by Ann Wroe
She made her public debut in a BBC television programme in April 1969. Her item was a short one, but it was noticed by several newspapers. Either Mrs Brown, a
school dinner-lady from Balham, a London suburb, was a phenomenon, or, an equally promising story, the BBC had been taken in. It transpired that the BBC had not been taken in, but had been as baffled by the experience of Mrs Brown as were the reporters who increasingly came to knock at her door. How was it that a woman apparently of little musical ability had one day sat at a piano and had begun to play Chopin with ease, and Chopin music that no one had heard before?
As subsequently became clear, it wasn’t quite like that. Rosemary Brown had been interested in music as long as she could remember. She had learnt the piano as a child and had hoped to be a dancer. She had long known she was psychic. She remembered having had a chat with Franz Liszt when she was seven. He had always kept in touch and sometimes went shopping with her. It was true that when times were hard Mrs Brown had worked in a school kitchen, but she had had a more dignified job in the Post Office. Some musical friends had taken an interest in her contacts with dead composers and had recorded some of the music she had received. That was how she came to be taken up by the BBC.
All this helped to make Mrs Brown a more believable person, and created a public ever eager to know more about her.
“The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns” is a worry for many people other than Hamlet. Members of the established faiths have been told what awaits them after death, but millions of others are unsure. They listened with interest to what Rosemary Brown had to say when she appeared regularly on television in Britain and the United States, including a spot on The Johnny Carson Show. In heaven, she said, there was no sex; “the earthy side of our being has been left behind”. There was though, oddly, an interest in fashion. Clara Schumann was very dressy. Everyone was well. Beethoven was no longer deaf. There were no quarrels. Everything was in harmony. That didn’t sound too bad. But was Mrs Brown making it all up? Was the music she said she was receiving any good? That had to be the test.
In the 1970s many music experts perused the scores that Mrs Brown had painstakingly taken down. Some were enthusiastic. Leonard Bernstein said he would “buy” the Rachmaninov. Peter Katin, an outstanding interpreter of Chopin, was happy to record many of the piano works. Most of the experts were unsure. They were impressed by the sincerity of Mrs Brown, who seemed to have no interest in profiting materially from her fame. They liked much of the music but were bothered that it was not outstanding, not the work of genius.
On the other hand the music seemedtoo good to have been composed by an amateur, however enthusiastic. The compositions suggested a professional hand. Nor were the pieces pastiches. One critic noted the “advanced harmonies” of a Liszt piece. A Hungarian writer was particularly pleased that his country’s most celebrated composer was still in form. Mrs Brown was not perturbed by the controversy. She said that her composer friends were simply demonstrating that there was life after death. In her book Unfinished Symphonies she sought to explain the mysterious nature of music by quoting a message she said she had received from Chopin.
Great music is something that is really born in the spirit and is reproduced, perhaps very badly, in your world.
A heavenly helping hand has often been acknowledged by otherwise down-to-earth composers. Mozart, for one, was baffled where his marvellous music came from. However, psychiatrists who were asked for an opinion about Mrs Brown’s music said that it had come from her own mind. They constructed a plausible picture of a talented woman who, through childhood poverty, had been deprived of a musical career and had returned to music after her husband had died. Her psychic experiences they ascribed to hysteria, using the term in its medical sense, of dissociation. Since the Enlightenment, religious visionaries of all kinds have often been called hysterics. Joan of Arc, Theresa of Avila: the list is long. Mrs Brown was in distinguished company.
John Cairncross
John Cairncross, scholar, and “fifth man” in the Cambridge group of Russian spies, died on October 8th 1995, aged 82
When John Cairncross was questioned about his work as a spy he insisted that he had never harmed his native Britain. He had passed information to the Soviet Union during the second world war only to help it in its fight against Germany, the common enemy at the time of the Russians and the British.
