Martin Fone's Blog, page 207
January 3, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (263)?…
Put on your thinking cap
If you are about to engage upon the lengthy consideration of
a question or a problem, particularly when you might be thought to require some
inspiration or guidance, you might be encouraged to put on your thinking cap.
This metaphorical cap presumably warms the little grey cells in your brain
ensuring a more considered opinion or the right answer, if you are endeavouring
to crack what Sherlock Holmes called a three-pipe problem.
This metaphor has been around since at least the seventeenth
century, although the cap in question was a more satisfyingly alliterative
considering cap. The English comic writer and actor, Robert Armin, used the
term in his Foole upon foole, published in 1605, thus; “The Cobler puts off
his considering cap, why sir, says he, I sent them home but now”.
Perhaps the most famous considering cap was the one
described in The History of Little Miss Goody Two-shoes, an anonymous work
published by John Newbery in 1765. In a chapter entitled The Whole History of
the Considering Cap, the author describes a considering cap possessed by a Mrs
Margery which was “almost as large as a Grenadier’s, but of three equal
Sides; on the first of which was written, I MAY BE WRONG; on the second, IT IS
FIFTY TO ONE BUT YOU ARE; and the third; I’LL CONSIDER OF IT”. Whoever had
it was encouraged “whenever he found his Passions begin to grow turbulent,
and not to deliver a Word whilst it was on”. It was also described as “an
universal Cure for Wrong-headedness”.
This figurative use of a cap has prompted some to speculate
as to whether it has its roots in practice. Judges did put on caps to pass
sentence, at one time for all cases, not just those involving the death
sentence. But, methinks, the deliberation had been completed before the
headwear was donned. Others point to the fact that in the 16th and 17th
centuries the educated classes, those who practised law or taught, often wore
caps. Perhaps, they surmise, the uneducated, working classes thought that the
headwear enabled them to think more clearly. We are in the realms of
speculation and, perhaps, the idea is no more than that the cap helps to keep
the head warm and thus ensures that the brain has an environment conducive to
thinking clearly.
The, to my mind, less satisfactory, phrase thinking cap
appears to have appeared early in the nineteenth century, at least in the
printed page, in America, possibly by way of Ireland. The Western Carolinian,
on October 16, 1821, exhorted the editor “to put his thinking-cap on, before
he hazards another such assertion”. My reason for suggesting an Irish
connection is this quotation from the Enniskillen Chronicle and Erne Packet
from November 18, 1824; “if thou art not wise enough to take a hint from
these proverbs, thou mayest put on thy thinking cap again to guess at my
intentions”. Irish migrants took more than their good selves to the
Americas.
Back in America the Kenosha Times from Wisconsin in July 1857
wrote, “this tendency is a very good thing as the safeguard of our
independence from the control of foreign power, and it obliges every man to
keep his thinking cap on”. It is this version of the phrase that has found
favour to this day. That said, I shall use considering cap from now on, in the
event I ever need to think deeply about anything, which, somehow, I doubt.
January 2, 2020
Gin O’Clock – Part Eighty Eight
One of the fascinating things about London is that there is
almost as much going on under the city’s surface as above ground. What can look
an unprepossessing doorway in a dingy street can lead the intrepid to a
wonderful underground oasis. Take Bride Lane, which runs from the southern side
of Fleet Street to New Bridge Street and, frankly, resembles a bit of a
building site when I graced it with my presence. At the Fleet Street end, on
the left-hand side, is a doorway with a sign proclaiming COLD.
I went down the stairs to find a bright, attractive bar and
a distillery behind explosion-proof plate glass. I had arrived at the City
of London Distillery (COLD). At the height of the gin craze in the 18th
century there were said to be around 1,700 stills in production in the City’s
square mile, 7,000 gin shops and each Londoner was dinking on average 14
gallons of the spirit a year. The area around Fleet Street would have had more
than their fair share of shops and distillers. With water a positive
health-hazard and gin just as cheap as beer but a lot more powerful, it was no
wonder that many sought their fix and tried to blot out the misery of their
diurnal existence by toping gin. Mind you, quality was an issue and many an
unscrupulous vendor was less than careful with the ingredients that gave their
drink its kick.
