Games Of Chance

This is a short post but a large subject, like what in blazes is going on? If these people do not know, as well as many others, is anyone going to be right or are they all going to be wrong.

Given this, and that they have access to more or less the same data and sources as our civil service and government and may understand it better, then can we believe anything we hear coming out of Westminster or Washington DC?

The link below is a collection of other links about the nature of uncertainty at present; apparently the answer lies in the leverage. The banks are said to be running it at 20 to 1.

If that is not bad enough a lot of the assets on which the leverage is based are government bonds. These are issued by the same governments that have borrowed heavily to support the banks.

http://www.financialarmageddon.com/2011/05/nothing-to-see-here.html

What really worries me is that I look on them as optimists.

Greece, A Byronic Tragedy

In the UK we have forgotten much of our own history in Greece. Between 1945 and 1947 the UK spend £85 million in the money of that time maintaining a large force of its own troops and supporting the Army of the liberated Greek Government in a bitter Civil War.

This happened because in the agreements of the Great Powers at the end of the war the restoration of Greece came within the UK remit. With a financial crisis at home the USA then had to step in to take on the tasks.

The history of the Greek State from then to now is very complicated. It joined the EU in 1981 and signed up to the Euro project that began in 1999. In recent decades the growth in tourism had led to many Brit’s visiting Greece and some migrating there.

There was a time when some of my best friends were bankers. It was another time and in another place and in a different world. In a passing conversation I was asked my opinion of the Euro project and the wisdom or otherwise of the British internal wrangling over joining.

The bankers were entranced by the removal of all that fiddling with many currencies, the apparent ease of exchange and the hope of a single currency imposing a degree of common purpose and Germanic discipline over the various governments. There was almost a belief that the Euro would end uncertainty.

My doubts were not welcomed. First, it was a purely fiat currency that was based on a theoretical construct of money management through rates of interest set by the new European Central Bank. They thought that being German it would be stable and able to control.

My concern was that as the actual money issue was in the hands of so many people there could be a problem. The other issue was whether the governments of the relevant states could actually begin to control their policy management and economic policies to achieve that stability.

More to the point was that whilst a common currency might help things along in the good times, what happened in the bad times and when some sort of external shock or parallel shocks occurred? Could the levels of co-operation and common purpose be maintained if conflicts of policy began to arise?

The country that I was concerned with was Italy, once notorious for its inflation and depreciation of the lire. Spain was also problematical, the old peseta being highly variable. The French were not much better, the old franc had collapsed and the new Franc just about jogging along before the Euro came into being.

For the smaller countries there was an assumption that if the larger states kept their heads and sensible financial and economic policies the rest would fall into place or be forced by some unknown force field in compliance. What I knew of history told me that unbridled optimism was the high road to disaster.

Now we are seeing what could amount to another collapse of government in Greece this time with some ugly issues. The high income groups now pay little tax at all, the public sector is large, there has been major inward migration and the welfare provision is both extensive and generous.

The outside authorities have entered the fray because they are providing the bail out money and there will have to be conditions. These seem to amount to a virtual sell off of much of the public sector provision and generations of severe debt repayments on high interest, characterised as the debt slavery of the Greeks. This may be right.

In 1823 after a bitter war the Greeks managed to detach themselves from the Ottoman Empire and attain a degree of independence. Many in Britain gave their voices, money and full support to their cause. Now the IMF has moved in.

As Byron might put it “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold…” But that was about another place. He also said “The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace,”

Byron died in Greece, not in battle but as many did in that period during any war but of a fever. He was widely honoured in Greece and elsewhere for his vision of liberty. Now his Greece is no longer independent and its people are in yet another period of foreign domination.

“The mountains look on Marathon – And Marathon looks on the sea; And musing there an hour alone, I dream’d that Greece might still be free”

Anything Can Happen

As this is a Bank Holiday, many will be relaxing and turning their attention to the domestic or entertainment parts of life as we know it. But how long can life as we know it continue given the way the world works?

