The Spanish Armada: Preparations

Not long ago I was asked, unexpectedly, to give a talk on the Spanish Armada. I have never claimed to be an expert on the subject, but this is what I came up with.

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The Spanish Armada story must be one of the best-known episodes in English history.
      "Fifteen eighty-eight
       Was the Spanish Armada date"
  as children once recited in junior school. But the date itself raises a question. By 1588 Elizabeth had been on the English throne for thirty years. Why did Philip of Spain wait so long before launching an invasion? and why do it at all, after all this time? Not only was Elizabeth a Protestant heretic, and possibly illegitimate as the offspring of a dubious marriage; but Philip had his own claim to the English throne, both as the husband of the late Queen Mary and as a descendant of the old Plantagenet kings. So why wait so long? The answer must be twofold: the delay was partly due to Elizabeth's skillful diplomacy (particularly her exploitation of her unmarried state); and partly because England ranked fairly low down on Philip's list of priorities.

Philip II of Spain was the son of the Emperor Charles V. Since 1555 he had ruled not only Spain, but also Sardinia,Sicily and Naples, and thus dominating the Italian peninsula. From his ancestors the Dukes of Burgundy he inherited what are now the Netherlands and Belgium. He also became King of Portugal when the old Portuguese dynasty died out. In addition he also ruled a vast colonial empire in America and the Far East; the source of enormous wealth. Every year the Plate Fleet brought the profits of the East across the Pacific from the Philippines to Panama, where it joined with the gold and silver of Mexico and Peru for shipment to Spain. These massive bullion imports enabled Philip to build up the only professional army in Europe, with which to intimidate his neighbours; though his multiple commitments meant that he went bankrupt no fewer than four times during his reign. In 1494 the Pope had allotted all the newly-discovered lands to Spain and Portugal, but the wealth involved became an irresistible target for the excluded nations. Trading, privateering and outright piracy became indistinguishable for enterprising English, Dutch or French captains.

Philip's huge empire brought him many different problems.
   Spanish power in the Mediterranean was threatened by the navies of the Ottoman (Turkish) empire, and by their allies, the corsairs operating out of what is now Algeria: the notorious "Barbary coast". This threat was lessened by the Turkish failure to take Malta,and by the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Lepanto, off the coast of Greece,in 1571, but for the rest of the century there was essentially a stand-off between Philip and the Turkish Sultan, with neither establishing a clear advantage.
   In 1566 the Dutch Protestants rose in revolt against Spanish rule. Philip sent armies there, under his half-brother Don John of Austria (the victor at Lepanto), and latterly under Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, but never managed to crush the rebels.

   France, not England, was Philip's main enemy, as it had been for his father, the Emperor Charles V. France was now in a very delicate situation. For decades, there was a spasmodic civil war between the Catholic monarchy and the Protestant Hugenots; the most notorious incident being the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in Paris, when thousands of Hugenots were murdered. From 1574 the King of France was Henry III; the last of his line, childless, presumably homosexual (nicknamed "Le Roi Mignon": "the sweetie king"). The power behind the throne was his mother, the formidable Catherine dei' Medici, from the great Florentine family; but the heir to the throne was a cousin, Henry of Navarre; a Hugenot! The other great power in France was the Catholic League, headed by the Duc de Guise and his brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine. It seems certain that Philip was backing the League with his money. King Henry and his mother did not trust the League, and were fearful of Spanish ambitions in France. In Paris the League was all-powerful, and Henry was losing control of his own capital to the Guise faction. (The Guises weren't even properly French, coming as they did from Lorraine. Mary Queen of Scots was from the same family, her mother being a Guise, and her first husband had been Henry III's elder brother)
 
