Nicholas Owen (c.1550-1606)

"I verily think no man can be said to have done more good of all those who laboured in the English vineyard. He was the immediate occasion of saving the lives of many hundreds of persons, both ecclesiastical and secular." Father Gerard

Richard Coles, singer, broadcaster and vicar, keeps his fans and friends intrigued by sharing the stories of a series of “saints for the day” – not pious hagiography but tall tales of extraordinary lives, which is how I discovered this intriguing individual. Nicholas Owen was possibly a dwarf – certainly extremely short – and had a series of other health problems, such as hernia and a crippled leg. The latter because a horse fell on him, and the broken leg was never properly set (disability was presumably much more common in the Early Modern period). The hernia was an injury caused by Owen’s work as a carpenter.

But no ordinary carpenter: Nicholas Owen was a Catholic, a lay Jesuit, at a time when his religion was proscribed in England. He was born in Oxford, and apprenticed as a carpenter, like his father Walter, later becoming a servant to Henry Garnett, a Jesuit who employed Owen to do some covert carpentry. Known to other recusants as Little John, Owen travelled around the country by night, and did his work secretly, because he was a builder of priests’ holes, secret compartments in the houses of the crypto-Catholic gentry.

Whereas previously, these refuges were no more than holes in the floor, Owen built every one differently, and each more ingeniously than earlier examples. Despite his physical limitations, he labored with masonry and carpentry and trompe l’oeil effects. Over thirty years, he is known to have built at least 100 priest-holes, expertly hidden from the eyes of Pursuivants (anti Catholic agents) by false fronts, secret trapdoors, covert stairs or underground passageways. He was arrested several times, for example in 1594, when he was released after a wealthy Catholic family paid his fine. He is also said to have helped Father John Gerard to escape from captivity in the Tower of London in 1597.

For his efforts, Nicholas Owen was later canonized by the Catholic Church. Apparently, he began each building project with prayer and Eucharist. Sadly, his piety was not enough to protect him from the forces of Puritan law and order: he was arrested in Worcestershire in 1606, when anti-Catholic feeling was at a height in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. Hearing of the capture, one of the Privy Councillors said: “Is he taken that knows all the secret places? I am very glad of that. We will have a trick for him.”

Nicholas Owen was taken first to the Marshalsea Prison, and then to the Tower of London, where he was tortured on the track. This, apparently, in contravention of the medieval tradition that “maimed people” were not to be exposed to torture. Nevertheless, Owen named no names – even though he would have certainly known hundreds of Catholics and their networks of support. He made a confession of his own activities, but without incriminating anyone else. With no skilled accomplice to break him out, he died in the Tower on March 2^nd 1606, disemboweled: the authorities later claimed that he had done the deed himself. A jailor admitted to one of Nicholas Owen’s relatives that in fact his hands were so damaged by the end that he could barely feed himself. So perished the man whom the Rev Richard Coles has labelled the patron saint of Illusionists and Escapologists.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

“The history of the universe...is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a Demon.”

If I ever had to choose my favourite author, it would be a difficult thing to decide between PG Wodehouse and Jorge Luis Borges. And I would defend the contention that they have much in common. Borges is one of the most Anglophile of foreign writers, with his love of Kipling and Shakespeare and Chesterton. His plots are ingenious, as are those of Wodehouse, although of course Borges is by far the more cerebral writer. Each mastered the short story – none of Borges’ works are longer than 14 pages. Borges is continually quoting from others, in a way that is almost as arch and witty as Wodehouse. Wodehouse created a series of fictional settings – the world of Blandings, the world of the Drones, the world of the Anglers’ Rest – albeit they are ultimately one continuous unreal world. Borges was forever creating different worlds, each more intriguing and mysterious than the last.

As a resident of Geneva, I take pleasure in the fact that Borges spent much of his youth in this city, and came back at the end of his life. One of my first excursions here was to his grave, in the Cimetière des Rois in Plainpalais. I had forgotten to bring flowers, but felt that some tribute was in order. So I slid my old Cambridge University Library card, which I had carried around with me for 25 years, into the earth of the grave. It’s no longer there: it was retrieved, along with the other gifts left by fans, and ended up in Buenos Aires, which is how I once happened to be profiled by an Argentinian newspaper: my suitably Borgesian anecdote, and no less true for that.

