl’s descriptions, in Man’s Search for Meaning, of people in Auschwitz who were able and willing to give fellow prisoners their last piece of bread. 

I have a notion that Liddell’s positive effect on people continues on down the ages.  In a remote part of New Zealand, I once did a weekend locum for a doctor who had been born in China during the war, born, in fact, in that same internment camp, and who as a child had sat on Eric Liddell’s knee.  And there is another New Zealand connection.  In the famous, perhaps infamous, 1936 Berlin Olympics, the great New Zealand middle distance runner Jack Lovelock won the 1500 metres, in a race which is still considered by some to be one of the most perfect ever to be executed.  Lovelock was a deeply mysterious character, an Oxford student and insomniac who would run through the town, past the beautiful spires, by night.  Subsequently a doctor, an orthopaedic surgeon, practising in New York, he tragically fell to his death under a train in the New York underground.  His story is beautifully retold in two books by the New Zealand writer James McNeish, The Man from Nowhere, and Lovelock.  His connection with the 1912 Olympics?  For Lovelock’s great 1936 race, the radio commentator for the BBC was Harold Abrahams. 

Anyway, we’ll always have Paris.  The Olympic torch is on its way to L.A., by motorbike, courtesy of Tom Cruise.  I didn’t watch the closing ceremony, tuning in instead to the BBC London Prom, in which Daniel Barenboim conducted the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.  While young Jews and Arabs sit together in the Royal Albert Hall to play Brahms and Schubert, US warships are full steam ahead to the eastern Mediterranean.  The world is on full alert.  I wonder what Eric Liddell would have made of the world today.  I suppose he would have kept calm, and carried on.  In his internment camp, there was a kid running around in bare feet, in the deep mid-winter.  So Eric gave him his running shoes.                                   

So far – at least at time of writing – the civil unrest that has swept through so many English cities has not spilled north of the border.  Knock on wood.  But there is no room for complacency.  Incidentally, somebody on Woman’s Hour (BBC Radio 4) the other day talked about “the invisible border”.  It was said in the context of a discussion about enforced marriage.  Apparently young women who are being trafficked abroad, usually by their own family, for purposes of compulsory nuptials for which they are less than enthusiastic, are encouraged to place a spoon (not a knife, or a fork) in their underwear.  That will set off the alarm as they pass through airport security, and thus they are afforded an opportunity to discuss their plight, with a disinterested party, in confidence.  In England, girls aged 16 can marry with parental permission, and those who campaign against forced marriage would like this option to be removed.  Of course, in Scotland, you can marry aged 16 without parental permission.  Is this not why Ms Lydia Bennet purportedly fled to Gretna with Mr Wickham?  The activist on Woman’s Hour certainly wanted to remove this option “above the imaginary border”. 

But we are not rioting in Glasgow, or Edinburgh, or Dundee, or Aberdeen, so maybe the border is more tangible than it appears.  A young woman was stabbed in Stirling on Saturday evening.  A man was arrested.  Rumours circulated on social media, generated from south of the imaginary border, that three people had been stabbed, and the attacker was a Muslim.  Police Scotland has said that this claim is false.  This sort of thing is often called “misinformation and disinformation”, and I often wonder if there is a subtle difference between the “mis-” and the “dis-”.  To my ear, disinformation sounds more nefarious than misinformation.  Misinformation could be accidental, but disinformation is deliberate.  So, somebody south of the imaginary border wants to foment trouble in Scotland.  But it’s a strange word, and a strange notion, to disinform.  It implies a retraction, in the same manner that you might be “disinvited” from a social function.  You might inform the public that Huw Edwards is the voice of the BBC; then you might disinform the public by carefully removing all trace of Mr Edwards from the BBC archive.  Mr Edwards would be like the character Syme in Orwell’s 1984.  Syme does not exist.  He never existed.  But in fact “disinformation” is not retraction; rather it is blatant lying.  So I propose that “disinformation” should be spelled “dysinformation”.  The “dys-” prefix, as in “dysfunctional” or “dysarthria” or “dysthymia”, implies that something is ill, bad, or abnormal.

