by William Boyd
The most famous aviator of the early decades of the century, and arguably the most famous aviator of all time, was Charles Lindbergh who, in 1927 at the age of twenty-five flew his single-engined plane The Spirit of St. Louis non-stop from New York to Paris. This considerable feat, while impressive, does not however fully explain why Lindbergh should become one of the great, iconic figures of his time. The answer—and this intriguing biography attempts to delineate it—must lie in a curious combination of historical circumstance and individual personality. The world has a way of creating the heroes it wants that has little to do with rationality and more to do with collective intuition—why Charlie Chaplin and not Buster Keaton, for example, why James Dean and not Montgomery Clift?—and there was something about the gauche youthfulness of Lindbergh that sent crowds wild. Here was a tall thin Minnesotan barnstormer who didn’t smoke and didn’t drink and loved his domineering mother. There was no vainglory, no false modesty and, apparently, no undue cupidity either. Whatever the blend was—a combination of naivety and technological skill, a kind of “aw, shucks” mentality coupled with massive determination—it worked, and after his historic flight Lindbergh ascended to a plateau of international fame enjoyed by very few this century. Fortune, honours, reputation, personal happiness followed. The young man married a shy, pretty heiress, Anne Morrow, and the couple became the focus of media attention in the Western world and seemed permanently at home among the great and the good.
But of course if that was all there was to it the Lindbergh name would eventually have dimmed and his celebrityhood would have occupied its due niche in aviation history. But along with clouds of glory, great fame trails more noxious vapours. When Lindbergh’s baby son was kidnapped and held to ransom he was plunged into the dark side of the Faustian contract that all who become famous unwittingly sign.
Lindbergh himself supervised the various agencies—police, FBI, private sleuths—involved in the hunt for his baby son and in the farcical negotiations with the kidnappers. The discovery of the baby’s decomposing body a few hundred yards from the Lindbergh home brought no end to the trauma. The ransom money had been paid and it was only by chance that a sequence of marked notes turned up and led the police to the prime suspect, an immigrant German called Richard Hauptmann.
Joyce Milton devotes much space to the details of the kidnapping and its ramifications and, inevitably, it proves to be the most compelling episode in this joint biography. Somewhat against recent trends she firmly and very effectively makes the case that Hauptmann was in fact guilty of the kidnap and murder and was not, as some commentators have suggested, a convenient scapegoat. She suspects that he did not work alone and, more tentatively, suggests possible accomplices.
The exemplary drama that was Charles Lindbergh’s life still had a few acts to play out, however. Having come from obscurity to huge fame, having known scandal and tragedy (all carried on in a blaze of publicity), Lindbergh now seemed wilfully to court opprobrium and disgrace. A long-time believer in “air-mindedness” (a vague philosophy that air travel could foster peace and international understanding) Lindbergh saw those values enshrined in the new Nazi state in Germany. Throughout the 1930s various visits to Germany, coupled with a disenchantment with life in the USA and a growing Anglophobia, pushed Lindbergh ever further to the right. He became a leading figure of the isolationist America First movement and his public pronouncements became ever more shrill and anti-Semitic. By the time America entered the war Lindbergh’s reputation was at an all time low, and to that generation of Americans it never really recovered. However, the new obscurity he found himself in allowed him covertly to participate in combat operations in the Pacific theatre (where he worked as a consultant for defence contractors, testing aeroplanes) and after the war his rehabilitation was completed when Eisenhower restored his commission and promoted him to brigadier general in 1954.
Lindbergh continued his work as a consultant in the airline industry but the triumphs of the post-war years belonged to Anne who had real success as a best-selling author—an experience Lindbergh was to share himself in his surprisingly accomplished autobiography The Spirit of St. Louis, published in 1954. The later years provide less diverting copy as the Lindberghs grew old, more or less gracefully, educating their four children, prosperous and comfortable, with homes in Geneva and Hawaii, still travelling the world and still dabbling in various half-baked spiritual philosophies. Lindbergh died of cancer in Hawaii in 1974. His widow still survives him.
