#the last circus trinity board !!!!

[froginamoodboard]

Donovan Murphy moodboard

Requested by: me

x x x x x x x x x

(Catch Dovonan slacking off over at @circustrinity )

[bbclesmis]

King Of The Castle: At Home With Dominic West

As the star of HBO's The Wire and The Affair, Dominic West made his name playing conflicted Americans battling their demons and struggling to find their places in the world. And cheating on their women. In real life, he's a self-deprecating father of four from outside Sheffield, and among his chief preoccupations is how to preserve the 800-year-old Irish castle inherited by his wife.

"Excuse me," says Dominic West, "I’m just going to wipe this so you can sit down and you won’t be infected with disease." About seven crumbs on his otherwise clean kitchen table disappear with the swipe of a tea towel, and he gets back to the business of making lunch. We’re in the kitchen of his house in Wiltshire, where he lives with his wife Catherine and their four children.

His head turns from cupboard to cupboard, like he’s watching a tennis match. “Where has the rice gone? Would you like rice?”

Yes please, if that’s what you’re having.

“I am, if I can fucking find it.”

He fucking finds it and a pan of rice goes on the hob next to the pan of leftover beef stew. “So I’m on the cover?” he says, looking out of the window. “But doesn’t that mean you’ve got to try and make it interesting?”

In 2000, Dominic West joined an Argentinian circus. This was the year before he auditioned for and won his breakthrough role of Detective Jimmy McNulty on The Wire and the year after he had a single line (“The boy’s here to see Padmé”) as a guard of one of those science-fiction sliding doors in Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. He was 30, five years out of drama school and father to a one-year-old daughter.

The circus, De La Guarda, had a show, also called De La Guarda, at the Roundhouse in Camden. It was the hottest ticket in London that year. The audience entered the round to ambient music under a low paper ceiling. Performers would burst through the paper, on ropes, and eventually a pounding live soundtrack accompanied a dozen or more roped performers as they ran around the walls of the circular venue. Water rained down. Some audience members would be lifted into the air; others, perhaps more fortunate, would be pressed into urgent dancing with attractive, adrenalised Argentinians unclipped from their shackles. Or indeed, West himself.

‘What’s amazing,’ says Keira Knightley, ‘is that Dominic can play characters who should be total dickheads, yet he manages to give them a point of view and his own incredible charm. It is a great skill’

“Why did I do it?” says West, somewhat incredulously. “You saw it! Wouldn’t you want to run away and join that circus? It was such a sexy show. I saw it in London and New York, then heard they were auditioning in London and I had to do it. I did a lot of shows in five months with those amazing men and women, then they went to Vegas. It was a disaster there. The water. People dressed up for a Vegas show — of course they didn’t want to get wet.”

West didn’t want to go to Vegas. But he would end up spending a lot more time in America, filming five seasons of The Wire and four seasons of The Affair, with a fifth and final one due to start filming a couple of days after we make lunch.

“The toughest part of making these big episodic American television shows is missing my family and the boredom,” he says, gearing himself up for the process to begin again. “Sitting around waiting and not being bored is hard. There was a time when I had a play in the West End [Butley, 2011] and was learning Iago [for Othello] and I had more on than usual. That was hard work, but the harder that aspect of the work gets, the more enjoyable it is. Actual graft is what’s great about acting. That’s something I relish, because most of the time, it’s about coping with tedium.”

To stop himself being bored on set, West likes to have fun. “You can’t not have fun with him,” says Keira Knightley, soon to be seen alongside West in the film Colette. “I think fun is something that Dominic brings to everything. He very much likes a night out, is always up for a laugh and is, in the best way, wicked. And he is a phenomenally good actor, he really is. So effortless.”

“For a lot of us,” Knightley says, “who do actually need to concentrate when we’re working, it’s, ‘How are you that good when you're chatting and joking until the very last second?’ Even I had to tell him to shut up so I could concentrate. Which I had to do quite a lot.”

West is not about to shut up. And he’s not the only one. “I just did a thing with Olivia Colman [a BBC mini-series adaptation of Les Misérables] and: fuck me! Ha ha ha! The whole thing is like playing top-level sports with her. How frivolous can you be up to ‘Action!’ and then be amazing. She doesn’t do that consciously, she is just really fucking good. She is way, way, way better than me. I had to stop listening to her because she is so funny.”

Then a more serious thought occurs. “Malcolm Gladwell’s thing about 10,000 hours [the writer’s theory, from his book Outliers, that to be expert in any field requires that exact amount of practice time]? I worked it out and I’ve had at least 20,000 hours. I’ve acted so much now I can turn it on and off, and that’s maybe where the humour thing comes in. I have had an awful lot of practice at this.”

Dominic West first got the taste for drama when he was nine years old. His mother, Moya, gave him a part in her amateur production of The Winslow Boy, at Sheffield University’s drama studio. His father, George, had a factory in Wakefield that made vandal-proof bus shelters. George’s father, Harold, a managing director of a steelworks in Barnsley, fought in WWI and was wounded at the Battle of Vimy Ridge. “After, he wrote a note to go with his medals,” says West, “that said, ‘Here are a few mementos from a deeply happy part of my life’.” West has found documentaries commemorating the centenary of the Armistice “deeply moving.”

He is the sixth of seven children, with five sisters and an elder brother. They grew up in a large house on the edge of the Peak District, about 10 miles southwest of Sheffield. He boarded at Eton and hated it to begin with. “I was very homesick, had no reference to it, didn’t know anyone who had gone and I felt I was in the wrong place.” Inspiring teachers and school plays gave him something to be excited about and set him on his path.

“It’s pretentious to say, really, but my acting education was defined by doing Hamlet at Eton, reading Ulysses when I was doing my English degree at Trinity College in Dublin, then War and Peace, which we put on at Guildhall [School of Music & Drama in London]. That’s it, really. All I learned anywhere.”

Legend has it that in the audience watching his Prince of Denmark was Damian Lewis, a couple of years behind West at school, and later the star of Band of Brothers, Homeland and Billions. So taken was the younger lad by what he saw that he decided to become an actor.

