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LO N D O N
ON FILM
E D I T E D BY PA M H I R S C H
& CHRIS O’ROURKE
 Screening Spaces

Series Editor
Pamela Robertson Wojcik
Department of Film, Television, and Theatre
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana, USA
Screening Spaces is a series dedicated to showcasing interdisciplinary
books that explore the multiple and various intersections of space, place,
and screen cultures.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14491
Pam Hirsch · Chris O’Rourke
Editors

London on Film
Editors
Pam Hirsch Chris O’Rourke
University of Cambridge University of Lincoln
Cambridge, UK Lincoln, UK

Screening Spaces
ISBN 978-3-319-64978-8 ISBN 978-3-319-64979-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949476

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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 Contents

Introduction: Film Londons 1

Pam Hirsch and Chris O’Rourke

‘Local Film Subjects’: Suburban Cinema, 1895–1910 15

Roland-François Lack

Glamour and Crime: The London Nightclub in Silent Film 27

Mara Arts

Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936): Conspirators and Bombs

in Actual, Literary and Filmic London 41
Pam Hirsch

‘A Relic of the Bad Old Days’: Hollywood’s London

in None but the Lonely Heart (1944) 57
Mark Glancy

London Can Take It: Documentary Reconstructions

of the City 73
Michael McCluskey

v
vi Contents

From the Docks to Notting Hill: Cinematic Mappings

of Imperial and Post-Imperial London 87
Eleni Liarou

Wanting More: Gender, Space and Desire in Darling

and Four in the Morning 103
Rose Hepworth

Queer London on Film: Victim (1961), The Killing of Sister

George (1968) and Nighthawks (1978) 117
Chris O’Rourke

Housing Policy and Building Types: From High Hopes to

High-Rise 133
Amy Sargeant

A Melancholy Topography: Patrick Keiller’s London 147

David Anderson

From Dogpower to Ratropolis: London in Animated Film 163

Rui Tang and David Whitley

Skateboard City: London in Skateboarding Films 177

Iain Borden

Shaun of the Dead and the Construction of Cult Space in

Millennial London 193
Paul Newland

The Cinematic Revival of ‘Low London’ in the Age

of Speculative Urbanism 205
Malini Guha

London in Transition: Sites of Melancholy 221

Charlotte Brunsdon
 Contents vii

East–West: Reflections on the Changing Cinematic

Topography of London 239
Ian Christie

Index 253
 Editors and Contributors

About the Editors

Pam Hirsch has recently retired as Lecturer in Literature and Film

History and Theory at the University of Cambridge, though she con-
tinues to research and publish. Her most recent book on film is The
Cinema of the Swimming Pool (2014) co-edited with Christopher Brown.
Her articles on film have appeared in Feminist Media Studies and the
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.

Chris O’Rourke is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television History at

the University of Lincoln. He has published on various aspects of British
cinema, including articles in Film History and Early Popular Visual
Culture. His first book, Acting for the Silent Screen: Film Actors and
Aspiration between the Wars, was published by I.B. Tauris in 2017.

Contributors

David Anderson is a Ph.D. researcher and Teaching Assistant in the

Department of English Language and Literature at University College
London, where his interests include the representation of London in
literature and film. He was a major contributor to Dorling Kindersley’s
The Sherlock Holmes Book (2015), has written for publications includ-
ing Prospect and The Point, and is a contributing editor at Review 31.
He is also writer-in-residence at the Cob Gallery. The chapter included
ix
x Editors and Contributors

in this volume draws on research carried out for his Ph.D. thesis, enti-
tled ‘Affective Topographies: Landscape and Subjectivity in the Work of
Patrick Keiller, W.G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair’.
Mara Arts is currently completing Ph.D. research on the representation
of London nightlife in the British cinema and popular press of the inter-
war period, at Birkbeck, University of London. She has previously stud-
ied and taught film at University College London. Mara is a founding
member of the Ephemeral Cities research group, which researches and
writes about the urban condition by reading cities both in, and as, texts
and cultural representations.
Iain Borden is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture, and
Vice-Dean Education, at The Bartlett, University College London.
Iain’s authored and co-edited books include Forty Ways to Think
About Architecture (Wiley, 2014), Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities
and Landscapes (Reaktion, 2012), Bartlett Designs (Wiley, 2009),
Skateboarding Space and the City (Berg, 2001/new edition forthcom-
ing), The Unknown City (MIT, 2001) and InterSections (Routledge,
2000).
Charlotte Brunsdon is author of Television Cities: Paris, London,
Baltimore (Duke University Press, 2018), Law and Order (British Film
Institute, 2011) London in Cinema: the cinematic city since 1945 (British
Film Institute, 2007), The Feminist, the Housewife and the Soap Opera
(Clarendon Press, 2000) and Screen Tastes (Routledge, 1997). She has
been Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Projection Project
(2014–2018) at the University of Warwick, where she is Professor of
Film and Television Studies.
Ian Christie is a film historian, curator and broadcaster. He has written
and edited books on Powell and Pressburger, Russian cinema, Scorsese
and Gilliam; and contributed to exhibitions ranging from Film as Film
(Hayward, 1979) to Modernism: Designing a New World (V&A, 2006)
and The Unexpected Eisenstein (GRAD 2016). The 2006 Slade Professor
of Fine Art at Cambridge University, he is a Fellow of the British
Academy, a past president of Europa Cinemas, and currently Professor of
Film and Media History at Birkbeck College.Mark Glancy is Reader in
Film History at Queen Mary University of London. He is currently writ-
ing a biography of Cary Grant and has served as the editorial consultant
to the documentary Becoming Cary Grant (Yuzu Productions, 2017).
 Editors and Contributors xi

His publications include the books When Hollywood Loved Britain: The
Hollywood ‘British’ Film, 1939–1945 (Manchester University Press,
1999), The 39 Steps: A British Film Guide (Tauris, 2003) and Hollywood
and the Americanization of Britain, From the 1920s to the Present (Tauris,
2014). With James Chapman and Sue Harper, he is a co-editor of The
New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches (Palgrave, 2007).
Malini Guha is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carleton
University, Canada. Her research and teaching are broadly concerned
with spatiality and the cinema, with an emphasis on post-colonial and
post-imperial modes of mobility, migration, displacement and settlement.
Recent publications include a chapter on cinephilia and topophilia in pop-
ular Bengali cinema published in Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes
in Film and Media (2016) and From Empire to the World: Migrant London
and Paris in Cinema, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2015.
Rose Hepworth is a graduate of the University of Cambridge’s Screen
Media and Cultures programme and was awarded her Ph.D. from
Cambridge for a thesis assessing the figure of the avatar as self-portrai-
ture in narratives by women across media platforms. She has authored
chapters in The Cinema of the Swimming Pool (eds P. Hirsch and C.
Brown, 2014), and Feminist Erasures (eds K. Silva and K. Mendes,
2015). As a Research Associate with the Computational Creativity
Group at Goldsmiths, University of London, Rose worked on a three-
year EU-funded project investigating computational fictional ideation.
Roland-François Lack is Senior Lecturer in French and Film at
University College London. He is the creator of The Cine-Tourist web-
site, devoted to the relation between place and film, and is currently
writing a monograph on the places of early French cinema.
Eleni Liarou teaches film and television history at Birkbeck, University
of London. She has published on issues of immigration and cultural
diversity in British film and television. She is one of the coordinators of
the Women’s Film and Television History Network and a member of the
Raphael Samuel History Centre.
Michael McCluskey is a Lecturer in English and Film Studies at the
University of York. He is working on a monograph on 1930s British doc-
umentary and is the co-editor of Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical
Intervention to be published by Edinburgh University Press.
xii Editors and Contributors

Paul Newland is Reader in Film Studies at Aberystwyth University.

He was previously a post-doctoral research associate at the University
of Exeter, where he worked on the film producer Gavrik Losey’s archive
in the Bill Douglas Centre. He is author of British Films of the 1970s
(Manchester University Press, 2013) and The Cultural Construction of
London’s East End (Brill, 2008), and editor of British Rural Landscapes
on Film (Manchester University Press, 2016) and Don’t Look Now:
British Cinema in the 1970s (Intellect, 2010).
Amy Sargeant teaches for Tisch School of the Arts, New York
University. She has published extensively on British Cinema of the silent
and sound periods, being author of British Cinema: A Critical History
(2005, second edition forthcoming) and The Servant (2011). With
Claire Monk she co-edited British Historical Cinema: History, Heritage
and the Costume Film (2002). Her latest publication, with Palgrave, is
Screen Hustles, Grifts and Stings.
Rui Tang is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Children’s Literature
of Cambridge University. She is particularly interested in fictional urban
images in animation and in different forms of children’s literature. She
is currently doing her research project and thesis on the city in animated
feature films.
David Whitley is a Senior Lecturer at Cambridge University, where he
teaches film, poetry and children’s literature. He is particularly interested
in the way the arts offer different forms of understanding and engage-
ment with the natural world. His most recent book is The Idea of Nature
in Disney Animation (2012).
 List of Figures

