The ghost of a scandal . . .
QUESTION
In the TV drama about Christine Keeler, Stephen Ward recites: ‘I saw a man upon the stair, I looked again he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, I wish that he would go away.’ What does this mean?
The Trial Of Christine Keeler told the story of the Profumo Affair from the point of view of Keeler and Dr Stephen Ward.
In the summer of 1963, Ward was brought before the Old Bailey on charges of procuring women and living off immoral earnings.
his real ‘crime’ was in introducing the high life to the low. Many of his famous friends abandoned him and he took a fatal dose of barbiturates before the jury’s verdict was announced.
At the end of episode five, Ward recites the opening quatrain of Antigonish by William hughes Mearns: ‘Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there! He wasn’t there again today, Oh, how I wish he’d go away!’
The anguished Ward sees himself as the ‘ghost’ who people wish would go away.
Mearns, the author of instructional books on creative writing, composed the rhyme in 1899, inspired by a haunted house in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.
It is one of life’s ironies of life that, despite his achievements, it is through this little earworm that his memory lives on. Mears was astute enough to realise this and loved to parody his own poem: ‘As I was falling down the stair I met a bump that wasn’t there; It might have put me on the shelf Except I wasn’t there myself.’
Kathy Brookshaw, Lancaster.
QUESTION
Who designated the Stone, Bronze and Iron ages?
DIVIDING human prehistory into eras based on technological advances in weaponry and tools was of prime importance in establishing archaeology as a science. The system was devised by Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, a Danish antiquarian who became the first curator of the Royal Museum of Nordic Antiquities (now the National Museum of Denmark) in Copenhagen in 1816.
By 1820, Thomsen had ordered the vast collection of artefacts into a visual narrative of prehistory according to whether they were made of stone, bronze or iron. In 1837, his essay Brief Outlook On Monuments And Antiquities From The Nordic Past described his three-age system. It is considered to be the basic chronology that underpins the archaeology of most of the Old World.
Thomsen wasn’t the first to suggest a form of classification. In the 7th century BC, the Greek poet hesiod suggested four stages of human history: Age of the Gods (Golden Age), Age of the Demi- Gods (Silver Age), Age of the hero (Bronze Age) and Age of Man (Iron Age).
his system was one of decline while Thomsen saw humans progressing through technological development.
In 1593, Michele Mercati, the curator of the Vatican Botanical Gardens, argued that stone axes had to be tools made by ancient europeans unacquainted with bronze or iron, which may have been the foundation for Thomsen’s system.
A. E. Howell, Glastonbury, Somerset.