Cowes Becomes Yachting's Capital – the Squadron's Early Years

We left an informal grouping of yacht-owning aristocrats at the end of the last chapter who had agreed to meet twice a year, once in London and once in Cowes. Two questions merit answering. Firstly, why meet at Cowes, and, secondly, how did this informal group become the most prestigious yacht club in the United Kingdom, if not the world? In the final section, I will examine the America's Cup, first raced for in 1851, and its subsequent history.

I described in Chapter 3 how, during the second half of the eighteenth century, inland spa towns had gradually lost favour to seaside resorts, as doctors began lauding the merits of seawater, seawater bathing and sea air. Besides, inland resorts were becoming ‘invaded’ by members of the ‘lower classes’, seeking to join in the promenades, the dances and the meetings. Royalty and the Aristocracy moved their socialising away from the inland spas to coastal spas.

Already, before the turn of the century, grand properties were being built along the Solent Coast around Cowes and along the Medina River. The swelling of its summer population was reported on by the Hampshire Courier and the Hampshire Telegraph, ‘two papers which may be regarded as the archives for the first period of English yachting, of the fine company which gave an increasing prosperity to Cowes before the nineteenth century had run into its teens’.

Travel to the Island was improved by the introduction of the paddle steamer, Prince Cobourgh, on the Southampton–Cowes run from 1820.

From the late 1960s until the late 1990s, power industries in Africa were most often national monopolies in charge of providing a public electricity service (Girod & Percebois 1998, p. 22). The three segments of electricity service delivery – production/generation, transport/transmission, and distribution – were vertically integrated, with supervision and regulation supported by public ministries or quasi-independent regulatory agencies. The rationale for this arrangement stemmed from the belief that public utilities had to support national development and the cohesion of society through the distribution of an important public good – electricity (1998, pp. 22–3). A fall in sales of electricity during the 1980s following economic decay in sub-Saharan Africa, however, left most utilities unable to expand or provide consistent service and unable to maintain equipment and infrastructure. The fallout from this era carried forward into the 2000s with large system losses in many countries due to technical problems and poor quality infrastructure. A great deal of blame for electricity sector problems can be attributed to dismal economic conditions and financial constraints, but problems were also frequently attributed to the quality of administrative oversight of the sectors.

Beginning in the 1980s, private sector proponents argued that public utilities in Africa lacked internal motivation, had little management autonomy, and were vulnerable to political interference (Girod & Percebois 1998; Yi-chong 2006). It was also argued that public utilities were not motivated to look for greater efficiency; were able to transfer costs resulting from poor management to the national pocketbook; and were able to finance investments using other government funds (Girod & Percebois 1998, p. 24). This situation prompted calls for restructuring, reorganization and the general reform of electricity sectors to improve and increase service delivery (Davidson & Sokona 2001; ESMAP 2000; Girod & Percebois 1998; Turkson & Wohlgemuth 2001; UNCHS 2001; Wereko-Brobby 1993); it also led to the promotion and creation of new organizations and institutional incentives that would promote substantial investment in, and expansion of, electricity infrastructure (UNCHS 2001, p. 143), while at the same time reducing political interference in the management of the sector.

The World Bank's promotion of electricity sector reform was central in the 1990s and early 2000s: it was ‘the main architect of energy sector reform and liberalization’ in developing countries (Vedavalli 2007, p. 78).

Long before the complex worlds of the Polifemo or Soledades came into being, Góngora displayed a certain precocious ‘alejamiento no-conformista’ in his satirical letrillas that would prove to be the seed of a centuries-long controversy. The neologisms, warped syntax, dazzling surface phenomena and many of the processes that would become intrinsic to gongorine style germinated from the young Góngora's fascination with the precariousness of signs, with the tenuous relation between word and world. For Góngora in these ludic and occasionally vulgar letrillas, the space between signifier and signified is where play is king, where, amid the disguises and misdirections, truths reside. As Robert M. Ford points out, ‘[q]uizá se podría ver en Góngora algo del espíritu carnavalesco del mundo al revés en el cual participa el poeta mismo’, a world whose at once simple and clever humour gives the lie to its intricacies and importance, its gravity. In these early works, Góngora sets about shredding the linguistic veil that covers over the disjunction between official, authoritative, privileged signifiers, and the static meaning that they desire but that eludes them. These ‘códigos degradados’ are representational failures that facilitate the performativity of the poetic voice as other or outside of the convention it deconstructs, a skill that develops and intensifies throughout Góngora's poetic career. There are in the letrillas glimpses of his periphrastic investigation into the processes of the universe and our complex understanding of them: we have ‘leño’ for fire, and ‘piedra’ for death, silence – simple execution of profound thought.

