Bernard Montgomery: An Insufferable Field Marshal

There can be no doubt that Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery (1887-1976) was one of Britain’s greatest ever military commanders, but it is also beyond dispute that he was one of the most difficult people to work with, a view that was certainly held by his American counterparts during World War II, namely George Patton and Dwight D Eisenhower. Montgomery described himself as being “tiresome” and the epithet seems entirely apt.

Before World War II

Montgomery did not come from a typical British officer class background, being the son of an Anglican bishop who was reasonably well-off but by no means rich. At Sandhurst (the Royal Military Academy) Montgomery was the “odd one out”, especially as he was not afraid of questioning opinions with which he did not agree. Being both middle-class and independent-minded were not the best qualities for a career as an officer in the British army prior to World War I.

During the 1914-18 war, Montgomery served with distinction and was lucky to escape with his life after being shot in the chest by a sniper.

Between the wars he attended the Army’s Staff College at Camberley, firstly as a pupil and later as a teacher of army tactics. He used this pause from active service to very good effect, as he had been horrified by the tactics that had been practiced during World War I and was convinced that there had to be a better way of fighting wars in the 20^th century. In particular, he deplored the “gung-ho” tactic of attacking en masse with a superior force that was bound to suffer a high casualty rate even if it won the encounter. Instead, he preferred to reconnoitre the enemy and identify his weaknesses before attacking where he was most vulnerable.

Egypt and El Alamein

In August 1942 Lieutenant General Montgomery was sent to Egypt to take command of the British Eighth Army, which was threatened by the progress of Rommel’s Afrika Corps as it advanced across North Africa. Montgomery did two things that were different from what had gone before. He coordinated the forces under his command, namely those on the ground and in the air, and he made himself known among his troops, which boosted their morale and led to them being intensely loyal to him. He knew that soldiers who trusted their commanders were far more likely to be victorious, and regarded high troop morale as “the most important single factor in war”.

On one occasion he was about to step into a tank when a soldier suggested that his broad-brimmed hat would get caught on the hatch and offered him a standard black beret in its place. Montgomery was for ever after proud to wear a soldier’s beret, on which he placed the badge of the Royal Tank Regiment alongside his officer’s badge.

The victory of the Eighth Army (together with the Australian 9^th Division) at El Alamein was largely due to Montgomery’s superior tactics and his use of military intelligence (including decrypted German radio transmissions) to second-guess his opponent. He also tried to work out what Rommel’s tactics would be by understanding how the German commander’s mind worked. His ability to get inside the head of his opponent was one of Montgomery’s greatest strengths.

However, it has to be admitted that this victory, which many people (including Churchill) came to regard as the turning point in the War, went somewhat to Montgomery’s head, as he came to believe that only he had the right ideas about how the campaign should proceed from that point. In particular he had a low opinion of the efforts made by the American forces under George Patton, whom he despised and mistrusted (the feelings were entirely mutual on Patton’s part).

The Italian Campaign

The next phase of the war was the invasion of Sicily, as the first step of the long Italian campaign. This was to be an allied attack, involving both British and American forces, but Montgomery was keen to ensure that the main credit for victory would go to him. Patton, for his part, had little time for Montgomery, whom he regarded as being arrogant, brusque and standoffish, and in this assessment he was not wrong. Patton could also not stand Montgomery’s tactic of meticulously planning every move, at one point calling him a “timid little fart”.

When the Americans captured Palermo, which Montgomery had wanted to do, the latter was highly annoyed. He agreed to meet Patton at Palermo and Montgomery planned to fly there in an American Flying Fortress that he had won in a bet. Patton gave an evasive answer when Montgomery asked if the runway at Palermo would be long enough to land such a plane and it turned out that it was not. Montgomery was lucky to escape unscathed when the Fortress ran off the runway and was wrecked. He had no doubt who to blame for this incident.

The Invasion of Europe

During the invasion of mainland Europe that started with the D-Day landings in June 1944, Montgomery was again conscious of the need to be one step ahead of the Americans. Montgomery most resented the fact that Eisenhower was the Allied Supreme Commander and therefore his boss. Montgomery had been promoted to the rank of Field Marshal, which was not a rank used in the American army, and Montgomery assumed that this gave him overall permanent command of the ground forces in Europe, both British and American, which had been the case only on a temporary basis when the invasion was being launched.

