BAGDContext CSM

ITV’s new crime thriler, The Bletchley Circle, ticks all the boxes for me…

You can watch it, here

http://www.itv.com/itvplayer/video/?Filter=324058

The story is set just after WW2 and against a backdrop of general austerity – it shares the visual style, colour palette, and fashion-sense of Foyle’s War. Tweedy coats, cardigans, wild-garden bombsites and railway trains are right-up-my-street.

The main, female, protagonists of the story were previously colleagues in the secret stuff at Bletchley Park during WW2. They use their data processing skills, pattern recognition and super-memory to solve a series of murders in the London suburbs.

One of the best things about the story is that it refutes the idea of random. The killings seem to have no rhyme or reason – in terms of location and victim – except that the girls are all sexually assaulted, after they have been murdered!

It’s really important to refute the idea of random in life. It’s especially important if you are involved in solving crime or preventing violence. Very little is random – the modern usage of the word is just a lazy way of saying that we haven’t thought about it and worked out the connections. In fact, it’s an admission of ignorance.

Bletchley Park was the code-breaking centre of the British war effort. Nowadays, it is famous as the location where Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers built the first electronic problem-solving machines. Google are supporting Bletchley as the birthplace of modern computing! Incidentally, it’s well worth a visit.

Of course, the women aren’t taken seriously – it’s not their place – and they aren’t allowed to mention how amazingly intelligent they are to their male partners and bosses (official secrets). There’s a consistent theme of condescending patronisation towards the women throughout.

There’s a clear sense of social tension as the women of WW2 reposition themselves for ordinary life, its frustrations and numbing routines. To be fair, this is evident for the male characters too. But the women are especially frustrated by the limitations of their various roles as wives, mothers and home-makers.

A few people have suggested that this problem is at the heart of the drama. I’m sure that’s right.  The difficulty is dramatising this problem of post-war frustration within the limits of prime-time TV genres. I thought the murder mystery genre worked pretty well.

In fact, it’s difficult to think of another genre that would have worked so well. The whole point is that the historical context was all about women being forced back into the home and their traditional roles. The world of work was much more limited, for everyone, back then and the idea of these women setting up some kind of commercial enterprise wouldn’t have worked in relation to their home lives and partners.

Even the off-piste sleuthing in the film is problematic enough in relation to the Police and to the men at home.

The women work independently and on the edges of the usual police procedural. That’s OK, we’re familiar with the form from Agatha Christie, where Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple do the same; and from Conan Doyle, where Sherlock Holmes lends a hand to the police.

The amateur sleuth, private investigator and retired police officer are staples of the crime mystery genre. There’s a perception that the police are institutionally corrupted by the political interference of city hall etc, and that’s without all the usual “bent copper” malarky.

The women quickly find that the connecting thread which provides the pattern, that will reveal the killer, is the railway timetable. Specifically, the slow-train out of St Pancras!

The film didn’t really go into detail about how they managed this. There just seemed to be a lot of brain power and tea. Nevertheless, the connections between railways, train timetables, murder and code-breaking was just too good to be true. In the film, the connection was made evident as they traced the line of the railway with a borrowed red lipstick.

In case you think all this is a bit far-fetched, you should remember that murder and the railway have been connected from the beginning. In London and as recently as the 1980s, the North London line provided a backdrop to the vile attacks of John Duffy and David Mulcahy.

One of the sub-plots here is the danger that accrues to women being out-and-about on their own. The railway carriage was, from the first, understood as a place were men and women could meet and talk beyond the usual controlling mechanism of society. This made travelling exciting; and potentially dangerous.

Of course, the mere suggestion of danger has usually been a simple ruse to keep people at home. A modern re-iteration of “here be dragons.” The reality is that the most horrible things often happen at home. my advice is to get out more; but to keep your wits about you.

You can read my previous posts, if you’re interested, about the connections between railways, murder, timetables and so on. Just scroll down the blog.

I’m looking forward to the next episode already.

We watched the first episode of BBC TV bench-mark autumn drama yesterday evening. It’s a dramatisation, by Tom Stoppard, of Ford Maddox Ford’s four-volume set, Parade’s End. It’s got an all-star cast and everyone has those distinctive bee-sting lips. No expense has been spared.

