Matt Salusbury

Time Team Dunwich sneak preview - discovery of jug handle causes much excitement

2012-01-25T15:47:00.000-08:00

TIme Team presenter interviews archeologist at Dunwich Maison Dieu dig, with Flora Tea Rooms in the background, June 2011

Channel 4's Time Team, which goes out a week on Sunday (Sunday 5 February 2012) is from the village of Dunwich in Suffolk, formerly England's third biggest city in the Middle Ages before it started falling into the sea.

The excavation, in a very rainy week in June last year, was in the grounds of the ruined Greyfriars Monastery, English Hertiage's most threatened site - thry expect to lose it to the sea in the next 50 years - and in the car park in front of the Flora Tea Rooms at the beach. Locals in the know were puzzled by the choice of Greyfriars, regarded by many as "archeologically barren", with the last dig in the 1990s believed to have dug up everything there still was to dig up. There were last minute doubts as to whether the Greyfriars dig would go ahead at all.

The dig at the Flora Tea Rooms car park site involved a long, thin trench on the edge of the car park up against the recycling bins and one of the last remaining World War Two pill boxes (the sea has already claimed most of these) and a couple of small trenches right outside the Tea Rooms in front of the tables, avoiding where they thought power, water and gas cables would be.

Long thin trench at the Maison Dieu dig, Dunwich

The Flora Tea Rooms dig was looking for signs of Maison Dieu, a charitable hospital run by a religious order to serve the poor of the then city of Dunwich. There's still at tiny Maision Dieu Hill on the beach, the "hill" is now a patch of eroded ground with a fisherman's shed on it, but it's crumbled away so much the shed's not safe to use anymore.

The village Reading Room served as the HQ, with lots of maps. There are plenty of Medieval surveys of Dunwich. It's in the Domesday Book, with a staggering 15 Frenchmen recorded there within two decades of the Norman Conquest, and a King's Commission was despatched in 1287 to discover why the city's considerable tax revenues had suddenly dried up. (A huge storm had blown down a lot of houses and blocked the harbour with shingle, ending the port's commercial viability, it turned out.) Maps from the 16th century onwards record the ruins in detail.

There was much excitement when Time Team (Wessex Archeology Service, who have a commercial arm, and Suffolk Archeology Service) dug up a jug handle from one of the Flora Tea Room trenches, characteristic of a particular style of Provencal pottery.

Of Maison Dieu itself nothing was found, except that fragments of "posh" ceiling tile, floor tile and dressed Caen stone from Normandy - pulled out of the rubble packing the trench. If these were bits of Maison Dieu, they would have been recycled Maision Dieu rubble used as hardcore for the foundations of a later building on the site.

Meanwhile, up at Greyfrairs, an extraordinary amount of time was apparently spent digging to establish and then stake out exactly where the 1990s dig had been, which seemed an extraordinary boring pursuit. The 1990s dig had resulted in resentment locally, because the finds had apparently been locked away in storage in the Ipswich Museum and never seen the light of day. Dunwich has its own museum (my parents are volunteers in the weekend) which recently got a security upgrade for its exhibition of seals on loan from the British Museum, so there was already lobbying for any Time Team finds to go on display in the Dunwich Museum.

Archeologist (seated) prepares for piece to camera about his exciting jug handle find

On the edge of the Greyfriars site, close to the cliffside wall, there were JCB diggers at work and one archeologist was out in the pouring rain passing a metal detector over the piles of earth they'd thrown up. It was the final day of the dig before the clear-up, and it wasn't looking good. The Dunwich defences, mentioned in chronicles that praised the bravery of the men of Dunwich who withstood a siege by the Earl of Leicester in 1173, was eluding the Time Team.

Soon afterwards, though, I heard that in the final phase of the dig, the Team had found the Dunwich defences - much bigger and much older than anyone had thought. The ditch went down almost five meters, which suggests a pallisade or wall of about the same height, and it has Saxon pottery shards at the bottom.
All these were initial findings, as related to me at the time of the dig, or soon afterwards. We'll have to wait 'till Saturday week's Time Team broadcast to learn of their final conclusions.

Lowlands media monitor - Holland's 1 in 13 youth unemployment, extra security for Belgium's rhinos

2012-01-02T03:46:00.000-08:00

I just returned from a short trip to Holland and Flanders (Dutch-speaking Belgium). My visit was mainly to keep up my Dutch language, but also to take a look possibilities for freelancing for the press in those countries, after Amsterdam-based International Features Agency's tip-off that new consumer magazine titles are opening in those countries, and the health of the Press in those countries is not quite as dire as in the UK.

As is often the case while abroad, there are stories in the local press that never make it into the increasingly poorly resourced UK newspapers. Two such stories that particularly caught my interest were:

The Netherlands as of December 2011 had a youth unemployment rate estimated at somewhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 13. A commentator in progressive daily De Volkskrant (literally "the people's paper") attributed this to strict Dutch employment laws, including a "mountain" of paperwork needed to dismiss somebody from a job. So far, the centre-right Christian Democrats haven't been able to dismantle these regulations (they'd like to!) The article ended with a plea for other countries to adopt the Netherlands' successful "polder model" labour market, noting that whenever countries such as the US in particular liberalised their labour laws ostensibly to save the economy, massive unemployment and longer working hours for less money inevitably followed. (The "polder" is the flat, reclaimed land that characterises Holland.)

The article also noted that Dutch people work on average 32 hours a week - the lowest in Europe. My look around the centre of the town of Nijmegen revealed numerous little independent outlets for "funshopping" which would have gone under years ago in the UK. Could it be that the Dutch, with fewer hours at work, simply have moretime to go out and buy stuff, thereby keeping the economy afloat?

I was, however, told by my hosts that another Volkskrant article, a survey of Holland's biggest companies, showed that they were all planning to make massive lay-offs next year, bringing Holland into line with the rest of disastrous Europe.

Meanwhile in Belgium, the Flemish-languageDe Standaard daily newspaper reports that extra security guards are being deployed to stand guard over the rhinos in the country's Plackendael safari park. The already insane international trade in rhino horn as an aphrodisiac used in traditional Chinese medicine has gone absolutely bonkers, with rhino horns fetching five- or even six-figure sums in US dollars. And it's not just living safari park rhinos that have become the target for rhino horn dealers - there has been a surge in items containing rhino horn from antiques shops and stately home collections.

Whistleblowers, defamation, News International surveillance target

2012-01-02T03:27:00.000-08:00

There have been some very interesting guest speakers at NUJ London Freelance Branch of late, here are my meeting reports from The Freelance:

Whistleblowing in the wind - Private Eye's Andrew Bousfield on health service whistleblowers, and Cathy James of Public Concern at Work on the limited legal protection available for those who uncover wrongdoing at work. More... (From The Freelance October 2011)

Libel reform and the public interest - libel lawyer Robert Dougans (he defended Simon Singh against the British Chiropractic Association) and Index on Censorship's Padraig Reidy on the prospects for libel reform, and on famous libel cases from Duke of Brunswick v Weekly Despatch to the "Goodbye Gombeen Man" case. More.... (From The Freelance November 2011, co-authored with Padraig Belton.)

Who rules now? Minny Dowler' family's libel lawyer, News International surveillance target and Leveson Inquiry star witness Mark Lewis on media ethics on the eve of the Leveson Inquiry. Also starring Professor Natalie Fenton of the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy (Goldsmiths, University of London. More... (From the Freelance, December 2011.)

Asahi Shimbun interview on threats to civil liberties post-9/11

2011-10-18T15:59:00.001-07:00

In the run-up to the recent 9/11 anniversary, i was invited to the Holborn offices of Asahi Shimbun, Japan's biggest newspaper, to be interviewed by Sawamura-san, the London bureau chief. It turns out they had me down as an expert on "threats to civil liberties" and wanted to interview me - for over an hour - on threats to civil liberties in the wake of 9/11 in the UK, or whether other factors played a more important role. This was for a planned series of 9/11 anniversary pieces from Asahi Shimbun's various correspondents round the world.

It was a very in-depth interview of the sort they don't do anymore in the UK press, during which it emerged that Japan had had a very nasty post-9/11 civil liberties crackdown all of its own. And they'd already talked to the I'm a Photographer Not a Terrorist people about Section 44 Terrorism Act.

Unfortunately, the Paris and New York bureaus of the paper had "got their features in" ahead of London, so my interview wasn't used - as they'd warned me might be the case. There's a vague chance the interview might live to fight another day as a short section of some future Japanese language-only Asahi feature.

Here Be Dragons - book review

2011-10-18T15:45:00.000-07:00

Here Be Dragons - How the study of anima and plant distribution revolutionised our views of life and Earth, Dennis McCarthy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009, paperback, 221 pages bibliography and index £8.99/ $18.95

This review first appeared in Fortean Times issue 281, November 2011

This celebration of biogeography – the study of the “lopsided distribution” of plants and animals, continents and even empires around the world – begins by pointing out that Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, Albert Russell Wallace and continental drift pioneer Alfred Wegener all did ground-breaking work in biogeography, and then went on to work in other fields and revolutionised all of these as well.

Wegener, it seems, was a bit of an adventurer, like most of the great biogeographers. Wounded in action in World War One, Wegener broke the early 20th century world records for ballooning endurance and longest ice cap crossing, before dying in a Greenland blizzard. His views on continental drift – and those of Alexander Du Toit, who followed Wegener, were an “outsiders’ struggle against convention.” Continental drift was dismissed at the time, by an orthodoxy that instead clung to a theory reliant on “miraculous rafters” who crossed oceans on bits of fallen tree, and of vast piles of yet to be discovered fossils that would one day prove that continents were fixed. The continental drifters were finally vindicated by the discovery in the 1960s of a spreading seafloor that was younger than the continents themselves.

McCarthy – a researcher with the humble Buffalo Museum of Science in upstate New York – writes beautifully and his story is compelling. He comes up with one of my all-time favourite chapter headings, “The Bloody Fall of South America and the Last of the Triassic Beak-headed Reptiles”. This gives a passing mention to the fearsome bison-sized “ratzilla,” the prehistoric guinea pig Jesephoartigisia monesi, which weighed a metric tonne.

Biogeography explains why there are bears and foxes in the Arctic but not the Antarctic, and McCarthy devotes much space to the “terminal Eocene event” that resulted in the “death of nearly all vertebrate life in Antarctica.” Compared the very rapid mass extinction of the pre-glacial Antarctic fauna, the demise of the dinosaurs was a picnic. McCarthy comments that there is “beneath the ice-sheets a continent-wide boneyard,” with the stoic penguins as the only surviving year-round Antarctic vertebrates.

Dragons even has a rare illustration of a just pre-glacial verdant Antarctic landscape populated with emu-like birds, sloths, falcons, possum-type creatures, something resembling a small cat, and a hefty hoofed mammal that look like a cross between a horse and an elephant. Pre-glacial Antarctic fauna is sadly neglected in the mountains of books for the general reader on prehistoric life, so it’s nice to see them getting a look-in.

As for the title, the routine appearance of “Here by Dragons” on ancient maps is itself a myth. The Latin phrase appears on only one known artefact, the Hunt-Lenox Globe, made three years after Columbus, and McCarthy says the phrase could have been used to identify the origin of Komodo dragon rumours.

Dragons reveals that Wallace’s line, the world’s “most famous biotic barrier” separating placental mammals from marsupials, is at its narrowest “a mere 25 miles” (40km). The final chapter on the (lack of) genetic variation among humans suggests the reason why the “genetic range of human beings is astonishingly narrow” is that we are “athletic generalists of the first rank” – most geographical barriers to species crossing can be climbed, swum or rafted over by humans.

It also turns out that all the authentic cuisine of “primeval paradise” Hawaii, and the flowers that make up Hawaiian lei garlands, was introduced to the islands by Polynesians some time after 500AD. Hawaiian pigs originated in Vietnam and its sweet potatoes came from a returning Polynesian expedition to Chile, while Captain James Cook brought the pineapples. Meanwhile, there’s one tree-dwelling skink whose “weirdly wide” distribution – on the far-flung islands of Samoa, Tonga and Futura – reflects the “irregular domain” of the 16th and 17th century Tongan monarchs.

It’s hard to find anything wrong with Dragons. You can probably skip the chapters on fish biogeography, which in an otherwise gripping read gets surprisingly dull at times. The date for the demise of Homo florensis seems a little recent. But such quibbles are insignificant. McCarthy tells us it was the fact that the Galapagos Islands “lacked frogs” that first got Darwin thinking that then prevailing “natural theology” may have had holes in it. The author very convincingly argues that biogeography, a relatively easy concept to grasp, is our best ammunition against current “intelligent design” and Creationist nonsense. And he argues this is a riveting and engaging fashion.

VERDICT: IS BIOGEOGRAPHY IS THE NEW ROCK ‘N’ ROLL?

SCORE - 8/10

© Matt Salusbury 2011

Sell, sell and sell again - syndicating simplified

2011-10-18T15:29:00.000-07:00

This first appeared in The Freelance, August 2011

How can freelances market their work abroad most effectively? Peter Veenhoven and Ole Pijnacker Hordijk, owners of the Amsterdam-based International Features Agency advise on "what works and what doesn't" in syndicating abroad. Read my report here.

Brazil was identified as a particularly interesting market for syndication. Since this talk, the Brazil correspondent of the London-based business-to-business magazine I edit has told me he can't afford to work for us anymore, as the Brazilian real has climbed so much in value against the pound that it's not worth the bother anymore to work for a publication that pays in sterling!

Weird Weekend 2011 video - talk on pygmy elephants of Kerala

2011-09-05T16:34:00.000-07:00

A video of my talk from Weird Weekend 2011 on the pygmy elephants of Kerala, India, is now online here. As I point out early on in the talk, "slightly smaller elephants, possibly" would be a better description. Including questions, the talk's just under an hour long, and features a never-before-seen photo of kallana, the alleged pygmy elephant of Kerala, and the Neyyar-Peppara forest tree-crab.

My talk is opened with a somewhat bewildering introduction by the man in the fez ("Barry Tadcaster", in fact the alter ego of the Centre for Fortean Zoology's Richard Freeman) and his "Orang Pendek" puppet. Such bizarre, non-sequiter introductions are a long-established Weird Weekend tradition. Please don't take Freeman's/Tadcaster's comments about me nicking Robocop's bike from behind the Polytechnic literally!

Conventionally-sized elephants feature on the coat of arms on the State of Kerala, seen here on a Kerala Tourism Ministry sign in Kovalum.

Speaking gig at Weird Weekend 2011 - 20 August

2011-08-16T07:20:00.000-07:00

I am speaking on "the (alleged) pygmy elephants of Kerala" (or more accurately the lack of them) at the Centre for Fortean Zoology's Weird Weekend 2011 in Woolfardishworthly, North Devon. I'm on at 1.15 on Saturday 20 August, assuming the Tarka Line train from Exeter is reliable. A train line named after an otter hardly inspires confidence! The full Weird Weekend programme is here.

The talk will be an account of my now not-so-recent investigations into the alleged "kallana" pygmy elephants of Kerala, India, and a sneak preview of my forthcoming Pygmy Elephants book.

Support the struggle of the interns!

2011-07-27T06:23:00.000-07:00

This first appeared in the Freelance, July 2011

THE NUJ's Cashbacks for Interns campaign, started by London Freelance Branch, was the subject of NUJ London Freelance Branch's June meeting. Our invited star speaker, Keri Hudson, who with the NUJ's help won her back pay for her unpaid work placement at an industrial tribunal, regrettably had to work late at short notice, in her current paid job.

In Keri's absence, Fiona O' Cleirigh, instigator of the Cashback for Interns campaign, said that “If people are working for free, wages go down, there will be only a small pool of talent with money" and urged members to get interns “in union from the start." Read more...

The Star Crossed Stone

2011-07-27T06:16:00.000-07:00

This book review first appeared in Fortean Times 278, August 2011

The Star Crossed Stone – The Secret Life, Myths and History of a Fascinating Fossil

$27.50, Kenneth J. McNamara, University of Chicago Press, hardback, 272 pages plus bibliography, index, footnotes.

Even before they were recognisable humans, back in the days of Homo heidelbergensis and H. erectus, people collected fossil sea urchins, took them with them to places where such fossils didn’t naturally occur, and were buried with them.

The current world record-holder for fossil sea urchins found in a single grave is at least 147 fossil sea urchins, and possibly as many as 200, arranged in a ring around “Maud,” a Neolithic woman unearthed in Dunstable Downs in1887. Roughly contemporary with “Maud” is a specimen of Echinolampus africanus – you guessed it, a fossil species of sea urchin – recovered from the tomb of the architect Kha in ancient Egypt’s Heliopolis, carved with an inscription from around 2000 BCE identifying the fossil as “found in the south part of quarry at Sodpu by Tja-Nefer”. McNamara suggests the quarry (possibly in Sinai, and dedicated to a god associated with several star constellations) could have been known for its “star stones.”

A chronologically more recent sea urchin burial featured one clasped in the cold, dead hand of a Saxon woman buried in Bury St Edmunds. Some French barrows from Neolithic times to the Iron Age seem to have been built around fossil sea urchins and nothing else.

Why? The five-pointed star with a hole in the centre, unique in nature to echinoderms (urchins and starfish,) is the only natural example of so many axis of symmetry. Our ancestors started collecting fossil urchins around the time their brains were first beginning to grasp concepts like symmetry, and making leaps into expressions of abstract ideas and “art”. The fossil sea urchin’s mysterious symmetry may have been humankind’s first-ever sacred geometry.

Urchins were modified by early humans – chipped out to take away the matrix around the star, or drilled to make into pendants or necklaces. Axes and scrapers were made from the very earliest days of tool-making from flint rocks with little fossil urchins embedded in it. These were carefully centred on the tool, and sometimes used as a grip.

Once you’ve revealing the fascinating fact that we’ve been collecting fossil sea urchins since before the dawn of humankind, there’s only so much you can say on the subject. McNamara says it over and over, padded out with too much atmospheric detail. While it’s nice to have some flavour of the conditions in which archaeological discoveries were made, the scene-setting of an imagined cold and frosty morning experienced by an archaeologist in 1911 in the South Downs is too much. As are McNamara’s own reminiscences of a childhood spent collecting Brooke Bond Tea cards.

But just when you want him to get to the point, McNamara shines with a mercifully fast-paced potted history of palaeontology, including proto-fortean martyr Bernard Pallisey, who “took a great delight in thumbing his nose” at the “learned writers of the time.” Pallisey announced that fossils were not the results of the Earth’s “plastic virtue” that was supposed to spontaneously produce simulacra of natural forms, but petrified animals. For his pains he died imprisoned in the Bastille.

Other highlights are epic narratives of complex ancient Egyptian cosmology and the fall and rebirth of the gods of Asgard, and where fossil urchins fit into these belief systems. (To the Vikings, fossil urchins were “thunderstones”.)

McNamara relates how sea urchins increasingly became less an object to accompany the dead on into the afterlife and an amulet of good luck or protection for the living, right up to 1929, when folklorist Herbert Toms photographed the collections of urchins that were then common on windowsills across Sussex.

The bibliography, footnotes and index are excellent.

VERDICT: ENTERTAINING PALAEONTOLOGY/ARCHAEOLOGY CROSSOVER – 7/10

© Matt Salusbury 2011

Counter Terror Expo 2011

2011-06-27T07:40:00.000-07:00

I went to Counter Terror Expo in Olympia in May assuming I’d find all sorts of dodgy goings-on involving the transformation of the policing of legitimate protest into some ludicrously over the top ‘counter-terror’ operation, or something, with an industry to match. (The company that runs Counter Terror Expo, Clarion, also does this year’s DSEi arms fair, hence the protesters outside Counter Terror.) But when I got into Counter Terror to take a look, the event’s title seemed a bit of a con.

I had to look quite hard to find in the exhibition for an example of ‘counter-terror’ tech that could be readily abused to crush civil liberties. I can report that it’s a very bad idea indeed to take your smart 3G phone on a demo. Half your life is on it.

“Mobile phone forensics “ is definitely one to be wary of. If Counter Terror is anything to go by, mobile phone forensics is absolutely huge. There are handheld readers that can get everything off your mobile in a second, or possibly even suck in details if it’s nearby through some Bluetooth-type system. Then there’s the software to store and analyse all the data on your mobile, and don’t forget they can now easily cross-reference it with all the other data they got.

And if you ever doubted the ability of the state to find you using your mobile phone as a beacon, Winkelmann sell detectors of ‘electronic devices.’ They’re designed for finding the triggers to IEDs, but their policing and civil liberties implications are obvious.

I heard secondhand reports that the two black blocs on the March 26 demo had left their smartphones at home and taken their old phones from a few years back, that were essentially just phones with text, and the minimum amount of phone contacts stored on them.

Micro Systemation (MSAB) “the leader in mobile device forensics” was flogging its XRY system - software for data recovery for law enforcement, with the expensive support team as well, of course. And training. The not very clear photo on their literature suggests the kit can read credit cards too, and comes with a briefcase full of different phone adaptors.

Then there’s a whole infant industry of “Voice Biometrics” or “voice-based identification.” As described by its cheerleaders at the Speech Technology Centre, this is “a branch of forensic science called ‘audio forensics is being propagated to process such audio evidences.” Its “based on the theory that voice of each person is as unique as fingerprints or DNA.” So the science behind it is still dodgy, and it’s not legally admissible as evidence in UK courts yet, but no doubt lobbyists are on the case ensuring it will be. Expensive training in voice biometrics is on offer, along with exorbitantly-priced voice database management system.

Although the voice biometrics publicity emphasises “suspects,” there are obvious links to mobile forensics, such as voice messages found on a mobile, etc. No doubt it won’t be long before someone is taking your data off your mobile, copying your voice messages, and doing voice identification on them, and build up databases of voice.

The voice biometrics brochure was pushing an infrastructure of regional and national voice databases , with three human operators each in the regional databases, using software that can handle 10 million operations a day. On the diagram, the “Voice IDs” linked to other stuff like photos. The diagram suggests a lot of voice data will come from mobiles.

Two bomb disposal robots entertain bored punters by delicately picking up small water bottles

Other than some scary stuff at the mobile phone end of the spectrum, Counter Terror turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag of corporate counter-espionage, mercenaries, protecting businesses from organised crime, Torture Garden fetish uniforms complete with gas masks, contemporary Japan panic nuclear biological chemical disaster, and really dreary stuff about the integrity of seals on containers coming to airports. Even demonstrations of unbreakable cases being run over by Land Rovers, and a simulated ‘IED’ area, couldn’t disguise the fact that this was an essentially dull event for people flogging security stuff, who’d gathered under the ‘counter-terror’ title in an attempt to look impossibly sexy and glamorous.

It seems the ‘corporates’ and law enforcement have no faith anymore in the vast infrastructure of CCTV that’s grown up. Many exhibitors sell packages that let you set up your own on-the-spot CCTV network instead for whatever occasion it is. There was one stall-holder selling CCTV systems to schools. Terrorism it ain’t, but selling it at a fair called Counter Terror makes it sound way cooler than it is.

CCTV Image magazine for winter 2011 was being given out. In it, a article says the mythical ‘300’ a day number of time you’re captured on CCTV is more like between 42 and 101 with a mean average of 68, based on known cameras in Cheshire and real journeys people took. (According to a Cheshire Constabulary survey.)

There were items for conventional policing on sale – batons, the people who do the warrant cards and police insignia and so on, but there wasn’t even the pretence that it had anything to do with terrorism. It just sounds more glam than policing and boring security and intelligence-gathering. There’s also the intriguing Metropolitan Life, a rather rubbish magazine for and by London coppers. It had a regular Indian cookery column by ex-cop Rayeesa Asghar-Sandys who now runs a cookery school in Herts. More interestingly, who’s advertising on the back? Divorce lawyers. Russell Jones & Walker have a specialist “Family team” called Divorce 4 Police offering a first appointment free, and 35 per cent off for Police Federation members.

Much of the floor space was devoted to the deeply dull but comparatively very big industry in reinforced fences and bollards. The only slightly exciting variation on the vast number of these was a ‘hostile vehicle protection system’ disguised as a strategically-placed large planter for ornamental shrubs or bench in your corporate forecourt. Someone seems to have convinced everyone that people want to ram trucks into their building. The ‘hostile protection vehicle system’ under its ordinary street furniture disguise has steel pillars going several feet into the ground, and is guaranteed to prang any mythical jihadi truck bombers who’ve taken a strong dislike to your corporation.

In the world of boring corporate security, PAS68planters.co.uk frighten their customers with the thought that “unwelcome visitors try to smash their way into your building with a truck”. They prevent them with “highly effective vehicle barriers” discreetly disguised as a plant pot. Competitor company Marshalls Street Furniture have reinforced planters, bollards and benches that continue underground and also stop speeding trucks in the obligatory dramatic crash test photos.

The sexiest item on display was the BCB International "The Buccaneer” a compressed air cannon that hurled ‘golf balls, nets or whatever you want” at pirates. Steel nets caught up in the propellers will take them out. They deliberately don’t provide ammo. The fact that it’s “not pyrotechnics” means you can bring it into any port no bother. The salesman said golf balls will hole a small launch. ‘Non-lethal’ improvised projectiles could include ice cubes or paintball pellets. They also do self-inflating body armour.

This is more anti-piracy on the high seas (the Red Sea in particular) than anti-terror, but the applications for use by Japanese whalers against Greenpeace are obvious.

Back on the boring end of the spectrum, there’s bespoke insurance for places like Libya and the new buzzword is ‘extraction’ – mercenaries to get your expatriate corporate workforce out of this weeks’ Middle Eastern dictatorship that was regarded as the most stable country in the world until last Tuesday.

Your worst paranoia about faceless militarized robo-cops is true after all!

Some of the wares on display were not so much counter-terror but counter espionage. Some were selling kit for encrypted voice calls on smart phones (Cellcrypt). And never mind the tinfoil hat brigade, corporates were being sold a tinfoil communications tent into which you could disappear safe in the knowledge that no one could get at the data held on those leaky electronic devices.

I didn't have time for any of the Counter Terror talks, but what did strike me from reading their brochures was the
frightening number of academics whoring themselves to the security industry.

Another revelation for me is that the ‘security experts’ of the world all agree that Cameron’s policy of cuts, cuts, cuts is wrong, wrong, wrong. Another freebie being handed out was the Intersec fear and security industry magazine. Its take on the Greek riots identified austerity, specifically youth unemployment, and people taking it out on a young immigrant workforce, as the key security problems in the Eurozone. Spain, they said, with a much bigger youth unemployment rate, had handled the crisis well with job creation programmes.

British security services according to magazine’s article ‘Spreading Disorder’ say Britain is four meals away from anarchy. The EU has to address youth unemployment or “immigrant-related racism” and rioting will spread. The professional cynics of the security industry agree that massive cuts are the worst thing you can do in these circumstances. They also say there’s not much else you can do in response to a security crisis, apart from buying in more of that boring perimeter security (fences and razor-wire) to go around your ministry buildings in response to Europe’s “new wave of anti-government protests”.

Maddest of all was the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators, who have as their logo a cartoon bomb-throwing anarchist.

Surveillance drones-R-us

Olympics organisers tell local Union branch they can't use the words "London Olympics" to describe the subject of their branch meeting

2011-06-06T07:31:00.000-07:00

The London Freelance Branch of the NUJ contacted the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) to request a speaker almost a year ahead of their planned Branch meeting on "reporting the London Olympics", which took place in April 2011.

After some truly bizarre interaction with the various London Olympics bodies, LFB were told they weren't allowed to use the words "London Olympics" to describe their meeting, as the term was copyrighted. (In fact, trademarked. As freelance journalists we know the difference.)

There's a report here on the meeting and the strange story of the Branch's attempts to get a speaker from LOCOG. We also learnt at the meeting that Team USA will be bringing their own food, and their security detail has been in and out of London for the past two years.

Evolution of Island Mammals - book review

2011-06-06T07:15:00.001-07:00

This first appeared in Fortean Times

Evolution of Island Mammals: Adaptation and Extinction of Placental Mammals on Islands

Alexandra van der Geer, George Lyras, John de Vos, Michael Dermitzakis
ISBN: 978-1-4051-9009-1
Hardcover, 496pp
Wiley-Blackwell, 2010

Here's a challenge. Can an enthusiast with only a biology 'O' level deal with a book pitched at zoology or paleontology postgraduates? There comes a point in pursuing fortean interests where you may have to confront literature so technical it leaves you behind. So I approached Evolution of Island Mammals warily, but found it surprisingly easy going. I only had to look up 'parietal' (bits on the side of your skull), while I called in my sister - an osteopath - to explain what "synostotic fusion" is.

That aside, there's a lot of material in here that’s fascinating to the non-specialist. Much of the research is new, or a new assessment of existing material, the result of admirably painstaking work by the Dutch-Greek authorial team who travelled the world’s obscure museum collections measuring and comparing old bones and teeth.

There's a few laughs in here too. Intrepid British lady naturalist Dorothea Bate arrived in Cyprus at the turn of the twentieth century and revealed that the miraculously preserved relics of the "300 marionites," the legendary founding fathers of Cypriot Christianity on display in churches, were in fact the fossilized bones of pygmy hippos. That discovery can’t have been well received locally.

Some of the larger mainland mammals – especially the good swimmers like hippos, elephants and deer – evolved quite quickly into cute miniature island versions. The smallest of the pygmy elephants, at just under a meter high, was proto-Sicily’s Elephas falconeri, the biggest mammal on an island it shared with mice, rabbits and not much else. The authors consider the controversial pygmy human "hobbits" of the Indonesian island of Flores, Homo floresiensis to be a distinct species. A volcanic eruption 17,000 years ago apparently finished off the "hobbits" and Stegadon sondaari, a dwarf relative of the elephants, and may have killed off the island's giants cave rats too.

