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I wrote in praise of the 19th century enduring Mutual Societies for Idler magazine in the March/April 2025 edition, mentioning amongst others The Wine Society and The Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society.

You can purchase copies of the Idler from these stockists: https://www.idler.co.uk/idler-stockists/

Here’s the essay:

Mutual Friends

What would you do if you found a few wooden vats of Portuguese red wine in the basement? Yes, well thankfully, back in 1874, Major General Henry Scott was a little more scrupulous than some of us and instead of knocking it all back, he did a rather remarkable thing.

            The barrels of wine were found in the cellars of the Royal Albert Hall at the end of the Great Exhibition of 1874. The public spectacle was focussed particularly on food and wine, and samples of both were sent by governments all over the world to be showcased at the glittering event. Much to the chagrin of the Portuguese, the organisers forgot to bring their wine out of the cellar to be tasted by the public and a minor diplomatic incident occurred with Portuguese diplomats making a formal complaint to the Foreign Office about this slight to their beloved Douros and Vinho Verdes.

            Enter Major General Scott. As the original architect of the Albert Hall, he felt a little embarrassed at this faux pas, and so volunteered to give some separate tastings to likely quaffers who might be encouraged to buy the wine. Over a series of lunchtime tastings, all the barrels were sold off, the Portuguese pride was satisfied and all might have ended there. But on 4th August, the “Committee of Gentlemen” who had tasted and then bought the wine decided, under Scott’s prompting, to form a “co-operative company” to purchase wines for their future enjoyment.

            One hundred and fifty years later, The Wine Society (whose legal name remains The International Exhibition Co-operative Wine Society Limited) is celebrating its special anniversary with a whole range of offers for its 240,000 members who, the previous year, spent almost £150 million buying wine. The organisation remains true to Scott’s delightful decision to be structured as a “mutual company”, defined by HMRC as an “organisation owned by, and run for, the benefit of its members, who are actively and directly involved in the business – whether its employees, suppliers, or the community or consumers it serves, rather than being owned and controlled by outside investors.”

            Scott and his chums weren’t the only people in the 19th century to consider the “mutual” approach. The Nationwide Building Society (founded 1884) is run for the benefit of its members and indeed, the whole building society movement was a response to what many Victorians saw as the excesses of the capitalist model — much like George Bailey’s Building and Loan in the film It’s A Wonderful Life, supporting poor renters against the evil property magnate Henry Potter.

            The Rochdale Pioneers too were hugely influential in the 19th century. A group of 28 working-class men, they founded the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844. Most of them were weavers and artisans who were struggling with the harsh economic conditions of the time, and with what seems now to be a remarkable spirit of both independence and bravery, they set up a cooperative store on December 21, 1844, selling basic goods like butter, sugar, flour, and oatmeal. Their sole objective was to provide high-quality, affordable goods to their members.

            Although they acted as one body with no formal leaders, the Pioneers established what are now known as the Rochdale Principles under the guidance of Charles Howarth and James Smithies. The Principles became the foundation for cooperatives worldwide and included democratic control (one member, one vote), open membership, limited interest on capital, distribution of surplus according to patronage, and education of members. What is so striking is that the aims of the working-class Pioneers were in many ways no different to those of the far more affluent founders of the International Exhibition Co-operative Wine Society. Both sought just outcomes over profiteering.

            Civilised Victorians saw the “mutual” model as a way of ensuring that essential services could be accessed by all at a fair price. Take UIA Insurance, set up in 1890 to provide insurance products to members of the trade union movement and other not-for-profit operations. By 2020, UIA Mutual had almost 100,000 members and assets of over £60 million. The Craft Guild of Chefs was formed in 1892 to encourage young men and women to enter the catering trade, and continues as a mutual to this day to that end. William Morris set up the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) in 1877 to protect Britain’s built heritage from the ravages of Victorian industrial architects.

            So can we learn lessons from the mutual movement today? Wine Society Chief Executive Steve Finlan thinks we can.

            “Our business purpose is to champion the joy of good wine and everything follows from that. We don’t pay bonuses to anyone in the organisation, we don’t pay dividends, we don’t have investors. The heat on my collar is not about growth for growth’s sake. We’re not a not-for-profit, we have to make a profit, but the trick is to make just enough, which is actually a surprisingly difficult thing to do.”

            In other words, on a turnover of £150 million, he needs to make sure the money is spread around the business with one sole purpose: to allow the Society’s 240,000 members to buy the best wine at the best price.

            “Last year,” he says, “the government chose to make the biggest ever duty rise in fifty years which has had a devastating effect on the industry. Most of our commercial competitors were forced to pass that increased duty onto consumers. We decided not to, and held our prices.”