The Gin Act of 1751, which prohibited distillers from
selling to unlicensed merchants and charged high fees to those who had
sufficient property to meet the newly established criteria for a gin retailer,
put an end to the working person’s ability to quench their thirst with gin,
leaving them to seek their kicks from beer or a nice cup of tea. The
ginaissance, without the ostensible social mayhem caused by rough gin, has seen
a new wave of small independent distillers. It is appropriate that COLD, said
to be the first establishment to distil gin, legally, at least, in over 180
years in the City of London, should seek to reclaim some of this lost heritage.
The distillery was founded in 2012 by Jonathan Clark with Jamie Baxter, who was the master distiller. It is fair to say, that the business has had its struggles to establish its niche in the rapidly expanding gin market, its original offering being well-made and balanced but a tad mundane, one that didn’t quite stand out from the market. This prompted a rethink and their original gin is now on its sixth recipe. They now have six gins in their product line, ranging from a London Dries to an Old Tom to a Sloe Gin, something for everyone. COLD is keen to promote its links with the City of London Corporation and proudly and with the blessing of the bigwigs at Guildhall incorporate the City’s emblem on their labels.
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I was there for an escorted tour of the distillery – there are three stills, modern versions of the Caterhead still, the original two named Clarissa and Jennifer, after the stars of the TV series, Two Fat Ladies, who were known to drink a glass of gin or two, and a third, a later, much larger addition, named Elizabeth. One run had finished and I was able to stick my head in and soak in the aroma of the botanicals which had gone into the mix, rather like a well-seasoned and spiced fruit cake mix.
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As well as the tour, we were given a G&T on arrival, a tad too much ice and tonic for my taste, then were shepherded into a small room where we sampled four of the gins from their range and were treated to an entertaining talk. Inevitably, I couldn’t resist staying on for another drink or buying a couple of bottles and I will describe the contents in more detail anon.
Until the next time, cheers!
January 1, 2020
Book Corner – January 2020 (1)
Step in the Dark – Ethel Lina White
Step in the Dark was published in 1938 and was Ethel Lina
White’s twelfth novel. The plot is a little thinnish but if you like an
entertaining read with a dash of romance and lashings of suspense and thrills,
then this may be one for you. What intrigues me about White is how inventive
she was in finding variations on the thriller, crime novel, some of which she
pulled off with aplomb and some which leaves the reader thinking the concept
was a bit weak. For me, this book falls into the latter camp.
The protagonist is a successful novelist, Georgia Yeo, a thriller
writer, who wrote to support her two children, following the death of her
husband. Now with some money, she embarks on a trip to Belgium with her
literary agent. There she meets a Swedish count who shows her around Brussels
and for whom she falls hook, line, and sinker.
Georgia decides to marry the Count and he whisks her off,
together with her children, to his private island off the archipelago of
Stockholm. But there the mood changes. The Count is not quite what he seems. He
is a confidence trickster, short of readies, despite the pretence of a lavish
lifestyle, and sees Georgia as the cash cow that will improve his financial
standing sufficiently that he has the funds to pull off another scam.
He sets Georgia the task of writing another best-seller,
helpfully providing her with the plot. Her predicament is spelt out to her by
the Count in this exchange; the plot will be “Your own story,’ he
replied triumphantly. ‘What is happening to you *now. This exact situation.’ As
she stared at him he began to laugh. ‘You think me mad? You wonder I dare let
you write about it, so that your friends may know? But you forget your
reputation as a writer of thrillers. You can tell the world the truth, but it
will be accepted as fiction”.
If she does not fulfil her task, her life and that of her
children will be in danger. The Count has assembled a sinister collection of
characters, his mother, the Professor who is a dab hand at accidental
assassinations, and a girl, Clair, who originally masquerades as a man and
turns out to be not only the Count’s wife but a victim of one of the Count’s
earlier scams, to thwart Georgia’s attempts to get word out to her friends and
family and to escape. Her other preoccupation is preventing her too worldly-wise
children from finding out the extent of the danger she has put them in.
All of Georgia’s attempts to effect her escape end in
failure. How is she going to get out or will she end up another of the Count’s victims?