‘Local Film Subjects’: Suburban Cinema, 1895–1910

Fig. 1 The proximity of the rural and the suburban: A car turns
into a countryman’s cart in The ‘?’ Motorist (1906) 23
Glamour and Crime: The London Nightclub in Silent Film
Fig. 1 The façade of the Piccadilly Club in Piccadilly (1929) 33
Fig. 2 Prince Ivan introduces himself to Jill in The Pleasure Garden
(1925) 36
Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936): Conspirators and Bombs in Actual,
Literary and Filmic London
Fig. 1 Blown up by his own bomb 42
Fig. 2 Roast beef at Simpson’s, in Sabotage (1936) 49
Fig. 3 Stevie, already a victim, in Sabotage (1936) 51
‘A Relic of the Bad Old Days’: Hollywood’s London
in None but the Lonely Heart (1944)
Fig. 1 Although Ernie Mott (Cary Grant) eventually receives
an attractive new suit of clothes from his Ma
(Ethel Barrymore), in the film’s early scenes he wears
ill-fitting clothing and appears dishevelled.
(None but the Lonely Heart [1944]) 63
Fig. 2 Director Clifford Odets insisted that the vast and very expensive
street set should be appropriately drab rather than picturesque.
(None but the Lonely Heart [1944]) 65

xiii
xiv List of Figures

London Can Take It: Documentary Reconstructions of the City

Fig. 1 A tree grows amid a bomb-damaged building in London
Can Take It! (1940) 78
Fig. 2 Circulation through the city in London Can Take It! (1940) 80
Fig. 3 Signs of containment in A Diary for Timothy (1946) 81
From the Docks to Notting Hill: Cinematic Mappings
of Imperial and Post-Imperial London
Fig. 1 A unifying figure. Paul Robeson in Song of Freedom (1936) 90
Fig. 2 A misunderstood outsider. Earl Cameron in
The Heart Within (1957) 96
Wanting More: Gender, Space and Desire in Darling
and Four in the Morning
Fig. 1 Diana racing around Trafalgar Square in Darling (1965) 110
Fig. 2 A joyride up the Thames in Four in the Morning (1965) 114
Queer London on Film: Victim (1961), The Killing of Sister
George (1968) and Nighthawks (1978)
Fig. 1 Mickey and PH survey the scene at the Chequers bar
in Victim (1961) 121
Fig. 2 George and Childie (right) celebrating in fancy dress
at the Gateways club in The Killing of Sister George (1968) 123
Fig. 3 Dancers at Glades disco in the final sequence
of Nighthawks (1978) 127
Housing Policy and Building Types: From High Hopes
to High-Rise
Fig. 1 The tower block surrounded by others under construction
in High-Rise (2015) 139
Fig. 2 H. insists on the demarcation between public and private
space in Exhibition (2013) 144
A Melancholy Topography: Patrick Keiller’s London
Fig. 1 Homeless men at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London (1994) 151
Fig. 2 ‘London Stone’, nestled in a wall by Cannon Street station,
in London (1994) 154
Fig. 3 The stagnant tower of 1 Canada Square in London (1994) 157
From Dogpower to Ratropolis: London in Animated Film
Fig. 1 Cruella’s car—emblem of ostentatious consumption
in 101 Dalmations (1961) 167
Fig. 2 The alternative London—built around underground sewers
rather than the Thames—in Flushed Away (2006) 172
 List of Figures xv

Skateboard City: London in Skateboarding Films

Fig. 1 John Sablosky performing a frontside aerial at Skate City’s
‘Black Bowl’. Slow-motion sequence from Hot Wheels (1978) 180
Fig. 2 Benny Fairfax (left) and Chewy Cannon (right) in front
of the Undercroft, in Adidas’ Away Days (2016) 188
Fig. 3 DIY constructed skatespot in Sydenham, South London,
by With Section. So What? (2016) 190
Shaun of the Dead and the Construction of Cult Space
in Millennial London
Fig. 1 Walk one. Shaun of the Dead (2004) 198
Fig. 2 Walk two. Shaun of the Dead (2004) 198
The Cinematic Revival of ‘Low London’ in the Age
of Speculative Urbanism
Fig. 1 James Bond (Daniel Craig) faces historical London
landmarks in Skyfall (2012) 215
London in Transition: Sites of Melancholy
Fig. 1 The Vanishing Street (1961): The new rears up behind
the old 226
Fig. 2 The Vanishing Street (1961): Two women discuss news
in the Jewish Chronicle 228
Fig. 3 Seven Summers (2012): The coots in their kingdom 234
East–West: Reflections on the Changing Cinematic Topography
of London
Fig. 1 ‘The people you do not see’: The shadowy lives of immigrants
in Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002) 247
 Introduction: Film Londons

Pam Hirsch and Chris O’Rourke

Alongside the official proceedings at the London 2012 Olympics, the

broadcasters BBC and Channel 4 commissioned a series of short films
for the concurrent London 2012 Festival. The decision to commission
four very different films by filmmakers as diverse as Lynne Ramsey, Mike
Leigh, Max & Dania and Asif Kapadia might have been designed as a
sort of polar opposite to the most famous Olympic film in history, the
one made by Leni Riefenstahl for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, which
presented a view of the city defined by a single ideology. Instead, the
2012 project deliberately presented a number of very different Londons.
These featured dysfunctional but compassionate families (Leigh’s A
Running Jump), freerunners and BMX-ers (Max & Dania’s What If),
and aerial shots of the city interspersed with news footage of the 7/7
bombings and the 2010 riots (Kapadia’s The Odyssey). Between them, the
films present both real and imagined London spaces, including the new
Olympics site in Stratford, the iconic financial district of the Docklands,

P. Hirsch (*)
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: ph211@cam.ac.uk
C. O’Rourke
University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

© The Author(s) 2017 1

P. Hirsch and C. O’Rourke (eds.), London on Film, Screening Spaces,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_1
2 P. Hirsch and C. O’Rourke

a modernist housing estate in the north-London borough of Camden

and the inside of a black cab.
The film activity surrounding the 2012 Olympics serves as a useful
starting point to introduce this volume for several reasons. Firstly, it is a
reminder of the enduring power of film to reflect on, and mediate, life in
the British capital. There has been a close relationship between London
and the moving image since the 1890s, when pioneer filmmakers first
began to document the city. In the twenty-first century, film continues
to shape the image of London in important ways, for both domestic
and (perhaps especially) international audiences, who may first encoun-
ter London as a cinematic space before they ever set foot on its streets.
Secondly, the commissioning of films designed to commemorate a par-
ticular event in London’s cultural life reminds us that cinematic repre-
sentations of the city are produced under specific circumstances and for a
variety of purposes. The essays that we have brought together in this col-
lection include case studies of films intended, among other things, as star
vehicles, political statements and government propaganda. As our con-
tributors show, these different aims have left their mark on the resulting
images of London.
Finally, like the commissioners at BBC and Channel 4, we have aimed
for a deliberately eclectic approach to the subject of London on film.
Individual essays focus on examples from a variety of periods and genres
of filmmaking, adopting very different theoretical and methodological
approaches. We have arranged these essays in loose chronological order.
This is with the aim of suggesting how cinematic representations of the
city have responded to particular moments in its history, as well as high-
lighting how films set in London have drawn on previous examples to
develop certain recognisable conventions and preoccupations. However,
we have not attempted to put forward a comprehensive account of
London’s image on film, and we are equally interested in the way ‘film
Londons’ challenge and contradict each other as we are in the ways in
which they reinforce broader cultural assumptions about the city and
its people. Because of this, the London that emerges from the follow-
ing essays, and from the films they examine, is variously glamorous and
grimy, cosmopolitan and parochial, ultramodern and rooted in the past,
inclusive and deeply divided.
It is not only the contrasts in cinematic representations that make
London an interesting and rich focus for this collection; there is a clear
pay-off in studying cinematic London based on the city’s place in both
 INTRODUCTION: FILM LONDONS 3

world and film history. When filmmakers first turned their cameras on
London, it was the self-proclaimed ‘heart’ of a vast British Empire. Many
of the earliest films made about the city added to its reputation as an
imperial hub. Filmmakers paid homage to London’s grand monuments,
closely following the example of tourist guidebooks. They helped to
increase the audience for official displays of pageantry staged in the capi-
tal, such as royal jubilees and coronations (Cinquegrani 2014, 43–84).
More than a century later, following the collapse of the British Empire
in the years after World War II, London has become crucial to debates
about a new type of globalisation. According to the sociologist Saskia
Sassen, writing in the 1990s, London is one of a handful of privileged
‘world cities’, whose function is to oversee the workings of an increas-
ingly international flow of capital (Sassen 1991, 3). This transformation
from imperial, to post-imperial and now multicultural ‘world city’ has
also been registered by filmmakers, who have used films variously to cele-
brate, question and critique what London means in the modern era (see,
for instance, Guha 2015).
At an institutional level, too, London’s internationalism has reinforced
its central position within British cinema and its status as a destination
for foreign filmmakers. Many of the first British film studios were built in
or around London. Early production and distribution companies quickly
gravitated to the city’s West End, to be near important entertainment
and financial districts. In recent decades, substantial foreign investment,
especially from America, has produced new studios, such as those owned
by Warner Bros. in the London commuter-belt of nearby Hertfordshire.
The area around London has become the production base for world-
wide blockbusters, notably the James Bond and Harry Potter franchises,
as well as commercially successful costume dramas and romantic com-
edies. Such films have, in turn, circulated a version of British (or English)
national identity to global audiences, often concentrating on a particu-
larly ‘London-oriented’ middle- or upper-class social milieu (Higson
2011, 28). As several of our contributors show, this trend is part of a
much longer history, in which London has served as a setting for foreign
production, notably by Hollywood studios. The British cinema has pro-
duced influential visions of London, but so too have filmmakers coming
from a variety of national and international contexts.
As a collection of essays about a single urban location, this book con-
tributes to a growing academic literature dedicated to analysing the rela-
tionship between cinema and the city, which now includes numerous
4 P. Hirsch and C. O’Rourke

