Why Florence Nightingale?

The speed with which the government has converted exhibition centres into hospitals is amazing. From sites normally used to trade fairs and concerts have risen fully equipped hospitals. In England, all of them bear the same name, and it has become a shorthand for the entire category of field hospitals: NHS Nightingale.

Most of us are familiar with the story of Florence Nightingale. The heroine of hundreds of primary school history lessons, her valiant efforts to clean up hospitals in the Crimean War saved thousands of soldiers' lives, and changed nursing forever, with its focus on caring and cleanliness. After the war was over, she returned to Britain, and dedicated the rest of her long life to improving standards in nursing and hospital cleanliness, including submitting radical new designs for hospitals to improve the care of the sick.

Seen here in totally accurate drawing definitely made at the time

But for all her good works, Florence Nightingale has a problem, which makes her a terrible choice of name for these new NHS hospitals. The Crimean War took place from 1853-1856. At this point, the commonly accepted theory for the cause of disease was the miasma theory- this stated that disease was transmitted through 'bad air,' caused by the rotting or decay of material. This was central to Florence Nightingale's thinking: when she ordered the hospital wards cleaned, and the buildings totally redesigned to allow for more air and light, it was miasma she was trying to combat.

Yet scientists had also noticed something interesting. When this rotting material was looked at through microscopes, it was seen to contain thousands of micro-organisms. The explanation of this was that these 'germs' were caused by spontaneous generation- the breakdown of rotting material, which caused illness, also caused the micro-organisms to appear from nothing. They had all the right answers, but not the right order.

Suspicions had persisted for years that this was not quite right. Some medical practitioners were inching towards the solution. In the 1790s, a Gloucestershire physician Edward Jenner had realised that giving someone cowpox stopped the far deadlier smallpox. But he was totally unable to explain how this fantastical discovery actually worked. In the 1840s, a Hungarian doctor called Ignaz Semmelweis, trying to solve the problem of women dying from childbed fever, saw that his friend also perished from the same disease when he cut himself during an autopsy. Semmelweis concluded that somehow, doctors were carrying the fever from the autopsy into the delivery room. He immediately insisted all doctors wash their hands, and the infection rate tumbled. But lacking proof as to why his ideas worked, he was hounded out of a job, dying in an asylum, ironically of blood poisoning. In Britain, an outbreak of cholera in 1854 in Soho was stopped by the diligent work of Dr John Snow, who traced cases and realised that they were all connected to the same water pump. When Snow inspected the pump, it transpired it had a leak from a nearby cess pit. Snow concluded that, somehow, cholera was spread through the water. In their own way, each was inching towards the solution of human disease. But they weren't quite there.

The answer to the greatest scientific mystery of all time came from a French research chemist. Louis Pasteur had been asked by a friend to investigate why the beer and wine in his brewery kept going off. Pasteur noticed that, the greater the concentration of micro-organisms in the liquids, the more rotten it had become. Boiling the liquid killed the micro-organisms, and so stopped it from going off. Pasteur suggested this would also work for human illnesses. He called this the germ theory. In 1880, he had the final piece of the puzzle, when his assistant unknowingly exposed a chicken to weak cholera. When they tried to give the chicken full blown cholera, it was immune. The secret of Jenner's vaccine was at last cracked open.

Many in the medical community reacted with scorn. Pasteur was a chemist, not a doctor. And how could such lowly microbes fell something so complex as a human being? One pamphleteer said:

The disease-germ-fetish, and the witchcraft-fetish, are the produce of the same mental condition; both of them considered simply as superstitions, or harmless theories.

The author? Florence Nightingale.

In her defence, she did change her tune. By the time she conducted later campaigns to improve sanitation in India, she was advocating handwashing to kill germs. And her ideas for cleaning hospitals to remove the miasma did work against germs, albeit totally coincidentally. But it does all make her a curious choice to be the poster of the new NHS hospitals set up to fight the worst outbreak of disease in a generation.

Far more fitting would be for the NHS to honour the real disease trailblazers, either who advocated germ theory before Pasteur, or who took his ideas and ran with them:

• Edward Jenner- Developed the smallpox vaccine in the 1790s, setting us on a path which ended with smallpox being the only disease eradicated from humans. 

Jenner,  breaking every single ethics rule by testing his experimental treatment on his gardener's son.

• Ignaz Semmelweis- The John the Baptist of germ theory, crying (and ignored) in the wilderness that disease was carried on the hands of doctors.