Kurt Cobb in a recent Energy Bulletin post asks if vested interests would starve the world. In this case he is referring to international companies with major influence on government bodies and organizations.

The questions relate to the products of these companies which in the short term might deliver some added food output but which have the potential to trigger a serious collapse in the production of key crops.

This is apart from the activities of traders with computers playing hide and seek with commodity figures who are alleged to be factoring in much higher prices than real markets would command. Or bankers needing the biggest cut they can get in the shortest possible time.

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-05-15/would-vested-interests-starve-world

Meanwhile in the United Kingdom people will be walking over lands with lost villages, on BBC1 is a programme about how satellites have identified many lost cities in Egypt and MSN, being American, is concentrating on the threat the Yellowstone Caldera poses to civilization. With a major drought risk in the mid west and maybe the sub-continent it may not need anything volcanic to happen.

Personally, we shall be watching our saved item on Hubert Parry with the Prince of Wales. Parry grew up in Gloucestershire, albeit born at Christchurch. In 1851 as a boy his father, a prosperous man, Thomas Gambier Parry employed servants. One was Jane Greening, of a local family.

In 1857 Edward Elgar was born not far away in Worcester, the son of Anne, whose maiden name was Greening and of humble origins. His father was a Man of Kent who moved north. It is difficult to work out but Anne’s family seems to have come from south Herefordshire and Gloucestershire.

Also on this patch was Gustav Holst, from Cheltenham, of German paternal stock but his mother was Clara Liddiard, also a Gloucestershire family, but a quite prosperous farming/minor landed one. Not too far away a little later, at Downe Ampney, we have Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Just a handful of people who were from a very small area yet who had such impact.

A Result!

Tweedledum And Tweedledee Ride Again

With the stage set with Cameron and Miliband the main protagonists, the mind wanders back to other similar political contenders of the past. I will skip the longer history but the BBC4 piece on the decade long era of Wilson and Heath gave me reminders of how bad it was and how little we have learned.

By the time this began in 1964 I had been working a while, mortgaged, with children and hard pushed to run an elderly Standard 10 car on the family budget. In an age without credit cards, when food was relatively more expensive and when consumer goods in general were relatively costly in comparison with disposable income, there were no foreign holidays, no big spending and necessarily a close interest in politics.

After a job change a couple of years before, in 1967 I was asked to give a short talk to the local Junior Chamber of Commerce about what the Wilson government were faced with. My thesis at the time was that it did not look good and it was clear that we had ugly choices in whether to try to have progress and prosperity in industry and commerce i.e. “growth”, continue pretending to be a world power or whether the welfare state was sustainable.

My boss heard about this and was livid, denouncing me to all and sundry for my lack of loyalty, my failure to understand the crucial need for prestige, my suggestion that the British Government had significant imperfections and that the British pound could not continue to be central to the world economy and future.

Six weeks later the pound was devalued, we departed from East of Suez and it was clear to any sane person that the game was up. My boss never spoke to me again, so I moved jobs.

The trouble was that sanity was not much in evidence in the higher reaches of the governments of either Wilson or Heath. Because of the system we had politics that turned almost solely on the then marginal constituencies, what was spent on who and keeping the London media happy. If you look at exactly were the marginal seats were then it will tell you a great deal about many decisions at the time.

What I see little of is just what was in the heads of either Wilson or Heath. We see all the hindsight studies about who did or said what at the time. But what were the experiences that shaped them? Wilson was a bright boy who went to Oxford and was on course for an academic career when the war turned him into a senior Civil Servant largely dealing with supply and the Home Front.

In the 1940’s this meant the centralisation of almost everything and the extension of state power and interference into every aspect of life, in short “Whitehall Knows Best”. The 1945 Election meant a Labour government determined to secure the “commanding heights of the economy” and run them for the theoretical good of the State, which is where the Labour party began to come apart at the seams.

