Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Strange bedfellows

The IPPR think-tank has recently published a report entitled Pubs and Places: the social value of community pubs, which attacks the government for adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to pubs through regulation and tax and warns community pubs could disappear altogether. Fair enough, you might think, although as Simon Clark points out here it is strangely quiet on the single biggest factor leading pubs to close.

Also, no surprise to see Mike Benner of CAMRA lending his support to the report, but who’s this alongside him, none other than the unfortunately-named Don Shenker of our favourite fakecharity Alcohol Concern. He says:

Community pubs perform a valuable social function and are frequently the cornerstone of rural life, providing safe and friendly drinking environments. Such pubs are often excellent examples of responsible drinks retailing.
That sounds like something of a Damascene conversion as I had always thought Alcohol Concern was essentially an anti-drink pressure group. In reality, this is just a cynical policy stance aimed at playing divide and rule with drinkers and the drinks industry. I’m not saying that they are all prohibitionists as such, but their fundamental agenda is to reduce alcohol consumption, increase prices and restrict availability.

If they had their way, there would be a damn sight fewer pubs than there are at the moment. In even the best-run community pub you will see plenty of people drinking more than four alcohol units at a sitting and a fair number becoming distinctly merry by the end of the evening, activities which no doubt Mr Shenker would look upon with flinty disapproval.

At moments like this, you sometimes can’t help wondering whether CAMRA has somehow been infiltrated by anti-drink pressure groups who have now worked their way up to the high command of the organisation and are intent on slowly destroying everything it has ever achieved. I hope Mike Benner has a very long spoon – he’s going to need it.

Otto Geist


Otto William Geist was an archaeologist, explorer, and naturalist who worked in the circumpolar north and for the University of Alaska for much of his adult life. The Otto William Geist Building, named in his honor, on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus houses the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

Geist was born in Kircheiselfing, Bavaria, to Franz Antone Geist and his wife. He had 14 brothers and sisters.

Geist came to Alaska in the early 1920s with his brother Josef, and worked for the Alaska Railroad, as an engineer on board the sternwheeler Teddy R., and as a miner in Bettles, Alaska. In 1925 he began collecting Native artifacts and in 1926 began collecting for the university, with support from university president Charles E. Bunnell.

During World War II, Geist helped to organize the Alaska Territorial Guard.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Wetherspoon’s

There has been some severe criticism of Wetherspoon’s here. Apparently they are downmarket drinking dens favoured by alcoholics.

This may be the case in London, but out in the provinces I find Wetherspoons’ pubs in general the haunt of middle-class drinkers who want a reasonable meal and aren’t willing to chance their arm in a “real” pub. They are cosy, middle-class havens, and they are very busy. They are, in a sense “pub lite”.

I’m no great fan of Wetherspoon’s, but the idea that they are downmarket drinking dens is ludicrous.

Sunday, Sunday

Back in the mid-80s, when we were still allowed only a measly two hours’ drinking time on Sunday lunchtime, my local pub would be standing room only from about 12.15 to last orders. Obviously something that was strictly rationed was enthusiastically consumed when available. Move forward 25 years, following progressive liberalisation of licensing hours, at 1.30 pm it’s practically deserted. Yet during the following 90 minutes large numbers of customers come in, so by three it’s heaving. A strange but dramatic change of drinking habits. I also often notice the car parks of food-oriented pubs full at 6 or 7 on Sunday evening, which is about the last time I would contemplate going out to a pub for a meal.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Nottingham


Had a trip to Nottingham today – there seemed to be some kind of morris dancing festival on. It’s a very characterful place, which I always feel is more like a large historic town than a city in the mould of Manchester or Birmingham. I did a number of pubs – the most memorable were the two Castle Rock houses, the News House and the Vat & Fiddle. Have Tynemill now metamorphised into Castle Rock? Sad to see the impressive Queens Hotel opposite the station, once a Shipstones’ stronghold, now closed and turned into a “Floor covering centre”.

Friday, March 27, 2009

J.B.S. Haldan


John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was a British-born geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He was one of the founders (along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright) of population genetics.

Haldane was born in Oxford to physiologist John Scott Haldane and Louisa Kathleen Haldane (née Trotter), and descended from an aristocratic intellectual Scottish family. His younger sister, Naomi, became a writer. His uncle was Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane, politician and one time Secretary of State for War; his aunt was the author Elizabeth Haldane. His father was a scientist, a philosopher and a Liberal, and his mother was a Conservative. Haldane took interest in his father’s work very early in his childhood.

He was educated at Eton and New College Oxford and served in the British Army during the First World War in the Black Watch regiment.

Between 1919 and 1922 he was a Fellow of New College, Oxford, then moved to Cambridge University, where he accepted a Readership in Biochemistry at Trinity College and taught there until 1932. During his nine years at Cambridge, Haldane worked on enzymes and genetics, particularly the mathematical side of genetics. Haldane wrote many popular essays on science that were eventually collected and published in 1927 in a volume entitled Possible Worlds.

He then accepted a position as Professor of Genetics and moved to University College London where he spent most of his academic career. Four years later he became the first Weldon Professor of Biometry at University College London.

In 1923, in a talk given in Cambridge, Haldane, foreseeing the exhaustion of coal for power generation in Britain, proposed a network of hydrogen-generating windmills. This is the first proposal of the hydrogen-based renewable energy economy.

In 1925, G. E. Briggs and Haldane derived a new interpretation of the enzyme kinetics law described by Victor Henri in 1903, different from the 1913 Michaelis-Menten equation. Leonor Michaelis and Maud Menten assumed that enzyme (catalyst) and substrate (reactant) are in fast equilibrium with their complex, which then dissociates to yield product and free enzyme. The Briggs-Haldane equation was of the same algebraic form, but their derivation is based on the quasi steady state approximation, that is the concentration(s) of intermediate complex(es) do(es) not change. As a result, the microscopic meaning of the "Michaelis Constant" (km) is different. Although commonly referring it as Michaelis-Menten kinetics, most of the current models actually use the Briggs-Haldane derivation.

Haldane made many contributions to human genetics and was one of the three major figures to develop the mathematical theory of population genetics. He is usually regarded as the third of these in importance, after R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright. His greatest contribution was in a series of ten papers on "A Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection" which was the major series of papers on the mathematical theory of natural selection. It treated many major cases for the first time, showing the direction and rates of changes of gene frequencies. It also pioneered in investigating the interaction of natural selection with mutation and with migration. Haldane's book, The Causes of Evolution (1932), summarized these results, especially in its extensive appendix. This body of work was a component of what came to be known as the "modern evolutionary synthesis", re-establishing natural selection as the premier mechanism of evolution by explaining it in terms of the mathematical consequences of Mendelian genetics.

Haldane introduced many quantitative approaches in biology such as in his essay On Being the Right Size. His contributions to theoretical population genetics and statistical human genetics included the first methods using maximum likelihood for estimation of human linkage maps, and pioneering methods for estimating human mutation rates. His was the first to calculate the mutational load caused by recurring mutations at a gene locus, and to introduce the idea of a "cost of natural selection".

Haldane is also known for an observation from his essay, On Being the Right Size, which Jane Jacobs and others have since referred to as Haldane's principle. This is that sheer size very often defines what bodily equipment an animal must have: "Insects, being so small, do not have oxygen-carrying bloodstreams. What little oxygen their cells require can be absorbed by simple diffusion of air through their bodies. But being larger means an animal must take on complicated oxygen pumping and distributing systems to reach all the cells." The conceptual metaphor to animal body complexity has been of use in energy economics and secession ideas.

Haldane was a keen experimenter, willing to expose himself to danger to obtain data. One experiment involving elevated levels of oxygen saturation triggered a fit which resulted in him suffering crushed vertebrae. In his decompression chamber experiments, he and his volunteers suffered perforated eardrums, but, as Haldane stated in What is Life, "the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment."

In 1952, he received the Darwin Medal from the Royal Society. In 1956, he was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Among other awards, he received the Feltrinelli Prize, an Honorary Doctorate of Science, an Honorary Fellowship at New College, and the Kimber Award of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the Linnean Society of London's prestigious Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1958.

Haldane became a socialist during World War I, supported the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War and finally become a Communist. He was an enthusiastic, idealistic Marxist, and wrote many articles in the Communist Daily Worker. He was the chairman of the editorial board of the London edition for several years.

His vision of the Socialist principle can be considered pragmatic. In On being the right size, Haldane doubted that socialism could be operated on the scale of the British Empire or the United States or, implicitly, the Soviet Union: "while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge."