Island Mammals concludes most of these island dwarf mammals died out before humans arrived, although Majorca’s early humans may have domesticated the 50cm-high Myotragus balaericus, the “mouse goat”.

The same evolutionary forces that produced cute miniature versions of mainland mega-fauna also drove the evolution of scary giant versions of normally cute fluffy little mainland mammals. The Cretan deer Candiacervus major, at 1.65 m at the shoulder, was slightly larger than the Irish elk. Malta has Leithia, a double-sized dormouse, preyed on by outsize owls. Madagascar once had knuckle-dragging ground lemurs, and Sardinia had Megalenydris barbaricia, a flat-tailed otter that was “truly a giant… much larger than that of a living otter”, although its remains are too fragmentary to tell just how much bigger. What really kept me awake at night was the thought of Diogaronyx, the terrier-sized “monster hedgehog” from a Miocene archipelago that’s now part of Italy.

While the scholarship of Island Mammals’ research is excellent, its presentation and structure is more “postgraduate.” This – and the price tag – make it more a work of reference than bedside reading for forteans to dip into for a pleasant read. The illustrations are mostly black and white, with small colour plates confined to the middle. This is a pity, as the authors have shown they can write a more coffee-table type book on this subject – Island Mammals evolved (excuse the pun) out of the Dutch-language Hoe Dieren op Eilanden Evoluren, a sumptuously-illustrated 2009 Darwin anniversary celebratory work aimed at the general reader. Surely this subject is broad and engaging enough to deserve an English-language work for us non-specialists.

Score: 7 (9 for specialists)

Dwarf Cypriot elephants' teeth from the Bate Collection at the Natural History Museum London. They feature in Evolution of Island Mammals. Photo: Matt Salusbury

How to hold on to your lifeline

2011-05-26T02:56:00.000-07:00

Matt Salusbury on why keeping your passport in the Middle East is more vital than ever

(This first appeared in EL Gazette, May 2011.)

It has long been common practice in some Middle Eastern countries for employers to retain the passports of expatriate teachers. Back in the days when falling out with your boss or being refused a holiday were the worst things that could happen, EFL teachers put up with it.

In the last six months, however, a wave of protests has swept across the Middle East. Expat EFL teachers left Tunisia, Egypt and Libya in droves, though they're now mostly back in Egypt. One British Tefler escaped from Tripoli courtesy of a lift from the South African armed forces, while another hitched a ride with Portuguese diplomats.

Both these teachers - and those who boarded Royal Air Force cargo planes and a Royal Navy warship - only got on board because they had proof of their nationality to hand. Estimates vary for the number of migrant workers stranded in Libya without passports – mostly African, Bengali or Egyptian. There could be almost a million. Meanwhile the US State Department and the British Foreign Office have instructed all nationals to leave both Yemen and Bahrain. Suddenly we’re in an unpredictable Middle East where your passport being locked in the office for 'safekeeping' is very bad news.

The UK and US advise talking employers out of keeping passports if at all possible. The UK says that if you can’t avoid handing in your passport you should make a full, colour copy before you do so and keep it somewhere safe. It’s enough to get you onto a Royal Navy helicopter.

Teachers should also register with their embassies. Canada recently said that because so few of their nationals in the Japan earthquake zone had done so they had no idea how many were there.

Under the laws of most Middle Eastern countries, it is illegal for bosses to retain passports. When expat workers go to court in the Gulf states to get their passports returned, they usually win. Teachers who want their passports back can also say that the UN's International Labour Organisation (ILO) has declared retaining passports 'forced labour', a form of slavery. Even Saudi Arabia has adopted the ILO conventions.

Saudi employers will briefly need to hold on to the passports of expats to obtain an iqbal (alien registration card and residency permit) for them, but beyond that there is no reason to retain them. Visas that allow expats in Saudi to go on holiday are complicated, though recent reports suggest that getting a temporary exit and re-entry visa is becoming much easier, with payment and paperwork available via an ATM.

The retention of passports continues to be quite common in Saudi Arabia and has in the past led to teachers being put at risk. Back in the Gulf War of 1991 BAE Systems (British Aerospace at the time) retained teachers' passports after classifying them as 'essential personnel'. Many chose to break their contracts rather than live under threat from Iraqi missiles, while reports suggested some were redeployed to undertake 'security duties'.

Saudi courts seem to take a dim view of employers retaining passports. To everybody's surprise, an Indian oil worker who was recently denied his passport by his boss went to the Saudi courts and won. Arab News reported that in January the Jubail and Damman courts ordered the return of the unnamed expatriate’s documents, along with his family's passports, stamped with (eventually) the correct exit visas.

Passport retention seems to be a problem in Kuwait. The US State Department website says, 'There are cases where employers retain passports of foreign nationals resident in Kuwait. You should try to avoid this where possible, but you should always keep a copy of your passport.'

In Oman, employers 'often ask that expatriate employees deposit their passports with the company as a condition of employment - this practice is contrary to Omani law', according to the State Department. While a 2006 Omani Ministry of Manpower circular upholds the employee’s right to retain their passport, it doesn't stipulate penalties for employers, making enforcement difficult. The UK Foreign Office reminds its nationals in Oman that they need their passport (or a copy) at all times to show as ID.

In Qatar a 2009 law forbids bosses from retaining passports 'except for visa and immigration processing'. Labour laws are likely to be tightened due to the international attention focused on the country as its vast expatriate workforce prepares for the football World Cup 2020.

In the UAE it's also against the law for an employer to keep passports. Only a 'competent judge' can do so. This has been upheld by a 2008 Ministry of Labour ruling that companies retaining passports 'will not be tolerated'. A 2002 law imposes fines of 20,000 dhirams (£3,300) or three months' prison for employers who do so. A bigger risk than revolution in the UAE (in the boom-bust Emirate of Dubai, specifically) is your employer suddenly going out of business with your passport still locked in the safe.

Teachers on work visas will need some form of exit visa to get on the plane out of Saudi (a 'letter of no objection' releasing you from employment), Qatar and 'in certain situations' Yemen. But when revolution starts and your country's (or another country’s) armed forces arrive to evacuate you, they couldn't care less about any exit visa, they just want to see your passport in your hand, or at least a copy of it.
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Update: Since the article appeared, the British consulate in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) has started issuing 'Emergency Travel Documents' for its nationals who need such documents in order to return to the UK. Reading between the lines, this could be as a result of passports not being released by employers.

I have also recently come across an unconfirmed story of a teacher in an international school 'held hostage' in Qatar. The lack of an exit visa was allegely involved.

This feature was inspired by a source (a teacher who I won't name) who contacted the Gazette about passport retention issues with their employer in Saudi. As they haven't got back to us, we assume it's been sorted and they have their passport. They reported to us that a group of female Egyptian colleagues who went to the manager's office to demand their passports. They got them.

Guardian poster boy for making Data Protection Act requests to the cops

2011-05-23T12:50:00.000-07:00

I seem to feature as some sort of poster boy in the Guardian's new guide to making Data Protection Act requests for your 'domestic extremism' files from the cops.

The article also reveals that John Catt, the artist who (along with his daughter) sketches on demos, has been given leave to bring a "lawsuit" (I understand it's an application for a judicial review) on the legality of his data being gathered and retained on the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). John and Linda Catt and myself are to date the Guardian's only case studies of people who've actually got off their arses and used the Data Protection Act to get their police files.

If succesful, the lawsuit could lead to the NPOIU held on a lot of us being deleted. This would include data on myself that I recently got from an NPOIU database via a Data Protection Act disclosure, about which more later. Suffice to say at this point the NPOIU placed me on a demo in 2007 that I didn't go to (in Crawley, of all places!) and have me down as a "domestic extremist" because I was observed by one of their spotters cycling quite close to the ExCel Centre on the day of the G20 Summit being held there in April 2009. Ooooh, scary!

Bizarrely, I've blagged an invite to a "Have your Say" event on the future of the NPOIU being hosted by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary at a posh hotel in Covent Garden tomorrow. A report here will follow.

Besides Mr Catt, I know of one other who's got their NPOIU data through Data Protection Act. And guess what - their data, like mine and Mr Catt's, includes data which is inaccurate and wrong,

Kallana reconnaissance – Kerala, India, March-April 2011

2011-04-25T14:12:00.000-07:00

Interim report

Sali Palode (left) and his "tribal" forest tracker Mallan Kani at the spot where they saw in 2010 what they describe as an adult male kallana (pygmy elephant) with tusks

I recently returned from my investigation into alleged “kallana” pygmy elephants in and around Neyyar-Peppara Wildlife Sanctuary in Kerala, South India. These elephants are supposed to have a height of 5ft (1.5m) at the shoulder – or less – in adulthood, and are particularly nimble, scrambling over rocks at great speed. (Conventionally-sized adult Asian elephants on the Indian sub-continent start at around 7ft at the shoulder and up.)

A full write-up of my kallana reconnaissance will appear in my forthcoming book, Pgymy Elephants, to be published by CFZ Press later this year. Meanwhile, I will have to be a bit vague, and refrain from publishing some of my photos, as I’m in talks with BBC Wildlife Magazine about a possible travel piece for their August issue, and they want first dibs on pictures and the story.

My talk on kallana is also part of the programme for the Centre for Fortean Zoology’s Weird Weekend 2011 in Woolfardishworthy, Devon on 19-21 August. I’m provisionally booked for Saturday 20th.

No, I didn’t find any pygmy elephants, nor did I see any conventionally-sized wild elephants. I didn’t expect to see any kallana. I did interview art teacher and multiple award-winning amateur photographer Sali Palode and his “tribal” guide Mallan Kani, of the forest-dwelling Kani people. They have been tracking “kallana” for over a decade, and have had three sightings in that time. They were able to photograph kallana on two of these occasions, in 2005 and 2010. (Sali speaks Mallayalam only, and his agent Balan Madhavan interpreted for me. I hope to have an extract of the interview linked to this blog shortly.)

Sali and Mallan also took me into the Neyyar-Peppara Sanctuary to show me the places where they encountered kallana. It’s thick forest with steep, single-file paths up and down the hills. The paths are elephant tracks, as evidenced by the dung piles with mushrooms growing out of them. The places where Sali and Mallan made their sightings were all on the edge of a small lake at the edge of the forest.

Art teacher, award-winning wildlife photographer and kallana witness Sali Palode, being interviewed in the Trivandrum Press Club

We did have a close encounter with a herd of about 20 gaur (wild forest bison) that Mallan found for us. Mallan’s forestry skills are impressive – he suddenly said, “Gaur! Guar!” although Sali and I saw and heard nothing, and he then disappeared into the forest. Ten minutes later a herd of gaur came stampeding straight at us. Some say that “kallana” are just young elephants playing a short distance from a herd that’s unseen and close by, but if the herd was close by, Mallan would know about it. I had the rare privilege of coconuts for lunch in one of the Kani hamlets in the forest after our trip. Access to “tribal” areas is normally restricted, we had cleared it with Sharma, the Trivandrum Division Chief Wildlife Warden, who knows Sali well.

Sali and Mallan enter the forest

Sali and Mallan on a steep elephant trail in the deep forest of Neyyar-Peppara

I am currently negotiating with Sali’s agent to purchase licenses to use a couple of Sali’s photographs, including one never published of a dead female he found by the lake in 2005. The local wildlife warden certified it as dead, stating it was a young elephant, and it was quickly cremated in line with Forest Department practice. Regional newspaper reports at the time saying a DNA sample had first been taken were incorrect.

I also had a chance to see some young captive elephants having a bath at Kodonad Elephant Camp, and it was good to get up close to them, and to compare young conventionally-sized elephants with the photos of “kallana.”

Up close and personal with young (conventionally-sized) captive elephants at Kodonad, on the Periyar River

I also interviewed two elephant experts. Prof Sukumar Raman is the expert on Asian elephants for the whole world, and I flew to Bangalore to talk to him on the huge Indian Institute of Science campus. I met and interviewed Prof Joseph Cheeran, a vet and an expert on captive elephants, in the Keralan city of Thrissur.

I have to say my initial conclusion is I am more sceptical about kallana then when I first arrived in Kerala. Prof Sukumar and Prof Cheeran said that many of the unique characteristics Sali says distinguish kallana from conventionally-sized Asian elephants are perfectly consistent with young Asian elephants, and there is a big range of size, tusk development and behaviour in young Asian elephants. All the kallana sightings were in the dry season – Kerala misses out on one of the monsoons and has a longer dry season – giving the elephants an emaciated appearance, which could be what Sali and Mallan were seeing.

It turns out that kallana doesn’t go back all that far in time either. Sali said Mallan first drew his attention to kallana “twenty-five years ago” on the summit of Agasthya Mala, south Kerala’s tallest peak, when he saw piles of smaller-sized dung. Prof Sukumar pointed out that younger elephants produce smaller balls of dung. Sukumar is also from South India, and said that “twenty-five years ago” in South India doesn’t necessarily mean 1986, but “a very long time ago,” so long that you can’t remember.

Sukumar also told me that the stories of kallana first arrived in Kerala around the same time, with reports coming over the border with the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu to the East. I wasn’t able to communicate directly beyond single English nouns with Sali and Mallan on our trip into Neyyar-Peppara, as we didn’t really have a language in common, but it’s no longer clear to me whether kallana is an ancient tradition of the Kani, or a secondhand report acquired via local media by the Kani and others in recent times from Tamil Nadu. There are some Kani settlements (and a lot of other forest-dwelling “tribal” settlements) in Tamil Nadu, but the Kani in Kerala seem to be isolated from and unaware of the Kani in Tamil Nadu, who speak a different language. More study of the transmission of kallana reports is needed.

Sukumar was more open to the idea of kallana, and said that, as a scientist, “I wouldn’t rule it out.” He suggested that kallana is an example of “phenotypic plasticity”, variations within any given population, and felt the most likely explanation is that there’s a family group of slightly smaller than usual individuals in the sanctuary. Sukumar pointed out that being smaller would be a good adaptation in negotiating the thick forest slopes of Neyyar-Peppara. Sukumar has studied the elephants of Burma, that also live in thick forests, and they are smaller than Indian elephants, but definitely the same species. While Balan Madhavan, Sali’s agent, was emphasising to him the need to gather dung, hair and other discarded bits of kallana for DNA analysis, Sukumar said not to bother, as any variations unique to the alleged “kallana” family of smaller elephants probably wouldn’t show up in the DNA, as they’re well within the range of what you’d expect in conventional-sized elephants. Sukumar’s team planned to join in the Kerala Forest Department’s elephant survey of Neyyar-Peppara, looking for evidence of kallana, a couple of years ago, but it was rained off by unexpectedly early and heavy rains. He hopes to do it again sometime, considerable academic commitments permitting.

Prof Sukumar Raman in his office at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, at the Bangalore campus of the Indian Institute of Science

Sali also claims to have seen a mystery tree crab in the Neyyar-Peppara reserve, living in gaps in trees that are not particularly anywhere near water. There’s a photo of a tree crab on his website, erroneously filed on the “insects” page. (I’ve yet to get in contact with the naturalist who runs Sali’s website.) Sali drew me a sketch of the tree crab, which looked very different, more like a spider. He also said he’d seen exotic tarantulas in the sanctuary, although it’s not clear whether he was saying they were unknown species. I hope to delve more deeply into the Neyyar-Peppara tree crab mystery.

Balan Madhavan, who’s a well-known wildlife photographer, said he hoped to get a photo of another Keralan cryptid, pogeyan, the grey clouded leopard. He’s spoken to foresters who’ve seen it, and is convinced it’s for real. Pogeyan’s alleged range is in the far north of Kerala, in the tea plantations of Malabar.

In Kerala’s capital, Trivandrum, I encountered several carvings and statues of what were described as “unicorns” or “elephant dragons” – horse-bodied, eagle-clawed beasts with elephant’s heads. Some grasped their trunks in their talons, some had trunks reaching down towards considerably smaller “baby elephants” whose trunks reached up to theirs. Some had small crests or tufts on their heads. Some had multiple tusks growing out of thes sides of their mouth where their teeth should be, like the mouth parts of a monster prawn. They had a Chinese or even Indonesian look to them, and the elephant bits were anatomically very accurate.

Makara ("elephant dragon") at the Maharaja of Travancore's palace, Trivandrum

These “elephant dragons” were in the Maharaja of Travancore’s 18th century palace, in the huge temple nextdoor, and guarding other temples nearby. I talked to the palace and temple guides, who told me the “elephant dragons” were carved by wood and stone carvers from Tamil Nadu in the late eighteenth century, during Travancore’s zenith. The stone dragons were added to the temple at that time. When I went to Bangalore, I saw that the coat of arms of the surrounding state of Karnataka also has “elephant dragons.”

Sukumar told me these are makara, and they’re not exclusive to India. They seem to be an architectural flourish or heraldic beast, at a time when Travancore (South Kerala and bits of Tamil Nadu) were establishing diplomatic relations with European powers. I don’t know how the existence of makara – a mythical elephant dragon often associated with a small elephant – fits in with the tradition of kallana. Sukumar says there’s been little by way of research into the origins of makara. I invite any art historians who don’t mind getting up really early to make calls to India to investigate further.

Strange Stories in a World of Wonder part 1

2011-04-20T06:29:00.000-07:00

This first appeared in Fortean Times FT 271 (February 2011) and part 2 in FT 272.

In common with a lot of fellow fortysomething forteans, my interest in strange phenomena was first kindled at a very tender age by a weekly magazine called World of Wonder. Branding itself as “the magazine for every boy and girl”, World of Wonder opened for business in the groovy cool fab bellbottomed days of 1970, when I was still just a bit too young for a chopper bicycle. WoW came through our letterbox every Saturday, and was an essential grounding for kids in interesting facts and “world knowledge” in the days before Wikipedia, and – decades before Facebook – its international penplas page was popular. The WoW of the early 1970s allowed itself occasional flights of futurology – giant walking cities on telescopic legs, and an illustration of what was then a fantasy– the proposed “Channel Tunnel”, its entrance spiraling into the ground like a helter-skelter.

IPC Publications’ World of Wonder (WoW) (not to be confused with an earlier, American World of Wonder magazine from the 1930s) was published by Fleetway, a division of magazines giant IPC. Although it would appear somewhat worthy in tone by today’s standards – its pages often ended up being cut up for school geography projects – what made WoW really cool was a regular feature called ‘Strange Stories’. The editors may have been a little embarrassed by ‘Strange Stories’ – it only even had two cover stories in its entire 258-issue, five-year run. Possibly they were worried that parents would disapprove of any in-your-face delinquent areas of study like yetis, lighthouse-threatening giant octopi, the Oak Island Money Pit or other degeneracy on the cover.

The regular ‘Strange Stories’ feature galloped through all the fortean old chestnuts – and some less well known forteana that since been forgotten – in three sumptuously illustrated pages or less, and packaged anomalous phenomena and high strangeness in easily digestible portions to the children of Britain, the Commonwealth and (in translation) Holland. ‘Strange Stories’ was the crucial factor setting some latter-day forteans onto the path of being rather interested in something a little bit odd.

Canadian Nick Van der Graaf, for example, reminiscing on the 26pigs.com website, said, ‘In WoW, I first heard of Kaspar Hauser, I first read about Spring Heeled Jack, all kinds of exciting and mysterious phenomena. To this day (I'm 38 now) I regret losing those marvellous magazines. I think they were a great influence on me.’

And then there were the pictures! The technology of the time meant it was easier and cheaper to pay illustrators (there were a lot more of them around) to paint illustrations by hand than to source and clear rights for photos from photo libraries. WoW even had an occasional series called “Up and about with our colour camera” in which they showcased the groovy cool fab but still rather fiddly technology of colour photographic printing. All ‘Strange Stories’ illustrations were painted by hand. For some reason probably also to do with the printing processes of the time, ‘Strange Stories’ illustrations were usually in a strange strange two-colour mix of blues and greys. Sea serpents and giant squid and octopi seemed a firm favourite for the WoW illustrators, sometimes rendered in spectacular colour, deep green seas and all. (The illustrators of the time were often either colour or black-and-white specialists.)

Some ‘Strange Stories’ illustrations, it is fair to say, scared the living daylights out of me. I am still haunted by a traumatic formative experience, turning the pages of WoW164 and being confronted with a graphic rendering of one of the many hallucinations that afflicted the inhabitants of the town of Point Saint Esprit, France, in 1951. The illustration showed a resident opening to door to a doctor on a house call, except that in place of the doctor’s face there was a skull beneath his hat. ‘Strange Stories’ identified ergotism, possibly caused by mould on the local flour, as th cause of the hallucinations, rather than any alleged CIA plot to lace the water supply with LSD (FT262;20-21) – further noting that villagers saw ‘processions of historical ghosts,’ that pets went ‘beserk,’ and that it all started after the priest noticed the arm on the village’s statue of the Virgin Mary was missing.

Some ‘Strange Stories’ illustrations were downright baffling. No explanation was given for why (in WoW61) Alexander Selkirk – the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe – was illustrated depicted surrounded by cats on his discovery by sailors on a Pacific Island. Elsewhere in the pages of WoW, the series on Greek mythology and the series on the history of dance provided excuses for the occasional bare nipple on Greek goddesses, sirens and Indian temple dancers – very exciting in those innocent days before the current torrent of filth that is the internet.

The illustrators brought in to ‘do’ WoW were among the best of the best. Many had come from IPC’s more established sister publication, Look & Learn. Dozens of illustrators worked on the magazine, often (like some of its editors) deliberately recruited from the world of comics, in an attempt to give often quite dry history and science features a look that would engage the kids. Some illustrators were imported from Spain and Italy. Among the home-grown British WoW illustration talent was Leslie C. Caswell, a Royal Academy member and World War Two war artist who served in Burma, and who illustrated Women’s Own in the 1950s and became well-known as a medical illustrator, before depicting for WoW Father Dominic Dechaux levitating over a King Philip II of Spain’s startled court for a feature on levitators, part of Strange Stories’ occasionally fortean sister series ‘Talking Point.’

Other WoW illustrators included Angus McBride and Richard Hook, who later went on to illustrate numerous Osprey Men at Arms books on uniforms from obscure ancient and medieval armies and wars. For assignments illustrating eighteenth century feats of derring-do, preferably involving three-corned hats, dashing highwaymen and chases on horseback, Cecil Lane Doughty, veteran of Eagle comic, was the illustrator of choice. For the numerous WoW stories on Spitfires, Concorde and other cool planes, there was aviation specialist Wilfred Hardy, who went on to design the 2009 series of Icelandic ‘legendary animal’ cryptozoology stamps.

Fantastic though the images accompanying ‘Strange Stories’ and ‘Talking Point’ may have been, the accompanying texts were brutally sceptical for a readership of such a tender age.

‘Strange Stories’ scepticism ran to (WoW 61) dismissing UFOs as weather balloons, unusual clouds and, - four decades before they were fashionable explanation – Chinese lanterns. WoW 5 asked, “Was there a King Arthur?” and WoW119 asked “Rope trick or tall story?” WoW 124 speculated that the Cottingley Fairies photos might be fakes at a time when many were still giving them the benefit of the doubt. WoW105 announced “The end of the world is cancelled” – written in 1972, it jokingly identified 1977 as the next predicted Armageddon.

WoW 163 bluntly concluded that one sighting of the bunyip – Australia’s large mystery animal – was just a misidentified musk duck. WoW142 examined the Cheyenne chief Roman Nose's magical invulnerability to bullets, as long as he observed the taboo of starving himself before battle. He survived several horses being shot from under him, before finally being succumbing to a bullet fired by the US Army at a raid at Republican River, Colorado, having forgotten to forgo food that day. ‘Strange Stories’ was of the starkly rational opinion that the sudden contemporary introduction of repeater rifles may have been the real cause of the failure of Roman Nose's magic.

For a publication that set itself the mission of introducing kinds to what was supposed to be a world of “wonder,’ such brutal scepticism aimed at such a young and innocent audience seems almost cruel. Although I suspect that the powers behind “Strange Stories” counted on the nine-year olds ignoring the perfectly rational explanation at the end, and be convinced the whole thing about giant skeletons in Mexico and UFOs was gospel truth. I know I did at the time.

Hoaxes were a common theme, especially hoaxes and scams pulled by professed alchemists. ‘Strange Stories’ told you all a child needs to know about history’s great hoaxes. The very first of ‘Strange Stories’ from WoW issue 1 was Piltdown Man. WoW 68 featured Monsieur Lenoine, 'the man who made diamonds' and who swindled diamond magnate Julius De Beers, who hired a conjurer to expose him. WoW 70 had the fake Shakespeare play Vortigen and Rowena, written by William Henry at the age of 18, and sold to producer Samuel Ireland. Their illustration showed the play being booed off the London stage on its first performance in 1795.

History’s great scam artists – like Perkin Warbeck, who led a rebellion against Henry VII of England after convincing many that he was the elder of the Princes in the Tower – rubbed shoulders on the pages of ‘Strange Stories’ with altogether more curious narratives of hoaxers and forgers. The German Otto Wacher (WoW252) was imprisoned in the 1920s for forging Van Goghs. Except that some experts pointed out that Wacher couldn’t paint, and these experts came to the conclusion that Wacher had obtained ‘real’ Van Goths which the artist had painted in a new, later style.

“Complex fraud” doesn’t get much more complex than Alves Reis, the hoaxer featured in WoW53’s Strange Stories. How nine- and ten-year olds were supposed to be able to follow even a summary of Reis’ byzantine plot is unclear. Reis faked an authorization to banknote printers Waterlow in London to print a special issue of £1 million-worth of high-denomination Portuguese escudo notes for him, for some reason overprinted with the word ‘Angola’ – then a Portuguese colony – and introduced these notes into circulation in Portugal. He started his own bank and was doing well until people spotted there were “too many” such notes circulated. After riots, bank runs and all the governors of the Bank of Portugal being imprisoned, Reis himself got 20 years in 1925.

Then there was archaeology, ‘Strange Stories’ style – WoW21 asked “Who were the yellow long armed giants?” When the Dutch “discovered” Easter Island in 1722, this was how the islanders described to them the builders of the statutes, whom they referred to only as “the others.” Then there was the discovery of lost Nestorian scriptures found shredded in a mouse’s nest in a cave in Mongolia in the 1940s, as the Communists closed in. WoW163 covered 13ft-tall human skeleton discovered in Peru and buildings apparently constructed by giants in Mexico. (And see FT256;58-59 for ‘Strange Stories’ take on the archaeological mystery of ‘Dorak Treasure’ allegedly dug up from Turkey, only to then disappear, if it had ever existed.)

The perpetrators featured in FT’s own occasional round-ups from the annals of inept crime would have been put to shame by ‘Strange Stories’ spectacular narratives of criminal derring-do. These included in WoW45 James Andrews, a Union officer in the American Civil War, who specialised in stealing trains from behind Confederate lines. WoW 206 covered Robert Redru, the French detective who (allegedly) shopped himself after discovering that he himself was a somnambulist murderer, and was sentenced to spending nights in prison until his death in 1939. American gangster Robert James Pitts, (WoW 235,) had his fingerprints surgically removed, only to find that after fingerprinting following a random police stop in Texas, the smudges where there should have been fingerprints fingered him more than ever, making him "the most marked man in America."

Stranger still was the obsessive Vicenzo Perrugia, (WoW100) who somehow seems to have stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, then tipped off a dealer that he had it in his ‘dingy flat in Florence’, from where it recovered two years later, leading to speculation that Perrugia had been paid by the Italian government for this odd art heist. In the dashing highwaymen (and women) department, there was (in WoW48) celebrated Edinburgh ‘female highwayman’ Grizel Cochran, who reached her criminal peak in 1685, while another Edinburgh resident who made it into Strange Stories’ annals of extraordinary crime was William Brodie, mild-mannered Edinburgh city councillor by day, highwayman by night, and apparently the inspiration for Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Look & Learn 698)

Eccentrics – especially Irish eccentrics – were another favourite theme to which ‘Strange Stories’ often returned. But most ‘Strange Stories’ featured eccentrics paled into insignificance compared to amateur mountaineer Maurice Wilson, who froze to death after deliberately crashing a plane into the slopes of Mount Everest as part of his solo attempt to climb it in 1933 (WoW99). Other differently-lifestyled ‘Strange Stories’ subjects were (WoW 72) Rudolph Raspe, creator of Baron Munchausen, and himself almost as weird. A scholar, geologist, compulsive fraudster and thief, Raspe fled from Germany to Cornwall, where he worked in a tin mine assay office before fleeing again to Ireland. Then there was Irishwoman Dervla Murphy’s, showcased in WoW 198. She is best known for her solo 1963 cycle ride to India, whose incidents included being stoned during a religious riot and held by Afghan bandits. Also definitely on the unusual end of the spectrum was tall, blonde Jack Metcalf, (WoW67), point-to-point racing champion of Knaresborough, horse taxi driver in Harrogate, captured by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army in 1745 whilst fiddling for the English at the battle of Culloden, surveyor and builder of the Harrogate to Boroughbridge road, and blind since the age of six.

And what would a fortean series for kids be without the curses? As well as the curse of hallucinated skull-faced doctors in Point Saint Esprit (see above), there was Valentino’s silver ring, (WoW10) which is now somewhere in a bank vault having brought misfortune to so many of its wearers. There was Archduke Ferdinand of Austria’s ‘cursed’ car (WoW 98) that killed many of its owners, and in which the Archduke was being driven for his fateful visit to Sarejevo in August, 1914. And there was the suspiciously unlucky “cursed” Hispania 9th Legion of the Roman Army (WoW25) almost wiped out by ‘Boudicea’ (Boudicca) in her rebellion of 79AD, and which then disappeared North of Hadrian’s wall 20 years later. The legion’s eagle standard top – minus its wings – was found discreetly buried under a villa in Slichester.

