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Colin Carman
~ Jane Austen Scholar & Cinephile
Tag Archives: mansfield park
Was Austen a Holy Roller?
Posted by colincarman in Jane Austen
anglicanism, book of common prayer, British literature, chawton, chawton house, christianity, hampshire, incest, Jane Austen, jane austen house museum, mansfield park, sense and sensibility, south warnborough, upton grey, winchester
"Miss Austen has the merit (in our judgment most essential) of being evidently a Christian writer…by her religion not at all intrusive" – Reviewer for Quarterly Review (1821)
Before we get started, what in the photo below doesn't belong?
What we know for certain is that Austen was a clergyman's daughter (and brother) and did not wear her faith on her sleeve. Nevertheless, the family attended church not once but twice on Sundays and read from the Book of Common Prayer (with its morning and evening prayers). The great biographer Claire Tomalin notes, in her fine biography (from 1997), that while Austen came from a devoutly Anglican family, there are very few scenes that actually take place in a church in her fiction. Once she realizes the error of her ways, Marianne Dashwood declares the following toward the end of Sense and Sensibility: "But it shall be regulated, it shall be checked by religion, by reason, by constant employment." Easier said than done, and Austen scholars tend to agree that the line is under-motivated, meaning, not really earned. Marianne is merely paying her more sensible sister Elinor (and the reader) lip-service.
As for Sunday services, the church close to the author's heart was Saint Nicholas, which was destroyed by fire, in 1871, more than fifty years after she died. The installation of a new heating unit caused a varnished dado to go up in flames. Talk about a backfire. The church that Austen worshipped in probably looked much different pre-restoration; regardless, in her day, she attended the baptisms of the Digweed and Clement children (family friends). Just prior to her death, her brother Henry was made Curate of Chawton. Inside Saint Nicholas (dating to 1270), you will find a three-paneled reredos, in an oak frame, depicting the Crucifixion. I'm of the opinion that the manor-house, Chawton, just up the driveway from St. Nick provided the inspiration for Mansfield Park. Inside there are eleven stained glass windows and a memorial for Lady Bradford whose husband, Major Bradford, lost his arm to a man-eating tiger.
The novel's heroine, Fanny, described as "well-principled and religious," winds up marrying her first cousin Edmund, a chatty clergyman. Students are usually discomforted by the fact that (1) the happily-ever-after ending involves two cousins tying the knot and, more troublingly, that (2) Fanny and Edmund are raised as siblings from the age of ten onward. If you want to go there, cousin-coupling wasn't unheard of, especially amongst the landed gentry who didn't leave their own social class, but if it had to happen, families preferred that the bride and groom were not of the same matrilineal line. In other words, uterine incest (or a couple whose mothers are sisters) was best to be avoided. Even nineteenth-century people sensed that inbreeding could result in genetic abnormalities. Ah well, it's all relative.
Speaking of Henry Austen, below is the memorial plaque for Austen found in Winchester Cathedral. Famously it makes no mention of her authorship and it's believed that Henry, the most pious of her older brothers, had to amplify her identity as a Christian in order to secure her a spot in the cathedral. I'll spare you the details but in the summer heat of 1817, a body would not be returned to its original chapel. For this reason, Austen is interred in Winchester while the two Cassandras (her mother and sister) are buried in the St. Nicholas churchyard. Later, in 1923, prayers by Austen were published though, again, the authorship is sometimes questioned. Below is my awkward selfie taken in Winchester. I'm going to delay the details of my pilgrimage to the grave until my final post next week, however.
Yesterday I walked from South Warnborough to the quiet hamlet of Upton Grey. All of the animals below give you an indication of just how rural this area is. That being said, a few Mercedes zipped by on the country road, so it's not exactly slumming it.
"Upton" is derived from the Anglo-Saxon for "homestead upon the hill." The church, Saint Mary's, has been there for over a millennium! The Norman arch and knave date back to 1120. Note the "King & Country" dedication. There's a fine memorial for a nineteenth-year-old lieutenant John Henry Beaufoy who fell, in 1809, at the Battle of Talavera in Spain. Over the past month, I've been delighted to find that village parishes are left open. The bigger church here in Alton, St. Lawrence, still has a damaged front door from the Civil War in the 1600s.
