The Heart Divided Muted Narratives and the Partition of the Punjab

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TRANSACTIONS OF THE LEICESTER LITERARY

& PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY.

VOLUME 104 2010

An Odyssey: From Arran to Leicester

50 years of Space Research in Leicester

French Without Tears

Rethinking the Life of Milton

Life and the Earth: Interlocking Histories.

Chemical Biology Approaches to TB Therapeuticsand Gene Therapy

The Heart Divided: Muted Narratives and thePartition of the Punjab

Journalists Who Tweet

Art and Gruel - a Case Study in Philanthropy

The History of Science: Echoes of the Past, oeaGlimps of the Future?

Fauna Britanica: Its Place in Our Culture

Can Chemistry be Green?

Annual Reports

The Isle of Arran


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TRANSACTIONS OF THE LEICESTER LITERARY& PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY.

VOLUME 104 2010

CONTENTS

AN ODYSSEY: FROM ARRAN TO LEICESTER

Presidential Address by Mrs Jean Humphreys......................................................................2

50 YEARS OF SPACE RESEARCH IN LEICESTER

Professor Ken Pounds CBE, FRS.........................................................................................10

FRENCH WITHOUT TEARS

Mr Michael Simkins ..........................................................................................................12

RETHINKING THE LIFE OF MILTONProfessor Gordon Campbell ..............................................................................................14

LIFE AND THE EARTH: INTERLOCKING HISTORIES.

Professor Aubrey Manning OBE, FRSE...............................................................................16

CHEMICAL BIOLOGY APPROACHES TO TB THERAPEUTICS AND GENE THERAPY

Dr Helen C. Hailes............................................................................................................19

THE HEART DIVIDED: MUTED NARRATIVES AND THE PARTITION OF THE PUNJAB

Dr Pippa Virdee.................................................................................................................22

JOURNALISTS WHO TWEETProfessor Sue Thomas ........................................................................................................25

ART AND GRUEL - A CASE STUDY IN PHILANTHROPY

Mr Lars Tharp ....................................................................................................................27

THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE: ECHOES OF THE PAST, OR A GLIMPSE OF THE FUTURE?

Sir Peter Williams CBE, FRS...............................................................................................30

FAUNA BRITANNICA: ITS PLACE IN OUR CULTURE

Professor Stefan Buczacki..................................................................................................31

CAN CHEMISTRY BE GREEN?Dr. Samantha Tang and Professor Martyn Poliakoff CBE, FRS ............................................33

ANNUAL REPORTS...........................................................................................................39

Cover picture: 'The Isle of ArranColour versions of the illustrations in this volume are in the on-line versions of these

Transactions

Copyright 2010 The Leicester Literary & Philosophical Society,c/o Leicester Museum, New Walk, Leicester, LE1 7EA

ISSN 0141 3511


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AN ODYSSEY: FROM ARRAN TO LEICESTER

Presidential Address by Mrs Jean Humphreys

Delivered on 5th October 2009

My compatriots will know the story of the old Highland minister who went to the General Assembly of theChurch of Scotland with his senior elder. Edinburgh being crowded, as it always is in Assembly week, they hadto share a bedroom and a bed. The bed was a four-poster with a canopy. The elder said Weel, minister, youbeing the mair important will hae the honour of going up above. But before long the minister called downOch, Sandy, if it wasnt for the honour of it Id rather be down beside you.

Transactions of the Leicester Literary & Philosophical Society.

2 Volume 104 2010

That is my state of mind tonight. I am very sensible ofthe honour of being asked to be President of this greatSociety, which has been part of my life for over 60years, but I fear that I cannot do it justice. It has given

me much pleasure and enlightenment, and someenduring friendships. I look forward to reading PatrickBoylans history of the Society, which will be acompanion piece to Jack Simmonss 1958 volumeNew University, which shows how the Universityowes its existence to the Lit. and Phil., and to thegenerosity of the people of Leicester. Severalpresidential addresses had aired the idea of auniversity system for Leicester, the last being that ofAstley Clarke in 1912. The War intervened, but on theday after the armistice was declared, he wrote to theLeicester Daily Post to announce that gifts of 100and 500 had been given as thank-offerings forpeace, to be devoted to establishing the universitysystem as a war memorial to the men and womenwho had taken part in the Great War. The citizens ofLeicester responded generously, and the UniversityCollege, taking London degrees, was begun in 1921,taking nine students. I would enjoy the friendship ofthree of the original students, so in a sense I go backto the very beginning of the University. I did not know

Dr Astley Clarke, who died in 1945, but his sister wasvery kind to me.

I was born and brought up on Drumadoon Farm, onthe Isle of Arran in south-west Scotland, on the Firthof Clyde, sheltered from the Atlantic by the long armof the Kintyre Peninsula. It is called Scotland inminiature with good reason: the Highland line goesthrough it, making the north end dramaticallymountainous and the south end largely moorland. Inbetween there is a large and fertile valley, the Valley

of Shiskine, which is my ancestral territory. Thescience of geology began on Arran with theeighteenth-century polymath and geologist James

Hutton, who observed the igneous origin of Arransrocks and minerals and formulated the principle ofuniformitarianism, which is the basis of moderngeology. There are several distinguished geologists inthe list of members and former presidents of thisSociety, and the Leicester students do their fieldworkin Arran year after year.

The valley of Shiskine, on the west of the island, is

connected to the port of Brodick on the east side bya road that was laid down by Thomas Telford in 1817,part of his great system of roads in the Highlands andIslands that opened them up to commerce and totourism. Tourism was stimulated by the novels andpoems of Walter Scott; his 1815 poem The Lord ofthe Isles brought Arran to the notice of travellers andsight-seers. The early Clyde steamers were namedafter Walter Scott characters: the Lucy Ashton, the Jeannie Deans and the Waverley, which is still inexistence for Clyde cruises in the summer months.

The east-west road, known as the String, climbs highover the pass, and it was traversed every day by my

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maternal grandfather, Colin Currie (always known asCole), with his horse-drawn vehicles, carrying mailand passengers to and from the ferry. He was thepostmaster and was famous for his devotion to duty(they say that he never missed a day) and for his great

kindness to friend and stranger. He married mygrandmother, who had come to Shiskine ashousekeeper to her brother, the domine orschoolteacher. Though Scotland was a small andimpoverished nation, it was strong on education. Ithas its four ancient universities. My alma mater,Glasgow, was established in 1451. In 1696 theScottish parliament passed the Schools Act, whichrequired every parish to have a commodious housefor a school and a salary of not less than 100 marks ayear for a teacher (approximately 5). Within a

generation this had largely come about. My siblingsand I would attend the same little two-room schoolthat our parents had attended.

My paternal grandfather, James Currie (no relation ofCole), was known as Tobago, even on his headstone.He had emigrated to the sugar plantations and wouldmarry Caroline Drysdale, daughter of the governor ofthe island. On her death he returned to his parents atGlen Loig Farm at the head of the valley. He wasabout to emigrate again when the Duke of Hamiltonoffered him the tenancy of Drumadoon Farm, at theleeward end of the valley. He married a valleywoman and had six children, but he died of bloodpoisoning from a neglected cut when the youngestwas only a few weeks old. Cole Currie advised thewidow to keep the farm and advertise for a manager.Thus John MacCallum came to the valley, a goodman from a good family whose downfall had beenthe Demon Drink. He was a good farmer and whenhe married my grandmother he was a good father to

the children, but his life-story turned them all intorabid teetotallers. My father would not have drink inthe house (my brother was the same and my sister stillis, but I have deviated somewhat!). My father and hisbrother emigrated to North America, my father toOregon, which he dearly loved; he always referred toAmerica as Gods own country. But at the outbreakof the First World War the brothers returned to takepart, my father with the Canadian SeaforthHighlanders. He was one of the few survivors of theterrible slaughter of Vimy Ridge, where on 9-10 April

1917 over 11,000 Canadians were killed. I can seethat it affected him all his life. There was a sternnessand a sadness at times; he was the disciplinarian of

the family, by sheer force of personality. My motherwould take us children to church, which meantwalking over the hill through whins and heather, butmy father never came until my brother became aminister in the Church of Scotland, and he attended

the ordination service. His absence was noticeable inthat church-attending community. His brother wentback to America, but in 1919 my father took over thefamily farm and married my beautiful mother, whichwas probably the saving of him.

My mother was known as the Belle of Arran for herlovely face and lovely nature. She had been at schoolwith my father, and such was the quality of thatprimary education that, leaving at 12, they were fullyliterate, numerate, and well equipped to join theadult world. My mother, aged 14, becamehousekeeper for her brother Sandy, aged 12, forwhom Cole had taken the tenancy of BalmichaelFarm, in the middle of the valley. There was a staff offarm workers but these young people were in charge

and worked hard to make it one of the best farms. Mymother spoke often about these Balmichael days.(Rather fittingly Arthur spent his last night of freedom

Jean with her mother and grandmother


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at Balmichael with my aunt and uncle). My mothertook the tradition of hospitality to Drumadoon. Imean hospitality in the sense of a warm welcome, aplace at the table, a seat at the fire, and a bed for thenight if it was required.

