Yew: the graveyard plant that is now saving lives

In the mid-1990s I spent a month doing research at Aberdeen University. During the week I sat transcribing letters in the library. On the weekends, I explored the coast and countryside in a borrowed van. One warm(ish) day in June, I visited Crathes Castle near Banchory. The castle dates from the 16th century, but what I mostly remember from my visit was the gardens, particularly the tall yew hedges that walled in the different spaces. Yew grows to a great age, and these hedges, well over 9 feet tall, date from the beginning of the 18th century.

Yew hedges at Crathes Castle, near Banchory. Photographer Darren Foreman, from Wikimedia Commons

The day I was there, a gardener was trimming the hedges. Balanced on a ladder, a good 8 to 9 feet above me, he was carefully saving all the clippings in a plastic garbage bag. The work looked precarious, and I asked him why he was taking so much trouble to save the trimmings. He told me they were parcelled up and sent to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where scientists were working on a cure for cancer.

Yew has long been grown as a hedge, or as specimen trees, for it is not just decorative but useful. English longbows were made of yew, and at one time all villages were expected to grow yew trees so that wood was available to make bows in time of war.

But yew is also poisonous. People probably first realised yew was a poison because animals grazing near the trees could die – especially horses, which have a particularly low tolerance, but also other domestic animals, including dogs. Even sleeping in the shade of a yew was considered dangerous. The solution was to grow yew trees in churchyards (or castle gardens) where the plants couldn’t endanger straying livestock.

Yew trees have long been associated with graveyards; Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard mentions the ‘yew-tree’s shade’, and Tennyson, in In Memoriam, refers to

Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
That name the under-lying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.

This link with churches and religious sites generally is very old, predating Christianity. Both Celtic and Norse religion mentions the yew. Its poison made it powerful.

According to the Renaissance scholar Paracelsus,

All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.

This is certainly the case with yew. The Islamic physician Avicenna knew it as a poison, but also recommended it as a cardiac drug, and mentioned it in his Canon of Medicine (1021).

It is also true in chemotherapy. The aim of chemo is to kill fast-growing cells with poison. These include cancer cells but not only cancer cells, for other fast-growing cells – hair, fingernails, blood and mucus – are also poisoned. The body takes a terrible battering, and it is only the dose that distinguishes the drug from the poison.

In the 1960s, scientists at the National Cancer Institute in America began to experiment with yew as a potential chemotherapy drug. Using bark from the Pacific Yew (Taxus brevifolia) they isolated a cytotoxic substance which they called Taxol. They began experimenting on mice in the 1970s, and began clinical trials of humans in 1982.

Taxol looked promising as a cancer drug – but it took a great deal of bark to extract it, and stripping the bark kills the trees. By the 1980s, the National Cancer Institute estimated that to produce enough Taxol to treat all melanomas and ovarian cancers in the US, 360,000 trees a year would need to be harvested.

It is hard to argue against the production of an effective cancer drug – but for a while it looked as if the Pacific yew would be driven to extinction. Yew is long-lived, but grows slowly, and the forests of the Pacific Northwest looked in danger. (This would not be the first time that a medical breakthrough leads to over-harvesting. Quinine is made from the bark of a Peruvian tree, cinchona, which was nearly lost to over-harvesting until plantations were introduced in the 19^th century.)

At the same time in Europe, work was going on using the European Yew (Taxus baccata). The clippings from Crathes Castle’s yew hedges, along with many other ancient and modern yew trees, went into producing another taxol-like drug, Doxetaxol, which is made from twigs and leaves, not bark, so doesn’t kill the tree. Meanwhile in America, Taxol is increasingly made from cultivated yew rather than wild forests – though also from another wild yew, the Canadian yew (Taxus canadiensis). We are not quite out of the woods yet.

Those people who have read my blog in the past may know that I was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. I mentioned my operation here, and warned that I might not be able to update the blog regularly while I had cancer treatment. I’ve finally finished that treatment now, which included 3 cycles of Doxetaxol.