I will not spoil the ending. What I will say about it,
though, is that compared with Lina White’s careful building up of layer upon
layer of tension, it is rather rushed and a bit anticlimactic. The story is,
however, well-written and the reader is carried along at a pace. It is one of
those books that you race through but don’t want to end. The characterisation
is good, even the minor characters are believable, and she paints the gothic
atmosphere well.
All in all, a bit of fun to read but not one of her better
books.
December 30, 2019
The Streets Of London – Part One Hundred
Royal Mint Street, E1
Running from its junction with Mansell Street at its western
end and merging into Cable Street in the east, Royal Mint Street was so named
in 1850 in (belated) recognition of the Royal Mint which had moved into the
Tower Hill area in 1810. Methinks it was a rather belated attempt to refresh
the reputation which, under its previous name, Rosemary Lane, had developed a
certain reputation. I may return to the Mint another time but I will focus
attention on other aspects of the street’s history.
From the beginning of the 18th century Rosemary Lane hosted a Rag Fair where Alexander Pope noted in footnotes to his satirical poem, Dunciad, published in 1728, “old cloaths and frippery are sold”. A contemporary commentator added more colour to the area by noting that “much of the clothing that was sold there was stolen; the market was also the final destination of all cast-off rags, in an epoch notorious for its careless habits and for seldom or never changing its linen”. Such was its reputation that in 1733, when a draper in Great Turnstile in Holborn noticed that he had lost 43 pairs of stockings, he immediately sent a boy to Mr Hancock’s in Rosemary Lane to look for them.
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Its great rival was the market in Petticoat Lane but it had
some advantages, namely being a wider and airier street, with taller buildings
and the added attraction of a gin house. One of the attractions of the stalls,
apart from cheap second-hand clothing, was that you were never quite sure what
you would find within the garments. This snippet from the Public Advertiser
from February 17, 1756 makes this point as well as shedding some light on how
the transactions were conducted. A woman by the name of “Mary Jenkins, a
dealer in old clothes in Rag Fair, was selling a pair of breeches to a poor
woman for seven pence and a pint of beer. While the two were drinking together
at a public house, the purchaser unripped the clothes and found eleven gold
Queen Anne guineas quilted in the waistband and a £30 bank-note, dated 1729, of
which she did not learn the value until she had sold it for a gallon of
twopenny purl” (warm beer flavoured with something bitter). A case of
caveat venditor.
There was some dispute amongst the authorities around the
turn of the 19th century as to whether the Rag Fair was simply a
marketplace for old tat. Thomas Pennant in his Of London, published in 1790,
talked of tubs in which customers paid a penny to dip their hands to pull out a
wig and that someone could clothe themselves for little or nothing. Joseph
Nightingale, in his London and Middlesex from 1815, vehemently refuted Pennant’s
account, recording that “the houses in Rosemary Lane, or the so called Rag Fair, are mostly
occupied by wholesale dealers in clothes, who used to export them to our
colonies, and to South America. In several Exchanges, or large covered
buildings, fitted up with counters, &c. there are good shops, and the
annual circulation of money in the purliens of this place, is really
astonishing, considering the articles sold, although their cheapness bears no
kind of proportion to Mr. Pennant’s conjectures”
Whoever was right at the time, by the middle of the century
it was characterised by disorder and tawdriness. Henry Mayhew gave us a vivid
illustration of life in the street in his London Labour and London Poor,
published in 1861. He reported that it was “chiefly inhabited by dredgers, ballast-heavers,
coal-whippers, watermen, lumpers, &c., as well as the slop-workers and
“sweaters” employed in the Minories”. He went on to give a
detailed description of the bric-a-brac on sale and the disorder to be found on
the streets. “Some of the wares are spread on the ground, on wrappers, or pieces
of matting or carpet; and some, as the pots, are occasionally placed on straw.
The cotton prints are often heaped on the ground, where are also ranges or
heaps of boots and shoes, and piles of old clothes, or hats or umbrellas. Other
trades place their goods on stalls or barrows, or over an old chair or
clothes-horse. And amidst all this motley display the buyers and sellers smoke,
and shout, and doze, and bargain, and wrangle, and eat, and drink tea and
coffee, and sometimes beer”.
The fair lasted until 1911. I shall return to this street to talk about some of the colourful characters who lived on it.
