A Bigger Message–Conversations with David Hockney

Like his contemporary and fellow Yorkshireman, Alan Bennett, whom he slightly resembles physically, David Hockney has been loved and admired throughout his lifetime. 

He painted one of his greatest works, ‘A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style’ in 1961 while still at the Royal College of Art. 

He has dazzled, surprised and often upset the world of art ever since. Picasso aside, he is the wittiest modern painter, in the sense not just of being funny, but intelligent; a whole history of Western art is both contained and extended by his originality. 

For example, it was both funny, and in the 1960s brave, to apply Boucher’s soft pornography to bums as well as bosoms. Andy Warhol made jokes about consumerist society’s dependence on the disseminated image. Hockney’s great joke, a serious one, has been seeing off abstraction. Asked by a puzzled viewer what a random splodge on a large Californian interior signified, he said that it was the world’s smallest Clyfford Still.

To Hockney, figurative painting and drawing is a constant of civilisation. 

You cannot interpret the world without it. Indeed, the way you interpret the world has been conditioned by the optical illusions you have grown up with, whether handmade from some imposed fixed perspective, or mechanical, like a still or moving photograph. If you want to live fully you must educate your eyes and learn to look again. Hockney’s vast body of work — he has sketched, drawn, painted, etched, printed, modelled, photographed, filmed, faxed, iPhoned and iPadded illustratively for nearly 60 years — provides the instruction. He is both truthful and entertaining. In the unfair way of life, he happens also to be well-read, musical, eloquent and Britain’s snappiest dresser.

His eloquence has been put to good use by Martin Gayford, whose previous book was an absorbing account of being the subject of a portrait by Lucian Freud. 

Freud is a wonderful painter, but to me he is a less interesting artist, or maker, than David Hockney; he is not all that interested in composition. Gayford has kept himself in the picture sufficiently to nudge and stimulate Hockney, whose book A Bigger Message effectively is. Gayford provides, therefore, a companion to David Sylvester’s Conversations with Francis Bacon, a key text for modern art. 

We are treated to many Hockney perceptions. Two favourites: ‘Caravaggio invented Hollywood lighting’ (now I understand why I admire and dislike this painter) and ‘Photographs are surfaces, not space which is more mysterious even than surfaces.’

Helen Foster Snow (September 21, 1907 – January 11, 1997)

Helen Foster Snow had an historic impact on journalism with her work in China, Korea, and Japan. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 and 1984 for her work, connection and “friendship bridge” with the Chinese people. She was also the second American to be awarded the title of “Friendship Ambassador,” the highest honor bestowed by the Chinese People’s Association for friendship with foreign countries.
She arrived in China in 1931 and spent nearly a decade there interviewing, journaling and writing. Snow and her husband Edgar were the first foreigners who broke through the news blackout by the national government, sneaking into the “red areas” of China, and as such were the first to do exclusive interviews with major Chinese political figures. Snow was the second foreign woman to enter the area. She was able to interview Mao Zedong and get his support for what was to become the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives and “gung ho” movement.

Meliissa Lugashenko

A dark and funny new novel from the multi-award-winning author of Mullumbimby.Too much lip, her old problem from way back. And the older she got, the harder it seemed to get to swallow her opinions. 

The avalanche of bullshit in the world would drown her if she let it; the least she could do was raise her voice in anger.Wise-cracking Kerry Salter has spent a lifetime avoiding two things; her hometown and prison. 

But now her Pop is dying and she's an inch away from the lockup, so she heads south on a stolen Harley.Kerry plans to spend twenty-four hours, tops, over the border. She quickly discovers, though, that Bundjalung country has a funny way of grabbing on to people. 

Old family wounds open as the Salters fight to stop the development of their beloved river. And the unexpected arrival on the scene of a good-looking dugai fella intent on loving her up only adds more trouble ; but then trouble is Kerry's middle name.Gritty and darkly hilarious, Too Much Lip offers redemption and forgiveness where none seems possible.