I can vouch for the fact that yew is a poison. At times while on Doxetaxol, everything ached, even the fillings in my teeth! But if the treatment has worked – and my chances are good – I owe a lot to that gardener at Crathes Castle, carefully collecting twigs and leaves while teetering on a ladder 9 feet above the ground. I owe a lot to the scientists too, of course, but it is easy to forget the many anonymous volunteers who have helped too, because ‘finding a cure for cancer’ is something we all hope for.

Anyway, I’m back at last – and I hope to be able to blog regularly once more. Thanks to all those who have sent me good wishes during the last few months.

Update: A friend who grew up in Britain sent me the following response -

‘It made me think of all the children’s stories I have read over the years of the Yew tree people. People didn’t build houses next to Yew trees because the sprites of the tees could turn into real people and interfere in their lives. They were not generally for the good. But if a baby cried they would rock the cradle. If they thought a baby was neglected they would spirit it away. Marion’s blog fits in with the folk tales very well. Poisonous – so keep away. But when the need arises they pop out and do humans good deeds. Folk tales send out messages.’

Which made me think – even more creepily – that the current investigation in the UK into pedophilia, following the disclosures about the late jimmy Savile, is called ‘Operation Yewtree’. Does anyone know why?

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 62,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

After the Eureka Stockade

158 years ago today, Victorian soldiers and police gathered 4:30am at the Mining Exchange in Ballarat, before creeping quietly out of town towards one of the rich gold seams around the town, appropriately named Eureka by its original discoverer.

At Eureka, a group of disaffected miners had built a wooden palisade, the Eureka Stockade.  There were many causes of their disaffection.  Most of them were newish immigrants, and they had brought with them political causes from their homelands.  The Year of Revolutions, 1848, saw rebellions through most of Europe, and when reaction set in, many of these rebels fled.  The gold fields in California (1848) and Victoria (1851) gave the possibility of a new life to unsuccessful revolutionaries from Ireland, Germany and Italy, as well as Chartists from England, where revolution had only just been avoided.

So there was a political dimension to the Eureka story: a month earlier, the diggers had formed the Ballarat Reform League, and produced a list of political reforms they wanted – including annual elections and manhood suffrage – that were largely based on the People’s Charter in England.

There were also more local issues, in particular resentment against a regressive tax on mining claims that was collected indiscriminately by a police force widely suspect of corruption (this was Victoria, after all) and the suspicious death of the owner of a popular hotel.

The Ballarat Reform League commissioned a new flag based on the Southern Cross, and swore and oath ‘under the Southern Cross’ to stay together until their objectives were achieved.

Swearing Allegiance to the southern cross, by Charles Doudiet, 1 December 1854

But on that Sunday morning, most of these brave rebels had headed home for the weekend.  They weren’t expecting trouble – and in fact, for rebels, they were remarkably peaceable.  I’ve always wondered about the logic behind hunkering down behind a defensive wooded palisade, with a flagpole defiantly flying their rebel flag, waiting for the authorities to respond.  (Was their strategy based, I wonder, on the Maori pa, another more sophisticated form of wooden stockade?  Symbolic Maori opposition to British authority often began with a contest of a flagpole, too – the First Maori War began when Hone Heke cut down a flagstaff, and British flag, at Kororareka [now Russell] in the Bay of Islands.)

The soldiers attacked at sunrise, and the affair was short but bloody.  Numbers vary, but roughly 22 diggers, and 6 soldiers and police died at the scene, and other diggers probably died later.  Others were seriously injured: Peter Lalor, an Irishman who was one of the leaders, lost an arm.  This later became a valuable attribute when he was elected to the Victoria Legislative Assembly.

It was all over bar the shouting in a couple of hours – but the legacy of Eureka lives on, and has became something of a Rorschach test for pundits.

In the Sydney Morning Herald, we have Peter Fitzsimons, Australian republican, with a new book to flog, urging us to introduce a new flag based on the Eureka flag.  Meanwhile the Liberal Senator Arthur Sinodinos released a statement praising ‘the brave Diggers who stood up against the Victorian government for their rights as small business entrepreneurs and miners.’

