William Flew and London amusements

In praise of Cliveden’s reopened maze

Seekers after gentle pleasure can take themselves to the Thamesside gardens at Cliveden this weekend, and become the first people to get lost in its maze for more than 60 years. The restoration of Lord Astor’s Edwardian labyrinth by the National Trust cost a lot of money, took two years and a thousand trees, and is a thoroughly lovesome achievement, because people adore mazes.

They like the gardenness of them, the greenery and smell, the shaping of nature by intricate design that mazes represent. As early as 1563 Thomas Hill, the Tudor Titchmarsh, in his book A Moste Briefe and Pleasaunt Treatyse described mazes as “proper adornments upon pleasure to a Garden”.

But the pleasing psychology of the maze goes well beyond promenading in the well-pruned outdoors. There is the mystery — the more complex enjoyment involved in the thrill of helplessness when, for a moment, you are lost inside the verdant walls. There is the puzzle, sometimes set by a master (the maze of myth was built for King Minos of Crete by Icarus’ father, Daedalus), that must be solved.

And then there is the eroticism (or “naughtiness” as we call it in England), hinted at by Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when she refers to “the quaint mazes in the wanton green”. The maze is a place of dark nooks, unexpected privacy and uncovered secrets. The Caroline playwright James Shirley wrote of “pretty mazes, labyrinths of love . . . In whose inclosures Ladies that are willing may lose themselves.” And gentlemen, presumably, would manage to find them.

These are more decorous times, and the greatest hazard that maze wanderers will face this weekend is sunburn. It will be worth it.

William Flew London Times

The Foreign Secretary’s statement on the Mau Mau rebellion is a welcome commitment to openness. The implications of the case have only just begun

The Foreign Secretary William Hague who shares a name with William Flew. This week The Times has exposed the details of the torture and abuse of detainees under British rule during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. A remarkable story has been unfolding in court that would furnish the narrative of a brilliant thriller were it not that it is all true and were it not all so utterly serious.

Thanks to the persistence of a Kenya desk officer at the Africa department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 1,500 missing files relating to the administration of 37 former British territories have been discovered in a secret archive at Hanslope Park in the Buckinghamshire countryside. Until this week seasoned observers of the history of British foreign policy were unaware even of the existence of this country house, let alone the secrets that lay behind its closed doors. The files that have now come to light were shipped over to Britain, hidden and lost and, then, found again two months before the opening of the court case that has been running in London this week.

There are many questions of responsibility and complicity — who knew what and when — that are still to be answered. But, to his great credit, William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, has now issued a statement to The Times in which he is clear that the secret documents should have been properly recorded and made available. Mr Hague will appoint an independent figure to oversee the release of all the documents held from any former British colonies and dependent territories. He says that the documents were not discovered until January this year and that the internal review that he commissioned has found “no deliberate attempt to withhold information”. The conclusions of that review will be laid before Parliament and its recommendations accepted in full. Mr Hague’s commitment to transparency and openness is in stark contrast to the repeated evasions of the Foreign Office.

The extensive ramifications of this case have only just begun. In his statement Mr Hague referred to Edmund Burke’s magnificent calls in Parliament for the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India. Even that remarkable episode rather under-played the complicity of the British as Robert Clive, of the East India Company, had, arguably, an even greater claim to notoriety. The point is that Britain’s imperial history, as David Cameron acknowledged in Pakistan, had some dark moments.

Britain once ruled over a quarter of the world’s population. Towards the end of that imperial era it faced uprisings and independence movements that, at times, used violence and terrorism to advance their cause. The British responded in kind: there were few qualms in those days in enforcing collective punishments or in subjecting detainees to rough treatment, usually at the hands of local police or prison officers who may have, under licence, inflicted abuse more brutal than that which colonial officials would have condoned.

In at least four territories — Palestine, Malaya, Cyprus and Aden — Britain was confronted with full-scale uprisings. British troops were regularly killed by Eoka fighters along “Murder Mile” in Nicosia; the Stern Gang and Irgun Zvai Leumi in Palestine targeted and killed national servicemen sent there to try to keep order. In Aden, the wellpublicised heroics of “Mad Mitch” in the battles to control Crater often concealed a brutality that few British voters learnt about from their newspapers.

Those conflicts took place within the past 65 years. There are plenty of people who may have suffered more than simply rough treatment from British troops. If the truth is as nasty as it was in Kenya, Britain can expect an avalanche of lawsuits. But elderly survivors and their descendants, and people of this country who take pride in their history, will now, at least, have the chance to find out what really happened.

