Martin Fone's Blog, page 16

Crocker’s Folly

Born in Newton Abbot in Devon in 1863 Frank Crocker was originally a furniture dealer’s assistant before moving up to London and marrying his wife Agnes in 1893 in St Marylebone. In the late 1890s he became a publican, following in his father’s footsteps as at one time he had been the landlord of the Dolphin Inn in Exeter, and owned the Volunteer in Kilburn.

Crocker’s life and fortunes were transformed when he heard a rumour that the Great Central Railway, formed in 1897 and designed to bring, initially, coal from the Nottinghamshire mines and, later, passengers to the metropolis, a brainchild of Sir Edward Watkin, himself no stranger to follies, was going to terminate near Penfold Street. Realising that this was an opportunity not to be missed, he decided to build a new public house in the area where the weary travellers could slake their thirst.

And no ordinary public house was it. Crocker hired the architect Charles Worley to design and oversee the building of what was to become The Crown in 1898. Its highlight was the Grand Saloon which featured an exceptional marble fireplace and a marble-topped bar counter. In all, fifty different types of marble were used, with paired Corinthian pilasters supporting the opulent part-gilded beamed ceiling. Even the chimney and saloon walls were faced with marble. There was a billiard room and a ladies only lounge.

It is astonishing that someone from relatively humble background could raise the capital for such a speculative venture. According to the 1901 census Crocker was living at the Crown with his wife and father and ten servants to assist with the pub trade and a couple of visitors. But his lofty ambitions were cruelly dashed because the location for the terminus of the Great Central railway was changed at the last minute, the terminus being built half a mile away nearer to the Marylebone Road.

The story goes that his speculative venture was so ruinous to his finances that in 1904 in despair Crocker committed suicide by throwing himself out of one of the upstairs’ windows of his pub. However, not everything around the story of Ctocker’s Folly is quite what it seems.

He actually died of natural causes, although the subsequent landlord, Charles Durden, did commit suicide in this way. Nor is it true that the pub was too far away from the railway to attract custom. It was only a stone’s throw from the Great Central Goods Depot aka the Marylebone station goods yard in Penfold Street, which opened in 1890. It is inconceivable that in the days that the yard was in operation workers did not relax after a day’s labour in the splendour of The Crown.

The Lisson Grove estate now stands on the site of the yard with only the railway bridge at Lisson Grove and a retaining wall along Luton Street visible reminders of its presence. As for The Crown, having starred in films including Georgy Girl (1966) and Reds (1981),it was renamed Crocker’s Folly in 1987, was closed in 2004 because of its poor condition and in 2014 the upper floors were converted into apartments and the ground floor saw the bars and restaurants restored to their former glory. It is now owned by the Maroush Group and its current address is 24, Aberdeen Place, NW8.

Sadly, the legend behind Croker’s Folly is a piece of fake news.

The Doggy Bag (2)

As doggy bags became more widespread and diners were emboldened to ask if they could take home the remains of their meal, it did begin to raise some awkward social questions, not least whether it was right to request a doggy bag if you did not own a dog. Queries along these lines regularly appeared in newspaper etiquette columns, one reader recounting in 1964 how her husband had “looked aghast” when she had had the audacity to ask for a bag and told her that it was in poor taste to take home table scraps.

Some columnists took a very firm position on the practice. Emily Post left her readers in 1968 in no doubt on her views: “I do not approve of taking leftover food such as pieces of meat home from restaurants. Restaurants provide ‘doggy bags’ for bones to be taken to pets, and generally the bags should be restricted to that use.” Despite these strictures, more and more diners felt comfortable, particularly given the increase in portion sizes, to request a container to take the remains of their meal home, whether it was to be heated up once more or really fed to the dog.

The practice of taking food away became more prevalent in the1970s and in response some restaurants took packaging to a fine art, creating doggy bags out of foil shaped to look like a swan or a seahorse. And it was not just solid foodstuffs that were taken away, the practice spreading to unfinished bottles of wine.

Such is the influence of all things American that inevitably the concept of the doggy bag spread into Europe but it immediately ran into some fundamental cultural difficulties. For the British there was a natural diffidence to overcome, the feeling that it was not quite the done thing to take away one’s leftovers, the desire to not draw attention to the fact that the meal had defeated us. There were also health concerns over reheating foodstuffs.