Until the 1570s, or even later, Philip never gave up hope of winning Elizabeth of England over. He would far rather have had her on his side against the French, and at least neutral in the Dutch war, than have to go to the trouble of overthrowing her by force. On her part, Elizabeth wanted above all to avoid war; and she used her unmarried state as a skillful negotiating gambit: would she marry a French prince or a Spanish one? or perhaps someone completely different: Eric of Denmark, or even Ivan the Terrible of Russia! Helped by her natural tendency to procrastination, she kept them all guessing, literally for decades.
     Elizabeth was a religious moderate, disliking persecution or "windows into men's souls" unless actual treason was involved. But a series of events forced her into an increasingly anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish position:-

   1568   Mary Queen of Scots fled to England. She was undoubtedly the heir to the English throne, and also a Catholic. Elizabeth used the excuse of the mysterious murder of Mary's husband, Lord Darnley, an English nobleman, to keep her under house arrest pending an investigation. But Mary inevitably became the focus of a series of Catholic plots against Elizabeth.
   1569   "The Rising of the North". Catholicism was still strong in the north of England, where several of the old feudal lords now rose in rebellion, but were defeated
   1570   A Papal Bull issued by Pope Pius V proclaimed Elizabeth a heretic and usurper: English Catholics were absolved of their oaths of obedience and commanded to overthrow her. About this time, numbers of young English Catholics were secretly trained abroad as priests and then smuggled back into England.
   1571   The Ridolfi Plot sought to free Mary and marry her to the Duke of Norfolk, England's premier Catholic nobleman. Norfolk was executed, and Mary placed under tighter restrictions
   1581    The learned and saintly Edmund Campion, England's most prominent Catholic priest, was arrested, tortured and executed for treason. Recusancy fines (for non-attendance at Anglican church services) were massively increased
   1583   The Throckmorton Plot to kill Elizabeth
   1586   The Babington Plot. A "sting" operation implicated Mary
   1587   Mary Queen of Scots was executed in February.

Elizabeth was reluctant to get involved in the Dutch revolt, but the assassination of the Dutch Protestant leader William the Silent in 1584 made her realize that the situation was critical, and she sent money and an English force under her favourite, the Earl of Leicester, to support the rebels. Leicester proved distinctly incompetent as a general, and Parma took some towns from the rebels, but even so this English assistance encouraged the Dutch and angered Philip.
   In Ireland the Fitzgerald Earls of Desmond (known as the Geraldines) rose in revolt in 1579. A Spanish force was sent to assist Desmond, but was caught and massacred at Smerwick in 1580.
   Then there was the issue of piracy in American waters. At first, English ships did not directly attack Spanish colonies, but in 1577 came Drake's voyage round the world, raiding undefended Spanish bases on the Pacific coast. Philip was understandably furious, but Elizabeth pleaded ignorance. In 1585 Drake attacked in the West Indies, sacking Cartagena and other Spanish bases.

Finally in 1586 King Philip decided he'd had enough, and instructed his leading admiral, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, to draw up a plan for the invasion of England. It was now far too late to help Mary Queen of Scots, but it is questionable how far Philip ever really wanted Mary, with her strong French links, on the throne of England. That problem at least would shortly be solved.

Before we outline Santa Cruz's plans, we must examine the changing face of war at sea. One of the problems facing King Philip was that, with his vast empire, he needed not one navy, but two: one for the Mediterranean and another for the Atlantic; and they weren't the same!

From ancient times, the warship of the Mediterranean had been the galley: long, narrow, low in the water, having a shallow draught without a keel, propelled by banks of oars: fighting by ramming the enemy or by closing and boarding. This method suited the Spaniards because of their splendid professional army (the word "infantry" originated with Philip's soldiers). The last great galley battle in history was at Lepanto in 1571, where a composite fleet commanded by Philip's half-brother, Don John of Austria, had decisively defeated the Turks off the west coast of Greece. Most of the Spanish commanders were galley-sailors: Santa Cruz himself had been in command of the reserve at Lepanto, and his intervention at a crucial moment had been decisive.
   But galleys were unsuitable for the rougher waters of the Atlantic, where ships needed higher sides and deep keels to tack with the wind. Also, advances in metallurgy enabled better guns to be cast. In the previous half-century a new kind of warship had been developed: the galleon, with 16 or more cannon each side, mounted on different gundecks, so that with proper training the sailors could fire a devastating broadside. Henry VIII's ill-fated "Mary Rose" was one of the very first galleons. Galleys by their very nature could not fire broadsides, and only carried a few cannon.

