Martin Fone's Blog, page 222
July 15, 2019
The Streets Of London – Part Ninety One
Tweezer’s Alley, WC2R
These days Tweezer’s Alley which connects Arundel Street with Milford Lane, running along the back of what is now the British American Tobacco building, and into which Water Lane runs, is an unprepossessing lane in the warren of streets that make up that part of Lower Temple. Absent from the maps of John Stow and John Styrpe’s update, Tweezer’s Alley first appears in printed maps in 1676 but there is evidence that there were buildings in the area from at least the thirteenth century. It is likely to have been a track leading to or running alongside the river bank. Its claim to fame, though, is that it is the subject of one of London’s most ancient extant ceremonies.
Civic obligations such as the funding a levee of men to fight in the army was an expensive business for many and by the thirteenth century, at least, a system was developed whereby the requirement could be replaced by the payment of a sum of money. Walter le Brun was the owner of a forge on a corner of a field, used by the Knights Templar, in what is now Middle Temple. It was undoubtedly a profitable business with many a knight calling on its services to have their horses shod. It is thought that the forge occupied the land where Tweezer’s Alley now is and that the lane took its name from an invaluable piece of the smith’s equipment, the tweezer, used to hold metal to the flames.
There was a quit rent payable on the site, valued at eighteen pennies. In 1237 one Emma of Tewkesbury agreed to change the basis of payment to goods in kind, six horse shoes and sixty-one nails. The horse shoes were flatter, much bigger and heavier than the ones we know, intended to fit a Flemish warhorse, a far larger beast than the Shire horse we are familiar with. So large were its hooves that it needed ten instead of the usual seven nails to secure the shoe to each hoof. The extra nail paid as part of the quit rent tribute isn’t a spare as its design is slightly different from the other sixty.
At some point the City of London assumed the obligation to pay the quit rent for the forge, the precise date is lost in the mists of time although there are suggestions in the archives that they paid the tribute as early as 1235. They had also assumed the obligation to pay a quit rent, two knives, one blunt and one sharp, for 180 acres of land in the wilds of Shropshire, thought to be Moor House, on the eastern side of the River Severn at Hampton Loade, a rent originally paid by Nicholas de Morrs.
With elaborate ceremony, for which the City is justifiably famed, the quit rent is still paid today. On a date between St Michael’s Day (October 11th) and St Martin’s Day (November 11th) the Ceremony of Quit Rents is held at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. Officials from the City hand over the objects to the monarch’s Remembrancer, a position established by Henry II in 1164 to help him keep track on all the monies owed to him. The Remembrancer tests the knives, using the blunt one to score a tally on a stick and the sharp one to split it in half. Satisfied he says “Good service”. He then counts the horseshoes and once he knows there is a complete set, he says “Good number”.
Rather sportingly, the Remembrancer returns the shoes, nails and knives to the City to use again the following year. The horseshoes are thought to date back to 1361. The ceremony is open to the public if you fancy a peek at London’s mediaeval ceremonial past, although at the time of writing the 2019 date has not been finalised.
As for Tweezer’s Alley, whilst it survived the bombs of the Second World War, it has been rather knocked about by planners and developers in the 1960s and more recently. Looking at it now it is hard to think that it connects us with the metropolis’ taxation system.
July 14, 2019
Toilet Of The Week (22)
Making a splash in the battle for female peequality is the Lapee, the brainchild of Gina Périer, a French architect based in Copenhagen, which made its debut at the Danish festival in Roskilde.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that it takes women an age to go about their business at open-air events. When I was involved in organising outdoor events the prime areas to concentrate in order were parking, toilets, and musical content. The frustration for females is that there is no equivalent to the urinals available to men.
But the wait is over. The Lapee unit, in pink, of course, can accommodate three, comes with an in-built storage tank and with a taller screen and an elevated hole to aim at. A rather nifty design ensured individual privacy.
Périer claims that with no door to negotiate it will take the average time for females to do their business down from three minutes to 30 seconds. The proof of the carsey will be in the pissing but it seems to be a step in the right direction.
July 13, 2019
Pet Of The Week
We talk of an elephant in the room but how about an elephant upstairs?
There is nothing new about keeping exotic pets or the fear and consternation they can cause to neighbours as some astonishing documentation unearthed from Edinburgh’s archives show. In 1705 a baker, Adam Kerr, was so exasperated that he wrote to the Edinburgh Dean of Guild Court to complain that an upstairs tenant, one Abraham Sever, was keeping an elephant in his room.
The mind boggles how Sever, an itinerant Dutch showman, got the creature up the stairs or, indeed, how the beams and floorboards withstood its weight. But what really got Kerr’s goat was its “dung and water coming down into his space” which left his shop and oven reeking. Not good for the bread trade, I would have thought.