There is no escaping history in England. And, in the countryside, there is no escaping the centrality of the church and the natural world. Having gone to the capital this week, I can safely say that Hampshire smells like manure whereas London smells like s**t. And there's a big difference!
5 Objects of Vivid Interest
bob dylan, donkeys, elton john, england, english literature, guinea pig, hampshire, Jane Austen, mansfield park, pride and prejudice, ralph fiennes, samuel richardson, william blake
"Won't You Come See Me, Queen Jane?" – Bob Dylan, "Queen Jane Approximately" (1965)
Chawton Village, encompassing the grand Elizabethan manor (now a library of 15,000 volumes) and the Jane Austen House, is a real l'embarras des richesses; that's French – real fancy, right? – for an overabundance of something, like a treasure-trove or a costume rack in Sir Elton John's house. Today I learned that "Chawton" is probably derived from the chalk deposits on which the landscape sits.
I selected just five of these objects for this post as I am in week three of my one-month research trip in Austenland. And I spared you the dying rat I saw on my morning walk even though – rodent-warning – there are guinea pigs in this post and none were hurt in the production.
1. What do you call a donkey with a doctorate degree? Answer: a smart ass. I didn't warn you against dad jokes: my speciality!
And c'est moi, derived from a long line of genuine smart asses. (Yes, they put a bonnet on me but I have a huge cranium. Who wore it better? Kate Winslet or me?) Speaking of asses: below is the donkey carriage that the Austen sisters used to Uber back-and-forth after a hard night of drinking mead in Alton.
Actually, they took the carriage to the country market town of Alton to send and receive mail, and, from The Swan, take a carriage to London to visit more family members. Fun fact: Britons in the age of Austen would sometimes send a gold guinea by post but conceal it under the wax seal. This lead to unarmed postal boys being robbed and the English government's urging citizens to avoid the practice. You've got Mugged!
Fanny Price (the heroine of Mansfield Park) grows very attached to "old grey poney," and so much so that it's her "valued friend." That's key since, in the nineteenth-century, a horse was a "coach horse" or a "riding horse" but never regarded as a "friend." My sister had a horse named Carouf and, for all her riding awards, a bedroom with dozens of ribbons pinned to the walls. Austen would call her a "horsewoman" but that doesn't sound very flattering. My parents were very devoted and allowed us to pursue any and every passion, excluding offshore sports betting and hard drugs.
You'll recall that when her big brother Edward was made heir to the Knight family, Jane Austen, her sister Cassandra, her mother and friend Martha Lloyd were able to make a former inn into their new home (now the Jane Austen House Museum). From there, she would publish her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, a work so successful that the Prince Regent's daughter Charlotte told her father excitedly about it. Unless a woman needed to publish to save herself financially, it was a blight upon her character to publish under name, thus "By A Lady."
2. Below is an image you see quite a bit in Austenland: The Reverend George Austen presenting his son to the Knights (1783). Lucky duck though an unlucky rat. Women's hair was coming down a bit by the 1780s though it was the fashion to wear your hair vertically and some three times the size of your head. That didn't include the beehive and by that, I mean an actual working beehive!
3. Notice Edward's silk frock coat and breeches, probably worn during his Grand Tour through France and Switzerland in 1786. Some big-assed buttons! Sister Jane Austen never appeared too bitter about all of her brother's adventures (available, of course, to men only) though all of her novels feature some kind of inequity or discrepancy when it comes to where men and women are placed, and in the latter's case, displaced. Think of the homeless sisters and mother in Sense and Sensibility or the difference between the grand Mansfield Park and the parsonage occupied by the cranky scold of a widow, Mrs. Norris.
As ever with Austen, it's subtle but it's there. Even this line from her letters could be read in different ways: "I went up to the Great House & dawdled away an hour very comfortably." One implication is the very family member without whom we would not even be discussing the Austen-Knight family was not all that comfortable, or even able to dawdle away, in her relatively lowly digs down the road. Keep an eye on Austen's usage of the word, the financially-charged "settled" because it's a way of underscoring the fact that nineteenth-century women, especially the unmarried ones, never feel really settled. It's unsettling, really.