“Categorically: no,” Lewis tells me, over the phone from Los Angeles. “I had always acted at school and always enjoyed it. Me thinking it was something I could do more seriously didn’t happen until I was 16 years old, after seeing Dom do Hamlet. He was very charismatic. A big, booming sonorous voice, especially for a 17-year-old. I was very taken with him, he was very captivating up on stage.”

Since graduating from Guildhall, West has worked solidly. He is not a huge movie star but is highly successful and versatile. There aren’t many men who could convincingly play both Fred West and Richard Burton, as West has done. He won a Bafta for his Fred West. He’s most memorable as Jimmy McNulty, not least because he and The Wire are so good, but also because constant reminders of those two facts have become standard reference points in the increasingly vast conversation about the New Golden Age of TV.

He has, in his own words, played “a long line of philandering cads”, from McNulty on to Hector Madden, the Fifties news anchor in two seasons of The Hour for the BBC, to Noah in The Affair and Willy in Colette. “What’s amazing,” says Keira Knightley, “is that he can play characters that should be total dickheads, yet he manages to give them a point of view and his own incredible charm, so you sort of forgive them for how terrible they might be. It is a great skill.”

But he is far from typecast. His five film roles previous to Willy in Colette are: Lara Croft’s dad, a sort of country-gent Indiana Jones, in Tomb Raider; a quietly pompous pyjamas-wearing modern artist in the Swedish film The Square, which won the Palme D’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival; Rudder, a comic-relief Cockney sea lion in Pixar’s Finding Dory; a Teflon swine of a CEO opposite George Clooney and Julia Roberts in Money Monster; and, in Genius, Ernest Hemingway.

There have been stage successes, including star turns in the West End. Following up the blockbuster and critically lauded play Jerusalem, the writer Jez Butterworth and director Ian Rickson could have done any play with anyone on any stage. They chose Dominic West to star in The River, a short, intense play with one man and two women in the 90-seater upstairs room at the Royal Court Theatre in London, for which West won universal praise.

‘It is a bad thing to be self-deprecating. It’s quite an English thing, which you become very aware of in America. People don’t understand: why do yourself down? I sort of agree with it, now’

“Dominic is able to unleash his unconscious in a really ‘present’ way,” says Ian Rickson. “It allows him to fuse into the darkness of Fred West, for example, or the troubled soul of McNulty. In terms of archetypes, he has a trickster quality hiding a warrior/lover inside. That’s exciting. There’s very little ego and a lot of generosity of spirit. He actually has a refreshingly comic sense of himself, so he does really value the opportunities he has, and doesn’t take them too seriously.”

West feels he does and he doesn’t. “I suppose deep down there’s a feeling that what I do isn’t desperately serious. It might have been Mark Boxer, the cartoonist, who said he went to some lunch for cartoonists, an awards maybe, and he was having a piss and the guy next to him said, ‘Cartoonist. It’s not a real job, is it?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s not. Isn’t that great!’ He took great comfort from that and I feel the same about acting. But there is something in me which feels, partly because I have been doing it all my life and did as a hobby before I did it professionally, that this is not a serious job for adults.”

Perhaps this is why he’s so self-deprecating. Twice during our conversations, he says that he’s not a “real actor”, bringing up Daniel Day-Lewis’s commitment to doing an accent the entire time he makes a film, on and off set, and his own inability to match that; and pointing out Robert De Niro’s weight gain for Raging Bull. For Colette, West wore a fat suit.

And yet, during our conversations, he trots out seven perfect accents and imitations: Mick Jagger, the German film director Werner Herzog, Northern Irish, Irish, Australian, New York and a deep, thespian-type voice to convey mock indignance. He’s not showing off. Some of the voices were to make anecdotes funnier and others were just as anyone might do an accent subconsciously when you think of someone with an accent. You know, for fun.

But he can be serious. “It is a bad thing, to be self-deprecating,” he says, a little bit disappointed with himself. “Maybe it’s an educational thing. It’s quite an English thing, which you become very aware of in America. People just don’t understand why on earth you would do that. There are enough people who would do you down, why do yourself down? I sort of agree with it, now. It is tiresome.”

Clarke Peters, who played Lester Freamon in The Wire, and Othello to West’s Iago on stage in 2011, has a different view of his friend’s dilemma. “As good an actor as he is, his self- deprecating comments are his truth. He would prefer to be playing than talking about himself; exploring a character, discovering nuances, dissecting a character’s arc, is where he’s comfortable. Presenting all that unseen work is nerve-wracking. And actors are never the best judges of their own work. So, to be safe from criticism and microscopic scrutiny, self-deprecation is the best defence."

The fat suit in Colette was no cop-out. “I was then about to play Jean Valjean,” West says, more forgiving of himself now, “a man who has been in prison for 19 years, so there was a clash of waistline imperatives.” He plays the lead in a song-free, six-part Les Misérables — the project in which Olivia Colman out-joked him — the BBC’s first big drama of 2019, with the opening episode broadcast on New Year’s Day.

According to Keira Knightley, the extra padding, and a walrus moustache, did not mute West’s physical attractiveness. “Nobody looks good in that,” she says, “but he somehow manages to be dangerously sexy through it. It was a main conversation between the rest of us on set: how he managed to ooze sexuality while he was farting in two fat suits. Quite extraordinary. I can’t think of another actor who might be able to do that.”

Sarah Treem, the showrunner of The Affair, could not conceive of anyone else but West as her leading man, Noah Solloway. “He didn’t audition. I wrote it with him in mind,” she says. “I was a huge fan of The Wire and I just loved how complicated he could be — both likeable and unlikeable at the same time.”

The Affair begins with Noah, a married father of four, embarking on a fling with a waitress, Alison, played by Ruth Wilson, and then follows the fall-out for the two of them, their spouses and extended families. West, Wilson and the wider cast are terrific, as is the show’s central conceit of telling the story from the point-of-view of different characters, usually two in each hour-long episode.

“Dominic is so good at playing all different facets of Noah,” Treem continues. “His intelligence, his lust, his insecurity, the pain of his childhood, his love for his children. He lets Noah be a very complicated, sometimes deeply generous, sometimes horribly selfish, man.”

