When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in London same thing, only first look to the Right.

My HMS Victory watercolor sketch. This was Admiral Nelson's flagship from the The Battle of Trafalgar. She can be visited at the British Naval museum in Portsmouth.

     
     Reflecting on the return flight from a visit to the UK, it occurs to me how tenuous a relationship I have with signage. This topic is fresh in mind as exactly 20 hours ago as I write this not counting the time difference I was standing in a very long line with my wife and kids preparing to board a plane to Dubai when we should have been just ahead in the much shorter line to Atlanta, which from our vantage point appeared to be the same line.

     I was a few paces back from the family when our youngest daughter came and got me, asserting “Dad, we’re in the wrong line.” I scowled at the signage in that boarding area, having never been clear on exactly where we were supposed to be, and found myself wondering, “would that have happened in the States?” Our plane it turned out took it’s sweet time boarding so we would have been all right...probably, but as this was the latest in a series of events like this, I find myself trying to make sense of it. I wedged my suitcase in the regular turnstile at King’s Crossing instead of using the one clearly marked for luggage only a few feet away, and then there was the croissant in the toaster at the hotel despite the one and only sign on the table asking guests not to do it. It came out partially ignited, and since I’ll eat burned toast my wife assumed that was me dismissing authority. I argued that I have no issue with the lady who set out that lovely breakfast, but she scoffed.

     I must conclude that for some reason, under certain circumstances, (like breakfast) no matter how bold or clearly posted, I don’t see signs, or I filter them out somehow. That’s possibly due to a dyslexic compartmentalized brain, but on a wider view, it brings to mind the exercise in trying to span the gap between one’s perspective as a visitor and......that of Britain’s. I must say in London they made probably the most important concession for tourists by boldly painting the words “Look Right” on the street facing every the curb at every intersection. It might as well have said...

HEY,  AMERICANS! YOU’RE IN ENGLAND. WE’VE GROWN WEARY OF SCRAPING YOUR OVERFED CARCASSES OFF THE PAVEMENT, SO PLEASE BE SO GOOD AS TO LOOK TO THE RIGHT SO YOU MIGHT FINISH YOUR VISIT IN ONE PIECE.

I acknowledge the space problem, therefore adding something about texting would be problematic; and yes, in Italy and Germany they drive on the right hand side; still, I have to imagine my country racks that largest slice of grisly pie chart, but even so, its gratifying to see the steady decline of pedestrian fatalities possibly since records have been collected.

This must have been executed after a particularly bad weekend. No time for a stencil, the crews set out with a brush and a can of paint.

  
      So there’s the aspect of perspective. If you’re thoroughly used to something, so used to it that you may not even see the need for a sign. Is it possible for you to communicate with an outsider effectively? In other words, I’m proposing that in every case, the people who most need the signage, should be the ones to design it. So yes, tourists from Michigan can come to Florida and sit down with a guy from Berlin and a lady from San Paolo and work out our traffic signs. And maybe one of us could have a crack at making the roundabout signage in the UK a bit more helpful; for our own sake. But more interesting to me, is the subtext of signage. When a group posts a sign, they seek to not only instruct another party on some preferable behavior, they are making a declaration about themselves. This bodes well for Britain, because their signage conveys a collective gentility and expectation of adult behavior that the country depends on, not just plays lip service to. About a week into our trip Tracey and I began to notice signage that while not outrageously different than the States, is just....different. Things we just wouldn’t say over here. Exhibit A. This sign on the subway. Someone is sick, and you are cordially asked to help the person off the train so that they can better be attended to. Isn’t that lovely?

        
     I’m not sure we post this sign in New York. Of course, the transit authority of New York City doesn't want sick people on it's trains, but would they enlist the public's help getting them onto the platform? “Wait, you’re asking me to touch a person? Will there be hand sanitizer?” We’d probably say instead......call for assistance, or just go with a poster for a Broadway play. I think the subtext is collectively, from the many postings we encountered throughout the country, the British as whole still seem to trust each other. We saw signs that had what I would call, wiggle room, where you are told "go ahead, but please use your good judgement and moderation." That was a refreshing change.
   
I don’t think as individuals we have a similar peaceful coexistence with authority on this side of the Atlantic, or with each other. Here the thought goes, “we might get sued, so let’s remove all middle ground. Post a Stay Out sign. No, better yet, let’s go with a fence, and hang the sign on that.”