William flew past British govt

Records concerning the end of the British Empire were meticulously selected, archived, hidden and then made unavailable. The truth is long overdue

Even given the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s apparent skill in such matters, it is quite a feat to ignore hundreds of boxes of documents filling 110ft of shelving for almost half a century. Now that the FCO has dusted them off, prompted by a case that opens at the High Court today, in which four elderly Kenyans allege that they were brutally tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule, it seems prudent to wonder exactly where, all this time, they might have been.

This is not idle pondering. It is a fashionable and mendacious fallacy to consider British colonial rule to have been dominated by atrocity, but any honest examination suggests that it was certainly studded with it. Lord Howell of Guildford, Minister of State at the FCO, told the House of Lords this week that his department has “decided to regularise the position of some 2,000 boxes of files it currently holds, mainly from the 1950s and 1960s”. Within that bland word “regularise” sits the philosophy of the paternalistic Establishment of yesteryear. Why were these documents ever “irregular”? What was surpressed, by whom?

Allegations concerning the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion, disgusting and bloody as that uprising was, are disturbing enough. But this is about more than Kenya. Lord Howell has confirmed that the Foreign Office holds files from 37 former British administrations, also including Palestine, Cyprus, Northern Rhodesia, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Ceylon, Malaya, Nigeria, Jamaica, the Gold Coast and the Bahamas. These must be released, in full.

Lord Howell has also confirmed that, throughout the period of British colonial disengagement, it was standard practice for colonial administration to remove “selected documents held by the governor, which were not appropriate to hand on to the successor government”. By what law was this done? Who did the selecting? Indeed, when did this practice cease? Was it still in effect in 1997, when Britain surrendered sovereignty for Hong Kong? Much like “regularise”, moreover, “not appropriate” conceals a cover-up behind the mask of prudence. Release of these files, suggest historians, could lead to lawsuits from almost any corner of the globe once coloured pink. Be that as it may, any redaction would make modern Britain complicit in the sins of the past.

The legal status of these documents, similarly, is no minor issue. Although apparently classed as public records under the Public Records Act 1958, their existence has never been publicly acknowledged. Should they have been available under the Freedom of Information Act, which came into force in 2000? Have any such requests been made, fruitlessly? Lawyers note that FOI requests come with a £600 ceiling for retrieval costs. By the chaotic nature of these documents’ storage, have they been considered beyond FOI? Do government departments still dump documents in this fashion?

The position of government lawyers, in the case of the four Kenyan claimants, is that responsibility for British activities during colonial rule passed to newly independent governments at the time of British withdrawal. If so, should not ownership of documents relating to them have done so, too? Is there a chance that Britain did not merely suppress its own evidence of wrongs, but stole and suppressed that which belonged to other nations?

This hitherto unsuspected trove of documents raises all these questions and more. They must be answered. Such a cache is not merely of immeasurable value to historians. It is also, potentially, the cue for a fundamental national reimagining of the last days of the British Empire. This country has long prided itself on a cleaner past than many other former colonial powers. If this is to remain the case, the truth, no matter how many yards of chaotic shelving it occupies, must emerge.

William Flew on Children

Inquiry begins into claims of illicit trade

For Ana María Valverde, May 17, 1975, should have been one of the happiest days of her life. She gave birth to Gonzalo and cradled her healthy son until she fell asleep.

Hours later she awoke alone and a hospital cleaner told her that the baby had been taken away because he was unwell. Later that night a doctor said that the child had died of complications. Mrs Valverde never saw her son’s body and was told by the Madrid hospital that he had been cremated. Yesterday Mrs Valverde was among 300 families who started legal claims across Spain accusing doctors, priests, nuns and undertakers of taking part in an illicit trade in babies.

In a scandal that has shocked the nation the families claim that their children were stolen to order and documents were falsified to cover the tracks, stretching from the 1950s to the 1990s. Campaigners believe that up to 300,000 babies were stolen by medical staff for couples who could not have children. They say that priests and nuns may have taken part because they disapproved of underage or single mothers.

Three days before he died a family friend told Antonio Barroso, then 38 and living near Barcelona, that his parents had paid a nun 150,000 pesetas for him, leading him to begin a search for his parents.

Since the national campaign started last year, one nun has admitted that she sold a child, and undertakers have said that they buried suspiciously light coffins, which could have been empty. “My parents were young, my mother was only 19. They accepted what the doctors said as they were destroyed by our loss,” said Sandra Mateo, Mrs Valverde’s daughter. “But after this campaign we checked official papers, which don’t add up. My father’s signature is on a form, which he never signed. They also claimed my parents gave up my brother, which is also not true.” Ms Mateo, 33, named six doctors and hospital staff in a criminal claim alleging child kidnapping.