West concurs, with a caveat. “I have had difficulty wondering why someone who I can identify with — he’s my age and has a bunch of kids — would do the things he does. Sarah, a very brilliant woman younger than I am, looked at me with a raised eyebrow when I said, ‘Men my age just don’t do that. Why leave your wife and kids for a waitress and start another family?’ She told me the stories of several real people who had. Not that I want my characters to be sympathetic, but I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and I have struggled with Noah in that regard.”

West has five children: a daughter, 20, with former girlfriend Polly Astor, and two sons and two daughters aged 12, 10, nine and five, with his wife, the landscape designer Catherine FitzGerald. It is Catherine’s beef stew we have been eating for lunch, their children’s clothes drying on the Aga behind us. On a smaller table in a nook in the corner of the kitchen, next to some half-completed maths homework, is a pile of dad’s hardbacks: The Flame by Leonard Cohen, William Dalrymple’s retelling of the Indian mutiny of 1857, The Last Mughal, and Changing Stages, Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright’s history of 20th-century theatre.

Out in the driveway, a small child’s BMX has been discarded in front of mum’s Audi A3, in perfect position to be crunched into the gravel next time the car sets off. At lunch, West didn’t know where the rice was because he and his family have only lived in this house, a former brewery in a Wiltshire hamlet, for a few weeks. They used to live in Shepherd’s Bush, in a house that once belonged to another actor from Sheffield, Brian Glover.

“I have led my family out of London slightly against their will,” West admits, “and quite legitimately want my children to be around plants and animals more than they perhaps might be in London. My wife said I’m trying to create my childhood home here and I said, [now, the thespian accent] ‘No I’m not! Preposterous! What do you mean? It’s nothing like that!’”

His wife’s childhood home is Glin Castle in County Limerick, Ireland, a true country pile (15 ensuite bedrooms, 380 acres, secret bookcase doors) that, in various versions, has been in her family for nearly 800 years. (It’s the house you can see in the background of the photographs on these pages.) She and West want to hold on to it. To do so, the house needs to become a going concern as an events and private hire venue to cover its annual £130,000 running costs.

“I do like history and I do like old buildings,” West says. “I’m also conscious of my wife’s father and his and her legacies. He worked in conservation in Ireland, to try and preserve these old buildings, which were out of favour for many years. It’s up to us to try and keep that going, because when they’re bought by hotels and the like, they’re often destroyed.”

This Christmas and New Year, he says, “we have a super-A-list celebrity taking it. Who, I can’t possibly divulge. Actually, can you do us a big favour and put the website, please, at the end of the piece? ‘Glin dash castle dot com.’ It would make my life easier.”

It’s time to do the school pick-up. “We can keep talking in the car,” he says, and leads the way to a silver Chrysler Grand Voyager. “It has,” West says, buckling up, “the biggest capacity of any people carrier.”

Precisely something a turning-50-next-year dad-of-five should say. “I have no problem getting older,” he says. “For male actors of my age there is less emphasis, and I have already started to play the dad of the lover instead of the lover. The pressure is off. Some swami said that the key to happiness is ‘I don’t mind what happens.’ You mind less about things, let go of them. Turning 50 is great. My daughter is also turning 21, so we should have quite a party.”

He has regrets. “I suppose I wish I had played more Shakespearean roles.”

What about the old-man ones? “Only Lear is as good as the young ones.”

What about not being James Bond? “Fuck no! I’m delighted now that I didn’t get it.”

Auditioning for Bond, in 2005, West turned up in a T-shirt and tatty jeans. “I remember the director, Martin Campbell, saying, ‘Thank Christ you haven’t turned up in a tux like everybody else’. It was for Casino Royale. At the time, I really wanted to get it. I love Bond, and I was the right age for it. They asked me, ‘What do you think should happen with Bond?’ And I said something deeply uninspired like, ‘I think he should go back to being more like Sean Connery’. I thought then that it was the best job you can do. Now, I’m not so sure. You have a year-and-a-half of hell doing publicity.”

West pulls up opposite the school. “Wait here. Enjoy the smell. Kids’ banana skins,” he says, opening the driver’s door. Puzzled, I sniff the air. There is no unpleasant aroma. The interior of Dominic West’s car smells perfectly fine. But, of course, he claims otherwise. He’s a terrific actor and a thoroughly likeable chap, but that self-deprecation still needs some work.

Colette is in cinemas on 11 January; glin-castle.com (https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a25557268/dominic-west-interview/)

[piesack9-blog]

Notes on Music ♫

The eight Tony Awards-winning musical œOnce”, book by Enda Walsh, music and lyrics by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, is at the Arden Theatre now through Oct. 21, an œIrish-kissed” hit that took Broadway by storm, here staged by Producing Artistic Director Terrence J. Nolan with a cast of twelve including such local favorites as Greg Wood, Scott Greer, Alex Bechtel and Charlie DelMarcelle, along with Ken Allen Neely as a Dublin street musician and Katherine Fried whose love for his songs permits him to soar and dream, and œthe power of music to connect all of us”. 40 N. 2nd St. 215-922- 1122 for tickets and information on Post-Show discussions.

Mary Shelley™s œFrankenstein”, adapted and directed by Alex Burns in a Quintessence Theatre production, opens on Sept. 26 featuring Kevin Burgen, Jake Blouch, Lee Cortopassi, Leah Gabriel, Hannah Wolff and Michael Zlabinger, in a 200th anniversary tribute to Shelley™s tale of œhumanity™s obsession with knowledge and of the unintended consequences of scientific innovation”. Through Oct. 21 at the Sedgwick Theater, 7137 Germantown Ave., Mt. Airy. 215-987-4450.

Liebesfreud chamber group opens its new 13th season of free Last Friday concerts on Sept. 28 at 5:30 p.m. offering an hour-long performance of Mozart™s String Quartet in B flat, K. 458 (œThe Hunt”), and Mendelssohn™s String Quartet in A minor, op. 13. Geoffrey Michaels, Philip Kates, violins; David Giles, viola; Charles Forbes, cello. 251 S. 18th St. 215-545-4302.