In 1937, Haldane became a Marxist and an open supporter of the Communist Party although not a member of the party. In 1938, he proclaimed enthusiastically that "I think that Marxism is true." He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1942. The first edition of his children's book My Friend Mr. Leakey contained an avowal of his Party membership which was removed from later editions.

Events in the Soviet Union, such as the rise of anti-Mendelian agronomist Trofim Lysenko and the crimes of Stalin, may have caused him to break with the Party later in life, although he showed a partial support of Lysenko and Stalin. Pressed to speak out about the rise of Lysenkoism and the persecution of geneticists in the Soviet Union as anti-Darwinist and the denouncement of genetics as incompatible with dialectical materialism, Haldane shifted the focus to the United Kingdom and a criticism of the dependence of scientific research on financial patronage.

In 1941, Haldane wrote about the Soviet trial of his friend and fellow geneticist Nikolai Vavilov:

"The controversy among Soviet geneticists has been largely one between the academic scientist, represented by Vavilov and interested primarily in the collection of facts, and the man who wants results, represented by Lysenko. It has been conducted not with venom, but in a friendly spirit. Lysenko said (in the October discussions of 1939): 'The important thing is not to dispute; let us work in a friendly manner on a plan elaborated scientifically. Let us take up definite problems, receive assignments from the People's Commissariat of Agriculture of the USSR and fulfill them scientifically. Soviet genetics, as a whole, is a successful attempt at synthesis of these two contrasted points of view.'"

His ambiguous attitude toward the persecution of Vavilov was explainable by the atmosphere of the period, where the involvement in the Communist movement needed an all-or-nothing stand. His attitude changed dramatically at the end of World War II, when Lysenkoism reached a totalitarian influence in the Communist movement. He then become an explicit critic of the regime.

He left the Party in 1950, shortly after considering standing for Parliament as a Communist Party candidate. He continued to admire Stalin, describing him in 1962 as "a very great man who did a very good job."

The most famous of Haldane's many students, John Maynard Smith, shared his mixture of political and scientific interests to some extent, but broke away from the Communist Party in 1956.

Haldane's move to India, initially to the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) was influenced by a number of factors. Officially he stated that his chief political reason was in response to the Suez Crisis. He wrote: "Finally, I am going to India because I consider that recent acts of the British Government have been violations of international law." His interest in India was also due to his interest in biological research, belief that the warm climate would do him good and that India offered him freedom and shared socialist dreams.

At the ISI, he headed the biometry unit and spent time researching a range of topics and guiding other researchers around him. He was keenly interested in inexpensive research and he wrote to Julian Huxley about his observations on Vanellus malabaricus boasting that he made them from the comfort of his backyard. Haldane took an interest in anthropology, human genetics and botany. He advocated the use of Vigna sinensis (cowpea) as a model for studying plant genetics. He took an interest in the pollination of the common weed Lantana camara. The quantitative study of biology was his main focus and he lamented that Indian universities forced those who took up biology to give up on an education in mathematics. Haldane took an interest in the study of floral symmetry. His wife, Helen Spurway, conducted studies on wild silk moths. He was also interested in Hinduism and after his arrival he became a vegetarian. Unable to get along with the director, P.C. Mahalanobis, Haldane resigned in February 1961 and moved to a newly established biometry unit in Orissa.

Haldane became an Indian citizen.

Haldane was a famous science popularizer. His essay, Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1924), was remarkable in predicting many scientific advances but has been criticized for presenting a too idealistic view of scientific progress. Haldane’s book shows the effect of the separation between sexual life and pregnancy as a satisfactory one on human psychology and social life. The book was regarded as shocking science fiction at the time, being the first book about ectogenesis (the development of foetuses in artificial wombs) - "test tube babies", brought to life without sexual intercourse or pregnancy.

Haldane was a friend of the author Aldous Huxley, who parodied him in the novel "Antic Hay" (1923) as Shearwater, "the biologist too absorbed in his experiments to notice his friends bedding his wife". Haldane's discourse in Daedalus on ectogenesis was an influence on Huxley's Brave New World (1932) which features a eugenic society.

C. S. Lewis wrote much of his three interplanetary space novels, The Space Trilogy, in response to Haldane, whom Lewis considered to be an immoral man. Lewis modelled the character Weston, featured in the first two books, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, on Haldane.

Haldane was one of those, along with Olaf Stapledon, Charles Kay Ogden, I. A. Richards, and H. G. Wells, whom Lewis accused of scientism, "the belief that the supreme moral end is the perpetuation of our own species, and that this is to be pursued even if, in the process of being fitted for survival, our species has to be stripped of all those things for which we value it—-of pity, of happiness, and of freedom." Shortly after the third book of the Ransom Trilogy appeared, J. B. S. Haldane criticised all three of them in an article entitled "Auld Hornie, F.R.S.". The title reflects the sarcastic tone of the article, Auld Hornie being the pet name given to the devil by the Scots and F.R.S. standing for "Fellow of the Royal Society". Lewis’s response, "A Reply to Professor Haldane", was never published during his lifetime and apparently never seen by Haldane. In it, Lewis claims that he was attacking scientism, not scientists, by challenging the view of some that the supreme goal of our species is to perpetuate itself at any expense.

Haldane died on 1 December 1964.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Archie Cochrane


Professor Archie Cochrane was born in Kirklands, Galashiels, Scotland. He qualified in 1938 at University College Hospital, London, at University College London and joined the Medical Research Council's Pneumoconiosis Unit at Llandough Hospital, a part of Cardiff University School of Medicine in 1948. Here he began a series of studies on the health of the population of Rhondda Fach — studies which pioneered the use of randomised controlled trials (RCTs).

Archie Cochrane’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War, where he served as a member of a British Ambulance Unit, and later during World War II as Medical Officer at a number of prisoner of war camps, had a profound and lasting effect on his future practice of medicine.

In 1960 he was appointed David Davies Professor of Tuberculosis and Chest Diseases at the Welsh National School of Medicine, now Cardiff University School of Medicine and nine years later became Director of the new Medical Research Council’s Epidemiology Research Unit at 4 Richmond Road, Cardiff.

His 1971 Rock Carling monograph Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections of Health Services was very influential. These ideas and his advocacy of randomized controlled trials eventually led to the development of the Cochrane Library database of systematic reviews, the establishment of the UK Cochrane Centre in Oxford and the international Cochrane Collaboration.

R.A. Fisher


Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, and geneticist. He was described by Anders Hald as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and Richard Dawkins described him as "the greatest of Darwin's successors".

Fisher was born in East Finchley in London, England, to George and Katie Fisher. His father was a successful fine arts dealer. He had a happy childhood, being doted on by three older sisters, an older brother, and his mother, who died when Fisher was 14. His father lost his business in several ill-considered transactions only 18 months later.

Although Fisher had very poor eyesight he was a precocious student, winning the Neeld Medal (a competitive essay in Mathematics) at Harrow School at the age of 16. Because of his poor eyesight, he was tutored in mathematics without the aid of paper and pen, which developed his ability to visualize problems in geometrical terms, as opposed to using algebraic manipulations. He was legendary in being able to produce mathematical results without setting down the intermediate steps. He also developed a strong interest in biology, and, especially, evolution.

In 1909 he won a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. There he formed many friendships and became enthralled with the heady intellectual atmosphere. At Cambridge, Fisher learned of the newly rediscovered theory of Mendelian genetics; he saw biometry—and its growing corpus of statistical methods—as a potential way to reconcile the discontinuous nature of Mendelian inheritance with continuous variation and gradual evolution. However, his foremost concern was eugenics, which he saw as a pressing social as well as scientific issue that encompassed both genetics and statistics. In 1911 he was involved in forming the Cambridge University Eugenics Society with such luminaries as John Maynard Keynes, R. C. Punnett and Horace Darwin (Charles Darwin's son). The group was active, and held monthly meetings, often featuring addresses by leaders of mainstream eugenics organizations, such as the Eugenics Education Society of London, founded by Charles Darwin's half-cousin, Francis Galton in 1909.