 The other doctors resented these changes so much they forced Semmelweis into an asylum

• John Snow- The doctor who solved the mystery of cholera transmission in the 1850s.

The map that Snow used to plot the cholera cases- the infected pump was at the centre

• Joseph Lister- A surgeon who transferred Pasteur's work into the operating theatre, inventing antiseptics and ending one of the biggest dangers of pre-modern surgery.

Carbolic acid being sprayed in the operating theatre by Lister- inelegant, but effective

• Alexander Fleming- Accidental discoverer of penicillin, the first medicine which could kill multiple micro-organisms. 

Fleming holding the penicillin discovery, presumably about to file it away for a decade (no, really)

• Howard Florey and Ernest Chain- Found Fleming's original (and ignored) research on penicillin, and turned it from a lucky accident in the lab into something which could, and did, save billions of lives.

Florey and Chain, busy doing what Fleming should have done ten years previously and actually making more penicillin

But then again, maybe choosing someone who was right, albeit by accident, and who steadfastly refused to change their ideas until it was long past the time to do so, is the best summary of Britain in the coronavirus outbreak.

Can't Pay, Won't Pay!

It was the single greatest domestic political blunder made by any postwar UK government. It provoked a huge civil disobedience campaign, violent riots, and toppled the longest-serving Prime Minister of the 20th century, one who won the previous election with a majority of over 100, and had been voted into office by 13.7 million people.

The issue which caused this political earthquake?

Paying for local councils.

No, really.

By the 1970s, Britain's councils were strapped for cash. They used a system called the rates to collect money, based on the potential rental value of a building you owned. It was derived from the system used to collect money for the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. As councils no longer simply handed out relief to the deserving poor, it wasn't anywhere near enough. More and more money had to be given to local councils from the central government, as costs rose and the value of the rates decreased.

The 1980s were a bleak time for the British left. Labour underwent a near-death experience, as the SDP split and the Bennite revolt came close to destroying the party. The result was two hammering at the ballot box, in 1983 and 1987. At times, the road back to national power looked impossible. But the party did hold power across vast swathes of Britain, at district and county level. It was from here the new left of the 1980s began their fightback against Thatcherism.

Thatcher took notice. Some councils were easy to deal with. The metropolitan county councils, most obviously the GLC of 'Red Ken' Livingstone, were simply abolished. But the costs of other councils continued to spiral as they spent on their new radical agendas. Liverpool council was famously taken over by the Trotskyite Militant Tendency, provoking a showdown with the government and also within the Labour party.

And then Thatcher unveiled her masterstroke of a solution. The rates would be scrapped, and replaced with a 'Community Charge.' A flat rate tax, payable by every adult. The bloc grant from central government would gradually be reduced. After a few years, councils would cover their own costs, and face a grim choice; set higher taxes to maintain levels of service, or set lower taxes to avoid being driven from office. For many, this looked like the end of local authorities as we knew them.

But behind the stunning simplicity were signs of danger. The poll tax (as everyone dubbed the new tax) had repeatedly been rejected by civil servants due to its unfairness; a duke would pay the same as a dustman. It had made its way to Cabinet thanks to over-eager free market advisors who were convinced it would be a vote winner. It would take a test case for the real problems to emerge.

In Scotland, the rates were re-calculated more regularly than they were in England. A rates revaluation in 1985 and 1986 had been politically damaging to the already poor stock of the Scottish Tories. Grasping at any lifelines, the Scottish Conservatives persuaded Thatcher to let them go first with the poll tax. They were so confident that it would be a vote winner that they cast aside the original plan to phase the tax in, and brought it in in one go in 1989.

The problems began mounting soon after. Partly, it was poor administration. A form sent to every household had asked them to list everyone living there- some people filled out everyone, resulting in children and even pets being billed for poll tax. Some people used it as an excuse to disappear from the electoral register. Buildings with an unknown number of occupants, or short term occupancies, proved a nightmare. The other catastrophe was the cost. Far from reducing costs, poll taxes were much higher than rates. Rates had also only been levied on home owners; suddenly, people were getting a bill from their local councils for the first time in their lives, and it was a fortune. But rather than blaming their local authority, the blame rebounded onto Thatcher.

All over the UK, the campaigning left swung into action. The far-left, long on the back foot, was at the centre of the All Britain Anti Poll Tax Federation, which brought together the activities of local Anti Poll Tax Unions. Their opposition was two-fold. The first focussed on protests and marches. This culminated in the huge rally, 200,000 strong, in London against the poll tax, the day before it was brought in for England and Wales, on March 31st 1990. The rally itself passed off peacefully, but after the main march was over it descended into clashes between police and protesters. In what was dubbed the Battle of Trafalgar, protests became riots, and mounted police charged crowds on foot. 339 people were arrested and 113 were seriously injured. The scenes of central London looking like a war zone shocked many. Amongst those condemning the chaos were the Anti Poll Tax Federation itself.