The story covers the same sort of territory as ITVs Downton, but in a more complex, intelligent and adult way – they get out of the house more. There’s the backdrop of WW1, the politics of female emancipation and all the upheaval that follows. It’s clear, from the first, that the class distinctions of Edwardian society are so rigid as to be stuck…from then on, things will have to change!

Maddox Ford was a member of the literary avant-garde and a fully paid-up member of late 19C London bohemia. You can find out about the films and about Maddox Ford on-line.

The books provide an early example of stream of consciousness writing and belong firmly in the modernist camp. Quite a lot of the story is set on Romney Marsh and surrounds in Kent and East Sussex. Later, we’ll get to the western front.

It’s always exciting to recognise local places…in fact, Maddox Ford lived locally to us and was friends with HG Wells, Joseph Conrad and Henry James etc. He probably knew Paul Nash, the artist, who lived down the road. The books, in their contemporary and paperback form, have covers with reproductions of Nash’s famous WW1 paintings on them.

The history of London’s bohemian elite during the 19C is linked to the development of new houses and new ways of living – Holland Park, Chelsea, Bedford Park and Hamstead have all had their moment. East Kent was colonised by the the actress Ellen Terry and her  entourage. They chose this part of the world because it was within easy reach of London by train.

I noticed that, this morning, the Daily Mail had made  a bit of a song-and-dance about how the BBC film began with two sexually explicit scenes in the first six minutes (who’s watching the clock?) In fact, these were important scenes that established the emotional instability of the female lead. This instability expressed itself in a variety of ways, including through her blatant promiscuity.

I was interested that, for the purposes of the film, the major protagonists first meet in a railway carriage. The smouldering potential of their encounter is set up with a number of shots of the train – including steam and pumping engine!

Just like in La Bete Humaine. Similarly, it’s understood that things that begin in this way will always end in tears.

The film also used a broken mirror in a number of shots. This produced a very effective fragmentation of image and reflection. This conjured up all sorts of connections to cubism, movement and dynamism. Like the hall of mirrors scene at the end of Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, this kind of visual dislocation is a sure sign of trouble ahead!

It was rather encouraging, nevertheless, to see my various posts about the psychoanalytical interpretation of railways made explicit in images of Parade’s End.

Two bits of news…

The first is that the BBCTV Christmas drama will be a re-make of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. I’ve already posted about the original film and about the potential of trains in relation to thrillers in literature and cinema. So, it will be interesting to see how they do it…

It’s about time I had a different Christmas railway film to The Railway Children!

Virgin have lost the franchise for the west-coast mainline to Glasgow…it looks like First Group are overpaying…. it will all end in tears.

Virgin deserve credit for introducing tilting trains to Britain.

This is a post about murder and trains. It’s also a post about Hitchcock, and the design of railway carriages.

Strangers on a Train is a Patricia Highsmith literary thriller that Alfred Hitchcock turned into a  film in 1951. The story is about two strangers who meet on a train. A plan is hatched whereby they will each commit a murder on behalf of the other. The fact that they have met, arbitrarily, on the train will cover their tracks and allow them to pull off the perfect crime!

Needless to say, things don’t pan out quite a tidily as planned…

It’s intriguing that writers and film makers have so often chosen the train as a crime scene. In some ways, this just reflects reality. The first railway murder was recorded in 1864 when Franz Muller murdered Thomas Briggs. A train driver spotted the body by the side of the tracks.

The case was notorious as it reflected a wide-spread anxiety about the risks of travelling on trains. The development of the railway allowed people, more or less for the first time, to travel about in large numbers. This mobility began to unpick the social segregations afforded by wealth, class and taste. For the first time, it was possible for the magistrate to sit next to the murder and be none the wiser.

The design of the first railway carriages exacerbated these anxieties. The early carriages were designed as slam-door compartments with no through-corridor. This meant that passengers could be stuck with each other for long periods of time. Also, there was no way that other passengers or the guards would be any the wiser…

It was obviously an improvement for passengers to sit in open cars saloon style cars. Nowadays, passengers sit in an arrangement of seats like that found on an plane and watched over by train managers and CCTV.