There is some validity to this argument that Eureka was a tax revolt by small businessmen and miners (the two categories were not then incompatible), but this wasn’t how Karl Marx saw it.  He only mentions Australia once in his writings, and the reference is to the Eureka rebellion, which he described in 1855 as ‘an economic crisis, with the ruling British monopolies trying to shift the burden on to the working people.’

Over the years, the Eureka rebellion has been a troubled legacy, claimed by both left and right.  The Eureka flag was used during World War II by the Fascist Australia First Party, and equally claimed by the left wing Builders Labourers Federation.  You can still occasionally see a Eureka flag flying at building sites.

In 1954, the centenary of Eureka became a problem for Prime Minister Menzies’ conservative government.  It was the middle of the Cold War.  In America, the Macarthy period was in full swing, and in Australia, Menzies had recently tried to outlaw the Communist Party of Australia.  Thwarted by the High Court, he took the issue to a referendum, which failed by a small margin, showing a deeply divided nation.

How then should the nation acknowledge (celebrate is perhaps too strong a word) this iconic moment in Australian history?

The standard – and cheapest – way to do so was the release a centenary stamp.  Anniversaries great and small were regularly marked by the Post Office, but in this case, apparently under Commonwealth Government pressure, no stamp recognizing the Eureka anniversary was released.  In fact there were no official celebrations at all – the issue was just too hot to handle.  (Geoffrey Blainey mentions a small celebration in Melbourne – but only Communists turned up.)

Historians took a different view.  At the University of Melbourne, the journal Historical Studies (now Australian Historical Studies) published a special issue, the Historical Studies Eureka Supplement (1954, and republished 1965).

Eureka stamp for the 150th anniversary in 2004

And 25 years later, under the coalition government of Malcolm Fraser, the Post Office released a Eureka stamp to mark the 125^th anniversary of the event.  There have since been a stamp marking the 150^th  anniversary as well.  Better late than never.

The Feathered Internet

It’s such a great story.  An English man was recently renovating his home, and when he cleaned out his disused fireplace, he found pigeon bones in the chimney.  This was not just any pigeon, but a pigeon On His Majesty’s Secret Service.  Attached to a leg was a capsule holding an encrypted message, sent during World War II.

Seventy years ago, this pigeon was released by Sergeant W. Stott, probably somewhere in France.  It flew across the English Channel, and made it as far as Bletchingley, Surrey, before it paused to rest on a chimney – and toppled in, perhaps overcome by smoke.  It could have been heading to General Montgomery’s headquarters nearby in Reigate, or to the code breakers at Bletchley Park, though that is much further away, north of London in Buckinghamshire.

Wherever this pigeon was headed, its message was special, because unlike most messages carried by pigeons during the war, this one was in code – one that may never be decoded if it was based on a one-off key, according to Britain’s GCHQ code-breaking unit.

Pigeon bone with capsule

This story is a reminder of what an important role carrier pigeons have played in communications, even in the 20^th century.  Some quarter of a million pigeons were deployed during World War II.  Each aeroplane flying into occupied Europe carried 2 pigeons, to be released if the plane crashed.  The Dickin Medal, honouring animals that serve in war, has been awarded to a number of pigeons, including William of Orange, who brought back the first information about the failure of the Battle of Arnhem in 1944, and is credited with saving 2000 lives.

And yet we still don’t even know for sure how pigeons navigate!

Pigeons have played an important role in human history for millennia.  The dove that Noah sent out after the Flood was a close relative.  In fact the nomenclature of pigeon and dove overlap: the Germans call feral pigeons ‘street doves’; the French pigeonnier is equivalent to the English dovecot.

Carrier pigeons are line-bred members of the same species as the ‘rats with wings’ that infest our cities.  They are descendants of the rock pigeon, Columba livia.  Once they roosted on rocky outcrops, and their distribution was limited by the need to find suitable habitats, but pigeons, like other feral species, have learned to live with people.  Like all domesticated animals, this is something of a devil’s compact, from the pigeon’s point of view: free bed and board in return for the occasional cull.  In return for providing nesting places – pigeonholes – humans have used pigeons for food, for fertilizer and for communication.

