Fish-nor

The Super Bowl occupies the attention of American football fans during the early part of the year, but “football” has a different definition outside America, referring to soccer.  FIFA stands for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association.  Just as the Super Bowl is the championship game of the NFL (National Football League) in America, the FIFA World Cup is the championship tournament of international men’s soccer. 

The top 32 teams of the season compete in the games.  All of the competitors are the highest ranked players from professional leagues in their native countries. The first FIFA World Cup tournament took place in 1930 and has occurred during the summer every 4 years since then, except during the period of the Second World II. England hosted the tournament in 1966, the year they also won the World Cup, a feat they have been unable to duplicate since then. The stakes were extremely high, therefore, as England defeated Sweden, advancing to the semifinals on July 11, 2018.  Had they beaten Croatia, they would have had a chance at reprising their victory in the final game on July 15th. 

I mention this to introduce an ironic coincidence. A few nights ago, I was watching an episode online from the second season of a British detective series called Endeavour, which is set in Oxford, England.  The episode, titled “Nocturne,” is set in 1966, during the World Cup tournament which led to that historic English victory. The excitement over the game serves as a backdrop to the action in the episode. Endeavour is the prequel to Inspector Morse, a British detective series which ran on television in the UK from 1987-2000. The title character of that series is an older version of the eponymous detective of the present series.  

Endeavour tells the backstory of how the bright, sensitive young Detective Constable Morse evolves into curmudgeonly and antisocial Detective Chief Inspector Morse. His unconventional first name, as he later explains in Inspector Morse, is because “My mother was a Quaker, and Quakers sometimes call their children names like ‘Hope’, and ‘Patience’. My father was obsessed with Captain Cook, and his ship was called Endeavour.”  Captain Cook was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the Royal Navy during the late 18th century. The Morse family motto is In Deo Non Armis Fido (I trust in God, not arms). It also happens to be the motto of Morse College, one of the four colleges at Yale University. But Morse’s choice of profession involves working with violence rather than faith. 

Today we take for granted the ability to watch the game in color on the television through satellite or cable and catch replays on the Internet. But in 1966, broadcasting technology was limited to radio broadcasts or black and white programming on television with the reception provided by an antenna. One of the more humorous scenes in “Nocturne” occurs when Chief Inspector Thursday, Endeavour’s boss, is trying to watch the game at home and tells his daughter to keep moving the antenna in order to get the clearest reception and then to hold it in place. 

Endeavour is unfortunately caught between “town and gown.” Coming from a working-class background like his colleagues in the CID (Crime Investigation Department) of the Oxford city police, he attended Oxford on scholarship, where he studied the Classics. He dropped out without finishing his degree, traumatized by a romantic relationship that ended badly. Because of his family background, he lacks the social connections to blend in with the academic population at the university. While the department and the rest of the country are fascinated by the World Cup, Detective Constable Morse is doesn’t know anything about football and prefers listening to classical music and opera and solving crossword puzzles. He is also a stickler for grammar. His unusual intellect and personality quirks help him to solve his cases, but they also set him apart from everyone else. 

The murder victim in the episode is a retired genealogist whose hobby is researching heraldry. He is found dead in a natural history museum in Oxford, supposedly killed by a khatar, or dagger used by Indian royalty for ceremonial purposes.  On a side note, I recently had the opportunity to see a khatar at an exhibition of the Royal Arts of Jodhpur at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston during a visit earlier this summer.  

A group of girls who are summer boarders at the nearby Blyth Mount School for Girls was visiting the museum at the time the murder took place. Morse interviews them to see if any of them noticed anything that would help to solve the murder.  He learns that the boarding school used to be Shrive Hill House, home of the fictitious Blaise-Hamilton family a hundred years earlier. The family had built a fortune through its ownership of tea plantations in India. On July 27, 1866, the governess, nursemaid, and three of the Blaise- Hamilton children were found bludgeoned to death with a croquet mallet. 