Post-letrillas, Góngora moves away from the Horatian or Juvenalian model of social satire, choosing instead to confront the mythology of writing and the writing of mythology. Parody of mythology for Góngora embodies ‘the desire for destruction, change and becoming, may be the expression of overflowing power, pregnant with futurity’, although this process is tentative at first. Robert Ball places ‘Arrojóse el mancebito’ on the fringes of Góngora's primary imitative phase (1580–1600) and ‘Aunque entiendo poco griego’ in the second, transitional phase (1600–11). It is during this time that the poet thrives on the performative jollity of the picaresque poet-jester, poking holes in the social fabric, sometimes with sharp and clever wordplay, sometimes with the brute force of deflationary humour.

THE best-known narrative of the Charlemagne tradition in the whole of Europe was undoubtedly the material connected with the defeat at Roncevaux, the only defeat the historical Charlemagne suffered during his illustrious career. The chanson de geste celebrating the heroic defence of Roland and his companions and the revenge executed by the emperor has dominated critical study of the genre and, since the nineteenth century, has enjoyed particular acclaim as a kind of ‘national’ epic in France itself, appropriated in the early years of modern criticism for a political agenda related to tensions within Europe and specifically between France and Germany. Such political appropriation of this material was not new in the nineteenth century, as we shall demonstrate in this chapter. While there was undoubtedly an older oral tradition relating these events, the oldest extant written version of the chanson de geste is an insular one. The narrative, as noted above in our discussion of the insular reception of the genre, is found in two main strands derived from the chanson de geste and from the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle, itself an early appropriation of the Roland material, where it is given a particularly religious import and semi-hagiographic tone.

La Chanson de Roland

The best known of the all the chansons de geste is often referred to as the Chanson de Roland, the Song of Roland, although it might be more accurate to think in terms of a number of Chansons de Roland. The fundamentals of the narrative in all versions are the same: Charlemagne has been in Spain for seven years and conquered the whole land except Saragossa, which is ruled by the Saracen Marsile, who sends a false message of submission; Charlemagne consequently begins to return to France, leaving his nephew, Roland, in charge of the rearguard. However, Roland's stepfather, Ganelon, has betrayed them and the rearguard is attacked by a large force, in two waves; only when almost everyone has died does Roland blow his horn to alert Charlemagne, who returns, finds the rearguard destroyed, and avenges his nephew's death, defeating first Marsile's army and then that of Marsile's overlord, Baligant.

REINER KUNZE's three-line, twelve-word poem “Selbstmord” (Suicide) was composed in 1971, the year that Erich Honecker gave his “No Taboos” speech, and the poem was published in 1972, the year that Ulrich Plenzdorf first published Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. Kunze's poem compares suicide to a door, states that it is the last door, but then counters that no one has ever knocked on all of the other doors. On the surface, it is an inspirational poem concerned with suicide prevention. At first glance, it concretizes suicide as a “way out” and then gives the hope that there is another, less violent way out. Implicit in this reading of the poem is also the idea that no one should ever reach for the door of suicide, an idea that may strike some as condescending and moralistic. Jean Améry, for example, deplored both psychological and sociological approaches to suicide, because they take the volition away from the person who commits suicide. Michel Foucault, furthermore, defends one's right to take one's own life. In other words: Who is Reiner Kunze to say that there are always other open doors? Such a debate, however, is about real, historical suicides. But such readings are not the only possible ones. After all, this is a poem.