Mr Cairncross was one of five clever Britons known to have been recruited by the Soviet Union when they were at Cambridge and who later served their masters well. In a striking note of patriotism, all, in memoirs or interviews, have denied disloyalty to Britain. Spies they may have been, but, in their own minds, they remained decent. As far as is known, their interrogators do not appear to have seriously challenged this large claim. Whatever suspicions they may have had, it would perhaps have seemed impolite to offend these well-connected and intelligent men. After all, Anthony Blunt, the most senior of the five, had become Queen Elizabeth’s adviser on art.
At any rate, all five were treated kindly. Anthony Blunt’s only formal punishment was to be deprived of his knighthood. Kim Philby, Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess may have punished themselves by nipping off to Russia once they learnt that the game was up. But all died, as John Cairncross did, peacefully, in their own beds.
Defenders of Mr Cairncross say the Russians were entitled to the information he passed to them while he was working with a team which had broken a German method of coding known as Enigma. He acknowledged that he told the Russians about German battle plans before a decisive battle, at Kursk, in 1943. But, according to Yuri Modin, the Russian controller of the Cambridge five, Mr Cairncross also disclosed information about western nuclear plans, which may have been of use to Russia when it became an enemy.
Mr Modin also recalled that after the war, when Mr Cairncross was working in the British Treasury, at the heart of government, he gave the Russians information about NATO. Philby also continued to work for Russia during the cold war, but he too had his defenders, among them Graham Greene, who wrote an introduction to his memoirs.
Britain has not always been compassionate to those regarded as traitors. William Joyce broadcast propaganda from Germany to Britain in the second world war. A British court found him guilty of treason. Because his nationality was in question, he may have been tried illegally. But Joyce was regarded as a yob who sneered at Britain in its finest hour, and he was hanged. Oswald Mosley, an aristocrat who would have been Britain’s Führer had Germany won the war, was merely detained in some comfort. Cynics looking at the leniency extended to the Cambridge five say that a superior education and some polish remain useful protections in Britain. America has been notably tougher with treachery. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 after being found guilty of passing information about nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union.
Anyone seeking some quirk in Mr
Cairncross’s upbringing, some early disenchantment with society, would be disappointed. His Scottish childhood home was austere but secure. His mother was a teacher and his father ran a shop. After excelling at Cambridge he topped the Foreign Office entrance examinations and was quickly promoted. He told people close to him, including members of his family, that he was never a communist, unlike the other spies at Cambridge.
But Peter Wright, a British security-service officer, said in his book Spycatcher that Mr Cairncross told him he had not only become a communist at Cambridge but, “with characteristic Scottish tenacity”, remained one. Getting the truth about spies is inevitably difficult, as lying is an important part of their skill. But, ideology apart, Mr Cairncross’s actions in helping Russia during the second world war were at least partly motivated by intellectual arrogance; an assumption that he, rather than the idiots who wererunning the war, was better able to judge what needed to be done to hasten victory. Possibly he was right. It was also possible that, despite his academic brilliance, his judgment was flawed. The two qualities do not alway
s go together.
After Mr Cairncross was rumbled he was allowed to resign discreetly from government service. From 1952 he lived mostly abroad: in America, where he got an academic job, in Rome, where he worked for the United Nations, but chiefly in France. He had skill as a linguist. Before going to Cambridge he had gained a degree at the Sorbonne. In France he built up a reputation as an authority on its greatest comic dramatist, Molière. Tartuffe, a play about pretence, was one of his favourites.
Jeanne Calment
Jeanne Louise Calment, the world’s oldest person, died on August 4th 1997, aged 122
For 100 years nothing much happened to Jeanne Calment. Centenarians are commonplace these days. But as she lived on, and on, she became famous, first in her home town, Arles, in southern France, then nationally, and eventually as the person with the longest proven life of anyone in history. France, always happy for new evidence that it is, in every way, the most desirable of countries to be born in, was gratified when (in October 1995) Mrs Calment passed the lifespan of a Japanese who had previously held this most competitive of records. Mrs Calment, it was noted, attributed her staying power to olive oil and good French wine.