Dysinformation on social media spreads like wildfire.  Going on to social media is a bit like going down to the pub. People’s tongues are loosened.  Intemperate comments are liable to be voiced.  After all, it’s just banter.  The sorts of comments you are likely to read on social media are exactly like the sorts of comments you are likely to hear down the pub.  The one difference is that pub talk is ephemeral, but comments on social media survive in perpetuity. 

It turned out that the 17 year old perpetrator of heinous crimes in Southport last Monday was neither Muslim nor an immigrant, legal or illegal.  A judge lifted the ban on identifying him, no doubt, because it was in the public interest that these facts be known.  But it didn’t make a whit of difference.  Apparently white working class males in England feel very disenfranchised.    

There is a trope, a cliché, that social media of themselves are neither moral nor immoral; what matters is how these platforms are used.  I would challenge that.  You have to evaluate such entities as they exist in the real world, and not in some hypothetical sphere.  X is puerile, or perhaps more accurately, adolescent.  It’s the preoccupation of the teenager, to conform, be part of the group, one of the gang.  It’s an indictment of our society that our politicians feel they have to have a social media presence, or they will simply disappear.  Mr Trump uses his own platform, called, ironically, “Truth”. 

Our universities embed academic courses within social media.  I think they should stop doing this.  University would be the ideal place in which to tell people that it is time to put away childish things.  (Of course, the tech giants wouldn’t like it.  But that is because they are making a lot of money.)

But I can’t say I’m hopeful.  Universities, even, perhaps especially, north of the imaginary border, are notoriously craven when it comes to yielding to the whimsy of the Zeitgeist.  In Edinburgh, the David Hume Tower is now 40 George Square.  In Saint Andrews, the rector has been dismissed because she voiced, in a personal capacity, a view that was not remotely extreme, but was deemed to make part of the student body feel “unsafe”.                    

But I’m beginning to sound like one of the guys down the pub having a rant after a few jars.  Any more outlandish remarks and I will be cancelled, disinvited, no-platformed, and disappeared.  So on a cheerier note, let me say I’m thoroughly enjoying the BBC London Proms.  Last night John Wilson conducted his own scratch bad, the Sinfonia of London, in an all-American programme, and tonight, Benjamin Grosvenor is going to play the rarely heard, 71 minute long, Busoni Piano Concerto.  I’m almost tempted to take a trip south of the imaginary border. 

I see that Scotland has won the World Schools Debating Championships, held in Belgrade.  The Scottish team, drawn from Dollar Academy, Portobello High School, Broxburn Academy, and St Columba’s in Kilmacolm, had defeated New Zealand, Pakistan, England, and Qatar, to meet Bulgaria in the final.  They won on the motion, “This house regrets the glorification of champions”.  It wasn’t given much publicity, so maybe they argued their case rather too well!

There is a long history of healthy debate in Scottish schools.  My school in Glasgow had a thriving Literary & Debating Society.  There would be a motion.  “This house believes that censorship in all its forms should be abolished.”  There would be four principal speakers, a proposer, given the floor for ten minutes, followed by the opposition; then the motion would be seconded, and again, the opposition backed up.  The chair would preside, but only intervene to ensure that rules of fair play were adhered to.  Then the debate would be opened up to the house.  The topics were wide-ranging – political, moral-ethical, social, local, national, international.  Nothing was off limits.  People were taught to mount a cogent argument, to back up assertion with evidence, to be open-minded and, above all, to listen.  People who went on to be very effective in the political world first cut their teeth, in various schools, in “The Lit” – Robin Cook, Charles Kennedy.  The tradition continued at university level.  I remember at Glasgow, visiting politicos were given a very hard time.  I wondered then why many of them bothered to put up with the harangue.  But a few were very effective at wooing and courting the crowd.  Jeremy Thorpe.  That was before his spectacular fall from grace. 

But a chasm has opened up between civilised discourse, and political point-scoring in the real world.  You see it, and hear it, in BBC debate programmes such as Any Questions? And Question Time.  Politicians, constrained by the whip, shamelessly spout humbug.  They talk over their opponent when the opponent expresses a view they do not wish to hear, or to be heard.  The chair is partisan.