Although WoW styled itself as ‘the magazine for every boy and girl’, it was rather skewed in favour of ‘Strange Stories’ from the annals of war, especially World War Two, which still loomed large in the playgrounds of the 1970s. Once such military-flavoured ‘Strange Stories’ entry was that of Arthur Sandeman, who – inspired by The Charge of the Light Brigade – joined the Central Indian Light Horse in the 1930s. When this unit mechanised in 1941, he transferred to the last remaining front-line British unit that actually still used horses, the Burma Frontier Force, and fulfilled his destiny with a last cavalry charge "into the jaws of death" that ended in massacre in defence of Taungoo airfield against the Japanese (WoW 241). Other unusual soldiers in the war against Japan were the ‘Hughies’, the Hong Kong Volunteer Corps, whose spirited defence of Hong Kong's power station against the Japanese was commemorated in WoW253’s Strange Stories. Many of the ‘Hughies’ were in their seventies, some were Boer War veterans.

Other curious Strange Stories episodes from the annals of military history were (WoW175) the USS Arakwe. The ship was patrolling the coast of South America just after the American Civil War, when it was lifted by a tidal wave two miles inland into Chilean soil. The Arakwe had run out of cannonballs so its crew fought off Chilean looters by firing hard cheeses from its cannons. (Or did it? The incident has the feel of one of those tall tales made up in the great tradition of 19th century American local newspapers to fill up space when not much was happening, and an internet search didn’t turn up any ships of that name. Can any FT readers shed light on this?)

Another of the “Strange Stories” in time of war was France’s “Black Legion” of 1,500 convicts in captured British uniforms dyed black (they actually turned out a rather nasty brown, on account of the base red colour of the British red coats they had used). They were sent by a desperate revolutionary French government in 1797 to cause panic in Britain. Commanded by Colonel William Tate, a 70-year old exiled American mercenary, they got blind drunk on their voyage to Britain and were depicted in an illustration in WoW24, on the deck of one of their warships waving bottles in the air. Landing at Fishguard, South Wales, they were beaten back by one Jemima Nichols with her pitchfork, and surrendered to the militia, mistaking the Welsh ladies’ tall hats for the headgear of the brigade of guards.

In the back of the car on the morning school run, there would be intense rivalry between WoW subscribers and those kids who took IPC’s larger format, better-seling, brasher sister publication Look & Learn, which tended to have more illustrations of speedboats and Spitfires, returned to the ‘Great Trek’ of the South African Boers with suspicious frequency, and had the beautifully illustrated Roman-Empire-in-a-parallel universe science fantasy strip ‘The Trigan Empire’, but crucially didn’t have anything like ‘Strange Stories.’ We WoW readers pitied the Look & Learn readers, who didn’t believe my reports about 13-foot high skeletons of Mexican giants, which must have been true, after all, I read it in ‘Strange Stories’. The Look & Learn readers probably ended up growing up more normal as a result. The joke was on us WoW readers, however. As we will see in Part Two next issue, Look and Learn swallowed up WoW and (as it did to seven other publications during its 20-year-reign) and eventually brought to an end the golden age of our beloved “Strange Stories.”

Strange Stories in a World of Wonder - part 2

FURTHER READING

26pigs.com World of Wonder bibliography

The Bumper Book of Look and Learn, selected by Stephen Pickles, Century/Random House, London, 2007

World of Wonder is held in the British Library serials collection, shelf mark P.993/58. The Fortean Times office holds a complete bound set of World of Wonder.

Strange Stories in a World of Wonder part 2

2011-03-14T12:59:00.000-07:00

As self-defined prophet and former newsreader Jeron Criswell King, aka The Amazing Criswell, notes in his bizarre prologue to the 1959 film Plan 9 From Outer Space, “ you are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable, that is why you are here.” For many forteans, there was a catalyst in their early life that first kindled their interest in the world of strange phenomena, and set them on the road to a preoccupation with high strangeness. Asked what that formative experience was, a number of today’s forteans now in their forties – at least those who grew up in the UK, Holland or the Commonwealth – would answer that what first got them hooked on “the mysterious, the unexplainable” was reading World of Wonder’s “Strange Stories”.

World of Wonder (WoW) magazine appeared every Saturday – usually dropped through the letterbox by the paper boy – into many households in the first half of the 1970s. WoW dealt with science, history, geography, technology (especially Spitfires and the latest cutting edge developments in “the mighty transistor”). But by far its strongest section was its “Strange Stories” spot. “Strange Stories” presented the kids of the 1970s with a firm grounding all the usual fortean staples - the Marie Celeste, the “abominable snowman”, sasquatch, the Cardiff giant, Kasper Hauser, Indian wolf children, the “Devil’s footprints “of 1855 Devon, the hollow earth theories of John Clere Symmes and others, Spring-Heeled Jack, the man in the iron mask, the Oak Island money pit, James Churchwald and his alleged lost continent of Mu, the Tunguska explosion. (WoW 156 carried an illustration of alarmed Transiberian Railway passengers in Tsarist Russia period beards, stiff shirt collars and all, witnessing the explosion from afar,) Less well known mysteries that seems to have been forgotten about in the intervening 40 years were also given space in the pages of “Strange Stories”, (see, for example the “Strange Phenomena Involving U-Boats in WWI” below.)

World of Wonder was a slightly text-heavier spin off publication from its sister publication Look & Learn, founded in 1962 by Leonard Matthews, who had launched several children’s comics, and brought in some of the best of the comics illustrators to engage the kids with dynamic illustrations that would draw children in to history, geography and science. Both World of Wonder and Look & Learn had to do this while also somehow remaining acceptable to parents – a tall order, and probably the reason why there were so few appearance of any “Strange Stories” on World of Wonder’s cover.

World of Wonder shared several illustrators with Look & Learn. British childern’s comics expert Steve Holland recalls that World of Wonder came into being in an attempt to produce a format that – it was hoped - could be easily translated to be sold on to publishers in Germany, France, Italy, Holland and Yugoslavia. In the event, there was only an English version – under the editorship of Robert Bartholomew - and a Dutch language edition. After a five-year run, the publisher that bought the Dutch edition of World of Wonder from publishers IPC decided to go it alone, commissioning their own material. As WoW had less of a pedigree than its slightly brasher cousin Look & Learn, publisher Fleetway (a division of IPC) absorbed WoW into a new look L&L with some extra pages, and Strange Stories continued in L&L, for a while, at least…

It was the illustrations that “Strange Stories” – and its occasionally fortean sister series “Talking Point” - particularly excelled at, and which made the biggest impression on its pre-teen audience. (See Part One for more on the usually uncredited WoW artists.) “There Are Giant Serpents in Every Sea” declared WoW 26, depicting a collosal long-necked plesiosaur swimming in bright green seas, dwarfing a sailing ship of the Olden Days, as well as one sea serpent spotted by startled straw-boater and blazer wearing holidaymaker and his wife at the northern English seaside reasort of Skegness in 1966. The fearsome Serrano Cay giant octopus featured on the cover of WoW 179, menacing two Mexican lighthouse keepers when it suddenly came out of the depths in 1905. According to “Strange Stories”, the octopus killed one keeper, Diego Alvez, before his colleague Ferdinand Moxo eventually managed to shoot it with a rifle. Another giant octopus, spotted from the French sailing frigate Alecton. (WoW 76) was depicted in brilliant pinks. There’s also the narrative of James Bartley, (WoW 58), a British harpooner swallowed by a sperm whale off the Falklands in 1891, and cut out alive from its corpse the next day (after his funeral). His hair was bleached by “gastric juices” and he went briefly insane, before he resumed harpooning duties. WoW58 filled a whole page with the gaping mouth of the whale closing in on helpless man overboard Bartley, with the large headline SWALLOWED BY A WHALE.

Other “Strange Stories” from the annals of natural history and cryptozoology included (WoW 35) a decade of disbelief at Sir Harry Johnston discovery of the okapi in the forests of the Congo until he finally came up with photos of it in 1909. The Parisian pet derby of 1909 (WoW 78) was a race involving the exotic pets of decadent fin de siecle Parisian aristocratic ladies – contestants included an Egyptian dung beetle, a goose, the Princess of Lucinge’s lion cub, a tortoise and a monkey, with some prize pets depicted held on leads by the Parisian aristocratic ladies with girly bows round their necks. After a short race which descended into mayhem as runners tried to stangle or eat each other, Madamoiselle Yturbe’s monkey won. The illustrator got a little carried away with some of the French gentlemen’s top hats, some of which obscured part of the text.
Stranger still was WoW’s short and wilfully obscure ‘Birds that cannot fly” series, which covered (WoW 224) the “Emu War” of 1932, in which the Australian Heavy Battery artillery unit of the Australian Army attempts to exterminate a huge, crop-devastating flock of emus was outwitted by the nimble birds running around in all directions. An emu-proof fence eventually proved slightly more effective.
Incredible journeys were favourite theme of Strange Stories. In WoW 141, Apsley Cherry Gerrard made the worst journey in the world across Antarctica over five weeks in 1991 to collect three penguin eggs. Mark Poltorctzky, aged 13, walked 700 miles across Russia in 1714, surviving trees falling on him and exposure in the snow to reach Moscow ands take up hiw post as an Imperial Choirboy in Moscow in WoW 146. The coffin containing the body of actor Charles Coughlan, (WoW 135) who was buried in a coastal cemetery in Galveston, Texas in 1899, was swept out to sea in a hurricane the following year to finally come ashore on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, close to his birthplace on 15 September 1927. Coughlan’s coffin had made a journey in which it averaged 65-80 miles a day.

Former Italian diplomat Felice Benuzzi and two of his compatriots and fellow prisoners of war interned in Camp 354 in Kenya also made a “Strange Stories”-style incredible journey in WoW 92, escaping to undergo an 18-day ordeal ending in a climb to the summit of Mount Kenya, where they planted a homemade Italian flag, then returned to 354 to give themselves up. They were apparently bored in captivitiy. But my favourite incredible journey story has to be the one from WoW 130 of the extraordinary hardships endured by Frenchman Rene Caille, who made a year-long odyssey in 1828, disguised as a runaway Egyptian slave, to become the first white man to gaze on the legendary splendours of the forbidden city of Timbuktu, thereby claiming a 10,000 franc prize. After many life-threatening episodes, he discovered that Timbuktu had become a complete dump.

For those who found school history lessons boring, there was plenty of Strange Stories of historical revisionism. WoW7 speculated on the possible survival of Louis XVII, crown prince who went missing aged nine in the French Revolution. WoW2 asked, was Napoleon poisoned? WoW 108 asked, was American school teacher of French origin Philip Ney really Napoleon’s Marshall Ney, who had emigrated after surviving a firing squad? Look & Learn (L&L) 692 asked whether Joan or Arc had survived, having not been burnt at the stake after all. WoW 33 presented claims that Guy Fawkes was a patsy, an innocent tenant of the Westminster cellars, caught in an anti-Catholic plot to convince James I that ‘Papists’ were trying to blow him up. WoW 46 offered alternative authors of Shakespeare’s plays, while - somewhat more plausibly – WoW 57 suggested that missing American aviatrix Amelia Earhart was a spy who fell into Japanese hands. “Strange Stories” was an advocate of the teaching of what we would now call “critical thinking”. Always gently sceptical, “Strange Stories” gave these revisionist history theories the time of day but suggested to impressionable young minds that such theses should be taken with at least a healthy pinch of salt

“Strange Stories” seemed to have a particular affection for chancers and adventurers who became living gods. These included penniless Irish sailor David O’Keefe, shipwrecked on the South Sea island of Yap, who was welcomed as its king, who displaced the German “agent” active on the island at the time, who built a trading fleet to export coconut kernels direct to Hong Kong, who saw of pirates and Dutch colonists, before a German battleship and troops finally forced him into exile in 1901. “Lawyer Lebeau” tricked onto a prison ship to New France (as the French possessions in Canada were then known), where he was captured by the Iroquois. He persuaded the Iroquois nation he was a messenger from the Great Spirit, convincing them his law degree was a letter from the King of France giving him authority to flatten mountains. The Iroquois eventually lost interest in him (WoW 257). And there was also James Brooke, who “accidentally” became king of the headhunters in 1920s Borneo. Not quite a living god, but certainly a Venezuelan national hero after his work as a “hero doctor” fighting a plague epidemic in Peru was Pierre Bougrat, whose Strange Story featured in WoW 158. Whilst esteemed in Latin America, right up to his death in 1962, Bouget was regarded by the French has an fugitive convicted murderer, having escaped to South America from France’s Devil’s Island penal colony on a small boat with five other convicts.

Are there patterns that can be discerned in high strangeness? There are certainly themes that keep coming up in “Strange Stories.” As we saw in Part One, hoaxers, spectacular criminals and spectacular crimes, hoaxes, amazing scams, archaeological mysteries, extreme eccentrics, curses were popular Strange Stories subjects, as were unusual episodes from the annals of war. Cryptozoology was also a Strange Stories favourite, lending itself as it did to spectacular illustration possibilities. Then there were Strange Stories clusters of incredible journeys filled with hardship, historical revisionism and men who accidentally became prophets or living gods (see text). Timeslips - especially Parisian timeslips - were another theme, including the sighting by two British tourists at Versailles in 1901 of women in the clothing of Marie Antoinette’s time. Then there was the apparent timeslip involving the disappearance – along with all records of her having been there - of a Mrs Randolph staying in room 343 of the Carillon Hotel, Paris with her daughter during the 1899 Paris Exhibition. The ever sceptical “Strange Stories” told its young readers that there was a likely rational explanation – Mrs Randolph disappearing from history, right down to her entry in the hotel register, was actually down to her being discreetly spirited away to hospital by a Parisian health authoritiy conspiracy, they being eager to avoid panic in the streets after being alerted that she had caught “the plague” in India.

But for a bizarrely obscure fortean sub-genres, nothing comes close to Strange Stories apparent pre-occupation with strange phenomena associated with German U-Boats of the First World War. Strange Stories catalogued four such cases, which you don’t read so often about in fortean circles these days.

One “Strange Stories” round-up of maritime mysteries featured U-Boat U236 which survived a mid-Atlantic torpedoing from a British sub in 1917 after one of these malfunctioned and jumped over U236. A year later, another (unnumbered) U-Boat fired a torpedo at the British Q ship Stock Force, only for the torpedo to slew back and blow the U-Boat up. WoW39 described how the U-Boat UB-65, reportedly haunted by the ghost of a dead officer, was beset by inexplicable disasters, and was spotted floating apparently abandoned by an American sub in 1918. (“Strange Stories”, perhaps wisely in view of possible parental surveillance, generally steered clear of ghosts.) WoW 25’s “Talking Point”, alongside better-known sea serpent sightings, had a dramatic illustration of Captain Georg van Forstner, on the bridge of yet another World War One U-Boat, this one while on active service in 1915, witnessing a strange, 60 ft- long “crocodile-like creature” – which in WoW’s illustration more closely resembles a finned Jurassic mososaur - being blown out of the sea and into the air by the boiler of explosion of a sinking British steamer that he’d recently torpedoed.

Normally sceptical WoW refrained from presenting a perfectly logical explanation for the “crocodile-like creature,” but the misidentified, fleetingly-glimpsed thrown up floating decaying corpse of a basking shark of whale as it shot past Captain Forstner before plunging beneath the waves does spring immediately to mind.

Some “Strange Stories” weren’t all that strange at all – Cardinal Wolsey’s rise to power, the invention of jeans by Levi Strauss, Napoleonic prisoners of war making intricate models out of bone – and the only mystery is what they were doing in Strange Stories at all. Just as newspapers have the odd “slow news day,” Strange Stories had the odd low strangeness week in which presumably already commissioned historical features – such as the dramatic yet not particularly strange rescue of Mussolini by powered glider, or the noteworthy but not exactly eyebrow-raised 1944 Operation Valkyrie plot against Hilter - had to be hastily rebranded under a dubious Strange Stories masthead. There is, after all, only so much strangeness out there suitable for a child audience, and “Strange Stories” had to find enough strangness to fill at least a full page every week for over five years.

And indeed, the “Strange Stories” strangeness supply did eventually run dry. WoW was taken over by Look & Learn in February 1975, with only a week’s warning to subscribers. While “Strange Stories” was among the limited number of WoW spots that made the transition, other regular WoW spots finished abruptly in mid-series, when WoW 258 was suddenly followed by L&L 686. L&L is best known for the sci-fi strip The Trigan Empire, which lost is excellent illustrator Don Lawrence soon afterwards and went downhill from there. The first L&L “Strange Stories” was the Turin Shroud, which had already been done as a Strange Story a couple of years before back in the old WoW glory days. “Strange Stories” went into decline in its L&L ownership, it ceased to be a weekly event and became more and more occasional, until it finally stuttered out of existence and faded from view forever around L&L 649 in 1975. The short fortean series “Haunted Britain” (featuring Geoff the talking mongoose and Drury Lane’s numerous theatre ghosts, followed, but L&L was a less nurturing environment for forteana than WoW, and it lived on only in the memories of then young forteans. (And not just the fortysomethings – at least one thirtysometing Strange Stories fan on online blogs recall discovering the series after stumbling across a complete set of WoW back issues in a box in a friend’s attic. Look & Learn, having gobbled up WoW and several other kid’s “knowledge” weeklies – Treasure, Tell Me Why, Speed & Power – finally bit the dust in 1982 – killed off by, of all things, soaring paper prices.

Most “Strange Stories” were presented to a young audience in good faith, and if “Strange Stories” team felt a story was not grounded in some kind of fact, they said so. After all, the “Strange Stories” team would face the wrath of angry parents if they passed off fantasy as sort-of-possibly-fact to the kids. But in retrospect, it seems one or two “Strange Stories” that were in fact groundless tall stories may have slipped through the net, probably copied from other secondary sources that had been unwittingly duped and hoaxed.

In this category of ‘probably made up’ was the alleged Parisian pet derby related above. Did the Parisian aristocratic ladies’ exotic pets derby (WoW 78) really happen?

And, finally… there is the most intriguing Strange Story of the Chinese invasion of Monterrey, California in the 1870s (WoW 228). According to Strange Stories, Imperial China under the Qing Dynasty sent a fleet of junks on a punitive expedition to America, in revenge for the way America cruelly exploited and humiliated Chinese immigrant workers in that country. So hopelessly antiquated was the Chinese invasion fleet that its navigators ran into trouble after underestimating the breadth of the Pacific Ocean, and headed for Monterrey, which had earlier briefly been the state capital of California, but not anymore. On landing, the Chinese invaders could not get the good citizens of Monterrey to understand that they’d come to punish them, and the locals seized them and carried them shoulder-high through the streets in welcome, as depicted by the “Strange Stories” illustrator. The invaders quickly assimilated into the immigrant Chinese community of Monterrey.

The brutal Qing dynasty certainly couldn’t give much of a damn what happened to the hordes of peasants, who were risking life and limb to flee the feudal miseries of China and its rulers in the first place. Qing China’s formidable foreign ministry, the Zongli Yamen, had been in operation since 1861, and its intelligence-gathering section woul have been informed of the correct distance across the Pacific. Any fleet of war junks China could have raised would probably have been blasted out of the sea by the numerous European, American or Japanese fleets that had taken up residence in the “Treaty Ports” they had carved out along China’s coast. And the internet is suspiciously silent on the subject of any alleged 1870s Chinese invasion of Monterrey, California. This begins to look awfully like one of the small town19th century American newspaper tall tales made up to fill space, or a faintly racist satire on contemporary Chinese immigration. Can any FT readers enlighten us on whether this particularly Strange Story really is made up?

As a nine-year old I of course believed every word of it, I had read it in the totally groovy coll fab Strange Stories, after all, so it must be true. I even vigorously defended the veracity of Strange Stories-sourced evidence, 13ft-high Mexican giant skeletons and all, against contemptible doubting Look & Learn readers in the back of the car on the school run.

While there have been compilations of Look & Learn published since its demise, back issues of World of Wonder and “Strange Stories” seem to command little value or interest – so little interest in fact, that I wasn’t even able to find out from ebay how much I could get for the complete bound volumes of WoW that earlier this year were still knocking around the home I grew up in. My mum wanted to throw them out, so I donated them to the offices of Fortean Times for safekeeping – a suitable home for what Charles Fort called “damned data.”

SOURCES

World of Wonder bibliography http://www.26pigs.com/world-wonder/bibliography.html

26pigs.com – reminiscences on World of Wonder http://www.26pigs.com/world-wonder/index.html

Official Look & Learn website http://www.lookandlearn.com

The Bumper Book of Look and Learn, selected by Stephen Pickles, Century/Random House, London, 2007

World of Wonder is held in the British Library serials collection (http://catalogue.bl.uk), shelf mark P.993/58. The Fortean Times office holds a complete bound set of World of Wonder.

Strange Stories in a World of Wonder

2011-01-25T01:55:00.000-08:00

The 'Strange Stories' series, which ran for the first half of the 1970s in World of Wonder magazine ('the magazine for every boy and girl') was very influential in getting some of today's forteans interested in Spring Heeled Jack, Kasper Hauser, yetis and that sort of thing. Part one of my feature on 'Strange Stories' from the January 2011 issue of Fortean Times is now availabe here - as a limited a sneak preview designed to entice you into buying the online paywall edition of the magazine.

As soon as the 'first British serial' has expired, the feature will be on this blog in full.

(Cover image understood to be 'fair dealing' for the purposes of a critique or review under the 1988 Copyright Act)

Italian translation of 'Trots in Space'

2011-01-25T01:42:00.000-08:00

I've just spotted this Italian translation of my Fortean Times 'Trots in Space' feature on the Posadists - a UFO cult who at one point believed that flying saucers were evidence of advanced Socialist civilizations on other planets. I'm following up to find whether this work comes under the syndication deal I signed with Fortean Times way back in 2003, or whether it's unauthorised, in which case, the authors owe me money!

Freedom of Information – think like a bureaucrat

2011-01-07T06:33:00.000-08:00

Maurice Frankel, who campaigned for many years to bring about the Freedom of Information Act, and Mark Watts of the FOIA Centre, examined the Freedom of Information Act at a recent NUJ London Freelance Branch meeting. The secret of using the Act, says Maurice is not to think like a journalist but to do something much harder, to think like a bureaucrat. Read the report here.

Report urges Met to facilitate fair reporting

2011-01-07T06:31:00.000-08:00

The recent Metropolitan Police Authority Civil Liberties Panel report in the aftermath of the April 2009 London G20 protests has many welcome recommendations. Its conclusions on police relations with journalists include the advice that "If containment is used, officers should be required to record when they prevent journalists from crossing containment cordons and the reasons for doing so". And the Panel wants "a more clearly auditable trail" kept by police of such incidents. The MPA also – after a minimal amount of research – was able to knock on the head suggestions often heard from front line coppers that Press Cards “might be forgeries”. There’s more here.

Paywalls - will they work?

2011-01-07T04:50:00.000-08:00

Dan Sabbagh - Media Guardian's new editor - discussed the latest developments in paywalls for newspaper websites at The Times, FT (Financial, not Fortean, for the avoidance of doubt) and other newspapers. Will they work, will they save journalism, and will they create any opportunities for freelances? Read this report from an NUJ London Freelance Branch meeting, from the Freelance.

Last Christmas...

2011-01-07T04:45:00.000-08:00

Did the Romans invent Christmas? My article in December 2009's History Today on whether Christmas came from the pagan Roman festival of Saturnalia - has finally emerged from behind its paywall, you can now look at if for free here.

'Meteor Man' on Fortean Times website

2010-11-18T09:30:00.000-08:00

My article on Ernst Chlandi, the unconventional self-taught physicist and founder of the science of acoustics, who proved that meteorites came from outer space, is now on the Fortean Times website.

Start your own English school - no experience necessary

2010-08-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

From the April 2010 EL Gazette

MANY TEFLERS have at some time suspected (or known for certain) that their school’s owners have little or no background knowledge of the subject, beyond an understanding of the money to be made. Now a company called TeachEnglishOnline.org offers all ‘business enthusiasts’ the opportunity to start their own English school in cyberspace for just US$250. The company promises that setting up an online EFL school requires ‘no setup, no hassle, and definitely no experience’.

TeachEnglishOnline.org offer a complete English Website Package that lets you start your own online EFL operation for a one-off fee, which means you won’t have to pay any royalties. The fee includes one year’s free web hosting, search engine optimisation and other internet bells and whistles.

Details of lesson content are more vague. A ‘demo’ shows a dummy version of an online English school, which promises that you ‘can learn Business English, General English, Kids English, IELTS or TOEFL’. Students pay $15 an hour and up for English lessons.

The Gazette could only find one sample TeachEnglishOnline.org lesson, in which ‘we will learn how to express quantities’ to the tune of xylophone music in the background, and we learn from a rather unnatural conversation that ‘wholemeal flour is used to make bread’. To be fair to TeachEnglishOnline.org, their sample lesson is no worse that one you’d be expected to pay money for in many of London’s less reputable schools.

E4D - English for dogs

2010-08-19T07:33:00.000-07:00

From the March 2010 EL Gazette

A dog brought in to the Royal Society for Prevention of Animals (RPSPCA) centre in Oldham near Manchester, England, has made good progress in a course of English lessons. Workers initially thought the dog, a male border collie named Cent, was deaf, because he didn’t respond to commands. But tests showed his hearing was good. Puzzled RSPCA workers consulted their records on Cent, and found that he had been brought to the RSPCA by a local Polish family who could no longer care for him. As one animal care assistant recalled, ‘It was only a few days later when it dawned on us that he must be used to hearing commands in Polish.’

A look at the internet provided Cent’s handlers with a list of Polish commands, and they went back to get help from the family that originally brought Cent in for help with Polish pronunciation.

Once Cent started responding to Polish commands, staff started teaching him to react to basic commands in English in a ‘reward-based’ programme. Within four months, Cent is now bilingual and ready to be found a home.

Oldham RSPCA recall they once took in a cat from an Asian family, ‘which had Asian owners and only responded to commands in their (unspecified) native tongue.’ (Although the Gazette is unaware of any cats giving much of a response to commands in any language.) See the September 2008 Gazette for gorillas arriving at a Valencia zoo who needed to be spoken to in English after they’d lived in zoos in France and Germany.

Why small countries do well at FCE?

2010-08-19T07:29:00.000-07:00

From the February 2010 EL Gazette

LOOKING at the latest scores for Cambridge Esol First Certificate English (FCE) exam results, there are some striking trends. One is the handful of small countries that seem to do exceptionally well.

The small former Soviet state of Belarus (population 9 million) has a 95 per cent pass rate in FCE, and 27.9 per cent of Belarusian FCE students get an A grade. Little central American nation Costa Rica has a 100 pass rate in FCE, while modest-sized EU ‘accession’ state Slovenia has an 89 per cent FCE pass rate, and a 22.5 A grade score. 88 per cent of Serbia’s FCE candidates pass, with about the same proportion of A grades as Slovenia. Sweden – with about the same population as Belarus - has a 93 per cent FCE pass rate, and a similarly high A grade score. Bahrain, the smallest Gulf State, has a 90 per cent FCE pass rate, much higher than any other Middle Eastern country.

What factors result in these very high scores? By comparison, the pass rate for FCE in the UK is an unimpressive 65 per cent, probably the result of the tendency of some language schools to put students through exams long before they’re ready. Russia has a 79 per cent pass rate for FCE, but a much lower proportion of grade A passes, only eight per cent. Sweden’s score can’t just be attributed to its language’s closeness to English – neither Germany nor Holland, with languages closely related to English, do particularly well at FCE.

We asked Cambridge Esol’s media relations officer Stuart Giblin if there was anything in the statistical set that could account for these scores. He got back to the Gazette to say that the samples on which the high scores for FCE were based for Serbia, Slovenia, Costa Rica, Bahrain, Belarus and Sweden were ‘statistically insignificant’ – in other words, so few people were taking FCE in these countries, that we can’t make any meaningful comparisons with bigger countries where the pass rates and A-grade rates are based on much bigger cohorts of candidates.

But the Gazette has done some digging of its own. We may be completely wrong, but we think we’ve identified factors in the small six – Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden Costa Rica, Belarus, Bahrain – that could account for their high scores, with possible lessons for those running exam classes elsewhere.

One clue to Slovenia and Serbia’s exam success is the origins of these countries, both are former Yugoslav republics. Socialist Yugoslavia had an impressive reputation for education, and some of the better elements of that system seem to have stuck. Vincent Smidowicz of Sidmouth International School, a consultant to City and Guilds, told the Gazette ‘Serbia does have excellent educational and cultural standards; earlier this month was my first visit and I was very impressed.’

Belarus’ high FCE score may be down to a local peculiarity, the Belarus Testing Initiative, devised by the British Council’s Belarus office back in 1997, with the support of the country’s education ministry. The Testing Initiative overhauled the country’s then prevailing antiquated system of oral exams for school leavers, followed by university entry exams written by the individual universities, taken several months later. These were replaced with exams deliberately aimed at integrating Belarus more closely into Western European higher education, with exam papers developed by a Thames Valley University consultant. Could this mean that international exams devised in the UK, such as FCE, have become more familiar to Belarusian candidates?

Swedes generally do very well at English, and it seems that some Swedish state schools – unlike the school systems of most other Northern European countries – put their pupils through FCE. Several UK universities that take a lot of Swedish students. In recognition of the generally high level of education in that country, some UK universities will take Swedes –often as relatively short-term exchange students - into their first year of a undergraduate course with just a Swedish gymnasium diploma plus an FCE.