Drumadoon is the anglicized form of the GaelicDraim-an-duin, meaning the ridge of the fort. Theridge is a great geological feature falling in a sheercliff on the seaward side and dominating the area. Itwas fortified by either the ancient Britons or theRomans. A mile beyond the doon at the northernboundary of the Drumadoon land are the KingsCaves, so called because Robert Bruce took shelterthere on his return from exile on Rathlin Island. Hesaw the spider and was given the courage to continue

the journey to the mainline to drive the English out ofScotland. (I have had resort to that spider many timesin my long life, but never more so than tonight). TorRigh (the Kings Hill), above the caves, is where wecut the peats every spring.

Drumadoon is a large farm by Arran standards, over600 acres, but mainly hill land suitable for the sturdyblackface sheep that could withstand the weatherand for the beef cattle. We always had a shepherdand two or three farm-workers for the 100 acres or soof arable land for the growing of the crops: hay, corn,turnips and potatoes. My father did the skilled workwith the horses himself the ploughing, sowing andmowing. It was hard work for small returns in thedays of the farming depression between the wars,when refrigerated shipping was bringing producefrom the other side of the world in competition withBritish agriculture. My mothers contribution to thefamily finances was vital. Whenever I hear adiscussion about working mothers I think of her, as

she was a working mother in every sense. Herhousehold was never less than a dozen. There werethe men in the bothy and a maid to help her. Granny,Coles widow, lived with us, and a man called TomSmith, to whom the kind-hearted Cole had promiseda home for life when he was left alone in the world.My mother honoured that promise, and Tom Smithdied at Drumadoon in his eighties. He walked with astick, but he did the vegetable garden and built thepeat stack. There was always a student from the Westof Scotland Agricultural College doing the practical

year, and there were various itinerant people likeMartin Webster of no fixed abode, who went fromfarm to farm with his bag of ferrets and nets, catching

rabbits. The rabbits were both a pest and our mainsource of nutriment.

I do not know by what alchemy my mother couldmake our simple food taste so delicious. Her rabbit

stew was like chicken, not that we knew much abouteating poultry, as the hens, ducks and geese thatwandered so happily about the farm were kept fortheir eggs, and it was only when a hen became tooold to lay that we ate it as boiling fowl and that wasa great treat. There was mutton, of course, and acouple of pigs in a pen lived happily enough on thescraps until their day of execution. Nothing waswasted. Our supplies of oatmeal (for the porridge thatwe had both night and morning), flour, sugar andcooking salt (rock salt, which was the cheapest) came

by the hundredweight, our tea by the stone. As wellas cooking three square meals a day my mother hadto send food to the workers in the fields at mid-morning and mid-afternoon. She baked soda sconeson a big griddle to supplement the bought bread,which, spread with butter and jam, made up thepieces that went with the huge pot of tea to thefields. She must have made hundreds of pounds of jam every year. But as well as all that she was themainstay of the dairy side of the farm. My father gaveup the beef cattle and concentrated on the herd ofmilking cows. With pedigree bulls he turned the herdinto a pedigree herd.

My mother did most of the milking because she wasa real expert, and the cows loved her. Whenever shewent into the byre with her milking stool and luggie(the metal pail with an upright metal handle) theywould greet her by mooing gently. They let downtheir milk to her more freely than to the other milkers.I would stand in the slip and hold the cows tail to

keep it from flicking into her face, and I would marvelat how the milk frothed up. Some of the milk went tothe nearest neighbours. It was measured into tin cansranging in size from half a pint to a gallon. Wechildren carried the milk down the front field on ourway to school some three miles distant, and wecollected the cans on our way home. The rest of themilk was sieved into an apparatus called a separator.We turned a handle and, as if my magic, the creamcame out of a spout at the back and the skim wentinto a bigger vessel at the front. The skim was fed to

the calves, who had to be taught how to drink out ofa pail. Once a week my mother made butter from thecream, and it was the most delicious butter I have

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ever tasted. Year after year it won first prize at theAgricultural Show. The sale of the milk in the villageand of the butter represented the cash flow and keptthe farm going on a daily basis. There was no moneyfor a Saturday penny for us children, though we were

given sixpence each to put in the church plate onSunday. To this day I find it easier to give money tocharity than to spend it.

Another source of income was the summer visitorswho came regularly to the village of Blackwaterfootabout a mile from the farm. In the 1890s theDrumadoon fields nearest to the sea were made intoa golf course by one of the great Scottish champions.Arran has seven golf courses, but our course wasspecial: there is only one other like it in the world. It

has only twelve holes, but they are cunningly laid outand very challenging. Families came on holiday everyyear, and Blackwaterfoot was adapted to them withhotels and boarding houses and shops. The dwellinghouses were built with a front house and a backhouse into which the natives would retreat, letting thebig house for a month at a time to the visitingfamilies, who enjoyed the golf course, the lovelysandy beach and the walks to the Kings Caves andother beauty spots. They were a rather superior lot,mainly teachers, doctors, lawyers, ministers andsportsmen, and they became our friends. Our house,with its lovely position across the golf course and itsview across Kilbrannan Sound to the Mull of Kintyre,and with its six bedrooms, was much in demand, andevery year from June to September we moved out intothe barn to let the visitors have it. The logistics of thisannual move, which was called the flitting, defybelief. The big stone-built barn with the threshing milland other equipment had to be cleared and cleanedand white-washed. It had a fire-place, as it had been

built as a dwelling-house for this annual event.Partitions were put up; the granaries were turned intodormitories for the younger people; and there weresmaller rooms at the back for the adults. Beds,bedding and furniture were brought out of stores, andin a single day we moved in. The big house was thencleaned and polished and set up for the visitingfamilies who came year after year, some of them fortwo months at a time. Drumadoon got a good rent 25 a month and that helped to keep us solvent inthese dire days of agricultural recession. We loved

our summers in the big barn, but by the end ofSeptember we were very glad to get back to thecomfort of the house. The house was let, right up to

the year of my marriage (1947), though the war hadmade British agriculture viable.

Our tenants were always an interesting lot, the lastregulars being the Simmers family of biscuit fame in

Scotland. Max Simmers had been an internationalrugby player, and his wife Gwen had been aWimbledon player. Her mother, Mrs Sterry, had beenfive times womens champion at the turn of thecentury, as Chattie Cooper. Gwens daughter was thevictim of a birth injury, but the two little boys, Brianand Graham, grew up to play rugby for Scotland.

Over the years, despite the shortage of money infarming, my father made improvements. He put waterbowls into the cows stalls, and the milk yield went

up. He got the Scottish Milk Marketing Board to takethe Arran milk away in ten-gallon cans no morelovely butter, but the monthly milk cheque was aconsolation. His next innovation gave us no greatgrief. He persuaded his fellow dairy farmers to go infor Tubercular Testing (Arran was the first area ofBritain to be completely TT). The grief came whensome of our cows failed the test; they were calledreactors, and had to be discarded. We had knownthem from the day of their birth, had named them, fedthem, had seen them grow to maturity and join themilking herd. It seemed a terrible betrayal as theywent aboard the lorry that took them away towhatever fate awaited them. The hauliers alwayscommented on the docility of the Drumadoon cattle.They had known nothing but kindness. This was asdifferent from factory farming as you will ever know.

My father was a good farmer, and he improved hismethods and his crops and his equipment over theyears. When he took over the farm in 1919 he

compensated his siblings, and the youngest brotherwent off to further his education, having left school attwelve. He got university entrance qualifications andtook degrees in agricultural economy at GlasgowUniversity and at Cornell, where he met the Yorkshireestate owner, Leonard Elmhurst. Leonard married theAmerican heiress Dorothy Whitney Strait, and theybought the Dartington Hall estate, asking Uncle Johnnie to be the agricultural economist. He spentthe rest of his life there, pioneering a lot of research,notably into the artificial insemination of animals.

His advice and encouragement no doubt enabled myfather to improve Drumadoon, but he was a greatman in his own right. He was a big man with a big


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voice. My cousin Faruig used to quip that when Uncle James called to his sheepdog to SIT, all the dogs inArran sat down. He sang at the local ceilidhs, he wasa freemason, he was a superb golfer, he played Bridge.He wanted the island to have a secondary school, and

a school was built before the Second World War, butwas immediately occupied by the Navy. Lamlash Bay,one of the finest natural harbours in the world, was anaval base for the escort vessels that tried to protectthe Merchant Navy shipping in the Atlantic from theU-boat attacks.

