MORAL and physical decay was a preoccupation consuming the minds of Victorians in the late 19th century. Many Britons harboured nagging doubts that the world’s foremost empire might be in decline? The fear manifested itself in art and literature, especially in Gothic novels such as Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula. Contemporary commentators, social campaigners, liberal imperialists and advocates of ”national efficiency” proffered a raft of varied explanations for the alleged condition of society. Blame was attributed to the rising crime rate, insanity, poverty, unemployment, immigration, radicalism, sexual deviance, feminism, VD, the transformation away from rural life to the disease-ridden towns and the very stresses of modern civilisation (labelled “the dark side of progress”) (‘Deviance, disorder and the self’, www7.bbk.ac.uk).
The Second Boer War, erupting in 1899, did nothing to settle these concerns. Imperial Britain’s early sub-par performance in the conflict against a “rag-tag” army of Afrikaner farmers fed into the rising tide of British fears of the degeneration of its racial stock. The first portends emerged even before the hostilities began – in the recruitment halls of Britain. The early Boer victories required British reinforcements from home leading to a manpower dilemma – the unhealthy British cities and slums churned out recruits from the working class who were “narrow-chested, knock-kneed, wheezing, rickety specimens” of men. At the time of the Boer War the average British soldier was of diminished stature, shorter than that of 1845…40% of those volunteering in Manchester recruitment halls were rejected as unfit for military service. By 1901 the percentage had increased even moreⓐ.
Afrikaner farmer-soldiers
Once the fighting began the lacklustre efforts of the British soldiers struggling to gain the upper hand left their Australian and New Zealand counterparts with a negative impression of the home country’s martial capability. While British soldiery laboured, the Australasian contingents of soldiers conversely equipped themselves well. Colonial troops from Australia and New Zealand possessed natural ability to shoot and ride, equipping them to perform well in the open war on the veldt…this plus their ‘bushman’ capacity to live off the land, meant that they clearly adapted to the South African conditions better than the British soldiersⓑ.
The Antipodean soldiers’ take home message from South Africa was that the “old Britons” were in decline, and that they, the “new Britons”, represented the “coming man”. This view fed into earlier established myths – Australia benefitted, it was said, from a climate infinitely better than Britain, a lavish land … making for a vigorous and healthy ‘race’. WK Hancock described the Australian ‘type’ of man as a harmonious blending of all the British types, nourished by a “generous sufficiency of food (good diet) …breathing space (vast countryside) and sunshine”. At the same time British voices were ominously warning of “racial suicide” and the waning of the nation’s “racial energy”, the self-styled “Better Britons” of Australia and New Zealand were talking up their own supposed “racial vigour”.
Britannia saving the world from barbarism (Source: http://teachmiddleeast.lib.uchicago.edu/historical-perspectives/middle-east-seen-through-foreign-eyes/islamic-period/image-resource-bank/image-07.html)
Footnote:“Degeneracy” out of vogue As Victorian Britain evolved into Edwardian Britain, the fears of racial deterioration didn’t diminish, birth-rates which were already in decline going back decades had plummeted dramatically since the Victorians. However, by the time of World War I degeneration theory had lost favour, advances in the understanding of genetics and the vogue for psychoanalytic thinking had prompted its obsolescence (‘Degeneration theory’, www.artandpopularculture.com).
Source: PinterestPostscript: Decadence and decay
“Decay” is closely related to the word “decadence” (Latin, decadentia, meaning ‘fall”. In 19th century imperialist thinking decadence and decay was a characteristic associated with the colonial anxieties of empire. The phenomenal success of the imperial powers, it was thought as in the case of past examples like Rome, made the elite complacent and weak, thus the seed of its downfall. The response of contemporary Europeans was a preoccupation with the morality and cultural values of their own societies (‘Decline and Fall’, William Rees, History Today, January 2023).
