Martin Fone's Blog, page 13

Find Of The Week (5)

In 1946 London book dealers, Sweet & Maxwell, acquired what they thought was a copy of the Magna Carta, dated 1327, at auction at Sotheby’s for £42 and subsequently sold it to the Harvard Law School for $27.50. It has since been digitized but for all intents and purposes it has lain in relative obscurity, that is until David Carpenter, a professor of medieval history at King’s College London, started looking at it online in December 2023.

Carpenter thought that what he was looking at was not a copy but an original which had been misdated. A detailed comparison of text and other tests were carried out on the Harvard document, which confirmed that the “copy” was an original issue of the Magna Carta.

There are four copies of the 1215 issue and seven of the 1300 version, including Harvard’s original. One version sold at auction in 2007 fetched more than $21.3m  at Sotheby’s in New York.

It seems that Harvard does need the input of foreign students and academics after all.

Who Killed Charmian Karslake?

A review of Who Killed Charmian Karslake? by Annie Haynes – 250521

The third book in Annie Haynes’ Inspector Stoddart series, originally published in 1929 and reissued by Dean Street Press, is set up as a classic country house whodunit. It is the morning after a ball at the home of Sir Arthur Penn-Moreton, Hepton Abbey, and tragedy has struck. The renowned American actress, Charmain Karslake, is found dead in her bedroom, having been shot at close range and her blue sapphire ball, which is constantly around her neck, is missing.

One of the curious aspects of this case is the acceptance of Karslake to attend the ball in the first place. While in London she has been fairly reluctant to accept any social invitations but something seems to have drawn her to Hepton. The crucial question is what or who was it and this forms the central line of attack for Stoddart to pursue in his attempt to crack the case, along with his fidus Achates, Harbord, his being convinced that, despite the missing necklace, theft was not the motive.

In this surmise he is correct as the jewel is later recovered, although in the course of rescuing it, Sadie Penn-Moreton, Sir Arthur’s sister-in-law and Dickie’s wife, is brutally attacked from behind. As Stoddart’s investigations continue, it emerges that Karslake arranged a secret rendezvous on the night of the ball, one conveniently overheard, in part at least, by a couple of maids, with a man called Peter Hailsham. However, the Penn-Moretons are adamant that no one of that name attended the ball and the only Maitland in the area was an old, impoverished man who had died some time ago.

This is a story full of red herrings and promising leads that suddenly just peter out. Stoddart is nothing if not tenacious and after each set back, he simply brushes himself down and follows the next trail. This slow and cautious approach prompts Sadie’s American father, Silas P Juggs, a canned soup magnate, to become frustrated by the lack of progress that the British detectives are making in finding his daughter’s assailant and prompts him to take matters into his own hands. This includes taking his daughter and son-in-law away on a cruise, thus depriving Stoddart of access to one of his prime suspects at an inconvenient time and forces him to resort to relying upon the Marconigram to maintain contact with his agents on the ship.

Jugg’s demands for instant action and immediate results contrasts with Stoddart’s steady, reserved, and reasoned approach, feeding into a xenophobia that runs as a minor leitmotif through the story. There is a sense of British snobbery about Americans, their access to new money and their loose morals and a French maid whose accent is mocked and whose timely revelations bring the case to its resolution. Another is references to earlier actual crimes and criminals and, of course, the use of a telegram brings to mind the demise of Crippen.

Of course, the key to the mystery lies in Karslake’s background and as Stoddart surmises, she is a Hepton lass with a secret or two. It is a tale of bigamy and sexual jealousy. With precious few suspects, Haynes does well to maintain the air of suspense and even when Stoddart makes an arrest, bowing to the pressures from above and the weight of mostly circumstantial evidence, there is the feeling that the case is not quite over yet.

Rather like The Crime at Tattenham Corner, the story concludes in the court room where there are more twists and turns. The outcome is a twist from leftfield, especially as Stoddard had somewhat surprisingly discounts that area of the Penn-Moreton household from the start and, rather amusingly, contradicts my rather bold statement in my last review.        

What I particularly like about Haynes is that she just get on with the story in an engaging style with no unnecessary padding and sets her reader an intriguing puzzle. What more can you ask for?