Vale John Cohen (August 2, 1932 – September 16, 2019)

From 1972 to 1997, Cohen was a Professor of Visual Arts at SUNY Purchase College where he taught photography and drawing.

A respected musician and founding member of the seminal old-time string band "The New Lost City Ramblers," John Cohen has also had an equally distinguished career as a filmmaker, photographer, and record producer. 

The term high lonesome sound, which he coined for his legendary 1963 documentary film, has become synonymous with an entire genre of American music. 

In addition to extensive fieldwork and documentation of Appalachian culture, Cohen has done important ethnographic research throughout the United States, Britain, and the Peruvian Andes. 

His highly-praised publication, "There Is No Eye: John Cohen Photographs" (2001), and the complementary Smithsonian Folkways CD "There Is No Eye: Music For Photographs," brought together several threads of Cohen's work over the past 50 years. 

As a producer, his many noteworthy recordings include Smithsonian Folkways' releases "An Untamed Sense of Control" by Roscoe Holcomb, "Dark Holler" by Dillard Chandler,

"The Lost Recordings of Banjo Bill Cornett," "If I Had My Way" by Rev. Gary Davis, and the compilation "Back Roads to Cold Mountain." Cohen worked with T-Bone Burnett as music consultant to the film "Cold Mountain," and appeared in Martin Scorcese's film about Bob Dylan, "No Direction Home."

Agnes Smedley in China

In China, Smedley served as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Manchester Guardian. She covered many topics, including the Chinese Civil War. She was also in Xi'an during the Xi'an Incident, which took her by surprise but led to her making broadcasts in English for the rebels. She then reported on the Anti-Japanese war during the Second United Front. She first travelled with the 8th Route Army and then with the New Fourth Army, as well as visiting some units of the non-Communist Chinese army.

During the 1930s she applied for membership in the Chinese Communist Party but was rejected due to Party reservations about her lack of discipline and what it viewed as her excessive independence of mind. Smedley was devastated by this rejection but remained passionately devoted to the Chinese communist cause.

Smedley left the field in 1937; she organized medical supplies and continued writing. From 1938 to 1941, she visited both Communist and Guomindang forces in the war zone. It was during her stay with Communist forces in Yan'an, after the Long March, that she conducted extensive interviews with General Zhu De, the basis of her book on him. She was helped with her book by the actress and writer Wang Ying who was living in the USA during the 1940s.

But then Smedley’s luck turned.  The Roosevelt administration wanted to push a reluctant USA into war with both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.  Smedley fitted the anti-Japanese agenda.  She was able to write Battle Hymn of China, which appeared in 1943.  It gave a vivid picture of an abused and heroic China – very useful for the war effort.

“Probably no more than twenty non-Communists in America had much familiarity with the Chinese Communists…  One of the very few persons now in the United States who had real up-to-date contact was Agnes Smedley.  Therefore her initial appearances in southern California were opportune and welcome to a variety of political circles.  In her talks, she effectively projected an image of a working alliance between the Chinese Communists and Nationalists as they waged war against a common Japanese enemy.”

Zhou Enlai–The Last Perfect Revolutionary–by Gao Wenqian

The book has been praised for portraying Zhou Enlai as a human, and not a political or ideological icon, by both presenting the man's flaws and his successes.

Peter Ritter of Time Magazine praises the book for depicting both sides of the Premier; as thoughtful and cultured, yet ultimately obedient to Mao whims, as "an active, if not always an enthusiastic participant".

Ritter concludes that Gao's book creates "a conflicted, even tragic, figure". Dong Wang, at the UCLA, shares a similar view, stating that "Mr. Gao’s unprecedented work reveals Zhou to be a tragic hero who had a very complex character".

