Letters

Neal Ascherson writes that Claud Cockburn’s concoction of a story about an anti-Franco revolt at Tetuan in Spanish Morocco did his reputation ‘lasting damage’ (LRB, 24 October). The context for Cockburn’s ‘report’ is that Republican Spain had been subjected to an arms embargo by the UK, the US and France (though on occasion the French government, led by Léon Blum, could be persuaded to turn a blind eye to arms being transported across the Catalan frontier). The Republican army was short of artillery and Cockburn wanted to plant the idea that Franco could lose the war, so invented the story of a mutiny at Tetuan, the seat of Franco’s uprising.

The story was believed by the press, widely published and the French arms embargo was briefly broken. Years later when Cockburn wrote with satisfaction of the event, he was harshly criticised. ‘Black propaganda may be necessary in war,’ the Labour MP Richard Crossman wrote, ‘but most of us … detested what we were doing.’ Cockburn thought such criticism risible. ‘A comfortable ethical position, if you can stop laughing.’

Francis FitzGibbon bids an unsentimental goodbye to the immigration and asylum tribunal on which he sat for many years, and records his ‘disgust that the laws it had to apply were becoming an impediment to justice’ (LRB, 24 October). He instances in particular the statutory requirement that ‘every decision-maker must conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country’ to which to send asylum-seekers. The Starmer government’s decision to scrap the Rwanda scheme means that the courts will have to await a different opportunity to answer the question FitzGibbon’s comment suggests: when is a parliamentary statute not law?

‘An act of Parliament can do no wrong,’ Chief Justice Holt remarked three centuries ago, ‘though it may do several things that look pretty odd.’ He described as ‘far from any extravagancy’ the assertion of Chief Justices Coke and Hobart a century earlier that not even Parliament could make a person judge in his own cause. This door was pushed wider open in 1975 when the law lords had to determine the tax liability of a German Jew who had fled to Britain in 1939 and had been deprived of his German citizenship by a Nazi law of 1941 directed at Jews. At least one of the judges, Lord Cross, was prepared to go this far: ‘To my mind a law of this sort constitutes so grave an infringement of human rights that the courts of this country ought to refuse to recognise it as a law at all.’

Since then a number of senior UK judges have reserved the theoretical possibility of striking down or refusing to implement unconstitutional statutes. While Lord Neuberger, until recently president of the Supreme Court, has hedged his bets (‘Judges cannot decide that a statute is invalid on the ground that it infringes the UK constitution – save possibly in exceptional circumstances’), Lord Steyn, Lady Hale and Lord Hope in 2005 took the opportunity of a challenge to the validity of the Hunting Act 2004 to warn that Parliament’s sovereignty was not unqualified. That case turned in large part on whether the Hunting Act had been passed in procedural conformity with the 1911 Parliament Act. The argument was in itself an undisguised trespass by the judges (unopposed, remarkably, by the attorney general) on the forbidden territory of Parliament’s own procedures. But on the question of parliamentary sovereignty, Lord Steyn’s view was explicit:

The classic account given by Dicey of the doctrine of the supremacy of Parliament, pure and absolute as it was, can now be seen to be out of place in the modern United Kingdom. Nevertheless, the supremacy of Parliament is still the general principle of our constitution. It is a construct of the common law. The judges created this principle. If that is so, it is not unthinkable that circumstances could arise where the courts may have to qualify a principle established on a different hypothesis of constitutionalism. In exceptional circumstances involving an attempt to abolish judicial review or the ordinary role of the courts, the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords or a new Supreme Court may have to consider whether this is a constitutional fundamental which even a sovereign Parliament acting at the behest of a complaisant House of Commons cannot abolish.

Julian Barnes writes about the use of wine or whisky to fortify men going over the top (LRB, 7 November). But it wasn’t only the French army that got pissed in the trenches. Tommy’s rum ration was key to British morale. Those at the sharp end swore by it. Captain Alexander Stewart of the Cameronians was vehement that

the finest thing that ever happened in the trenches was the rum ration, and never was it more needed than on the Somme. Yet some blasted, ignorant fool of a general – damned in this world and the next – wanted to stop it and, for a time, did. The man must be worse than the lowest type of criminal … He should have been taken up to the line and frozen in the mud. I would have very willingly sat on his head, as he was a danger to the whole army. Curse him.

Lieutenant-Colonel J.S.Y. Rogers, medical officer to 4th Black Watch, claimed simply that ‘had it not been for the rum ration I do not think we should have won the war.’

