PROFILE SIR ROBERT CRAWFORD
A WEEK IN THE LIFE
John Kelleher
The Imperial War Museum, headquartered in South London was conceived in 1917 in the final stages of the conflict briefly known as the “war to end all wars.”
Across the century since it has chronicled innumerable conflicts around the world involving Britain and the Commonwealth.
Sir Robert Crawford, its Director General, who retires this autumn after 40 years, has spent his career gazing into the heart of this darkness - the museum’s account of the impacts of war on the lives of ordinary people.
“I think war is part of our human condition. I don’t think it will go away, but I think it is important to remain optimistic about humanity’s ability to manage this challenge. Institutions like this have a role in equipping people with an understanding of the history of war and of the historical antecedents to current conflicts that should enable them to address the challenges of war more responsibly and effectively in the future.”
Crawford, who earns £129,000 annually, joined the Museum in 1966 as a junior researcher straight from Oxford. His first job was cataloguing part of its immense film archive of the build-up to D Day and ensuing battle for Normandy.
“I told the director it would take thirty-five of me the rest of the century to complete cataloguing this material in the amount of detail that was required! We now do it in a somewhat speedier manner.”
Crawford, 63 now has others among the Museum’s 645 fulltime staff who maintain the still growing archive. Although Museum overlord, he praises his team for such achievements as creating the Holocaust exhibition, the dramatic Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, HMS Belfast, the air museums at Duxford and the Cabinet War Rooms.
But at the Museum’s core is an unswerving vision – overseen by Crawford since he became Director General in 1995. Education is its enduring raison d’etre and, despite regular debates about widening its remit, he says The Great War – the first “total war” - is still the best starting point for the collection. Suggestions it might drop Imperial from its name have also been examined frequently and rejected.
With mere months before retirement Crawford shows no sign of flagging.
Recently he was in Washington for a fund raising dinner for the American Air Museum at Duxford. “Uniquely we managed to close Reagan Airport for a flyover of three second world war aircraft.” He also attended a Downing Street reception marking the cultural world’s contribution to the economy, opened the “For Your Eyes Only” exhibition on James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming and chaired meetings about funding and the museum’s future.
From October that future will be the responsibility of the Museum’s first female director, Diane Lees, presently running London’s Museum of Childhood.
“My retirement will be a clean break. Rather like headmasters and vicars, one doesn’t offer a ghost like tread in the patch of one’s successor. I do hope though they might invite me back for an exhibition opening or two.”
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
CHINA DESIGN NOW - A REVIEW
CHINA DESIGN NOW
THE V+A
A short distance from the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington there is a shop full of cool Scandinavian design. Elegant and curvaceous modernist creations by Marimekko and the like.
It offers a stark contrast to (and perhaps a ordered and restorative balm after) the cacophony of the current featured show at the V+A – “China Design Now” which runs until the middle of July.
The exhibition offers a reminder of Napoleon’s famous words: “Let China sleep for when she wakes the world will tremble.”
Indeed it could be sub-titled:” whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.”
The show is all about design in modern China – graphic and architectural ideas in particular.
Three cities are featured from the east coast of this continent of cultures -Shenzhen, Shanghai and the Olympic capital Beijing. Little is revealed about the vaster hinterland.
There is also little to put any of this in any historical context. Instead we are offered a welter of sensation. The overwhelming feeling is of bewildering confusion – of the Western notion of the fragile beauty of Chinese design and art confounded by a dam burst of youthful ideas – borrowed, stolen, pasted or smashed together from a thousand and one primarily Western youth culture sources to into an exotic hybrid.
One young visitor said she was appalled by the thought that millions of young Chinese children were growing up with this mishmash as their visual backdrop.
It is hard to find coherence or what we’ve come to think of as traditional elements of Chinese beauty here.
There are some fine modern variations on Chinese calligraphy, but primarily one can admire the sheer vitality and energy on show, of ideas going in a thousand different directions.
This is a world being endlessly born – something that parallels the nature of China since its entrance into the modern world. It’s a new cultural revolution and, rather akin to Mao’s political event, it grows by despoiling the past.