            What’s particularly interesting about the ebullient Finlan’s obvious pleasure in his work is that he was recruited five years ago after a very successful career in red-in-tooth-and-claw commercial retailers including Marks & Spencer and Clarks Shoes. He admits:

            “It probably took me almost twelve months to unlearn many of the ways of thinking from my career. To be fair, it probably took my new colleagues in the Society the same amount of time to accept some of the commercial principles I had to bring with me.”

            So could that model be applied elsewhere? The model in which only the satisfaction of the members of the mutual matters? Let’s have a think: how about the water industry?

            Finlan laughs.

            “Without question, the mutual model should be looked at more seriously across the board. It’s just a very grown up model, it gives you a much more holistic way of looking at and running a business. The primary difficulty in that is that investment is getting more and more expensive, access to investment is very difficult. So it’s difficult for an organisation like a water company, which may have failed to invest adequately for 20 or 30 years, to suddenly change direction. But it does feel as though business generally needs some kind of reset.”

            A cautionary note can be found in the story of another mutual, The Royal Arsenal Co-Operative Society, founded in 1868 in order to ensure that the families of employees of the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich could buy food at a reasonable price. Initially, it began with just twenty workers; by 1975, its membership had reached a staggering 500,000 and the services it provided ranged from food and milk to pharmaceuticals, shoes and even undertaking. Its turnover was over £60 million, yet its “mutual” principles remained the same, the same as the Wine Society holds to today.

            Throughout the bulk of the twentieth century, The Royal Arsenal Co-Operative was one of the most important suppliers of goods to working people in the south east of England. What caused its collapse? By the late 1970s, commercial supermarkets such as Sainsbury’s were expanding aggressively and bringing with them new techniques of buying, selling and supplier management. The Co-Operative didn’t have the capital or the commercial acumen to compete and, in 1985, it transferred all its activities to the national Co-operative Wholesale Society. The dream was over.

            The Wine Society is fortunate in that it has its own capital reserves in the form of tens of millions of pounds’ worth of en primeur wine stored in its cellars. These have been built up ever since Major General Scott first sipped from the Portuguese barrel. But, as a mutual, it also doesn’t have to orchestrate a flight of capital to some obscure pension fund the other side of the world every time it makes a surplus. Instead, Finlan and his team look at ways of improving the services to members, holding prices, supporting struggling growers in regions where the weather hasn’t been kind. It does all this, while consistently winning Decanter magazine’s Wine Retailer of the Year award against commercial competition.

            We should all drink to that. And if you’re wondering where to do that, you could do much worse than pop down to the Peckham Liberal Club in south London, a mutual founded in 1899, whose beautiful wood-lined interior will welcome you seven days a week in an atmosphere of civilised and sociable comfort.

Imagine a world where football clubs, regional water companies, pharmaceutical businesses and all the other strange late capitalist phenomena took the first tentative steps towards mutuality. Pace John Lennon, it may not be easy, but it might be worth trying.

I was commissioned by London charity London Plus to research and write a report on the role of the volunteer and community sector during lockdown in London. The report, Tales of Covid, has just been published by London Plus, and you can read it here: https://londonplus.org/case-studies/tales-of-covid. It was a genuine privilege to be able to report on the quite extraordinary work carried out by heroic individuals all over the city, without whose dedication the city would have ground to a frightening halt in 2020.

I wrote a post for The Ghostwriters Agency, of which I’m proud to be a member: https://www.theghostwritersagency.com/news/6yvtc2qmx3ke9y06pg1w4o9lwncgqb

My first grandchild is six months’ old. Despite the fact that this new life is of overwhelming interest to me, I won’t show you a photo of him because I realise that’s very dull. I didn’t understand that a few months ago and thought my friends were just under the weather when I thrust my IPhone into their faces.

         “Look!” I exclaimed and, to be fair, they did. Then they tried to change the subject.

         I was wondering how this was all going to turn out. The first time round the block, when my son was born almost thirty four years ago, his mother and I were so petrified of the responsibility we had no time to take photos. Now, I find myself lying in bed casually speculating about how I’ll teach little Jesse the front crawl. It’s unlikely I’ll be given carte blanche on this — when both my kids were still tiny, I took them on a caravan holiday to Britanny and hired a pedalo which I managed to capsize. I told the kids this was a new game and that the person who held on to the upside-down boat for the longest in the turbulent sea would get a prize. When we finally got back to shore, I said:

         “That was fun, wasn’t it? Probably no actual need to tell your mother about it, though.”

         My daughter immediately rang her mother and excitedly told her about the brilliant game Dad had invented and how we were all in the sea for absolutely ages.

