Last summer, I met a ballerina at a bus stop.

 

This summer, I shot him

 

------

 

Aaron Dalla Villa.

 

___

 

Honestly, that's how it happened. I was coming home from a party, some dude started talking to me at a busstop, and because I was all boppy-mood post-party, I let down my don't talk to me guard and made with the friendly.

 

Turned out he was a dancer, just passing through town. I invited him to aerial with me, and he showed up the next day, and then again later in the week for a semi-private lesson. We were fast friends, and then he moved to Chicago.

 

Last week, between weddings in Chicago, I found a few hours with him. We went out to breakfast at one of my old haunts, and then snuck in a 20 minute photoshoot before he had to head to rehearsal.

 

Technically, he does mainly modern, less ballet. But there were too many Erin/Aaron/Aeryns in my life when I met him, so Ballerina is his name to me.

 

He's also building his modeling portfolio (I can help with that!), and his acting career.

 

Really nice guy. Funny how random moments can lead to lifelong friends.

My beloved student : Fikri zulhafiz ( delay development category )

p/s : Let us pray 4 his safety coz he just involved in accident..hopefully he will getting better..May Allah Bless u Fikri...come back soon my boy!!

 

Photo taken by Herwart Schneider and kindly provided by him for inclusion on this page.

  

München-Riem

ca. 1978

  

EC-ARC "Goya"

Douglas DC-8-52

45619 / 142

Aviaco

 

EC-ARC is coming in to land on Riem’s runway 25. The airframe was noted at Riem on 3 April 1975 (on a diversion from STR) and on 4 May 1978 (but certainly visited more often).

 

Information from airhistory.net - thanks to Michael Röser:

Built 1961 for Iberia. Leased to APSA as OB-R-931 1969, returned as EC-ARC to Aviaco 1972. American Jet Industries N57AJ 1978, Nordair C-GNDF 1979, Air Fleets International N3751X, later N893AF 1980. Painted for the Lord's Airline 1990 but never operated and scrapped Miami 1993.

 

Registration details for this airframe:

www.scramble.nl/database/civil/details/DC8_145

 

EC-ARC with Iberia at LHR in 1965 (initial colours):

www.airhistory.net/photo/502305/EC-ARC

 

This airframe as OB-R-931 with APSA at LGW in April 1969 (including detailed airframe history):

www.flickr.com/photos/kenfielding/5586870922

 

EC-ARC with Iberia at GLA in April 1973 (later colours):

www.flickr.com/photos/markp51/16273706189

 

This airframe as C-GNDF with Nordair at YUL ca. early 1980s:

www.flickr.com/photos/96002349@N00/7882029684

 

N893AF with Air Fleets at YUL ca. 1980:

www.flickr.com/photos/96002349@N00/7938208938

 

This airframe as N893AF with The Lord’s Airline at MIA in 1991:

www.flickr.com/photos/steelhead2010/25743447951

 

N893AF derelict at MIA in March 1993:

www.flickr.com/photos/105925977@N03/52902740807

  

Scan from Kodachrome slide.

Optimized by JPEGmini 3.18.4.211102121-AP 0x816ac07a

Jardins de l'Europe 30/06/2015 18h11

The park on the banks of Lac d'Annecy with the statue of Claude Louis Berthollet (9 December 1748 Talloires, France – 6 November 1822 Arcueil, France) a Savoyard-French chemist who became vice president of the French Senate in 1804. (more about him: Wikipedia - Claude Louis Berthollet).

In the background Lac d'Annecy surrounded by the Alpes.

 

Lac d'Annecy

Lac d'Annecy (Lake Annecy in English) is a perialpine lake in Haute-Savoie in France. It is the third largest lake in France, after the Lac du Bourget and Lac de Grand-Lieu, if the French part of Lake Geneva (which is also partly in Switzerland) is excluded. It is known as "Europe's cleanest lake" because of strict environmental regulations introduced in the 1960s. It is a popular tourist destination known for its swimming and water sports.

 

The lake was formed about 18,000 years ago, at the time the large alpine glaciers melted. It is fed by many small rivers from the surrounding mountains (Ire, Eau morte, Laudon, Bornette and Biolon), and from a powerful underwater source, the Boubioz, which enters at 82 m depth.

 

FACTS & FIGURES:

Primary outflows: Thiou

Maximum length: 14.6 km

Maximum width: 3.2 km

Average depth: 41 m

Maximum depth: 82 m

Surface elevation: 446.97 m

 

[ Source & more Info: Wikipedia - Lac d'Annecy ]

   

and one of my new favorites

  

''I want to skim some stones :D''

 

And so our stroll ended on the banks of a woodland stream.

Found him sleeping on the tree. Super cute creature. I took a lot of photos and couldn't decide which looks better, so I uploaded many I think look best. :)

 

Sony A77 + Tamron 70-300mm f4-5.6 USD lens

 

Hua-Hin, Thailand

View On Black

 

a rare, quiet and calm moment captured of caesar just a few moments ago..usually during the day he's so full of energy and just wants to play fetch with his soccer ball and while i got a bunch of shots of him trying to catch a ball in the backyard, those looked boring and plain to me. they show off his physical abilities but i wanted to show his softer, more gentle side.

 

it took a few minutes to get him to lay like this..the treat i had in my one hand initially made him even more excited but i waited it out and it paid off...if there's one thing this dog teaches me, it's patience. i do love him for that as well as the incredible companionship he provides us all.

 

technically, someone had asked me about my indoor shots and while i'm not really great at using my (external) flash..i have figured out that bouncing it over and behind my head works best..i shoot with the camera on manual as well as the flash, that way i can take a few test shots then adjust +/- a few stops if need be.

Mossman and Port Douglas.

In 1873 George Dalrymple discovered and named the Mossman River. Dalrymple had tried to set up sheep runs near what was to become Townsville in 1860. When this did not work the Government made him Commissioner of Lands in the Townsville region and he pioneered the town of Bowen. Dalrymple soon resigned and then established the town of Cardwell as a private venture. In 1873 he went on a government expedition to find a port for the Palmer River gold diggings (there were 30,000 men on the diggings almost overnight) and he sailed to the Endeavour River and the newly emerging town of Cooktown. Cooktown was established for the Palmer River diggings. This was the time when Dalrymple discovered the Daintree River and named the Mossman River. Daintree was named after Dalrymple’s friend Richard Daintree, a QLD government geologist who found gold and other deposits in northern QLD. The Mossman River was named after another of Dalrymple’s friends, Hugh Mosman (the spelling of the town was changed to avoid confusion with the suburb of the same name in Sydney) another geologists and mine explorer. Mosman was the man who named Charters Towers when he found gold there in 1872. We visit Charters Tower on Saturday.

 

Nearby Port Douglas was established in 1877 to cart supplies to the Hodgkinson River goldfields and within a few years farmers had cleared flat land in the nearby Mossman River valley for sugar cane growing. The venture only succeeded because a cane mill was established there in 1883. The long wet season, made sugar a tricky business in the Daintree region. But with government assistance and more growers, a new cane mill was built in Mossman in 1897 with a train system to bring the sugar cane to the mill. This time the enterprise worked and the township grew especially once the train line was extended to Port Douglas in 1900. By 1902 Mossman had 4 hotels, a school, a Catholic Church, a general store and a post office. In the 1930s the town was linked to Cairns with a main road and the old port at Port Douglas declined into a tiny fishing village. Today Mossman is still a sugar growing area and the town has around 2,000 people and the road continues north through the Daintree to Cooktown. Port Douglas has had a revival since Christopher Skase built his luxury resort, the Sheraton Mirage Resort there in the mid 1980s. At that time Port Douglas only had a 100 or so residents. Today it has around 1,000 permanent residents and up to 1,000 holiday makers at peak times!

 

Australian Red Cedar- Toona ciliata.

Many of us at home have an antique Australian Red Cedar chest of drawers or dining chair or book case. Cedar was the most popular 19th century timber for Australian furniture and mouldings. But the environment paid dearly for our love of this furniture. The NSW forests were stripped of giant cedars first, then southern QLD. The last area remaining to be plundered was the Daintree. Timber getters flocked to the Daintree in 1873 after Dalrymple announced his explorations. Within 3 years nearly 60 ships had been fully loaded with Daintree cedar. No wonder cedar was referred to as “red gold.” It is estimated that some trees were more than 500 years old. Many reached to 60 metres tall. They were giants. But the exploitation was not efficient. Many trees were felled and then left to rot as they were too difficult to float downstream to Mossman or Port Douglas. In 1875 the QLD parliament had an enquiry into cedar felling but with no change of felling policies. By 1885 the cedars were gone. They have not revegetated in the Daintree since. However in NSW Toona ciliate has regrown in some coastal forests quite quickly. In the Australian register of giant trees only one Cedar is listed at a mere 55 metres in height. (Mountain Ashes are listed at over 90 metres tall). Cedar is commercially extinct in Australia but it is still logged in New Guinea and a very small forestry plantation on the Atherton Tablelands. Sugar cane and a bit of dairying replaced cedar felling but timber felling continued well into the 20th century. The last timber mill erected in the area was in 1924 in Daintree village.

 

Getting the cedars and other produce to market was always a problem for the Daintree area. There was no port although there was talk of a port for the mouth of the Daintree to be called Whitby after the town in Yorkshire where Captain Cook once lived. But nothing eventuated. During the west season Daintree village was completely isolated except for boat access. In the dry season the 30 kms from Mossman still took a full day to complete on horseback. All this changed in 1932 when a road was built from Mossman to Daintree. Once the Great Depression hit some people moved into the Daintree area near Cape Tribulation on a government group settlement scheme with 300 acre blocks. But the farmers were disappointed. After the hard work of clearing the rainforest their crops were destroyed by feral pigs. Some stayed on subsisting on tropical fruits and vegetables. So the start of white settlement in the Cape Tribulation area was in the 1930s. A coastal sailing vessel called into Cape Tribulation once a week with mail and some supplies from the mid 1930s onwards. After World War Two timber felling started in the Cape Tribulation area. Milling ran from 1948 until 1962. But the isolation protected the area from too much development. The road only reached the area in 1955.

 

Daintree.

This refers to several different places. There is the town of Daintree, the River Daintree, and the Daintree Forest National Park. This National Park includes several national parks in the Daintree region which in turn form the Queensland Wet Tropics Rainforest World Heritage area. The Daintree Park is 100 kms north of Cairns and one part is known as the Cape Tribulation National Park and the other Mossman Gorge National Park. To enter the Cape Tribulation part of the Daintree National Park you have to cross the ferry at the Daintree River. We will only be cruising along the Daintree River and doing a short forest walk near the Daintree village. The Park got UNESCO Word Heritage status in 1983. It received this status because of the diversity of animals and plants in the park and because it is the last extensive lowlands wet tropical forest left in Australia. Most of our other rain forests are in the mountain ranges.

 

The Daintree forest is thought to be over 100 million years old. It is in a high rainfall zone of Australia and this presented great problems to early settlers. Malaria and other tropical diseases were great killers here before the 1960s and better medical treatments. Since its declaration the QLD and federal governments have been buying back private land to add to the park. Parts of the park receive about 4,000 mm of rain a year- eight times the annual rainfall of Adelaide! The park is also subject to cyclones but it has been lucky and escaped major damage. The worst cyclones to hit the park occurred in 1920 and 1934.

 

Animals and Plants.

The Daintree contains about 30% of Australia’s frog, reptile and marsupial species, 65% of our bat and butterfly species and over 430 species of bird. Although we are unlikely to see any, the Park is home to Tree Kangaroos, many possums, dingoes, various small marsupials, and flying foxes and other bats. The jungle associated with a lowland rain forest is a perfect habitat for many birds including the elusive Cassowary, kookaburras, kingfishers, cockatoos, pigeons of various kinds, and scrubfowl. The rarities which are seldom seen include some Bowerbirds and even one species of bird of paradise (the Riflebird). The riverside and coastal areas are home to many seabirds. The common reptile to be seen is the salt water crocodile known for their aggression and size. If you see a flash of blue against a green leaf in the rain forest it could be the famed Ulysses Butterfly. This is just one many species of butterfly in the Daintree. The one animal you might not want to see but might see is the introduced Cane Toad. It was introduced to kill off the sugar cane beetles in 1935. It came from South America. It failed to do that job but it spread rapidly as it had no natural predators. It feasts on native snakes, frogs and small animals. It has now extended across to the Northern Territory and south into NSW and cane toads number some 200 million. If ingested by other animals it poisons them. All attempts to control their breeding and spread have so far failed. They are a major environmental disaster for Australia.

 

The rain forest jungle provides a growing area for mighty trees which block out the sun at ground level, twisting vines and creepers and small plants and ferns near the ground. On our walk in the rain forest you will be most aware of the ground hugging species rather than the tall canopy species. But on their trunks you will see buttress roots, lichens, fungi and moss. The rotting vegetation on the forest floor encourages more moss, native orchids and some small flowering plants. But be careful as some are stinging plants and others hide rainforest leaches! At eye level you will see various palms such as the Fan Palm, the Black Palm, Coconut Palm (although this is not native) and Rattan Palms. Below them you will see the beautiful ferns- Tree Ferns, King Ferns, Ribbon Ferns, Creek Ferns and others. As this is Australia you will also see cycads with their stiff fern like fronds. Cycads bear cones like conifers and are amongst the oldest plants on earth. The Daintree has the greatest diversity of cycads anywhere in the world. These cycads and some of the big trees like the Hoop and Bunya Pine and Kauri are all living counterparts of the Jurassic-age fossils of elsewhere like Riversleigh in western QLD. You will also find banksias, macadamias, eucalypts and some of our more usual vegetation.

 

Roger decided to add his TV to our picture of our TV on TV. Yo dawg.

 

So yes - three different Sharp Aquos TVs here!

 

Russell Brand.

Sharp Aquos TV, TV, skull.

movie: Get Him To The Greek.

recursive.

 

Roger Arnett's house, Richmond, Virginia.

 

June 22, 2012.

Pic by Roger Arnett.

  

... Read my blog at ClintJCL.wordpress.com

   

BACKSTORY: While rewatching Get Him To The Greek (which we rate 5/5 stars on Netflix, and 9/10[Clint] and 10/10[Carolyn] on IMDB), they showed a shot of the TV. It just happened to be*our* TV, a Sharp Aquos flatscreen. So we took a picture of our TV within our TV. We must have missed this the first time we watched the movie.

 

This happened a bunch in 2009, so we have several recursive shots of our TV on TV. www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/tags/sharpaquostv/

Statue of Sir Adam Beck on University Avenue at Queen Street West. Toronto, Canada. Spring afternoon, 2021. Pentax K1 II.

 

A biography of Sir Adam Beck: www.biographi.ca/en/bio/beck_adam_15E.html

 

BECK, Sir ADAM, manufacturer, horseman, politician, office holder, and philanthropist; b. 20 June 1857 in Baden, Upper Canada, son of Jacob Friedrich Beck and Charlotte Josephine Hespeler; m. 7 Sept. 1898 Lillian Ottaway in Hamilton, Ont., and they had a daughter; d. 15 Aug. 1925 in London, Ont.

 

The Prometheus of Canadian politics during the first quarter of the 20th century, Sir Adam Beck brought the inestimable benefit of cheap electric light and power to the citizens of Ontario through a publicly owned utility, the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario. He had to fight continuously to build Hydro, as it came to be called, but supported by municipal allies he succeeded in creating one of the largest publicly owned integrated electric systems in the world. Brusque and overbearing, he made many enemies in the process, even amongst his friends, as he rammed his projects forward, frequently over the objections of the governments he notionally served. His ruthless determination to expand Hydro, with little regard to the cost, led eventually to a movement to rein him in. He spent his last years pinned down before three public inquiries as lawyers, accountants, and political adversaries picked over every Hydro expenditure. These public humiliations broke his spirit but failed to diminish his enormous popularity. Adam Beck more than any other public figure in Ontario reshaped the institutional life of the province by making electricity a public utility and legitimizing, through his accomplishments, public ownership as an effective instrument of policy throughout Canada.

 

Beck came from an enterprising immigrant family of builders and makers. In 1829 Frederick and Barbara Beck had emigrated from the Grand Duchy of Baden (Germany) to upstate New York, and then had moved to the Pennsylvania Dutch community of Doon (Kitchener) in Upper Canada, where they settled on a farm and built a sawmill. Their son Jacob, who had stayed behind to work first as a doctor’s apprentice and later in the mills and locomotive works of Schenectady, joined them in 1837. A few miles from his parents, in Preston (Cambridge), he opened a foundry. When fire destroyed it, his friends rallied and he was able to rebuild bigger than before. His first wife, Caroline Logus, whom he married in January 1843, died soon after the birth of a son, Charles. In 1843 Beck had recruited a skilled iron moulder from Buffalo, John Clare (Klarr), to join him; Clare would cement the alliance by marrying his sister in September 1845. With Clare and another partner (Valentine Wahn) running the business, Beck returned to tour his homeland, where he met Charlotte Hespeler, the sister of his Preston neighbour, merchant-manufacturer Jacob Hespeler. When Charlotte came out to Canada, she and Beck were wed, in October 1845; a daughter, Louisa, was born in 1847, followed by two sons, George and William. In a move typical of his venturing spirit, Jacob suggested relocating his company closer to the projected line of the Grand Trunk Railway, but Clare refused. So in 1854 Beck dissolved the partnership and bought 190 acres on the route of the railway ten miles west of Berlin (Kitchener). There he laid out a town-site, which he named Baden, and built a foundry, a grist mill, and a large brick house. Beck’s businesses flourished on the strength of iron orders from the railway, and a brickyard and machine shop were eventually added. It was in this thriving hamlet that Adam Beck was born in 1857.

