fixed in time yet racing backwards and forwards.
The era of the play is shaped by an extraordinary set of circumstances. After years of revolution, dynastic upheaval and war across Europe, full-blown capitalism has started to establish large-scale manufacturing industries and lay down infrastructure. This puts advancement within reach of a mass of people regardless of their background: an economic boom combining with new political, social and artistic freedoms which create unprecedented opportunity. Railway construction more than anything else will develop this early industrial era and drive it towards the modern age.
Britain was the first nation to industrialise, and Belgium followed closely behind. As a result, when the play opens in late January 1841, Brussels is bristling with commercial possibility, and teeming with British money and know-how. As Louis says at the top of the play: ‘It’s everywhere you look! Iron and brick construction ‘as gone nuts and knob-heads in suits jostle for a slice of the action.” Later in Act I, Sir Lionel predicts how the concourse of the Bogaardenstation will be in a few years “…people of every class will be rubbing shoulders and bumping into each other – their common purpose the pursuit of wealth.”
The milieu Sir Lionel describes is one many of us recognise. To my knowledge, every British passenger railway terminus was built in the Victorian era, an iron and brick edifice not unlike the terminus of the play. The atmosphere and energy generated in 1841, by people about their business in a transport hub at a time of relative prosperity, is much the same now as it was then. Our footsteps are a great deal closer to the concourse of the newly built Bogaardenstation Railway Terminus than its chronology might suggest.
Unfortunately, the unprecedented commercial opportunity enjoyed by some created wretched conditions for others. Britain was also the first nation to experience the appalling over-crowding and squalor that appeared on the other side of the all-powerful industrial coin. The Reverend quotes from an article by Engels about London, which appeared in The Times a few years before the play is set: ‘Within the most courtly precincts of the richest city of God’s earth may be found the outcasts of society, rotting from famine, filth and disease.’ (Act II Scene 8)
Apart from a few, purpose-built communities created by enlightened entrepreneurs, nowhere was prepared for a large influx of people. Clean water supply, sewage disposal and public health provision fit for purpose were a long way off, as was effective legislation to prevent the worst excesses of worker exploitation. Wherever there were more workers than jobs, or too many families for available lodgings, conditions were ideal for the ruthlessly greedy to flourish.
Despite his cheeky cockney charm, Louis shows his true colours as early as the opening scene: “No, we’re after the easy money: rustical peasants cramming into our city. That’s right! They sweat over machines round the clock for a pittance, then pay extortionate rent for a rat-hole. (points at man in audience) Spot on, pal! Give that man a big cigar. I’m talking Industrial Revolution! It’s the new way to do business, and if you don’t keep up you’ll get left behind.”
Those who flocked to towns and cities left behind the prospect of help from their former landowners and masters. A new, municipally based, humanitarian response was needed within rapidly expanding urban populations to protect the vulnerable and alleviate pernicious hardship.
Despite his lack of street savvy, The Reverend saw the need to start a hospice in his vicarage for babies who would otherwise perish. Funding from Sir Lionel and Lady Buller then enabled the hospice to expand into a much larger enterprise. The Reverend explains to Boney the need for a children’s hospice in Act II Scene 6: “Southampton’s burgeoning prosperity brought a tide of human misery in its wake…”
Boney (1767-1841), now in his mid-seventies, is too mentally fragile to cope with the seismic changes happening around him. He sees a nightmare approaching. At the top of Act I Scene 3, he warns Alice, the Flower Seller: “It’ll start benignly, innocently ignoring common sense, but once fully grown it’ll devour common decency. You’ll see! Bedlam furnaces, Beelzebub engines. Oh, bloody bloody hell!” The industrial behemoths that had invaded English shires a few decades earlier were given manic and satanic nicknames, reflecting the fear and dismay of a people whose lives for countless generations had been shaped by the agrarian rhythms of the land.
The hectic new world of commerce and industry intimidates Boney; it helps to destabilise him and compound his confusion. It also makes him feel alienated. In Act I Scene 3, he says of the busy, ambitious folk scurrying across the concourse: “They’ve dubbed the epic struggle for freedom a ‘bygone age’… so I can be dismissed as a relic who wears the hat of a fool. Bastards!” Making matters worse is that Boney sees his old enemy, the British, as the cause. He knows that they bring most of the know-how and finance which fast tracks Belgium’s industrialisation. He is also aware of Britain’s and Belgium’s special relationship. Boney makes some sort of truce with the new era towards the end of the play: “I should have been buried where I belong: in the old world, with my comrades and with everything I regret.”
The Terminus’ characters, dialogue, action and music continually resonate with its early industrial setting, providing a chronological anchoring point for the audience. In counter-point, Boney’s unfixed mind switches haphazardly between the events of his life. Moving in all directions, his mind emulates the melee on the concourse. In his own words from Act I Scene 7: “My aching bones are frozen to the marrow and ready for the grave, but my mind won’t stop racing: backwards, forwards, this way then that. Like a weathervane in a storm, it spins round and round and then goes to wherever the wind pleases.”