Lucian Pye, in Foreign Affairs, credits the book as "further proof of the payoffs of telling the truth about politically sensitive matters" and congratulates it for ultimately helping to "secure a positive memory of Zhou"

Paul McCartney and his wife Linda– Give Ireland Back to the Irish

"Give Ireland Back to the Irish" is a song by the British–American rock band Wings that was released as their debut single in February 1972. It was written by Paul McCartney and his wife Linda in response to the events of Bloody Sunday, on 30 January that year, when British troops in Northern Ireland shot dead thirteen civil rights protestors. 

Keen to voice their outrage at the killings, Wings recorded the track two days later at Abbey Road Studios in London. It was the band's first song to include Northern Irish guitarist Henry McCullough.

The single peaked at number 16 on the UK Singles Chart and number 21 on the US Billboard Hot 100, but topped the national chart in Ireland. Having never released an overtly political song before, McCartney was condemned by the British media for his seemingly pro-IRA stance on Northern Ireland.

James C. Scott–Against the Grain

A state can be defined as a territory over which an elite exercised coercive power maintaining itself by taxing the population either through its produce or its labour. Scott takes a rather bleak view of early states but his critique provides a fascinating insight into just how they worked. 

He argues that for a state to exist it needed to be reliant on a staple that could easily be taxed – and grain was the ideal. Because the fields were fixed and the crop ripened over a short period of time it was impossible for the farmer to avoid the tax collector. 

Communities elsewhere in the world reliant on tubers or root vegetables such as yams and manioc as their staple were more able to avoid tax since the crop can be left in the ground and harvested over a long period. 

Such societies seldom develop into states. Another advantage of grain to the state was that it had a higher value per unit volume than most other foodstuffs and was easy to store in the protection of the city, from where it could be doled out to slaves and soldiers or used to feed the population when under siege. Through taxation the state became the quartermaster and producers became subjects. The non-productive elites who emerged in such a system had a keen interest in protecting the grain-producing farmers and so some of the surplus they controlled was invested in city walls and armies.

Scott argues convincingly that early states are “population machines” designed to control labour, domesticating them as a farmer domesticates his herd. Maintaining the numbers of workers was vital and if numbers fell a new crop had to be gathered through warfare, adding to the ranks of the unfree. Raiding to acquire goods and manpower – an aspect of what Max Weber referred to as “booty capitalism” – became a normal part of life. 

Women were also herded into state enterprises. Around 3000 BC there were 9,000 textile workers in the city of Uruk (in today’s Iraq) – about 20% of the population – most of them women. From the farmer paying his dues to the state, either as a tithe of his crop or as labour, to the captive slave, all the working population were in some kind of bondage, their efforts supporting the ever-increasing luxury in which the elite demanded to live. Underpaid fast-food workers standing out against employment conditions that allow their companies’ CEOs to pay themselves vast salaries can be excused for thinking that little changes.

Early states were fragile constructs and Scott offers a particularly revealing analysis of this. Within the system lie the seeds of its own destruction. Large urban populations living in close proximity are prone to epidemics, a threat that increased as trade developed, bringing strangers to the city carrying diseases to which the locals had no resistance. 

Then there was ecocide–the degeneration of the environment through overuse – deforestation and overgrazing causing sedimentation and floods that, in turn, led to increased salinisation and the development of malaria.

Add to this social unrest and endemic warfare and it is surprising that early states managed to survive. In fact, most did not, and episodes of “collapse” punctuate the historical record. Scott sees collapse not as a disaster but as an opportunity. The oppressive state system is dismantled and the population disperses, redistributing itself across a wider territory – it is a bolt for freedom.

Early states were surrounded by a sea of “barbarians”, who were essentially mobile, adopting varying subsistence strategies – hunting and gathering, foraging, slash-and-burn cultivation and pastoralism. In contrast to the state, they were complex and diverse but the two had to live together in some sort of unstable equilibrium. 

The natural tendency of the barbarian was to raid – after all, why go through the drudgery of cultivation if you can get all the grain you need by spilling a little blood? But then why go to this effort at all if a symbiosis could be established through an exchange of goods and services, the state offering grain and manufactured goods while the barbarians could provide raw materials and slaves and offer themselves as mercenaries. And so the system moved to another stage of complexity.