4. Above, you'll also see the wood paneling in the Great Hall beside the fireplace. The metal fireplace dates back to 1588 when the English warded off the Spanish Armada. More interesting than the coats of arms (installed by a later descendent, post-Austen, Montagu Knight) are those scratches, probably inscribed there to ward off witches and other demonic spirits. The Anglican Church does not acknowledge the existence of ghosts but that's doesn't mean that, out here in the countryside, people weren't likely to get a bit spooked around the fire on a winter night. Horseshoes were superstitiously nailed above doorways to ward off spirits, or sometimes the finger nail pairings, hair, and urine of those believed to have been bewitched were put in a stone vat and kept beside the bed. Stocking stuffer ideas, y'all!
5. Below is the jewel in Chawton's librarial crown: the manuscript of "Sir Charles Grandison, or the Happy Man," an adaptation of the eponymous novel by one of Austen's favorite writers, Samuel Richardson. Private theatricals were the vogue at the time – think of the bored and housebound Bertram cousins staging "Lovers' Vows" in Mansfield Park but tearing it all down once the imperious Lord Betram returns home – and demanded that family members build sets, write scripts, and learn their lines. Take a load off, Fanny.
Today, all of that unfolds on Instagram and if your sister Kristen has what it takes, she might wind up on "Hampshire Idol," "England's Got Talent," or if not, "Love Island." I was asked not to sneeze or breathe for at least 48-hours before that text was presented to me yesterday at Chawton House. I resisted the urge, like Ralph Fiennes consulting with a Blake drawing in the horror film "Red Dragon," to render the curator unconscious and devour the work, like a dog (or a guinea pig) that eats your homework.
5. Finally, the rodent you've been waiting for: the guinea pig in a version of Pride and Prejudice featuring nothing but those little pellet-eaters! Ah, Austen: an author, a way-of-life (the subject of my new book) but also a (cottage) industry!
Austen's Powers
austenland, boris johnson, brexit, britain, dickens, frankenstein, gardener, hampshire, Jane Austen, lewis carroll, mansfield park, mary shelley, portsmouth, UK
"You've had good weather. Jane is smiling on you." – the Secretary for the Jane Austen Society of the UK
IS this a novelist or a cult?
If Austen is a writer, she is, according to one visitor at Chawton House today, the "greatest writer in history." That's quite a claim! Frankenstein is my favorite novel – it's the Swiss Army knife of novels, really: you can do anything with it! – but I wouldn't go so far as to say Mary Shelley was the greatest writer in the language. Have you read Valperga? Bloody hell! If Austen is a cult, it's a pretty innocuous one: the followers prefer Earl Grey and cakes over Kool-Aid.
Yesterday was the annual general meeting, or AGM, for the Jane Austen Society of the UK, and my participation was the one requirement of the research grant that I received. The other was that I don't use too much American academic jargon around the library: please leave your "Anthropocene" and your "queer performativity" in the coat check, thank you very much.
All in all, I didn't have to do much as the first "bloke" to serve as the International Visiting Researcher here at Chawton House. Finally, my male privilege is paying off. They incorrectly announced that joining them from overseas was Dr. Colin Carman from Colorado University – it's actually Colorado Mesa University – but I rolled with it. Apparently, Pakistan has just opened a branch of the Jane Austen Society. Elizabeth Bennet in a burqa. Gotta' start somewhere!
I packed one J. Crew necktie and navy-and-white seersucker pants for the occasion, so I was doubling as a Southern mayor. I was even able to slip away during the lunch break in order to read The Guardian and eat my egg sandwich in the wilderness. "In these great places," Mary Crawford declares in Mansfield Park, "the gardeners are the only people who can go where they like." The same is true of college professors. The association's president Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles presided. He was Britain's ambassador to Afghanistan. If you can survive that colonial sand trap, surely you can figure out the alternative ending to Persuasion. Below is a picture of me and the "brill" Clio, a graduate student at Southampton University, which we took after I traveled by a vintage coach from Alton. Dating from the 1960s, the coach could have easily doubled as a greenhouse once the sun came out and it was good we had the wind at our back to reach our destination.
(The other picture is of me playing the lap-dancing stan to Charles Dickens in Portsmouth. Chuck looks grumpy, eh? He preferred the company of underage girls; oh wait, that was Lewis Carroll.)
