Red Sea show down; US Steel, Digital Life, Electric Car Wars and Christmas in WW 2.
Christmas Day, 2023 Volume 4 # 32
The Long Way Round Africa
The prospect of Houthi fighters from Yemen launching drones at commercial shipping has many taking the long way round Africa via the Cape of Good Hope.
Container ships and highly flamable oil tankers are avoiding the bottleneck at the opening to the Red Sea and going the extra 5,100 miles or 8,200 kilometres around the tip of Africa. All to avoid the remnants of Iran/Saudi proxy war in Yemen.
Huge fuel costs and the time the ships are at sea. If it lasts much longer it could drive oil prices higher as well as the cost of goods from Asia. Rough waters around the Cape of Good Hope; in spite of the gentle name, there are giant waves, a strong current that can even push around a top heavy container ship.
It could get nasty. All those little yellow blobs could be warships.
US Steel: How the Mighty Have Fallen.
J.P. Morgan took US Steel Corp/. public on April 1, 1901. It was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Index the same day and stayed there for ninety years. When you added the value of its Common and Preferred Stock along with its bonds it was the first billion dollar company.
A 1996 article on the history of US Steel described just how huge the deal was in its day. "In those days, you could get a decent meal in New York for 10 cents," says Robert Sobel, professor of business history at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. "On an inflation-adjusted basis it was the biggest IPO of all time."
J.P. Morgan created US Steel by buying existing steel companies including paying Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie $492-million for his giant steel holdings.
US Steel was the symbol of American strength. But its stock price didn't match winners like General Motors. “During the 90 years it was in the industrial average, U.S. Steel stock rose only 509%, far below the 4,408% for the overall average,” said the article on the firm’s history. US Steel was done in by cheap foreign competition.
US Steel became USX. It was dropped from the Dow. Now Nippon Steel is bidding $14.9-billion to take over US Steel. Adjusted for inflation (to $36-billion) that is less than half the size of J.P. Morgan’s 1901 deal.
But it might not go through. American politicians are urging the government to block the deal. The Financial Times says it is `misguided’ sentimental nationalism about a once star American industrial giant.
US Steel headquarters are in Pittsburgh. When I went to Carnegie-Mellon University there in 1979— a three and half month business course— Pittsburgh was the fourth largest head office city in the United States, after New York, Chicago, and LA. Not any more. The photo below is Pittsburgh in 1950, at the height of its corporate power.
Digital Heaven and Hell
A lot of it is common sense. Countries where governments meddle in the net, like Pakistan, Iran, Egypt and Algeria have high scores. Canada is poor for a rich country, probably because costs are so high and there is little competition.
How Surfshark figure this out: Here is how they got there, their words not mine.
Auto Inflation
The average car price has gone through the roof in the past 10 years.
And cars will get pricier once we go electric. A lot of people don’t like that prospect.
The Fight Against the Electric Car
It comes from the right and the left. From the right: the Toronto Sun ran an anti-electric car story this past week. Seems to me the main reason is if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Greenpeace Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault are promoting electric cars— only EVs can be sold in Canada as of 2035— then electric cars must be bad.
The Sun is wrong, on electric cars anyway, but so are Trudeau and Guilbeault. They are selling the electric car change as a moral fight against climate change. Instead they could pitch it as a way to fight tailpipe air pollution. They could also appeal to people’s frugal nature, since Canadians seem to go into apoplexy if the price of gasoline and diesel goes up a dime. Radio stations have daily `gas watch’ segments that predict the rise in fuel prices. It’s a national obsession. Almost no one knows the cost electricity by kilowatt hours.
On the left, there is panic about mining all the minerals needed to make batteries.
Shocking pictures of ugliness of open pit Lithium mining and the evils of Cobalt from the Congo make a strong Luddite argument. This headline from Wired Magazine went with the picture below:
The devastating environmental impact of technological progress
An insatiable demand for the copper, lithium and rare-earth metals required to fuel the consumer electronics and electric vehicle industries is leaving indelible scars on our fragile planet.
Also, the Just Stop Oil movement, the people who glue themselves to streets and throw paint at masterpieces in museums, just piss off the general population. Interesting to note that in September of 2023 the world consumed a record amount of oil. It will be a long time before it disappears. But electric cars will get the job done faster than an eco-lecture.
Prediction: I will get many notes on this little tidbit from both sides.
Speaking of Climate
The Plant Hardiness Map shows you where you can and cannot grow things. Natural Resources Canada will be bringing out a new one in 2024. A warming world is good news for northern gardeners. A look at the last two Plant Hardiness Maps show that the warmth has been creeping higher since 1961. In this part of southern Quebec there was always a hard frost around Labour Day, early September. This year the first hard frost was in early November, a full two months later.
It’s easy to see the march of warm. And the 2024 version is going to be even warmer.