 

Adam passed a bucolic childhood exploring the edges of the millpond with his brothers, poking about the sooty recesses of the foundry with the workmen, and horseback-riding with his sister. He was sent off to attend William Tassie*’s boarding school in Galt (Cambridge), where he showed no particular distinction; a slow and indifferent student, he preferred riding to reading. His formal education ended at Rockwood Academy, near Guelph. On his return to Baden, his father, who abhorred idleness, set him to work as a groundhog (a moulder’s apprentice) in the foundry. It was said by those who knew Adam that he inherited his enterprising spirit, his determination and visionary ability, and some of his sternness from his father, and a love of public service from his mother. Adam’s career as a moulder came to an end with the failure of his father’s businesses in 1879. At age 63 Jacob Beck, unbowed, started afresh once again, this time as a grain merchant in Detroit. Louisa and the youngest members of the family, Jacob Fritz and Adam, accompanied their parents; one of the older boys, William, stayed in Baden to run the cigar-box manufactory he had started in 1878. Adam returned to work briefly in Toronto as a clerk in a foundry and then as an employee in a cigar factory. With $500 in borrowed money, he joined William and their cousin William Hespeler in a cigar-box factory in Galt in 1881. Hespeler eventually left the partnership, but the two Becks persisted and built a modestly successful business. In 1884, with the inducement of a five-year tax exemption and free water, they moved their works to London, Ont., to be closer to the centre of the province’s cigar-making industry. William left soon afterwards to open a branch in Montreal and for a time Adam worked in partnership with his brother George; from 1 Jan. 1888 Adam was the sole proprietor of William Beck and Company, which later became the Beck Manufacturing Company Limited.

 

Cigar boxes would appear to be a fragile basis on which to build a fortune or a political career. The smoking of cigars, however, was a major rite of male sociability during the Victorian era. Earlier in the century cigars consumed in Canada had originated in Germany and later they came from the United States. The imposition of the National Policy tariff of 25 per cent on rolled cigars but not on tobacco leaf led to the migration of the industry to Canada. London was one of the first major centres where the leaf grown in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin entered the dominion, and it was there and in Montreal [see Samuel Davis*] that the domestic cigar-making business took root. In London the industry would reach its peak around 1912, when 22 companies, employing 1,980 workers, produced more than 20 million cigars. Situated on Albert Street, the Beck factory was essentially a veneer plant. Cedar logs and specialty woods from Spain and Mexico arrived by rail, were stored in the yard for seasoning, and then were peeled into strips to make not only cigar boxes but also cheese boxes and veneer for furniture and pianos. Toiling side by side with his workers (25 in 1889, rising to 125 in 1919), Beck built a thriving business, taking orders, setting up equipment, manhandling logs, and wheeling the finished boxes to customers. (He himself was a non-smoker, an enduring fatherly influence.) Eventually the company supplied all of the main cigar makers with the boxes, labels, and bands in which their products were shipped. Until he was 40, business was Adam Beck’s main preoccupation.

 

In the years after 1897 he emerged much more prominently in public life. He got out more, married, offered himself for public office, and turned the management of his firm over to his brother Jacob. An avid sportsman, he had played baseball as a boy; in London he played tennis and lacrosse and, with a group of bachelors, organized a toboggan club. On the advice of his doctor he took up riding again for relaxation. But nothing with Adam Beck could ever be just a recreation – he quickly became a breeder of racehorses and a competitive jumper. His social life revolved around the London Hunt Club where, in 1897, he became master of the hounds, a post he would hold until 1922. A mutual love of horses and riding brought the muscular Beck and the slim, strikingly beautiful Lillian Ottaway together at a jumping meet; she was 23 years his junior. After a whirlwind courtship they were married in 1898 at Christ’s Church Anglican Cathedral in Hamilton. Lillian, who had been raised in Britain, spoke with a slight English accent, had a lovely soprano voice, rode with gusto, and carried herself regally. Her mother, Marion Elizabeth Stinson*, from a wealthy Hamilton family, had married an English barrister, who died before Lillian was born. At 18 Lillian returned to Canada when her mother married a prominent Hamilton lawyer. After a honeymoon tour of Europe, Beck triumphantly brought his bride to London, Ont., where they promptly acquired the most ostentatious house in the city, Elliston, the estate of Ellis Walton Hyman*, and proceeded to make it even grander, with his and hers stables, under a new name, Headley. From being a sporting, business-possessed bachelor, Beck, with his young wife on his arm, moved effortlessly into the very centre of London society. She sang in the cathedral choir, their house and grounds were the envy of the city, and they made a romantic and devoted couple at dinners and hunt club affairs. Winston Churchill stayed with them on his lecture tour of 1900-1, as did Governor General Lord Minto [Elliot*] and Lady Minto in 1903.

 

As Adam Beck came out into society, he developed an interest in public life. In provincial politics London had long been a Conservative fief – William Ralph Meredith held the seat from 1872 to 1894. The Liberals captured it in a by-election when Meredith was appointed to the bench. At the next general election, in March 1898, Beck entered the lists for the Conservatives, ultimately falling 301 votes short of beating the Liberal Francis Baxter Leys. Although he perhaps should not have expected a better result, having no previous political experience or strong organization, he left the field feeling slightly wounded. Nevertheless, his political energies were channelled into the Victoria Hospital Trust, to which he was appointed by the city in 1901. Here he scandalized supporters with his aggressive approach towards patients’ rights, his attacks on hospital inefficiency, and his hands-on way of managing repairs economically. It is said that Beck, realizing that he was not likely to be reappointed, ran for mayor to outflank his opposition. In any case, he offered himself and was elected in January 1902. Making few promises, preferring instead to be judged by his works, he plunged into the first of what would be three one-year terms. His administration was marked by a vigorous, reforming tone that discomfited the aldermanic coterie. He promoted civic beautification by offering a prize from his own purse for a garden competition. He persuaded the city to take over the operation of the London and Port Stanley Railway when the private operator’s lease expired. He cleaned out the fire department, promoted public health, and became involved in the leadership of the Union of Canadian Municipalities, whose annual convention he brought to London in 1904. Beck thus learned the political craft at the top of local politics, as a mayor without a long apprenticeship. He entered public life as an oppositionist, a critic who used his personal popularity to drive his reluctant colleagues forward and to cleanse the municipal stables. Despite his class position as a manufacturer, in politics he developed the style of a populist champion of the ordinary citizen against the establishment. Although one might have glimpsed intimations of his future in these London years, it would have required an extremely vivid imagination to see in this maverick local politician the system-building Napoleon of provincial politics that history would know as Sir Adam Beck.

 

In the election of May 1902 the leader of the Conservative party, James Pliny Whitney*, encouraged Beck to run again, with the offer of a cabinet post. Although the party as a whole was unsuccessful, the popular Beck beat Francis Leys by 131 votes and thus, for the next two and a half years, he would serve as both mayor and mpp of London. It was in his capacity as mayor of a southwestern Ontario industrial city that he came in contact with a group of activists from his home district of Waterloo County who had become agitated by the hydroelectric power question. Led by the manufacturer Elias Weber Bingeman Snider and the enthusiast Daniel Bechtel Detweiler, the anxious businessmen and municipal politicians of the industrial centres of the Grand River valley had begun to organize themselves to obtain Niagara power that they believed would otherwise go to Toronto and Buffalo. They had met in 1902 to study the situation, and then formed common cause with the politicians of Toronto concerned about private monopoly. At first they hoped the provincial government could be persuaded to undertake the distribution of cheap power to the municipalities. Talks with the Liberal premier, George William Ross*, who refused to take on the inevitable debt, convinced them that if they wanted control over electrical distribution they would have to do the job themselves. Beck went as an observer to the first meeting of this group, the Berlin Convention of February 1903, a gathering of 67 delegates representing all of the main towns and cities in southwestern Ontario; he came away an active convert to municipal intervention. In response to this public pressure, in June the Ross government passed legislation (drafted by Snider) authorizing a commission of investigation to explore the possibilities of cooperative municipal action and a statutory framework within which the municipalities could create a permanent commission to operate a distribution system. Snider was the obvious choice as chair of this Ontario Power Commission, which more frequently went by his name. Beck along with Philip William Ellis, a Toronto jewellery manufacturer and wholesaler, and William Foster Cockshutt, a Brantford farm-implements manufacturer, were chosen by the municipal delegates to serve with Snider as commissioners. Thus, in the fall of 1903, Beck began a crash course on the power question. It was a subject ideally suited to his developing temperament, and he could readily identify with the professed goals: economic electrical light and power, equity between the different manufacturing regions, and the welfare of the common people. The vision of sensible, non-partisan, and public-spirited businessmen and municipal leaders (such as himself) appealed to Beck. He could also subscribe to the implicit attack on monopoly, social privilege, and finance capitalism. This was a moral universe in which he felt right at home.

 

As the Snider commission began working out the details of a municipally owned hydroelectric distribution system in 1904, Beck sensed the weakness of the voluntary, cooperative structure. It lacked the authority to order the power companies to surrender sensitive information vital to the enterprise, and the municipalities could not agree on much for long. Financing a collective municipal enterprise without provincial backing would be fraught with difficulties. The more he studied the question the more he became convinced that the province would have to play a major role, not just facilitate municipal activity. This growing conviction coincided with a major shift in the political landscape. The Liberal party was losing its hold over the electorate. Rooted in rural Ontario, it had trouble coming to grips with issues important to the rapidly growing urban constituencies. The Conservatives had crept to within three seats of upsetting the Liberals in 1902. In January 1905 Whitney’s Conservatives swept to a landslide victory, capturing 69 of the 98 seats. In London, the increasingly popular Adam Beck won with a plurality of 566 votes.

 

The hydroelectric question had not figured prominently in the campaign. The change in government, however, catapulted Beck into a position of some influence provincially. On 8 February he was made a minister without portfolio in the new administration. After the election, Whitney grandly promised that the water-power of Niagara “should be as free as air” and be developed for the public good. “It is the duty of the Government,” Beck insisted in his populist fashion, “to see that development is not hindered by permitting a handful of people to enrich themselves out of these treasures at the expense of the general public.” To that end Whitney cancelled an eleventh-hour water-power concession granted by the Ross government and on 5 July he appointed Beck to head a hydroelectric commission of inquiry. It was empowered to take an inventory of available water-power sites, gather information on existing companies in terms of their capital costs, their operating expenses, and the prices they charged, and recommend an appropriate provincial policy with respect to the generation and distribution of hydroelectricity. Beck continued to be a member of the Snider commission but clearly he had moved on to a broader conception of the power question; he now wielded a much more powerful regulatory and investigative instrument and could act with the authority of the province. Henceforth he would be the undisputed leader of the hydro movement.

 

The Snider commission, which reported first, in March 1906, recommended the construction of a cooperatively owned hydroelectric system linking the major municipal utilities to generating facilities at Niagara under the control of a permanent power commission financed and managed by the subscribing municipalities. In the weeks that followed, the Beck commission, in the first of its five regional reports, and more particularly the activities of Beck himself, superseded the Snider notion of a municipal cooperative. Beck’s initial report, on Niagara and southwest Ontario, prepared the way instead for provincial action by pointing out the excessive rates charged by private power companies, and the inherent difficulties of government regulation. He gave an important speech in Guelph urging direct provincial intervention. He inspired a mass meeting of municipal representatives at Toronto city hall and, on 11 April, a demonstration on the lawn of the legislature demanding that the province empower a commission to generate, transmit, and sell power to the municipalities at the lowest possible cost, and regulate the prices charged by the private providers. Beck also orchestrated a deluge of petitions from the municipal councils. All of this effort was intended to soften up his colleagues in cabinet, most of whom harboured deep suspicions about public ownership in general and Beck’s movement in particular. The strategy worked. The Whitney government hesitantly introduced legislation on 7 May (Act to provide for the transmission of electrical power to municipalities) which, in effect, created a three-member provincial crown corporation (though it was not called that), the Hydro-Electric Power Commission. Operating outside the usual civil service constraints and with extensive powers of expropriation, this body would have full powers to purchase, lease, or build transmission facilities financed by provincial bonds. Local utilities could buy power from the commission only after municipal voters had approved the contract and the enabling financial by-law. Astonishingly, Beck’s extraparliamentary organization cowed even the opposition: the bill passed unanimously in less than a week.

 

In organizational terms Beck had pushed on beyond an unwieldy municipal cooperative to a provincial crown agency. In doing so he had alienated some of his friends, especially in the way he had shoved Snider aside and unilaterally appropriated studies done by the Snider commission for his own investigation. Nonetheless he had created a broad coalition of municipal activists behind his determination to build a publicly owned, provincial system. But there were many possible forms, involving different degrees of state intervention, that the organization might take. The government remained ambivalent, guarded, and internally divided. What eventually emerged as Ontario Hydro, however, was Beck’s creation over the opposition of his cabinet colleagues. On 7 June 1906 Whitney appointed Beck chairman of the new commission, as expected. Needed engineering expertise would come from Cecil Brunswick Smith. And to balance Beck’s populism and rein in his enthusiasms, Whitney also persuaded a reluctant John Strathearn Hendrie of Hamilton to serve, Beck’s peer as a horseman, a man of his wife’s class, and a known supporter of the private power companies, among them the Hamilton Electric Light and Cataract Power Company Limited [see John Patterson*].

 

The private interests, especially the group promoting the only Canadian firm at Niagara, the Electrical Development Company of Ontario Limited from Toronto, having failed in their first attempts to derail Beck, now bent their minds to seeking some reasonable accommodation with the government. There were many in the cabinet, the premier included, who were sympathetic to this point of view. The Electrical Development Company was in a precarious financial position; a collapse would be a costly blot on the province. Whitney insisted that every consideration be given the company in negotiating the contract for power in early 1907 with the winning bidder, the American-based Ontario Power Company, and then with respect to the construction of the transmission line. In each case negotiations failed. The premier did not conceive of his policy as a guerre à outrance against the private interests. He believed in talking tough, but in the end was willing to come to terms. Unlike Beck, Whitney was a practitioner of brokerage politics. Beck, a newly formed ideologue, was not prepared to bargain away what had formed in his mind as a just alternative to private control. It was possible that neither of them knew the truth about themselves, though in time they came to a realization of their honest differences. For his part Beck had to manoeuvre against the wishes of his premier and colleagues in cabinet. From their point of view he could be unpleasant, ruthless, even unprincipled. He would change his mind without notice, withhold information, go back on deals, and alternately retreat in a sulk or play the rude bully.

 

Beck proved a formidable champion. The Toronto market was a key element in his grand scheme. Without access, which the city wanted, he could not deliver cheap electricity to southwestern towns, but Toronto’s system was controlled by the Electrical Development Company. In the resulting contest over a proposed by-law to fund a municipal network powered by Hydro, Beck’s emotional, simplistic rhetoric was a telling factor. He also profited from the ineptitude and arrogance of his corporate opponents in Electrical Development, Frederic Nicholls, Sir Henry Mill Pellatt*, and William Mackenzie, whose financial reputations had already taken a beating from the royal commission on life insurance in 1906. During the winter of 1907-8 by-laws endorsing the contracts with Ontario Hydro were approved by municipal ratepayers with huge majorities in Toronto and elsewhere. Hydro policy also proved extremely popular in the election of June 1908, in which the government increased both its popular vote and its number of seats. Beck now had a dual mandate from the municipal and provincial electorates. When a desperate Mackenzie amalgamated several enterprises into one utility in 1908 and then belatedly attempted to forestall provincial ownership with a counterproposal to build the system and distribute power under government regulation, the offer came too late. The government had gone so far it could not safely turn back; a publicly owned transmission company would have to be created. Mackenzie and his colleagues had played the game badly and when they lost, after having been given every possible consideration, they turned viciously on Beck and the government. Their quixotic campaign to undermine provincial credit in British financial circles, and then to seek disallowance in Ottawa of key Hydro legislation, served only to bring Whitney and Beck closer together and solidify the political foundations of Ontario Hydro.

 

Using electricity generated by the Ontario Power Company, the Hydro-Electric Power Commission became an operating entity in a series of theatrical turning-on ceremonies that began in the fall of 1910 and continued into 1911 as successive towns and cities were wired into the grid. Each of these civic festivals became an opportunity for Beck to recount the triumph of public power over private greed. His hostility towards the private power companies, who were now his competitors, and his shameless self-promotion as the champion of “The People’s Power,” deeply troubled his colleagues. Moreover, his independent conduct raised awkward questions about the precise relationship between the management of Hydro and the government. Before the election of December 1911 Whitney floated a trial balloon, suggesting that the time had come to make Hydro a department of government, under the full control of the cabinet. Beck did not openly attack the proposal, but once he was acclaimed in his own seat and the government was re-elected, his municipal allies, acting through the Ontario Municipal Electric Association, formed in early 1912, launched an aggressive campaign on his behalf; it not only supported Beck as chairman of a quasi-independent commission, but also (in February) brought him a handsome $6,000 salary, without requiring his resignation from the legislature.

 

With this vote of confidence from the people and somewhat more reluctantly from the premier, Beck struggled within a competitive environment to build Hydro through dramatic price cutting and political showmanship. In his campaign to expand consumption Beck became an electrical Messiah: in speeches and publicity he extolled the power of abundant cheap light to brighten the homes of working people; cheap electricity would create more jobs in the factories of the province; hydro would lighten the drudgery of the barn and the household; and electric railways radiating out from the cities into the countryside would create more prosperous, progressive farms even as light and power made brighter, cleaner cities. With his famous travelling exhibits of the latest electrical appliances (popularly called circuses), rural tests, and local Hydro stores (where household appliances were on display), and in parade floats, newspaper and magazine advertisements, and a host of speeches, Beck presented public hydro as an elixir, but he was no snake-oil salesman. He understood the economics of the electric industry better than his competitors or his critics. Along with utilities magnate Samuel Insull of Chicago, Beck realized that the more electricity he could sell, the cheaper it would cost to acquire. It was a difficult lesson to teach. He even had to browbeat some of the more fiscally conservative municipal utilities, most notably the Toronto Hydro-Electric Power Commission, to pass the lower rates on to consumers. In the process he continued to expand his publicly owned system at the expense of his private competitors.