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ⓐ one contemporary commentator, cricket writer Albert E Knight, thought the remedy for the physical and moral degeneration of Englishmen lay in cricket – advocating for the creation of more playing fields as an antidote to the decline of young working class men, so that they could be the beneficiaries of the ”cricket way of making honest and healthy Englishmen”
ⓑ a report conducted in 1904 with the title “Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration” confirmed that Britons were even more physically unfit than the war had suggested
THE absence of cars in cities during the coronavirus lockdown has been a boon to cyclists, both for the recreational kind and for commuter cyclists. There has been an “unprecedented surge in popularity” of bicycle traffic—even in the land of the automobile, the United States—with many bike shops reporting a doubling of their average sales…such is the demand now that bike manufacturers can’t build them fast enough [‘Cycling ‘explosion’: coronavirus fuels surge in US bike ridership’, (Miranda Bryant), The Guardian, 13-May-2020, www.theguardian.com; ‘Australia is facing a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ as cycling booms, advocates say’, (David Mark), ABC News, 16-May-2020, www.abc.net.au].
Starley’s Rover (Source: sewalot.com)
The renewed present enthusiasm to take up bike-riding in response to the pandemic recalls earlier periods of “bike-mania”in the West—late 1860s to mid-1870s and the 1890s—as the humble bike was evolving into its modern form. Credit for the basic look of the standard, no-frills bicycle as we we think of it today is generally given to John Kemp Starley for his 1885 invention, the “Rover Safety Bicycle”. The Rover’s similar-sized wheels, chain drive attached to the crankshaft and rear wheel, diagonal frame and relative lightness (20kg) retains the basic design of the modern bicycle [‘Pedal Your Way Through the Bicycle’s Bumpy History’, [Evan Andrews), History, 30-Jun-2017, [www.history.com].
1889 Ladies Rover Safety Bike (Image: bicyclehistory.net)
The Rover was seen as a curiosity at first, but when two years later John Boyd Dunlop manufactured the pneumatic tyre, it was a game changer for the new bicycle. Starley’s prototype and all two-wheelers that followed now had a smoother, cushioned ride on the typically bumpy roads of the 19th century. Being lighter the new bike also went faster [‘How bicycles transformed our world’, (Roff Smith), National Geographic,17-Jun-2020, www.nationalgeographic.com].
Most folk are aware that before the modern bicycle there was the penny-farthing – also known as the high-wheeler or by the all-purpose term, the ‘ordinary’. The farthing, whose feasibility owes much to French mechanic Eugène Meyer’s innovation of the tension-spoked wheel, was popular through to the end of the 1880s but prone to accidents❉. The lineage of the modern bike however goes back still further – to the bulky, all-wood laufmaschine (“running machine”), invented by Karl von Drais in 1817 in western Germany. The laufmaschine⌧ was the first mode of transport to utilise the in-line, bi-wheel principle, but slim-lined and graceful it wasn’t! Bereft of pedals, brakes and chains, it was propelled by the rider pushing against the ground. The addition of pedals came with another German inventor, Philipp Moritz Fischer, and modified by a French blacksmith/ inventor, Pierre Michaux, both contributing to the development of the modern bicycle. The 1860s brought a variant on the velocipede known as the ‘boneshaker’ (aptly describing the experience for the rider). Nonetheless, with its stronger and malleable metal frames it sparked the first bicycle craze in France which then spread worldwide. By the 1870s the ordinary was state-of-the-art in bikes with its hollow steel tubular frames and forks, steel rims and solid rubber tyres. By now the bike epicentre had crossed the Channel to England and the new standard became the ‘Ariel’ model designed by James Starley of Coventry (uncle of John K Starley), who added centre pivot steering, tangent spokes and a mounting step [‘A Beautifully Illustrated History of Nearly Two Centuries of Bicycle Design and Technology’, (Tony Hadland & Hans-Erhard Lessing), Slate, 22-Jul-2014, www.slate.com; ‘From boneshakers to bicycles’, Britannica, www.britannica.com].