Bezoar Stones

On the face of it, using the ingested but not entirely digested material found in the intestines of an animal as an adornment on a piece of jewellery seems a tad bizarre, but that is what bezoars are. Bezoar stones are formed inside animals such as deer, antelope, goats, oxen, and llamas, around small rock fragments that are lodged in the digestive tract. Over time these pieces of rock become coated with concentric layers of calcium and magnesium phosphate derived from the animal’s gut and are worn smooth by the contractions and relaxations of the muscles in the digestive tract.

Gross as that might seem, although it is a very similar process to that of the formation of a pearl, bezoars were believed to be imbued with magical and medicinal powers. Coming from the Persian word pad-zahr meaning antidote, they were sometimes found inside animals that had been sacrificed and were believed by Arabian and Greek doctors in the first millennium AD to be a universal cure for poison as well as leprosy, measles, cholera, and depression. They could be worn as a charm, ground into a powder or dropped into a drink.

Writing in the British Medical Journal in 1943 Ralph H Gardiner gave a more romantic version of the origin of bezoar stones. “The legend of the bezoar stones, which was generally credited in olden times, was that they were the crystallized tears of deer. The deer ate snakes, which caused such intense stomach-ache that tears were brought to the animal’s eyes. These fell out and men gathered them up. Cases of poisoning and other noxious diseases were said to have been cured by them, and one was used as a last resort at the death of King Charles II.”

Bezoars were introduced to the West in around the 11th century by Arabian doctors, primarily as an antidote to arsenic, the poison of choice amongst would-be assassins in the courts of Europe, as Professor Snape explained in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001). By the 16th century they were a stone of choice amongst the very rich, Queen Elizabeth I having a bezoar set in a silver ring and the word used as an adjective to describe the beige colouring of some of her clothes.

By this time, rare and sought after by the rich and powerful bezoars were phenomenally expensive and could command prices equivalent to ten times their weight in gold. For those who could not afford such an extravagant item, there was a slightly cheaper alternative, Goa stones. Hardened balls made by Jesuit priests in Goa from shells, silt, amber, resin and, occasionally, bits of bezoar and crushed gemstones, they were believed to be an antidote to poisons and also provided some protection against disease.

Plague On Hirta

Hirta is the largest of the islands of the St Kilda archipelago on the western edge of Scotland. Its last residents left on August 29, 1930, on the Harebell, having come to the sad realization that their lifestyle was no longer sustainable. Before boarding, the villagers left an open bible and a plate of oats in each cottage. The last former resident of St Kilda, who left when she was eight, died in April 2016.

Outbreaks of contagious and deadly diseases were a regular occurrence among the residents of the remote Scottish islands due in part to their limited contact with the outside world, lack of medical care and knowledge, and low levels of herd immunity, but mainly because of their difficult living conditions coupled with malnutrition. Viruses that were unpleasant and sometimes deadly on the mainland would have a disastrous on island communities, as Neil MacKenzie, the minister on St Kilda from 1829 to 1843 noted: “when whooping cough, measles, or scarlet fever visit there are more than the average number of deaths”.

The first inkling that the outside world had that something catastrophic had occurred on Hirta in 1727 came from a letter to the Society of Scotland for the Propagating of Christian Knowledge written by Daniel MacAulay, a minister from Skye who visited the island the following year. He stated that “of the twenty-one families that were there, only four remain”, following the epidemic. No other contemporary accounts survive.

However, Kenneth Macaulay, the minister of St Kilda from 1758 to 1759, reconstructed events in an account he wrote in 1761, based on the testimonies of survivors. “A contagious distemper”, he wrote, “swept away the greatest part of this people about four and thirty years ago. The distemper was the smallpox. Of twenty-one families, four grown persons only remained, and these had the burden of twenty-six orphans”.

Part of the island’s seasonal routine was to visit some of the other islands within the archipelago to hunt for birds and eggs, particularly Solan Geese which were found on Stac an Armin, an imposing monolith, the tallest in the British Isles, that juts out of the sea for 643 feet. A party of three adults and eight boys had been dropped off at the island just before the outbreak and they were marooned there until the middle of May the following year.

Their ordeal must have been particularly unpleasant and distressing but at least they escaped the ravages of Macaulay’s “contagious distemper”. What was the virus that ravaged the population of Hirta? Was it smallpox, as was popularly supposed, or does the survival of the party marooned on Stac an Armin point to something different?

We will find out next time.

