Getting by on Bondi Beach

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I was at a talk this morning on Australian labour practices. As my day job involves employment law, this was not as random as might seem. The speaker was rattling through some of the key differences between UK and Australian employment law and noted that the minimum wage in Australia was AU$15.51 per hour. In the UK the national minimum wage rate currently stands at £6.08 per hour.

This disparity helped me to understand why buying a small round of four beers in Perth last year had not given much change from a twenty dollar bill. At the very least, it helped explain how Aussies could afford to live in what seemed like an eye-wateringly expensive country.

I’ve been to some other painfully pricey places – Tromsø in the Norwegian Arctic, Iceland (before the crash) and Dublin (both before and after the crash) – but Australia was in a different league. It could make a grown man cry as his wallet dissolved into a pile of worthless shrapnel. The only way to cope was to shrug, suspend reality and credit limits and not think about the credit card bill.

All of this got me wondering how minimum wage levels compared around the world. On a simple back of fag packet calculation, Australia seemed to be the highest. But this did not take into account purchasing power parity (PPP).

Factoring in PPP lets you compare currencies and minimum wages by basing it on the equivalent purchasing power of a dollar (actually an ‘international dollar’, but I’ll leave that level of complexity to the economists).

After crunching the numbers through the IMF’s comparison table, it seems that Australia still tops the charts, but only by a couple of cents. A raft of European countries have relatively high minimum wage rates.

Minimum wage by country (per hour in 2012 US$)

Australia – $10.07 (AU$15.51)

Brazil $2.84 (R$4.78 reais)

Canada (Ontario) – $8.29 (CA$10.25)

China (Shanghai) – $1.99 (¥7.877)

France – $8.58 (€9.22)

Hungary – $3.85 (Ft93,000)

Luxemburg – $10.06 (€10.68)

Russia – $1.08 (руб27.24)

Spain – $5.90 (€4.55)

UK – $8.92 (£6.08)

USA – $7.25 (US$7.25)

Note: if a weekly or monthly minimum wage is prescribed, a per hour rate has been calculated based on a 39-hour week.

Digging the freeminers

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During the industrial revolution landowners throughout Britain became rich on the proceeds of mineral deposits found deep beneath their estates. Coal was the ‘black diamond’, yielding a carbon-crusted fortune to families such as the Fitzwilliams of Wentworth or the Pembertons of Trumpington Hall.

The primacy of the land-owning families was nearly universal. The only major exception to aristocratic domination was found in the thoroughly egalitarian freeminers of the Forest of Dean.

Any male born within the Hundred of St Briavels (roughly the area of the Forest of Dean and some of its surrounding parishes), who is over 21 years old and who has worked for a year and a day in a coal or iron mine within the Hundred is considered a Freeminer. This was an ancient privilege given legislative certainty in the Dean Forest (Mines) Act 1838.

Freeminers are entitled to mine personal plots called ‘gales’, with a register of their entitlements kept by the Deputy Gaveller, a Crown officer responsible for administering free mining customs.

Why were Freeminers given such valuable rights in perpetuity? Legend recalls that the area’s miners were instrumental in constructing the earthworks and tunnels needed to capture the key town of Berwick-upon-Tweed under Edward I (see my earlier post on this vital border position) and were rewarded by a grateful king.

Other stories suggest it was their services in the Hundred Years’ War that resulted in Henry V granting the privileges. Or was did this later service merely result in the king reconfirming existing privileges?

The historical truth has been lost, along with the original deeds and charters. What remains is a patchwork of stories, copied texts and legend stitched together in statute. Michael Portillo visited one of the last surviving mines in the latest series of BBC 2′sGreat British Railway Journeys (Oxford to Milford Haven).

According to the Forest of Dean’s Iron Mining Museum, there are approximately 150 Free Miners living today and only a handful of small collieries still operate. In addition, an iron mine (Clearwell Caves) and five small stone quarries still operate within the Hundred of St Briavels.

