Feb 2001:

This is a retrospective on Birmingham and Britain that I wrote after I 
came home to Sydney at the end of Jan 2001.  It is perhaps a bit more
reflective than the other reports as I have had time to mull over my
experiences there.

Birmingham and Manchester were the homes of the Industrial Revolution.
It was a pity that when I had to painfully study all that history in
high school, memorising what was then meaningless facts like "James Watt
designed his steam locomotive in Wolverhamton", I did not have the
opportunity to visit the Midlands to see these places for myself.  Ah,
how deliciously ironical is Fate!  I ended up doing a sabbatical right
in Birmingham, destined finally to have these once meaningless facts
come alive for me.  Birmingham was once the powerhouse of the British
Empire, with Manchester, Lancashire, Liverpool, Glasgow, Clyde and
London following close.  From these cities went the best engines, the
finest machine tools, the most efficiently produced textiles, the
highest quality glass.  The best science and technology were here.  A
bus tour of Birmingham still reveals its past glory.  All was wonderful
in the Empire of Queen Victoria.  When did the decline set in?  Here is
a guess.  In the 1st World War, Britain lost a whole generation of its
most gifted men.  Typical examples were the poet Brook and the physicist
Moseley.  This loss was not felt for a while, as her lead was maintained
by inertia, but in the course of time the lack of vision, innovation and
business acumen entailed by second-raters at the helm took its toll.  By
the time the Nazis threatenned Britain, the game was almost over.
Britain was saved by two things -- pluck and luck.  Pluck was exploited
cleverly by Chruchill to convince his people that somehow they will
prevail, and to the good fortune of the world's democracies, they
believed him.  We owe the British people this debt -- in their
darkest hour when they stood alone against the evil of Nazism, they
never thought of surrender.  Luck was when Hitler decided to stop
bombing British airfields (the RAF was almost finished) and start
bombing cities instead -- London, Coventry, etc.  This gave the RAF the
respite it needed, then Pluck took over and eventually the RAF won the
Battle of Britain.  This battle is, in my estimation almost as momentous
as Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis.  It, like them, saved Western
civilization from barbarism.   
 
Today, Birmingham is in the midst of re-invention.  It has a new
symphony hall, built when Sir Simon Rattle was still the conductor of
the CBSO -- he has since left to succeed von Karajan as conductor of the
Berlin Phil.  Yokelin and I attended a number of performances there,
including a wonderful all-Beethoven evening.  More about this later.  In
the plaza by the symphony hall is a magnificent sculpture, large,
imposing and modernistic.  It is a procession of people, more than 20 I
think, representing how Birmingham sees itself evolving from its
glorious past into the challenging future.  When I first saw it, I was
somewhat taken aback, for it looked like "socialist realism" art, the
kind of neo-Leninist statement one expects in, say, St Petersberg or
Beijing.  But this one is strange, for it grows on you.  I gradually
learned to love it, and now I kinda miss it.  The center of Birmingham
is being completely ripped apart to change it into a truly European city
complete with sidewalk cafes, cultural arcades, piazzas, etc.  I intend
to visit it again in 2 years' time to see this renaissance for myself.
"There are more miles of canals in Birmingham than in Venice", you will
be told by a canal boat guide.  It's true.  In fact one can tour most of
England by canal!  Check that out -- it's one of those little known
facts that can win you bets :-).  What the guide omits is that the canals
in Birmingham, when they leave the very pretty newly yuppified center
of town, pass through abandonned factory/warehouse lots and other relics of a
once thriving industrial heartland. 

The University of Birmingham is not very old.  It dates from 1900.  The
buildings are of red brick, hence the term "Redbrick" to describe the
next tier of universities after Oxford, Cambridge and London.  The two
original "Redbricks" were Manchester and Birmingham, still probably the
best engineering universities in Britain (one may safely say, the equal
of Imperial College).  The microwave oven was invented in the U of B.
One of its professors of physics was Poynting, a hero of mine when I was
besotted with physics.  Sir Mark Oliphant who went on to set up the
Australian National University was also a professor in the U of B.
Today, its international fame in the areas close to mine are in Group
Theory, Type Theory, Mathematical Logic, Artificial Intelligence.  The
campus is pretty, surrounded by a lot of greenery. 

Our stay in Britain was very pleasant.  The weather was not great; I
hated the dampness and missed the bright Australian sky.  But I made
many new friends and caught up with old ones.  Friendships make up for a
lot.  On our arrival in Birmingham, my old high school buddy Young (Tay)
insisted we stay with him until we found suitable digs.  He has been in
Birmingham for years, having completed his PhD in Bristol long ago, and
is now very active in the Liberal Democrats.  He helps vet candidates
for MP.  Young has a lot to answer for.  He introduced me to classical
music when we were 14.  He was already a dedicated pianist, and had an
extensive collection of Wagner, Beethoven, Chopin and Mozart.  To cut a
long story short, it is due to him that I now cannot live without
listening to Beethoven or Shostakovich at least a few times each week.
Funny thing, I have two high school buddies who live in England, both of
whom have highly refined tastes in music compared to mine.  One is Young
and the other is (Ho) Kah Poong in London.  They love opera, and Wagner
in particular, and they have tried their best to persuade me to give the
Vespers a chance.  No such luck!  I met up with Kah Poong and two other
high school classmates in London.  These two I had not seen since we
left school 40 years ago.  They are Mike Loo and Yin Wong.  Now, it must
be a measure of how strongly we bonded in school that on the day we met,
we just took off as if it was the week after we left school -- the same
juvenile crassness, the mutual teasing as when we were 18.  Our partners
who were with us could not but look on with some astonishment.  On
another occasion, Yokelin and I went to London to visit Jim Croll and
his partner Patricia.  Jim was my room-mate in Canterbury, and one of my
confidants.  He is now professor and head of Structural Engineering in
University College.  He agrees with my observation that if you head an
organization, you will find that the people under you separate into
several groups, one of which are the Whingers (Americans: you call them
Whiners).  These Whingers are never happy.  Fix their complaints, and
they will find something else to complain about.  The Whingers are
usually about 20% of the people.  How do you deal with them?  A German
professor friend of mine has the perfect solution.  He forms committees
comprising only Whingers, and gives them complicated but meaningless
goals to work on.  If they report out before his headship is over, he
gets another committee of Whingers to study the report.  Jim loved this
solution, and hopes to implement it, and I eagerly await the result.
I need not tell you that Jim and I also mercilessly tease each other
like teenagers.

