Some people manage to have two or even more quite different careers. A skilled  classical pianist who did the British Council Eastern culture tours  some years back during the winter, revealed at a drinks do afterwards that he was also the Essex Cricket 2nd elven team wicket keeper..... in very thick gloves, I speculate.... and that he preferred doing that to the piano stuff... and he was good... which was  not so important to him. I bet his mum and dad had a considerable discussion about his future when he was a lad.

many authors write stuff totally unrelate to their day job, I think - but what about others? Rev  David Shepherd a cricketer was also an umpire  later, I think. Tony Curtis was a good artist ..... and on and on. I expect res Historians will have better and perhaps more surprising examples of keeping the day job... as welll.

Earlier this year the contrast in character between the prime ministers of neighbouring countries was rather starkly represented by one British example being admitted to intensive care having contracted Covid-19 through injudiciously ignoring personal hygiene advice while his Irish counterpart at the same time, as a qualified doctor, was giving up one day a week from politics to help out in an acute treatment centre in Dublin.

However Varadkar's recourse to the "day job" was one which hardly qualifies here, in that it would hardly have been an option to take up for the man had his country not been plunged into an "all hands on deck" scenario. But a prime minister who maybe better fits the bill, and also coincidentally a gay one at that, is the now little remembered Earl of Rosebery, he who reluctantly followed Gladstone at Queen Victoria's insistence as she wanted to deal with someone "she could like" when the old bag-man retired. Thankfully for Rosebery his tenure only lasted a year when his government fell and poor Vickie had to bite the bullet and deal with the Tory Marquess of Salisbury, a man she described in her diary as "a vile old man, but always well turned out".

This meant Rosebery could again concentrate on that which he did best - training racehorses (he produced three Derby winners, two of which won during his tenure as PM), as well as that which he apparently did too well but which he probably shouldn't have been doing at all.

While Victorian society would later be scandalised by Oscar Wilde's pursuit of the Marquess of Queensbury's son, young Lord Alfred Douglas, it was Alf's older brother Frank who much earlier had caught the eye of the pre-PM Rosebery, who procured his services as "secretary" and - when word got back to the dad regarding the actual nature of the secretarial services his offspring was providing - then found himself  the subject of a very real threat by the semi-psychopathic Queensbury to "personally horse-whip the bugger". Queen Vic saved Rosebery on that occasion, sending the Prince of Wales to meet with Queensbury and advise him against improper use of perfectly good equine equipment, while advising the MP to discreetly "disappear" for a while and to sack his secretary. Rosebery wisely concentrated his extra mural efforts afterwards on managing his Crafton Stud, and just for good measure also qualifies for this thread through his well regarded "other" day job of historian, his essays and books deemed good enough within Oxbridge academia to feature as recommended reading (early Plantaganet history) for decades after his death.

When the provincial surveyor for Wellington Province in New Zealand heard of a newly arrived Scandinavian family who were looking for land to buy he was cock-a-hoop. A Scot, John Stewart had been charged by the provincial council with preparing the unpromising Manawatu region for settlement and here was his first prospective sale. With steep hills, dense woodland and thick scrub it was going to take a lot of work to clear. Even the local Rangitane people had had little regard for it and had sold it off to the council as a block lot for a lump sum.

Fondly imagining a large clan of strapping Norwegian woodsmen ready to set to the task, Stewart was taken aback when his pioneer family turned out to be a portly, bespectacled Danish pastor from Copenhagen and his 2 bookish sons. If they failed, gave up and returned home then other settlers would be discouraged and the council would be in the red and his job on the line. Still, the pastor had made the down-payment and so Stewart reluctantly handed over the deeds for 400 acres of raw wilderness to the seemingly unsuited pioneers.  

Stewart’s fears seemed confirmed when he heard that on arrival at the property they had built a mud-hut to live in. Just one frozen Manawatu winter in that, he thought, and come the spring they’d surely be on the first ship back to Europe. But when the thaw did come he was surprised to find that the pastor and his sons had not spent the winter hibernating in misery but had earned themselves blistered hands and sore backs digging trenches, felling trees and sawing logs in preparation for the building of a permanent house. And within 18 months they were in possession of a going homestead with sheep, pigs, cows and crops. The pastor was obviously a driven man who wasn’t the sort to just throw in the towel and give up easily.

But while nature and the elements couldn’t bow them, predictably it would be humans who would do so. 2 years later, when a particularly brutal Maori rebellion broke out in 1868, the homesteaders found themselves in an isolated and vulnerable position and were forced to flee to Wellington. The pastor returned to Denmark and John Stewart was devastated. His worst-case scenario had been realised.