Celebrated jazz pianist Fred Hersch, a twelve-time Grammy Awards nominee, appears in a solo concert on Sept. 28 at 8 p.m., performing works from throughout his illustrious career and from his more than three dozen albums. This Benefit for St. Stephen™s Episcopal Church Arts Programming is the first in a series of four such events, curated by Mr. Hersch and dubbed œThe Future of Jazz Piano Series”. St. Stephen™s is an historic parish founded in 1823 and is known for its strong commitment to the arts. 19 S. 10th St. Tickets at 215-922-3807.

The Philly POPS open their 40th season on Sept. 28 with Leslie Odom, Jr., local dynamo who starred on Broadway in the musical smash œHamilton”, earning a Tony and a Grammy, and here performs with Maestro Michael Krajewski in a lush American Songbook program that he feels Nat King Cole would perform today including” Autumn Leaves”, œUnforgettable”, œMona Lisa” and œWithout You”, working with his guitarist Steven Walker. Sept. 28 at 8 p.m., Sept. 29 and 30 at 3 p.m. Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center, Broad and Spruce. 215-893-1999.

The Friends of the Wanamaker Organ™s big Fall Concert is set for Sept. 29 at 8 p.m., dedicated to the memory of beloved Philadelphia organ virtuoso, long-time member of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Wanamaker asst. organist and Friends board member Michael Stairs, performed by Peter Richard Conte and Joshua Stafford and including such Stairs favorite composers: Franck, Dvorak, Humperdinck, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sowerby, Lemare as well as Disney hits. Flugelhornist Andrew Ennis will offer a cameo. In the hushed main floor of Macy™s, 1300 Market St. 215-241-9000, ex. 2408.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is in Verizon Hall on Sept. 29 at 8 p.m. with Maestro Yannick Nezet-Seguin on the podium for Dvorak™s œOthello” Overture, Rachmaninoff™s Symphonic Dances, and with guest soloist Lisa Batiashvili, Tchaikovsky™s Violin Concerto. Broad and Spruce, 215-893-1999.

The annual free Puerto Rican Day Parade will turn Sept. 30 into a massive and colorful event of music, dancing and floats as they march from their starting point at 16th and The Parkway. 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. Further information at 215 627 3100.

Inis Nua Theatre presents, all the way from Scotland, David Greig™s œThe Monster in the Hall” with music by Nigel Dunn and Stephen Wright, directed by Claire Moyer, a dark tale of a daughter and father pretending to be fine, a random Norwegian woman in the closet, and a backup band to wipe away the gloom. With Eleni Delopoulos, Doug Durlacher, Jamison Foreman and Chris Park. Oct. 3 - 21 at the Louis Bluver Theatre at the Drake, 302 S. Hicks St. near 15th and Spruce. 215-454-9776.

The Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts opens its new season on Sept. 28 at 8 p.m. with œHumans”, performed by Circa, ten highly-skilled Australian circus performers and acrobats on a bare stage, illustrating” the expressive possibilities of the human body at its extremes”. Repeated on Sept. 29 at 2 p.m. 3680 Walnut St. 215-898- 3900.

œLove Never Dies”, Andrew Lloyd Webber™s sequel to œThe Phantom of the Opera”, gets its local premiere on Oct. 2 at the Academy of Music for eight performances including matinees through Oct. 7 in a revised working of the original 2011 Australian production. Broad and Locust. 215-790-5800.

Curtis-trained pianist Hanchien Lee and her Philadelphia Orchestra violist husband Meng Wang make their first-ever local joint appearance on Oct. 3 at 12:30 p.m. in an intriguing hour-long recital: Schubert™s Sonata in D Major D 384; Bruch™s Romance; and Brahms™ Sonata in E flat major, opus 120, no. 2. Free but with a goodwill donation always welcome. Church of the Holy Trinity, 19th and Walnut on Rittenhouse Square. 215-567-1267.

Source: http://ucreview.com/notes-on-music-p7973-86.htm

[abbottikeler]

The Ikelers: A Family Chronicle, 1753-2018 (Part VI)

Then, in the summer of 1919, some months after he had failed in a run for U.S. Congress, it was Fred’s turn.  At eight o’clock on the evening of July 31st, while he and Laura were preparing for an evening out, Fred suffered a massive stroke.  He died six hours later in the upstairs front room of their Market Street home with his wife and two sons, age 18 and 11, at his bedside.  Fred was still weeks shy of his 49th birthday. 

A courthouse document tells us Frank helped his sister-in-law sell her home a few months later, and the June, 1920 census lists Laura and her two sons as boarders in a doctor’s home on the other side of Market Street.  Why the precipitate sale and the radically reduced circumstances?   Was there a body of outstanding debts that had to be settled?  Or was Laura still in shock and simply temporizing until she could come up with a long-range plan for herself and her children?

Worse still, the string of calamitous events was not at an end.  The very next year, aged only 52, Frank himself died.  According to a contemporary news account, he had been suffering for some time from Bright’s Disease, a chronic kidney condition, and succumbed after a week of hospitalization.  His death left little Freddie, age 11, an orphan, and necessitated the sale of the Fifth Street house.  Thus, by the end of 1921, both of Judge Ikeler’s sons were gone, their possessions scattered or sold, and their children’s futures thrown into limbo.

That brings us to a closer look at that imperiled younger generation of Ikelers—my father, Stuart; his brother, Frank; and their first cousin, Fred.  For knowledge of the latter two, I’ve relied primarily on information from Frank’s only son, Thomas Ikeler, now deceased; and from Mary Jo Scott, nee Ikeler, Fred’s only living child.  

Her orphaned father, she tells me, was passed back and forth through the whole of his adolescence from one collateral relation to another, eventually graduating from college and taking a law degree from Harvard.  He married Katherine Kyle in the 1930s (she, like him, born in 1910), and settled down to a successful law practice in western Pennsylvania.  He and his wife adopted two children—Fred Taylor, Jr in 1941, and Mary Jo in 1943—and lived out most of the rest of their lives in an upscale suburb of Pittsburgh.   Fred Taylor, Sr died at 62 in 1972; his wife at 81 in 1991.  I’ll have more to say about them later, in relation to me and my generation, since they lived not far from my own family in the 1940s and 50s.  