         So it probably won’t be just me and the kid on the beach next summer. Jesse’s mum, my daughter, is pretty strict even without her knowledge of my parenting skills, so I have to watch my step. When I’m out in Twickenham with them, I point at other babies in the park.

         “Look at that one!” I say, obviously too loudly. “It’s got such a fat head.”

         “Shhh,” she frowns at me.

         What I’d really like to do is chuck Jesse up in the air and then pretend not to catch him until the last second, causing him to chortle merrily at my antics. I don’t do that. Instead, I hide my own fat head behind my hands then reveal it with a wide-eyed grin which, when she does it, makes him chortle merrily. When I do it, he starts crying.

         I did spot him the other day though, eyeing me with what was obviously intelligent curiosity when he thought I wasn’t staring slavishly at him. It’s remarkable how you can tell your own grandson has a higher-that-average IQ.

         I’ve learned to keep all advice to myself. When my son was a baby, we had supper with my parents at their house and during the meal, the baby alarm in his bedroom started broadcasting his pathetic cries. His mum started to get up to go and comfort him. My mother said, with a metallic glint in her eye:

         “Why not just turn that wretched speaker off?”

         I have started secretly singing Bob Dylan songs to Jesse. That didn’t seem to do my kids much harm. When my son was two, he said one day:

         “Dad, I’ve got a new Bob Dylan song to sing you.”

         “Great! Go ahead.”

         He looked at me pityingly and then started to chant:

         “Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan…”

         It’s OK, Jesse hasn’t split on me yet about the singing, partly because he can’t talk yet. I know he likes it though. When he’s supposed to be going to sleep he keeps his eyes open for as long as he can so that he can still hear my lovely voice intoning Desolation Row. Then my daughter turns up.

         “Why is he still awake?” she demands.

         I’m looking forward to taking him to the GTech stadium to watch Brentford with his Dad, my son-in-law. Last season, I ended up next to the Leeds away fans one Saturday and could almost taste the furious spittle on their enraged faces. He’ll enjoy that, but I may just have to remind him there’s no need to tell his mother.

I reviewed Pandæmonium by Humphrey Jennings in the latest edition of Idler magazine. You can buy copies of Idler magazine at all good newsagents and other shops as listed here: https://www.idler.co.uk/idler-stockists/

Here’s the review:

Pandæmonium
Humphrey Jennings
André Deutsch, 1985

Humphrey Jennings was a filmmaker, poet, painter and intellectual who died in 1950 aged just 43, having fallen from a Greek clifftop while researching a new documentary on European healthcare. The director Lindsay Anderson (If, etc) said he was “the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced.” Along with Charles Madge, he founded the Mass Observation movement in 1936, helped arrange the infamous Surrealist Exhibition in London the same year attended by everyone from Salvador Dalí wearing a deep-sea diving suit to Dylan Thomas handing out eggcups filled with string, and he made several wartime documentaries including Listen To Britain and Fires Were Started.

Jennings was a magnetic personality. The wealthy arts philanthropist Peggy Guggenheim had a brief affair with him in Paris in the 1930s, and remembered him jumping up and down on the bed shouting: “Look at me…don’t you think I’m beautiful?” His wartime documentaries for the Crown Film Unit were masterpieces but he could be a fierce taskmaster.

His attention focussed increasingly on the way in which art could faithfully record and celebrate the innate qualities of “ordinary” life, and he began to collect writings which in his view illuminated what he saw as “the coming of the machine age” from the late 17th century to the late 19th century, an age which he increasingly believed “was destroying something in our life.” By the time of his death he had collected over a thousand pages of quotations and notes which were finally edited into publishable shape by his old colleague Charles Madge and published as Pandæmonium in 1985.

Pandæmonium was the capital of Hell described by Milton in Paradise Lost, built by the angels on the instruction of Mammon. Amongst his notes, Jennings had written: “Pandæmonium is the Palace of All the Devils. Its building began c.1660. It will never be finished. The building of Pandæmonium is the real history of Britain for the last three hundred years.” Elsewhere he wrote: “The poets are the guardians of the Animistic system, the scientists of the Materialist system.”

Jennings, with his filmmaker’s eye, referred to his collection of texts as “images” which “present the imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution.” The book is a dazzling collection, featuring famous names — Charlotte Brontë, Friedrich Engels, Edward Lear, Charles Darwin — alongside the forgotten and the obscure. Here’s an engineer named James Nasmyth writing in 1830 on the coalfields of Yorkshire:

Amidst these flaming, smoky, clanging works, I beheld the remains of what had once been happy farmhouses, now ruined and deserted…In some places I heard a sort of chirruping sound, as of some forlorn bird haunting the ruins of the old farmsteads. But no! the chirrup was a vile delusion. It proceeded from the shrill creaking of the coal-winding chains.

