I had occasion to visit St Thomas Hospital, across the Thames from Westminster, this week. As one of the main central London hospitals, and presumably the one to which they would rush most injured politicians in the event of a missile strike during prime minister's question time, it is now a vast warren of different sections and departments addressing different medical conditions and built at different times over the last 130 years.
With its 1970's facade it doesn't appear a historical site, however, in fact there has been a Thomas's hospital in the area for some eight hundred years, early accounts from 1215 AD name the hospital, then located in Southwark, after Thomas Beckett, the accounts refer to it then as “ancient”, although it was probably founded in 1173, when Beckett was canonised, However, it may have dated back to as early as 1106 when the St Mary Overie Priory was established.
Over the centuries the hospital went through many changes, the St Thomas Hospital Training school was established in 1550 when Guys Hospital was built at nearby London Bridge.
Hence it is an institution with a considerable amount of English history behind it.
The new St Thomas's hospital opened in 1860
The modern hospital in its current location at Lambeth, by the river and within sight of the Houses of Parliament, was built in the 1860's in an area historically known as Stangate. It has of course expanded considerably since that time. However, my own visits took me to one of the earliest parts of the hospital, the South Wing, around which other extensions have since been built.
At the centre of that wing is the mid-Victorian “Great hall” at the end of which are various statues of medical luminaries such as Florence Nightingale and eminent surgeons of the day.
In the corridors around the Great Hall are what I assume were once children's wards, but which now house specialist sections such as sleep disorders and allergy treatment rooms. What struck me was that along the passageways between the sections the walls are decorated with beautifully painted murals depicting scenes from English and European fairy tales. Pictures placed there to delight and comfort generations of English children with images of Jack the Giant Killer, The Babes in the Wood and The Princess and the Pea (above - so sensitive was the princesses fair skin she could feel the hard pea despite all the mattresses - not very PC that is it?) painted as if in water-colour, as they would have been in the books which our grandparents, and indeed maybe our parents once read.
Of course, it would not be permissible now to decorate the walls of a public building with such images, for they are far too European, the children and fairies in them are too rosy cheeked, their lips too red and, most damningly their skin is too white.
The culture they evoke, the ancient culture they call back to, is our culture, European, Anglo-Saxon culture, history, myth and legend, beautiful, ethereal timeless and by the hour, by the day, slipping further from us.
When such projects are undertaken today the inclusion of diversity and multiculturalism would be mandatory. No matter that the structure is in England, nothing must be permitted to reflect the ancient native English culture unfettered by the alien and imported ones. Were anything resembling those walls to unveiled today, not only would the shrieks of “EWWW migh God, it's soowe disgustingly WHITE!!” be heard from Belsize Park to Dulwich, but the authorities would probably become involved, and someone would be prosecuted.
Of course it would never get to that point, the guardians of the new flame would take charge at planning stage.
A committee would be formed to ensure diversity and ethnic representation and veto any fairy tales which did not comply the current regulation of free expression. Little Red Riding hood would be unlikely to get passed the censors, she would be found guilty of stereotyping those famously gentle and vegetarian creatures, wolves, whilst Jack the Giant Killer would be banned for certain on account of heightism. Babes in the Wood might just be okay, although the malevolence of the white villains, the nasty uncle and his underlings, might be exaggerated while the babes themselves would probably end up mixed race.
Jack and Jill would probably be one of the few Nursery Rhymes to make it through on account of the fact that it is the clumsy white male who falls and breaks his crown, whilst Jill's “tumbling” would become clever athletics which enable the smart (now Muslim feminist) Jill to avoid the same fate as her inferior male counterpart. (And you don't want to know how they would almost certainly adapt Goldlocks and the Three bears)
In place of those rejected politically incorrect European fairy tales would depictions of scenes from tales allegedly passed down by word of mouth through generations of Asian tribes, or found written in Aramaic script on crumbling parchment in Timbuktu, but, more likely actually made up in a studio flat in Cricklewood a few weeks earlier.