Relationships between the two men continued to be fraught, with Eisenhower on several occasions having to appease Montgomery by letting him have his way in tactical matters. Sometimes this was a wise move, but not always.

For example, Patton wanted to advance against Germany via a southern route whereas Montgomery preferred a northern approach through the Netherlands. Eisenhower gave in to Montgomery, but the resulting campaign (Operation Market Garden) was, for once in Montgomery’s glittering career, a dismal failure.

As it happened, the Germans made things much easier for the allies by attempting a counter-attack through the Ardennes Forest not far from where the bulk of the American forces under Patton were stationed. The Americans turned the situation to their advantage and forced the Germans back. However, Montgomery was later to claim far more credit for this victory than he was entitled to do, British forces having only played a minor part in the Ardennes campaign. Not surprisingly, this attitude infuriated the Americans.

Montgomery now wished to claim the ultimate accolade of capturing Berlin itself, as did Patton, but Eisenhower decided that it would be politically expedient for that honour to fall to the Soviet forces that were advancing from the East. No doubt he reckoned that for either man to have been able to claim that particular credit would have made them even more insufferable than they already were.

After the War

Patton died after a road traffic accident in Germany not long after the war ended, but Montgomery lived on into old age, dying in 1976 at the age of 88. His post-war work included helping to create NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that has done much to preserve peace in Europe and the wider world.

“Monty” never lost his popularity with the British people, and made a number of appearances in television documentaries (etc) in his later years, in which he was always keen to praise the bravery and devotion of the troops under his command while also making sure that credit went where it was due.

Bernard Montgomery had a remarkable talent for winning battles and planning campaigns, but along with that went the character flaws that made him a very difficult person to get along with, especially with regard to the military and political hierarchy. Winston Churchill, who had to be persuaded to appoint Montgomery to command of the Eighth Army prior to El Alamein, was famously quoted as saying of him: “In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable.”

© John Welford

Ndabaningi Sithole: one of the fathers of Zimbabwean independence

Men of the cloth do not often feature in struggles for black liberation or emancipation, although notable examples were Dr Martin Luther King and Rev Jesse Jackson in the United States. In Zimbabwe, Ndabaningi Sithole was such a man. A gifted orator, Ndabaningi Sithole was the brains behind the foundation of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) in 1963.

He was born on 21st July 1920 in the village of Nyamandlovu in Matabeleland (western Zimbabwe), but he was an Ndau by descent, the Ndau being one of the minority ethnic groups in Zimbabwe, found mostly to the south-east of the country. His early years were not easy because his father distrusted education and would not support his son’s endeavours to gain a good educational grounding. Blessed with immense intellectual abilities, young Ndabaningi defied his father and started to pursue his education through missionary schools just as most Zimbabwean revolutionaries did. He attended Dadaya School under the tutelage of Garfield Todd, a white New Zealander who was to become Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia from 1953 to 1958. 

His determination to be educated led to him gaining a National Junior Certificate and eventually a BA degree from the University of South Africa by private study. He returned to Dadaya School as a teacher, and in 1947 led a short protest strike in support of several girl students whom he believed had been punished in a degrading manner by Garfield Todd.

Sithole became a Christian and was uncertain for some time whether to pursue a career as a teacher or in the Church. In 1953 he was accepted by the American Board Mission and spent three years in the United States before returning to Rhodesia to become head of a primary school and to be ordained as a Methodist minister. His interest in politics arose when he became president of the African Teachers Association and wrote a short book with the title “African Nationalism”, which was published in 1959. Although he advocated a moderate and peaceful approach to reform, such views were dangerous in a country that was governed by the minority white population.

He soon realised that politics were his vocation and joined the National Democratic Party, led by Joshua Nkomo, in 1960. He soon reached a position of influence within the party and was forced to resign his teaching post, becoming a full-time time politician from that point on. The Government’s response to black nationalism was to become more authoritarian, proscribing the NDP as a criminal organisation in December 1962, but a new organization, the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU) was declared very soon afterwards.