Read somewhat differently, Kunze's poem provides an appropriate image for this study. The poem does not indicate where the door of suicide leads, nor does it indicate whether it is an exit, as most readers might assume, or whether it might be an entrance. Each door has two sides. For the study of GDR literature, fictional suicides are not only a way out but also a way in. The poem indicates, furthermore, that there are a myriad of such doors. Fictional suicides allow the scholar, as well as the writer and the reader, to enter into issues of memory and transtextuality in the GDR, as much as transtextuality provides a way into the idea of suicide. Suicide is one of many doors into GDR literature, but it is one that has, until now, remained largely shut.

This study has opened a door into suicide in GDR literature, but it has not knocked on all possible doors of suicide in GDR literature. There is no shortage of such texts. There are also GDR films that deal with suicide.

This study has attempted to pose, and answer, new questions regarding the literary relationship between Luis de Góngora and Lope de Vega, particularly in the twilight of their respective careers. Neither of these poets turned to parody without precedent. That they did turn to parody, however, after their greatest career successes and at the end of their lives, establishes a correlation between lateness, decline, mastery and humour. These texts show an awareness of kairos in the midst of the endless and shapeless chronos, a moment of truth, of reflection; an event that must not simply continue on in the predictable rhythm of masterful creation followed by inevitable decline. Parody after (and incorporating) mastery is shown by Lope and Góngora (and possibly by other artists such as Beethoven or Verdi) to be aware of its terminal position and, as such, both accepts and humorously defies the final tock of the clock. The processes and paradoxes of parody allow these poets to mythologise their own poetry, incorporating the past while simultaneously looking forward to the next leap in poetic progress, even if they are not there personally to experience it. The legacy of Lope's and Góngora's counter-conventional paradigm is the subject of another study, but whatever course lyric poetry might take, it begins at the kairotic moment of parody.

In this book I have attempted to read La fábula de Píramo y Tisbe and the Burguillos anthology in a way that allows a paradigm of late style to emerge, rather than imposing any preconceived theory upon the texts. This study has demonstrated the developmental and parallel intertextual, self-reflexive devices employed by both poets: their metaphors and multiplications of meanings, their challenges of and deference to poetic authorities of the past, and their appreciation of the absurd. What we can glean from the analyses is that, to a large extent, Lope and Góngora use the same methods ‒ regardless of style ‒ in order to renew, to pay homage and to acknowledge the limits of art. Contrary to the standard critical view of these poets as opposites with dissimilar motives, I have illustrated through this evaluation of late style and parody that Góngora and Lope share in a poetics of solidarity.

WHILE THIS STUDY IS primarily about fictional suicides and the crisis of literary heritage beginning with Honecker's “No Taboos” Speech in 1971, this first chapter briefly outlines the representations of suicide in East German literature before 1971. In a sense, this chapter is a summary of a book that I did not write but could have written had this study been a two-volume set. In short, the fictional suicides in East German literature before the 1970s do not primarily struggle with literary heritage, as those of the 1970s and 1980s do. Further, they tend not to be central to the work in which they appear, and some of them are not clear cases of suicide. Working more or less chronologically, I subdivide the fictional suicides in East German literature of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s into four sections: antifascist suicides, workers’ suicides, hints of suicide in the works of Christa Wolf before Kein Ort. Nirgends, and one cleverly literary suicide in Rolf Schneider's 1968 short story “Imagination.”

This progression from antifascist suicides to workers’ suicides through Wolf's works of the 1960s and Schneider's “Imagination,” leading toward the caesura of the early 1970s, also moves by and large from fictional suicides as relatively realistic representations of society (although they were never quite that simple) to fictional suicides that are many steps removed from being mere reflections of society. This chapter, then, recounts the prehistory of the story I tell beginning in chapter 2. While chapters 2–6 offer analysis of transtextual relationships and their relations to representations of suicide, this chapter is a relatively straightforward literary historical overview of suicide in East German literature in the 1940s, 1950, and 1960s. I should add the disclaimer that fictional suicides can be difficult to identify as such. I make no promise that I have included all fictional suicides in GDR literature.