Each birthday, reporters would be dispatched to write about Mrs Calment’s career in longevity. But extracting the gems of her experience was not easy. In her final years Mrs Calment’s sight and hearing had almost gone. There is a certain amount of repetition in these birthday accounts. One much-told story is that in 1965, when Mrs Calment was 90, a local lawyer made a deal with her to take over her flat when she died, meanwhile paying her the equivalent of $500 a month. But the lawyer died first, 30 years after the deal, having paid Mrs Calment several times the value of her flat and ensuring that she lived out the rest of her time without money worries. “It happens in life that we make bad deals,” Mrs Calment was reported to have said.
The lawyer story is probably true. But as Mrs Calment grew ever older and frailer, the tales about her became suspiciously improbable. Did she really remember Van Gogh when he had both his ears, or was this a piece of embroidery by a journalist who worked out that the painter lived in Arles when Jeanne Calment was a girl? Did she really say, off pat, “I’ve been forgotten by God”?
Perhaps it does not matter. For most people, the interest in Mrs Calment was her durability. We all live under sentence of death. How did she put it off so long? And was it worth it? Research into ageing is one of the newer disciplines. The University of California’s department for “the economics and demography of ageing” has located more than 20,000 centenarians in the United States and quite a few “super centenarians” aged at least 110. It studied the life of Jeanne Calment for clues to her endurance. “Here was someone of the greatest age and one we could authenticate,” said a worker in the department. Since Methuselah, said to be 969, and his less-famous son Lamech, a mere 777, many claims have been made for long life. But Mrs Calment had the papers to prove that she was born on February 21st 1875, the year that Tolstoy published Anna Karenina. Her father was a shopkeeper and Jeanne was married within her class to another shopkeeper. The couple had one child, a girl. Mrs Calment seems to have had no endangering illnesses. Putting aside her faith in the life-sustaining qualities of olive oil, the Californian researchers assumed that Mrs Calment’s otherwise unexceptional life had been prolonged because of her genes. It seems the best chance of attaining a great age comes from having long-lived parents. Mrs Calment’s father lived to the age of 94 and
her mother to 86. But it doesn’t always work. Her daughter died at 36.
People generally are living longer in the rich countries. In some, average life expectancy has doubled over the past century. There will be 1.3m American centenarians by 2040, according to present projections. The Californian researchers are unwilling to point to a maximum age beyond which no one could live, although they take the view that no one could live for ever. Would anyone want to? As it happens, in the week that Jeanne Calment died, 44% of Germans who took part in a survey said they did not want to live beyond 80, and only 18% hoped to be centenarians. They may change their mind nearer the time.
The nasty ailments, cancer, Alzheimer’s and heart disease, tend to strike those aged between 50 and 80. Survive beyond that period and you could still live a life without being a nuisance to your nearest and dearest. Another American group, the National Institute on Ageing, reckons that many octogenarians can climb stairs, go for a walk and do their shopping. At theage of 85, Bernard Baruch, an adviser to American presidents, wrote, “I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.” He was to live another ten years.
Mrs Calment may have simply grown weary. “Journalists visit her,” said her doctor, “but she no longer enjoys them.” The journalists are now keeping a watch on Christian Mortensen, a Danish-born American, who will be 115 on August 16th. Others are contesting his claim to be the oldest living person, among them a Brazilian woman who says she is 126 and a Lebanese who smokes 60 cigarettes a day and is sure he is 135. But Mr Mortensen has the all-important birth certificate, and has already held his first press conference, reminiscing about his early days as a cowboy. A promising start.
Alec Campbell
Alec William Campbell, a veteran of Gallipoli, died on May 16th 2002, aged 103
In the first world war 324,000 Australians volunteered to fight overseas, an extraordinary number in a nation of fewer than 5m people. Of the 60,000 Australians who died in the war, 8,700 were lost in a few months during a hopeless attempt to capture Gallipoli, a small piece of territory in Turkey. In the words of a piece of doggerel at the time, “In five minutes flat, we were blown to hell / Nearly blew us right back to Australia.”