Revenge in the rose garden

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The American Civil War is one of history’s most horrifying and bloodiest conflicts of all time. This mid-nineteenth century spasm of fratricidal butchery ranks as the most savage war to have ever blighted the American continent. The anger and obstinacy of a civil war found a distinctly uncivil outlet in mechanised, industrial fighting.

Although the fighting was particularly fierce and bitter, the post-conflict peace held. Reconciliation, rehabilitation and magnanimity were, for the most part, the order of the day. This applied equally to pardoned soliders, vanquished commanders and defeated Confederate politicians as the United States tried to heal its deep and rancorous wounds.

President Jefferson Davis was charged with treason and imprisoned, but released after two years. Vice-President Stephens was only imprisoned for five months and would later serve in Washington D.C. as a Congressman.

This forgiving approach was not, however, universally popular or always applied. One piece of personal revenge, individually targeted and vindictive, was the seizure of the wife of General Robert E. Lee’s Virginian property, the Custis-Lee Estate.

During the war, the Quartermaster of the Union, General Montgomery C. Meigs, was charged with finding a solution to overcrowded federal burial sites. General Meigs was a southerner who had served under General Lee. He firmly believed Lee had committed treason and held him personally responsible for much of the national calamity.

He therefore ordered that the Custis-Lee Estate in Arlington be seized for use as a burial ground. Demonstrating his personal animosity he ordered thousands of burialson the site of Mrs Lee’s prized rose garden. His intention was to render the estate uninhabitable should peace ever see the return of the Lees to Arlington.

In the BBC’s The American Future: A History, Simon Schama notes that Meigs’s righteous vengeance increased when his own son was killed. First Lieutenant John Rodgers Meigs was also buried in what would become Arlington National Cemetery with his tomb a deeply personal memorial and manifestation of his father’s grief.

Back and forth in Berwick

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Berwick is a small town on the Northumbrian coast occupying the northern shore of the River Tweed. Today it lies 2.5 miles south of the Scottish border and is a peaceful tourist town and local administrative and service centre.

This peaceful existence belies its turbulent past as the epicentre of Anglo-Scottish struggles. Wars, sieges, conquest and raids were Berwick’s lot for centuries. It is estimated that the town changed hands 13 times up to 1482 when it finally reverted to English control.

And, whilst it might have been under English control, it was not technically a part of England until the Reform Act of 1885 specified its inclusion. Until then, it was either mentioned specifically in legislation (as Great Britain, Ireland and Berwick Upon Tweed) or deemed to be included in England under the Wales and Berwick Act 1746.

A wonderful apocryphal story emerged that, as a result of these constitutional quirks, Berwick is still at war with Russia. The story suggests that Britain went to war in the name of Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Ireland, Berwick-upon-Tweed and all British Dominions. The Treaty of Paris in 1856 ended the war, but made no mention of Berwick. This officially resulted in Berwick (population 11,000) being pitted against the Russian Empire and subsequently the USSR.

Unfortunately, and like so many of the best historical ‘facts’, this is not true. It was so famous a story that it was investigated by the BBC’s Nationwide programme, and they found that Berwick was not mentioned on either the declaration of war or the peace treaty, and that the Wales and Berwick Act 1746 ensured any reference to England included Berwick.

Why is there a ‘b’ in subtle?

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Why is there a ‘b’ in subtle? And, for that matter, why is there a ‘b’ in debt, doubt orplumber? The letter ‘b’ is not the only seemingly redundant silent letter in English – why is there a ‘p’ in receipt, a ‘c’ in indict or a ‘s’ in isle or aisle.

A sensible guess might suggest that the pronunciation has shifted over the years, leaving the silent letter exposed like a rocky outcrop revealed by a receding tide. Or perhaps it reflects the etymological origins of the word and was retained regardless of its later redundancy.

Few would guess that the redundant and silent letters were later additions, or that their insertion was as a result of intellectual snobbery on the part of middle age and Renaissance scholars.