Although the main purpose of each episode is to dramatize the solving of a murder or murders, “Nocturne” is unique because of the way it highlights the effect of various social factors in the timeline of the episode. Morse discovers that the murder at the museum is linked to the events of that fateful day in 1866. The theme of prejudice affects several characters in the story, who are outcasts in different ways, something Morse can identify with, given his own background and personality.  He has a conversation with the murdered genealogist’s niece later in the episode in which they talk about why it is so important to some people to find out where they came from and the niece says, “Surely who you are and what you can do counts more than breeding, so called?”

Morse interviews Stephen Fitzowen, an author who wrote a book about the murders. The author says that it was at first believed that Mrs. Blaise-Hamilton had committed the murders but the theory was abandoned because she had been bedridden for a long time due to a “nervous condition.” In Victorian times, women were often thought to be mentally unstable because of their “volatile” emotions. Morse examines Mrs. Blaise’s Hamilton’s Bible and notices a drawing of five stick figures, one with its face blacked out and several underlined passages referring to bastardy.  I can’t think of anything more shocking to a wife, especially from the upper classes, than finding out that her husband was unfaithful to her and had, in addition, fathered an illegitimate son whose Indian mother would have been her social inferior. While searching the family records, Morse also finds out that Blaise-Hamilton had been paying the boy’s mother a monthly pension. Mrs. Blaise-Hamilton’s frustration with the situation and her depression over the betrayal would have been viewed by the doctors of the time as a nervous malady and treated with bed rest to soothe the sufferer’s agitated mind. 

The boy accompanied his father back to England and is introduced to the rest of the family as the child of a friend who had died during the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny at Cawnpore. Morse observes that being an Anglo-Indian or half-caste wouldn’t have mattered in India but in Victorian England, or even the England of Morse’s time, things were different.  The boy’s physical appearance marked him as having mixed ancestry and prevented him from being accepted by British society. His illegitimacy with its lowered social status would also have kept him an outcast. His father left him with the gamekeeper and his wife, a white British couple, to be raised as their son. 

 The law of primogeniture governed inheritance rights at that time. Primogeniture is "the right, by law or custom, of the paternally acknowledged, firstborn son to inherit his parent's entire or main estate, in preference to daughters, elder illegitimate sons, younger sons and collateral relatives; in some cases the estate may instead be the inheritance of the firstborn child or occasionally the firstborn daughter." (Wikipedia). Although the boy was Blaise-Hamilton’s firstborn son, his illegitimate birth and his father not publicly acknowledging him prevented him from inheriting the family fortune.  

Charlotte, as the only surviving legitimate child after the murder, would normally have inherited the entire estate once her father passed away. The fictional storyline of the episode introduces a change in the law in 1966. Parliament was preparing to hear a report that would potentially lift the restrictions on inheritance towards those who were illegitimate and their descendants, allowing them to make a claim on the estate, just as with any legitimate descendants, which is a crucial plot point in the story. 

Fitzowen tells Morse that the real crime of the man who was wrongly accused and arrested for the murders was that he happened to be Irish and adds, “Bearing the surname Fitzowen, I can testify to this. When in doubt, blame the Irish.” However, he doesn’t recognize the irony of his own remarks. He says that Mrs. Blaise-Hamilton’s mental instability was inherited by her daughter. He believed the girl was the real murderer, referring to her as “Bloody Charlotte,” a name which had survived in local legend. The only evidence he has to support his claim is that the daughter’s face had been scratched out in the photographs he has gathered and that the portrait of her in the attic has her face painted over.  It is only when Morse takes a closer look at one of the photographs that he discovers the real reason that the pictures were altered. Charlotte's father confined her to an institution after the murders, where she died unmarried without heirs. Since she was in a mental institution, the estate and its holdings were auctioned off and the proceeds went to the Crown. 

