This a heartfelt RANT and no apologies!!!

In 1695 Scottish-born William Paterson thought up a simple but, in theory, brilliant scheme that would remedy Scotland’s worst ills. He was a prolific promoter of speculative money-making schemes, who had been partly responsible for the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 (although he was soon branded a crook and drummed out of London by his fellow founders).

The plan was the establishment of a Scottish colony in Central America, at a place called Darien (now part of Panama), so that merchant ships no longer had to make the long and perilous journey around the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. Instead, goods would be transported to the colony on the eastern site of Darien and carried across the narrow isthmus to a port on the western seaboard, where ships with exchange cargoes from the East Indies and Asia would lie waiting.

The Scots, not least because of the duplicity of the English King (a Dutchman called William of Orange!), were determined to raise all the capital alone. By August 1696 a sum of £400,000 sterling had been raised in Scotland mainly from amongst the Scottish Aristocracy. This was an enormous sum, amounting to about half the country’s available capital.The Darien scheme was a complete and disastrous failure. Around one-quarter of Scotland’s liquid assets were lost in the venture and some two thousand people died.

The failure of the Darien adventures and its devastation of the Scottish economy resulted in a payment of £398,000 (a sum known as ‘the Equivalent’) in exchange for The Treaty of Union, and the last Scottish Parliament met on 25 March 1707 - it was not to be re-established in Edinburgh until 1999, almost 300 years after the failure of Darien.

The above is a skimming of the facts and others argue whether or not the Equivalent was a bribe (or in current parlance a ‘bail-out’) or pragmatism in the face of economic meltdown.  Whatever, I am convinced that the Darien adventures and the thirty years that followed hold the keys to an understanding of the psyche of modern Scotland.

What is interesting is that both the big Scottish Banks, HBoS and RBS, owe their existence to Darien and its consequences.  The Bank of Scotland (now HBoS) was founded in 1695 and William Paterson soon persuaded the new Bank’s directors to back his Company of Scotland with enormous sums and without questioning the details of his venture.  As a result the infant Bank descended into a crisis in its first year of life including a run on its reserves during 1696-7 and only survived following a split away by a prudent faction of its Board who refused to extend any more credit to Paterson.

30 years after Darien a new bank, to which half of the Equivalent stock was subscribed, was established in 1727 and called The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS today).

‪Did Andy Hornby, former Chief Executive of HBoS ever read "Bank of Scotland: a history, 1695-1995‬ By Richard Saville" – published by the Bank to mark its 300th Anniversary?  If he did he missed the glaringly obvious lesson.  Like William Paterson who did a runner from London to Edinburgh in 1696 after the English Parliament laid charges of treason against him, Hornby scarpered from Edinburgh  to Nottingham to take up the post of Chief Executive of Alliance Boots, the international healthcare group – sorry my mistake – Boots is now owned by a Gibraltar company and has moved its headquarters to Switzerland!

So where do protest songs come in?  Mulling over the financial muddle of the last two years I keep hearing three songs rattling around my head.

Starting with Robert Burns’ poem of 1791 deriding the members of the Scottish Parliament who signed the Act of Union with England in 1707:

 

We're bought and sold for English gold-

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

 

Next: Woody Guthrie’s  "The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd." (1939) Written in the form of a Scottish ballad and including the legendary and utterly poetic line:

 

Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.

 

Joseph Geringer writes about Pretty Boy Floyd:

The legend of "Pretty Boy" Floyd had grown to such energy that hardly a day went by without one major newspaper in America running one story on him. Well-known columnist Vivian Brown was among those intrigued and sought out the man himself for an interview for the publication, Oklahoma News. As she later put it: "The papers were full of Floyd. The Depression was having its demoralizing effect upon society and many of the destitute were admiring the boy who could go out and take money from the bankers...Public temper was right for Floyd to catch the public fancy."Summarizing her interview in the article, which was published right after his death, Brown wrote: "There is much to support the picture of Floyd as a modern-day Robin Hood. Like the famed marauder of the English forests, he took money from those who had it — the banks —and divided the proceeds of his raids with the poor.