All of the words listed above entered English from Old French. I will use the example of debt, but the derivation for the others is set out at the end of the post. Debt comes to English from the Old French dette or dete. In both Old French and Middle English, the word had no letter ‘b’ and is completely absent from the pronunciation in both languages.

So where did it come from? Scholars from the middle ages and into the Renaissance started to fully immerse themselves in classical texts and languages. They worked out the ultimate Latin roots of many words, and wanted the Latin original to be made obvious in their ‘modern’ spellings.

Thus the Latin debitum (think of debit) gave its ‘b’ to debt. This happened in both English and French, but Modern French purged itself of redundant letters. The English language, lacking so effective an exfoliant as the Académie française, never lost these letters. As a result they remain, petrified remnants demonstrating the strange and twisting history of language development.

All word references from the Oxford English Dictionary, third edition (September 2006); online version (December 2011).

As a postscript to the above, plumber arrives from the Latin root plumbum, meaning lead. A plumbārius in classical Latin is a worker in lead, and Roman pipes were invariably fashioned from lead. Nowadays, regardless of whether the pipes are lead, iron, copper or plastic, they are all attended to by plumbers.

Run for your life

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You are being chased through a thick pursued by horrific creatures – half man and half goat. Your heart is racing as you run, stumbling over roots and bushes, thorns ripping at your clothes and branches whipping at your face and hands.

Behind you, the forest echoes with the blood curdling yelps and cries of the pursuing host. They are faster than you, more nimble in the forest, darting through the trees until they surround you. You fall, collapsing in blind panic as the unearthly beings close in.

And so, in slightly roundabout way, we get to the etymological origin for the word ‘panic’. In modern English, panic has come to mean a feeling of sudden terror, a wild and unreasoning state of fear. The ancient Greeks had a far more specific meaning for the word – it started life as a description of the terror induced by the god Pan.

The god Pan was the Greek god of wild places, nature, deep and dense forests, inaccessible mountain passes and valleys. He was thought to frequent wild hilltops, deserted caves and remote, lonely places. The terror inducing sounds and echoes that fired already nervous minds and the fears experienced in such places came to be attributed directly to the patron god.

Over time, Pan was forgotten along with the rest of the ancient pantheon. Although he was replaced with new gods, his terrifying legacy would live on in the word panic.

This is one of the many splendid nuggets I came across reading the rather wonderfulEtymologicon, by Mark Forsyth (of the Inky Fool blog).

Keeping count of the Karls

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I am making my unintentional continuation of the royal theme on this blog a tribute to the 60^th anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne. A less regally-focused service will resume tomorrow!

Call them traditional or unimaginative, but royal dynasties enjoy using their favourite names – think of all the French kings called Louis (18), Edwards in England (8) and Alfonsos in Spain (13).

This would cause terrible confusion for historians if it wasn’t for the system of ordinal(or regnal) numbers. These are the numbers that are placed after a monarch’s regnal name at a stroke distinguishing them from their identically named predecessors and descendants.

The system should be straightforward and self explanatory – for example George V was the fifth King of England called George. So Karl IX of Sweden, son of King Gustav I, was the ninth King of Sweden called Karl, right? And his brother, Eric XIV, was obviously the 14^th King of Sweden called Eric.

Unfortunately not. Both monarchs were influenced by Johannes Magnus’s ‘Historia de omnibus gothorum sueonumque regibus’ (History of all Kings of Goths and Swedes). Johannes catalogued the Swedish monarchy from the dawn of time but drew heavily on his own fertile imagination to fashion ‘facts’ from the murky and undocumented past.

In setting down his categorical collection of rulers, he invented at least six Erics and six Karls. His work was so influential that King Gustav’s sons both styled themselves with ordinal numbers far higher than the real number of predecessors sharing their regnal name.

      

As a result Karl IX was probably the fourth Karl to occupy the throne of Sweden, whilst only eight or so Erics preceded Eric XIV’s reign.