My favourite type of railway carriage is the corridor-express type. This is a lovely combination of compartments with six or eight seats, depending on class of ticket, and with sliding doors. The compartments mean that passengers can sit in comfort, facing each other and in relative privacy; whilst the corridor means that they can explore the train! Perfect.

Of course feelings of anxiety are always associated with adventure, excitement and pleasure (Freud). In these circumstances, it’s hard to get people to stay at home. Luckily, bad things don’t happen very often. Indeed, bad things mostly happen at home. My advice is to get out more.

All these themes combine, with the obvious adventure of travel, to distinguish the train as a perfect setting for romance, intrigue and murder.

Nowadays, the railway murder even provides the basis for re-enactment games on heritage steam trains.

I’ll return to these themes at regular intervals…

This is a lovely enamel badge from before WW2.

It was made to give to workers at the London and North Eastern Railway. The LNER was one of the “Big Four” regional companies created in 1923. The railway was famous for running the east-coast mainline, “Flying Scotsman” and “Night Scotsman” sleeper service to Edinburgh out of King’s Cross.

The badge is numbered on the reverse, 98827. Presumably, there’s a list somewhere that would tell us who this particular badge was awarded to.

The beginning of the Olympics has reminded me about the difference between training and practice. The development of athletes depends on a structured timetable of activities and preparation. Practice is just something you do to maintain a standard; not to improve.

The schedule and timings are obviously redolent of train timetables…

plus they are big beasts and move pretty quick!

Good luck Team GB.

The Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway is a light railway that runs between Hythe and Dungeness in Kent. It was built in the 1920s. Karen found this charming book of photographs of the railway. It probably dates, by the look of the children, from the mid 1950s.

The railway has an eventful history and played an important role during WW2: moving men and materials about and providing a first line of defence against potential invaders.

If you ever take the train from Hythe down to Dungeness, you should watch out for strange looking concrete structures. These are the sound-mirrors designed to detect the sound of potential enemies across the water. In the end, this kind of early-warning systems were superseded by electronic RaDaR systems. The structures were allowed to disintegrate until quite recently. Now they have been restored and are pleasingly mysterious and surrealistic.

Karen and me have quite a big collection of vintage silk squares…

We started collecting these in the early 1990s when they were deeply unfashionable. We buy and sell them from the store in Folkestone. Karen recently found this terrific Hermes scarf with steam engines on it – perfect for a blog post.

Hermes are world famous for their handbags and silk squares.

The company was established in 19C Paris and were harness makers for most of their history. In 1937, they began to print silk squares. The timing of this wasn’t accidental.

The business opportunity of producing silk squares was founded on the intersection of several cultural trends. I’ll describe these briefly…

Women

The first thing to say is that it might be tempting to think of  the printed headscarf as a form of repressive head-covering. This would be a mistake. In its 20C form, the printed silk square is specifically associated with the social and sexual emancipation of women.

In cultural terms, the modern scarf devolves from the traditions of wearing military favours and of the commemorative handkerchief. We are all familiar with the idea, in chivalry for example, of knights wearing coloured tokens of favour. More recently, there were commemorative printed cotton handkerchiefs from the Napoleonic military period.

A short detour…

One of the groups of material we have in our collection are propaganda scarves made during WW2. These were made for exchange between sweethearts and cover all the major communities and services in London. These include for the Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air-Force, the Free-French, and the Americans. We also have various Home-Front themed scarves that commemorate the general contribution of civilians to Total War.

Now, back to the main story…

I’ve already posted about various social anxieties that emerged, at the end of the 19C, as a consequence of the development of industrial capitalism. Not least of these was the discovery of female sexuality! Of course, I don’t mean that female sexuality didn’t exist before the end of the 19C; but the normative conventions that defined female sexuality for most of the 19C were much more constrained. In addition and as I’ve mentioned before, the clinic and the prison were used to coerce those women who refused to conform to the prevailing conventions of family, hearth and home.

Anyway, at the end of the 19C women began to re- define their sexuality in a multitude of different ways. Cigarette smoking and bicycle riding were eagerly adopted as cultural signifiers of female liberation.

In this context, the scarf was both a practical and exotic accessory.

