Crumlin Viaduct

At 200 feet high and 1,638 feet long it was described as “one of the most significant examples of technological achievement during the Industrial Revolution”, but all that remains of Crumlin Viaduct, a victim of Dr Beeching’s axe, are its stone supports. It was the highest railway viaduct in Britain and only the Aqueduct of Spoleto in Italy and the Portage Timber Viaduct in the United States were taller. It was also the least expensive bridge for its size ever constructed.

In 1846 an Act of Parliament granted permission for the building of the Taff Vale extension which would allow the coal mines of South Wales to access the developing industrial centres in the North West and Midlands of England. Its route required the track to cross the Ebbw Valley, an engineering feat that needed to overcome two significant geological features; the valley was tall, creating a structural problem as well as a wind problem as it acted as a wind tunnel, and there were actually two valleys, the Ebbw and the smaller Kendon.

Concluding that stone would be a poor choice for a structure of this size and type, Chief Engineer, Charles Liddell, recommended that a cast iron structure be built. After a tender process, the contract was awarded to a Scottish civil engineer, Thomas Kennard, who cast the iron structures at his Falkirk Ironworks and shipped them to Newport. Construction began in October 1853.

The first girder was hoisted into place on December 3, 1854 but during the maneuvering of the second, it buckled, slipped, and fell. One man, who was standing on the girder at the time, was killed and two others seriously injured, remarkably the only serious casualty during the construction phase. Made of wrought iron with stone supports, the seven span section across the Ebbw was completed in August 1855 and the three span section across the Kendon in the December at a total cost of £62,000 or £41 7s a foot.

The viaduct was officially opened on Whit Monday, June 1, 1857, by Lady Isabella Fitzmaurice and the occasion was marked by celebrations. Trains travelling across the viaduct and along the Western line beneath were decorated with flags, flowers, and evergreens. To entertain the locals beer booths, fun fairs, and side shows were set up in the fields and a couple of balladeers sang a song they had composed to celebrate the event. “Thousands come from far and near,/ so full of youth and bloom,/ To open the Great Crumlin Bridge/ on the Glorious first of June” it went and copies of the song sheet were available at a penny a time. The first train to cross was greeted with “loud shouts and roars, accompanied by the roar of the cannons and music from the band; it made a most spirit stirring occasion”, a contemporary report noted.

Although the Crumlin Viaduct was listed in 1962 as a site of architectural and historical interest, British Railways was allowed to demolish it after passenger services had stopped using it and because it was thought to be structurally unsound. The last passenger train to cross it was the 21.10 from Pontypool to Treherbert on June 13, 1964. Demolition began in the summer of 1966. Curiously, while the work was being carried out, the viaduct was used as a set for the film Arabesque, starring Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren.   

A Telegram From Le Touquet

A review of A Telegram from Le Touquet by John Bude – 240406

A Telegram from Le Touquet, originally published in 1956, has been recently reissued as part of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series. Taxonomically it is the twenty-second and penultimate in John Bude’s long-running William Meredith series, but, in truth, he plays only a minor albeit vital part in the tale. The heavy lifting in the investigation on the French Riviera is conducted by Inspector Blampignon of the Sûreté National, who featured in Bude’s earlier Death on the Riviera (1952).

The book falls into two unequal parts. The first part is narrated by Nigel Derry through whose eyes we are introduced to the main characters of the story and begin to understand the tensions and emotional undercurrents that are bubbling to the surface at his aunt Gwenny’s country house that Easter. To his astonishment his desire to marry Sheila, Gwenny’s ward, is vetoed without an adequate explanation. Gammon, an old soak and a beau of Gwenny’s, seems to be falling out of favour with a younger, more dapper Frenchman now in tow, and begins to make a beeline for Gwenny’s dowdy and naïve sister, Deborah Gaye. And there is some mystery surrounding the bohemian artist, Skeet, who seems to have some kind of hold on Gwenny and is involved in a knife fight with her latest beau, an occurrence that decides Gwenny to shut up the house at short notice and decamp to her holiday home in the south of France.

Gwenny never gets there. Her body is found in a trunk by her servants, the Fougères. To their surprise they had received a telegram from her advising them instead of arriving on the Sunday she would not reach the house until the Tuesday. Nigel also received a telegram, the eponymous missive from Le Touquet, inviting him unexpectedly to join his aunt. Some incriminating evidence that links him to her murder is found in a car.

