Beastly Belloc

          This book lurks in one of the young Tin's rooms - a testament to the staying power of nonsense and eccentric drawings that even though he's well into teenage years and the book is around 130 years old it's still much loved and even occasionally read. In fact I quite like to dip in when the mood strikes too. Apart from the wonderful contents the copy that I have is very old, bound in cardboard and held together with yellowing sellotape, the pages almost brittle - it feels like a real book, a book that's been passed around, read by many and has some stories of its own wrapped up somewhere just beyond the printed paper.

          The drawings are also fabulous - BTB is Basil Temple Blackwood and although this post isn't about him you just have to look at the pictures to get some idea that he wasn't exactly conforming to the norm.

          If you've never read any Hilaire Belloc then I'd urge you to do so - certainly 'Cautionary Tales' was a bit of a standard when I was a kid but he did much else besides. I was pointed in his direction as an adult by none other than Attila The Stockbroker, who was certainly a massive fan and I'm very grateful for that. Belloc's books for children are wonderful and inhabit a strange knowingly innocent world; rather like Roald Dahl he never patronises or sugar-coats but see's what children see. His books for adults are, if possible, even weirder - I've not read too many but what sticks with me is his sheer partisanship, he never makes any bones about his own likes and dislikes, prejudices and fovouritisms - you don't have to agree with them but he makes you see them as curious, funny and even a little insane and you realise that these are vwhat make us who we are. For a French born writer, with a French father and an English mother, he has a strangely strong and specific patriotism - he's proud to be from Sussex and makes no bones about the fact that the men of Sussex, and West Sussex in particular, stand above the world and are superior in every way. I think it's in his book 'The Four Men' that he takes this to extremes (I could be wrong there because somewhere along the way these books disappeared from my shelves). Oddly however he represented France at sailing....

          He also represented Salford as an MP for the Liberal Party back in the days when that actually meant anything - I dread to think what he would make of its successors - probably suggest feeding them to zoo animals, slowly. He distrusted the whole party system anyway - with that I think he'd find many fellow travellers today.

          Finally, if you're in any doubt as to the man's influence - Syd Barrett was a big fan and 'Matilda Mother' on Piper at the Gates of Dawn was originally taken straight from the Belloc poem in Cautionary Tales...but was rewritten when Belloc's estate objected to the use of his words.

          Anyway I just wanted to share just some of the wildly wonderful and strange pages of this book - if you want to read the whole thing (which will take five minutes but last a lifetime) then you can see / download it here at Project Gutenberg - but its no substitute for finding a good crumbling real copy one day...

As a thank you to Attila here he is doing an Hilaire Belloc inspired cautionary tale - taking careful aim at Steven/Seething Wells ....

 

 

And just for completeness here's that alternative version of Matilda Mother