The idea that Austen was somehow divorced from reality, and the political events of her time – oh you know, just those minor skirmishes known as the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and the American war of 1812 – is a myth that stubbornly persists. The fact is that she explored how major historical events affected English people in private. Their reactions to public events always reveal their innermost character. Those who think that Austen toiled away in rural isolation don't know that her cousin Eliza married a Frenchmen, the Comte de Feuillide, who was later guillotined (outlined in 1794). I hate when that happens. The coquettish life of his widow, Eliza, has been thoroughly researched by Deirdre La Faye (who was missed at this year's AGM). La Faye made a major and meticulous deposit in Austen studies.
Speaking of the French, the lecture at the AGM was on Austen's connections to French culture – the "French connection" – and it was an important reminder that Brexit and the premiership of Boris Johnson (or "BoJo" as the tabloids call him) are existential threats to England and globalism more broadly. Austen never crossed the Channel but she did enjoy her many trips (to see her brother) to London, which she described in her letters as the "Regions of Wit, Elegance, fashion, Elephants & Kangaroons" (sic). Did you know that the so-called greatest novelist in the English language had horrendous spelling? There was no auto-correct, of course, and read Love and Friendship to see how she consistently confuses her Is and Es, so "Freindship" over and over again. I before E except after C, June Austin! Here the townie Mary Shelley, whose famous philosopher father, tutored her in their London home, had the country girl beat. Her Monster: "Friend, goooood!"
At the AGM, the average age of the attendee was 75 and bless their hearts: these devotees train 51 miles SW from London to Alton, bus to Chawton (roughly a mile away), and listen to a guest lecturer carefully selected for his/her lack of jargon. The British approach to literary studies is very different than America's – they find our research a bit "wacky" and daft – and an Oxbridge professor can get away with an entire essay on the use of dipthongs and assonance in Pride and Prejudice whereas we Americans only take notice when you use "post-structuralist," "Foucault," and "Marxian hermeneutics" in a single sentence.
It was in the country village of Chawton that Austen transformed herself into a professional writer. She heavily revised the drafts she had on hand of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility (composed in her birthplace of Steventon), and, over the last eight years of her life, she completed a trio of new works: Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. By then time, Austen was middle-aged (by Regency-era standards) and therefore past the usual age at which an English woman married. "Being now in her twenty-first year, Maria Bertram was beginning to think matrimony a duty" (Mansfield Park 67).
Shrewdly, she realized that writing for money could be her ticket to ride. In 1814, she wrote her beloved niece, Fanny Knight, to report that there may or may not be a second edition of Mansfield Park, adding: "People are more ready to borrow & praise, than to buy – which I cannot wonder at; – but tho' I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls Pewter too." Without her novels, Austen would have died penniless.
While we are on the topic of my family, my paternal grandparents were Revolutionary War reenactors. My grandfather would get all dressed up in his three-cornered hat, hunting shirt and matching breeches; my grandmother donned the bonnet and looked like a regular Abigail Adams. I suppose it's these folks that passed down the DNA for loving history. Austen is synonymous with the Regency period and its frilly fashion. Skip "The Jane Austen Book Club" and watch instead the benignly funny Austenland for a light-hearted romance in which an American girl (Keri Russell) travels to England to immerse herself in her hero's native countryside and find her very own Mr. Darcy. Along the way, we're told, she's excited to meet such Regency-era women as Mrs. Pepper Pot and Mrs. Wigglewam.
Wham, bam, thank you, Ma'am!
PS: How precious is this quirky English fellow who insists on wearing Regency-period clothing to work?
Gone Girls!
chawton, frances burney, hampshire, Jane Austen, mansfield park, pride and prejudice, romanticism, southern england, wollstonecraft
"Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions." – Austen, Mansfield Park
If you're sticking with me during this one-month research trip in southern England, chances are you like books and this entry is devoted to some pretty fine and rare books. My brother calls physical books – you know, the pre-Kindle ones made from paper and paste and ink – "dust collectors" but he does so only to irritate me, and succeeds every time! Older brothers are especially skilled at such things. Christopher, are you out there? You didn't even wish me a bon voyage! Ah well, as Austen writes in Mansfield Park, "What strange creatures brothers are!"
