[This was first written in September 2003, before ancestry.com was available to assist in the genealogical inquiries.]
Back to reality –
Oops, there goes gravity!
– Eminem
“All that Jazz”
Sitting in the classroom, in the darkness, with the videotape playing, I was trying to suppress the giggles. Giggling is not really appropriate behavior for a history professor, I know, but under the circumstances it was all that I could do.
I had been showing my “Migration and Immigration in American History” class the movie “The Jazz Singer” (not the Neil Diamond version, but the original 1927 Warner Brothers’ flick). There isn’t much in the movie that could make one laugh, but a particular conversation between two of the characters got me going anyway.
Moisha Yudleson, the Kibitzer, was reading Sara Rabinowitz, a letter from her son, Jakie. As anyone who has seen the movie will know, Jakie has left the house as a youngster, after receiving one too many beatings from his father, the Cantor, and has gone on to make his way in life as a popular singer. His letter back to his mother recounts his successes and tells of the help he has been receiving from a Mary Dale, the beautiful lead dancer in the performance troupe.
The news concerning Mary brings a shriek of dismay from the Mother. “Oh no,” we read her proclaiming, “maybe my son will marry a shiksa!”
But the Kibitzer reassures her: “Maybe not – you know Rosie Levy on the theayter <sic> is Rosemarie Lee.” The possibility that this was so seemed to be confirmed by the fact the Warner brothers (who made the movie) changed Jakie Rabinowitz’s name to Jack Robin during the movie (in accordance with the character’s actor, Al Jolson, née Asa Yoelson).
It was at this point that an epiphany came to me and laughter followed as night follows day. What, I said to myself, if my mother, whose maiden name was Mary Dale Chanter, was given that name by her father to hint at a Jewish connection? I did some mental gymnastics and arithmetic, and came up with a few pertinent facts. My mother was born in 1929, when “The Jazz Singer” was doing the rounds of the English cinemas; Chanter was a fairly unusual English name, and could well be, after all, an Anglicization of Cantor – a name that might have derived from the position held in a synagogue; last, but not least, names were of considerable importance for the English middle class of my grandparents’ and parents’ generations (probably still are, for all I know), and there would have to be some reason for someone to be given the name Mary Dale.
As I pondered on this, I remembered that of all the middle names given to everyone I knew on the family tree, the only one I could not explain was Dale. I had asked my mother about this and had received a rather uninformative answer that the Dales were one branch of the family – but I had never come across this branch in my rummaging through family documents. My mother’s elder sister, was born the same year as Elizabeth R, and so had been given the future queen’s name. Her second name was Bois, my grandmother’s maiden name. There were also Gillespies flying around on my mother’s side, and on my father’s side were Peases, Thomsons, Greggs, Frys, among numerous others. But no Dales, as far as I could recall, on either side.
In my generation, all the boys had been given the names of Rob Roy MacGregor’s children – Andrew, James, Robert and Alastair – and then other meaningful middle names. Chanter, for Andrew, Derek (my uncle who was killed in World War II) for James, Standish (a common second name among the Thomsons) for me, and Michael (no real reason, but he was born later in the Sixties and by then nobody seemed to care as much) for Alastair. My sister’s name was Marion, which I believe also had some connection to Rob Roy, and her second name, much to her consternation throughout childhood, was Pease.
So, with all this cogitation, I came up with the rather intriguing notion that my grandfather, George Chanter, was an assimilated Jewish man with a sense of humor. The joke, I thought, was possibly on some of the older generation, who, I assumed, would not have been amused by the thought of any Jewish connection. I continued to chuckle as the movie came to an end, received some rather curious looks from my students, and endeavored to push these thoughts into the back of my mind as I tried to relate the movie to the topic of U.S. immigration.
Tea for two
Later, I decided I should pursue this Chanter/Cantor connection to see where it might lead. I needed to find out more about this man Chanter. Who was he? And how did he come to be linked to the Gillespies and the Boises? Unfortunately, he died when my mother was very young, so he has always been somewhat shrouded in mystery. But, after some searching I learned that the connections between Chanter and Dorothy Bois originated in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and, as everything among the English really ought to be, they were tied to the commodity of tea – a nice cup of char.
Now tea is something that I have taken a keen interest in over the years. Maybe it’s in the genes. The question of how to make a good cup of tea used to be a vital one for me. As an undergraduate I used to take pride in the pot of tea I could brew, though, looking back, I think that it probably would have been better if the mugs in which I offered up the beverage had been cleaner. But as to the pot, part of the secret probably lay in the fact that it never really received a good scrubbing.