My father was fanatical about education. He said to usI cannot leave you any money, but I will give yousomething that cannot be taken away from you: I willteach you to work and I will give you a good

education. He was as good as his word. I think that Ican safely say that I am the only person here tonightwho has traversed acres of ground on hands andknees, thinning and weeding turnips. I did not mindthe work bit work was what people did; themagazine of the Church of Scotland was called Lifeand Work. But I did not want to be educated if itmeant leaving Drumadoon and my parents and all ofmy animal friends. My father said it is harder for yourmother and me to send you away than it is for you togo, so I went, and got educated in Glasgow, atSecondary School, at University, at JordanhillTeachers Training College. Then I got a job teachingEnglish at the newly-opened Secondary School onArran which my father had striven so hard to havebuilt.

The Second World War came in the middle of myeducation, and it changed all our lives. Britishagriculture came into its own; two Land Girls joinedthe household and Drumadoon got a little Ford

Ferguson tractor through the Lease Land agreementwith the Americans the Ford tractor with theFerguson hydraulic lift that made ploughing so mucheasier. Very few of them were made, as the men soonfell out, but of the eight that went to Britain five wentto England and three to Scotland, and Drumadoon gotone of the three, thanks to our M.P., Sir CharlesMacAndrew, who was Deputy Speaker of the Houseof Commons. He appreciated all that my father haddone for the island. We christened our tractor VeraLynn, and she became the pride and joy of Peggy, the

Land Girl the same age as myself, but deprived ofuniversity education by the death of her father. Myfather always said that she was the equal of any man

with her expertise with the horses and the tractor. She

could plough a straight furrow the acid test. Peggywould become my beloved sister-in-law, and she wasas effective as a ministers wife as she was as a LandGirl.

In 1939 Arran was flooded with evacuees; my motheradded two little boys to her household. There were somany of secondary school age that the GlasgowEducation Committee had to start a boarding schoolfor them, and the requisite teachers were sent. Mysister Janet and I, in the strange situation of beingevacuees in our own home, attended the school butwent home to Drumadoon at the weekend. Some ofour teachers liked to come too to get away from theboarding school atmosphere, notably Jack Petrie andDonald Brander. Jack would be my headmaster in thenew school in 1946, and Donald would bring me myhusband.

In 1940 the school packed up and we all went backto Glasgow, where we survived the Clydebank blitz.

Donald was called up to the RAF but was seconded tothe British Council in Ankara. Turkey was neutral,having backed the wrong side in World War I. At thesame time a young Englishman called ArthurHumphreys was seconded from the RAF to the BritishCouncil in Istanbul. Arthur, a graduate of Cambridgeand Harvard, had been a junior lecturer at LiverpoolUniversity, where one of his students was the brilliantFrank Kermode. Frank has addressed this Societytwice, in 1960 and 1998, according to my visitorsbook. Donald and Arthur duly met, and they spent

holidays climbing in the Taurus Mountains along witha young man from the embassy called Ted Beck. Tedsobituary was in the papers recently: Sir Edward Beck,

Our tractor Vera Lynn


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Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and StGeorge. Donald told the others about the peaks ofArran and invited them to come to Arran after the war,which they duly did. It was at Easter 1946 that Arthurfirst came to Drumadoon, under the impression that

the farm was Donalds and that my father was themanager. When he discovered his mistake he wasgreatly abashed, but asked if he could come back inthe summer and join the gang. Our school anduniversity friends used to love to come and work inthe summer. I crawled those acres with people whoachieved high office in later life.

Arthur came for that summer of 1946 and we becameengaged. He was about to return to Istanbul tobecome professor of English, at the behest of Halide

Edip, the previous professor, a remarkable lady. Ascholar and poet, she had helped Atatrk to bringTurkey into the twentieth century almost overnight in1924. She was about to retire, and she persuadedArthur to resign from Liverpool and take her place.Nothing loth, he agreed. Then Halide Edip diedsuddenly, and the university authorities decided thatthey wanted a Turk to be professor of English, so theycancelled the invitation. Arthur was left without a joband with a fiance on his hands. The British Counciloffered him a post at Bratislava, and his Liverpoolprofessor told him that University College Leicesterwas advertising for a professor of English. Feeling thatin Britain one did not jump from junior lecturer toprofessor, Arthur applied at the eleventh hour and tohis great surprise was offered the job. He rang me atDrumadoon to ask which I would prefer, Bratislava orLeicester. I had no hesitation in saying Leicester itsnearer to Arran. Typical of Arthur to leave the

decision to me; typical of me to be selfish enough tolet him do it! We were married on 8 August 1946 inShiskine Church with the reception in a marquee inthe front field among the hayricks. We had ahoneymoon in Norway and returned to set up home

in Leicester in September 1947.

It was a bad time to set up home. Arthur had had twoterms on his own. He started work in January 1947,on the same day as Harold Martin, the registrar whodid so much to get the University established and afterwhom the Botanic Gardens are named. Arthurmanaged to buy us a house a three-story house thatthe Army had used and rehabilitated with a lick ofgreen paint. It needed some work done on it, but1947 was a time of severe restriction, and no

permission was given. The chimney sweep told us oftwo German prisoners of war who were allowed outof camp in the evenings to work, and thus we metMax and Ossie, Max a master decorator with goodEnglish and Ossie a circus performer with no Englishbut a willing spirit. We were to pay them a shilling anhour and to give them their evening meal since theywere out of camp. Rationing was at its most severe even bread and milk were rationed. Drumadoon sentfood parcels, and even the milkman relented and letme have a pint of milk a day instead of one everyother day when I told him about the Drumadoon catsgetting their bowl filled night and morning. Wequeued for wallpaper and took what we could get.The cracks in the walls had to be covered upsomehow. The stick of bombs that had destroyed thePark Pavilion and several large houses on the edge ofVictoria Park had done lesser damage to the housesaround.

The kindness of the College community and Leicester

friends and neighbours helped to get us made into agoing concern. Mr Attenborough was the Collegeprincipal, and he and his wife made us mostwelcome. They had just moved into Knighton Hall,and their sons, who were my age, had left home toembark on their remarkable careers. MrsAttenborough taught me a lot, from how to get thelumps out of gravy (I had never cooked) to the need tobash the stems of cut roses to make them last longer(she was a great gardener, and we at Drumadoon hadno flower garden, as every inch of land was needed

for the crops).Arthur and Jean at harvest time


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Arthur inherited a good English department. DrArthur Collins had taught English single-handedly formany years and had recently appointed Monica Jones(Philip Larkins long-term friend). She was a verylively personality and she appears in several of theuniversity novels of the time, notably Lucky Jim byKingsley Amis and Eating People is Wrong byMalcolm Bradbury who was one of our students inthe 1950s. Philip Larkin was Assistant in the Libraryfrom 1946 to 1950, assistant to Miss Rhoda Bennett,daughter of the Dr Bennett who had given the 500

to set up the College fund and after whom theBennett building is named. She became a very goodfriend and was endlessly kind to us new people.There was also a Scots lady, Agnes Gallan, teachingEnglish. She married Bernard Willson, who becameprofessor of German.

I have had the greatest difficulty in writing this talk, asArran would keep taking over. Only a quarter of mylife was spent in Arran, but it was the quarter thatmade me what I am and gave me the values that

govern my life. It is very difficult to cram the otherthree-quarters into the few remaining minutes.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of my decision tocome to Leicester, I think that I did the University andthe City a good turn in bringing Arthur here. In a verydifferent sphere, he was the counterpart of my parentsin his capacity for hard work, his generosity of spirit,his ability to accept people as they are and to bringout the best in them, in his unfailing concern for hisstaff and students, many of whom keep in touch withme. When we came Arthur said to me Ill give it fiveyears and then rejoin the British Council. He gave it29 years of incredibly long hours, teaching, taking

tutorials, examining, sitting on endless committeesfor the planning of the University, not just theacademic side, but the practical as well: thebuildings, the student amenities, the silver, the robesand gowns and regalia. The first Senate wantedexcellence; they made wise decisions.

That excellence still prevails and the University hasclimbed high in the university league tables abovemy own alma mater, Glasgow. It has chosen itsprincipals and vice-chancellors with great care. The

first, Charles Wilson, was called back to head his olduniversity, Glasgow. Fraser Noble was similarly

Opening of the Queens Hall, Percy Gee Building 1958


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summoned to Aberdeen and Maurice Shock toOxford. It was a sign of our growing prestige inuniversity circles that we could keep Ken Edwardsand now Bob Burgess. And what distinguishedpeople agreed to become our chancellors: LordAdrian, Sir Allan Hodgkin, Sir George Porter, SirMichael Atiyah and now Sir Peter Williams. Manymembers of the English Department have addressedthis Society over the years and continue to do so.Several members of Arthurs staff were appointed tochairs of English in other universities, and several of

his students too. The Leicester network of friendshipspreads far and wide. An early student of Arthurs senthis daughter to read English with Arthur. She marrieda fellow student and they sent their daughter to readEnglish here, so we are a three-generation universityalready.