Alas, there is no record (so far) of what happened afterwards but presumably either because that was what he did Sever and elephant moved on after entertaining the locals or they were forcibly evicted.
As is often the way with stories of fish out of water, Sever’s female Indian elephant had an unhappy life, wandering around Europe from around 1688, being sold on from one owner to another, and making its owners a handsome profit. Starving, frozen, and exhausted after a long tour up into northern Scotland the poor elephant died in a ditch near Dundee in the winter of 1705/6.
The only bright spot of this fascinating insight into the exotica of Scottish life is that the elephant’s demise allowed the surgeon, Dr Patrick Blair, to perform the first dissection of an elephant in Britain.
July 12, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (239)?…
Cock and bull story
If you visit the village of Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire, near Milton Keynes, you will find two drinking establishments on the High Street, the Cock and the Bull. Conveniently situated on what was Watling Street, now the A5, the village was a popular resting spot for coach travellers travelling to and from London and the North. The locals were keen for gossip and local news and in the heyday of coach travel, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a competition developed between travellers and locals as to who could concoct the most outlandish and fanciful stories.
Alas, despite the best efforts of Stony Stratford to argue otherwise, this charming story is almost certainly a cock and bull story, a phrase used to describe an excuse or explanation which comprises of a story which is implausible. For a more likely origin we have to travel over the Channel to France.
In Respit de la Mort, written by Jean Le Fèvre de Ressons in around 1376, we find the passage: tant ay sailli du cocq en l’asne/ et ay divers Chemins tenu/ que je suy jusquez chy venu”, which translates to “so much have I sprung from the cock to the ass/ and have divers paths taken/ that I have up to here come”. That the phrase was used to describe the abrupt switching of conversation from one topic to another without any apparent rhyme or reason is illustrated by Randle Cotgrave’s definition, in 1611, of the phrase in his useful Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues; “sauter du coq à l‘asne. To run, without order, out of one matter into another”.
It was still used in this sense, mirroring the French phrase, a century later. Robert Nelson’s 1715 translation of Thomas à Kempis’ The Christian’s Exercise: or Rules to live above the world while we are in it (a worthy tome, I’m sure) contains the passage when discussing people whose words and actions are muddled, “but they skip from a Cock to a Bull”.
Perhaps more germane to our enquiries, un coq-à-l’āne as a noun meant an abrupt change of subject but was also used to describe a form of satirical and burlesque epistle consisting of fanciful and incoherent ramblings, popularised by the Renaissance poet, Clément Marot. By the early seventeenth century the Scots were using cockalane, clearly based on the French word, to describe a satire or a lampoon or a rambling, disconnected story. Cotgrave defined coq-à-l’asne as a “libell, pasquin (a type of lampoon), satyre”.
The first recorded usage of cock and bull story south of the border appeared in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, but revised in 1628 to include this description of the behaviour of some men; “[their] sole delight is, to take Tobacco & drinke all day long in a Taurne or Ale-house, to discourse, sing, iest, roare, talke of a Cock and a Bull ouer a pot..”. Sounds good to me and would certainly clear my blues away.
Although coach travel was not an unknown thing in Morton’s day, I think the derivation from the French phrase is more likely. But we still haven’t explained why the French ass becomes the English bull. Help may be at hand form our old friend, John Taylor, the water poet. He wrote an anthology of poems, published in 1630, entitled Wit and Mirth, subtitled “made yp, and fashioned into clinches, bulls, quirkes, Yerkes, quips, and jerkes”. Clearly, a bull was a made-up story of dubious veracity.
It makes sense but then again, this too could be a cock and bull story.
July 11, 2019
Gin O’Clock – Part Sixty Nine
My recent involvement in CAMFEST 2019 has meant that I have spent more time than I usually do in Camberley and its appallingly rebadged shopping centre, The Sq. The main supermarket in residence there is Sainsbury’s, a store I do not normally visit. With some time on my hands I had a perfect opportunity to investigate what that store was doing to cash in on the ginaissance.
The first bottle I selected was a rather dumpy, bell-shaped affair called Blackfriars London Dry Gin, distilled for Sainsbury’s by our old friends, G & J Greenalls from Warrington. The front labelling contains a floral design with a central plain strip in which the name of the gin is displayed together with a facsimile signature of the distiller, Mark Parton. The front label also contains two important bits of information, the first being that it has been “taste tested by customers”. I’m not sure what this is meant to tell us but I suppose it is mildly comforting to know that some people have had the hooch in their mouths, I assume not the very spirit I have bought. But what happened to them? Did they like it? Did they spit it out in disgust?
