This diary is just a way of saying thank you to all of you who signed a message of support in regard to Dr Malcolm Kendall-Smith. This is the Royal Air Force Flight Lieutenant medical officer, born in New Zealand, who felt he could no longer support the war in Iraq.
In my earlier diary, I gave some of the background to his decision. He is now paying dearly for it. Stripped of rank, and ordered to pay his life's savings towards the legal costs, he is now in his second week of his eight-month sentence in prison.
I was really quite touched by how many of you in the States were prepared to let him know of your concern for him. I was particularly moved, as I am sure he will be, by the messages that you also sent. I valued these and wanted to give them a substance and life that our electronic media alone could not give. This, then, is an account of how I went about trying to achieve it. It was an honor for me to do so on your behalf and by sharing the story, it is a way of giving reality to my gratitude to you.
To have merely copied your comments seemed inadequate. As they came in, I updated the diary to let you know that they would printed out and bound, so that they could be presented attractively and, at the same time, I would do justice to their worth.
A quick search on Google produced the name of a bookbinder whose business address was half way between my home on the banks of the Menai Straits and my other village towards the end of the Lleyn Peninsula. Although it was Easter, I was able to make contact and arrange to visit this, as it turned out, internationally well-known craftsman on his return from London later the following week. In the meantime, I contacted Malcolm Kendall-Smith's lawyers to let them know of the support that had been expressed and that these would be sent to him as soon as they had been bound. As he had just been processed to enter prison, I wanted the knowledge of this support to be made known to him immediately.
In printing out the Daily Kos diary, I decided to keep the colors and general format of both the "recommends", which acted as the signatures of all of you, and the way the comments were laid out. I included one or two email messages that I had received. In total, there are about thirty pages.
The first page describes what can now properly be called the "book" is all about. I used the quotation that had been provided by one the contributors:
Malcolm Kendall-Smith
"If one man can stand on principle and there abide, the wide world will come round to him!" - Robert F. Kennedy
On April 13, 2006 Reuters published the news that Malcolm Kendall-Smith had been found guilty of exercising his conscience over the tragedy of the war in Iraq.
Immediately, notice of this verdict was posted on Daily Kos, the web site of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the United States of America.
Within a very short space of time, three hundred and twenty three people had recorded their respect for the courageous stand taken by Malcolm Kendall-Smith and many added personal posts of support and praise for this action. The quotation given above is taken from one such post.
Within this binding is a record of the original post, the response given under the names used on the internet by those who wished to register their support and a selection of the comments that accompanied these as messages of thanks, encouragement and hope.
I took the pages to Keith Haughton, the bookbinder, and he promised to complete the work by the end of this week. Better than his word, he telephoned me on Wednesday to say that the binding was finished. I went back to his studio to collect it yesterday.
It was a beautiful warm, sunny afternoon for the journey. We need this sunshine. Spring has been very late this year. The daffodils, the national flower of Wales, are still in full bloom and the leaves have yet to fully appear on all the trees.
The country route, involved in a journey of little more than twenty miles, took me down narrow Welsh lanes that follow the ancient paths that have been used for centuries:
You come upon Keith's place as you turn one of the many corners in the road. Penarth Fawr is a unique example of a Medieaval stone-built house of around 1450 AD. It has a hall with a superb timber roof and he shares a studio for his bookbinding in the adjoining stables with his charming wife Elizabeth, who has been a potter all her working life and whose ceramics are on display with the sumptuous leather bindings that are the normal result of Keith's craftsmanship. It is shown here in a downloaded internet photo:
Sadly, I had been unable to ask Keith to use his grander materials for the book of your messages to Malcolm Kendall-Smith. We had decided, however, that Democratic Party blue was the appropriate color of the cloth and the name of the recipient had been gold-blocked on the front cover.
I persuaded Keith outside into the late afternoon sun as he explained to me how he had stitched and bound the pages:
I should have talked more to Keith about his finer work - I know little about bookbinding, although I have a small collection of ancient books that I treasure. Why else should I have become an expert in the work of an obscure eighteenth century poet, James Thomson, if it were not for the quality of engravings and the feel of the weighty leather that encloses and dignifies his writings?
Instead, I behaved like any other victim of pop culture and asked him about his work for Hollywood. Keith has made many of the ancient books that you have seen in films like the Indiana Jones series. Rather stupidly, I searched my memory for other films that involved books. "Had James Bond used them as props at all?" I asked. Apparently not, although Keith had bound all the cast scripts for a number of the films.
The project that he had just completed intrigued me the most. You will see his work shortly when "The Da Vinci Code" is released. Now here was a topic. It was just yesterday morning that the Guardian had revealed that Mr Justice Peter Smith had embedded a coded message into his written judgment on the Da Vinci Code case, involving the author Dan Brown and two writers who failed in their claim that he breached their copyright to create his bestselling novel. It is there waiting for one of you to find out what the message says.
I hope Justice Smith was called to the bar at the Middle Temple. It would all be so neat. Here was I, talking to Keith about the Da Vinci Code and about a judge with a sense of humor, in the garden of his medieval home having dined my terms in the splendid hall of one of the three ancient Inns of Court that had been established in the fourteenth century, after it had belonged to the Knights Templar for a hundred and fifty years. What secrets Keith and I might have discovered between us!
Instead, the talk of lawyers reminded me of why I was there. So, taking grateful possession of the book of your messages to Malcolm Kendall-Smith, I left Keith in his delightful garden and returned home to the more pressing business of the real world.
Today, I telephoned Justin Hugheston-Roberts, the barrister who is representing Malcolm, in his Chambers in Wolverhampton. Despite earlier promises that I could have a word with him, this was not forthcoming and I was unable to progress further than his Clerk. What I was rather reluctantly told was that Malcolm Kendall Smith had been moved from Colchester to Chelmsford prison. I could learn little about how he was feeling after the events of his trial other than that he was "fine" but I could be given no details. I did learn that an appeal is in preparation.
A barrister, or Chambers at least, that possesses less of the Spring warmth than I had hoped. Perhaps not a Middle Temple man? Importantly, though, they said they would be happy to pass on the book containing our messages to Malcolm Kendall-Smith.
And so this journey comes to an end with the book being sent off in the afternoon post on another bright day here in Wales. In doing so, I am deeply aware of those of our friends on both sides of the Atlantic who, whilst sharing our views about the Iraq war, have seen it as their obligation to follow orders and serve their tour of duty. After being once in Afghanistan and twice in Iraq, Malcolm Kendall-Smith felt his conscience led him down another path. Who is right and who is wrong? I don't think it matters. Those that we admire have all examined their conscience and we must respect them equally for having done so and made the best decision that our frailties as human beings will allow.
Malcolm is now stripped of rank, pension benefits and life savings and we shall not see him permitted again to wear the medals on his uniform that his previous service earned:
He loses none of my respect for having chosen a route that requires its own form of bravery. On one thing we all do agree. This Iraq war is wrong.
(Cross posted from ePluribus Media)