2 years later again, however, in 1871 the 2 sons returned and this time with a shipload of 10 families from the highlands of Sweden and Norway. The pastor’s sons picked up the pieces of their own farm while the newcomers established a thriving settlement adjacent which would later become the city of Palmerston North named in honour of the British prime minister who had died in 1865. Stewart was overjoyed at this second reversal of fortune, and visiting the settlement, discretely enquired of one of the Swedish families about the remarkable pastor. “Oh! Bishop Monrad? He was the bishop of Lolland-Falster and prime minister of Denmark. Didn’t you know?”

Lolland & Falster is a small but prestigious diocese of the Danish Church, a bit like England’s Bath & Wells. After resigning the bishopric in 1854 Ditlev Monrad had entered politics becoming prime minster of the country in 1863. Months later Austrian and Prussian forces invaded Schleswig triggering the Second Schleswig War. Controversially Monrad had rejected a peace-deal brokered by the aforementioned Lord Palmerston and called on Danes to fight on even though the combined might of the Habsburg Empire and Prussia meant almost certain defeat. The result was that Denmark lost heavily in the war and was forced to cede much more territory than would have been the relatively small concession which Palmerston had proposed. Monrad was dismissed by the king and left Denmark for New Zealand.

“So he didn’t know when he was beaten then?” said Stewart to the Swedes. “Maybe we should have named the town after that prime minister!”

Thank you Vizzer for these interesting story. It was a good read for me.
Kind regards, Paul.

Yes, and for me. I live far away from the Manawatu, and it's not a place that gets much coverage apart from the Tongariro Crossing. Palmerston North tends to be the butt of jokes (as do most smaller cities in the North Island outside of Auckland and Wellington, probably because those larger ones bookend the island) and Whanganui was for many ears most known for its unlikeable mayor. 

Local histories do tend to stay local - we went to a talk and film about Benhar quite close to where we lived before we shifted (and still only about an hour and a half away). It was at one time well known for making porcelain and providing most of the toilets and handbasins for the country. I have known about it for a long time, but it was surprising how many people at the small event had not known about it before. 

Have got away from the subject, sorry. But if I thought harder, I would know quite a lot of people here who would fit the bill - pioneers tend to have to turn their hand to lots of different occupations.

The story of the Danish bishop was new to me.

The nordic noir genre of detective story may not be for everyone but I liked the Arne Dahl (Mysterioso) series.  One of the detective characters Gunnar Nyberg is a former Mr Sweden.  I didn't realise when I watched the series at first that Magnus Samuelsson who played the part was in real life a former strong man.  He also farms.  I haven't watched The Last Kingdom but I've been informed he plays a character called Clapa in that.

The bishop Monrad was a clever man, when he returned to Denmark he was eventually re-selected as bishop at the same diocese again.

Clever man? He had a 50/50 call on taking on the Prussians - and guessed disastrously wrong. He had a 50/50 call on Darwin's new-fangled evolution thingy - and got that one uproariously wrong. He had the whole world to choose from when deciding in 1865 maybe now was a good time to lie low somewhere - and chose a swamp in New Zealand. Please tell me he's not seen as a "national hero" in Denmark!

Keeping in the vein of Danish top dogs losing Schleswig however - the first elected PM in Denmark after the war, Knud Kristensen, had another disastrous stab at annexing South Schleswig when he reckoned the Germans were so dazed, befuddled, down-in-the-dumps and bewildered after WWII that maybe they wouldn't notice. They did (it's a bit big not to be missed if it suddenly disappears into another country), he was ousted, and so he went back to what he did best - raising pigs (tasty ones too) in his farm in Humlebæk.

That old day job is a handy thing to fall back on, it appears, especially if your hobby is becoming Danish PM with sights set on getting your grubby little hands on those poor Schlessies!

Well, regarding quite a few of those who have been both Danish PMs as well as other ministers, before 1901 most were estate owners - big farmers - or senior civil servants when that term meant something, following 1901 quite a few have been government employees in one position or other with a sprinkling of - small - farmers in between, and in the middle of the C20th quite a few skilled labourers - this seem though to be a threatened species.

All in all a mixture from which some surnames appear to, err re-appear, as a few dynasties within some of the older political parties seem to cling to the open, elected power, where others stay behind the political scene as in the role of the likes of Sir Humphrey Appleby.