Or the priest and poet Charles Kingsley in 1848:

Beauty is God’s handwriting — a wayside sacrament…where [the townsman] may walk through green meadows, under cool mellow shades and overhanging rocks, by rushing brooks, where he watches and watches till he seems to hear the foam whisper, and to see the fishes leap.

Perhaps too sentimental for some — Jennings has over the years incurred the wrath of the furious Left for romanticising rural poverty — the texts which he collated in Pandæmonium compose a beautiful portrait of a far simpler world where meaning was to be found in the relation between man and nature. It is a romanticism which sits alongside Orwell’s vision of a Lost England or William Morris’s advocacy of traditional craft skills and vernacular art forms. To Jennings, this was animism: the secret heart of the individual’s relationship to the earth which the materialist machine age wished to stamp out. He put it this way:

At a certain period in human development the means of vision and the means of production were intimately connected…I refer to the Magical systems under which it was not possible to plow the ground without a prayer — to eat without a blessing, to hunt an animal without a magical formula. To build without a sense of glory.

After Jennings had died so unexpectedly on that Greek clifftop, he was found to have just one pound in his bank account. Most of his work, including his documentaries, he considered a necessary obligation, to enable him to continue to pay the rent and support his family, while he occupied his time in imagining. This collection, Pandæmonium, would take another thirty five years to see publication, thanks mostly to the persistence of his daughter, Mary Lou Jennings, and it remains a unique and vital witness to the changing character of the English nation. Beautifully arranged and edited by Charles Madge, it is perhaps now more than ever, a talisman to clutch close amid the clamour.

I have recorded an online course for Idler magazine to try and motivate more people to write their own life story. You can access the course here: https://www.idler.co.uk/course/how-to-write-your-life-story-with-simon-petherick/

Over the years I’ve worked professionally as a ghostwriter, it has struck me now and then that people are probably more capable of writing their own story than they imagine. This course has been designed to try and and encourage them.

There will always be a need for ghostwriters like me, particularly when it comes to books by celebrities or business people who maybe just don’t have the time to sit down and write. I talk about that here: https://simonpetherick.com/2022/11/21/ghostwriting-interview-with-michael-portillo/

I have an essay in The Guardian’s Long Read section on writing in the age of Thatcher: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/oct/25/my-doomed-stand-margaret-thatcher-war-truth-central-office-information

This essay, In Search of Shangri-La, is published in Issue 84 of Idler magazine, available here.

‘I am from the lamasery of Shangri-La.’ These first words spoken by Chang, the High Lama’s functionary, in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton, introduced the world to the legendary hideaway for the very first time. High up in the Himalayan mountains, virtually inaccessible owing to the treacherous narrow paths which lead up to it, Shangri-La is a vision of perfection lying beneath an eerie blue moon. For ninety years, we have embraced the place in countless ways: why did it embed itself so deeply in our collective psyche?

James Hilton was an unlikely midwife for Shangri-La. The son of an East End schoolmaster, he spent his 20s knocking out book reviews for the Telegraph and writing adventure yarns which never threatened the bestseller lists. He lived quietly in Woodford Green, the north-east suburb of London. After ten years of hacking, Lost Horizon was published when he was thirty three years’ old but it was Goodbye Mr. Chips, published the following year, which made him famous.

On the surface, they couldn’t be more different: Chips is a sentimental tale about the impact of a quiet schoolteacher upon generations of Fenland schoolboys, while Horizon tells of high drama in the Himalayas. Dig deeper, however, and you soon sense the deep mystical rumble that powers them both: Hilton, for all his conventional background and demeanour, was fascinated by woo-woo.

A quick summary of Lost Horizon, for those who haven’t read it: a party of four escapes a dangerous revolution in Afghanistan by aeroplane. They are a brave but eccentric British diplomat known as ‘Glory’ Conway, his puppy-like devotee Mallinson, an American called Barnard who turns out to be on the run from the Feds, and a British missionary, Miss Brinklow. Their plane is hijacked and they end up flying over the Himalayas and crash somewhere on the Tibet/China border. Chang and a retinue appear, take them to the nearby lamasery of Shangri-La, where Conway eventually meets the High Lama and discovers that the inmates have learned how to extend their lives by living in quiet tranquillity and moderation and breathing in the pure air of the remote mountain. The High Lama himself is over 200 years’ old.

Both Horizon and Chips made Hilton a celebrity almost overnight, and with commendable lack of restraint, he hot-footed it to California where he spent the rest of his life hob-nobbing with the stars. It was Frank Capra’s film version of Lost Horizon which came out in 1937 with Ronald Coleman as the dashing Conway which finally brought Shangri-La to the world’s attention. Such was the impact of this romantic vision of a far-off, mountain utopia that President Roosevelt named the new federal government retreat that was completed in 1938 after it — Camp Shangri-La had its name changed to Camp David in 1953 by Eisenhower.