Arthur loved travelling, and would have been anideal British Council man. He got a fair amount oftravelling on British Council lecture tours andsummer schools. His last talk to this Society was

about our tour of Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1972.He was an external examiner for universities as

diverse as Trinity College Dublin, Malta, Hong Kongand Singapore. He had fellowships at the FolgerLibrary in Washington D.C. and at the HuntingtonLibrary in California. When he retired, most of theseplaces asked him to go and teach or do research. Hechose the places where he had been most happy:America, Singapore and Turkey. We had somewonderful adventures in all three places until he gotcancer. When Drumadoon had to be sold, Arthurbought me a little cottage in Pimmill village on Arran:Meadow Cottage, right on the sea, looking across to

the hills of Kintyre, with glorious sunsets. The Arran/Leicester connection was continued in a mostcomforting way. Libby Wilson, whom I had known asa child at Knighton Hall, read medicine at GlasgowUniversity and married a fellow student, AlistairGrassie. They came to Shiskine as G.P.s and fitted inas to the island born. Charles and Jessie Wilsonvisited them often, and we entertained them atMeadow Cottage. Arthur died in Meadow Cottageand Libby and Alistair were a great comfort andsupport. He is buried with my parents in the Clachan

graveyard in Shiskine, and I shall join them when mytime comes.

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Jean on the occasion of becoming a Distinguished Honorary Fellow 2008


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for A0620-00 in both radio and optical telescopes.Having been for a few days the brightest X-ray sourcein the night sky, A0620-00 gradually faded from viewover the following months, but not before opticalspectroscopy had identified it with a binary starsystem, wherein a brief expansion of the optical star

had dumped a mass of gas onto its black holecompanion, leading to the powerful X-ray outburst.

The Ariel 5 all-sky calalogue, published in 1978,contained details of 297 X-ray sources, most but notall - in our local Galaxy. Identifying many of theremainder with active galaxies has probably beenAriel 5s most enduring legacy. Subsequentobservations found the X-ray flux from these galaxiesto be remarkably variable, again pointing to aninterpretation now accepted with gas accreting

onto a black hole, the same physical process as ingalactic binary stars, but on a million times greaterscale.

By the launch of NASAs Einstein Observatory in1980, Uhuru and Ariel 5 had laid the foundations ofX-ray Astronomy as a major new scientific discipline.The subject then rapidly became global, as Europe(ESA) entered the field with EXOSAT in1983, Japanfollowed with GINGA in 1987, Germany with theROntgenSATellit in1990 and Italy and the

Netherlands with Beppo-SAX in1996. We were ableto play substantial instrumentation and science rolesin EXOSAT, GINGA and ROSAT. Paradoxically, itseems that the severe funding cuts in the 1970s,which led to the termination of both the Skylark andAriel programmes, gave us the extra incentive topursue that broader international collaboration.

Each successive X-ray mission had important andunique aspects. EXOSAT (1983-6) was the first tooperate from deep space orbit (now the orbit of

choice for X-ray missions), allowing longuninterrupted observations. The X-ray detectors onGINGA, also developed here in Leicester, were thelargest ever flown and provided unique spectral andtiming data from the launch in 1987 until re-entry in1991. GINGA was also politically important as it wasthe most high profile UK-Japan science collaborationto that time.

ROSAT was a German,/US/UK collaboration, inwhich NASA provided the 1990 launch, Germany an

imaging X-ray telescope and Leicester/RAL anadditional telescope optimised for the extreme

ultraviolet. Deep sky surveys by both telescopesgreatly increased the numbers of known X-ray andEUV source, laying the basis for a wide range ofastrophysical research in the following decade.

In 2009 X-ray astronomy is enjoying a golden age of

discovery, with 3 powerful X-ray telescopes in orbit.All 3 operate in the highly eccentric orbits pioneeredby EXOSAT. Their observing capabilities arecomplementary, with the NASA Chandra Observatoryhaving arc sec imaging, ESAs XMM-Newton thehighest sensitivity, and Japans Suzaku covering thewidest energy range.

XMM-Newton, with a mass of 4 tonnes and 10metres in length, is the largest ESA science spacecraftto date. Launched by Ariane 5 in December 1999, it

carries three X-ray telescopes each with 58 co-axialgrazing incidence mirrors. In the focal plane of twotelescopes are CCD cameras designed and built herein Leicester. After 10 years in orbit all systems areworking well with observations to date having led toover 1700 scientific publications from astronomersaround the world.

Looking back 50 years on from the formation of asmall research group at the University to undertake aStudy of Solar and Stellar X-ray emissions, it is clear

the space-age science of X-ray Astronomy is nowfully mature. The change has been dramatic, withXMM-Newton having a sensitivity 1000 times greaterthan Ariel 5. Powerful computer software allowsastronomers to combine their X-ray data with datafrom other space- and ground-based telescopesoperating across the electromagnetic spectrum,providing new insights on the past 13 billion years inthe Universe we see around us.

Space research at the University is now pursued on a

much wider front, with current Leicester involvementin the development of an infrared camera for the James Webb Telescope, the eventual successor toHubble, new instrumentation for forthcoming ESAmissions to Mercury and to Mars, and a substantialresearch programme on the Earths Atmosphere,Oceans and Climate.

Let me end my talk with a word on Human SpaceFlight, something I have taken a greater interest inover recent years. It seems likely the USA is going

back to the Moon by 2020, or thereabouts, with theintention of setting up a permanent base. China also


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has ambitious plans to go to the Moon, as does India,while Europe and Russia have the capability andresources. Although the timing of a new era of SpaceExploration will be affected by the current globalfinancial problems, it is not a question of if but ratherof when. For us in the UK, that prospect raises thequestion, should we take part ?

My own view has been coloured by my experience asa founder Trustee at the National Space Centre. Giventhat the UKs future is likely to depend on oureducation and skills it seems vital that we use everymeans to get children interested in science as early as

possible . In that respect the 400,000 schoolchildrenwho have visited the NSC since 2001 is something ofwhich Leicester can feel proud. I share the view ofmany of those children. Space is exciting; humanspaceflight especially so. A recent independentreview for the British National Space Centreconcluded that taking an active role in aninternational programme of Space Exploration willhave substantial economic benefits. By the sametoken, I would fear that being left behind couldstrengthen a view that the greatest challenge andopportunities for the future generations will lieabroad.

FRENCH WITHOUT TEARSMr Michael SimkinsActor and Author

Delivered on 2nd November 2009

I made my name as a writer when I wrote a memoir about my main job, which is acting. Whats MyMotivation attempts to chronicle the depraved carnival that is the life of an actor: a jobbing actor that is,not a star something else entirely.

Stars flounce about between appearances on the Jonathan Ross show and trips by private jets toVermont to discuss their next project with StephenSpielberg.

Jobbing actors dress up as chickens to advertise TVdinners, present in-house safety training videos forSainsburys employees on the correct way to use a fireextinguisher, and tour around the Midlands in arented Vauxhall Astra performing role-play workshopsto demonstrate new best working practices for sewageworkers. Its all helps to scrape together a living, andcomes with lashings of ritual humiliation and ragingdisinterest.

Ive been an actor for 30 years so know what Imtalking about, even if someone else has written mylines. Ive done hundreds of stage plays and trillions ofTV dramas, usually playing experts, policemen orunsuspecting husbands. Ive also done a lot of adverts,including Sylvanian Families, Lassie meaty chunks,

and was one for a clinic in Doncaster specialising inthe treatment of leg ulcers.

Woody Allen probably best summed up the world ofshowbusiness when he wrote that its not so muchdog eats dog, as dog doesnt return other dogs phonecalls. People often ask me whats the differencebetween amateur actors and professionals, expectingmy answer to include the word talent.. But in factability is not the defining difference Ive knownsome wonderful amateur actors and some rottenprofessionals (Im sure youre coming up with a list ofyour own, even as you read this, and I bet that bloke

dressed like Lord Nelson who does those ones for carinsurance is among them)

No, the only immutable difference is that professionalare prepared to put up with the uncertainty, misery,anxiety and humiliation of not knowing where theirnext meal is coming from. However able amateursmay be as able, they havent got the stomach for it (theuncertainty that is, not the meal). Acting is aboutpicking yourself up more times than youre knockeddown and always returning for more, and being

prepared to see your wife and children starve whileyou do it.


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A popularly quoted statistic maintains that 90 % ofactors are out of work at any one time. This figure is ofcourse grossly incorrect. Its more like 95%. But whatthe statistic doesnt go on to qualify (and heres the rubas the Bard would say) is that the same 5 % tend towork most of the time, while the same 95% tendnever to work at all.

