It all started with a plate....Cameron and Blair shared a teacher

Not all surprises about who has known who have come about through work projects. This one, a combination of unusual questions, curiosity and an above usual awareness of current political events came up with a connection that I suppose I have suspected had to exist for several years now.

A cousin was talking about an antique plate that he had seen and he wanted to know more about it. Made in 1810, he thought. It had a Royal stamp on it, but he couldn't remember much more about it than that. The first thing was to establish which Royal it might have been. Given the complexity of that period it meant a quick stop at the academically conflicted but speedy and instructive Wikipedia to check out if George III was well or ill at the time (to establish if Regency would have been an issue). This was followed by our making a random comment about when William IV was on the throne and subsequently looking him up as well. Wikipedia's gossipy side came to the fore and up cropped David Cameron as a descendant from one of William's children from the wrong side of the blanket, who had made 'an advantageous marriage'.

Next stage in the saga of the plate was to sound my mother out about the Royal pottery. She had been a potter for years and is still very interested in the subject. She came up with several very sane suggestions, one of which involved visiting a slow website.  While the site loaded in a chugging fashion, I nattered randomly and mentioned about the Cameron connection to William IV. "Oh", she said, as she also waited for more relevant words, "where did he go to school?". "Eton". "How old is he? Would he have been there under McCrum?".  Still chugging.... "Not sure, I'll check in a minute". "If he did he would have been there with a very great man".  Michael McCrum was a tutor of my grandfather's and a contemporary of my uncle's at Cambridge and had been sent to Eton as headmaster to sort out some problems with discipline.

By the time Cameron and co were at Eton, McCrum had returned to Cambridge. The headmaster that followed him was Eric Anderson. His previous post had been as housemaster at Fettes College, in Edinburgh. While at Fettes, he had been responsible for one Anthony Charles Lynton Blair! Further look-ups showed him to be a highly influential man, a past teacher of Prince Charles and a very good friend of the Queen Mother's.

Other political protegees include Boris Johnston and Rory Stewart.

The plate is as yet unidentified, some of the markings were not consistent with what they should have been, or not as described over the phone at least. It was a random conversation and not in-depth research, but in the light of all that is going on with the Leveson Inquiry at the moment, it is pretty intriguing that there is such a strong link between both Blair and Cameron through an influential man. Of course the problem for the inquiry is as much "Who Knew What" as it is with "Who Knew Who", but both are important in our current world. There is widespread interest in the whole concept of Who Knew Who, in terms of journalists, police and politicians and the flow of influence. The Inquiry has been fascinating and addictive.

Why Who Knew Who?

In this blog I am aiming to look at the relationships that have contributed unwittingly to the flow of knowledge and the flow of ideas throughout history. In the main, posts will be related to science, nature and literature, but not always restricted to that list. The first real post will relate to politics and there will certainly be others that veer into that cauldron of emotional response. My own politics are very simply pragmatic, so will be too hard to pin down for it to be worth trying.  I hope :)

As a landscape architect I have had the enormous privelege of working on enormously diverse projects. Often these have involved a good level of research into issues related to the project as an integral part of the work, but occasionally as background to it, to highlight issues that may have cropped up or to satisfy private curiousity over a random detail. Through this huge diversity, titbits have come to light and a running thread throughout almost all of it has been about who has actually known who, in terms of generational jumps or unexpected friendships. For example, it was a bit of a surprise to hear Laurens van der Post, travel writer of extraordinary compass, described as a member of the Bloomsbury Group on a radio program.  Just as an aside! Indeed, it turns out that he was a regular visitor of their myriad parties and walks when he was a young man.

In the early 1990s this interest was developed further during work on the A3 at Hindhead. As part of the study into some perplexingly horrible road alignments it was important to establish the cultural associations in Hindhead itself and in the surrounding villages. Since this work, a fascinating book has been published locally called The Hilltop Writers by WR Trotter, but in those days it was local libraries, museums and diaries that provided the source material. It is a very rich seam. I will do a 'thing' on it in more detail later, but the presence of Lord Tennyson in Haslemere, Arthur Conan Doyle and George Bernard Shaw at Hindhead, Helen and George Allingham at Witley and Flora Thompson in the post office in Grayshott all within a 20 year period, walking almost every day to call on their friends and acquaintances across the heath on each side was an extraordinary collection of talented and creative people.

Thankfully some of the more disturbing ideas never came to anything and Hindhead has now been bypassed through a tunnel, saving a cultural, historic and scenic landscape from utter destruction. It is going to be interesting to see how the heath develops on the previous line of the A3...

Ideas rarely start from a static beginning. As members of the public in receipt of these ideas it can often appear to be so, but for almost all of the great discoveries it is useful to contemplate Newton's view of the matter:
“I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me”. 

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.

Isaac Newton