Borges was born in Buenos Aires, son of a lawyer and a woman descended from a long line of freedom fighters, both of whom spoke and read English as well as Spanish. Borges’ paternal grandmother was from Staffordshire. For all of these reasons, Borges may not have been exaggerating when he later said that as a child he had not at first realized that English and Spanish were separate languages.

With his younger sister Norah, Borges invented imaginary friends and games and adventures, roaming the library and garden of the house. He later described his father’s collecton of 1000 books as “the chief event in my life”. He was a shortsighted and bookish child, who did not attend school until he was nine. It was always thought that Jorge would become a writer, and it was at that age that his Spanish translation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” was published in the local paper. By twelve, he was reading Shakespeare in English.

When Borges was 15, his father was forced to retire due to his failing eyesight, and the family moved to Geneva so that he could consult an eye specialist. For four years, the children attended College Calvin. Here, Borges discovered French Symbolist literature, Schopenhauer, Walt Witman, and even made a few friends. When Borges was 20, the family returned to Buenos Aires, where he talked, read, and wrote poetry: his first collection was published a few years later. He had a brief involvement in politics, but his enthusiasm was soon eroded when his chosen hero revealed himself to be out of touch and ineffective, and was replaced by a series of repressive military juntas.

During his twenties, Borges devoted himself to writing stories and articles for magazines, strange surreal stories such as those in A Universal History of Infamy, with his trademark blend of fact and fiction. To make ends meet, he became a municipal librarian, where he led a “menial and dismal existence” with unprepossessing colleagues. He seems to have spent much of his time in the basement, reading or translating the books.

A turning point came in 1938 when first his father died, and then Borges developed septicaemia after a minor injury, which nearly killed him. After he recovered, and fearing that he could no longer write, he produced “Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote”, the first of the ingenious and highly original stories for which he is best known, always based on a fantastic intellectual conceit, in this instance borrowed from Thomas Carlyle. He has been claimed as one of the forerunners of Latin American “magic realism”, but he also influenced the fantasy and science fiction genres. In lighter vein, Borges would publish spoof stories co-written with his friend Adolfo Bioy-Casares (author of The Invention of Morel, one of the most perfect and haunting novels ever written, in my opinion), using the preposterous pseudonym H.Bustos Domecq. I was delighted to find an English edition of these stories in a Greenwich Village bookstore last year.

After Juan Peron was elected in1946, Borges was made “Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits in the Public Markets” – in response to the series of political articles he had been writing criticizing the rise of fascism. Borges was a liberal, anti-fascist, but equally anti communist. He was soon fired, observing: “dictatorships foment subservience, dictatorships foment cruelty; even more abominable is the fact that they foment stupidity. To fight against those sad monotonies is one of the many duties of writers.” Instead, he became a lecturer in literature, with a police informer attending every lecture. In 1955, the political situation changed again: under a more progressive government, Borges was appointed as Director of the National Library. The following year, he was made Professor of English and American literature at the University of Buenos Aires.

Long before, the blindness which had afflicted his father had turned out to be hereditary. In his 20s, Borges had the first of multiple operations for cataracts, none successful. By now he was completely blind, hence his comment: 

“I speak of God’s splendid irony in granting me at one time 800,000 books and darkness.”

Blindness was one of the reasons that he returned to poetry, a form which is easier to compose entirely in one’s head, and retain in the memory. In an interview he said:

“…in a certain way there is a purification in the blindness. It purifies one of visual circumstances. Circumstances are lost, and the external world, which is always trying to grab us, becomes fainter.”

Also at this time, he also developed his love of Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature. For two years at Cambridge, I followed the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic tripos, and was therefore delighted to find the inscription from the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon on Borges’ grave in Geneva.

In 1961, Borges shared the International Publishers’ Prize with Samuel Beckett, and from then on became a global literary superstar, travelling to the United States and to Europe: he was translated into English particularly after 1967. His first marriage, to an old friend Elsa Astete Millan, was not successful. He then took up with one of his students, Maria Kodama. She was an Argentinian of Japanese origin, who began as his secretary and ended up as his wife.

The return of Juan Peron in 1973 meant that Argentina was again uncomfortable for Borges. He said in an interview: “Damn, the snobs are back in the saddle. If their posters and slogans again defile the city, I’ll be glad I’ve lost my sight. Well, they can’t humiliate me as they did before my books sold so well.” 
The political situation, together with the death of his mother at the age of 99, meant he again spent more time abroad. With Kodama, he compiled a travel atlas of his writing and her pictures. Finally, on June 14 1986, aged 86, Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer, back in Geneva.