 

In Toronto and across the province, Beck acquired a more ardent following than the government itself. At home he and his family continued to rise in public esteem. London’s municipal electric utility, which received its first hydro from Niagara in 1910, became a model for progressive business promotion and Beck loyalism. Personally Beck maintained an active interest in civic politics. When the water commissioners proposed a treatment facility to take more water from the tainted Thames River, he boldly promised to find enough clean fresh water in artesian wells. The city took him up on this offer, voting $10,000 for the purpose. In 1910 Beck drilled the wells, installed electrical pumps, and brought the project in on time and on budget, or rather, he absorbed the excess costs himself. In two grand gestures Beck brought light and water to the growing city in the same year.

 

However, it was in the field of public health that the Becks made their greatest contribution. Sometime in l907 or 1908 the Becks’ young daughter, Marion Auria, contracted tuberculosis. Her worried parents sought out the best specialists in America and in Europe. Mercifully her case responded to treatment. But the Becks became concerned for those families in their community who lacked the means to provide their children with medical care. Everyone, they believed, ought to have close access to first-class tuberculosis facilities. Accordingly, in 1909 Adam and Lillian Beck organized the London Health Association to provide a sanatorium. From local individuals and organizations they raised $10,000 (led by their own donation of $1,200), the city contributed $5,000, and the province added $4,000. On 5 April 1910 Governor General Lord Grey* opened the Queen Alexandra Sanatorium in the village of Byron, west of the city. For the rest of their lives the Becks remained deeply attached to this sanatorium and made its maintenance and expansion their passion. As president from its inception to his death in 1925 and a sometimes overbearing physical presence on the weekends, Adam Beck personally oversaw all major and even many minor renovations.

 

A society beauty, Lillian Beck also continued to be a fiercely competitive horsewoman. The Beck stables produced a string of outstanding hunter-class horses that won Adam and Lillian international recognition. In 1907 they competed in the Olympia Horse Show in London, England, where Lillian’s horse My Fellow won its class. To remain competitive, the Becks leased an estate in England in 1913 to maintain their equestrian operation at the highest international standards. From that time onward Lillian and Marion lived about half the year in England; Adam paid extended visits when his schedule permitted. In 1914 their prize-winning horses Melrose, Sir Edward, and Sir James were counted among the finest middleweight and heavyweight hunters in the world. The Becks also competed regularly at the National Horse Show in New York City where, in 1915, Lillian was named a judge over chauvinist protests, famously breaking down the barriers of this once exclusively male domain.

 

Adam Beck’s contribution to London had been publicly recognized in an unprecedented dinner given in his honour on 25 Nov. 1913. At this glittering affair, attended by 500 in the Masonic Temple, Anglican bishop David Williams* proclaimed him “incorrupt and incorruptible”; Roman Catholic bishop Michael Francis Fallon* eulogized his vision, character, and charitable works; and the mayor and city council gave him a silver candelabra and tray. While the ladies looked on from the galleries, the head-table guests were served their dinners from a small electric railway. According to the London Free Press, this banquet was “the most remarkable and spontaneous demonstration of affection and regard ever tendered a public man in London.” Visibly moved, Beck spoke briefly of his satisfaction at lightening the load of the poor, the housewife, the farmer, the merchant, and afflicted children, and pledged to carry on the fight to create a renewed citizenship based upon “service, progress and righteousness.” These local honours were crowned the following year when he received a knighthood in the king’s June honours list. He was now Sir Adam, the Power Knight, and Lillian formally became what she had long been in style, Lady Beck. Charging at fences on horseback, or driving the rapidly growing Hydro system forward, Sir Adam Beck was at the height of his power in 1914.

 

Re-elected by a large majority in the general election of 29 June 1914, Beck directed a major structural transformation of Hydro during his next term with fewer constraints than in the past. Whitney, who died in September, was replaced by a less adept premier, William Howard Hearst*. Beck’s nemesis, John Hendrie, resigned from the Hydro-Electric Power Commission to become lieutenant governor. Beck thus had a much freer rein, though Hearst did not include him in his cabinet. Hydro’s head set about expanding his organization with a powerful lobby, the Ontario Municipal Electric Association, zealously behind him. Beck and the regional municipalities fixed upon electric radial railways as a major force for modernization and rural reconstruction. In 1913 the Hydro Electric Railway Act and amendments to the Ontario Railway Act had prepared the way legislatively. A web of light lines that connected farms, towns, and cities and delivered transportation at cost under a public authority had enormous appeal and Beck became its most ardent hot gospeller. He managed to have the abject London and Port Stanley Railway electrified as a glowing prototype. Coincidentally the baseload of the proposed railways would greatly increase electric consumption and drive Hydro to a new stage of development as a fully integrated regional monopoly that provided hydroelectric generation, transmission, and distribution services as well as high-speed transportation. This grandiose vision of electrical modernization had commensurate costs, which Beck somewhat disingenuously managed to minimize.

 

In 1914 Hydro and the municipalities received legislative permission, subject to ratepayer approval, to enter into the inter-city electric railway business. By stages Hydro acquired the legal authority to generate power as well as distribute it through the purchase of a utility (Big Chute) on the Severn River and the construction of regional power stations in 1914-15 at Wasdell Falls, also on the Severn, and Eugenia Falls, near Flesherton. These were sideshows, however; the centrepiece of the proposed integrated system remained Niagara. In 1914 Hydro quietly began planning for a massive hydroelectric station there, but there was precious little water left at Niagara to turn the turbines. A treaty negotiated with the United States in 1908 limited the amount that might be diverted for power purposes; the three existing private companies at Niagara had already acquired, between them, the rights to most of the Canadian quota. Beck had made the development of the hydroelectric system into the central issue on the Ontario political agenda when conflict broke out in Europe in August 1914.

 

The Becks threw themselves wholeheartedly into the war effort. In 1912 the military authorities had cleverly put Adam’s organizing talents and his knowledge of horses together by naming him to a remount committee. At the outset of the war he took charge of acquiring horses for the Canadian army in the territory from Halifax to the Lakehead. In June 1915 he assumed this responsibility for the British army as well, an appointment that brought him an honorary colonelcy. Inevitably, allegations arose that his agency either paid too much for horses or acquired unsuitable remounts, but the claims were not substantiated upon investigation. Together Adam and Lillian Beck also made personal contributions to the war effort, donating all of their champion horses to the cause. General Edwin Alfred Hervey Alderson, for example, rode Sir James, Adam’s most famous horse. Lady Beck, in England for most of the war, working with the Canadian Red Cross Society, devoted herself particularly to ensuring that wounded veterans were welcomed into British country homes for their convalescence. The Queen Alexandra Sanatorium in Ontario was expanded in 1917-18 to accommodate the rehabilitation of wounded returnees. The arrangement worked well, but in the later stages of the war battle-hardened veterans began to complain about the hospital’s stern regimen, much of which was attributed to Sir Adam’s “Germanic” direction. In 1916, for his local and patriotic help, Beck had received an lld from the Western University of London, which he served as a director and later as chancellor.

 

At first the war had relatively little impact on Beck’s plans for Hydro. The municipal elections of January 1917, for example, revolved around the approval of by-laws for Hydro radials and vague authorization for the future generation of power at Niagara. Then the rapidly increasing power demands of wartime industrialization provided the overriding urgency, later in 1917, to overcome opposition to the purchase of one of the power companies at Niagara (Ontario Power) and forge ahead with the construction of a large diversion canal and a world-scale plant at Queenston, which would make much more efficient use of the available water. Shamelessly using the moral purpose of the war, Beck hemmed in his private competitors even more, setting the stage for their eventual acquisition, though the negotiations would be unduly drawn out, litigious, and embittered. However, war, inflation, railway nationalization, and the demands of automotive technology for better roads combined to damp enthusiasm for the radial railway project. Moreover, the problem for the Hydro-Electric Commission now was not finding ways of selling surplus power, but rather keeping up with galloping industrial, commercial, municipal, and domestic demand. When the war ended, Hydro’s transformation into an integrated utility producing as well as transmitting its own power was much closer to realization. Its corresponding administrative growth had been grandly marked by the ornate office building begun on University Avenue in Toronto in 1914 and occupied in 1916. Sir Adam had a good war, but he emerged from it a wounded politician.

 

From the very beginning there had been critics of the Hydro project and Beck’s management of it. Canadian private producers and British investors placed obstacles in the way during the early stages. As Hydro advanced, it attracted new critics: private power advocates from the United States, who viewed the progress of public ownership in Ontario with alarm. In 1912 a New York State committee of investigation, the Ferris committee, issued a sharply critical report. A year later a prominent American hydroelectric expert, Reginald Pelham Bolton, denounced the unorthodox financing of Hydro in An expensive experiment . . . (New York). Between 15 July and 23 Dec. 1916 James Mavor, a professor of political economy at the University of Toronto, published a devastating critique of Hydro’s lack of accountability, dictatorial methods, and tendency to subvert democracy in a series of articles in the Financial Post (Toronto), later reprinted as Niagara in politics . . . (New York, 1925).

 

In the final analysis Beck was his own worst enemy. His authoritarian management style invited criticism. In 1916 the provincial auditor, James Clancy, threw up his hands at Hydro’s accounting practices. Beck embarrassed his premier and government with surprises. He was not one to compromise, even with his friends. A scrapper and sometimes a bully, he intimidated his staff and his municipal allies, and regarded the government and the legislature with disdain. He was more popular and more powerful than the premier, and he acted as if he knew it. Hydro, in his mind, was bigger than any government and he was the personal embodiment of Hydro. Cautious people who wanted to know in advance how much projects would cost were battered into submission and put on his list of enemies; when the bills added up to two or three times the initial estimates, there were always convoluted exculpatory explanations. Dismissing his censors, Beck stormed ahead, fuming with rage at the conspiracies mounted against him and bristling with indignation at the slightest criticism. Even Beck’s defenders tired of his haughty, domineering ways. A frustrated Hearst, when accused by Beck of hindering Hydro’s development in the spring of 1919, rebuked Sir Adam for never taking him into his confidence, for his presumptuous attitude towards parliament, and for saddling others with responsibility for Hydro’s mounting debt. Beck responded by withdrawing his support from the government and by announcing his intention to run independently in the upcoming election.

 

The election of October 1919 came as a devastating blow to Beck and, potentially, to his project. As an independent in London, he was defeated by his sole opponent, Dr Hugh Allan Stevenson, the Labour candidate, who benefited from disaffected Tory votes, some nastiness about Beck’s ethnic background, and a vocal uprising amongst the returned soldiers in the Queen Alexandra Sanatorium. The timing could not have been worse. Beck’s massive Queenston hydroelectric station lay only half completed and the radial railway scheme had stalled; however, Beck’s enormous popularity, which transcended party lines, saved him. The victorious but leaderless United Farmers of Ontario initially sounded him out as a possible premier, but both sides quickly thought better of it. Although Labour strongly supported Hydro, the UFO were much more reserved, especially about Beck’s radial-railway enthusiasms; they preferred improved roads. As chairman of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission, Beck had also been an mpp and, for much of the time, a minister without portfolio. The election broke that political connection with the government in power. The eventual premier, Ernest Charles Drury*, had little choice but to keep Beck on as chairman, but he appointed a tough ex-soldier, Lieutenant-Colonel Dougall Carmichael, to the commission to keep him in line.

 

Over the next four years the new government and the tempestuous Power Knight remained locked in combat. For much of the time William Rothwell Plewman, a reporter for the Toronto Daily Star, acted as unofficial mediator between Hydro and the premier, who was determined that Hydro do the government’s bidding and not the other way around. On 6 July 1920 the government announced a royal commission to reconsider Beck’s radial program in light of the rising costs, disappointing experience in other jurisdictions, and technological change. Beck immediately orchestrated a campaign of resistance. In emergency meetings on the 8th at Toronto city hall and the Hydro building, for instance, the Hydro-Electric Radial Association registered its “strong disapproval” of the commission. Provincial treasurer Peter Smith responded for the government that it would not be stampeded. In July 1921 the commission, chaired by Robert Franklin Sutherland, produced a report that was highly critical of radials and recommended construction of only a much reduced system. Meanwhile, Beck had wasted valuable political capital in an acrimonious takeover of Sir William Mackenzie’s Toronto Power Company Limited and its related electric and radial companies and in fighting the City of Toronto over an eight-track entry corridor for a mammoth radial system. Characteristically, he condemned the Sutherland report in an intemperate pamphlet and urged the municipalities not to let up in their campaign. The adverse report, a hostile provincial government, and defeats for radial by-laws (particularly in Toronto) in the municipal elections of January 1922 effectively put an end to Beck’s radial dream.

 

Drury, concerned at the spiralling costs of the Queenston hydroelectric plant, wanted an inquiry into this project as well. At first Beck agreed. However, when his hand-picked expert, Hugh L. Cooper, questioned the design, recalculated the costs upward, and insisted upon changes in the power canal to enhance capacity, Beck rejected his advice and appointed another consulting engineer. The turbines had begun to turn on the first phase of this huge project on 29 Dec. 1921, but there seemed to be no relation between the estimates Beck presented and the mounting bills; in one year the difference amounted to $20 million. Unable to explain the situation, Colonel Carmichael offered his resignation, which the premier refused. The cost of the undertaking, now much larger, had ballooned from the initial $20 million to $84 million and counting. Drury, who had to guarantee the bonds for the over-budget project and take political responsibility for it, insisted upon a commission of inquiry with a sweeping mandate to examine the overall operations of Hydro, not just Queenston. This commission, appointed in April 1922 and chaired by Liberal lawyer Walter Dymond Gregory, became in effect an adversarial audit of Beck’s management that involved scores of witnesses, produced thousands of pages of testimony, and ran into the middle of 1923.

 

These political setbacks were, in some respects, the least of his problems. On 17 Oct. 1921 his beloved wife had died from complications following surgery for pancreatitis. Sir Adam and Lady Beck had been a deeply devoted couple despite their often long absences from one another. Living in the Alexandra apartments next to the Hydro building, they had only just begun to settle into life together in Toronto society. Moreover, she had been the one mellowing influence in his life. He was devastated by the loss. A widower, he was now also the single parent of a fiercely independent teenager. With the check upon his temper in a Hamilton grave, he became more difficult and erratic in the face of his daughter’s defiance and the ascendancy of those he considered to be his political enemies. These were the years of Beck’s towering, black rages.

 

Beck had run Hydro as a private corporation. Honest and incorruptible personally, he nevertheless paid scant attention to the niceties of accounting. He would routinely spend funds authorized for one purpose on any project he deemed in the interests of Hydro, including local by-law campaigns. For Beck the ends justified the means. Meanwhile, his vision of a provincial, publicly owned hydroelectric monopoly that served the municipal utilities and provided power at the lowest possible cost had been largely realized. In 1923 Hydro served 393 municipalities and distributed 685,000 horsepower using facilities in which over $170 million had been invested. Beck was a magnificent builder. There could be no denying his accomplishments, though, as the hearings of the Gregory commission showed, his management style, planning, political methods, and accountability to the legislature could be questioned.

 

The vexations suffered at the hands of the UFO government eventually drew Beck back to the bosom of the Conservative party in self-defence. In the election of June 1923 he stood as a Conservative in his old London riding. The irony of a civil servant running as a candidate in opposition to the government was not lost on Drury or the Farmers’ Sun (Toronto), but Beck managed to get away with it. This time he won with a plurality of more than 7,000 votes – a wonderful personal vindication. George Howard Ferguson*’s Conservatives swept the province, and Beck returned to cabinet in July as a minister without portfolio. Ferguson brought the Gregory inquiry to an abrupt conclusion and made much of the fact that Sir Adam’s general stewardship of Hydro had been supported in the commission’s voluminous evidence and summary reports. Beck’s probity could be stressed while quietly the government used the critical aspects of Gregory’s reports to bring Hydro more fully within the framework of financial and political accountability.

 

Then, just when it seemed these clouds had passed over, Beck’s personal integrity came under attack from an unexpected source. Hydro secretary E. Clarence Settell absconded with $30,000 in Hydro funds and left a blackmailing letter itemizing Sir Adam’s alleged misdeeds. When he was apprehended in October 1924 heading for the border with his mistress, he added further charges to the indictment. Wounded by Settell’s treachery, and by now a very sick man, Beck had to endure yet another inquiry as judge Colin George Snider conducted an investigation of more than 40 specific allegations having to do with the private use of automobiles, misappropriation of public money, unauthorized expenditures, conflicts of interest in tendering, and irregularities in expense records. Issued in December, Snider’s report condemned Isaac Benson Lucas’s management of Hydro’s legal department and Frederick Arthur Gaby’s conflict of interest in a dredging contract within the engineering department, but it found no evidence of serious wrongdoing by Beck. Save for a few petty mistakes in his expense accounts, the commission exonerated him. Settell went to jail for three years. Although another attempt “to get” Sir Adam, in the words of the Toronto Globe, had failed, the critics continued the battle of the books against Hydro. Beck thundered back with vigorous refutations in pamphlets that put his fighting spirit on full display. Returning to London one night by train, he gestured in some excitement to his travelling companion and long-time ally Edward Victor Buchanan, head of London’s utilities: “Look out there! The lights in the farms. That’s what I’ve been fighting for.”

 

The political struggle and quarrels with his daughter over her determination to marry Strathearn Hay, whom he deemed unsuitable in part because he was related to the Hendrie family, exhausted Beck, whose health and mental outlook deteriorated. It took Howard Ferguson’s intervention to persuade him to attend Marion’s wedding in January 1925. Ordered to rest by his doctors, who had diagnosed his illness as pernicious anaemia, Beck went to South Carolina for a holiday in February, and then he underwent transfusion treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. There he brooded about his beloved Hydro, strategies for the hydroelectric development of the St Lawrence River, and the continuing machinations of the private power interests, and he grumbled that the premier and his colleagues in government were neglecting him. He was a broken man by his own admission.