Santa Cruz outlined his invasion plan in March 1587. The figures were astonishing. He reckoned on an army of 59,000 men; which, with the sailors needed to transport them, came to a manpower total of 94,000, plus horses. To carry this gigantic force to England he envisaged a fighting force of 150 galleons, 40 hulks (large store-ships), 40 galleys and a mass of smaller ships: a total fleet of 556 vessels. The ships would be armed with 1280 cannon (which sounds a lot, but actually only averages 2 per ship). The expedition would be provisioned for six months; the supplies including 19 tons of biscuits, 23,000 barrels of salt fish, tons of cheese and bacon, tens of thousands of gallons of water and wine ....... the total cost coming to one and a half billion maravedis!
     Where was all this to come from? To take a single instance: Santa Cruz asked for 150 galleons, but how many did Philip actually have? just 24! and he was already in financial difficulties! Was the admiral trying to tell his king that the expedition wasn't really feasible?
     A new plan was then evolved: to invade and conquer England on the cheap. In the Netherlands, just across the narrow seas from the coast of Kent, the Duke of Parma commanded a first-rate army of 60,000 men (most of whom, incidentally, were not Spaniards). Would it not be possible to mount a much smaller expedition, which could sail from Spain, pick up Parma's troops, land them somewhere near Margate and use them to defeat Elizabeth's makeshift forces in a single rapid campaign before returning to take on the Dutch once more? But in April 1587, while this revised plan for a slim-line Armada was still being drawn up, Drake raided Cadiz harbour; and there, in the most favourable galley conditions imaginable, he destroyed twelve royal galleys while losing no ships himself in the process. Drake then landed at Sangres, further up the coast, where he captured and burnt huge quantities of supplies intended for the Armada before returning home. It was clearly shown that galleys stood no chance at all in a battle with galleons.

Version 2 of the Armada was very much smaller. Only 19,000 soldiers were taken on board, with a consequent overall reduction of manpower to 30,000: only a third of the original proposal. The fleet was also much reduced, to just 130. This included just 4 galleys (none of which managed to reach the Channel), 4 galleasses (an experimental hybrid ship, which did not prove a great success), 25 big hulks for the stores and far fewer small ships. The main fighting force was 65 galleons; still far more than King Philip possessed: instead large merchant ships were commandeered and armed as galleons. The number of cannon, however, was doubled to 2,400; half of which were heavy, firing shot of over 4 pounds weight. The new Armada was thus far more effective as a fighting force.

After endless delays, the expedition finally set sail from Corunna in north-western Spain on July 12th 1588. But Santa Cruz was not on board. He had died in February, aged 63. As his successor King Philip nominated the Duke of Medina Sidonia; a rich, pious and brave nobleman. He had no experience of the sea, and indeed had begged Philip not to give him the command, but had striven manfully to overcome the confusion he inherited in the dockyards.

What followed was to prove a turning-point not only for England, but for the entire history of western Europe. If England had fallen to the Spaniards, Protestantism would have been reduced to a handful of small, scattered enclaves: Scotland, Scandinavia, Switzerland and a few German principalities. The Dutch rebels would have been unlikely to resist for much longer. Even the future of France was at stake, for at the same time as the Armada set sail, Henry III had fled from Paris and taken refuge by the Loire, leaving his capital under the control of the Duc de Guise and his pro-Spanish Catholic League.
   What would happen now?

My next essay will outline the Armada campaign.