Like Wodehouse, Borges is one of a kind, a writer who is widely admired, but is impossible to imitate (as I know to my cost, having tried to copy both). Both led quiet lives (although Borges’ contained rather more sex and romance). Each has suffered from being regarded as a conservative, or worse. On my desert island, I would turn to Wodehouse for relaxation, Borges for stimulation, but I would derive an equal enjoyment from each of them. As the epigraph to this entry shows, Borges, like Wodehouse, had an effortless ability to phrase a sentence – but whereas Wodehouse’s are merely sublimely amusing, those of Borges are always provocatively intelligent.

Links

http://www.themodernword.com/borges/

Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946)

"Now that I so seldom have the strength to paint, I have started on a self-portrait. This way the model is always available, although it isn't at all pleasant to see oneself." - letter to a friend, 1921

This year marks the 150^th anniversary of one of Finland’s most famous painters, whose long career spanned phases of Realist, Romanticism, Impressionism, Naturalism, Symbolism, Expressionism and Abstraction. Across Finland, there will be events and exhibitions to mark her life and work. The fact that she succeeded as a disabled woman artist, in an era where female creativity was rarely celebrated, is truly a cause for celebration.

None of this might have happened had she not falled down stairs and broken her hip as a four year old. As a result, she ended up with a limp. She never attended school, and was left with limited mobility. But being housebound meant that she could concentrate on drawing. By the time she was eleven years old, she had enrolled at the Finnish Art Society – five years younger than the other students. Although the death of her father from TB left the family poor, she continued her studies, despite the disapproval of her mother. Rather than tackling “feminine” themes, at this time she opted for large scale historical paintings.

She then moved to Paris for further study, funded by a grant from the Russian Imperial Senate (Finland being part of Russia at this time), travelling around Europe and trying to promote her career. In 1885 she came close to marriage, but her fiance’s parents thought her bad hip was caused by TB and discouraged the match. Perhaps being single meant she could concentrate on painting, but she wanted to have a child, and even tried at one stage to adopt.

Problems of health and poverty took her back to Finland in 1890. She lived with her mother, whom she looked after till the latter died in 1923. However, she also continued to paint, and taught at the Art Society Drawing School. However, in 1902, her poor health forced her to resign from her teaching position. In this phase of her life, her work moved away from the larger scale and historical style, towards depicting inner experience in an intimate style. Finally, she was rediscovered by art dealer Gösta Stenman, after which her career took off. In 1917, Schjerfbeck finally had her first solo exhibition. From this point on, her career went well and the days of poverty were over. She spent the last two years of her life at a santorium in Saltsjöbaden, Sweden, where she died on January 23 1946.

It’s easy, as with her biography, to see Schjerfbeck as a sad and crippled figure, but actually in her life she showed huge resilience, and finally achieved the success she hoped for. Well into her 80s, she continued to paint her marvelous self-portraits: she was working energetically to the end.

Links

Images

Finnish anniversary celebrations

Franklin D.Roosevelt (1882-1945)

Who was the greatest ever American president? A good case could be made for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is undoubtedly one of the top three people to have held that office. In his first administration from 1933, he helped drag USA out of the Great Depression. He went on to became the only US president ever to serve for three terms. He brought America into the war against significant domestic opposition, and was instrumental in the final Allied victory. All this, from a man who had become paralysed as a result of polio, contracted in 1921. What a hero!

Born into a privileged old American family - President Theodore Roosevelt was a distant cousin - Roosevelt attended Harvard and became a lawyer. His marriage to Eleanor (a fifth cousin) produced six children, but ended up as an expedient political partnership rather than a loving relationship. The major factor in the breakdown was FDR’s long standing affair with Lucy Mercer (codenamed “Mrs Johnson” by the Secret Service).

Roosevelt’s career began in the New York Senate. After he supported Woodrow Wilson’s bid for the Presidency, he was appointed Assistant Secretary to the Navy in 1913. His rise to power was not plain sailing: he failed in a bid to win election to the Senate in 1914, and was the vice-presidential candidate when James Cox were beaten by Warren Harding in the 1920 presidential election. However, in 1929, he was elected Governor of New York, and his career went from strength to strength.