Scott’s original book is history as it should be written – an analysis of the deep forces exposed in the eternal conflict between humans and their environment. What makes it even more welcome is that it has been written with the enthusiasm of discovery.

Bill Ash– WW2 Spitfire Pilot– Writer and Escapologist

His glad handing visitor above was the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King.

Bill Ash was a Spitfire pilot shot down over occupied France in 1942 who went on to make numerous escapes from German PoW camps. 

Bill, who has died aged 96, had three spells in Stalag Luft III and was one of the inspirations for Steve McQueen's character, the "cooler king", in the 1963 film The Great Escape. 

After the war, he went on to represent the BBC in India, co-found a political party, write several novels and mentor a generation of theatre and radio writers.

Bill was born in Dallas, Texas. His family was genteel but poor – "not so much white collar as frayed collar," he recalled. As a boy he stacked shelves and later, while working at a local newspaper office, saw the bullet-riddled bodies of the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde. 

When he was 12, a family friend persuaded him to take the $200 he had saved up for a college education and invest it in stocks and shares. The 1929 stock market crash came a week later. It was that loss, Bill said, that put him on a collision course with capitalism.

Back in London he was appointed MBE, became a British citizen and studied politics and economics at Balliol College, Oxford, on a veteran's scholarship. In 1946, he married Patricia Rambault, a Wren. She had written to Bill regularly when he was a PoW.

In the early 50s, Bill joined the BBC, where his colleagues included Tony Benn, who became a lifelong friend. Bill became head of the BBC's Indian operations, but as his career briefly flourished, his marriage crumbled. Towards the end of the 50s he married Ranjana Sidhanta, a leftwing academic.

In the 70s and 80s, he chaired the Writers' Guild of Great Britain. He encouraged a new generation of writers through his work at the BBC and, later, as literary manager at the Soho Poly theatre in central London (now the Soho theatre). His 1985 book The Way to Write Radio Drama is a standard text.

Howard Zinn– A People's History of the United States

Library Journal calls Howard Zinn’s iconic A People's History of the United States “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.” 

Packed with vivid details and telling quotations, Zinn’s award-winning classic continues to revolutionize the way American history is taught and remembered. 

Frequent appearances in popular media such as The Sopranos, The Simpsons, Good Will Hunting, and the History Channel documentary The People Speak testify to Zinn’s ability to bridge the generation gap with enduring insights into the birth, development, and destiny of the nation.

John Atkinson Hobson–Imperialism

John Atkinson Hobson (6 July 1858 – 1 April 1940) was an English economist and social scientist. Hobson is best known for his writing on imperialism, which influenced Vladimir Lenin, and his theory of underconsumption.

His principal and earliest contribution to economics was the theory of underconsumption, a scathing criticism of Say's law and classical economics' emphasis on thrift. 

However, this discredited Hobson among the professional economics community from which he was ultimately excluded. 

Other early work critiqued the classical theory of rent and anticipated the Neoclassical "marginal productivity" theory of distribution.

After covering the Second Boer War as a correspondent for The Manchester Guardian, he condemned British actions and characterised it as acting under the influence of mine owners. 

In a series of books, he explored the associations between imperialism and international conflict and asserted that imperial expansion is driven by a search for new markets and investment opportunities overseas.

Spain Court Case–Allows Exhumation of Dictator Franco

The gates of the suburban mausoleum that could soon house Spain’s most restless ghost are decked with a shrivelling bunch of red and yellow carnations, a handful of prayer cards and a cheap, broken crucifix. 

If the socialist government’s long and fraught campaign to exhume Francisco Franco from the fascist splendour of the Valley of the Fallen finally succeeds, his body will be reinterred in June here in the humbler surroundings of the Mingorrubio-El Pardo municipal cemetery. 

The graveyard, which sits at the end of a bus route less than an hour from Madrid, lacks the baleful scale of Franco’s current resting place. 

