So ends Margaret Thatcher’s one and only published scientific paper. Many people have contributed less to science. But not many of those became Fellows of the Royal Society.

‘The saponification of α-monostearin in a monolayer’ was published in 1951 in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture (not open access…) and describes the results of a series of some somewhat fiddly-sounding temperature- and pressure-dependence studies of the saponification of a glyceride.

Paul Nurse railed a couple of years ago against the modern style of paper writing, preferring the simpler times and terms of his youth. This paper reads as though it should have an list of apparatus at the beginning. Instead it opens with a cursory overview of the context of the experiments – the monostearins studied have found use as emulsifying agents, and their properties in this context are not well understood. The young Margaret Roberts was seemingly tasked with elucidating these for J. Lyons, the food manufacturer. A contemporary in the company recalled that Roberts had the job of “improving the over-run [air content] of ice cream”, which ties in well with the emulsifier work she published (in ice cream, emulsifiers can act as both stabilisers and aerating agents). It ends as all good science should : “The reason why equation (3) is not obeyed at higher temperatures is obscure. … no satisfactory explanation was found and it is felt that there are insufficient data to warrant a discussion of this problem.”

So, no, as everyone knows, she didn’t invent Mr Whippy. Not least because soft-scoop ice cream was already well-established in the US by this time, also because it seems unlikely that any one person could invent such a thing. But it is likely that she worked in the ice cream group and undertook research relevant to the product. And so went Thatcher the Chemist.

But what of the co-author, Hans Helmut Gunter Jellinek ? Much more interesting, if less well documented.

Jellinek was born in 1917. His wife Ruth was born in Stuttgart n 1918, and the two were married in England in 1948.

Hans Jellinek’s career began in England, possibly at Lyons itself, and at some point over the new twenty years he and his wife moved to the USA where he took up a post at Clarkson College of Technology in upstate New York. While holding down a job at what is now Clarkson University, he went to Japan and also seems have gained some local notoriety, and an excellent local-paper headline in the Schenectady Gazette.

He published over 160 articles and books over a 40-year career that ranged from the kind of food research he did at Lyons, to studies of the degradation of plastics, to the interfacial properties of ice and snow.

He retired a professor in 1982, seemingly so that he could spend more time with his work. At this point he received a lovely note from his co-author of 1951. Maybe it is just formality, properness, but I do wonder if, in all the time from joining him as a junior colleague to writing to him as a Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher had ever called him by his first name.

The last British-based member of the International Brigades died a
couple of days before Christmas.

A big class of jolly Spanish children just sprinted past this on their way to the big wheel.

During the Thirty Years’ War, Wallenstein laid siege to Stralsund for three months. Before relief came (at a price) from Gustav of Sweden, the town’s walls were defended by a load of battle-hardened Scottish highlanders.

I don’t think there is anything to mark this in the town, but they have replaced a section of the Knieperwall with a large glass tank containing the skeleton of a toothed whale.

I love the Thirty Years’ War. Among the dozens and dozens of intertwined factors and events that resulted in Stralsund under siege, the most immediate one was that it didn’t sign up to the neutrally-named “Capitulation of Franzburg” treaty.

All cities should endeavour to have a body of water. Something to break the confines, open the horizon. Edinburgh had a loch. But drained it and stuck a railway station in there instead.

Alfred Drury’s bronzes on the downstream side of Vauxhall Bridge recognise the great pillars of the national culture : science (seen here), fine art, education and, er, local government.

I was reading the other day that ‘industry’ is hidden or missing from the UK landscape. I am of the view that people just aren’t looking for it. Felixtowe is a nice little seaside town on the uneventful Suffolk coast. It is also the biggest container port in the UK, the 6th largest in Europe and the 34th largest in the world. One of the most important places in the UK for international trade. Just look at them go.

The CSAV RUNGUE, flying the flag of the great maritime nation of Liberia, on its way out of the Europoort at Rotterdam. Not sure where it was heading on the 12th of July, but it rolled into Miami a couple of weeks later.

The Sun is already below the horizon. (Possibly.)

Liberec, 28 December.

Growing up in the east of England, home of arable fields and pigsties, I have always seen mountains and forests as mysterious and enticing things. Filled with woodland realms and mountain kings. So it was with no little anticipation that I took my girlfriend off to the mountains in the north of the Czech Republic for the New Year. We were to be based in a hotel on the top of the Ještěd-Kozákov ridge, just outside Liberec and surrounded by woodland. And not just any woodland. A lush, ancient, Peter-and-the-Wolf style forest. Ripe for walking in.

Plans were made in short order and once installed in the hotel we set out down the mountain, wearing clothes that would not look out of place in London on a brisk afternoon. We laughed at the German tourists and their gortex and hiking poles, and their seriousness. We had seen their group at breakfast, as boorish as visitors from the local large country can be when they drop in on a smaller neighbour. We in contrast, cowed by our lack of language skills, were Über-polite. Courteous to the point of diffidence. The very soul of the relaxed traveller. And so it seemed even more appropriate that they should see us striding off in to the woods in such casual attire – we know what we are doing, and we can do it with making such a fuss about things.