‘Owzat

The origins of the noble game of cricket are lost in the mists of time, possibly starting as a game for children. In a court case over aa plot of land in Guildford, heard in 1597, a 59-year-old, John Derrick, testified that he and his school friends had played creckett on the site fifty years earlier when they attended the Free School, suggesting that the game was played by children in the 1550s.

In 1611 two men were prosecuted in Sussex for playing cricket instead of going to church, the first reference to the game being played by adults. That same year a dictionary defined cricket as a boy’s game, suggesting that its adoption by adults was a fairly new development. Another court case, this time brought before the King’s Bench in 1640, mentions a cricket match between the Weald and Upland which had taken place some “30 yeares” previously.

It was not until 1744 that the first attempt to codify the Laws of Cricket was made by a group of London clubs. At the time players bowled the ball along the ground, hoping that a clever bounce from a speedy ball would get past the batsman; for his part, the batsman held a curved wooden bat, more akin to a hockey stick, and there were just two stumps and one bail, offering a wider and squatter target than the modern three stumps and two bails.

Batsmen scored runs by running between the two opposing wickets but instead of crossing the crease to validate a run they had to strike a bat held by an umpire. There were no boundaries so every run had to be run and, indeed, no dedicated piches. Any flattish piece of land would suffice.

However, courtesy of Antigone Journal, which describes itself as “an open forum for Classics in the twenty-first century”, there is a little known record which has some importance in our understanding of the development of cricket, a poem composed in Latin by William Goldwin. Entitled In Certamen Pilae with a subtitle of Anglice, A Cricket-Match, it is a lively 95 line poem in hexameters describing a game of cricket, thought to have been written around 1703 and, therefore, preceding other early accounts of the game by at least some thirty years. It is not clear whether this was an actual game that Goldwin had watched or participated in and if so, where or whether it was a product of his imagination.

Goldwin, a baker’s son from Windsor, was born in 1683 and educated at Eton and then King’s College Cambridge, before becoming a Fellow. He then moved to Bristol where he was Master of the Grammar School and then vicar of St Nicholas until his death in 1747. While at Cambridge he published a collection of eight Latin poems entitled Musae Juveniles.

For a young man with such an educational background the task of composing a poem in Latin on a subject for which there was a lack of obviously relevant vocabulary seemed to present little difficulty and he managed to decorate his text with echoes of Virgil, Lucretius, and Ovid amongst others. To read the poem in full, follow this link. Mercifully, for non-Latinists and those whose Latin is a tad rusty, the good people of Antigone Journal have included an English translation. It is a welcome and fascinating addition to the canon of cricketing memorabilia.

Why Shoot A Butler?

A review of Why Shoot a Butler? by Georgette Heyer – 250507

It is a popular misconception of cosy country house murders that it is always the butler what done it. In this, the second in Heyer’s Country House Mysteries series, originally published in 1933, she stands the convention on its head by having a butler, Dawson from Norton Manor, and the valet, Collins, amongst the three murder victims, the other being a ne’er-do-well drunkard, Mark Brown, who is pushed into the water and drowned. The book’s title echoes the rather snobbish attitude prevailing at the time of who would deem members of the servant class worthy of being killed.

It does not take much to realise that the cause of their ill-fate is some knowledge that they are trying to exploit and which one of their so-called betters is trying to suppress. My sense of mild frustration with this book is that while there are some enormous clues dropped along the way which makes the identity of the culprit fairly straightforward to identify, the backstory and the events that provide the motive are really just dropped into the narrative as fait accomplish when it suits Heyer to show that her amateur sleuth, Mr Frank Amberley, is closing on the solution.

He may be Frank by name but Mr Amberley is far from open in his dealings with the police, guilty of withholding some important evidence. He comes across a car inside which there is the body of a man, Dawson, who has been shot. Standing by the car is a woman, Shirley Brown, who states that she did not kill the man. Although brusque in his dealings with her and despite being a barrister whose duty it is to uphold the law, he tells the police of the location of the vehicle and what it contains but not that Shirley was present at the time.

Frank too is surprised by his actions but Heyer is not the doyenne of historical romance for nothing and, unlikely as it appears, he has fallen hook, line, and sinker for her. The cynic might think that as he begins to realise who Shirley really and that she might be the fons and origo of a comfortable existence, her attractions grow. However, the clincher is that as the case draws to its inevitable conclusion, she becomes a damsel in distress, allowing Amberley to play the knight in shining armour, a feat of derring-do enough to win her hand.   