About Frank, my father’s elder brother, I have little personal knowledge.  He seems to have moved more or less exclusively between upstate New York and the Bloomsburg area throughout his adult life.  He visited us in Pittsburgh only once, in the late 1940s.  According to his son, he married his first wife, Harriet, a Bloomsburg native, in 1925, three years after graduating from Trinity College in Hartford, CT.  He and she had one child, Thomas, in 1926, before she filed for divorce and took her son to southern California, where he, Thomas, spent his childhood while his mother worked in the film industry.  Frank married four times altogether and had one other child, Roberta (1936-1986), from the second of his four wives.  

According to his son, Frank seems to have made his living as an intermittently employed salesman and a husband financially dependent on his latest spouse.  Thomas also confirmed what my parents had told me--Frank was a lifelong, unrecovered alcoholic.  He arrived intoxicated, for example, to his son’s graduation from Annapolis in 1950, though it was the first time father and son had seen each other in decades.  It was also the last time Thomas saw him alive.  Frank died in Bloomsburg in 1956, aged 55.  His son, Thomas, had only one child, Mark, who didn’t live beyond his adolescence.  Frank’s other child, Roberta, died without issue, of cancer, in her fifties.  Thus there are no Ikelers, male or female, left in that line.  Thomas, a retired naval officer and himself a recovered alcoholic, lived out his last years near Sarasota, Florida.  It was from there, by telephone, that he passed on to me what information he had about our grandmother and my Uncle Frank.  Thomas died at 85 in 2011.

Though it would appear that Fred survived the trauma of his Bloomsburg childhood in much better shape than his cousin Frank, his daughter Mary Jo assures me he (and his wife Katherine) were also heavy drinkers, if not outright alcoholics.  Among Fred’s legal colleagues and Katherine’s country club set, it was apparently a more excusable weakness.

Which brings me, at last, to my own father, Stuart Redmond Ikeler.  From the 1915 revised history of Columbia County, I learned he was a common sight as a small boy, waiting each weekday afternoon on the Courthouse steps for his father to finish work and walk him home from school.  From his own mouth, I learned how much he admired and loved—to the point of hero-worship—that same paternal presence.  And from my mother, I learned how deeply he resented his own mother repeatedly undermining his father’s efforts to resist his weakness for drink.  He held Laura, so my mother said, responsible for his father’s early death.

When his father did indeed die in August, 1919, Stuart was not yet 12.  The shock of the loss drove Stuart to desperate measures: when the Bloomsburg Fair came through town the following month, he ran away with the circus and refused for months to return to his mother’s care.  Only when his Uncle Frank interceded with the promise that he would help him into a boarding school the following fall, was he persuaded to come home.  

Stuart then spent the next four years at Gettysburg Academy and the four years after that at the same college where his older brother had gone—Trinity, in Connecticut—graduating in 1928. The 1930 census shows him living and teaching at The Hunn School, a secondary academy in northern New Jersey.  It was during his time on the faculty there that he met my mother, his future wife, Rachel Abbott.    

She came, on her father’s side, from a second-generation English family that had settled in Nova Scotia and intermarried with descendants of ex-patriate loyalists whose ancestors had come to Boston in 1630.  She was a direct descendant of Richard Mather, John Cotton, and Cotton Mather’s sister.  Ironically, just as Stuart’s ancestor had been driven out of New Jersey for opposing the revolutionary cause, Rachel’s ancestors in Boston had been ordered to take ship with the retreating British to Nova Scotia after the Battle of Bunker Hill in December, 1775.  

On her mother’s side, Rachel was descended from Cornish great-grandparents, who claimed a Cornish pirate, killed in the Caribbean, among their forebears. The couple immigrated to Canada in 1837, and boasted two sons who were knighted by Edward VII—William Osler, for his contributions to medicine and medical education, and Britain Osler, instrumental in the success of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Their sister, Charlotte Osler (Rachel’s grandmother), married Charles Gwyn, a Toronto lawyer, recently landed from Wales.  My own grandmother, the eldest daughter of that union, Rachel Caroline Gwyn, had begun a career as a concert singer at the time she met her husband.   

[gyrlversion]

Thousands of eco-warriors pour into London to bring city to standstill

Environmental protesters will paralyse London‘s roads today by creating human barricades at five landmarks.

Organisers of the Extinction Rebellion group claim up to 30,000 eco-protesters are expected to block major routes from 9am. Scotland Yard warned drivers to expect road closures and widespread disruption in the capital. 

The movement, which is demanding the Government takes urgent action on climate change and wildlife declines, has been backed by actress Dame Emma Thompson and former archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams. 

Climate protest group Extinction Rebellion set up camp in London’s Hyde Park yesterday before today’s plans for disruption

The campaigners, who include the granddaughter of a baronet, are demanding the introduction of a legally binding policy to reduce carbon emission to net zero by 2025. 

They say they will continue to block key roads in London for weeks and ‘escalate civil disobedience’ if their demands are not met. 

Humans have declared war on nature, says ex-archbishop of Canterbury

Humans have declared war on nature and put progress before the planet, the former archbishop of Canterbury said on the eve of environmental protests aimed at bringing London to a standstill.

Dr Rowan Williams said the world is in a crisis which could be called ‘being at war with ourselves’.

He spoke at a meditation event outside St Paul’s Cathedral in the capital attended by activists preparing to take part in mass demonstrations organised by the Extinction Rebellion group.

Sitting on the ground amid protesters who held flags and banners, he said: ‘We have declared war on our nature when we declare war on the natural world.

‘We are at war with ourselves when we are at war with our neighbour, whether that neighbour is human or non-human.

‘We are here tonight to declare that we do not wish to be at war. We wish to make peace with ourselves by making peace with our neighbour earth and with our God.’

Praying at the all-faith gathering, he added: ‘We confess that we have polluted our own atmosphere, causing global warming and climate change that have increased poverty in many parts of our planet.

‘We have contributed to crises and been more concerned with getting gold than keeping our planet green. We have loved progress more than the planet. We are sorry.’