Antifascist Suicides

While most of the fictional suicides described in this book are not primarily realistic representations of real suicides, some of the fictional antifascist suicides—suicides related in some way to the horrors of fascism, the portrayal of which is antifascist, regardless of whether the character who kills himself is fascist or antifascist—may to some degree be inspired by real suicides that took place in the context of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The Government of Uganda and the World Bank's commitment to the Bujagali project did not wane. In April 2007, the World Bank Group approved US$360 million in loans and guarantees for the project (Bujagali II) – $130 million in loans to Bujagali Energy Ltd (BEL) from the International Finance Corporation; a Partial Risk Guarantee of up to $115 million from the International Development Association; and an investment guarantee of up to $115 million from the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency. Financial support for the project also came from the African Development Bank ($110 million) along with the European Investment Bank and the German Bank for Development. The new total estimated cost of the project was US$799 million. Up almost US$300 million from the original project cost, Ministry of Energy sources reported that the increased cost was a result of higher prices for oil, cement, steel, iron and consultancy services (Mugirya 2007).

The second Bujagali project (Bujagali II) did not go without controversy, however. The National Association of Professional Environmentalists (NAPE) continued to voice concerns about the project. Their major anxieties remained the cost of the project, the expected rise in future electricity tariffs, and hydrological concerns surrounding drought and climate, fisheries and protected land. Moreover, NAPE continued to take its concerns to the World Bank and other project financiers. Senior Bank officials responded to these concerns openly and directly. Michel Wormser, World Bank Sector Director for Sustainable Development, Africa Region, stated: ‘The World Bank Management remains committed to the successful implementation of this project including the appropriate application of relevant environmental and social safeguards … The project is critical to Uganda's economic development and we will continue to work with the Government to ensure that this project meets high standards’ (Kasita 2007). In the same interview with Ugandan media, Wormser said: ‘The project's approval reflected a shared view by management and the board of the critical importance of providing a new source of electricity expeditiously to Uganda and confidence that thorough economic, environmental and social due diligence has been undertaken to identify and realise that source’ (ibid). As one indicator that the Bank learned from some of the transparency problems encountered in its support for the dam, it created a comprehensive website solely dedicated to the project.

ON JUNE 9, 1978, THE SOVIET AMBASSADOR to the GDR, Pjotr Andrejevich Abrassimov, and his Bulgarian counterpart showed up at the home of none other than Erich Honecker to protest the appearance of Werner Heiduczek's novel Tod am Meer in December of 1977. Although censorship was rampant in the GDR, appeals for censorship made directly in the residence of the First Secretary of the SED were rare. What is it about this novel that Abrassimov found so subversive? In his official statement, Abrassimov cites the portrayal of Soviet soldiers as “ungehobelte Grobiane, als brutale Leute und Ignoranten” (crude brutes, as brutal people and ignoramuses). He goes on to cite passages in which Soviet soldiers rape German women and otherwise insult the German people. And he reports an absence of the atrocities committed by German Fascists in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Indeed, as Carsten Wurm indicates, the novel was barely approved by the censors, and was likely approved as a result of the censors being hesitant to cause another stir in the immediate wake of the Biermann affair, the massive response to which had created a real political crisis. As Michael Hametner states, the novel was, for many readers “ein Kultbuch—für die Zensur in der DDR ein Ärgernis” (a cult book—a nuisance for the GDR censors). Abrassimov's visit to the Honecker residence had consequences. The novel was banned and not rereleased until 1987 in the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika. From Abrassimov's appeal to Honecker in 1978 until the collapse of the GDR, Heiduczek published only children's literature.

While Abrassimov's observations of the novel's offensiveness are accurate, Tod am Meer is also subversive in its rewriting of Thomas Mann's Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice), Mann being an otherwise accepted writer in the Lukácsian realist paradigm that was favored by GDR cultural authorities. Much is subversive in the novel's relationship to Mann's novella. One could point to the fact that the novel's main character, Jablonski, kills himself rather than having to return to the so-called workers’ and peasants’ paradise on German soil. In addition, the novel is subversive in its constant hinting that the Stalinist system is itself self-destructive. These three points: the rewriting of Mann; Jablonski's self-destruction; and the representation of the Stalinist system as self-destructive are, furthermore, interconnected.