My very brief career as a beggar

Some years ago I visited Florence. On my last morning there, I had to carry my luggage from the hotel to the railway station. It was very hot and my bags were heavy, so I stopped for a rest at the Baptistry.

I sat on the steps by Ghiberti's great door, fanned myself with my hat and then put it on the ground by my feet. I must have looked dreadful, because a passer-by dropped a small coin into it.

Despite this evidence of the extreme ease of making money by begging, I have not repeated the experiment.

My Early Life, by Winston Churchill

This must be one of the most entertaining autobiographies of all time. Churchill wrote in in 1930, when he had already served as a Liberal cabinet minister under Asquith and Lloyd George, and as Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer under Baldwin, but was now embarking on nine fruitless years out of office. The book covers the time up to the start of his Parliamentary career in the first years of the 20th century.

Churchill passes quickly through what he portrays as his distinctly unpromising youth: an appalling prep school, years of underachievement at Harrow, then Sandhurst (where he needed two attempts, and the services of a "crammer", to pass the entrance exams), a commission in the Fourth Hussars and a posting to Bangalore in India. There, he tells us, his education really began, with a programme of serious reading in his leisure-time. (It is interesting that a hundred years earlier the future Duke of Wellington had embarked on a very similar campaign of self-education under much the same circumstances) Churchill developed his sonorous prose style by devouring the great classic historiansGibbon and Macaulay.

This is where the story really starts. The book is largely taken up with Churchill's adventures, which took the form of searches for battle. The odd thing is that none of these stemmed from his normal regimental duties He first came under fire in Cuba, of all places, where he travelled to witness the attempts of the Spanish colonial forces to put down a rebellion on the island. He then obtained leave to join a campaign to crush some troublesome tribes on the north-west frontier of India, where he witnessed his first killings and had the first of his many narrow escapes from death. This expedition enabled him to write his first book, "The Story of the Malakand Field Force". A map shows us how depressingly familiar that region is today, for Churchill was writing about the Swat valley and the "Tribal Areas" of Pakistan on the Afghanistan frontier. Churchill's comments on the outlook and behaviour of the tribes still hold true today, though nowadays we blast them from drones in the sky rather than deter them from rebellion by burning their villages and destroying their crops as Churchill's expedition did. (Oddly enough, he makes no reference to Islam at all in this book)

Next came the Sudan, where General Kitchener had been sent to destroy the power of the Dervishes and avenge the killing of General Gordon at Khartoum. Kitchener was most reluctant to allow Churchill anywhere near the campaign, considering him an pushy young self-publicist (which he was, of course!). Only after intense lobbying by his mother and friends (even the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, was persuaded to put in a good word for him!) did Kitchener surrender with an ill grace and allow Churchill to join the expedition as a supernumerary unpaid Lieutenant in the Lancers. There he took part in the last cavalry charge ever made by the British army at the battle of Omdurman, where he shot two Dervishes and again narrowly avoided being killed himself. This led to another book: "The River War", which was again very well-received.

Churchill's next step illustrates his limitless ambition. He resigned from the army in order to fight a bye- election at Oldham as a Conservative candidate. M.P.s at this time were still unpaid, and he proposed in future to support himself by his writing. As it happened, his attempt to enter into Parliament failed, but this enabled him in autumn 1899 to go to South Africa, where the Boer War was just starting, as war correspondent for the "Morning Post", at the extraordinarily high salary of £250 a month plus expenses.

More adventures followed. He was in a troop train derailed by Boer artillery, was taken prisoner and interned, escaped, was a fugitive with a price on his head ("£25: dead or alive"), hid in a coalmine and on a goods train which took him to safety in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. From there he returned to South Africa, rejoined the army, survived the disaster of the battle of Spion Kop and took part in the relief of Ladysmith. The publicity gained from all these exploits led to his election as M.P. for Oldham at the general election of 1901.