Below are some real jewels found only in the Chawton Library. Wait for them: don't scroll! Here is the statue of the author herself just in front of Saint Nicholas. I purposefully avoided "Authoress" for reasons that will soon become clear. The bonnet is to Jane Austen as the crusty old beard is to Walt Whitman, or the coke nail to William S. Burroughs.
As I made plain in my original post, my heart really belongs to the radicals of the English Romantic period: Godwin, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Hunt, and the Shelleys. My father would never identify as a hippie – he can't even whistle a Beatles tune – but he did instill in Meg, Chris, and me a spirited anti-authoritarianism. We weren't even expected to follow his rules; it was my mum's job to enforce the rules. (Uh-oh, English colloquialisms creeping in already!) We don't really know much about Jane Austen's mum; like most women of the era, she was more pregnant than not and social norms demanded that girls be promptly married. I wonder how much of the marriage-crazed matchmaker existed in Mrs. Cassandra Austen and whether she, in parts, inspired the risible Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. It's worth noting that when her daughter, Elizabeth, first speaks in the novel, she politely chides her mother for acting the fool. There's a subtle radicalism in any household where the children know more than their dear ol' mums and dads. Isn't Mr. Bennet's reaction to Elizabeth's rejection of the man-splaining Mr Collins the best ever? But I digress.
If you are a self-respecting Austenite, you must must must visit and donate generously to Chawton House. You can even sponsor a brick! What's wonderful about the librarians and curators at there is that they have created a splendid showcase of women writers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including an original edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (published in 1792). This political manifesto, written hastily in a matter of days, inaugurated the modern feminist movement as we know it, and its central postulate is pretty much a no-brainer (as much as I hate that expression): give girls an education! Reason is the tide that lifts all boats, including husbands who have nothing of substance to talk about with their pretty but empty-headed wives. I use "no-brainer" because, as Wollstonecraft forcefully argues, a brainless woman is also a petty, conniving and coquettish woman. Ridiculed as a "hyena in petticoats" during her day, Wollstonecraft was a true renegade and it's a tragic irony that she would die in childbirth, leaving this world but leaving behind the motherless child that would go on to pen Frankenstein. (Don't get me started!) Fun fact: First Lady Melania Trump keeps a copy of A Vindication on her nightstand and longs for her own prison-break. Nah, that's fake news! The Trumps don't read! Frederick Douglass is still doing a fantastic job, remember? It's nice to have a month off from our national nightmare.
Remember from the last post that the Austen sisters lived down the road in a brick cottage but would walk to the great manor house owned by their richer older brother. Creative types are usually idiotic when it comes to money, so Edward's very existence must have been a family blessing. He was Lord of the Manor of Alton Eastbrook and had a Grand Tour, as was the custom for English men hoping to get frisky on the Continent. As Madonna liked to advertise, Italians do it better, and by "it," she meant temper tantrums in satin pajamas from Harrods. Edward Austen/Knight was adopted by the Knight family, which, as a new friend at Chawton reminded me today, is a lot like the adoption of Fanny Price by the Bertrams in Mansfield Park. Movin' on up! Here's another allusion: Edward would rent, or let out, Chawton much like the line below in the opening paragraphs of Pride and Prejudice ("Have you heard that Netherfield is let at last?").
The peacock is actually on loan from the Oscar Wilde estate. The proud peacock is a bit "overdetermined" – English lit. crit. talk – but it beats a buzzard or a turkey. Another (American) Romantic, Edgar Alan Poe, reportedly, chose the parrot before he finally settled on the raven, which was a smart move. He made that decision after the opium and incest wore off. Imagine the announcer yelling: Please welcome to the field, the Baltimore Parrots! And the crowd went wild.
Finally, above is the only time that Jane Austen saw her name in print as she published anonymously, as was the custom for authoresses (too many S's) of the age. Look on the left-hand side and down ten rows. Dating from 1796 – Austen would have been twenty-one – she is listed as a subscriber to Frances Burney's Camilla: or a Picture of Youth. "Miss J. Austen, Steventon." Why put your name on something when the book reviewers at Blackwoods would skewer you even worse for being a "woman writer"? Oh yeah, and a woman who earned a living through writing hadn't yet emerged yet. Some still maintain, erroneously, that Mary Shelley's poet husband, Percy Bysshe, wrote Frankenstein and, in its day, the gothic classic was damned as the "foulest toad-stool" to ever spring from a dung-heap. Clearly the reviewer hadn't read the Twilight series.
