What is Boloism?

by Roger Sandall

(Quadrant, January-February 1981)

Just an entertainer

Let us now praise fameless men—and especially the author of Boys Will Be Boys, Roads To Ruin, The Shocking History of Advertising, A History of Courting, Call The Doctor, Taking The Cure, Amazing Grace, not to mention his just-published history of the First World War, Dear Old Blighty. While it would be possible to fill out this catalogue (and the titles listed above represent only about half his published works) let this suffice for the time being.

At the age of 71 (and now at 94 still writing for the TLS; RS, 2004) Ernest Sackville Turner is a "freelance writer" whose lance has been tilting merrily at the world for nearly fifty years. His wit is engaging. His interests are demonstrably diverse. His social criticism is broad-minded, civilised, and urbane, and as anyone who has read his books will tell you, one of the more attractive things about them is the way they enable you to deal confidently with an astonishing range of questions:

What was the menace of Boloism? Why did the British Revolution fail at Leeds? What bright thing did Taine have to say about the spa at Barèges, and what dull thing did Lytton Strachey really say to the Military Tribunal which was trying to send him off to the trenches? Who, speaking against the expenses of a hereditary nobility, warned that "a fully equipped duke costs as much to keep as two dreadnoughts" and is just as dangerous?

What ingenious arguments were advanced by the learned Coke, in his Institutes of the Laws of England, in favour of drawing and quartering the traitors England hanged? What is thalassotherapy, and why does anyone think it helps? Who was it that "acquired by marriage a vast tract of Scotland thinly peopled by proud wretches and left it a paradise of happy sheep, with the dispossessed natives clinging on at the edges trying to convince themselves that they were better off"? Whose was The Hidden Hand?

Now we all know what a Judicious Critic will have to say about this sort of thing. Where the rest of us see only a pleasing multifariousness the JC will detect a spendthrift mind. What anyone else might regard as evidence of a generous and giving spirit, the JC will set down to sheer carelessness.

From the specialist's viewpoint anyone attempting to write on such varied subjects can only appear as some kind of literary adventurer, or an improvident merchant of curiosae, or some sort of bookish side-show artist — perhaps with a weakness for the gamier side of the show. And how seriously can we be expected to take a man who has been by his own admission a regular contributor to Punch? Enough is enough. The only appropriate course is to dismiss Mr Turner as "merely an entertainer", busy but not deep. Ernest Sackville Turner seems to me rather more than this but he certainly enjoys the role of entertainer, as can be seen in his history of watering places, Taking the Cure.

The English take the waters

"One would think the English were ducks; they are forever waddling to the waters", complained Horace Walpole in 1790. But it was not only the English who had the habit. At least since the days of the Roman resort of Baiae, on the Gulf of Naples, which another and earlier Horace had frequented, men and women of the most various tribes had waddled and walked and limped and ridden to the waters in order to bathe their limbs and to sweat away their contaminations.

The Horace of the odes was a warm water man. His physician was a cold water man; and banished him from Baiae to Clusium. The contrast between warm water men and cold water men provides a clue to the drama of Turner's history, for there has been an unending moral tension between Baths Curative and Baths Sensual—the latter, alas, always tending to degenerate into mere stews.

To all of this Mr Turner is an able guide. And much of his success as an entertainer derives from his witty, literate, and resourceful use of the marvellous documents he uncovers. In the English city of Bath (where the water, as Sam Weller put it, yields "a very strong flavour of warm flatirons") pigeons now flit through the steamy wraiths of the King's Bath. But at the beginning of the eighteenth century birds of a different feather were on display—and a good number of ageing roosters too:

"Bath in season presented a singular cross-section of ailing humanity: the emaciated earl, the over-bled alderman, the soldier in an iron bodice, the merchant with skin like tree bark, the mummified bishop, the kippered colonel, the shaking dotard, the noseless libertine, the maiden with green-sickness, the morose scholar, the squire who had been overlain by his horse . . .