edited volumes (see, for example, Clarke 1997; Penz and Thomas 1997;
Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2001; Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2003; Webber and
Wilson 2008; Koeck and Roberts 2010). Like Mark Shiel, we recognise
that cinema has ‘been constantly fascinated with the representation of
distinctive spaces, lifestyles, and human conditions of the city’, and that
filmmakers have found equally distinctive ways to utilise the tools of the
medium, in order ‘to capture and express the spatial complexity, diver-
sity, and social dynamism of the city’ (Shiel 2001, 1). One of the things
that unites the different approaches taken by contributors to this volume
is an interest in the way that film, as opposed to other cultural forms,
mediates the spaces of London through specifically cinematic frame-
works of genre and narrative, codes of cinematography and editing, and,
in some cases, the meanings generated by the dynamics of stardom and
audience reception. We are also interested in how particular cinematic
modes, ranging from popular blockbusters to essay films, documentaries
and newer forms of video-making, have inflected the representation of
urban space.
Previous collections on the cinematic city have addressed a pur-
posely broad geographical range. However, some places, such as Paris,
Berlin, New York and Los Angeles, have been particularly well served by
the existing scholarship. Until relatively recently, London has not been
among these privileged cinematic cities, although essays by Mike Mason
(2001) and Chris Petit (2008), several of the contributions to Gail
Cunningham and Stephen Barber’s collection London Eyes (2007), and
the catalogue for a Museum of London exhibition about ‘London on
Film’ (Sorensen 1996) started to map out the contours of London’s cin-
ematic portrayal. Charlotte Brunsdon’s book London in Cinema (2007)
brought a sharper academic focus to this topic, and her arguments and
examples provide a touchstone for many of the essays in this collection.
Brunsdon has continued to shed light on the way that London settings
function as part of film narratives, drawing particular attention to the
importance of genre (Brunsdon 2009). The current collection seeks to
move these conversations further. In common with Brunsdon’s work,
we aim to highlight London’s centrality as a location within an array of
films, many falling outside the emerging ‘cinematic-city’ canon of 1920s
city symphonies, film noirs and social-realist dramas. This collection can
also be seen as a response to Brunsdon’s argument, set out in her over-
view of recent scholarship on the subject, in favour of ‘the importance of
the particular, the historical and the specific in relation to films, cities and
 INTRODUCTION: FILM LONDONS 5

disciplines’ (Brunsdon 2012, 227). By focusing on a single location, the

following essays build on the insights put forward by previous studies of
film’s relationship with the urban environment. But they also question
how useful the ‘cinematic city’ is as an overarching category, showing
how film depictions of London are often engaged with very local identi-
ties, histories and debates, even as they bring such constructions of place
to a wider audience.
We have chosen to arrange the essays in this volume in a chrono-
logical order that is necessarily loose. We begin with Roland-François
Lack’s detailed investigation of the early filmmaker Robert Paul’s
use of London locations, and move towards Malini Guha’s analysis of
London settings in the recent James Bond films Skyfall (2012) and
Spectre (2015). While some essays focus on an individual film or cycle of
films, others discuss examples that span several decades. The collection
ends with essays by Charlotte Brunsdon and Ian Christie that examine
trends in London filmmaking over a longer time period, and that bring
together many of the concerns explored by other contributors, including
the relationship between London films and nostalgia and the persistent
attractions of particular London neighbourhoods to filmmakers from the
silent period to the present day. In the remainder of this introduction, we
identify some of the other themes and approaches that connect individ-
ual essays. In particular, we consider the importance of London’s distinct
topography to a number of our contributors, before looking at the treat-
ment of specific types of London location in films discussed across the
essays. Lastly, we consider how filmmakers have engaged with transfor-
mations in and of London, which may suggest fruitful avenues for future
research.

Topographies and Typologies
London has been constantly changing since the earliest films of the
1890s. Its population has grown, shrunk and grown again in the inter-
vening century, and the city has expanded geographically as well. Within
this change, London has retained many of its older local identities, and
new neighbourhoods and ways of life have developed, often existing side
by side. The opening voiceover to Ealing Studios’ wartime drama The
Bells Go Down (1943) claims that ‘London isn’t a town, it’s a group of
villages’, and films of London have helped to preserve or redefine this
patchwork view of the city in the popular imagination. In recognition of
6 P. Hirsch and C. O’Rourke

this, Brunsdon chose to structure her 2007 book spatially, focussing on

how various areas of London have been represented in films. However,
she is careful to point out that there is a complicated and fluid relation-
ship between the real, material neighbourhoods of London (or any
city) and the sense of place created in cinema (Brunsdon 2007a‚ 15).
Similarly, Neil Mitchell introduces his guide to London movie locations
by arguing for the double nature of places featured in films: ‘The East
End, Camden Town, the more exclusive enclaves of Knightsbridge and
Mayfair, the licentious streets of Soho and the South Bank are all distinct
physical environments which also exist concurrently as ideas in the imagi-
nation of visitors, residents and film audiences alike’ (Mitchell 2011,
6–7). As our contributors show, different areas and aspects of London
are also made meaningful in films through their relationships with each
other. Filmmakers have regularly used contrasts between the city’s neigh-
bourhoods to suggest, for instance, changes in a character’s fortunes,
moral outlook and state of mind, or to underline distinctions of class,
gender and ethnicity.
The division between West End and East End, which was solidified in
the Victorian era (White 2008, 5–6), remains one of the most prevalent
and resilient structuring devices in films set in London, appearing across
multiple periods and genres of filmmaking. Often, the West End in
films functions as part of what Brunsdon has called ‘landmark London’
(2007a, 21), encompassing the Parliament buildings in Westminster and
Buckingham Palace, as well as other details associated with a picture-
postcard view of the city, such as double-decker buses and red telephone
boxes. A number of essays reveal the continuing potency of this part
of the city in the cinematic imagination and in constructions of British
national identity. Pam Hirsch notes the importance of London’s West
End in Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936), in which the terrorists’ choice to
blow up Piccadilly Circus—a place that advertised itself as ‘the centre of
the world’—acts as a reminder of what was potentially under threat in
the political upheavals of the 1930s. Michael McCluskey’s study of war-
time documentaries, including Listen to Britain (1942), shows how a
similar use of ‘landmark London’ was deliberately mobilised by filmmak-
ers at the Crown Film Unit during and after the Blitz. Guha finds an
echo of these earlier examples in the James Bond film Skyfall, this time
in the context of the ‘war on terror’, when, having defeated the forces of
global terrorism, Daniel Craig’s Bond is shown on a rooftop overlook-
ing the nineteenth-century London of Big Ben and the Old War Office
 INTRODUCTION: FILM LONDONS 7

Building—a view steeped in nationalist and imperial history. Comparable

views are used to introduce the romanticised, reassuringly middle-class
image of London created in Disney’s 101 Dalmatians (1961), discussed
by Rui Tang and David Whitley in their essay on animated films set in
the city.
As London’s main commercial and entertainment district, the West
End is often associated in films with glamour and consumption. In addi-
tion to films set predominantly in nightclubs, discussed below, other
examples contain more fleeting depictions of the West End as a space
of leisure. In the ‘Swinging London’ film Darling (1965), examined
by Rose Hepworth, the carefree Diana Scott (played by Julie Christie)
is shown driving round Trafalgar Square in her boyfriend Miles’s open-
top car. In Hepworth’s analysis, this scene confirms how at home Diana
feels in the city’s public spaces, including those that are usually gendered
as male. In the ‘social problem’ film Victim (1961), analysed in Chris
O’Rourke’s essay on representations of queer London, the West End is
an equally permissive but also more oppressive space, associated not so
much with newfound freedoms as with sexual ‘deviance’ and criminality.
Scenes shot on location in the Salisbury pub near Covent Garden reveal
a seedy underworld of persecuted homosexual men (at a time when male
homosexuality was still illegal), as well as blackmailers operating in the
supposedly respectable heart of the metropolis.
In contrast to the West End, the East End in films has often (but not
always) been presented as the home of a more authentic, working-class
London, and it retains these connotations in spite of increasing gentri-
fication in the area (see Newland 2008). Crime in the East End is typi-
cally shown to be less shocking and more prosaic, linked to narratives of
grinding poverty and a desire to escape miserable surroundings. This is
especially obvious in recent gangster films, as well as in the post-World
War II cycle of London films noir, including They Made Me a Fugitive
and Ealing’s It Always Rains on Sunday (both 1947). An important,
but previously overlooked precursor to these films is None but the Lonely
Heart (1944), made by the Hollywood studio RKO, and the subject of
Mark Glancy’s essay. In the film, the lead character, Ernie Mott (played
by the usually glamorous Cary Grant), expresses anger at the way that
the poor are forced to scrabble a living, so that only joining a criminal
gang seems to offer an escape. As Glancy shows, this deliberately stylised
Hollywood vision of fog-bound, 1930s London was criticised by some
British reviewers for looking too unrealistic and too gloomy for wartime
8 P. Hirsch and C. O’Rourke