Overheard, by the way, by noisy Americans in the pub across from the Jane Austen House: "Since I turned fifty, I have to pee every ten minutes. Maybe I need a sleep study." Then, the wife (returning with a gift bag from the Jane Austen House and Museum): "Is there only beer here? Austen probably only drank cocktails…more feminine!"
Okay, there are a number of things wrong in this exchange: prostates and sleep do not correlate, and while Austen does complain of a hangover in her letters, there were no Cosmos or Palomas in Regency-era England. Immoderation of any kind is a loathsome thing in Austen's fiction. A major influence over her was Brunton's Self-Control (1811). It's not the booze but how it's used. This is why the "dangerous illness" of Tom Bertram is singled out toward the conclusion of Mansfield Park. His immoderation inevitable catches up with him; hence: "Tom had gone from London with a party of young men to Newmarket, where a neglected fall, and a good deal of drinking, had brought on a fever." Fever in the evening, fever all through the night…
Somewhere along the line, "Sex and the City" and Jane "RomCom" Austen embedded themselves in the bloodstream of modern female culture. Yeah, you become a fly on the wall when you're flying solo in an English village. I'd be even more invisible if I were a lady even though I like to think I'd be a pretty hot chick, bonnet or no bonnet.
In my next post, we will all head to the gardens at Chawton House, so bring your sunscreen!
Sign Posts!
What Killed Jane Austen?
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Colin Carman Twitter
Are Eric and Don Jr. too old for the draft? Sacrificial (heirsuit) lambs welcome! @realDonaldTrump 1 week ago
Another favorite from 2019 is _The Topeka School_ by @lernersbrows Both zeitgeisty novels belong in the 2010s time… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 week ago
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Chuck Mosley will soon be hitting the UK on his Reintroduce Yourself acoustic tour.
More dates added to the UK and European legs of Chuck's tour. Full list below, with possibly more dates to come.
The new album by INDORIA, You'll Never Make The Six, is now available to download.
The album features Chuck Mosley and will be released exclusively in the UK on the Infinite Hive label. This issue will feature exclusive remixes and artwork for the UK CD on Infinite Hive by some of Chuck's old friends and colleagues and will be available in late September in time for Chuck's extensive UK tour, which kicks off in Cambridge on 18 September.


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LivingSocial Brings Daily Deals To The Hood
One of the challenges of running a social commerce site these days is that there is just too much demand, from both local merchants wanting to give out deals and consumers who want to try them. There are only 365 days in a year, and the daily deal format limits each city to 365 deals a year.
Sites like GroupOn and LivingSocial are hitting those limits. GroupOn is expanding its inventory by "personalizing" deals, essentially showing different deals to different people. LivingSocial is handling the issue by going hyperlocal. It will now start offering deals by neighborhood and city districts.
LivingSocial will start bringing daily deals to the hood out in Washington, D.C. and New York City. In Washington, D.C., there will be deals for The District, Montgomery County and Northern Virginia (not exactly neighborhoods, but why get bogged down in details). In New York City, you can sign up for deals Uptown (soul food), Midtown (cupcakes), Downtown (facials) and in Brooklyn (dance lessons). Again, these aren't really neighborhoods—Brooklyn on its own is bigger than most cities in America—but they do break up the city into more manageable zones and open up the site to more deals.
This is something, in fact, that Groupon does as well in a couple cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. In fact, it breaks down Washington, D.C. the exact same way: the District, Montgomery County and Northern Virginia.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Future gazing 05 November 2014
'Mobility of the future: smart fleets and the future of road transportation' was the theme of a conference in Brussels last month, organised by Goodyear. Steve Banner reports
Running long-haul heavy trucks on LNG (liquefied natural gas) could help cut CO2 emissions and improve air quality, while at the same time reducing the European Union's dependency on crude oil and enhancing security of supply. So said Joao Aguiar Machado, head of the European Commission's (EC) Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE), at a conference in Brussels last month, organised by Goodyear.