As the years went by, Shangri-La became a commercial shorthand for various notions of rest and relaxation. The Shangri-La hotel group was formed in 1971, and the Chinese-owned behemoth now has 100 luxury hotels around the world; for two thousand quid a night, you can stay at the Shangri-La in Paris and have a balcony overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Americans have proved particularly susceptible to the notion: car fan Bill Owen opened the Shangri-La Speedway track in New York in 1946, while a little-known Chinese takeaway in Queens, New York — the Shangri-La — inspired two sets of sisters to name their band after it. The Shangri-Las formed in 1963 and had a smash a year later with Leader of the Pack, touring with both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The Shangri-Las created the whole concept of rebel pop, and even today feedback fiends Jesus and Mary Chain sometimes refer to themselves as a Shangri-Las covers band.

Hilton’s fictional sanctuary seemed to inspire people to think of, on the one hand, a blissful place of peace, contentment and longevity; and on the other, of rebellion against the status quo. Take a look at the Shangri-La enclave at the Glastonbury Festival: first launched at Worthy Farm in 2009 as a far-out freak session for latenighters, it’s now a full-on drum-bashing alternative politics sideshow which, according to the Glasto website, holds up a mirror to the masses, creates conversations, encourages activism and stimulates the senses. Not quite what Hilton had in mind, one suspects.

But what exactly did Hilton have in mind? Was his Shangri-La just a fancy, an idea of untroubled bliss at a time when Europe in the ’30s was becoming increasingly unstable, or was there something more going on? The paradise that so appeals to Conway in the novel certainly sounds delightful, particularly perhaps to Idler readers. As Chang tells him at one point: ‘It is significant that the English regard slackness as a vice. We, on the other hand, should vastly prefer it to tension. Is there not too much tension in the world at present, and might it not be better if more people were slackers?’

Life in Shangri-La, which extends for each person for decades, even hundreds of years more than it does for people in the West, is tranquil and unhurried, but by no means pious. Inmates are encouraged to drink, take drugs, have sex as well as perfect the arts, as long as they do everything in moderation. It is a life not unlike that proposed by Epicurus in his garden in Athens: modest food, good conversation, a sprinkling of stimulants and an abhorrence of politics and business. As the High Lama tells Conway: ‘Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue.’

Yet this attractive prospect conceals a deeper, mystical vision, which accounts for the curious anomaly whereby Shangri-La today can stand for pampered capitalist luxury hotels at the same time as radical, right-on political posturing. I suspect only Hilton could have achieved this. The American antiquarian bookseller Jerry Watt has developed a splendid theory that Hilton was actually the real author of a book called The Eye Of Revelation, first published in America in 1939 by an author called Peter Kelder. The book introduced to the West for the very first time a series of esoteric yoga practices called The Five Tibetans which laid the grand claim that, by following them every day, one could extend one’s life by decades. Go to any yoga studio in the world today and at some point someone will suggest running through the Five Tibetans. When Bruce Forsyth was about to marry the Puerto Rican beauty queen Wilnelia Merced, who was considerably younger than him, her mother gave him a copy of The Eye of Revelation and told him to follow it religiously, in order to keep time with his younger wife. Like the good soul he was, he did so every day for the next thirty years.

The Eye of Revelation has been a bestseller for decades, also going under the name of The Fountain of Youth. But no-one has ever seen this Peter Kelder, ever; he is a total mystery. His publishers claimed that he lived in Los Angeles at the time of publication in 1939 — the same city as Hilton. Jerry Watt draws plenty of fascinating parallels between the story as set out in the Kelder book and Hilton’s Shangri-La, concluding that Kelder and Hilton are one and the same. I like to think he’s right, because it accords with Hilton’s concealed fascination with Eastern esotericism.

Shangri-la as a name and concept has its roots in the Bon religious tradition of Tibet, which goes back at least to the tenth century. Believers, known as Bonpos, have often been regarded by traditional Tibetan Buddhists as an heretical anomaly, following as they do a lush Shamanic idea which contrasts colourfully with the somewhat dour precepts of pure Buddhism. The Bonpos believed — still do believe — in a cast of animist household Gods who all sound a lot more fun that the strict non-attachment rules propounded by Buddhists, with all their weighty instructions about Good Talk and Good Actions.

