Frances Oliver
Recently an old (in both senses) friend, whose increasing macular degeneration does not allow for him to do it himself, gave me the task of sorting half a century of newspaper clippings, with a view to then disposing of most.
My friend and I are pretty much on the same political wave length and I too am an assiduous newshound so the articles were largely what I would have expected; warnings about destroying the world and the climate on which we all depend. Warnings that our globalised free-market economic system is trashing the earth, dooming indigenous peoples, hurting the poor and crowning the rich. Some of these articles go back to the 70’s and 80’s; some are general and many about specific dangers. That of nuclear power, written well before 3-Mile Island or Chernobyl, air pollution, soil pollution and soil exhaustion, over-fishing, pesticides, plastic packaging, cetacean deaths and frog deaths as a barometer, etc.
The loss of the ozone layer – but that one was in fact fixed, as it didn’t need any real loss of consumption or loss of money, at least one hopes it was. Also the environmental dangers of supersonic flight, which one commentator thought would become soon the normal method of long-distance travel. That disappeared, being simply too pointless and expensive and noisy to develop, though there were some of the rich or bedazzled who took pride and pleasure in celebrating the New Year on the same flight on different continents. The likes of Elon Musk now go for outer space instead.
One danger on which there are all too few articles is that of over-population; a factor that underpins all others but has become so risky to talk about that even the small NGO – at least it now exists – campaigning on it has changed its name from ‘Population Concern’ to ‘Population Matters’, and family planning charities will only designate themselves promoters of ‘reproductive health’. Bless David Attenborough for being the one celebrity to have given support to this campaign.
The response to all the warnings, when the powers that be even noted them, has of course been too little, too late, or not at all. It is no joy to see how many predictions have come true and how a globalised system to which the crash of 2008 might have brought at least a wind of change is ever more blind and entrenched.
But let us turn to other files of cuttings – society, culture and art. Here at least we come to a bit of welcome change. In the 70’s and 80’s it seems there was actually a ‘Paedophile Society’, a group, not yet declared illegal, dedicated to promoting sex with consenting children as young as four. The open formation of such a group would not be possible today. This story is now back in the news, the society and its prominent members being covered in a program on Radio 4 by one of those excellent BBC investigative journalists. One later clipping, from ’97, is headed ‘France Faces the Unspeakable, Horror Stories Help to End Law of Silence on Child Sex Abuse’ and one wonders what happened in France after that. Britain was certainly not alone.
There are of course cuttings about the two dangerous epidemics that the lengths, breadths and many deaths of Covid seem to have eclipsed from popular memory. There was the spread of ‘mad cow disease’, or BSE, probably caused by feeding sheep offal to cattle and then able to spread to humans through cattle meat. This epidemic could have been much worse and did not in the end have many human victims, but there is a sad, disturbing clipping showing names and photos of fifteen young people known to have died from Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, the human form of BSE. Along with this another of a smiling Agriculture Secretary holding up great slabs of meat, declaring ‘British Beef is Safe’. Later comes another livestock disease ‘Foot and Mouth’. This cannot spread to humans but led to a bitter loss of many farms and damaged much tourist business, through the cruel, wasteful and misguided Blair Government policy of compelling cattle slaughter and disposal not only on affected farms but also of healthy animals in a wide adjacent area. Can anyone who saw them forget those photos of giant pyres of burning dead cows?
Then there are a few clippings that lead to unanswered questions and unresolved mysteries. Whatever happened, one wonders, to the little girl whose mother died trying to save her when she fell into a deep water hole at Mont-Saint-Michel while tourists stood by and some unconcernedly videoed the scene? The child was saved by a local café owner who called the fire department, but it was too late for the mother, who drowned. And has anyone ever followed up a Sunday Times October 1988 ‘Spotlight’ on twelve defence workers, six of them at Marconi, who died, one by one, ‘in a mystery echoing a James Bond plot’?
My friend did not collect reviews as such but only reports of bizarre cultural oddities. There are a few striking examples from the visual arts. One wonders, again, what happened to the statues a German artist made by plasticizing human corpses? Apparently there were lots of volunteers to aid him post mortem with his art. Another was a work exhibited some years ago in the Newlyn Gallery, actually performance art of sorts, of a naked woman putting her hands inside a dead pig. The message from this absurdity was something about people’s exploitation of animals. Shock-exploitative schlock always purports to carry a message. Not having the benefit of formaldehyde immersion like Damien Hirst’s pickled cow, there must have been, if the exhibit travelled, frequent changes of dead pig.
Truly horrific was a painting of Myra Hindley created by thousands of children’s handprints. The clipping was an excellent and fierce report by columnist Barbara Ellen. This revolting work was financed by Charles Saatchi and was to be shown at the Royal Academy. We do see a little progress now and then; I doubt even a Saatchi would finance such an exhibit now. Andres Serrano’s crucifix in a bottle of urine started a multitude of sins. Barbara Allen in her article calls not for censorship but self-censorship, agreeing the Jane Guthrie, who with her husband Derek, founded The New Art Examiner. Jane wrote brilliantly about Serrano’s so-called art work when it first appeared.
I have mentioned only a few of the choice items, but I am giving up for now; the collection has reached the Millennium. Does anyone remember that Club of Rome report ‘The Limits of Growth’ which figures prominently in my friend’s files? Rachel Reeves obviously does not; Jeremy Corbin might have and got short shrift. Another then MP, Margaret Beckett, is quoted saying: “We have twenty-five years to sort things out.“ It’s now 2025. Need one say more?