December 24, 2019
The Tale Of Charles Dickens’ Turkey
‘Twas the day before Christmas and the novelist, Charles Dickens, was waiting with great expectations for a 30-lb turkey that his tour manager, George Dolby, had promised to send him. But it didn’t arrive. Dickens dashed off a frantic note to Dolby; “WHERE IS THAT TURKEY? IT HAS NOT ARRIVED!!!!!!!!!!” What promised to be the best of times turned out to be the worst of times.
The bird did not arrive. Entrusted to the tender care of the railway companies it was making its way from Hereford to Dickens’ home in Kent when, somewhere on the Great Western Railway (GWR) line between Gloucester and Reading, the wooden horse box in which it was stored, a sort of goods carriage, caught fire, possibly caused by an errant spark from the engine.
Suffice it to say, Dickens’ turkey was well and truly cooked and GWR considered it to be too badly damaged to present to the novelist. Instead the meat was sold off to the needy at sixpence a portion.
Dickens did receive a letter of apology from GWR and an offer of compensation.
The incident, which has just come to light as a result of some correspondence unearthed at the National Railway Museum in York, happened in 1869. Dickens died in June the following year and so was deprived of turkey on what turned out to be his last Christmas. Hard times, indeed.
Quite what he ate instead is anybody’s guess.
Season’s greetings to you all. The next post is scheduled for Monday December 30th.
December 23, 2019
You’re Having A Laugh – Part Thirty Two
Paul Kammerer and the Midwife Toad
We tend to think that Charles Darwin was single-handedly
responsible for developing the theory of evolution but he was not working in a
vacuum. An important and controversial contribution was made by the French
naturalist, Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), who posited a theory that
acquired characteristics were passed down through the generations. He thought
that giraffes originally had short necks and legs but, in order to get to the
succulent upper leaves, had to develop the long legs and necks they have today.
Lamarck though that if a parent had a limp, their child would also inherit one.
Lamarckism fell out of fashion but the Austrian scientist, Paul Kammerer (1880-1926), spent part of his career trying to establish whether there was anything in it. He chose to concentrate on the Midwife Toad which, unlike most toads, does not mate in water and so lacks the black, scaly bumps on their back feet, known as nuptial pads, which allows other male toads to hang on to their partners as they mate. If he forced Midwife Toads to mate underwater, he wondered, would they too grow those bumps? If they did, Lamarck might have been on to something.
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After getting his toads to mate underwater, Kammerer discovered,
after a few generations, that the males were beginning to develop black nuptial
pads, which were then inherited by their offspring. If his findings stacked up,
there may have been something in Lemarckism after all. In 1923 and 1924 Kammerer
travelled extensively across the United States and Britain, giving lectures and
writing about his experiments. In 1924, he published The Inheritance of
Acquired Characteristics, claiming that his experiments and results showed that
Lemarck was right.
Kammerer split the scientific community. His findings were
enthusiastically embraced by Soviet Russia, the theory of the inheritance of
acquired characteristics fitting into the prevailing Marxist philosophy, so
much so that Kammerer was appointed as director of a laboratory in Moscow’s
Communist Academy in 1926. Other scientists, though, were not so sure.
In 1926 an American scientist, Gladwyn K Noble, curator of
Reptiles at the Museum of Natural History in New York, travelled over to Vienna
to see for himself. By this time Kammerer was in Moscow and so a colleague
showed him the one preserved toad that was left from the experiments and
photographs taken while the research was ongoing. Noble claimed that the specimen
was a fake, the nuptial pads being nothing more than swellings caused by the
injection of black Indian ink.
Noble published a letter in the journal, Nature, on August 7 1926,
claiming that Kammerer had faked the results of his experiments. In a letter to
the Soviet Academy of Science written in September 1926, Kammerer admitted the
hoax, but claimed that he was not responsible for faking the exhibit Noble had
seen and had no idea who had done it or why. With his academic and professional
career ruined, Kammerer’s body was found, on September 23, 1926, at the top of
an Austrian mountain in Puchberg am Schneeberg with a gun shot wound to his
head and a pistol by his side.
Kammerer’s case has become a notorious example of academic hoaxing
but more recent developments in genetic research suggest that he might not be
the villain he has been made out to be. In 1942 scientists began to understand
a phenomenon called epigenetics whereby circumstances or the environment can
make changes to the way gene information expresses itself without changing the
genetic code itself. Those changes can be passed on to offspring.