Dramatic as these scenes were, it was the Fed’s other campaigning tactic which was causing the most panic inside the government. Widespread outrage at the way the tax had been handled, plus the spiralling costs, made the Fed’s call for non-payment an attractive proposition. Up to 18 million Britons failed to pay the tax. This refusal was not limited to the ‘usual suspects’ on the far left, but  many who had never disobeyed the law in their lives were sending their requests back emoty, or not at all. Such a widespread flouting of the law was unprecedented, and it was this which caused panic in the government. Tory MPs began to get reports of widespread unhappiness with their inability to reign Thatcher in. Labour surged ahead in the polls for the first time in years. The coalition which had kept them in office since 1979 was starting to unravel.

But Thatcher seemed determined to plough on, even as Tory popularity plummeted. She was apparently immune to the panic it was causing amongst her own party. The muttering that the Iron Lady was going rusty were getting louder. Voices began to be raised, opinions shared, that the end was in sight for Mrs Thatcher.

And by an extraordinary twist of fate, the Tory king over the water could claim to be blameless in the poll tax debacle. It had been the next item on the agenda when he had staged his walkout resignation from the cabinet in 1986. When Michael Heseltine made his bid to oust Thatcher in November 1990, he pledged to do away with the poll tax entirely. But that’s a story for another time.

The Wit and Wisdom of... FDR, Mk II

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. 

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Franklin D Roosevelt, first inaugural address, March 1933. In the words of Mario Cuomo, Roosevelt was the man who "lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees" during the New Deal.

We Will Not Be Silent

We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!

The ending of the fourth leaflet by the White Rose Group. Students at the University of Munich produced leaflets and graffiti, warning their audience that Hitler would lead Germany to ruin, and that the Nazis were engaged in the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. The leaders of the White Rose, Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christop Probst, were guillotined on 22nd February 1943. They were 24, 21, and 24 years old, and the courage with which all three faced their treason trials and executions was noted.

"In Czechoslovakia, 10 days" 30 years of the Velvet Revolution

For the real question is whether the 'brighter future' is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?

Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, 1978

Although it is often presented as such, the spectacular collapse of communist authority in East Germany, with the Berlin Wall and inner German border thrown wide open, was not the end of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. The revolutions of 1989 came in waves, and were an unpredictable rollercoaster for those caught up in them.

The government of Czechoslovakia believed it could ride out the storm. A highly repressive society, even by Soviet-bloc standards, Czechoslovakia also had raw memories of the last time it had tried to ease the shackles of communist rule. The Prague Spring, a period of liberalisation in the mid-1960s, was met with a Warsaw Pact invasion in the summer of 1968. Ever since,

International Student's Day began in Czechoslovakia, marking a confrontation between Nazi occupiers and students at the Charles University on 17th November 1939. On 17th November 1989, students gathered in Prague to mark the event, and protest against the defiance of the Czechoslovak regime, which was stubbornly resisting change even as communist dictatorships collapsed around it. The Czechoslovak state responded in the only way it knew how. It sent in the riot police.

Czechoslovak riot police confront protesting students, 17th November 1989.

What exactly happened is still a matter of fierce debate. Rumours spread that a student was dead. Others later claimed he was an agent of the StB, the feared secret police, simply play-acting, to try and discredit the students. Others said he was simply overcome with emotion. What exactly happened is not important.

Memorial to the students, 23rd November 1989

What happened next is. Czechoslovakia had a long history of underground dissident thought. In the late 1970s, Charter 77 had been signed, committing dissidents to challenge the government on human rights grounds. In November 1989, it began to emerge from the shadows. The figurehead of the dissidents (although he hated that term) was Vaclav Havel, a playwright. He had spent most of the 70s and 80s in and out of jail for his plays and political essays. As rallies began to be held, and theatres and students went on strike, the cry went up: 'Send Havel to the Castle!' Prague Castle was the seat of the president. Two political bodies, Civic Forum and its Slovak sister Public Against Violence, sprung up out of nowhere to challenge the legitimacy of communist rule. The Churches threw their weight against the regime. And, most symbolically of all, the leader of the Prague Spring, Alexander Dubcek, left twenty years of internal exile and re-appeared on the scene, cheered enthusiastically wherever he went.

