#Woburn abbey

[thesixthduke]

[bea-lele-carmen]

[thedudleywomen]

On This Day (27 Aug) in 1562, Margaret St John, Lady Russell, Countess of Bedford, died from smallpox at Woburn Abbey.

Margaret was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth I, the wife to Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford, and mother of seven, including her eldest Anne Russell, who had also recently joined the Queen's household.

Smallpox, a highly infectious disease, transmitted by close contact, was virulent during the Elizabethan period. It was known to be fatal, especially to the vulnerable (children, elderly) and women. Early symptoms of the disease include high fever, fatigue, severe back pain, abdominal pain and vomiting, with the characteristic rash appearing 2-3 days later, initially on the face and hands.

Elizabeth I herself would contract smallpox in Oct 1562; whilst she survived this almost-fatal attack, she was left permanently scarred, as did Mary Dudley, Lady Sidney, who contracted it from the Queen from attending her.

Anne, who would go on to marry Ambrose Dudley, 3rd Earl of Warwick, did not have any children of her own. However, she took on a mothering role to her younger siblings, which included her youngest sister Margaret, later Countess of Cumberland (being only 2 years old at the time of her mother's death), as well as her nieces and nephews (including Lady Anne Clifford).

Margaret was interred in the 'Bedford Chapel' within St Michael's Church, Chenies: a chapel that had been constructed in 1556 by Anne Sapcote, the Dowager Countess of Bedford, for the place of rest for her late husband, John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford. The chapel became the preferred place of burial for members of the Russell family during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Margaret's husband Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford, was buried with her on his death over 20 years later, in 1585, with the couple's tomb being decorated with a effigies, lying side-by-side.

[vintagewildlife]

Bison and wapiti in the park at Woburn Abbey By: The Duchess of Bedford From: Wild Oxen, Sheep & Goats of All Lands 1898

[whiskersonkittens65]

Woburn Abbey and Gardens

[justforbooks]

In 1941 a secret British radio station called on Germans to rise up against Hitler. Run by German exiles, it was explicitly left wing. The station’s target audience was “the Good German”. Its broadcasts were serious and idealistic: a ray of light amid totalitarian darkness. They were also a complete flop. With Nazi propaganda rampant, and Hitler’s armies seemingly invincible and on the march across Europe, few bothered to listen in.

It was at this point that Britain’s wartime intelligence services tried a more radical approach. That summer, a talented journalist called Sefton Delmer was given the job of beating the Nazis at their own information game. Delmer spent his childhood in Berlin and spoke fluent German. In the early 1930s he chronicled Hitler’s rise to power – flying in the Führer’s plane and attending his mass rallies – as a correspondent for the Daily Express.

Working from an English country house, Delmer launched an experimental radio station. He called it Gustaf Siegfried Eins, or GS1. Instead of invoking lofty precepts, or Marxism, Delmer targeted what he called the “inner pig-dog”. The answer to Goebbels, Delmer concluded, was more Goebbels. His radio show became a grotesque cabaret aimed at the worst and most Schwein-like aspects of human nature.

As Peter Pomerantsev writes in his compelling new study How to Win an Information War, Delmer was a “nearly forgotten genius of propaganda”. GS1 backed Hitler and was staunchly anti-Bolshevik. Its mysterious leader, dubbed der Chef, ridiculed Churchill using foul Berlin slang. At the same time the station lambasted the Nazi elite as a group of decadent crooks. They stole and whored, it said, as British planes bombed and decent Germans suffered.

Delmer’s goal was to undermine nazism from within, by turning ordinary citizens against their aloof party bosses. A cast of Jewish refugees and former cabaret artists played the role of Nazis. Recordings took place in a billiards room, located inside the Woburn Abbey estate in Bedfordshire, a centre of wartime operations. Some of the content was real. Other elements were made up, including titillating accounts of SS orgies at a Bavarian monastery.

The station was a sensation. Large numbers of Germans tuned in. The US embassy in Berlin – America had yet to enter the war – thought it to be the work of German nationalists or disgruntled army officers. The Nazis fretted about its influence. One unimpressed person was Stafford Cripps, the future chancellor of the exchequer, who complained to Anthony Eden, the then minister for foreign affairs, about the station’s use of “filthy pornography”.