And Bahrain? The numerous guides for expatriates on living and working in Bahrain emphasise the importance of the lucrative one-to-one exam tutoring market, with particular surges in demand as the exams season approaches, and in the re-takes season once the results are out. Bahrainis, it seems, will pay for personal training to get them through EFL exams.

According to International House Costa Rica’s executive director Marcela Devine, Costa Rica has a tiny sample of people taking FCE – only about 50 candidates a year, mostly young adults - in its main test centre in the capital, San Juan. Ms Devine told the Gazette that the country’s FCE success ‘is entirely due to good candidate preparation… we offer a mock exam several months before the exam and use the results for organising exam preparation courses.’ UK language schools please note!

Bahrain English Language Teaching market

2010-08-19T07:26:00.000-07:00

From the February 2010 EL Gazette

The island nation of Bahrain, the smallest Gulf State, has just over a million inhabitants. Various estimates put the proportion of expatriates in Bahrain at between a third and a half of the population. It’s also the only Gulf State with free education for all up to age 16, with English a mandatory school subject from an early age and also one of the nation’s two official languages, so there’s a big demand for expatriate EFL teachers, both in the mainstream state and private sector, and in the thriving international schools sector.

Most secondary school teachers in Bahraini secondary school system are expatriate nationals of other Arab countries. The English for the Future Project aims to improve the standard of teaching and learning in the region. In Bahrain, the focus of Teaching for the Future, delivered by British Council trainers, is on teacher training, methodology (including Clil) and introducing new technology into the classroom.

The numerous private schools – which teach most subjects in English –are popular with Bahrainis, and it is in this sector where most native-speaker expatriate teachers are found. By nationality, most expatriates in Bahrain are Indians, and a look at the CVs of many senior teachers in India reveals that they’ve worked in Bahrain. There’s a big market for home tutoring in Bahrain, with many expatriate Teflers earning a living in this way, with surges in demand as the exams season approaches.

Bahrain’s international schools – including several Indian and Pakistani-founded international schools - are world class, with the St Christopher’s International School among the very select few globally that gets its students into the world’s top ten universities. There are a lot of British nurseries and international schools on the British curriculum, and there’s also the Bahrain School, catering from kindergarten all the way through to IB, and run by the US Department of Defense. (See page 11 on Kazakhs studying in relatively close Bahrain, where international schools will take them with a lower Ielts score.)

Many private schools are aimed at Bahrain citizens, with a lot of evening classes after work. For better known private schools like Bell Centres or the British Council, teachers would need a PGCE or Diploma and experience. Expats don’t pay taxes, and their employer has a legal requirement to pay an end of contract ‘indemnity’ bonus, based on basic salary, starting at a basic 15 days salary per year worked. But expatriates can’t establish themselves as permanent legal residents in Bahrain.

There's been a proliferation of universities and polytechnics opening in Bahrain recently, with most courses in English medium, and catering to students from other Gulf countries. There’s a steady increase in Bahrainis who've studied abroad and who are returning to do postgrad courses in Bahrain.

Bahraini universities are establishing a reputation for scientific research, some hold patents on some important AIDS treatments. These universities all have big EAP operations, and many expat EFL teachers work there. Bahrain Polytechnic in particular employs a lot of native speakers.

More recent foundations include the Royal University For Women, and the ministry of health’s College Of Health Sciences, which has its own English department. Private sector universities include AMA International University, a branch of the Philippine-based university. New private universities are proliferating at great speed, and concerns about quality assurance have led to the establishment of a national body to oversee this sector. This has already warned 10 private universities to make improvements or face closure.

As in many Arab countries, the spectre of unemployment – especially youth unemployment – is of concern. Most of the country’s private sector jobs, which demand English, are held by expatriates. The unemployed, as well as those Bahrainis working in lower paid jobs, are perceived as held back by their English.

A recent solution is the government's Career Progression Programme, (CPP) which involves the Bell Bahrain training centre in partnership with the Expert Group, training providers to the oil and gas industries. The CPP, administered by the government’s Labour Fund, aims in the long term to reduce Bahrain’s dependence on an expatriate workforce.

Bell Centres started its first CPP English classes for 70 students in July 2009. Sami Adnan Sulaiman, Bell Bahrain’s centre manager, said the courses were designed so that students could ‘structure their learning around their jobs.’ There are three other providers besides Bell/Expert Group delivering EFL through the project. The ambitious CPP project has a target to deliver EFL training to 6,500 Bahrainis from the ‘mid-income local workforce’ in the next three and a half years. A big incentive ensuring that students succeed at CPP is the salary increase of at least of 50 dinars a month (£81) they will get on completion of the course, which represents an monthly uplift of between a quarter and an eighth to some of the lower paid workers.

UK university student visa delays

2010-08-19T07:21:00.000-07:00

From the February 2010 EL Gazette

UK IMMIGRATION minister Phil Woolas appeared on the BBC’s Newsnight programme defending his government’s immigration record. He noted that all students have to present themselves in person to the UK Border Agency (UKBA) or its ‘agents’ – private contractors who pass on visa applications to UKBA for scrutiny. The minister quoted a refusal rate for UK student visa applications from Pakistan that’s now risen to 42 per cent, evidence that his department was getting tough on immigration.

Mr Woolas mentioned that the visas system is now ‘much tougher, that’s why the universities complain to us.’ The Newsnight interview focused on ‘getting tough,’ rather than on facilitating the arrival of over 160,000 international higher education students into the UK every year, bringing in a total of £4 billion a year in student fees - 8 per cent of the higher education sector’s total income. Course fees of £10,000 a year are now ‘average’ in undergraduate science, and Imperial College in London seems to top the list of high international student fees, asking ‘up to’ £20,400 for one of its courses.

Higher education graduates are likely to go straight home afterwards, having contributed much to the economy. The debate in the UK is about ‘getting tough’, rather than ensuring the higher education sector continues to attract the high fee-paying students it needs to survive. The cost to universities of educating home (UK) and EU students is far higher than the £3,225 each student in these categories brings in annually - universities need to recruit international students to subsidise them.

But when the current university academic year started in October, universities found many of their international students had to start their courses late, or that these students lost their university places altogether, because of delays in getting Tier 4 (student) visas. London Student newspaper reported that at Queen Mary’s, part of the University of London, ‘about 25 students missed their chance to study here, because they did not get their visas in good time, despite having applied well in advance.’ The London School of Economics told the same paper that ‘some offer holders, especially from Pakistan, have had to defer to next year (academic year 2010-2011) and may conceivably be lost altogether.’

There’s an annual peak in Tier 4 applications in August for university courses starting in October. By October, the Guardian newspaper was reporting that universities had started filming lectures so visa delay-bound students could catch up on arrival. They had to finally close the door on these students in November.

What causes these disastrous visa delays? October saw the start of the first full academic year since The Tier 4 system for student visas came into full force in March 2009.. The UK Council for International Student Affairs (UKCisa) surveyed ‘affected students’ about their visa hassles. Their report, Tier 4: students’ experiences (applying from outside the UK) UKCisa identified ‘delays and backlogs’ resulting in ‘a significant numbers either arriving late for courses or not being able to arrive to all.’ Some initial difficulties with Tier 4 have been sorted out, but the problems remaining have the effect of discouraging students from applying for UK university.

The majority of students surveyed found visa applications relatively swift and hassle-free, with the application forms and guidance on websites relatively helpful, But a quarter of students surveyed had difficulties because their acceptance letters sent by universities don’t always fit UKBA’s - unclear – requirements. The Entry Clearance Officers (ECOs) who scrutinise applications ‘at times developed their own local interpretations of what was required,’ according to the UKCisa report, and ‘errors and obfuscation’ by ECOs and their commercial partners led to student visa applicants being ‘tripped up, put off… or even refused.’ .

UKBA’s commercial partners, such as Jerry’s in Pakistan, Worldbridge in Germany, and VSF Ltd in most of the world, came in for particular criticism. They seem to have very little knowledge of the new visa rules, according to the survey. One Bangladeshi student said the ‘behaviour of some staff at VFS is very rude and unprofessional.’

Other common problems were the hassle, time and expense of providing documents in translation and evidence of funds, and of students presenting themselves in person for biometric tests. One in ten students had to submit their visa application all over again, which meant travelling to re-submit their biometric data again too. Their fingerprints are unlikely to have changed in the meantime! Another student said the regulations for evidence of financial support changed three times during his application. The visa fee is £145, but many applicants said that having to provide all this evidence added at least an extra £200 to this.

Some students described getting ‘contradictory advice from the (UKBA) website and from consular staff,’ and a lack of advice services available by phone or email. Answers to email enquiries took up to five times as long as advertised. Family, friends and teachers proved to be a better source of advice to most students than UKBA website, with agents and university international offices proving more helpful than British consulates.

All this does obvious damage to the UK higher education sector’s reputation, when it’s becoming cheaper and easier to go instead to the other English speaking countries for a degree, or to continental Europe, where the English-medium university sector is booming. One student told the UKCisa survey that his parents had ‘forbidden’ himself and his siblings from studying in the UK, so disgusted were they with the visa application service.

Other countries that attract university students are getting tougher too, but their waiting times for visas are shrinking, not growing. In 2008, an applicant for a US student visa in Dubai would have to wait 56 days, now it’s down to three days. Strict though the application procedure for Australian student visas and the US F-1 student visa are, they’re an awful lot more straightforward than the UKBA’s rules. These rules – as Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced in December – will shortly change again.

Meteor Man - from Fortean Times 265, August 2010

2010-08-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

MATT SALUSBURY salutes Ernst Chladni, the self-taught polymath who confounded academic wisdom by turning to witness testimony and historical data in his quest to prove that meteors had an extraterrestrial origin

VERY EARLY in the morning of 12 August this year, the Perseid meteor shower will do its annual star turn. Once again, my girlfriend and I will be watching the cold, cloudy, light-polluted, 21st century London skies, hoping to catch sight of some blink-and-you-miss it fiery trails. The Perseids this year will be of a stronger than usual ‘storm intensity’, with several hundred meteors hitting the atmosphere every hour. Regrettably, the shower will peak around dawn – this and a Full Moon on the night will probably mean our view of the Perseids will be rubbish.

Nowadays we know what meteors are. But just over two hundred years ago, meteors vexed the great minds of Europe. “Meteor” means literally “something in the air,” and the prevailing explanation for them was that they were the result of an “accretion” of gases high in the atmosphere, that somehow congealed into solids.

Volcanoes were also believed to cause meteorites, either by throwing out stones that rained down, or by expelling plumes of “effluvia” that congealed into rock somewhere in the atmosphere, possibly aided by electricity. Others thought meteors were terrestrial stones dumped by hurricanes, or even that the “magnetic effluvia” of the Northern Lights caused their formation. With the arrival of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, scientists had an increasing tendency to conclude that meteors existed only in the superstitious minds of peasants who had misidentified stones struck by lightning.

The idea that meteorites were “cosmic bodies” falling from outer space was the least fashionable explanation. The meteorite mystery was solved mostly through the efforts of a man more interested in music and maths than cosmic astronomy. The father of meteorics (the study of meteorites) was an eccentric physicist called Ernst Chladni. His methods of investigation, and his lifestyle, were distinctly fortean. Like Charles Fort, Chladni spent way too much time in reference libraries. Like Fort, the evidence he amassed in support of his ideas on meteors came not form staring through telescopes or from analysing rocks, or from any expertise in his chosen subject, but from curiosity and through three weeks spent in a university library reading eyewitness reports.

Chladni’s evidence was as likely to come from passages from Homer and from that proto-fortean favourite The Gentleman’s Magazine as it was from scientific journals. And in formulating his conclusions, Chladni relied not on his considerable – although informal and self-taught – grounding in science, but his training as a lawyer, to help him tell “fact” from “fairy tales” when evaluating witness testimony.

The earliest guesses at the origin of meteorites were in fact some of the most accurate. The Roman naturalist Pliny accepted that stones occasionally fell from the sky, and recorded the fall of a meteor in Thrace as confirmation of a prediction made centuries earlier by the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras that a “stone from the sun” would one day fall. (1)

Aristotle conceived a model of an orderly universe with celestial bodies moving in fixed, orderly ways in otherwise empty space. In the Aristotelian universe, there were no messy bits of rock rattling around or “small bodies beyond the moon” that could get in the way of the celestial bodies in empty space. It was impossible for stones to fall from the sky, as apart from the celestial bodies, there was no matter out there to fall. Aristotle suggested instead that meteors were the tops of exploding volcanoes blown into the sky. His explanation wasn’t well received by his contemporaries, but as the Aristotelian universe later became the cornerstone of Christian and Islamic cosmology, the volcanic origin of meteors gained more authority.

Comets were allowed to move out “beyond the moon” after the sixteenth century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe discovered that the comets orbited much further out than Aristotle has allowed. Newton accommodated Tycho Brahe’s discoveries on comets, but otherwise seemed to confirm Aristotle’s idea that there could be no small bodies beyond the moon. He concluded that – with the possible exception of
vapours and effluvia from earth, and the “aether”– “to make way for the motion of the comets it’s necessary to empty the heavens of all matter.”

Dr William Whiston’s An account of a surprizing Meteor seen in the air, March the 6th, 1715 at night, and his “Conjectures for the solution of the foregoing phenomena” was relatively mainstream for the time – he felt that meteors resulted when “exhalations and effluvia from the earth travelling above the ‘vapours’ become heavier than air and coagulate into stones in the Northern parts,” but ferment into thunder and lightning in the South.

In fairness to the Age of Reason’s meteorite debunkers, an awful lot of superstition and folk tales fell from the sky. The large meteor that fell on Eisenstadt, Bavaria in 1492 was housed in the local church as an example of the “wrath of God,” while practically any stones that looked odd – from fossil shark’s teeth to prehistoric flint tools – were touted as “thunderstones” that had fallen during thunderstorms. The statue of the goddess Diana at Ephesus (probably carved from a meteorite) “fell from the sky,” as did the Lamean lion in the ten labours of Hercules (probably the fossil bones of a prehistoric mammal). The Council of Claremont in France, which proclaimed the First Crusade in 1095, was preceded by portents including an ominous shower of meteors.

To the secular minds of the Enlightenment, all this was a red rag to a bull. The new brand of science required expensive kit to measure natural phenomena, and observers trained to use this equipment. Peasants and other “unlettered observers” who reported stones falling from the sky didn’t know what they were talking about, their worthless testimony belonged in the bygone world of witch-hunts and old wives’ tales.

The 18th century was a time of exciting new discoveries. From the 1750s, scientists experimented with electricity. This exciting new science seemed to breathe new life into the atmospheric accretion model, with the electrical action of lightning in the upper atmosphere seen as somehow the key to the procreation of meteors. Mainstream science didn’t so much cling to ancient received wisdom, as get carried away trying to explain meteorites by linking them to sexiest new fields of scientific enquiry, gasses and electricity.

One contemporary scientist was Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, who in his earlier career with France’s Académie Royale des Sciences gained a reputation as a tenacious superstition-buster. He demolished contemporary claims about water dowsing, and claims about a boy who could see water through strata of earth and rock. Lavoisier was part of the team called in to evaluate Franz Anton Mesmer’s claims around “animal magnetism”, for which he found no evidence.

Lavoiser’s report on “a stone which it is claimed fell from the sky during a storm” was the first known chemical analysis of a piece of a meteorite, which fell in 1768 in Luce, France. He read his report to the Academy the following year, and it was written up in 1772. (2) Lavoisier, the junior partner in the committee that authored the report, found iron pyrites in the stone, and concluded that “thunder struck preferentially on pyritiferous rock,” which peasants had misidentified. He speculated that the iron pyrites in the rock somehow attracted lighting. On the subject of meteors, he added that "true physicists" had always been sceptical.

Antoine Lavoisier's report on "a stone which it is claimed fell from the sky during a storm"
An electrical explanation for meteors has been tentatively suggested by the Academy’s Jean Baptiste Le Roy the previous year, in his report to an enquiry triggered by a fireball “more intense that the sun” streaking over Sussex and reaching an apparently impossibly high speed exploding over Melun, France.

Academy president G. de Fouchy added a note to the Academy proceedings for 1772, which pointed out that subsequently three identical stones had been recovered from different sites in the area around the Luce fall, and that further study was needed. In fairness to the vulcanist, hurricanist, atmospheric accretionist and lightningist tendencies of this era, it’s noticeable that they usually concluded with words to the effect of “requires further study.”

By 1789 a much more influential Lavoisier had published his paradigm-shattering Elements of Chemistry, which caused a steady stream of defections from the prevailing scientific model of “phlogiston” – a substance with a negative weight that was added during combustion – and replacing this with newly discovered gasses such as hydrogen and oxygen. Just as scientists were getting carried away with electricity, so Lavoisier was now changing his mind about meteors, seeking explanations for them in the exciting new world of gasses. He was now favouring an idea he had earlier rejected, that dust containing metals rose to inflammable layers of the upper atmosphere where it could be ignited by electricity to form meteors.

But when a rain of meteors fell on July 24 1790 in Barbotan, near the French town of Agen, the preferred approach of the scientific establishment was denial. Sworn affidavits by 300 witnesses attesting to the fall were simply ignored. Professor Nicolas Baudin, a local physicist out for a stroll, did see a meteor fall, but when he wrote this up five years later, his editors added their comment on Baudin’s and other such reports – “we do not place any faith in any of them.”

Such reactions were understandable given the political context: France in 1790 was gripped by revolution, and several key events in the French revolution were the result of mass panics or rumours of imaginary plots that seized the crowd in Paris. Revolutionaries would have been reluctant in this atmosphere to encourage any apparent superstitious mass hysteria about stones raining from the sky. (3)

Enter Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni. He was born in 1756 in the German city of Wittenberg, descended from Protestants who had fled persecution in Hungary. Although fascinated by science from a young age, Chladni was forced instead to study law at the insistence of his strict father, a law professor at the local university. Ernst Chladni later recalled a materially privileged but restrictive upbringing – he wasn’t allowed to take up music until he was 19. With his father’s death in 1782, Chladni was free to take up music and mathematics. (4)

In 1787 he discovered a way to make sound waves visible, by sprinkling fine powder on a metal plate and rubbing the edge of the plate with a violin bow. The vibrations caused the powder to form symmetrical patterns (still called “Chaldni figures”). He wrote this up in 1787 in Endectungen über die Theorie des Klages, which founded the discipline of acoustics.

Chladni had a talent for what’s now called “science communication” – his sound wave patterns were visually beautiful, and he combined the science with entertainment and music, inventing and helping to build weird and wonderful instruments – the “clavicylinder”, a kind of glass harmonica harpsichord, and the glass rod-based “Euphon”. With a horse and carriage, he took his show on the road. In a day job familiar to many forteans, he made a living he described as a “nomadic, carefree existence” on the paid lecture circuit, sometimes with 14 gigs in a row in each town.

Now scientifically respectable, Chladni was on tour in Göttingen in 1793 when he got into conversation with the elderly and frail Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg, one of Europe’s best-known physicists. Licthenberg told Chladni he’d seen a fireball exploding over the city on a November evening two years earlier. Chladni gave Licthenberg the credit for coming up with the idea that meteors may be “cosmic bodies” and that he should seek evidence in Philosophical Transactions. But having a brilliant idea is not the same as doing the unglamorous library work, as every fortean knows.

Chladni spent the next three weeks in the Göttingen university library, where he found reports of 24 well-documented fireballs and 18 falls of iron or stone, and many less well-documented cases, including ten historical falls from the first century AD to the 17th century. Of these, the most impressive was the mysterious “Pallas iron”. This was a huge 700kg (1543 lb) lump of iron with holes like a Swiss cheese, found by German naturalist Baron Peter Simon von Pallas in Krasnoyarsk, Russia in 1772, and it was still well known when Chladni was researching. The Pallas iron was one of five “iron masses” Chladni knew of.

Chladni found other reports of meteor falls: the recovery of stone fragments “40 or 50 English miles” apart at Blagdon, England, in 1783, and Jean Baptiste Le Roy’s report to the Academie Royale des Sciences on the 1771 Melun, France, fireball (see above). Prefiguring FT’s own “Classical Corner,” Chladni also found reports in Homer’s Odyssey and of the meteor fall on Roman Thrace from Pliny’s Natural Histories.

Chladni’s “lawyer’s ear” convinced him that consistencies in all these accounts meant the eyewitnesses were telling the truth. The patterns he kept finding in accounts were: scorched recovered rocks heated enough to melt their outer layers, thunderclaps, and stones too hot to handle. In Philosophical Transactions Chladni found descriptions of terrestrial stones known to have been struck by lightning, descriptions which were very different from those of meteors. The very high speeds reported and the fact that meteors seemed to come from all directions convinced Chladni that they had to come from “cosmic space.”

Chladni wrote up his researches in the snappily titled Ueber den Ursprung der von Pallas gefundenen und anderer ihr ähnlicher Eisenmassen und über einige damit in Verbindung stehende Naturerscheinungen, (On the origin of the mass of iron found by Pallas and of other similar iron masses and on a few natural phenomena connected therewith, see front page at the top of this article), which appeared in 1794. The short book’s chapter headings didn’t pull any punches. One stated bluntly that “fireballs are cosmic bodies” and “most shooting stars are no different.” Other sub-headings insisted that shooting stars are “not of volcanic origin… They are not smelted by lightning.”

Chladni hesitated to publish Ueber den Ursprung, expecting a hostile reception, and he got it. Many scientists immediately dismissed the work because it relied on eyewitness accounts of a phenomenon Chladni has himself never observed, and his methods would still be unacceptable to the scientific establishment today. In later magazine articles, Chladni said people were telling him they believed him but they felt they couldn’t say so publicly. Even Lichtenberg criticised Chladni’s book at first, but eventually came round to his way of thinking.

And while Chladni’s premise turned out to be correct, some of his ideas were bizarrely wrong, far more barking than the prevailing theories of the day. Chladni decided that some small meteors were “spongey masses” that ascended from the earth and caught fire, and that some falling meteors were tiny, but swelled up to enormous size when they hit the atmosphere, while others were made of ‘soft and elastic fluids’. By 1805 Chladni had decided all meteors came from lunar volcanoes, before changing his mind again.

Two months after Chladni’s book appeared, supporting evidence literally fell out of the sky near Siena, Italy. A sparking and booming red cloud threw stones to the ground, some of which were recovered, and they had an identical chemical composition to other meteorites. The Siena fall was widely discussed, most reports blaming lunar volcanoes.

A 56-pounder (25kg) fallen meteorite was recovered from Wold Cottage, Yorkshire in 1795, and went on display in a London coffee house, complete with witness affidavits, where Royal Society’s president, Sir John Banks, saw it. He engaged the young chemist Edward Charles Howard to analyse it. Improvements in chemical analysis techniques since Lavoisier’s day helped identify a distinctive iron-nickel alloy in the Wold Cottage sample, which also showed up in the Sienna stones. Howard had read Chladni’s book on meteors, which was now taken seriously by British authors

While orthodox scientists may not yet have accepted Chladni’s views on meteor origins, his book had at least got them thinking about what evidence they needed to look for – a fall seen by a “trained observer.” A fall of meteors at l’Aigle, France in 1803 seemed to provide the confirmation the sceptics were holding out for.

Young physicist Jean Baptiste Biot, dispatched by the ministry of the interior to investigate these meteor falls, followed a sound fortean principle, always ask the locals. His report was dated Year 11 of the Republic (1803) and it’s noticeable that all the eyewitnesses he interviewed are addressed as “Citoyen,” (Citizen.) In the new egalitarian France, the unlettered observers were no longer contemptible peons but citizens worthy of respect. Biot took the testimony of local Academy of Sciences member Leblond, but also interviewed farmers, an elderly widow and the concierge of the local castle, and their testimony carried equal weight.

Biot also checked the local mineral collections and mines, and found “nothing among their products” anything like the meteor falls he’d found. While not explicitly stating that the l’Aigle fall was extraterrestrial, Biot’s conclusion that it came down to earth at a 22-degree angle “at very great speed” was understood by most readers to preclude other explanations, and he summed up by saying, “I have succeeded in putting beyond doubt one of the most astonishing phenomena that mankind has ever observed.”

The atmospheric propagation of meteors theory lingered on until the 1860s. The idea that meteors were from lunar volcanoes didn’t finally die until the late 19th century. Two centuries later, science historians are divided on whether Chladni was more influential than the then obscure Biot, and on whether Chladni founded meteorics or just laid the groundwork for others to follow.

Chladni continued what he called his “somewhat nomadic way of living” on the paid lecture circuit, largely unaffected by the controversy around Ueber den Ursprung. He “never received and acceptable offer of a professorship.” On the back of his work on acoustics, his most lucrative lecturing gig was a private audience at the Tuileries palace in Paris in 1809, at which he demonstrated his “sound figures” to Napoleon and an impressed Biot and his fellow Academicians. Chladni mentioned Biot’s mission to l’Aigle in his 1819 meteor update Ueber Feuer-Meteore, (On Fiery Meteors), by which time he had discovered the Gentleman’s Magazine, citing its latest reports of Irish meteor falls. Fiery Meteors has a more extensive proto-fortean list of historical “falls that have been observed, in chronological order” and “distances they were observed to travel” – from Japan, 839 AD, “a stone or iron mass” reported in Alexandria in 1280, and so on.

When the Napoleonic Wars came to Wittenberg, Chladni fled to nearby Kemberg, where he was based for the rest of his life, in a crowded one-room house/laboratory. Physicist Wilhelm Olbers said of an elderly Chladni in 1824, “it is truly sad that this, in many ways, deserving man has found no institution to award him a position with a salary.” Chladni died on yet another lecture tour in 1827.

Only in 1950 was the origin of meteors in the asteroid belt conclusively proven, with fireballs being superheated ionising gases around the falling meteorite, and the thunderclap being the sonic boom from the shock wave of it hitting the atmosphere at high speed.

Chladni cited several reports of a sinister hissing sound accompanying falling meteors, and we still don’t know exactly what this is. In recent years, the Ministry of Defence’s Project Condign report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK (see Fortean Times 211:pp4-6, Fortean Times 212: p28, 250: p28) has revealed that government scientists take seriously the idea that superheated meteors may somehow interact with atmospheric gases to create exotic plasmas that are mistaken for flying saucers. Over 200 years after Chladni unravelled the origins of meteors, some meteor mysteries remain.

© Matt Salusbury 2009

In the event, the moon wasn’t a problem, but thick cloud and pouring rain meant we had to call off our Perseid-watching gig for 2010. I saw a few sudden movements in the sky above my garden early on the night of 12 August which could have been meteors.

FOOTNOTES

1) Anaxagoras’ explanation turned out to be partly correct. The cores of some meteorites contain tiny diamonds a few microns across, currently thought to have originated as material expelled from supernovae – exploding suns

2) Rapport fait a l’Académie Royale des Sciences, par MM. Fougerous, Cadet & Lavoisier, d’une observation, communiquée par M. l’abbé Bachela, sur une Pierre qu’on pretend être tombée du ciel pendant un orage Observations sur la Physique, 63-76, June 1772

3) The composer George Frideric Handel had a similar upbringing. His father had a career in law planned for him until he (Handel senior) dad when George was 13, allowing him to take up music for the first time.

4) There is a widely-held belief, especially among “alternative science” enthusiasts, that Lavoisier (or in some versions of the story the French Academy of Sciences) induced all the museums of Europe to throw away their meteorites in 1790, and that is the reason that there are no meteorites collected from before this date in existence today, except the 1492 Ensisheim meteorite, which was too big to throw away. I have found no evidence from primary sources for any mass throw-out of meteorites. Chladni knew of at least five extant “irons” including one from 1751 in Croatia in the Imperial Natural History Cabinet in Vienna, which as the Vienna Natural History Museum stil holds numerous meteorites in its collection that date back to 1748. A piece of the Pallas iron, of 1772 vintage, is still in the Berlin Natural History Museum. Many collections appear to have started shortly after 1790.

The story of the mass throw-out of meteorites may be a pre-internet urban legend. I have traced it back to the first page of Richard Milton’s Alternative Science (Fourth Estate, London, 1991), and Richard Milton told me he can no longer recall the source that he got it from – which is fair enough 18 years after he wrote it .I have not found any sources before 1968 mentioning the alleged mass meteor throw out, and Charles Fort made no mention of it in The Book of the Damned (1919). The resident meteor experts at Imperial College and University College London (UCL), the UK’s leading centres for the history of science, hadn’t heard of such an event either.

I could not find any writings by Lavoisier in which he said “Stones cannot fall from the sky, because there are no stones in the sky,” the proclamation which allegedly triggered the mass meteor throw-out. (Some internet sources attribute it to France’s Academy of Sciences, or to the “French scientific establishment.” ) Lavoisier was way too busy reforming the French government’s finances in 1790 to bother with that, most of his writings from this year are about the affairs of state. And he wasn’t denying the existence of meteors by then, merely speculating that they came from the upper atmosphere not outer space. Andrew Gregory of the UCL Centre For The History of Science felt that “Stones do not fall from the sky” sounded more like a quote form Aristotle, and he couldn’t see “why anyone would want to say that at that point” in 1790.