Naturally the trick is to make sure youre in the 5%,and to have the grace and wisdom to realise if yourenot before its too late to retrain for anything else. Thepubs of central London (indeed, most of the south ofEngland) are full of middle-aged actors sitting inbalding suede shoes and grubby corduroys, nursing apint and complaining to anyone wholl listen abouttheir bloody agent. But by then its already too late.

Thats not to say miracles dont happen. Which is whatkeeps us going. A mate of mine, a talented andbeautiful actress and Cambridge graduate, was on thepoint of giving up aged 26 having not worked for ayear when the phone rang one evening at her bedsitin Camden.

The caller, who claimed to be movie star KevinCostner, said hed just seen her on an old advert oncable TV over in Los Angeles, and wanted her to sendover a DVD of herself to his Hollywood studio as he

thought she looked perfect to play the lead in his nextfilm (The Postman, if youre wondering).

So convinced was she it was a hoax call - indeed, soconvinced it was a hoax call by me that she told him(me) to go forth and procreate before putting thephone down. It took a subsequent call from Costnerssecretary before she was persuaded of the callersveracity. Five days later she was in LA having dinnerwith the star. Next day she screen-tested, and tenweeks after that she was filming in British Columbia.

Im very glad for her all jobbing actors are but thatdegree of good fortune can stretch ones friendship toofar. As someone once said (probably an actor), its notenough that you succeed; your friends also have tofail.

Nonetheless if you can make a go of it its a great life.Certainly better than working for a living. Stage acting perfectly described by the actor Patrick Troughton asshouting in the evenings, is an infinitely fascinating

and mercurial craft. Laurence Olivier ground his teethin frustration when congratulated on his performanceone night by a fellow thesp. When asked the reason

for his dismay, he answered I know I was good, but Idont know how I did it

And when all is said and done, actors are wonderfulpeople to spend ones time with: kind, tolerant, liberalminded, loyal, and sensitive as long as were talking

about ourselves. But enough of me, what did youthink of my performance? is our favourite mantra.

Of course we can also be feckless, irresponsible anddisloyal to long suffering partners. But thats onlybecause were clinging together for warmth. Life canbe lonely when youre on the road in some terribleAgatha Christie play, far from family and firesidecomforts: and youve got to find something to do withyour days apart from visiting National Trust propertiesand going to the pictures. Tallulah Bankhead once

said, Darling, if it happens on tour, it aint adultery.

In fact legend has it that at a seminar after aperformance of Hamlet, one academic onceapparently once asked the celebrated director of thepiece if he thought the Prince of Denmark everactually consummated his relationship with Ophelia.Yes he replied, I think it was during the secondweek at the Grand Theatre Wolverhampton

So why do we do it? Well, mostly because we cant do

much else. For instance, much to my wifes frustration,I cant change a plug, mend a fuse or clean a sparkplug (do cars still have spark plugs?) But I can time alaugh, handle a Shakespearean sonnet and say a lineso that people a hundred yards away in the gallery canhear it without feeling Im bellowing at them througha loud hailer. Thats enough for one lifetime

Oh by the way, Ive also written about my sportingincompetence, and most recently about my journeythrough France with only an outstretched thumb and

four words of French for company. But that, as theysay, is anozzer story.

A final thought. A circus parade is processing throughthe town. At the very back is an old bloke whose jobis merely to shovel the manure from all the circusanimals into a big bag slung over his shoulder. Apasser by asks him how long hes been doing the joband how much he gets paid, to which he replies 50years and 50 a week. Well why on earth dont youstop doing it and find a better job instead? asks the

passer-by.

What, and give up showbusiness?


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RETHINKING THE LIFE OF MILTON

Professor Gordon Campbell

Professor of Renaissance Studies, University of LeicesterLecture delivered on 16th November 2009

Sponsored by the University of Leicester Bookshop

John Milton was a Puritan, and it has long been assumed that he grew up in a puritan household. I believedthis myself, until new documents began to emerge in 1998, and these documents show exactly the opposite,which is that Milton came from a non-Puritan family, one keen on ritual and ceremony and stained glass andorgan music in the church, and involved in non-Puritan entertainments such as plays; indeed, we have recentlydiscovered that Miltons father was a churchwarden in a high Anglican chapel in Hammersmith and a trusteeof the Blackfriars Playhouse, which was the second theatre of Shakespeares company. How did Milton come

to repudiate his high church background to become a puritan?


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When Milton graduated from Cambridge in 1632, hisfather rather hoped that he would get a job. Miltonannounced to his father that he hadnt learnedanything at Cambridge, and in any case wanted to bea poet, so he moved home with his parents, andstayed there for six years. Home was in Horton, avillage which was then remote but is now at the endof the runway at Heathrow. It was there, in 1637, thatMilton seems to have shifted his religious allegiance.He had been what would now be called a highchurch Anglican; he became a puritan, the group towhich modern evangelicals trace their origins. Ishould like to adduce two events, one public and oneprivate, that might have contributed to Miltonsradicalisation in 1637.

First the public event. On 14 June 1637 the Court ofStar Chamber pronounced sentence on three puritanswho had been convicted of sedition: the lawyer

William Prynne, the divine Henry Burton and thephysician John Bastwick. The corporal punishmentthat was part of their sentences was carried out on 30 June in the palace yard at Westminster, and it isentirely possible that Milton was present in theprofoundly sympathetic crowd who witnessed it;although living some distance from London, heseems to have been there at the time. Prynne, whoseears had been clipped in 1633 after his previousindictment by the Star Chamber, had the stumpscompletely removed with a hot iron; his nose was slit,

and the initials S L (Seditious Libeller) were burntinto his cheeks. Prynne was later to remark that the

letters stood for Stigmata Laudis, the marks ofArchbishop Laud. Like Burton and Bastwick, whoalso lost their ears, he was also sentenced to be fined5000 and to suffer perpetual imprisonment. Themutilation of the three radicals by a court that wasseen as a vehicle of the Anglican churchsauthoritarianism polarised the nation. Milton hadbeen a contented Laudian both in his personalloyalties and in his theology, and he had probablyentertained little sympathy hitherto with WilliamPrynne, the apparent ringleader, but their mutilationsignalled a church that had become autocratic.Milton began to bid William Lauds high anglicanismgood night.

It is equally possible that an event closer to home hadencouraged disillusionment with the Laudian church.Home was the village of Horton, and the event wasan archidiaconal visitation which took place on 8

August 1637; again, the report has only recently beendiscovered. The archdeacon noted approvinglyLaudian details such as the kneeling bench by therails, but was concerned that some of the seats weretoo high, including that of Mr Millton. He also notedthat the two Tombestones in the Chancel in thepavement are laid the wronge way; the twotombstones in the floor of the chancel include that ofSara Milton, Miltons mother, who had been buried afew months earlier. The transgressions seem venial,but may well have touched a nerve exposed by the

spectacle in the palace yard. The Laudian church wasnot only persecuting godly men of professional


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standing, but was also interfering with the family pewand declaring the gravestone of Sara Milton to havebeen improperly orientated. It is difficult to judge theimpact of this visitation on the Miltons. Possibly theyshrugged it off, but it is also possible that contributed

to the erosion of the younger Miltons allegiance tothe Caroline church, evident in his only majorvernacular poem of the Horton period, Lycidas; inthat poem the church is portrayed as greedy andcorrupt, a characterisation that would have beenalien to Milton not long before.

Miltons Lycidas ends with a declaration that it wastime to move on to fresh woods and pastures new,and in his case that meant Italy. English travellers toItaly, usually aristocratic, often Roman Catholic and,

increasingly, interested in art. Milton was none ofthose things, but two aspects of Italy attracted himstrongly: one was music, and the other was theintellectual life of the academies, which had nocounterparts in England. On music we know that heattended a recital by a soprano called LeonoraBaroni, who was accompanied by her motherAdriana Basile on the lyre; Milton promptly wrotethree Latin epigrams in her honour. He also attendedan opera, Chi soffre, speri(Let He Who Suffers Hope)of which the libretto had been written by the futurePope Clement XI and the part of the hero was sung bya castrato. He also bought music books, and when hegot to Venice shipped home a case of music bookswith works by composers such as Monteverdi andGesualdo. On the academies, we know that hevisited several, including one in Florence called theSvogliati (men without will); there he read some ofhis Latin poetry, which was declared in theAcademys minute book to be multo erudita. The onlyother establishment where we can date his presence

with precision is the English College in Rome, whichtrained priests to be missionaries in England (andindeed still trains English priests). His presence isrecorded in the Pilgrim Book, together with that ofthe other English visitors that evening.