 

In May, Beck quietly slipped back to his home in London, where he attempted to conduct Hydro business by telephone from his bedroom. He weakened rapidly over the summer and died on 15 Aug. 1925 in his 69th year. Beck’s passing shocked the province; the seriousness of his condition had not been widely understood. The death announcement occasioned a spontaneous outpouring of grief, with eulogies pouring in from every quarter. His obituaries filled pages in the newspapers. “Canada has not produced a greater man than the late Sir Adam Beck,” declared Saturday Night (Toronto) as it enshrined him in the national pantheon along with Sir John A. Macdonald*, Lord Mount Stephen [Stephen], and Sir William Cornelius Van Horne*. Ontario city halls were draped in black, the Hydro shops and offices closed in tribute, and in London business ceased for an hour. Thousands lined the streets for his funeral cortège. The ceremony at St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral, attended by all the major political figures of the province, was also broadcast over the radio. As his funeral train mournfully passed from London across Beck’s political heartland to Hamilton, where he was to be interred in Greenwood Cemetery under a granite cross beside his wife, farmers and their families paused from their toil and men swept their hats from their heads. The entire Toronto City Council attended his burial. It is a small irony that Beck lies in what he would have considered enemy ground, Hamilton, the last bastion of private power. But for once his wish to be beside his wife overcame his prejudices.

 

Sir Adam Beck’s death marked the end of an unusual period in Ontario politics, one in which the chairman of Hydro had exercised greater power and influence than the premier and commanded a broad-based, populist political following much stronger than any political party. In building Hydro, Beck almost succeeded in creating an institution that was a law unto itself and for a long time it would continue to demonstrate some of the characteristics of independence. He died a wealthy man with an estate valued at more than $627,000, although his manufacturing business had been in decline for some years. His salary from his chairmanship of Hydro over 20 years totalled $197,000. Some of his wealth may have come to him from his wife. After making numerous small bequests to relatives and charities, he left a trust fund of approximately half a million dollars to his daughter and her heirs.

 

Beck’s memory was kept alive by the Ontario Municipal Electric Association, Hydro, and the citizens of London. In 1934 Toronto and the Hydro municipalities raised a splendid monument to him that still commands University Avenue. This brooding statue, by Emanuel Otto Hahn*, and Beck’s grave in Hamilton became sites of regular pilgrimages and wreath-laying ceremonies by the heirs and successors to the OMEA as they struggled to perpetuate the notion of Hydro as a municipal cooperative. Hydro publications regularly stressed the vision and legacy of Beck during the era of growth after World War I; eventually the much enlarged power stations at Queenston were renamed Beck No.1 and Beck No.2 in his honour. In London a new collegiate was named after him and a nearby public school was named after Lady Beck. The Women’s Sanatorium Aid Society of London built a charming chapel, St Luke’s in the Garden, across from the Queen Alexandra Sanatorium in memory of the Becks in 1932. The sanatorium itself became the Beck Memorial Sanatorium in 1948. In print, W. R. Plewman’s vivid 1947 biography captured the greatness of Beck and the tempestuous nature of his personality. Merrill Denison*’s commissioned history of Hydro in 1960 established continuity between the transcendent hero figure at the beginning and the transforming, province-girdling corporation Hydro had become in the postwar era.

 

As the obituaries noted, Hydro itself was Beck’s greatest monument. He worried on his deathbed that political partisanship would overcome it and that Hydro as an independent entity would not survive. But in his absence it continued to flourish, firmly rooted in the towns and cities, along the back concessions, and amongst the merchants, workers, farmers, and homemakers of the province. Hydroelectricity generated and delivered by a crown corporation to municipally owned utilities at the lowest cost had become an Ontario institution that would outlive changing governments and passing ideologies. That had largely been Sir Adam Beck’s doing.

Visit this location at CHOCOLATE REALM in Second Life

Lynn shot this a while back at Ding Darling. Two vultures and a Wood Stork.

One Wood Stork caught a Needle fish as soon as he did the others started chasing him trying to steal it from him.

“In HIM was Life, and that Life was the LIGHT of all mankind. The LIGHT shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” John 1:5

 

Meditation…

"John describes Jesus as God’s creative, Life-giving and Light-giving word that has come to earth in human form. Jesus is the wisdom and power of God which created the world and sustains it who assumed a human nature in order to accomplish our salvation in it."

 

"Almighty God and Father of Light, Your eternal Word leaped down from heaven in the silent watches of the night. Open our hearts to receive His Life and increase our vision with the rising of dawn, that our Lives may be filled with His glory and His peace.” ~ www.dailyscrioture.net

 

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Filename - In Him was Life - DSC_1957 Moms Birthday Sunset NR ClS January 2014

 

Following the Son...

Blessings,

Sharon 🌻

 

God's Beauty In Nature is calling us into a deeper relationship with Him...

 

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Billy and I spent the last day of 2008 running a few errands, a little flickring and catching up with some far-away friends on the phone. Traditionally, I used to throw a couple steaks on the grill, but since it was buried under a foot of snow I decided to broil them.

 

Billy helped out in the kitchen and Cheyenne was close by in case we dropped anything. Much to her dismay we didn't, but being New Year's Eve, she was thrilled to get some tasty grizzle as she patiently waited, salivating under the dining room table more like Pavlov's dog than mine . Actually, I think I saw Billy salivating too, so I guess dinner was pretty good or he was just really hungry.

 

After dinner, the snow was falling outside in such a beautiful way and the streets were quiet, so we decided to bundle up, brave the cold and walk down to my dad's house just before midnight to surprise him and watch the ball drop togther. It made Dad's night.

 

Walking home, Billy got the biggest kick out of the way the snow would squeek under our feet as we walked. He giggled with almost every step. Fifty-three going on thirteen. That made my night.

 

After we walked back to our place I suggested making angels in the snow. (okay, I'm a dork) Billy was quick to nix that idea for some dessert, a bit of scrabble (kindred spirits) and a fire. Yep... By the little bit of meringue on the end of his nose, I think that made his night.

 

So as I write these words and think about the last few hours, I can't help but remember sweet moments during the last year and all those friends who have filled so much of it with wonderful things that I never want to forget. I hope something or someone made their night and your night too.

 

Happy 2009, Y'all!

 

T

xo

    

View On Black

   

Ganesha, also spelled Ganesh, and also known as Ganapati and Vinayaka, is a widely worshipped deity in the Hindu pantheon. His image is found throughout India and Nepal. Hindu sects worship him regardless of affiliations. Devotion to Ganesha is widely diffused and extends to Jains, Buddhists, and beyond India.

 

Although he is known by many attributes, Ganesha's elephant head makes him easy to identify. Ganesha is widely revered as the remover of obstacles, the patron of arts and sciences and the deva of intellect and wisdom. As the god of beginnings, he is honoured at the start of rituals and ceremonies. Ganesha is also invoked as patron of letters and learning during writing sessions. Several texts relate mythological anecdotes associated with his birth and exploits and explain his distinct iconography.

 

Ganesha emerged as a distinct deity in the 4th and 5th centuries CE, during the Gupta Period, although he inherited traits from Vedic and pre-Vedic precursors. He was formally included among the five primary deities of Smartism (a Hindu denomination) in the 9th century. A sect of devotees called the Ganapatya arose, who identified Ganesha as the supreme deity. The principal scriptures dedicated to Ganesha are the Ganesha Purana, the Mudgala Purana, and the Ganapati Atharvashirsa.

 

ETYMOLOGY AND OTHER NAMES

Ganesha has been ascribed many other titles and epithets, including Ganapati and Vighneshvara. The Hindu title of respect Shri is often added before his name. One popular way Ganesha is worshipped is by chanting a Ganesha Sahasranama, a litany of "a thousand names of Ganesha". Each name in the sahasranama conveys a different meaning and symbolises a different aspect of Ganesha. At least two different versions of the Ganesha Sahasranama exist; one version is drawn from the Ganesha Purana, a Hindu scripture venerating Ganesha.

 

The name Ganesha is a Sanskrit compound, joining the words gana, meaning a group, multitude, or categorical system and isha, meaning lord or master. The word gaņa when associated with Ganesha is often taken to refer to the gaņas, a troop of semi-divine beings that form part of the retinue of Shiva. The term more generally means a category, class, community, association, or corporation. Some commentators interpret the name "Lord of the Gaņas" to mean "Lord of Hosts" or "Lord of created categories", such as the elements. Ganapati, a synonym for Ganesha, is a compound composed of gaṇa, meaning "group", and pati, meaning "ruler" or "lord". The Amarakosha, an early Sanskrit lexicon, lists eight synonyms of Ganesha : Vinayaka, Vighnarāja (equivalent to Vighnesha), Dvaimātura (one who has two mothers), Gaṇādhipa (equivalent to Ganapati and Ganesha), Ekadanta (one who has one tusk), Heramba, Lambodara (one who has a pot belly, or, literally, one who has a hanging belly), and Gajanana; having the face of an elephant).

 

Vinayaka is a common name for Ganesha that appears in the Purāṇas and in Buddhist Tantras. This name is reflected in the naming of the eight famous Ganesha temples in Maharashtra known as the Ashtavinayak (aṣṭavināyaka). The names Vighnesha and Vighneshvara (Lord of Obstacles) refers to his primary function in Hindu theology as the master and remover of obstacles (vighna).

 

A prominent name for Ganesha in the Tamil language is Pillai. A. K. Narain differentiates these terms by saying that pillai means a "child" while pillaiyar means a "noble child". He adds that the words pallu, pella, and pell in the Dravidian family of languages signify "tooth or tusk", also "elephant tooth or tusk". Anita Raina Thapan notes that the root word pille in the name Pillaiyar might have originally meant "the young of the elephant", because the Pali word pillaka means "a young elephant".

 

In the Burmese language, Ganesha is known as Maha Peinne, derived from Pali Mahā Wināyaka. The widespread name of Ganesha in Thailand is Phra Phikhanet or Phra Phikhanesuan, both of which are derived from Vara Vighnesha and Vara Vighneshvara respectively, whereas the name Khanet (from Ganesha) is rather rare.

 

In Sri Lanka, in the North-Central and North Western areas with predominantly Buddhist population, Ganesha is known as Aiyanayaka Deviyo, while in other Singhala Buddhist areas he is known as Gana deviyo.

 

ICONOGRAPHY

Ganesha is a popular figure in Indian art. Unlike those of some deities, representations of Ganesha show wide variations and distinct patterns changing over time. He may be portrayed standing, dancing, heroically taking action against demons, playing with his family as a boy, sitting down or on an elevated seat, or engaging in a range of contemporary situations.

 

Ganesha images were prevalent in many parts of India by the 6th century. The 13th century statue pictured is typical of Ganesha statuary from 900–1200, after Ganesha had been well-established as an independent deity with his own sect. This example features some of Ganesha's common iconographic elements. A virtually identical statue has been dated between 973–1200 by Paul Martin-Dubost, and another similar statue is dated c. 12th century by Pratapaditya Pal. Ganesha has the head of an elephant and a big belly. This statue has four arms, which is common in depictions of Ganesha. He holds his own broken tusk in his lower-right hand and holds a delicacy, which he samples with his trunk, in his lower-left hand. The motif of Ganesha turning his trunk sharply to his left to taste a sweet in his lower-left hand is a particularly archaic feature. A more primitive statue in one of the Ellora Caves with this general form has been dated to the 7th century. Details of the other hands are difficult to make out on the statue shown. In the standard configuration, Ganesha typically holds an axe or a goad in one upper arm and a pasha (noose) in the other upper arm.

 

The influence of this old constellation of iconographic elements can still be seen in contemporary representations of Ganesha. In one modern form, the only variation from these old elements is that the lower-right hand does not hold the broken tusk but is turned towards the viewer in a gesture of protection or fearlessness (abhaya mudra). The same combination of four arms and attributes occurs in statues of Ganesha dancing, which is a very popular theme.

 

COMMON ATTRIBUTES

Ganesha has been represented with the head of an elephant since the early stages of his appearance in Indian art. Puranic myths provide many explanations for how he got his elephant head. One of his popular forms, Heramba-Ganapati, has five elephant heads, and other less-common variations in the number of heads are known. While some texts say that Ganesha was born with an elephant head, he acquires the head later in most stories. The most recurrent motif in these stories is that Ganesha was created by Parvati using clay to protect her and Shiva beheaded him when Ganesha came between Shiva and Parvati. Shiva then replaced Ganesha's original head with that of an elephant. Details of the battle and where the replacement head came from vary from source to source. Another story says that Ganesha was created directly by Shiva's laughter. Because Shiva considered Ganesha too alluring, he gave him the head of an elephant and a protruding belly.

 

Ganesha's earliest name was Ekadanta (One Tusked), referring to his single whole tusk, the other being broken. Some of the earliest images of Ganesha show him holding his broken tusk. The importance of this distinctive feature is reflected in the Mudgala Purana, which states that the name of Ganesha's second incarnation is Ekadanta. Ganesha's protruding belly appears as a distinctive attribute in his earliest statuary, which dates to the Gupta period (4th to 6th centuries). This feature is so important that, according to the Mudgala Purana, two different incarnations of Ganesha use names based on it: Lambodara (Pot Belly, or, literally, Hanging Belly) and Mahodara (Great Belly). Both names are Sanskrit compounds describing his belly. The Brahmanda Purana says that Ganesha has the name Lambodara because all the universes (i.e., cosmic eggs) of the past, present, and future are present in him. The number of Ganesha's arms varies; his best-known forms have between two and sixteen arms. Many depictions of Ganesha feature four arms, which is mentioned in Puranic sources and codified as a standard form in some iconographic texts. His earliest images had two arms. Forms with 14 and 20 arms appeared in Central India during the 9th and the 10th centuries. The serpent is a common feature in Ganesha iconography and appears in many forms. According to the Ganesha Purana, Ganesha wrapped the serpent Vasuki around his neck. Other depictions of snakes include use as a sacred thread wrapped around the stomach as a belt, held in a hand, coiled at the ankles, or as a throne. Upon Ganesha's forehead may be a third eye or the Shaivite sectarian mark , which consists of three horizontal lines. The Ganesha Purana prescribes a tilaka mark as well as a crescent moon on the forehead. A distinct form of Ganesha called Bhalachandra includes that iconographic element. Ganesha is often described as red in color. Specific colors are associated with certain forms. Many examples of color associations with specific meditation forms are prescribed in the Sritattvanidhi, a treatise on Hindu iconography. For example, white is associated with his representations as Heramba-Ganapati and Rina-Mochana-Ganapati (Ganapati Who Releases from Bondage). Ekadanta-Ganapati is visualized as blue during meditation in that form.

 

VAHANAS

The earliest Ganesha images are without a vahana (mount/vehicle). Of the eight incarnations of Ganesha described in the Mudgala Purana, Ganesha uses a mouse (shrew) in five of them, a lion in his incarnation as Vakratunda, a peacock in his incarnation as Vikata, and Shesha, the divine serpent, in his incarnation as Vighnaraja. Mohotkata uses a lion, Mayūreśvara uses a peacock, Dhumraketu uses a horse, and Gajanana uses a mouse, in the four incarnations of Ganesha listed in the Ganesha Purana. Jain depictions of Ganesha show his vahana variously as a mouse, elephant, tortoise, ram, or peacock.

 

Ganesha is often shown riding on or attended by a mouse, shrew or rat. Martin-Dubost says that the rat began to appear as the principal vehicle in sculptures of Ganesha in central and western India during the 7th century; the rat was always placed close to his feet. The mouse as a mount first appears in written sources in the Matsya Purana and later in the Brahmananda Purana and Ganesha Purana, where Ganesha uses it as his vehicle in his last incarnation. The Ganapati Atharvashirsa includes a meditation verse on Ganesha that describes the mouse appearing on his flag. The names Mūṣakavāhana (mouse-mount) and Ākhuketana (rat-banner) appear in the Ganesha Sahasranama.

 

The mouse is interpreted in several ways. According to Grimes, "Many, if not most of those who interpret Gaṇapati's mouse, do so negatively; it symbolizes tamoguṇa as well as desire". Along these lines, Michael Wilcockson says it symbolizes those who wish to overcome desires and be less selfish. Krishan notes that the rat is destructive and a menace to crops. The Sanskrit word mūṣaka (mouse) is derived from the root mūṣ (stealing, robbing). It was essential to subdue the rat as a destructive pest, a type of vighna (impediment) that needed to be overcome. According to this theory, showing Ganesha as master of the rat demonstrates his function as Vigneshvara (Lord of Obstacles) and gives evidence of his possible role as a folk grāma-devatā (village deity) who later rose to greater prominence. Martin-Dubost notes a view that the rat is a symbol suggesting that Ganesha, like the rat, penetrates even the most secret places.

 

ASSOCIATIONS

 

OBSTACLES

Ganesha is Vighneshvara or Vighnaraja or Vighnaharta (Marathi), the Lord of Obstacles, both of a material and spiritual order. He is popularly worshipped as a remover of obstacles, though traditionally he also places obstacles in the path of those who need to be checked. Paul Courtright says that "his task in the divine scheme of things, his dharma, is to place and remove obstacles. It is his particular territory, the reason for his creation."

 

Krishan notes that some of Ganesha's names reflect shadings of multiple roles that have evolved over time. Dhavalikar ascribes the quick ascension of Ganesha in the Hindu pantheon, and the emergence of the Ganapatyas, to this shift in emphasis from vighnakartā (obstacle-creator) to vighnahartā (obstacle-averter). However, both functions continue to be vital to his character.

 

BUDDHI (KNOWLEDGE)

Ganesha is considered to be the Lord of letters and learning. In Sanskrit, the word buddhi is a feminine noun that is variously translated as intelligence, wisdom, or intellect. The concept of buddhi is closely associated with the personality of Ganesha, especially in the Puranic period, when many stories stress his cleverness and love of intelligence. One of Ganesha's names in the Ganesha Purana and the Ganesha Sahasranama is Buddhipriya. This name also appears in a list of 21 names at the end of the Ganesha Sahasranama that Ganesha says are especially important. The word priya can mean "fond of", and in a marital context it can mean "lover" or "husband", so the name may mean either "Fond of Intelligence" or "Buddhi's Husband".