FDR, however, had lost the use of his legs after contracting polio – or possibly another virus such as Guilllaume Barré - during a vacation in August 1921. He was 39. He did not accept that he was permanently disabled, trying a whole range of therapies, in particular swimming. He spent time at the Warm Springs resort, and subsequently bought the centre and turned it into a polio rehabilitation institute. Nor was FDR willing to be known as disabled. He judged, probably rightly, that the public would not be willing to accept a political leader who had a major impairment. So FDR made strenuous efforts, detailed in Hugh Gallagher’s book FDR’s Splendid Deception, to conceal the truth about his disability. For example, out of 35,000 photographs of FDR, only two show him in his wheelchair. Nor is there any newsreel footage, or even political cartoons depicting him as disabled. He did not use the wheelchair in public, nor even crutches. He wore callipers, lent on his aides, and laboriously swung his legs to make it appear that he was walking. His determination to conceal the truth, according to Gallagher, took a severe physical and emotional toll on him over the next twenty years.

However, FDR’s relationship with disability was not simply about denial. He bought the Warm Springs resort and turned it into a polio rehabilitation centre. FDR built “the Little White House”, an accessible holiday home in Warm Springs: he also drove a hand-controlled car. He loved to drive around his Georgia neighbourhood, meeting ordinary men and women. As a person, he was intuitive, not rationalist – no Thomas Jefferson – and had simple tastes, according to Gallagher, who argues that “His paralysis softened the handsome patrician, made him approachable, more human. His physical weakness was something people of every class could understand. At some level of consciousness, perhaps, FDR’s paralysis served him a link with ordinary men and women.” Famous for his dog, Fala, and his broadcast “Fireside chats”, FDR was able to develop the common touch.

Roosevelt also set up the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and helped raise huge amounts of money, particularly with the development of the March of Dimes campaign from 1937. Among the beneficiaries of research funds was Jonas Salk, who went on to develop the polio vaccine.

It was the depths of the Depression – with 25% unemployment and a 50% fall in industrial output since 1929 - when in 1932, disabled FDR won the Democratic nomination and subsequently the Presidency of the United States. In his acceptance speech, he said “I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people... This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms.” He had succeeded by bringing together trades unions, poor whites, Jews, Italians, Poles, African-Americans and Southerners together with the traditional Democrat supporters. As he famously said, in the middle of the banking crisis which heralded his inauguration, “All we have to fear is fear itself”.

As President, Roosevelt was extraordinarily interventionist by American standards past and present. For example, he regulated the banks and other parts of the private sector, and used government money to pay the unemployed construct dams and buildings for the Public Works Administration. Vast government enterprises were created and gold was bought back from citizens by the US Treasury. FDR also repealed Prohibition. No wonder he was so easily re-elected for a second term, with unemployment having fallen from 25% to 14%, and the creation of Social Security payments – such as pensions – and Federal rights to belong to a union, to take strike action, and undertake collective bargaining. In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR argued that economic rights were like a second Bill of Rights: by today’s standards, he resembles a European social democrat, rather than any conventional American politician.

At the beginning of the war, FDR gave Britain moral and economic support, and began a covert correspondence with Winston Churchill. From 1940, he rapidly built up the US armed forces. First, 50 older destroyers were given to Britain, followed by the 1941 Lend Lease agreement, contributing $50 billion to the Allies, to be repaid after the war. He told the American people that he wanted USA to be the Arsenal for Democracy, using his charisma to counter the strong isolationist tendency in US politics. He was elected to a third term – against all previous tradition – promising to do all he could to keep USA out of the conflict.

After Pearl Harbor, war was unavoidable. FDR left the administration of the war to his generals. From 1943, he played the key diplomatic role, at the conferences with Churchill in Cairo, and with Churchill and Stalin in Tehran and finally Yalta. Although Stalin backed FDR’s plan for the United Nations, FDR failed to understand his true ambitions to create Soviet-backed authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe.

FDR’s health had been in decline since 1940. Part of the problem was that he gave up his daily exercise routine during the war: he stopped standing up, and was wheeled around everywhere. After years of struggle, physical and political, he was also depressed and lonely. By 1944 he was very ill. Stress and smoking, added to his neurological problems, resulted in heart disease. Nevertheless, he was elected President for a fourth time, with Harry Truman as his Vice-President. On March 29, just before the founding conference of the United Nations, FDR died from a stroke.

Barely a month later came the declaration of Victory in Europe. As the New York Times wrote at the time: "Men will thank God on their knees a hundred years from now that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House". But FDR should not be seen as a superhuman leader. He was an ordinary human being, struggling with a disability which perhaps taught him compassion and humility, who achieved remarkable things.