Extinction Rebellion, which describes itself as a non-violent direct action and civil disobedience group, said the protests at major central London locations including Parliament Square and Oxford Circus from Monday ‘will be bringing London to a standstill for up to two weeks’.

The first stage of their global ‘Rebellion Week’ will see human barricades at Marble Arch, Oxford Circus, Waterloo Bridge, Parliament Square and Piccadilly Circus.

Their goal is to shut down vital roads and transport links, causing misery for commuters and keeping over-stretched police officers busy for hours. 

The so-called festival of action will see food stalls set up and talks given in the middle of the road throughout the day. Some protesters even plan to super-glue their hands to objects in the road and each other. 

One of those expected on the streets is Tamsin Omond, the granddaughter of Dorset baronet Sir Thomas Lees. The 35-year-old went to Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. 

The most prominent figure in Extinction Rebellion is Left-wing academic Roger Hallam, whose stated ambition for the group is to ‘bring down all the regimes in the world and replace them’, starting with Britain.

Last November, Extinction Rebellion blocked bridges across London to bring chaos to the capital. 

In February, they took part in a nationwide school strike and on April 1, during one of the Brexit debates, a group of their protesters stripped off in the House of Commons. 

Speaking at a meditation on the eve of the protests Dr Williams said humans had declared war on nature.

He said: ‘We are here tonight to declare that we do not wish to be at war. We wish to make peace with ourselves by making peace with our neighbour Earth and with our God.’

Thompson has previously said of the demonstrations: ‘It is time to stand up and save our home.’

The Met Police said it was aware of the protests. 

Officers said their operational response to camping ‘would be dependent on what if any other issues might be ongoing at the time’. 

On April 1, during one of the Brexit debates, a group of Extinction Rebellion protesters stripped off in the House of Commons 

Extinction Rebellion protesters sit after pouring fake blood onto the ground in London outside Downing Street on March 9

Scotland Yard said they have ‘appropriate policing plans’ in place for the demonstrations and that officers will be used from across the force ‘to support the public order operation during the coming weeks’.

Protests across Europe 

Today will see people in at least 80 cities in more than 33 countries hold similar climate demonstrations.

The first protest of the day was held at Schuman Square in Brussels this morning as protesters formed a human ‘XR’ logo – the same as that of Extinction Rebellion.

The Extinction Rebellion ‘Rebellion Week’ begins at Schuman Square in Brussels today as protesters form a human ‘XR’ logo

Police advised people travelling around London in the coming days to allow extra time for their journey in the event of road closures and general disruption.

A spokesman for the organisers said: ‘The International Rebellion begins and Extinction Rebellion will be bringing London to a standstill for up to two weeks.

‘They will be blocking five of the city’s busiest and most iconic locations in a non-violent, peaceful act of rebellion where they invite people to join them for several days of creative, artist-led resistance.’

Demonstrators arrived at London’s Hyde Park yesterday, some having journeyed to the city on foot in recent weeks from various parts of the UK for what is described as an ‘International Rebellion’. 

While organisers encouraged people to set up camp in Hyde Park overnight into this morning, they were warned they could be breaking the law by doing so is an offence under Royal Parks legislation.

A spokesman for The Royal Parks said Extinction Rebellion had not asked for permission to begin the protest in the park and that camping is not allowed.

DOMINIC LAWSON: Deluded middle-class climate warriors can’t see the real danger of their bright idea 

 Claire Perry said her encounter with this (until now) obscure group had been ‘good and productive’

Getting to see a government minister isn’t easy. I’d challenge any reader to see how long it takes to persuade the civil servants manning the bureaucratic barricades to let you bend a minister’s ear about whatever concerns you.

Yet somehow they found a space in the diary for a group called Extinction Rebellion (XR) to lobby the Minister of State for Energy, Claire Perry.

Ms Perry told the Mail on Sunday that her encounter with this (until now) obscure group had been ‘good and productive’.

Really? Extinction Rebellion is this week launching mass protests designed to shut down or obstruct transport links, causing (more) misery to commuters and business. If that’s the result of ‘productive’ talks, I wonder what would happen if they had gone badly.

But making Britain hell for business (and anyone who drives a car) is what Extinction Rebellion stands for. As the Energy Minister must know, its mission is to ‘save the planet’ by eliminating Britain’s CO2 emissions entirely by 2025.

Brutish

Or in other words, to reduce us to a state of mere subsistence, last seen in the pre-industrial age when life was (for the great majority) nasty, brutish and short.

As if to emphasise the primitiveness to which they wish us to return, this is the group which on April Fool’s Day performed a naked protest in the public gallery of the House of Commons.

Actually, this is the only way people with such views could take part (so to speak) in parliamentary debate. Because any party which tried to get MPs elected on a policy of mass immiseration would not win a single seat. There might be some thousands of middle-class students and drop-outs sufficiently aesthetically offended by mass consumerism to vote for such a manifesto, but that would be it.

This is the group which on April Fool’s Day performed a naked protest in the public gallery of the House of Commons

Unsurprisingly, the leaders of this movement tend to come from well-to-do homes, which have never experienced scarcity or privation. 

The figures behind the demonstrations planned for this week include Tamsin Omond, granddaughter of the Dorset baronet Sir Thomas Lees

The figures behind the demonstrations planned for this week include Tamsin Omond, granddaughter of the Dorset baronet Sir Thomas Lees; Stuart Basden (who said his week in prison after an earlier action was ‘a bit like boarding school’); and George Barda, son of the distinguished stage and music photographer Clive Barda OBE FRSA and a 43-year-old postgraduate student at King’s College London.

I am distantly related to one of the inspirations for this movement, the environmentalist author and journalist George Monbiot (we are both scions of the family which created the J Lyons catering and food manufacturing empire). Monbiot is anything but a hypocrite. He leads the life he preaches to others: he doesn’t own a car, never flies and, so far as I know, survives on a purely plant-based diet.

Last week, Monbiot appeared on Frankie Boyle’s television show, New World Order, and was cheered by the youthful audience when he demanded action to end economic growth, adding that this meant ‘we’ve got to go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it’.