The Bon people were originally from a Tibetan plateau region called Khang Ripoche, which can be translated as snow precious; the snowy path leading to it is known as Khang-ree la. The Bon people also lived in a region called Shang-Shung which is believed to be the location for the mythical kingdom called Shambhala. Shambhala is a place of sanctuary imagined by both Tibetan Bonpos and Buddhists, a spiritual place of peace and perfection. The idea of Shambhala was popularised in the West by oddball spiritualist Madame Blavatsky in her 1888 book Secret Doctrine and represented something akin to the Shamanic idea of the Upper World, the home of the soul rather than the body or the mind.

This is where we get to the secret heart of Shangri-La. Eventually, the High Lama tells Conway that Shangri-La exists as a kind of Ark in readiness for when the world finally goes completely mad and a final, awful global conflict takes place. ‘He foresaw a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, would rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing would be in danger, every book and picture and harmony, every treasure garnered through two millennia, the small, the delicate, the defences — all would be lost…when the strong have devoured each other, the meek shall inherit the earth.’

Hilton’s Shangri-La is in effect a heresy to be feared and persecuted by all those who would have us toe the official line, just as the Catholic Church ruthlessly slaughtered the 13th century Cathars for their refusal to believe that human life had any purpose other than as a waiting room before the soul could merge with the infinite. The powers that be don’t like people believing that life on earth has little meaning, because it discourages them from grasping the importance of work, duty, paying taxes and obeying the law. Once you start believing that Shambhala, or Shangri-La, is real, the urge to be a model citizen according to the diktat of Church or State begins to subside.

That’s why the wayward anarchists at Glasto can lay claim to Shangri-La and the Shamabala Festival in Northampton can this year celebrate “twenty years of adventures in utopia” with a decidedly leftfield, eco-political fervour and a lovely-looking audience right out of an Alice in Wonderland fantasy; it’s why the Shangri-Las with their rebel-girl aesthetic — He turned around and smiled at me, You get the picture? Yes we see — could flourish in a country whose President chilled out at Camp Shangri-La. There is a secret code hidden inside the name Shangri-La which I believe thrilled the ostensibly conventional schoolteacher’s son James Hilton and led him to create an heretical vision of a world beyond the control of our masters. It is a world waiting for us where we finally can lead a life of contentment, community and unbridled pleasure.

‘Conway found it pleasant to realise that the serene purpose of Shangri-La could embrace an infinitude of odd and apparently trivial employments, for he had always had a taste for such things himself. In fact, when he regarded his past, he saw it strewn with images of tasks too vagrant or too taxing ever to have been accomplished, but now they were all possible, even in a mood of idleness.’

At the end of the novel the narrator pictures Conway, having allowed his regrettable sense of loyalty to lead him to support young Mallinson in escaping the mountain-top lamasery, struggling single-handedly to return through the inhospitable terrain of the high Himalayas to the mystical lamasery. The last line in the book reads:

‘Do you think he will ever find it?’ I asked.

And of course, we all hope that he does.

A while ago, a friend of mine asked me for my advice about whether she should give a quite small amount of money to someone who claimed he could turn it into a lot of money. I advised against it: it sounds like Spanish Prisoner, I said. What’s Spanish Prisoner? she asked. It’s the oldest con in the world, the granddaddy of them all, in which the sum of money exchanging hands is so small that you can’t believe it’s a con. Surely, if they were out to con me, they’d be trying to take more money from me? my friend persisted. Not so. Spanish Prisoner works in two ways: firstly, the operator is probably doing this to lots of people at the same time, so the small numbers quickly add up. Second, the mark can often be persuaded to double her money, again believing that the sums are so low they couldn’t be a con.

The con is the oldest known in Europe, used as my friend discovered, to this day. It is named after an allegedly true story concerning a beautiful Spanish heiress locked in a tower in 14th century Spain. A few years ago, I wrote a story speculating on how it all might have happened. Here we go:

The Spanish Prisoner

A very long time ago, a bold and fine-hearted knight was riding across the dry, cracked lands of southern Spain. Both he and his horse were tired, hungry and thirsty. They had not spent time with other people for several days and the sun shone upon them fiercely.
‘Have faith!’ the excellent young man called out to his steed, who had slowed now to a meandering walk. ‘Our Lord will provide for us, you need have no doubt on that score!’
The air was hot and still and the knight’s lips were black from the sun. The horse’s ribs showed in pathetic ridges across its belly and its head dropped almost to the ground as it walked.
In the distance a pale shape wavered in the heat.
‘Aha!’ cried the knight. ‘A village or even a town, no doubt. We shall sup well tonight, old friend.’
After another hour’s slow progress, the shape revealed itself to be a castle, standing alone on the hazy horizon. The knight fixed his gaze upon it and gently guided his old companion towards the building.
As they came to a bridge which crossed a dried-out riverbed, a beggar stepped out from behind a tree and spoke to the knight.
‘Sir Knight!’ he cried. ‘I see you have travelled far. Do you head for the castle?’
‘I do Sir,’ replied the knight. ‘It is my intention to place my health and that of my trusty steed in the hands of the great nobleman who owns it.’
The beggar shook his head. He was a short man, wearing a filthy jerkin and with unruly hair. He approached the knight.
‘Then your health shall suffer most terribly, Sir Knight,’ he said, and leered up with a toothless grin.
‘Why say you, you ruffian?’ commanded the knight. ‘Do you dare show disrespect to the fine nobleman who has built this castle, whomever he may be?’
The beggar shook his head.
‘No, Sir Knight,’ he said. ‘I mean no disrespect to him whatever, in fact I send all my most gracious salutations to him in his new heavenly abode.’
‘What? You say the owner of this castle is dead?’
‘He is dead, Sire, and all of his family bar one are dead.’
‘Bar one, you say?’
‘Yes, my Lord. His daughter, the most beautiful young lady in the whole of Christendom, is his only survivor and she rests still in the castle.’
‘But how can this poor and most beautiful vision be alone with her family all gone? Explain yourself!’
‘Brigands, Sir Knight. A mere month ago, a band of the most cruel and dangerous brigands arrived in our land and they laid siege to the castle and eventually broke through its defences and slaughtered everyone in it, apart from the lovely Princess, who is now locked in a chamber at the top of that tower.’
With that, the beggar pointed at a tall tower at one corner of the castle, then looked back and directed his toothless grin once more at the knight.
‘By the sacred dagger of Sir Lancelot himself, that is unjust!’ shouted the knight. ‘I shall go immediately to set her free. No filthy brigand shall be safe from the edge of my shining sword.’ And he pulled his ancient weapon from its scabbard and raised it high. ‘I shall avenge this poor lady and set her free and I shall place myself entirely at her service.’
The beggar raised his hand.
‘Not so hasty, Sir Knight,’ he said. ‘You have not heard all of my story.’
‘What else can there be to know?’ asked the knight. ‘Quick, out with it, I have no mind to dally.’
‘The brigands have left the castle, my Lord,’ said the beggar. ‘Apart from the Princess in the tower, it is entirely empty.’
‘Then do not take up my time, fool! I must release her.’
‘You cannot.’
‘What say you? Do you dare doubt me?’
‘No, Sir Knight. I know you to be the bravest man in Christendom. But even the bravest man in Christendom cannot break down the doors of the prison in which the Princess is kept. And there is only one key.’
‘May the Good Lord strike down the vermin who dared commit these crimes!’ shouted the knight. ‘Tell me, where is the key?’
The beggar shook his head.
‘I do not know exactly, Sir Knight.’
‘What? You do not know, you say?’
‘Not exactly, my Lord. For if I did know, I would have released the Princess myself and married her.’
‘Cut out your tongue, you cur! How dare you speak of the noble Princess with such familiarity? To think that she would consider a betrothal to one such as yourself!’
‘That’s as maybe,’ said the beggar. ‘But I do not have the key, so I cannot test your proposition.’
‘My God, but you test me,’ growled the knight. ‘Out with it: where is the key?’
‘I do not know its location precisely, but I know who has it,’ said the beggar.
‘Who, in the name of all that is decent and fair?’
‘The brigands, Sir. The brigands have the key. They await a ransom from the English cousins of the Princess and when they have received that ransom, they will release the Princess.’
‘Where are these foul men?’ demanded the knight. ‘Tell me, and I shall attend to them at once.’
The beggar shook his head again.
‘They are twenty, Sir Knight, and you are one. Despite your glorious and fine reputation as the bravest man in Christendom, there is no doubt that you would not survive a challenge against all twenty of them. Perhaps you would take ten with you, but that would still leave ten and your body would finally submit to their fatal blows and the Princess would remain in her prison, awaiting her dilatory English cousins whose slowness in sending the ransom may cause her to die herself from starvation.’
‘Ah!’ the knight exclaimed, dashing his hand across his brow. ‘Is there no solution to this foul predicament?’
‘There is one, Sir Knight,’ said the beggar.
‘Yes?’
‘The brigands,’ said the beggar, ‘have left the castle and have put up in an inn in the village on the other side.’ He pointed towards the blurring horizon. ‘I happen to know the man who runs that inn. I would say that if I were to take him some modest sum, he would find me the key from the pocket of one of the brigands while they lie drunk in his tavern and he would give it to me. He is my kinsman, Sir Knight, and his father broke bread with my father.’