A Green Christmas
Two deer grazing by my pond on Thursday of this week. The pond is kept open by a bubbler for aeration. There is just a light dusting of snow. The deer can still eat.
Essay of The Week
Christmas at war. A few years ago CBC Radio asked me to do a talk on what Canadians I had written about, and my own father, did in the war. I don;t have a transcript of the program, but I do have the pre interview notes.
Q: You have written a lot of obituaries about men and women in the war. How did they spend Christmas early in the war and later when it was almost over?
A: Dal Russell was a Canadian fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain. He was from Toronto and was 23 when spent the Christmas of 1940 in England…"Cigarettes and food arrived. Many Thanks…he wote home in a telegram. In almost every telegram sent home he asked for cigarettes, food and, in one case, a sleeping bag.
Q: There was one woman who was a spy…
A: I wrote an obituary of her husband, but Sonia d’Artois was an agent who spent 1943 training Scotland. Later she parachuted into Occupied France. (She married a Canadian, Guy d’Artois) By Christmas of 1945 she was in Canada with her young son.
Q: You wrote a story about a man who spent his Christmas in the frozen arctic?
A; HMCS Huron spent Christmas of 1943 and New Year's in a port near Murmansk, a place so cold it made Sub-Lieutenant Hughson's native Ottawa look balmy by comparison.
It didn't lower standards aboard the Huron. A photograph shows a 19-year-old Geoffrey Hughson and his fellow officers in formal dress for a holiday dinner.
Q: Not everyone was overseas. You wrote about a Canadian woman who worked for an espionage service in New York City
A: Yes Rita Grimshaw spent Christmas of 1943 working for the Canadian spymaster William Stephenson, known later as The Man Called Intrepid. It was a secret Christmas because she couldn’t tell anybody, not even her family, what she was really doing.
Q: Your own father was in the war.
A: My father spent Christmas of 1944 on an airbase in England and in London when he was on leave. He was part of the crew on a bomber and they all worried about being the last person killed in the war, which they knew was ending. I know my father was home in March of 1945, because I was born nine months later and that was my first Christmas, though I was eight days old so I don’t remember much.
Q: What was Christmas like for Canadians on the home front?
A: Worry, hard work and anxiously listening to the radio to see when it would all end. Six years is a long time.
And here is the obituary of Rita Grimshaw:
RITA GRIMSHAW CIPHER CLERK, 96
CANADIAN WOMAN WORKED FOR BRITISH SPY SERVICE IN WARTIME NEW YORK
She took an oath to never talk about her duties with the BSC, an espionage and propaganda service run by Canadian entrepreneur and soldier William Stephenson
Thursday, November 11, 2021
FRED LANGAN
Special to The Globe and Mail
Rita Grimshaw - she was Rita Pyman at the time - was 18 years old and living in Toronto when she read a newspaper advertisement that promised travel and adventure. The ad's headline: "To Work for Britain." It read: "A department of the British government in New York City requires several young women, fully competent in secretarial work and of matriculation or better educational standing. The chief need is for expert file clerks and for typists and stenographers. ... Those selected can expect to serve for the duration of the war."
She replied to the ad without telling her parents, and the next thing she knew the RCMP were at the door. Her parents were shocked.
The Mounties were there to check out Ms. Grimshaw and her family. They all passed muster. They were a patriotic family.
Her father, Walter, had been gassed at Ypres during the First World War - too old to be conscripted, he had chosen to enlist - and two of her brothers served in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
There was a war on and the job she was after was with the British Security Co-ordination (BSC), the New York-based espionage and propaganda service run by William Stephenson, later made famous in the book A Man Called Intrepid.
Ms. Grimshaw and other young Canadian women were hired to work for a British spy agency operating out of New York because Americans were forbidden to work for foreign governments who were at war.
Ms. Grimshaw had just finished the secretarial course at St. Joseph's College School in Toronto when she landed the job and moved to New York, just before Christmas of 1943.
"Imagine leaving home just before Christmas. That tells you what kind of a woman she was," Karen Grimshaw said of her mother, who died last month at the age of 96. "She shared living quarters with a girl called Penny, whose full name I can't recall. My mother worked as a cipher clerk, rerouting codes and things. Because there was so much confidentially she didn't talk much about it, even in the past few years. But you did get a sense of the decoding, using machines." The young women were treated well and lived an exciting life in wartime New York.
"At first, my mother lived in [a] hotel with Penny. She met the actor Peter Lorre in the lobby and developed a passion for Frank Sinatra," Ms. Grimshaw said.
Mr. Stephenson made sure members of his staff were treated well as long as they stayed true to their oath of secrecy.
"Stephenson was immensely proud of his Canadian female staff," said a lengthy article on him in the December, 1952, issue of Maclean's magazine. "He took a personal interest in making sure they all got decent quarters in Manhattan. One of his instructions is they should never give the impression they were in secret work."
