At this point we deviated from Great George Street and wandered through the Parliament Square Garden. If you refer to the previous map posting (20190909_160000_OurWalk) you will see the statue of Sir Winston Churchill mentioned, but none of the others. The ones that I photographed are all arrayed in a row along the top part of the garden.

The first one that we come to is Henry John Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston also known as Lord Palmerston. Or, by the general public as "Pam". Born in 1784 as the son of an Irish peer (whose peerage he inherited in 1802), he became a Tory MP in 1807. (Being an Irish peer did not disqualify someone from becoming an MP because it didn't give them the right to sit in the House of Lords.) He became a minister in 1809, serving as Secretary of War until 1928. A period that long in the one ministry would be almost unthinkable in the modern era. I would have thought that the job would have become a little bit tedious after the first decade. He was Foreign Secretary from 1830 to 1834, 1835 to 1841, and 1846 to 1851. He was broadly a supporter of Italian independence, so that gave him some brownie points from me. He became Home Secretary in 1852, and then had his first term as Prime Minister in 1855. A quick calculation will show that he was north of 70 by then so that probably didn't count against him as much as it would these days. He remained Prime Minister until 1858, was out of office for 16 months, then returned as Prime Minister for the second time in 1859. He retained that position until October 1865 when he died in office at the age of 80.

Apparently Queen Victoria never entirely trusted the man, but you have to give him his longevity. Any Prime Minister who loses office these days generally takes their bat and ball and goes home immediately after the election. Or at least they do in Australia; I note that Theresa May contested her seat in the last British general election and is still around.

Obviously Lord Palmerston is not, and to date he remains the last Prime Minister to die in office.


The original of this shot was not me at my photographic best. I was stopped down too far (although getting shallow DOF with a Micro 4/3 sensor is damn near impossible), I wasn't conscious of the light sufficiently, and I didn't check the background well enough, resulting in Pam here getting lost in it.

What to do? Well, I hate Adobe's living guts but I have to admit that the new Object Selection tool in Photoshop is fricking awesome. I drew a rectangle around Pam and it plucked him out exactly. I feathered the selection and used a good ol' brightness contrast adjustment to make him brighter. Yet he was still getting lost in the background. My first thought was to go for an artificial background blur. But neh, too predictable, too pedestrian. Aha! Pam's colour is cool. The background is cool because the sky is grey. What if I warm it up to make him stand out? So I went back to the Object Selection tool, inverted the mask, feathered it and whacked on an 85 warming filter to the background at... lemmie see... ah yes, 58% looks OK. Any thoughts either positive or negative? Please leave them in the comments.