"We're seeing increased interest in LNG among hauliers, and the EU's Council of Ministers is supporting the development of an alternative fuels infrastructure that will result in a network of LNG stations across Europe," he told delegates. "Drivers [and transport planners] will be able to use telematics systems to find the nearest gas refuelling stations."
What Machodo was talking about is the LNG Blue Corridors project. This envisages a network of 14 LNG refuelling stations at key locations along four corridors criss-crossing the EU, from north to south and east to west, and augmenting existing commercial LNG outlets. The scheme also includes a plan to put around 100 LNG-powered heavy trucks – constructed by manufacturers including Volvo, Renault Trucks and Iveco – on the road. Iveco, for example, recently unveiled its LNG Stralis tractor unit with a claimed range of almost 500 miles.
Due to be completed by 2017 at a cost of some £11.5m, the entire project is supported by the EC under the Seventh Framework Programme, and involves 27 partners from 11 countries. Among partners listed is Nottingham-based dual-fuel conversion specialist Hardstaff Group.
Theme of the Brussels conference was 'Mobility of the future: smart fleets and the future of road transportation' – also the title of a white paper from Goodyear, launched at the event. Compiling this paper involved researchers quizzing 576 fleet managers from nine European countries, including the UK.
Looking at the data, surprisingly, just 40% stated that the price of fuel is their biggest concern – although, unsurprisingly, 92% are monitoring overall fuel consumption, 76% investing in driver training to improve fuel efficiency and 72% setting fuel consumption targets. Oddly, that last figure drops to 56% for UK-based fleet managers.
Just over half (53%) of those questioned for the report wanted more incentives for operating environmentally-friendly trucks, while 60% would like support for buying fuel-efficient tyres. Incidentally, only 20% had invested in onboard TPMS (tyre pressure monitoring systems): however, the white paper argues that they should be mandatory on trucks. Meanwhile, the study also found that at least 30% of fleets do now check the labels that accompany tyres, detailing fuel efficiency, safety and noise levels.
"It is clear that fleets are already investing in technologies designed to reduce fuel consumption, but they need further support from European and national regulators," insisted Michel Rzonzef, vice president of Goodyear's commercial business unit for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
However, the paper also points to the issue of driver retention. A quarter of managers stated that recruiting and retaining drivers was either their biggest or second-biggest concern, and the report argues that government initiatives are needed to encourage young unemployed people to consider truck driving as a career.
What about driverless trucks to solve the problem? Ben Kraaijenhagen, vice president of foresight and environment at MAN, believes its not going to happen. "There will always be a driver onboard," he stated. "People would find the idea of a truck without one completely unacceptable."
That said, trucks fitted with the automotive equivalent of an aircraft's autopilot will come, he suggested – enabling them to drive themselves down long, uninterrupted stretches of motorway, or through road works while the driver occupies himself or herself with other duties. That could, for example, involve texting head office to find out the precise location of a backload that needs collecting.
Joachim Fehrenkotter, managing director of German transport firm Spedition Fehrenkotte, agreed. "A truck driver will become more like the captain of a ship who continually monitors the vessel's functions, but is not required to be at the wheel all the time," he said.
Mercedes-Benz has already anticipated this trend with its Future Truck 2025. On display last month's IAA Hanover show, it was equipped with its own autopilot under the 'Highway Pilot' banner, with radar, proximity and camera sensors providing the 'eyes'.
Technology can, however, be tripped up by legal considerations, warned Nigel Base, commercial vehicle manager at the SMMT (Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders), who is quoted in Goodyear's report. "There is a lot of discussion about the potential of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications," he observed. "Throw in automated braking, cruise control, lane assist, etc, and you can see technology marching ahead... The issue is that legislation can lag behind."
Returning to alternative fuels, while cryogenic gases such as LNG may represent a viable option for some operators in future, other solutions will also remain valid. In urban areas that may mean diesel-electric hybrids, such as MAN's Metropolis research vehicle, shown at the IAA Show back in 2012, suggests Kraaijenhagen. Switch it to battery power and it produces zero emissions. "What's more, it can get down to below 65 decibels," he asserted.