So, at the age of 26, Churchill found himself already famous as the hero of many adventures, a popular writer and journalist, and now a Member of Parliament. Before taking up his seat, he embarked on a hectic lecture tour of Britain, and then of the United States and Canada, which left him with £10,000 in the bank: an enormous sum for the time, which preserved him from financial worries for many years. Few young men could ever have achieved so much in so short a time, and his meteoric career was only beginning, for in less than ten years he would be a Cabinet minister.

    But none of this could have been achieved without Churchill's family connections. His grandfather was the Duke of Marlborough; his father, Lord Randolph, (who died shortly before Churchill joined the army) was the most charismatic young Conservative politician of his generation; his mother was a great society beauty. From his infancy he had been introduced to everyone who mattered. As a young subaltern he was invited to a private dinner where the Prince of Wales was a guest - and contrived to irritate his future sovereign by arriving twenty minutes late! His early books were read and praised in the highest circles.The great Joseph Chamberlain, cabinet minister and apostle of Imperialism, came to Oldham to speak on his behalf in the election campaign.
    Throughout the book Churchill takes pains to contrast the view he had of the world as a gung-ho young army officer with how he now perceives things as an experienced government minister in his fifties. Looking back, he regrets that he never had a chance to go to university, but feels that what he lost in academic education was more than compensated by what he gained in experience of life.  

When one reads a biography of Churchill, such as the splendidly-written one by Roy Jenkins, one realizes how much of the story Churchill left out. One could hardly expect him to have publicized that his father apparently died of syphilis, or that by the time he was a rising young politician his mother (described by Jenkins as a "serial adulteress") was married to what we would nowadays call a "toy-boy", scarcely older than Churchill himself. His younger brother Jack receives barely a mention. His years at Harrow were not as unproductive as he implies. I used to know a history master at Harrow, who told me that some of Churchill's essays were preserved in the school archives, and that they were very good. Churchill dismisses in a single line the fact that he won the Public Schools Fencing Championships; whereas he devotes several pages to his exploits on the polo field as a young army officer. (For some reason, successful English people take a delight in positively boasting about how useless they were at school. I cannot imagine a German or Japanese behaving like this!)
     The last sentence of the book refers forward to September 1908, "When I got married and lived happily ever after". Not only does Churchill not give the name of his wife, but there has been no mention in the book of any girlfriend whatsoever! In fact the only woman apart from his mother appear  in the book is his old nurse, Mrs Everest. What are we to make of this?

It was inevitable that such a dramatic story should be made into a film: "Young Winston", with Simon Ward in the title role and Robert Shaw and Anne Bancroft as his parents.

Bean casserole made easy

This is my mother's recipe. It looks a rather muddy mess, but is actually very tasty!

Serves 2 good helpings

400 gm tin of butter-beans
400 gm tin of tomatoes
8 or more dried apricots
1 onion, grated or chopped
2 bay-leaves
1 full teaspoon of Marmite
Salt and pepper

Mix all the ingredients together the night before, cover and leave to stand, so that the apricots can absorb the flavour. Add more liquid the next day if necessary. Cook in the oven for one hour at 180 degrees.

The Gunpowder Plot in Staffordshire

Many people know that most of the Gunpowder Plotters were killed or captured at Holbeach House, near Dudley, in south Staffordshire. But what were they doing there? This essay attempts to answer that question.

This famous engraving shows eight of the plotters: Robert Catesby, who was the leader and inspiration of the enterprise, Thomas Percy, Guido Fawkes (who at this stage of his life did not answer to the name "Guy"), the two sets of brothers, John and Christopher Wright and Robert and Thomas Winter (more properly, "Wintour"), and Bates. Four other major plotters are missing from the picture: Robert Keyes, Ambrose Rookwood, Francis Tresham and Sir Everard Digby.
    What had these men got in common? They were all Catholics, driven, as they saw it, to desperate measures because King James I, who had seemingly promised to relax the penal laws against Catholics, had now reverted to strict enforcement. (At that time, ruinous fines were imposed on anyone refusing to attend Church of England services, and any Catholic priests who were caught were liable to be tortured for information and then executed). Of the twelve men, Guido Fawkes, a Yorkshireman, had been a mercenary soldier in the Spanish service, Thomas Percy was a relative and dependent of a great nobleman, the Earl of Northumberland, and Thomas Bates was Percy's servant, which is why he was only given a surname in the picture, and was depicted without a hat. The other nine were all landowning gentry, mostly with property in the Midlands, related to each other by a complex network of marriages between the old Catholic families. They were mostly in their mid-thirties, though Digby was ten years younger than the others.