We wound our way down a path that seemed to have been built by the trees themselves. This was the forest I had imagined. The walk was easy, fun. Making snowballs and marvelling at the virgin snow stretching out on the path before us. Sampling the silence and the infinity of the ancient forest, the long range order of the trees.

We reached the base of the mountain all too soon, and, after a brief moment to congratulate ourselves on our accomplishments, we turned and started back up. It was slightly harder going than we had anticipated but no less of adventure. We still had the trees, the mythology.

About an hour later we were still going. The path, curiously, as unfamiliar and untouched as it was on the way down. But such concerns were muted by the footprints of some other hearty walker and his dog in front of us. They went this way, surely we can too – after all, there was only one path, and we knew where it came from. We collected a couple of walking sticks from the forest floor. Only for appearance, of course. And took in the view across a vast snowy valley that somehow we had missed on the way down

Half an hour more and the romance was beginning to fade. The snow was up past our knees. The forest had opened out and we found ourselves on what appeared to be a mountain ridge, with night about to fall. Thoughts began to wander to half-remembered snippets on mountain survival. Should it be a snow hole, or shelter made of pine fronds? Pine cones are edible, aren’t they? Thoughts also drifted to the indignities of being rescued : hapless tourists rescued in good health, probably about 200 yards from the hotel reception. Maybe they would send a helicopter. The footprints we had been following stretched resolutely out ahead of us up the mountainside. Two clear sets, a man and his dog. A dog!

As the light began to dip further, common sense began to overcome pride. Footprints be damned. We were going back. A dog had beaten us.

It seemed only moments later that we arrived, exhausted, wet and delirious at the car park half way up the mountainside. We strode in as Shackleton to be met by the barely expressed indifference of the young families loading up their cars with sledges and pushchairs.

A glance back up the hill explained it all. There were two paths! To the right, a familiar welcoming trail into the magical forest, and on the left, a rugged goats’ path, marked only with a faded wooden signpost pointing to the next village some 16 km away.

It wasn’t long before we were back in the hotel. Huddled round bowls of soup, not looking at the Germans.

London is awash with the relics of Empire. Great statues and monuments commemorating great men and greater victories. But it is not always the British Empire. There is the occasional Roman Wall. And then a couple of minor road signs and a plaque, which are all that remain of the London outpost of the Hanseatic League.

The League was an empire of trade which ran northern European commerce, and so much of northern Europe itself, for more than a century. Its offices stretched from Kievan Rus and Riga in the east to London in the west, with a sphere of influence that took in Greenland and Colchester.

The English tend to know little of their history (relative to other occupants of these islands), and that which they do know is often somewhat heroic. Tales of kings and queens and splendid isolation. Something about being on an island, perhaps. Possibly something to do with Shakespeare: Richard this, Henry that. But also something to do with the compromises required if a “national” history is to be taught. Among the under-reported events is the Anglo-Hanseatic war of 1470-4, where the Hanse dealt such a spanking to the English navy that Edward IV was forced to Utrecht to sign a treaty which locked England out of trade in the North and Baltic seas and, essentially, ceded a chunk of prime territory in the centre of London to a foreign power. (The treaty also granted the Hanse the right to build a warehouse in King’s Lynn. It’s still there today, though now resolutely the property of Norfolk County Council). Utrecht firmed up the arrangements in London where a Kontor in one form or other had existed for centuries.

The Stalhof, on the bank of the Thames just west of London Bridge, controlled amongst other things the export of English cloth to much of Europe. It had its own currency, with merchants seconded from the major centres in Lübeck and Hamburg. But not many windows that faced outwards. “Rich German merchants” were targeted by Wat Tyler’s rebellion, and their presence was no more welcomed by the good Städtern of mediæval London.

The land under the steelyard was bought by the city in 1853 and turned into Cannon Street station, the site of the aforementioned plaque, and, aptly, right next to what is (I think) the last working wharf on the square mile. By then the great League was no more than a rump, subverted by rise of the Swedes and the Dutch and ultimately sunk by Bismarck. It was finally written out of history in 1862, but the memory persists (if only as a politicised ideal).

It is a bit of a shame that none of the Hanse architecture survives in London to rival the gables and conical spires that decorate Lübeck and Hamburg. But there is some historical resonance in a great trading empire parked in the square mile (even if the English once went to war against the free trade it offered) and it played its part in establishing modern London as the entrepôt that it remains today, if more for people than for goods and grain.

There are loads of great histories of the Hanseatic League and its role in European history, though they are mostly in German – it isn’t a subject much covered in the English language. A friendly intro was written in 1891 by Helen Zimmern.