However, all was not well in the leadership of ZAPU, and Sithole and others split from Nkomo in July 1963. The new party was called the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), its leaders including, besides Sithole, Herbert Chitepo, Robert Mugabe, Edgar Tekere and Enos Nkala. In 1964 both ZANU and ZAPU were banned and many nationalists, including Sithole, were placed in detention camps. Sithole was detained for five years, after which he was arrested on a charge of plotting to assassinate the Prime Minister, Ian Smith, and sentenced to six years in jail. The evidence rested on a letter that Sithole was supposed to have written, but he always maintained that it was a forgery, stating at his trial: “I wish publicly to dissociate my name in thought, word and deed from any subversive activities, from any terrorist activities, and from any form of violence.”

On his release in 1974, Sithole lived in exile in Zambia with other ZANU leaders, one of whom, Herbert Chitepo, was killed by a car bomb in March 1975, an occurrence that led to the emergence of Robert Mugabe as the leader of ZANU with a more militant approach than that advocated by Sithole. Even before this event, Sithole had lost a vote of no confidence in his leadership, but Mugabe was still in prison at the time. ZANU split along tribal lines, with the Ndebele joining Sithole in ZANU-Ndonga and the Shona following Mugabe in his ZANU-PF (Patriotic Front).

Sithole’s moderate approach led to him being part of the four-man executive council to govern “Zimbabwe Rhodesia” under the “Internal Settlement” of 1978, in conjunction with Ian Smith, Bishop Abel Muzorewa and Chief Jeremiah Chirau. He also took part in the Lancaster House Agreement of December 1979 that was designed to reach a settlement for black majority rule that would be agreed by all the parties and recognised internationally. 

However, the militants in ZANU and ZAPU, who had been engaged in guerrilla-war tactics against the Smith government, were distrustful of Sithole for his presumed sell-out to the whites, and, although Mugabe had signed the Agreement, the solution was clearly not to his liking, involving as it did a guaranteed presence of white members in the new Parliament. Having failed to win a seat in the Parliament elected in 1980, and fearing for his life, Sithole left for the United States in 1983, where he stayed until 1992. 

At the age of 75 he attempted a political comeback by being elected to the Zimbabwe Parliament in 1995. The following year he stood against Mugabe in the election for president, but only gained 37,000 votes as against the 1.4 million won by Mugabe. However, he had withdrawn from the election before polling took place, his name remaining on the ballot, because he claimed that the election was being unfairly managed. Accusations of election rigging have been levelled at Robert Mugabe ever since, and with good reason. 

In 1997 Sithole was arrested, tried and convicted on a charge of attempting to assassinate Robert Mugabe, and he was also ejected from his parliamentary seat. As his appeal was never heard, it must remain technically uncertain whether there was any truth in the allegation, although the likelihood of the charge being entirely fictitious must be high, given the characters of the people involved. 

In June 2000, Sithole’s ZANU-Ndonga won his seat yet again. However, by this time Sithole himself was seriously ill and he left Zimbabwe for medical treatment soon afterwards. He died in hospital in Pennsylvania on 12 December 2000 at the age of 80.

Ndabaningi Sithole will always be seen as an important figure in the history of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle. Had he been able to prevail against the stronger and less principled Robert Mugabe, there is every possibility that much of the misery suffered by the people of Zimbabwe in more recent years might have been avoided.

(See also: The Second Chimurenga: Zimbabwe's Successful War of Independence)

© John Welford

Mary Seacole: the forgotten "Florence Nightingale"

Mary Seacole is now being given proper recognition for her contribution to nursing and the welfare of soldiers during the Crimean War. Everyone has heard of Florence Nightingale, the "lady with the lamp", but nothing like as much fame has fallen on the shoulders of Mary Seacole, although this oversight is at last being corrected.

Mary Seacole – her early life

Mary was born in 1805 as Mary Jane Grant, in Kingston, Jamaica. Her father was a Scottish soldier, and her mixed-race mother ran a boarding house for British army officers. This lady had a smattering of nursing knowledge, as well as being well versed in the use of herbal medicines, skills which she passed on to her daughter.

