The Postcard
A Living Picture Series postcard featuring artwork that was signed 'F/S 1906'.
The card was posted in Eye, Suffolk using a ½d. stamp on Tuesday the 7th. August 1906. It was sent to:
Miss A, Garrett,
120, Denmark Road,
Lowestoft.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"I arrived home safe and
sound but nearly baked.
I got two punctures on the
way home, so had to stop
and mend them.
Lovely, wasn't it?
W."
'The Three Fishers'
"The Three Fishers" is a poem and ballad written in 1851. The original poem was written by English poet, novelist, and Anglican priest Charles Kingsley. It was first set to music by English composer John Hullah shortly thereafter.
Robert Goldbeck also set it to music in a version published in 1878.
Some more recent recordings of the song follow a musical arrangement created by Garnet Rogers in the 1980's, first recorded by his brother Stan on For the Family.
It was also used in Ralph Fiennes's film The Invisible Woman (2013), about Charles Dickens and his mistress Ellen Ternan.
The Unchanging Sea (1910), a short film by D. W. Griffith, was inspired by the "Three Fishers" poem. The first stanza is used in the film itself.
The poem tells the story of three fishermen who sail out to sea, and lose their lives when overtaken by a storm. It describes the tragic loss of the fishermen's lives to their families. Hullah's music is described as a "plaintive air" which enhances Kingsley's poem.
-- The Poem
Three fishers went sailing out into the West,
Out into the West as the sun went down;
Each thought on the woman who lov’d him the best;
And the children stood watching them out of the town;
For men must work, and women must weep,
And there's little to earn, and many to keep,
Though the harbour bar be moaning.
Three wives sat up in the light-house tower,
And they trimm’d the lamps as the sun went down;
They look’d at the squall, and they look’d at the shower,
And the night wrack came rolling up ragged and brown!
But men must work, and women must weep,
Though storms be sudden, and waters deep,
And the harbour bar be moaning.
Three corpses lay out on the shining sands
In the morning gleam as the tide went down,
And the women are weeping and wringing their hands
For those who will never come back to the town;
For men must work, and women must weep,
And the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep—
And good-bye to the bar and its moaning.
-- History of the Poem
When Charles Kingsley was a boy, his father was rector of Clovelly, a small seaside parish on the coast of north Devon. Kingsley was often present when the herring fleet put out to sea, an event often accompanied by a short religious ceremony for which the fishermen, their wives and their families were all present.
Musicologist Derek B. Scott credits Kingsley as one of the founders of the Christian Socialist Movement in the United Kingdom, noting that the line, "Men must work and women must weep," became a catchphrase.
Also according to Scott, the line sung as a refrain after each stanza, "And the harbour bar be moaning," refers to the belief that it was a bad omen if the tide made a moaning sound as it receded over the sand bar that kept the harbour waters still.
The song was quite popular during much of the Victorian era. In 1883, English painter Walter Langley created "For Men Must Work and Women Must Weep", a watercolour painting based on Kingsley's poem.
The song (as arranged by Hullah) was frequently sung by popular vocalists such as Antoinette Sterling and Charlotte Sainton-Dolby, each of whom gave distinctly different interpretations.
Antoinette Sterling once explained:
"Although I had never been to sea in a storm, and
had never even seen fishermen, I somehow
understood that song of ' The Three Fishers' by
instinct.
On reading the poem over for the first time, no one
could know from the opening that the men would
necessarily be drowned. Therefore it was a story.
But there is a natural tendency to anticipate an
unhappy ending; hence it was customary to begin
the song so mournfully that everybody realised from
the very start what the end was going to be.
Madame Sainton-Dolby, for instance, used to sing it
sorrowfully from the first note to the last. I had never
seen or known of anyone who was drowned, but that
mysterious instinct was so strong that I could not
foreshadow the finish.
When, therefore, I started, I always made the first
verse quite bright. I must believe it was the true way,
since both the poet and composer endorsed my
rendering of it."
According to a text by Harold Simpson, when Antoinette Sterling finished performing the song at her London debut:
"There was a tumult of applause; people rose
in their places and cheered, waving hats and
handkerchiefs in their excitement."
-- Recordings
There have been a number of modern recordings of the song since the American folk music revival. At that time it was recorded by Richard Dyer-Bennet for his 1955 album, Dyer-Bennet, Volume 1, and later by Joan Baez for her 1963 album Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2. They each performed a version using Hullah's arrangement.
In the 1980s, Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers recorded a version with a musical arrangement by his brother, Garnet Rogers, for the album, For the Family; it was subsequently re-recorded by Stan's son Nathan on his 2004 album True Stories.