As for the mystery, you could say that it is about two halves of a loaf of bread, blackmail, an inheritance and a revised will, the contents of which have been suppressed and once revealed would change the lives and fortunes of three characters. A tallboy and a copy of Curiosities of Literature feature large as Amberely tries to get his hands on the two parts of a will, an unfortunate slip of the tongue by his cousin, Felicity, almost giving the game away, alerting the murderer, who has a curious complex about dead bodies, that they are far from being out of the woods.

There are some wonderful characters, not least the resourceful and perceptive Lady Marion Matthews, Amberley’s aunt, and the long-suffering, Watson-like Sergeant Gubbins. It is another novel in which the professional police, this time in the form of Inspector Fraser, who, even when given the culprit on a plate makes a  mess of the arrest, are shown to be incompetent, only increasing the impression of Amberley’s brilliance.

A tad overlong, it is nevertheless an enjoyable read.

Device Of The Week (6)

Books are many things, but killers?

Well, in the 19th century a mixture of arsenic and copper was used to create a vivid emerald green colour which was used for colouring clothing, wallpaper, paint and, by book publishers, for book covers.

In these times of heightened health and safety consciousness, there are concerns that handling books with covers laced with arsenic on a regular basis can lead to irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat and the toxic pigment in the book bindings can flake off and be easily inhaled. Many libraries have taken the drastic step of removing old books with green covers from circulation because testing them has hitherto been expensive and time-consuming. Only last year the University of Bielefeld and other German universities removed 60,000 volumes as a precaution.

Now, though, thanks to some ingenious work done by some researchers at the University of St Andrews a hand-held device has been developed which detects the presence of the toxic pigment by shining different colours of light on to the book. The amount of light reflected at each colour is like a fingerprint of the book and the team have found a way to isolate the unique fingerprint of a toxic green book cover.

The process takes a matter of seconds and the team hope to roll the device to other libraries and academic institutions in an attempt to rescue some 19th century volumes from unwarranted exile.

For more details of this fascinating project and information about the free exhibition which runs until 31st July, follow this link.

Website Of The Week (7)

Here’s a 21st century first world problem if there ever was one, the stress of trying to find a pub garden or picnic site that is either in the shade or the sun, depending upon your preference. Worry not any longer as Sunseekr is the very tool that you have been longing for.

All you have to do is select a time and a place and the website will tell you whether that spot will be in the sun or the shade. You can also get it to highlight pubs, cafes or restaurants in the surrounding area and to show whether they’re sunny or shady.

Of course, in Britain with just 130 days of sunshine, more in the south of England than the north and Scotland, and with variable cloud cover, it might not be quite as useful as it seems at first blush. Nevertheless, forewarned is forearmed.

Murder On French Leave

A review of Murder on French Leave by Anne Morice – 250504

Anne Morice’s books are bright and breezy with a fine turn of phrase and oodles of light whimsy and sharp observation and this, the fourth in her Tessa Crichton series, originally published in 1972 and reissued by Dean Street Press, is no exception. Do not expect to find the fiendishly complicated plots or the deliberately obscurantist take on the detective fiction that other exponents of the genre delight in. Hers are as cosy as can be, light, unchallenging and an easy read.

The French leave in the title is a trip to Paris where Tessa, an actress, has a six week filming assignment and she, her policeman husband, Detective Inspector Robin Price of the Yard, and her younger cousin, Ellen, tack on a few days of R&R before her work starts. The flight out is delayed and her red suitcase containing her jewel case and scripts is mislaid, only to be returned to her Parisian flat intact with the addition of another script cum plot summary entitled The Waiting Room by an unknown dramatist, Henry Fitzgerald.

Their schedule in Paris seems innocent enough with a trip to the races at Longchamps, a soiree of Indian music, and a meal in a swanky restaurant amongst other attractions. However, wherever they seem to go they bump into a shadowy figure, Sven Carlsen who holds a senior position in a United Nations spin-off organisation, IDEAS, which seems to be the home for a collection of people connected with the world of espionage and revelling in diplomatic immunity.