Instead of Jack and the Beanstalk we would see young Abdul Hasib and the his magic pomegranate dancing before a beaming and peace loving Mohamed. The Little Mermaid would be replaced by Tabita Malika the little African girl who saved her village from the evil white Boer people with the help of Naasir the sacred hippopotamus.
Or maybe they would insist on some contemporary fairy tales, and we would be confronted by little Sayyid and his designer suicide belt, the enchanting Isha with the burka that doubled as a time machine, and brave Julius who sang a special song to make all the naughty white people disappear.
You say I jest yet the sad fact is you know that panels such as those which decorate the walls of the old St Thomas's hospital South Wing would not be allowed in any publicly funded building built in Britain today, not because of fashion, not because of taste but because of politics. In a modern privately funded building such imagery would be mocked, derided and condemned. There would be an outcry amongst the Guardianista, a Channel 4 documentary would be made about racism in design and maybe even questions would be asked in Parliament ("I call upon my honourable friend, the minister for cultural reassignment, to share my outrage at the saddening and lamentable lack of new order approved diversity in the design of .......") It simply would not happen.
However, it would not be thus everywhere. Now let me take you on a journey, to a newly built children's hospital in Lagos, Entebbe or Nairobi, to a Gujarati orphanage, a maternity ward in Algiers or a Children's school in Rawalpindi. Let us imagine, these buildings have just been completed, maybe paid for out of the UK aid budget, and those running them decide that in order to make them attractive to children, the walls should be decorated with images depicting scenes from local legends and folk tales.
Now what do you imagine would happen if some committee came along and announced that they could not just feature images from local African or Asian culture, as that wasn't inclusive or multicultural enough. If they were going to depict images from local children's stories, they would have to also include “The little Prince”, “Sleeping Beauty” and of course “Snow White”. Alternatively, the whole project would have to be abandoned and the walls adorned with Telly Tubbies or strange one eyes blobs like our Olympic mascots which wouldn't offend white Europeans.
You know exactly what would happen, there would be an outcry, it would be called “racism”, “imperialism”, “Colonialism” and an outrageous attack on the local culture.
Of course, there would be no such committee, and no such suggestion, the locals would happily go ahead and paint their walls with images from their culture, their history and their fairy tales, as indeed they should. Then white people, including those who would be so mortally offended had Hans Christian Andersen adorned modern hospitals back home would have cooed in delight at the local culture.
It is only our history, our culture and our fairy tales which must be cast away forgotten and abandoned, it is only we who must welcome multiculturalism and the replacement of all that we are. The fable covered walls in the older parts of St Thomas's hospital remind us of a time when we were different when we valued who we were and remembered where we came from.
They carry echoes from another time, almost from another world, the sound grows fainter, but can still be heard if we choose to listen, and we must listen to those echoes before they, like so much else we once treasured and have now lost, fall silent.
With its 1970's facade it doesn't appear a historical site, however, in fact there has been a Thomas's hospital in the area for some eight hundred years, early accounts from 1215 AD name the hospital, then located in Southwark, after Thomas Beckett, the accounts refer to it then as “ancient”, although it was probably founded in 1173, when Beckett was canonised, However, it may have dated back to as early as 1106 when the St Mary Overie Priory was established.
Over the centuries the hospital went through many changes, the St Thomas Hospital Training school was established in 1550 when Guys Hospital was built at nearby London Bridge.
Hence it is an institution with a considerable amount of English history behind it.
The new St Thomas's hospital opened in 1860The modern hospital in its current location at Lambeth, by the river and within sight of the Houses of Parliament, was built in the 1860's in an area historically known as Stangate. It has of course expanded considerably since that time. However, my own visits took me to one of the earliest parts of the hospital, the South Wing, around which other extensions have since been built.
At the centre of that wing is the mid-Victorian “Great hall” at the end of which are various statues of medical luminaries such as Florence Nightingale and eminent surgeons of the day.