In France restaurateurs took umbrage at the thought of their carefully prepared creations being microwaved at home, an offence against the deeply held belief that food should be eaten at the moment that the chef has served it. Nevertheless, by 2015 campaigners railing against le gaspillage alimentaire, food waste, had succeeded in promoting legislation requiring supermarkets to donate unsold food to charity. A rider suggested that restaurateurs offered clients containers to carry away their leftovers. The sac à chien had arrived.

Curiously, though, just as doggy bags were gaining a level of acceptability, even being offered at Michelin starred restaurants like the Fat Duck, they seem to be going out of fashion again. Even in America, according to the New York Times, fewer people are asking to take their food home.

The reasons are hard to deduce. In an age when all forms of cuisine can be delivered to your door at a click of a few buttons, perhaps that congealing mass in an aluminium foil container lurking at the back of the fridge becomes even less appealing. Restaurants perhaps are more sensitive to the issue of food wastage and are reducing their portion sized accordingly or, maybe, the diners’ appetites have adjusted to what has been placed before them.   

Whatever the reason, the doggy bag is something that will continue to divide opinion.

Flightless Birds

One of my fantasies has always been to soar high in the sky like a bird, preferably as seemingly effortlessly as a raptor surfing the thermals. But around sixty species, admittedly less than 1% of the species of birds but numbering some box office stars like penguins and ostriches have chosen to eschew the delight of flight for a more sedate life on terra firma or riding the ocean waves. Why?

The ability to fly is particularly useful for escaping from predators and to extend the range for finding food and favourable living conditions, but it comes at a high cost. Birds use up a lot of energy flying, about 75% more per day than mammals of a similar size. A paper published in 2016 in PNAS argued that birds that live on islands with no or few predators to worry about and less competition for food are likely to evolve towards flightlessness. Without the need to migrate or travel long distances, the cost of flight outweighs its benefits.

The evolutionary move towards flightlessness leads to the shrinkage of a bird’s pectoral flight muscles and the sternum keel where the flight muscles attach becomes smaller. Wing bones become shorter and less robust, while their legs grow longer and sturdier to adapt to a life on land. Some birds like penguins have swapped their ability to fly for swimming, essentially retaining their flight muscles and sternum keel but adapting them for swimming.

In species that have been flightless for a long time, their feathers lose the tiny, hook-like structures that normally keep them aerodynamic, giving them a fluffier appearance. Think ostriches and kiwis. It is also thought that skeletal changes come before alterations in plumage as it takes much more energy to grow and maintain bones than it does to maintain feathers.

Fossil evidence suggests that there were many more species of flightless birds than there are now. The arrival of man, both as a predator and a changer of environment, and other predators such as rats and dogs saw these types of birds as easy prey. The birds had little time to adapt genetically and having sacrificed their ability to fly suffered an existential crisis, especially those that had evolved on islands. This pretty much explains the fates of the Dodo on the island of Mauritius and the Moa in New Zealand.

Flightlessness comes at some cost, it seems.

Not To Be Taken

A review of Not to be Taken by Anthony Berkeley – 250405

Originally published in 1938 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, Anthony Berkeley’s Not to be Taken, subtitled A Puzzle in Poison, was originally serialised in the literary weekly, John O’London’s Weekly, in the form of a competition. Readers were invited to answer four examination style questions which were set before the publication of the big reveal in the final chapter.

Interestingly, the reissue includes Berkeley’s post-competition report in which he reveals, inter alia, that no entrant answered the questions completely to the satisfaction of the author and judging panel but that twenty per cent of the entrants identified the culprit correctly and that Mrs Gilruth and Mr Kastner were near enough the mark to share the top prize of £200, a not inconsiderable amount in those days.

Structuring the story for a competition has two stylistic consequences. Firstly, it has by necessity a very episodic quality about it and, secondly, it is very fairly clued. The attentive reader will pick up enough clues that through the process of elimination they have a fighting chance of identifying the culprit, as this reader did, but also some sense of the how and why the arsenical poisoning of John Waterhouse was accomplished. That said, I think, as events proved, that it would have been possible to satisfy the judges in all respects to score the maximum points in the competition.