The meteorite collection of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris has a fragment from the 1492 Ensisheim fall in Germany. While the catalogue gives no year of acquisition for this, it was the first meteorite to be registered in the catalogue. See http://sp.lyellcollection.org/cgi/content/abstract/256/1/163

Ueber den Ursprung der von Pallas gefundenen und anderer ihr ähnlicher Eisenmassen und über einige damit in Verbindung stehende Naturerscheinungen, Ernst Florenz Friedrich Chladni, Riga, 1794

'Chladni meets Napoleon', H. J. Stockmann, European Physical Journal Special Topics, 145, pp15-23 (2007), EDP Sciences, Springer Verlag 2007

Über Feuer-Meteore, und über die mit denselben herabgefallenen Massen, Ernst Florenz Friedrich Chladni, J. G. Heubner, Vienna, 1819

Chladni Figures – A Study In Symmetry, Mary D. Waller, G. Bell and Sons London 1961

'Ernst Chladni and the origins of modern meteorite research', Ursula B Marvin, Meteorics and Planeteary Science 31 545-588, 1996, Meteorological Society, USA

“J’ai reusi a metre hors de doute un des plus etonnans phenomenes que les hommes aient jamais observes.” A quote from Relation d’un voyage fait dans le department de l’Orne pour constater la realite d’un meteor observe a l’Aigle le 26 floreal an 11, J.B. Biot Instituut Nationale Paris Memoires, Baudoin, Paris, 1799-1819

An account of a surprizing METEOR seen in the air, March the 6th, 1715(16) at night, William Whiston MA,J. Senex, W. Taylor, London, 1716

Elements of Chemistry in a New Systematic Order containing all the Modern Discoveries (Traites de Chemie), Antoine Lavoisier, trans. Robert Kerr, Edinburgh,1790

'Rapport fait a l’Académie Royale des Sciences, par MM. Fougerous, Cadet & Lavoisier, d’une observation, communiquée par M. l’abbé Bachela, sur une Pierre qu’on pretend être tombée du ciel pendant un orage', Observations sur la Physique, 63-76, Paris, July 1772

Endectungen über die Theorie des Klages, Ernst Chladni, Leipzig 1787

Ueber Feuer-Meteore, Ernst Chladni, J. C. Heibner, Vienna, 1819

Lettre ecrite a l’Auteur de cel Recueil, pour M. Lavoisier, de L’Academie, Sur le jeune Homme de Dauphine, don’t il a été question dans la Gazette de la France, des 5, 12 & 15 Juin 1772, Observations sur La Physique, 239-243 June 1772 (Lavoisier debunks dowsing for water)

Mike Jay, ‘Cosmic Debris’, Fortean Times Feb 2001

New Ways to Make Journalism Pay - conference report

2010-02-24T13:45:00.000-08:00

Gavin McFadyen of the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, and formerly with the World In Action team, tells how non-profit foundations increasingly fund investigations. The NUJ's Jenny Lennox (left) chaired this session. Photo copyright Tony Rizzo.

For many months now, I've been working on the committee that organised an looking practical examples of how journalists can start up their own media enterprises and make a living out of them, now that the corporate model of media ownership seems to be failing.

The New Ways to Make Journalism Pay conference hosted by NUJ London Freelance Branch in January was the result. There's a report on the conference here, and links to audio files and video clips of the conference will be added to this shortly.

Dominic Ponsford, Press Gazette editor, presented a case study of an established magazine forced by the current climate to go from weekly to monthly and move most of its news online - his own Press Gazette. Conference instigator and outgoing LFB vice-chair Alex Klaushofer (right) kicked off the proceedings. Photo copyright Tony Rizzo, and thanks to him for making them available.

Mass photography - February 2010 Freelance

2010-02-24T13:37:00.000-08:00

The Freelance for February 2010 is now out, including my report from the Mass Photography Gathering in Trafalgar Square (above).

Guardian audio with Rob Evans

2010-02-22T02:32:00.000-08:00

I've just discovered that I also feature in a Guardian audio short interview with their own Rob Evans on police databases (26 October 2009)

The Dorak Affair, an archaelogical mystery, from Fortean Times November 2009

2010-02-08T07:42:00.000-08:00

This article first appeared in Fortean Times November 2009. Its editor recently confirmed to me that they now have 'no budget' to put FT articles online, so I suppose it falls to me to put my FT articles on the web myself.

FIFTY years ago, on 29 November 1959, the Illustrated London News ran a ‘FIRST AND EXCULSIVE REPORT OF A CLANDESTINE EXCAVATION WHICH LED TO THE MOST IMPORTANT DISCOVERY SINCE THE ROYAL TOMBS OF UR’. Distinguished archaeologist James Mellaart listed the ‘Royal treasure of Dorak,’ named after the village in Turkey where they were unearthed. The Dorak treasures included a gold statuette, silver-inlaid swords and daggers, and dismantled panels form a throne, complete with a gold sheet adorned with Egyptian hieroglyphics dating the finds to around 2473 BC. An engraving on one sword blade showed ‘certainly the earliest detailed representation of ocean-going ships outside Egypt’. So spectacular were the finds that Mellaart concluded that it was here in the ‘Yortan’ province neighbouring the contemporary Troy of King Priam, that Mediterranean civilization kick-started. Mellaart’s article was accompanied by drawings based on his own sketches of the impressive artefacts, with an apology that ‘Owing to the circumstances of this discovery’ there were no photos yet. A book on the ‘founders of civilization’ was promised soon, which would turn archaeology on its head.

Then things went a little weird. None of the Dorak treasures – or any photos of them – have shown up anywhere. The archaeological establishment soon doubted whether the finds had ever existed. Dorak was hastily forgotten – an embarrassment of Piltdownian proportions.

James Mellaart, (‘Jimmie’ to most colleagues), was a Dutchman of Scottish descent whose first encounter with archaeology came when he reached the age of conscription. With Holland under German occupation, the Swiss consul advised he hide out the war in Leiden University’s Department of Egyptology. In 1951 he got a scholarship to study with the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, (BIAA), based in Turkey’s capital. He gained a reputation for his uncanny, knack, almost like ‘a water diviner’ of walking a potential site, reading the signs, picking a spot to excavate, and striking it rich almost immediately. By the time of the ‘Dorak affair’ he already had two sensational discoveries in Turkey to his name: the Neolithic site of Hacilar, found after following up on local gossip, and Çatal Hüyük, one of the ‘earliest sites of civilization,’ where hunter-gatherers made the leap to farming. From the beginning, Mellaart was fascinated by the Biblical ‘Sea People’ of the thirteenth millennium BC, who he thought may have lived along Turkey’s coast. Mellaart thought he’d found the semi-mythical ‘Sea People’ in the Dorak hoard.

In Mellaart’s own account, he was on an evening train to Izmir in 1958, on his way to view artefacts in an Izmir museum. A girl entered and sat opposite him. She was, as Mellaart recalled ‘very attractive… in a tarty sort of way.’ And she wore a gold bracelet, reminiscent of the bracelets found at Troy. The girl, who spoke English with an American accent, introduced herself as Anna Papastrati and told him she had many bracelets at home like the one she wore, would Mellaart like to see them?

At her Izmir home, Anna showed Mellaart more gold artefacts, a bit at a time, ‘She seemed to be teasing me,’ Mellaart later observed. Some old, damaged, photos were produced, showing ‘skeletons in tombs’, with writing on them in modern Greek. There was a vague story about Anna’s family uncovering the tombs in the village of Dorak, on the shore of Lake Apolyont during the Greek-Turkish war in the early 1920s. Mellaart ended up staying three days at Anna’s house, making notes and sketching antiquities: an ‘erotic’ gold statue of a goddess holding her breasts, ceremonial axe heads and sceptres in marble and obsidian.

Anna eventually agreed to send Mellaart photos of the Dorak hoard at a later date. Only on leaving Anna’s house did Mellaart remember to ask for its address – 217 Kazim Dirik Street. Izmir was rapidly expanding at the time, and the street, now believed to be 1777 Street, changed its name at least four times since 1958. Four years later, the Turkish authorities couldn’t find the house, and said the district was a commercial zone with no residential properties. The promised photos of the Dorak hoard never came, but a curiously unconvincing typed letter signed ‘Love. Anna’ arrived for Mellaart, granting permission to use the sketches in an article.

Lacking any photographic evidence, the BIAA declined to sponsor publications on Dorak in archaeological journals, so Mellaart took it to Illustrated London News, which regularly ran archaeology features. Details changed in later versions of Mellaart’s Dorak story: he stayed a week instead of just three days, the Dorak incident had taken place several years earlier, but he’d been sworn to secrecy, or he’d been afraid to tell his wife he’d spent several days at the house of a strange woman.

The small number of people who’ve seen Mellaart’s 60,000-word unpublished monograph on Dorak – complete with rubbings from sword blades – are convinced that this work is too elaborate for Mellaart to have made the whole thing up.

The most likely explanation for the Dorak hoard is that some of it was genuine, looted from sites around Turkey, mixed in with fakes, and a single genuine Egyptian piece to (fraudulently) date it. ‘Anna’ was a plant, a honey-trap to lure a respected archaeologist into authenticating the hoard, with a view to selling it to a millionaire collector abroad – Istanbul antique dealers speculate that the US, Greece or Egypt could be likely destinations for the Dorak treasure, whatever it was. The Turkish authorities subscribed to this view. Turkish newspaper Milliyet suddenly announced on 29 May 1962 it believed Mellaart was part of a plot to smuggle £48 million-worth of Dorak ‘national treasures’ out of Turkey. A criminal case on smuggling charges was brought against Mellaart that year, which was dropped in a general amnesty in 1965. Turkey’s Department of Antiquities refused Mellaart all further permits to excavate in the country.

Dorak slipped out of the annals of archaeology and into the realms of mystery. And in a twist worthy of Hergé’s Adverntures of Tintin, when I went to look at the British Library’s microfilm copy of Mellaart’s original 1959 Illustrated London News article, I found that in the copy that had been microfilmed, the four unnumbered pages with the colour plates showing drawings of the Dorak treasures had been torn out!

FURTHER READING

The Dorak Affair, Kenneth Pearson and Patricia Connor, Michael Joseph publishers, London 1967
The Goddess and the Bull – Çatalhöyuk – an Archaological Journey to the Dawn of Civilization, Michael Balter, Free Press/Simon and Schuster, New York 2005

Altenberg 16, AAAS & The Dorak Affair, Suzan Mazur, Scoop Independent News (New Zealand) 18 July 2008, .

© Matt Salusbury 2009

Did the Romans invent Christmas? from History Today

2010-02-08T07:36:00.000-08:00

My investigation into whether the Christian festival of Christmas came from teh Roman festival of Saturnalia from History Today of December 2009 is now online, read it here.

Fortean Traveller, the Heksenwaag, Ouderwater, Holland

2009-11-13T09:13:00.000-08:00

This article first appeared in Fortean Times issue 255, November 2009

Matt Salusbury is weighed in the balance and found not witching

Oudewater

THE HISTORIC market town of Oudewater lies in the official ‘Green Heart’ of the crowded Netherlands, a green buffer zone that prevents the cities of Amsterdam, Utrecht and Rotterdam reaching out to form one huge Tokyo-style conurbation. Oudewater is a 50-minute bus ride from local provincial capital Utrecht, past the occasional windmill and car showroom and along neat and tidy maize fields and well-kept pastures grazed by enormous cows. Dutch agriculture is a very orderly affair indeed.

You can walk through charming little Oudewater, with the narrow river Ijssel running through the middle of it, in a few minutes. It has waterfront brick houses dating from Holland’s 17th century ‘Golden Age,’ with gables and staring ornamental heads above the door. Subsidence over the years has made some of the houses lean forward at eccentric angles. Like many Medieval Dutch market towns, Oudewater still has its old waag, its weighing house, where weights and measures were officially set. In an agricultural economy based on commodities sold by weight, the weighing house would have been one of the town’s most important institutions. Oudewater’s weighing house is an unassuming little two-storey stone building on the waterfront, on the corner of Leeuwingen Street. But Oudewater’s weighing house is world famous as the Heksenwaag, the ‘Witch Weigher,’ the place where desperate people accused of witchcraft came to from as far away as Germany and even Hungary to be officially weighed to determine whether or not they were witches.

The Heksenwaag still weighs people to check whether they are witches, on an industrial scale. When I visited, the salaried Weighing Master (in fact a weighing mistress) was taking a well-earned day off, and volunteer Maaike den Boer was interrogating and weighing day-tripping families at the rate of about one every three minutes. Her volunteer colleague, Jaap van der Laan – also the Heksenwaag’s Spanish interpreter – somehow found time between weigh-ins and signing visitors’ certificates to tell me the Witch Weigher has around 70 punters a day stepping onto its scales in the summer high season, and Jaap estimated that their all-time record is close to 2000 in a week, including all the school trips, parties and weddings.

They still use the 500-year old wooden scales, all original except for the ropes. August sunlight poured in through the high windows at the top of the weighing chamber, which is a large room with a high ceiling, with an old iron balance from which thick ropes suspend two plain, square wooden platforms big enough to comfortably accommodate one person. The platforms hang just above the floor – I somehow managed to get my size 11 boot wedged fast between the floor and the scale.

The Heksenwaag's witch-weighing scales, all original apart from the ropes

The witch weighing procedure is as follows: you stand on one of the scales, while the volunteer interrogates you about your personal habits – cooking with herbs, a love of walking in the woods, and a preference for mushrooms are all suspicious signs. Then there’s the question about whether you’ve ever eaten an egg that’s been brooded on by a snake. Tip: answer ‘no’ to this one, a ‘yes; answer is apparently a dead giveaway. The interrogation complete, the inquisitor then loads some big old cast iron weights on the other scale. You need to weigh a minimum of 100 pounds to clear the witch-test (the weights have actually gone metric), but there are complicated adjustments for your height, build and age. They’re vague about this formula, but when I was there, everyone was declared of ‘normal body weight for a human’– even the girl who I though had rather blown her chances by putting on the tall fancy dress witch’s hat and clutching the broomstick she’d found lying on a nearby bench.

Volunteer Maaike interrogates witchcraft suspects

On payment of an extra €I, I walked away with a certificate in Dutch with 16th century spelling. While the certificate didn’t explicitly state that I wasn’t a witch, it did confirm that I had a normal weight for a human of my ‘bodily proportions’, and it bore the stamp of the Town Council of Oudewater. (English versions are available too.) The current Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands was weighed back in April 1952, and monarchists will be glad to hear that a constitutional crisis was no doubt averted by the confirmation that she was not a witch either.

We can all laugh today at this Monty Python and the Holy Grail-type tourist attraction – the film features a distinctly dodgy-looking witch weighing in which the accused was declared a witch after she was found to s weigh exactly the same as a duck – but witch weighing once a deadly serious business. Witches were thought to be supernaturally lightweight, which is why they had the power of flight. Desperate witchcraft suspects – often accused because of family feuds, land disputes or anonymous letters in the local mayor’s letterbox, came from far and wide to get a certificaat from Oudewater’s Heksenwaag. Its reputation was enough to prove beyond doubt they were too heavy to be a witch, thereby saving them from the stake. Holland’s last mass witch trial was in the southern town of Roermond in 1613, in which at least 40 condemned were burnt at the stake, in a witch panic that may have been a manifestation of the contemporary Catholic counter-reformation. An unusually high proportion of convicted Dutch witches in the 16th century were children – often alleged to have caused the milk of nursing mothers or cows to dry up.

The Seven Provinces of the Netherlands (the union of the majority Protestant provinces to the north) banned the death penalty for witchcraft in 1614, but other sanctions such as exile remained, and witch trials continued in the Catholic south. Dutch Protestant spiritual leaders continued to rail against witches long after the Reformation, and curiously, ultra-Protestant Holland continued to force feed Holy Water mixed with the wax of Easter candles to suspect witches, which was supposed to make them to reveal their true form. Two Dutch sceptics were significant in undermining belief in witchcraft, Dr Johann Weyer dismissed most witchcraft accusations as female hysteria, but believed there were some male witches. His work influenced the Scottish King James VI (later James I of England) and his witchcraft-sceptic book Daemonologie (1597). The Dutch Protestant minister Balthasar Bekker’s bestselling four-volume De Betoverde Weereld (The Betwitched World, 1693) concluded that the world had no demons or witches, and that these were the products of ‘heathen’ pre-Christian superstition. He didn’t completely rule out the existence of the Devil, but the Church authorities concluded that doubting the existence of the Devil would lead inevitably to questioning whether there was a God either, and he was declared a heretic and fled into exile in Sweden.

Did the town fathers of Oudewater believe in witches? Jaap told me that original certificates issued by Oudewater witch weighers are in the Province of Utrecht archives, and they’re accompanied by long and chilling dispositions of the trials and the circumstances of the witch weigh-ins. Some of the defendants who were recorded as non-witches in Oudewater were strikingly lightweight and thin, according to these records. It may be that Oudewater’s Weighing Masters, having earned a reputation for integrity in weights and measures, quietly used their power to save the lives of hundreds of people charged with a crime whose very existence they doubted.

Any why Oudewater? The apocryphal story goes that the 14th century Hapsburg Emperor Charles V, when the region was part of the Spanish Netherlands, was travelling in the area and sat in on a witch trail in the nearby town of Polsbroek. The local court recorded a supernaturally low weight for the accused woman, which the Emperor found hard to believe. Oudewater had a reputation locally for ‘correct’ weights and measures, so the accused was taken to Oudewater to be weighed, where the Weighing Master ruled that she weighed comfortably over 100 pounds, and she was freed. (Could Charles V have been quietly witchcraft sceptic too?) Oudewater’s Weighing Master also refused the ‘gold ducats’ the emperor offered for his services. Impressed by his integrity, the Emperor granted Oudewater’s Weighing Master an exclusive permit to weigh suspected witches. But all the surviving Heksenwaag certificates date from much later, the earliest extant ones are from the early 17th century, while what appears to be the last serious certificate declaring the bearer to have a non-paranormal human body weight dates from 1733, many years after the European witch panics are supposed to have subsided. Current Weighing Master Dr Jeanette Blake said she couldn’t be certain about the date of the last genuine Oudewater certificate, because ‘they were hectic times.’

There’s an extensive bilingual Dutch and English display on the history of Dutch witchcraft in the Heksenwaag’s attic, along with audiovisual presentations, an early edition of De Betoverde Wereld, and some reconstructed ‘witch rings’ – clumps of feathers that were supposed to have magically formed into rings, found inside the pillows of witches. Witch rings provided enough evidence to get you burnt at the stake following a 15th century witch trial, typically of ten minutes’ duration.

The Heksenwaag is open every day from March to the end of September, 10am-5.30, admission is €4.50, excluding certificate of weighing. The Connexxion bus service 180 to Oudewater runs hourly from outside Utrecht Central Station, and more frequently from Gouda Central Station. Dutch Railways have discount advance deals on the Eurostar from London to any station in Holland.

© Matt Salusbury 2009

Freelance journalist uses Data Protection Act to uncover police dossier on himself

2009-10-26T08:43:00.000-07:00

My article on using the Data Protection Act to get my police criminal intelligence report appeared in today's Guardian, with a companion piece on my case by Rob Evans. See today's Press Gazette blog, which has already picked it up. Follow their links to the original Guardian story, and see my comments on this on the Press Gazette blog.

Get that book published, work in non-traditional media

2009-10-23T06:53:00.000-07:00

The November 2009 Freelance is now going up online. My articles include:

Get that book published!

Fiction publishing may be “flatlining,” but more and more journalists are getting non-fiction books published, and having a book out gets you more work. Former Virago editor Rebecca Swift, of The Literary Consultants, and former Bloomsbury editor Matthew Hamilton, currently with literary agent Aitken Alexander, tell you how.

Find non-traditional markets for editorial services

Leeds-based freelance Adam Christie (above, centre, in dark blue shirt,) says his regular work with both the Yorkshire Post and the local BBC "disappeared in an evening". He tells how he found work using his journalism skills "outside the media industry".

Which website?

Web designer and “new media” expert Gary Herman says most of the famous computer catastrophes were down to insufficient attention to the "spec", the specification of what a website or software tool is for. If you're considering paying someone to set up a website, or setting one up yourself, think very carefully about the "spec": what is the purpose of the site and how may it change in future? Read his advice here.

And I’m currently helping to organise this conference on “new ways to make the media pay” for Saturday 16 January 2010.

Radical Times - a short history of International Times

2009-10-23T06:30:00.000-07:00

They declared "punk is dead" as early as February 6th, 1977, before most people were even aware that it had been born

My article on the launch of the complete web archive of radical periodical International Times is now on the History Today website.(From the September 2009 issue.)

Pgymy Pachyderms footnotes

2009-10-01T06:15:00.000-07:00

FOOTNOTES

Back to Pygmy pachyderms Fortean Times article

(1) Hidden Giants – Forest Elephants of the Congo Basin, Stephen Blake, Wildlife Conservation Society, Rapac, Projet Especes Phares, AG Partners, Gabon, West Africa, no date given but circa 2006, ISBN 0-9792418-0-4. I would like to praise the impressive conservation projects carried out by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in the habitats of the forest elephant and other endangered animals, and to thank them for their help on this article.

(2) ‘Pigmy Elephants,’ Guy Dollman, Natural History Magazine, Natural History Museum, London, vol 4, no 31, 1934.

(3) ‘A propos des Formes Naines d’Elephant D’Afrique’, (on dwarf forms of the African elephant,) Mammalia Tome 26, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifque, Paris (no date given for Cameroon specimen).

(4) ‘A Dwarf form of the African Elephant,’ Prof. Theodore Noack, Annals and Magazine of Natural History, London, vol 7, no 17 1906, This is a summary translation from German from Zoologischer Anzeiger vol 29, no 20 January 1906.
‘Pygmy elephants of Africa,’ Zoological Society Bulletin, R. L. Garner 1923 vol 26, New York Zoological Society, New York.
‘Our second pygmy elephant’, W. T. Hornaday, Bulletin of the New York Zoological Society, Vol 26, no. 1 1923. New York Zoological Society, New York.
William Bridges, A Gathering Of Animals, an Unconventional History of the New York Zoological Society, Harper and Row, NY, no date given. The New York Zoological Society became the Wildlife Conservation Society.

(5)‘L’elephant nain du lac Leopold II (Congo),’(Dwarf elephant of Lake Leopold II,) Dr. H, Schoutenden (Museé de Congo, Tenveuren), Revue zoologique africaine, Vol 3 1914, Hayez, Brussels. This based on a report from the Cahiers section of La Nature – Revue Des Sciences, vol 39, 1910-1911, Lahure, Paris. “We have learned from Mr. Le Petit, an explorer of the Natural History Museum in Paris in Temba-Mayi river, which feeds into the north bank of the lake… (this) is where M. Le Petit saw a group of five individuals.” (Author’s translation)

(6) ‘Evolution Status of the so-called African pygmy elephant (Loxodonta pumilio, NOACK 1906)’ Régis Debruyne, Arnaud Van Holt, Véronique Barriel, Pascal Tassy, Compte Rendu Biologies 326 (2003) 687–697 Natural History Museum/ Elsevier, Paris.

(7) On The Track of Unknown Animals, Bernard Heuvelmans 1959, Richard Garner trans.
Kegan Paul, London, 1955 first edition (French) and 1995 3rd edition. (Text on pygmy elephants is identical for both editions.)

(8) The mitochondrial DNA survey is described in Hidden Giants – Forest Elephants of the Congo Basin Stephen Blake, Wildlife Conservation Society.
Dr Colin Groves’ comment on on herds of forest elephants that often don’t have bulls are on the ABC News website.
Garner’s comments on Congo are from ‘Pygmy elephants of Africa,’ New York Zoological Society Bulletin, R. L. Garner 1923 vol 26.
The controversy around hybrids prompted the African Elephant Specialist Group to put out a “position paper” stating their official view on hybrids. “Recent genetic evidence” would suggest that the savannah elephant Loxodonta africana africana and the forest elephant Loxodonta africana cyclotis “may in fact constitute two separate species… In addition, the existence of a third species, a West African elephant inhabiting both forests and savannahs in the region has been suggested… The (African Elephant Specialist) Group believes that the premature allocation of African elephants into separate specific taxa (species) would leave hybrids in an uncertain taxonomic and conservation status, and that more research is needed before such an allocation can be made.” Position Paper, African Elephant Status Report 2002.

Thanks to Dr Victoria Herridge, who is researching elephant locomotion at University College London and the Natural History Museum, for her help on this article. Dr Herridge had a visit from the production team of the film 10,000 BC shortly before she showed me round the museum’s Bate Collection of pygmy elephant fossils. And yes, Victoria did advise them that mammoths couldn’t possibly have built the pyramids, and that mammoths and elephants don’t run – running being defined as when all the animal’s legs leave the ground at some point.

(9) ‘Zur weiteren Dokumentation des Zwergelefanten,’ Wolfgang Böhme and Martin Eisentraut, Zeitschrift des Kolner Zoo (Journal of the Cologne Zoo,) 1990. The article also describes how Dr Claus Muller, who was the vet at the presidential Tatoma Zoo in Freetown, Liberia in the 1970s, said he regularly tended to two five-foot (1m 50cm) adult elephants. There are two photos of these elephants in the article, which are not of very good quality – in one of them Dr Muller and a woman are standing right in front of the elephants, so you can’t see much. An English summary is in ISC Newsletter (International Society of Cryptozoology) Vol. 11, No 1, 1991.
State-controlled legal elephant hunting still exists in Congo Brazaville, with a 15000 Central African francs fee for exporting ‘ivory under trophy’, according to the Congo Brazaville government website www.congo-site.net/v4x/tourism/trsmchass.php. Nestroy may have been on a ‘diplomatic hunt.’
Harald Nestroy is donating his fee for his photographs to his philanthropic projects in Bhutan.

(10) The Dzanga Clearing study is in Hidden Giants – Forest Elephants of the Congo Basin, Stephen Blake.

(11) Speculation on elephant populations during civil wars from Africa’s elephant – a biography, Martin Meredith, Hodder, London, 2001. Discovery of Sudan and Eritrea elephant herds from BBC News. The baboons acted as treetop look-outs, in return for which the elephants dug wells and grubbed up tubers for them to eat. Elephants are apparently able to smell water underground.

(12) ‘Origins of the Elephants Elephas Maximus L. of Borneo,’ Sarawak Museum Journal 2008.

(13) www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/species/about_species/az_species/index.cfm?uPageID=F. Numerous elephant population surveys for India and for all Asia give noticeably different statistics. See also ‘Asian elephant survey’ The Hindu, (Chennai, India,) 8 November 2007, www.thehindu.com.

(14) “Malayali wildlife expert P S Easa” reported earlier kallaana sightings by the Kani in ‘Elephantine Paradox - Pygmy Jumbos Sighted,’ R Gopakumar, Deccan Herald, (Mysore, India,) 20 January 2005, www.deccanherald.com.
Paul Sondaar and Gert van den Bergh’s 1997 study of Indonesian stegadons led them to conclude that their legs shortened to allow “low gear locomotion” on steep slopes – possibly giving them access to upland pastures. Cited in La Terra degli Elefanti, (in English and Italian,) Alti del 10 Congresso Internazionale, C Cavaretta, P Gioia, M Mussi, M R Palombo, Consiglio Nazionale della Richerhe, Rome, 2001. See the display in the mammal hall of the Natural History Museum, London on how full-size elephants negotiate big ditches. (At ). African elephants in the desert of Namibia’s Skeleton Coast crawl up dunes on all fours, and belly-surf down dunes on their bottoms. Dr Herridge told me we will have to wait until 2011 for the publication of her definitive study on elephant locomotion, including the locomotion of fossil pygmy elephants.

(15) ‘A group of four,’ Deccan Herald, 6 June 2005.
In Search of India’s Pygmy Elephants, Sali Palode, Mallan Kani, Sanctuary Magazine, www.sanctuaryasia.com/sanctmagazine/archivedetail.php?id=664.
‘A pygmy among the jumbos?’ Telhelka, the people’s paper, Thekkady, India, 19 February 2005, www.tehelka.com/story_main10.asp?filename=Ne021905A_pygmy.asp
Author’s email correspondence with Prof. R. Sukumar, 12-04-2009

(16) Elephant Days and Nights, R. Sukumar, Oxford, Delhi 1994.
18 January 2008, untitled article by Manoj K.Das, The Hindu, 25 August 2005

(17) ‘Move to track pygmy elephants abandoned,’ K.S. Sudhi, Telhelka, January 18 2005.
A group of four, Deccan Herald, 6 January 2005
‘Elephantine Paradox - Pygmy Jumbos Sighted,’ R Gopakumar, Deccan Herald, 20 January 2005
‘In search of pygmy elephants’, The Hindu, 23 August 2005
‘Pygmy elephants’, Khaleej Times, United Arab Emirates, 30 May 2005
‘21 elephants found in Western Ghats at Kanyakumari,’ The Hindu, 6 January 2008.
Emails, faxes and letters sent to Peppara Reserve Wildlife Wardens, to the office of Kerala Forests and Wildlife’s Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and to various named people at Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI) enquiring about possible results from the DNA test on the alleged kallaana carcass elicited no reply. No one picked up the phone on the several occasions I rang all the numbers listed for KFRI. As my mum said, they were probably out in the forest.

(18) Author’s email correspondence with Prof. R. Sukumar, 12-04-2009

Back to Pygmy pachyderms Fortean Times article

Pygmy Pachyderms? On the track of pygmy elephants, from Fortean Times

2009-10-01T05:59:00.000-07:00

This is a slightly longer version of my article, which appeared in Fortean Times 251.