"The satirist Ned Ward, who visited Bath at this time, found the resort infested with sparks, cullies, bullies, stallions, fools, puts, fops, cuckolds, gamesters, antic beaux, London Jilts, strayed apprentices and dancing masters. This is how Ward saw the King's Bath, beloved of the gentry:

" 'In this bath was at least fifty of both sexes, with a score or two of guides, who by their scorbutick carcasses and lacker'd hides made you think they had lain pickling a century in the Stygian Lake: some had those infernal emissaries to support their impotent limbs: others to scrub their putrify'd carcasses, like a race-horse. In one corner was an old fornicator hanging by the rings, loaded with a rotten humidity: hard by him was a buxom dame cleansing her nunquam satis from mercurial dregs and the remains of Roman vitriol'."

Many were ailing, and some were desperately ill. But there were other visitors who appear to have been decidedly more robust. A character in a Drury Lane comedy of the period is introduced as a man who "will sowse into the Bath stark naked as ever he was aborn, and if there be a plomp Londoner there, a fat-shouldered lass or so, as we have a great many crummy dames come here to waste an't please ye, he's on the back of her in a trice, and tabering her buttocks round the bath as if he were beating a drum,"

Seemliness gradually imposed itself upon these uninhibited scenes—but only gradually. Meanwhile it was natural enough for Methodists to regard Bath as a highly appropriate field for their endeavours. In the 1730s the Countess of Huntington built a chapel there, and her preachers "leapt at the chance of 'attacking Satan at his headquarters'."

This surprising vision of Bath as His Satanic Majesty's earthly citadel suggests that there were occasions when the Countess of Huntington's imagination ran away with her. Yet there were many who shared her opinions, for the exciting effects of mixed bathing and public undress had by then placed even the demurest springs under suspicion.

Medical men who advocated baths and bathing, and who had tolerably wholesome motives for doing so, soon found that the respectability of their establishments depended on the austerity of their regimes. No "tabering of buttocks". No watery rendezvous. No lubricity. If Eros should somehow-or-other stubbornly survive, then it would be only after the sort of severe Darwinian test which insisted upon cold water, solitary treatment, and misery.

At Gräfenberg, 2000 feet up in the mountains of Austrian Silesia, the colony of Vincent Priessnitz huddled. Although Priessnitz had begun with cold sponges, "by the 1840s these had been replaced by a variety of more rugged measures, among which were the wet sheet, the sweating blanket, the plunge bath, the sitz bath and the falling douche.

Of all the wonders of Gräfenberg it was the last which represented "the most alarming discipline." The falling douche consisted of columns of water shot vertically down upon the patient from heights of up to nineteen feet.

"To take a douche, the patient held his hands clasped above his head, to protect it from immediate assault; the water was then directed on his spine, loins, arms or elsewhere, but never on the stomach. One patient likened the experience to standing under a falling load of gravel, another to a great stick breaking over the back and shoulders. Some times there was a pole   . which the patient clutched to prevent himself being knocked flat ..."

The verdict of Taine, after witnessing the fiercely pummelled bodies at the spa of, might apply with equal force to the treatment of Gräfenberg: "One had to be very fit to take the cure there."

Thus Mr Turner in his lighter vein—the ever instructive entertainer moving easily amongst his sources, from Seneca to Madame de Sévigny, from Smollett and Steele to Robert Southey and Bernadette Soubirous. In Taking The Cure we have the bemused ethnographer of medical curiosity, the dry observer of a world in which patients with baseless hopes and practitioners with baseless methods unite in a fraternity of shared delusion.

No-one who has read Turner's account can say, if he undertakes a course of sweating blankets, wet sheets, or back-breaking cataracts, that he has not been warned what to expect. Indeed, it is one of the attractions of the author's approach that his account is so thorough, and his instructions so detailed, that if a reader were inspired to hydrotherapise himself he could easily use the book as a manual. Moreover, far from being "mere entertainment", Taking The Cure is a work which any physician curious about the psychology of therapeutic practice might profitably consult.