What we hear of Boney’s childhood has a warm, unhurried, idyllic quality. He tells Lady Buller In Act II Scene 2: “My cousins had a little house built for them in an apricot tree. It was glorious. We’d play ‘til the evening sun cast long, slender shadows across the orchards.” As part of the same conversation: “One of my uncles carved the figureheads on boats that traded along the Mediterranean. We’d drop anchor at Cairo, Genoa, Messina, Constantinople: anywhere with a warm wind across a blue sky.”
Most of Boney’s recollections are, however, much darker and more troubled, when his mind flips to the failures and betrayals that have shaped his life. The first of these is from his time at the All Innocents Seminary College. Boney was bright boy with a devout, religious belief. Despite not coming from a privileged background, he gained a place at the college in 1780 when he was twelve. It went badly.
In Act I Scene 4 he recalls: “Love thine enemy, suffer the little children, put the last first. But woe betide you if you strayed beyond the bounds of conformity, (confiding) for conformity was vital to buttressing the ancient fabric of inequality and self-interest. (as before) So I was beaten – often – to expunge the sin of contradiction and to forewarn me against ever thinking that one day, I might be so bold as to bang on the door of their fine, unwelcoming house.”
Boney then had two children with his childhood sweetheart, Meriel. That ended in disaster. From Act II Scene 6: “We tried to wrap up our babies before we gave them back to the earth. Two lifeless little bundles of rag… Meriel couldn’t do it but she wouldn’t let them go. It broke her heart. That’s what killed her, more than being cold and hungry.” Boney’s family perished in the unparalleled freezing winter that gripped France six months before the Revolution of July 1789. He was only twenty.
Boney was a staunch supporter of the Revolution until its fine ideals disappeared in 1793-5, when the Terror ran riot, and a guillotine was seen as the solution to every problem. Napoleon was instrumental in ridding France of violent radicalism the following year. He became its leader, First Consul, in 1799 and built a country in which the majority had a share. Act II Scene 6: “Napoleon Bonaparte wasn’t a leader you or I could imagine. He’d fill you with a terrible resolve. Just a few words or a look could do it. Even when vastly outnumbered, you’d find a way to defy death and drive it into the enemy’s ranks. For Napoleon, everything was possible – everything! If he’d wanted us to follow him to the ends of the earth, we’d have done exactly that: gladly… proudly…”
Yet in 1803, after only four years of becoming First Consul, Napoleon restored monarchy to France by making himself Emperor. Boney saw this as something of a betrayal. Refer-ring to the catastrophic defeat at Waterloo in 1815, he reflects in Act I Scene 7: “Though not a battle that halts the march of oppression or sets people free. No. The Little Corporal was one of us to start with, liberating wherever he went, but he turned into an Emperor and used up his comrades in a last-ditch attempt to save his crown.”
Defeat at Waterloo ended the Napoleonic era and with it the glorious years of Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité. Despite Boney being haunted by the blame he attaches to himself for the defeat, it is the trauma of three years earlier, the retreat from Moscow, that most damaged his ability to cope. He says to his troops and Lady Buller in Act I Scene 4: “Even the east wind tearing away at us points our flag homeward. In time, my feet will thaw out on French soil. When they do, I want all of you with me. Yes? Keep moving, my brave lads, and stay together, no matter how much it hurts.” Boney and Lady Buller are standing on the concourse without a single French soldier in sight. Fortunately, she understands something of his condition and can help.
From the Grand Army of 800,000 that marched into Russia in 1812, it is estimated only 23,000 made it back to France. The suffering of those who perished, and indeed of those who made it home, is almost unimaginable. In Act II Scene 4, Boney reflects: “This icy, desolate land has loomed so large in my mind’s eye that bit by bit it’s been eating up my reason. And now it’s on the move. I’ll not be scared, though it fills me with foreboding, like far away menace in the blackest of nights. If I stop and stay quite still, somewhere out there… beyond the sobbing and pleading in the wind, I think I can hear it.” Sleeping rough on a freezing concourse makes it all but impossible for Boney to put his 1812 ordeal behind him.
After the Waterloo campaign of May to June 1815, there are hardly any recollections from Boney: twenty-five years unaccounted for. I imagine he had all but lost his sense of purpose. He found himself in Brussels, eight miles from the battlefield, and was eventually taken in by Louis’ father. Over two decades later, in April 1840, Louis’ father died and immediately Louis turfed Boney out onto the streets. Boney made the newly built Bogaardenstation Terminus his home the following month. Despite being used to toughing out the harshest of conditions, he had not before had to contend with a combination of physical frailty and parlous state of mind.
