The Bishops' Sea: Admirals of the Ocean Seas

 

Our Vice-President for Retail Operations visited the store on Thursday. The white glove inspection went very well, and I'm pleased with my part in it, and that would be that except for all the disruption in my schedule, which is why I am offering a progress report on ongoing research/writing as opposed to May 1951 postblogging ahead of my August vacation. 

Today I am talking about some reading I've been collating on the early days of the Spanish Caribbean, and a sideways look at John Cabot. The Admiral of the Ocean Seas was a new St. Christopher, carrying the burden of Christianity to the New World. The latter, apologies to the Cabot Project aside, was a cut-rate imitation who needed the supervision of the Bishop of London, if not unctuous clergymen who invite themselves in to sit at the bedstead and read the Bible to a painfully dying  mother of seven who has to pretend to be polite to gain that ". . . advice, often material." 

A Technosocio-educational History Appendix to Postblogging Technology, April 1951: The American Mind Is Closed For The Season

 

On 12 April 1951, the search committee of the board of trustees of the University of Chicago announced the replacement to Robert Hutchins as Chancellor of the University of Chicago: Lawrence Kimpton (1910--77)[corr]. A deeply obscure figure (his Wikipedia page doesn't even get his death date right), Kimpton was a successful chancellor and his life makes for a rich reading of a critical decade in technological and educational policy. 

On the morning of 25 April, 1951, 45 Field Regiment, RA, broke position  to withdraw behind the Delta Line, stripping First Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment, isolated far behind the PVA advance on Hill 235, overlooking the Imjin River, of fire support. Fifty-nine Glosters had been killed in action to this point, and 522 now went into captivity, of a total of 1091 casualties killed, wounded and missing suffered by the   29th Commonwealth Brigade in this single action.

Apart from happening in the same month, and the dominating influence over all news that month of the MacArthur dismissal, the two are not unrelated, a point brought to mind by a recent email correspondence with friend of the blog, Chris Manteuffel, over the last few days.

Postblogging Technology, April 1951, II: Fade Away

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

William Chase

Dear Father:

This is  my delayed last, since in spite of the Siam Air Lines crash I am still flying to Macao next week for my confinement. My mother will be there the week after, and has telegrammed ahead with some words about Alyce that just about curled off the page. 

I don't honestly know what to feel. We all know that Uncle Henry is a cad. He  was obviously carrying on with Alyce before Aunt Bess left us in the body, but who knows whether it started before her mind left us? One thing is for sure, Uncle Henry has badly needed a woman to keep  him in check. I don't think he appreciates just how many enemies he has made in the aviation business.  Sherman Fairchild has amply proven his talents as a boardroom intriguer, and he is going to swoop in the moment Uncle Henry slips up, which we both know he will.

Reggie is over the moon about the news about the Chase Mission. He has already been to a private meeting in Taipei where he has been assured that he  and his fellow "Yankee Air Piratets" will have official status with the mission and probably some consideration with respect to promotion. Quite frankly, it is time for the Navy to step up, considering the sheer number of "Engineers Wanted" ads in recent numbers of Aviation Week.

As I leave for the plane comes the news of the Battle of the Imjin and the fate of the Glosters. For me, it all blurs together in the sorrows and horror of war, but could you please check with your cousin? Uncle  George will, I think, be taking it badly, especially as it seems to have pushed HMS Affray out of the Hong Kong press.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, April 1951, I: Mad Science

 

I feel a bit out of my wheelhouse when it comes to the Medicine section of Time. Hoo-boy, those mid-century medical people, hunh? But the story of Andrew Conway Ivy and "Krebiozen," is something else. It is very, very tempting to make our dubious Yugoslav refugee, "Dr." Stefan Durovic, a mad scientist right out of central and a good match with Ronald Richter, but on closer examination this really takes Big Science off the hook. This story needs to be about "the most famous doctor in the country" and, at a bit more of a stretch (and stealing material from 1958), Nobel laureate Sir John Douglas Cockroft.