On returning to England in 1639 Milton turned toschool teaching, running a small school in his home.England drifted into civil war (1642-51); the Englishcivil war divided families, including Miltons. Miltonsbrother, and apparently his father, sided with the

royalists. The victory of the Puritans was symbolisedby the execution of the king in January 1649. It was

the greatest moment of Miltons political life, and italso gave him his first and only proper job. Hebecame the governments secretary for foreigntongues, and so was responsible for translatingdiplomatic correspondence into Latin, which was the

language of diplomacy. He also became the officialdefender of the killing of the king, and wrote tracts onbehalf of the English government defending thataction. These were enormously time-consumingtasks, and reduced his capacity to write creatively.Soon another difficulty arose, that of blindness.Miltons blindness was to occasion his best-knownsonnet, and Milton was later to link his disability tothe poetical ability of Homer and the propheticalability of Tiresias.

By the time he finished Paradise Lost, in the early1660s, the godly republic for which Milton hadworked had collapsed, and King Charles, possibly themost immoral monarch, at least in terms ofheterosexual promiscuity, in Englands history, hadreturned. On one level the poem is about that defeatand the consequent need to justify the ways of Godin allowing it to happen. On another level it is aboutfalling, about apostacy, of which the greatest anxietyin Miltons England was conversion to Islam, orturning Turk, as Othello calls it. Conversion wassupposed to be from another religion, but among thelarge numbers of English people captured by piratesand taken to North Africa to be sold, many convertedto Islam. You can almost feel the shiver inseventeenth-century England, because conversionwas supposed to go the other way.

In his final years Milton cleared out his desk andpublished works that he had written in his youth. Inlate July 1674, he made an oral (nuncupative) will; it

is in places a grumpy document, the best examplebeing the bequest to his two ungrateful daughters ofthe dowry that he never received. He died quietly inNovember.

Four centuries later, Milton is still valued. Why?Some of the reasons are obvious. His gifts as a poetare unmatched. In drama we have Shakespeare, infiction George Eliot and Melville, but Milton is themost gifted exponent of poetry in English. There isalso some appeal in Miltons ideas. He argued that

governments have no business meddling with thereligious beliefs of their citizens; that how people


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LIFE AND THE EARTH: INTERLOCKING HISTORIES.

Professor Aubrey Manning OBE, FRSE

University of Edinburgh

Delivered on 30th November 2009

Joint lecture with the Geology Section

It is an honour to be invited to address the Lit & Phil, a venerable institution whose origins may derive fromthe Scottish Enlightenment which, spreading south came to illuminate 19th Century Britain.


16 Volume 104 2010

worship and whether they worship should not beregulated by the legal machinery of the state. He alsodenied the right of his rulers to determine what couldbe printed and read. He claimed that marriage shouldbe founded on mutual affection and intellectual

compatibility and that, when those broke down,divorce should end the misery and permit bothparties to attempt other relationships. He thought hisrulers should be held to account for their actions andthat the law was above them. He also contended thebest kind of government was republican, anargument that has often prevailed, though not atpresent in his native land. If we had an absolutistmonarchy rather than our present constitutionalmonarchy, republicanism would be alive and well;indeed, it may grow if the present monarchs

exemplary refusal to meddle in public affairs is notcontinued by her heir.

But he is not our contemporary, and there are limitsto the extent we can claim him as a modern. He was

certainly no democrat and nowhere advocates awidened franchise, nor indeed does he evince muchenthusiasm for the electoral process. His socialassumptions, about the rights of the propertied andthe subordination of the servant class and the relative

status of men and women, are all rooted inseventeenth-century assumptions rather than modernones. His intolerance of Roman Catholicism istroubling to a modern reader. He did have Catholicfriends, and he wrote admiringly of Catholic figures,but he can sound like an Ulster Protestant inveighingagainst the pope of Rome. In our own time anti-Catholicism has not quite disappeared, and to ourshame, Roman Catholics are still excluded from theBritish throne, and male children have priority overfemale children in the order of succession. As Milton

knew perfectly well, we do not live in a perfectedworld, but we do live in one in which thosecommitted to great ideals can make a difference andthose who can write great literature can enrich ourlives.

I am a zoologist who had the great fortune on myretirement to become associated with and educatedby colleagues in the earth sciences. It has certainlygiven me new insights into my own subject and Ibelieve that understanding the interlocking historiesof life and the Earth is a vital part of recognising whatour future situation really is.

We have long referred to Earth as the Goldilocksplanet neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.

Likewise cosmologists can tell us that if our motherstar the Sun were much larger or smaller than it is,

life could scarcely have developed because thelifetime of such stars is too short. Our star has burntfor over 4 billion years and is about half way throughits life cycle. There is a lot of potential future to workfor!

The early history of our planet as the solar systemwas accreting from cosmic dust must have beenviolent. Unlike Earth, Mercury and the Moon haveno atmosphere or surface water and thus no erosion.

They still show almost unchanged the craters of themajor bombardment when collisions with meteorites


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must have been frequent. On Earth some of the mostancient rocks of the crust approaching 4 billionyears old reveal pebbles and boulders which havebeen rounded in the beds of rivers. There was liquidwater on the surface almost from the beginning. That

water must have at least partly boiled off when bigmeteorites struck to recondense when the energy ofsuch colossal impacts had dissipated. These are not,one would think, conditions conducive to the originof life. Yet although there is no possibility of fossilstructures, there are chemical traces in such earlyrocks which have the clear hallmarks of livingorganisms.

We know what they would have been closelysimilar to so-called Archaebacteria which are found

all through the Earth, living with us today. They thrivein the interstices of rocks down to 2 or 3 km, living inoil wells, living in hot volcanic springs and aroundthe mid ocean vents. They thrive in extremes oftemperature, salinity and pressure. Many can live atthe temperature of boiling water and cannot growbelow 60 degrees. They must have originated in hotsea water and once begun they could have livedthrough the heat of meteor impacts.

The young earth, only about one ninth of its agetoday, already supported life and for the next THREEBILLION years or so life developed and diversifiedbut remained at the micro-organism, single celledlevel. Other types of bacteria the familiar ones thatlive alongside us and in us evolved and some morecomplex and larger cells resembling the single-celledalgae and protozoa of today.

Then, about 8 or 900 million years ago having nowacquired some of the sense of deep time from

geological colleagues, I now regard this as relativelyrecently a major leap in the story of evolution tookplace. Unicellular organisms began groupingtogether, cells became specialised for differentfunctions and complex, multicellular and muchlarger organisms emerged. For the first time in wefind fossils of complex life. This is the EdiacaranAssemblage to use a neutral term for it is hard tosay whether they were plants or animals. If theywere animals then they must have had plants to feedon plants are at the base of every food chain. They

are quite diverse and are found in many places butmost significantly for us, found in Leicestershire in

the form of the beautiful and spectacular fossil,Charnia. (Whose discovery and study is worth alecture in itself!)

It seems unlikely that the Ediacarans left any

descendants. They soon disappeared but by 100million years later about 500 million years ago,ancestors of all the major groups of plants andanimals were widely distributed in the oceans.

By now Earth is supporting life in abundance. This isone half of James Lovelocks mantra Earth supportslife. Life supports Earth, - I prefer, affectsEarth. Thereis no need here to rehearse the main facts ofevolutionary history. Until so recently, about half acentury back, biologists just accepted the history and

fitted it in with the disposition of the land masses andocean basins. Where there were awkward facts some fossils of the same freshwater animals in SouthAfrica and Argentina - we invoked land bridgeswhich, like Atlantis, we made rise up and fallbackagain! With the wonderful advent of plate tectonicsand a full view of Earths dynamic processes we cannow recognise how pervasively they have affectedthe course of evolution. Marsupials flourish inAustralasia and, to a lesser extent, in South America,because they became isolated early on before theevolution of Eutherian mammals when the huge landmass we call Pangea broke up. Many groups of largeherbivores which had evolved in South America andflourished until very recent times, became extinctwhen at last, about 3 million years ago, the Isthmusof Panama closed to link that continent to NorthAmerica and a range of advanced Eutheriancarnivores notably sabre-tooth cats crossed to thesouth. The closing of that gap also had global effectson Earths climate and all that means for life, because

it broke up the circulation of warm waters betweenAtlantic and Pacific oceans. These are justconspicuous and familiar examples; there are manyothers from all around the planet.

That is one side of Lovelocks mantra, butcorrespondingly life has affected the history of Earthand thus, as he has so eloquently illustrated, renderedit unique in the Solar System. The first release of freeoxygen into the oceans and finally the atmosphere,the emergence of complex ecosystems which erode

rocks leading to soil formation, the recycling of waterthrough plants into rivers leading to further erosion


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and the succession of new sedimentary deposits.Then life has formed some of the very rocksthemselves - whole gigantic formations of limestoneand chalk which dominate the landscape acrosscontinents have their origin in living organisms. So

do all the deposits of oil and gas.