Not far from its entrance, Mingorrubio boasts neither the basilica’s sword-wielding angel sentries nor the 150 metre-high cross that draws coachloads of tourists, schoolchildren and those nostalgic for a half-remembered Spain.

King Richard–Meets Peasants Before The Slaughter 1891

When Adam Delved and Eve Span Who then Was the Gentleman

Charlotte Philby–The Most Difficult Thing

Charlotte Philby’s debut thriller opens with privileged Anna waking one morning and 

  walking away from her comfortable lifestyle – the adoring husband, the beautiful children – and heading for the Greek island of Skiathos with a new passport and new name in hand.

From there, the action flips backwards and forwards as Philby takes her time unravelling who Anna really is, why she has left her life, what led her to this seismic moment and whether we can ever truly outrun the mistakes of our past.

Pre-publicity has focused on the fact that Philby, a journalist who has written for this newspaper among others, is the granddaughter of the notorious British spy Kim Philby and she has been open about how his life served as the initial inspiration for her debut.  There are hints here, too, of the stories of undercover police officers who lied for years to the women they tricked – Anna’s path to treachery and flight is kickstarted in part by her relationship with Harry, a high-flying journalist at the newspaper where she begins her career, who may be both less and more than he seems.

George Orwell–Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. Many terms used in the novel entered common usage, including Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Room 101, telescreen, 2 + 2 = 5, prole, and memory hole. 

Nineteen Eighty-Four also popularised the adjective "Orwellian", connoting things such as official deception, secret surveillance, brazenly misleading terminology, and manipulation of recorded history by a totalitarian or authoritarian state. 

Time included it on its one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. It was placed on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, reaching No. 13 on the editors' list and No. 6 on the readers' list. In 2003, the novel was No. 8 The Big Read survey by the BBC.

I.F. Stone–The Trial of Socrates

In unraveling the long-hidden issues of the most famous free speech case of all time, noted author I.F. Stone ranges far and wide over Roman as well as Greek history to present an engaging and rewarding introduction to classical antiquity and its relevance to society today. The New York Times called this national best-seller an "intellectual thriller."

First, Stone shows that Socrates’s philosophical practice is incompatible with democratic ethics. Take the famous Socratic method, wherein the philosopher “ironically” feigns naivete, the better to expose the faulty logic of his interlocutor—so that you find, after a long conversation with Socrates, that by first agreeing you’d rather have an effective physician than an ineffective one, you have signed yourself up for a theory of absolute monarchy.

Stone himself was impervious to all such career anxiety, because by launching a kitchen-table one-man sheet called I. F. Stone’s Weekly he had declared independence and blasted the way that is now too easily followed by a throng of self-publishers and blog artists.

Simon Winchester– Pacific The Ocean of the Future

Among the 25 titles to Winchester's name there are books about skull collector Alan Dudley (Skulls), champion of Chinese science Joseph Needham (The Man Who Loved China), geologist William Smith (The Map that Changed the World), and the unhinged verbal genius William Chester Minor's role in the making of The Oxford English Dictionary(The Surgeon of Crowthorne); books that demand more than a passing acquaintance with phrenology, sinology, geology and etymology.

In only one scientific field – geology – is Winchester academically trained. And yet he has a magical ability to fashion popular narratives out of technical, in fact often quite obtuse, subjects – curiosities.

H.O.Meredith–Economic History of England A Study in Social Development

Direct Action World War I Anti Conscription Poster

Faith Bandler–YES for Aborigines May 12 Referendum

Clarrie O'Shea– 50 Years On

50 years on, Clarrie O’Shea’s legacy rings loud

15/05/2019 BY HANNAH SCOTT

Luba Grigorovitch Branch Secretary

Fifty years ago today, a Victorian union leader was sent to prison for standing up against tyranny.

The jailing of Clarrie O’Shea triggered Australia’s mass industrial uprising, with around one million Australians participating in a General Strike.