I am only a generation or two removed from the time when the way tea was made really mattered. Now the world has moved on to more pressing questions – such as how to make a good latte – but prior to the formal end of the British Empire (may it rest in pieces) the English at least believed that the way a cup of tea was made was a marker for the level of civilization attained. And, I suppose, there was some logic to this. If you have stolen someone else’s drink and made it your own, you are quite likely to be obsessed with the way it is prepared, if only to separate yourself from the victims of your theft.
The divide between the English and the suppliers of this beverage may not have been there at the outset, when the first supplies were picked up, but it is certainly there now. It most probably came to be determined by the quality of the tealeaves. As most of the best leaves found their way to the Port of London, the manner in which all but the wealthiest Indians made tea changed to compensate for the poor quality of leaves, virtual dust, they were forced to use. None of that nonsense, in India today, about warming the pot (I remember as a ten year old being scolded by a great-uncle for not warming the pot prior to dumping in the leaves); no pouring of boiling water over the leaves and letting it steep for the requisite number of minutes (at least five); no placing of tea on an elegant tray, along with milk, sugar lumps, and (an important item) a second pot of boiling water; no extensive rituals with regard to the combining of tea, milk and sugar in the Wedgwood cups. Instead, just the placing of the dusty leaves into a saucepan along with milk, sugar, and often cloves, cardamom, a stick of cinnamon, and even ginger; followed by the boiling of this concoction over a flame, and drinking it whenever it took one’s fancy (not at specified times during the day).
This is not to say that everyone who was English was in the know. Class divided some from others. Take our friend Edward Blair, aka George Orwell, for example. As an old India hand he had the kind of knowledge about tea that any full-blown worshipper would relish. And yet, he liked the idea of making a cup of tea that would smack more of the English working classes than the upper crust whence he came. How else might one explain the fact that he asserted that the milk should be added to the tea, and not vice versa? This was clearly his attempt at slumming it – “Down and Out with a cup of char.” His rationalization was curious. Since it makes no difference whether you put the milk in first or not, why not always put it in after? That way you can always get it to be the color you desire. Downright working-class practicality. None of that ethereal, amateur conceptualization: we estimate how much milk we’ll need to get it to be as close as we can to perfection, but we know that can never be reached; the world will always be somewhat off-color, and you just have to make do. You may be posted to some backwater position in the Indian Civil Servant, but, stiff-upper-lip and chip-cheerio, you can do it, old boy – just poor the milk in first.
Well, the debate is moot. The eldest daughter of our friend Chanter informed me of the proper way to poor the tea when I was about thirteen – at least the way the English did it in Ceylon (she’d learned this from her mother). You hold the teapot in the right hand and the petite milk jug in the left, and you pour simultaneously. Do that to perfection and your breeding really will shine through!
And there it rests – well not exactly. It turns out that it does make a difference (and this is something that my taste buds had told me for many, many years, but whenever I said this to friends they scoffed. I never did the Ceylon tea taste test, but I was convinced – and still am – that I would know the difference between a cup with milk put in first and one with it poured in after). Source: “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Could one find one more reliable? I don’t think so. Douglas Adams tells us that scalded milk tastes different from regular milk. Pour tea into the milk and it doesn’t get scalded, do it the other way round and it does, ergo….
’nuff said, as they say in Rochdale, or wherever Orwell envisioned himself.
Lawn Tennyson
But, I digress. Or at least, I tell you something about the English and their tea to help situate a bunch of them on a lawn, being photographed, sitting by the tennis court, sipping a cuppa, servants on hand, circa 1920. All very cozy (though revolution waits in the wings!).
Who are these people drinking their tea? Well, it is the plantation owners, the Gillespies, and the members of the family of Boises, who have given their name to one of the largest tea trading companies in Ceylon. These two families are joined via the marriage of James Bois and his wife Margaret Gillespie. Not an especially happy bunch. Perhaps they haven’t really mastered lawn tennis yet. Perhaps they are still in mourning over the loss of young Charles, the only brother of the Bois sisters, who was confirmed dead at Gallipoli. It may also be that the fates of the sisters seem to be etched on their brows. The second daughter, the artist at her easel, is suffering from tuberculosis, as is the third daughter. Marjorie, the youngster, seems to be the only ray of sunshine amidst the sea of tennis whites and blazers. Dorothy, about to return to England, is getting on in years (now over thirty), and she must have had a hard time finding a suitable match in the small British community of Colombo.