The section about the transformation of Beijing for the Olympics is revealing. When I visited nearly a decade ago the vast avenues were already becoming lined with modernist creations.
But behind them were still a maze of old streets – the hutongs or neighbourhoods.
Since then Beijing has gone into overdrive – exorcising the old and creating whole neighbourhoods of dramatic post-modernism. Just as with the smaller Canary Wharf area in London this blooming of a thousand new buildings offers a dazzling display.
But it is being done at a price - the seeming carnage enacted on a culture that has been swept away. It is easy for the Western mind, often fixated on the romantic to bemoan this.
After the visit to Beijing one feature I wrote talked of the willow-pattern prettiness of Behei Park in the early morning – its lake around a white Dagoba fringed with trees and people practicing t’ai chi. I was criticised for this by a Chinese friend - and for some elements of our film - for conjuring a romantic and backwards looking image of contemporary China.
Perhaps the criticsm was valid from the perspective of a young Chinese who saw change and modernisation in a wholly positive light. Quite correct from the perspective of creating a new nation where everyone benefits from its growing economy.
For them much of the past serves a commercial purpose – luring tourists – but in other respects signifies oppression by a now defunct ruling class and poverty.
The new China emerging now is getting wealthier and offering its citizens opportunities we in the West take for granted.
But such reservations about these changes also highlight the different things that are valued now in a West that went through many convulsions as it moved into the modern age.
In the UK we walk through the gutted hearts of many an old town or city and see fragments of our “heritage” poling through the soulless malls of multinational shopping outlets. We feel regret for a history now lost beneath the concrete and wish such a fate could be avoided elsewhere.
Now we seek to create a balance carefully between the benefits of continuing modernisation and a desire to preserve the best of the past. This is in stark contrast to the increasingly dominant idea in previously impoverished parts of the world which are modernising as fast as they can.
Such concern about the careful preservation of the past can be seen as a luxury that cannot be afforded.
We in the West seek to see our dreams of cultural continuity and of places in a finer harmony with their past in cultures that have trailed behind our embrace of the modern world. And we resent the sort of idea of progress that rocks that dreamboat.
In the Arabian Gulf for instance, the nomads of the desert have forsaken their tents and impoverished lifestyle for the vast gallop to modernism of Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
It is a shame, we feel, as we perceive something of what we see as the romantic Bedouin soul being lost among the concrete and glass. Such a perspective might be the folly of what Edward Said defined as orientalism.
For would we have accepted living in wattle and daub as serfs if a parallel world of wealth, comfort and improvement were on offer?
It’s a complicated question. The China being born today seems alien and challenging – but perhaps it embodies what western liberals once praised about Maoism - the challenge of constant revolution made solid.
THE V+A
A short distance from the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington there is a shop full of cool Scandinavian design. Elegant and curvaceous modernist creations by Marimekko and the like.
It offers a stark contrast to (and perhaps a ordered and restorative balm after) the cacophony of the current featured show at the V+A – “China Design Now” which runs until the middle of July.
The exhibition offers a reminder of Napoleon’s famous words: “Let China sleep for when she wakes the world will tremble.”
Indeed it could be sub-titled:” whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.”
The show is all about design in modern China – graphic and architectural ideas in particular.
Three cities are featured from the east coast of this continent of cultures -Shenzhen, Shanghai and the Olympic capital Beijing. Little is revealed about the vaster hinterland.
There is also little to put any of this in any historical context. Instead we are offered a welter of sensation. The overwhelming feeling is of bewildering confusion – of the Western notion of the fragile beauty of Chinese design and art confounded by a dam burst of youthful ideas – borrowed, stolen, pasted or smashed together from a thousand and one primarily Western youth culture sources to into an exotic hybrid.
One young visitor said she was appalled by the thought that millions of young Chinese children were growing up with this mishmash as their visual backdrop.
It is hard to find coherence or what we’ve come to think of as traditional elements of Chinese beauty here.
There are some fine modern variations on Chinese calligraphy, but primarily one can admire the sheer vitality and energy on show, of ideas going in a thousand different directions.