The story of Gallipoli and the Anzacs, the name given to members of the Australia New Zealand Army Corps, became a legend in Australia (and indeed in New Zealand, which lost 2,700 men). Nine Australians were awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military honour. Australians talk of the Anzac spirit, rather as the British of a certain age talk of the Dunkirk spirit (both refer to managed retreats that softened the sting of defeat). A lot of Australian homes are simply called Anzac. Each year the battle is commemorated on April 25th, the anniversary of the Anzacs’ landing in Gallipoli in 1915, in what is now known as Anzac Cove.
This year, as on many previous occasions, the main commemorative procession was led by Alec Campbell, who because of his age was allowed the comfort of riding in a car. When Mr Campbell died a few weeks later flags were flown at half mast throughout Australia. He was given a state funeral on May 24th and the prime minister, John Howard, cut short an official visit to China to be there.
Mr Campbell was uneasy at his growing fame as one by one newspapers reported the deaths of the few remaining Gallipoli survivors. One of the last was Roy Longmore, who died last year aged 107. The last survivor on the Turkish side, Adil Sahin, died in 1998. When it seemed likely that Mr Campbell was the only remaining witness of Gallipoli he was increasingly referred to in Australia as a “national treasure”.
Alec Campbell was not so sure about that. He said, correctly, that he was an ordinary chap, but he politely answered reporters’ questions about his life. He was born into a farming family in Tasmania. Queen Victoria was still reigning. Australia had not yet seen a motor car. He worked on a cattle station, then as a carpenter, then as a civil servant. He gained an economics degree in his 50s, studying part-time. He taught himself to sail and took part in several big races in Australian waters. He was married twice and fathered nine children. It was a respectable life, although perhaps not an extraordinary one. Now, Mr Campbell, what about Gallipoli …?
The decision to land in Turkey was a consequence of the lack of success by Britain and its allies on the western front in France. Turkey, which had sided with Germany only reluctantly, was reckoned to be a soft target. Land forces, aided by the navy, would advance to Constantinople, and Turkey would surrender. The way would be open to supply Russia with much needed arms t
hrough the Dardanelles, the strip of water that separates Europe and Asia, and the Russians would march triumphantly to Berlin. What would now be called a multinational force of some 500,000 men was assembled from the far reaches of the British empire; and a disparate bunch they were, among them the Assyrian Jewish Refugee Mule Corps, believed to be the first Jewish unit to fight since 70AD, when the Romans attacked Jerusalem.
The Turks defended their territory well, killing 33,000 of the invasion force. The Anzacs were given a particularly tricky stretch of Gallipoli to attack. The beach where they landed was dominated by well-fortified high ground. The Anzacs lost 2,000 men on the first day. Alec Campbell arrived at Gallipoli some time after the initial attack, when the Anzacs were barely holding on. He was only 16, was still not shaving, but insisted he was 18.
Older Aussies called him the Kid, and did their best to protect him He was given the job of running water to the men in the front line. That was dangerous enough. Every day runners would be picked off by Turkish snipers. “They kept you on your toes,” he said. “To stick up your noddle was nearly always fatal.” Mr Campbell’s tour of duty ended after two months when he fell ill with a fever and was invalided home. He was asked how many Turks he had killed. “None,” he replied, probably truthfully. But in later life, fed up with the question, he said “Dozens.”
A British government report conceded that the attack on Turkey had been “ill conceived”. In Australia the criticism was earthier, and if anything the bitterness that followed the massacre of its young men has grown over the years. If Australia ever decides to become a republic, the memory of Gallipoli may play a part. Mr Campbell voted for a republic in the referendum in 1999. But he was not by nature a propagandist. If he spoke of the folly of
