We can no longer rely on our American Cousins
I only salvaged a few objects from my late dad’s home when it was cleared. But these included two that could be said to bookend his era of British history. The first was a barometer, presented to a Harrington ancestor “by his colleagues at HM Customs Harwich” in 1903. The second was a 1969 edition of the collected political speeches of Enoch Powell.
The barometer stands for Britain’s seafaring heyday, at which time most vessels would have carried one. Even for a bureaucrat such as my forebear, documenting the fruits of that seaborne trade in the Customs House in Harwich, this object would have been richly symbolic of the peculiar mix of risk-taking and scientific pedantry that characterised our island’s maritime tradition.