Further reading

Hugh Gallagher, FDR’s Splendid Deception, 1985.

Harriet Tubman (1820-1913)

Never having received appropriate recognition in life, after death, Harriet Tubman became an African American icon and a hero to later generations of Civil Rights activists. Her concrete achievements in war and peace, and her struggles on behalf of African Americans and women in particular, surely make her someone that disabled people can also call a role model.

Harriet Tubman was born a slave in Maryland, and was originally named Araminta Ross. Her grandmother, Modesty, had been brought from Africa – according to the family legend, she was of Ashanti origin, from what is modern day Ghana. Tubman’s father managed the timber on a plantation; her mother was a cook. She herself was hired out as a nursemaid aged five or six, and was brutally whipped by her employers. As a teenager, she was in a store when a white man asked her to help restrain another slave. She refused, and when the slave ran away, the white man threw a two pound weight. The iron lump missed the other slave but hit Tubman in the head. She survived the resulting injury, but it caused her siezures and narcolepsy for the rest of her life. Perhaps as a result of the epilepsy, she became very deeply religious, and regularly thereafter had visions and premonitions.

In 1844, Tubman married a freed slave, John Tubman, and changed her name, although remaining enslaved. In 1849, when her owner died, she and her brothers escaped from slavery, only to return. Tubman then escaped again, using the Underground Railway network of abolitionists (including Quakers) to travel north, mainly by night. She later described her feelings on reaching Pennsylvania: "When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven."

Although she was safe in Philadelphia, she said "I was a stranger in a strange land," because her relatives were enslaved in Maryland, “But I was free, and they should be free." Tubman returned to Maryland to help members of her family escape slavery, then other African Americans, including eventually her own parents. In total, she made 13 expeditions, rescuing 70 slaves, and advising many more on how to make their escape. Often disguised, she became known as “Moses”. On one trip, she was able to meet up with her husband, only to find that he had remarried and did not want to come North with her. She reflected later "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."

Harriet Tubman was in touch with other abolitionists, such as John Brown, Thomas Garrett and William SewardIn 1859, Seward sold her land in Auburn, which became a haven for freed slaves and other African Americans.

Tubman was also in touch with African American activists, such as Frederick Douglass. In 1868, Douglass wrote to Tubman to honor her practical achievements and contrast it with his more public advocacy: “You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night. ... The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.”

For obvious reasons, Harriet Tubman was a strong supporter of the Union side during the Civil War, although she was frustrated by Abraham Lincoln’s unwillingness to enforce emanacipation in conquered Confederate territory. She went to offer her support in Port Royal, South Carolina, serving as a nurse. More unusually, for the time, she also conducted reconnaissance missions for the Union forces, for example providing information which helped in the capture of Jacksonville, Florida. She became the first woman to lead an armed assault in the Civil War during the Combahee River Raid which led to the release of 700 slaves. Despite these efforts, she never received any acknowledgement or pension from the United States government for her service during the conflict.

After the war, Tubman returned to Auburn. More injustice followed when, on a trip to New York, she was roughly handled by a train guard and other white passengers, resulting in her arm being broken. Happily, she also ended up marrying a veteran, Nelson Davis, who was more than twenty years younger than her. They were together for twenty years and adopted a daughter together. But Tubman remained poor and struggled for money, particularly after falling victim to two fraudsters. In her later years, she was an active supporter of women’s suffrage, and in the process of speaking and advocating, her own story became more widely known.

Harriet Tubman suffered increasing symptoms from her head injury in the last decades of her life, undergoing brain surgery to relieve her suffering. In 1903, she donated land to her church to open a home for poor African Americans. It was there that in 1913 she died of pneumonia, being buried with full military honours in Auburn. Booker T.Washington spoke at the inauguration of her memorial.

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Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

“Only a man who knew what it was to discern a gleam of hope in a hopeless situation, whose courage was beyond reason, and whose aggressive spirit burned at its fiercest when he was hemmed in and surrounded by enemies, could have given emotional reality to the words of defiance which rallied and sustained us in the menacing summer of 1940” (Anthony Storr)

Winston Churchill was born prematurely and looked after by a wet-nurse, as was the aristocratic way in 1874. Throughout his childhood, he endured a continuing lack of unconditional love and affection from both his parents which, according to the psychiatrist Anthony Storr, left Churchill psychologically ill-equipped. His salvation was his nanny, Mrs Everest, on whose death he described as “my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years I had lived”. However, it seems likely that Churchill also had an underlying genetic disposition towards depression which, interacting with inadequate parenting, resulted in his mental health vulnerabilities. Indeed, his great ancestor the Duke of Marlborough shared his depressive tendencies, as did his own father, Randolph Churchill.