audiences to appreciate, although its depiction of the East End now

seems highly influential.
In other films discussed by our contributors, the East End is made dis-
tinctive on film by its immigrant communities, often associated with the
London Docks. In Piccadilly (1929), an important film for both Mara
Arts’ and Ian Christie’s essays, the Chinese community in Limehouse
becomes the locus for anxieties about the city’s increasingly multiracial,
or ‘cosmopolitan’, identity between the wars. If that film uses the East
End to suggest that there is a more-or-less unbridgeable gap between
middle-class white Londoners and working-class people of colour, the
Paul Robeson film Song of Freedom (1936), discussed by Eleni Liarou,
shows the Docks and its ethnic diversity in a more positive light. Both
Liarou and Christie explore how filmmakers in the post-World War II
(and post-Windrush) era have attempted to remap some of the older dis-
tinctions between East End and West End, in order to reflect London’s
changing demography. This has involved, for instance, drawing attention
to the experiences of black Londoners in West London, in films such
as Sapphire (1959), Pressure (1976) and Kidulthood (2006), or to the
British-Asian community in North London, as in Bend It Like Beckham
(2002). In contrast to films that focus on the East End as a space of
racialised tension, Brunsdon’s essay reflects on how The Vanishing Street
(1961) represents the loss of ethnic identity, in this case by juxtaposing
the richly textured details of everyday life in Jewish Whitechapel with the
arrival of bulldozers and a new modernist housing development.
Several essays in this collection look beyond inner London to the sub-
urbs. Lack’s essay argues that London cinema has always been suburban,
as well as urban, using the early filmmaker Robert Paul’s engagement
with his local Muswell Hill, then at the northern fringes of the city, as
an example. As Lack’s meticulous study shows, Paul not only used the
move to the suburbs to expand his studio facilities; he also used local
streets (some of them still being built on) as a backdrop for his experi-
ments with film narrative. In Lack’s view, films such as The ‘?’ Motorist
(1906) register the material changes taking place in Victorian and
Edwardian London, as well as thematising the strange and sometimes
amusing proximity of urban and rural ways of life. Paul Newland’s essay
takes a very different approach to the nearby suburb of Crouch End, the
setting for the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead (2004). For Newland,
the film successfully captures (and satirises) the aimlessness felt by many
inhabitants of ‘millennial’ London, as well as turning a deliberately
 INTRODUCTION: FILM LONDONS 9

unremarkable suburban street into a place of fan pilgrimage. Newland’s

essay suggests that suburban, ‘millennial’ and ‘cult’ versions of London
on film would all reward further consideration.
If many of the essays in this collection explore particular areas of
London, others focus on specific types of spaces. Housing is a concern
for McCluskey and Brunsdon, in their discussion of the representation of
bomb-damaged and demolished homes, and for Hepworth, who exam-
ines the gendering of interior spaces in Darling and Four in the Morning
(both 1965). In her discussion of both films, Hepworth shows female
protagonists oppressed and contained in domestic situations, notwith-
standing their differing social class positions. Amy Sargeant offers an
overview of the way films set in London have represented housing types,
as affected by changing government policy since the 1980s. Social-realist
filmmakers, in particular, have taken a critical stance on, for example,
the Thatcher government’s ‘Right to Buy’ policy affecting council-
house tenants. In Mike Leigh’s High Hopes (1988), Mrs. Bender is the
last remaining council tenant in her terrace, facing prejudice from her
new middle-class neighbours next door. As Sargeant’s essay also shows,
other filmmakers have used less realist genres to question urban plan-
ning theories by taking them to an extreme. Her discussion of High-Rise
(2015), adapted from J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel of the same name,
puts the film in the context of architectural debates about the possibil-
ity of planned society. In the film, the central tower block becomes a test
case for whether buildings can contain the class tensions of the modern
metropolis. The bleak vision that it presents suggests that the anxieties
about the vast inequalities of wealth in London that Ballard was satirising
in the 1970s have in no way dissipated.
Nightclubs also feature as a significant location in a number of essays.
The ‘Piccadilly Club’ in the film Piccadilly is discussed by both Christie
and Arts. Christie is interested in the way the West End–East End divi-
sion is paralleled in the upstairs-downstairs worlds of the nightclub. Arts,
on the other hand, discusses Piccadilly as part of a cycle of films made in
the 1920s that attempt to show the glamour of nightclubs, whilst con-
forming to the moralistic guidelines of the British censors. Nightclubs
emerge from these films as pleasurable spaces, but they are also impli-
cated in crime and sexual transgression. O’Rourke also focuses on the
space of the nightclub in his discussion of The Killing of Sister George
(1968) and Nighthawks (1978), connecting these films to debates within
the lesbian and gay community about the commercialisation of the city’s
10 P. Hirsch and C. O’Rourke

gay scene. Together these essays start to sketch out a history of the way
London’s nightlife has been imagined on film, and how this intersects
with histories of gender and sexuality.

Transforming London
As many of the essays in this collection make clear, films set in London
are in a constant dialogue with existing and often stereotyped images of
the city, whether these are constructed by earlier filmmakers or in other
cultural forms, such as novels, newspapers and television. Several of our
contributors focus on films that deliberately attempt to make the city
appear unfamiliar. In doing so, these films raise questions about what
London is and to whom it belongs. Iain Borden’s investigation of skate-
boarding videos shows how there is a permanent tension between the
high-cultural, modernist spaces of, for example, London’s Southbank
Centre, and the skaters (and street artists) who have repurposed the
space underneath the building. As both Borden’s essay and Newland’s
discussion of fan videos produced in response to Shaun of the Dead show,
new technologies are creating opportunities for amateur, as well as pro-
fessional, filmmakers to put their own stamp on the city.
Some modes of filmmaking may be particularly capable of show-
ing a transformed London. Tang and Whitley argue that, through the
conventions of animated films (including the use of anthropomorphic
animal protagonists), London’s cinematic image can be played with, pas-
tiched and criticised in a variety of ways. In Flushed Away (2006), the
‘Ratropolis’ of the sewer mirrors the London above ground, but, in
Tang and Whitley’s interpretation, it also critiques the city’s consumer
culture by showing how copious human junk has been recycled to cre-
ate a miniature society underground. Christie’s essay describes a similar
but more overtly political critique in the modern-day ‘social problem’
film Dirty Pretty Things (2002). As Christie notes, the filmmakers delib-
erately sought out locations that had not previously appeared in films
set in London, including hotel basements and underground carparks, in
order to reveal a ‘shadow’ city populated by exploited illegal immigrants.
Similar to the microcosm offered by the tower block in High-Rise, the
hierarchical layout of the hotel, in particular, provides a visual trope for
entrenched societal inequalities.
Physical damage has the power to make the city appear strange, and
various filmmakers have used ruined spaces in London to consider the
 INTRODUCTION: FILM LONDONS 11

city’s history and its future possibilities (see Brunsdon 2007b). Both
Anderson and McCluskey discuss a shot in Patrick Keiller’s essay film
London (1994) in which a bombed office block, caught in the IRA’s
renewed bombing campaign in mainland Britain, is shown abandoned.
McCluskey links this to similar moments in wartime documentaries
where the surreal aspects of the Blitz experience are brought home to
viewers by showing spaces that have been left empty or else repurposed,
as in scenes of people sleeping on London Underground platforms. In
these instances, the city is shown to be resilient, adaptable and capable
of transforming itself in a way that underlines the necessary wartime
message—contained in the title of the early World War II film London
Can Take It! (1940)—of hope and perseverance. Anderson, meanwhile,
connects Keiller’s image of the bombed office block to another shot in
London showing Canary Wharf, a symbol of the redeveloped Docklands
financial district, which has been deliberately obscured behind greenery,
as if it has already been turned into a ruin. Anderson reads these shots
together as an example of the film’s absurdist attack on rampant eco-
nomic speculation and mismanagement of London in the late twentieth
century. In his view, London is a film which invites viewers to reflect on
the ephemeral nature of power and wealth. In her discussion of Seven
Summers (2012), a film about the transformation of the Lea Valley in the
run-up to the Olympics, Brunsdon also examines the capacity of films to
consider the impact of change in the city, without necessarily being sub-
sumed by what Anderson calls ‘uncritical nostalgia’.
In a Britain facing an uncertain (at the time of writing), post-Brexit
future, films about London and its identity can take on different, unex-
pected meanings. In the wake of the 2016 referendum on Britain’s mem-
bership of the European Union, the film critic Barry Norman speculated
that the Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico (1949), in which a small
patch of London is declared to be part of the Dukedom of Burgundy,
and thus is no longer subject to the post-war regime of economic auster-
ity, might help us to predict what life will be like in a post-Brexit world
(Norman 2016). Whether or not films can help us understand the way
that London will be in the future, the essays in this collection demon-
strate the variety of ways in which London has been imagined in the past,
and suggest that film continues to shape our perceptions of the city and
its people in significant ways.
12 P. Hirsch and C. O’Rourke