To get to that point, though, the reader has to battle through shoals of red herrings and misdirection galore. Characters pop in and out of the narrative, designed to distract the reader, but when it all boils down there are a handful of characters we meet at the start of narrative and the truth lies somewhere in there. Berkeley seems to have fun in his attempts to mislead the reader and in putting together a tale of a murder plot that goes horribly wrong. To say more would give the game away.

As we work our way through the tragedy of John Waterhouse we are guided by an amiable fruit farmer, Douglas Sewell, who narrates the story. He also has the distinction of stumbling upon the truth of what went on and this presents him with a dilemma. Although he is certain that he has uncovered the sordid truth, nevertheless he does not have proof that would stand up in court and the culprit, when confronted, while admitting that his surmises are correct prefers to have a heavy conscience rather than hand themselves into the law. The representatives of the law, curiously, have a minor presence in the tale, only too willing to kowtow to the secret service who wish to hush up Waterhouse’s services to King and country in the Far East.

It is a story of marital frustration, wrong choices, ill luck, and the chemical properties of arsenic. It also raises the question of how much we really know about those we consider to be our boon companions, our knowledge constrained by what they are prepared to reveal or let slip. As well as exploring some of the almost eugenic theories that were prevalent at the time, Berkeley sheds some light on the anti-Nazi sentiments prevailing at the time with Waterhouse’s secretary, Mitzi Bergmann, a German who mysteriously absconds when the going gets tough and his comedic cook, an unashamed Austrian Nazi. Curiously, the action begins on September 3rd, a day that the narrator says is always ominous. A year later, of course, it saw the outbreak of World War Two.

This is an enjoyable, if somewhat light and unusual, story and is well worth a read.

Ice Of The Week

Worried about the disappearing Arctic glaciers? It seems that the culprit is not just climate change but also rich club-goers in Dubai who are prepared to pay a premium for the ultimate in ice to be put into their drinks.

The business model of a Greenland-based company, Arctic Ice, is to scour the fjord near the country’s capital city of Nuuk for icebergs that have naturally detached from the ice sheet, cut them up with chainsaws, and then pack them into refrigerated containers for the 10,000 mile journey to the United Arab Emirates. There they are carved into normal sized spherical ice cubes which retail at $100 for six.

“Arctic Ice”, their website says, “is sourced directly from the natural glaciers in the Arctic which have been in frozen state for more than 100.000 Years. These parts of the ice sheets have not been in contact with any soils or contaminated by pollutants produced by human activities. This makes Arctic Ice the Cleanest H20 on Earth”.

As well as its purity the ice is denser than other forms of frozen water, which means that it does not melt as easily and dilute your drink. Inevitability, despite emphasising the sustainability side of their business, owner, Malik V Rasmussen has caught some cold blasts from social media. Perhaps he should hook up with our friends at the Global Premium Water Conference.

Now we know why Trump is keen on Greenland. He wants the ice for his coke.

Website Of The Week (3)

Since I was a boy I have always found making a paper aeroplane that did not nosedive gracelessly to the ground as soon as it left my hand. How envious was I of those who could get their creations to cut through the air for several feet.

Of course, nowadays there is a website that gives you all the information you need to achieve lift off. Fold ‘N Fly has a database of 53 designs and you can filter your search according to difficulty, attributes, including distance, time aloft, acrobatic, and decorative, and whether you need scissors or not.

Once you have made your choice, there are step-by-step instructions with illustrations on how to construct it, a video tutorial, and the ability to download and/or print the instructions. There is even an opportunity to gain a pilot’s licence by upgrading for a one-off fee of $7.77.

Now where was this sixty years ago?! This is what the internet should be all about.

The Canon In Residence

A review of The Canon in Residence by Victor Whitechurch – 250402

Someone substituting their clothes for yours is a strange Damascene moment but it seemed to work for the Reverend John Smith in Victor Whitechurch’s novel, The Canon in Residence, originally published in 1904. A simple but charming story, we follow the eponymous Canon – he is appointed Canon of Frattenbury Cathedral midway through the book – on holiday in Switzerland and the subsequent transformation in his character and fortunes when he returns to Blighty.

