Economic and financial recovery is like the film Restoration (1995) from the book by Rose Tremain has drama just like our present recession. The story begins with young doctor, Robert Merivel (Robert Downey), in service of King Charles II (Sam Neill) after saving the King's spaniel. Merivel enjoys a life of hubris and careless pleasure at court, until the King orders Merivel to wed Celia, the King's mistress, basically to get the assets off balance sheet and fool other mistresses. The film opened as world bond markets went into meltdown. At the pre-screenings, the test audiences (Califormian muesli types) the written comments complained that The Great Fire of London seemed like an all too convenient plot device for resolving the story. Harv' Weinstein, a genius producer, furiously dipping into his jelly babies and diet cokes, foresaw a solution and this is why the final film is the first to open with a credits crunching sex scene (that was shot and edited by my brother Laurence - a brilliant cinematographer by the way).
What makes me think of this on the day of the HBOS shareholders' general meeting and vote on the Lloyds TSB takeover (a vote that looks like a totally foregone conclusion) is that I just hope they too have the insight to say hang on, something's just too convenient here, we're being tricked into selling out far too cheap!? The answer stands or falls on how unavoidably and all-destructive the Great Fire or Credit Crunch recession really is for these banks?
This morning, I also get an insightful email from Melvyn Bragg about the Great Fire: "Here are some observations and excerpts from the two great London diarists of the time, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. It seemed that people looked first and foremost to saving their own goods and getting out of the path of the flames, rather than considering what might be the best way to act in order to stop the fire outright. Pepys described in his diary entry [a dossier by a Government official that remained secret for 200 years] on 2nd September how he observed “Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another…Having staid, and in an hour's time seen the fire rage every way, and nobody, to my sight, endeavouring to quench it, but to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire…”
Pepys described the voracity of the fire in great detail and wrote how,as he walked along with his wife “all over the Thames, with one's face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops. This is very true; so as houses were burned by these drops and flakes of fire, three or four, nay, five or six houses, one from another. When we could endure no more upon the water; we to a little ale-house on the Bankside, over against the Three Cranes, and there staid till it was dark almost, and saw the fire grow; and, as it grew darker, appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire…We staid till, it being darkish, we saw the
fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruins. So home with a sad heart…” (entry for 2nd September)
The diarist and town-planner, John Evelyn, described in his diary of 2nd September how the fire “continued all this night, which was as light as day for ten miles round, in a dreadful manner, I went on foot to the same place. The conflagration was so universal, and the people so astonished, that from the beginning they hardly stirred to quench it, so that there was nothing heard or seen but crying out and
lamentation, running about like distracted creatures, without attempting to save even their goods. It leapt after a prodigious manner from house to house, and street to street, at great distances one from the other. Here we saw the Thames covered with goods floating, all the barges and boats laden with what some had time and courage to save. And the fields for many miles were strewn with movables of all sorts, and tents erecting to shelter both people and what goods they could get away. Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle! London was, but is no more!”
For London then read Edinburgh and Scotland today!
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