As a child, Churchill was not very impressive: small, thin and with a slight speech impediment, he was bullied at school. In 1893, he wrote from Sandhurst “I am cursed with so feeble a body that I can scarcely support the fatigues of the day; but I suppose I shall get stronger during my stay here.” However, he was determined to be tough, and had no lack of physical courage, having exerted willpower to overcome his fears. He was positively reckless in combat during the Boer War and the First World War.

Churchill was also hugely ambitious: writing from India in 1899, he said “What an awful thing it will be if I don’t come off. It will break my heart for I have nothing else but ambition to cling to…” Storr suggests that he sought recognition as a way of staving off despair. As Churchill said later “We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glow worm”. He had a strong sense that he was being kept for some higher purpose, the cause that finally presented itself when he was sixty-five and his country and the world was in such danger from fascism.

Churchill's energy and stamina are legendary.  When Churchill came back into Government at the outbreak of World War Two, it was my grandfather, then Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty, who welcomed him as First Lord of the Admiralty and made the introductions to colleagues on Sunday 3 September 1939.  In his memoirs, he wrote about the gruelling hours which Churchill kept:

"After a gruelling day's work Churchill became more light-hearted as midnight approached.  He threw off fatigue like a garment and relaxed.  I can see him now in my mind's eye dictating a speech, wearing an old pair of bedroom slippers and padding up and down his room like a caged lion, hands behind his back, head bent forward. A cigar always protruded from his mouth and through thick clouds of smoke he hissed scintillating sentences at the silent typewriter.  He had no prepared notes; he had not even jotted down headlines on the order of his speech.  All those distinguished phrases which characterise his speeches came out fashioned spontaneously in the furnace of his imagination...for two or three hours he dictated thus without a break.  If he finished by two a.m. he was more wide awake than ever.  We vainly suggested it was time for bed.  He usually had other ideas.  "What about a visit to the war room?"  He loved looking at the flags denoting the position of our warships on the oceans of the world."

CP Snow described Churchill as having a strong sense of insight, or intuition, rather than relying on insight. This approach sometimes led him astray, as with the disastrous Dardenelles campaign in the First World War (in which my grandfather fought, and nearly died). But his instincts about Hitler and about Stalin eventually proved to be correct. His brilliance was not that of a thorough or rigorous thinker. Famously, he preferred to have ideas presented to him on half a side of paper, because that was how he himself worked. He could also be very insensitive to the feelings of others, such as the assistants who had to keep him company through the night, and who were not able to take an hour's sleep after lunch or before dinner, as he usually did.

Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, records the Prime Minister in 1944, talking about his depressive tendencies: “I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand right back and if possible to get a pillar between me and the train. I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything. A few drops of desperation.” Yet after the Dardenelles, and in his wilderness years, he may have been deeply depressed, but he was not suicidal. He devised ways of keeping himself going – writing, painting, even bricklaying at his country house at Chartwell.

In his final years, Churchill suffered a recurrence of despair and a sense of his life having been futility, despite all he had achieved for himself and for his country. Hardening of the arteries and possibly Alzheimer’s disease may have contributed. His daughter records him as saying late in life “I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end”. Storr suggests that, as a result of a lack of parental affection, “he had a void at the heart of his being which no achievement or honour could ever completely fill”.

I am not sure how much I like, as opposed to admire, Churchill. His achievements in diverse fields were extraordinary, even though he hardly deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature: I have an early memory of my grandfather reading to me out of his History of the English Speaking Peoples.  Churchill started his career as a Liberal, but was more right wing than this might imply. He was a vigorous advocate of eugenics in the first decades of the twentieth century; he was a supporter of Edward VIII (and Mussolini, at the beginning); he opposed Indian Home Rule and should be assigned some of the blame for the Bengal famine of 1943; he was ultimately responsible for the saturation bombing of German cities in the first half of 1945; his post war term as Prime Minister was not distinguished. Yet despite this and other failures, he was a larger than life man, of ferocious appetites, powerful personality and immense inner drive. Small wonder that he topped a BBC Poll of “One Hundred Greatest Britons” in 2002: to many people, he was not only correct in describing the Second World War as “our finest hour”, he was also the architect of Allied victory. With his recurrent depression, his speech impediment, not to mention the physical and mental decline of his last years, Winston Churchill can also be counted, unquestionably, as a person with disability.