A life-size model of extinct elephant Elephas tilensis, last of the known fossil pygmy elephants of the Mediterranean, being manhandled into the Museum of Geology in Athens. Although "only" 5ft (1m 55cm) at the shoulder, E. telensis was one of the bigger Mediterranean dwarf elephants, and was about the same size as the putative present-day kallaana and Elephas pumilio are said to be. Photo by kind permission of George Lyras

ELEPHANTS are the world’s largest land animals, but some claim there are pygmy elephants out there too. The fossil record has a rich variety of extinct pygmy elephants from around the world. But there are also reports of living pygmy elephants – India’s kallaana, Thailand’s Chang Khom, and West Africa’s “wakawaka” and Loxodonta pumillio. Following good Fortean practice, I present below some evidence for and against pygmy elephants, and leave readers to make their own minds up.

The known prehistoric pygmy elephants of the fossil record were as small as 3 foot (just under one metre) at the shoulder, with babies as small as a large cat. Some may have still been around when the first humans arrived on their island habitats, as recently as 6000 years ago. By comparison, “pygmy elephant” is a misleading description of modern cryptid pachyderms. Alleged present day pygmy elephants aren’t supposed to be that small. Witnesses describe them as around five foot (150cm) high at the shoulder, so they’d still be powerful beasts by anybody’s reckoning.

22 different living species of African elephant were described in early 20th century, and it was fashionable for hunters to develop new taxonomic names for their kills, often naming them after themselves. German zoologist Paul Matschie then whittled these dubious African elephants down to four species based on the shapes of their skulls, and by the 1940s zoologists had consolidated African elephants into the two types we recognize today – the smaller Loxodonta africana cyclotis (the forest elephant) and Loxodonta africana africana (the savannah elephant, also called the Sudan elephant or “bush” elephant, the type we’re likely to see in zoos.)

Controversy rages about whether these are species or sub-species. Zoologist factions of “lumpers” and “splitters” either categorise them together as a single species, with L. cyclotis as a sub-species of L. africana africana, or insist the savannah elephant and the forest elephant are two separate species. (1)

The savannah elephant, the biggest of all elephants, lives in East Africa, and also shares space with the forest elephant L. africana cyclotis in Central and West Africa. Forest elephants are found in rainforests, and compared to savannah elephants they’re stockier and rounder, with straighter, thinner tusks and with a smaller adult size range – from 6.6ft-9.8ft (2-3m). Hannibal’s elephants that crossed the Alps were probably all forest elephants.

The forest elephant has only been widely known since 1924, which led to many bog-standard forest elephants being misidentified as “pygmy elephants” by big game hunters unaware of a smaller sub-species already known to science. As late as 1934, Guy Dollman of London’s Natural History Museum complained that the then Governor of Sierra Leone kept presenting him with trophies of the “sumbi dwarf species of elephant from Gola Province,” easily identifiable as “beyond any question of doubt the skulls of young elephants” of the known forest elephant sub-species. (2)

Big game hunters of the early 20th century referred to 1911-vintage “growth tables” based on observations of captive South Aftican savannah elephants. By comparison, specimens like the 2m10cm at the shoulder (6ft 8in) specimens shot by W.D. Bell in Cameroon were defined as “small or dwarf elephants”, while they were of a respectable height for that sub-species. (3)

The best known “pygmy elephant” was a male named “Congo”, sold to the New York Zoological Society for Bronx Zoo by animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck in 1905 as a specimen of mesalla, a dwarf species of elephant from Cameroon “never before seen in captivity… many of the natives say that it never becomes taller than a man.” Zoologist Theodore Noack looked Congo over while he was at Hagenbeck’s zoo in Hamburg en route to America, and pronounced him the type specimen of a hitherto unknown species of pygmy elephant, Loxodonta pumilio, which doubled Congo’s asking price to $2,500. (4)

Bronx Zoo proudly displayed Congo as their pygmy elephant. But, alas, it seems they had been conned. Congo was shot by his keeper after succumbing to a chronic leg infection at the still juvenile estimated age of 11, and was 6ft 8 in (2m 10cm) on his death – a respectable height for a forest elephant. Congo’s remains are at the New York’s Natural History Museum, and are now described as those of a “forest elephant.”

Other often-cited evidence for “pygmy elephants” comes from around 1911, during the exploration of Lake Leopold II in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Lake Mai-Ndombe, or its tributaries, reports are vague). A Lieutenant Franssen (presumably in the Belgian army) heard stories from the local Bongo tribe of an unusual elephant dwelling on the shores of the lake, and was determined to bag a specimen. Following its tracks, which were “very different to that of an elephant,” he eventually did shoot a specimen of what is certainly a strange-looking elephant, and estimated from its corpse that it would have stood 1.66m (5ft 4in) tall. Franssen named it Loxodonta africana fransseni, and died of a tropical fever soon afterwards. There was another unusual elephant sighting around the lake at around that time, of a “troupe of six individuals”, all with short trunks, short ears, and a longer than usual neck. The size of these elephants “did not pass two metres in height” – well within the range of an adult forest elephant. Locals called it wakawaka, the elephant that “comes with the rains”.

A closer look at these stories shows they are second- or third-hand cobblings together of different reports, with unsourced additions. The original French source for the Lake Leopold water elephants seems to be a 300-word entry in La Nature from 1910-1911, describing the “troupe of six individuals” snorkeling across the lake with trunks raised. This report didn’t once use the word “dwarf” (nain in French) or dwell on their size, and described only elephants with unusual behaviour and habitat, with no mention of a Lieutenant Franssen or wakawaka. The information that the observers only saw “water elephants” for “a few moments” (quelques instantes) was omitted from later versions. (5)

DNA analysis has not been kind to the legend of the pygmy elephant. A 2003 DNA survey examined nine “dwarf” elephant specimens from museums in Terneuven and Paris (including Lieutenant Franssen’s “L. africana fransseni”). Skull morphology suggested these were all “extremely small individuals, at least four of them are adults,” but that all L. pumilio and L. fransseni specimens were bog-standard forest elephants. The investigators team declared, “pygmy elephants are the results of individual cases of nanism (dwarfism) or pathological growth… We conclude that the specific taxon Loxodonta pumilio (or Loxodonta fransseni) should be abandoned.” (6)

DNA evidence has thrown up another possible explanation for elephants misidentified as “pygmies.” We now know that forest elephants move in and out the forests and into the savannah, and that there are whole populations of savannah elephant-forest elephant hybrids. “Father of cryptozoology” Bernard Heuvelmans mentioned local traditions reported from the Belgian Congo of “a third type of elephant” or “red elephant” living alongside forest and savannah elephants. While Western explorers took this to be a pygmy elephant, could they have misunderstood the locals describing a forest elephant-savannah elephant hybrid? (7)

A late 1990s mitochondrial DNA survey of live forest elephants in Congo DR’s Gararamba National Park by Dr Al Roca showed that half the specimens examined had the mitochondrial DNA of a forest elephant mother and the nuclear DNA of a savannah elephant father. Some now argue that entire elephant populations are now so hybridized that there’s a separate third species evolved from hybrids. And Dr Colin Groves of the Australian National University says some herds of forest elephants “often don’t have bulls.” Could the fathers of this herd be from a different herd of occasionally encountered savannah elephants? Dr Victoria Herridge, a researcher at London’s Natural History Museum, also concluded some of the specimens of long-dead zoo, museum and circus elephants she has looked at seemed to be hybrids. R.L. Garner, director of Bronx Zoo while “Congo” was there, admitted Congo might have been not a pygmy but an “an intermediate type” – a hybrid? (8)

You can’t get a more distinguished eyewitness than Harald Nestroy, who briefly served in West German Chancellor Billy Brandt’s federal cabinet. In 1982, as German ambassador to what’s now Congo Brazaville, he was on a legal elephant hunt in the remote Likouala region. This is in the national park which includes Lake Tele, rumoured haunt of alleged dinosaur survivor mokele mbembe (FT ??,?? ) Likouala is also home to the world’s only pygmy crocodile, Osteolaemus tetraspis, and it’s where the wakawaka water elephants were spotted and Lieutenant Franssen shot his Loxodonta africana fransseni. If you wanted to hide a pygmy elephant, Likouala would be the place to do it. (9)

Nestroy photographed what he claimed was a herd of pygmy elephants, and soon afterwards he photographed a group of conventional-sized forest elephants and buffalo in the same clearing, which helped give an idea of scale. One of his two pygmy elephant herd photos shows a large bird, a while cattle egret, standing behind one of the adults, from which it is estimated the adults in the group are 1.50m (5ft) tall, at least a foot shorter than forest elephants should be.

In recent years we’ve learnt much about forest elephant society and behaviour, as a result of an ongoing 16-year study at Dzanga Clearing in the Central African Republic. When the mothers of savannah elephants are shot by poachers, her calves rarely survive. But orphaned forest elephant calves do often survive, as younger females of 14 years and up apparently compete with each other to adopt them. Given that Nestroy’s sighting was at the height of a wave of elephant slaughter, he could have come across a group of younger female survivors and their adopted calves, the larger members of the herd having been shot for their ivory. (10)

Heuvelmans conceded that Africa’s pygmy elephants “may merely be the freak offspring of normal elephants. It is often difficult to distinguish between true pygmies and pathological dwarves.” It is of course possible that there were races of African dwarf elephants, but they’ve been wiped out in three waves of mass elephant slaughter – in the early twentieth century, for ivory billiard balls, until World War One caused the ivory market to crash, in the 1970s and 1980s Asian consumer ivory boom, and in the current desperate civil wars of Africa, which have introduced a lot of cheap automatic rifles into the continent and displaced many people deep into the jungle with no livelihoods.

A 1994 US Fish and Wildlife Survey reconnaissance flight found an undiscovered lake in the remote Odzala National Park, in Congo Brazaville, littered with 200 elephant carcasses shot within the previous three years. Another elephant kill site, with over 100 slaughtered elephants shot within the preceeding two years, was found in Chad in 2007. A dwarf elephant population could have been eradicated by poachers – or displaced from its habitat and bred out by mating with other elephants – and we’d never know it. The determination of Lieutenant Franssen, the Governor of Sierra Leone and others to shoot and bring back a definitive “type specimen” to prove the existence of pygmy elephants seemed guaranteed to drive them to extinction if they ever existed.

Hunters may even have made up pygmy elephant to legitimise their activities. According to Heuvelmans, British big game hunter W R Foran claimed in the 1950s that pygmy elephants were invented by ivory traders, as it was then forbidden (under Congo Free State “special permits”) to kill elephants that weren’t fully grown, so when poachers shot a young one they pretended it was a pygmy.

P.T.Barnum’s five-foot stuffed ‘pygmy elephant,’ once exhibited alive, still exists and was auctioned to a private collector in 2006. But it was such a botched taxidermy job that it’s hard to draw any conclusions about its size when alive.

Forest elephants like to stay hidden in the forest, and often the only indication they are ten feet (3.5m) away from you is that you can hear them breathing. We can still only estimate elephant numbers using a number-crunching formula based on piles of dung. Conservationists admit that because of wars going on in Angola, Congo, Sudan and Somalia, “no one has any clear idea of the fate of the elephant populations” there and that it’s “still impossible to gauge the numbers present with any degree of precision” in forests.” Africa’s elephants have surprised us with their feats of unexpected survival. Everyone anticipated that war in Eritrea would have killed off the few remaining elephants there, but in 2001 a herd was suddenly discovered in the Gash River on the Ethiopian border, living in symbiosis with baboons. And in southern Sudan, despite the war, a herd of elephants was found living on a treeless island as recently as 2007. In several countries, forest elephants were thought to have disappeared, until suddenly reports came in of crops being destroyed out of the blue by big herds that then vanish. (11)

The evidence for living Asian pygmy elephants in India seems stronger. The Asian elephant Elephas maximus (often called “Indian elephant” outside Asia) shows great variation in size and physique across the continent, with some populations given dubious sub-species designations, and one variety already unofficially known as “pygmy elephants.” The Indian mainland elephant, Elephas maximus indicus weighs 2.5-4.5 metric tonnes and stands up to 3m (almost 10ft) at the shoulder. There’s such a range of elephant physiques within India that there’s even a “caste” system for describing different builds of elephant – the koomeeriah (“thoroughbred”) is the stocky, barrel-shaped, well-proportioned variety and mriga (Sanskrit for “deer”) is a slimmer and more delicate elephant type. Female Asian elephants usually lack tusks, and some of India’s bigger males are makhnas – without tusks.

As you go east of India, Asian elephants get smaller and lighter in colour. Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Burmese elephants, and the handful of elephants still living in Bangladesh and China, are smaller than India’s, as are Sumatra’s elephants, which live in 44 completely isolated populations, and which some designate as a separate sub-species, Elephas maximus sumatrensis.

The elephants of Borneo are described by the World Wildlife Fund and others as “pygmy elephants,” but they are still massive beasts. With a height of around 6ft (1.8m) at the shoulder, they’re only six inches (15cm) shorter than their distant cousins on the mainland. Borneo “pygmy elephants” have proportionally bigger heads compared to their body, their faces have a rather comically sad expression, and their tails reach almost to the ground. Proportionally bigger heads were a characteristic of the much smaller extinct island dwarf elephants of the fossil record. Research into Borneo elephant DNA in 2003 showed that their ancestors separated from the mainland population about 300,000 years ago. Confined to the northern tip of the island, Sabah, in Malaysian territory, and on the endangered list, Borneo’ “pygmy elephtants” are down to about 1000 living individuals.

Research last year (2008) on Borneo “pygmy elephants” suggests even weirder origins. The Sarawak Museum Journal could find no archaeological evidence for elephants on Borneo before 1700, and reports by the first Western explorers to arrive don’t mention any. It seems Borneo’s elephants were shipped form South Sulah, the southernmost tip of the Philippines archipelago, to nearby Borneo, which was then part of Sultanate of Sulah and North Borneo, but was subsequently leased to Western adventurers by the Sultanate. After the dust of occupation of the Philippines by Spain and then America had settled, Sabah had become Malaysian. (12)

Elephants on Sulah were hunted to extinction some time around 1800. The inhabitants of Sabah have long regarded the island’s wild elephants as having a domestic origin, and the island’s elephants have a reputation for being less aggressive than their Asian cousins. The designation Elephas maximus borneensis is still unofficial.

Back in India, recent estimates put India’s wild elephant population at as little as 20,000, with perhaps 15,000 in captivity. There are believed to be between 59 and 100 distinct populations of wild elephants in India’s isolated forests, “with little or no possibility of genetic interchange.” (13)

Starting in the early 1990s, an increasing number of reports emerged of kallaana – living pygmy elephants from the forested Agastyar mountain range in Peppara Wildlife Sanctuary in the southern state of Kerala. Kallaana was said to be “under 5ft” (1.5m) at the shoulder when fully-grown, or even as small as “half the size” of a normal elephant. But kallaana is a longstanding tradition in the culture of Kerala. The name – in the Malayalam language spoken by about 30 million people in southern India – means “stone elephant,” because the little elephants are said to scramble over rocky slopes which conventionally-sized elephants can’t negotiate. The Malayali community say that they in turn got their kallaana traditions from the Kani tribal people that live in and around the Peppara Sanctuary in 12 settlements. Another Kani name for the kallaana is “thumbiaana,” meaning “as light as a butterfly”, a reference to the great speed with which if flits through the forests when pursued. It’s interesting to note how some paleontologists have speculated that the fossil pygmy stegadons (an extinct close relative of elephants) in prehistoric Indonesia may have developed “low-gear locomotion” as their legs shortened, a possible adaptation allowing them to scramble up steep slopes to get access to upland pastures. But Dr Herridge points out that full-size elephants can handle slopes surprisingly well. (14)

According to the Kani tribals, kallaana are shyer and less aggressive than conventional Asian elephants, and avoid contact with them. Sali Palode, an art teacher from the village of Palode, Kerala, and a professional photographer who won India’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award in 2007, photographed what he claimed were several kallaana on 8 January 2005. Palode had been on the trail of kallaana for five years, a quest that was based on the sound Fortean principle of asking the locals – he had been alerted by Mallan Kani, a local “tribal” guide, who brought him to the banks of the Karmana river.

Sali put the height of kallaana at “just over 150 cm” (just under 5ft) and said it had “a different look, particularly in terms of the shape of the skull”. He added, “the shrunk (sic) forehead and ear folds are proof that this was an adult.” He photographed another live kallaana three days later, and came across the body of a recently dead female kallaana, which he also photographed. He said of this second sighting that “we were just 10 metres (about 30ft) away and I am sure it was 10-15 years old… Notice the wrinkles on the trunks. A baby elephant will be hairy and have soft skin.” He cited the “grown-up nipples” on the corpse, which was taken away by Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI) officials and cremated, but not before they took a DNA sample. There’s no word yet on any tests on this sample. If the intention was to send a sample for analysis by the KFRI’s better-resourced partners on its elephant surveys, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, it doesn’t appear to have arrived there. Ecologist Professor Raman Sukumar, chair of the IISc’s Asian Elephant Special Group, who participated in local KFI elephant surveys, said that “no tissue or DNA samples have been sent to me” from Kerala, nor to his colleagues at Bangalore’s Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research.(15)

Asian elephant families stay together in tight-knit groups to protect calves well into their early teens, and calves up to two years old have bristly hair like a mammoth. These characteristics would help prevent misidentification of an Asian elephant calf as an adult dwarf. But the IISc’s Prof. Sukumar, the expert on Asian elephant ecology, suggests that kallaana “could be the result of an morphological variation, not a new species." He adds that witnesses could “mistake a sub-adult male in a herd as a dwarf elephant. Sometimes, tuskers in their teens get together and play with a herd… I think somebody has mistook one such for the mythical kallaana.” While pygmy elephants of the fossil record evolved on islands free of predators, Prof Sukumar notes that the Peppara Sanctuary is not an island forest where animals could evolve in isolation – the forest is connected to surrounding areas, and it has tigers. (16)

Other critics note that Palode’s photos don’t contain anything with which we could compare the elephants to give us an idea of scale, and that his kallaana photos look a lot like a young Borneo pygmy elephants, and could actually be these.

In 1995, KFRI conducted a search for kallaana after reports by “tribals.” January 2005 saw a KFRI survey supported by ecologists from the Bangalore-based IISc to look for kallaana, and for kallaana dung from which they could take DNA samples. But unexpectedly early “heavy rain… forced the officials to abandon the programme… The dung of the animals would get washed away in the heavy rain.” Dr. Easwaran of the KFRI said at the time that the Kani had misidentified “young and short elephants leaving the group and venturing out in search of water during summer months.” An unnamed forest official referred to the body found by Sali Palode and taken away for cremation, confirming that the body of a small elephant had recently been found (presumably the one found by Mani and Palode and removed for cremation). “At first we thought it was a calf,” commented Kerala’s Chief Conservator of Forests, a Mr Varghese.

Forestry officials again went looking for kallaana dung in March 2005, and interviewed the Kani “tribals.” The survey leader, Neyyar-Peppara Sanctuary Wildlife Warden L. Krishnaprasad, reported that "our officials, along with members of the tribe, perambulated the area where the animal was reportedly sighted but to no avail.” B.S. Corrie, former Chief Wildlife Warden, said at the time that the absence of evidence for kallaana "does not mean that the animal is not present in Kerala forest.”

In May of the same year, it was reported that another “search for the pygmy elephant in the forests of Kerala has drawn a blank.” The census team, again supported by IISc, found “no traces in the Agasthyavanam forests - The teams have concluded that the pygmy elephant is non-existent at least in the Kerala forests.” A search for kallaana was also part of an elephant survey of the district in 2008 by 60 forestry officials. While the survey identified 21 conventionally-sized local elephants from footprints and eyewitness reports, it found no evidence for kallaana. (17)

Pygmy Asian elephants may also have lived as recently as 1920 in southern Thailand. A pygmy or “humpbacked” elephant, called Chang Khom or Chang Pru was said by villagers to be water buffalo-sized. Thai naturalist Dr Boonsong Lekhakul recorded in an article that “some 30-50 years ago” (no date given) how people claimed that Chang Khom could be seen in the Pru Forest along the Songkhla Beach. Some older locals maintained that the Chang Khom were just young elephants. The Elephant Institute of Thailand states that “no definitive conclusion has been reached as to whether dwarf elephants ever existed in Thailand.”

Surprising Asian elephant populations occasionally turn up, such as Sir John Bashford Snell’s 1993 encounter with a previously unknown group of six huge male elephants with high-domed heads, over 11ft (3.3 m), in the Royal Bardia National Park on the Indian-Nepali border (FT 70, 31). The pygmy hippo was written off as a “native legend” until the naturalist Robert Hermann Schomburgk brought one to Europe from Liberia in 1913. Pygmy hippos were until recently believed to have become extinct in the wild, another casualty of one of Africa’s many civil wars, until a pygmy hippo was photographed by a camera trap in the Liberian rainforest early last year (2008). Living deep in a forest, and with a need to run from leopard predators, the pygmy hippo would have a very similar ecological niche to the to putative kallaana.

India’s scientific establishment are certainly prepared to entertain the idea that kallaana could be out there, and to keep an open mind. Says Prof. Sukumar of the search for kallaana, “While I will not rule out anything (scientists should be open to unexpected surprises), I have not seen anything convincing so far… This is still a worthwhile venture.” (18)

More photos here and a link to a 2008 talk on pygmy elephants here...

Sub-editors ask for more, photographer detained in cop van - the July/August Freelance

2009-07-29T06:04:00.001-07:00

Sub-editor Martin Cloake looks at the future of subbing. Photo: © Matt Salusbury. (It was a meeting on subbing, so none of the proper photographers showed up with their cameras.)
The July/August online-only edition of the Freelance is out.

My articles include:

Sub-editors ask for more - Christy Lawrance on how to up your rate for shifts, Martin Cloake on the future of subbing. Read more here...

Freelance photographer briefly held in police van at Parliament Square protest - colleagues de-arrest him. Read more here...

Get yourself a record - New Statesman article on police databases

2009-06-23T06:14:00.000-07:00

These officers from the Metropolitan Police Forward Intelligence Team (FIT) apparently either didn't spot me or didn't bother to record my presence at the demo I was covering at Harmondsworth immigration detention centre near Heathrow on 8 April 2004. Or so the Met's Crimint database would suggest. (Follow link to article below.)

Photo: copyright Matt Salusbury

"Get Yourself A Record" - my article in the New Statesman abhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifout data gathered about me by the Metropolitan Police Forward Intelligence Team and held on the Met's Crimint database is now online here
.

Since then I've got a reply from the Met's Subject Access Office (partly) "rectifying" an incorrect record of a non-existent arrest following my "legal challenge." Watch this space for details.

There's a related Panorama documentary on police surveillance planned for broadcast on Monday July 6.

The Freelance - avoid legal trouble, Finnish freelances fight, harrasment charges for photography on Underground

2009-06-02T08:23:00.000-07:00

The June 2009 edition of the freelance journalists' magazine the Freelance is out. My articles include:

How to stay out of legal trouble, with media law lecturer Timothy Crooke.

Finnish freelances fight new rights-grab contract.

Tourist who took photographs on Underground up in court on 'harassment' charge, case dropped.

A Fatwa on Christian paper in History Today magazine

2009-05-28T09:36:00.000-07:00

My article on 'a fatwah on Christian paper' is in the June 2009 issue of History Today. The page takes a while to load, please be patient.

Renaissance man - Giordano Bruno

2009-05-05T09:35:00.000-07:00

This review first appeared in Fortean Times 427, April 2009

You couldn’t find a better example of paradigm-shifting iconoclasm in the fortean tradition than in the Neapolitan philosopher examined in Ingrid D. Rowland's new biography, Giordano Bruno - Philsopher, Heretic. Bruno and his ideas were “damned” – his books were banned by the Vatican - but his extraordinary ideas about an infinite and constantly expanding universe are now mainstream. While his more diplomatic contemporaries like Gallileo recanted in the knowledge that the cosmological cat was out of the bag, Bruno was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1600, as part of a great Papal ‘jubilee’ year of mass executions.

Gallileo and Bruno shared the same inquisitor, and the experience of dealing with Bruno may have softened the Vatican’s stance by the time Gallileo’s case came up. Kepler admitted that when he read Bruno’s newly published ideas, they sent him into a “cosmological panic.”

Bruno was ordained as a Dominican friar twice, and was excommunicated three times by various denominations. He appeared to recant to the Inquisition, and then changed his mind and told them they had no authority to try him. Despite three orders of friars working round the clock in confessional shifts, they failed to get Bruno to retract. Bruno’s greatest flaw was that he was so extremely awkward squad. Constantly belligerent, he got up everyone’s noses throughout the intellectual centres of Europe – from Prague to Geneva to Oxford, where the dons mocked his extravagant Neapolitan gestures and his peculiar Latin pronunciation.

We know of at least four books by Bruno on his amazing and mysterious memorization techniques, in which orators are taught to remember speeches by visualising pageants of Classical gods and heroes parading on sea monsters inside giant wheels arranged within other wheels, The Dominicans sent the young Bruno to show off his memory by reciting Psalm SSS in front of the Pope in Hebrew from memory, and then doing it backwards. He was briefly a mnemonics tutor to King Henri II of France.

Bruno’s cosmology was based on philosophical extrapolation rather than mathematical calculation or observation. He believed that the universe was infinite, teeming with inhabited worlds, to which God constantly added new ones. He admitted that there weren’t yet the mathematical tools available to comprehend the vastness of universe, or the smallness of the sub-atomic world he also began to visualize. The gods of Classical antiquity and ancient Egyptian were just guardian angels of his Christian god. He insisted there was no such thing as sin, and that one day God would inevitably forgive “even the devils of hell.”

When the secular Kingdom of Italy booted the Vatican out of power in Rome and erected a statue of Bruno pointedly turning its back on the Holy See. The Vatican’s most recent pronouncement on Bruno in 2005 stopped short of exonerating him. Even today, he continues to put peoples’ backs up.

The maddening, extraordinary Bruno left a strange and baffling body of literature. His more mature works have an outlandish beauty – On the Vastness of the Universe and Beuno’s other epic verse cosmologies resemble Paradise Lost or Dante’s Inferno. Then there is his bawdy play The Candlemaker, a Canterbury Tales-style romp among the chancers of Naples. In a class of its own is Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast and On the Infinite and the Miniscule, Bruno’s study of the miniscule, including the the fate of all members of a batch of dung beetles hatched on one particular day in his home village. The film Amelie or or even Charles Fort’s more dizzying flourishes come close in their style.

So utterly “damned” has Bruno’s data become that this is the first complete biography in English, and Ingrid Rowland makes a thorough and captivating job of it. If you enjoyed the fantasy of a flawed geniuses fighting the Church while revealing portals to infinite universes from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, you may also enjoy this all too true story in which it all goes horribly wrong.

Rowland skates over Bruno’s difficult concepts of “magic”, and I would have liked some more detail on these. A new English translation of Bruno’s collected works is due out soon, which should address this. Sadly absent from Philospher, Heretic are Bruno’s cryptic woodcuts with which he illustrated his cosmological works. But any flaws with Rowland’s biography are inherited from its subject. I was tempted to skip the long extracts of Bruno’s more belligerent works from his long phase predominantly involving slagging off the Church’s “pedant asses”, where he comes across as rather conceited. Bruno’s works are possibly not helped by losing a lot in translation from Neopolitan, which makes many of these extracts hard going. But all in all, this biography shines as brilliantly as Bruno did.

City Hall grills Met police over G20 policing

2009-04-30T09:05:00.000-07:00

Left to right (front): MPA members Jenny Jones, Valerie Brasse, Graham Speed. In the hot seat opposite, left to right: deputy police commissioner Chris Allison, deputy police commissioner Tim Godwin, MPA vice-chair Kit Malthouse, MPA chair, London Mayor and Telegraph columnist Boris Johnson. On his right: Catherine Crawford, MPA chief executive, Jane Harwood, MPA chief executive.

The policing of the G20 protests came under scrutiny today (Thursday 30 April 2009) at a public meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), the London Assembly body that watches over the Met. Assembly Member Jenny Jones in particular gave the police a run for their money, asking why the police had refused to let her into the Bank of England kettle, and why “very aggressive tactics” were used to remove the Bishopsgate Climate Camp. Assistant Commissioner Tim Godwin -– standing in for Commissioner Stephenson, who was recovering from appendicitis – and Assistant Commissioner Chris Allison – were there for a grilling.

London Mayor Boris Johnson – who chaired the meeting – opened by saying of the G20 that “everybody in London and in the country (was) horrified by some of the images of what happened particularly to Ian Tomlinson, his family need answers and need them urgently.” Boris said he approved of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary inquiries, but reminded everyone that the police “do a fantastic job.” This was met by shouts of “Rubbish!” from the public gallery, the first of many lively interjections from the public, particularly from Class War people, and particularly on the subject of tasers. Boris later threatened to have the meeting “suspended” (closed to the public) if they didn’t shut up. One woman in the gallery was masked up as if for a demo.

Tim Godwin for the Met said that while it was “probably unlawful for us to comment” on incidents of police conduct that are now under criminal investigation, but “we will not tolerate any MPS officers to make inappropriate comments via the internet” and that one officer had been resigned over this already. He admitted of the G20 policing that “we have a number of serious issues” that need to be addressed, and added, to laughter from the gallery, that the Met “can and want to learn better.” As Jenny Jones said, “I can hear the waves of doubt behind us” coming from the gallery.

Evidence from protest groups
The Authority invited Andrew May of the group Defend Peaceful Protests to come and put questions to the police at the meeting. All the G20 inquiries are going to take evidence from protest groups. Tim Goodwin said the HMIC enquiry had already taken a lot of evidence from the Climate Camp legal team. One new bit of terminology that kept popping up was concern for the rights of the “vulnerable protester” – examples given were Ian Tomlinson and a pregnant lady who was only eventually allowed to leave the kettle to go to the toilet. One MPA member, herself disabled, said she had wanted to go to the protests but had been “too frightened.”