The Drais Laufmaschine, 1817
1890s, the world gone crazy for the bicycle
By the 1890s demand for the new safety bicycle saw mass production take off. The earlier “high rollers” were now past tense. Bikes were now practical and stable vehicles with gears and brakes, the earlier serpentine-shaped frame replaced by a diamond pattern. By the decade’s end most bicycles were only 11 to 16 kg in weight (Britannica). Another technological breakthrough making riding easier for the cyclist came in 1898 when Briton William Reilly invented the prototype for variable gears, a two-speed gear called “The Hub”. Columbus Bicycles in Hartford, Connecticut, could make a bicycle a minute due to the speed of its automated assembly line – a technological innovation later successfully copied by the automobile industry⟴. The transfer of technology from bicycles could be seen in various ways. Both Henry Ford and the Wright brothers started as bike mechanics before making the switch to the invention and production of other, more advanced forms of transport (Smith).
Instrument of freedom and independence
The bicycle gave the masses mobility, it no longer mattered that the less well-off couldn’t afford to travel by horse and carriage…bicycles were affordable, lightweight and easy to maintain. Ordinary folk suddenly were able to explore the countrysides, visit towns and places – far and near. Just about everyone, it seems, got into the act of riding bicycles – royalty and rulers in places like Russia, Zanzibar and Afghanistan took up cycling; First-wave feminists – Susan B Anthony declared that “bicycling emancipated women more than anything else”; women were especially enthusiastic as the activity allowed them to escape their voluminous and cumbersome Victorian skirts for more practical attire such as bloomers. When the lighter, less unwieldy safety bicycles came along, police in the UK were quick to adopt them in their work. Likewise, the NYC police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt mounted the city police on bikes to apprehend the new “public danger” of ‘scorchers’ (“speed demon” cyclists ) (Smith).
Source: Pinterest
The new craze for bicycles got the nod of approval from the US medical fraternity as well…advocated by doctors as “a boon to all mankind, a thing of beauty, good for the spirits, good for health and vitality” [David McCullough, The Wright Brothers: The Dramatic Story Behind the Legend, (2015)].
The conventional explanation for the demise of the bicycle boom is the rise of the commercially-viable automobile, but other factors may have contributed to the bicycle’s decline, such as the rapid growth of the early mass transit systems such as streetcars and trams which were a more practical alternative to bikes, especially in bad weather (Britannica).
1971 Tour de France (Source: Profimedia)
Endnote: in 2020 with the wholesale disruption to international sport due to COVID-19, the world’s premier event in the cycling calendar, the Tour de France was in a very select group of major sporting events given the green light to go ahead as normal, albeit delayed.
Columbia Bicycles, Connecticut (Source: etsy.com)
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❉ the penny farthings were inherently unsafe hence the name applied to Starley’s improved-design bike, the Rover safety bicycle. Also appearing around this time were the tricycle and the unicycle
⌧ it also went by other names, draisienne and vélocipède, and by the derogatory name, “dandy horse”
⟴ Columbia Bicycles got into the business in the 1870s when its proprietor and bike enthusiast Albert A Pope starting importing Excelsoir Duplex ordinaries from England, the manufacturer also formed the League of American Wheelmen to advocate for better roads in American for bicycling – the “Good Road Movement” of the 1890s [‘Albert Augustus Pope’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
ONE of the many memorable paragraphs of Herman Melville’s classic allegorical work of American fiction, Moby-Dick, is when the narrator/character Ismael speculates on what remuneration he might receive for signing on to the voyage of the whaler Pequod:
❝ I was already aware that in the whaling business they pay no wages; but all hands, including the captain, receive certain shares of the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship’s company… I made no doubt that from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay—that is, the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage…what they call a rather long lay, yet it was better than nothing ❞.