After graduating in 1912, Fisher was eager to join the army in anticipation of Great Britain's entry into World War I; however, he failed the medical examinations (repeatedly) because of his eyesight. Over the next six years, he worked as a statistician for the City of London. For his war work, he took up teaching physics and mathematics at a series of public schools, including Bradfield College in Berkshire, as well as aboard H.M. Training Ship Worcester. Major Leonard Darwin (another of Charles Darwin's sons) and an unconventional and vivacious friend he called Gudruna were almost his only contacts with his Cambridge circle. They sustained him through this difficult period. A bright spot in his life was that Gudruna matched him to her sister Eileen Guinness; they married in 1917 when she was only 17. With the sisters' help, he set up a subsistence farming operation on the Bradfield estate, where they had a large garden and raised animals, learning to make do on very little. They lived through the war without ever using their food coupons.

During this period, Fisher started writing book reviews for the Eugenic Review and gradually increased his interest in genetic and statistical work. He volunteered to undertake all such reviews for the journal, and was hired to a part-time position by Major Darwin. He published several articles on biometry during this period, including the ground-breaking "The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance" , written in 1916 and published in 1918. This paper laid the foundation for what came to be known as biometrical genetics, and introduced the very important methodology of the analysis of variance, which was a considerable advance over the correlation methods used previously. The paper showed very convincingly that the inheritance of traits measurable by real values, the values of continuous variables, is consistent with Mendelian principles.

With the end of the war he went looking for a new job, and was offered one at the famed Galton Laboratory by Karl Pearson. Because he saw the developing rivalry with Pearson as a professional obstacle, however, he accepted instead a temporary job as a statistician with a small agricultural station in the country in 1919.

In 1919 Fisher started work at Rothamsted Experimental Station located at Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England. Here he started a major study of the extensive collections of data recorded over many years. This resulted in a series of reports under the general title Studies in Crop Variation. This began a period of great productivity. Over the next seven years, he pioneered the principles of the design of experiments and elaborated his studies of "analysis of variance". He furthered his studies of the statistics of small samples. Perhaps even more important, he began his systematic approach of the analysis of real data as the springboard for the development of new statistical methods. He began to pay particular attention to the labour involved in the necessary computations, and developed methods that were as practical as they were founded in rigour. In 1925, this work culminated in the publication of his first book, Statistical Methods for Research Workers. This went into many editions and translations in later years, and became a standard reference work for scientists in many disciplines. In 1935, this was followed by The Design of Experiments, which also became a standard.

In addition to "analysis of variance", Fisher invented the technique of maximum likelihood and originated the concepts of sufficiency, ancillarity, Fisher's linear discriminator and Fisher information. His 1924 article "On a distribution yielding the error functions of several well known statistics" presented Karl Pearson's chi-squared and Student's t in the same framework as the Gaussian distribution, and his own "analysis of variance" distribution z (more commonly used today in the form of the F distribution). These contributions easily made him a major figure in 20th century statistics.

In defending the use of the z distribution when the data were not Gaussian, Fisher introduced the "randomization test". According to biographers Yates and Mather, "Fisher introduced the randomization test, comparing the value of t or z actually obtained with the distribution of the t or z values when all possible random arrangements were imposed on the experimental data."

However, Fisher wrote that randomization tests were "in no sense put forward to supersede the common and expeditious tests based on the Gaussian theory of errors." Fisher thus effectively began the field of non-parametric statistics, even though he didn't believe it was a necessary move.

His work on the theory of population genetics also made him one of the three great figures of that field, together with Sewall Wright and J. B. S. Haldane, and as such was one of the founders of the neo-Darwinian modern evolutionary synthesis. In addition to founding modern quantitative genetics with his 1918 paper, he was the first to use diffusion equations to attempt to calculate the distribution of gene frequencies among populations. He pioneered the estimation of genetic linkage and gene frequencies by maximum likelihood methods, and wrote early papers on the wave of advance of advantageous genes and on clines of gene frequency. His 1950 paper on gene frequency clines is notable as the first application of computers to biology.

Fisher had a long and successful collaboration with E.B. Ford in the field of ecological genetics. The outcome of this work was the general recognition that the force of natural selection was often much stronger than had been appreciated before, and that many ecogenetic situations (such as polymorphism) were not selectively neutral, they were maintained by the force of selection. Fisher was the original author of the idea of heterozygote advantage, which was later found to play a frequent role in genetic polymorphism. The discovery of indisputable cases of natural selection in nature was one of the main strands in the modern evolutionary synthesis.

Fisher introduced the concept of Fisher information in 1925, some years before Shannon's notions of information and entropy. Fisher information has been the subject of renewed interest in the last few years, due to B. Roy Frieden's book Physics from Fisher Information, which attempts to derive the laws of physics from a Fisherian starting point.

Fisher was an ardent promoter of eugenics, which also stimulated and guided much of his work in the genetics of humans. His book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection was started in 1928 and published in 1930. It contained a summary of what was already known to the literature. He developed ideas on sexual selection, mimicry and the evolution of dominance. He famously showed that the probability of a mutation increasing the fitness of an organism decreases proportionately with the magnitude of the mutation. He also proved that larger populations carry more variation so that they have a larger chance of survival. He set forth the foundations of what was to become known as population genetics.

About a third of the book concerned the applications of these ideas to humans, and presented what data there was available at the time. He presented a theory that attributed the decline and fall of civilizations to its arrival at a state where the fertility of the upper classes is forced down. Using the census data of 1911 for Britain, he showed that there was an inverse relationship between fertility and social class. This was partly due, he believed, to the rise in social status of families who were not capable of producing many children but who rose because of the financial advantage of having a small number of children. Therefore he proposed the abolishment of the economic advantage of small families by instituting subsidies (he called them allowances) to families with larger numbers of children, with the allowances proportional to the earnings of the father. He himself had two sons and six daughters. According to Yates and Mather, "His large family, in particular, reared in conditions of great financial stringency, was a personal expression of his genetic and evolutionary convictions."

The book was reviewed, among others, by physicist Charles Galton Darwin, a grandson of Charles Darwin's, and following publication of his review, C. G. Darwin sent Fisher his copy of the book, with notes in the margin. The marginal notes became the food for a correspondence running at least three years. Fisher's book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection also had a major influence on the evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton and the development of his later theories on the genetic basis for the existence of kin selection.

Between 1929 and 1934 the Eugenics Society also campaigned hard for a law permitting sterilization on eugenic grounds. They believed that it should be entirely voluntary, and a right, not a punishment. They published a draft of a proposed bill, and it was submitted to Parliament. Although it was defeated by a 2:1 ratio, this was viewed as progress, and the campaign continued. Fisher played a major role in this movement, and served in several official committees to promote it.

In 1934, Fisher moved to increase the power of scientists within the Eugenics Society, but was ultimately thwarted by members with an environmentalist point of view, and he, along with many other scientists, resigned.

The interest in eugenics, and his experiences working on the Canadian farm, made Fisher interested in starting a farm of his own. In these plans he was encouraged by Gudruna, the wife of a college friend, and this led to him meeting Ruth Eileen Gratton Guinness, Gudruna's younger sister. Their father, Dr Henry Gratton Guinness, had died when they were young. Ruth Eileen was only sixteen years of age when she met Fisher. She knew that her mother would not approve of her marrying so young. As a result Fisher married Ruth Eileen at a secret wedding ceremony without her mother's knowledge, on 26 April 1917, only days after Ruth Eileen's 17th birthday. They had two sons and seven daughters, one of whom died in infancy. His daughter Joan married George E. P. Box and wrote a well-received biography of her father.

As an adult, Fisher was noted for his loyalty to his friends. Once he had formed a favourable opinion of any man, he was loyal to a fault. A similar sense of loyalty bound him to his culture. He was a patriot, a member of the Church of England, politically conservative, and a scientific rationalist. Much sought after as a brilliant conversationalist and dinner companion, he very early on developed a reputation for carelessness in his dress and, sometimes, his manners. In later years he was the archetype of the absent-minded professor.

He knew the scriptures well and H. Allen Orr describes him as "deeply devout Anglican who, between founding modern statistics and population genetics, penned articles for church magazines" in the Boston Review. But he was not dogmatic in his religious beliefs. In a 1955 broadcast on Science and Christianity, he said, "The custom of making abstract dogmatic assertions is not, certainly, derived from the teaching of Jesus, but has been a widespread weakness among religious teachers in subsequent centuries. I do not think that the word for the Christian virtue of faith should be prostituted to mean the credulous acceptance of all such piously intended assertions. Much self-deception in the young believer is needed to convince himself that he knows that of which in reality he knows himself to be ignorant. That surely is hypocrisy, against which we have been most conspicuously warned."