In the US, political debate has become coarse, tribal, and vicious.  The vitriol is fuelled by social media.  Last week, Mr Trump called Ms Harris “a bum”.  I presume that was a US rather than a UK bum.

Bum (1) the buttocks; the anus.

Bum (2) (chiefly N American slang) a dissolute fellow, tramp; a sponger.  Adj, worthless; despicable; dud; wrong, false. 

I don’t think Mr Trump backed up his assertion with any evidence.  In her memoir, The Truths We Hold, I don’t recall Ms Harris spending a significant amount of time on Skid Row.  And even if she had, would it matter?  In the debating world, Mr Trump’s assertion is known as an argument ad hominem.  It is a slur.  We can expect more of them.  Ms Harris’ statement, on the other hand, that Mr Trump is a felon, is a statement of fact.

I recall that in 2016, Mr Trump deployed similar tactics in debating with Hilary Clinton.  He would prowl about the stage, and position himself close right behind her.  That the chair did not put a stop to this was really a dereliction of duty.  “Go back to your lectern Mr Trump.  I won’t tell you again.”  In response to the attacks, Hilary Clinton said, “When they go low, we go high.”  It will be very interesting to see how Ms Harris handles Trump.  I think she should go low.  I don’t mean by that that she should descend to his level.  Heaven forfend.  Rather, changing the metaphor, I think she should get under the radar, and catch him unawares, in debates, at points at which he is vulnerable.  She needs to fact-check him, on the spot, in real time.  Mr Trump reminds me of a character in John Buchan’s Greenmantle, that great Prussian bruiser, Stumm.  When Richard Hannay punches him on the nose, Stumm blinked.  Stumm is a bully, and like all bullies, he does not expect to be hurt.  Not that I am suggesting that Ms Harris punch Mr Trump on the nose.  But I think Ms Harris could rattle Mr Trump.  I think she already has.    

On this side of the Pond, compared with all of that, political discourse seems almost civilised.  At least for the moment.  The first PMQs after the General Election was rather decorous.  Mr Sunak was self-deprecatory when he remarked that the Team GB Olympians might not value his advice on how to win.  Sir Keir concurred in wishing the athletes in Paris all the best.  He certainly doesn’t regret the glorification of champions, or aspiring champions.  But Sir Keir is enjoying a honeymoon period, which I dare say will not last long.  Shortly we will return to business as usual, to Ya-Boo politics.  It’s a far cry from the Literary & Debating Society.            

After the assassination attempt last week, Mr Trump said he was going to rip up, and rewrite, his speech of acceptance, due in Milwaukee on Thursday, of the nomination to be the Republican candidate for the presidency.  He said he wanted to be president for all Americans, not just half of them.  He wanted to heal divisions.  Perhaps he’s had a Damascene moment.  If you come within a quarter of an inch of losing your life, you are bound to look upon it differently. 

The events that are unfolding across the Pond have a biblical quality.  Mr Trump has attributed his miraculous escape to divine intervention.  He turned his head at just the right moment.  I was reminded of a story in The Little World of Don Camillo, by Giovanni Guareschi, concerning the activities of a parish priest in an obscure village in the Po River valley, with a Communist mayor, in post-war Italy.  Even in such a parochial environment, political tensions were liable to run high, and Don Camillo’s life was endangered because he had knowledge, obtained within the sanctity of the confessional, of the identity of a murderer.  Consequently somebody took a pot-shot at him when he was communing in the church, as was his wont, with Our Lord, on the cross.  He was given a nudge, a quarter of an inch, and Our Lord took the bullet.  Don Camillo said, “You moved my head!” but our Lord shrugged and said, “Don’t get so excited.”