Halfway between Rome and Florence is Orvieto, an ancient town perched on an outcrop of tufa, or volcanic ash.  Orvieto has been inhabited since the time of the Etruscans, who began the practice to digging passageways, enclosures and wells out of the tufa below the city.  They also dug out holes in these walls, and channels for rain water, to encourage pigeons to roost there with all mod cons.

Orvieto’s pigeon holes

The pigeons fly down from Orvieto to gorge on the fields below and then fly home to roost.  During a siege, they provided a reliable food supply for Orvieto’s residents – and pigeon dishes are still a specialty.

As well as food, pigeons were also important for their droppings – guano in all its forms was one of the most important nitrogenous fertilizers before the chemical industry took off in the late 19^th century.  Dovecots served a similar purpose to Orvieto’s pigeon-holes – a safe roost for pigeons to nest and to be harvested for food – but their conical shape also made them ideal for harvesting droppings.

So far, so bucolic.  But beyond food and fertilizer, carrier pigeons played a crucial role in communications, right through – as we have seen – to the 1940s.

Carrier pigeons were a necessary part of business, politics and war.  In 1815, the first news of the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo reached England on a carrier pigeon.  During the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, Parisians used pigeons to send information from within the besieged city – and the Germans used hawks to try to stop them.

The importance of pigeons in business, though, was brought home to me most profoundly years ago when I visited the Palais Jacques Coeur in the French city of Bourges.

Jacques Coeur was a 15^th century merchant from Bourges who traded with the Levant.  In 1436 the French king made him master of the mint.  Over the next decade or so, his influence at the French court increased: he lent money to Charles VII, and acted as his treasurer.  Meanwhile his businesses expanded geographically, until he had managers and contacts throughout France and across the Mediterranean.  This network of contacts relied on carrier pigeons.  His magnificent townhouse, the Palais Jacques Coeur, survives to the present day, and its top floor is a vast pigeon loft, where Coeur could keep tabs on all the information coming in.

Jacques Coeur’s pigeon loft

Communication by pigeon is one way only.  People carry pigeons with them, and when they need to send information, they release the birds to fly home to their nests, where food and their mate are waiting.  This asymmetry of information gave someone like Jacques Coeur, at the centre of a vast network of traders, sailors, politicians and spies, great power – though such power was dangerous, and eventually he lost everything when he was arrested on a trumped up charge of poisoning the king’s mistress, Agnes Sorel.

Meanwhile, I hope that someone can decode the message found in the Surrey chimney, though whatever it says is now only a matter of curiosity.  The message is 143 characters long – just too long for Twitter.  But pigeons don’t tweet, do they?  They coo.

This time last year:
Sea Dragons, 17 November 2011
The President and the Barmaid, 21 November 2011
Was this the real Stephen Maturin? 25 November 2011
Clothes and the stories they tell, 1 December 2011

…neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned…

Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor who won a US Senate seat in Massachusetts, is an expert on bankruptcy.  Responding to Governor Romney’s statement that ‘Corporations are people’, she replied:

No…corporations are not people.  People have hearts.  They have kids.  They get jobs.  They get sick.  They thrive.  They dance.  They live.  They love.  And they die.  And that matters… because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.

The quote is everywhere; it even made it into a Doonesbury cartoon here.

Doonesbury cartoon, 7 November 2012

Meanwhile the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, worked as a derivatives trader for corporations – Elf Aquitaine and Enterprise Oil – before he changed course and decided to join the ministry in 1989.  His dissertation at theological college was on the topic ‘Can companies sin?’ – to which he answered Yes.  He recently told the Guardian:

When one group corners a source of human flourishing, that is deeply wicked.  It applies to the City, to commodities traders, or to churches who say only this way is right.