 

AUM

Ganesha is identified with the Hindu mantra Aum, also spelled Om. The term oṃkārasvarūpa (Aum is his form), when identified with Ganesha, refers to the notion that he personifies the primal sound. The Ganapati Atharvashirsa attests to this association. Chinmayananda translates the relevant passage as follows:

 

(O Lord Ganapati!) You are (the Trinity) Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesa. You are Indra. You are fire [Agni] and air [Vāyu]. You are the sun [Sūrya] and the moon [Chandrama]. You are Brahman. You are (the three worlds) Bhuloka [earth], Antariksha-loka [space], and Swargaloka [heaven]. You are Om. (That is to say, You are all this).

 

Some devotees see similarities between the shape of Ganesha's body in iconography and the shape of Aum in the Devanāgarī and Tamil scripts.

 

FIRST CHAKRA

According to Kundalini yoga, Ganesha resides in the first chakra, called Muladhara (mūlādhāra). Mula means "original, main"; adhara means "base, foundation". The muladhara chakra is the principle on which the manifestation or outward expansion of primordial Divine Force rests. This association is also attested to in the Ganapati Atharvashirsa. Courtright translates this passage as follows: "[O Ganesha,] You continually dwell in the sacral plexus at the base of the spine [mūlādhāra cakra]." Thus, Ganesha has a permanent abode in every being at the Muladhara. Ganesha holds, supports and guides all other chakras, thereby "governing the forces that propel the wheel of life".

 

FAMILY AND CONSORTS

Though Ganesha is popularly held to be the son of Shiva and Parvati, the Puranic myths give different versions about his birth. In some he was created by Parvati, in another he was created by Shiva and Parvati, in another he appeared mysteriously and was discovered by Shiva and Parvati or he was born from the elephant headed goddess Malini after she drank Parvati's bath water that had been thrown in the river.

 

The family includes his brother the war god Kartikeya, who is also called Subramanya, Skanda, Murugan and other names. Regional differences dictate the order of their births. In northern India, Skanda is generally said to be the elder, while in the south, Ganesha is considered the first born. In northern India, Skanda was an important martial deity from about 500 BCE to about 600 CE, when worship of him declined significantly in northern India. As Skanda fell, Ganesha rose. Several stories tell of sibling rivalry between the brothers and may reflect sectarian tensions.

 

Ganesha's marital status, the subject of considerable scholarly review, varies widely in mythological stories. One pattern of myths identifies Ganesha as an unmarried brahmacari. This view is common in southern India and parts of northern India. Another pattern associates him with the concepts of Buddhi (intellect), Siddhi (spiritual power), and Riddhi (prosperity); these qualities are sometimes personified as goddesses, said to be Ganesha's wives. He also may be shown with a single consort or a nameless servant (Sanskrit: daşi). Another pattern connects Ganesha with the goddess of culture and the arts, Sarasvati or Śarda (particularly in Maharashtra). He is also associated with the goddess of luck and prosperity, Lakshmi. Another pattern, mainly prevalent in the Bengal region, links Ganesha with the banana tree, Kala Bo.

 

The Shiva Purana says that Ganesha had begotten two sons: Kşema (prosperity) and Lābha (profit). In northern Indian variants of this story, the sons are often said to be Śubha (auspiciouness) and Lābha. The 1975 Hindi film Jai Santoshi Maa shows Ganesha married to Riddhi and Siddhi and having a daughter named Santoshi Ma, the goddess of satisfaction. This story has no Puranic basis, but Anita Raina Thapan and Lawrence Cohen cite Santoshi Ma's cult as evidence of Ganesha's continuing evolution as a popular deity.

 

WOSHIP AND FESTIVALS

Ganesha is worshipped on many religious and secular occasions; especially at the beginning of ventures such as buying a vehicle or starting a business. K.N. Somayaji says, "there can hardly be a [Hindu] home [in India] which does not house an idol of Ganapati. [..] Ganapati, being the most popular deity in India, is worshipped by almost all castes and in all parts of the country". Devotees believe that if Ganesha is propitiated, he grants success, prosperity and protection against adversity.

 

Ganesha is a non-sectarian deity, and Hindus of all denominations invoke him at the beginning of prayers, important undertakings, and religious ceremonies. Dancers and musicians, particularly in southern India, begin performances of arts such as the Bharatnatyam dance with a prayer to Ganesha. Mantras such as Om Shri Gaṇeshāya Namah (Om, salutation to the Illustrious Ganesha) are often used. One of the most famous mantras associated with Ganesha is Om Gaṃ Ganapataye Namah (Om, Gaṃ, Salutation to the Lord of Hosts).

 

Devotees offer Ganesha sweets such as modaka and small sweet balls (laddus). He is often shown carrying a bowl of sweets, called a modakapātra. Because of his identification with the color red, he is often worshipped with red sandalwood paste (raktacandana) or red flowers. Dūrvā grass (Cynodon dactylon) and other materials are also used in his worship.

 

Festivals associated with Ganesh are Ganesh Chaturthi or Vināyaka chaturthī in the śuklapakṣa (the fourth day of the waxing moon) in the month of bhādrapada (August/September) and the Gaṇeśa jayanti (Gaṇeśa's birthday) celebrated on the cathurthī of the śuklapakṣa (fourth day of the waxing moon) in the month of māgha (January/February)."

 

GANESH CHATURTI

An annual festival honours Ganesha for ten days, starting on Ganesha Chaturthi, which typically falls in late August or early September. The festival begins with people bringing in clay idols of Ganesha, symbolising Ganesha's visit. The festival culminates on the day of Ananta Chaturdashi, when idols (murtis) of Ganesha are immersed in the most convenient body of water. Some families have a tradition of immersion on the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, or 7th day. In 1893, Lokmanya Tilak transformed this annual Ganesha festival from private family celebrations into a grand public event. He did so "to bridge the gap between the Brahmins and the non-Brahmins and find an appropriate context in which to build a new grassroots unity between them" in his nationalistic strivings against the British in Maharashtra. Because of Ganesha's wide appeal as "the god for Everyman", Tilak chose him as a rallying point for Indian protest against British rule. Tilak was the first to install large public images of Ganesha in pavilions, and he established the practice of submerging all the public images on the tenth day. Today, Hindus across India celebrate the Ganapati festival with great fervour, though it is most popular in the state of Maharashtra. The festival also assumes huge proportions in Mumbai, Pune, and in the surrounding belt of Ashtavinayaka temples.

 

TEMPLES

In Hindu temples, Ganesha is depicted in various ways: as an acolyte or subordinate deity (pãrśva-devatã); as a deity related to the principal deity (parivāra-devatã); or as the principal deity of the temple (pradhāna), treated similarly as the highest gods of the Hindu pantheon. As the god of transitions, he is placed at the doorway of many Hindu temples to keep out the unworthy, which is analogous to his role as Parvati’s doorkeeper. In addition, several shrines are dedicated to Ganesha himself, of which the Ashtavinayak (lit. "eight Ganesha (shrines)") in Maharashtra are particularly well known. Located within a 100-kilometer radius of the city of Pune, each of these eight shrines celebrates a particular form of Ganapati, complete with its own lore and legend. The eight shrines are: Morgaon, Siddhatek, Pali, Mahad, Theur, Lenyadri, Ozar and Ranjangaon.

 

There are many other important Ganesha temples at the following locations: Wai in Maharashtra; Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh; Jodhpur, Nagaur and Raipur (Pali) in Rajasthan; Baidyanath in Bihar; Baroda, Dholaka, and Valsad in Gujarat and Dhundiraj Temple in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. Prominent Ganesha temples in southern India include the following: Kanipakam in Chittoor; the Jambukeśvara Temple at Tiruchirapalli; at Rameshvaram and Suchindram in Tamil Nadu; at Malliyur, Kottarakara, Pazhavangadi, Kasargod in Kerala, Hampi, and Idagunji in Karnataka; and Bhadrachalam in Andhra Pradesh.

 

T. A. Gopinatha notes, "Every village however small has its own image of Vighneśvara (Vigneshvara) with or without a temple to house it in. At entrances of villages and forts, below pīpaḹa (Sacred fig) trees [...], in a niche [...] in temples of Viṣṇu (Vishnu) as well as Śiva (Shiva) and also in separate shrines specially constructed in Śiva temples [...]; the figure of Vighneśvara is invariably seen." Ganesha temples have also been built outside of India, including southeast Asia, Nepal (including the four Vinayaka shrines in the Kathmandu valley), and in several western countries.

 

RISE TO PROMINENCE

 

FIRST APEARANCE

Ganesha appeared in his classic form as a clearly recognizable deity with well-defined iconographic attributes in the early 4th to 5th centuries. Shanti Lal Nagar says that the earliest known iconic image of Ganesha is in the niche of the Shiva temple at Bhumra, which has been dated to the Gupta period. His independent cult appeared by about the 10th century. Narain summarizes the controversy between devotees and academics regarding the development of Ganesha as follows:

 

What is inscrutable is the somewhat dramatic appearance of Gaņeśa on the historical scene. His antecedents are not clear. His wide acceptance and popularity, which transcend sectarian and territorial limits, are indeed amazing. On the one hand there is the pious belief of the orthodox devotees in Gaņeśa's Vedic origins and in the Purāṇic explanations contained in the confusing, but nonetheless interesting, mythology. On the other hand there are doubts about the existence of the idea and the icon of this deity" before the fourth to fifth century A.D. ... [I]n my opinion, indeed there is no convincing evidence of the existence of this divinity prior to the fifth century.

 

POSSIBLE INFLUENCES

Courtright reviews various speculative theories about the early history of Ganesha, including supposed tribal traditions and animal cults, and dismisses all of them in this way:

 

In the post 600 BC period there is evidence of people and places named after the animal. The motif appears on coins and sculptures.

 

Thapan's book on the development of Ganesha devotes a chapter to speculations about the role elephants had in early India but concludes that, "although by the second century CE the elephant-headed yakṣa form exists it cannot be presumed to represent Gaṇapati-Vināyaka. There is no evidence of a deity by this name having an elephant or elephant-headed form at this early stage. Gaṇapati-Vināyaka had yet to make his debut."

 

One theory of the origin of Ganesha is that he gradually came to prominence in connection with the four Vinayakas (Vināyakas). In Hindu mythology, the Vināyakas were a group of four troublesome demons who created obstacles and difficulties but who were easily propitiated. The name Vināyaka is a common name for Ganesha both in the Purāṇas and in Buddhist Tantras. Krishan is one of the academics who accepts this view, stating flatly of Ganesha, "He is a non-vedic god. His origin is to be traced to the four Vināyakas, evil spirits, of the Mānavagŗhyasūtra (7th–4th century BCE) who cause various types of evil and suffering". Depictions of elephant-headed human figures, which some identify with Ganesha, appear in Indian art and coinage as early as the 2nd century. According to Ellawala, the elephant-headed Ganesha as lord of the Ganas was known to the people of Sri Lanka in the early pre-Christian era.

 

A metal plate depiction of Ganesha had been discovered in 1993, in Iran, it dated back to 1,200 BCE. Another one was discovered much before, in Lorestan Province of Iran.

 

First Ganesha's terracotta images are from 1st century CE found in Ter, Pal, Verrapuram and Chandraketugarh. These figures are small, with elephant head, two arms, and chubby physique. The earliest Ganesha icons in stone were carved in Mathura during Kushan times (2nd-3rd centuries CE).

 

VEDIC AND EPIC LITERATURE

The title "Leader of the group" (Sanskrit: gaṇapati) occurs twice in the Rig Veda, but in neither case does it refer to the modern Ganesha. The term appears in RV 2.23.1 as a title for Brahmanaspati, according to commentators. While this verse doubtless refers to Brahmanaspati, it was later adopted for worship of Ganesha and is still used today. In rejecting any claim that this passage is evidence of Ganesha in the Rig Veda, Ludo Rocher says that it "clearly refers to Bṛhaspati—who is the deity of the hymn—and Bṛhaspati only". Equally clearly, the second passage (RV 10.112.9) refers to Indra, who is given the epithet 'gaṇapati', translated "Lord of the companies (of the Maruts)." However, Rocher notes that the more recent Ganapatya literature often quotes the Rigvedic verses to give Vedic respectability to Ganesha .

 

Two verses in texts belonging to Black Yajurveda, Maitrāyaṇīya Saṃhitā (2.9.1) and Taittirīya Āraṇyaka (10.1), appeal to a deity as "the tusked one" (Dantiḥ), "elephant-faced" (Hastimukha), and "with a curved trunk" (Vakratuņḍa). These names are suggestive of Ganesha, and the 14th century commentator Sayana explicitly establishes this identification. The description of Dantin, possessing a twisted trunk (vakratuṇḍa) and holding a corn-sheaf, a sugar cane, and a club, is so characteristic of the Puranic Ganapati that Heras says "we cannot resist to accept his full identification with this Vedic Dantin". However, Krishan considers these hymns to be post-Vedic additions. Thapan reports that these passages are "generally considered to have been interpolated". Dhavalikar says, "the references to the elephant-headed deity in the Maitrāyaṇī Saṃhitā have been proven to be very late interpolations, and thus are not very helpful for determining the early formation of the deity".

 

Ganesha does not appear in Indian epic literature that is dated to the Vedic period. A late interpolation to the epic poem Mahabharata says that the sage Vyasa (Vyāsa) asked Ganesha to serve as his scribe to transcribe the poem as he dictated it to him. Ganesha agreed but only on condition that Vyasa recite the poem uninterrupted, that is, without pausing. The sage agreed, but found that to get any rest he needed to recite very complex passages so Ganesha would have to ask for clarifications. The story is not accepted as part of the original text by the editors of the critical edition of the Mahabharata, in which the twenty-line story is relegated to a footnote in an appendix. The story of Ganesha acting as the scribe occurs in 37 of the 59 manuscripts consulted during preparation of the critical edition. Ganesha's association with mental agility and learning is one reason he is shown as scribe for Vyāsa's dictation of the Mahabharata in this interpolation. Richard L. Brown dates the story to the 8th century, and Moriz Winternitz concludes that it was known as early as c. 900, but it was not added to the Mahabharata some 150 years later. Winternitz also notes that a distinctive feature in South Indian manuscripts of the Mahabharata is their omission of this Ganesha legend. The term vināyaka is found in some recensions of the Śāntiparva and Anuśāsanaparva that are regarded as interpolations. A reference to Vighnakartṛīṇām ("Creator of Obstacles") in Vanaparva is also believed to be an interpolation and does not appear in the critical edition.

 

PURANIC PERIOD

Stories about Ganesha often occur in the Puranic corpus. Brown notes while the Puranas "defy precise chronological ordering", the more detailed narratives of Ganesha's life are in the late texts, c. 600–1300. Yuvraj Krishan says that the Puranic myths about the birth of Ganesha and how he acquired an elephant's head are in the later Puranas, which were composed from c. 600 onwards. He elaborates on the matter to say that references to Ganesha in the earlier Puranas, such as the Vayu and Brahmanda Puranas, are later interpolations made during the 7th to 10th centuries.

 

In his survey of Ganesha's rise to prominence in Sanskrit literature, Ludo Rocher notes that:

 

Above all, one cannot help being struck by the fact that the numerous stories surrounding Gaṇeśa concentrate on an unexpectedly limited number of incidents. These incidents are mainly three: his birth and parenthood, his elephant head, and his single tusk. Other incidents are touched on in the texts, but to a far lesser extent.

 

Ganesha's rise to prominence was codified in the 9th century, when he was formally included as one of the five primary deities of Smartism. The 9th-century philosopher Adi Shankara popularized the "worship of the five forms" (Panchayatana puja) system among orthodox Brahmins of the Smarta tradition. This worship practice invokes the five deities Ganesha, Vishnu, Shiva, Devi, and Surya. Adi Shankara instituted the tradition primarily to unite the principal deities of these five major sects on an equal status. This formalized the role of Ganesha as a complementary deity.

 

SCRIPTURES

Once Ganesha was accepted as one of the five principal deities of Brahmanism, some Brahmins (brāhmaṇas) chose to worship Ganesha as their principal deity. They developed the Ganapatya tradition, as seen in the Ganesha Purana and the Mudgala Purana.

 

The date of composition for the Ganesha Purana and the Mudgala Purana - and their dating relative to one another - has sparked academic debate. Both works were developed over time and contain age-layered strata. Anita Thapan reviews comments about dating and provides her own judgement. "It seems likely that the core of the Ganesha Purana appeared around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries", she says, "but was later interpolated." Lawrence W. Preston considers the most reasonable date for the Ganesha Purana to be between 1100 and 1400, which coincides with the apparent age of the sacred sites mentioned by the text.

 

R.C. Hazra suggests that the Mudgala Purana is older than the Ganesha Purana, which he dates between 1100 and 1400. However, Phyllis Granoff finds problems with this relative dating and concludes that the Mudgala Purana was the last of the philosophical texts concerned with Ganesha. She bases her reasoning on the fact that, among other internal evidence, the Mudgala Purana specifically mentions the Ganesha Purana as one of the four Puranas (the Brahma, the Brahmanda, the Ganesha, and the Mudgala Puranas) which deal at length with Ganesha. While the kernel of the text must be old, it was interpolated until the 17th and 18th centuries as the worship of Ganapati became more important in certain regions. Another highly regarded scripture, the Ganapati Atharvashirsa, was probably composed during the 16th or 17th centuries.

 

BEYOND INDIA AND HINDUISM

Commercial and cultural contacts extended India's influence in western and southeast Asia. Ganesha is one of a number of Hindu deities who reached foreign lands as a result.

 

Ganesha was particularly worshipped by traders and merchants, who went out of India for commercial ventures. From approximately the 10th century onwards, new networks of exchange developed including the formation of trade guilds and a resurgence of money circulation. During this time, Ganesha became the principal deity associated with traders. The earliest inscription invoking Ganesha before any other deity is associated with the merchant community.

