Diplomacy in Action

As we have mentioned before, occasionally we reap a nice treat or two from the fact that Kathi works at the Embassy. Recently, the new American Ambassador (Robert Tuttle) presented his credentials to Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace. The presentation of credentials is a significant event in most countries and is usually accompanied by some solemnity, but in London, it is something special and, of course, surrouned by tradition.




As part of the ceremony, the Marshall of the Diplomatic Corps, presently Sir Anthony Figgis,
was driven to the embassy in a state carriage to take Ambassador and Mrs. Tuttle to Buckingham Palace. All Embassy personnel and family members were invited to gather on the front steps of the chancery to greet the Marshall upon his arrival, and then bid goodbye to the Marshall and the Ambassador and Mrs. Tuttle as they departed the Embassy for Buckingham Palace.

About an hour later, the staff was invited to return to the front of the Embassy to greet the party upon its return from Buckingham Palace.

One of the traditons associated with this ceremony is for the Ambassador, as a show of gratitude for the ride, to feed the carriage horses when they return him to the embassy. And, of course, Ambassador Tuttle did just that, using a combination of carrots and apples. The horses, presumably having enjoyed the snack, then returned to their stables with their red-coated drivers and footmen.

The top photo shows the closed carriage arrivng at the embassy. In the middle one, the now open carriage, with the Ambassor and his wife is returning to the embassy. And in the third photo the carriage is arriving in front of the embassy with Sir Anthony, and the Tuttles.

It’s frequently very interesting around here!

Lexicography Sam

You remember Samuel Johnson -- creator of the first great dictionary of the English language. His London home is on the route of our recent London exploration walk. Just around the corner from his home a major office building is being built and the builders have decided to do something unusual but fitting. They've surrounded the construction site with the usual fence but the bank who's financing the construction had the fence painted with large letters of the alphabet, each one accompanied by a word, plus definition, from Johnson's dictionary.

Check out some representative entries at: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/891603/1/40413015

Royal Justice

While on our recent Saturday walking exploration we found ourselves passing the Royal Courts of Justice. We’ve written earlier about the Old Bailey (where Kathi was the judge in the re-enactment of a famous London murder trial) which is the city’s (and the country’s) premier criminal court. Well, the Royal Courts of Justice are the civil justice equivalent – where major civil trials, including such things as libel, bankruptcy litigation, various kinds of suits and major divorces are tried.

Some pictures are at: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/891390/1/40407722

We didn't get a chance to try to show you the immense size of this court and legal chambers complex, but it goes on for a long way on the front side and also goes back several blocks into the area away from the street.

A Great London Saturday

On 15 October the weather in London was beautiful with an unusually blue sky. We took advantage of these conditions to do some walking and exploring. After busing to Trafalgar Square, we walked along the Strand in the direction of Fleet Street and St. Paul's Cathedral. Leaving Aldwych we passed the Church of St. Clement Danes. The church building is probably the second on the site, with the original dating to about the 10th century. The name is a bit of a puzzle today, but there were a lot of Danish invaders of England at the time and it is believed that they may have been the builders of the church. (Clement was a pope in the 10th century and associated with seafaring and it is believed the Danes named the church for him. Thus, the builders of the church became known as the St. Clement Danes.) In what may seem a bit of a paradox, given the church's great age is the fact that, today, it is dedicated to the Royal Air Force, or RAF, the youngest of the British military arms.

We took the accompanying picture which shows bomb damage on one of the walls of the church, resulting from the German Blitz of 1940. Given that the RAF earned its place in history as "the few" who saved Britain from invasion ("Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few," as Churchill said) it seems appropriate that the church now associated with the RAF wear some scars from the battle that brought the RAF to the world's attention.

Continuing our walk eastward, we found ourselves on Fleet Street -- the historical home of Britain's newspaper industry. "Fleet Street" came to be the collective name for the British publishing industry and was used just as we use the phrase "Wall Street" to mean the American financial industry. Fifty years ago a headline that said "Fleet Street paralyzed by Work Stoppages" would have told any Briton that the newspaper publising industry was in the throes of a strike.