A famous example of epigenetics in practice was to be seen during
the famine that hit occupied Netherlands in the winter of 1944/5. Malnourished,
pregnant women gave birth to children with a higher incidence of mental
problems and a tendency to become obese than normal. Some of these traits were
passed on to the women’s grandchildren. And a midwife toad has been found in
the wild with nuptial pads.
Perhaps the remaining specimen had been faked but the results of Kammerer’s experiments were as he portrayed them. If so, he will have the last laugh.
[image error]
If you enjoyed this, try Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin
Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
December 22, 2019
Christmas Crackers (5)
Here, allegedly, are the best contemporary Christmas cracker jokes. Make of them what you will.
Why does Donald Trump have his Christmas dinner on a plastic plate? – He doesn’t get on with china.Why is Parliament like ancient Bethlehem? – It takes a miracle to find three wise men there.Christmas dinner is a lot like Brexit. Half the family were told they needed to make room for Turkey, so opted to leave Brussels.Why has Santa been banned from sooty chimneys? – Carbon footprints.What is Coleen Rooney’s favourite game to play over the festive period? – Guess Who.Why doesn’t Jeremy Corbyn ever visit Santa? – Because he struggles in the poles.Why is Greta Thunberg boycotting parsnips and carrots at Christmas? – Because she’s a swede dish campaigner.What’s the difference between Rudolph’s nose and David Cameron’s autobiography? – Only one will be red at Christmas.What do you call a snowman who goes on Love Island? – A melt.What is Olivia Colman’s favourite part of a turkey? – The Crown.
December 21, 2019
Christmas Tip Of The Week (3)
Pulling a Christmas cracker is one of those rituals that has performed before you can sink your teeth into the sumptuous feast that has been set before you, that has taken hours to prepare and is getting steadily colder. Personally, I’m not bothered whether I win a paper hat and plastic toy together with the right to read a corny gag out, but some are more competitive. Did you know that there are some techniques which can maximise your chances of getting the larger portion of the cracker?
According to defence technology experts, QinetiQ, here are some handy tips to ensure that you win every time:
Ensure that the end of the cracker you are holding is lower than the other person’s so that it is tilting towards you;Use a firm, two-handed gripPull slowly and steadily rather than deploying a hard yank. Yanking can compromise your section of the cracker;Don’t twist the cracker.
Easy really. I hope it works.
My etiquette expert informs me that the correct time to pull a cracker is either after the main course has been completed or after the pudding has been eaten. Makes sense but then a Christmas dinner wouldn’t be the same without silly hats.
December 20, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (262)?…
According to Hoyle
This is another one of those phrases, no languishing in
obscurity, that denote that something is done within a strict set of rules and,
therefore, has been accomplished in accordance with the highest authority. The
Hoyle in question is the English barrister and writer, Edmund Hoyle (1672-1769).
Hoyle’s claim to fame was that he was the fount of all
knowledge on matters relating to card and board games. At the age of 70, in
1742, he published A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist, a very popular game
at the time, especially amongst the leisured classes. It not only codified the
rules of the game but also gave the reader insights into tactics so that they
might improve their cardmanship and win a game or two. It was an early example
of what might be termed an instruction manual and spawned a new genre of
literature. Hoyle went on to publish instruction manuals for the games of
backgammon, piquet, chess, quadrille, and brag.
So popular was Hoyle’s book on whist and expensive, a copy
would set you back a guinea, that it was pirated by a couple of printers. This
led to a battle royal over rights, Hoyle trying to keep ahead of his rivals by
continually revising and expanding his book, resorting to litigation and,
finally, including the legend, “no copies of this book are genuine but what
are signed by Edmund and Thomas Osborne (his publisher)” together with his
autograph on the title page, using a goose quill, no less.
It became one of the best sellers of the century and was
cited as the final authority in settling disputes around the game and still is
to this day.
