Dates are important to me. I have always been good at learning them, helped by mnemonics taught me by my mother. When I was seven, attending the convent school and in the class of Sister Angela whom I adored, I had a meretricious triumph, my first of a quasi-public nature. An official visit was paid to the school by the Rt. Hon. Oliver Stanley, president of the board of education. He was the first politician I had seen, let alone met. Big, tall, fat, red-faced, genial and courteous, he shook hands during his classroom tour. Sister Angela introduced me as ‘a bright young man’. ‘Bright, is he?’ said the minister. ‘Well, boy, date of the Battle of Hastings?’ ‘1066.’ ‘Right. Battle of Bannockburn?’ ‘1314.’ ‘Right. Battle of Agincourt?’ ‘1415.’ ‘God bless my soul! The boy’s a marvel!’ There was no particular merit in my performance. But Sister Angela said, ‘You did me proud.’
What interest me particularly are the dates when people are born and die, and the events that surround them. My own year of birth, 1928, witnessed a great culling: old Thomas Hardy, my mother’s favourite novelist, ‘Butcher’ Haig (‘He did for my brother Tom,’ my father used to say, ‘and nearly did for me too.’), H.H. Asquith and Ellen Terry. Odd to think she had been briefly married, as a teenager, to G.F. Watts. Takes you back, eh? The next year, before I was one, occurred the deaths of Diaghilev, Clemenceau and Rosebery. The same year, I may add, saw the birth of John Osborne, about whom I can tell many tales. Knowing your own historical context gives you a perspective on events, not always reassuring. There are clamours for peace treaties in the Middle East and elsewhere today. Well, 1928 was a great year for those. Italy signed a 20-year peace treaty with Abyssinia, seven years before her invasion and conquest, and another with Greece, a dozen years before a similar invasion. And Briand and Mr Kellogg of the USA drew up a pact of perpetual peace, signed by 65 nations, including such professional aggressors as Germany, Japan and the USSR.
It is a delight to me to note who were exactly the same age or near-contemporaries, and what was their historical background. Thus, Winston Churchill (whom I was to meet when I was 16) was born in 1874, the year Disraeli at last became prime minister with a proper majority (‘Top of the greasy pole!’) and Bismarck began his Kulturkampf against Catholicism. The year also saw the births of Somerset Maugham, Gertie Stein, Chesterton, Weizmann, founder of Israel, Schönberg and the shifty editor of the Times, Geoffrey Dawson. Quite a crop! Churchill was 15 years older than Hitler, whom he also outlived by 20 years, so Hitler was, as it were, the meat in a doorstep Churchillian sandwich.
Churchill’s ally and adversary Stalin was born five years after him, in 1879, the year Brahms wrote his marvellous violin concerto and Tchaikovsky composed Eugene Onegin. It was also the year Ibsen put on A Doll’s House and Stevenson published Travels with a Donkey, a favourite book of mine. Among Stalin’s strict contemporaries were Beaverbrook, Einstein and Beveridge. The year before Stalin entered the world, Lord John Russell (of the Great Reform Bill) had died, along with Pio Nono and that superb draftsman Honoré Daumier. F.D. Roosevelt, eight years younger than Churchill, was born in 1882, the same year Wagner wrote Parsifal. His contemporaries were Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Stravinsky, Sam Goldwyn, de Valera, Jack Hobbs and Braque — a mixed bag by any standard. Hitler came along seven years later in 1889, the year the Eiffel Tower was built, Van Gogh painted his cypresses, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers was put on. Hitler’s contemporaries were Charlie Chaplin, Sir Stafford Cripps, old Arnold Toynbee and his fellow dictator Salazar, who once had me banned from Portugal. It is significant that Hitler was born the year Jerome K. Jerome published Three Men in a Boat, for his war — perhaps the most personal great war in history — banished Jerome’s world for ever. That book made me laugh (at 12) more than any other I have enjoyed.
There are certain years which are rich in giving us genius and delight. A key one is 1775, which saw the births of Charles Lamb, Jane Austen and J.M.W. Turner. Which could we least do without? Hard to say. Sometimes I think Lamb, sometimes Austen. And it is impossible to imagine the visual world without the refraction of Turner. The three never met or, so far as I know, referred to each other, though Walter Scott, born four years earlier, paid a generous tribute to Austen and at least twice invited Lamb to stay at Abbotsford (couldn’t afford it). Six years before this annus mirabilis, in 1769, there was another key year when Wellington and Napoleon were both born, not to mention Castlereagh, Thomas Lawrence and Soult, grand survivor of Napoleon’s marshals, who lived till 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition. Wellington, however, outlasted him by a year. His was a tremendous span, since his birth coincided with the first lightning conductor, the beginning of modern actuarial insurance, Madame du Barry climbing into Louis XV’s bed and Arkwright’s spinning machine, while the year he died saw the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the coining of that troublesome word ‘evolution’.
Chronological coincidences are sometimes significant, often meaningless. We all know Shakespeare was born in 1564, the same year as Christopher Marlowe. But how many know it was also the year of Galileo’s birth, and the death of Michelangelo, at the grand old age of 89, and of the sinister Calvin? Milton was born in 1608, the same year old Bess of Hardwicke died, and two years before Caravaggio met his tragic end. Milton lived to 66. It is odd he was born the same year as General Monck, nemesis of the Commonwealth that Milton served as Latin secretary. Did they ever meet?
Swift was born in 1667; Queen Anne was two when he was born and he lived to 1745, the year Sir Robert Walpole died and Bonnie Prince Charlie came south. I like the 1770s: a rich decade. Wordsworth and Beethoven were born in 1770; so were Canning and Hegel. The next year along came Scott and Sydney Smith, and in 1772 Coleridge. Metternich was born in 1773, Constable in 1776, Hazlitt and Humphry Davy in 1778, and the following year Thomas Moore and Melbourne. Another good year was 1788, when Byron, Peel and Schopenhauer were born, and Gainsborough died. Then there was the birth-year of Keats, 1795, which also saw the arrival of Thomas Arnold, Ranke and Carlyle. Strange, is it not, to think of Keats and Carlyle both toddlers at the same time.
Humanity is a shuffling, incongruous crowd, edging itself on to the planet, trudging across it, then vanishing over the receding horizon, a procession of visionaries and monsters, the odd genius set alongside mediocrities and accident-prone unfortunates, hedonists, martyrs and heroes. Thus 1759 was the ‘Year of Victories’, with Wolfe aged 32 dying with Quebec in his grasp. Dying the same year was Handel, full of age and honours, and being born was Burns, Scotland’s greatest son, alongside Pitt the Younger, the tragic Mary Wollstonecraft, Wilberforce the abolitionist, Schiller and the audacious Danton. What does it all mean? Nothing, really, but it is an intriguing game to play. God does not play dice, said Einstein. But He has parlour games of His own.
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