Monbiot has been consistent in this: in 2007 he wrote an article for the Guardian welcoming the prospect of a recession, even though, as he acknowledged, ‘it would cause some people to lose their jobs and homes’. (He got his wish: it turned out not to be popular).

But if it’s the planet you want to save, and you believe its very existence is threatened by excessive emissions of CO2, then what happens in this country is almost beside the point. The UK contributes little more than one per cent of global CO2 emissions. Even if the inhabitants of these islands were reduced by an environmentalist version of the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot to a state of pre-industrial and self-sufficient subsistence farming — no wicked imports of food via boat or plane — it would have a minuscule effect on the planet’s future.

In fact, the UK — chiefly through the steady closure of the domestic coal industry — has been in the vanguard of reducing CO2 emissions: in 2018, our emissions were at their lowest levels in 120 years.

Activists from Extinction Rebellion block off a road at Parliament Square, London, during a protest in October last year

The group yesterday set up camp in London’s Hyde park ahead of plans to cause widespread disruption across London later

It’s not British politicians that groups such as Extinction Rebellion should be haranguing and demonstrating against, but those in the People’s Republic of China. That is the nation responsible for 60 per cent of the growth in global CO2 emissions over the past decade.

And China is currently building almost 260 gigawatts of new coal-fired power generating capacity — in itself almost the size of the entire U.S. coal-fired capacity.

The trouble is the Chinese state would treat rather robustly any Extinction Rebellion activists who attempted to demonstrate on its busiest streets, or to mount a naked protest in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. I don’t recommend they try that.

Plunder

Nor should we be so critical of the Chinese. They, as we in the West did before them, are using cheap energy wrenched from the Earth’s resources to escape from lives of almost unimaginable poverty. And it was economic growth which ultimately created the circumstances in which peace rather than conflict became the normal state of human affairs: nations could prosper and enrich themselves through trade rather than the plunder of neighbours in a zero-sum world.

If the likes of Extinction Rebellion were to get their way, it is something like that bleak past which would be revisited upon us. And the political forces emerging from that would be truly terrifying.

If she is still in the habit of seeking their opinions, Claire Perry might point that out to the delusional middle-class climate warriors.

Who’s ready to get arrested? Undercover with the eco-activist group Extinction Rebellion who plan to bring London to a halt on Monday – and are as ruthlessly professional as they are deluded

By HOLLY BANCROFT FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY 

Cigarette break: XR training volunteer Clare Farrell

I’m sitting in a cavernous community hall in East London with a group of eco-activists huddled in thick jackets against the cold.

We’re being drilled for our arrest – like soldiers being trained for capture and interrogation by the enemy.

Our tutor is a sixtysomething woman with fuzzy white hair who knows all about civil disobedience and its legal consequences.

She explains passionately that we must not speak to the police, other than to give our name and date of birth.

We must not get drunk before the ‘action’ in just a few days’ time.

And we should consider wearing adult nappies – in case we’re locked up for hours in a police van with no access to a lavatory. Or if we decide to chain ourselves to railings, barriers or whatever else to cause maximum disruption.

Welcome to Extinction Rebellion (XR), the revolutionary protest group hell-bent on eliminating fossil fuels from Britain.

To achieve this, they are planning an onslaught of civil disobedience on a scale rarely seen in this country. And I’m here undercover as a new recruit, or ‘rebel’ as they call it.

My induction took place late last month in an anonymous office block near Euston station. I’m told XR was given the space for free by a well-placed sympathiser.

A lift takes me to the fourth floor – an open-plan space with a smattering of desks and some 40 new recruits, an even mix of male and female, all casually dressed.

A handmade poster by the lifts is daubed ‘Eco not Ego’. A large sign warns us to avoid ‘suppression juice’ – that’s alcohol – so we can ‘rebel with a clear body and mind’. Brightly coloured banners hang from the ceiling – ‘No Brexit in a dead planet’, says one – while a giant papier-mâché skeleton of some big beast lies, under construction, in the corner.

This introductory meeting is led by a bearded XR activist called Greg, who lives in a squat in West London with other members of the group. His first move is to lead us in an awkward ‘ice breaker’. Sitting in rows on school chairs, we’re instructed to stick both arms in the air and waggle from side to side, chanting ‘woo-hoo’.

Then comes a minute’s silence for ‘the dying planet’. Struggling not to laugh, I bowed my head with the others, eyes down.

‘Devote some of your brain to imagining the kind of world you want to create,’ says Greg. ‘To get through this struggle together, we need to hold tight to our dream.’

We’re asked to think of one word to describe the world we want – and shouts of ‘harmony’, ‘sharing’ and ‘green’ come from around the room. ‘Courageous’, mutters a boy in a long beige trench coat sitting next to me. 

Questions follow. The volunteers are keen, but concerned. 

A charity worker with short blonde hair says she is worried about XR’s policy of deliberately getting arrested.

Not that she’s against breaking the law – just that it might deter volunteers who cannot take the risk of getting into trouble.

Eating her dinner from a Tupperware box, another young woman raises concerns about XR’s links to Labour’s hard-Left Momentum faction. George agrees XR and Momentum have a good relationship.

Preparing for action: A photo of an XR meeting taken by our undercover reporter. There is no suggestion those pictured are all intending to break the law

Then we are told to get in a long line, arranged in order of willingness to get arrested. It is time to hone our tactics and strategy for the forthcoming ‘rebellion week’ – which starts tomorrow.

‘Move around the room according to what you feel,’ says Naomi, one of the lead activists.

‘The question is this: how arrestable are you in XR?’

A handful immediately place themselves at one end of the room, the extreme that signifies: ‘Yes, I really wish to be arrested right now.’ A few walk to the opposite side, meaning: ‘Absolutely not.’

I’m with the majority shuffling around in the middle amid embarrassed laughter. This position says: ‘Maybe, let’s think about it.’

They ask us how far we’ll go. Will we commit a litany of protest crimes – smashing windows, defacing buildings? Will we glue ourselves to doors or block roads using ‘swarming’ – sitting down for a few minutes at a time to stop traffic?

‘I’m comfortable with spray paint that permanently damages but not breaking windows,’ states a woman in her 30s from a refugee charity.

