Mike Leigh, Shakespeare, and - yes! - Philanthropy

In the past week or so it's been almost impossible to turn on the radio without hearing latest national treasure Mike Leigh speaking about his uncharacteristically optimistic new film, Happy-Go-Lucky. We saw it last week in a preview with a live Q&A with the director afterwards (only he was in London and we were in York and a satellite effected the link). But in all the fuss about the film I think something important has been missed.

We have been endlessly told that Poppy, on whom the film focuses (played by Sally Hawkins) is a model of positiveness and that we could all learn something from her. And while that might be true, she also makes it very difficult for anyone she encounters who doesn't want to share her relentless cheerfulness. When, early in the movie, she goes into a small bookshop and tries unsuccessfully to engage a staff member in conversation, I was reminded of Auden's ‘I have no gun but I can spit’. If she'd have gone up to the bookseller and playfully pinched his bottom, all right-thinking people would have agreed that she had trespassed into his personal space – but is personal space only physical? Don't we all have a right to some psychological personal space? If I want to be a miserable old git, don’t I have that right, so long as I don't impose my miserable old gitness intrusively on others? (message to my family: the question is rhetorical in this context).

The other key character in the film is a clearly damaged personality who works as a driving instructor. Poppy’s approach to life is as different to his as it is possible to be, and when the two approaches collide, it's he who comes off worst. I saw an interview with Sally Hawkins recently in which she spoke of the character she plays as "very sensitive". Oh no she isn't. If she was sensitive she wouldn't go around winding people up -- she would know when to shut up, and when not to impose her sunniness on someone else.

What, you will by now be asking, has this got to do with philanthropy or social justice? Well, there is a link, albeit a tenuous one. Before I spell it out, I want to say something about another experience last week -- we saw Northern Broadsides version of Romeo and Juliet (which would doubtless be advertised in the States as ‘William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet’) at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough on Saturday (after an excellent fish and chip supper at the Princess Café – that’s just to add colour, and has absolutely nothing to do with philanthropy).

The Friar, in his eagerness to help the young couple, and in his certainty that he knew what it was right to do for them, was the immediate architect of the ensuing tragedy. He, and Poppy, and many in the field of philanthropy -- there you are, I promised we’d get there -- seem to have a kind of unthinking confidence about what is good for others. Of course, sometimes they might be right -- but if they're wrong than the lesson of Happy-Go-Lucky and Romeo and Juliet (Mike Leigh, who I'm sure is an avid reader of this blog, will doubtless be delighted that the two works are written of in the same breath, so to speak) is that the consequences can be awful.

This, of course, is the importance of grant making for foundations. It's grant making, when done well, which ensures that foundations are listening to the people at the sharp end and if not to them directly, then to people who are close to them. Foundations interested in social justice need to be sure that they are pushing their resources in directions where they will do good and at least do no harm. That's one of the messages of Happy-Go-Lucky and Romeo and Juliet; it's just that Mike Leigh and Sally Hawkins haven't realised it yet - though Shakespeare, who realised all sorts of things centuries ahead of his time, probably did.

Giving with one hand...

When York author Fiona Shaw wrote her first novel, The Sweetest Thing – a love story set against the background of the chocolate factories in York at around the turn of the century (19^th to 20^th) – one of the reviews suggested that her plot was unrealistic, because it featured a Quaker chocolate manufacturer who was also a philanthropist, and who used industrial espionage. This, wrote the reviewer, would never happen. But Fiona (who is a trustee of the Rowntree Society, a small charity which I chair) had in part based the character on Joseph Rowntree. There is ample evidence to suggest that JR did indeed use industrial espionage to keep Rowntree’s ahead of the game in cocoa and sweet manufacturing; and of course his record as a philanthropist, progressive employer and Quaker needs no elucidation to readers of this blog.

What, you will be wondering, has brought this on? Well, the other day at the Royal Academy From Russia exhibition, I was gazing at the wonderful picture of Tolstoy, and the voice in my headphones pointed out that he too was a bundle of contradictions – dressing like a peasant during the day and being waited on by servants in the evening, promoting the benefits of celibacy while…oh, you can imagine the next bit.

And of course the same applies to many of the great philanthropists. I got into a bit of trouble (see foot of 1st column on 13th page) a year or two back when, speaking about Andrew Carnegie at an event organised by the Carnegie UK Trust, I hinted that Carnegie had been a brutal employer. The same is true for that great philanthropist of the art world, Henry Clay Frick, who, acting on instructions from Carnegie, had his Pinkerton guards shoot strikers dead (I have a small interest in Frick – the man who tried and failed to murder him, Alexander Berkman, may just have been an ancestor).

Does it matter, when they give with one hand and take with the other? We all have inconsistencies in our lives; we present a face to the world which may not be exactly the one we present to those closest to us, or the one we see in the mirror in the morning. But, yes, I think inconsistencies on this scale do matter, and are at least worthy of critical appraisal. I don’t feel that Joseph Rowntree did much harm by his use of industrial espionage, and the good he did is in no way undermined by it; he might have argued that he was only enabled to do what he did by ensuring the commercial success to which the espionage contributed. But I’m not at all happy to wander round the magnificent Frick Collection near Central Park without recollecting how it came to be there. You (well, I, anyway) can’t just gloss over a conflict in character as sharp as that between a killer, and a collector and donor of great art.

Of course, Frick is an extreme example. But perhaps a little more critical scrutiny would be in order when the next contemporary billionaire businessman is feted because of his decision to give serious money to charitable causes. This takes us neatly back to the Mike Edwards book on philanthrocapitalism mentioned in my last posting. In her comments on it, Caroline Hartnell, writing for OpenDemocracy, said:

But more than anything, the underlying values are in conflict: philanthrocapitalism is a product of individuals making large personal fortunes. The very wealthy can wield enormous power in society, through their philanthropy as well as their economic activities. But social justice demands greater equality between people in terms of possessions and power. And the limits of the hard-pressed earth we live in mean that if everyone is to have enough, many may have to be content with less. How much transformation of the world that has made philanthrocapitalists so rich can they be expected to support?