Many more recent recordings closely follow the arrangement by Rogers, such as The Duhks on their Migrations album (2006), and The Once on their self-titled 2010 release, but each giving their own rendering.
-- Joss Ackland
The village museum in Clovelly, where Kingsley was inspired to write the poem, features a life-sized model of Kingsley sitting at a desk writing the poem.
When visitors enter the room, a motion sensor triggers a voice recording of the poem, read by actor and village resident Joss Ackland.
Nelson Goodman
So what else happened on the day that yje card was posted?
Well, the 7th. August 1906 marked the birth in Somerville, Massachusetts, of Nelson Goodman.
Henry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism, and aesthetics.
-- Nelson Goodman - The Early Years
Goodman was the son of Sarah Elizabeth (née Woodbury) and Henry Lewis Goodman. He was of Jewish origins. He graduated from Harvard University, AB, magna cum laude (1928).
During the 1930's, he ran an art gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, while studying for a Harvard PhD in philosophy, which he completed in 1941.
His experience as an art dealer helps explain his later turn towards aesthetics, where he became better known than in logic and analytic philosophy.
During World War II, he served as a psychologist in the US Army.
Nelson Goodman's Academic Career
Goodman taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1946 to 1964, where his students included Noam Chomsky and Hilary Putnam.
He was a research fellow at the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies from 1962 to 1963 and was a professor at Brandeis University from 1964 to 1967, before being appointed Professor of Philosophy at Harvard in 1968.
In 1967, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he was the founding director of Harvard Project Zero, a basic research project in artistic cognition and artistic education. He remained its director for four years and served as an informal adviser for many years thereafter.
Goodman died at the age of 92 in Needham, Massachusetts on the 25th. November 1998.
Nelson Goodman's Philosophical Work
-- Induction and "Grue"
In his book Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, Goodman introduced the "new riddle of induction", so-called by analogy with Hume's classical problem of induction.
He accepted Hume's observation that inductive reasoning (i.e. inferring from past experience about events in the future) was based solely on human habit and regularities to which our day-to-day existence has accustomed us.
Goodman argued, however, that Hume had overlooked the fact that some regularities establish habits (e.g. a given piece of copper conducting electricity increases the credibility of statements asserting that other pieces of copper conduct electricity) while some do not (e.g. the fact that a given man in a room is a third son does not increase the credibility of statements asserting that other men in this room are third sons).
Hempel's confirmation theory argued that the solution is to differentiate between hypotheses, which apply to all things of a certain class, and evidence statements, which apply to only one thing.
Goodman's famous counterargument was to introduce the predicate grue, which applies to all things examined before a certain time 't' just in case they are green, but also to other things just in case they are blue and not examined before time t.
If we examine emeralds before time t and find that emerald a is green, emerald b is green, and so forth, each will confirm the hypothesis that all emeralds are green.
However, emeralds a, b, c,..etc. also confirm the hypothesis that all emeralds are grue. Thus, before time t, the apparently law-like statements "All emeralds are green" and "All emeralds are grue" are equally well confirmed by observation, but obviously "All emeralds are grue" is not a law-like statement.
Goodman's example showed that the difficulty in determining what constitutes law-like statements is far greater than previously thought, and that once again we find ourselves facing the initial dilemma that "anything can confirm anything".
-- Nominalism and Mereology
Goodman, along with Stanislaw Lesniewski, is the founder of the contemporary variant of nominalism, which argues that philosophy, logic, and mathematics should dispense with set theory.
Goodman's nominalism was driven purely by ontological considerations. After a long and difficult 1947 paper co-authored with W. V. O. Quine, Goodman ceased to trouble himself with finding a way to reconstruct mathematics while dispensing with set theory – discredited as sole foundations of mathematics as of 1913 (Russell and Whitehead, in Principia Mathematica).
The program of David Hilbert to reconstruct it from logical axioms was proven futile in 1931 by Gödel. Because of this and other failures of seemingly fruitful lines of research, Quine soon came to believe that such a reconstruction was impossible, but Goodman's Penn colleague Richard Milton Martin argued otherwise, writing a number of papers suggesting ways forward.
According to Thomas Tymoczko's afterword in New directions in the philosophy of mathematics:
"Quine had urged that we abandon ad
hoc devices distinguishing mathematics
from science and just accept the resulting
assimilation, putting the key burden on the
theories (networks of sentences) that we
accept, not on the individual sentences
whose significance can change dramatically
depending on their theoretical context."
In so doing, Tymoczko claimed, the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science were merged into quasi-empiricism: the emphasis of mathematical practice as effectively part of the scientific method, an emphasis on method over result.