As Elmo P Hofman elaborated in a 1926 essay, “the whaleman was not paid by day, week or month, nor was he allowed a certain sum of every barrel of oil or for every pound of bone captured” …his earnings came from a “specified fractional share” (a lay) of the net profits of the trip (cited in ‘How Profit Sharing Sent Captain Ahab in Search of Moby Dick, Joseph Thorndike, Forbes, 15-Dec-2015, www.forbes.com). Rather than being wage-earners the entire crew including the skipper were sort of joint shareholders in the commercial venture.
The 1956 film
The experiences of real-life whaling boats of the era of Melville’s novel offers insights into the synchronic system of divvying up the profits – if we look at the profits of the 1843 whaling voyage of the Abigail of New Bedford⚀, it reveals a 70/30 split of the dividends, 70% to the owners and partners and 30% sub-divided between the captain and crew (Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, Karen Gleiter, In Pursuit of Leviathan (1997)). This was pretty typical for the period of what has been described as “an oddly denominated profit-sharing scheme” (‘The Whaleman’s Lay’, Ahab Beckons, 04-Feb-2018, www.ahab-beckons.blogspot.com). A captain might score a lay of ⅛th whereas a ‘green’ hand might only net a ¹⁄₃₅₀th lay or worse, so the novice sea-hand Ismael was perhaps over-optimistic about his likely share (in the novel Ismael is offered an exceptionally long lay which after haggling hard he manages to have reduced to a more acceptable lay of ¹⁄₃₀₀th). So, like the unknowables or “known unknowns” of the stock exchange, a crew member of a whaling vessel engaging in this pelagic industrial arena, even if he knows what lay he had scored, still won’t have any idea of how much he’ll earn for his months and months of hard ship work. Everything hinged on the voyage’s profitability.
Then on top of all this there were deductions from a crew member’s lay when he did finally get the money…anything an ordinary whaleman purchased from the ship’s store during the voyage—tobacco, boots, clothes, etc—was subtracted from his lay. The same if he was given an advance to send to his family. A crew member, especially one with a very long lay, could easily end up in debt to the ship’s owners at voyage’s end (‘Life Aboard’, New Bedford Whaling Museum, www.whalingmuseum.org).
New Bedford Whaling Museum
𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪
⚀ 50 miles south of Boston, from the early 1820s on it supplanted Nantucket as America’s foremost whaling port
🇬🇧 🔫 🇬🇧 The phenomena of James Bond in both book and movie form was meant to be purely escapist entertainment, bereft of the slightest pretension that they were anything remotely cerebral. Interesting then that Bond has gleaned so much serious academic enquiry and analysis over the years. A sample of articles on JSTOR reveals a feast of scholarly entries on the subject of James Bond — “Shaken, Not Stirred Britishness: James Bond, Race, and the Transnational Imaginary”, “The Marketable Misogyny of James Bond“, “Paradoxical Masculinity: James Bond, Icon of Failure”, “Why James Bond Villains Prefer Post-Soviet Architecture”, “The Spy Who Loved Globalization”, ”How safe do you feel?: James Bond, Skyfall, and the Politics of the Secret Agent in an Age of Ubiquitous Threat”, and so on it goes.
The James Bond film franchise is certainly sui generis among English-language movie series. October 5 this year marked the 60th anniversary of the introduction of James Bond to cinema screen audiences (Dr No, 1962), and the cinematic sequence remains as yet unbroken, notwithstanding ”the elephant in the room” of last year’s No Time To Die in which the indestructible James Bond actually dies! Virtually all other elongated movie series have ultimately reached a natural (or unnatural) termination point – even the long-running, prolific and increasingly unimaginative Carry On comedy series ran out of steam by the Eighties 🄰.
Ian Fleming ‘Casino Royale’, 1st 007 novel (Image: bondfanevents.com)°Box office El Dorado Over a six-decade period the 25 movies🄱 constituting the James Bond industry made by Eon Productions (Broccoli and Saltzman’s production company) have earned a total somewhere north of US seven billion dollars. Boosted undoubtedly by the mass popularity of screen Bond🄲 the James Bond spy novels written by former WWII naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming, on which the cinema franchise is based, have themselves racked up sales of more than 60 million copies.