It was Fisher who referred to the growth rate r (used in equations such as the logistic function) as the Malthusian parameter, as a criticism of the writings of Thomas Robert Malthus. Fisher referred to "...a relic of creationist philosophy..." in observing the fecundity of nature and deducing (as Darwin did) that this therefore drove natural selection.

He received the recognition of his peers in 1929 when he was inducted into the Royal Society. His fame grew and he began to travel more and lecture to wider circles. In 1931 he spent six weeks at the Statistical Laboratory at Iowa State College in Ames, Iowa. He gave three lectures a week on his work, and met many of the active American statisticians, including George W. Snedecor. He returned again for another visit in 1936.

In 1933 he left Rothamsted to become a Professor of Eugenics at University College London. In 1937 he visited the Indian Statistical Institute (in Calcutta), which at the time consisted of one part-time employee, Professor P. C. Mahalanobis. He revisited there often in later years, encouraging its development. He was the guest of honour at its 25th anniversary in 1957 when it had grown to 2000 employees. In 1939, when World War II broke out, the University tried to dissolve the eugenics department, and ordered all of the animals destroyed. Fisher fought back, but he was then exiled back to Rothamsted with a much reduced staff and resources. He was unable to find any suitable war work, and though he kept very busy with various small projects, he became discouraged of any real progress. His marriage disintegrated. His oldest son, George, an aeroplane pilot, was killed in the war.

In 1943 he was offered the Balfour Chair of Genetics at Cambridge University, his alma mater. During the war, this department was almost entirely destroyed, but the University promised him that he would be charged with rebuilding it after the war. He accepted the offer, but the promises were largely unfilled, and the department grew very slowly. A notable exception was the recruitment in 1948 of the Italian researcher Cavalli-Sforza, who established a one man unit of bacterial genetics. He continued his work on mouse chromosome mapping and other projects. They culminated in the publication in 1949 of The Theory of Inbreeding. In 1947 he co-founded with Cyril Darlington the journal Heredity: An International Journal of Genetics.

Ronald Fisher was opposed to the UNESCO Statement of Race. He believed that evidence and everyday experience showed that human groups differ profoundly “in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development” and concluded that the “practical international problem is that of learning to share the resources of this planet amicably with persons of materially different nature,” and that “this problem is being obscured by entirely well-intentioned efforts to minimize the real differences that exist.” The revised 1951 statement titled "The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry" was accompanied by Fisher's dissenting commentary.

He eventually received many awards for his work and was dubbed a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II in 1952.

Fisher was opposed to the conclusions of Richard Doll and A.B. Hill that smoking caused lung cancer. He compared the correlations in their papers to a correlation between the import of apples and the rise of divorce in order to show that correlation does not imply causation.

To quote Yates and Mather again, "It has been suggested that the fact that Fisher was employed as consultant by the tobacco firms in this controversy casts doubt on the value of his arguments. This is to misjudge the man. He was not above accepting financial reward for his labours, but the reason for his interest was undoubtedly his dislike and mistrust of puritanical tendencies of all kinds; and perhaps also the personal solace he had always found in tobacco."

After retiring from Cambridge University in 1957 he spent some time as a senior research fellow at the CSIRO in Adelaide, Australia. He died of colon cancer there in 1962.

Minimum price, maximum confusion

Reading this interview with the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, it struck me that he had fallen into the common trap of confusing minimum pricing with banning below-cost selling. In reality, the two are completely different concepts. The vast majority of the alcohol sold below 50p a unit, and even below 30p a unit, is not sold below the cost price, whereas it wouldn’t be difficult to sell fine wine and malt whiskies below cost and yet still come in well above 50p a unit.

The supermarkets are often accused of below-cost selling, but in reality those low prices they offer on multibuys are likely to be the result of driving eye-watering bargains with brewers. I’d be amazed if even half a percent of the alcohol units sold by the typical supermarket were sold below cost.

And, while banning below-cost selling may seem a no-brainer to many, it could easily end up having the unintended consequence of preventing retailers (and pub licensees) selling off short-dated stock, or the end of a barrel, at a reduced price, and stopping them providing tasting samples or even the occasional free pint for a valued customer.

Ben Chifley


Joseph Benedict Chifley Australian politician and 16th Prime Minister of Australia, was one of Australia's most influential Prime Ministers. Among his government's accomplishments were the post-war immigration scheme under Arthur Calwell, the establishment of Australian citizenship in 1949, the Snowy Mountains Scheme, the national airline TAA, a social security scheme for the unemployed, and the founding of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). One of the few successful referenda to modify the Australian Constitution took place during his term.

Born in Bathurst, New South Wales, Chifley was the son of a blacksmith of Irish Roman Catholic descent. He was one of four brothers and between the ages of five and 14 was raised mostly by his grandfather, who lost all his savings in the bank crash of 1892: Chifley acquired his lifelong dislike of the private banks early. He was educated at Roman Catholic schools in Bathurst, and joined the New South Wales Railways at 15.

Ben Chifley became an engine driver. He was one of the founders of the AFULE (the Australian Federated Union of Locomotive Enginemen) and an active member of the Labor Party. In 1914 he married Elizabeth Mackenzie. She was a Presbyterian; Chifley left the Roman Catholic Church to marry her and never returned. In 1917 he was one of the leaders of a prolonged strike which resulted in his being dismissed. He was reinstated by the Jack Lang New South Wales Labor government in 1920. He represented his union before industrial tribunals and taught himself industrial law.

In 1928, at his second try, Chifley won the Bathurst-based seat of Macquarie in the House of Representatives. He was in general a supporter of the James Scullin government's economic policies, and in 1931 he became Minister for Defence. At the 1931 general election, the Scullin government fell and Chifley lost his seat. During the Depression he survived on his wife's family's money and his part-ownership of the Bathurst newspaper the National Advocate.

In 1935 the Lyons government appointed him a member of the Royal Commission on Banking, a subject on which he had become an expert. He submitted a minority report advocating that the private banks be nationalised.

Chifley finally won his seat back in 1940, and the following year he became Treasurer (finance minister) in John Curtin's Labor government. Although Frank Forde was Curtin's deputy, Chifley became the minister Curtin most relied on, and he controlled most domestic policy while Curtin was preoccupied with the war effort. He presided over the massive increases in government expenditure and taxation that accompanied the war, and imposed a regime of economic regulation that made him very unpopular with business and the press.

When Curtin died in July 1945, Forde became (very briefly) Prime Minister, but Chifley defeated him in the leadership ballot and replaced him six days later. Once the war ended, normal political life resumed, and Chifley faced Robert Menzies and his new Liberal Party in the 1946 election, which Chifley comfortably won. In the post-war years, Chifley maintained wartime economic controls including the highly unpopular petrol rationing. He did this partly to help Britain in its postwar economic difficulties.

Feeling secure in power, Chifley decided it was time to advance towards Labor's objective of democratic socialism. In 1947 he announced the government's intention to nationalise the banks. This provoked massive opposition from the press, and middle-class opinion turned against Labor. The High Court of Australia eventually found Chifley's legislation to be unconstitutional.

In the winter of 1949 a prolonged and bitter strike in the coal industry caused unemployment and hardship. Chifley saw the strike as a move by the Communist Party to challenge Labor's place as the party of the working class, and he sent in the army to break the strike. Despite this, Menzies exploited the rising Cold War hysteria to portray Labor as soft on Communism.

These events, together with a perception that Chifley and Labor had grown increasingly arrogant in office, led to the sweeping Liberal election victory of December 1949. Chifley suffered a 48-seat swing--still the worst defeat of an incumbent government at the federal level in Australia. Chifley was now aged 64 and in poor health (like Curtin he was a lifelong smoker), but he refused to retire. Labor had retained control of the Senate, and Chifley took advantage of this to bring misery to the Menzies government at every turn. Menzies responded by introducing a bill to ban the Communist Party of Australia. He expected Chifley to reject it and give him an excuse to call double dissolution election. Menzies apparently hoped to repeat his "soft-on-Communism" theme to win a majority in both chambers. However, Chifley let the bill pass (it was ultimately thrown out by the High Court)

However, when Chifley rejected Menzies' banking bill a few months later, Menzies called a double dissolution election in April 1951. He succeeded in winning control of both Houses at the election.

A few weeks later Chifley died of a heart attack in his room at the Kurrajong Hotel in Canberra (he had lived there throughout his prime ministership, having refused to reside at The Lodge).