Goodyear's white paper also mentions research into Fischer-Tropsch fuel, synthesised from coal, natural gas and biomass. "This reduces emissions but remains too expensive to replace diesel in a free market," the report observes.
What of conventional diesel fuel-saving? A surprising revelation from this report is that 27% of European operators still make no use of telematics, with a further 16% only making sparing use of it. The other 57% do employ telematics, however, with 25% of the total describing the technology as vital.
Coming at fuel saving from another angle, the report supports proposals that the EC should assess the safety and environmental impact of bigger and heavier trucks up to 25m long and grossing at up to 70 tonnes by 2016. It would also like to see trucks heavier than the generally permitted limit for cross-border EU traffic allowed to traverse borders where they are already in use on domestic work.
But do not underestimate the continued opposition towards heavier trucks among Europe's institutions and nations, warns DG MOVE policy officer, Jan Szulczyk. "There is not enough agreement across the EU in favour of increased payloads and such a proposal would never get through the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament," he insists. "Every time larger and heavier vehicles are talked about it all gets very emotional and the topic is killed."
As for fleet managers interrogated for the report, they would like to see greater standardisation of road transport regulations across the EU. More than two thirds (68%) are in favour, although only 51% would support a move towards longer, heavier vehicles. In the UK, that percentage falls to 44% but rises to 69% in Benelux countries.
Supporters of increased harmonisation included Ferd Feidt, managing director of Luxembourg-based Betons Feidt, which supplies concrete and other materials to the construction industry. In his home country, the firm can operate at 44 tonnes on four axles, compared with 36 tonnes in Germany, 38 tonnes in France and 39 tonnes in Belgium. Feidt said this degree of variation from one EU market to another makes no sense. "There are too many jurisdictions and we need clear European-wide standards," he insisted.
Steve Banner
65577\Future_glazing.pdf
Goodyear Dunlop Tyres UK Ltd
MAN Truck & Bus UK Ltd
Mercedes-Benz UK Ltd


Leahy & Associates Architects Ltd.
John J. Casey & Co.
The works involved the demolition of an existing building and the construction of a new 5 storey 124 bedroom hotel over new double basement carpark located in a very restricted city centre location.
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Samantha Ryan of Saskatoon finished fifth in the women's 100m butterfly S10 at the Paralympic games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with a time of 1:09.73.
Ryan started slow and was seventh after 50 metres, but moved up to fifth by the end of the race.
Sophie Pascoe of New Zealand won the gold medal by setting a new paralympic record of 1:02.65.
China's Chen Yi earned silver and Poland's Oliwia Jablonska won bronze.
Spencer Krieger of the Huskies was named defensive player of the week after his performance in their 29-17 win against Alberta on Friday.
Krieger had 6 solo tackles, 1 sack and a fumble recovery.
Krieger is a fifth-year business student and plays defensive back.
Player of the week honours also went to Denzel Radford of the Calgary Dinos for special teams and Noah Picton of the Regina Rams for offence.
Canada's wheelchair basketball team advances to the quarter-finals in Rio Paralympic Games with a 82-49 victory against Brazil.
Canada was ahead 49-22 at halftime and easily held on for the victory.
Canada was in a three-way tie for top spot in group A with a 3-1 record, but is seeded third because of the point differential tie-breaker.
Arinn Young of Legal, Alta. led the offense for Canada with 22 points.
Erica Gavel of Saskatoon is a member of the team.


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Q: Angular: ng-click with a parameter not working I've got the following HTML:

And the following functions in my controller's $scope:
$scope.addName = function() {
    $scope.names.push($scope.newName);
    $scope.newName = '';
};
$scope.delName = function(i) {
    $scope.names.splice(i, 1);
};

The addName() works fine but the delName() is never called. Is it impossible to bind an ng-clik to a function with an argument?

A: The error was in the html, the ng-repeat $index should not be evaluated beforehand:
This is the valid HTML:

A: The code seems fine to me, can you isolate your problem in a jsFiddle?
EDIT:
Removed incorrect answer about splice not modifying to array.

A: You can do as follows

In css
[ng-click],
[data-ng-click],
[x-ng-click] {
    cursor: pointer;
}

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