There is no doubt that there is something totemic or emblematic about the Lindbergh life. Such huge and sudden fame, followed by personal tragedy of such a shocking and disturbing nature, seems almost mythic in its retribution, as if Lindbergh was another Icarus who had flown too near the sun. And at the centre of the story resides the curious, oblique and complex personality of Charles Lindbergh himself (Anne Lindbergh, for all that this is a joint biography, essentially plays second fiddle). Joyce Milton too appears to have problems pinning it down. In a lucid biography of otherwise scholarly and professional qualities she refers to her subject haphazardly as Lindbergh, Charles, Slim (a nickname), Slim Lindbergh, Lindy and Charles Lindbergh—sometimes using three different appellations in one paragraph. It is as if this baffling persona is still ducking and weaving, evading the biographer’s scalpel. Was he an innocent who had fame thrust upon him and couldn’t cope with its pressures? Was he a bigot and a fool? Or a hopeless idealist suckered by more unscrupulous forces? Was there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein “no there, there”? Each reader will make his or her judgement but one of the shrewdest comments on Charles Lindbergh comes from Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and writer, who befriended Lindbergh at the time of the kidnapping but who turned away from him in the crypto-fascist, America First years. Nicolson described the great aviator thus: “he is and always will be not only a schoolboy hero, but a schoolboy.” It explains a great deal.
1993
Newham
An A–Z
Aeroplanes announce Newham to the approaching traveller as they steeply climb and bank above this distant and forgotten borough of London. The STOL-jets and prop-planes from the City Airport strain skyward. Nobody looks up: people pay as much attention to these soaring aircraft as they would to a dog barking.
Barking Road, Newham’s old commercial spine, built early in the nineteenth century to connect the East and West India Docks with the river port of Barking. Now it wears the familiar garb of every urban high street: franchise chains and letting agencies, car salesrooms, pubs and shuttered shops. Here and there the odd sixties high-rise. Rows of two-storey terraced houses lead off on either side. The Boer War lingers here in pockets—Mafeking Road, Kimberley Road—as do little bits of Scotland—Glasgow Road, Tweedmouth Road, Perth Road. Bright doors speak of stubborn house-pride: cerise, mauve, moss green, canary.
Canary Wharf’s solid blunt obelisk looms everywhere, over house gables, dominating the western horizon, confronting you as you turn corners. Margaret Thatcher’s real lasting monument, a concrete and glass hymn to commerce, capitalism and market forces rising heftily, beefily, out of the Isle of Dogs.
Dogs shit freely on Newham’s streets as they do throughout London, in Chelsea and Mayfair as well as in Barnet and Peckham. And dogs run free around the estates behind the Barking Road. The few dogs on leashes look at their free-ranging brothers enviously, longing to be released.
East London goes on for ever, the great “other city” within the vast spreading mass of London. Cut off from the west by the office towers of the Square Mile, it runs from Stepney to Dagenham, onwards and onwards. The sluggish flow of traffic on the arterial roads glints in the afternoon sun like the scales of fish.
Fish still swim in Roding Creek, I suppose. One hundred and fifty years ago Barking was a fishing port with over 200 Barking smacks and 1,000 men and boys to man them. Now the northern outfall of London’s main drainage decants here at the mouth of Roding Creek where it joins the Thames. The air is rank with the
smell of gas.
Gasworks can provide a kind of immortality. Beckton Gasworks are so called after Simon Adams Beck, governor of the Gas Light and Coke Co., who bought the site at East Ham in 1867. Beck-town grew and grew and became the largest gasworks in the world. On the map all colours cease at Beckton: it remains white, the gasometers, the tanks and the filterbeds marked as neat rows of circles—strange hieroglyphics.
Hieroglyphics badge Newham’s walls today, the graffiti and the tags of the urban young, a form of writing that can be found replicated in Paris, Rio and Manhattan. Tribal markings that defy the local—all seemingly written in the same crazed hand—which are, bizarrely, truly international.