As to bishop Monrad, he's now mostly seen as the writer of our Constitution of 1849 of which quite a bit still remains, and somewhat forgotten in his disastrous [here I agree with you, Nordmann] role of a gamer against Bismarck.
When he returned from NZ he regained his bishopric, and like many of the above mentioned [clever] politicians, kept drawing on the Treasure for life.

nordmann wrote:

He had the whole world to choose from when deciding in 1865 maybe now was a good time to lie low somewhere - and chose a swamp in New Zealand.

To be fair, many of the world’s most famous and indeed many of its greatest cities are founded on land which was originally swampy – Cairo, Rome, Shanghai, London, Bombay, Venice, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Baghdad, New York, Calcutta, St Petersburg and Singapore etc. Perhaps Monrad saw himself as another Pieter Minuit who famously bought the marshy island of Manhattan from the Lenape people for a handful of trinkets. Indeed Minuit, a Walloon who served as governor of the New Netherlands, later assisted with the establishment of the Swedish colony of New Sweden on the Delaware where he also served as governor. A man who could turn his hand from diamond-cutting, to trading furs, to metallurgy, to administrating colonies for different countries etc. really should have decided what his day job actually was when in 1638 he took a shipload of colonists bound for New Sweden on a huge detour to the Caribbean to pick up a consignment of tobacco only for himself, the crew and the colonists all to perish in a hurricane.

Well, it's one thing to found a settlement on high ground surrounded by marsh - in fact back in the day this was a rather intelligent thing to do if one wasn't too sure about the intentions of all those on the far side of the swamp. Moving to the other side of the planet with your family to live in a swamp isn't quite the same thing.

But speaking of swamps and day jobs; Posterity, with no little encouragement from Hollywood in recent decades, has dealt a rather gammy hand to Captain William Bligh, I reckon. Forever to be "remembered" as a wantonly cruel disciplinarian sea captain on one now rather infamous voyage the story rarely references what qualified him as commander in the first place - his engineering background and naval surveyor experience which, in his time, was invaluable to his employers who were extremely interested in beefing up foreign ports in newly "acquired" territories and locating sites for possible new bases elsewhere. Bligh, being of something a little more than scientific bent himself, was also fastidious and effective when recommending specialist personnel for expeditionary voyages such as the Bounty also was on.

After the mutiny incident, and one can hardly blame Bligh for settling for something of a more landlubber life afterwards, he eventually washed up in Dublin as boss of the newly revamped Port & Docks Board. And whatever failings one might (probably unfairly) assign to his role as naval captain, one can certainly not fault the man when he finally got around to doing the "day job" that he must surely have missed when also lumbered with commanding randy insubordinate entitled eejits (who the navy had appointed, not him) on the high seas.

Dublin port was notoriously dangerous for larger vessels. The bay being more silt than water, its narrow channels from the Kish Bank in the Irish Sea to the shoreline near the capital not even having the decency to remain in one place for any length of time, meant that the powers-that-be (then British of course) were faced with something of a dilemma. Constant dredging was yielding ever diminishing effect and already reaching astronomical cost, but even higher costs would be incurred should the main Irish port require to be relocated elsewhere and still serve the capital. Bligh's job, at least as the port authorities saw it, was to bite the bullet and use his surveying expertise to assess where best to move it to, a meticulous survey that he immediately carried out on a stretch of seaboard depressingly lacking in opportunities for building deep water ports at all.

However he also had a closer look at the problem in the bay itself and realised that there was a third option, if a little radical. In fact two alternatives - one where a ship canal would be gouged across the Sutton isthmus which would then revert Howth to an island status it had last enjoyed in neolithic times, and one where the then largest single sea wall construction project ever envisaged would create two long prongs of mason-cut stone to the tune of a few million tons in order to create an artificially enhanced tidal current in the bay that would effectively do the dredging of accumulated silt naturally and deposit it north and south.

The canal idea was ditched (pardon the pun) when a bunch of retired Navy admirals and their mates living in the exclusive environs of Sutton and Howth took umbrage at the prospect of either losing their well apportioned retirement piles or being cast adrift on an island. The sea wall idea also sent nervous shudders through those holding the purse strings - nothing on this scale had ever been attempted before and huge debate arose regarding just how such complicated silt patterns could be guaranteed to behave afterwards in the desired way. Bligh stuck to his guns however - he even brought his plans and calculations to the Royal Society to demonstrate that this was no idle guesswork on his part but based on meticulous and accurate science. These calculations (which can be seen in the National Library in Dublin today) were impressive indeed, not just for their measure of tidal flow, seasonal variations, water volumes involved, and tonnage of masonry required, but also because they introduced the then little understood concepts of variable torque, adjustments for salinity, and engineered silt deposition that others tasked with port construction normally considered so complicated that they simply shied away from even attempting the project where such factors were required to be considered.