‘I’m somewhere between the permanent spray paint and the chalk spray paint,’ says a man studying for a PhD in environmental activism. ‘They can’t charge you with criminal damage if you use chalk paint.’

‘Training session’: XR potential recruits Greg, left, and George

After an hour or so, we’re all split up into what they call ‘affinity’ groups based on how radical they judge us to be. They don’t seem to think I’m very revolutionary.

Roles are assigned for the forthcoming ‘action’. Our group has a ‘wellbeing co-ordinator’, a ‘legal observer’ and a ‘media organiser’.

Middle-class zealots who’ll make Monday a misery for millions 

The most prominent – and radical – of the XR leaders is failed organic farmer and PhD student Roger Hallam

Failed farmer wants a world revolution 

The most prominent – and radical – of the XR leaders is failed organic farmer and PhD student Roger Hallam.

After years in a succession of Left-wing groups, the 52-year-old says the ‘name of the game’ for XR is to ‘bring down all the regimes in the world and replace them’. Hallam (above) says paralysing traffic will eventually cause food shortages and trigger uprisings.

In a recent interview, he said XR protesters should be ready to cause disruption through personal ‘sacrifice’. If necessary, they ‘should be willing to die’.

XR co-founder Stuart Basden, 36, a middle-class writer from Bristol

Co-founder says jail’s like boarding school 

XR co-founder Stuart Basden, 36, a middle-class writer from Bristol (above), has goals that go way beyond a desire to curb global warming.

Indeed, he has claimed: ‘XR isn’t about the climate. You see, the climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life.’

Basden has urged XR followers to embrace going to prison – where he spent a week after defacing London’s City Hall with spray paint last year – saying it is ‘a bit like boarding school’

Tasmin Osmond, 35, is a veteran of ‘direct actions’

Veteran campaigner from baronet family 

Tasmin Osmond, 35, is a veteran of ‘direct actions’ which had little to do with climate change, such as Occupy London, the poverty protest which set up a camp outside St Paul’s cathedral in 2011.

The granddaughter of Dorset baronet Sir Thomas Lees, Omond (above) went to Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where she read English.

She was thrown out of anti-aviation group Plane Stupid after saying the green movement ‘brand’ was ‘unwashed, unshaven and up a tree’, and this ‘doesn’t represent me’.

George Barda, 43, believes the ‘Criminal UK Government’ is to blame for climate change

Student who’s on Putin’s TV channel 

George Barda, 43, believes the ‘Criminal UK Government’ is to blame for climate change.

A post-graduate student at prestigious King’s College in London, the son of classical music and stage photographer Clive Barda still finds time to be a dedicated revolutionary and camped outside St Paul’s cathedral in the Occupy London campaign.

Today, Barda (above) is a director of XR parent company Compassionate Revolution and regularly appears on Russia Today, Russia’s controversial British TV channel.

How far would we go for the movement? A Scottish actress in her 20s tells us she’s planning to recruit her mother. ‘I think I’d be OK with being arrested,’ she adds. ‘It’s just that I’m so in and out of the country, I work between here and Paris. I don’t know if I would be able to make my court date, so I don’t know if it would work out.’

Another young woman, a university student, says she’ll bring her harp along to keep us entertained during ‘rebellion week’. Before the meeting breaks up, the organisers call for mature women willing to be trained as ‘de-escalators’.

These are the people asked to calm down frustrated members of the public, particularly drivers, trapped in the traffic jams we’re going to cause.

Then the evening comes to a conclusion with repeated chants of ‘Extinction… Rebellion’ from the hardened activists, who then treat us to an impromptu and utterly excruciating dance.

A beat box starts blaring, one long-haired man sways expansively, arms waving out of time, the others jig about. I leave, armed with XR stickers and posters to plaster on the streets.

The group gives me constant updates through the WhatsApp messaging system, and a few days later I’m back in the office block for another training session. This time, it’s altogether more alarming.

An activist in her 20s called Jess lays out XR’s terrifying vision of the future: ‘We want to build a structure, a community and test prototypes for the coming structural collapse of the regimes of Western democracies. And we see this as inevitable – this has to happen.’

Now, we’re drawn further into the plans for illegal protest, and made to take part in role-play scenarios of activists clashing with the police.

The golden rule is to stay silent when confronted by police – unless we quote from a self-righteous prepared statement outlining our supposed right to break the law as a ‘conscientious protector’ of Planet Earth.

And we must never, ever identify any of the XR organisers in case they are charged with inciting illegal activities.

Activists who plan to ‘lock on’ by super-gluing themselves to public property are warned to expect a long wait, as few police officers are trained to dissolve the glue.

The hope is to cause the maximum amount of chaos. They might even have activists locked on at five separate protest points in London. If we are seized by the police, we must make our bodies go floppy, to tie up more officers as they attempt to carry us away.

I endure a further marathon training session at a climbing centre in North London.

We’re being addressed by the white-haired lady, who I now know is press officer Jayne Forbes. Stating her own readiness for martyrdom and jail, she tells us that: ‘I’m an older person with no responsibilities.

‘I’m prepared to go to prison and I think we are privileged in this country to have prisons that are relatively acceptable.

‘If I was living in Brazil or something, I could get killed as an activist. Our prisons are not bad compared to many in the world.’

She tells us never to agree to a caution because that would be ‘an admission of guilt’.

We must never accept the help of a duty solicitor because they would be ‘pally with the police’. I’m learning a great deal.

We’re advised only to bring an old-fashioned ‘burner’ mobile phone to the protest in case the police want to seize the device as evidence.

I’m told a paperback will help me while away the long hours in a police cell – and that I can ask for up to three blankets from the custody officers.

I now have a list of ‘friendly’ solicitors on a small sheet of paper reminding me of my legal rights. Can we get vegan food in prison? XR thinks the answer is ‘yes’.

By the time I say my goodbyes, I’m truly worried. If this week goes according to plan for Extinction Rebellion, I know that many of its members will be only too delighted to learn first-hand about the inside of our police cells and our prisons – believing they have come one step closer to making their dangerous plan a reality.

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