By 1943, Delmer’s counter-propaganda operation had grown. He and his now expanded team ran a live news bulletin aimed at German soldiers, the Soldatensender Calais, as well as a series of clandestine radio programmes in a variety of languages. Delmer’s artist wife Isabel joined in. She drew explicit pictures showing a blonde woman having sex with a dark-skinned foreigner. Partisans sent the pamphlets to homesick German troops stationed in Crete.

Others who made a contribution to Delmer’s productions included Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, and the 26-year-old future novelist Muriel Spark. Fleming worked for naval intelligence. He brought titbits of information that made the show feel genuine, including the latest results from U-boat football leagues. Many Germans guessed the station was British. But they listened anyway, feeling it represented “them”.

Pomerantsev is an expert on propaganda and the author of two previous books on the subject, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible and This Is Not Propaganda. The son of political dissidents in Kyiv, he was born in Ukraine and grew up in London. During the 00s he lived in Moscow and worked there as a TV producer. Since Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion he has been part of a project that documents Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Like Delmer, Pomeranstev has personal experience of two rival cultures: one authoritarian, the other liberal and democratic. He draws parallels between the fascist 1930s and our own populist age. The same “underlying mindset” can be seen in dictators such as Putin and Xi Jinping, and wannabe strongmen and bullies such as Donald Trump. “Propagandists across the world and across the ages play on the same emotional notes like well-worn scales,” he observes.

In Pomerantsev’s view, propaganda works not because it convinces, or even confuses. Its real power lies in its ability to convey a sense of belonging, he argues. Those left behind feel themselves emboldened and part of a special community. It is a world of grievance, victimhood and enemies, where facts are meaningless. What matters are feelings and the illusion propaganda lends of “individual agency”. Its practitioners bend reality. And – as with Putin’s fictions about Ukraine – make murder possible.

The book offers a few ideas as to how we might fight back. When horrors were uncovered in Bucha, the town near Kyiv where Russian soldiers executed civilians, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, appealed to the Russian people. This didn’t cut through. Most preferred to believe the version shown on state TV: that Moscow was waging a defensive fight against “neo-Nazis”. It was a comforting lie that absolved Russians of personal responsibility.

Ukrainian activists hit a similar wall when they cold-called Russians and told them about the destruction caused by Kremlin bombing. Many called relatives in St Petersburg and other Russian cities to explain they were under attack. Typically, their family members did not believe them. “They really brainwashed you over there,” one said.

The activists had more success when they mentioned taxes or travel restrictions – issues that spoke to the self-interested “pig-dog”. Pomerantsev suggests that Delmer’s approach worked because he allowed people to care about the truth again, nudging them towards independent thought, while avoiding the pitfall of obvious disloyalty. He brought wit and creativity to his anti-propaganda efforts as well, turning his radio shows into bravura transmissions.

Pomerantsev makes an intriguing comparison between der Chef and Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch who in summer 2023 staged a short-lived rebellion against Putin. Two months later, Prigozhin died in a plane crash. The oligarch was a charismatic figure who roasted Russia’s generals for their incompetent handling of the war. He used earthy prison slang. It was this ability to communicate in plain language that made him popular – and a rival.

The book muses on whether Delmer was ultimately good or bad. Are tricks and subterfuge justified in pursuit of noble goals? It concludes that the journalist’s greatest insight was his understanding of his own ordinariness, and how this might be exploited by unscrupulous governments and rabble-rousing individuals. “He was vulnerable to propaganda for the same reasons we all are – through the need to fit in and conform,” Pomerantsev notes.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[acidisgroovy]

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Geezer Butler (pre-Black Sabbath) at the 'Festival of the Flower Children', Woburn Abbey, Woburn, Bedfordshire 1967

[sempiternal-meridians]

The idea of an ‘orangery has a much more sophisticated ring to it, and in its purest form, an orangery is a glorious thing.

But what is an orangery, and how is it different to a conservatory?

Historically, the orangery is in some ways the father of all garden rooms, at least in European terms. It was in the 17th century that the (recently acquired) English mania for oranges led to the building of special structures to keep them at the required temperature. These tended to be built out of brick, with flat roofs and large windows along the south side to flood them with sunlight. it made sense to begin attaching orangeries to houses, rather than having them situated in the garden itself. 