Hoyle’s strictures on the game of whist was used in a rather
forced simile in an account of a duel in which William Byron killed the
unfortunate William Chaworth, immortalised in A Circumstantial and Authentic Account
of a Late Unhappy Affair Which Happened at the Star and Garter Tavern, in Pall
Mall by a Person Present and published in 1765. During the course of this
account the anonymous reporter lamented how often men trained in the noble art
of fencing, which presumably Chaworth was, were skewered by men relying solely
on fury and natural strength, which presumably described Byron’s approach. “It
is like”, he bemoaned, “a professed whist-player, disposing of every
card according to Mr Hoyle, whilst an ignorant gamester, unacquainted with that
gentleman’s maxims, plays in so extraordinary a manner, and so very different
from the established rules, that all his antagonist’s plan is entirely
destroyed”. It just isn’t cricket.
The Town and Country Magazine I n 1786 reported on a
gentleman, lauded for his skill at cards, who “played every card according
to Hoyle, nay…he frequently made improvements on him”. Inevitably, the
phrase gravitated from the narrow world of cards to a more general application
as this passage from the Morning Chronicle of September 26, 1829, reporting on a
meeting of the Third Reformation in Cork. Shows; “it is not altogether
according to Hoyle to assert, as the Resolution does, that we owe the pure form
of Protestantism to the Prelacy alone”.
Perhaps because Hoyle had a more limited influence on the
lives of many than did Cocker, this reference to a well-respected source has
rather languished in obscurity.
December 18, 2019
Book Corner – December 2019 (3)
The Provincial Lady Goes Further – E.M.Delafield
Published in 1932, this is Delafield’s sequel to her
best-selling The Provincial Lady, reviewed elsewhere in this blog (https://windowthroughtime.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/book-corner-january-2018-3/).
It is better known as The Provincial Lady goes to London in America, as indeed
she does. It is written in the same breathless, chatty style of its
predecessor, definite articles and personal pronouns jettisoned with gay
abandon. It’s like reading a diary full of pensées or a certain type of blog.
Our heroine, the provincial lady, has found some sort of
minor literary fame as a result of her first novel. The book opens with various
of her acquaintances feeling somewhat miffed about the way they were portrayed.
(Note to self: don’t use real, live people in next book). But life is still its
chaotic mess, trying to run a family on a meagre budget, dealing with a
temperamental French nanny who always seems to be having a crise, problems with
the domestics and a husband who is less than helpful, monosyllabic and happy to
snooze behind a copy of The Times.
Still, the royalties from her book do give some welcome
financial relief, allowing her to rent a small flat in London, ostensibly as
somewhere to write her next book but, in reality, a bolthole from her crazy
domestic life in Devon and an opportunity to set her foot gingerly into the
literary and social world that the capital offers.
She meets up with an old school pal, Pamela Pringle, who
leads a rather complicated love life, several husbands along the way and a
string of male admirers in tow, and involves our heroine in the complicated
stratagems to cover up her traces. Any invitation to a soiree, dinner, or an
event prompts a clothing crisis. She never seems to have the right clothes to
wear. Delafield delights in satirising, in a light and gentle way, the mores
and behaviour of the upper middle classes at play.
Our Lady ventures abroad taking a trip to Brussels to attend
a literary conference, arriving typically late and feeling rather awkward and
out of place, left to socialise with other social misfits and outcasts, and the
family on a holiday to Brittany. She is spreading her wings and she talks, at
the end of the book, about going to America.
The book has a gentle wit throughout, portraying a clever
woman but one who is out of her depth and disconcerted by the complexities of
modern life. She seems always to be on the verge of some disaster and, of
course, pressure from her editor to complete her next book. The book is full of
parenthetical asides, notes to oneself, ideas for articles which are never
pursued or observations of a more philosophical nature.
Our Lady is a bit of a feminist but lacks the confidence or
the readiness of wit to stand her ground. A case in point is this passage where
Robert, her husband, volunteers her services to perform at the village concert;
“Definite conviction here that reference ought
to be made to Married Women’s Property Act or something like that, but exact
phraseology eludes me, and Robert seems so confident that heart fails me, and I
weakly agree to do what I can”.
The book is somewhat autobiographical. The magazine, Time and Tide, appears frequently in the book and Delafield was a director of it. She had two children and lived the life of an upper-middle class woman in Devon, struggling to keep a ramshackle home going.
It’s great fun, at least as good as the first, and I shall probably be travelling with her to America.