In my report on Greece I said I will tell you where to go and see Greek
archaeological collections.  Yes, Greece of course, but some of the very
best are NOT in Greece but in the British Museum in London!  If you can
spare a whole day when you visit London, go and see the Greek, Roman,
Egyptian and Assyrian collections there.  (To see the whole musuem,
you will need 3 days! There are also extensive collections of Greek
stuff in Paris and Berlin.)  Lord Elgin took away many of the friezes
from the Parthenon ("temple of the virgin") at the Acropolis and brought
them to England.  They now sit in the British Musuem, and are called the
"Elgin Marbles".  The Greek government wants them back.  

One of the most precious exhibits is the Rosetta Stone.  I stood by
it, examining the texts, imagining the circumstances of its creation,
re-living its later history, losing myself in reverie for a long time.
I first learned about it when I was 10 or 11 and going through an
"Egypt" phase (unlike most kids I did not go through a "dinosaur" phase)
and read everything I could lay my hands on about Egypt.  And finally,
here it was, before my very eyes!!  The classical Greek on it is very
legible.  I cannot understand much of it (yet!) but I could make out the
name Ptolomeus, the king who issued the decree on the Stone.  You can
buy a replica in the musuem shop -- I did not because it is quite heavy.
In another room is a stone also inscribed in classical Greek
commemorating a visit by Alexander the Great -- the characters for 
"Vassilius Alexandros" are clearly visible.  If you have Greek or
Russian friends named Vassily, or British friends named Basil, they are
"Kings" from the ancient Greek!  The Ptolemeic dynasty of Egypt was
actually Greek, descended from Alexander the Great's general Ptolemy.
They ruled from the city of Alexandria, wherein was the most magnificent
library in the ancient world.  This was the Hellenic civilization that
eventually became effete under Cleopatra (a Greek princess in fact), but
not before some of the greatest advances in science and mathematics were
given to the world.  It was here that the first amazingly accurate
empirical estimate of the earth's diameter was made (they KNEW it was
round!).  The destruction of Greek science was largely due to the advent
of Christianity, I am sorry to reveal.  The antipathy between
Christianity (for that matter, we can include most religions here) and
science is not yet over.  

In the year 2003, Birmingham will become a majority non-Anglo city.  The
majority will be colored -- West Indians and East Indians, the latter
being Pakistanis, Indians and Punjabis.  I have a happy observation.
The inter-racial mixing in the Midlands is very thorough, relaxed and
unself-conscious.  As we caught buses everywhere, we often encountered
groups of black, Indian and white girls going out together to a night
in town, laughing, teasing, and complaining just like all teenagers
do.  Inter-racial couples were common.  One night when we were waiting
for our bus, this white Adonis had his black Diana on his lap at the bus
shelter, and were pashing away much to our conservative embarrassment.
You do not see this kind of irrelevance of race in the United States, at
least not between blacks and whites.  OK, you will read of the
occasional bigot in Britain, but the good news is that the plucky nation
is well on the way to showing the world how to attenuate prejudice by
educating and socialising it away.
 
You must have read about the sorry state of British Rail.  I'll be brief
about what is now perceived to be the problem.  It is PRIVITISATION of a
NATURAL MONOPOLY.  Many things are natural monopolies for good reason.
Sometimes it is physically impossible for customers to have a choice,
like I cannot choose from whom I want to buy my tap water.  Other times,
the service is so unprofitable that no one is willing to supply it, like
railway stations in remote areas that are sparsely populated.  The
following are, at the current state of technology, natural monopolies:
railway systems, water supply, basic research, social welfare.
Telecommunications used to be, but with advances in technology it is no
longer so.  Even with one cable or copper wire leading to your house,
you can choose to have different services provided by different
companies.  But it is not economic to have several train companies
time-share the same rail tracks.  However, if you are a purist for
private ownership, believing as a matter of (almost religious) faith
that anything that is publicly owned is inefficient and wicked, then you
will of course privatise the railway system.  How?  You cannot
time-share the tracks, so instead you PARTITION them, sell one sector
off to one company, and another off to a different company, etc.  Bingo!
You now have, say, 12 PRIVATE MONOPOLIES!  The rationale for private
ownership, according to Adam Smith, is that competition is good.  But
when you have monopolies, there is no competition -- it doesn't matter
if they are private or public!  Guess how many new monopolies Mrs
Thatcher created when she sold off Brit Rail?  25!  I kid you not --
twenty five!  Guess what happens next?  If a task needs doing, but one
company can try to fob it off to the next, it will not be done.  Because
cost-cutting is now paramount, as shareholders expect dividends!  Bit by
bit, the system deteriorates, safety falls victim to profit.  You know
the end of this story.  Very sad.

But what can one expect from ideologs like Mrs Thatcher?  She is a
passionate supporter of that Butcher of Chile, General Pinochet.  This
guy invented a new way to terrify university students in Chile who
opposed his Facism.  He got his gestapo to dump them into the Pacific
Ocean from helicopters.