Cynically, we assume that Mr Trump, in ascribing his survival to the intervention of the Almighty, is merely wooing and cultivating the evangelical vote.  But let us for a moment suppose he thinks he has been miraculously preserved for some higher purpose.  I should think his must be a common reaction to an uncommon set of circumstances.  In all the miraculous escapes afforded Winston throughout his military career, he often had the strong sense that he was being preserved for some higher calling.  Those of us who have been critical of the first Trump term might consider such a notion to be absurd.  But the bible is full of similar absurdities.  God has called upon the most unlikely individuals to be his emissary.  Noah was a figure of ridicule, building his ark on dry land.  Moses got nervous as a public speaker.  David was an adulterer and a murderer.  Saul, aka Paul, was a fanatical zealot; he held the coats when they stoned Stephen.  And so on.  It’s a bit like the 1963 film of The Great Escape.  The Forger was blind, and the Tunnel King had claustrophobia.  It’s ridiculous. 

On Thursday, Mr Trump wore a dressing on his right ear.  That’s not just therapeutics, it’s iconography.  What is it about the ear?  When they came to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, one of the disciples rather lost his temper and cut off the ear of a servant of the high priest.  Jesus gently rebuked him.  He might have borrowed a line from Othello.  Keep up you bright swords, for the dew will rust ’em.  The traumatic amputation of an ear once started a war between Great Britain and Spain, Guerra del Asiento (1739 – 1748), or the War of Jenkins’ Ear.  It concerned the slave trade in the Caribbean.  The conflict was subsumed within the War of Austrian Succession.  As Jesus said, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.

One thing I’ll say about Trump: I don’t think he’s a warmonger.  He says he will end the war in Ukraine with a single phone call.  Good luck with that.  Mr Chamberlain thought he could avert war through similar diplomatic channels, not exactly a phone call, but a trip to Berchtesgaden.  That went well.

But now, all of a sudden, everything has changed.  Mr Biden has bowed to pressure.  He is like an elderly person who has finally been persuaded by his family to hand over the car keys.  He has endorsed his vice president Kamala Harris to be the democratic candidate for the presidency.  Mr Trump has said that she will be an even easier opponent to beat, than “Sleepy Joe”.  Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?  But I don’t think so.  I’ve read her book.  The Truths We Hold.  (Why do American political memoirs always have such portentous titles?)  Incidentally, I don’t think people pronounce Ms Harris’s name correctly.  It should be “Comma-la”.  There is a gag, that if Ms Harris was your lawyer seeking compensation on your behalf, she might add a few commas on to the total sum achieved.  In other words, she’s a fighter.  Early days, but we have the possibility that the presidential contest will be between a prosecutor, and a felon.  All of a sudden, the forthcoming American election has become interesting.      

Sir Tony Blair popped up on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme’s 8.10 am slot one day last week, en route to opening a conference of his highly influential think tank.  He was full of enthusiasm for Artificial Intelligence (AI).  It’s The Next Big Thing.  We in the UK are already pioneers.  We must grasp this opportunity with both hands.  Sir Tony was particularly interested in the application of AI to the running of the National Health Service.  We need to digitise all our data and make it available, as an inexhaustible well of resource.  He was particularly interested in preventative medicine.  Prevention is better than cure.  Your genome, for example, might tell you what awaits you.  Then you can cut the grim reaper off at the pass.  Your laboratory results might lie slightly outwith the quoted “normal” levels.  Therefore you must have a “pre-” condition.  Treat it now.  Big Pharma have sensed this enormous commercial opportunity for quite some time.  Drive your cholesterol down as low as you can; drive your blood pressure down as low as you can; take a poly-pill, and treat half a dozen conditions that you don’t actually have.      

I suppose this is what politicians, or ex-politicians, do.  Finger in the air.  See what’s coming round the corner, get on the front foot, and don’t be left behind.       

It all reminded me of the digital revolution in health that started around the beginning of the millennium.  It was seen as an unstoppable force.  The computer infiltrated the consultation room, like a nanny in a horror movie, taking up residence in the family home, to care for the children, apparently all sweetness and light, but in reality a deeply malignant emissary of the devil.  Everything was going to run smoothly – I was going to say “like clockwork”, but of course it’s not like clockwork at all.  Now, there are 7.5 million people waiting for an outpatient hospital appointment, and that’s just south of the border.  People who can afford it elect to go privately.  I confess when in practice I would sometimes encourage my patients so to do, or at least I would give them the option, and tell them how it was.  The neurologist will see you in eighteen months, or, if you elect to go privately, this afternoon. 