    Maybe it’s because the UK is really one big world heritage site, and they have no choice but to trust it’s citizens and visitors. The many cathedrals, castles and palaces have to be kept up, and to do it they need revenue, and to create revenue they need to grant access. This hit home on a visit to Alnwick Castle on the border near Scotland. As we made our way through the stately Italianate rooms full of historic art pieces and objects we began to perceive the personal items and family photos of the Duke of Northumbrian and his family. At some point it dawned on me that we were in a person’s home. There were cameras of course, and a few very officious attendants in the various state rooms. But still, we’re the public. We had our shoes on, and there’s a lot of us. I appreciated the open access we enjoyed to a staff person in one of the castles we visited; valuable objects and paintings surrounded us in the apartment within easy reach, but she was happy to say they had never had a problem, and inferred a greater concern over the threat of humidity or fire.

Anwick Castle and it's Lovely grounds. It dawned on me during our visit that no one in the U.K. has the least notion of what weeds are. Save your comments my British friends, you don't, that's why you invented vast expanses of perfect lawn and oh, I don't know... golf?

   
     It’s a definite balance. If you go to enough art museums you get trained to get a little antsy when someone noses in too close to a painting. It’s not tolerated in galleries I’ve visited in the States, as we found out in New York when my oldest daughter pointed at a detail in a painting (a horse no doubt). She was frightened by the gallerista, being unused to a stranger scolding her. We didn’t have any issues like that in Britain. The people we met were lovely, in fact the owner of the one B&B where we stayed at mentioned how well behaved our daughters were. I had just taken the last armload out to our car, and at that moment the two of them were in the back seat nose to nose screaming at each other.

Punting on the River Cam with my family and Tracey's niece Tess, her boy-friend Mat has the pole. "It's not so hard" Mat asserted, "the students at Cambridge do it blind drunk."

  
      My friend Paul Bevan Thomas warned me about the London crowds, and after one day I was already happy to escape to a quieter venue. Paul hails from the town of Chichester on the coast of Southern England near London, and he arranged to have his parents David and Mary pick me up at the train station after I had spent the day at Portsmouth harbor, visiting the British Naval Museum where Nelson’s flagship Victory is dry-docked. I have nothing insightful to say on the vessel beyond the obvious, that to say she is perfect. Every square inch of her to my eye, perfectly maintained. Okay two things: the chain pumps were really cool, made perfect sense, and the interpretive approach to the powder room was very well done. Here’s a sensitive spot, way down in the bottom of the ship below the water line, the gunner and his mates prepared the charges for the cannons. In the dark? No. With an open flame or a lantern? No, too dangerous obviously. There was a chamber situated in the powder room that reflected light through glass windows, but the chamber could not be accessed through the powder room, it had to be accessed from above using another space completely sealed off from the volatile gunpowder. That was cool, very simple and smart. I think I read that the powder rooms could also be flooded instantly if necessary.

The Admirals quarters with the table set for entertaining the officers. The table top would be fastened to the ceiling during battle, while the chairs, glassware and china would go safely down in the hold.

      
      Visiting the Victory was great, there was a route planned for the public that wound its way along the gun decks to the Admiral’s quarters, from the quarter deck down to the ship’s bilge compartments, with knowledgeable servicemen and volunteers throughout to answer questions. I found myself mixed in with a large gaggle of primary school students so the going was slow, but I didn’t mind. Out on deck there’s a brass marker in the deck on the very spot where Admiral Nelson took the fatal bullet from a French sharp shooter, and one of the kids must of jabbed it with his shoe because I heard them yell in unison “TEACHA....HE STEPPED ON NELSON”S GRAVE!” They were much quieter below in the darkness of the or-lop where the Admiral breathed his last. There a large original painting sits of the final death scene, painted by the artist Arthur Devis. He wasn’t there for the battle, but joined the ships company off of England and did sketches of the surviving crew and officers who would be depicted around the Admiral in his last moments.

A small corner of the gun deck. Mess crews ate from tables hanging between the guns, and hung their hammocks there as well. All of the dishware and trays were made of wood. The ropes you see along the ceiling raise and lower the guns' port lids.

   
     Henry the Eighth’s flagship Mary Rose can be seen at the museum as well, or what’s left of her salvaged from the mud of Portsmouth harbor after 500 years. Actually it was the mud that preserved the ship, at least the half that sank down into it. Tons of amazing artifacts were hauled up from around the wreck; cannons, weapons, personal items, cutlery, tools, human remains, and even a dog’s skeleton is on display, and all of it gives a sense of what life was like for the people on board at the Battle of the Solent. The interpretive presentation again is very good, especially the background on the battle itself. As I understand it, Henry wanted his marriage annulled, Pope said no, and then Henry as we all know decided “let’s form a church we can work with.” The Pope’s offense must have dovetailed nicely with French ambitions, because a French fleet sailed out and made landfall at Portsmouth, where they met the English fleet in the narrow harbor inside the Isle of Wight.

