What I Did in 2004

Letters

Vol. 27 No. 2 · 20 January 2005

From Rod Eastwood

Alan Bennett wonders whether there were any barbers in Auschwitz (LRB, 6 January). If he were to visit the Jewish Museum in Finchley on a Sunday afternoon, he would be able to talk to Leon Greenman, now 94 years old, who actually was a barber in Auschwitz. Alternatively, he could read Greenman’s book, An Englishman in Auschwitz, published in 2001.

Rod Eastwood
Halifax, West Yorkshire

From Gerry Harrison

I was at the same meeting of Camden Council as Alan Bennett last October. I was there as a ward councillor, speaking in opposition to the planning development that he had come to support. Like him, I am a patient of the James Wigg Practice.

Bennett said that ‘trees grow’. Yes of course, but one has to be wary of the contrivances of artists’ impressions or developers’ elevation drawings. I was a member of this Planning Committee for eight years, and have never seen any such illustration include a street packed with cars or spread with graffiti. Indeed the trees are always in leaf (sometimes to conceal some detail that otherwise might be questioned), the passers-by are always smiling and the sky is always blue.

Gerry Harrison
London NW5

Vol. 27 No. 3 · 3 February 2005

From Andrew Jotischky

Alan Bennett may be right about the surprise of many inhabitants of the Lune Valley at the suppression of Cockersands Abbey, and thus at the end to supplies of fresh fish, but the date of surrender was 1539, not 1536 (LRB, 6 January). Henry VIII’s commissioners, visiting the abbey in 1536 under the mandate of the Act of Suppression, found that the abbey’s income totalled £366 4s 1d – well over the £200 determined by the crown as the benchmark for a functioning abbey. They also reported the church and monastic buildings as being largely in good repair. Moreover, most of the 22 monks, aged between 29 and 60, petitioned to remain in the religious life. When the end came three years later, therefore, in the case of Cockersands at least, it wasn’t the mercy killing of a dying beast that some traditional views of the Dissolution suggest. Cockersands was founded in 1184 by a hermit on the beach near the Lune Estuary, and the last remaining abbey building, the octagonal chapter-house, which survives on a local farm, can be visited from the Lancashire Coastal Path. Because it was a Premonstratensian, not a Benedictine monastery, the monks had a pastoral role in the local community as well as a contemplative one within the cloister.

Andrew Jotischky
Lancaster

From Christopher Small

Alan Bennett, taking his tour around Burford church in Oxfordshire last October, must not have noticed the signatures of the Levellers who were briefly imprisoned in the church in 1649 after Cromwell had crushed their mutiny, and who scratched their names in the lead of the font while waiting to be shot outside the church door in the morning.

Christopher Small
Isle of Lismore, Argyll

From Nick Chapple

Alan Bennett wishes there were a register of war memorials in this country. The UK National Inventory of War Memorials was established in 1989 and is an ongoing project to compile a comprehensive record of war memorials of all kinds. It currently has records for 50,000 of the estimated 54,000 memorials. The information in the inventory can be accessed by contacting the Imperial War Museum. It is intended to create online access, when funds permit.

Nick Chapple
London SE24

From Virginia Warren

If Alan Bennett finds himself at Stokesay again, he should have another look at the war memorial in the churchyard: the side against the hedge has a list of the names of men who returned alive to the parish from World War One. I’ve never noticed a list of returnees on any memorial elsewhere.

Virginia Warren
Cambridge

Vol. 27 No. 4 · 17 February 2005

From Harold Reynolds

Alan Bennett complains that the Court of Appeal had ordered that the wrongly imprisoned Vincent and Michael Hickey ‘effectively pay board and lodging for the years that they have spent in jail’ (LRB, 6 January). However, the issue before the Court of Appeal was whether it was lawful to deduct from the Hickeys’ awards for pecuniary damages sums that had been awarded to them for their living expenses during the period of their imprisonment. The Hickeys did not have expenses for board and lodging when imprisoned and hence there was no ground to grant them an award for those expenses.

Harold Reynolds
Scarsdale, New York