Wilson’s economics were learned in the 1930’s and whilst he may have kept up with the subject it was already moving rapidly in several directions. Certainly, it was very difficult to work out which was most likely but Wilsons background was not going to help make the right decision.

Heath on the other hand, another bright scholarship boy, spent time in a Europe riven by enmities and civil conflict leading to war. He then served in the Royal Artillery and seems to have done his duty very well. But The Gunners way of working was not quite like that other arms. This is a large subject I will skip. But the Gunners were highly organised, needed managing in detail and precision was the key to their efforts across their activities. Quite unlike politics in the UK. Also his economics were learned at the same time and in the same town as Wilson’s.

After the war, Heath pitched up in the Ministry of Civil Aviation for a brief spell. This ministry at the time was almost a total statist organisation. Like many other nations there was a firm belief that all aviation, military and civil was a central government operation and any civil elements were incidental but worked under direction.

Then Heath went on to Brown Shipley and Co., private merchant bankers with a central role in trade and financing. Again, basic to many of these companies was the need to keep the UK at the centre of world finance, almost at all costs. The firm still exists and can be googled. It has a brief history on the web page.

After that in 1950 Heath entered politics and make rapid progress because of his diligence, Gunners attention to detail and contacts in The City. But between him and Wilson, apparently so different, there were common intellectual and general policy interests that would take them along similar lines with disastrous results.

It is all there on the web to be seen in the biographies. There were the clumsy defence economies and the endless bad decisions with consequences that could have been foreseen however unintended. Also, the major changes to local government, the Health Service, major industries that were destructive of jobs, growth, and community and not least the surrender to Europe.

The reason was really quite simple. When the two of them, with their cronies and media advisers went in for hyperactive State activity they did not see or realise how the changes in progress in many areas were going to change the structure of industry, how commerce operated, how people would choose to live their lives and how finance was going to become so dominant.

So what changes?

Noises Off

Once popular farces were a staple of West End Theatre, either three act or two act they made audiences happy and were great fun to watch. The world has moved on now and they have become rare events. TV and other media comedy has different ideas. But I wonder if the British tradition of farce has now taken over politics?

Almost everywhere you look in our systems of government, law and administration you see not simply the basic elements of farce but situations where it is the way our leaders and power brokers run their own affairs and those of the nation.

But this is not fun. Certainly it may be satisfying to laugh at weeping members of the House of Commons being carted off to prison for expenses and other fiddles for which there is no rational explanation only greed, stupidity and arrogance but these are the people who have been passing all these laws.

Yesterday I saw a report in which a peer under the cosh for House of Lords expenses was saying that the second chamber of our Parliament was really a cash machine for passing peers and their friends. There are alleged to be 792 of these people all in the queue. There have been some odd people, very odd in some cases pleading that from time to time it is rumoured they do something useful, but this has escaped me.

If they are so good and so experienced in high affairs how come we have had in the last decade or more a tidal wave of badly flawed legislation that has all but ruined the economy, any community, much of family life and a great deal more?

How come that in the last months of the Labour government the House of Lords permitted a deliberate wrecking policy to ensure that the country would become almost ungovernable and what attempts were made to put things right would be obstructed at every turn by organisations filled and run by Labour placepersons.

Human Rights ideals were turned into the farce of judges attempting to end free speech and for that matter any academic debate that any corporation disliked as well as ensuring that fraudsters, criminals, dealers in drugs and death were freed from criticism or questioning, even by Parliament or the police.

The funding of capital projects in the public sector had saddled major areas of vital provision in health, education, social care and the rest with huge debts that will impact the budgets in such a way that only major cuts will solve.

In addition, so many more crimes, duties and regulations have been created that few people know what they are about or why or what to do. And that is those who are running things let alone the poor ordinary citizen who no longer knows who governs, why or what they are doing.

Whilst all this is going on the world economy still looks too prone to any adverse event or development. The stresses in Europe are increasing. Many more people are on the move. There are wars still being fought and in the making. So what do we see on the TV?