The South Wall and the northern Bull Wall that Bligh championed still exist as he designed them (and make for an exciting and pleasurable alternative to a boring old Sunday stroll for Dubliners today). His silt deposit predictions were also spot-on. Thousands of acres of slob-lands disappeared, converting to shallows on the south side, an impressive and ever expanding island on the north side, and at last a dependable channel in between for ships to make their final approach to proper dockyards (which he also built) safely.

Bull Island, the new land mass created by Bligh, is still evolving - just as he also predicted. It now accommodates two large golf courses, quite a bit of wild meadowland, a bird reserve, and Dublin's longest beach, so is still a popular hit with Dubliners, as it was from the get-go (apart maybe from the oyster growers whose slobs were sacrificed to make way for it). Bligh projected it would all work as expected for about 300 years, after which he recommended a similar project north of Howth to encourage the chain reaction further up along the coast. We're approaching this time limit now in fact, though I wonder will another Bligh emerge at the crucial moment to get the job done. And if one does, will they also suffer the ignominy of being rather cruelly "remembered" thereafter as a tyrannical and arrogant nincompoop?

nordmann wrote:

But speaking of swamps and day jobs; Posterity, with no little encouragement from Hollywood in recent decades, has dealt a rather gammy hand to Captain William Bligh, I reckon. Forever to be "remembered" as a wantonly cruel disciplinarian sea captain on one now rather infamous voyage the story rarely references what qualified him as commander in the first place - his engineering background and naval surveyor experience which, in his time, was invaluable to his employers who were extremely interested in beefing up foreign ports in newly "acquired" territories and locating sites for possible new bases elsewhere. Bligh, being of something a little more than scientific bent himself, was also fastidious and effective when recommending specialist personnel for expeditionary voyages such as the Bounty also was on.

nordmann, as you speak about William Bligh and his first career and about the well known mutiny, I don't know if it is too much an aside, if I mention that I first read the novel some 60 years ago in translation. 
https://www.amazon.com/Mutiny-Bounty-Novel-Charles-Nordhoff/dp/0316611689

But later, and I don't remember if that is mentioned in the book, I read what a capable man, Captain Bligh was, leading the crew put with him in a small vessel back to the civilized world.
I just checked my copy from 60 years ago and indeed the return in the small vessel was the third part of the Nordhoff trilogy.
https://www.historyrevealed.com/eras/18th-century/after-the-mutiny-captain-blighs-return/

Are the qualities of him that you mentioned not the ones that helped him to let the small boat have a save return? The same qualities that helped him in his second career in Dublin?

BTW nordmann,  I wasn't aware of the man's second Dublin career. Thank you for mentioning it overhere.

Kind regards, Paul.

Paul wrote:

Are the qualities of him that you mentioned not the ones that helped him to let the small boat have a save return? The same qualities that helped him in his second career in Dublin?

Bligh was a resourceful man, as well as insatiably curious regarding all matters of "natural philosophy" (science), especially matters related to his naval experience. In a letter to his wife shortly after they married he extolled those virtues she possessed that first had attracted him to her, which included her interest in astronomy and her remarkable observations of the transit of Venus that she had made with her own personal telescope.

However it was engineering and cartography that interested him most. After the Battle of Dogger Bank, in which he served as lieutenant in charge of a vessel for the first time, his ship hit bad weather on return to England and diverted to Whitby where, because of some damage sustained in the battle, it was decided repairs should be conducted before resuming. These took a few weeks, during which time Bligh, with the difficult approach to a safe mooring still fresh in his mind, took the opportunity to survey the harbour, primarily a fishing facility, and design improvements whereby it could be cheaply upgraded to accommodate naval vessels with their typically deeper draught and higher freeboard dimensions requiring matching moorings for the loading and unloading of artillery and provisions. Bligh was acutely aware of how many lives had been lost in the past purely because naval ships such as his often ended up foundering for want of a suitable port, these unnecessary delays also often increasing risk to potentially exhausted or injured crews immeasurably. He submitted his plans for Whitby to the Royal Society (including a forerunner of the massive breakwaters he later designed for Dublin) as a model for how even the most basic fishing ports could be improved to act as supplementary naval ports, which other Society members then used as a basis for a proposal to the navy. Coming from the Society it had the imprimatur of the crown (something Bligh surely knew) and was taken seriously by the Navy Board, who secured extra exchequer funds and implemented the policy.