References
Brunsdon, Charlotte. 2007a. London in Cinema: The Cinematic City since 1945.
London: British Film Institute.
———. 2007b. Towards a History of Empty Spaces. Journal of British Cinema
and Television 4 (2): 219–232.
———. 2009. Introduction: Screen Londons. Journal of British Cinema and
Television 6 (3): 165–177.
———. 2012. The Attractions of the Cinematic City. Screen 53 (3): 209–227.
Cinquegrani, Maurizio. 2014. Of Empire and the City: Remapping Early British
Cinema. Oxford: Lang.
Clarke, David B. (ed.). 1997. The Cinematic City. London: Routledge.
Cunningham, Gail, and Stephen Barber (eds.). 2007. London Eyes: Reflections in
Text and Image. Oxford: Bergahn.
Guha, Malini. 2015. From Empire to World: Migrant London and Paris in the
Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Higson, Andrew. 2011. Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the
1990s. London: I.B.Tauris.
Koeck, Richard, and Les Roberts (eds.). 2010. The City and the Moving Image:
Urban Projections. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mason, Mike. 2001. Naked: Social Realism and the Urban Wasteland. In
Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark
Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, 244–253. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mitchell, Neil. 2011. London: City of the Imagination. In World Film Locations:
London, ed. Neil Mitchell, 6–7. Bristol: Intellect.
Newland, Paul. 2008. The Cultural Construction of London’s East End:
Urbanisation, Modernity and the Spatialisation of Englishness. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Norman, Barry. 2016. Can Passport to Pimlico Predict Post-Brexit Britain? Radio
Times, July 9. http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-07-09/can-passport-
to-pimlico-predict-post-brexit-britain. Accessed 3 Mar 2017.
Penz, François, and Maureen Thomas (eds.). 1997. Cinema and Architecture.
London: British Film Institute.
Petit, Chris. 2008. The Tattered Labyrinth: A Selective A-Z of London Cinema.
In Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, ed.
Andrew Webber, and Emma Wilson, 226–233. London: Wallflower Press.
Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Shiel, Mark. 2001. Cinema and the City in History and Theory. In Cinema and
the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and
Tony Fitzmaurice, 1–18. Oxford: Blackwell.
Shiel, Mark, and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.). 2001. Cinema and the City: Film and
Urban Societies in a Global Context. Oxford: Blackwell.
 INTRODUCTION: FILM LONDONS 13

Shiel, Mark, and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.). 2003. Screening the City. London:
Verso.
Sorensen, Colin (ed.). 1996. London on Film: 100 Years of Filmmaking in
London. London: Museum of London.
Webber, Andrew, and Emma Wilson (eds.). 2008. Cities in Transition: The
Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis. London: Wallflower Press.
White, Jerry. 2008. London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People.
London: Vintage.
 ‘Local Film Subjects’: Suburban Cinema,
1895–1910

Roland-François Lack

A plaque affixed in 1996 to an ordinary house on Park Road in Chipping

Barnet, a northerly suburb of London, commemorated the filming of
‘the first British Moving Picture here in February 1895’ by Birt Acres,
‘Inventor and Pioneer Cameraman’. Another plaque on an ordinary
house in another North London suburb, Muswell Hill, remembers the
nearby film studio and laboratories built in 1898 by Robert W. Paul,
‘Inventor, Cinematographer, Producer and Exhibitor’. On a theatre in
Walton-on-Thames is a plaque that reads: ‘From 1899–1924 this build-
ing formed part of the original studios of Cecil Hepworth whose Rescued
by Rover was made here.’ In May 2017 two plaques were unveiled at the
sites of early film studios in Walthamstow. To my knowledge these are
the only plaques in suburban London that commemorate the first years
of English cinema. There should be many more.
London cinema was suburban from the start. Early English film pro-
duction was cosmopolitan and internationalist but also local. Robert
Paul in Muswell Hill and Cecil Hepworth in Walton-on-Thames were
embedded in those districts, not only as residents and employers but

R.-F. Lack (*)

University College London, London, UK
e-mail: r.lack@ucl.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2017 15

P. Hirsch and C. O’Rourke (eds.), London on Film, Screening Spaces,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_2
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
smoothbore, his mother a pair of the famous La Roche dueling
pistols and a prayer book. The family priest gave him a rosary and
cross and enjoined him to pray frequently. Traveling all summer, they
arrived at Lake Winnipeg in the autumn and wintered there. As soon
as the ice went out in the spring the journey was continued and one
afternoon in July, Monroe beheld Mountain Fort, a new post of the
company’s not far from the Rocky Mountains.
“Around about it were encamped thousands of Blackfeet waiting
to trade for the goods the flotilla had brought up and to obtain on
credit ammunition, fukes (trade guns), traps and tobacco. As yet the
company had no Blackfoot interpreter. The factor perceiving that
Monroe was a youth of more than ordinary intelligence at once
detailed him to live and travel with the Piegans (a Blackfoot tribe)
and learn their language, also to see that they returned to Mountain
Fort with their furs the succeeding summer. Word had been received
that, following the course of Lewis and Clarke, American traders
were yearly pushing farther and farther westward and had even
reached the mouth of the Yellowstone. The company feared their
competition. Monroe was to do his best to prevent it.
“‘At last,’ Monroe told me, ‘the day came for our departure, and I
set out with the chiefs and medicine men at the head of the long
procession. There were eight hundred lodges of the Piegans there,
about eight thousand souls. They owned thousands of horses. Oh,
but it was a grand sight to see that long column of riders and pack
animals, and loose horses trooping over the plains. We traveled on
southward all the long day, and about an hour or two before
sundown we came to the rim of a valley through which flowed a
cotton wood-bordered stream. We dismounted at the top of the hill,
and spread our robes intending to sit there until the procession
passed by into the bottom and put up the lodges. A medicine man
produced a large stone pipe, filled it and attempted to light it with flint
and steel and a bit of punk (rotten wood), but somehow he could get
no spark. I motioned him to hand it to me, and drawing my sunglass
from my pocket, I got the proper focus and set the tobacco afire,
drawing several mouthfuls of smoke through the long stem.
 “‘As one man all those round about sprang to their feet and
rushed toward me, shouting and gesticulating as if they had gone
crazy. I also jumped up, terribly frightened, for I thought they were
going to do me harm, perhaps kill me. The pipe was wrenched out of
my grasp by the chief himself, who eagerly began to smoke and
pray. He had drawn but a whiff or two when another seized it, and
from him it was taken by still another. Others turned and harangued
the passing column; men and women sprang from their horses and
joined the group, mothers pressing close and rubbing their babes
against me, praying earnestly meanwhile. I recognized a word that I
had already learned—Natos—Sun—and suddenly the meaning of
the commotion became clear; they thought that I was Great
Medicine; that I had called upon the Sun himself to light the pipe,
and that he had done so. The mere act of holding up my hand above
the pipe was a supplication to their God. They had perhaps not
noticed the glass, or if they had, had thought it some secret charm or
amulet. At all events I had suddenly become a great personage, and
from then on the utmost consideration and kindness was accorded to
me.
“‘When I entered Lone Walker’s lodge that evening—he was the
chief, and my host—I was greeted by deep growls from either side of
the doorway, and was horrified to see two nearly grown grizzly bears
acting as if about to spring upon me. I stopped and stood quite still,
but I believe that my hair was rising; I know that my flesh felt to be
shrinking. I was not kept in suspense. Lone Walker spoke to his pets,
and they immediately lay down, noses between their paws, and I
passed on to the place pointed out to me, the first couch at the
chief’s left hand. It was some time before I became accustomed to
the bears, but we finally came to a sort of understanding with one
another. They ceased growling at me as I passed in and out of the
lodge, but would never allow me to touch them, bristling up and
preparing to fight if I attempted to do so. In the following spring they
disappeared one night and were never seen again.’
“Think how the youth, Rising Wolf, must have felt as he
journeyed southward over the vast plains, and under the shadow of
the giant mountains which lie between the Saskatchewan and the
Missouri, for he knew that he was the first of his race to behold
them.” We were born a little too late!
“Monroe often referred to that first trip with the Piegans as the
happiest time of his life.”
In the moon of falling leaves they came to Pile of Rocks River,
and after three months went on to winter on Yellow River. Next
summer they wandered down the Musselshell, crossed the Big River
and thence westward by way of the Little Rockies and the Bear Paw
Mountains to the Marias. Even paradise has its geography.
“Rifle and pistol were now useless as the last rounds of powder
and ball had been fired. But what mattered that? Had they not their
bows and great sheaves of arrows? In the spring they had planted
on the banks of the Judith a large patch of their own tobacco which
they would harvest in due time.
“One by one young Rising Wolf’s garments were worn out and
cast aside. The women of the lodge tanned deerskins and bighorn
(sheep) and from them Lone Walker himself cut and sewed shirts
and leggings, which he wore in their place. It was not permitted for
women to make men’s clothing. So ere long he was dressed in full
Indian costume, even to the belt and breech-clout, and his hair grew
so that it fell in rippling waves down over his shoulders.” A warrior
never cut his hair, so white men living with Indians followed their
fashion, else they were not admitted to rank as warriors. “He began
to think of braiding it. Ap-ah’-ki, the shy young daughter of the chief,
made his footwear—thin parfleche (arrow-proof)—soled moccasins
(skin-shoes) for summer, beautifully embroidered with colored
porcupine quills; thick, soft warm ones of buffalo robe for winter.
“‘I could not help but notice her,’ he said, ‘on the first night I
stayed in her father’s lodge.... I learned the language easily, quickly,
yet I never spoke to her nor she to me, for, as you know, the
Blackfeet think it unseemly for youths and maidens to do so.
“‘One evening a man came into the lodge and began to praise a
certain youth with whom I had often hunted; spoke of his bravery, his
kindness, his wealth, and ended by saying that the young fellow
presented to Lone Walker thirty horses, and wished, with Ap-ah’-ki,
to set up a lodge of his own. I glanced at the girl and caught her
looking at me; such a look! expressing at once fear, despair and
something else which I dared not believe I interpreted aright. The
chief spoke: “Tell your friend,” he said, “that all you have spoken of
him is true; I know that he is a real man, a good, kind, brave,
generous young man, yet for all that I can not give him my daughter.”
“‘Again I looked at Ap-ah’-ki and she at me. Now she was smiling
and there was happiness in her eyes. But if she smiled I could not. I
had heard him refuse thirty head of horses. What hope had I then,
who did not even own the horse I rode? I, who received for my
services only twenty pounds a year, from which must be deducted
the various articles I bought. Surely the girl was not for me. I
suffered.
“‘It was a little later, perhaps a couple of weeks, that I met her in
the trail, bringing home a bundle of fire-wood. We stopped and
looked at each other in silence for a moment, and then I spoke her
name. Crash went the fuel on the ground, and we embraced and
kissed regardless of those who might be looking.
“‘So, forgetting the bundle of wood, we went hand in hand and
stood before Lone Walker, where he sat smoking his long pipe, out
on the shady side of the lodge.
“‘The chief smiled. “Why, think you, did I refuse the thirty
horses?” he asked, and before I could answer: “Because I wanted
you for my son-in-law, wanted a white man because he is more
cunning, much wiser than the Indian, and I need a counselor. We
have not been blind, neither I nor my women. There is nothing more
to say except this: be good to her.”
“‘That very day they set up a small lodge for us, and stored it
with robes and parfleches of dried meat and berries, gave us one of
their two brass kettles, tanned skins, pack saddles, ropes, all that a
lodge should contain. And, not least, Lone Walker told me to choose
thirty horses from his large herd. In the evening we took possession
of our house and were happy.’
 “Monroe remained in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company
a number of years, raising a large family of boys and girls, most of
whom are alive to-day. The oldest, John, is about seventy-five years
of age, but still young enough to go to the Rockies near his home
every autumn, and kill a few bighorn and elk, and trap a few beavers.
The old man never revisited his home; never saw his parents after
they parted with him at the Montreal docks. He intended to return to
them for a brief visit some time, but kept deferring it, and then came
letters two years old to say that they were both dead. Came also a
letter from an attorney, saying that they had bequeathed him a
considerable property, that he must go to Montreal and sign certain
papers in order to take possession of it. At the time the factor of
Mountain Fort was going to England on leave; to him, in his simple
trustfulness Monroe gave a power of attorney in the matter. The
factor never returned, and by virtue of the papers he had signed the
frontiersman lost his inheritance. But that was a matter of little
moment to him then. Had he not a lodge and family, good horses
and a vast domain actually teeming with game wherein to wander?
What more could one possibly want?
“Leaving the Hudson’s Bay Company, Monroe sometimes
worked for the American Fur Company, but mostly as a free trapper,
wandered from the Saskatchewan to the Yellowstone and from the
Rockies to Lake Winnipeg. The headwaters of the South
Saskatchewan were one of his favorite hunting grounds. Thither in
the early fifties he guided the noted Jesuit Father, De Smet, and at
the foot of the beautiful lakes just south of Chief Mountain they
erected a huge wooden cross and named the two bodies of water
Saint Mary’s Lakes.” Here the Canada and United States boundary
climbs the Rocky Mountains.
“One winter after his sons John and François had married they
were camping there for the season, the three lodges of the family,
when one night a large war party of Assiniboins attacked them. The
daughters Lizzie, Amelia and Mary had been taught to shoot, and
together they made a brave resistance, driving the Indians away just
before daylight, with the loss of five of their number, Lizzie killing one
of them as he was about to let down the bars of the horse corral.
 “Besides other furs, beaver, fisher, marten and wolverine, they
killed more than three hundred wolves that winter by a device so
unique, yet simple, that it is well worth recording. By the banks of the
outlet of the lakes they built a long pen twelve by sixteen feet at the
base, and sloping sharply inward and upward to a height of seven
feet. The top of the pyramid was an opening about two feet six
inches wide by eight feet in length. Whole deer, quarters of buffalo,
any kind of meat handy was thrown into the pen, and the wolves,
scenting the flesh and blood, seeing it plainly through the four to six
inch spaces between the logs would eventually climb to the top and
jump down through the opening. But they could not jump out, and
there morning would find them uneasily pacing around and around in
utter bewilderment.
“You will remember that the old man was a Catholic, yet I know
that he had much faith in the Blackfoot religion, and believed in the
efficiency of the medicine-man’s prayers and mysteries. He used
often to speak of the terrible power possessed by a man named Old
Sun. ‘There was one,’ he would say, ‘who surely talked with the
gods, and was given some of their mysterious power. Sometimes of
a dark night he would invite a few of us to his lodge, when all was
calm and still. After all were seated his wives would bank the fire with
ashes so that it was as dark within as without, and he would begin to
pray. First to the Sun-chief, then to the wind maker, the thunder and
the lightning. As he prayed, entreating them to come and do his will,
first the lodge ears would begin to quiver with the first breath of a
coming breeze, which gradually grew stronger and stronger till the
lodge bent to the blasts, and the lodge poles strained and creaked.
Then thunder began to boom, faint and far away, and lightning dimly
to blaze, and they came nearer and nearer until they seemed to be
just overhead; the crashes deafened us, the flashes blinded us, and
all were terror-stricken. Then this wonderful man would pray them to
go, and the wind would die down, and the thunder and lightning go
on rumbling and flashing into the far distance until we heard and saw
them no more.’”
 LIII
A. D. 1819
SIMON BOLIVAR