Little is known of Mary's early life, although she visited London in the 1820s, and in 1836 she was married to Edwin Horatio Seacole, one of her mother's house-guests, but he died within a few years.

Mary ran the boarding house with her sister for some time, and also practised as a nurse, both in Jamaica and Panama, where she went to help her brother in running his hotel there.

The Crimean War

In 1854 the Crimean War broke out, with Britain and France in conflict with Russia, most of the hostilities being carried out near the shores of the Black Sea. The miseries suffered by the troops were partly the result of incompetence on the part of the generals and politicians, and partly due to the remoteness from Britain of the theatre of war. This was the first time that the British army had been called upon to fight so far from home or friendly territory.

Mary Seacole sailed to Britain with the intention of volunteering for Florence Nightingale's nursing corps. Whether it was the colour of her skin or her lowly social status that was the issue is a matter for debate, but the fact remains that her office of service was turned down.

Undaunted, she set sail for the Crimea at her own expense, arriving at Balaclava in February 1855. With a business partner, she did exactly what she had done back in Jamaica, and opened a boarding house that acquired the name "The British Hotel". From this base she offered a range of comforts for the troops, both officers and serving men.

Being independent, and not constrained by the authority of Florence Nightingale's official nursing corps, she was free to roam almost as widely as she wanted, and she became a familiar sight as she moved among the fighting men with her mules, taking them food, wine and medical supplies. She clearly did this work at considerable physical risk to herself, as she tended the wounded and dying while the fighting was still in progress.

On 9^th September she obtained permission to accompany the army as it took control of Sebastopol, and was the first woman to enter the city.

After the War

In 1856 the war ended, leaving Mary Seacole with no customers at the British Hotel, but plenty of unsold stock and unpaid bills. She therefore returned to Britain in financial difficulties, especially as her venture to open an establishment at Aldershot, where much of the British army was based, came to nothing.

The Crimean War produced several remarkable people, one of them being William Howard Russell of The Times, who could claim to be the world's first modern war reporter (it was his account of the Charge of the Light Brigade that brought the true horror home to the British public). Russell was fully aware of Mary Seacole's activities in the Crimea, and his reports helped to win support for her financially. Queen Victoria came to know of her deeds, and gave her blessing to a "Seacole Fund" that recognised Mary's achievements and gave her some financial stability in her later years.

She was prompted to tell her own story, which she did in an autobiography entitled "The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands", which became something of a bestseller.

She died in 1881, in London, at the age of 76. However, after her death she faded from public memory and it is only in relatively recent times that her contributions to nursing and field care have been given their proper due.

In 2004, she was voted in an online poll as the greatest ever black Briton.

Following a 12-year fundraising campaign, in June 2016 a statue of Mary Seacole by Martin Jennings was unveiled in the grounds of St Thomas’s Hospital in London, looking over the Thames towards the Houses of Parliament. This is the first statue ever erected in the UK in honour of a black woman.

© John Welford

Vlad the Impaler

The legend of Dracula was inspired by the life and antics of Vlad III, a 15^th century prince of Wallachia, but fiction was far excelled by reality in terms of savage cruelty and murderous sadism.

Vlad was born in 1431 in Sighisoara, Transylvania (part of modern Romania). His father, Vlad II, was a member of the Order of the Dragon, a secret organisation that had been created by the Holy Roman Emperor to resist incursions into Europe by the Muslim Ottomans. The younger Vlad became a member of the order at the age of five, and thus acquired the family name of Dracul.

Vlad II had been exiled from Wallachia (also in modern-day Romania) to Transylvania, and was also under severe pressure from the Ottomans. He was forced at one stage to send two of his sons into captivity, which meant that Vlad Junior spent four of his teenage years in Ottoman custody, where he developed a hatred of the Turks.

Vlad’s elder brother Mircea was murdered in 1447, as was Vlad Senior. The Ottomans invaded the region and installed Vlad Junior as a puppet ruler of Wallachia in 1448, but this did not please the Hungarians, who forced him to flee to Moldavia. However, Vlad was able to persuade the ruler of Hungary that he was a better bet to rule Wallachia than the boyars (nobles loyal to Hungary) who currently did so.