Chopin’s Nocturne op. 9 no. 1 in B flat minor was playing on a music box when the police came to investigate the murders in 1866. It is heard several times throughout the episode and the episode's title takes its name from the piece. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a nocturne, "is a composition inspired by, or evocative of, the night, and cultivated in the 19th century primarily as a character piece, a relatively brief musical composition, usually for piano, expressive of a specific mood or nonmusical idea. Closely associated with the Romantic movement, especially in Germany, 19th-century character pieces often bore titles citing their inspiration from literature (such as Robert Schumann’s collection Kreisleriana, 1838) or from personal experience (e.g., Schumann’s Kinderszenen, 1838; Scenes from Childhood). Others refer to specific personages directly or in disguise (such as Schumann’s Carnaval, composed 1833–35) or evoke geographic or national images (e.g., Frédéric Chopin’s polonaises, mazurkas, and Barcarolle, 1845–46). Felix Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte (1830; Songs Without Words) covered a particularly wide range of styles and moods, while Chopin tended to favour musico-literary genres, such as ballades, and more-generalized idyllic or melancholy associations, such as nocturnes." 

With Morse’s knowledge of classical music, he recognizes that the complexity of the piece requires the talent of a highly skilled pianist. The schoolmistress says that Shelly Thengardi, one of the summer boarders is the only one with that level of expertise. Shelly is also an Anglo-Indian and subject to the same prejudice that existed against Blaise-Hamilton’s illegitimate son during the time of the murders at Shrive Hill House. She tells Morse that some of the other girls refer to her insultingly as Fish-nor. She is neither fish nor fowl because she neither purely white British nor purely Indian. She says that her father told her that the rule of the British Raj over India was a long injustice but she would not have existed without it, which he saw as a silver lining. Shelly continues to quote her father, saying that the past can only hurt us if we let it. 

When Morse asks the schoolmistress if Shelly and Bunty Glossop, another one of the summer boarders, are friends, she replies, “Shelly's not friends with anyone.” 13-year-old Bunty Glossop is highly intelligent and very observant. She is able to quote Lewis Carroll from memory. Morse and Bunty share some of the same traits. Both are sensitive, highly intelligent individuals who lost their mothers when they were young. This probably influences their temperaments and makes them unable to fit in. 

In the universe of the series, Lady Matilda’s is a fictional college in Oxford, intended to be a combination of the colleges of Lady Margaret Hall and St. Hilda’s. The schoolmistress says of Bunty that “she would be a prospect for Lady Matilda’s if boys don’t get in the way.”  She worries that the ambitions of someone with Bunty’s intelligence and potential to succeed would be sacrificed to the demands of an unsupportive partner.  The schoolmistress describes herself as a 34-year-old unmarried woman in the middle of some God-forsaken nowhere where there are no potential marital prospects. Out of desperation and loneliness, she begins a relationship with a man she met at the pub on her day off. He is a postgraduate student who was working at the museum when the genealogist was killed. It can be inferred from the episode that despite the progress in women’s rights since Victorian times, unmarried women seem no happier than many married women, even if they have jobs and financial freedom. 

The question of property and inheritance rights is still an issue today although the context has changed. The United States Constitution gave the states police power, which governs issues related to marriage and family law. While interracial marriages are now accepted as legal unions, until the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell vs Hodges in 2015, many states did not recognize the legitimacy of gay marriage. This precluded partners in such relationships from receiving the federal benefits accorded to heterosexual couples, including medical and survivor’s inheritance benefits. Obergefell made gay marriage legal in all 50 states by relying on the Constitutional provision of equal justice under the law.

Prejudice towards those who are different because of their physical appearance, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and nowadays, even political affiliation, continues, although we claim to be a democratic society with liberty and justice for all. Whereas in the past it was hidden under the surface, as the episode showed, today accusations of bigotry, intolerance, and prejudice are a rallying cry for individuals and groups, fueling the fires of unrest and discontent. 

It hurts when those who discriminate against us the most are the ones who are the closest to us. Some of us respond by withdrawing and others by lashing out or by engaging in self-destructive behaviors. Endeavour Morse encounters many of these types of individuals during his investigation and over the course of his career and personal life. His own efforts to fit in with those around him are largely unsuccessful, which eventually causes him to change into the person he becomes in his later years.