Hair

This was especially the case after the development, by Karl Nessler (Nestle), of the “permanent wave” as a widely available hair styling technique. From the beginning of the 20C onwards, women were able to style their hair in a semi-permanent way. Correctly looked after, the hair could remain styled for about a week. The only problem was that, if the hair got wet or windswept, the style would be lost.

In the circumstances, it was entirely appropriate that the printed silk square should emerge as a convenient and practical adjunct to maintaining the permanent wave. The square was quickly integrated into the fashion system after WW1.

Movement and Modernity

WW1 marked a sharp acceleration in the machine-ensemble of modern life. Motor cars, ocean liners, and aircraft became more visible . Each of these machines quickly became identified as an exemplar of modernity through a combination of technology and speed.

It wasn’t surprising that women should join this adventure.

Glamour and Luxury

It turned out that hardly anything was as glamorous as a dynamic woman. It wasn’t surprising that hermes should be at the forefront of producing hand-luggage and scarves to serve this emerging market.

The Scarf

So, the headscarf became associated with a category of celebrity female adventurer. The fashion semiotics of the scarf combined glamour, emancipation and modernity to positive effect.

The steam scarf by Hermes is a design by Philippe Ledoux, probably in the 1960s. The theme of the steam engine fits with the rediscovery, during the 1960s, of 19C culture and technology.

As usual, the design includes a number of related pictorial and typographic elements. The integration of these elements into a coherent and stylish whole is the mark of a great design.

La Bete Humaine is a story by the French writer, Emile Zola, published in 1890. The book has been turned into a film on several occasions. Notably, by Jean Renoir in 1938. A number of themes int he book and film are interesting – not least the overbearing presence, both mechanical and systemic, of the railway…

The main characters of the story are Roubaud, the deputy station master at Le Havre, his wife Séverine, and Jacques Lantier. Lantier is an engine driver on the line and the “human beast” of the title. He has a hereditary madness and has, several times in his life, wanted to murder women. The story is part of the Rougon-Macquart series of novels.

Animal Instincts

The explicit reference to animal instincts in the title would have been especially upsetting to the refined sensibilities of the 19C. Polite society considered its behaviour to be governed by moral sentiments defined by the moral absolutes of religious belief. In this context, it was upsetting for polite society to have the animal instincts of its conventional behaviour progressively laid bare by the discoveries of science and psychology.

The major figures in this story are Darwin, Charcot and Freud.

Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” and “Theory of Evolution” debunked the idea that human beings are a special and separate part of the natural world. This insight has always been a problem for religious creationists. Accordingly, human behaviour could be described entirely in the terms usually applied to the physical appetites of the animal kingdom. These appetites have nearly always chosen so as to describe nature as “red in tooth-and-claw.” No room for empathy there then.

Moral sentiments, understood as the defining characteristic of an elevated human sensibility, were subsequently exposed as a convenient veil that obscured the more obviously cynical and venal parts of human interaction.

Charcot (the “inventor” of psychology) applied systematic medical investigation, diagnosis, and therapy, to patients who displayed “abnormal” behavior. Charcot was determined to link psychology and neurological disorder to an anatomically specific and identifiable (and therefore curable) pathology.

Interestingly, Charcot was house doctor at the Salpetriere Hospital, Paris. This hospital had originally been a gun-poweder factory and prison. It became the women’s prison in Paris. In practical terms this meant that most of its inmates were women whose social behaviour and sexuality were misaligned with prevailing norms.

The medical, psychological and traumatic therapeutic treatments pioneered at the hospital were entirely consistent with medicine’s normative functions as described by Michel Foucault.

Freud

By the end of the 19C, Freud had begun to understand that the link between psychological neurosis and anatomical pathology (as desired by Charcot) could not be substantiated. Even today, it is incredibly difficult to link particular behavioural issues with specific forms of brain trauma. Psychology has a long and terrible history of attempting to map the brain. Inevitably, this leads to surgical intervention as a means to modify problematic behaviour. Labotomy, anyone?

In the circumstances, Freud conceptualised the possibility of a hidden subconscious pathology that underpinned neuroses. This had to be revealed, or drawn out, through therapeutic interrogation and over a long period. This was called psychoanalysis.

The association between animal instinct and subconscious desire, within the context of late 19C polite society, is what Zola is investigating. Of course, what Zola is describing is also a widespread political and social anxiety about inconsistent forms of behaviour.