The General Strike came at a pivotal moment in the history of modern Australia.

After nearly twenty years of conservative rule under Menzies, Holt, McEwan and Gorton, Australia was finding its modern, progressive voice.

Our first peoples had finally won the right to vote, support for the Vietnam War was starting to fade following the Tet offensive, and the Beatles were about to drop their seminal Abbey Road album.

The times were a changin’.

Meanwhile, conservative forces were starting to worry that their choke-hold on political power was slipping. They were determined to quell any sense of popular rebellion.

Into this volatile mix strode Clarrie O’Shea – a Melbourne tram conductor, who had been the Secretary of the Victorian Branch of the ATMOEA, the Tramways Union, since 1947.

Clarrie was no shrinking violet. While genial and funny, and a keen punter, he strongly believed that the capitalist system was stacked against working people, and he dedicated his life to upending the injustices he saw around him.

He also believed that workers had an absolute right to strike. So when the courts piled fine upon fine upon fine onto the Tramways Union for taking unauthorised industrial action, he stood firm and refused to pay.

The authorities seized ATMOEA’s bank accounts – but the Union had taken precautions by moving most of its money elsewhere.

Summonsed to the Industrial Court, O’Shea turned up flanked by thousands of workers and unionists.

Before presiding Judge Sir John Kerr (later to become Australia’s most infamous Governor General) he refused to take an oath or to disclose the whereabouts of the union’s remaining funds.

“I do not wish to be sworn,” he said. “I challenge the authority of this court … because I am a paid servant of my members, I am directed to protect their interests at all times.”

“I do not want to hear any speeches from you,” Kerr replied.

After adjourning court for half an hour, Kerr came back to invoke the Industrial Court’s controversial ‘penal powers’, and ordered O’Shea be taken to Pentridge Prison.

He was told he would remain in jail indefinitely – to be freed only when he “purged his contempt”, by revealing where the unions funds had been stashed.

The news spread like wildfire. Thousands of Victorian unionists walked off the job immediately. Workers in other states quickly followed suit – some through organised strikes, many more through wildcat actions.

Soon over one million Australian workers withdrew their labour in protest over the jailing of Clarrie O’Shea, and the use of state power to attack working people.

The situation became untenable for the Federal Government. As the crisis escalated, a mystery ‘philanthropist’ paid ATMOEA’s outstanding fines, breaking the deadlock, and enabling O’Shea to be set free.

Today’s parallels with 1969 are startling.

We now have had conservative rule for 17 of the past 23 years. Across the economy, union density is at historic lows, and the bargaining power of workers has been diminished.

Workers’ wages are barely keeping up with inflation, while jobs are becoming more precarious.

Casualisation of work is rampant, while the much-trumpeted new frontier of the gig economy is little more than a re-badged form of serfdom.

Today, it is commonplace for people to be working two, three or four different jobs just to make ends meet.

The right to strike has been whittled away by successive governments. Last year, striking NSW rail workers – taking legitimate and legal protected industrial action – were forced to go back to work by the Fair Work Commission.

Trade unions have been under relentless attack. The Trade Union Royal Commission spent nearly two years and over $45 million crawling through union records and publicly grilling union officials.

Permanent quasi-judicial bodies such as the Registered Organisations Commission and the ABCC have been established purely to monitor, regulate and disrupt union activities, and to tie union officials in a web of red-tape.

As we have seen through the botched Federal Police raids on the AWU, the close ties between political offices and these bodies has raised serious questions about integrity and the misuse of government power.

That’s why Clarrie O’Shea’s legacy will ring loud this weekend.

The Federal election is our chance to set Australia on a new path.  It’s our chance to take power for the people, to make our scandal-ridden corporate sector accountable, and to restore faith in our public institutions.

This is Australia’s chance, once again, to find its modern, progressive voice.

John Hasted–Alternative Memoirs

John Hasted, who has died aged 81, was a physicist and a musician in 1950s folk clubs. His Communist party allegiance underpinned his involvement in the Workers' Music Association.