The Goodman–Leonard (1940) calculus of individuals is the starting point for the American variant of mereology.
While the exposition in Goodman and Leonard invoked a bit of naive set theory, the variant of the calculus of individuals that grounds Goodman's 1951 The Structure of Appearance, a revision and extension of his PhD thesis, makes no mention of the notion of set (while his PhD thesis still did).
Simons (1987) and Casati and Varzi (1999) show that the calculus of individuals can be grounded in either a bit of set theory, or monadic predicates, schematically employed.
Mereology is accordingly "ontologically neutral" and retains some of Quine's pragmatism (which Tymoczko in 1998 carefully qualified as American Pragmatism).
The USS Washington
Also on that day, the USS Washington was commissioned.
The seventh USS Washington, also referred to as "Armored Cruiser No. 11", and re-named Seattle in 1916, was a United States Navy Tennessee-class armored cruiser.
She was laid down on the 23rd. September 1903 at Camden, New Jersey, by the New York Shipbuilding Corporation, and launched on the 18th. March 1905, sponsored by Miss Helen Stewart Wilson, daughter of United States Senator John L. Wilson of Washington state.
USS Washington was commissioned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on the 7th. August 1906, with Captain James D. Adams in command.
The USS Seattle in the Great War
On the 6th. April 1917, the United States, after attempting to remain neutral despite repeated incidents on the high seas, finally entered the Great War.
Seattle arrived at New York on the 3rd. June 1917 to be fitted out at the New York Navy Yard for war service. She sailed on the 14th. June as an escort for the first American convoy to European waters and as flagship for Rear Admiral Albert Gleaves.
At 22:15 on the 22nd. June, she encountered her first enemy submarines at 48°00′N 25°50′W.
Shortly before the convoy was attacked, Seattle's helm jammed and she sheered out of formation sharply, sounding her whistle to warn the other vessels. A few minutes later, the ship was brought back on course.
Soon lookouts noted a white streak in the water 50 yards (46 m) ahead of the vessel, crossing from starboard to port at right angles to Seattle's course.
Admiral Gleaves, asleep in the charthouse at the time, was awakened and was on the bridge in time to see the armored cruiser's gun crews manning their weapons and the transport De Kalb opening fire on the U-boat.
Subsequently, the destroyer Wilkes attacked an enemy submersible, but failed to sink the German submarine.
Later information indicated that the enemy, probably aware of the approach of the first American expeditionary forces, had dispatched a pair of submarines to lie in wait for it.
The attack, conducted under "ideal" conditions, was, fortunately for the Americans, unsuccessful. Admiral Gleaves, in his report to the Commander in Chief, Atlantic Fleet, on the 12th. July, reported:
"The enemy's failure to score hits
was probably due to the fortuitous
circumstances of the Seattle's helm
jamming and the sounding of her
whistle, leading the enemy to
suppose he had been discovered."
Seattle operated on comparatively uneventful escort duties for the remainder of the Great War, completing her ninth round-trip voyage at New York on the 27th. October 1918.
USS Washington Statistics
-- Ordered1st. July 1902
-- BuilderNew York Shipbuilding Corporation, Camden, New Jersey
--- Cost $4,035,000 (contract price of hull and machinery)
-- Laid down23rd. September 1903
-- Launched18th. March 1905
-- Sponsored byMiss Helen Stewart Wilson
-- Commissioned7th. August 1906
-- RenamedSeattle, 9th. November 1916
-- Decommissioned28th. June 1946
-- Stricken19th. July 1946
-- Fate Sold for scrap 3rd. December 1946
-- Displacement 15,712 long tons (full load)
-- Length 504 ft 5 in (153.75 m)
-- Beam 72 ft 10½ in (22.212 m)
-- Draft 25 ft (7.6 m) (mean)
-- Installed power 16 × Babcock & Wilcox boilers
23,000 ihp (17,000 kW)
-- Propulsion 2 × vertical triple expansion reciprocating engines, 2 × screws
-- Speed 22 knots (41 km/h; 25 mph)
-- Complement83 officers 804 enlisted 64 Marines
-- Armament 4 × 10 in (250 mm)/40 caliber Mark 3 breech-loading rifles (2x2)
16 × 6 in (150 mm)/50 caliber Mark 8 breech-loading rifles
22 × 3 in (76 mm)/50 caliber rapid-fire guns
4 × 3-pounder (47 mm (1.9 in)) Driggs-Schroeder saluting guns
4 × 21 inch (533 mm) submerged torpedo tubes.