This is a world being endlessly born – something that parallels the nature of China since its entrance into the modern world. It’s a new cultural revolution and, rather akin to Mao’s political event, it grows by despoiling the past.
The section about the transformation of Beijing for the Olympics is revealing. When I visited nearly a decade ago the vast avenues were already becoming lined with modernist creations.
But behind them were still a maze of old streets – the hutongs or neighbourhoods.
Since then Beijing has gone into overdrive – exorcising the old and creating whole neighbourhoods of dramatic post-modernism. Just as with the smaller Canary Wharf area in London this blooming of a thousand new buildings offers a dazzling display.
But it is being done at a price - the seeming carnage enacted on a culture that has been swept away. It is easy for the Western mind, often fixated on the romantic to bemoan this.
After the visit to Beijing one feature I wrote talked of the willow-pattern prettiness of Behei Park in the early morning – its lake around a white Dagoba fringed with trees and people practicing t’ai chi. I was criticised for this by a Chinese friend - and for some elements of our film - for conjuring a romantic and backwards looking image of contemporary China.
Perhaps the criticsm was valid from the perspective of a young Chinese who saw change and modernisation in a wholly positive light. Quite correct from the perspective of creating a new nation where everyone benefits from its growing economy.
For them much of the past serves a commercial purpose – luring tourists – but in other respects signifies oppression by a now defunct ruling class and poverty.
The new China emerging now is getting wealthier and offering its citizens opportunities we in the West take for granted.
But such reservations about these changes also highlight the different things that are valued now in a West that went through many convulsions as it moved into the modern age.
In the UK we walk through the gutted hearts of many an old town or city and see fragments of our “heritage” poling through the soulless malls of multinational shopping outlets. We feel regret for a history now lost beneath the concrete and wish such a fate could be avoided elsewhere.
Now we seek to create a balance carefully between the benefits of continuing modernisation and a desire to preserve the best of the past. This is in stark contrast to the increasingly dominant idea in previously impoverished parts of the world which are modernising as fast as they can.
Such concern about the careful preservation of the past can be seen as a luxury that cannot be afforded.
We in the West seek to see our dreams of cultural continuity and of places in a finer harmony with their past in cultures that have trailed behind our embrace of the modern world. And we resent the sort of idea of progress that rocks that dreamboat.
In the Arabian Gulf for instance, the nomads of the desert have forsaken their tents and impoverished lifestyle for the vast gallop to modernism of Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
It is a shame, we feel, as we perceive something of what we see as the romantic Bedouin soul being lost among the concrete and glass. Such a perspective might be the folly of what Edward Said defined as orientalism.
For would we have accepted living in wattle and daub as serfs if a parallel world of wealth, comfort and improvement were on offer?
It’s a complicated question. The China being born today seems alien and challenging – but perhaps it embodies what western liberals once praised about Maoism - the challenge of constant revolution made solid.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Profile of Rear Admiral jeremy de Halpert
A week in the life
Sunday Times
May 4 2008
This summer a sunken German U-Boat that has lain undisturbed for 90 years will be shifted from a busy section of the English Channel – to clear a passage for giant supertankers carrying Russian oil.
“The English Channel and the Dover Straits are the busiest shipping lanes in the world. On a single day, there are more shipping movements there than air traffic movements at Heathrow,” says Rear Admiral Jeremy de Halpert CB, Executive Chairman of Trinity House.
Trinity House has overall responsibility for the safety of shipping here and around the coast of England, Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar. It works closely with matching organisations for Scotland and Ireland.
“I always call us the highways agency of the sea. We mark the roads and clear the wrecks,” says de Halpert, 60, who took over the £95,000 a year job in 2002 - together with the pro-bono role of Deputy Master, running its charity.
The Rear Admiral’s 40 years in the Royal Navy included action in the Falklands. More recently he has held such high-ranking jobs on dry land as Director of Overseas Military Activity at the Ministry of Defence.
“I still try to spend about four weeks a year at sea. For the past two days I’ve been at sea about our new vessel The Galatea.”