Further reading

Anthony Storr, Churchill’s Black Dog

Georges Couthon (1755-1794)

It was as a footnote in a book by Michel Foucault that I first encountered Georges Couthon, a leading light of the French revolution who had paraplegia. Since then, I have visited the Musee de Carnavalet in Paris several times to see Couthon’s wheelchair, a padded wooden contraption with a handwheel for propulsion, but despite dragging myself up several flights of stairs, it has never been on display. I still cannot work out whether Couthon was barbarous or benign, but the idea that a wheelchair user was at the core of the dramatic political events of the French revolution interests me hugely.

Georges Couthon was born in the Auvergne, son of a lawyer, grandson of a shopkeeper. He also trained as a lawyer, and practised as a barrister in Clermont-Ferrand, where he was noted for the gentleness of his manner and his amiable character as well as for his clear, precise and persuasive language. He gave free legal advice to the poor and supported charitable institutions. He also became a Free Mason.

Although Couthon had suffered from joint problems since his childhood, it was not until 1782 that he progressively lost the use of first one and then his other leg, despite attempting various treatments such as electrotherapy, a milk diet and sulphur baths, . Disability did not stop him marrying in 1787, and he had two children. But for the rest of his life he suffered considerable pain and experiecnced regular health crises which often forced him to stay in bed. His paralysis has never been satisfactorily diagnosed, but may have arisen from an infection of the spinal nerves, or even multiple sclerosis.

In 1791, Couthon became a deputy of the Legislative Assembly. In Paris, he joined the Jacobin club. In the Assembly, he was noted for his eloquence and his democratic ideals. For example, when the King came to the Assembly, Couthon proposed that he be called “King of the French” but neither “Sire” nor “Majesty”.

In 1792, Couthon was elected to the National Convention. At first, he did not take sides in the struggle between the Montagnards and the Girondins. He voted for the death of Louis XVI, and became an associate of Robespierre. When the Girondin faction fell from power, he asked that moderation be used against them in defeat. He then became a member of the Committee of Public Safety.

When in 1793 the city of Lyon rebelled against the new regime, the Committee of Public Safety passed a degree calling for Lyon to be destroyed, to set an example. Couthon was sent to take charge. However, he ensured that while the houses of the rich were pulled down, those of the poor were exempted. Nor was he keen to supervise the mass executions which were demanded. So he requested to be relieved of his commission, and a more brutal leader was sent to replace him. Predictable atrocities followed.

Couthon had returned to Paris, where he became President of the Convention for a few weeks, to be succeeded by the painter Jacques Louis David. From early 1794 he began to use a wheelchair, which had formerly belonged to the Countess of Artois at Versailles. Neither then nor earlier did his disability prevent him carrying out political activity, important missions for the government, and family life.

Couthon helped Robespierre and Saint-Just bring down Danton: it is said that before his execution Danton remarked “If I left my legs to Couthon the Committee of Public Safety might stagger on a bit longer”.

However, less to Couthon’s credit was the Law of 22 Prairial, which, in order to shorten the proceedings of the Revolutionary Tribunal, removed the right of legal defence for people accused of polical opposition to the Revolution,. Couthon argued that a crime against the people was worse than a crime against an individual person, and such “attacks on the existence of a free society” should be treated differently. As a result of this law, tens of thousands were executed during the Terror which followed.

Ironically, it was Couthon himself who was one of the first victims. When Robespierre threatened a new purge of the Convention, his enemies moved against him and his followers before they themselves could be executed. Georges Couthon could have left Paris on a mission to the Auvergne, but he wrote that he wanted either to die or triumph with Robespierre and liberty. During his arrest, he fell down the stairs, and injured his head. Sincere to the last, he said to his enemies: “I am accused of being a conspirator: I wish that you could read into the depths of my soul”.

On 10 Thermidor (28 July), Couthon was executed, along with Robespierre and Saint-Just. Couthon was taken to the scaffold first, but it took the executioners 15 agonising minutes to arrange his body under the guillotine. Never blood-thirsty or cruel like his co-defendents, in death as in life Georges Couthon achieved what my French disability colleagues call “the equality of the Guillotine”.