“International cheap phonecalls” proclaims the sign above a shop window, an audacious oxymoron. Indeed, “International” appears to be a favoured adjective in Newham. “International hair styling,” says another shop window. There is “International rowing,” also, at the regatta centre, and you can pray for your misbegotten soul at the Amazing Grace International Worship Centre on the Barking Road. Two senses of “international” operate here: one is about inclusion—come one, come all—one is about keeping up with the Joneses.
Jones Scrap Metal, at the beginning of Barking Road, is reputedly the biggest in London, which is a not-to-be-sneezed-at claim-to-fame for Canning Town. Another feather in Newham’s cap is the City Airport. Amongst London boroughs only Hounslow can boast a fully fledged international (that word again) airport. You can fly all over Europe from Newham, to Rotterdam and Amsterdam, Paris and Brussels—which is not bad from a borough generally regarded to be on the skids.
Kids mooch around in tatty recreational areas, kids with bikes and skateboards, all colours, all nationalities. The walls and sheds and garage roofs around them are all crowned with barbed wire or razor wire or more complicated revolving impediments. Keep kids out, these hostile barriers seem to say, indications of deeper suspicions, no innocence here, a want of love.
Lovage Approach is the new Newham, south of Tollgate Road. Dinky, villagey lanes, with small, clustered brick houses, leaded diamond-paned glass in the windows, porches and dormer windows, a hotch-potch of domestic styles. Architects creating a “community,” here, reaching back to their notional roots—a reckless pillaging from a catalogue of olde-worlde vernacular styles—as we approach the millennium.
Millennium Mills still stands, built decades before the Millennium Dome, not so far away. A monument to the borough’s industrial past when the “offensive trades” were ordered out of metropolitan London and were obliged to set up shop in the east along the Thames. An industrial base almost vanished now, impossible to rebuild or renew.
New City Road turns off Barking Road. A long run of terraced houses. On either side are other identical streets, Kingsland Road, Patrick Road … Avenues of neatly pollarded plane trees, houses built in the nineteenth century for clerks working in the City. This could be Fulham or Battersea twenty years ago. Now with the new “villages” proliferating perhaps this is all there is in Newham that is really old.
“Old” Newham never really existed, however. The borough was created in 1965. The county boroughs of East Ham and West Ham brought together with bits of Plaistow and Woolwich and Upton. “Ham” means low-lying pasture.
Pasture is hard to find today. There are angular bits of waste ground, thick with buddleia and rosebay willow herb, abandoned tracts of land between spur roads and the wire-mesh walls of tyre depots and scrap metal merchants. Strangely, along the Royal Albert Dock Spine Road there is a sudden profusion of allotments, well tended. Things are growing here: runner beans and potatoes, lettuce and cabbages. Prince Albert would be pleased, I think, to see such husbandry and enterprise, and so would his queen.
Queen Victoria’s presence still leaves a marked trace. All the royal docks are in the borough. Her own Victoria Dock, her husband’s Albert Dock and her grandson’s dock, George V. The City Airport sits between Albert and George like an aircraft carrier moored in a wide placid river.
River views are distant ones in Newham. The docks dominate the river here: huge wind-flurried rectangles of water reflecting the turbulent skyscape. And the sewage jetties and the sludge piers of Beckton hog the river bank at Galleons Reach as the Thames’ northern meander turns east again. From a spine road you can catch a glimpse of the scalloped towers of the Thames Flood Barrier, shining like burnished steel.
Steel shutters on modest shops—newsagents, electrical goods—tell you something about a place. Many shops selling second-hand furniture tell you something about a place. But just when you think you have Newham sited in its demographic circle of hell you see the dry-ski run—the Beck-ton Alps Ski Centre—and the Asda superstore. The contrasts abound: pie and mash for sale and McDonald’s Drive-Thru; boarded-up, torched flats and bijou pseudo-villages. And everywhere streets bulging with traffic.