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Baby and bathwater

Unintended consequences seem to be a speciality of the present government, and one of the finest examples yet seen is the report that stringent nutritional standards may put paid to school meals in secondary schools. Many schools may not be able to meet the standards at all, while others will be forced to scrap a choice of dishes and offer a single set menu, which no doubt will be Jamie Oliver-style muck that will have all the appeal to pupils of a plate of cold sick. Inevitably they will end up voting with their feet and taking packed lunches or eating elsewhere. Surely it is far better getting kids eating a reasonably filling and nutritious meal than worrying about the finer points of zinc and iron content, and I can’t really see that pie and chips once a week is going to harm growing children.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Dorus Rijkers


Theodorus "Dorus" Rijkers was a famous Dutch lifeboat captain and folk hero, most famous for his sea rescues of 487 shipwrecked victims over a total of 38 rescue operations, and at least 25 before joining the lifeboat-service.

Dorus received his nickname Grandpa (Dutch: Opa) while still a young man. He had married Neeltje Huisman, a fisherman's widow who already had 6 children. Shortly after the marriage, the oldest of Neeltje's daughters had a child of her own, and so at only 23 years old Dorus became known as Opa in Den Helder where he lived. Although the nickname began as a joke, Dorus soon started acting and looking like a grandpa, and from that time on he became primarily known by his nickname.

Dorus gained most of his fame as a result of his service to the Noord- en zuid-Hollandsche Redding Maatschappij (NZHRM), one of the two main Dutch lifeboat-societies at the time. The NZHRM would later become the Koninklijke Nederlandse Redding Maatschappij (KNRM).

However his life-saving career began in 1872 before he joined the NZHRM, while acting as captain of his own boat. While at sea, he saved all 25 crew members of the barque Australia from drowning at sea. Because of this incident, Dorus gained a reputation as a rescuer, which preceded his joining the NZHRM as a volunteer. On the basis of his reputation, he was granted the position of coxswain upon joining the NZHRM without having to prove his qualifications. His rank of coxswain entitled him to immediately command his own boat and crew.

Although Dorus joined the NZHRM as a volunteer, he worked so many hours that it precluded him from taking on other paid work. Dorus and all of his crew members received a sum for each trial and each service.

During his nearly 30 years service with the NZHRM, Dorus saved hundreds of people from drowning at sea, becoming legendary long before his retirement. In the waters where he served, he saved such large number of people with such effectiveness that the survival statistics increased dramatically. At the end of his career, although he remained active, his role became more symbolic in nature.[citation needed]

In 1888, Dorus Rijkers met King William III of the Netherlands after rescuing sailors from the German barque Renown. The King gave Dorus a gold medal of honor and smoked a pipe with him.

A 1911 list showing Dorus most important between 1872-1911 rescues (including the Renown-rescue). Note that his full name, Theodorus, is used here.

In 1911, Dorus retired at age 64, after which he received only a very small pension. He struggled to make ends meet by eating simple food and living plainly.

During an October 1922 interview with Dr. L.A. Rademaker, editor of the Hague newspaper 'Het Vaderland', Dorus complained about his situation. He claimed that he had been forced to sell the gold medal of honour in order to buy himself a bicycle. The Helden der Zee Fonds 'Dorus Rijkers' (Dorus Rijkers Fund for the Heroes of the Sea) was created after Dorus' plight and that of other retired life-savers were chronicled in 'Het Vaderland'.

In April 1928, Dorus Rijkers died at the age of 81. He was given a funeral that was so grand that it resembled a state funeral in size and style. There was music, a big parade, thousands who came to pay their last respects including a large number of Marine Officers, also high ranking government officials, among them representatives of the Ministry of the Navy. The grandeur of his funeral showed the great public esteem in which Dorus was held at the time.

Ginger Baker


Peter Edward "Ginger" Baker is an English drummer, best known for his work with Cream. He is also known for his numerous associations with New World music and the use of African influences and other diverse collaborations such as his work with the rock band Hawkwind.

Baker gained fame as a member of the Graham Bond Organization, and then for becoming a member of the band Cream with Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton from 1966 until they disbanded in 1968. He later joined the group Blind Faith. In 1970 Baker formed toured and recorded with fusion rock group Ginger Baker's Air Force. He recorded Stratavarious in 1972, with the Nigerian pioneer of Afrobeat Fela Ransome-Kuti and the vocalist Bobby Tench from The Jeff Beck Group, an album released under his own name. Baker Gurvitz Army was formed in 1974 until its demise in 1976. Since then Baker has released many albums of ethnic fusion and jazz percussion and has recorded and toured with various jazz, classical and rock ensembles.

Baker's drumming attracted attention for its flamboyance, showmanship, and pioneering use of two bass drums instead of the conventional single bass kick drum. As a firmly established jazz drummer, he dislikes being referred to as a rock drummer. While at times performing in a similar way to Keith Moon from The Who, Baker also employs a more restrained style influenced by the British jazz groups he heard during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In his early days as a drummer he performed lengthy drum solos, the best known being the thirteen-minute drum solo "Toad" from Cream's double album Wheels of Fire. He is also noted for using a variety of other percussion instruments and for his application of African rhythms.


Baker formed and recorded with Ginger Baker's Energy and was involved in collaborations with Bill Laswell, jazz bassist Charlie Haden and jazz guitarist Bill Frisell. He was also member of Hawkwind, Atomic Rooster and Public Image. In 1994 he formed The Ginger Baker Trio and joined bassist Googe in Masters of Reality formed by producer, singer and guitarist Chris Goss.

Ginger Baker sat in for Fela Ransome-Kuti's drummer Tony Allen during recording sessions which were published in 1971 by the Regal Zonophone / Pathe Marconi label under the record title Live! and released through the Polydor label in 1972. Fela also appeared with Ginger Baker on Stratavarious alongside Bobby Gass, a pseudonym for Bobby Tench of The Jeff Beck Group, an album by Ginger Baker released on the Polydor label in the same year. Stratavarious was re-issued as a compilation along with the two complete Ginger Baker's Air Force albums entitled Do What You Like in 1998.

Baker and Bruce played together in the Graham Bond Organisation and Alexis Korner's ecletic Blues Incorporated before they accepted an invitation from Eric Clapton to join the band Cream in 1966. Cream disbanded during 1968 and in 1969 Baker joined Clapton along with Ric Grech and Steve Winwood in forming Blind Faith. Bruce and Clapton also played together near the end of Clapton's tenure with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. In 1994 Baker joined BBM (Bruce-Baker-Moore), a short-lived power trio with the lineup of Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce and Irish rock blues guitarist Gary Moore. During May 2005 Ginger Baker was reunited with Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce for a Cream re-union at the Albert Hall in UK.

Nellie Fox


Jacob Nelson Fox was a Major League Baseball second baseman for the Chicago White Sox. Fox was born in St. Thomas Township, Pennsylvania. He was selected as the MVP of the American League in 1959. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1997.

Fox began his career with the Philadelphia Athletics in 1947, though he was never a full-time starter during his three seasons with the team. Traded to the White Sox October 29, 1949, Fox's career took off. He spent 14 seasons with Chicago, making 10 All-Star teams. He played his final two seasons (1964-65) with the Houston Colt .45s and Astros.

With the White Sox, Fox played next to a pair of slick-fielding shortstops, Venezuelans Chico Carrasquel (1950-55) and Hall-of-Famer Luis Aparicio (1956-62), and was, year after year, a member of the best defensive infield in the League. Fox won Gold Gloves in 1957, 1959 and 1960.

Only 5-foot-9, he made up for his modest size and minimal power — he hit only 35 home runs in his career, and never more than six in a single season — with his good batting eye, excellent fielding, and base running speed. Fox was perennially one of the toughest batters to strike out, fanning just 216 times in his career, an average of once every 42.7 at-bats which ranks him 3rd all-time. He led the league in most at-bats per strikeouts a phenomenal 13 times in his career. Although not known as a great hitter (lifetime .288 batting average), he batted over .300 six times, with 2,663 hits, 355 doubles, and 112 triples. He also led the league in singles for seven straight years, in triples once, and in hits four times.

After his playing career, Fox was a coach for the Astros (1965-67) and the Washington Senators/Texas Rangers (1968-72).

Nellie Fox died of lung cancer in Baltimore, Maryland in 1975.

Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss)


Theodor Seuss Geisel was an American writer and cartoonist, most widely known for his children's books written under his pen name, Dr. Seuss. He published over 60 children's books, which were often characterized by imaginative characters, rhyme, and frequent use of trisyllabic meter. His most celebrated books include the bestselling Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. Numerous adaptations of his work have been created, including eleven television specials, three feature films, and a Broadway musical.