Police identification numbers
There was also laughter at Tim Godwin’s suggestion that some officers had no identification numbers on G20 duty because “some come off by accident.” He said, “anyone not doing that (displaying their number while on duty) will be in deliberate disobedience of a direct order.” The Met’s Clothing Board are on the case to make sure that reflective tabards will carry shoulder numbers, and coloured shoulder flashes identifying heads of “serials” that obscure shoulder numbers will be changed. Chris Allison said he’d been out on the Tamil protests enforcing police regulations on the wearing of identifying numbers.

It was news to the MPA that the Met had very recently forked out £85,000 in compensation to those who “shouldn’t have been arrested” at an October 2008 Mexican Embassy protest. Why hadn’t they been told earlier? Boris agreed that there were “communications problems” between the Met and the MPA here.

Kettling
Much of the meeting was, in Boris’ words, a “discussion about what I would call kettling” and police cordons, and on what MPA member Toby Harris called “the degree of permeability of the cordon.” Neil Johnson of the MPA, asked, “how can protesters extract themselves?”

Chris Boothman, who has a lot of experience of the Notting Hill Carnival, asked if police had asked behavioural experts about the effects of containment in the kettle, and whether “containment can exacerbate the situation.” Dee Doocey said she’d heard reports of people as they left the “kettling area” being forced by police to delete mobile phone images under the Terrorism Act. Clive Lawton says that the Met had in its mind-set divided up protesters into “those who were full of villainy before they started” and a group of people “who get stirred up an excited,” and how being in a crowd affects the individual “being contained in a space, getting angrier” and said more attention and research needs to be paid to this.”

Forcible deletion of photos
Chris Allision said that “there is no tactic that says as we release people we make them delete their photos. We fully accept that people are going to film us and have a right to film us.” Forcing people to delete film is “not a tactic and not a policy.” Boris said any cases the MPA hears of this will be brought before the Authority.

Clearing the climate camp
John Biggs said he didn’t like the “innocent protester thing”, the casual distinction made by the police between “innocent protesters” and others who are somehow inherently wicked. Several MPA members pointed out that a policing tactics affect all Londoners, whether they were at the protests or not, and that many Londoners who were nothing to do with G20 may at some point, quite legitimately, want to go on protests in London in the future. “I’m sure 99 per cent of Londoners don’t have the faintest idea or what Section 4 or Section 14 (Public Order Act 1988) is. For ordinary Londoners in that (climate) camp, there’s a potential for a lot of confusion, a need to communicate more the reasons for clearing the camp, how it (blocking the highway with the camp) affects London.” He asked “whether people in the camp had it made clear to them that it needed to be cleared,” and that it was made clear to them by police that it was legitimate as well as strictly legal to do so.

CCTV
Jennette Arnold was concerned about how the police service appeared to be unaware on the level of “disturbing actions by officers”, with all the CCTV and “eye in the sky,” why was this not picked up, and if it was not picked up, what is the point of all these CCTV? “CCTV should be two way, for policing, and for taking action against police misconduct on behalf of the “vulnerable protester.” To applause, Jennette said that “if you’d seen an attack on a police officer, we would have found the CCTV of it.”

Tactical Support Group
There was also a lot of scrutiny about the “culture of the TSG (Tactical Support Group).” Chris Boothman asked, “is there something about the make-up of the team, the values that they hold, that actually produce some of the incidents?” Reshard Auladin said, “ever since this authority has existed, there have been issues with a few officers of the TSG.” The suggestion of dispersing the TSG to boroughs was mooted. Boris admitted, “ I do think there are specific concerns about the TSG.”

Boris Johnson’s role in G20 policing – and media hype
It wasn’t just police that were in the hot seat. John Biggs said “the public will always see politicians as hiding behind police,” and asked Boris, “what role did you have in this?”

Boris said his role in the G20 policing was an “entirely operational matter” and that it would be “inappropriate to comment” and “quite wrong for me to micromanage the operation”. He said only that he had a meeting with Gold Commander and regular briefings in City Hall. Pressed on the “guidance” he had given to the police at G20, Boris said “my view was and remains, the overwhelming majority who came to London had to right to do so… those bent on violence should be impeded” and police should do so as effectively as possible. But the G20 policing had produced what Boris called “disturbing images… which is why we are here.”

The MPA also criticized London Mayor and MPA Chair Boris Johnson in his “third role as a columnist.” Having (as Mayor) urged the media not to hype up the protests ahead of the G20, Boris in his 24th March Telegraph column predicted protesters would “surge like the orcs of Mordor” and described cider-fuelled protesters as “rioters”. While he admitted that his predictions had “not been vindicated by events” he said his words had turned out to be “an accurate description of some of the people there” and stopped short of promising not to do it again.

Old Tactics
I couldn’t help noticing that the examples the Met cited of protests on which they based their G20 tactics were a long time ago – N30 (November 30 1999) and Mayday 2001 – tactics that were widely condemned at the time and, eight years later, now seem rather old.

A transcript of the meeting and a webcast will be on www.london.gov.uk shortly, if it isn’t already.

Under scrutiny - Deputy Met police commissioner Tom Godwin

Deputy Met police commissioner Chris Allison

MPA member Jenny Jones about to get tough with the police, as usual

An uncomfortable moment for Boris Johnson as he is reminded of his "swarming like the orcs of Mordor" description of protesters in his Telegraph column

"No more cover up" T-shirt protest in the gallery

Words and pictures © Copyright Matt Salusbury

May 09 Freelance - shame of G20 plod, Facebook thought we were stupid

2009-04-27T07:11:00.000-07:00

What's my photo of a Babylonian cunieform tablet doing here? Find out here.

Print media industry magazine Press Gazette suddenly announced it will cease publication after the May issue, going the way of much of the media it reported on, but the Freelance, for freelance journalists everywhere, is still going strong, and the May 2009 online edition is now out.

My articles in the May Freelance include:

Shame of G20 plod - journalists at the sharp end of G20 protest policing

Facebook thought we were stupid - another reason not to bother with Facebook. They changed the terms of use without notice to grab everyone's copyright, then they were forced to climb down.

Keeping ethics alive (book review). An inspiring new book on the ethics of journalism deserves a wider readership than the obscurity of an internal union pdf publication that it will probably languish in.

Dark Nights is out

2009-04-24T06:02:00.000-07:00

The 2009 Dark Nights - official journal of the Vampyre ConneXion is now out - mostly written, illustrated and designed (on Word!) by myself. Features include the Camden Town fire, 'vampyrates' (vampire pirates), Japaneze vampaparazzi (photographers and reporters from Japanese lifestyle magazine Kara Maniax who doorstep attendees at vampire-themed fancy dress parties) and many more.

There's a very limited number of copies available for £3.50 including UK postage, details from Franco Carta (aka Dionisus) via dionisus@btinternet.com

This is likely to be the last Dark Nights for a while. Harmless fancy dress vampire enthusiast societies, like banks, are feeling the pinch at the moment and merging, and what's left of the Vampyre ConneXion seems to be doing events jointly with former rivals the London Vampyre Group.

Clapperboard image copyright Wibbell Productions 2008, all other images copyright Matt Salusbury

Fake pound coins that I've found in my change

2009-04-08T02:17:00.000-07:00

Fake pound coins that have turned up in my change over the past 12 years

Today BBC News warned today that coin testing companies are telling them that as many as one in twenty pound coins could be fakes. This is after the Royal Mint raised its estimate of the proportion of pound coins in circulation that are fakes to one in forty last September.

I first noticed fake pound coins turning up in my change in 1997, when a newsagent in
Oxford Street drew one to my attention and refused to accept it. Since then, I've kept them, and I've got well over thirty. The giveaways are the rubbish lettering round the edge, the shallow relief on both sides, and the uneven circle of dots round the sides of each face. Some of them are really rubbish. There was a period a couple of years back when I would get several in my change at once, but now I'm actually finding less fake pound coins in my change.

I'm parking these images below while I find the time to master Photoshop, after which I will re-post them with annotations pointing out those telltale signs of fakery.

All images copyright Matt Salusbury

Look at the letter 'A' on the coin at the top, and the letter 'N' on the coin at the bottom. They're rubbish.

Messed up 'D's and crosses

Seriously rubbish lettering

Cream of the crop

2009-03-12T10:07:00.000-07:00

Arguably the best deals for summer school teachers in the UK are at universities

From EL Gazette, February 2009

UK University EAP programmes are generally regarded as a much better deal for suitably-qualified teachers than the traditional private summer school EFL market, and EFL teachers who want to aim higher should look into teaching on a higher education English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programme. EAP providers, especially in the public sector, where the workforce is unionised and the contracts are regulated, are much clearer than the traditional ‘straight’ English language summer schools onthe actual number of hours you will end up working for your money. This reputation for clarity in stating the deal up-front is confirmed below.

Jonathan White, deputy head of campaigns at the University and College Union (UCU), which represents higher education lecturers, told the Gazette that ‘salaries are obviously important, but we would advise anyone looking to work in the university sector to also consider the full range of terms and conditions, including… the place of EAP courses within the overall academic programme of an institution… Our view would be that once all this is considered, there is no question that you would be far better off working as an employee of a university rather than of a private company.’

Although our questions were specific to summer course employment, most respondents’ replies didn’t restrict themselves to summer courses, and told us about year-round EAP programmes or teaching Applied Linguistics. The lecturer’s trade union sent comments that were aimed more at comparing permanent posts in the public sector with the private sector. While all universities that replied still have EAP summer school vacancies every year, this pre-occupation with year-round, permanent posts may mean that there’s more reliance on permanent staff and less call for temporary teachers for the summer. (We noticed a flurry of activity on job sites for permanent UK EAP lecturing jobs in December, at the time of writing.)

The Gazette emailed 19 full BALEAP members as well as a random selection of our existing EAP contacts, and contacted the press offices of the big private sector EAP providers. At the time of writing, only six providers had responded, all in the public sector. Several others, including Kaplan, had promised to get back to us, but no reply was with us come the deadline. To be fair, several universities excused themselves for being too busy preparing for marketing visits in the run-up to Christmas.

Two universities, both in the Russell Group, agreed to respond on the basis that replies were not attributed to them. Such coyness about salaries, terms and conditions seems a little odd, given that that the details mostly don’t vary too much from those already published for last years’ summer schools, providers are mostly planning to put comprehensive details of their vacancies up on job sites and on their own websites within the next couple of months.

One university asked for an ‘internationally recognised TELF diploma,’ we think they meant to type ‘Tefl diploma.’ There are some universities that offer a way into EAP for the newly qualified.

Several universities asked for a Delta and an MA, which given the global shortage of Dip (DELTA)-qualified teachers and the expense of getting either qualification, never mind both, is pushing their luck. More than one university mentioned a disparity in what qualifications they wanted by way of qualifications, and what they actually got.

Teachers abroad who are returning to the UK to teach EAP in the summer should note that only two out of six respondents did offer subsidised on-campus accommodation at half the normal rent, with one other saying accommodation was available, but at market rents. One anonymous campus university said ‘accommodation is provided if teachers live beyond commuting distance,’ rent was not mentioned.

All universities say that responding to ads on their own website’s vacancies page, as well as jobs.ac.uk and the Education Guardian newspaper (out every Tuesday) is the way to apply for EAP summer jobs. Some of these, of course, will also be advertised on the jobs listing on the EL Gazette website. One respondent told us they ‘wouldn't necessarily discourage well-qualified applicants from sending in their CV at any time of the year, though: we sometimes need extra staff in January.’ Prospective summer EAP teachers should keep an eye out, as vacancies are announced from January all the way through to April.

Tim Marr and Janet Enever, senior lecturers in Applied Linguistics London Metropolitan University said their minimum qualifications were an MA Tesol or similar plus Delta, although they ‘believe that currently a university is able to 'carry' a small percentage of Celta qualified staff.’ Hours are 35 hours a week full-time, of which 15-18 are contact teaching hours. Short term, long term or permanent contracts are available.

Some London Met part-time posts are paid hourly-rate, full-time ones are as per their annual contract. The lecturers we contacted were ‘not aware of current rates’ of pay, and forwarded our enquiry on this to English Language Services. London Met did say that holiday pay a legal requirement.

A Russell Group university that preferred not to be named, said they advertise summer vacancies ‘if they need to in March and April.’. The university’s minimum qualifications were a Degree (‘foreign languages preferred’)and Delta or equivalent – Celta plus a relevant MA being regarded as Delta equivalent. They also need three years’ experience, preferably with some of this in EAP. Hours for their summer courses are ‘up to 18 a week,’ (presumably this means 18 contact teaching hours), with contracts of seven or 11 weeks to cover six-week and 10-week pre-sessional courses. Accommodation is not part of the deal, but university halls of residence are available at around £80 a week. Rates are ‘expected to be £650 a week in 2009,’ including holiday pay.

Liz Austin, pre-sessional programme leader at Essex University, says her programme requires a Delta or equivalent, with an MA ‘desirable’. Essex requires ‘extensive Tefl experience’ and prefers EAP teaching experience in ‘a British HE setting.’ Contracts are 10-11 weeks from mid-July to mid-September. There 24 contact hours a week, including
‘class, tutorials, attendance at lectures, long assignment marking.’ They expect teachers to do ‘class preparation and homework marking’ on top of that.

Essex’s 2008 salary was £5,350 (presumably for the 10-11 weeks) plus 8 per cent holiday pay and a bonus paid to tutors who’ve taught there before. The package includes several days’ induction and workshops during the course as part of salaried hours, and teachers can on free course trips and attend course social events if they want to. Liz describes the Essex pre-sessional as a ‘good starting point for experienced TEFL tutors looking to move across to EAP teaching.. Tutors with less experience in EAP are well-supported by senior staff.’

Another Russell Group university that didn’t want to be named said their minimum requirement is a Celta, though they’ve only ever taken on teachers with a Dip or an MA in ELT and at least three years’ experience in EAP. ‘We pay for 20 hours per week but in fact teachers have 15-17 hours of classroom contact.’ Rates are £3032 per five week phase (including holiday pay).

Ros Richards, Director of the the school of languages and European studies at the University of Reading said advertising starts in February, and advised that ‘quite a few institutions use the jobs section of the BALEAP website.’ Reading needs at least a Dip Tefl or equivalent, ‘but we seek to appoint with relevant MA plus EAP teaching experience.’ Reading’s contracted teaching hours ‘average 19 per week.’ Depending on the nature of the pre-sessional block they’re engaged to teach on, Reading have 11-week, 8-week and five-week courses. They offer 50 per cent off specified University hall accommodation. Their rates for 2008 were £542.55 to new teachers and £558.81 to returning teachers, and these will go up by 5 per cent next summer. An extra 9.21 per cent is paid out in holiday pay.

Euro helps UK EFL buck doom and gloom trend

2009-03-12T10:01:00.000-07:00

Not all language schools in the UK are doing so well. This one, at 145 Oxford Street, London W1, appeared to be locked, with mail piling up in the doorway. A notice of eviction served by the property's owners, Prudential, was sellotaped to the door as of early March.

From EL Gazette, February 2009

Mario Rinvolucri, founder of Pilgrims School of English - in Canterbury in the South East of England - told that Gazette that Pilgrims’ own latest figures, and the intelligence he’s getting from across the UK EFL industry, show that ‘receipts are extremely good’ in the UK industry as a result of the record rise in the value of the Euro against the pound. Pilgrims has been picking up a lot of end of season executive courses from the Eurozone (the 15 EU states currently using the Euro currency) in a development which is bucking the general trend towards ‘doom and gloom’ in the recession-bound UK economy.

Mr Rinvolucri conceded that corporate clients were still on 2008 budgets, and it remains to be seen whether the 2009 budgets of corporations will maintain that level of spending in the current global economic climate. The success in recruiting from the Eurozone is also helped by the increasing use of ‘teacher agents, ’ according to Mr Rinvolucri. These are practising teachers in, for example, large comprehensive schools in Germany, who persuade some of their colleagues to come on Comenius courses, or teachers in private EFL schools that offer free taster courses for summer schools at Pilgrims. Teacher agents have all been on Pilgrims summer courses, and ‘are much more teachers and much less agents.’

Vietnam EFL 'out of control'

2009-03-12T09:56:00.000-07:00

ENGLISH language schools in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC, formerly Saigon) are now proliferating so fast that its private English as a Foreign Language (EFL) sector is ‘out of control,’ according the English language Vietnam news website Vietnam Net Bridge. Nguyen Van Cuong, of the city’s Education and Training Department says that there are now 474 registered private EFL schools under its supervision, and that ‘the task of controlling the quality of English education centres in HCM City is quite a challenge.’

Setting up an ‘international centre’ teaching EFL under an ‘international’-sounding brand name is relatively cheap, and Mr Cuong said that it’s possible with an investment of as little as 2 million dong (£78) in a prime location. Opening another branch of an existing school requires much less bureaucracy than setting up a new school from scratch, so that most schools have two or three branches in the city, with some schools operating as many as 20 branches.

Operating multiple branches means that chain schools can send their existing teachers into several schools, rather than having to spend money on hiring new teachers. Students sign up in the expectation of being taught by ‘highly qualified native-speaking teachers’ only to find that these are often backpackers who are very thinly spread around many different branches of a school. One student complained to Vietnam Net Bridge that he had signed up on the promise of four days a week out of five, but now he gets to be taught by a native speaker only once a week.

Other sharp practices in Ho Chi Minh City’s mushrooming private EFL sector include frequent unsubstantiated claims that schools’ certification is internationally recognised. And complaints about false advertising go beyond claims about native-speaker teachers. One school projected a ‘luxurious appearance’ to a student, named as Minh Nghia,’ when he came to enquire about enrolling, but put that student in ‘small and stuffy’ classrooms. A staff member at the centre gave assurances that his class would have a maximum of 20 students, but the class turned out to have 30 students, with new students constantly added as they enrolled. "The class is too crowded and it’s really hard to listen to the teachers’ words,’ said Nghia.

A language centre director, speaking to Vietnam Net Bridge on condition of anonymity, said that ‘English centres owned by Vietnamese universities inside their campuses, which in the 1990s were very popular, and whose payments were only several 10,000 dong, (just under $4) can barely survive,’ as ‘low-cost English centres are now losing ground to the ones whose fees are in the millions of dong or even in US dollars,’ fuelled by a popular belief that teaching using a high proportion of native speaker teachers automatically translates into higher quality.

Own Brand of teaching

2009-03-12T09:54:00.000-07:00

BRITAIN'S most controversial stand-up comedian Russell Brand is currently best known for a recent scandal involving a ‘prank’ phone call in which he left obscene phone messages on the answering machine of a well-known veteran actor. The incident forced his resignation from his BBC Radio 2 show and cost the jobs of several senior BBC executives. Brand’s lower profile in the US didn’t stop him putting a lot of backs up in a rare US appearance at the MTV Video Awards last September, where he taunted the celibate lifestyle of clean-cut teen pop act the Jonas Brothers (from High School Musical).

More of interest to Teflers though, is Brand’s recent revelation on his Russell Brand’s Ponderland TV show that he was previously an EFL teacher on London’s Oxford Street for a year. Using a four-letter scatological reference to describe the quality of his teaching, he admitted that he was the ‘cool, popular teacher’ who, following a time-honoured Oxford Street private EFL sector practice, would occasionally take his students for lessons in a nearby park on sunny days. When Brand started passing a ‘joint’ (marihuana cigarette) among his students, however, he was betrayed by ‘some evil student who actually wanted to learn English!’ The management came to question Brand’s class about this, and Brand recalled desperately preparing his class by getting them to collectively agree an alibi for him. This stratagem failed however, because in Brand’s own words, ‘I was such a s*** teacher that none of them understood me.’

Thumbs down - Korean student who shopped his teacher

2009-03-12T09:50:00.000-07:00

From EL Gazette, February 2009

THUMBS DOWN to the male teenage student of an English school in Seoul, Korea, identified only as ‘Master Kim’, who shopped his English teacher to the police for appearing in a porn video, and who seems to have himself escaped prosecution for doing something which is also illegal in that country.

According to Seoul newspaper Kukmin Ilbo, a Korean English teacher at a hagwon (English language crammer school) in Seoul was fined 10,000,000 won (£4,600) for appearing in a pornographic video after one of her students recognised her on a website.

The teacher, identified only as Ms Kim, (a surname shared by a sizeable proportion of the Korean population) had featured several years ago in several porn videos starring herself and her boyfriend while studying in a postgraduate Sociology course in Canada, after running into difficulties keeping up payments on the tuition fees. Appearing in and watching pornography are illegal in Korea, and Ms Kim was unaware that the law includes performance by Korean nationals in pornographic material recorded abroad in countries where such activity is not illegal, such as Canada.

Ms Kim’s vigilant teenage student, named as ‘Master Kim,’ ‘just happened to be surfing porn sites’ when he came across a woman whose face looked strangely familiar. A ‘closer inspection’ revealed it was his English teacher. He tipped off the Seoul Metropolitan Police website, who began an investigation resulting in English teacher Ms. Kim being fined. Commentators on the case on English-language blogs pointed out that the (male) student Master Kim, who was also engaged an activity illegal in Korea by viewing pornography in the first place, received a very different treatment from the police, with no action taken against him.

United nations of ELT

2009-03-12T09:47:00.000-07:00

MA students of Tesol and Tefl span the globe and the age ranges. We look at their demographic

From EL Gazette, February 2009

Who are the students on MA Tesol or MA Tefl courses? Are they native speakers studying in their own countries or non-native speakers going to English-speaking countries to study? (We found one MA course in the UK, for example, that had several ‘alien’ native speakers from Canada and the US.)

We put these and other questions to numerous MA Tesol/Tefl (some are MSc Tesol/Tefl) courses in the UK, Canada, the US, as well as a few in Australia, and the only MA Tesol we know of in South Africa. The response rate was low. Numerous respondents said they’d forwarded our surveys to colleagues, who didn’t then get back to us.
Distance students tend to be older, and non-native speakers also tend to be younger than native speakers, although one university that had both distance and on-campus courses said that its distance MA students, whether native-speaker or non-native speaker, tended to be older, while they couldn’t discern much of a difference in age group according to nationality. The gender balance of MA courses suggests that EFL remains a ‘pink collar profession’ overwhelmingly staffed by women.

A vast diversity in countries of origin was common to nearly all MA courses, and it was universities located in less cosmopolitan parts of their country, or in harder (or more expensive to get to) parts of the world that tended to buck this trend, catering mostly for their own nationals as part of their state or national teaching licensing system. Even schools that could only spare time for a very brief phone conversation with us, like SIT in Vermont, USA, noted the great diversity of nationalities in their MA Tesol student body. Several respondents volunteered the observation that the native speaker MA Tesol students - nationals of the country that hosted the course - felt they benefited from being among such a diverse student body.

Virginia Soriano Chico, postgraduate programme coordinator of Aston University’s school of languages and social sciences in the UK, said her department has around 145 students on our distance learning MSc in TESOL suite of programmes and 48 students on our MA in TESOL Studies and MA in TESOL and Translation Studies

Aston’s MSc Tesol by distance has British, Japanese, Greek, Italian, Maltese, German students and many others from Europe, Japan, China, Taiwan, the Middle East, South America and African countries. Ten of the 145 are based in the UK. Aston’s campus-based students are from ‘many countries including the UK, Germany, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, Poland, Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, China, Taiwan, Japan, Turkey, Iran, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Jordan.’

Their MA Tesol students have a minimum of two years’ teaching practice and are mostly in their thirties with a few in their fifties some work with the British Council abroad, and some own their own schools..The (on campus) MA students tend to be younger – with a few exceptions they’ve just got a Bachelors degree and are in their twenties. Aston MSc students are 58 per cent female, the MA programme has 79 per cent female students.

Istvan Kecskes of the University of Albany (State University of New York) said their MA Tesol course has 45 students, of which three fifths are native speakers born in the US, with the remainder being international students from China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, India, Poland and Spain. Seven out of ten are female, and the age range is from their twenties to their fifties. Albany’s MA intake are all experienced teachers, mostly ‘senior teachers with international experience,’ but with ‘novice teachers’ among them. Albany gets more international MA Tesol students than previously, and sees more students coming into Tesol from other professions.

Half of the MA students at the department of English and language studies at Canterbury Christ Church University in the UK are non-native speakers, from Japan, Korea, Ukraine, Yemen, Pakistan, Turkey and Argentina. 85 per cent are women, ranging from their twenties to their sixties. They have an average of five years’ teaching experience, while at least one has been teaching for 30 years. They are mostly on the course with the aim of becoming a Director of Studies. They haven’t seen any recent changes in the age range, and seem be getting more native speakers from the UK.

At the University of York in the UK, 20 students on the distance MA, all but one who gave their gender were female, UK nationals and native speakers were outnumbered by non-native speakers from Singapore, Greece, Spain and Korea. Asians and Greeks tended to be much younger than the Brits, who were generally in their forties.

Individual distance MA Tesol/Tefl or Applied Linguistics students from the University of Birmingham, also in the UK, distance tended to be male native speakers, in their thirties.

In a random sample of MA Tesol by distance students at the New School New York – one in her sixties, mostly US nationals, one of whom was pleasantly surprised at the ‘diversity of the student body.’

Students from Hamline Graduate School in Minnesota who responded to an earlier Gazette survey were mostly North Americans (US citizens and one Canadian) and in their thirties. One woman aged 50 described her nationality as ‘Scandinavian’ (not a nationality), but given that Minnesota has a high proportion of residents of Scandinavian origin, she may have a US citizen describing her ethnicity.

Liz England of Shenandoah University said of the approximately 200 students enrolled on their MA Tefl/Tesol courses that she was struck by the great diversity of the student body. They’re a mix of native and non-native speakers, the latter from ‘five continents’ including Morocco, Korea, Germany, Japan, Mozambique and the UAE. Women outnumber men. Students range in age from 30 to 70. Most are already employed full-time teaching in EFL/ESL or other fields, and there are Directors of Studies and ministry of education people among them. The student body is becoming ‘more diverse’ with a bigger demand for distance MA courses compared to on-campus courses.

Renaissance of the Gulf

2009-03-12T09:35:00.000-07:00

From EL Gazette, February 2009

The numbers of Arabian Gulf nationals studying around the world continue to rise, with little sign of the global recession

Matt Salusbury

Writes

Where are students from the Gulf states of the Middle East going to study? The ‘Gulf states’ are members of the Cooperation Council for Arab States in the Arabian Gulf, which are Bahrain, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Sultanate of Oman, the states of Kuwait and Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE, which including Abu Dhabi and Dubai.)

Some countries have no statistics for enrolments from individual Gulf countries, and lump students from there together as ‘Middle East,’ which includes Turkey and North Africa. Australia is one such country. English Australia’s figures for the EFL sector lists 5,500 from ‘the Middle East’ in 2007, up 60 per cent on 2006. Within this group, enrolments from Saudi Arabia doubled in that year, totalling 7,300 Saudis studying in Australia as of October 2008.

Australia takes recruitment of Gulf students so seriously that a Parliamentary Sub-committee covered the issue back in 2005, urging Australia to capitalise on ‘recent restrictions to student visas and perceptions of the US and the UK as being "unsafe" and "unwelcoming" destinations for students from the Middle East and Gulf’.

New Zealand, helped by a low exchange rate for its currency and the perception of the country as a safe place, is enjoying a surge in Saudi enrolments. There were only 76 Saudi students in New Zealand in 2006, but by 2008 these had almost tripled.

Ireland’s latest (2005) figures show 300 Kuwait students, many of whom were studying in Ireland’s five medical schools. Eight per cent of all medical students are from Kuwait and four per cent of them are from the UAE, making them the fourth and fifth biggest groups in medicine by nationality. There were over 150 Emiratis in Ireland in 2005, with Emiratis outnumbering Saudis.

Ireland has seen a recent increase in Saudis on the King Abdullah Scholarship Programme, Nearly 90 per cent of these are male, and they’re mostly on part-time ‘non-degree’ business or English language courses.

The Association of Universities and Colleges in Canada (AUCC) told the Gazette that the number of students from all Gulf countries on student visas on Canadian campuses has grown rapidly, with nearly 70,000 fulltime students in 2006. The AUCC said that Arab students are especially numerous at McGill University and the universities of Ottawa and Toronto. The latest (2005) figures show that 23 per cent of Gulf states students in Canada were female, this proportion is 10 per cent more than a decade earlier.

In Spring 2008, Canada relaxed immigration rules on student visa-holders who settle there after a course of study, and Gulf News reported that Emiratis in particular are taking advantage of this change.

Back in 2006, the American Council of Education warned that ‘students from the Gulf States… are choosing to study in Europe, the Middle East, or Asia rather than coming to the United States.’ Their report cited year-on-year declines in enrolments from the Gulf – by one fifth in Oman’s case - and concluded ‘this is part of a larger pattern of decline among Muslim countries’ in the wake of 9/11 and the Afghani and Iraq wars. The recent ‘Obama bounce’ seems to be improving global perceptions of the US, which may encourage Arab students back there.

America’s efforts to entice students from the Gulf states include the State Department’s education arm in the region, AMIDEAST, which opened bigger accommodation with a separate teaching centre in Muscat, Oman, in the summer. Before the move, AMIDEAST’s Muscat operation was already handling 130 visitors and 200 calls a month, all enquiring about studying in the US.

AMIDEAST will open an office in Qatar soon, and is already marketing State Department-sponsored Youth Exchange and Study Program scholarships for Qataris to study in a US high school for a year. Qatar’s ‘Education City’ outside the capital Doha includes five US university campuses, compared to one British university (Herriot-Watt) and one Australian university (Wollongong) in the Gulf, both in Dubai.