Man and Machine (the engine driver)

The building-blocks of industrial capitalism are money, people and machinery. These resources are deployed according to efficient and economical principles of the division, specialisation, and integration of labour. The increasing mechanisation of industrial process raised efficiency by increasing speed. In the circumstances, the cadence of the human operative was increasingly defined by the machine.

The engine driver became an exemplar of a new kind of human-mechanical interface. The particular responsibilities attaching to the “correct” workings of the railway locomotive were mythologised in the tragedy of Casey Jones.

Weirdly, when a steam engine is being driven “hard” the whistle can be mistaken for a woman screaming…

Industry Economy and Society

The productive potential of the industrial worker became leveraged up through the association of money and engineering. This was a cause of some anxiety to political and social elites at the end of the 19C. The aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war provided, for  France, a period of introspection and soul-searching. The received wisdom was that French military defeat had been a consequence of moral delinquency and physical enfeeblement of French society. Nothing to do with poor military leadership then

Ideas from political-economy and Darwinism were therefore combined into a sociology based on the Nietzschean doctrine of relentless struggle (if it doesn’t kill you; it makes you stronger). The evident truth of this perception was increasingly identified in the widespread debauchery and criminality of the underclass.

Sex-Crime and Murder

It was entirely appropriate that, against this background of generalised anxiety, the widespread interest in criminality  should express itself  in the media reporting of “faits divers.”

The most extreme (and fascinating) of these crimes has always been the brutal and violent murder of young women. Often, underscored by a sexual motive. Sadly, there has always seemed to be a lot of that about. In Britain we have long been obsessed with the unsolved “Jack the Ripper” mysteries. Co-incidentally, these murders occurred almost at the same time as Zola was writing his novel…

A bit later, the post-impressionist artist, Walter Sickert, began painting a series of “kitchen-sink” pictures of squalid bed-sits in Camden. These pictures purport to show the victim of a brutal murder…

For better or worse, these kinds of story, and the visual culture (paintings, engravings and photographs) of their presentation became a fully integrated element of the developing spectacular of late 19C society.

Jean Renoir

It was entirely appropriate that the French film director should revisit Zola’s themes during the 1930s. The aftermath of WW1 saw the emergence, across Europe, of popular-front politics. In many cases, the policy choices of these mass-mouvements were defined in relation to the social-darwinist anxieties mentioned above.

The poster for Renoir’s film recasts the protagonists in melodrama where the woman is hysterical (mad) with desire (Charcot and Freud again) and the man’s physical supremacy multiplied by mechanical power and exacerbated  by the railway engine. You can see all this in the poster image, above.

The speeding train is unstoppable, like the tragic narrative of these protagonists.

Mechanical and Model Societies

In conclusion, its worth noting that the moral  benefits of industrialisation, mechanisation, and automation, are often called into question. Along with the usual problems of alienation, the structures of industrial specialisations are thought to atomise indiduals and to reduce empathetic feeling.

Feelings of moral separation, and superiority, are the first signs of bureaucratic despotism. In the end, the path to utopia will not be automated. Nor will it run on rails…

The implicit message of Zola and Renoir is that the machine, by its scale and power, is both beautiful and brutal…

“Train d’enfer” is a French expression that is a little difficult to translate into English. You might think it has something to do with railways; but actually and nowadays, it is more often used to describe a kind of relentless momentum and dynamic movement.

For example, you could describe a midfield diamond formation in football as imposing this kind of rhythm on a game. In cycling a breakaway effort, leading from the front, might also be described in these terms.

But the expression is obviously linked to railways and steam locomotives. I don’t think the expression has anything to do with runaway trains. It’s more to do with the huge efforts of steam powered speed records.

Don’t forget that, in the big steam express locomotives of the mid 20C, the engine was powered by coal. The coal had to be endlessly shovelled from tender to fire-box. This was exhausting work.

I think the expression comes from the combination of mechanical speed and human effort. The association with hell fires comes from the glow of the furnace reflected in the frantic movements of the fireman.

The poster, above, by the Irish artist, William Orpen, gives a very good impression of this dramatic scene.

The expression is so dramatic and meaningful that it has been used several times a film title.