pumpkinstrokemarrow

That all being as it may, it seems that in the bad old days shipowners were keen to turn a crust and to that end were apt to skimp on maintenance and to overdo the loading. This way they could keep rates down and profits up. And just to be on the safe side they usually insured the ship, sometimes for rather more than it was worth. On the other hand, you didn't insure the seamen and you didn't pay pensions to their widows. But you could have them chucked in jail if they declined to sail after they had signed up, skimping and overdoing notwithstanding. The result of this mix was that there were a lot of unscrupulous shipowners and a lot more avoidable deaths.

Then along comes Samuel Plimsoll, a man who needed a cause. He stamped up and down the country and stamped up and down the House of Commons. He raised a great stink and held huge meetings, this at a time when there was little other entertainment. Songs about him and his cause were performed in music halls. He was intemperate, often careless with his facts & figures and generally he was a bit of a pain. But despite all this, and the goodness of his cause, it took some twenty years to get the Plimsoll mark that we, and more or less everybody else, now have. There is a monument in his honour on the embankment, paid for by grateful seamen.

It seems quite possible that a smoother operator, someone who operated in the corridors of power rather than on the streets, could have achieved the same result rather faster. But no such smooth operator appeared until the end. And would a smooth operator have had the passion to get the thing on the road?

Useful to be reminded that there was a time when health and safety had not been invented and some capitalists really were evil. And that one of consequences of our sort of indirect democracy is that the powers that be don't always do what the people want; which is perhaps just as well in the case of capital punishment but not so well in some other cases one can think of.

So, a few days ago, we thought to go and pay our respects to this monument, said to be in the Victoria Embankment Gardens - but without taking care to find out exactly where in the Gardens. I had not thought that they were very big. So exit at Waterloo Station and across Waterloo Bridge to open proceedings in the courtyard of Somerset House. Cleared of cars and with a new fountain, it was very handsome. We admired the window I used to sit behind near forty years previously. We admired the animal heads of the Chinese Zodiac. Not bad, but the artist had not thought through how to mount the things and it rather looked as if someone had chopped the heads off twelve large animals and stuck them up on poles.

We then searched the gardens between Waterloo Bridge and Hungerford Bridge for the monument, to no avail. Settled for lunch in the outdoor café near the bandstand. Pleasant sort of place with pleasant staff who sold us a couple of Spanish omelettes: we should have known better. When they turned up they were perfectly ordinary omelettes with a filling of cold chips and some salad. Quite eatable but not quite what we had in mind.

We then resumed the search, extending it east as far as No. 2 Temple Place, a place without any signage to tell you what it was or did - but it does sport a web site (http://www.twotempleplace.co.uk/index.html. Seemingly the home of a trust set up by a very discrete private banker. So discrete that I had never heard of him and certainly can't afford his services). We also found an interesting water gate to a long gone palace and sundry monuments but nothing plimsoulian. We wondered whether he was hiding in the eastern fragment of the Gardens which had been shut for maintenance.

Back to Somerset House where we decided to call time on Plimsoll and settled instead for the Courtauld Institute, a place we first visited when it lived quietly in Bloomsbury. All a bit of a mess - the building which was far too grand for civil servants not being cut out to be an art gallery - but we had forgotten what a splendid collection of pictures they have. To the point where there was stuff after Cézanne which I rather liked. Even some expressionists. There was also a Cézanne, a view of the lake at Annecy with large tree to the left, which we managed to confuse with a reproduction which has been hanging in our hall for years and years. Humbling to find out how carelessly one uses the things on one's walls.

Closed with tea with the model ships in the south lobby and return home to find that the monument was in the southern portion of the gardens which I had rather forgotten about, despite, many years ago, having slept in them one night. We will catch Plimsoll another time.