If you came anew to the Bond movies looking for a healthy dose of gritty social realism based on the world of espionage a la John LeCarre, you’d be sadly disappointed. The franchise’s entries are all about fantasy and high-adventure escapism. Unlike the shadowy cloak-and-dagger characters that the real world of spies and secret agents (apparently?) inhabit, James Bond 007 in his public persona is an open book, he doesn’t use a fake name, he doesn’t try to disguise his appearance or furtively hide in dark corners. He’s direct, brash, brutal and recklessly undisciplined in his actions and antics, with a propensity to be easily distracted from the assignment at hand by the happy prospect of a spot of horizontal folk-dancing.
Though wildly successful at the box office over an extraordinarily long shelf life, James Bond is not everyone’s cup of tea. An early critic Judith Crist described the series’ first vehicle Dr No as “an updated comic strip of the Fu Manchu school, fast moving, faster shooting, utterly fantastic”. JB has been pilloried by feminists for his unrepentant chauvinism—especially in Sean Connery and Roger Moore’s interpretations of the character—and four decades of “Bond Girl“ objectification of women. The backlash against JB’s misogyny compelled producers to tone down the blatant sexism in the most recent incarnation of the most famous of all British secret agents played by Daniel Craig. Bond has also been excoriated as a “thug trained to wear a tuxedo”…007’s “license to kill” green-light unleashes the agent’s deep predilection for perpetrating extreme, lethal violence in cold blood.
Predictable Bondery Then there’s the plots! The storylines are more than fanciful…James Bond’s arch-villains hatch mind-bogglingly ludicrous schemes which suggest that they have been maxing out on the Kool-Aid – such as nuking Fort Knox’s gold reserves; constructing a massive capsule-gobbling rocket to capture the space crafts of both superpowers; detonating explosives along the Californian fault lines to destroy Silicon Valley; ad nauseum. The franchise has also been lambasted for being BORING! Agent 007 has been called out for living “the same story over and over” (Elizabeth Winterhalter). Repetition is a constant motif…we see Bond right on cue rendezvous with a typically crotchety “M” to be briefed on his latest world-rescue mission, flirting with Miss Moneypenny in their regular tête-à-tête ritual, and getting a rundown on the very latest weapon gadgetry from an equally irascible “Q”. In every second scene, just about, JB is pursued by a posse of miscellaneous henchmen only to miraculously escape certain death by the barest of margins every time. The movies almost invariably end in the same formulaic fashion: Bond infiltrates the arch-villain’s impregnable lair, triumphs over the likes of Blofeld and Goldfinger and numerous assorted henchmen, and finishes by bedding his leading lady on an inflatable dingy, in space, a balcony, etc and signing off to “M” with a corny double entendre🄳.
Bond with “Jaws”, larger than life henchman turned ally
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Cultural relevance to the West Some Bondphiles have an altogether different take on this Groundhog Dog trait in James Bond of repeating the same basic plot structure infinitum…they see it as a key ingredient of the franchise’s success: ”the simplicity of the plot arch allows the films to seamlessly transcend and become culturally relevant to the audience” (‘What is the Secret of James Bond’s Eternal Success?’, www.undandy.com). Another explanation of James Bond’s allure contends that the fictional MI6 spy instantly resonated with Western audiences in the climate of the Cold War, being seen as a kind of antidote to the prevailing morass of the social order (especially in the US). 007’s talent as a fixer of “global crises” casts him in the guise of a saviour salvaging the world from an inevitable downward spiral into chaos and discord (‘James Bond and America in the Sixties’, Drew Moniot, JUFA, Vol.28, No.3, 1976). Moniot also attributes JB’s popularity in America to the existence of a vacuum of real-life heroes in 1960s society, the emergence of 007, a mythological hero who was invincible, fulfilled that psychological need at that time.