It turns out, though, that Chanter has not yet arrived on the scene. We would like him to be there, perhaps a business connection with the Boises, perhaps a merchant in his own right, or part of Ceylon’s civil service, at the very least. But no. In securing her starboard cabin for her return to Southampton, she has come aboard a vessel (run by the Bois company) whose origin was Calcutta. Making his way home, now in his late-40s and retiring from a good long stint in the Indian Civil Service in Calcutta, or the environs thereof, is our friend Chanter. They will meet and have a brief courtship and then marry back in England. Chanter’s family will be present in large numbers, most especially his mother’s branch of the family, the Dales. Nothing humorous; no naming ceremony in honor of one of movie history’s great moments; just a common-all-garden marriage between the ICS and the tea business.
Survival of the Fittest
“Survivor” has come and gone, and now (around 2000) we have Survivor in the outback. This too will pass, and it will no doubt be back again, along with many other imitations – the Orwellian “Big Brother” for one. “Real Life”, which follows the somewhat sophomoric behavior of college-age kids living together in a communal house, will continue to garner big audiences among television viewers, almost by definition voyeuristic. Like Mr. Chancy Gardner in “Being There” we all seem to like to watch. We may have to watch, with the cheap production costs making these shows an attractive alternative to the old and tired sitcom.
But what are we watching? Is it truth or reality? What is history? Far from E.H. Carr’s mind when he posed this question was the quest for survival, except perhaps Lenin’s attempt to outlast the White Russians. But how different would his work look if television had been as influential then as it so clearly is now? Would he have been looking, not for signs of patterns in a history of class conflict, but for a “weakest link?” And hasn’t social history to some extent become a battle to turn to another social group, and say “You are the weakest link. Goodbye” – preferably with an English accent, and teeth stained by years of tea consumption.
In the aftermath of the first season of “Survivor”, talk shows, even those on more elite PBS stations, discussed reality television and its impact. One of the most intriguing questions asked was whether the people on these shows or their actions were “real”? How much did they reflect the competitive conditions of real life? Some callers and commentators felt that the behavior was an exact reflection of reality; others felt that every action was entirely artificial. Well, I concluded, not having seen a single show and therefore being an authority on the matter, that they were more real than reality.
And, with reality television in mind, I would suggest that if we, who would accelerate past our Carr, were to attempt to do the same thing for History, moving beyond good and evil, beyond debates about subjectivity and objectivity, bias and truth, art and science, and were to endeavor to create an entirely artificial reality “history,” we might get closer to the truth than has been possible in standard histories (or at least we might enjoy ourselves more in the process of approaching whatever it is that we are approaching – no doubt a tractor-trailer hurtling towards us as we saunter along our country lane doing a bit of Sunday driving).
I mean, let’s face it. Chanter the Cantor might be as real as Chanter of the ICS. His life lies as much within the realm of the possible, however frequently that kind of a life or narrative gets erased from English History. Chanter/Cantor may not be History, but it is reality.
Mind you, though, I suppose if we were to explore the lives of the Gillespies, the Chanters, the Dales, and the Boises in their imperial entirety (whatever that might mean), perhaps we would find enough reality that we wouldn’t need anything more real.
Meaning and Meaning Less
Did it matter then whether my instant, imagined history of the Chanters was true? Perhaps it only matters if it could possibly be the truth. Might it be so? Yes. Is that enough? For English history, there is surely no greater need for reality history than the fact that the history of reality became so tied to Nation, that the possibility of the Cantor within the Chanter, became one of the silences in English historical narratives.
What the heck is an Englishman anyway? My own name, Gregg is a Scottish name, and while I would have to be pretty sloshed to claim that I am a Scot (except in front of a classroom of students – when it is necessary to summon up tales of past masculine triumphs apparently), having lived there only three complete years of my life, I could do so nonetheless (I was a member of London Scottish Rugby Union Club, after all). More importantly, I should do so, if only to bring out my un-English English side. There is something about migration here that probably also speaks to American history, a history founded on the story of the migrant. If you have any idea what it might be, let me know. But for English history, at least let us at least remember the Bonetti rule. Peter Bonetti, Chelsea’s great goalkeeper of the 1960s and early 1970s, was the son of an “Italian” father and “English” mother. Every Chelsea supporter is convinced that he could have played for Italy, but he chose Queen and country, and the bench behind Gordon Banks (except one fateful day in the summer of 1970!).
Pudd’nhead’s fingerprint
Looking over those Ceylon photographs again, I have to mention that one of these Gillespies, one from the family who parlayed their plantations in the American South into a tea plantation business in Ceylon (after a short stint in Brazil – getting out before the South Carolina colony there went bust), certainly has darker and different features than the rest. Could it be that his appearance hints at another line of inquiry in unearthing the roots of this peculiarly English family? But that is another story, another, albeit Dizzy, reality history.
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