In the corridors around the Great Hall are what I assume were once children's wards, but which now house specialist sections such as sleep disorders and allergy treatment rooms. What struck me was that along the passageways between the sections the walls are decorated with beautifully painted murals depicting scenes from English and European fairy tales. Pictures placed there to delight and comfort generations of English children with images of Jack the Giant Killer, The Babes in the Wood and The Princess and the Pea (above - so sensitive was the princesses fair skin she could feel the hard pea despite all the mattresses - not very PC that is it?) painted as if in water-colour, as they would have been in the books which our grandparents, and indeed maybe our parents once read.Of course, it would not be permissible now to decorate the walls of a public building with such images, for they are far too European, the children and fairies in them are too rosy cheeked, their lips too red and, most damningly their skin is too white.
The culture they evoke, the ancient culture they call back to, is our culture, European, Anglo-Saxon culture, history, myth and legend, beautiful, ethereal timeless and by the hour, by the day, slipping further from us.
When such projects are undertaken today the inclusion of diversity and multiculturalism would be mandatory. No matter that the structure is in England, nothing must be permitted to reflect the ancient native English culture unfettered by the alien and imported ones. Were anything resembling those walls to unveiled today, not only would the shrieks of “EWWW migh God, it's soowe disgustingly WHITE!!” be heard from Belsize Park to Dulwich, but the authorities would probably become involved, and someone would be prosecuted.
Of course it would never get to that point, the guardians of the new flame would take charge at planning stage.
A committee would be formed to ensure diversity and ethnic representation and veto any fairy tales which did not comply the current regulation of free expression. Little Red Riding hood would be unlikely to get passed the censors, she would be found guilty of stereotyping those famously gentle and vegetarian creatures, wolves, whilst Jack the Giant Killer would be banned for certain on account of heightism. Babes in the Wood might just be okay, although the malevolence of the white villains, the nasty uncle and his underlings, might be exaggerated while the babes themselves would probably end up mixed race.
Jack and Jill would probably be one of the few Nursery Rhymes to make it through on account of the fact that it is the clumsy white male who falls and breaks his crown, whilst Jill's “tumbling” would become clever athletics which enable the smart (now Muslim feminist) Jill to avoid the same fate as her inferior male counterpart. (And you don't want to know how they would almost certainly adapt Goldlocks and the Three bears)
In place of those rejected politically incorrect European fairy tales would depictions of scenes from tales allegedly passed down by word of mouth through generations of Asian tribes, or found written in Aramaic script on crumbling parchment in Timbuktu, but, more likely actually made up in a studio flat in Cricklewood a few weeks earlier.
Instead of Jack and the Beanstalk we would see young Abdul Hasib and the his magic pomegranate dancing before a beaming and peace loving Mohamed. The Little Mermaid would be replaced by Tabita Malika the little African girl who saved her village from the evil white Boer people with the help of Naasir the sacred hippopotamus.
Or maybe they would insist on some contemporary fairy tales, and we would be confronted by little Sayyid and his designer suicide belt, the enchanting Isha with the burka that doubled as a time machine, and brave Julius who sang a special song to make all the naughty white people disappear.
You say I jest yet the sad fact is you know that panels such as those which decorate the walls of the old St Thomas's hospital South Wing would not be allowed in any publicly funded building built in Britain today, not because of fashion, not because of taste but because of politics. In a modern privately funded building such imagery would be mocked, derided and condemned. There would be an outcry amongst the Guardianista, a Channel 4 documentary would be made about racism in design and maybe even questions would be asked in Parliament ("I call upon my honourable friend, the minister for cultural reassignment, to share my outrage at the saddening and lamentable lack of new order approved diversity in the design of .......") It simply would not happen.
However, it would not be thus everywhere. Now let me take you on a journey, to a newly built children's hospital in Lagos, Entebbe or Nairobi, to a Gujarati orphanage, a maternity ward in Algiers or a Children's school in Rawalpindi. Let us imagine, these buildings have just been completed, maybe paid for out of the UK aid budget, and those running them decide that in order to make them attractive to children, the walls should be decorated with images depicting scenes from local legends and folk tales.