The National Association for Victims of Irregular Adoptions (Anadir) has called on Cándido CondePumpido, the Attorney-General, to investigate what it said was a national web of baby thefts. Mr CondePumpido said that although he could not find evidence of a national conspiracy he had appointed a special prosecutor to oversee cases.

Anadir has created a DNA database to help families to trace relatives. Historians discovered that after the 1936-39 Civil War General Franco ordered an ideological campaign of clandestine adoptions to remove children from the families of leftwingers. Campaigners believe that by the 1950s baby thefts had become a racket motivated by money.

“This went from being a politically motivated thing . . . to being a mafia business,” said Enrique Vila, a lawyer for Anadir.

William Flew Running Bare

American pop singer who enjoyed hits in the US and Britain with Running Bear and Cradle of Love

While it would be unfair and inaccurate to describe Johnny Preston as a one-hit wonder, his fame rested almost entirely on the success of the song Running Bear, which reached No 1 on both sides of the Atlantic in 1960.

Preston provided the vocal performance of the song but it was written by J. P. Richardson, better known as the DJ and singer the Big Bopper, and became a hit only after Richardson had died in the plane crash in which Buddy Holly and Richie Valens were also killed in February 1959.

Richardson wrote the song as a teenage tragedy and it told the story of the doomed romance between Running Bear, an “Indian brave”, and Little White Dove, an “Indian maid”.

Released in October 1959, it became a US No 1 at the beginning of the following year. It reached the No 1 slot in the UK in March 1960. Preston was awarded a gold disc after more than one million copies were sold.

Johnny Preston Courville was born in 1939 in Port Arthur, Texas. He sang in high-school choral contests, but like millions of American teenagers became an enthusiastic convert to the joys of rock’n’roll and formed his own band, the Shades.

It was after Richardson had seen them performing at a local club that he offered Preston the chance to record Running Bear.

He followed up the success of that record with Cradle of Love, which reached No 2 in the UK and No 7 in the US, but after Feel So Fine, his third release, performed creditably, the hits tailed off.

He died from continuing problems after having undergone heart surgery last year.

What other bears in water might look like

William Flew Online Car Sales

 Tesco is taking its business from the supermarket aisles to the motor trade with the launch of its own second-hand car dealership.

Tescocars.com, which was launched yesterday, is selling former business fleet and rental cars directly to customers shopping online. It hopes to grab a slice of a market said to be worth £24 billion each year in Britain.

The website is offering a choice of about 3,000 cars, ranging in age from six months to three years, with more set to be added to the site each day.

Through a “lifestyle option” search, customers can look for vehicles that match criteria such as budget, size, ecofriendly credentials, even colour. They will not test drive the car before purchase but can watch an online video of an RAC test drive.

But it won't be one of these

Buyers will pay a £99 handling fee and £149 delivery charge for any address in the mainland UK. Customers who do not wish to pay a delivery fee can collect the vehicle from a handover centre at Longbridge, Birmingham.

Tesco said that it was including 2,000 Tesco Clubcard points as part of a purchase. The car can be returned within seven days, with the loss of the handling and delivery fees.

The company claimed that it could sell cars about 20 per cent more cheaply than traditional dealerships. Andrew Higginson, its chief executive of retailing services, said: “By supplying directly to the customers, there is no middle man, no expensive showroom and no salespeople on commission. Buyers can be sure they are getting the best value out there.

Or one of these

“We are offering a wide choice of the most popular models from small hatchbacks to executive saloons to family-sized MPVs. Each and every vehicle will have passed a 167-point RAC inspection.”

Tesco is also providing other services, including vehicle repairs and MOT testing, from more than 1,000 independent garages through an arrangement with National Service Network. It can already replace a car’s tyres, after its tie-up with Blackcircles.com and the launch of Tesco-tyres.com. It provides car insurance and other services through Tesco Insurance.

Or this

The supermarket group said that it would not buy second-hand cars from its customers or allow trade-ins and partexchanges of customers’ cars.

This is just the latest diversification for Tesco, which, in its relentless drive for profits, has already branched out into providing banking services, pet insurance and even film production. Moreover, the entry of such a juggernaut into the world of second-hand cars is likely to worry both existing online sellers — the likes of Autoquake, which has a similar business model — and the franchised dealers. If there is a significant take-up of the service, the supply of used cars could begin to dry up for existing dealerships, in turn pushing up prices.

