Keith Alcorn reports on the talk by Kate Teltscher, Gigantic Children of the Sun: Kew’s Palm House.

The re-opened Temperate House at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has been much in the news recently, but as Kate Teltscher, Reader in English Literature at University of Roehampton, told her Birkbeck Arts Week audience last Thursday: “For my money, the Palm House is the greatest!”

She was introducing her research on the Palm House and the meaning of palms in the Victorian era, the theme of her forthcoming book The Palace of Palms, at her talk `Gigantic Children of the Sun: Kew’s Palm House`.

The Palm House opened at Kew in 1848, three years before the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. It was a wonder of the age, `an erection unmatched in the world` according to The Florist’s Miscellany. Its vast curving structure, using the latest construction methods in iron and glass, asserted Kew’s new role as a national botanic garden, open to all and free of charge. Visitor numbers doubled in the year after it opened: over 130,000 people made the journey to Kew Gardens in 1849 to admire the enormous palms, luxuriate in the tropical heat and perhaps to imagine themselves looking down on a jungle from the viewing gallery.

Commentators at the time welcomed `this wonderful age when the gigantic children of the sun can live amongst us`.

The Palm House `evoked the wide reach of British imperial power and technological triumph over distance and climate`, as well as ostentatious Victorian wealth, Kate Teltscher argued. But why were palms given pride of place at Kew? What did they mean to the Victorians?

Palms had religious, scientific and economic significance for Victorian audiences, she said. Palms in the Bible represented triumph and abundance and were associated with the landscapes of the Holy Land. They also stood for numerous other geographical locations in the tropics.

As plants, palms were considered `the very perfection of organisation`, representing a union of beauty and utility that distinguished them from other trees. They were viewed as the summit of the plant world due to their beauty and utility, just as humans were considered the most evolved of the animals.

Palms were also considered an economic boon, for they had so many uses. Date palms and coconut palms provided food, the enormous leaves provided material for weaving and shelter, and the enormous trunks provided building material.

Palm oil was used as a lubricant on the railways, in soap and in candles. Price’s brought out a coconut oil candle for the royal wedding of 1840 – at the time it was customary to have a candle burning in the front window at the time of a wedding.

Palm oil, seen today as a problematic product because of the impact of its production on deforestation, was seen by the Victorians as an ethical product. The trade in palm oil was seen as an effective way of combatting the slave trade, by providing an economic alternative to the trade in West Africa. (Suppressing the slave trade was a central objective of British foreign policy after the abolition of slavery in British colonies in 1833).

Kate Teltscher’s analysis illustrates the wide range of meanings and social processes embedded in gardens and plants, especially their relationship to Britain’s empire during the nineteenth century. Palms were objects of scientific and commercial fascination, located within global networks of exploration and trade. `Gigantic Children of the Sun` was a tremendous overview of a rich topic.

Keith Alcorn is a PhD student in the departments of History and Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research investigates the relationships between Britain’s empire and the transformation of British gardens through the introduction of exotic plants in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Lynsey Ford, an alumna of Birkbeck, reports on an Arts Week Event from the Four Corners film and photography centre in East London.

On Wednesday 16 May, I had the pleasure of attending The Archive Project: 50 Years of Film and Photography in East London which took place at Birkbeck cinema. Dr Patrizia Di Bello from The Department of The History of Art introduced Carla Mitchell to a packed audience, who provided an excellent presentation as the Creative Director of Four Corners film and photography centre. Now celebrating its forty-fifth year at 113 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, Carla’s talk examined the peak of productivity at the organisation between 1972-1987.

Four Corners was created by Joanna Davis, Mary Pat Leece, Ronald Peck and Wilfried Thust, (graduates from London International Film School). The quartet’s chief mission was to bring accessible film to the borough and to provide regular cinema screenings for local residents and equipment to film and edit material. Over the next four decades, Four Corners quickly developed a reputation as being at the forefront of ‘cutting edge’ film production, nurturing home-grown talent from underprivileged backgrounds as well as from a pool of BAFTA and Turner Prize nominees through hands-on production workshops. The centre introduced monthly meetings where artists, photographers and trainees filmmakers collaborated, exchanging original ideas and clips in front of live audiences. Four Corners also excelled in pioneering film projects; Nighthawks (Dir: Ron Peck/Paul Hallam, 1978), had the distinction of being the first British gay feature film, following a schoolteacher who remains in the closet at work but cruises gay bars and discos at night.

After Channel 4 took over a franchise with Four Corners, sterling work continued through Four Corners apprentice Ruhul Amin, who created A Kind of English (1986) recognised as the first Bangladeshi British film discussing the struggles of a Bengali family adjusting to life in Britain.

Carla also discussed the influence of Camerawork (Half Moon Photography Workshop), a fellow film and photographic organisation which championed community activism and anti-racist causes, and Carla looked at the creative input of leftist British publication Camerawork Magazine founded in 1976, led the late Jo Spence (whose personal library collection is housed at Birkbeck College). Camerawork Magazine challenged the more contentious taboo subjects upon the political landscape of Britain through the transition under Thatcher’s government from the late seventies. Jo Spence launched the magazine with her essay ‘The Politics of Photography’ and was at the forefront of Women’s collective Hackney Flashers (1974-early 80s) which encouraged feminist agitprop exhibitions; Women at Work (1975), Who’s Holding The Baby? (1978), Domestic Labour and Visual Representation (1980) all exploring the woman’s role in and outside the home.