Today this association of the industry with the street has gone. Some years ago, to break the hold of the unions on working conditions, which included many outdated make-work practices, the papers began moving their operations elsewhere. Today, Fleet Street is lined with office buildings that once housed the press, but now house a variety of companies and businesses and the newpapers are no longer all published in the same small neighborhood. But many relics of the former identity of the street remain.

This picture was taken on our walk and shows the building that once housed the Dundee Evening Telegraph and three other publications.

One of the other sights we passed is shown in the third photograph. As you may know, the actual City of London is quite small -- it's one square mile that is made up largely of the city's financial center. Only this small area is actually the City. What is more commonly thought of as London is, in reality, a collection of villages and cities, such as Westminster, Camden Town, Knightsbridge, Marylebone and others. While these are often thought of as neighborhoods or regional areas (and they are) each of them also has a history as a separate village or town which, eventually, was subsumed within the growing city. They tend to all have their own regional government institutions -- and yet many other governmental activities are performed at the London level. So there is a mayor of Westminster as well as a Lord Mayor of London (who is the mayor of the whole 7 million person city as well as the City of London proper.)

The various cities, villages or areas have their own unique coats of arms and symbology which is often displayed on things like lamp-posts. In addition, the borders between the various enclaves are sometimes marked with symbols. The City of London, that central square mile that "is" the city has as its distinctive symbol, the dragon. When entering the City on any of the major roads leading into and out of it one will pass a monument or statue or some other marker to let you know you are passing into the City. This picture shows a monument which commemorates the location of a former law court but also marks the passage from the St. Martin in the Fields area into the City proper and, therefore, is topped by a dragon.

On the rails

One of the things we (especially Chuck) really like about the UK is the train services. The Brits, of course, complain incessantly about the trains; but compared to the US the service is fantastic. Chuck has used trains for business well over 30 times so far and only once has a train been more than 5 minutes late. And we've begun using them for some of our recreational travel within the UK. (Chuck, for his part, is a bit of a "train nut" anyway.)

There are numerous stations in London -- served by a number of different railroad companies. Each station tends to handle trains for destinations in a given direction from London. For instance, Paddington Station (in addition to handling the Heathrow Express that goes to the airport every 15 minutes) also handles trains of the Great Western Railroad serving destinations to the northwest of the capital.

Our most recent trip, to Liverpool and Chester, took us a bit farther north and we left from Euston Station on a Virgin Trains Company train (as pictured above.)

For most destinations there are frequent departures -- for instance to Cambridge, the site of the great University that Chuck visits from time to time, departures tend to be about every 15 or 20 minutes during the day. In most towns outside London "the station" is located very centrally and often within easy walking distance of wherever we are going. UK trains make us wish we had not done such a drastic job of dismantling passenger train service in our country.

Most of the newer trains make very good speeds for much of their routes -- speeds of 70 to 80 mph are routine with some doing 100 mph. The second picture, above, is of a modern, high speed Italian electric train called the Pendolino (because it swivels like a pendulum to lean into curves to minimize the feeling of centrifugal force during high speed turns). Virgin Trains has introduced some of the Pendolinos on their routes and we rode one to Liverpool on Columbus Day weekend.

Trains in the UK are very well-used with a high degree of ridership. The "suburban" trains that serve communities within about 50 miles of London carry many thousands into and out of the city every day. The longer-route inter-city trains which, of course, run less frequently, are also well utilized. One of the neat things about rapid transit in the UK, including the Underground and buses as well as trains, is that they are used by all sorts and classes of people. Your seat mate on a London bus is as likely to be a bank executive on his way to work as a student.

Of course, without the well-used public transport systems London would long ago have died as a result of gridlock.

Medieval and Roman Chester

As mentioned in the previous story, we used the Columbus Day 3-day weekend to visit Liverpool and then Chester.

Chester is a beautiful town -- containing one of the greatest concentrations in the UK of Elizabethan buildings, dating from as early as about 1500. It also has a virtually intact city wall.