Or

Tesco’s venture is not without risk, however. There have been some significant casualties in selling cars online. Direct Line and Royal Bank of Scotland’s Jamjar.com was the first big online new car retailer, but it is no longer operational. In addition, car sales could be hit by the continued high price of fuel and the Government’s austerity drive, which is expected to be felt more severely by consumers this year.

William Flew on Happiness

When things look bad, one set of people does well . Doommonger s are currently on such a roll they are spoilt for choice.

First, the bankers have stolen all the money and inflation is about to rob us of the future. America is sinking and China is rising, making the world so unbalanced that it threatens to topple over.

Even if that doesn’t happen, say the doomsters, we still face global warming. Though recently on the back burner of popular consciousness, fossil-fuel Armageddon is simmering away.

And if carbon emissions don’t get us, there is, well, the oil shortage. Peak oil theory may be past its prime, but petrol at £6 a gallon is surely the end of civilisation as we know it.

Another thing: how on earth are we going to feed and water a global population of 9 billion (due by 2050, according to United Nations estimates) when we only have one planet? Even Stephen Hawking recently warned that extinction looms unless we start to colonise space within the next 200 years.

Clearly we’re doomed — unless an asteroid hits Fukushima first. In which case we’re doomed slightly before we were otherwise doomed. Or maybe not. In Oxford last week thinkers and futurists gathered to discuss the “megatrends and context for large scale change”. While not underestimating the challenges, some participants were decidedly more upbeat about our prospects than you might expect.

For a start, the mega-trends of global development have so far been remarkably positive. Average life expectancy at birth across the world has risen from under 50 in 1955 to more than 65. In the UK, life expectancy for men is now 77 and for women 82 — and still rising.

Global GDP, a measure of the goods and services we produce, has rocketed since the industrial revolution from below $1,000 to $6,000 (using the dollar value in 1900), generating far more freedom in how we spend our money. In the 1790s a typical English worker spent 75% of his income on food; in 2005, it was 14%.

Technological advances have brought huge gains in that most precious commodity: time. In 1900 the typical American employee had to work an hour to pay for one kilowatthour of electricity; now he has to work for only five minutes.

Despite such gains, many people remain doubtful, even fearful, of the future. However, Mark Stevenson, author of An Optimist’s Tour of the Future and a participant in last week’s conference, is on a mission to counter the doomsters.

“The future doesn’t have to be about damage limitation,” he said. “It could be a renaissance. There are potentially game-changing technologies out there. What I am trying to do is put an optimism of ambition back on the table.”

It is already possible, he points out, to build “synthetic trees” that extract carbon from the air. “One hundred million such machines could offset all our global carbon emissions,” says Stevenson, who inter-viewed leading scientists around the world for his book. “That sounds like a lot, until you realise that we make 60m cars every year.”

At the same time biotechnology companies are creating bacteria that consume carbon and expel material that can be used as fuel. Bring the two kinds of technology together, Stevenson suggests, and you might one day create the “carbon-neutral petrol station”.

Nanotechnology — the science of manipulating matter at the scale of individual atoms or molecules — is another area with immense potential. “It is probably at the stage where information technology was in 1965. We have hardly scratched the surface,” he says.

Less than 50 years ago, electronic info-tech was nascent and the internet did not even exist as an idea. Nanotechnology, or “molecular engineering”, may yet create tiny machines that revolutionise what we make and how we make it. Companies are already investigating how it could transform desalination systems, a development that could see off doomsters’ predictions of future “water wars”.

What about the risk of rogue nanotechnology turning us into the “grey goo” feared by Prince Charles?

Stevenson concedes that many people are hard-wired with a “precautionary principle which says, ‘If you don’t know what is over the brow of the hill, you should approach it with a certain amount of trepidation’.” However, he also believes that science and communication have reached such a pitch that change and development are inevitable.

The solution? Embrace change, he says, and influence it constructively.

Nick Bostrom, another participant at the conference and director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, takes a similar view. “A lot of the most powerful developments are ones that could go either way,” he said. “They could be dangerous, but they could be extremely helpful if we manage them wisely.”

Bostrom picks out “human enhancement” technology. He doesn’t mean breast implants. I nstead , he suggests t hat advances in medicine and biotechnology will increase lifespan and “cognitive capacity ” . Hu mans have already been improving their physical and mental attainment through better nutrition and education, he says. Biotechnology could radically speed up the process, perhaps through t he linking of brains with computers.