The second part of the novel, which describes the events leading up to the discovery of the murder, the subsequent investigation and the revealing of the culprit, is narrated in the third party and, oddly, having done much to focus attention on Derry and to implicate him in the murder, Bude quickly absolves him of any involvement which, together with the switch of narrative focus, gives the book a very disjointed feel.

To add to the feeling of disappointment the culprit is easy to spot, although the locus of the murder and the herculean efforts required to get the body to the south of France show an astonishing degree of ingenuity. The motive, Gwenny’s hostility to the proposed marriage and Skeet’s hold over her are only revealed after a telephone call, the contents of which are not disclosed to the reader at the time but are pulled out of the chapeau with a Gallic flourish at the grand reveal. That the nuts and bolts of the crime are only revealed through a confession and the culprit suffers an all too convenient heart attack which eliminates any issues over which jurisdiction should deal with the murder adds to an overwhelming sense of anticlimax.

Blampignon is about as far removed from Poirot as you can imagine. Portly, sweaty, energetic, only uttering the occasional “Eh bien”, “Mon Dieu” and “Merde” to indicate his Gallic origin, his approach is less about engaging the little grey cells as rolling his sleeves up and getting stuck in. As he remarks at the end, the murderers only real mistake was to send that telegram. Had they not, they could easily have got away with murder.

The book is an entertaining enough read and the first part allows Bude to round his characters in the reader’s mind, but there are too many unsatisfactory features to make it a true classic.

Law Of The Week

Nimbyism is one thing, existing residents objecting to a proposal that will affect their peace and quiet, but having the audacity to move into an area and then complain about what you find there is quite another. The diaspora from the city to the countryside is fraught with difficulties. People who are quite content to put up with the hum of traffic and the rattle of trains while living in an urban setting suddenly seem shocked when they find that the countryside is not the tranquil Elysium they had imagined it to be and that the soundscape is full of mooing cows, noisy cockerels, and the peal of church bells.

The French courts have been plagued with cases in which irate newcomers have sought to put an end to alleged noise pollution caused by a host of animals, even frogs croaking in a pond and noisy cicadas going about their cicadian business. Not any more, though.

In a piece of legislative breath air, that puts our own moribund parliament to shame, the French parliament has just passed a law that puts an end to such nonsense, giving the courts the authority to strike out such cases. As the justice minister, Éric Dupond-Moretti, observed, “those who move to the countryside cannot demand that country people who feed them change their way of life,”

Well said.

Israel Rank: The Autobiography Of A Criminal

A review of Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal by Roy Horniman – 24040

Originally published in 1907 and reissued by Dean Street Press, this book will be better known for being the basis of the 1949 Alec Guinness tour de force and the best Ealing Comedy film, Kind Hearts and Coronets. However, the book is radically different from the film. Instead of a farce we are presented with a deep dive into the mind of a social climbing serial killer and, perhaps more disturbingly, the forerunner of the murderous half-Italian of the film is a man who is undisputedly Jewish on his father’ side. His link to the Gascoyne aristocracy is through his mother.

The name of the protagonist, Israel Rank, has been chosen with great care. The forename leaves no question in the reader’s mind that he is of semitic stock, or Oriental as he prefers to call himself in the text, and the surname Rank speaks of his obsession with the class system and his overpowering desire to better himself and reclaim the aristocratic title that seemed so far from his grasp when he pored over the genealogical table that his father had preserved.

However, the overt Jewishness of the central character makes this book a rather uncomfortable read. Did Horniman intend it to be an antisemitic tale, designed to draw gasps of dismay and outrage from his Edwardian readership as a cynical outsider uses charm, trickery, and murder most foul to worm himself into the hear of the English aristocracy or was it intended to be a satire of antisemitism? At this distance it is hard to be sure and the way Rank introduced the deadly scarlet fever bacteria to a baby by wiping its face with an infected cloth reminiscent of the blood libel made me doubt my original feeling that it was satire. There is little doubt that antisemitic feeling was rife in Edwardian England and when satirical intent is not obvious or misses the mark, it can be as bad, if not worse, than its original target.

The book takes a long time to get going as it is as much about his social maneuverings to better himself by ingratiating himself into circles of increasing influence and importance, primarily through his association with three women, his childhood sweetheart, Sibella, his wife, the former Miss Gascoyne, whose brother he murdered, and his salvation, Esther Grey. Although we think we know how the book is to intend, and despite all his cleverness, Rank makes a series of catastrophic errors that quickly leads to his detection, Horniman does have one great surprise up his sleeve which he leaves until the last pages of this 400 plus page novel to reveal.