 

Hindus migrated to Maritime Southeast Asia and took their culture, including Ganesha, with them. Statues of Ganesha are found throughout the region, often beside Shiva sanctuaries. The forms of Ganesha found in Hindu art of Java, Bali, and Borneo show specific regional influences. The spread of Hindu culture to southeast Asia established Ganesha in modified forms in Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand. In Indochina, Hinduism and Buddhism were practiced side by side, and mutual influences can be seen in the iconography of Ganesha in the region. In Thailand, Cambodia, and among the Hindu classes of the Chams in Vietnam, Ganesha was mainly thought of as a remover of obstacles. Today in Buddhist Thailand, Ganesha is regarded as a remover of obstacles, the god of success.

 

Before the arrival of Islam, Afghanistan had close cultural ties with India, and the adoration of both Hindu and Buddhist deities was practiced. Examples of sculptures from the 5th to the 7th centuries have survived, suggesting that the worship of Ganesha was then in vogue in the region.

 

Ganesha appears in Mahayana Buddhism, not only in the form of the Buddhist god Vināyaka, but also as a Hindu demon form with the same name. His image appears in Buddhist sculptures during the late Gupta period. As the Buddhist god Vināyaka, he is often shown dancing. This form, called Nṛtta Ganapati, was popular in northern India, later adopted in Nepal, and then in Tibet. In Nepal, the Hindu form of Ganesha, known as Heramba, is popular; he has five heads and rides a lion. Tibetan representations of Ganesha show ambivalent views of him. A Tibetan rendering of Ganapati is tshogs bdag. In one Tibetan form, he is shown being trodden under foot by Mahākāla, (Shiva) a popular Tibetan deity. Other depictions show him as the Destroyer of Obstacles, and sometimes dancing. Ganesha appears in China and Japan in forms that show distinct regional character. In northern China, the earliest known stone statue of Ganesha carries an inscription dated to 531. In Japan, where Ganesha is known as Kangiten, the Ganesha cult was first mentioned in 806.

 

The canonical literature of Jainism does not mention the worship of Ganesha. However, Ganesha is worshipped by most Jains, for whom he appears to have taken over certain functions of Kubera. Jain connections with the trading community support the idea that Jainism took up Ganesha worship as a result of commercial connections. The earliest known Jain Ganesha statue dates to about the 9th century. A 15th-century Jain text lists procedures for the installation of Ganapati images. Images of Ganesha appear in the Jain temples of Rajasthan and Gujarat.

 

WIKIPEDIA

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today however we are at Glynes, the grand Georgian family seat of the Chetwynds in Wiltshire, and the home of Lettice’s parents, the presiding Viscount and Countess of Wrexham and the heir, their eldest son Leslie and his wife Arabella. Lettice is staying at her old family home for the festive season as she usually does between Christmas and Twelfth Night*. However, this year she had an extra reason for being with her family this Christmas.

 

For nearly a year Lettice had been patiently awaiting the return of her then beau, Selwyn Spencely, son of the Duke of Walmsford, after being sent to Durban by his mother, Lady Zinnia in an effort to destroy their relationship which she wanted to end so that she could marry Selwyn off to his cousin, Pamela Fox-Chavers. Having been made aware by Lady Zinnia in October that during the course of the year, whilst Lettice had been biding her time, waiting for Selwyn’s eventual return, he had become engaged to the daughter of a Kenyan diamond mine owner whilst in Durban. Fleeing Lady Zinnia’s Park Lane mansion, Lettice returned to Cavendish Mews and milled over her options over a week as she reeled from the news. Then, after that week, she knew exactly what to do to resolve the issues raised by Lady Zinnia’s unwelcome news about her son. Taking extra care in her dress, she took herself off to the neighbouring upper-class London suburb of Belgravia and paid a call upon Sir John Nettleford-Hughes.

 

Old enough to be her father, wealthy Sir John is still a bachelor, and according to London society gossip intends to remain so, so that he might continue to enjoy his dalliances with a string of pretty chorus girls of Lettice’s age and younger. As an eligible man in a aftermath of the Great War when such men are a rare commodity, with a vast family estate in Bedfordshire, houses in Mayfair, Belgravia and Pimlico and Fontengil Park in Wiltshire, quite close to the Glynes estate belonging to her parents, Lettice’s mother, Lady Sadie, invited him as a potential suitor to her 1922 Hunt Ball, which she used as a marriage market for Lettice. Selwyn rescued Lettice from the horror of having to entertain him, and Sir John left the ball early in a disgruntled mood with a much younger partygoer. Lettice recently reacquainted herself with Sir John at an amusing Friday to Monday long weekend party held by Sir John and Lady Gladys Caxton at their Scottish country estate, Gossington, a baronial Art and Crafts castle near the hamlet of Kershopefoot in Cumberland. To her surprise, Lettice found Sir John’s company rather enjoyable. She then ran into him again at the Portland Gallery’s autumn show where she found him yet again to be a pleasant and attentive companion for much of the evening.

 

Sir John also made a proposition to her that night: he offered her his hand in marriage should she ever need it. More like a business arrangement than a marriage proposal, Sir John offered Lettice the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of his large fortune, be chatelain of all his estates and continue to have her interior design business, under the conditions that she agree to provide him with an heir, and that he be allowed to discreetly carry on his affairs in spite of their marriage vows. He even suggested that Lettice might be afforded the opportunity to have her own extra marital liaisons if she were discreet about them. Turning up unannounced on his doorstep, she agreed to his proposal after explaining that the understanding between she and Selwyn was concluded. However, in an effort to be discreet, at Lettice’s insistence, they did not make their engagement public until the new year: after the dust about Selwyn’s break of his and Lettice’s engagement settled. Sir John motored across from Fontengil Park in the days following New Year and he and Lettice announced their engagement in the palatial Glynes drawing room before the Viscount and Lady Sadie the Countess, Leslie, Arabella and the Viscount’s sister Eglantyne (known by all the Chetwynd children affectionally as Aunt Egg). The announcement received somewhat awkwardly by the Viscount initially, until Lettice assured him that her choice to marry Sir John has nothing to do with undue influence, mistaken motivations, but perhaps the person most put out by the news is Aunt Egg who is not a great believer in the institution of marriage, and feels Lettice was perfectly fine as a modern unmarried woman. Lady Sadie, who Lettice thought would be thrilled by the announcement of her engagement, received the news with a somewhat muted response and she discreetly slipped away after drinking a toast to the newly engaged couple with a glass of fine champagne from the Glynes wine cellar.

 

We now find ourselves in the Glynes morning room where after noticing her prolonged absence, the Viscount has discovered his wife sitting quietly alone.

 

The Glynes morning room is very much Lady Sadie’s preserve, and the original classical Eighteenth Century design has been overlayed with the comfortable Edwardian clutter of her continual and conspicuous acquisition that is the hallmark of a lady of her age and social standing. China cabinets of beautiful porcelain line the walls. Clusters of mismatched chairs unholstered in cream fabric, tables and a floral chaise lounge, all from different eras, fill the room: set up to allow for the convivial conversation of the great and good of the county after church on a Sunday. The hand painted Georgian wallpaper can barely be seen for paintings and photographs in ornate gilded frames. The marble mantelpiece is covered by Royal Doulton figurines and more photos in silver frames. Several vases of Glynes’ hothouse flowers stand on occasional tables, but even their fragrance cannot smother Lady Sadie’s Yardley Lily of the Valley scent which is ever present in the air.

 

“I say! What are you doing in here, old girl?” the Viscount asks as she sees his wife sitting at her bonheur de jour** in the corner of the morning room. “The rest of the family is still in the drawing room, including Lally and Charles, who have returned from their visit to Bowood.***”

 

“I’m well aware of that, Cosmo. I heard them come back.” Lady Sadie says peevishly. “And less of the old, if you don’t mind.”

 

“Sorry Sadie.” the Viscount apologises. “It’s having all the young ones around and their new vernacular. It’s ‘old boy this’ and ‘old girl that’. It’s catching.”

 

“That’s alright, Cosmo, so long as it doesn’t catch on, here.” Lady Sadie replies with a cocked eyebrow.

 

“We were wondering where you’d gotten to.” the Viscount says. “I’ve opened another bottle of champagne.”

 

“Have you, dear?” Lady Sadie remarks absently.

 

“Of course I have, Sadie!” the Viscount chortles. “After all, it isn’t every day that our youngest daughter gets married.”

 

“I suppose not, Cosmo.” Lady Sadie replies rather laconically.

 

The Viscount watches his wife as she picks up a studio photograph taken in London by Bassano**** of their eldest daughter, Lally as a gangly young teenager, and Lettice as a girl of seven, both dressed in the pre-war uniform fashion of young girls: white lawn dresses with their hair tied in large satin bows. She sighs.

 

“Sir John is suggesting that we all motor over to Fontengil Park for luncheon, now that Lally and Charles are back.” the Viscount remarks awkwardly in an effort to break his wife’s unusual silence. “To celebrate the good news as it were. I thought it was rather a capital idea! Don’t you agree, Sadie?”

 

Lady Sadie doesn’t reply, instead staring deeply at the faces of her two daughters forever captured within Mr. Basanno’s lens, her look expectant, as if she were waiting for them to speak.

 

“You know, I must confess, I wasn’t too keen on him to begin with, nor the idea of he and Lettice marrying.” He looks guiltily at his wife. “I never really liked him, and always thought him a bit of an old lecher, sniffing around young women half his age, like our daughter. But Lettice assures me that she has made up her mind to marry him, and that there was no undue influence in the making of her decision.”

 

“Undue influence.” Lady Sadie muses in a deadpan voice.

 

“And now that I’ve really met him and chatted with him properly, I actually don’t mind Sir John, even if I do worry that he may be a tad old for Lettice. He’s quite a raconteur, very eloquent and worldly, and he obviously wants to make her happy. He might be just what she needs after all: a mature man who can help guide her in life, and indulge her too. He says he has no intention of stopping her career as an interior designer.”

 

Lady Sadie does not reply to her husband’s observations.

 

“Of course Eglantyne is quite against the engagement.” The Viscount chuckles. “But then, you know her opinions about marriage.”

 

Lady Sadie’s silence unnerves the Viscount as he tries desperately to fill the empty void between the pair of them.

 

“I thought I might get Harris to motor Leslie, Arabella, the grandchildren, you and I over there together.” the Viscount goes on when no opinion is forthcoming from his wife. “It might be fun for Harrold and Annabelle to come for a ride with us in the big old Daimler. Charles and Lally can go in their car with nanny and the baby.”

 

“Piers is hardly a baby anymore, Cosmo.” Lady Sadie opines as she puts down the photo of Lally and Lettice and picks up one of their eldest son, Leslie, as a boy of six in a Victorian sailor suit, with his soft blonde waves swept neatly behind his ears. “He’s two now, nearly three.” She then adds, “Won’t that be rather tiresome for Sir John’s cook, catering for us all?”

 

“We are connected to the exchange, Sadie. He can telephone ahead.”

 

“As you like.” she replies in a rather non-committal way. “Although I might cry off with one of my heads.”

 

“You don’t have one of your heads, Sadie.” the Viscount says darkly.

 

“How do you know I don’t, Cosmo. You don’t suffer them as I do.”

 

“I’ve been married to you long enough to know when you have a headache and when you don’t.” he replies. “And you certainly don’t have one now, even if you say you do.”

 

Putting down the photo of Leslie and picking up one of their second son, Lionel also in a sailor’s suit, and wearing a straw hat, Lady Sadie shudders. His look is sweet, but already at the tender age of three or four he was causing trouble, playing nasty tricks and hurting his nannies and worse, his own siblings. When Lettice was born a few years after the photograph was taken, Lady Sadie had to warn Lettice’s nurses that they were never to leave her unattended in Lionel’s presence, lest he smother her with a pillow, which he tried to do on several occasions when the nurses were slack in their observation of Lady Sadie’s rule or they were caught off guard.

 

“And of course Sir John can take Lettice over there in that topping blue Bugatti Torpedo***** of his.”

 

“Ghastly, vulgar and showy.” Lady Sadie opines. “Tearing up the country lanes as he speeds along them, so that no decent person of the county can walk them any more without fearing for their lives when he’s visiting the district.” She sniffs. “Or so I have it on good authority.”

 

She returns to her perusal of photos.

 

“I say, Sadie,” the Viscount remarks in surprise. “What’s the matter?”

 

“Whatever do you mean, Cosmo?” she asks, lifting her head from a baby photo of Leslie sitting on the corner of a button back****** sofa taken at the same time as the one she has of him leaning precariously against a rocking chair in a silver frame standing on the right side of her bonheur de jour.

 

“You know perfectly well.” the Viscount retorts. “Don’t be obtuse.”

 

“I’m not being obtuse, Cosmo!” Lady Sadie retorts.

 

The Viscount sighs, knowing in order to get an answer, he must play his wife’s game of teasing out the answer from her: a game he is well versed in playing after many years of marriage.

 

“You’re obviously not happy about the engagement, which I have to say surprises me. Why have you suddenly taken so much against Sir John? I thought you’d be delighted by the announcement.”

 

Lady Sadie ignores her husband’s question and picks up a large and ornate framed photograph of a wedding group taken in the early years of the Twentieth Century. It features a rather beaky looking bride in a pretty lace covered white wedding dress and a splendid black feather covered Edwardian picture hat. Her groom, dressed in his Sunday best suit with a boutonnière******* in his lapel and a derby on his head sits back in his seat, looking very proud. Around them stand various men and women in their Edwardian best, but the flat caps and mismatched jackets and trousers of the men and similarly mismatched outfits of the ladies suggest that this is not an upper-class wedding. In front of the bride a five year old Lettice stands proudly dressed as a flower girl in a white lace dress with ribbons in her hair, clutching a bouquet.

 

“Didn’t you take that photograph with your first Box Brownie********, Sadie?” the Viscount asks as he walks over and stands next to his wife and looks at the photograph.

 

“Yes, I did, Cosmo.” Lady Sadie acknowledges. “How good of you to remember.”

 

“Oh, who could forget that occasion?” the Viscount chortles sadly. “That was poor Elsie Bucknell’s wedding to that wastrel who turned her head with all his talk of being a tailor to all the great and good of Swindon, when in fact he was nothing but a con man from Manchester.”

 

“You were very good to settle the debts he left her with after he and his real wife absconded with all her money.” Sadie says, pointing at the rather pretty woman in white and a neat picture hat sitting to the groom’s right.

 

“Well, it was the right thing to do, wasn’t it? As lord of manor, it was my duty to support her, poor jilted woman.”

 

“Yes, the right thing.” Lady Sadie agrees with a sigh. “You’ve always done the right thing, Cosmo.”

 

“Well, I also did encourage her to marry him when she asked my opinion of him.”

 

“You’ve not always been the best judge of character, Cosmo.” Lady Sadie remarks.

 

The Viscount laughs. “What does that say about me choosing you as my bride then, Sadie?”

 

“I did imply that your poor judgements of character only happen sometimes, not always.” She runs her fingers over the glass in front of Lettice’s smiling face. “Lettice was as pleased as punch to be the flower girl at that wedding. Do you remember?”

 

“I do believe she thought all the smiles and gushing of the adulating congregation were for her and not for Elise behind her.”

 

“I do believe you are right, Cosmo.” Lady Sadie chuckles. “Did you know that’s why they call them, ‘Flappers’?”

 

“Who dear?”

 

“The newspapers and magazines.” Lady Sadie muses. “I found out not all that long ago, from Geraldine Evans of all people, if you can believe it,” she remarks with another chuckle, mentioning the elder of two genteel spinster sisters who live in Holland House, a Seventeenth Century manor house, in Glynes village. “She told me that they call the young girls of the Bright Young Things********* ‘Flappers’ because it refers to the fact that when they were girls and their hair was still down, it was tied by flapping ribbons or tied in pigtails that flapped.” She points to the big bow in the young Lettice’s hair.

 

“No. No, I didn’t know.” the Viscount replies a little awkwardly. “Look, what’s all this got to do wi…”

 

“Thinking of the right thing, Cosmo, I really should take this photo out of the frame, what with all the sad connotations it has, but I can’t quite bear to do it.” Lady Sadie goes on, interrupting her husband. “I’m rather proud of this photograph.”

 

“There’s no need. Elise has long since left Glynes after all the scandal, so she won’t know. Anyway, it’s a very good shot, Sadie.” her husband agrees, putting his hand around her and giving her right shoulder an encouraging squeeze.

 

“I’ve never been what you’d call artistic, like Eglantyne,” Lady Sadie says, referring to her husband’s favourite younger sibling, who is an artist of some renown in London. “Or like Lettice, but I’m not bad at taking photographs.”

 

“I think you’re a dab hand at it, Sadie my dear.” He rubs his wife’s right forearm, and bestows a kiss on her greyish white waves atop her head. “Far better than me, or Leslie. But I ask again, what’s any of this to do with Sir John, and your sudden dislike of him?”

 

“You know, you think you know what, or who your children will become,” Lady Sadie says wistfully, replacing the photograph in the frame back on the surface of her bonheur de jour. “And yet, they always surprise you.”

 

“Oh, I don’t think either Leslie or Lally have been particularly surprising.” the Viscount retorts.

 

“No?”

 

“No. As the eldest son, Leslie has turned out to be the fine heir to the Glynes estate that we always wanted. He’s responsible, and goodness knows his insight and forward thinking has prevented us from finding ourselves in the straitened circumstances that the Brutons or poor Nigel Tyrwhitt and Isobel are in now. And now that he’s married, it will only be a matter of time before he and Arabella give us a grandson to carry on the Chetwynd line and one day become the next Viscount Wrexham.” He smiles indulgently at the thought. “And Lally’s marriage to Charles Lanchenbury is all we could hope for, for her. I mean, Charles may not inherit a hereditary title from old Lanchenbury, which is a bit of a pity. But still, he’s a successful businessman and she’ll never wont for anything. She seems to rather enjoy playing lady or the manor in High Wycombe with her brood.”