British Bond and foreign Blofeld
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Vicarious🄴 charm of the bon vivant lifestyle Part of the appeal lies in the character of James Bond. Fleming visualised 007 as fit, sensual, with superior grey matter and a technical wiz, a model of “red-blooded heterosexuality”. He also emphasises Bond’s “Britishness” in the novels, JB’s 100% success rate on missions and in the romance stakes presents Bond as representing the “Best of British”… Fleming’s idea of an antidote to the sad realities of a declining Britain denuded of empire. Leaving aside the ever-present mortal danger to his very existence, Bond leads “a ridiculously good lifestyle (by) any man’s standards”🄵(Undandy), his appearance is akin to a “GQ cover model”; an endless supply of the best alcohol (which the MI6 agent knocks back with worryingly frequency); the best cars (trademark Aston Martin DB5); his apparently irresistible sex appeal to women (‘Bond by rules’, Tim Brayton, 2012, www.alternateending.com). As crime doyen Raymond Chandler neatly put it, “Every man wants to be James Bond and every woman wants to be with him”.
Tropeville central Aside from JB’s personal magnetism, the series’ catalogue of recurring tropes helps to cement the franchise’s appeal. Familiar ingredients include the default opening sequence depicting 007 in action through the prism of a gun barrel; over-the-top hi-tech gadgets; a smorgasbord of diverse exotic locations; a brisk cocktail of action stunts (car chases, boat chases, ski pursuits, etc); the centre-stage presence of the Bond Girls and of a megalomaniacal arch-villain mastermind; all eagerly anticipated by James Bond‘s legion of rusted-on fans. Also adding value and lustre to the films are the high quality title-songs – like the utterly unforgettably iconic Goldfinger theme, and not far behind that Shirley Bassey classic, Live and Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever, and You Only Live Twice, etc, etc.
Bond, tapping into the zeitgeist of the day One (insider) view on the longevity of James Bond comes from those at the helm of the multi-billion dollar franchise today, Cubby Broccoli’s daughter Barbara and his step-son Michael Wilson. Broccoli’s heirs attribute the success to the family having managed to keep hold of the franchise’s reins throughout its entire history, and to JB’s and the franchise’s adaptability, 007 being able to change with the times🄶 (‘Why James Bond Has Endured For So Long, According to the Franchise Producer’, Joshua Meyer, Film, 8-Dec-2021, www.slashfilm.com).
Footnote: James Bond, books v films
The early James Bond movies kept pretty faithful to the plots of Ian Fleming’s crime thrillers, however as the series went on, the screen adaptations bore increasingly less resemblance to the novels (eventually everything except the Fleming titles were jettisoned). Other differences relate to the protagonist himself, 007’s proclivity for terminating with extreme prejudice (and without a skerrick of compunction) the various henchmen aligned against him increases tenfold from the books to the movies, as does his appetite for sexual conquests whilst on the job. Another point of departure from the novels for the films is the lack of story continuity from one picture to the next (eg, Bond in a grieving state at his wife’s murder at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service doesn’t get a mention in the follow-up Bond feature).
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🄰 probably the closest to it is the Star Wars franchise (1977 to the present)
🄱 there was in addition one non-Eon Bond film, Never Say Never Again, a Taliafilm production
🄲 even Bond’s snobbish swipe at the Beatles in Goldfinger at the height of Beatlemania in 1964 didn’t dent his appeal with the public
🄳 with one or two notable exceptions…On Her Majesty’s Secret Service ends with the death of Mrs James Bond and No Time To Die ends with the death of 007 himself
🄴 in creating the overachieving superspy Fleming was in fact acting out his own vicarious impulses…endowing 007 with the sort of ideal, action-man hero lifestyle that the writer dreamt of
🄵 one writer characterised it as “elegant lifestyle porn” (Brayton)
🄶 one example: in the rebooted Skyfall (2012), the film and JB concern themselves with the very real and very contemporary threat of the ubiquity of the internet and cyber-terrorism
figcaption class=”wp-element-caption”>Turn-of-the-century “degen” lit