The “collective wisdom” made possible by social networking could also become a powerful tool. “If you want humanity to end up in a good place in the long run,” he says, “then something that improves the way we aggregate information and reach judgments could be potentially important.”

Perhaps the most likely and powerful prospect is the rise of intelligent machines. “Breakthroughs in machine intelligence could cause fundamental changes,” says Bostrom. “If you are talking about a 50-year time horizon, you can’t rule it out.”

The inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil goes further. He suggests the “singularity”, when machines become more intelligent than humans, is only about 35 years away.

He sees a future in which, to use the words of Bill Gates, “technologies have advanced so far and so fast that they enable humanity to transcend its biological limitations”.

Given the rate at which computer processing power keeps increasing, such dramatic changes may be possible — though it is worth remembering that earlier futurists suggested we woul d ha v e hotels on the moon by now.

However, you don’t have to entertain seemingly sciencefictional extremes to find cause for hope. In his recent book The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley sets out two persuasive cases. First, he argues that we tend to underestimate the strides already made. While millions still face poverty and other tribulations, the vast majority of people are better fed, sheltered and protected against disease than earlier generations.

As Ridley putsit : “ This generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts . . . square feet, gigabytes, megahertz . . . bushels per acre, miles per gallon and, of course, dollars than any who went before.”

Though a rising population could pose threats to resources, there is more food per capita available than there has ever been. The fault lies in its unequal distribution.

He also argues that inventions take time to produce their greatest gains, as costs reduce and benefits spread. He cites air travel: flying off on holiday has been possible since the 1930s — but it was a luxury back then. It only became cheap enough for mass travel decades later.

Ridley’s second theme is that “ideas have sex”. The more ideas mingle, the more they evolve, helping us to shape the future and address its challenges . Here we have entered a new phase.

Bostrom says: “Most people who ever lived probably did not notice any technological change in their lifetime — you grew up and died with the same technology. We, on the other hand, expect to see a new iPhone every year.”

Today’s older generation saw the arrival , among other things, of air travel, antibiotics, computers and cloning. The next generation may see similarly bold advances.

Nor is change solely about technology . Among o t her positive themes identified at the Oxford conference were increasing personal freedoms, with the demise of various totalitarian states; progress in social equality, particularly for women; and the economic dynamism of Asia.

Though sunlit uplands may seem distant to people hunting jobs in a recession or students facing daunting fees for university, there are reas ons f or optimism. Oddly, though, a “brighter” future, even one filled with brainy robots to satisfy our every whim, may not ultimately make us happier.

Material gains have had little impact on our sense of wellbeing, judging by official surveys conducted regularly for nearly 40 years in America.

In 1972, long before today’s essential life-support systems of Facebook and mobile phones, 30% of people said they felt very happy and 53% pretty happy. In 2008 the figures were 30% and 55%. OVER the decades of economic and political change, the proportions of people seeing themselves as happy and unhappy have remained remarkably stable, averaging 32% very happy, 56% pretty happy and 12% not too happy.

Within those broad findings, researchers such as Andrew Oswald at Warwick University have identified some notable variances that, in some ways, put fears about the current economic malaise in perspective.

Yes, contrary to the popular saying, money can buy happiness — up to a point. According to Oswald’s research, an income of $100,000 a year confers slightly more happiness than being married, which, with being slim and taking exercise, is another marker of contentment.

Others argue that we are “creatures of comparison” and that what matters is relative wealth. If everyone trades up from a Ford to a Lexus, after a while no one is any happier.

Instead the most striking finding is that happiness traces an arc through life, as Lewis Wolpert, the British biologist, discusses in a new book entitled You’re Looking Very Well.

Wolpert, once a world leader in embryonic development and an emeritus professor of University College London, suffered serious depression when he was 65. Now recovered, aged 81 and content, he examines research that shows that the older you are, the happier you become.

The evidence indicates that teenage happiness turns to gloom in the forties and fifties. However, the sun re-emerges, and in their seventies and eighties people tend to be more cheerful and optimistic, even though poverty, lack of care and discrimination remain common among the elderly. Perhaps they stop worrying about the future.

Though it may be our instinct to be cautious of the unknown, the optimists suggest that human endeavour and ideas follow a form of evolution that builds on the past, producing innovation and a better future.

In his book, Ridley twice quotes the historian Lord Macaulay. In one instance, Macaulay noted: “On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”

On another occasion Macaulay observed: “We see in almost every part of the annals of mankind how the industry of individuals, struggling up against wars, taxes, famines, conflagrations . . . creates faster than governments can squander and repairs whatever invaders can destroy.”