 

“Oh yes.”

 

“Lionel was a surprising one.” The Viscount picks up the photograph of his second son in his Victorian sailor’s outfit and wide brimmed straw hat that his wife had held before. “Who would have imagined that behind such an angelic face lurked the depraved character of the devil incarnate?” He feels his wife shudder again at the thought of their wayward son beneath his hand. “There, there, Sadie my dear.” he coos. “The further away from us he is, the less we have to think about him,” He heaves a great sigh of regret. “Or deal with his messy affairs.”

 

“You know I received a letter from him yesterday?” Lady Sadie asks.

 

“No.”

 

“Yes,” Lady Sadie snorts derisively. “From Durban of places, would you believe?”

 

“The same as young Spencely.”

 

“Yes! Isn’t that a coincidence? It was quite a good letter actually, and the first I’ve had since Leslie’s wedding where he doesn’t implore me to ask you to bring him back here. He writes that he went to Durban to show off two of his new Thoroughbreds to a perspective buyer: some playboy horse racing son of a nouveau riche businessman. It sounds like he’s had a bit of luck, as he seems quite flush at the moment, going to nightclubs and the like down there.”

 

“Squandering his earnings on gambling, women and god knows what else, down there, I’ll warrant.” the Viscount opines gruffly.

 

“No doubt.” Lady Sadie sighs.

 

“Poor Lettice.” the Viscount adds in a softer tone, as his mind shifts to his youngest daughter’s heartbreak at the hands of Selwyn Spencely.

 

“Aahh, and then there was Lettice.” Lady Sadie remarks, taking up a round gold frame featuring a studio photograph of a beaming Lettice at age ten in a smart winter coat and large brimmed hat, full of confidence sitting before the camera. “The most surprising child of all, not least of all because she was a surprise late pregnancy for me.”

 

“Oh, Lettice is no surprise to me, Sadie.” the Viscount retorts. “I mean, Eglantyne picked her as having an artistic temperament right from the beginning, and she was right. I knew she had more brains than our Lally has, which is why I gave her all those extra lessons.”

 

“You indulged her, Cosmo!” Lady Sadie remarks. “You’ve always spoiled her. So does Eglantyne. She’s your pet, and hers too.”

 

“Every bit as much as Leslie is yours, Sadie.” He points to the silver framed portrait of Leslie.

 

“You were the one who encouraged her to start up this ridiculous interior decoration nonsense.”

 

“Well, in reality it was really Eglantyne who drew my attention to her flair for design, but I’m glad that she did. Look at the successes she has had! She runs her own business, with very few hiccups or missteps,” He momentarily remembers the kerfuffle that there was with Lettice signing a contract drawn up by Lady Gladys Caxton’s lawyers without consulting the Chetwynd family lawyers. “And she’s very good at keeping accounts.”

 

“Excellent, she’ll make the perfect bookkeeper.” Lady Sadie remarks sarcastically.

 

“It will put her in good stead for running Sir John’s households, Sadie.” the Viscount tempers. “Goodness knows he has enough of them. And she has received accolades from Henry Tipping**********, printed in Country Life********** for all to see, and that is fine feather for her cap, you must confess.”

 

“I don’t deny that.” Lady Sadie agrees somewhat reluctantly.

 

“No, I always knew Lettice would be the greatest success of all our children.” the Viscount says proudly.

 

“Did you, Cosmo?”

 

“Of course I did, Sadie. I understand her.”

 

“You!” Lady Sadie scoffs. “You may decry that you love your youngest and favourite daughter so well, Cosmo, and without a doubt, you do. However, whatever you say, you don’t understand Lettice.”

 

“And you do, Sadie?” the Viscount retorts hotly. “When she comes home to lick her wounds after Zinnia sent Selwyn away, craving comfort, you drove her from the house, telling her she needed to throw herself into the social rounds, rather than stop and miss him. Is that understanding?” He folds his arms akimbo and looks away from his wife in disgust. “No wonder she kept her engagement to Sir John a secret for the last month or so, since you suddenly seem to despise her husband-to-be: a man whom I should like to point out, you thought was perfectly suitable for her not so very long ago. Sir John may not have the title of duke, but he has a title nonetheless, and I have no doubt that his fortune is equal to that of the Duke of Walmsford.”

 

“You misunderstand me, and my motives, Cosmo.” Lady Sadie replies, hurt by his words, but also resigned to the fact that he believes them. “As always, I am portrayed like one of Mrs. Maingot’s derided pantomime villains in the Glynes Christmas play.”

 

“If the cap fits, Sadie.”

 

“See, you think I don’t understand my children, but I assure you that, aside from Lionel, I do.”

 

“Who could ever understand that child of the devil, Sadie?”

 

“Indeed, well aside from our errant black sheep, I understand the others. You love them, Cosmo, probably far more than me, but I on the other hand, understand them.”

 

“How so, Sadie?”

 

“You misalign my actions because you don’t understand them, either. When Lettice came here after Zinnia packed Selwyn off to Durban, what did you do? You gave her a place to shelter, yes, but you mollycoddled her: feeding her shortbreads and allowing her to retreat from the world.”

 

“Well, that’s what she needed, Sadie.”

 

“No. That’s where you are wrong, Cosmo. She didn’t need mollycoddling. It just made things worse. It amplified her situation and how she felt as you allowed her to spend her empty days brooding. Lettice is apt to brood, when given the opportunity. What she really needed was to be told that the sun will still rise and set, in spite of her own innermost turmoil, and what she needed was to be sent back out into the world, so that she could be distracted, and build up her resilience. That’s what she needed, Cosmo, and I helped her achieve that. And that, my dear, is what I mean by truly understanding Lettice. Believe it or not, I understand her as a young woman, and I understand what she needs.”

 

“Well, if you wanted to build resilience in her, that’s what you’ve achieved, and admirably at that. Selwyn jilts our daughter and what does she do? Rather than moping, which is what you seem to think I would have encouraged her to do, she went out and got herself engaged to one of the most eligible bachelors in the county, in England no less. Yet you don’t seem at all happy about the engagement, even though you put Sir John into the mix at the Hunt Ball that you used as a marriage market for Lettice.”

 

“Once again, Cosmo, you see your daughter, but you don’t understand her.”

 

“Then pray enlighten me, Sadie because I certainly don’t understand you right at this moment.”

 

“Lettice’s heart is breaking, and ever since she was a child, when her heart is broken, she lashes out, like when Mopsy died. Remember her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel?”

 

“How could I forget that beautiful dog. But surely you aren’t comparing her tears and tantrums as a seven year old child, to now, Sadie? There are no tears this time, no tantrums.”

 

“But that’s where you are wrong, Cosmo. This is her tantrum. It just isn’t one that exhibits itself in the same way. Lettice is trying to prove to Selwyn,” She pauses for a moment and thinks. “No, more prove to Zinna, that she isn’t defeated by whatever nasty games she is playing to break the romance between Lettice and Selwyn. She’s trying to exact revenge on them both.” Lady Sadie sighs. “But she’s going about it all wrong.”

 

“What do you mean, Sadie?” The Viscount sighs as he sinks down onto the edge of one of the morning room chairs nearest him and looks across at his wife, who sits, slumped in her own seat at her desk, looking defeated.

 

“I blame myself really for this turn of events.” Lady Sadie gulps awkwardly. “I’m almost too ashamed to admit it, but I was misaligned in some of my thinking, and wrong in my judgement, and now the results have well and truly come home to roost.”

 

“What are you talking about, Sadie?”

 

“Sir John, Cosmo.” She says simply. “When I held that Hunt Ball, I practically threw Lettice at Sir John.”

 

“Well, to assuage your fears, Sadie, that is what I meant by confirming that there were no undue influences in Lettice’s decision.” the Viscount pronounces. “I asked her whether she felt obliged to marry Sir John because you had encouraged the match, and that she feared being stuck on the shelf.” He looks meaningfully at his wife. “But she says that neither of these had any influence on her decision. She says that Sir John isn’t perfect, but that he’s a good man, and that he isn’t lying to her. As I said - as you said – Sir John may not be young, but he’s eligible and wealthy to boot. Lettice will be chatelaine of a string of fine properties, and she’ll never have to worry about going without.”

 

“But Lettice is wrong about him nor lying to her.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

Lady Sadie snatches the lace handkerchief poking out of her left sleeve opening at her wrist and dabs her nose, sniffing as she does. “Several of my friends, Lally, and even Lettice tried to warn me about him. They said that he’s a lecherous man, with a penchant for younger women, actresses in particular.”

 

“Well,” the Viscount chuckles. “Plenty of men of good standing have been known to have the odd discreet elicit affair with a Gaiety Girl*********** or two.” He then blusters. “Not myself of course!”

 

“Of course not, Cosmo.” She reaches out one of her diamond spangled hands to her husband and takes his own proffered hand. “Never you. You were always too much of a gentleman to have a liaison with another woman. As I said, you always do the right thing, Cosmo. Do you know, I do believe that is why Zinnia stopped coming to our house parties. You weren’t for conquest, no matter how much she threw herself at you. And she did, quite shamelessly.”

 

“Did she?” the Viscount asks innocently.

 

“You know she did!” Lady Sadie slaps her husband’s wrist playfully. “Now who’s being obtuse?”

 

“Well, maybe I did sense her overtures towards me, but she never stood a chance, Sadie!” the Viscount replies with an earnest look. “You were only ever going to be the one for me.”

 

“That’s sweet of you Cosmo, and I appreciate it. But, for all his pedigree and wealth, and for all his apparent care for Lettice, your judge of character of Sir John is fatally flawed my dear.”

 

“Flawed?”

 

“Sir John Nettleford-Hughes is not for our youngest daughter.” Lady Sadie goes on. “Nor any good and upstanding young lady of society. I know now that he is a philanderer: discreet yes, but not discreet enough, and no matter how many houses he has, or wealth, he will never make Lettice happy – quite the opposite in fact, I fear, even if she can’t see that in her present state of besottedness. She will become the neglected, deserted wife and the ridicule of society. And that is why I am against Sir John, and this marriage, which will be as disastrous for her as dear Elsie Bucknell’s was for her.” Sadie points to the wedding party photograph again.

 

“What?”

 

“Yes.” Lady Sadie cocks an eyebrow as she gives her husband a withering look. “His latest conquest is an up-and-coming West End actress named Paula Young. Such a nasty, common name.” she opines. “Then again, it suits a nasty and common little upstart tart of an actress!”

 

“Sadie!”

 

“Sorry Cosmo, but that’s what she is, if she allows herself to be seen in such an…” Lady Sadie shudders. “An intimate situation with a man like Sir John.”

 

“Surely there is some kind of misunderstanding: just gossip, Sadie.”

 

“Gossip yes, but verified nonetheless.” Lady Sadie answers sadly. “Though I wish to god that I could say it wasn’t. My cousin Gwendolyn was having dinner at the Café Royal************ and saw them together herself less than a week ago.”

 

“What was Gwendolyn doing at the Café Royal?”

 

“She is a duchess, Cosmo dear, or have you forgotten?”

 

“Who could ever forget that Gwendolyn is the Duchess of Whiby, Sadie? She certainly won’t let anyone forget it.”

 

“Well, she was escorting her grand-nice Barbara who debuted last year as part of the London Season, because poor Monica had influenza and was confined to bed, and she noticed Sir John and that that cheap actress at a shaded corner table.”

 

“A simple dinner between two friends., Sadie.” the Viscount tries to explain the situation away.

 

“Gwendolyn says that he was practically devouring her as he lavished her bare forearms with kisses.” Lady Sadie replies with another shudder and a look of disgust. “In public! With an actress! How vulgar, and certainly not discreet, even if at a corner table in the shadows!”

 

“Gwendolyn goes looking for gossip wherever she goes, Sadie, even in places where it isn’t.” the Viscount cautions his wife.

 

“I know, but be that as it may, Cosmo, I also have it from your own sister, Eglantyne, that many years ago, before she was married, he also had an elicit affair with that awful romance novelist Gladys Caxton, whom Lettice and you had all the trouble with not long ago.”

 

“Well you know Eglantyne doesn’t believe in the institution of marriage.” the Viscount begins.

 

“This was before any of us even knew of the understanding reached between Lettice and Sir John, Cosmo.”

 

“Well,” he chuckles in an effort to shake he sudden concerns off. “If that affair was many years ago, who cares, Sadie? It has no significance now.”

 

Lady Sadie slides open a drawer of her bonheur de jour and takes out a sheet of paper on which is written a list of names.

 

“After Gwendolyn’s revelations, I did a bit of digging myself, and these are the actresses ingénues and parvenues I was able to connect him to.”

 

“The cad!” the Viscount gasps as his widened eyes run down the list. “There must be at lest two dozen women on this list.”

 

“There are twenty-nine to be exact, Cosmo, and they are only the ones I could find and link him to.”

 

“You know I always thought that he was an old letch.” the Viscount restates his long held belief again. “I can’t deny that I’d heard the rumours too, but being unmarried I didn’t pay them much mind. And when he showed up here today, all charm, and was so solicitous to Lettice, making my little girl so happy, well...”

 

“You were swayed on your judgment of this character.” Lady Sadie says with an arched eyebrow and a knowing look.

 

“I was.” the Viscount agrees. “I was persuaded: taken in by him as a matter-of-fact! What a fool I am!”

 

“Charming people can always beguile, dear Cosmo.”

 

“I shall go into the drawing room this very minute and have it out with him!” He gets to his feet, trembling with anger and frustration as his elegant hands form into fists. “I’ll fling Sir John out on his philandering ear!”

 

Lady Sadie reaches out again to still her husband, wrapping her hand comfortingly around his wrist. “No you won’t, Cosmo.” she says calmly and matter-of-factly, gazing up at him sadly. “It would be the wrong thing to do, and you know it. And, as we have agreed, you always do the right and decent thing. It would be too embarrassing to conduct such a scene before a houseful of guests, even if they are family: for Sir John, Leslie, Arabella, Lally, Eglantyne, me, you,” She lowers her voice and adds sadly. “For Lettice.”

 

“You’re right, Sadie.” the Viscount says, still trembling with anger. “Shall I speak to Lettice?” he suggests. “Pull her aside and have a discreet word with her?”

 

“Why, Cosmo?”

 

“I could forbid her to marry him. I could threaten to cut her allowance off.”

 

Lady Sadie laughs in a sad and tired fashion. “Cosmo, what purpose would that serve? She’s already told you that she intends to go through with this marriage, and that she won’t be swayed.”

 

“Well, Lettice might come to her senses if I tell her… tell her the reasons why I’m forbidding her to marry that… that bounder!”

 

“She knows already what kind of man Sir John is, Cosmo. She was one of the people who told me that he’s a philanderer.”

 

“What?”

 

“Lettice told me herself that he has a penchant for young ladies.”

 

“Well, if she hears it from me, her own father?”

 

“You’ll only drive her deeper into his arms, Cosmo. She’s angry. She’s hurting. She’s rebelling, God help us all!” Lady Sadie says knowingly. “She’s seeking revenge. And your threat to cut off Lettice’s allowance would be meaningless if she marries Sir John. As you have duly noted already, he’s richer than Croesus*************. Besides, thanks to you and Eglantyne she also has a successful business venture to support her now.”

 

“What the devil is she playing at then?” the Viscount asks. “Is it not bad enough that we have an errant son in Lionel, that we must now have a daughter who marries a known philanderer with a penchant for young actresses, and will doubtless end up being dragged through the divorce courts as a result, casting shame on the family?”

 

“I don’t know, Cosmo, other than she is lashing out at Lady Zinnia, exacting her revenge as she sees it.”

 

The Viscount looks down at his wife sadly and ponders. “You’re being remarkably calm about all this, Sadie.”

 

“Yes,” she replies with a derisive snigger as she starts to take up some of the lose photos and file them together. “I know. Usually, it’s me having histrionics, not you. However, there is something I keep reminding myself of that brings me solace as I mull this situation over in my mind.”

 

“What on earth can bring you solace about this disastrous situation Lettice has willingly foisted upon herself?”

 

Lady Sadie looks knowingly at her husband. “One swallow does not a summer make**************, Cosmo. And an engagement, especially a hasty one, does not necessarily lead to marriage.”

 

“What are you saying, Sadie?”

 

“I’m simply saying that if a man breaks off his engagement with a lady, he’s a cad and a bounder. However, a lady is perfectly entitled to break off her engagement with a gentleman. In fact,” She smiles smugly. “It is her prerogative to do so.”

 

“Are you suggesting that we should encourage Lettice to break her engagement with Sir John?” the Viscount asks. He sighs and rubs his cleanly shaven chin. “I say! What a clever ploy, Sadie.” he muses. “Quite brilliant! Quite Machiavellian, no less!”

 

“No, I’m not saying that at all, Cosmo.” Lady Sadie quips. “You misunderstand me again.” She releases an exasperated sigh. “This is also what I mean by you not understanding Lettice. There is no talking to her right now, she’s so focussed on her own hurt and anger, and is determined to exact her own misaligned form of revenge on Selwyn and Zinnia. At the moment you could say that Sir John is made of glass and will shatter into a thousand slivers the moment she marries him and stab her to death, and she’ll still marry him to spite them, because she simply cannot see straight. She’s so angry that she won’t listen to reason.” She settles back in her seat and steeples her fingers before her as she stares off into a future only she can see. “Lettice is like a blizzard: blustery, but eventually her anger will peter out.”

 

“So you are suggesting what?”

 

“So, what I’m suggesting is that in this case, we must be patient with Lettice. We must settle ourselves in for the long game, and just watch what happens when her storm peters out.”

 

“So, in your opinion, we do nothing, then?” the Viscount blasts.

 

“For the time being, no, Cosmo.”

 

“But if we do nothing, she’ll marry the cad, and then where will we be?”