America’s 1991 liberation of Kuwait means Kuwait has close ties to the US. The National Union of Kuwait Students said that in 2008 there were ‘1,500 Kuwaiti students studying at universities in the US, Egypt and the UK on scholarships from the Kuwait Embassy. Another 500 Kuwaiti are enrolled privately in American universities.’

Saudi Arabia’s gigantic King Abdullah Scholarship Programme (KASP, see here) is focused on the US, with a target for 25,000 Saudis to be studying in the US by academic year 2009-2010.

The Gulf states don’t just send students to American universities, they (especially Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) are the biggest donors to US university endowment funds. This facilitates more of their nationals coming to study there.

In the UK, the latest figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show over 3200 Saudi higher education students in the UK in 2007, up 18 per cent on the previous year. Kuwaiti and Qatari numbers were up by about the same proportion, with well over a thousand students from each state, and there were 600 Qataris. Emirati recruitment was more modest (seven per cent up, to over 2200) and Bahraini enrolments were down.

The British Council Kuwait is now starting training and accreditation for local educational agents. UK Trade and Investment recently identified ‘financial and professional education’ in Saudi Arabia and Qatar topping the list of ‘opportunities’ for export to these countries.

Scottish universities seem particularly adept at marketing to the Gulf. Glasgow’s website markets its diverse home city’s large Muslim community, with the most mosques of any city in Scotland. (The University of New South Wales also markets its tolerant and cosmopolitan home city of Sydney, Australia, and its university mosque where 400 Muslim students attend Friday prayers.) Meanwhile, London’s EFL providers are telling the Gazette they're having trouble coping with the influx of King Abdullah Scholarship Programme Saudis.

South African EFL providers report that they’re receiving more Saudis of a younger average age, helped by relatively easy visas. As we go to press, a South African mission to the Gulf states is arriving in Dubai, with the Gulf States acting in concert on agreements with South Africa on tourism, hospitality, leisure and nuclear energy technology transfer, but no mention of education yet. Talks are also about to start on a pan-African trading bloc with the Gulf states, with South Africa as a senior partner.

In Gulf countries that have no elections, national leaders are acutely aware of the need to constantly drive ‘reforms.’ Several Gulf states are committed to reducing their dependence on an expatriate workforce, and on training up their own nationals to replace them. All this will mean continued investment in English-medium education. All Saudi primary schools will teach EFL from 2009, for example, with English as the medium of instruction for all mathematics and science in the Kingdom from 2011.

But there’s still a chance that increased demand from the Gulf could stall. At the end 2008, Saudi Arabia was, according to the Guardian newspaper, ‘expected to cut back on both current spending and adjust ambitious long-term development plans in the light of the slump in (oil) prices.’ Qatari and Emirati government run investments funds have taken a pounding through exposure to US and European share price crashes. Boomtown Dubai is starting to see a slowdown, while Kuwait recently took the extreme step of closing its stock exchange for several days to stop share prices ‘haemorrhaging.’ But the same report re-assures us that even in a global recession, the existing assets of the Gulf states will ‘remain massive.’

Ellie interim report on early adoption of languages

2009-03-12T09:31:00.000-07:00

From EL Gazette, February 2009

THE FIRST interim report of the gigantic European Commission-sponsored ElliE report on the early adopting of foreign language learning in European primary schools is out. (See the July 2008 Gazette, p1 and 5.) This first stage concentrates on children aged seven to eight across schools in Poland, Italy, Croatia, Holland, Sweden, England and the Catalan region of Spain. The foreign language they are learning is in most cases English.

The report found that children are highly motivated for learning a foreign language at this age, are aware of their language abilities and show strong preferences for what sort of language learning environment they learn in. The study found a great emphasis on oral production in language teaching aimed at this age group. Children of the target age group could already ‘produce meaningful chunks of language such as greetings and responses,’ and the vocabulary they were producing contained more nouns than verbs. School principals, teachers and the children’s parents are keen on the children starting to learn languages early.

A positive learning environment, access to a variety of materials were among the factors helping the students’ progress and motivation. The report noted a big variation from country to country in requirements for language proficiency among primary school language teachers.

The next phase of the research will concentrate on ages 8 to 9, with a report due out in the final days of 2009.

Mickey Mouse link to China EFL chain

2009-03-12T09:27:00.000-07:00

This article first appeared in EL Gazette of February 2008

ENTERTAINMENT colossus the Walt Disney Corporation has opened an English language school in Shanghai, as part of its strategy of entering the Chinese EFL market. The private school caters for children aged two to eleven, using teachers from North America and locally recruited bilingual teaching assistants.

Disney’s market research shows that Chinese parents are willing to spend up to 20 per cent of their annual earnings to enable their children to learn English, and Disney predicts a 12 per cent annual growth in China’s ELT market, which it described in a Shanghai Daily interview as the world’s biggest. Disney estimated that by 2012, China’s estimated US $2 billion spend on language learning for its youth would double to US $4 billion.

· China came third in Computer Weekly magazine’s ranking of top IT ‘outsourcing destinations to watch.’ China was outclassed by Argentina and Bulgaria in the survey, with praise for these countries’ language skills and education systems. The ‘English language capability of Chinese workers’ and its weak intellectual property laws were seen as ‘unsatisfactory.’

You can't take pictures here (without a licence), JK Rowling and "fair use", journalism is "disintegrating," financial journalism in times of crisis

2009-02-25T07:12:00.000-08:00

The March/April edition of the Freelance is now out. My articles in it include:

News for a round earth
Investigative journalist Nick Davies warns that the profession of journalism is "disintegrating," and journalists have to look for new "mini-media" models for making money out of news. Read it here...

Financial journalists, dig deeper!
Are financial journalists just "fans of capitalism with typewriters" (or modern equivalent)? Peter Wilby on the role of financial journalism in times of economic crisis. Read it here...

Student snubbed in square
"Plastic plods" tell student film makers they need a licence to film for a student documentary in Parliament Square, and what happened when they came back with a letter from their tutor. Read here...

J K Rowling clarifies fair use
How a judgement against an unauthorised "companion work" to the Harry Potter books has implications for "fair use" of other creators' works. Read it here

The hokey Coaker
Mixed messages on the right to photograph. Read it here...

Work your proper hours
The point in the year at which, if you did all your unpaid overtime in one go starting from January 2, you would start working for money. Read this article here...

Dig deeper, financial journalists!

2009-02-25T07:05:00.000-08:00

Peter Wilby tells it like it is.

We are all financial journalists now, it seems, and the Treasury Select Committee has been grilling financial jounros about their role in the slide into recession. First journalists were accused of not predicting the recession (in fact, several had done so several years ago, and were roundly ignored). Then they were accused of frightening the punters into taking their money out of Northern Rock. Current Media Guardian columnist and former Independent on Sunday and New Statesman editor Peter Wilby spoke at a recent meeting on the role of financial journalists in time of crisis. Read my report on this here.

News for a round earth

2009-02-25T06:43:00.000-08:00

Nick Davies speaks

Nick Davies, investigative journalist (recently at work on the Guardian's investigations into corporate tax avoidance) and author of Flat Earth News, warned journalists at a recent meeting that their profession is 'disintegrating.'Rather than dwell on this, however, Nick urged journalists to look for new models for how to much money out of journalism. Read my article in the March/April 2009 Freelance for more.

While his book is mostly doom and gloom, Nick was much funnier than I had expected. The meeting was a joint gig co-hosted by NUJ London Freelance Branch and NUJ Press & PR Branch. Nick asked one of the PR people in the audience which PR agency he worked for. His reply, 'Myself, mostly. I keep getting sacked for being too honest.'

Lens limits - government says "Cap it"

2009-02-16T07:59:00.001-08:00

The February 2009 (online) only edition of the Freelance is now out. It includes a report on Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker's less than helpful comments on government policy on restricting photographers, and examples of clueless Police Community Support Officers telling photographers (professional and amateur) that they can't photograph in a public place, with or without a (mythical) 'licence'. Read more here. The March Freelance will be out soon.

BETT show for educational technology

2009-02-16T07:25:00.000-08:00

I went to the slightly terrifying BETT Education Show at the end of January. BETT used to stand for something once, but its PR people now tell me it’s just BETT, which doesn’t stand for anything in particular.

As a humble correspondent for an English Language Teaching industry publication, I naively expected that the show would actually have something to do with education. I couldn’t have been more wrong. As part of the state’s current War on Young People, most of the kit on show was schools management systems software, attendance management kit, swipe cards to monitor where your students are at, CCTV cameras, kit to spy on what the kids are chatting about online, knife arches, electronic locks on equipment, and all the expensive paraphernalia of the iron boot of top-down coercive control freakery. No wonder there’s not enough money for teachers and books, all the money being thrown away on stuff to not very effectively spy on, regulate, and control the kids.

One day, in spite of the apparent best efforts of the managerial castes, the younger people of this country will attain positions of power, while us less young people will be forgetful old folks in need of them to provide an elderly care infrastructure. Will the younger people of today be in a forgiving mood towards the generation that fired subsonic Mosquito electronic warfare devices at them to disperse them, or issued Dispersal Orders on them to stop them congregating, or put them into a coercive ‘school attendance management system’? I don’t think so.

Then there are interactive whiteboards. As the EL Gazette’s Mexico correspondent, teacher Paul Morris told me, “Don’t get me started on interactive whiteboards!” He points out that the youth of today are disorientated enough by lots of streamed images and things going ‘beep!’ around them all day, miniature films coming in on their mobiles and computers, keeping them in a state of permanent distraction. The last thing “the kids” need is more time spent passively staring at screens. It was noticeable that among all the tech, tech, tech at the trade fair, the biggest crowd puller was a little space with some seating and a guy from government and a guy from education, sitting down talking about exam-based learning versus knowledge for its own sake. The only tech they had was a couple of radio mikes they were talking into. And the space was packed with teachers listening intently. With all the distracting images dancing around the kids these days, the calmness of actually sitting down and having the sound of real person just talking is more important than ever.

The interactive whiteboard industry, however, carries on regardless. The UK industry, with giants like manufacturer Promethean (excuse the pun) got a boost in the form of a £5 billion government investment in “education technology” (kit) when Blair took power in 1997. But they, and whiteboard market leaders Smart (Canadian) and Hitachi, look like they’re about to get hammered by the various Chinese exhibitors who were showing off giant flatscreen high-resolution anti-glare plasma screen TVs whose screens you can write on with a light pen. There’s less radiation, less power used and no fiddly expensive bulbs.

Look out everybody! China's flatscreen TVs, shortly to become cheaper than your interactive whiteboards

Promethean’s vast trade stand had a dedicated demonstrator who spend three whole working days just showing off interactive whiteboards, in Spanish.

Promethian's dedicated Spanish language interactive whiteboard demonstrator

There were a few items of kit that impressed me – simple, democratic ideas that filled an actual need. Pocket Projectors do exactly what it says on the tin, they are projectors the size of a mobile phone, ideal for an audience of about six. Their demonstrator said he did presentations on the Tube with them, and projected onto the white shirt fronts of his corporate clients.

Pocket projectors do exactly what it says on the box. This one is the size of a mobile phone

The white shirt fronts of Pocket Projectors' corporate clients have proved handy for projecting presentations onto whilst giving presentations on crowded Tube carriages.

ABCi Ltd run surveys for school students, asking them questions about their school, with people reading out the questions if they can’t read the questions yet. The finished surveys link to action plans, which you can get in person on the phone as well as online. A recent primary school survey they ran had a lot of questions about the school toilets, because that’s where the bullying happens. One BETT punter, a university professor was unimpressed, “Why should I care what the students think?” he asked ABCi people. He was presumably more interested in the knife-arches and the attendance management package.

Subsequently, one of the people from BETT's PR agency admitted to me in an email that she visited a refitted secondary school and was a bit taken aback by the extent of the 'big brother' technology in use to ensure every student was in their lesson on time.

© Words and images Matt Salusbury

Meet your mentor

2009-01-06T06:02:00.000-08:00

Can befriending increase the effectiveness of support for non-native speakers at English medium universities?

(This article first appeared in English Language Gazette of January 2009)

Matt Salusbury

Writes

WITH THE continued rise in international students in English-speaking universities, more EAP and Foundation courses are springing up. But alongside training international students in English and in study skills, there’s also another strand to support for non-native English speaking students to ensure that they can stand the course – mentoring. Course descriptions for courses designed for international students on various UK university websites increasingly show less emphasis on many hours of generic EAP in groups, and more emphasis on tutorials, one-to-one English language sessions, and mentoring. What is mentoring, and how can it be used to help international university students succeed?

Mentoring is an increasingly popular tool in the UK, according to the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation (MBF), who run training projects for mentors through nine regional coordinators round the country, backed by the Home Office and the Cabinet Office. Mentoring is a concept being used in many areas of life – from tackling bullying at school to settling young offenders back into the community.

Mentoring (the term is often used interchangeable with ‘coaching’) is about helping people acquire the awareness and confidence necessary to fulfil their potential. Several Chinese students on MA courses in the US interviewed for our recent survey, for example, said life at a US university got much easier when they suddenly realised they were expected to ask for help when they needed it. This realisation, while vital for their success, has little to do with English or study skills. Within mentoring there is ‘peer mentoring’ – in universities this will be by other students – and ‘classic’ mentoring, which usually means a role taken on by university teaching or support staff. Properly done, mentoring should always be monitored, usually by the university. The MBF run the Approved Provider Standard (APS), which has benchmarks and best practice for mentoring.

Charlotte Leather of the MBF told the Gazette about some of the developments in mentoring projects aimed at international students at UK universities. These are most peer-monitoring projects which engage students who are already enrolled in ‘befriending’ roles – providing social support for international students when they first come to the UK.

Charlotte says these befriending projects are important part of ensuring retention of international students across UK universities, and that students who ‘befriend’ incoming international students can also fill an important role in familiarising them with areas of the subject they are coming to study. Universities are usually able to get established students to work as ‘befrienders’ on a volunteer basis, as the experience gained by mentors is seen as very valuable to their future career. Academic departments or units that have a lot of international students are also starting to work closely with students’ unions on these mentoring projects.

Rong Huang of Plymouth University has done extensive search on mentoring support for international students at every level, and how mentoring affects success. On one course, for ‘direct entry students’ students from China and other countries joining a course in its third year, he found there was a 43 per cent failure rate, and that the international students’ ‘transition has currently been managed on an ad hoc basis.’ His response was to train student mentors, including international students who had just arrived, and to use feedback from the ‘direct entry students’ and their mentors to compile materials for the next international intake of this course. There’s now a ‘special visit day’ for potential students of the course, at which the university goes to gatherings of potential applicants abroad and provides them with a full orientation. As a result, the university’s agents abroad can provide much more precise information about what the student can expect.

Charlotte told the Gazette that the University of Exeter’s peer mentoring scheme now starts six weeks before the start of the degree course, when the student arrives at the airport to be met by a student peer mentor. It’s followed by introductions to subject areas, the library, the university and the UK, all before the course starts. Mentors are older students – at the request of the international student body they are a combination of international and ‘British’ students, as international students felt they weren’t meeting enough students from the UK.

Another innovative mentoring project is the one at Sheffield University, which has 23 international student mentors who can be contacted through an email network for enquiries about orientation and on subject areas.

Rong Huang notes that there’s a tendency to see international students in terms of their country of origin, and how this affects their learning styles – how the UK’s academic culture is different to that of Asia, and particularly China, for example. While there’s been a lot of work on addressing these specific issues – see the UK Council for International Student Affairs (UKCIS) ‘Prepare for Success’ for example – Huang says there’s been little research into the international student body as a whole. His research at Plymouth University showed they were generally satisfied by their courses and support services, but less happy with courses’ value for money and the quality of their seminars.

It was in their participation in social activities and sports that the international students surveyed felt dissatisfaction. Most international students were not ‘socially active,’ and their friends were mostly from their own countries. Only 15 per cent of them reported that their friends were ‘British’ students, and 77 per cent thought that UK students were ‘hard to get to know.’

Limited by their English? With increasing numbers of international students, is UK education risking its reputation? Read this article here

Picture research for writers, get that photo book published, Guardian multimedia “podheads”

2009-01-02T07:14:00.000-08:00

The January 2009 Freelance is now on the web. My articles include…

What photo book publishers want
Advice on getting photography books published, from a specialist in the field, independent publisher Dewi Lewis. Read this article on the Freelance website.

Cash from pic research
Writers can make more money on the picture research side of the features they write - if they ask for it.
Read this article on the Freelance website.

The pod people are here! - at the Guardian.
The Guardian and Observer have just moved to a new site at Kings Place (apparently with no apostrophe) in King's Cross. Their operations will completely change. The staff will be re-organised into "pods"…. Read this article on the Freelance website. Thanks to Tom Davies for the info, and to my editor and co-author Mike Holderness for inventing the word "podhead" to describe the leader of a Guardian media ‘pod.’ (Picture: Guardian Media Group office reception, opposite the old Guardian and Observer offices, recently vacated, in Farringdon Road. © Matt Salusbury)

Snapping or writing about coppers to become a crime?
Reasearching the details of individual police officers or members of Her Majesty's armed forces may soon become an imprisonable offence, under the Terrorism Act 2008, which received Royal Assent in November… Read this article on the Freelance website.

These police officers from the Metropolitan Police Forward Intelligence Team (FIT) seem to have taken a keen interest in me over the years, enough to have given me the "photographic reference number" 1481. Would I now be committing an imprisonable offence if I tried to find out more about individual officers with FIT or other units? Picture: © Matt Salusbury

Limited by their English?

2009-01-01T09:29:00.000-08:00

With increasing numbers of international students, especially at Masters level, us UK education risking its reputation?

Matt Salusbury

Writes

(This article first appeared in English Language Gazette of January 2009)

ACADEMICS are sounding the alarm about the huge number of overseas students recruited to UK despite some of them barely speaking English, and the effect is it having on the quality of their universities’ brands. (And see the front page for news of 46 international students at Newcastle University whose TOEFL scores were faked.) But there are also many international student success stories in UK universities, and we analyse below some of the secrets of their success.

The UK has been keen to embrace international students. BBC News estimated that as of July 2008, more than 60 per cent of the UK Masters students are from outside the country. In 2007, there were 44,225 non-EU overseas students in the UK.
Dr Avrind Sivaramakrishnan of the Asian College of Journalism, writing in Education Guardian in July, reported that 20 out of 80 foreign students reputedly left one particular course because they found their English was inadequate. Sivaramakrishnan says educational agents ‘are sometimes economical with the reality.’ One of his students ‘went to a British recruitment event, and returned saying they only wanted MBA and technology students with chequebooks at the ready.’
A British academic based in Chinese university, using the pseudonym Victoria Adam, told Education Guardian that Foundation programmes were an excellent idea, but ‘as the programmes proliferated, standards have not been maintained. In China, a business teacher said that in one of his classes, 75 per cent of students failed.’ The consequence, according to ‘Victoria,’ is that ‘Chinese students who cannot listen, speak or write after eight years of formal English education may well still find themselves on the way to Britain.’

An anonymous academic from a prestigious Russell Group university told BBC News this summer that ‘I tried to speak to a student who could not understand a simple request; in the end, we had to resort to pen and paper…once students have arrived at the university… it becomes difficult for them to be failed or sent home.’

The BBC News report highlighted another problem – it’s ‘unusual for students to fail postgraduate courses.’ Higher Education Statistics Agency analysis of trends for degrees ‘does not explicitly contain the concept of failing a course.’

One reader of this report posting a comment on the BBC News website claimed that ‘Our university is known for passing students with poor English skills.’

The repercussions for the reputation of the UK’s universities was highlighted by the case of Kai Lee, a Chinese Masters student whose ‘essay-writing empire’ was busted last November. Lee advertised his services through Mandarin-language posters on the campus of the University of Central Lancashire (Uclan), charging up to £1000 for essays and dissertations for students at several universities. Lee was uncovered by Uclan student newspaper Pluto, but many Uclan students leaving comments on Pluto’s web forum felt it was a victimless crime, blaming a ‘university system’ that recruits high-paying non-English proficient students.

Bahram Bekhradnia of the Higher Education Policy Institute warned BBC News that ‘the concern about international students and their language ability is actually two way.’ Bekhadnia says foreign governments are concerned that students they send to the UK on scholarship programmes spend so much time getting their English up to scratch that that they don't learn much of their subject. This problem influenced the Chinese ministry of education’s decision to end its funding for students on UK Masters courses. The British Council in Beijing confirmed that the Chinese ‘ministry of education support (in the form of scholarships) is now focused on PhD students and not Masters’

What solutions are there to the problems posed by a surge in non-English proficient international university students? A coherent programme of mentoring is a must (see my article on this here). Universities should admit only those international students who are strong academically. No amount of EAP support will help a student get a degree in a subject in which they are weak. Get students on Foundation courses as early as possible, and our earlier survey of EAP courses produced general agreement that students need a minimum IELTS score of 5 even to get on a Foundation course. (See the April 2008 Gazette.)

We asked some EAP units with a good reputation what factors they felt influenced non-native speaker international university students succeeding

Alison Strandling, from the Language Centre of the world class London School of Economics (LSE, part of the University of London) says its centre has one-to-one consultations for EAP students as part of its programme, and its EAP teachers also have office hours when students can receive individual help and support. LSE’s virtual learning platform is becoming increasingly important in supporting international students. No additional fees for EAP are charged on top of the standard subject course tuition fees, which encourages students to maximize their use of them.

University of East Anglia’s Pro-Vice Chancellor (academic) Professor Edward Acton told the Gazette, ‘ I think each of the solutions you cite is important. The one we have poured much energy into is the development of pre-university pathways,
combining academic and intensive English language tuition, provided on campus… Immersion in an English-speaking environment and habituation to UK study methods before starting a degree course seems to be paying great dividends. As a group, international students coming to us from this route are thus far distinctly outperforming those recruited directly.’

Saudi scholarship surge

2009-01-01T09:08:00.000-08:00

Literally thousands of Saudi scholarship students are appearing in universities and EAP courses around the world

Matt Salusbury

Writes

This article first appeared in English Language Gazette January 2009

ENGLISH language schools and English medium universities around the world are already experiencing an influx of Saudi students as a result of the Saudi Ministry of Higher Education’s King Abdullah Scholarship Programme (KASP). Approximately 17,000 Saudi nationals a year join the programme and study abroad, with numbers likely to grow further in the next few years. The destination countries for KASP students transcend the English-speaking world, with English-medium universities in continental Europe and Asia as part of the deal.

According to official Saudi diplomatic sources, ‘The Programme of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz for Foreign Scholarship’ was launched in April 2006, and was based on a plan submitted by the Higher Education Council. King Abdullah’s name has been associated with numerous large-scale education projects, including the King Abdullah Institute for Science and Technology and the brand new university being built in the brand new King Adbullah Economic City in the desert.

The original King Adbullah Scholarships were for Saudi nationals to study in ‘the United States and the Asian nations’ and the US remains by far the biggest destination for KASP students, recently facilitated by an apparent easing on the US visa regime for those with passports from the Middle East. Saudi Cultural Attache to the US Dr. Mohammad Aleissa said that the King Abdullah scholarships were part of a Saudi initiative in partnership with then President George W. Bush’s administration to counter ‘some misundestandings’ between the US and Saudi Arabia post-9/11. According to Tom Green, vice president for enrollment management at East Michigan University in the US, the King Abdullah programme’s organizers ‘hope to sponsor 20,000 students by the end of 2008, and by the end of 2009 they hope to have 25,000 students in the United States.’

The Asian destinations for 3,000 KASP students in the first intake of the programme were China (200 KASP scholars were in China as of June 2008), Japan, Singapore and South Korea – presumably on English-medium programmes at universities there. Shortly before we went to press in November 2008, 138 King Abdullah scholarship students went to an intensive orientation session on Riyadh, in preparation for going out to higher education study in India.

Since its inception, King Abdullah scholarships have increased in the scope of the countries that its scholars go to, and in the range of students it sends abroad. The programme originally had a ‘cap’ restricting it to the top five per cent of students in Saudi schools, Now the cap has been removed, and less high-flying students can get on the programme based on a checklist of various demographic and academic achievement criteria, although a look at the criteria suggests that students still have to be in the top ten per cent for academic achievement. While the ministry of higher education runs the scheme, the selection of candidates is in the hands of ‘independent academic committees’ made up of representatives of various Saudi university faculties in relevant subject areas.

KASP Director Dr Majed Alharbi was in the UK in late 2007 to talk to universities, and following this, KASP students are turning up in the UK in increasing numbers. See page 6 for the impact of KASP on London’s EFL school market. A quick Gazette ring round UK universities showed that some were hoping to recruit more Saudis through KASP, while others were already keeping a close eye on the number of Saudis arriving, in case this began to impact on their mix of nationalities.

And the range of countries covered by KASP has grown. In Holland, Groningen University took 79 medical students under the programe in 2007, and the University of Twente in the north of the country has been actively recruiting KASP students. The Gazette came across university websites in Italian that mention agreements through KASP. The British Council in Saudi Arabia forwarded the Gazette an introductory document from the Saudi deputy ministry of scholarship affairs (part of the ministry of higher education) which said that KASP students are also currently studying (as well as in all the above countries) in Australia, Slovakia, Hungary, Ireland, Germany, Malaysia, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, New Zealand, Canada and Spain.

There are currently a total of 40,000 Saudi students on KASP scholarships or who have completed them. The programme is currently in Phase 4, which focuses on studies for medicine, pharmacy, engineering, computer science, mathematics, physics, accountancy, insurance and e-commerce. 5000 KASP places are reserved for Masters and Doctorates courses. It’s a generous package, covering air fares, accommodation, a monthly stipend, an allowance for books and clothes, living costs for dependents and also medical and dental insurance. It funds up to a year’s ‘language preparation’ in preparation for courses of study.

The normal KASP progression route is an intensive English course followed by a university degree course. Saudi students can usually apply through the Saudi Arabia consulate of the country they want to study in. In the US, the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission works with the Washington DC-based Academy for Educational Development (AED), which runs an admissions service for KASP students. AED is currently ‘focusing its efforts on placing new KASP students in intensive English language programmes’ and ‘researching academic program opportunities appropriate to each student's academic goals and admissions credentials.’ The local Saudi consulates monitor the academic progress of KASP students, and particularly their attendance at English classes, and the Saudi Gazette recently reported that 512 KASP students were ‘recalled’ due to their ‘weak performance and poor attendance records.’ The programme has now beefed up its compulsory pre-departure orientation courses.

KASP has been sending abroad middle class Saudis who normally wouldn’t get the chance to study overseas for an extended period. Many of its students are women, and these face an additional complication. Scholarship students going abroad need a mahram, a Ministry-approved male relative to accompany them for up to four years. Western immigration authorities are puzzled by the concept of mahrams and what exactly the purpose of their visit is, which leads to additional complications. Recent developments in Saudi Arabia such at the founding of the new Riyadh Women’s University and the admission of women into training for the diplomatic corps may lead to a eventual relaxation of such restrictions as the mahram requirement. Women who pay their own way when studying abroad can already go without a mahram.

KASP has stimulated demand among Saudis for study abroad in general. London and South African schools report they are receiving many more ‘young Saudis,’ including juniors, who aren’t eligible for KASP. In Australia there have been several recent conferences on the impact of so many Saudis on its EFL sector, with teachers with Middle East experience advising on how to prepare these students for university.

Thatcherism Goes to College still quoted after 20 years

2008-12-09T12:08:00.000-08:00

I was absolutely gob-smacked to find that my book, Thatcherism Goes to College, is still being quoted (let alone read) almost 20 years after it appeared, and by somebody only just out of college herself. An October 2008 article by Laurie Penny in still relatively cool leftie magazine Red Pepper quotes my book.

The function of a degree has perceptibly shifted from a rigorous course of academic and intellectual training to a necessary ticket into a certain class of ‘graduate’ professions – many of which would not have required a degree even ten years ago. As this shift has occurred, colleges, departments and university careers services have aggressively pursued a corporate agenda.

In 1989, Matthew Salusbury observed in Thatcherism Goes to College that ‘Bristol University’s history department was proud of the number of bankers and financial service personnel they had produced, using the fact to justify their continued existence. They would not have recognised the argument that a life in the stock market was as much a waste of a history degree as a lifetime’s unemployment.’ Two decades on... Read the original Red Pepper article. The quote comes just after the 'Corporate agenda' sub-heading.

There's a surprising number of copies of Thatcherism... on Amazon, for up to £60. Email me if you want one new for £2 plus postage.

George Young MP (Con) is not such a big fan of the book, as is evidenced by this extract from Hansard, in which he fails to get very far with his proposal to make the taxpayer foot the bill for MPs' actions for libel and 'malicious falsehood'. If, as he claims, any 'costs were paid', I think my publisher would have told me about it. Curiously, his speech came years after the incident, at about the time I started coming into contact with Reclaim The Streets. What a strange coincidence.

Hoe Dieren op Ijlanden Evolureen (How Animals Evolve on Islands)

2008-12-03T07:50:00.000-08:00

Here's a sneak preview of a page from Hoe Dieren op Ijlanden Evolureen (How Animals Evolve on Islands), a Dutch language book due out in January 2009. My source didn't tell me the authors or publisher, but they did tip me of that one of my pictures was on page 16. This is by arrangement with me, as part of a swaps deal in which I got a licence to use some copyrighted images from the Athens Museum of Paleaontology in my forthcoming Fortean Times article on pygmy elephants.

My pic at the bottom of the page shows molars (teeth) from prehistoric adult pygmy elephants in the Bate Collection in the Natural History Museum London, from Malta and Cyprus. The text looks at the reasons for their extinction.