One of the most prolific designers of orangeries in this period was Sir Jeffry Wyatville, who created the examples at Chatsworth, Woburn Abbey and Longleat, alongside many others. He favoured a simple freestanding design built in stone with vast south-facing windows – the style that we might now still refer to as an orangery rather than a greenhouse or conservatory.

via: House & Garden UK

[yaggerdangs-remedy]

Geezer Butler at the Woburn Abbey Festival 1967

[proton-wobbler]

Round 2, Poll 9

Lady Amherst's Pheasant vs Japanese Paradise Flycatcher

sources under cut

Lady Amherst's Pheasant

"it has AMAZING feathers and is very very pretty"

While the data is scant, there are reports that this species is a clinal migrant and lives in high altitudes in the summer and the foothills in winter, or during severe weather. Their typical range is within southwestern China and northern Myanmar.

They get their name from their English introduction by Lady Amherst to her estates, near the Duke of Bedford's Woburn Abbey. While feral populations are believed to be extinct, two have been sighted or photographed in recent years- Staplegrove, Taunton (2020) and Scotland (2021).

Japanese Paradise Flycatcher

"Look at it! It's even got eyeliner! It's so fabulous."

Their habitat is described as: "shady mature deciduous or mixed forest and plantations on low hills and mountains, but prefers wooded valleys with streams at lower elevations in Central Japan; in Southern Japan also in broadleaf evergreen forest." - BoW

Birds of the World: both species

Images: Pheasant (Summer Wong); Flycatcher (Natthaphat Chotjuckdikul)

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

Sir Joshua Reynolds (English, 1723 - 1792) Lady Elizabeth Keppel, 1761

Full length, decorating Term of Hymen; in bridesmaids dress of flowered satin; a Black attendant holds flower wreath; at foot of column is a burning censer; curtain draped over tree. 2nd state of 5: on upper step of pedestal 4 Latin lines.

Reynolds’s “sitter-book” records eight appointments with Lady Keppel (1739–1768). The woman who accompanies her had two independent morning sittings in December 1761 (both after Keppel had been painted). We do not know her name, in place of which Reynolds entered a single word—“negro”—in his notebook. This terse archival trace confirms that she, like Lady Keppel, was painted from life. She is shown handing Keppel a garland of flowers with which to deck a statue of Hymen, the god of marriage. This detail alludes to Keppel’s recent role as a bridesmaid at the wedding of George III and Queen Charlotte. The dress worn by the servant may either be of glazed cotton, British silk, or possibly painted Chinese silk. If the woman was indeed Keppel’s servant, her dress may be a hand-me-down from her mistress, as was common in this period. The portrait (now at Woburn Abbey, UK) was exhibited at the Society of Artists as Whole length of a lady, one of her majesty’s bride maids. It was paid for by Lady Keppel’s brother, the third Earl of Albemarle (1724–1772). In 1762, shortly after the painting was finished, he would command British forces at the Battle of Havana, which resulted in Spain’s surrender of Cuba. This key victory of the Seven Years’ War reshaped the balance of power in the Atlantic. Gallery label for Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain (Yale Center for British Art, 2014-10-02 - 2014-12-14).

[thesixthduke]

[bea-lele-carmen]

[instantfirecollector]

Captivating Fairy tale Grottos.

The Little Chapel, Les Vauxbelets, Guernsey.

Shell Grotto, Hampton Court House.

The grotto of Linderhof Castle.

The Palazzo Corsini Grotto in Rome, Italy.

Boboli Gardens Grotto, Florence, Italy.

The grotto of the Villa di Castello in Florence, Italy.

The right chamber of the grotto of the animals.

The left chamber of the grotto of the animals.

Villa Litta Grotto.

Villa Litta Modignani.

Villa Litta Modignani.

Villa Litta Modignani.

Chateau du Rambouillet Grotto.

Lourdes Grotto.

Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto, located on Dominican Hill Road Baguio, Philippines.

Grotto Rayavadee in Krabi, Thailand.

The Grotto at Isola Bella.

The Grotto of the Munich Residenz.

Woburn-Abbey-Grotto.

[whiskersonkittens65]

Woburn Abbey and Gardens

[mea-gloria-fides]

The Most Noble Ian Russell, 13th Duke of Bedford of the sixth creation and Nicole, Duchess of Bedford with their Bassett Hound at Woburn Abbey.