Earth is our essential physical home, but it has notalways given life an easy ride. The history of complexlife over the last 600 million years reveals a numberof so-called mass extinctions when huge numbers oforganisms disappeared leaving biodiversity muchdepleted. At the boundary between the Permian andTriassic ages, about 280 million years ago, someestimates suggest 95% of all diversity became extinct.The cause of these cataclysmic events is still a source

of wonderfully complicated arguments aboutvolcanic eruptions, meteor strikes and stagnantoceans.

Good science is spurred on by just such controversiesand these events in lifes history on Earth have muchto tell us about our present unique set of problems.For a further mass extinction is in progress at themoment and it is owing to one species our own which, in the brief instant of geological time since itsemergence has come to dominate and threatenecosystems across the Earth.

Modern earth science can help us to recognise thosenatural hazards which Earth will always fling at us.Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions willcontinue, so will climate continue to change as it hasdone in the past. Technology and human ingenuitywill have to be applied in force but before we canhope to succeed in securing a sustainable future anumber of inconvenient truths will have to be faced

squarely. Again earth science can help to inform usbetter and avoid in future some of the destructivedevelopments which have led, for example, to thedegradation of soils and the misuse of precious freshwater. Science has the enormous advantage that, atits best, it is culture free and a universal language. Itcan help us to get beyond the awful distractions ofpolitical life to address the real problems that face usall if we are to have a good quality of life in the longterm. We continue to make profligate and highlyunequal demands on resources across the world; too

many of us take the Earth for granted. The world ingeneral and the rich western world in particular is

grossly overpopulated for the standard of living weaspire to. The re-establishment of some betterbalance between human beings and the environmentthat supports us and all other living organisms willnot come quickly or easily. I suspect that some things

will have to get worse before we acquire thenecessary resolve. Climate change is the one factorwhich seems to have grasped attention and providedus with a tap on the shoulder. As thepalaeoclimatologist Wally Broeker says, Climate isan ill-tempered beast and we are poking it withsticks! Climate has always been changing, but neverbefore in a world holding over 6 billion people and alot of them living close to the sea.

However there is much to play for and for a rapidly

increasing number there is coming a newunderstanding of Earths and lifes history togetherwhich can better inform future action. Biologists andearth scientists share a love for the natural world.Such feelings of wonder and perpetual curiosity havebeen splendidly upheld by groups as the Lit & Philhere. Long may you flourish!


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Tuberculosis Therapeutics

Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious curable diseasecaused by the bacterium Mycobacteriumtuberculosis. In the early 1990s the World HealthOrganisation (WHO) highlighted that TB was a globalemergency and in the late 1990s they estimated thatthree billion people, a third of the worlds population,is infected with TB. More recent data from 2006indicated there were more than 9 million new cases,mostly in developing countries, with 1.5 milliondeaths during that year of which 0.2 million wereinfected with HIV. It is clear that TB is still one of theleading infectious diseases and contributing factorssuch as increasing population, migration and povertywill not go away. In addition, HIV is the greatest riskfactor known to cause TB infection to proceed to

disease.

Tuberculosis is an ancient disease and in 4000 BCwas common in Egypt. In around 2000 BC it becameestablished in Europe and in the 1650s was the causeof death of one in five people in London. Casesincreased significantly in the UK until the twentiethcentury when owing to improved standards of livingthe number of cases started to decline and in the1940s there were approximately 50,000 cases peryear. Following the introduction of the BCG and

antibiotic treatments this has decreased further to6,000 cases per year in the UK in 2000.

From the 1850s onwards sanatoriums wereestablished in the UK. The good nutrition, rest and ahealthy environment, away from the highly populateddisease infested slums cured some patients. Earlychemotherapeutic treatments included the use ofmercury, antimony, gold, and cod-liver oil. In themid-twentieth century antibiotics became availablewhich had a significant impact on treating thedisease. The current treatment recommended byWHO is a combination of 4 antibiotics for 6 to 24months: rifampicin, isoniazid, ethambutol andpyrazinamide, which can all be synthesised orobtained at low cost. Also introduction of the DirectlyObserved Treatment Short-course (DOTS) strategy hasbeen effective in ensuring drug compliance to avoidthe development of multidrug resistant TB (MDR-TB).Despite this, the death rates are still relatively high, in

the UK and USA 1 in 15 patients die but in Africa andthe Middle East 2 out of 3 patients die. Use of theBCG vaccine has also been effective, although insome countries has had reduced impact. Treatmentnon-compliance or spontaneous mutation in the TBgenome has led to the development of MDR-TB,which is very expensive to treat. In the past 30 yearsonly one new TB antibiotic has been developed andwith the high incidence of TB together with the threatof MDR-TB new chemotherapeutic treatments with adifferent mode of action and new vaccines are

required.

CHEMICAL BIOLOGY APPROACHES TO TBTHERAPEUTICS AND GENE THERAPY

Dr Helen C. Hailes

Reader in Chemical Biology, University College London

Lecure delivered on 11th January 2010

Sponsored by The Royal Society of Chemistry

Chemical biology, the use of synthetic chemistry and techniques to probe and manipulate biological systems,holds significant potential to deliver advances across a wide range of related research fields. For example, theuse of new synthetic strategies to construct molecules as tools to identify or perturb biological targets, canlead to the identification of novel compounds with improved biological properties. Two areas of interest are

tuberculosis therapeutics and approaches to tackle this ancient disease, and a more recent research field, thatof gene therapy. In both of these areas chemical biologists can make a significant impact and contribute tostrategies that may impact on human health.


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In the 1950s Sir John Cornforth synthesisedMacrocyclon, a mixture of calix[8]arenes withpolyethylene glycol (PEG) chains of different length atthe lower rim. The name calixarene is derived fromthe Greek calix, which means vase. Calixarenes are

ringed compounds with alternating methylene andphenolic groups (e.g. Figure 1).

Figure 1. General structure of a calix[8]arene with an R groupat the upper rim and R group at the lower rim phenolicposition.

Macrocyclon showed remarkable anti-TB activity inin vivo mouse experiments. More recently, in theDepartment of Chemistry at UCL, becauseMacrocyclon is a mixture of compounds, we havebeen synthesising homogeneous samples ofcalixarenes with different groups at the upper andlower rim. From this we have been trying todetermine the mode of action of these interestingcompounds against M. tuberculosis. A range ofcompounds were identified as having anti-TBproperties in vivo and earlier work had establishedthey work via a host mediated mechanism. Currentresults have indicated that the amino acid L-arginineis required for calixarene anti-bacterial activity,

together with the enzyme nitric oxide synthase-2(NOS-2). Furthermore that nitric oxide (NO) may beimplicated in their mode of action. Further

experiments are now underway, with calixarenespossessing fluorescent labels to understand how theywork in vivo, with a view to designing andsynthesising even more effective anti-TB compoundsfor use in chemotherapy.

Gene Therapy

Some diseases can not be cured by conventionalmedicinal chemistry approaches such as cysticfibrosis where there is a defective protein, resulting inmucus accumulation in the lungs and the poorabsorption of food. To correct such defectiveprocesses one strategy attracting a lot of interest inrecent years is gene therapy involving the delivery ofcorrective DNA to synthesise the correct protein.

However, DNA contains charged phosphate groupswhich can not pass through the cell wall, and then,even if delivered to the right cell there is the problemof the DNA reaching the nucleus. In addition, DNA isdegraded in the body. One approach in gene therapyis the use of viruses to deliver DNA, howeverimmunogenicity problems and other unwantedeffects have been encountered. An alternative strategyis to make an artificial virus, made up of lipidssimilar to those present in cell membranes. Naturallipids include cholesterol and phospholipids andthese form lipid bilayers at the cell membrane. Sincecell membranes in general are comprised of neutrallipids and those with an overall negative charge, if adelivery system for DNA is comprised of neutral lipidsand cationic lipids, these can interact favourably withnegatively charged DNA and cell membranes. Whenlipids are formulated with DNA, they can form arange of structures including liposomes. These DNA-liposome complexes can deliver DNA to cells (Figure2): the lipid fuses with the cell membrane and then

the DNA is released into the cell, however, mergingwith the membrane is slow and DNA is not easilytransported to the nucleus.

Figure 2. Lipid DNA-complex and scheme to represent merging with cell membrane


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This system would be even more efficient if the DNAcould be compacted and this can be achieved usingpositively charged peptides, which via electrostaticinteractions compact the DNA. Further strategieshave been explored to enhance the delivery complex

further; these include the addition of a targetinggroup to ensure that the complexes deliver toselected cells, rather than every cell. This can beachieved by using targeting peptides, whichrecognise features on particular cell surfaces. Furtherrefinements include coating of the particles withpolyethylene glycol (PEG), a readily available

polymer, to enhance the stability of the complex inbiological fluids. This is readily achieved by linking tothe lipid component. Complexation of all of thesecomponents, PEG-lipids and targeting condensingpeptides with DNA then forms a targeted stable

complex, often referred to as a nanoparticle, due toits size in the 100 nm scale, that can deliver DNA toselected cells (Figure 3). Such systems havesignificant potential in medical applications and mayhelp make gene therapy a reality for a range ofdisease treatments.