He was born in Woodbridge, Suffolk, and educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he read chemistry, and won a choral scholarship. Interested in Marxism, he visited the WMA's London offices and launched the Oxford Workers' And Students' Choir. He served in the army during the second world war and worked with the Telecommunications Research Establishment. 

Back in Oxford, he specialised in dielectric constants. He decided that his politics would hinder his promotion, and in 1948 he became a University College London lecturer, while researching atomic physics. In 1964 his Physics Of Atomic Collisions was published. 

After years with the WMA Singers, the Topic Singers and London Youth Choir, in 1946 he heard the New York-based Almanac Singers on record and, believing folk music to be the sound of the future, arranged cyclostyled tuition in banjo and guitar from Pete Seeger. 

Before folk clubs proliferated, Hasted was providing singarounds at UCL and Cecil Sharp House, London home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society; he cut 78s for Topic records. His Streets Of London (not the later Ralph McTell work), gained currency through the songbook New City Songster (1955). 

By 1956, Hasted had realigned the Ramblers folk group, and the John Hasted Skiffle And Folksong Group emerged from the cellar of 44 Gerrard Street, Soho, soon renamed the 44 Skiffle Club. In the late 1950s came his accompaniments for Dominic Behan's Irish Songs Recalled and Shirley Collins's Sweet England, and False True Lovers. In 1958, he visited the US to meet scientists, and Woody Guthrie. 

His second wife persuaded him to focus on science, and from 1968 until his retirement he was head of experimental physics at Birkbeck. His Aqueous Dielectrics was published in 1973; The Metal Benders (1981) examined Uri Geller's exploits; his autobiography was Alternative Memoirs (1992). 

He had twin daughters from his first marriage to Elizabeth Gregson. His second wife, Lynn, died in 1988; they had one son. 

John Barrett Hasted, physicist and musician, born February 17 192; died May 4 2002

The Bush Music Club–June 1960–BWIU Hall

Railway Voices– Songs and poems of Australian Railway workers

Adelaide Times Tuesday 20 April 1858 p. 3.

Old chap, cried Thomson to Payne,
As the day's remarkably fine,
Let's put ourselves into the train,
For a trip on the Gawler Line.

Now off, grind, grind, we go,
Jiggle and joggle we jump ;
Ten carriages all in a row,
Hooked on to each others rump.

Huzza! for the Gawler train,
Where nothing its speed can rebut,
As it whirls us might and main,
Through gates whether open or shut.

A whistle, a yell, and a snort
As we reach North Adelaide Station,
But we're presently pulled up short,
For truck's in conflagration.

Here, water ! water ! roared Payne,
With a most tremendous shout ;
The engineer's here in the train,
Run, Thompson, and rouse him out.

For water it's useless to bawl,
And the gatekeeper grinned in his face,
For it's very well known to us all
That there is'nt a drop in the place.

So on, whiz, whiz, we passed,
While the sparks continued to spout,
Till we reached the next station at last,
And got the fire put out.

Huzza ! for the Gawler line,
Shouting, screaming, and bawling ;
The management's superfine,
With a burning truck and tarpaulin.

Now again grind, grind, we go,
Jiggle and joggle mid jump,
Ten carriages all in a row,
Hooked on to each others rump !

A whistle, a shriek, and a roar !
And how the stoker cursed ;
While somebody screamed from before,
" By golly ! the boiler's burst."

Payne's head reached the carriage top,
With a sudden thundering rap,
While Thompson pitched with a flop
In an opposite lady's lap.

Poor Payne was assisted out,
They bandaged his head with towels, 
While the lady walked groaning about
She was taken so bad in her bowels.

A weary hour goes by—
Again whiz, rattle, and grunt,
And off goes the Gawler fly
With another machine in front.

Success to this northern line,
And its regular weekly fix ;
If you leave the Station at nine,
You may get to Gawler by six.