The President and the Prime Minister playing ping pong as a break from the party re-election games. But which of them will lose their trousers?

The President Goes Over The Hills And Far Away

When President Obama visits Her Majesty, there may be an exchange of gifts. My suggestion for Her Majesty is that she might consider giving The President a bust of the Duke of Wellington to replace the one of her old friend, Sir Winston Churchill that the President had removed from the Oval Office.

Also, one that would be fitting along the same lines would be a boxed set of all the “Sharpe” series that appeared on TV. Perhaps some time might be set aside for them to watch together one or two of the better ones accompanied by a few slugs of choice Tullamore Dew. Sharpe and his men in the films are from the 95th Rifles (see below) and the series are largely about The Peninsular War and Waterloo.

The President has Irish ancestry in the maternal line going back to male Kearney’s whose marriages in the period of the late 18th and 19th Century included a Donovan and a Holloway. Irish Origins dot com has a table. It is possible that the Holloway might be of English origin.

So I had a look at the indexes. On the Trafalgar Roll there four Holloway’s listed, all from England and nor do the Waterloo and Army listings yield any of that name that might be possible. in Ireland.

But for the Donovan’s at Trafalgar there are sixteen Irish names listed of whom seven are from Cork with two from districts adjacent to where The President’s family were. The Army listings have many Donovan names but as there are many families in that general area of Ireland it would take a great deal of research to sort out the lead possible cases.

For the Kearney name in the Trafalgar Roll with near variants there were about a dozen Irish who were scattered, with three from Dublin where one branch of The President’s family were. So there is an outside chance there but far from certain. With the Kearney name there are some Army names to check up and it is easier to work out what is possible. There are some interesting possibilities.

In families with several children and a number of sons, often some of the younger sons had to find other things to do away from the family home. They turn up in many and various places notably the Army or Navy. So the chances are that none of the direct ancestors may have served but it is likely that someone in the family did one way or another.

Many would have been in local Militia’s, a form of conscription for local policing and law and order, but the militia’s could be sent anywhere in the UK and were. Often large drafts of men went on to the Regular Army proper as volunteers, of a sort.

In Plymouth in 1807 over 200 of the Worcestershire Militia transferred to the 7th Regiment, known as the Royal Fusiliers and regarded as a London regiment. Another 20 skilled and literate men went into the 43rd Light Infantry, including my direct male forebear of the same name. The 71st Highlanders at one stage picked up 70 men from Surrey.

There was a Thomas Kearney from Athlone who served in the 7th Regiment from 1800 to 1821 ending as a Colour Sergeant. Rather later Maurice Micklewhite (aka Michael Caine) was in Korea with the Regiment on active service. The Kray Brothers were on its strength at one time, but deserted. They did not have the bottle for the 1950’s Army.

The brothers, who were active in West End nightclub life were on close terms with some of the US Democrat’s celebrity supporters notably Frank Sinatra, friend of Joe Kennedy and Judy Garland. Her Majesty’s father, King George V had to put up with Joe Kennedy as US Ambassador and did not like him much.

Looking at the known Kearney family names of The President’s there are some in the listings for the period. There is a Michael from near to the President’s Irish acres who served in the 19th Foot, known as The Green Howards from 1800 to 1813, but they were in India during this time.

They did see a good deal of action in The Maratha Wars, notably the 1803 Battle of Lasswaree and the 1804 Farrukhabad. The latter was famous for The Great Chase when a few hundred Regular and East India Company cavalry defeated several thousand Maratha’ and pursued them for 24 hours to inflict severe losses. The 8th Kings Irish Hussars were present.

There was one William who was close who signed on as an older man in 1808 serving until 1821 with the 88th Foot, completing his time with the 6th Veteran’s Battalion. This Regiment was better known as The Devil’s Own, The Connaught Rangers. They gave astonishing service in the Peninsular War. They were not at Waterloo but another William was, this one a Driver in the Royal Artillery and he came from Mallow.