Here you see the vent socks that moving air into the space at an exact humidity. The wreck was a treasure trove of artifacts, including hundreds of the fabled English longbows, the actual first ever found anywhere.

     The Mary Rose fired a broadside, came about to unleash another as the wind heeled her over. The newfangled lower gun ports were mistakenly left open, and she took on water, sinking the ship between both fleets, in full view of Portsmouth Harbor and the horrified King and Queen. A large engraving contemporaneous with the event called the Cowdray Engraving is projected on a screen, and the Mary Rose’s top mast is visible during the rest of the battle poking up from the water, men cling to the topmasts. A woman was giving a short talk and answering questions so I couldn’t help but ask, “This big battle with two fleets and hundreds of ships...all this happened right here off the dock of the Naval Museum?” It was hard to imagine it, or make the connection. It seemed too finite a space to host a naval battle. “The English wanted the battle confined" our guide explained, she went on to say the English removed the channel markers so the French would run aground and be bottled up at the entrance, instead of having room to bring their greater numbers and fire power to bare. It definitely worked. The French finally gave up and headed home their invasion plans thwarted.

Guns excavated from beneath the wreck. Notice they are breech loaders, an early experiment with naval gunnery.

        
     I wondered at them bringing up the remains of the Mary Rose’s hull though. It is interesting, what's left of it. No doubt it will or has yielded many clues to naval architecture of the period, from an expert’s perspective no doubt. They have for thirty years worked on removing the seawater from the wood while replacing it with a water soluble glycol mixture sprayed on to keep the cellulose in the wood from collapsing, which will happen when you pull up timbers from the sea bed after 500 years. It’s now in the drying out phase, and when that’s over she is hoped to be perfectly preserved for good. The wreck has been in the channel all this time, for hundreds of years fishermen would snag their nets on it and say “Oh, that’s the Mary Rose.” It was only until the advent of scuba gear that people became concerned over the prospect of real plundering, so efforts were made to miss-mark it on the charts until a real salvage effort could be launched in the late 70’s and 80’s.

The Mary Rose.

   
     Paul’s dad David knows this area pretty well, as it’s the cruising and racing grounds of the Itchenor Sailing Club where he sailed his Solent Sunbeam Argosy. The club has hosted a small fleet of these lovely wooden sailboats which were designed and built for club racing and cruising in the 1920’s by the marine designer Alfred Westmacott. David showed me a nice coffee table book,  The Brilliance of Sunbeams, A Celebration of the Classic Keel Boat, by Peter Nicholson. David’s Sunbeam V12, the Argosy, has it’s own chapter in the book, unfortunately it’s entitled Sunk, Found, Recovered. The chapter does not dwell too much on why she went over, except to say the conditions were appalling, with “35 knot winds and steep seas in which the Cowes Combined Clubs set the race on the Wednesday of Cowes Week 2000.”  When you set a race, you set a race. Anyway, after a dicey interlude in the water, David and his co-owner Paul Deeny were rescued, but then came the task of finding and trying to raise the boat. She sank with her sails fully set, so with the prevailing currents they estimated roughly where she was. They found her with the help of a trawler, who’s lines came up with the correct colored bottom paint, but I infer from the chapter that she wasn’t finished sailing around underwater. Finally they found her 28 meters deep, where divers were able to raise her with air bags. The laborious process of getting her up, drained, and ready for towing was no small affair, but finally they got Argosy back to Chichester where she could be raised on the ‘scrubbing trolley and pulled ashore.’ Of course her rigging and mast was a total loss, but other than scrapes and some inner work, she was restored with fair expediency. That’s a testament of the value these boats have to their owners and the locals there on the Solent who helped Mr. Bevan Thomas raise Argosy and set her to rights. I like that there was no cost/benefit analysis mentioned or calling the insurance company. The first call was get to a recovery effort rolling. That wasn’t just any boat out there, that was Solent Sunbeam number 12.

A rough watercolor sketch of the Solent Sunbeam Argosy.

  
      I had a great time with Mary and David, and my thanks goes out to them for a lovely dinner featuring a fish pie and homemade ice cream. The next day Mary showed me around town, we toured the amazing Chichester Cathedral, and the Roman Palace which features some stunning examples of mosaics from the Roman occupation of Britain. This complex was only excavated starting in the 1960‘s, and much of it still remains underground. You can see places where the plows of farmers gouged through the tile work. This area of England was on of the first places claimed by the Romans and given the proximity to the Solent Estuary it’s strategic importance is obvious. An invading army did not want to leave their boats out in the channel for any length of time. So this is a place where an average homeowner can set out to plant a tree or dig a garden pond, only to come up with an ancient artifact.

I could go on, but yes, let’s drop anchor here.

Here’s to all the nice folks in Britain who made our visit wonderful, Salute!


Brian