As well as switching back to the past, Boney’s mind also surges forward to pre-echo the future. In Act I Scene 3, there are similarities between Boney’s descriptions of the fighting at Waterloo and accounts of battles fought nearby on the Western Front a century later: “No room for crafty manoeuvring, only brutal, head-on assaults. Butchery on a grand scale: victory by attrition”. Later in the scene he talks of “men trapped in a torment of mud”, foreseeing the hell of trench warfare.
Poppies bloom in the countryside around Waterloo village every summer, as they do in the fields of Flanders. Under a shower of them Boney stands wracked with emotion to pay tribute to those who gave their lives in conflicts throughout the ages to the present day. In whatever era they fell, Boney is fiercely protective of how they are remembered. “Go on, recoil at their savagery! Rubbish their patriotism! Ignore their courage and feel no gratitude. But don’t ever sneer at them. (wells up) Even if their ideals have betrayed them and self-important, little nobodies have laughed in their face, you show respect! Dead men shouldn’t have to squirm. Leave them alone! They answered the call and gave everything. Let poppies pay their silent tribute. No more bullshit. Let them rest in peace.” (Act I Scene 7)
In no small part, Boney’s winter nightmare alludes to the future Soviet Union. He sees an “icy, desolate land” both in the frozen, pitiless landscape he dragged himself across in 1812, and in a bleak, unforgiving regime beyond the chronological horizon that will demand strict regulation of thought, as though it were part of a mechanical means of production. From Act I Scene 7: “You’ll trap millions of peasants in perpetual misery:their hopes crushed by cold, hard logic, and their dreams suffocated by an endless, grey monotony.”
The Terminus presages the modern prominence of Brussels, which became one of the European Economic Community’s headquarters in the 1950s, and to this day remains at the heart of the European Union. With Belgium at the vanguard of the Industrial Revolution in continental Europe, the eponymous terminus assumes huge financial strategic importance. Louis is in no doubt he is in the right place at the right time: “Best of all, foreigners wander around with fistfuls of cash.”
Other building-blocks of the modern age also have their beginnings at the time of the play. Louis sees lucrative potential in the written word harnessed for mass influence of a population growing in literacy. Government agencies and charitable organisations are starting to emerge which will eventually provide universal healthcare and education, as well as a safety net for the poorest.
The red flag of the communist revolution is held aloft during a street party: not a chrono-logical aberration as Marx’s political theory had already been influenced by Engels’s research for The Condition of the Working Class in England, published as articles in 1842. None of this, however, seems to impinge on a rare, brief, quiet moment on the concourse when Lady Buller enjoys a hot drink, and a medieval clock is heard to chime in the old part of the city.
Two other occurrences are worth mentioning as they add to the remarkable confluence of events impacting the Bogaardenstation Terminus in January 1841.The special relationship between Britain and Belgium continued to thrive after Waterloo and led to the Treaty of London, 1831, which ratified the terms of Belgian independence from Holland. Sir Lionel was one of the treaty’s architects and the play is set during its tenth anniversary. His keynote speech (Act I Scene 2) outlines his considerable personal and financial stake in Belgium, and his plans for its future.
The other occurrence worth mentioning is the return of Napoleon Bonaparte’s body to France, an occasion which happened a few weeks before the play is set. Boney says in Act II Scene 6: “Frenchmen could feel proud of the country Napoleon built. Yet, for years, they let him rot in a sweaty little coffin on the other side of the world! “ The realisation that Meriel is dead, and Napoleon has made it back, both help release Boney to die.
Not to acknowledge the extent of Lady Georgina Buller’s influence on the play’s events and characters would be a dreadful oversight. In the 1840s, British husbands had a legal right to control their wives in every way and, if necessary, beat them or lock them up. Middle-class women were expected to stay at home and not to become involved in any matters, except those concerning charitable works. Yet Lady Buller does things her way and on her terms: helping to deliver babies in Southampton’s slums, wandering by herself through the melee on the concourse, raising the status of a servant to that of a friend and living on an equal footing with her husband.
It should not surprise that such a trailblazer with an unswerving sense of right and wrong would shun convention by befriending an outcast existing at the bottom of the pile. Despite the prohibitive social imperatives of the day, Lady Buller manages to do all she does with tact, generosity of spirit and quiet effectiveness. No wonder Alice, the Flower Seller, pays her such a heartfelt compliment in Act II Scene 2: “It’s been lovely to serve a real lady, Ma’am.”
Perhaps the Reverend should have the last word. In a paraphrase of one his sermons, he sees the concourse awash with people travelling in all directions and at defining moments in their lives. He is, however, unaware that his eloquent metaphor alludes to monumental changes in his own life which will be triggered by the events of the play. In Act I Scene 4: “From the sea of souls ebbing and flowing across the concourse of this station, some are at the very start of their journey, some continue to travel by straight ’way departing on another journey no sooner have they arrived whereas, for others, their passage terminates here, and they travel no further.”
Copyright Nigel W Fair June 2018
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