The BSC was more than a spy operation, although it was involved in espionage in Canada, the United States and Latin America. It foiled a coup in Bolivia, broke up a German spy ring in the U.S. - sending 13 people to prison - and trained special agents at a secret camp in Oshawa, Ont.
Ms. Grimshaw would have seen pieces of many of those things. The BSC also engaged in propaganda, trying to influence U.S. public opinion to get the United States to join the war before Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
Then-British prime minister Winston Churchill put Mr. Stephenson, also a Canadian businessman, in charge of leading the propaganda war. Mr. Stephenson had easy access to American columnists, such as Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson.
Mr. Stephenson's operatives even manipulated horoscope columns to make things look good for Britain and its allies and bad for Germany and Japan.
Almost all the Canadians working at the BSC's Manhattan offices, in Rockefeller Center, were women, and they all swore an oath of secrecy. Only two women out of 1,000 or more were sent home for boasting about their secret life. For her part, Rita Grimshaw kept true to her vow throughout her life.
She gave her family little information about her wartime activities, but Ms. Grimshaw would meet with her former co-workers from the BSC and they would talk about the secret work they did.
When an artist did a portrait of her about 20 years ago, she was asked to write a short biography to go with the painting. Her daughter Karen says it was the only time she ever wrote about her experiences with the BSC.
"In 1942, as Vera Lynn sang (There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover, a small gang of beautiful, brainy, and tightlipped young women were hired by the British Security Coordination (BSC) in New York to receive and reroute secret codes from the underground in Europe and other sympathetic hot spots. I was one of those young women. Our boss was Sir William Stephenson, a.k.a. Intrepid! Those years are very memorable by their shared bond of secrecy."
Mr. Stephenson, known as Sir William after he was knighted in January, 1945, had posed as a passport officer with the British consulate in New York.
At the end of the war, 20 copies of a report detailing the activities of the BSC were printed in Oshawa, bound in leather by a shop in Toronto, and each was placed in a locked box. That book, British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas 1940-45, was only made public in 1998. All the BSC's records were burned in 1945.
In a review of the book, Charles Kolb wrote about the avalanche of material that arrived in the offices every day, which women such as Ms. Grimshaw would have to sort out.
"The number and length of the messages was becoming a serious issue and would reach 50,000 encrypted messages per day by 1943.
The report documents the development of Telekrypton ciphering machines, Transatlantic Lines, Rockex I enciphering and deciphering, and its replacement by Rockex II beginning in March 1944," Mr. Kolb wrote.
In a letter dated May 8, 1945, the day victory was declared in Europe, Mr. Stephenson sent a letter to Ms. Grimshaw thanking her for her help in the secret work at Rockefeller Center.
"On this day of final victory in Europe it is both a duty and a pleasure to express my appreciations and the thanks of the organization for your valued contribution to our efforts," began the one-page letter. Mr. Stephenson then emphasized the need for continued secrecy: "Because of the confidential and often very difficult nature of the work, I assure you that your loyalty, your discretion ... are very much appreciated."
Rita Pyman was born in Toronto on Jan. 14, 1925. Her father, Walter Pyman, was a typesetter and her mother, Sabina (née Scott) was an Irish immigrant. The family lived on Pape Avenue in the east end of Toronto. Young Rita went to a Catholic high school in downtown Toronto, where she picked up her secretarial skills.
After the excitement of her time in New York, she returned to Toronto and in the fall of 1945 went to her brother's wedding, where she met Ross Grimshaw, an RCAF officer fresh from a tour on Lancaster bombers. They married a few months later, on Dec. 1.
When her three daughters were old enough, Ms. Grimshaw went back to work.
"I returned to the work force, taking the position of secretary treasurer of the Ontario Racing Commission and business manager of the Magistrates' Quarterly," Ms. Grimshaw wrote.
"Our mother worked pretty much most of our whole lives," Ms. Grimshaw said. "She was a business manager, so she had a secretary rather than working as one. She was very interested in racing and she and my father would go to a lot of races" When she wrote her biography for the portrait, she included a whimsical summation of her married life.
"This past December, Ross and I celebrated our 58th wedding anniversary. Time seems to have flown by: 58 years; 696 months; 21,170 days; 63,510 meals; three daughters to raise and educate; 10 prime ministers; two dogs named Tippy, one with a broken tail; one canary named Peter Pan; one accordion; one piano; summers in Port Elgin; trips to Montreal, Quebec City, British Columbia; one summer on Prince Edward Island; two years hiatus in Halifax; trips to Hawaii and Europe; four houses; 10 cars; four grandsons and one granddaughter."
Ms. Grimshaw, who died in Toronto on Oct. 21, was predeceased by her husband and her eight older siblings. She leaves her three daughters, Karen Grimshaw, Marie Linzon and Susan Levesque; five grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.