In Ethiopia the more things change the more they look the same. This was particularly true in regard to the politics of agricultural development and the rules and regulations governing access to farming land, which continued to evolve along previously existing lines after the demise of the Derg and the rise to power of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in May 1991. Like its predecessor, EPRDF was unrelenting in its efforts to renew and consolidate the state's grip on agricultural land and farming populations. Likewise, EPRDF's interest in making agricultural development a state monopoly and an avowedly techno-scientific enterprise had its origins in the previous half century. While these continuities are important, the period after May 1991 witnessed also the grafting of new rules and practices that had farreaching implications in the way farming populations organized places, production and exchange at the local level. For example, the impact that the renewed liberalization of the food market and the growing availability of modern inputs and extension services have had on the evolution of Ethiopia's smallholder agriculture in the last two decades and a half has been considerable. A relatively new development in Ethiopia after 2005 pertained to the expansion of medium- to large-scale commercial farming on a hitherto unprecedented scale. This chapter situates these developments in the social space of the lake region, so as to understand the relatively new direction that agrarian politics, together with agricultural and environmental change and transformation, have taken in Ethiopia since May 1991.

OLD IDEAS, NEW TIMES

If revolutions are products of ideas, the ideas that produced Ethiopia's second revolution in May 1991, also had their origin in the student movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. In addition, this revolution, like the one that preceded it, was led by a group of politicians that had subscribed to the teachings of Marx, Lenin and Mao at some point in their relatively long political careers. Specifically, the influence that the writings and deeds of the noted Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha had on the shaping of some of the ideas and policies of EPRDF's long-time leader the late Meles Zenawi (r. 1991-2012) was profound. Furthermore, Meles seems to have tapped into the literature that Italian colonial officials and intellectuals had produced on Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa over half a century before.

THE narrative of the chanson de geste Fierabras, in continental and Anglo-Norman versions, is focused on the recovery of relics of the Passion, stolen by the Saracen emir Balan from Rome when his army sacked the imperial city. The infidel attack on the Holy City itself, though only referred to briefly in the extant Fierabras, is the cataclysmic event which triggers the whole action. The conflict between the Christian leader Charlemagne and the Saracen emir Balan is prefigured by a single combat between Fierabras and Oliver, which contains echoes of Roland and Vernagu's conflict in the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle and of Charlemagne and Baligant's fight in the Chanson de Roland. Such ‘trials by combat’ were something of a rhetorical set piece in the chanson de geste and, as we have noted, a significant narrative meme in all the insular Charlemagne texts. In Fierabras the emir's son, Fierabras, challenges the French and Oliver responds; they engage in a single combat which represents the wider battle between Saracen and Christian. Oliver vanquishes Fierabras, who is converted to Christianity. However, before Oliver can get back to safety, he is captured by the Saracen army and, in company with others from among the peers, is taken to Balan's stronghold of Aigremore. Charlemagne sends the remaining peers with a threatening message demanding the release of the prisoners and the return of the relics. Instead, all the peers are taken prisoner by Balan, but then released by Balan's daughter, Floripas. The peers take over Aigremore, evicting the Saracens before being themselves besieged therein. After various adventures and sorties they are able to send a message to Charlemagne, who comes to their rescue and defeats Balan in a combat which is based on the ideological assumptions that ‘right is might’ and that the representative of God will always win. The narrative ends with the baptism of Floripas and her marriage to Gui de Bourgogne and the distribution of the relics to various churches in France; a coda looks forward briefly to the events of La Chanson de Roland.

Fierabras texts can be divided into two traditions: the Vulgate tradition, also named by Marc Le Person, the most recent editor of the continental chanson de geste, the ‘version longue’, and the non-Vulgate or abbreviating tradition, the ‘version courte’ according to Le Person's classification.

Dating the beginning of the sailing narrative is inherently problematic since people have sailed for pleasure since there were boats to sail, so a fisherman, the captain of a commercial vessel, or a harbour pilot might well sail for pleasure on high days or holidays, and they had no reason to record their experiences in a permanent form.

Leisure use of yachts is recorded from ancient times. W. M. Nixon goes back to 600 BC and the Roman poet Catullus, ‘proud owner of a 30ft seagoing yacht, planked in pitch-pine on oak frames … with a somewhat cumbersome lug-sail’, he sailed from his home water of the Adriatic to Greek ports, and ‘on his most ambitious cruise, of all, the Black Sea’.