Geisel also worked as an illustrator for advertising campaigns, most notably for Flit and Standard Oil, and as a political cartoonist for PM, a New York City newspaper. During World War II, he worked in an animation department of the U.S Army, where he wrote Design for Death, a film that later won the 1947 Academy Award for Documentary Feature.

Theodor Seuss Geisel was born on March 2, 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts to Henrietta Seuss and Theodor Robert Geisel. His father, the son of German immigrants, managed the family brewery and after Theodor was married, supervised Springfield's public park system. Geisel was raised in the Lutheran faith and remained a member of the denomination his entire life. Geisel attended Springfield's Central High School and entered Dartmouth College in fall 1921 as a member of the Class of 1925. At Dartmouth, Geisel joined the humor magazine Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, eventually rising to the rank of editor-in-chief. While at Dartmouth, Geisel was caught throwing a drinking party, violating national Prohibition laws of the time. As a result, the school insisted that he resign from all extracurricular activities. In order to continue his work on the Jack-O-Lantern without the administration's knowledge, Geisel began signing his work with the pen name "Seuss"; his first work signed as "Dr. Seuss" appeared after he graduated, six months into his work for humor magazine The Judge where his weekly feature Birdsies and Beasties appeared. At Dartmouth he was encouraged in his writing by professor of rhetoric W. Benfield Pressey, a beloved teacher who took a keen interest in Geisel's emerging talent.

After Dartmouth, he entered Lincoln College, Oxford, intending to earn a D.Phil in literature. At Oxford he met his future wife Helen Palmer; he married her in 1927, and returned to the United States without earning the degree. The "Dr." in his pen name is an acknowledgment of his father's unfulfilled hopes that Geisel would earn a doctorate at Oxford.

He began submitting humorous articles and illustrations to Judge, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Vanity Fair, and Liberty. One notable "Technocracy Number" made fun of the Technocracy movement and featured satirical rhymes at the expense of Frederick Soddy. He became nationally famous from his advertisements for Flit, a common insecticide at the time. His slogan, "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" became a popular catchphrase. Geisel supported himself and his wife through the Great Depression by drawing advertising for General Electric, NBC, Standard Oil, and many other companies. He also wrote and drew a short-lived comic strip called Hejji in 1935.

In 1937, while Geisel was returning from an ocean voyage to Europe, the rhythm of the ship's engines inspired the poem that became his first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.[citation needed] Geisel wrote three more children's books before World War II, two of which are, atypically for him, in prose.

As World War II began, Geisel turned to political cartoons, drawing over 400 in two years as editorial cartoonist for the left-wing New York City daily newspaper, PM. Geisel's political cartoons, later published in Dr. Seuss Goes to War, opposed the viciousness of Hitler and Mussolini and were highly critical of isolationists, most notably Charles Lindbergh, who opposed American entry into the war. One cartoon depicted all Japanese Americans as latent traitors or fifth-columnists, while at the same time other cartoons deplored the racism at home against Jews and blacks that harmed the war effort. His cartoons were strongly supportive of President Roosevelt's conduct of the war, combining the usual exhortations to ration and contribute to the war effort with frequent attacks on Congress (especially the Republican Party), parts of the press (such as the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune), and others for criticism of Roosevelt, criticism of aid to the Soviet Union, investigation of suspected Communists, and other offenses that he depicted as leading to disunity and helping the Nazis, intentionally or inadvertently.

In 1942, Geisel turned his energies to direct support of the U.S. war effort. First, he worked drawing posters for the Treasury Department and the War Production Board. Then, in 1943, he joined the Army and was commander of the Animation Dept of the First Motion Picture Unit of the United States Army Air Forces, where he wrote films that included Your Job in Germany, a 1945 propaganda film about peace in Europe after World War II, Our Job in Japan, and the Private Snafu series of adult army training films. While in the Army, he was awarded the Legion of Merit. Our Job in Japan became the basis for the commercially released film, Design for Death (1947), a study of Japanese culture that won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950), which was based on an original story by Seuss, won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film.

After the war, Geisel and his wife moved to La Jolla, California. Returning to children's books, he wrote what many consider to be his finest works, including such favorites as If I Ran the Zoo, (1950), Scrambled Eggs Super! (1953), On Beyond Zebra! (1955), If I Ran the Circus (1956), and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957). Although he received numerous awards throughout his career, Geisel won neither the Caldecott Medal nor the Newbery Medal. Three of his titles from this period were, however, chosen as Caldecott runners-up (now referred to as Caldecott Honor books): McElligot's Pool (1947), Bartholomew and the Oobleck (1949), and If I Ran the Zoo (1950).

At the same time, an important development occurred that influenced much of Geisel's later work. In May 1954, Life magazine published a report on illiteracy among school children, which concluded that children were not learning to read because their books were boring. Accordingly, Geisel's publisher made up a list of 348 words he felt were important and asked Geisel to cut the list to 250 words and write a book using only those words. Nine months later, Geisel, using 236 of the words given to him, completed The Cat in the Hat. This book was a tour de force —it retained the drawing style, verse rhythms, and all the imaginative power of Geisel's earlier works, but because of its simplified vocabulary could be read by beginning readers. These books achieved significant international success and they remain very popular.

Geisel went on to write many other children's books, both in his new simplified-vocabulary manner (sold as Beginner Books) and in his older, more elaborate style. In 1982 Geisel wrote Hunches in Bunches. The Beginner Books were not easy for Geisel, and reportedly he labored for months crafting them.

At various times Geisel also wrote books for adults that used the same style of verse and pictures: The Seven Lady Godivas; Oh, The Places You'll Go!; and You're Only Old Once.

Though he devoted most of his life to writing children's books, Geisel never had any children himself.

Geisel died, following several years of illness, in San Diego, California on September 24, 1991. His ashes were scattered after he was cremated.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Cutting off your nose?

There’s a quite astonishing piece in The Publican from Hamish Champ in which he alleges that belligerent smokers are helping to close pubs by taking their business away. Well, yes, pubs are closing at a rapid rate of knots because of reduced custom from smokers, but the blame for that must be laid squarely at the door of the government.

Smokers are not some uniform, co-ordinated body, and to say they are deliberately shunning pubs as an act of spite is absurd. Plenty of smokers do still go to pubs and put up with having to go outside when they want a fag, but others quite reasonably have decided that isn’t for them and visit much less often, if at all. Everybody does what suits them as individuals, and the number of people who make consumer choices with the conscious intention of “making a point” is minuscule.

If I had to go outside the pub to drink a pint of beer, then I can assure you I would scarcely ever drink except at home. If loads of pubs then shut down I wouldn’t consider it to be my fault, and would regard it as totally unreasonable to be blamed for pub closures.

Champ also says that licensees have gone to great expense to provide smoking facilities within the law. Obviously, given the constraints of many sites, this is often simply impossible, but as a general statement it is very wide of the mark. Most “smoking facilities” are extremely perfunctory and often consist of no more than an awning in a dingy yard next to the bogs. The number of pubs that have made the effort to provide a sizeable covered area with reasonably comfortable chairs and tables is very small. As soon as the weather is clement enough to sit outside, they do reap the benefit, though.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

How much is too much?

I recently ran a poll with the question “How much would you consider exorbitant for a pint of 4.0% ABV beer?”

There were 40 votes, broken down as follows:

£2.25: 3 (7%)
£2.50: 2 (5%)
£2.75: 10 (25%)
£3.00: 9 (22%)
£3.25: 7 (17%)
£3.50: 2 (5%)
£3.75: 1 (2%)
£4.00: 6 (15%)

So a wide range of opinion there, with every option getting at least one vote, but a clear clustering around the £2.75 - £3.25 band. Obviously it also varies depending on what part of the country you are in – I voted for £2.75, as that reflects prices in this area, which are some of the lowest in the country, but I wouldn’t necessarily regard £3.25 as that unreasonable in London.

Having said that, I did have a very pleasant pint of Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery Bitter today for £1.49.

The view is often expressed that, as a high-quality craft product, cask beer should be able to command a price premium over mass-market kegs. There is some merit in that, but you have to be aware that there are many cost-conscious drinkers who you won’t necessarily take along with you, and that in order to justify a price premium you have to deliver consistent quality, something on which companies in a variety of markets have come unstuck in the past.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

The Good Tramp Fuel Guide


There’s a huge amount of information around about cask beers, where and how they are brewed, what they taste like, and where they are available. To a lesser extent this is true about premium bottled ales, whether or not bottle-conditioned. But the consumers of keg and canned products will find a serious dearth of information about them. Not that most of them are bothered, of course.