The problem with his plan, as Rank quickly begins to realise, is that the nearer he gets to the top of the succession tree and the more of the heirs who die in suspicious or unnatural circumstances, the greater the suspicion that will rest on the outsider who is charging towards the winning post from the back of the field. Not everything goes smoothly; an innocent verger is killed, drinking a cup of water laced with poison intended for the vicar.

Rank’s ruminations reveal a complex character. He abhors blood sports but is content to set about slaughtering his own limited field of victims, although almost, but not completely, drawing the line at physical violence. His preferred modus operandi is to set in motion a sequence of events that will lead to a fatal event, whether it is by poison, fire, or disease. Only in one instance does he deliver the final coup de grace.

Given the book’s age, it is clearly the forerunner of and likely to have been influential in later developments of the crime fiction genre such as the inverted murder mystery and the psychological murder mystery. For that reason alone it is worth a read. But it is also an entertaining enough story with a dramatic twist that, largely, stands on its own merits.

For those with highly attuned sensitivities, though, it comes with a health warning. Whether the anti-Italian sentiments in Robert Hamer’s film version occupy a higher moral high ground than Horniman’s antisemitism is a question for media studies students. DSP, in marketing it as Kind Hearts and Coronets, clearly think it does.

Kiwi Fruit

With its furry, light brown skin, bright green flesh speckled with tiny black seeds, and a tropical flavour reminiscent of a mix of strawberries and bananas, the kiwi fruit has moved on from being a rare exotic to a staple fruit on the supermarket shelves. Packed full of vital oxidants, containing almost twice as much vitamin C as an orange and rich in vitamins K and E, it is a fruit for these health conscious times. It is also very versatile, equally tasty when eaten raw, blended into a smoothie, or, taking a leaf out of the Chinese culinary book, as a jam.

There are between forty and sixty species of Actinidia, to give the kiwi fruit its taxonomical generic name, of which A. deliciosa, a separate species since the 1980s, is the most likely to be found in shops. Growing equally as well in the northern and southern hemispheres, the production of kiwi fruit is now big business with a global market estimated to be worth USD 1.89 billion in 2024.

Less than a century ago, though, it was virtually known, at least in the west, its rise in fortune, one of commercial agriculture’s greatest success stories of recent decades, due to a mix of luck, perseverance, and marketing acumen.

Despite its name, the kiwi fruit is indigenous to the temperate forests of the mountains and hills of southwest China, where it was prized for its medicinal properties. The fruit, known as Yang tao, meaning sunny peach, was first mentioned in writing during the Song dynasty in the 12^th century, and was collected from the wild rather than cultivated. By the time Li Shizhen produced his compendium of medicine, natural history, and Chinese herbology, Bencao Gangmu, in 1597, it was known as Mihou tao, macaque fruit, because of the monkeys’ predilection for it.

The first specimens of A. chinensis reached Europe in the 1750s, thanks to a Jesuit missionary, Father Pierre Le Chéron d’Incarville. When a plant hunter, Robert Fortune, was sent by the Horticultural Society of London to China between 1843 and 1845 “to collect seeds and plants of an ornamental or useful kind”, he also sent a specimen home, which was held at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. It was not until 1886, though, that the first fruits of A. chinensis were even seen in Europe, Kew receiving specimens preserved in spirit. Instead, the plants and seeds were regarded as ornamental curiosities rather than the source of a delicious, edible fruit, not least because early attempts to produce fruit under cultivation were rather hit or miss affairs.

The seeds of A. chinensis which plant collector, E H Wilson, sent from Hupeh in 1900 to one of England’s principal nurseries, James Veitch & Sons Ltd, germinated but, frustratingly, only produced male plants, thus thwarting any plans to grow the plants and fruit commercially. Seeds sent in 1904 by Consul-General Wilcox from Hankow to the United States Department of Agriculture seeds fared better, the resulting vines bearing fruit at the Plant Introduction Field Station at Chico in California by 1910, but their commercial potential was not realized.

Where England had failed and the United States had missed an opportunity, New Zealand was poised to make hay. Missionary and principal of a New Zealand girls’ school, Mary Isabel Fraser, collected some A. chinensis seeds from plants she had come across at a Church of Scotland mission in Yichang and sent them to a Whanganui farmer, Alexander Allison. He planted them and by 1910 the resultant vines had borne their first fruits.