 

“I’m not convinced, Cosmo.” Lady Sadie assures her husband. “I think that if we cool our heels and let things play out, Lettice will come to her senses in the fullness of time.”

 

“You seem very sure of that, Sadie.” the Viscount says with a dubious look at his wife.

 

“I am, Cosmo.”

 

“And if you’re wrong? What then?”

 

“I’m not.” she assures him. “But if I were to be, then we shall simply have to steer her back to her senses when she is in a frame of mind that best allows us to encourage her to break off this disastrous marriage with Sir John.”

 

The Viscount shudders. “How can I have a son-in-law who’s as old as I am, or older.”

 

“Not quite, Cosmo, dear.” Lady Sadie assures him. “He’s a year and a half younger than you. I know. I did my in depth research about him before putting him forward as a potential suitor in 1922.”

 

“Evidently not in depth enough, Sadie,” He holds up the sheet of paper before he wife before screwing it up in anger and throwing it vehemently into her waste paper basket. “If Lettice is now engaged to a wealthy womaniser who carries on with actresses in public.”

 

“Don’t worry.” Lady Sadie continues to soothe in a soft voice, “We won’t have Sir John as our son-in-law. You’ll see.”

 

“Now that I know what I know,” the Viscount sighs. “I just hope you’re right, Sadie.”

 

“I usually am, Cosmo,” Lady Sadie resumes shuffling the photographs. “In the end.”

 

*Twelfth Night (also known as Epiphany Eve depending upon the tradition) is a Christian festival on the last night of the Twelve Days of Christmas, marking the coming of the Epiphany. Different traditions mark the date of Twelfth Night as either the fifth of January or the sixth of January, depending on whether the counting begins on Christmas Day or the twenty-sixth of December. January the sixth is celebrated as the feast of Epiphany, which begins the Epiphanytide season.

 

**A bonheur de jour is a type of lady's writing desk. It was introduced in Paris by one of the interior decorators and purveyors of fashionable novelties called marchands-merciers around 1760, and speedily became intensely fashionable. Decorated on all sides, it was designed to sit in the middle of a room so that it could be admired from any angle.

 

***Bowood is a Grade I listed Georgian country house in Wiltshire, that has been owned for more than two hundred and fifty years by the Fitzmaurice family. The house, with interiors by Robert Adam, stands on extensive grounds which include a garden designed by Lancelot "Capability" Brown. It is adjacent to the village of Derry Hill, halfway between Calne and Chippenham. The greater part of the house was demolished in 1956.

 

****Alexander Bassano was an English photographer who was a leading royal and high society portrait photographer in Victorian London. He is known for his photo of the Earl Kitchener in the Lord Kitchener Wants You army recruitment poster during the First World War and his photographs of Queen Victoria. He opened his first studio in 1850 in Regent Street. The studio then moved to Piccadilly between 1859 and 1863, to Pall Mall and then to 25 Old Bond Street in 1877 where it remained until 1921 when it moved to Dover Street. There was also a Bassano branch studio at 132 King's Road, Brighton from 1893 to 1899.

 

*****Introduced in 1922, the Type 30 was the first production Bugatti to feature an Inline-8. Nicknamed the “Torpedo” because of its similar look to the wartime munition, at the time Bugatti opted to move to a small two-litre engine to make the car more saleable, lighter and cheap. The engine capacity also made the Type 30 eligible for Grand Prix racing, which was a new direction for the marque. Despite the modest engine capacity, the power output was still remarkable thanks to the triple-valve arrangement. Also benefiting the Type 30 was good road handling, braking and steering which was common throughout the marque. The Type 30 was also the first Bugatti to have front brakes.

 

******Button back upholstered furniture contains buttons embedded in the back of the sofa or chair, which are pulled tightly against the leather creating a shallow dimple effect. This is sometimes known as button tufting.

 

*******A boutonnière is a flower that someone wears in the buttonhole of, or fastened to, their jacket on a special occasion such as a wedding.

 

********The Brownie (or Box Brownie) was invented by Frank A. Brownell for the Eastman Kodak Company. Named after the Brownie characters popularised by the Canadian writer Palmer Cox, the camera was initially aimed at children. More than 150,000 Brownie cameras were shipped in the first year of production, and cost a mere five shillings in the United Kingdom. An improved model, called No. 2 Brownie, came in 1901, which produced larger photos, and was also a huge success. Initially marketed to children, with Kodak using them to popularise photography, it achieved broader appeal as people realised that, although very simple in design and operation, the Brownie could produce very good results under the right conditions. One of their most famous users at the time was the then Princess of Wales, later Queen Alexandra, who was an avid amateur photographer and helped to make the Box Brownie even more popular with the British public from all walks of life. As they were ubiquitous, many iconic shots were taken on Brownies. Jesuit priest Father Frank Browne sailed aboard the RMS Titanic between Southampton and Queenstown, taking many photographs of the ship’s interiors, passengers and crew with his Box Brownie. On the 15th of April 1912, Bernice Palmer used a Kodak Brownie 2A, Model A to photograph the iceberg that sank RMS Titanic as well as survivors hauled aboard RMS Carpathia, the ship on which Palmer was travelling. They were also taken to war by soldiers but by World War I the more compact Vest Pocket Kodak Camera as well as Kodak's Autographic Camera were the most frequently used. Another group of people that became posthumously known for their huge photo archive is the Nicholas II of Russia family, especially its four daughters who all used Box Brownie cameras.

 

*********The Bright Young Things, or Bright Young People, was a nickname given by the tabloid press to a group of Bohemian young aristocrats and socialites in 1920s London.

 

**********Henry Tipping (1855 – 1933) was a French-born British writer on country houses and gardens, garden designer in his own right, and Architectural Editor of the British periodical Country Life for seventeen years between 1907 and 1910 and 1916 and 1933. After his appointment to that position in 1907, he became recognised as one of the leading authorities on the history, architecture, furnishings and gardens of country houses in Britain. In 1927, he became a member of the first committee of the Gardens of England and Wales Scheme, later known as the National Gardens Scheme.

 

***********Country Life is a British weekly perfect-bound glossy magazine that is a quintessential English magazine founded in 1897, providing readers with a weekly dose of architecture, gardens and interiors. It was based in London at 110 Southwark Street until March 2016, when it became based in Farnborough, Hampshire. The frontispiece of each issue usually features a portrait photograph of a young woman of society, or, on occasion, a man of society

 

************Gaiety Girls were the chorus girls in Edwardian musical comedies, beginning in the 1890s at the Gaiety Theatre, London, in the shows produced by George Edwardes

 

*************The Café Royal in Regent Street, Piccadilly was originally conceived and set up in 1865 by Daniel Nicholas Thévenon, who was a French wine merchant. He had to flee France due to bankruptcy, arriving in Britain in 1863 with his wife, Célestine, and just five pounds in cash. He changed his name to Daniel Nicols and under his management - and later that of his wife - the Café Royal flourished and was considered at one point to have the greatest wine cellar in the world. By the 1890s the Café Royal had become the place to see and be seen at. It remained as such into the Twenty-First Century when it finally closed its doors in 2008. Renovated over the subsequent four years, the Café Royal reopened as a luxury five star hotel.

 

**************The idiom “richer than Croesus” means very wealthy. This term alludes to Croesus, the legendary King of Lydia and supposedly the richest man on earth. The simile was first recorded in English in 1577.

 

**************The expression “One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy” is attributed to Aristotle (384 – 322 BC).

 

Cluttered with photographs and furnishings, Lady Sadie’s bonheur de jour is different from what you might think, for it is made up entirely of 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures from my collection.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

The Chetwynd’s framed family photos seen on the desk and hanging on the walls are all real photos, produced to high standards in 1:12 size on photographic paper by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire. The frames are almost all from Melody Jane’s Dollhouse Suppliers in the United Kingdom and are made of metal with glass in each. The largest frame on the right-hand side of the desk is actually a sterling silver miniature frame. It was made in Birmingham in 1908 and is hallmarked on the back of the frame. It has a red leather backing.

 

The remaining unframed photographs and photograph album on Lady Sadie’s desk are a 1:12 size miniatures made by the British miniature artisan Ken Blythe. Ken Blythe is known for his miniature books. Most of the books crated by him that I own may be opened to reveal authentic printed interiors. In some cases, you can even read the words, depending upon the size of the print! I have quite a large representation of Ken Blythe’s work in my collection. What might amaze you even more is that all Ken Blythe’s opening books are authentically replicated 1:12 scale miniatures of real volumes. The photo album, although closed, contains pages of photos in old fashioned Victorian style floral frames on every page, just like a real Victorian photo album. Not only did Ken Blythe create books, he also created other 1:12 miniatures with paper and that includes the photographs. To create something so authentic to the original in such detail and so clearly, really does make this a miniature artisan piece. He also made the packets of seeds, which once again are copies of real packets of Webbs seeds and the envelopes sitting in the rack to the left of the desk. Ken Blythe’s work is highly sought after by miniaturists around the world today and command high prices at auction for such tiny pieces, particularly now that he is no longer alive. I was fortunate enough to acquire pieces from Ken Blythe prior to his death about four years ago, as well as through his estate via his daughter and son-in-law. His legacy will live on with me and in my photography which I hope will please his daughter. I hope that you enjoy this peek at just two of hundreds of his books that I own, and that it makes you smile with its sheer whimsy!

 

The vase of primroses in the middle of the desk is a delicate 1:12 artisan porcelain miniature made and painted by hand by Ann Dalton.

 

The desk and its matching chair is a Salon Reine design, hand painted and copied from an Eighteenth Century design, made by Bespaq. All the drawers open and it has a lidded rack at either end. Bespaq is a high-end miniature furniture maker with high attention to detail and quality.

 

The wallpaper is a copy of an Eighteenth Century blossom pattern.

*

I talk to him when I'm lonesome like; and I'm sure he understands. When he looks at me so attentively, and gently licks my hands; then he rubs his nose on my tailored clothes, but I never say naught thereat. For the good Lord knows I can buy more clothes, but never a friend like that

 

~W. Dayton Wedgefarth

 

The light was lovely and Waylon is a great model:-)

 

Taking a bit of a break - will be back 1st week in August:-)

A photo of my son pitching on his little league baseball team. He doesn't like posing for the camera, so I love it when I can get a good photo of him on the field!

20190620-BP4A2592

Not quite sure How I managed to get dragged into this but my husband borrowed a socket set from one of the electrcians at work. He forgot to give it back for 3 days & was told his penence was 1/2 dozen cupcakes.

Here they are. Earthed of course.

 

These cupcakes for him can be adapted designed & made to suit any trade.

I should do welder cakes next for my husband!!

OoooooooooooH, for more hours in the day!! LOL !

 

New website

www.webscreative.com.au/mossycupcakes/

 

(Photo LRP)

 

A bigger version of the previous photo, stitched together from 6 individual photos.

[Intro]

She fucked him

She fucked her

Why the fuck did she not fuck me?

Is it because I'm too ugly?

Maybe I'm too fat

Maybe she's not into black guys

With big cocks

Wait. What am I saying.

We're in the third grade

I don't have a big cock

Haven't even had an erection

But she made them

Get harder than Hart

Get it?

Kevin Hart?

Get Hard?

No well okay then

 

[Hook]

Third Grade Slut

She did it in the butt

Didn't wanna get pregnant

But she did.

That fucking slut

 

[Verse 1]

She fucked him

She fucked her

Why the fuck did she not fuck me?

I'm fucking pissed

Mother fucking shit.

I want her to taste my dick

Eat that shit like a slim Jim stick

Lick her cunt like a big dog

Fuck that face like a big dog?

Couldn't find nothing to rhyme that made sense

Shit can find anything that rhyme with sense

Nice little titties that haven't even formed

Cause she's only 8 and so am I

But she fucks guy that are over 25

I don't know why

I have not been fucked yet

The teacher even tried to help me fuck that

 

[Hook]

Third Grade Slut

She did it in the butt

Didn't wanna get pregnant

But she did.

That fucking slut

 

[Verse 2]

Tryna expose her clit like Berlin

Eat her ass like it's din din

Take a trip to an island

And fuck her silly with my hand

Man I'm getting hella litty

Suck on the nipple and titty

Oh wait oh no hold up girl

Shit I think I'm finna twirl

Around to that asshole

Fuck that shit till it's raw

Pull out and see my dick is gone!

Oh no!

Damn it!

My dick fell off

Into her asshole

What the fuck do I do

Man I'm such a fucking shoe

Shit shit shit shit

Welp at least got to taste the clit

Of the

 

[Hook]

Third Grade Slut

We did it in the butt

Didn't wanna get pregnant

But she did.

That fucking slut

 

[Verse 3]

This song is getting pretty long so Im gonna end it here

Losing my dick in an anus is actually one of my biggest fears

You know what I'll stop now and let you people go

Never mess with a girl who's clearly a slut ass ho

If you don't like my music.....Then kiss the tip

Fuck you you piece of shit

 

[Hook]

Third Grade Slut

She did it in the butt

Didn't wanna get pregnant

But she did.

That fucking slut

Third Grade Slut

We did it in the butt

Didn't wanna get pregnant

But she did.

That fucking slut

Muahahahah! That's the evil skeleton laugh I make whenever I bounce this ONE DOLLAR guy around (he's hung on an old stretchy telephone wire, which makes him extra bouncy).

 

hanging.

cape, skeleton, skeleton dude, top hat.

triptych.

 

upstairs, Clint and Carolyn's house, Alexandria, Virginia.

 

May 9, 2015.

  

... Read my blog at ClintJCL at wordpress.com

... Read Carolyn's blog at CarolynCASL at wordpress.com

 

... Read my yard sale-related blogposts at clintjcl dot wordpress dot com/category/yard-sales/

  

BACKSTORY:

 

BACKSTORY: Got up around 8:15AM, made it out driving by 8:44AM, and went out until ~12:45PM, for a total of 4 hours. Spent $33.35 plus ~$8.37 gas for 47.1 miles of driving (16.4 mpg @ $2.94/G), for a total cost of $41.72. We drove to 59 yard sales, stopping at 23 (39%) of them. We made 24 purchases (27 items) for a total estimated value of $235.08, leading to a profit/savings of $193.36. So in essence, we multiplied our $41.72 investment by 5.63X. (Also, if you think about it, the profit counts for even more when you consider that we have to earn $~220 on the job, pre-tax, in order to take home the $193 in cash that we saved. How long does $220 of disposable income take to earn, vs the 4 hrs we spent here?) Anyway, this works out to a *post-tax* "wage" of $48.25/hr as a couple or $24.13/hr per person.

 

THE TAKE:

  

$10.00: amp, Peavey Blazer 158, 14.5x13.5x8.5", serial # S0586802, Mfg loc-637092-001, 00449040/aef25 (EV:$±39.99±)

 

$6.00: shelves (2), white, 24.125x11.625x11.562 (EV:$10.99)

 

$6.00: game, Croquet Golf, Wham-O (EV:$14.95)

 

$3.00: game, Telestrations, 12 player party pack (EV:$27.97)

 

$2.00: Brita filter, green (EV:$22.00)

 

$1.00: cable (2), micro usb (EV:$0.74 ea)

 

$1.00: shower grip handle, As Seen On TV, suction mount (EV:$10.30±)

 

$1.00: book, ±Soul Calibur± 2 fighter's guide (EV:$14.99 price tag)

 

$1.00: Pin Point Impression Toy Needle Art Frame, 5x4x3 (EV:$±14.99±)

 

$1.00: Phantom skull, 15.5",shoulder width of 5", cape width 10, head width 1.7, hat 2.25" high (EV:$17.00)

 

$0.25: toy, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Donatello, Burger King, 2003, 2.25x2.5", 2 joints, windable, arms wind and he goes forward and flips with his arms (EV:$±2.00±)

 

$0.25: toy, ±Simpsons±, Zombie Skinner, Spooky Light-Up, Burger King, 2001, 3.7x1.7", 2 joints, missing base and light-up tombstone that says "School's Out -- Forever" (EV:$2.25), but that was never removed from package, and has all the parts.

 

$0.25: toy, Pokemon, Pikachu, Burger King, 2008, 2x2.3"x1.7 (EV:$±1.53±)

 

$0.25: toy, Rugrats, Chuckie, Burger King, 1998, 2.75x1.25", windable, bounces on a rabbit (EV:$±0.99±)

 

$0.25: cable (2), 1 mini usb, and 1 is some weird connector (EV:$±1.02±)

 

$0.10: cloth, polyester cleaning mitt, pink, ±Japanese± packaging (EV:$1.00 because we saw something very similar at the Dollar Store afterwards)

 

$0.10: spray paint, blue, interior/exterior, 10 oz bottole with ~10% left in it (EV:$±0.12±)

 

$FREE: ±camping± pads, Ridgerest (2 split in half), 20x17 (EV:$11.96)

 

$FREE: light, clip lamp, clip part is broken. (EV:$6.75)

 

$FREE: cube, 15"±^3, Ikea, wood frame with padded cloth cover, made in Romania, RN# 67490, ID: LL11 30633, REG#: VA11765(RO) (EV:$±8.81 (8 EUR)±)

 

$FREE: artwork, Ferjo, Art focus Auctioneers of Fine Art, Perry Art Gallery 199627x19", art itself 16x16 (EV:$5)

 

$FREE: snow shovel, 46x14", plastic (EV:$±5.99±)

 

$FREE: rake, plastic tongs, 67x30", US Patents 3,724,188 (EV:$8.99±)

 

$FREE: conditioner, Bath & Body Works, Rainkissed Leaves, 1 fl oz, (EV:$±2.99±)

This poor cormorant thought there was enough room, on the rock, for him. Wrong!

5/14/10 I attended Gadsden's Relay For Life. Very moving as I walked around with my husband who is a cancer surviver of nearly five years. If you have time, please look at all the wonderful people from Doctor's Care in Gadsden who allowed us to visit their booth

Him & Her series 241009 -04

Mallard drake (Anas platyrhynchos), alog, Teal Pond, Thomson Marsh, Kelowna, BC.