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Telegraph
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Sacred Mysteries: The artist's dangerous retreat from the world
David Jones, the poet and visual artist, almost ended his days in a residential hotel called Monksdene in Northwick Park Road near Harrow-on-the-Hill. He'd lived there on his own in a bed-sitting room for 20 years when in 1972 he broke his hip. So for the last two years of his life he was cared for by nuns of the Little Company of Mary at the Calvary Nursing Home. I've seen a good account of visiting Jones in his last years (his late seventies), in which a misprint calls it the Calgary Nursing Home. The difference is important, for Jones came to see creative work, such as painting or poetry, as united with the Eucharist, which collapses time and makes present the sacrifice accomplished by Christ on Calvary, where the cross was set up. And now David Jones features, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil, in an enjoyably written book on an important subject: whether it is good for an artist – or anyone else – to retreat from the world. In The World Within, Guy Stagg (whose previous book was on walking to Jerusalem) writes about Wittgenstein as the Saint, Weil as the Martyr and Jones as the Hermit. Of course these roles are highly individualised by the three figures chosen. In pursuing Jones through his strange kind of hermit life, Stagg visited Caldey Island, now a Trappist monastery, where Jones stayed repeatedly in the 1920s and 1930s, when it was a Benedictine house, as his life took a decisive turn. Jones founded his morality, art and religion on his experience of the First World War, when he was in action for long periods. He admired the virtues of the private soldiers and was deeply affected by seeing, through the cracks of a shed, a priest in vestments saying Mass for men kneeling on straw. After the war, Jones learnt to be an accomplished wood-engraver and joined in with Eric Gill's commune at Ditchling, following him to Capel-y-ffin in Brecknockshire. Then came another crossroads. He was engaged to Gill's daughter Petra, but held back, worried about whether he could afford to marry and how he could continue his life as an artist. She at last wrote, saying she wanted to marry another man. I can never quite decide whether it was Jones's experiences in the war or the failure of his engagement to Petra Gill that left him with the depressions and agoraphobia that shrank his external life to a Harrow bedsit. These symptoms came upon him on his finishing the first draft of his long poetic account of the war, In Parenthesis. His was not a voluntary retreat from the world, but was imposed by his ill health. That did not mean it was no vocation. Stagg points out that a BBC film from 1965 picks out in Jones's crowded room an inscription in his masterly lettering combining in Welsh and Latin the phrases from the Mass Hostiam puram, hostiam sanctam, hostiam immaculatam – 'This pure sacrifice; this holy sacrifice, this perfect sacrifice.' When the BBC interviewer asked if, in his studio and living room, he was making his own world in the middle of this one, he answered: 'It's the only way I can do it.' Stagg wonders whether the last days of Wittgenstein, Weil and Jones – alone, without friends or family beside their beds – 'should serve as a model or a warning'. 'The promise of retreat,' he says in conclusion, 'is that we find our true selves, unhampered by the compromises of company, but I suspect there is more truth in the character that emerges through encounter.'
Daily Mail
17-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Revealed: The hospitals where nearly nine out of ten babies are being born to non-British mothers
British mothers are now outnumbered by foreign-born mums at nearly one in seven maternity units, analysis shows. At Northwick Park Hospital, in the London 's Harrow borough, a staggering 84.2 per cent of live births in 2023 were to non-UK mothers. Behind Northwick Park was Newham's University Hospital (77.1 per cent) Hillingdon Hospital (72.1 per cent) and North Middlesex Hospital (71.2 per cent). Nearly one-third of all births in England and Wales are now to mothers born abroad, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) says. In 2003, before immigration spiralled to all-time highs, that figure stood just shy of a fifth. India is the most common country of origin for non-UK born mothers, just ahead of Pakistan, Romania, Nigeria and Poland. When the ONS figures are broken down by hospital, 27 different sites register rates exceeding 50 per cent. This includes St Mary's, an NHS hospital in Manchester which delivers more babies than anywhere else in the country. Nine of the ten hospitals with the highest non-UK mother births are in London. Birmingham's City Hospital (64.5 per cent) in Winson Green ranks eighth. The other end of the spectrum is localised, too, with three of the five lowest rates in Wales. Royal Glamorgan in Llantrisant (5.7 per cent) ranked last, according to MailOnline's breakdown of all 269 facilities. Exact figures weren't supplied for dozens of sites with too few births to analyse. An ONS spokesperson told MailOnline: 'Almost a third of babies born in 2023 in England and Wales were to non-UK born women, a slight increase on the percentage in 2022. 'This is a continuation of the long-term trend of the percentage of live births to non-UK-born mothers generally increasing. 'While our birth data show us the parents' country of birth, it doesn't give us a picture of the family's ethnicity or migration history, and it's worth noting that not all women born outside the UK will be recent immigrants.' India remained the most common country of birth for non-UK-born mothers (3.6 per cent of all live births) and fathers (3.9 per cent) in England and Wales last year. Pakistan was second again. Ghana entered the top 10 most common countries for non-UK born mothers for the first time in 2023, in ninth place with 0.6 per cent of live births. But Germany fell out of the top 10, having been there since ONS records began for this measure in 2003. Albania ranked at number seven, up from eighth in 2022, having entered the top 10 for the first time in 2021. Afghanistan was at number eight, falling from seventh place in 2022. Professor Sarah Harper, an expert on populations and migration at the University of Oxford, told MailOnline: 'Non-UK born mothers have always tended to have a higher total fertility rate than UK-born mothers. 'This is particularly the case with South Asian-born mothers and since Brexit the UK has taken more immigrants from South Asia and fewer from EU countries.' There were just 591,072 live births in England and Wales in 2023, the lowest number since 1977 (569,259). This number also represented a decrease of 14,407 compared to the year prior. Professor Harper said this trend falls down to economic factors such as affordability but also a change in attitude to people wanting to have fewer, if any children. The total fertility rate (TFR) in England and Wales dropped to 1.44 children per woman, its lowest value since records began in 1938. Freefalling birth rates have triggered doomsday warnings about population collapse, which demographers believe will devastate Western economies. If the downward spiral continues it may leave countries with too few younger people to work, pay tax and look after the elderly.