In 1456 Vlad took his opportunity to seize the Wallachian throne from the boyars. Having killed his rival, he invited the leading boyars to a banquet, ostensibly to make peace with them, but instead he forced them to become slaves in a programme of castle-building.

Vlad’s efforts to establish Wallachia as a powerful kingdom led to the elimination of anyone seen as a threat to this aim. That not only meant any noble who might challenge his rule but also anyone whom he regarded as a drain on the country’s resources. He began by inviting thousands of vagrants and people who were physically or mentally disabled to a feast, which was genuine, but after they had finished eating the hall was locked and set on fire.

Vlad also had a deep hatred for immoral women, who would have their breasts cut off and be skinned or boiled alive, with their remains being put on public display afterwards.

Another target were the “foreign parasites” who sought to get rich through unfair trading arrangements. He therefore had thousands of German and other merchants butchered in 1459.

The name Vlad the Impaler was well deserved, because impaling his victims on stakes was a preferred method of execution. Stakes would be arrayed in concentric circles around his castles and his victims forced down onto them, sometimes taking hours to die. Nobody was allowed to remove the dead bodies, which rotted where they were.

Skinning and boiling were also used as means of killing people, and on one occasion he hammered nails into the heads of foreign ambassadors whom he considered were being insufficiently polite to him. It is possible that he drank the blood of some of his victims, which filtered through to the Dracula legend.

In 1461 Vlad crossed the Danube to attack the Ottomans, capturing 20,000 Turkish prisoners in the process. When Sultan Mehmet II returned to the Danube for a counter-attack he was greeted by a forest of impaled bodies on stakes.

However, Vlad had underestimated the strength of his enemy and lost his throne. He was captured by the Hungarians and spent the next ten years as a prisoner, amusing himself by impaling birds and mice on tiny stakes. 

He was able to get back into favour with the Hungarians, even marrying a Hungarian princess (presumably with considerable reluctance on her part) and winning support for a fresh invasion of Wallachia.

However, his success was short-lived in that he was killed in 1476 when the Ottomans invaded yet again. It was perhaps fitting that his head was later stuck on a stake in Constantinople.

© John Welford

William Radam and his marvelous medicine

William Radam well deserved the label of “snake oil salesman”. He operated in the United States during the late 19^th century, selling his “Microbe Killer” for which he claimed amazing powers.

William Radam

For a pharmaceutical pioneer, Radam had an unconventional background. He was a gardener who had observed that it didn’t matter what weeds he treated with weedkiller, they all died. He reasoned that, since all diseases were caused by “microbes”, if you could kill the microbes you would cure the disease, whatever it was.

He therefore began to sell his miracle cure with the recommendation to take: “A wineglassful after meals and at bedtime … it will prevent and cure disease by destroying bacteria, the organic life that causes fermentation and decay of the blood, the tissues, and the vital organs”. By claiming to prevent disease as well as cure it, he therefore gained a marketplace among healthy people as well as sick ones. 

The diseases that Microbe Killer would prevent and cure were many and various – everything from the common cold and indigestion to syphilis and cancer. It proved to be highly popular, at three dollars a gallon, and Radam eventually set up 17 factories in countries around the world.

Needless to say, Radam was quick to rubbish the medical profession, accusing them of hoodwinking the public by pretending to know what caused a patient’s disease by diagnosing their symptoms. Clearly, applying scientific rigour to the study of medicine was all nonsense – what was needed was a hefty dose of Microbe Killer and nothing else!

Eventually, someone thought it would be a good idea to apply scientific rigour to William’s marvellous medicine. It turned out to be more than 99% water, with small quantities of sulphuric and hydrochloric acids plus a dash of red wine to add taste and colour. At least the former gardener did not think that weedkiller was an appropriate means of dealing with microbes!