The "Port Improvement" scheme was a huge public success - one by-product was of course that fishing facilities and commercial yield also improved around the country as a direct result. It is probably no coincidence and a pointed acknowledgement of Bligh's talent as architect and engineer that the first candidate for improvement was Whitby, and done exactly as he had planned too. The two long piers flanking Whitby's harbour approach, with their distinctive twin lighthouses, are an impressive monument to William Bligh's precocious talents, though I doubt there are many these days would even make that connection at all. And it can only be one of those great ironies which history tends to regularly throw up that Whitby nowadays in fact is instead closely associated with Captain James Cook (the Cook Museum there is well worth a visit) and his famous Pacific voyages, on one of which indeed Cook had among his crew a certain Lieutenant W. Bligh!

Thank you very much nordmann for your further interesting explanation about Bligh.
Btw. I learned today the word "nincompoop" from you...
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/nincompoop/

Kind regards, Paul.

Not quite in the parameters of the thread but adjacent. In the local rag today is mention of one who has a PhD in  The History of Public House Games...... no mention of his day job since but there has to be one surely. I also wonder what jobs one can apply with that qualification. Probably calls himself Dr. Do I sound a tad snotty about this? I know of two young ladies who have similar in the subject Literature for Children. Not unusual and probably  academic so one must be careful what one gets sniffy about. I can see that one leading to  work in publishing etc. And  a Phd does not have to relate to work. Is it true that the comedian Harry Hill is a qualified brain surgeon? there must be many examples of divergent careers.

Not quite in the parameters of the thread but adjacent. In the local rag today is mention of one who has a PhD in  The History of Public House Games...... no mention of his day job since but there has to be one surely. I also wonder what jobs one can apply with that qualification. Probably calls himself Dr. Do I sound a tad snotty about this? I know of two young ladies who have similar in the subject Literature for Children. Not unusual and probably  academic so one must be careful what one gets sniffy about. I can see that one leading to  work in publishing etc. And  a Phd does not have to relate to work. Is it true that the comedian Harry Hill is a qualified brain surgeon? there must be many examples of divergent careers.

LIR,

  Believe it or not but a few years ago someone obtained a university degree in "The Beatles"

Dirk

And you had better believe it, Dirk I ain't LIR either.

Priscilla wrote:

And you had better believe it, Dirk I ain't LIR either.

I don't know what the flying fornication this is about?  I have never claimed to be Priscilla.  I never claimed to have done a degree about the Beatles either.  I started many years ago to do a part-time degree in French but I didn't finish it because circumstances came about that I had to leave the part of the country where I was studying.  Shame because I'd passed the subsidiary English exam (English was my subsidiary subject).

As ever the 'I's have it in a LIR post - seven of them, even.  Aye, aye, aye, aye, aye aye, aye.

Higher up this thread Dirk replied to a post thinking mine  was by LIR. He was corrected = without any flying fornication...... interesting concept.

However, yet another thread being derailed with  not anything of huge interest; personal stuff.  Sad. Let's try to keep on track, sigh.

This thread is about people who have one or more interesting strings to their already formidable bows.

I don't suppose my stint as a barmaid for a couple or three evenings a week while working as a secretary during the day would be deemed interesting.  There is a trend for people to do perhaps two or three part-time works to support themselves these days.

I see that writers/authors have been mentioned before.  Thinking of historical examples Charles Dickens worked variously as a court reporter, then as a journalist and then as an editor whilst writing until he established himself as a writer to make it his sole career.  While Elizabeth Gaskell's role as the wife of a Unitarian minister might not have been a "job" as such it must have kept her busy so she juggled the roles of housewife/support to her husband and author of works like Cranford and Wives and Daughters.  The late Christopher Lee worked in the Intelligence Service before he became an actor though admittedly he wasn't fulfilling the two roles concurrently.

Someone (not on Res Historica) had mentioned watching a documentary (on CD) about Wilko Johnson, a guitarist in the 1970s band, Dr Feelgood and then later a Blockhead (the Blockheads being Ian Dury's backing group).  In the early seasons of Game of Thrones WJ played a frightening but dumb knight who doubled as an executioner.  He left the series because he received a cancer diagnosis though fortunately he had successful surgery regarding that illness.  WJ is gifted as a raconteur also.