The penniless tenant farmers kept their mouths shut, they had no scruples about taking contraband wrested from bankers."

 

Finally - Bob Dylan, disciple of both Burns and Guthrie, wrote the topical protest ballad “Hurricane” in 1976 for  Rubin "Hurricane" Carter a former middleweight who was convicted twice for the murder of three people in 1966. He was later released after serving twenty years of three life sentences due to an appeal that claimed the motive the prosecution presented during the second trial was driven by race, and therefore discriminatory. The question of Carter’s actual guilt or innocence remains an issue and in fact he lost Dylan’s support following an assault on one of his female supporters in prison. The song has no reference to bankers but the glorious image fits perfectly:

 

 

Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties


Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise


 

 

 

 

 

I called the Furniture Testing Lab and asked for the British Standard reference for Noises That Chairs Make so that we can advise specifiers on the correct Performance Specification to include in their tenders. Strangely there isn't one although a lively lad named Oliver pledged to check with Brussels to see if they have any legislation likely to Sprout soon.

I inherited an oft-ridiculed habit from my Mother of cutting out silly season clips from the Press and I treasure an archive of nonsense that helps to keep me sane as the hurricane of seriousness rages all around us.

If you are a clipper send me some of your best and look out for more in my blog if you seek refuge in the absurd.

 

 

 

 

I'm intrigued by the women's footwear - the woman second from the right looks like she has ballet pumps on or is even in bare feet. Shes also wearing a dress or skirt rather than 'Rosie the Riveter' gear. Women have obviously worked in factories and mills since the Industrial Revolution but there was a sea change during World War 2 when they took up every type of trade whilst the men went away to fight.

I remember visiting my friend Robert Morris' factory in the centre of Glasgow in the 1980s and seeing a similar scene in the polishing shop - all the workers were female.

The image also makes me reflect on the massive reduction in manufacturing in the UK which is a dangerous trend. The modern mantra that we should offshore everything that isn't at the sexy end of manufacturing is absurd - look at these numbers (which are already a couple of years out of date):

 

 

His daily routine began between 5am and 6am when he wrote thirty letters mostly to friends and collaborators telling them that he had decided to change this or that detail of a project. Ponti then left his family home for his nearby studio, a converted garage so big that, in the early days, his draftsmen rode their scooters right up to their desks, where he worked from 7am to 8pm. He sketched and wrote so frenziedly that his daughter recalled his hands being stained "black with graphite and ink" by the middle of the afternoon. Ponti then carried on working after returning home for dinner: often drawing silently after the lights had gone out, his sketches illuminated by the lights in other houses.

Inspired by the traditional Chiavari chairs Ponti had seen at the seaside, was so strong and light that a child could lift one up on a single finger, the 1957 Superleggera chair he designed for Cassina swiftly became classics of the period. I love it because of its sublety - it looks somewaht ordinary to begin with - and it's rigourous structural minimalism. It is modern yet its form and craftsmanship are are as traditional as Van Gogh's chair - four legs and a cane seat. Forsaking gimickry or self consciously avant garde forms requires great confidence in a 'modern' designer.

I am captivated by the image of the little boy - dressed like a Madison Avenue adman - the scale is contrived (i'm sure the chair is much bigger relative to the boy) but who cares.

I love Ponti for lots of reasons including his Pirelli Tower in Milan and his dedication to his Citroen DS (see later blog) - his energy and genius was such that he could produce his iconic furniture designs in his sleep while us mortals toil for years to come up with something half decent.

Thanks to Design Museum for most of the facts.

Superleggera Chair, 1957

Design: Gio Ponti

Manufacturer: Cassina

© G. Ponti archives/S. Licitra – Milan