ONCE at the stilted court of Spain young Ferdinand, Prince of the

Asturias, had the condescension to play at tennis with a mere
colonial; and the bounder won.
Long afterward, when Don Ferdinand was king, the colonial
challenged him to another ball game, one played with cannon-balls.
This time the stake was the Spanish American empire, but
Ferdinand played Bolivar, and again the bounder won.
“Now tell me,” a lady said once, “what animal reminds one most
of the Señor Bolivar?”
And Bolivar thought he heard some one say “monkey,” whereat
he flew into an awful passion, until the offender claimed that the
word was “sparrow.” He stood five feet six inches, with a bird-like
quickness, and a puckered face with an odd tang of monkey. Rich,
lavish, gaudy, talking mock heroics, vain as a peacock, always on
the strut unless he was on the run, there is no more pathetically
funny figure in history than tragical Bolivar; who heard liberty, as he
thought, knocking at the door of South America, and opened—to let
in chaos.
“I don’t know,” drawled a Spaniard of that time, “to what class of
beasts these South Americans belong.”
They were dogs, these Spanish colonials, treated as dogs,
behaving as dogs. When they wanted a university Spain said they
were only provided by Providence to labor in the mines. If they had
opinions the Inquisition cured them of their errors. They were not
allowed to hold any office or learn the arts of war and government.
Spain sent officials to ease them of their surplus cash, and keep
them out of mischief. Thanks to Spain they were no more fit for
public affairs than a lot of Bengali baboos.
They were loyal as beaten dogs until Napoleon stole the Spanish
crown for brother Joseph, and French armies promenaded all over
Spain closely pursued by the British. There was no Spain left to love,
but the colonials were not Napoleon’s dogs. Napoleon’s envoys to
Venezuela were nearly torn to pieces before they escaped to sea,
where a little British frigate came and gobbled them up. The sea
belonged to the British, and so the colonials sent ambassadors,
Bolivar and another gentleman, to King George. Please would he
help them to gain their liberty? George had just chased Napoleon out
of Spain, and said he would do his best with his allies, the
Spaniards.
In London Bolivar unearthed a countryman who loved liberty and
had fought for Napoleon, a real professional soldier. General
Miranda was able and willing to lead the armies of freedom, until he
actually saw the Venezuelan troops. Then he shied hard. He really
must draw the line somewhere. Yes, he would take command of the
rabble on one condition, that he got rid of Bolivar. To get away from
Bolivar he would go anywhere and do anything. So he led his rabble
and found them stout fighters, and drove the Spaniards out of the
central provinces.
The politicians were sitting down to draft the first of many comic-
opera constitutions when an awful sound, louder than any thunder,
swept out of the eastern Andes, the earth rolled like a sea in a storm,
and the five cities of the new republic crashed down in heaps of ruin.
The barracks buried the garrisons, the marching troops were totally
destroyed, the politicians were killed, and in all one hundred twenty
thousand people perished. The only thing left standing in one church
was a pillar bearing the arms of Spain; the only districts not wrecked
were those still loyal to the Spanish government. The clergy pointed
the moral, the ruined people repented their rebellion, and the
Spanish forces took heart and closed in from every side upon the
lost republic. Simon Bolivar generously surrendered General
Miranda in chains to the victorious Spaniards.
So far one sees only, as poor Miranda did, that this man was a
sickening cad. But he was something more. He stuck to the cause
for which he had given his life, joined the rebels in what is now
Colombia, was given a small garrison command and ordered to stay
in his fort. In defiance of orders, he swept the Spaniards out of the
Magdalena Valley, raised a large force, liberated the country, then
marched into Venezuela, defeated the Spanish forces in a score of
brilliant actions, and was proclaimed liberator with absolute power in
both Colombia and Venezuela. One begins to marvel at this heroic
leader until the cad looms out. “Spaniards and Canary islanders!” he
wrote, “reckon on death even if you are neutral, unless you will work
actively for the liberty of America. Americans! count on life even if
you are culpable.”
Bolivar’s pet hobbies were three in number: Resigning his job as
liberator; writing proclamations; committing massacres. “I order you,”
he wrote to the governor of La Guayra, “to shoot all the prisoners in
those dungeons, and in the hospital, without any exception
whatever.”
So the prisoners of war were set to work building a funeral pyre.
When this was ready eight hundred of them were brought up in
batches, butchered with axes, bayonets and knives, and their bodies
thrown on the flames. Meanwhile Bolivar, in his office, refreshed
himself by writing a proclamation to denounce the atrocities of the
Spaniards.
Southward of the Orinoco River there are vast level prairies
called Llanos, a cattle country, handled by wild horsemen known as
the Llaneros. In Bolivar’s time their leader called himself Boves, and
he had as second in command Morales. Boves said that Morales
was “atrocious.” Morales said that “Boves was a man of merit, but
too blood-thirsty.” The Spaniards called their command “The Infernal
Division.” At first they fought for the Revolution, afterward for Spain,
but they were really quite impartial and spared neither age nor sex.
This was the “Spanish” army which swept away the second
Venezuelan republic, slaughtering the whole population save some
few poor starving camps of fugitives. Then Boves reported to the
Spanish general, “I have recovered the arms, ammunition, and the
honor of the Spanish flag, which your excellency lost at Carabobo.”
From this time onward the situation was rather like a dog fight,
with the republican dog somewhere underneath in the middle. At
times Bolivar ran like a rabbit, at times he was granted a triumph, but
whenever he had time to come up and breathe he fired off volleys of
proclamations. In sixteen years a painstaking Colombian counted six
hundred ninety-six battles, which makes an average of one every
ninth day, not to mention massacres; but for all his puny body and
feeble health Bolivar was always to be found in the very thick of the
scrimmage.
Europe had entered on the peace of Waterloo, but the ghouls
who stripped the dead after Napoleon’s battles had uniforms to sell
which went to clothe the fantastic mobs, republican and royalist, who
drenched all Spanish America with blood. There were soldiers, too,
whose trade of war was at an end in Europe, who gladly listened to
Bolivar’s agents, who offered gorgeous uniforms and promised
splendid wages—never paid—and who came to join in the war for
“liberty.” Three hundred Germans and nearly six thousand British
veterans joined Bolivar’s colors to fight for the freedom of America,
and nearly all of them perished in battle or by disease. Bolivar was
never without British officers, preferred British troops to all others,
and in his later years really earned the loyal love they gave him,
while they taught the liberator how to behave like a white man.
It was in 1819 that Bolivar led a force of two thousand five
hundred men across a flooded prairie. For a week they were up to
their knees, at times to their necks in water under a tropic deluge of
rain, swimming a dozen rivers beset by alligators. The climate and
starvation bore very heavily upon the British troops. Beyond the flood
they climbed the eastern Andes and crossed the Paramo at a height
of thirteen thousand feet, swept by an icy wind in blinding fog—hard
going for Venezuelans.
 An Irishman, Colonel Rook, commanded the British contingent.
“All,” he reported, “was quite well with his corps, which had had quite
a pleasant march” through the awful gorges and over the freezing
Paramo. A Venezuelan officer remarked here that one-fourth of the
men had perished.
“It was true,” said Rook, “but it really was a very good thing, for
the men who had dropped out were all the wastrels and weaklings of
the force.”
Great was the astonishment of the royalists when Bolivar
dropped on them out of the clouds, and in the battle of Boyacá they
were put to rout. Next day Colonel Rook had his arm cut off by the
surgeons, chaffing them about the beautiful limb he was losing. He
died of the operation, but the British legion went on from victory to
victory, melting away like snow until at the end negroes and Indians
filled its illustrious companies. Colombia, Venezuela and Equador,
Peru and Bolivia were freed from the Spanish yoke and, in the main,
released by Bolivar’s tireless, unfailing and undaunted courage. But
they could not stand his braggart proclamations, would not have him
or any man for master, began a series of squabbles and revolutions
that have lasted ever since, and proved themselves unfit for the