Protesters confronting Czechoslovak riot police, November 1989

Rally in Wenceslas Square, Prague, 24th November 1989

In the end, it was all too much. On November 24th, the entire communist leadership resigned. Within a month, the communists had been ousted from government, and the demonstrators had got what they wanted: Havel was installed as President of Czechoslovakia.

The once and future kings- Havel embracing Dubcek upon hearing that the communist leadership had resigned, 24th November 1989

The historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash summed up the end of communist rule best:

In Poland it took 10 years; in East Germany 10 weeks; in Czechoslovakia 10 days.

Most of the pictures came from this Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2019/nov/16/czechoslovakias-velvet-revolution-1989-in-pictures

"As far as I know, it takes effect immediately, without delay": The fall of the Berlin Wall, November 1989

It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes.

John le Carre, The Secret Pilgrim, 1990.

The opening of the Berlin Wall, on 9th November 1989, wasn't the end of the Cold War. That was still over two years away. Neither was it the beginning of the end. That had begun, barely noticed, in the previous decade, when the cardinals of the Catholic Church had elected a Pole as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, thereby setting up the death knell of Polish communism and starting a contagion in the Eastern Bloc. The whole opening of the Berlin Wall turned out to have been a colossal, unplanned, blunder anyway, rather than a planned piece of historical theatre.

But it was the moment when it became obvious to the world how seismic the changes underway were. As the divided capital of a divided Germany, Berlin was the ultimate symbol of the Cold War. West Berlin was an island of capitalism amidst a sea of communism. It had been the flashpoint for earlier clashes between the USA and USSR, such as during the Berlin Blockade and Airlift of 1948-49, the ultimatum to leave in the early 1960s, the building of the Wall itself in 1961, and the tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie that same year. When the inner German border was split wide open, in the autumn of 1989, it was clear that something momentous was underway.

2019 in Books

Books read- 26

Pages read- 10,347
Target- 23
Numbers of new books- 26

Fiction/Non-fiction ratio- 3/4:23/22 (Arthur Clarke's collected works are a complex mixture of fact and fiction. Either way, another dreadful year for fiction)
Longest Book- Harold Wilson, Ben Pimlott, 811 pgs
Shortest Book- Utopia, Thomas More, 89 pgs
Quickest Read- Bad Astronomy, read 11th January
Longest Read- Gone Girl, 25th May to 24th December. However this was an audio book, only listened to on long journeys, so the actual longest read was Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation, 28th January to 14th April.
Most Read Authors- Victor Sebestyen, on the origins of the Cold War (1946) and the ending of it (1989)
Ebooks- Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation, Peter Marshall; Ælfred's Britain: War and Peace in the Viking Age, Max Adams; Utopia, Thomas More; Henry VIII and the Men Who Made Him, Tracy Borman; How Democracy Ends, David Runciman.
Audio books- The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, Ben McIntyre, Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn.
Useless Fact- I was one of 2.3 million people to log having read Gone Girl on Goodreads in 2019. I was one of 84 to log 1997: The Future that Never Happened. Clearly, a weird disappearance/murder in 2012 speaks more to people in 2019 than New Labour does...

The List

• Æthelred the Unready, Levi Roach
• Bad Astronomy, Philip Plait
• 1946: The Making of the Modern World, Victor Sebestyen
• Conquest: The English Kingdom of France, Juliet Barker
• 1997: The Future that Never Happened, Richard Power Sayeed
• Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation, Peter Marshall
• Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations, Arthur C Clarke
• Power Trip: A Decade of Policy, Plots and Spin, Damian McBride
• The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, Ben McIntyre
• Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and its Consequences, James Buchan
• Ælfred's Britain: War and Peace in the Viking Age, Max Adams
• Black Tudors: The Untold Story, Miranda Kaufmann
• Utopia, Thomas More
• Henry VIII and the Men Who Made Him, Tracy Borman
• Harold Wilson, Ben Pimlott
• The Wars of the Roses: England's First Civil War, Trevor Royle
• How Democracy Ends, David Runciman
• The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel
• The Cold War: A New Oral History of Life Between East and West, Bridget Kendall
• Thin Air, Michelle Paver
• Richard III: Brother, Protecter, King, Chris Skidmore
• Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, Victor Sebestyen
• Stasi Vice, Max Hertzberg
• The Year 1000: What Life was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, Robert Lacey & Danny Danziger
• Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
• The Nazis: A Warning from History, Laurence Rees