An early example of the use of yachts for royal leisure is shown by Harold, king of Norway, presenting a ‘king's ship’ to the English king, Athelstan (924–939); and King Edgar (944–975) enjoyed ‘sommer progreses and [his] yerely chiefe pastimes were the sailing round about this whole isle of Albion’. ‘When King Robert Bruce of Scotland lived in his castle at Cardross near Dumbarton “his chief amusement was to go upon the river [Clyde] and down to the sea in a ship which he kept for his pleasure. In 1326 six men were paid 2s for crossing in his yacht to Arran.”’

Brian Lavery in The Island Nation tells how ‘A fifteenth century manuscript in the British Library shows three people in a small boat partly covered with an awning, playing musical instruments and drinking from a jar’. I point out the continuous association of sailing and drinking at various points in this book; and also the link with music, and often singing, especially after ‘a few jars’, as seems to have been the case on this occasion.

Representations of the Sea

We need to pay attention to the various ‘meanings’ of the sea, since these inform leisure sailing and define the various types of pleasure and purpose to be gained from it.

La fábula de Píramo y Tisbe (1618) is, in the vein of Góngora's Hero and Leander poems, a ludic expansion of a myth whose classical origins (Ovid's Metamorphoses) and enduring popularity draw our poet like a moth to a flame. The 508 verses of Píramo y Tisbe tell the tale of two young lovers whose only original mode of communication is through a chink in the wall between their adjoining houses, although Góngora invents an African maid (‘fatal carabela’, v. 137) who ferries notes between them. The two agree to meet at the tomb of Ninus; however, a mountain lion, mouth drenched with the blood of a sheep (possibly merino), frightens Tisbe, who runs and hides, dropping her veil in her haste. The lion drinks from the fountain before tearing at the lost veil, thereby giving Pyramus the impression that Tisbe has been mauled. He then runs himself through in despair, at which point Tisbe arrives and decides also to skewer herself on his sword. Góngora's version broaches the gulf between Ovid and the increasingly stale poetics of the many sixteenth-century versions. Similarly to the myth of Hero and Leander, there was no shortage of poetic interpretations of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in contemporary Spain. Several of these works constitute Góngora's parodic (but also emulative) targets, from the Ovide moralisé and Silvestre's La fábula de Píramo y Tisbe (1582) to the Historia de los muy constantes y infelices amores de Píramo y Tisbe (1561) attributed to Jorge de Montemayor and Antonio de Villegas’ Historia de Píramo y Tisbe (1565). The Spanish poetic lineage of Pyramus and Thisbe as catalogued by David Garrison and by Antonio Pérez Lasheras indicates that the tradition of rewriting mythology under the precept of imitatio is generally reflective of the epistemological status quo. Góngora's parodies (I include here his unfinished 1604 poem, ‘De Tisbe y Píramo quiero’) seek to redress the stagnating effect of a centuries-long privileging of imitatio over inventio. In Góngora's case, many of his unsuccessful imitators interpret his obscure language without penetrating its surface meaning, ironically reinstating the privilege of imitatio. Misinterpreting the aesthetic then leads to misinterpretation of the mechanisms by which Góngora constructs, and invites his reader to construct, meaning.

As yachting became increasingly popular among the members of the rapidly expanding middle class with surplus income to spend on leisure, so the composition and structure of yachting and yacht clubs changed, and the Corinthian style of yachting grew. The key factors in this growth were political stability and the creation of a railway network linking the cities to the coast.

Regarding political stability, the working class moved away from radicalism towards cooperation, friendly societies and trade unionism. Abroad, the Navy was establishing a Pax Britannica that lasted from the Crimean War (1853–1856) to the First World War.

With the advent of the railways, ‘the countryside seemed to shrink perceptibly, as the iron rails swiftly formed connections between the cities, linking town and country, city and coast, and bringing together the far extremities of the land’.

Who Were the New Participants in Yachting?

As Ryan has pointed out, yachting expands as the middle class expands, and it was expanding fast. We can distinguish three overlapping but distinct groups.

Firstly, there were those involved in manufacturing or the production of raw materials, such as coal. It was among these new industrialists, the manufacturers and their managers, that new yachtsmen were recruited; and if not from them, because they were too concerned and too anxious about maintaining their new found status and wealth, from their sons.