But, never fear, here is a site devoted to one particular variety of the genre, Super Strength Lagers. It doesn’t seem to have much of a standard of connoisseurship, indeed giving the notorious Tennent’s Super 10/10, despite saying of its taste, “it can only be described as a cross between dog shit and mouldy cheese with a hint of sweetness.” And the comments about the “eight-can challenge”, which would be a lethal dose to most drinkers, surely must attract the ire of our friends at Alcohol Concern.

It’s a relief that Robinson’s Old Tom, which is 8.5% ABV, but is a high-quality strong ale intended for considered sipping, is given a mere 2/10 mark. You wonder how it got into this company in the first place.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Give that man a big hand!

The estimable Sir Liam Donaldson spurts forth on yet another major health hazard.

(h/t again Mr Eugenides)

Other people's eyes


I spotted this review of the Crown in Stockport, which was recently one of the three runners-up in CAMRA’s National Pub of the Year award. Now, what it says about the Crown is very positive, although surely even in this day and age the fact that a “normal” pub doesn’t accept cards is hardly worthy of comment.

But its general remarks about Stockport are so wide of the mark as to beggar belief:

Stockport is not known for the quality of its bars and pubs and, with a handful of notable exceptions, the south Manchester town has to little to attract the discerning drinker. Or even the people looking for a quality mainstream experience.
Umm, can this be the same place that I describe on here as “a thriving town which is definitely not part of Manchester and has one of the finest collections of characterful pubs in the country”?

At least it has the virtue of not being taken over by the big pub chains:
In fact it’s the largest town in the country that hasn’t been colonised by the branded bar chains, the only option being a rather dog-eared Wetherspoons, leading the charge among a bunch of decidedly down-at-heel pubs.

Unless fake Burberry caps and tracky bottoms tucked in socks are your idea of style, you’ll agree this is the land the style bar revolution forgot.
And I'll drink to that!

Thursday, March 19, 2009

The thin end of the wedge

There’s an excellent article by Rod Liddle in this week’s Spectator, with a distinct tone of “I told you so.”

Now, as we all expected, they have turned their attention to the consumption of alcohol — and those of you who enjoy the occasional tipple but do not smoke and were minded in the end to support the ban on smoking, well, this is what you have let yourselves in for. Smoking was always the thin end of the wedge. Drinking was always going to be next, followed very rapidly by punitive measures to stop you eating the sort of food that you enjoy. God knows what they will start on after that, but they’ll have a lot of fun with drinking before they are finished.
He says that a few years ago he used the phrase “passive drinking” in a satirical sense, only to see it seriously taken up by the odious Sir Liam Donaldson in his Puritanical crusade. Likewise, this idea of Rod’s may seem far-fetched, but are we likely to see it happen in the years to come?
Hell, perhaps we’ll see pubs forced to adopt drink-free areas, so that people who wish to live a healthy life can sip cranberry J2Os without the fear of being afflicted by passive drinking.
That, of course, would be the precursor to the total ban on alcohol in public places...

Welcome to your local speakeasy

As usual, Pete Robinson pulls no punches in this analysis of the woes of the pub trade and the futility of minimum pricing.

Does anyone, in all honesty, believe that loading supermarket prices would bring people back into pubs? "Okay Lads, this stuff is costing us £1 a pint now. Let's go and stand outside a pub and pay £3.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Less drink, more hysteria

You wouldn’t believe it from reading some of the hysterical commentary in the media over the past few days, but in fact alcohol consumption in the UK fell by 3% over the past year, and is now 6% below the 2004 figure. This bears out what I have said in the past, that very often the chattering classes’ outrage about something only peaks well after the alleged “problem” has started to diminish. The report linked to also points out that the UK is only 14th in the European league of alcohol consumption, well behind both France and Germany. Given that, it is hard to see why it needs to be seen as a priority for public policy either north or south of the border.

Despite this, we still get pig-ignorant, snobbish drivel like this from the toothsome Janet Street-Porter in today’s Independent. This comment sums it up, really.

Sir Liam debunked

There’s an excellent rebuttal of Sir Liam Donaldson’s proposals for minimum alcohol pricing from The Zythophile, a blog I must confess I had not come across before.

There’s the ridiculous claim that minimum unit pricing will be good for pubs, because there will be fewer people drinking cheap supermarket beer at home, they’ll all be going down the pub instead. Really? Even at 50p a unit, supermarket booze will still be cheaper than the pub - so how does that work, then?
Yes, exactly what I’ve been saying, and a point the appeasers in the CAMRA leadership signally fail to grasp.
Conversely, and perhaps even more importantly, nowhere in the report will you see anything about the enormous benefits, social and economic, of alcohol, the way it binds society together, and the huge and lasting pleasures excellent wines, beers and spirits bring when consumed in moderation. What’s the economic value of all that? If you said every drinker received just £2-worth of pleasure from drinking alcohol every week, that’s £4.7 billion of drinking pleasure every year – so that’s the cost to the NHS outweighed, for a start.
Absolutely, buy that man a pint!

(h/t Mr Eugenides)

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Time for sober reflection

There’s a thoughtful article here in today’s Telegraph by Max Davidson looking at the current debate over alcohol policy. He is right to say that kneejerk, headling-grabbing measures are unlikely to have the desired effect, even if they were politically possible, but he is also right to say that we shouldn’t deny that there is any problem at all.

During the thirty-odd years of my drinking career I have certainly seen a much more unpleasant and disorderly atmosphere develop in town and city centres on weekend nights, and there are many more products on the market that seem designed to cater for those who are intent on rapid inebriation without caring much how they get there.

Nobody claims that things were perfect in the 1970s, but I have argued before that changes in the design of pubs and licensing policies have exacerbated late night disorder.

Society has also increasingly tended to disapprove of regular, moderate drinking, in ways such as employers preventing their employees from even having the odd pint at lunchtimes, and drink-driving well within the legal limit being frowned upon. This has broken down the old rituals which kept people’s drinking in check and led them to take an “all or nothing” approach to alcohol.

The government’s official drinking guidelines have proved counter-productive, as they are so unrealistic that people cheerfully ignore them, and they serve to stigmatise those drinking at levels a bit above them, who are not the problem. It is not the 40 unit a week people who are ending up in liver clinics and A&E, it is the 100+ unit a week people.

Of course, taking an interest in what you're drinking, whether cask beer, fine wines or malt whisky, is likely to promote an attitude of enjoying them for their own sake rather than simply as a means to an end, and will encourage a more responsible overall attitude to alcohol.

But governments have to be very careful about legislating in this area, as you cannot promote social change through legislation if it goes against the grain of what is happening on the ground, and there is huge potential for unintended consequences. And you certainly can’t bring about a sense of greater responsibility through legislation alone.

The premium pint

Go into any multi-beer pub, such as the Crown in Stockport, and the odds are that all the cask beers on sale will be at the same price for the same approximate strength. The same is largely true of the premium bottled ales on the off-licence shelf. Yet amongst wines and spirits there can easily be price differences of 3 to 1 between the same strength products.

While there can be big differentials between pubs, no cask beer brewers have successfully managed to establish and maintain a price premium over their rivals, even though some products are manifestly better than others. It’s puzzling why this should be so when it so obviously doesn’t apply in pretty much every other consumer market.

Maybe to a large extent it’s because “cask beer” is seen as a generic product, as the manufacturers of keg lagers, cider and Guinness are able to command a price premium of up to 60p a pint over cask beers of comparable strength. Of course why that should be so is a different question. Possibly the fact that standards of cellarmanship vary so much between different pubs also has a part to play.

I was interested to spot while composing this post that Jeff Pickthall had linked to my poll about how much people would consider exorbitant for a pint of 4.0% ABV beer, and makes a similar point about the lack of price premiums in the cask beer market. One commentator describes the poll as “simplistic”, which of course it is in a way, but it is clear from the responses so far that people’s perceptions of acceptability differ dramatically.

As Jeff says, “Ask wine-lovers ‘How much would you consider exorbitant for a bottle of 12% ABV wine?’ and the response would be a puzzled ‘which wine?’

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Minimum pricing poll

I recently concluded a poll with the question:

Do you agree with the Scottish plan for a minimum price per unit of alcohol?