Now what do you imagine would happen if some committee came along and announced that they could not just feature images from local African or Asian culture, as that wasn't inclusive or multicultural enough. If they were going to depict images from local children's stories, they would have to also include “The little Prince”, “Sleeping Beauty” and of course “Snow White”. Alternatively, the whole project would have to be abandoned and the walls adorned with Telly Tubbies or strange one eyes blobs like our Olympic mascots which wouldn't offend white Europeans.
You know exactly what would happen, there would be an outcry, it would be called “racism”, “imperialism”, “Colonialism” and an outrageous attack on the local culture.
Of course, there would be no such committee, and no such suggestion, the locals would happily go ahead and paint their walls with images from their culture, their history and their fairy tales, as indeed they should. Then white people, including those who would be so mortally offended had Hans Christian Andersen adorned modern hospitals back home would have cooed in delight at the local culture.
It is only our history, our culture and our fairy tales which must be cast away forgotten and abandoned, it is only we who must welcome multiculturalism and the replacement of all that we are. The fable covered walls in the older parts of St Thomas's hospital remind us of a time when we were different when we valued who we were and remembered where we came from.
They carry echoes from another time, almost from another world, the sound grows fainter, but can still be heard if we choose to listen, and we must listen to those echoes before they, like so much else we once treasured and have now lost, fall silent.
10 comments:
What of the future Sarah? Are there no nationalist artists willing to produce works which delight rather than seek to shock and conform to the 'diversity' (sic) principle? We must encourage our people to retain their identity through continuing a distinctive tradition of arts, crafts and illustration that does not conform to contemporary political diktat. The so-called 'Brit Art' movement of the past twenty years or so has been nothing more than an exercise in ugly money-obsessed vacuity: so-called conceptual art which says nothing more than that our society no longer values beauty and is instead obsessed with an adolescent conception of ‘rebellion’. This ‘rebellion’ is actually a soulless and mechanical conformity to a tired internationalist template established by Marcel Duchamp when he exhibited a urinal in 1917.
Damian Hirst, Tracy Emin and the Chapman brothers specialise in the production of one thing: headlines. Headlines that are as dull and predictable as the ‘art’ that they (or in the case of Hirst, workers in his art factory) produce. These are then used to generate money. It’s all part of the pointless and very uninteresting celebrity culture that has been foisted upon the masses and is now willingly embraced even by people who are ostensibly educated. 1984’s ‘prolefeed’ is now with us and functioning just as it did in the novel.
The contentless nature of ‘Brit Art’ is paralleled by the ersatz and contentless conceptions of ‘Britain’ and ‘Britishness’ approved by New Labour and the New Tories.
Why not run a competition for real young British artists? The BNP should call for submissions. It could generate a real buzz. Naturally, the media would find the idea of such a contest abhorrent, but it might make our compatriots sit up and think about the state-endorsed and enforced multiculturalist imagery that is as formulaic as Stalin’s socialist realism. Our nationalist politics needs to operate within a wider nationalist movement. Such art does not have to be strident, or indeed overtly ‘nationalistic’ in tone, for all it needs to do is ignore the strictures of ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’.
Having been involved in the production of publicity material within the public sector, I have been angered at the literal ethnic cleansing of imagery that is deemed not to be sufficiently ‘diverse’. When I have wanted English people to be represented, I have been overruled. The widely noted black man/white woman pairing is very much favoured. I’ll have to stop here, as my blood pressure will go through the roof as there’s nothing I can do about it.
Beautiful, Sarah, just beautiful.
It almost makes me wonder if these need to be taken down and hidden to protect them lest some iconoclast destroy them. That would be a shame because those who come by, as you did, would not then see them. But the idea that some modernist with a Taliban mind would decide that they must be destroyed once and forever is pretty horrifying.