Smith, when we first meet him, is a bit of a stuffed shirt, bound by the conventions of his particular branch of his calling, the Anglican church, horrified at the thought of the clergy wandering around in mufti. While he is staying in a hotel in Thusis, he gets chatting to a garishly dressed fellow Englishman who tells him that clergymen will never understand the true nature of humanity while wearing a dog collar. To his horror, Smith wakes up the next morning to find that his companion has taken his clerical garb and left him with the garish clothing.

Determined to make the best out of a bad job, Smith throws himself into the scene in St Moritz, only to be pulled up sharply when he hears Eleanor Taylor read out a letter detailing his appointment as Canon in Frattenbury. Embarrassed Smith high tails back to England and tries to settle into Frattenbury society, convincing himself that Eleanor does not recognise him.

The clothes thief, inevitably, drinks to excess and gambles in Monte Carlo, dropping Smith’s card case along the way, and rumours of the Canon’s supposed indiscretions reach and appal the rather straitlaced ecclesiastical community in Frattenbury. Smith further exasperates his peers by adopting radical causes. The crisis comes when he defends his verger, Blake, who is accused of passing on a twenty pound note, part of the haul from a robbery at a bank in Worthingham.

The truth is that Smith himself had found the note in the jacket that the clothes thief had left. His friend, who becomes more than that as the story concludes, is able to exonerate him by demonstrating that the clothes thief had been impersonating Smith. The real culprit is arrested but Smith is able to show his true Christian spirit at the end, thanking him for opening his eyes to the views of others.

A character study more than anything else, enlivened by an acute knowledge of the cattiness of ecclesiastical life, a subject that proved to be ground for Anthony Trollope and one that allows Whitechurch to draw on his own experience as a cleric, and laced with genuine humour, the book can be seen as a gentle call to arms. The clergy should abandon their high and mighty attitudes and attempt to get closer to the flock they are supposed to serve. It is only by understanding them that they can really make a difference.

It is an enjoyable read and Whitechurch has created a memorable book from what at first sight seems pretty thin fare. One word of caution, though: the Kindle edition is dreadful, with errors virtually on every page, making it a little bit exasperating to read. A small price to pay, perhaps, for a book that has hitherto been hard to track down.

Sipsmith Origin 1639 Gin

One of the byproducts of the ginaissance is the plethora of books about gin, tracing its history, detailing the changes in fashion, and the types that have been developed. Most attribute the arrival of gin to Britain to the ascendency of William, Prince of Orange, to the British throne and his penchant for the Dutch spirit, genever. However, some new research by Sipsmith Master Distiller, Jared Brown, and his drink historian wife, Anistatia Miller, have debunked this theory.

It all started while researching the variations of spellings of the word “juniper” in old books in the National Archives, and stumbling across a copy of The Distiller of London from 1639. Within its coded pages lay a recipe featuring juniper, orange peel, lemon peel, and orris root, the foundation stones of what is now the London Dry Gin, predating the arrival of Dutch genever-based spirits by around fifty years. It was an opportunity too good to miss and Brown swung into action, ultimately adding Sipsmith Origin 1639 Gin to the range of Sipsmith gins.

In production they use a grain spirit, typically used in whisky production, which gives a buttery feel in the mouth. As well as the botanicals mentioned in the 1639 recipe, Brown has infused the distillate with ripe strawberries and raspberries before laying it to rest in oak barrels. The result is a slightly light tawny looking spirit which has an ABV of 42%.

On the nose there is no mistaking that this is a juniper-centric spirit, music to my nostrils, with accompanying citric notes, a dollop of spice and the freshness of the berries. In the glass, the rich, oily juniper takes centre stage while the citrus provides some intense top notes, the whole effect mellowed down by the gentler influence of the spices and berries.

It is not an elegant or sophisticated gin but is one that allows its component parts to breathe and contribute to the whole. As someone who has found that what the Sipsmith gins gains in subtlety they lose in pizazz, this is a gin that goes a long way to restoring the balance. If the original was anything like this, then it must really have been groundbreaking.

Of course, the obvious question is why did it not take off there and then. The English Civil War and the rise of puritanism, naturally, had their parts to play, causing the recipe for a new tipple to fall into obscurity, only for the fashion of gin to make its mark with the Protestant Ascendancy and the arrival of William of Orange. Nevertheless, Bowen’s researches has shed a fascinating insight into the true origins of British gin.