Everyone knows the story of how the plot to blow up Parliament was betrayed to Lord Monteagle, a Catholic nobleman (probably by Tresham), how Monteagle then passed the message on to the King and his chief minister, Robert Cecil (who must surely already have known that something was going on), and how Fawkes was discovered with the stock of gunpowder around midnight on November 4th /5th, 1605. But the blowing-up of Parliament was only to be part of the plot. Some of the plotters were waiting at Dunchurch, near Rugby. It was hoped that the explosion would kill not only King James but also his heir, Henry, Prince of Wales, and perhaps even his four-year-old younger son, Charles (later King Charles I). This would leave as heir to the throne James's daughter, Princess Elizabeth: just nine years old, but already with her own miniature court at Coombe Abbey, nine miles away from Dunchurch. With James and his sons dead, the plotters intended to kidnap Elizabeth, proclaim her as Queen and bring her up a Catholic. They hoped to spark off a mass rising of English Catholics, and maybe also foreign intervention by Spanish troops. All this was, to say the least, highly optimistic. Any priests who got to hear of the plot were horrified and urged its abandonment, the Pope favoured conciliation with England, and King James and Philip III of Spain were beginning to negotiate the peace treaty which they both wanted.

When the plotters learned of the arrest of Guido Fawkes they would have been well-advised to abandon all their plans and take cover, but many of them still hoped that part of the plot would succeed. They accordingly fled back to their power-base in the Midlands and seized war-horses from Warwick castle, and also a supply of gunpowder, in the hope of starting an armed rising. Not surprisingly, only a handful joined them, including John Grant, Henry Morgan and a Staffordshire landowner, Stephen Littleton. On November 8th most of the group were trapped at Holbeach House, Stephen Littleton's home, by 200 men under Sir Richard Walsh, the sheriff of Worcester. In the fighting Catesby, Percy and the Wright brothers were killed and Thomas Winter, Rookwood, Grant and Morgan were wounded. The others were captured individually over the next few weeks. Meanwhile Guido Fawkes, after savage torture, had revealed most of the details of the plot. Francis Tresham died in the Tower of London of a urinary infection two days before Christmas.

After a treason trial at which they were not permitted any defence lawyers, the surviving plotters were sentenced to the full penalty for traitors, which was execution by hanging, drawing and quartering. Accordingly on January 30th 1606, Digby, Grant, Bates and Robert Winter were dragged by sledge to St Paul's churchyard and, one by one, partially strangled on a rope, then, whilst still alive, castrated, disembowelled and chopped into pieces. The next day Fawkes, Thomas Winter, Keyes and Rookwood suffered the same fate at Old Palace Yard next to the Houses of Parliament (not, of course, the present building!) There were other executions in different parts of the country: Stephen Littleton and Henry Morgan being executed in Stafford.

Holbeach House still stands: it is now a care home.

There is a final ironic twist to the story. Little Princess Elizabeth, who was intended to be the plotters' puppet ruler, of course never did become Queen. When she grew up she married a German Protestant prince: Frederick, Elector Palatine; and in 1714 her grandson became King of England as George I, thus ensuring a Protestant succession to the throne. All later British monarchs are descended from her.

Shrewsbury panorama

We have recently moved to Shrewsbury, the county town of Shropshire. The old part of the town lies within a loop of the river Severn, and includes a tangle of alley-ways with very strange names: Grope Lane, the Dogpole, even the Pig-Trough!