‘Enough nonsense,’ said the knight. ‘Tell me where the inn is, and I shall go there myself and see this innkeeper.’
The beggar shook his head once more.
‘No, Sir Knight, and for three reasons no: First, my kinsman will not recognise you, and will not favour you over the brigands who pay for their drink. Second, the brigands themselves may wake from their slumber and set upon you. Third, you and your horse are near the very edge of exhaustion. The inn is a day’s hard ride away. You risk failing yourself in the heat and then what good will that do the beautiful Princess?’
‘But then the Princess is doomed!’ cried the knight, his face wracked with pain.
‘Perhaps not, Sir Knight,’ said the beggar. ‘I am as you see a low-born man who has not triumphed in the great battle of life. I am as you find me: a lowly beggar who lives underneath this bridge. But perhaps there is one thing I can do: perhaps I can take a few ducats from your own purse and take them myself to the kinsman who runs the inn and exchange them for the key which I can then bring back to you. And perhaps, once you have released the Princess and married her and inherited all the wealth of her family’s kingdom, you might look favourably upon me and grant me some menial role in your stables.’
‘Go now!’ said the knight. ‘There is no time to lose. The most beautiful Princess is starving in that tower,’ he said, weeping with frustration and waving his hand towards the castle. ‘I must save her.’
‘My Lord is right,’ said the beggar. ‘Should I make the journey quicker by taking your horse? With some water from my bag she might recover her strength enough to get me to the inn and back within a day and a night.’
‘You have water? Where?’
‘In my bag under the bridge, my Lord. Shall I bring it?’
‘Of course you shall bring it, and we shall give all of it to my fine horse, so that she may carry you swiftly to the inn to exchange these ducats for the key to the Princess’s prison.’
While the beggar went down below the bridge to fetch his leather sack of water, the knight dismounted from his horse and removed his belt which contained his money sack. When the beggar returned, they fed the horse the water and the knight handed over five ducats from his sack.
‘Be sure to ride like the wind,’ said the knight, as the beggar settled himself into the saddle.
‘I shall my Lord,’ said the beggar, tucking the coins into his pocket. ‘Rest awhile in the shade under the bridge and preserve your strength. I shall be back tomorrow with the key to the castle prison and you shall free the most beautiful lady in Christendom.’
‘May the Good Lord thank you and bless you on your journey,’ said the knight. ‘God speed.’
And with that, the beggar took the horse into a gentle trot and crossed over the bridge.
The knight watched him depart and then climbed down the bank to settle in the shade underneath the bridge. He had not eaten or drunk anything for three days and as he lay down to sleep, he had a vision of extraordinary beauty.
‘Princess…’ he murmured, and fell into a deep sleep.
The next day, the beggar returned. The knight heard the hooves of the approaching horse and emerged from under the bridge.
‘You bring me the key to my future!’ he cried out, although his voice was weak.
The beggar came closer, dismounted and stood in front of the knight, shaking his head.
‘Not yet, my Lord. I fear I did not account both for the greed of my kinsman and the fear which his guests the brigands induce in him. He tells me that he needs another five ducats before he dares search the slumbering ruffians for the key.’
‘By the hand of King Arthur himself, I shall teach this kinsman of yours a lesson he shall never forget!’ shouted the knight, staggering slightly.
The beggar shrugged.
‘Very well,’ said the knight, and took out another five ducats from his money sack. ‘Take this to him and if you do not return tomorrow with the key, then by Jove I shall ignore your advice and I shall go to the inn myself.’
‘Rest awhile, Sir Knight,’ said the beggar. ‘You should not excite yourself, you have travelled for days in the heat without food or water, you must needs rest, Sire. I shall return tomorrow.’
With that, he mounted the horse once more, and turned back across the bridge.
The knight returned to his spot beneath the bridge. Despite the heat of the day his teeth chattered and his brow was wet with sweat.
‘Princess…Brigands…’ he muttered feverishly and lay down on the ground to sleep.
The next day, the beggar returned once more. This time, the knight did not appear in front of him, and so the beggar dismounted and climbed down the bank of the dried-out river and saw the knight lying on the ground.
‘Sir Knight,’ the beggar called out.
There was no answer.
‘Sir Knight,’ the beggar repeated and his voice echoed under the stone of the bridge.
There was still no answer and the beggar approached the knight and peered cautiously at him. The knight’s black lips were open and his eyes stared straight up at the roof of the bridge. The beggar poked the knight’s stomach with his foot but there was no change in the knight’s expression.
The beggar crouched down beside the knight and began to untie the belt that held the knight’s money sack. He pulled the sack free, put it in his pocket, then nudged the knight once more with his foot. The nobleman rolled gently down the slope of the bank and rested, arms akimbo, on the dry bottom of the riverbed. Then the beggar climbed back up the bank, mounted the horse once more, and set off at a gentle trot away from the bridge and the castle which shimmered distantly in the silent summer haze.