The city was a Roman camp, established by those wide-ranging Italians in the first century. As they were wont to do, over time they built a wall and a significant fortress in this location, on the frontier of Roman Britain, at the border of Wales. The Romans, of course, ultimately left when Roman Britain collapsed in the 4th century, but the town continued. In the medieval era the Roman walls, much the worse for wear, were added to and upgraded and these combination Roman-medieval walls still exist. The city played a part in the English Civil War as well, when it was a stronghold for the Royalist forces though the surrounding county of Cheshire was predominantly Parliamentarian in sympathy. It is one of the few cities where, except for a very few yards, one can walk the entire circuit of the walls.

Of course the town long ago grew to include a lot of area outside the walls. But the combination of the virtually intact city walls, the large number of 16th century Elizabethan buildings and the location on the River Dee make Chester both unique and beautiful. And, like any self-respecting English city of any size does, Chester has a cathedral -- and, as always, it's worth spending some time in any of these fantastic buildings that exist in such numbers throughout the UK. To see some of the sights we liked so much check out: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/876492

One of the most difficult tasks, which Chester seems to have handled well, is the combination of narrow, historic streets with the automobile. The town has also done a great job of combining its fascinating history with modern life; there are modern buildings, shopping centers, hotels, and so on, but they are well-integrated into the town without causing enormous clashes.

If you ever find yourself touring the English countryside outside of the London area, you would, we think, find a couple of days in Chester most rewarding.

Ships and the Beatles

We took a weekend trip by train over the Columbus Day long weekend. We went from London's Euston Station (about 10 blocks from our flat) to Liverpool on Saturday morning; did some sightseeing there that day and stayed overnight. On Sunday morning we continued exploring Liverpool, then in mid afternoon, took the short train ride to Chester. We did some sightseeing there that evening, stayed overnight, did some more exploring on Monday and left late Monday afternoon to return by train to London. It was both fun and interesting.

Liverpool, of course, is well-known as the hometown of the Beatles. But, before that, it was, for a long time, the second city and the second seaport of the British Empire. The vast majority of Irish immigrants on their way to the US made their way from Ireland to Liverpool to catch their ships. And Liverpool was a major port for trading throughout all the British Empire and, especially, the Far East, with regular cargo and passenger service to India and China. Many large shipping companies had their headquarters in Liverpool. And it seems natural that this bustling port city would also be the site of a tremendous shipbuilding industry. In addition, during World War II, Liverpool was a major base for the Royal Navy's operations in the Battle of the Atlantic -- the fight against German submarines.

Today this enormous sea-related history is honored by preservation of many of the warehouses and other facilities on Liverpool's River Mersey. Some of the buildings are now shops, restaurants and even apartments; but there is also a major maritime museum and, naturally, that was high on Chuck's list of things to see.

On the way to the maritime museum, though, we visited the waterfront "Beatles Story" museum. This, too, is very interesting and well-done -- and even Chuck found himself enjoying much of it. It probably goes without saying that the Beatles are BIG, BIG, BIG in Liverpool, with, seemingly, every place they ever walked past being memorialized in some way. This is easy to understand when one remembers that for most of the latter part of the 20th century the city was watching its maritime empire crumble to changing trade patterns and experiencing high unemployment and growing poverty. The Beatles put the city on the map for something positive when most of its recent experience had been negative.

(In his wonderful book about the UK ("Notes from a Small Island"), Bill Bryson opens his chapter on Liverpool by saying "on the day I arrived in Liverpool the locals were having a litter festival".)

Well, it's not like that any longer and the city is definitely on the way up. It was recently designated a major cultural city by the European Union (we don't know to what degree the culture referred to is that of the Beatles). There are a number of fine theatres and museums, including the Walker Art Museum, which we also visited. All-in-all we both concluded that we found much more to like in Liverpool than we had expected to.

