John Bald/language and literacy

Seaham Harbour Heroes - The George Elmy Lifeboat

 

In 1962, the Seaham Harbour lifeboat, the George Elmy, set out in the mountainous seas we regualarly see crashing over the top of the lighthouse on a rescue mission that failed at the last moment, as the boat was hit by a huge wave just outside the harbour. Only one of the rescued people survived - the whole crew was lost, and my wife and her mother still remember the eerie silence of the town on the following morning as they delivered milk.  

The boat was unsinkable, but not self-righting. As self-righting boats had been available since the 1890s, this seemed stupid, but the issue turns out not to be as simple as it appears, as self-righting boats were less stable, which brought different dangers. Following the Seaham disaster, the RNLI developed a new type of self-righting boat that worked by taking on a ton and a half of sea water when it was launched, and using the movement of this floating ballast to right the boat. Not an obvious solution, and the disaster can't be ascribed to the pure folly that we might imagine. 

Repaired and retired, the George Elmy - named after the donor's brother, not from the North-East - was used as a fishing boat, and purchased by local people from Ebay.  After £100k of restoration, half of it from the Heritage Lottery Fund, it is now on proud display at Seaham and entered on the register of historic ships. The exhibition of local life alongside the George Elmy is well worth a visit, and Sir Thomas Allen, the unofficial first citizen of the North-East, is patron of the organisation.

End Game: Winterreise, Sir Thomas Allen and Joseph Middleton, Frant Church.

The village of Frant is a small and peaceful community just south of Tunbridge Wells. It is the kind of place that could have featured in Schubert's Winterreise, a setting 24 short poems by Wilhelm Müller describing a desolate personal journey, beginning with rejected love - clearly by himself than the girl or her family - and ending with a vision of a pathetic, barefoot old man playing the hurdy-gurdy, derided by people and dogs, with no money in his plate and surviving only through his own persistence. Winterreise is end-game for Schubert, barely completed before his death at 31, and also for Sir Thomas Allen, whose own end game is increasingly reminiscent of late Beethoven.

Winterreise is not for laughs. If few words appear more than once, the German  "Elend", which combines misery, suffering and wretchedness, certainly does, and an hour and a quarter of uninterrupted and unrelieved "Elend",  delivered with Sir Thomas' wonderful combination of sound, expression and posture, demands great concentration even to listen to. The piece poses extreme technical demands, and there is only so much that the human frame will take, and the voice give.

This is the ultimate for both. Sir Thomas' publicity still tends to show him as a younger man than he is, and the photographs do not do him justice. One in The Times, some years ago, of him as the Count in Cosi Fan Tutte, did manage to catch the full power of expression he concentrates in his older face, and televsion got it right in the close-ups of his performance of Lover Come Back To Me with John Wilson in the Proms. Sustained over this length of time, and exploring the full range of Schubert's Elend, it is as much a part of the performance as the perfectly controlled, communicative and expressive singing and Joseph Middleton's perfect, selfless accompaniment, one of the finest examples of piano playing one will ever hear.

All, of course, in context. Winterreise is not for everyone, and, Mr Middleton's artistry notwithstanding, not for most of the young, for whom there is more to life than misery. And yet, as in Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium, the soul will clap its hands and sing, the traveller take hold of his stout staff and continue on his way, room at the inn or no. Long may Sir Thomas' journey continue.