freedom Bolivar gave. He knew at the end that he had given his life
for a myth. On the eighth December, 1830, he dictated his final
proclamation and on the tenth received the last rites of the church,
being still his old braggart self. “Colombians! my last wishes are for
the welfare of the fatherland. If my death contributes to the cessation
of party strife, and to the consolidation of the Union, I shall descend
in peace to the grave.” On the seventeenth his troubled spirit
passed.
 LIV
A. D. 1812
THE ALMIRANTE COCHRANE

WHEN Lieutenant Lord Thomas Cochrane commanded the brig of

war Speedy, he used to carry about a whole broadside of her
cannon-balls in his pocket. He had fifty-four men when he laid his toy
boat alongside a Spanish frigate with thirty-two heavy guns and
three hundred nineteen men, but the Spaniard could not fire down
into his decks, whereas he blasted her with his treble-shotted pop-
guns. Leaving only the doctor on board he boarded that Spaniard,
got more than he bargained for, and would have been wiped out, but
that a detachment of his sailors dressed to resemble black demons,
charged down from the forecastle head. The Spaniards were so
shocked that they surrendered.
For thirteen months the Speedy romped about, capturing in all
fifty ships, one hundred and twenty-two guns, five hundred prisoners.
Then she gave chase to three French battle-ships by mistake, and
met with a dreadful end.
In 1809, Cochrane, being a bit of a chemist, and a first-rate
mechanic, was allowed to make fireworks hulks loaded with
explosives—with which he attacked a French fleet in the anchorage
at Aix. The fleet got into a panic and destroyed itself.
And all his battles read like fairy tales, for this long-legged, red-
haired Scot, rivaled Lord Nelson himself in genius and daring. At war
he was the hero and idol of the fleet, but in peace a demon, restless,
fractious, fiendish in humor, deadly in rage, playing schoolboy jokes
on the admiralty and the parliament. He could not be happy without
making swarms of powerful enemies, and those enemies waited
their chance.
In February, 1814, a French officer landed at Dover with tidings
that the Emperor Napoleon had been slain by Cossacks. The
messenger’s progress became a triumphal procession, and amid
public rejoicings he entered London to deliver his papers at the
admiralty. Bells pealed, cannon thundered, the stock exchange went
mad with the rise of prices, while the messenger—a Mr. Berenger—
sneaked to the lodgings of an acquaintance, Lord Cochrane, and
borrowed civilian clothes.
His news was false, his despatch a forgery, he had been hired by
Cochrane’s uncle, a stock-exchange speculator, to contrive the
whole blackguardly hoax. Cochrane knew nothing of the plot, but for
the mere lending of that suit of clothes, he was sentenced to the
pillory, a year’s imprisonment, and a fine of a thousand pounds. He
was struck from the rolls of the navy, expelled from the house of
commons, his banner as a Knight of the Bath torn down and thrown
from the doors of Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster. In the end he
was driven to disgraceful exile and hopeless ruin.
Four years later Cochrane, commanding the Chilian navy, sailed
from Valparaiso to fight the Spanish fleet. Running away from his
mother, a son of his—Tom Cochrane, junior—aged five, contrived to
sail with the admiral, and in his first engagement, was spattered with
the blood and brains of a marine.
“I’m not hurt, papa,” said the imp, “the shot didn’t touch me. Jack
says that the ball is not made that will hurt mama’s boy.” Jack proved
to be right, but it was in that engagement that Cochrane earned his
Spanish title, “The Devil.” Three times he attempted to take Callao
from the Spaniards, then in disgusted failure dispersed his useless
squadron, and went off with his flag ship to Valdivia. For lack of
officers, he kept the deck himself until he dropped. When he went
below for a nap, the lieutenant left a middy in command, but the
middy went to sleep and the ship was cast away.
Cochrane got her afloat; then, with all his gunpowder wet, went
off with his sinking wreck to attack Valdivia. The place was a Spanish
stronghold with fifteen forts and one hundred and fifteen guns.
Cochrane, preferring to depend on cold steel, left the muskets
behind, wrecked his boats in the surf, let his men swim, led them
straight at the Spaniards, stormed the batteries, and seized the city.
So he found some nice new ships, and an arsenal to equip them, for
his next attack on Callao.
He had a fancy for the frigate, Esmeralda, which lay in Callao—
thought she would suit him for a cruiser. She happened to be
protected by a Spanish fleet, and batteries mounting three hundred
guns, but Cochrane did not mind. El Diablo first eased the minds of
the Spaniards by sending away two out of his three small vessels,
but kept the bulk of their men, and all their boats, a detail not
observed by the weary enemy. His boarding party, two hundred and
forty strong, stole into the anchorage at midnight, and sorely
surprised the Esmeralda. Cochrane, first on board, was felled with
the butt end of a musket, and thrown back into his boat grievously
hurt, in addition to which he had a bullet through his thigh before he
took possession of the frigate. The fleet and batteries had opened
fire, but El Diablo noticed that two neutral ships protected
themselves with a display of lanterns arranged as a signal, “Please
don’t hit me.” “That’s good enough for me,” said Cochrane and
copied those lights which protected the neutrals. When the
bewildered Spaniards saw his lanterns also, they promptly attacked
the neutrals. So Cochrane stole away with his prize.
Although the great sailor delivered Chili and Peru from the
Spaniards, the patriots ungratefully despoiled him of all his pay and
rewards. Cochrane has been described as “a destroying angel with a
limited income and a turn for politics.” Anyway he was
misunderstood, and left Chili disgusted, to attend to the liberation of
Brazil from the Portuguese. But if the Chilians were thieves, the
Brazilians proved to be both thieves and cowards. Reporting to the
Brazilian government that all their cartridges, fuses, guns, powder,
spars and sails, were alike rotten, and all their men an encumbrance,
he dismantled a squadron to find equipment for a single ship, the
Pedro Primeiro. This he manned with British and Yankee
adventurers. He had two other small but fairly effective ships when
he commenced to threaten Bahia. There lay thirteen Portuguese
war-ships, mounting four hundred and eighteen guns, seventy
merchant ships, and a garrison of several thousand men. El Diablo’s
blockade reduced the whole to starvation, the threat of his fireworks
sent them into convulsions, and their leaders resolved on flight to
Portugal. So the troops were embarked, the rich people took ship
with their treasure, and the squadron escorted them to sea, where
Cochrane grinned in the offing. For fifteen days he hung in the rear
of that fleet, cutting off ships as they straggled. He had not a man to
spare for charge of his prizes, but when he caught a ship he staved
her water casks, disabled her rigging so that she could only run
before the wind back to Bahia, and threw every weapon overboard.
He captured seventy odd ships, half the troops, all the treasure,
fought and out-maneuvered the war fleet so that he could not be
caught, and only let thirteen wretched vessels escape to Lisbon.
Such a deed of war has never been matched in the world’s annals,
and Cochrane followed it by forcing the whole of Northern Brazil to
an abject surrender.
Like the patriots of Chili and Peru, the Brazilians gratefully
rewarded their liberator by cheating him out of his pay; so next he
turned to deliver Greece from the Turks. Very soon he found that
even the Brazilians were perfect gentlemen compared with the
Greek patriots, and the heart-sick man went home.
England was sorry for the way she had treated her hero, gave
back his naval rank and made him admiral with command-in-chief of
a British fleet at sea, restored his banner as a Knight of the Bath in
Henry VII’s chapel, granted a pension, and at the end, found him a
resting-place in the Abbey. On his father’s death, he succeeded to
the earldom of Dundonald, and down to 1860, when the old man
went to his rest, his life was devoted to untiring service. He was
among the first inventors to apply coal gas to light English streets
and homes; he designed the boilers long in use by the English navy;
made a bitumen concrete for paving; and offered plans for the
reduction of Sebastopol which would have averted all the horrors of
the siege. Yet even to his eightieth year he was apt to shock and
terrify all official persons, and when he was buried in the nave of the
Abbey, Lord Brougham pronounced his strange obituary. “What,” he
exclaimed at the grave side, “no cabinet minister, no officer of state
to grace this great man’s funeral!” Perhaps they were still scared of
the poor old hero.
 LV
A.D. 1823
THE SOUTH SEA CANNIBALS