There were 29 votes in total, and the results were:

Yes, it sounds a good idea: 4 (14%)
Maybe, let’s see how it goes: 3 (10%)
No, definitely not: 22 (76%)

So, a pretty decisive defeat there. As we have seen, this has been kicked into touch by the Scottish Parliament, but today we have seen the clinically obese Sir Liam Donaldson advocating it for England.

Those who wish to defend the right of adults to enjoy alcohol responsibly will have to keep our watch up, as this idea is likely to come back again and again.

English drinkers to be fleeced too

Just as you thought minimum alcohol pricing had been kicked into the long grass in Scotland, the idea now raises its ugly head again in England. The clinically obese Sir Liam Donaldson, “Chief Medical Officer” for England, is demanding that a minimum price of 50p per unit should be set in England. No matter that this will greatly increase costs for ordinary families who enjoy the occasional tipple, it will supposedly improve public health.

What a load of bollocks. Most people use alcohol entirely responsibly, and this proposal will simply increase their costs. But it will do nothing to curb problem drinkers, who are the least price-conscious of all. This is snobbish, prohibitionist nonsense and Sir Liam should be sacked from his official position immediately. It won’t affect Sir Liam and his claret-swigging mates, so what right do they have to impose this on the poor?

The government may have dismissed this for the time being, but we should be under no illusions that it will keep coming back. Not for the first time, something first mooted in Scotland will eventually be inflicted on England – just look at the poll tax and the smoking ban. And watch out for plans to severely curtail the amount of booze and fags people are allowed to bring in across the Channel.

This idea is superbly dismissed here by the ever-eloquent Raedwald:

If these cloistered fools ever once asked themselves why people drink to excess they might just find that it's the escape that many have from the suffocating, cloying, overweening, intrusive, impertinent and unwelcome interference of Labour's Nanny State in the minutae of their lives rather than the cost per unit that's the more important factor. But that's a lesson these idiots will never learn.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

No laughing matter

No doubt yesterday many of you will have made a contribution towards Comic Relief, thinking it would all go to good causes. You know, like this:

Comic Relief is funding Alcohol Concern to identify and submit alcohol projects and initiatives for young people.
Hmm, I don’t want any of my donations to go to an organisation dedicated to jacking up alcohol taxes and closing pubs down, thank you very much.

On the bench

I have great respect for Wetherspoons’ success as a pub operator, but somehow I struggle to warm to their pubs. Thinking about this, I reached the conclusion that one of the key reasons is that they largely eschew bench-type seating in favour of individual tables and chairs.

Traditionally, pubs have always tended to have benches fixed around the walls. This design was used because it works. It's flexible, as you can spread out coats and papers, or huddle close together, it's sociable, as everyone faces in towards the centre of the room, it's adaptable to different-sized groups of people, and it gives a room a distinctive quality of “pubbiness”. It's no coincidence that all of what are regarded as the finest pub rooms have fixed wall seating, whereas one of the most depressing rooms I have ever seen in a pub had plain white walls and nothing but about eight round tables each surrounded by four stools.

So why is it that modern pub designers so often go for having individual loose chairs grouped around tables instead? These may give a place the atmosphere of a gentlemen's club, or a Continental bistro, (or, at worst, a works canteen) but they certainly aren't right for pubs. They mean that people tend to cluster around tables in inward-facing groups rather than talking to each other, and make the place less sociable. They make the person who's just popped in on their own for a pint and a quick read of the paper feel ill at ease, and they're awkward too for groups of more than four.

The only conclusion is that they’re trying to make pubs look and feel less like pubs and more like restaurants.

Tim tells it straight

The ever-outspoken Tim Martin of Wetherspoon’s certainly didn’t mince his words when laying into the Government over its policies towards pubs:

Tim Martin, the chairman, said the high level of tax being levied on the trade was “contributing to the closure of pubs in record numbers”. He said each of Wetherspoon’s pubs generated average taxes of £530,000 but earned only £50,000 in after-tax profits.

“The Government seems not to understand the economic impact of new taxes and legislation and continues to impose new burdens at a huge rate,” Mr Martin said.

“Opportunistic 'tax grabs' and employee legislation to 'curry favour' with voters which businesses cannot afford will prove to be counter productive for the Government,” he said.
The report shows, though, that Wetherspoon’s are doing much better than many of the competition in combating the recession, which underlines the point that how a pub is run can make a big difference even when overall trade is down.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Matching ties

It’s often argued that the existence of the beer tie is a major factor holding back small brewers. However, if you listen to licensees it doesn’t appear that micro-brewers’ products would be top of their list. When asked in a survey what beer they would most want to stock if they had a free choice, the winner was…

Carling!

In fact all the Top 10 were the predictable mass-market kegs.

This gives a clear picture of what life would be like if the tie were completely removed. It might open up more opportunities for the very smallest brewers, but it would lead to a situation where the vast majority of bars were dominated by the same row of national and international keg brands, and the middle ground of brewers would largely disappear. Provided it does not lead to market dominance in specific areas, the brewery tie enhances competition rather than diminishing it.

The pub company tie is a different matter, but the existence of brewers like Thwaites and Robinson’s with substantial tied estates is a major bulwark of choice and diversity in the beer market. Genuine choice results not only from the total number of products available but also the degree to which the market is concentrated. Is there more real choice for the consumer in a market with 100 products, but where two account for 95% of sales, or in one with 20 products, but where 10 account for 95%?

And it should not be forgotten that, without the tie, cask beer would have virtually disappeared in Britain in the 60s and 70s.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Then they came for the chocolate-lovers

As a Scottish GP calls for a tax on chocolate to combat obesity, it seems that no form of pleasure or self-indulgence is now immune from Puritanical censure. The idea that the assault on smoking did not presage an assault on pretty much everything else anyone likes doing has now been stripped of any credibility.

Describing this kind of thing as “health fascism” has sometimes been portrayed as hyperbole, but in reality it does display a genuinely Fascist attitude, that individual adults do not have sovereignty over their own bodies and lives and have to subordinate their own interests to a higher purpose.

In fact many of today’s so-called health crusades have their antecedents in the Nazi era – Hitler was famously a teetotaller and vegetarian, and the Nazis made great efforts to deter their citizens from smoking, drinking and eating meat so they would (supposedly) be better able to serve the Reich. However, I suspect most of the pork and beer-loving Germans took all this with a large pinch of salt.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Back on the shelf

There was good news for Scottish drinkers when the opposition parties blocked the SNP government’s plan to impose a minimum price per unit of alcohol. Whatever one’s views on the merits of the proposal, they were right to insist that it was such a significant change that it should be fully debated in the Scottish Parliament and not just sneaked in via secondary legislation. It is now not likely to come in until well into 2010, if at all.

This followed the release of a study by the Centre for Economics & Business Research which found that consumers in Scotland would pay £80 million more a year – £35 per household – if a minimum price of 40p per unit was brought in, but the policy would do little to help problem drinkers. It pointed out that heavy drinkers tended to be the least responsive to price changes.

There is a hypothesis popular with anti-alcohol campaigners called the Ledermann Theory which postulates that the amount of “alcohol harm” in society is directly proportional to overall consumption, and therefore reducing the latter is in itself desirable. However, the study referred to above suggests otherwise, and I would have thought it was common sense that a substantial rise in the price of alcohol would tend to widen the statistical gap between light and heavy drinkers rather than impacting evenly across the board.

Most of the people buying cheap booze are not doing so because they are problem drinkers, but simply because they’re not very well off. And there has to be a limit as to how much responsible drinkers should be made to suffer in an attempt to deter the irresponsible minority.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Contrasting cats

I’ve always thought that a pub is enhanced by a pub cat, and it’s unfortunate that none of my regular haunts seem to have one.

I was amused the other day to come across here these two cartoons of pub cats (and no, I don’t know what the page is about either, or what relevance it has to pub cats):

Poncy Soft Southern Pub Cat in Native Habitat

Hard Northern Pub Cat in Native Habitat

Obviously this predates the smoking ban!

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Smoking ban poll

I recently concluded a poll with the question:

Should pubs and clubs be allowed to set aside a separate indoor smoking room?

Yes: 37 (79%)
No: 10 (21%)

Now, obviously the readership of this blog is somewhat self-selecting, but that’s a pretty overwhelming majority.

The blanket smoking ban remains a gross affront to individual liberty and the issue is not going to go away. I would remind all readers that I am a non-smoker, but not someone who believes anything he doesn’t like should be banned.

To anyone who argues that the smoking ban is a fact of life and pro-pub campaigners should move on, I would respond “if we had alcohol Prohibition, would you not fight it as long as you lived?”