Front covers captured the rise of National Front skinheads upon the streets of Camden and the team of photographers exposed the darker political ramifications upon the landscape caused by the turmoil of the Miners Strikes, where trade unionist Arthur Scargill led the union as a leading activist. Camerawork Magazine would cease as a publication in 1985.

Today, Four Corners has benefited from a generous £1 million heritage lottery grant, which has seen the creation of a new centre in 2007 at 121 Roman Road, thanks to backing from Arts Council England, London Development Agency, Film London, London Borough of The Tower of Hamlets and European Regional Development Fund. Today it houses dark rooms, a gallery, training rooms, edit suites and space to hire.

Four Corners will officially launch their Radical Visions, an archive exhibition from June to September 2018 commemorating their legacy in East London, with a public display showing all 32 copies of Camerawork magazine. With input from 50 volunteers since 2016 and £100,000 from The Heritage Lottery Fund, Four Corners continues to thrive and inspire future generations of filmmakers both nationally and internationally. Carla provided a poignant and fitting tribute to the hard work of skilled artists who continue to cut advance with Four Corners.

Charlotte Deadman, a researcher in fin de siècle Anglo-Irish culture, the Gaelic League, Gaelic Revival and the Irish literary revival, comments on Arts Week event Gaelic Hardship.

The key theme of this sell-out event was an exploration of movement between languages in Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien’s 1941 novel, An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth), considered the first post-modernist Irish language novel. The panel – Joseph Brooker, Tobias Harris and Eoin Byrne – commenced proceedings with a timeline tracing O’Nolan’s background (born in 1911 into a highly-literate Irish-speaking Catholic family), his career as civil servant, epistolarian and novelist.

O’Nolan (as ‘Flann O’Brien’) contributed regularly to the letters page of The Irish Times, leading to his own column, ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ (‘full little jug’), under the pen name Myles na gCopaleen: O’Nolan’s aliases – ‘brand names’ – were pivotal to his deliberate blurring of identity. In a letter to Sean O’Casey in 1942, O’Nolan wrote that An Béal Bocht was his ‘honest attempt to get under the skin of a certain type of Gael, which I find the most nauseating phenomenon in Europe’. The novel satirises the government’s gaelicising of Irish culture to the point that an onlooker could believe ‘all Irish literature was written for school children and nuns.’

An Béal Bocht was O’Nolan’s only Irish language novel; the fossilisation of the language, as he saw it, persuaded him to henceforth write only in English. However, O’Nolan refused to sanction an English version of his novel; Patrick C. Power’s translation was published in 1973, seven years after O’Nolan’s death. We learnt that the genesis of The Poor Mouth can be located in O’Nolan’s ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ column and that the narrative framing – Bonaparte O’Coonassa’s autobiography edited by ‘Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O’Brien)’ – was intended to toy with reader expectations of the genre. The novel’s complex intertextuality draws upon a patchwork of phrases and events excised from well-known Irish language autobiographies, blended with pseudo-Gaelic myths, the significance of some of which has apparently been lost in translation. Eoin Byrne explained that the pen names in The Poor Mouth mirrored contemporary reality: while writers adopted nom de plumes, they all knew who was who and, affecting ignorance, publicly trashed each other.

Guest speaker, Hugh Wilde, read a passage after which Tobias Harris explained the significance of the ‘comic extension’ therein conveyed, suggesting O’Nolan’s ‘Jams O’Donnell’ represents a ‘sense of dual consciousness, of two cultural worlds’ – one promoting the idea of the heroic ‘Gael of Gaels’, the other Anglicised and hostile to the Gaels, expressed in Jams O’Donnell’s duality of language; Harris illustrated this duality, citing Irish passports which bear the holder’s name in both Irish and English.

Eoin Byrne speaks at the event

Eoin Byrne explained that the education system in Ireland set about eradicating the Irish language and that the resultant national linguistic divide became fundamental to a sense of identity: while colonial rule punished speakers of Irish, the Irish Free State’s ‘de-Anglicising’ agenda punished speakers of English. The Poor Mouth is effectively a collage of historical times, chronicling the ‘de-anglicising’ of Ireland, the English language symbolic of oppression.

Joseph Brooker then read a passage which he described as ‘a performance piece’, the Gaelic language portrayed as a marker of social prestige: O’Nolan’s parody of the Gael autobiography genre blurs into nonsense and consequently is incapable of saying anything of worth. Eoin Byrne’s animated re-reading of the passage in its original Irish form was a high spot of the evening.

The final reading was given by guest speaker, N. J. Harris. The event culminated in a focus on the novel’s portrayal of characters ‘living up to stereotypes…to their literary fate’ – although this is Bonaparte’s story, he is symbolically rendered silent – and that, central to the novel, is circularity of time, woven through in variations on the leitmotif ‘their likes will never be there again’. At the novel’s conclusion, parody is displaced by poignancy, reflecting on the cycle of imprisonment that runs in Bonaparte’s family: the novel is ultimately a commentary on the restrictions urban Dublin society inflicted on rural Irish speakers.

The panel summed-up The Poor Mouth as ‘a response to the cultural violence of extreme nationalism’ within the Irish language movement: a demonstration of post-modernist pessimism. This was an excellent evening, striking the perfect balance between informal and informative. I look forward to their likes being there again.