Things take a darker turn when the star attraction, an elderly Indian sitar player, collapses on stage having taken a sip of water from a carafe and subsequently dies in hospital while Leila Baker, the organiser of the soiree, is later found murdered by strangulation near the Champs de Mars. Ellen notices something odd at the soiree and is convinced that the Indian will die, although she does not tell Tessa or Crichton what it is, and even though Carlsen is arrested and charged with Leila’s murder, her necklace having been found on him, Tessa is convinced of his innocence because she caught sight of him in a cinema foyer at the time of the murder.

The stage is set for a romp involving elements of espionage, a kidnapping, and a race against time. Both Tessa and Robin in their different ways tackle elements of the mystery but Ellen appears to be the more perceptive of the trio, spotting something in the mysterious script. As seasoned readers of the genre know, knowledge can be a dangerous things and Ellen is soon the victim of a kidnap plot which forces Tessa’s hand.    

Much of the rationale behind the murder of Leila, the Indian was collateral damage of a failed earlier plot, and the subsequent “suicide” of Dr Mûller can be drawn from script, whose author, of course, is the ubiquitous Carlsen. There are trips to the hairdressers, a nip from a badly behaved poodle which is expertly bandaged, a collection of mysterious people who seem determined to stitch Carlsen up, an almost fatal misinterpretation of a French word, bague, alibis and characters dressing in disguise. A car accident en route to Orly airport brings matters to a head and the mystery is resolved. While the solution is easily spotted, the denouement is satisfying and leaves no lose ends dangling.

Excellent stuff.

Pink Or Blue?

As we saw last time, the association of the colour blue with boys and pink with girls did not become universally accepted until sometime in the mid-20th century and there are cited examples that boys were being dressed in pink and girls in blue when coloured clothing was first the norm. What caused this reversal of colour association or was it really only an urban myth all along? Firmly in the latter camp is Marco Del Giudice, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico, who published a paper in July 2012 in Sexual Behavior refuting what he called “the scientific urban legend of the reversal of pink-blue gender coding”.

Analysing over five million books published in the English language between 1880 and 1980 Del Giudice claimed that he had found many examples of the standard blue for boys and pink for girls association, but virtually none for the reverse. He concluded that his analysis showed “remarkable consistency in gender coding over time” and that the magazine articles cited to show the reverse were “anomalies, not indicators of widespread cultural trends”.

When repeating his analysis in 2017 on newspapers and magazines published in America between 1881 and 1930 Del Giudice found thirty-four instances of the now generally accepted standard colour associations with gender and 28 of the reverse. This led him to conclude that “pink-blue gender coding showed a certain degree of inconsistency (though not a reversal) between the late 19th and early 20th centuries…However, the true extent of that inconsistency is still unclear, as different sources return dramatically different results”.

Del Giudice was clearly a man not to admit defeat easily and perhaps a rationale behind the discrepancy of his findings can be found in the very different natures of books and magazines. Magazines are more ephemeral and are more likely to be influenced by transient trends and the power of their advertisers whereas the authors of books tend to take a more measured view, one that is likely to stand the test of time.

Be that as it may, the advent of the women’s liberation movement in the mid-60s led to another change with girls encouraged to don more masculine or, at least, unfeminine clothing. For two years in the 1970s the influential catalogue of the Sears, Roebuck & Company catalogue did not feature any pink clothing aimed at toddlers. This was only a temporary trend and by the mid-1980s with the arrival of pre-natal gender testing, expectant parents and their families were only too eager to anticipate the arrival of a new born by buying pink clothing for girls and blue for boys.    

A fascinating side question from all this is whether the colours that we choose to dress our young children in influences their view on gender. A paper published in 2011 in The British Journal of Developmental Psychology revealed that when a group of one-year olds were shown a selection of pairs of objects, one coloured pink the other blue, they were no more likely to choose pink than blue. However, by the age of two girls exhibited a distinct preference for pink while by the age of four boys were vigorously rejecting pink. It seems that at the precise time in their development that toddlers become aware of gender, then the colour associated with their sex becomes all-important.

Vestiges of this gender colour coding seem to remain in adulthood. While research conducted at Newcastle University, reported in 2007 in Current Biology asking adults to name their favourite colour showed that blue came out top for both sexes, reddish hues found more favour with women than men.

The practice of dressing girls in pink and boys in blue is a social construct which seems to have emerged in the early 20th century and may not have firmly established itself until the 1940s. It is fascinating to note, notwithstanding Del Giudice, that it could easily have been the other way round.