You might imagine Sir Tony’s think tank might pause to consider we may have taken a wrong turn.  But no.  Rather, they are “doubling down”.  AI is the next cure-all.  Here we go again.  Naturally I wrote to The Herald:

Dear Sir,

Artificial Intelligence (AI), according to Sir Demis Hassabis and Sir Tony Blair, “could be one of humanity’s biggest ever inventions” (The Herald, July 10), but I think we should find an alternative name for this entity.      

During my 13 years in emergency medicine in New Zealand, the junior doctors went on strike twice, and the emergency department was run by consultants.  As a group, they were highly intelligent.  They didn’t spend much time perusing data, and their use of investigative technology was spare, and extremely targeted.  Instead, they spent a lot of time taking a very careful history from the patient.  They never thought algorithmically; they used a combination of knowledge, skill, and wisdom, as captured in the motto of the Royal College of General Practice: cum Scientia caritas.  Their approach was not remotely robotic.

On their watch, the recourse to laboratory and imaging diagnostic facilities, and the hospital admission rate, all went down.  Medicine, well-practised, has got nothing to do with Big Data.  Accurate diagnosis is all about filtering out white noise.  AI will no doubt be a very lucrative gravy train for somebody, but it won’t benefit the doctors and nurses, and it certainly won’t benefit the patients.  

Sincerely…

For the remainder of the week I perused my daily paper for my letter.  But it never appeared.  When this happens, I usually try and shrug it off.  After all, the newsprint will be wrapping the fish and chips by tea-time.  But I cannot deny my disappointment.  I have been dismissed as a Luddite.  Yesterday’s man.

But I was taught never to practise Blunderbuss Medicine.  There is no such thing as a “routine” blood test.  You order a test to answer a specific question that has been posed by the patient’s history and examination.  The result may or may not help you to make a clinical diagnosis.  Making a diagnosis is making a decision, and it has to be clear-cut.  There is no such thing as “a touch of diabetes” – much as Big Pharma would like you to think so.  You might as well suffer from a touch of pregnancy.  Think diagnostically.  I call this “the broad brush strokes of medicine”.  Example: don’t conclude somebody has pernicious anaemia just because they have a borderline low vitamin B12 level.  If the patient is well, that result is perfectly normal.  The last time I made a diagnosis of pernicious anaemia, I measured the patient’s B12, and the result came back: zero.  But I wax too technical. 

If you put the entire population on a spectrum of ill health, if everybody is on the borderline of something, then you effectively kill off the art of diagnosis, and the waiting lists for access to health care can do nothing other than sky-rocket.

By Saturday I had given up on my letter.  And the world moves on.  Mr Trump took a bullet in the ear.  Conspiracy theories abound.  Apparently he said to the welter of secret service personnel on top of him, “Where are my shoes?  I need my shoes.”  I suppose it’s the sort of thing that preoccupies you when you are inches away from death.  It remains to be seen whether this is an “inflection point” signalling a return of good manners to public life or, rather, the continuation of a downward spiral.

Sunday was at last a beautiful summer’s day and I found myself amid the rolling hills of Ayrshire, having a delightful lunch with family in The Blair (no relation to Sir Tony as far as I know) in Auchentiber.  Then in the evening, it became evident that football, on this occasion, was not coming home.  I watched the match.  I don’t belong to the “Anyone but England” camp; I supported my good neighbour, particularly because the fans had given the mild-mannered Gareth Southgate such a hard time.  I’d heard England were performing below par throughout the competition, but I thought they played very well, even if Spain were the better team.  If a Spaniard hadn’t headed the ball off the goal line it might have gone to extra time, thence to penalties. But these are all counterfactuals.

So life goes on.  This morning I got my paper as usual and opened the letters page with no great expectation.

I’m in!