There are a few Liverpool pictures at: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/876272

Tower Bridge

On Sunday, October 2nd, we toured the Tower Bridge. (No, it's not "London Bridge" -- Brits have great fun laughing at Americans who think it's London Bridge -- which is one bridge farther upstream.) The bridge was opened in 1894 after many years of discussion and consideration of competing designs; it was built to alleviate a serious shortage of crossings over the Thames river as London's traffic increased. It is named for the nearby Tower of London (the northern end of the bridge is right next to the Tower's wall). The bridge has become one of the most recognizable symbols of London and is really quite an engineering and aesthetic achievement.

The tour includes the two towers and the pedestrian walkways across the river at the top. They were made part of the bridge so that even when the roadway is open to let ships pass, pedestrians can continue to cross by climbing up and over.

It is another prized example of Victorian engineering which, if you're a regular reader of this blog, you know is one of Chuck's favorite aspects of London. The tour includes all the original machinery for the then-hydraulically-powered machinery that lifted the roadway. (Today that equipment, while still in place and on display, is not used, but has been replaced by modern electric motors.) The historical picture at left shows the bridge with the roadway raised for a ship to pass.

For more pictures of the bridge, the views from the upper walkways and the area around it, go to: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/853065

Back to the Bailey

As you may remember, last January we took an evening tour of the Old Bailey, the UK courthouse. On Monday, 26 September, Kathi had the opportunity to return to the Old Bailey with a group of ladies who decided to view ongoing trials. There are 18 different courtrooms at the Old Bailey and the public is permitted to make up the viewing gallery in most of the courtrooms.

We were given a short history of the Old Bailey along with a summary of the cases being heard in each courtroom (we hired a tour guide to provide this service). We were free to move from one courtroom to another to observe the proceedings. Kathi opted to sit in on two murder cases. The first was that of a young woman who was alleged to have stabbed to death her boyfriend. The testimony that was heard was that of the medical examiner.

The second case was quite strange – Gary Ozzy Osbourne was accused of murder. He changed his name to that of his rock star hero, Ozzy Osbourne. He is alleged to have stabbed his friend five times during an argument. They were both said to be small-time drug dealers. The witness testifying was a former friend of the defendant’s who was testifying as to the defendant’s confession to him.

As we learned in our January tour when we played parts in a real trial scenario, each individual in the courtroom has a designated place to sit or stand. This includes the friends and family of the victim who sit in an area protected from public view in the courtroom. However, the friends and family of the defendant are relegated to the viewing gallery which is made up of only three rows of seats. Kathi concluded that this was good motivation to keep quiet during the trial.

Even though she didn’t get to act as judge, as she did during the tour in January, Kathi decided that both judges did admirable jobs in difficult cases.

More Theater

Recently, we decided to vary our theatre experience somewhat from our usual and enjoy an outdoor theatre performance of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at The Globe Theatre. The Globe is a faithful reconstruction of the open-air playhouse designed in 1599, where Shakespeare worked and for which he wrote many of his greatest plays. Many theatre-goers attend “on-the-cheap” and opt to stand throughout the entire performance, which we both agreed was not an option for us. In fact, we actually splurged on portable seatbacks for our wooden bench seats. The play was not one which either of us had read, but was quite enjoyable and was extremely well performed.

A couple of our more usual theatre experiences included A Few Good Men, which premiered on Broadway first and then was made into a successful film. The cast for the London West End premiere was very impressive and starred Rob Lowe as the rookie Navy lawyer assigned to defend two Marines on trial for the murder of one of their platoon members. Another fine play was Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, starring Brian Dennehy. We agreed that although this was not a “light” play, it was superbly done and definitely one of the best that we’ve seen.

Our most recent treat was a delightful musical, High Society, the story of the wealthy, elegant and priggish, Tracy Lord who is about to embark on her second marriage to a successful but stuffy businessman. We loved the memorable Cole Porter tunes including True Love, Just One of those Things and I Love Paris. The cast included Jerry Hall as Mother Lord. In case you don’t recognize the name, she is the Texan supermodel and ex-wife of Rolling-Stone, Mick Jagger. She made her West-end debut last year as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, which we missed. This was the opening performance of High Society (our first premiere!). We predict a respectable run!