James Butler quotes Willie Thompson, a survivor of the Grenfell Tower fire, saying ‘It’ll happen again. Another Grenfell’s in the post’ (LRB, 10 October). On 22 February 2024 a fire broke out on the eighth floor of a fourteen-storey residential building in Campanar, Valencia. Fanned by winds as strong as 100 km per hour, the building was engulfed in flames within ten minutes and the fire spread to a second building next door. Ten people died, along with 48 dogs and 36 cats. More people and fewer animals would probably have died if the fire had started either later or earlier than 5.30 in the afternoon, when many people were out at work and pets were at home. A number of people ignored the firefighters’ instructions to stay in their flats until they were rescued, and escaped death as a result. The apartment block was faced with aluminium composite panels with a polyethylene core, similar to the materials used at Grenfell Tower. These panels were legal in Spain when installed between 2005 and 2009.

Rosemary Hill writes about the demise of the great department stores (LRB, 26 September). I am old enough to remember the school holiday treat of visiting one of the dual-named ‘high-street titans’: Bourne and Hollingsworth, Marshall and Snelgrove, Debenham and Freebody, Dickins and Jones, Swan and Edgar. All exuded upper-class glamour, demanding best clothes and best behaviour.

Bill Lancaster mentions Jarrolds of Norwich as a stalwart survivor of this style of shopping (Letters, 24 October). Norwich also had Buntings, which lasted almost a hundred years on the corner of St Stephens Street, now the site of Marks and Spencer. My mother-in-law, Edna Seaman, worked there from 1926 until 1941. She was the daughter of a Norfolk farmer, one of seven children, six of whom survived into their nineties. She told me of coming home from school one day, aged fourteen, and finding a suitcase in the hall. She was told it was for her: the following day she was to start a seven-year apprenticeship at Buntings. She worked in every department in turn, and acquired a lifelong appreciation of beautiful things. She also imbibed the unspoken rules of service: deference, politeness and an always smiling face. The assistants lived in dormitories above the shop and worked a six-day week. On Saturday night, after cashing up, she cycled home the thirteen miles to East Dereham with her dirty washing strapped on the back of her bike. The following day, with clean linen, she cycled back to Norwich. Buntings advertised itself as ‘The Store for All’. A classical trio played every day from noon till six in the tearoom. Notwithstanding the draconian hours, she described it as one of the happiest periods of her life.

Rosemary Hill describes the way department stores and women’s consumption of fashion were mediated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through literature, citing works by Zola and Woolf. To me, the most striking mediation of fashion and consumption in the era was through pochoir prints, which rose to prominence in France in the same era.

Pochoir prints were created by layering watercolour and gouache by hand through stencils. Some prints required as many as eighty stencils to achieve a high degree of colour saturation and detail. Magazines such as the Gazette du bon ton, one of the most influential fashion publications of the period, used pochoir to depict a variety of stylised garments, interiors and objects. The magazine also had exclusive contracts with Poiret, Paquin, Doucet, Doeuillet, Chéruit, Redfern and Worth to illustrate their latest designs. Its lavish prints served both as a marketing tool and as vignettes that defined what it was to dress, act and be ‘modern’.

Tom Johnson quotes the early modern mathematicians Robert Recorde and John Wallis, and remarks on Wallis’s invention of the lemniscate symbol to denote infinity (LRB, 24 October). Recorde had a far greater influence on the way we write mathematics: his book The Whetstone of Witte (1557) introduced the = symbol for equality, with the rationale that ‘noe 2 thynges, can be moare equalle’ than a pair of parallel lines. The book is also notable as the first in English to use the modern plus and minus signs. (Recorde also coined the term zenzizenzizenzic to mean an eighth power, which survives today as the solitary entry in the OED with six ‘z’s.)

Tom Shippey doesn’t question the opinion that plague carried off half the West European population during the Black Death (LRB, 7 November). As a microbiologist, I have reservations. And contemporary accounts mislead. John Wyclif claimed that the Black Death had caused the number of students at Oxford to fall from six thousand to three thousand. Hastings Rashdall in his classic history of medieval universities poured cold water on Wyclif, commenting that ‘the medieval mind was prone to exaggeration, especially where figures are concerned. It delighted in good round numbers, and was accustomed to make confident statements entirely without adequate data.’ And when another plague returned, Daniel Defoe wrote of ‘People being more addicted to Prophesies and Astrological Computations, Dreams, and Old Wives’ Tales’. There is nothing new under the sun.

At my local independent bookshop, where selected books are displayed vertically, I noticed recently that many of them had undulating fore-edges. Modern machine-made paper has a grain and paper will flex more readily with the grain. When I was taught bookbinding, the rule was that pages should have a vertical grain. This results in a book with a natural flex when opened. A book made so that the paper grain runs horizontally opens tightly and its pages will lack natural flexibility. Publishers place great emphasis on cover design but seem to ignore elementary binding technique. I can only assume it comes down to the economics of printing the maximum number of pages from a given sheet of paper?