Postblogging Technology, April 1951, I: Lost At Sea

R_. C_.,

Shaughnessy,

Vancouver,

Canada.

Dear Father:

I know that you probably expected to hear that I have landed safely in Macao by this time, but my mother has, completely unexpectedly, decided that she is going to come to Macao to see me through my confinement, as opposed to sitting in Chicago and complaining that I won't come to America for the blessed event. I have no idea what is going on, which leaves me free to speculate that my mother is another victim of taking Mr. Rohmer seriously and believes that your grandfather's organisation commands all the mad scientists of Asia, in aid of which I presumably will either have a safe delivery or give birth to a cruel and brilliant superman (-woman) born fifty thousand centuries before his time!!!

Either way, I am pretty sure my mother would be happy. Well, okay, maybe not if the first born is female. Other than that, I mean. Cruel and brilliant superman, I mainly mean. 

Oh! My point! She's not coming until the end of the month, so I am putting off my trip to Macao.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXII: Roman Britain's Window Into the Sacred Spring

 The Roman Empire arrived in the United Kingdom in 43AD and left it in 408BC. These are relatively late and early dates compared with adjacent regions of northwestern Europe. I think we can probably argue that they are latest and earliest for some class of  normal Roman provinces that I haven't seen constructed but feel plausibly could be. It has a good claim to be the most economically backward province so integrated, in the northwest or absolutely. This makes the archaeological signal of the comparatively short-lived Roman occupation unusually easy to pick out.

As if that were not enough, modern Britain is quite a well-developed place, with a strong archaeological rescue requirement. This makes for a fast pace of construction in south-eastern Britain, and lots of archaeological work, published to an increasingly enormous "grey literature" available to British archaeologists. For all that archaeologists complain about the loss of sites and precious information to general construction and modern deep ploughing, we are in an unusually good, perhaps even uniquely good position to understand what happened when the Romans came. This may, or may not, give us some additional insight into the reordering of human life that I have dubbed the "Sacred Spring."  

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, March 1951: Sound and Submarines

 

Ours Is An Age of Slowing Technological Change

The restoration of the accumulated paid time off provisions of my collective agreement, complete with a backlog of 150 hours has been a blessing and I have made some preliminary stabs at reducing my backlog of Kindle reading in particular. The David Bird edited collection, Agriculture and Industry in South-Eastern Roman Britain is a particularly rich text (which I have used here before), and I will blog about it next week. I will be less kind to Matthew Jones' The Official History of the UK Strategic Nuclear Deterrent: Volume I: From the V-Bombers to the Arrival of Polaris, which is pretty good on early ABM but bogs down at the policymaking level when discussing the main line of things that actually, you know, happened. 

One might, in defence of the official historian's approach, argue that the main line of British nuclear deterrence just plain is a story of getting bogged down. As far as one can tell, by the end of the Attlee government, Britain's nuclear deterrence resided in the V-bombers, the potential of which had yet to be fully explored, and got as far as BLUE STEEL, conceived in 1954, before the long series of cancellations and disappointments leading up to the decision for Polaris. It is almost unbelievable that the Polaris programme originated with Edward Teller's proposal for a small hydrogen bomb in 1956, and was first test-fired in 1961. That's two iPhone generations! (Even throwing in the earlier JUPITER progamme only pushes it back a year and one more iPhone.)

It also arrived in the middle of, and not at the beginning of, the 1950s buildout of a new generation of submarines, meaning that the sole surviving leg of the British nuclear deterrent (and perhaps the only real modern deterrent weapon system) originated and was carried through in the midst of a crash programme of ASW development. 

I don't know. Seems a bit destabilising to me. Especially when Chevaline meant that British boomers had to patrol north of NATO's sonic Maginot Line between the tip of the UK and the Denmark Strait. At least according to the text that is written down in the Wikipedia article, anyway.