The comedy of social reform

Which is all very well. But it is at this point that a Judicious Critic might feel obliged to interject. He would notice that Turner has written a number of books on a number of subjects, and he would point out that while all of them deserve to be described as social history of one sort or another, not all his subjects deserve to be treated with quite such levity. A reprobate who drowns while taking a water cure may well be a suitable subject for mirth; a small boy who suffocates while cleaning the chimney of a ducal mansion is plainly not.

A more sombre approach is recommended for such matters; and certainly the very title of Roads To Ruin strikes a more desolate note than (say) Paths To Baths might have done. This Turner is less flippant and less amused—but never less entertaining. In Roads To Ruin we have the increasingly rare spectacle of a man with a serious interest in social reform, a social critic with a keen eye for the less appealing aspects of the conservative world view, who never loses his sense of humour.

The text which provides a point of departure is taken from Sydney Smith: 'There are always worthy and moderately gifted men who bawl out death and ruin upon every valuable change which the varying aspect of human affairs absolutely and imperiously requires." And what chiefly interests Turner are the reasons they give for bawling death and ruin, the arguments presented to show why it was unthinkable to allow a man to marry his deceased wife's sister ("Two Wives, One Mother-in-Law"); why the prospect of a workless Saturday, that central feature of the Australasian weekend, was thought bound to lead to general debauchery ("Sin and Saturday"); why the House of Lords thought that little boys in chimneys were as natural as chimneys themselves ("Little Boys For Small Flues"); and why eminent minds thought it desirable to saw in pieces the cadavers of hanged men ("A Treatment For Treason").

The Master Sweeps were the first to argue the need for boys in chimneys. They had themselves "been driven up chimneys in their childhood and saw no reason why a lazy new generation should not go to work in its turn. A child could not be too young to learn, they argued; it was humane to send a very small child up a narrow flue as an older one might stick."

When the mechanical brush was invented, the Masters "complained that the brush would not work, that even it if could be coaxed up a chimney it would not bring down the soot, and that even when it brought down the soot it made too much mess." New boys were a perennial problem. "A new boy was initiated as a rule by being supported on the shoulders of an older one. If he showed any disinclination to ascend, the older boy stuck pins in his feet, or subjected him to other indignities." In the Commons this was excused by Sir Joseph Yorke, an Admiral, on the grounds that if it were not considered inhumane to stir sailors up into the yards with a "cat" why was it evil to stir a lad up a chimney with pins?

Both the Master Sweeps and the Lords gloomily foresaw a holocaust of domestic fires if the Bill against the use of child sweeps were to succeed. There had already been several committees of enquiry: but perhaps another would be the wisest course—anything to secure a further delay. "Better this great inconvenience, said the Earl of Haddington, than the greater inconvenience of having property burnt down … The Bishop of Exeter agreed. Lord Segrave and the Earl of Wicklow pleaded the hardship of owners of old habitations, and the Duke of Beaufort produced 3,000 signatures from Bristol against the Bill (the Duke of Sutherland happily produced petitions in favour). The Marquess of Londonderry detected another danger: if their lordships agreed to exempt climbing boys, they might as well bring in another Bill to arrest the employment of children in all the other public works of the country."

A treatment for treason

But it is in "A Treatment For Treason" that the arguments against reform find surely their strangest expression. Who, in his right mind, could imagine the ghoulish lengths to which Coke went in order to justify hanging, drawing, and quartering? Besides an elaborate metaphorical justification ("the victim was to be strangled, 'being hanged up by the neck between heaven and earth, as deemed unworthy, of both, or either' ") this English Worthy sought help from Scripture, and "gave chapter and verse to show how Joab was drawn, Bigthan hanged, Judas disembowelled, Sheba beheaded and Rechab and Baanah quartered; though he does not point to anyone who suffered all these discomforts at once."