These are similar statements from two new players on the political scene questioning the role of the corporation.  Add to that the strong criticism of corporate corruption from the new Chinese leadership (yet to be followed up by any action) and maybe we are seeing something of a trend.

Criticism of corporations is not new, of course.  Elizabeth Warren’s statement parallels that of the British Lord Chancellor, Edward, First Baron Thurlow (1731-1806).  During the trial of Warren Hastings of the East India Company, Thurlow said:

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.

The idea of a Company goes back a very long way.  The word is associated with Companion, from the Old French compaignier, which literally meant those who come together to break bread – pain.

Those who break bread together, trade together, and the early trading companies – the Levant Company, the East India Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company and others – depended on the idea of a group of companions sharing the risks and rewards of their venture.  Large-scale investments, such as sending a ship, or a fleet, to the East Indies for spices, needed lots of money, so traders pooled their resources by buying shares in the enterprise.  The Dutch set up the first stock market in the early 17^th century, where traders could buy and sell shares in companies such as the Dutch East India Company and the West India Company.  The English copied the idea.

These early companies were formed around a single investment.  Once the voyage to the Indies was over, the shareholders divided up the profits and began all over again.  But gradually companies developed into permanent institutions, with an address and a board of directors.  Each company needed an Act of Parliament: to be incorporated meant to be given a fictional body (Latin: a corpus) which gave the company the rights of an individual in a court of law: to collect debts, to sue or be sued, and so on.  (Rights that were not available to married women until the 1880s).

Through the 17^th and 18^th century, the most important companies were trading ventures or big colonial projects, such as the Londonderry plantation in Ireland.  With the Industrial Revolution, big infrastructure projects – canals, then later railways – needed to raise capital through selling shares.

It was a clunky system: each railway project needed a separate Act of Parliament, and that usually meant a generous gift of shares to the MP who oversaw the Act through Parliament.  During the 1830s, there was a lot of speculation, insider share trading, and high-risk investments that went belly up when the economy turned sour in the 1840s.  Many investors bought shares for a small percentage of their paper value – a bit like options today – hoping to cash in when share prices rose.  When they didn’t rise as anticipated, the shareholders were caught out.  Sound familiar?

During the 1840s the British government began to sort out the mess.  The Joint Stock Companies Act (1844) let investors form a company with corporate status by registration, rather than going through the hoops of an Act of Parliament.  The total cost of forming a corporation fell to £10 – not quite the $1 companies of shonky dealers today, but still much cheaper than having to bribe MPs.  Then 11 years later, in 1855, a new Act introduced limited liability for shareholders.

Together these two Acts freed commerce from restrictions and made it much easier to raise capital – but also made it harder for Parliament, or anybody else, to oversee what went on in the share market.  From now on, a corporation – a legal fiction designed to let companies behave like individuals – was unrestrained by the fear that restrains individuals: the fear of personal bankruptcy and its consequences.

They still can’t dance.

This time last year:
Violators, Victims and Vigilantes, 9 November 2011

Eventide: the end of benevolence

As part of its austerity measures, the new Queensland LNP government has announced (not terribly loudly, mind) that it is winding down a number of government-owned aged care facilities.  Some are closing altogether.  Just down the road from me in Sandgate, two buildings at Eventide are going. Seventy jobs will be lost, 80 old people will be dislocated, and an army of local volunteers who help there have been stripped of their purpose. Locals are up in arms, and there has been a highly political rally outside the Home.

The argument is that the facilities are old, and it would cost too much to upgrade them to meet new federal standards that come in next year, but it’s hard not to suspect that the State Government has plans to eventually flog the site off to developers.  The site is wonderful: seafront land looking northwards across Hayes Inlet to Redcliffe, and eastwards out to Moreton Bay.

In any case, it looks like the end of an era.  Eventide has been in the suburb of Brighton since 1946, but its roots go back much further, to its origins as the Benevolent Institution in the early years of free settlement at Moreton Bay, before Queensland even existed as a separate colony.