You can read all about in their book, A Most Noble Water, while sipping a glass of Origin 1639, of course.

Until the next time, cheers!

The Doggy Bag

“A funny old bird is the pelican. His beak can hold more than his belican. Food for a week/ he can hold in his beak,/ but I’ll be darned if I know how the helican”. Most of us at some time sitting in a restaurant have had that pelican moment, so exquisitely encapsulated by Dixon Lanier Merritt, when we conclude that the plate of food in front of us is too overwhelming to finish.

The realization prompts a dilemma; should we just resign ourselves to leaving the residue on the plate or should we pluck up the courage, risking the wrath of the restaurateur, and ask for a doggy bag? Chefs, after all, are a sensitive breed and do not want their creations heated up again in a microwave or, heaven forbid, fed to a pooch.

Having eaten out a lot in the United States where the portions are frequently gargantuan, there seems to be no scruples about taking the leftovers home; indeed it seems to be part of the dining experience. Some restaurants I have been to even take the remains away and package them for collection at the reception so that the doggy bag is not visible to other diners.

It comes as no surprise then that the origins of the doggy bag can be traced to the US during the Second World War. Although the United States was not as directly affected by the war as their then European allies, nevertheless there were food shortages and responsible citizens were encouraged to conserve food and feed their pets on scraps.

Restaurants, though, did not normally conserve leftovers but by 1943 some cafes in San Francisco, in an initiative to prevent animal cruelty, began to offer their patrons bones and other items to take home for their pets. These were wrapped up in what were known as Pet Pakits, making it easier to carry them home. The trend caught on in other parts of the country, where as an added touch the packaging was labelled Bones for Bowser. It did not take long for customers to get wise and leave a bit on their plates to be wrapped up for their pooch.

In 1946 Dan Stampler opened up his Steak Joint in Greenwich Village in New York and quickly built up a reputation for serving up enormous portions, so large that many patrons struggled to finish the plate off. By 1949, to save their embarrassment and to eliminate food wastage, the innovative Stemper, who also went on to patent a two-pronged bottle cork extractor, began to wrap the remainders of steak meals in thermal bags, emblazoned with the logo of his Scottish terrier.

The doggy bag was born!

Cob Cottages

It is the archetypal English country cottage, the birthplace of Thomas Hardy in Higher Bockhampton near Dorchester in Dorset with walls constructed of cob and with a roof of thatch. But what is cob?

There is evidence that cob was used as a building material in the 13th century, possibly devised as a variation of the wattle-and-daub style of construction, but it gained popularity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a reaction to the high cost of bricks, which were taxed at the time, and the lack of availability of stone in certain areas.

Traditionally, English cob was made by mixing the clay-based subsoil with sand, straw, and water and oxen were used to trample it down and mix it. As some English soils are heavily chalk based, cob made with significant amounts of chalk content is known as chalk cob or wychert. Unlike in adobe construction where dried blocks are used, in cob construction lumps of damp cob are compressed and shaped to form a continuous wall sitting on top of a stone foundation. Sometimes the mixture is trodden onto the wall by the builders, a process known as cobbing.

Each layer of cob would be allowed to dry naturally and then that part of the wall would be trimmed before the next course was built. Lintels for openings such as doors and windows would be set in place as the walls took shape. The pace of construction was dictated by the length of time it took to dry each course. Typically, cob cottages have very thick walls, usually around twenty-four inches thick, and the windows are correspondingly deep set. Like Hardy’s cottage many are roofed with thatch.

Cob has some properties that make it ideal for building. It is fireproof, although the addition of a flammable thatch roof does diminish that advantage, impervious to creepy crawlies, provides excellent insulation against fluctuations in temperature, keeping houses warm in the winter and cool in the summer, is cheap and environmentally-friendly because the base materials are abundant and requires little energy to process. Another plus is that if the building has outlived its use, the material is biodegradable.

However, not everything in the cob cottage garden is rosy. Cob has a low resistance to water, especially in its raw form, and without proper treatment can erode in intense or prolonged periods of wet weather. Although durable, cob requires regular maintenance to ensure the longevity of the structure. However, if well maintained and refreshed as necessary, cob cottages can last as long as structure built with more traditional materials, as Hardy’s cottage, built in 1800, demonstrates.