Much of Turner's essay on this woeful subject concerns Sir Samuel Romilly's campaign for penal reform. And at a time when "culture" and "ethnicity" are being freely invoked to defend some very strange things indeed, it usefully reminds us that there is no custom so hideous or tradition so indefensible that Sydney Smith's band of "worthy and moderately gifted men" will not find in it something redemptive, something to defend and preserve.

Romilly himself committed suicide in 1818 after the death of his wife. Axe-men continued to chop off heads for some years after this date, but they were restrained from quartering. It was in fact not until 1870 that the penalty was finally removed from the statute-book. Turner writes well about social reform. There is something about social issues which concentrates his mind more powerfully than either people or places appear to do, and the result is that Roads To Ruin and Call The Doctor contain strongly sustained narratives of a kind which are less often encountered in his other books.

At the same time one is left with the impression of a man going against his natural literary grain. It is as if a concerned and solemn Ernest were overriding and suppressing a gayer and lighter Sackville inheritance. Viewing his work as a whole, it seems unmistakeable that his true instinct is for a higher style, for an altogether more exacting kind of prose—in fact, for the sort of thing the eighteenth century did well. And an eighteenth-century tone and manner is something not easily married to the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill.

Two wives, one mother-in-law

The trouble is partly one of materials. Turner is a man who responds to his documents. But what is one to do with the sources from which "Two Wives, One Mother-in-Law" was compiled? What can even the wittiest imagination make of the sermons in the Church Review or The Methodist Times ? To ask this question is a little like asking what Chesterfield might have made of them, supposing that he had been uncharacteristically afflicted with a passion to save the world.

The fact is that prolonged immersion in this sort of thing not only dampens the spirit, it can be positively injurious to a writer's health. And just how foreign this Low Church environment was to Turner's nature can be seen at once when we open the pages of Amazing Grace, subtitled The Great Days of Dukes. In literary company which would make other authors self-consciously stiffen—with Chesterfield and Horace Walpole; alongside Dryden, Pope, and Burke—Mr Turner is entirely at home. Here he is free at last to employ the irony and the measured rhythms of a style which appears to have suffered little from his reading of the Church Review and The Freethinker and which is, at its best, worthy of the period:

"If the Palace of Blenheim was not so much a home as a monument, the same applied to other ducal seats; but instead of honouring military fame they commemorated and glorified family power, social impregnability and political influence. They were a declaration of dynastic intent; an affirmation of faith in the law of subordination; and a celebration of the mystique of aristocracy."

Commenting on the embarrassments which sometimes occurred when the attributes of the heir and the magnificence of the title were not in harmony, he writes:

"It might take centuries of service, solicitation, and aggrandisement before a family reached the point at which it could sustain a duke, and there was no assurance that the candidate would be worthy of the honour when it came. However, it was a rare duke who could afford the luxury of feeling humble, or dare to plead lack of capacity, or retreat into a life of piety. There he was, a most puissant and most excellent prince, and it was necessary to make the best of it."

Perhaps the man he had in mind when he wrote these words was Russell, fifth Duke of Bedford, whose command of English was so poor that in his early twenties he was afraid to speak in Parliament lest he "disgrace not only his lordships' house but his own." As the years passed, however, the Duke became less inhibited; so much so, indeed, that in 1795 he ventured to criticise the award of a pension to the ageing Edmund Burke. More than this: the Duke also took it upon himself to speak favourably of Reform.

This provoked Burke's famous anathema, a "classic of denunciation" which still retains interest today for the contrast it draws between the arrogant expectations of an aristocracy which has conveniently forgotten its own origins, and the just rewards claimed by men who have served the state. The Duke appeared to regard Burke's pension as excessive, but what of his own wealth?

"The grants to the House of Russell were so enormous as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the Leviathan among all the creatures of the Crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolicks in the ocean of the royal bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst he 'lies floating many a rood', he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he pours a torrent of brine against his origin and covers me all over with spray — everything of him and about him is from the Throne. Is it for him to question the dispensation of the royal favour?"