In the same week he visited retirement homes near Dover run by the charity which, as one of the largest endowed maritime charities in the UK, has £3 million annually to spend.
As Executive Chairman he saw the naming of a new cruise liner in Southampton, attended meetings in London, Harwich, Edinburgh and Paris and had a formal dinner with deep-sea fishermen.
Trinity House spends £30 million a year on a wide range of safety responsibilities – running lighthouses and maintaining buoys, and ensuring safe navigation in coastal waters. It has 300 people – 100 at sea in its three vessels. The funding comes from levies on vessels using ports.
Henry VIII founded Trinity House in 1514 and his portrait gazes down on business at its’ HQ near Tower Hill. But today Trinity House uses technology undreamt of in Tudor days. Things have evolved radically even over de Halpert’s career. His office displays a sextant, a chronometer and a star globe. “When I started in 1966 this is what you navigated with out of sight of land. They’re museum pieces now.”
Marine Satnav using GPS is standard, with Britain’s now fully automated lighthouses and buoys becoming primarily visual aids for mariners.
Trinity House and its French counterpart are now testing something called eLoran – a high-powered landbased navigation transmission system. de Halpert says it performed very well in recent trials investigating how easily GPS signals could be disrupted or jammed by atmospherics or terrorism. “eLoran was rock steady wheras GPS was all over the place.”
In the still precarious world of marine navigation a secure new aid is welcome indeed and bad news for terrorists, or anyone else, hoping to cause chaos at sea.
Sunday Times
May 4 2008
This summer a sunken German U-Boat that has lain undisturbed for 90 years will be shifted from a busy section of the English Channel – to clear a passage for giant supertankers carrying Russian oil.
“The English Channel and the Dover Straits are the busiest shipping lanes in the world. On a single day, there are more shipping movements there than air traffic movements at Heathrow,” says Rear Admiral Jeremy de Halpert CB, Executive Chairman of Trinity House.
Trinity House has overall responsibility for the safety of shipping here and around the coast of England, Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar. It works closely with matching organisations for Scotland and Ireland.
“I always call us the highways agency of the sea. We mark the roads and clear the wrecks,” says de Halpert, 60, who took over the £95,000 a year job in 2002 - together with the pro-bono role of Deputy Master, running its charity.
The Rear Admiral’s 40 years in the Royal Navy included action in the Falklands. More recently he has held such high-ranking jobs on dry land as Director of Overseas Military Activity at the Ministry of Defence.
“I still try to spend about four weeks a year at sea. For the past two days I’ve been at sea about our new vessel The Galatea.”
In the same week he visited retirement homes near Dover run by the charity which, as one of the largest endowed maritime charities in the UK, has £3 million annually to spend.
As Executive Chairman he saw the naming of a new cruise liner in Southampton, attended meetings in London, Harwich, Edinburgh and Paris and had a formal dinner with deep-sea fishermen.
Trinity House spends £30 million a year on a wide range of safety responsibilities – running lighthouses and maintaining buoys, and ensuring safe navigation in coastal waters. It has 300 people – 100 at sea in its three vessels. The funding comes from levies on vessels using ports.
Henry VIII founded Trinity House in 1514 and his portrait gazes down on business at its’ HQ near Tower Hill. But today Trinity House uses technology undreamt of in Tudor days. Things have evolved radically even over de Halpert’s career. His office displays a sextant, a chronometer and a star globe. “When I started in 1966 this is what you navigated with out of sight of land. They’re museum pieces now.”
Marine Satnav using GPS is standard, with Britain’s now fully automated lighthouses and buoys becoming primarily visual aids for mariners.
Trinity House and its French counterpart are now testing something called eLoran – a high-powered landbased navigation transmission system. de Halpert says it performed very well in recent trials investigating how easily GPS signals could be disrupted or jammed by atmospherics or terrorism. “eLoran was rock steady wheras GPS was all over the place.”
In the still precarious world of marine navigation a secure new aid is welcome indeed and bad news for terrorists, or anyone else, hoping to cause chaos at sea.
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