In the 1840s, the first free settlers donated money to set up a hospital in Brisbane.  As well as treating the sick, it also provided rudimentary accommodation for other ‘charity cases’, which could include

The mentally ill, handicapped and poverty stricken…. The dying, cancerous, cripples, unwed mothers, unemployed young men, alcoholics, children, the blind, infirm old people, the mentally disturbed and retarded… (Goodall, 22)

In the 1840s, nobody in their right mind would enter a hospital if they had family or friends – or funds – to allow them to be nursed at home.  The hospital was for the poor and the isolated, and in early Brisbane there were plenty of them.  Immigrants were often alone in the world, without the support of an extended family, and for those who fell on hard times, through illness or old age, the Brisbane Hospital and Benevolent Institution was the last resort.

In 1859 Queensland became a separate colony.  At about the same time, medicine was becoming more professional.  New developments such as anaesthesia, the germ theory of disease, and recognition of the importance of hygiene, all changed the nature of hospitals.  They were no longer simply dumping grounds for the mad, the sad and the bad.  On the contrary, these people were seen as an embarrassment to be hidden away.

Resident of Dunwich Benevolent Asylum, Stradbroke Island, 1938. State Library of Queensland collection, copyright expired.

The islands of Moreton Bay were a convenient dumping ground for many inconvenient groups: Peel Island became a leprosarium, St Helena a prison, and at Dunwich, on Stradbroke Island, the abandoned quarantine station was recycled to accommodate the inmates of the Benevolent Institution.  The new government moved them in 1866.

Like lepers and prisoners, these people were virtual prisoners.  One inmate had been a convict at Dunwich between 1827 and 1831.  In 1867 on his third escape attempt, he made contact with Aborigines he had met nearly 40 years ago, borrowed a canoe, and vanished to the mainland.  (Goodall, 67)  Most inmates were less enterprising, and their graves can be seen on the outskirts of Dunwich today.

Change finally came at the end of World War II.  During the war, the RAAF training school was based on the shores of Moreton Bay, on reclaimed mangroves opposite Redcliffe.  When the air force moved out in 1946, the Benevolent Institution and its residents – 768 in all – moved into their abandoned buildings.  The complex was named Eventide.

As the name suggests, the main inmates were old people.  By 1946, the world of charitable institutions had become more specialised, more professional. Other charity cases, such as orphans, single mothers or the insane, all went to separate institutions.  And however inadequate, old age pensions and unemployment benefits meant that there was a safety net of sorts.

That left the aged, especially those without family or funds. I remember visiting Eventide as a child in the 1950s.  Somebody – perhaps a friend of my grandmother’s? – lived there.  The old people were mostly confined to bed, in long wards without privacy or personal space.  The cinder block rooms were grey and cold.  Even then, I hated the name ‘Eventide’ with its sense of finality: ‘God’s Waiting Room’.

In the 50+ years since then, aged care has changed – thank goodness.  There is much more effort made to help people stay in their own homes.  At the same time, as our population ages, private aged care – for those who can afford it – is big business.

For those who are old and poor though, there are still very limited choices.  Winding down Eventide won’t help.

Joseph B. Goodall, Whom Nobody Owns: The Dunwich Benevolent Asylum, An Institutional Biography 1866-1946 (Ph.D, University of Queensland, 1992)

This time last year:
Family Papers, 4 November 2011

Talking to Asia in the 19th and 21st Centuries

The response to the new white paper, Australia in the Asian Century, just released by the federal government, has been underwhelming to say the least.  Which is a pity.

There’s little doubt that the 21^st century belongs to Asia (however that murky geographic concept is defined), and most of the recommendations of Ken Henry’s panel seem worthy, if uncosted.  During the next century, most of the world’s middle class will be Asian, and Australia naturally wants to tap in – in trade, education, tourism and cultural exchange.

So far, so motherhood.  But one issue the report raised, and the PM emphasised in launching the report, has come in for a lot of criticism.  “All students will have continuous access to a priority Asian language – Chinese (Mandarin), Hindi, Indonesian and Japanese.”