Figure 3. Nanoparticle formed by the complexation of designer lipids and peptides with DNA.


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The Partition of India in 1947 was a pivotal time inthe formation of India and Pakistan. In the province ofPunjab it was responsible for one of the most violentupheavals the twentieth century has everexperienced. When the independence celebrationswere taking place in August 1947 in New Delhi andKarachi, the regions of Punjab and Bengal were thescenes of massive murder and uprooting. Whatfollowed the departure of the British in India was oneof the biggest migrations in the twentieth century asordinary people were forced to abandon ancestralhomelands. An estimated 15 million people crossedthe borders between India and Pakistan. This was theresult of unprecedented levels of communal violencewhich contained elements both of spontaneity andplanned ethnic cleansing. The dislocation was at itspeak in the Punjab between August and December

1947. When Europe was busy healing its woundsfrom the end of the war, India was going through aturbulent beginning: a mass uprooting of people andsocial dislocation. The death toll associated with thepartition violence is still contentious and remainsdisputed; the figures vary from 200,000 to 2 million.

Over the past 60 years there has been a lot ofacademic interest in how Partition has impactedupon India and Pakistan; less has been written onunderstanding the human dimension. The use of oral

history and literature in Partition studies has greatlyenhanced our understanding of the trauma and

turmoil ordinary citizens endured during thosechaotic and frenzied days. It has provided anopportunity to document the history of those whooften fall outside the remit of official history. Thisarticle focuses on the experiences of women whohave been left out of that official history.

Fictional writers were the first to capture the humandrama of partition, many writers like Intizar Husain,Bhisham Sahni, Saadat Hasan Manto and AmritaPritam were writing from their experiences ofpartition dislocation. They were much more apt atcapturing the nuances and sensitive subject matterunder the guise of fiction. Historians until morerecently have been quite reluctant to use literature asa source of social history. Bapsi Sidhwa, herself awriter, believes that historians only quote the

politicians and catalogue prejudices of the period. Itis the novelists who try to convey the emotional truthsof individual people.1

However, during the past fifteen years feminist writersand social activists like Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menonand Kamala Bhasin2 have done much to highlight thedarker side of partition and the impact this had onwomen and the wider silences surrounding theabduction and rape of women during 1947. Theyhave uncovered these hidden histories and bought

them into the public realm of discussion and debate.These works have challenged the conventional

THE HEART DIVIDED: MUTED NARRATIVES ANDTHE PARTITION OF THE PUNJAB

Dr Pippa Virdee

Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Humanities, De Montfort University

Lecture delivered on 25th January 2010

I say to Waris Shah today, speak from your graveAnd add a new page to your book of love

Once one daughter of Punjab wept, and you wrote your long saga;Today thousands weep, calling to you Waris Shah:

Arise, o friend of the afflicted; arise and see the state of Punjab,Corpses strewn on fields, and the Chenab flowing with much blood.

(English translation of Amrita Pritams Ode to Waris Shah)


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histories, which marginalized women and othersubaltern groups. These studies have been pivotal inunearthing the gender dimension of partitionviolence, during which an estimated that 75,000women were raped and abducted during this time on

both sides of the border. Fiction, memoirs andautobiographical writing have further enhanced ourunderstanding of this neglected area often filling inthe gaps left by official history.

Sixty years on little is still known about Muslimwomen and their experiences of migration andresettlement during the Partition of the Punjabbecause most recent work has been confined tounderstanding the plight of Indian women andcomparatively little about women in Pakistan. Most

notably Farrukh Khan has done research on Muslimwomens experiences through film and literature. Hisdocumentary, Stories of the Broken Self, is based onfirst-hand accounts of Pakistani women and theirexperiences of the 1947 Partition. Literature andpersonal accounts provide an opportunity tounderstand the social predicament that Muslimwomen were faced with during the rise of the MuslimLeague. Looking back we can see little change in theposition of women.

Muslim Women and Political Emancipation

A rare account that documents the plight of Muslimwomen is The Heart Divided by Mumtaz ShahNawaz. Set in the late 1930s elite Lahore, thefictional account tells the story of two sisters, theirfamily and wider friendships. It unfolds under thechallenges of modernity and the impact this has onthe Muslim community and politics. The storynarrates the division of India and Pakistan which the

author believes had already started to take place inthe 1930s in the hearts of people. (pvi)

In later years Zohra often wondered when the change

in her life began. The change that had led her, a

young Muslim girl, born and bred behind the purdah,

to a life of independence and adventure. It was not

easy to define when it began, for the lives of all the

girls of her generation had changed so much and they

were woven together in such a manner, like many-

coloured threads of an intricate pattern, that it is

difficult to decide when the change in her particularlife began. (p1)

Though a fictional account, the novel is based onNawazs own life. She was a socialist, poet, womensadvocate and also an idealistic Congress supporterwhen in the 1940s she began to question this. Thenovel charts the story of Zohra and how she

perceived the rift between the Congress and theMuslim League and how it is mirrored in widersociety and life. Nawaz died in 1948 at the age of 35and the novel was published posthumously; had shesurvived to see the Pakistan created, she wouldundoubtedly have been disappointed with the lack ofprogress in womens rights that she had envisaged.

Society, Abduction and Silences

The theme of abduction is explored in a number of

fictional accounts, most notably by Amrita Pritam inPinjar (translated as The Skeleton) and the classicUrdu short story, Lajwanti, by Rajinder Singh Bedi.Pinjar focuses on Puro/Hamida, who is abducted andforcibly converted to Hinduism. Yet what is alsoapparent in the novel is the rejection of Puro by herfamily after she was abducted and therefore deemedas being stained. Similarly in Lajwanti, the heroineis abducted but is recovered and returned to herhusband, Sundar Lal, the main protagonist. He findsit difficult to revert back to the life he once had. Hesays, Lets just forget the past. You were hardly toblame for what happened. Society is at fault for itslack of respect for goddesses like you. (p28).Although Lajwanti was recovered and rehabilitated,she had also been ruined. Sunder Lal on his part hadneither the eyes to see her tears nor the ears to hearher painful groans. (p29).

Farkanda Lodi is a renowned Punjabi/Urdu fictionalwriter and can articulate this silenced history in a

more open and profound way. She suggests that theyare still silences that exist about women and thehorrific crimes they were subjected to during thecommunal violence in 1947. The trauma associatedwith the upheaval and violence of 1947 has createda collective amnesia about the event. This has led tomany people having only selective recall andchoosing to forget consciously these harrowing andpainful memories. The abduction of young girls wasan unspoken reality, something which existed butwas hardly ever mentioned because of the

importance of womens honour. The silence alsoexists within her family:


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My bhabi [brothers wife] who was also my cousinand her family migrated from Kapurthala. When theycame here they were wounded and shatteredcompletely. None of them was killed but they wereseriously injured Only one woman from our

relatives was abducted. But she never speaks abouther abduction. As you see our respectable culturedoes not allow us to speak about such things. That iswhy she never discusses this issue. We did hear, inour childhood, that she was abducted and theybrought her back, what happened to her during thattime I do not know at all.

Lodi then goes on to expose the plight of womengenerally, blaming society and the cultural milieu forconfining and keeping women in a weak and

vulnerable position.

In my opinion, it is always a woman who is born tosuffer. No one, a stranger nor a close one spares her.It was not only Sikhs who did that to her. Her ownpeople did not spare her. She is weak, helpless andvulnerable. She has been forced to remain weak. It isthe training; she gets this from her parents, cultureand the social environment that develop in her in apitiable pathetic soul. Our system and society do notallow her to progress. So she is in pain, for me her lifeis a constant miseryEven through the ages, theplight of woman never changed, though it is gettingbetter now.3

Bapsi Sidhwa also agrees with this point, highlightingthe pitiful position of women and use of the body asa tool to target the other.

It is the women who bear the brunt of violence thataccompanies these disputes. They find their bodies

brutalised. Victories are celebrated on the bodies ofwomen. When women are attacked, it is not they perse who are the targets but the men to whom theybelong. It is humiliating for a man to see his womanbeing abused before him.4

The abducted woman in Lodis family eventuallysettled down and has children which is anotherreason why these memories of a traumatic past arerarely discussed. As a mechanism for dealing withthis past, families have, where possible, moved on

and started a new life. These memories belong to apast that has been locked away and hidden, a secret

history that is deemed too sensitive to discuss openly.Through the

The Heart Divided Muted Narratives and the Partition of the Punjab

Documents

Transcript of The Heart Divided Muted Narratives and the Partition of the Punjab