Unfortunately, some people today do not seem to be any less gullible than the customers of William Radam. The market for homeopathic remedies seems to be as buoyant as ever, despite the fact that they contain nothing more in terms of clinically effective substances than did Microbe Killer. No doubt there were people in Radam’s day who swore blind that their regular dose of highly dilute and slightly acidic red wine was doing them the power of good, just as devotees of homeopathy claim today. However, apart from the beneficial placebo effect that comes from believing that something is doing you good, the old and new snake oils are no more than that – snake oil!

© John Welford

Who was Ned Ludd?

General Ned Ludd never existed, but his followers wreaked havoc in the factories of early 19^th-century Britain and provoked strong reprisals from the government of the day. The Luddites played a role in the development of the working-class movement that led eventually to the formation of legal trade unions.

The origin of the Luddites

The name probably originates with Lud, a mythical king of early Britain who was said to have built the first walls of London and after whom Ludgate Hill is named. The Luddites saw themselves as invoking the spirit of free-born British people from a past age. By claiming to be based in Sherwood Forest they also saw themselves as latter-day followers of Robin Hood, striking a blow for the ordinary working man against the forces of power and capitalism.

Their actions began in 1811 with the sending of letters to mill owners in Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire who had recently installed steam-engine powered machines (known as frames) that increased production in the hosiery and knitwear industries but needed fewer people to do the work. The factory system was also making it uneconomic for people to work on hand-powered frames in their own homes, as had been the traditional pattern in these areas.

War with France had given the mill owners more incentive to install powered knitting frames, given that Napoleon Bonaparte’s “Continental System” had effectively sealed the continent of Europe against exports from Britain. In order to cut their costs, and thus make it feasible for exports to be sent to other markets, the industrialists of Britain had no option but to produce more by using fewer workers, on lower wages, and that meant installing large, steam-driven machines.

A series of poor harvests during the period from 1808 to 1812 had caused food prices to rise, so there was genuine hardship in the general population. Many people felt that they had to do something to fight against the forces that were oppressing them, and they saw the machines in the factories as the root cause of their distress.

The spread of Luddite discontent

The above-mentioned letters, signed by “Enoch”, were threats to the mill owners to remove the machines, or see them destroyed, and the actions that followed served to carry out those threats. Bands of men broke into the factories at night and smashed the machines with sledge-hammers. The “General’s Army” sometimes consisted of hundreds or even thousands of men marching in disciplined order through the streets on their way to the factories. Even if there was no actual “Ned Ludd”, somebody was hard at work organising these events.

The Luddites soon spread their activities northwards to the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, where the woollen and cotton garment industries were based.  Government troops had to be brought in to protect the factories and arrest the demonstrators, one estimate being that 12,000 soldiers had to be diverted from the war effor

Needless to say, some Luddite activities did spill over into more general mayhem, with food riots riding on the back of the organised machine-breaking. There was, for example, a riot in Manchester in April 1812 in which desperate women raided the stocks of potatoes held by dealers who were charging extortionate prices for them.

Force met with force

The government’s response was to meet force with force, and a Frame-Breaking Bill was passed by Parliament in 1812. This made the destruction of machinery punishable by hanging. One opponent of the bill was Lord Byron, whose speech in the House of Lords included the words:

“Nothing but absolute want could have driven a large and once honest and industrious body of people into the commission of excesses so hazardous to themselves, their family and their community.”

This statement made the case that it is wrong to regard the Luddite movement as that of an undisciplined mob, despite its excesses. On the one hand, it could be said that, by destroying the new machines, they were depriving the operators of those machines of their living, but it was also true that the goods produced in the factories were often of much lower quality than those of the handloom weavers, who were craftsmen with a real pride in their work.

Ultimately, the actions of the Luddites were futile, because economic necessity was driving the movement of industrialisation, and the machine-smashing could only delay the changes, not prevent them for ever.

The Luddite cause was not helped by the assassination of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, on 11^th May 1812. Although it soon became clear that his assassin, John Bellingham, was motivated by purely private motives, many people felt that anything that threatened violence against the establishment had to be resisted strongly, whatever the provocation. Memories of the French Revolution were vivid in many peoples’ minds, and the connection between mob violence and the murder of political leaders was an easy one to make.

The suppression of the Luddites was carried out by means of the punishment of a number of their leaders, including hangings and transportation to Australia, although none of those leaders answered to the name of Ned Ludd.