Our younger lad is an artist. He graduates from Wimbledon College of the Arts this year and, DV, he will start his Master's at the Royal Academy in September this year.
When we next speak to him, I could suggest that he visits the hospital if he gets a chance to view the art work and see what he thinks.
In the meantime, I dare the most rabid, psychotic MSM leftie in existence to declare this particular individual as "hideously white".
Who or what has been the driving force behind this denigration and destruction of all that we once treasured? These things didn't just happen, aren't just happening; they are being made to happen with malevolent intent. Part of the process of our physical destruction. If we don't know who we are or where and what we have come from then why resist the force which seeks our destruction? An honest search can discover the source of woe if we want. But, would we do anything if we did identify the monsters behind the veil?
Durotrigan, I hope you like this on contemporary art.
http://conservativedemocraticalliance.blogspot.com/2008/07/maggots-feeding-on-body-of-art-david.html
Thanks for the link Mr Fox. A most stimulating article. Mike Smith rightly also highlighted a notable vein of cruelty and misery which runs through all contemporary elite-sponsored art. I am sure that there must be many talented artists and designers in the country who never gain the recognition that they deserve because they refuse to go along with this childish obsession with appearing to be 'outrageous' and 'transgressive'.
Admittedly, I had to chuckle when Smith suggested a variant on one of Emins's vile pieces of work in which a zebra is copulating with a woman in a Victorian dress; he knowingly observed that the supposed 'rebel' Emins would never create the same piece of work with the zebra copulating with a figure representing Cherie Blair or Diane Abbott.
Sarah, may I suggest you carry a small but good camera? I carry two: One small for furtive stuff like riots and lefty demos where its best not to be spotted and a larger one for quieter shots. At least those pictures you saw could be remembered that way.
Durotrigan and Alan here are a couple more of interest on contemporary artand the antidote.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/52492/sec_id/52492
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/54253/sec_id/54253
Thank you, Mr Fox
The articles confirm what contemporary researcher Brian Gerrish has said about the degradation of art as part of Common Purpose, aimed at dismantling British identity.
This is one of my favourite paintings, btw, The Defence of Rorke's Drift.
Although not actually sung during the siege of Rorke's Drift, the uplifting rendition of Men of Harlech by men of the Royal Regiment of Wales is commensurate with the grand theme of the painting.
This is where it occurs in the film.
I agree that it is important for there to be a healthy supply of high quality new nationalist art for propaganda purposes. Maybe this could be achieved by some sort of art competition or prize?
I would particularly like to see art created for the purpose of making liberals feel guilty for their support of race replacement. For example:
- Art that romantisises the white working class ( paintings of Lindsey oil refinery strikers, paintings of men in high viz jackets etc)
- Art that highlights all that is wrong with mass immigration, (paintings of 7/7, grim paintings of knife crimes in grubby take away joints, gun crimes, paintings of that mass gang stabbing outside a London train station recently etc)
- Art that demonises or pokes fun at the sneering Guardian reading London media class, politicians etc and would make the liberals feel ashamed to be part of that class of people when they look at such a painting.
- Art that makes the white liberals feel guilty for abandoning the white working class. (eg, a painting of a white liberal woman kneeling over and cooing over a newly adopted black baby. Meanwhile she has her back turned on her own white children who are toddlers and are crying out for their mother, with anguish on their faces. But the white mother isn't listening, she can't hear their cries, she has abandoned them for her exotic new plaything. One of the white abandoned toddlers crawls off to the far right of the painting where a man who looks vaguely like Nick Griffin is ready to give the abandoned white toddler a warm embrace)
- Art that serves as a warning to the middle class liberals who hate the WWC. The warning in the painting would convey the message: You won't lose your skin colour, but you could lose your money and become one of the white working class that you so despise. So you'd better be nice to the white working class, because it could be you in the future - and if it was you, you wouldn't want some sneering Guardian reading white liberal snob calling you "white trash chav scum".
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