FAR back in the long ago time New Zealand was a crowded happy
land. Big Maori fortress villages crowned the hilltops, broad farms
covered the hillsides; the chiefs kept a good table, cooking was
excellent, and especially when prisoners were in season, the people
feasted between sleeps, or, should provisions fail, sacked the next
parish for a supply of meat. So many parishes were sacked and
eaten, that in the course of time the chiefs led their tribes to quite a
distance before they could find a nice fat edible village, but still the
individual citizen felt crowded after meals, and all was well.
Then came the Pakehas, the white men, trading, with muskets
for sale, and the tribe that failed to get a trader to deal with was very
soon wiped out. A musket cost a ton of flax, and to pile up enough to
buy one a whole tribe must leave its hill fortress to camp in
unwholesome flax swamps. The people worked themselves thin to
buy guns, powder and iron tools for farming, but they cherished their
Pakeha as a priceless treasure in special charge of the chief, and if a
white man was eaten, it was clear proof that he was entirely useless
alive, or a quite detestable character. The good Pakehas became
Maori warriors, a little particular as to their meat being really pig, but
otherwise well mannered and popular.
Now of these Pakeha Maoris, one has left a book. He omitted his
name from the book of Old New Zealand, and never mentioned
dates, but tradition says he was Mr. F. C. Maning, and that he lived
as a Maori and trader for forty years, from 1823 to 1863 when the
work was published.
 In the days when Mr. Maning reached the North Island a trader
was valued at twenty times his weight in muskets, equivalent say, to
the sum total of the British National Debt. Runaway sailors however,
were quite cheap. “Two men of this description were hospitably
entertained one night by a chief, a very particular friend of mine,
who, to pay himself for his trouble and outlay, ate one of them next
morning.”
Maning came ashore on the back of a warrior by the name of
Melons, who capsized in an ebb tide running like a sluice, at which
the white man, displeased, held the native’s head under water by
way of punishment. When they got ashore Melons wanted to get
even, so challenged the Pakeha to a wrestling match. Both were in
the pink of condition, the Maori, twenty-five years of age, and a
heavy-weight, the other a boy full of animal spirits and tough as
leather. After the battle Melons sat up rather dazed, offered his hand,
and venting his entire stock of English, said “How do you do?”
But then came a powerful chief, by name Relation-eater. “Pretty
work this,” he began, “good work. I won’t stand this not at all! not at
all! not at all!” (The last sentence took three jumps, a step and a turn
round, to keep correct time.) “Who killed the Pakeha? It was Melons.
You are a nice man, killing my Pakeha ... we shall be called the
‘Pakeha killkillers’; I shall be sick with shame; the Pakeha will run
away; what if you had killed him dead, or broken his bones”.... (Here
poor Melones burst out crying like an infant). “Where is the hat?
Where the shoes? The Pakeha is robbed! he is murdered!” Here a
wild howl from Melons.
The local trader took Mr. Maning to live with him, but it was
known to the tribes that the newcomer really and truly belonged to
Relation-eater. Not long had he been settled when there occurred a
meeting between his tribe and another, a game of bluff, when the
warriors of both sides danced the splendid Haka, most blood-
curdling, hair-lifting of all ceremonials. Afterward old Relation-eater
singled out the horrible savage who had begun the war-dance, and
these two tender-hearted individuals for a full half-hour, seated on
the ground hanging on each other’s necks, gave vent to a chorus of
skilfully modulated howling. “So there was peace,” and during the
ceremonies Maning came upon a circle of what seemed to be Maori
chiefs, until drawing near he found that their nodding heads had
nobody underneath. Raw heads had been stuck on slender rods,
with cross sticks to carry the robes, “Looking at the ’eds, sir?” asked
an English sailor. “’Eds was werry scarce—they had to tattoo a slave
a bit ago, and the villain ran away, tattooin’ and all!”
“What!”
“Bolted before he was fit to kill,” said the sailor, mournful to think
how dishonest people could be.
Once the head chief, having need to punish a rebellious vassal,
sent Relation-eater, who plundered and burned the offending village.
The vassal decamped with his tribe.
“Well, about three months after this, about daylight I was
aroused by a great uproar.... Out I ran at once and perceived that M
—’s premises were being sacked by the rebellious vassal who ...
was taking this means of revenging himself for the rough handling he
had received from our chief. Men were rushing in mad haste through
the smashed windows and doors, loaded with everything they could
lay hands upon.... A large canoe was floating near to the house, and
was being rapidly filled with plunder. I saw a fat old Maori woman
who was washerwoman, being dragged along the ground by a huge
fellow who was trying to tear from her grasp one of my shirts, to
which she clung with perfect desperation. I perceived at a glance
that the faithful old creature would probably save a sleeve.
“An old man-of-war’s man defending his washing, called out, ‘Hit
out, sir! ... our mob will be here in five minutes!’
“The odds were terrible, but ... I at once floored a native who was
rushing by me.... I then perceived that he was one of our own people
... so to balance things I knocked down another! and then felt myself
seized round the waist from behind.
“The old sailor was down now but fighting three men at once,
while his striped shirt and canvas trousers still hung proudly on the
fence.
“Then came our mob to the rescue and the assailants fled.
 “Some time after this a little incident worth noting happened at
my friend M—’s place. Our chief had for some time back a sort of
dispute with another magnate.... The question was at last brought to
a fair hearing at my friend’s house. The arguments on both sides
were very forcible; so much so that in the course of the arbitration
our chief and thirty of his principal witnesses were shot dead in a
heap before my friend’s door, and sixty others badly wounded, and
my friend’s house and store blown up and burnt to ashes.
“My friend was, however, consoled by hundreds of friends who
came in large parties to condole with him, and who, as was quite
correct in such cases, shot and ate all his stock, sheep, pigs, ducks,
geese, fowls, etc., all in high compliment to himself; he felt proud....
He did not, however, survive these honors long.”
Mr. Maning took this poor gentleman’s place as trader, and
earnestly studied native etiquette, on which his comments are
always deliciously funny. Two young Australians were his guests
when there arrived one day a Maori desperado who wanted
blankets; and “to explain his views more clearly knocked both my
friends down, threatened to kill them both with his tomahawk, then
rushed into the bedroom, dragged out all the bedclothes, and burnt
them on the kitchen fire.”
A few weeks later, Mr. Maning being alone, and reading a year-
old Sydney paper, the desperado called. “‘Friend,’ said I; ‘my advice
to you is to be off.’
“He made no answer but a scowl of defiance. ‘I am thinking,
friend, that this is my house,’ said I, and springing upon him I placed
my foot to his shoulder, and gave him a shove which would have
sent most people heels over head.... But quick as lightning ... he
bounded from the ground, flung his mat away over his head, and
struck a furious blow at my head with his tomahawk. I caught the
tomahawk in full descent; the edge grazed my hand; but my arm,
stiffened like a bar of iron, arrested the blow. He made one furious,
but ineffectual attempt to wrest the tomahawk from my grasp; and
then we seized one another round the middle, and struggled like
maniacs in the endeavor to dash each other against the boarded