A Somerset Lad

The man and his wife and three children came up to the top deck of the bus. Bound for the beach, they carried bags with beachwear, towels and a picnic.

Emaciated, and shaky, the man had taken a day off from the fish and chip shop in which he worked. This was to be a day of which he would make the most.

He sat behind me, noticed a blue scarf and asked where I was bound. I told him and we chatted about sport. Then he asked me what I did, I told him and we began a discussion.

He said he loved history and had been watching a documentary on Franz Ferdinand. It prompted me to refresh my own recollections.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand was heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, an empire that included much of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. On 28th June 1914, his visit to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, one of the countries in the empire, aroused hostility among those in Bosnia who sought independence.

Nedeljko Čabrinović, one of the Bosnian nationalists, threw a grenade at the archduke’s car. Čabrinović’s act of terrorism failed; the grenade exploded behind the car carrying Franz Ferdinand and injured the occupants of the vehicle following them.

Franz Ferdinand was enraged. Going to the residence of the imperial governer, the archduke protested, “So this is how you welcome your guests – with bombs!”

It was not as though political assassinations had not happened before and not as though the imperial administrators were not aware of tensions in the city. As the man on the bus pointed out to me, an elementary understanding of security would have told them that Franz Ferdinad should not travel further that day, and, when he did move, should only do so under strict security. Instead, astonishingly, he and his wife were allowed to leave the residence in an open car, to visit the hospital to which those wounded by the grenade attack had been taken.

Even the foolish decision to travel the streets need not have been fatal, had the drivers taken the correct route, there would not have been a problem.

No-one had thought to tell the driver of a car, that had been subject to a bomb attack that same morning, that  the route had changed. The drivers of the vehicles had to turn around, which need not have given an opportunity for further attack, were it not for the fact that one of the cars stalled, bringing the whole line to a halt.

A competent administration would have ensured the archduke’s car was immediately surrounded by policemen or soldiers, but Franz Ferdinand was left unprotected.

Gavrilo Princip, another Bosnian nationalist was sat at a cafe and saw what had happened. He walked across the street and took out a low-powered pistol, at which point one might have expected him to have been brought down by gunfire from those charged with the archduke’s protection.

Princip did not even shoot Franz Ferdinand first; he shot the duchess Sophie in the abdomen before shooting the imperial heir in the neck. The archduke died at the scene, the duchess on the way to the hospital.

The incompetence of the imperial authorities contributed much to the conversation on the bus.

It is the season of school outings.

Yesterday morning, a teacher leading an overnight hike came to talk to each class taking part urging them to remember where they were going and to wear clothes appropriate for hill walking – and to please bring soap and deodorant.

It seems that the tendency to see school outings as an occasion to wear best clothes and footwear which are then spoilt as students participate in activities. The teacher seemed mystified that anyone would wear good clothes on an outing.

A jumble of memories from the past surfaced.

There was a memory of a Sunday School outing to Portrush on the coast of Northern Ireland in the early-1990s.

Dressed in a cable-knit sweater, cotton trousers and canvas shoes, I remember getting on the bus and feeling underdressed when compared to some of the men of the parish who had come in their dark Sunday suits (and who sat on the beach still wearing jackets and ties).

The outing might have been one of the few days in the course of the year when they got away from their farms: it seemed they felt it was an occasion for which they wanted to look their best.

There was a memory of a school outing from our Somerset village of High Ham to London. It was the week that Arsenal achieved the double, so must have been 1971.

I remember having a pale yellow T-shirt and cream-coloured shorts and thinking the shirt was not so different in colour from the yellow in which Arsenal had played in the FA Cup Final. A trip to London was a rare occurrence in the life of a ten year old boy from deep in rural England: it was obviously an occasion in which everyone tried to look their best.

The most unlikely memory to arise was that of a talk in 1998 on James Orr, who was a poet from Bsllycarry in Co Antrim who had participated in the United Irish Rebellion of 1798.

Marking the bicentenary of the Battle of Antrim, the talk noted that those setting off to fight in the United Irish cause had put on their best coats and clothes. they must have regarded a battle as the sort of occasion to look one’s best.

Compared with dressing up for the bloody slaughter of 1798, the idea of dressing up to get wet and muddy while walking hills seems almost sensible.