The legacy of the Luddites

The textile workers of the time had no recourse to a trade union to represent their grievances to factory owners, so there was no safety valve when problems arose. The “Combination Acts” of 1799 and 1800 made trade unions illegal, so any such activity was driven underground. Although these laws were repealed in 1824-5 the process of collective bargaining was illegal until 1860. The Luddite movement was seen by some as a good reason for suppressing trade unions, but ultimately it showed that working people needed to be able to deal with their problems in a constructive way, around a negotiating table, without being forced to take extreme measures.

The word “Luddite” is used today to describe someone who sets their face against progress and stubbornly refuses to accept change. In terms of the original Luddites this charge has some force, in that change was inevitable and breaking the machines was never going to work as a means of reversing the trend towards mechanisation in the garment industry. However, there are occasions when the Luddite mentality has its place, in that craftsmanship should be protected and preserved when under threat. Once certain skills are lost they will be lost for ever, and actions that remind people of that fact should not always be rejected on the grounds that they are anti-progressive.

© John Welford

Three favourite quotes from Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was not only one of the greatest scientists of all time but he also had a “way with words” that he used to express deep truths in memorable ways. Here are three quotations from him (sorry that I don’t know the circumstances under which they were written or said) that I find to be particularly appealing:

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

This is similar to his assertion that the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits, and one can see that a life lived through the first half of the 20^th century, when the world tried twice to tear itself apart through war, would naturally tend to this point of view.

Einstein described himself as a “militant pacifist” who would fight for peace, and would no doubt have agreed 100% with his near-contemporary and fellow pacifist Bertrand Russell who said that “War does not determine who is right, only who is left”. What could be more stupid than behaviour that costs so much and produces so little?

However, Einstein might also have been influenced by his great predecessor Isaac Newton, whose theories inspired his own re-interpretation of them. Newton once wrote: “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.” Those two great minds clearly both recognized that science had its limits, and working out what their fellow humans would do with the discoveries made by scientists was clearly one of those limits.

Those who seek to deny what science says now about climate change and man-made global warming would surely be on the “stupid” list of both Newton and Einstein were they alive today.

If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?

My desk is always cluttered! That is because I like to have everything I need close at hand and not have to be constantly getting up and either fetching things or putting them away. Librarians are supposed – in theory – to be tidy people who always know where everything is, but tidiness has never been my number one priority!

I once worked for a company in which a decree went around from “upstairs” that nobody was allowed to have more than two pieces of paper on their desk at any one time.  Needless to say, I took absolutely no notice of this edict! Nothing came of it – possibly because the manager who issued this command was too empty-minded to ever think of visiting the library!

It was good to know that – should I have ever been challenged to defend my desk clutter – I would have had Albert Einstein on my side!

The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library.

Again – it’s good to know that one’s efforts have the support of one of the greatest minds ever to have existed!

The company I mentioned above did not agree with this sentiment towards the end of my time with them. It was a major UK player in the telecommunications industry, with offices and factories in towns and cities throughout the country. I was the chief librarian, with responsibility for coordinating the company’s four libraries (in Coventry, Liverpool, Poole and Nottingham). As time went by, each library was closed in turn, and the staff made redundant, leaving me with just the Coventry library from which to serve the needs of a 50,000 strong workforce with just one library assistant as my support staff. The fact that this was plainly impossible was all that management needed to declare that the job did not need to be done at all, so the final library was closed as well. The whole company went to the wall six months later.

The thinking was that libraries were not necessary because “it’s all on the Internet”. Somebody once said that the Internet was the world’s largest library, in which all the books had been thrown on the floor. In other words, in order to get the best value from the undoubted benefits that the Internet can provide, you need somebody who can help you to find what you need, and what you can trust, in the shortest possible time. Can I suggest that a professional fully-trained librarian might be just that person?

Libraries have moved on since Einstein’s time, but the principle enshrined in the above quotation still applies. Perhaps it needs a slight rewording – the only thing you absolutely have to know is who you can call upon to help you when you come to a grinding halt in your search for information!

© John Welford