The First World War

Two hundred years after Burke, and some fifty years after his own first writings began to appear in English magazines, Mr Turner has produced his sixteenth book—Dear Old Blighty, about the First World War. It has the merits of its predecessors, and not least among these merits is the fact that its author is a man untouched by time. He is altogether undaunted by the 1980s. He writes as if social science did not exist; as if words like 'semiotic' and 'problematic' had never been heard; as if paradigms had yet to be invented. As an author he belongs to that fine tradition of fastidious amateurism which regards academic scholarship as something which it is only sensible to consult, but which men of taste should otherwise ignore.

In Dear Old Blighty he approaches his subject with customary zest. Though it is reasonable enough to ask—what exactly is his subject? How can he have anything to add to what he admits is "an unstoppable flow of books about the great battles, about day-to-day life in and behind the lines", about causes and effects and intrigues, real and imagined? The answer is that these large and weighty matters concern him little at all. What he tries to convey instead is the ordinary experience of life in Britain itself.

As might be expected from his earlier social histories, Turner focuses on the less familiar aspects of the wartime scene. In "The Sound of Guns" he tells how English children could hear the remote din of battle, even in school. From across the channel the guns could be heard on the Surrey hills, and even on Hampstead Heath, 150 miles from Ypres. William Plomer, at Beechmont School, near Knole, heard "on still days, when we were bent over Zenophon or quadratic equations, the windows rattled by a sudden crescendo of the interminable thunder of the guns in Flanders, and a wandering breeze would stir the war map on the wall."

There are moments of comedy. Charges that drunkenness was hampering the war effort in the factories led Lloyd George to persuade the King to set a national example of abstemiousness. Somewhat impetuously, His Majesty did more, foreswearing all consumption of liquor in the Royal Household for the duration. Within a very short time the King felt that he had been made to look a fool. "Certainly," writes Turner, "it was one of the most fruitless acts of self-abnegation to be found in the pages of history … The bars of the House of Commons remained as busy as ever; and if C. S. Forester's The General is any guide, society diners-out who suspected that their hostess had gone dry took their own liquor in flasks."

There is also more serious information of the kind which Turner often uncovers. In "The Nastiest Rumour" he throws light on the portentous tale of those battlefield corpses which were allegedly being turned by the Germans into soap. This is best known as a result of an after dinner speech which Brigadier General John Charteris delivered, in 1925, in New York. Charteris was reported as saying (and subsequently denied saying) that the whole story of the cadavers had been invented by British Intelligence for propaganda use in China, in the hope that it would stir up hatred of the Germans among the Chinese.

This account was then followed by Bertrand Russell, and was also incorporated into the work of the German-sympathising George S. Viereck in Spreading Germs of Hate (1930). Since then it has appeared in numerous books about the effects of propaganda, often in ways which emphasise the supposed unscrupulousness of British Intelligence. Turner notes, however, that on June 16,1915, (more than six months before the spate of press reports which were allegedly attributable to the initiative of British Intelligence) there is a report in Cynthia Asquith's Diaries which mentions a discussion of the subject. This suggests that however the story was subsequently exploited, it may not have originated in quite the way which many authors have confidently said it did.

What is Boloism?

But what (you ask) was Boloism? Who was Bo!o? And will we ever learn whose was The Hidden Hand? M. Paul Marie Bolo won brief notoriety as a German agent. He was one of a whole cast of shadowy characters, most of them creatures of fantasy, who were known collectively as The Hidden Hand—a hand on which every unaccountable setback the Allies suffered was invariably blamed. Bolo himself was real enough however. So were his crimes, for which he was shot by the French in 1918. And as evidence that Ernest Sackville Turner's seventy-one-year-old powers of expression are as sharp as ever, here is his summary of Bolo's pre-war career:

A rogue from boyhood, briefly a dentist, he survived charges of theft and bigamy to found banks in South America." Next time you have to cram a biography into twenty words, try writing something as dryly compact as that.