Traffic lights in Newham seem set longer than anywhere else in London. “The borough doesn’t like motorists,” a minicab driver confides. The wait seems to go on for ever. And look at all the speed-bumps. Yet most people’s view of the place is from a car—passing through, heading east or west, on a spine road or a flyover—or from the tall gantries of the Docklands Light Railway. Rare names appear that ring a distinct bell—West Ham, of course—and others that provoke fainter recognitions—Custom House, Silvertown (can there be a place in London called Silvertown?), Canning Town and Upton.
Upton Park, it is hard to believe, had—in the eighteenth century—a botanic garden second only to Kew, hence its name. It is famous now for being home to West Ham FC, for some of the worst housing in Europe and for The Spotted Dog, the oldest pub in the borough, which dates from the sixteenth century. The Spotted Dog—ave atque vale.
Valediction forbidding mourning. Can there be a stranger borough in London? Can there be images of the city more dramatically bleak and excitingly futuristic? The wind seems keener and fiercer in Newham than elsewhere in London, tugging at you as it rushes from across the North Sea and the Thames estuary, hurrying on its giant flotilla of dark rain clouds, spinnakering westwards. Stand on the dockside at the city airport and watch the planes lift off for Frankfurt and Bruges, your eye momentarily held by the flashing light at the tip of Canary Wharf, your ear catching the rumble of a train on the elevated trackways of the DLR—as you turn you note the precisely angled slope of the dry-ski run and the bright stacked apartments of a new village-cluster and, behind you, the fuming steel ziggurat that is the Tate and Lyle sugar factory. Some sort of weird rejuvenation is happening here out in the east of London, however surreal. The mineral rain spits on your face, abrading your cheeks gently, as with a fine steel wool.
Woolwich, or to be more precise, North Woolwich, forms the southernmost portion of the borough, and, because the rest of Woolwich was south of the river—in Kent—it was known, until it was amalgamated into Newham, as “Kent in Essex.”
Xeroxing a map of Newham and noticing how it is composed of so many real places with real histories made me realize how artificial a construct it is. So I suggest we should abandon its current pronunciation, the apologetic, half-swallowed mumble of “newum,” and boldly rechristen it New Ham, which, along with the ancient low-lying meadows of East and West Ham, might give the place a sense of continuity and a kind of validity—make it seem less young.
Young boroughs lack traditions, lack a sense of community. Newham has existed for only thirty-five years. West Ham, by contrast, is an ancient parish and was even a parliamentary borough in 1855 and, moreover, one that played a significant role in the history of socialism. Keir Hardie was elected Labour MP for West Ham South in 1892. Neville Chamberlain suspended its Board of Guardians in 1926 for what the government regarded as over-generous poor relief. What can youthful Newham offer in terms of history and tradition that won’t seem wholly ersatz?
Zoroastrianism may seem an unlikely notion, even a facetious one, but Newham and its agglomeration of parishes and county boroughs have always been a h
ome to nonconformity and pluralism. There were over a hundred nonconformist chapels of all denominations at the turn of the century; there were Quaker meeting houses in Plaistow in the seventeenth century and the borough still boasts two convents and two friaries. I’m sure that today any passing Zoroastrian would receive a warm welcome in the Amazing Grace’s International Worship Centre on the Barking Road. You look around at all the contrasts and contradictions of the place and have to conclude that, whatever its difficulties, its transformations and its deprivations, the real and enduring spice in Newham’s life has always been its ineffable, unrivalled and bewildering variety.
2000
Evelyn Waugh (1)
Evelyn Waugh died on Easter Sunday, 10 April 1966, at the age of sixty-three. I was at boarding school and had just turned fourteen but I remember the occasion of his death. One of the more rebellious intellectuals in the sixth form had pinned a notice to the main notice board deploring the fact that the philistine school authorities had made not a single announcement, had urged not a solitary act of remembrance, about the passing away of one of the greatest English novelists. This ardent Waugh fan urged that individual boys make donations so that flowers could be sent to the family. A small list of names, with modest sums of money beside them, was scrawled below. I don’t know whether some bouquet or other eventually made its way from the school to Waugh’s home in Somerset—but I do remember pointedly logging away the unfamiliar name of this author. Evelyn Waugh? … Wonder if he’s any good?