Over the years there have other attempts to persuade our Anglophone kids to knuckle down and learn an Asian language, but apart from a few ambitious nerds (Kevin Rudd, anyone?) most high school students baulk at the difficulties, especially when their matriculation results depend on how they go in a variety of subjects.  Dean Ashenden nails the problem here - and goes on to point out that

To the extent that we do need Asian-language speakers for business or other purposes, why on earth get schools to produce them?  We’ve already got them.

According to the census, we have 330,000 Mandarin speakers, 111,000 Hindi, 56,000 Indonesian, 44,000 Japanese, 80,000 Korean, 233,000 Vietnamese and 37,000 Thai.

But if teaching the next generation Asian languages is a flawed endeavour, how did earlier generations of English-speakers deal with the problem of talking to Asia?

It’s ironic, but 200 years ago, when Australian settlers first began trading with China, Chinese law forbade anyone, on pain of death, from teaching Chinese to foreigners. The first English speakers to learn Cantonese, such as the missionary Robert Morrison (1782-1834), had to do so in secret.

The European factories in Canton, c. 1820. The flags represent Denmark, Spain, the U.S., Sweden, Britain, and the Netherlands – and all would have been provided with a specialist interpreter by the Cantonese authorities

China carefully controlled its trade with the outside world.  The only trading port was Canton [Guangzhou] and the trade was strictly regulated under the comprador system.  Foreign traders had to employ Chinese translators.  They could only enter Canton during the trading season and were not allowed to bring their wives or families with them.   Not knowing the language put gweilo at a disadvantage in their dealings with the Chinese – that was the point! – but they got by with translators and a patois – pidgin English is a corruption of ‘business English’.

In other parts of Asia, things were less regulated.  The British in India (or the Dutch in Indonesia) lived in closer proximity with the locals.  In 18^th century India, intermarriage was common, and the children of these unions probably spoke the languages of both parents.  In the 19^th century, interracial marriages were frowned on, but British children born in India might learn Urdu or Hindi from the servants.  In any case the stronger position of the East India Company made English the language of commerce.

In the Middle East, foreign embassies and trading companies used a different strategy, employing dragomans as guides and interpreters within the Ottoman Empire.  Recently I supervised a terrific PhD thesis about an Armenian family in Beirut who acted as dragomans to the British Embassy across several generations through the 19^th century.  These men were skilled linguists who spoke Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Italian and English, as well as their original Armenian.  Such people still play a role today, dealing with tourists, journalists and aid agencies as well.  The pay can be good, but in dangerous times they risk being too closely identified with the foreigners they serve.  Many will have worked hard to learn English through the internet, but if they start as adults they will struggle.

Children really are the key.  The Chinese prohibition on wives and families in Canton was critical in maintaining control of their language, because small kids pick up languages so easily.  It’s much too late by the time they reach high school, but children pick up (and drop) languages with a facility we adults can only envy.

So – do we need to teach more children Asian languages?  By all means.  I don’t regret my years of schoolgirl French, which gave me a vague insight into French culture, a rather better grasp of my own language, and means that I can confidently buy a baguette in a Paris market.  But I wouldn’t want to negotiate a trade deal in French.  I’ll leave that to someone genuinely bilingual, like my friend’s son, raised by a French father and an Australian mother in both languages.

Similarly, there are plenty of bilingual people already in Australia, who have spoken 2 languages from early childhood.  My highly anecdotal evidence is that we could recruit all the Hindi teachers and translators we need from amongst Brisbane taxi drivers – except that most of them are half way through an engineering degree, and would, quite rightly, turn up their noses at the sort of money we pay teachers anyway.

The PhD thesis on dragomans in Beirut is:

Judith Laffan, Negotiating empires: “British” dragomans and changing identity in the 19^th century Levant (2011) – available online, but only to UQ staff and students.

This time last year:
Phar Lap and the Australian Dictionary of Biography, 18 October 2011
That Missing Curtsey, 21 October 2011
Mud Wrestling on St Crispin’s Day, 26 October 2011
Trick or Treat? 31 October 2011