Listing Through Life

Where did Nevil Shute get the name for the device created to break through the Atlantic Wall? It seems that a British actor named Charles Macklin, back in 1755, was bragging that he could recite any paragraph from memory after seeing it once. His buddy, poet Samuel Foote, decided to test his skills. He wrote a poem titled The Great Panjandrum and showed it to Macklin. Here it is.

So she went into the garden
to cut a cabbage-leaf
to make an apple-pie;
and at the same time
a great she-bear, coming down the street,
pops its head into the shop.
What! no soap?
So he died,
and she very imprudently married the Barber:
and there were present
the Picninnies,
and the Joblillies,
and the Garyulies,
and the great Panjandrum himself,
with the little round button at top;
and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can,
till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots

Nobody thought to record whether Macklin passed the test.

The poem has given a word to the English language — Panjandrum: a very important person: an important or influential (and often overbearing) person.

The poem also became very popular with teachers who wanted to give their students memory exercises and was included in many books of children’s rhymes. Here’s a picture of the great she-bear from one of those books.

The rest of the illustrations can be found here.

Last night, I finished reading A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute. I browsed around on the Internet to see if the book was made into a movie. (It was — two movies, actually.) Anyway, that lead me to this page where Nevil Shute explains how he came up with the plot for the novel. Finding myself on a Nevil Shute site, I wandered about and found this page.

It turns out that during World War II, Shute worked for the Navy’s Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development. (I thought the concept of miscellaneous weapons was pretty funny, as though they were just laying about at random. But what do you expect from a country that has a government official called Minister without Portfolio?) Anyway, Shute was given the task of finding a way to smash through the Atlantic Wall, the huge concrete barrier the Germans had constructed along the French coast.

Shute came up with The Great Panjandrum, a pair of wheels that carried a large supply of explosives. The wheels were powered by a series of rockets. The whole thing was set off from a boat and was supposed to roll up the beach and explode on contact with the wall. Naturally, it was supposed to be a big secret, but somehow word got out and large crowds gathered to watch the test on an English beach. Things started out OK, but soon the wheels veered off to the side. Three more tests were no more successful — the rockets tended to go off in odd directions and the spectators had to scramble. Finally, the whole idea was given up. Or was it? Some people think it was all a fake to begin with (explaining how word got out), intended to distract the Germans from the D-Day landings.

And the name? Check out my next post.

I’m currently reading In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson. On the first page, I read this:

Australia is such a difficult country to keep track of. On my first visit, some years ago, I passed the time on the long flight reading a history of Australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein I encountered the startling fact that in 1967 the prime minister, Harold Holt, was strolling along a beach in Victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished. No trace of the poor man was ever seen again. This seemed doubly astounding to me — first that Australia could just lose a prime minister (I mean come on) and second that news of this had never reached me.

To begin with, it reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s quote in The Importance of Being Earnest: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

But then I decided to find out a bit more about Harold Holt. It turns out that he was the 17th Prime Minister of Australia, taking office in 1966. In June of that year, he visited the United States and pledged Australia’s support for Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy (a pledge that he evidently hadn’t cleared with anyone in his country). He agreed to send more troops and made the infamous quote, “And so, sir, in the lonelier and perhaps even more disheartening moments which come to any national leader, I hope there will be a corner of your mind and heart which takes cheer from the fact that you have an admiring friend, a staunch friend that will be all the way with LBJ.”

In December, 1967, after watching a yacht race, Holt and some friends drove to Cheviot Beach on the southeast coast of Australia. In spite of repeated warnings, Holt dove into the heavy surf and was never seen again. Two days later it was announced that he was presumed dead.

That’s almost enough about Harold Holt. Just one final bit of whimsy — Holt is most famously commemorated by the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre near Melbourne.