There are three John’s. One born in Dublin, (was he one of the President’s?), served with the 11th Hussars, The Cherry Pickers, from 1799 to 1828 and they served both in The Peninsular and at Waterloo. Another from not far away in Limerick, served from 1817 to 1829 with the 83rd Foot. This was a Dublin regiment that before his time had served in the Peninsular and at Waterloo.

The third John is intriguing, he was at Waterloo with the 2nd Battalion of the 44th Regiment, The Essex Regiment. In 1814-1815 the 1st Battalion was in America notably at the Battle of Bladensburg and then burning Washington DC. They were commanded by Arthur Brooke, Deputy to the force, and a Brooke of Brookeborough in County Fermanagh.

A later Brooke of that family, Field Marshal Alan Brooke has a statue in Whitehall, a testament to his crucial service in World War 2 and again known to Her Majesty. He shared her father’s dislike for Joe Kennedy. Also, with a statue nearby is one to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, although born in London, of Ulster family.

His were not far from the family of Major General Robert Ross of Rostrevor, County Down who commanded the 1814 Force and when entering the White House found the dinner still warm in the kitchen left by the fleeing family of President James Madison. Perhaps, when The President and Her Majesty dine something flambé might be on the menu.

Turning to others of the Kearny surname with other Christian names, there is a Patrick from Limerick who served with the 53rd Foot and then 66th Foot from 1815-1817 but neither served at Waterloo. A David was with the City of Limerick Militia in 1803.

Robert, another Dublin man served with the 16th Light Dragoons from 1805 to 1828. The regiment were raised in 1759 as Burgoyne’s Light Horse and served in America at the Battle of Brandywine. They too were in the Peninsular and at Waterloo. Later, they became embodied after World War1 with the 5th Irish Lancers to form the 16/5 Lancers. He was discharged as worn out in the rank of Troop Sergeant Major.

An Edward served with the 21st Light Dragoons from 1801 to 1818, this regiment being disbanded in 1821 and later revived in 1861 in India. It served in San Domingo and South Africa in Edward’s time and a troop provided the body guard for the exiled Napoleon on St. Helena until his death.

There are two more, one a Daniel was with the 2nd Battalion of the 95th Rifles at Waterloo. It is the other who has caught my eye for the place at the top of the short list.

It is James Kearney of the 1st Battalion of the 95th Rifles (as in the Sharpe series) who served from 1805 to 1816 and must have seen it all in The Peninsular and at Waterloo. He was discharged at York as old and worn out, as well he may have been. James was from very close to The President’s Irish acres.

There could be others because the internet sites are not full or reliable. A few years ago I did a lot of work on Army muster rolls of the period at the Public Record Office and one in particular, the 71st Highlanders. The depot was in Glasgow with the consequence that the regiment had many Lowlanders as well as number of Irish.

They had been ordered to America in 1814 but were then disembarked in Cork and sent up to barrack at Limerick for a short while before going to Flanders to deal with Napoleon in 1815. It is probable that they took on some recruits while they were there.

Like most others of the British Army there it was a raw bunch of men that had to face the French at Waterloo. I have lists of names transcribed as well as photocopies of a part of the 71st’s Waterloo Roll.

I decided to check the online Waterloo Roll for accuracy only to find many names missing and a few others where the spelling was changed. So there could be others that only searches of the original documents will yield. Amongst them may be your relations or mine or indeed The President’s.

As a courtesy Her Majesty might ask The President how his 82nd Airborne Division are faring at present. In 1944 the airfields they went to for the drops at the Normandy Landings and later Arnhem were not very far from Sandringham.

At the time both she and Prince Philip were in the services. He would learn that Her Majesty, as well as being expert in animal husbandry knew how to drive, maintain, service and change the wheels on a truck. There are few Heads of State with these broad practical skills around in the modern age.

Here’s forty shillings on the drum, if you want more try “Over The Hills And Far Away” on Youtube, the Davros Team one is quite striking. It does not shirk the business of what war is all about either then or now.