This is the view from Shrewsbury school. The buildings in the foreground are the school boat-houses. Across the river are, from left to right: St. Chad's, the redbrick tower of the modern market hall, the spires of St. Mary the Virgin and St. Alkmund's, and the tower of St. Julian's. St. Chad's was built by George Steuart in the 1790s. St. Mary the Virgin has some exceptionally fine late-mediaeval stained glass  The Abbey is off the picture to the right.

Between St.Chad's and the river is a particularly charming place: a formal garden in in old quarry, known as the Dingle.

The centre of the town is The Square, with its mediaeval market hall.

This is the old Grammar School, built in the early 17th century; now the town library. The statue in front is Charles Darwin, the school's most famous former pupil. Others include the Elizabethan poet-statesman Sir Philip Sidney, and, less happily, the dreaded Judge Jeffreys from James II's reign.

    (See also: a later post on Shrewsbury's black and white buildings)

A Third World Slum

In 1984 I went on a trip to the Soviet Union, which as well as taking us to Moscow and Leningrad also included crossing the Caucasus mountains down to Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. I have written a full account of the trip on an earlier blog entry, and I want to focus here on just one aspect.

 In Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, I had my first and only experience of observing an actual Third World slum. We were amazed to find that our hotel, which was a very large new building, backed onto a slum; a revolting area of little cabins made of bits of board and corrugated iron, packed together all higgledy-piggledy and housing several hundred people. There were television aerials and even a few cars amidst the squalor, but I also saw large rats foraging in broad daylight.

These are a couple of photos I took from the hotel, one being the view from my room.

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Apart from the slums, there were few old buildings in Yerevan. The pride of the city was clearly the new football stadium just down the road from our hotel: the home of Yerevan Ararat, one of the best teams in the USSR.
      It was the sight of the slums in Yerevan which sparked off the most discussion in our party. The whole lot could have been cleared away for the cost of building our hotel, and the new football stadium must have cost millions. So why were the slums still there? Of course, it is likely that before the war Yerevan was ALL slum, and that the rehousing done so far was actually an impressive achievement. I suspected there just weren’t enough civil engineers in the Soviet Union assigned to such projects. The building sites we saw in the other trans-Caucasian cities, Tbilisi and Baku, were primitive operations which would have horrified any British bricklayer. There were no wheelbarrows on site, the scaffolding looked most unsafe, and some of the ladders were just bits of wood nailed together. We were all surprised that the authorities had given so little thought as to what the tourists would make of the squalor staring them in the face.

 I was saddened how fast the tourists fell into an entirely patronising attitude towards the slum-dwellers, on the general theme of, “Well, we wouldn’t like to live there, but the people seem happy enough, and they probably prefer it to living in blocks of flats”. (this view, interestingly enough, was expressed in these very words by an East German.) Judging by the extreme grottiness of the flats we saw under construction, I could understand people not wanting to live in them, but those slums were a plain and simple health hazard, and should have gone long ago. Besides, refraining from demolishing slums on the grounds that the inhabitants still want to live in them was hardly the approach one would expect from the Soviet planning authorities! I was more convinced than ever that the Soviet Union was a very inefficiently run country, still escaping from ancestral poverty and backwardness, and that trying to conceal this not-too-disgraceful fact was the cause of a great deal of pretense and dishonesty. Long before the end of the tour, we were starting to laugh at the latest display of incompetence, though a French lady in the group kept exclaiming “Oh! What a country!” in a tone of despair.

The Soviet Union disintegrated six years after our visit. Perhaps our experiences should have led us to anticipate this, but we proved no more prescient than the professional commentators. Whether the collapse of the U.S.S.R. really benefited the Caucasus and Trans-Caucasus might be questioned, because there has been endemic warfare there ever since. Whether the Yerevan slums are still there, I do not know.