These men were, very predominantly, based in and around the cities, created by the Industrial Revolution. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Manchester, Salford (the location of Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844), Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle, Hull, Bristol and Glasgow all doubled or trebled their population. New cities grew from towns, created because they were suitable for a particular product or process like Leicester (engineering, joinery, traditional hosiery), Stokeon- Trent (pottery), Cardiff (coal export), Middlesborough and Barrow-in- Furness (ironworks), and Crewe and Swindon (railways).

Adapting the Anglo-Norman Inheritance: Themes and Concerns

THE enhanced emphasis on religious warfare discerned in the insular French-language tradition is decidedly to the fore in the English Charlemagne romances, which often take the opportunity to sharpen the confrontation between two opposed faiths. In the Middle English Song of Roland, for example, Roland's first encounter on the battlefield, where he kills Amaris, is clearly figured as a stereotypical combat between Christian and heathen, by contrast with the French tradition, where the issue at this point is exclusively the honour of France and Charlemagne. In the English version, Amaris challenges Roland as representative both of Charlemagne and of Christianity: ‘wher art thou, Roulond, leder of charles? | thy lay is fals, and also thy lordes’ (655–56). Having felled ‘that fals kinge’, Roland responds: ‘thy soule … to satanas I beteche! | thou shalt neuer greve man þat to god will seche’ (663–64). Similarly, whereas the Egerton Destruction de Rome has the Roman leader Savari encourage his troops with conventional thoughts of their wives and heirs and the fear of shame (245–9), in the Sowdone of Babylone Duke Savaryz's speech focuses instead on the battle as a proxy war between the Christian and Saracen gods:

The earliest of the Middle English adaptations of Otinel, the Auchinleck Otuel, specifically represents the climactic single combat between the converted Otuel and the Saracen Clarel as a trial of strength between their respective deities (1265–70). In fact, the prologues in all three Otuel texts (Otuel, Otuel and Roland, and Roland and Otuel) stress the conflict between heathen and Christian as their central concern, whereas in the French Otinel, in both manuscript versions, the prologue ends with the promise of a hitherto untold adventure of renowned Charlemagne. The English poems promise ‘bolde batailles … Þat was sumtime bitwene | Cristine men & sarrazins kene’ (Otuel, 4–6), tales of the doughty douzeperes ‘Þat wele couthe feghte with a Saraȝene’ (Roland and Otuel, 17), and stories of Roland's achievements defeating infidel opponents (Otuel and Roland, 15–17, 24–5).

The Golden Age of Yachting was not confined to the rich. There was a much larger group, which took up the new sport of dinghy sailing, among whom were a significant number of women sailors.

Lubbock's Bank Holiday Act, 1870, and the release of Saturday afternoons from work, allowed aquatic leisure activities to spread to the lower middle classes during and after the 1870s; and ‘by the turn of the century even the poor came to assume that they had a right to leisure’.

Cruising, in whatever size boat, has always been much more popular than racing. In the San Francisco Call, 22 May, 1904, there is an article on ‘Ladies of High Station Who Love the Sea’. It starts by telling the reader that good women sailors are far more frequent among ‘British sisters’ than among American women. Three outstanding helmswomen are mentioned, but over twenty who enjoy cruising (these being high class ladies, they have crew).

Unfortunately for the historian, it is hard to get a handle on yacht cruising. The tens of thousands who packed a hamper and sailed with friends and/ or family a couple of miles down the river to their favourite picnic spot are unrecorded, and since they had no reason to join a yacht club, even assuming they would have been acceptable, there is even less record of their existence.

To cater for the needs of the cruising man, E. F. Knight, along with Claud Worth and his regular crewman, H. J. Hanson, created the Cruising Association in 1908, to counter the snobbishness and exclusiveness of the Royal Cruising Club. The Association, whose purpose was and is to offer support to the cruising yachtsman created a network of Boatmen, carefully selected and supervised by the Honorary Local Representative, who would go off to meet any incoming vessel flying the Association burgee.

On the Clyde, the Clyde Cruising Club was formed on a November night in 1909, when four young men, standing on the starboard paddle box of the Duchess of Montrose heading for Wemyss Bay (on the mainland) from Rothesay (the Isle of Bute, and a major yachting haven) agreed to set up a club for the cruising man.