The second is that the spirit is “distilled four times using ten botanicals”. Readers of this blog will know by now that I like to know what the botanicals are that make up my gin. Frustratingly, having trumpeted the fact that it has used ten botanicals the labelling gives nary a clue as to what they may be. Trawling the web for enlightenment, I can only find five identified – juniper berries, coriander seeds, angelica roots, and the peel from oranges and lemons. And that’s it. What the other five is anybody’s guess. The consumer needs greater clarity, I feel.
The cap is a black screwcap which, once removed, reveals an aroma pungent with juniper, always a good sign in my book, with some citric hints. To the mouth it has a reassuringly solid junipery taste, slightly oily, at least when sampled neat, but revealing a certain sweetness as you roll it around your mouth. The aftertaste is warm, spicy and earthy. At 43% ABV I found it a surprisingly complex drink which worked well with a tonic making it a crisp and moreish drink. Definitely a hit.
The other gin I picked up was in an even squatter, dumpier bottle, Drury 173 London Dry Gin. It has a rather striking front label, a mix of geometric and floral designs in gold against a turquoise background. The label tells me that “our gin has been skilfully distilled to create unique spicy notes with a lovely lemon finish”, that the distiller is Natalie Wallis and that the finished article is Recipe no 19. If at first you don’t succeed, I guess, try, try again.
Again, there is no mention of precisely what has gone into the gin but on removing the artificial cork stopper the aroma was a pleasant mix of juniper with hints of citrus. To the taste the juniper was foremost, giving a warm, spicy taste and then the more citrusy elements came into play, leaving a pleasant and lasting aftertaste. At 40% ABV it is fine to open an evening’s drinking with but a bit more information about its contents wouldn’t come amiss.
Both gins are exclusive to Sainsbury’s, so I believe, and were launched in June 2017 along with a gin in a tin, a Pink Gin and Lemonade Can.
Until the next time, cheers!
July 10, 2019
Book Corner – July 2019 (2)
The Battle Lost and Won – Olivia Manning
Published in 1978, a year after The Danger Tree, this is the second book in Manning’s Levant Trilogy, set in Cairo during the Second World War. The stories of Harriet Pringle, a character loosely based on Manning herself, and Simon Boulderstone, a character to whom we were introduced for the first time in the first book, are picked up from where they were left off and run parallel through the book.
For me, Boulderstone is the more interesting character. He has just lost his brother, Hugo, in the North African campaign, cuts short his military leave and throws himself into playing his part in defeating the enemy. We see the consequences of the Battle of El Alamein through his eyes. “Hugo’s death”, Manning observes, “had brought his emotional life to a close”. This part of his story closes with Simon being wounded and the death of his batman, ironically as Simon was beginning to get close to him.
Harriet, on the other hand, is still enduring a miserable existence amongst the ex-pat community. She is holed up in a diplomatic flat and her companions, Lady Angela Hooper, whose child was killed in an IED incident, and Edwina, whom Simon thought was Hugo’s girlfriend, are chasing doomed romantic liaisons. Edwina’s affair with the dashing peer, Peter Lisdoonvarna, ends when he tells her that he is already married. Angela’s affair with one of the bar flies, the poet and lecturer, Bill Castlebar, comes to naught initially when his wife turns up unexpectedly as part of an ENSA concert party until they eventually pluck up the courage to elope together.
These liaisons make Harriet reflect on her unsatisfactory marriage. Her husband, Guy, is a much more peripheral figure in this book but is as infuriating as ever. He continues to throw himself into his work and barely seems to give Harriet a second thought. She is finding it difficult to cope with the climate and eventually succumbs to amoebic dysentery, following a trip to Luxor. Even then he can barely spare the time from his busy if somewhat futile schedule to visit her in hospital.
Whether for selfish reasons or because he was genuinely concerned about her ability to cope with a climate and the boredom of life in Cairo, Guy moots the idea that Harriet returns to Blighty. Initially aghast at the thought, during the course of the book the idea becomes more attractive and she eventually agrees and books a passage on the next available boat. But at Suez she has a premonition about the ship, rightly as it turns out, and joins a companion she has met to go to Damascus, to experience “all the wonders of the Levant”.
Perhaps the key passage to understanding the book, which, frankly, is lighter and less substantial than the others, is this: “She thought, ‘Everything has gone wrong since we came here.’ The climate changed people: it preserved ancient remains but it disrupted the living. She had seen common-place English couples who, at home, would have tolerated each other for a lifetime, here turning into self-dramatizing figures of tragedy, bored, lax, unmoral, complaining and, in the end, abandoning the partner in hand for another who was neither better nor worse than the first. Inconstancy was so much the rule among the British residents in Cairo, the place, she thought was like a bureau of sexual exchange.” These are the personal battles lost even though the fortunes of war are turning.
There are moments of comedy and tragi-comedy. The insufferable Lord Pinkrose makes a cameo appearance, to be assassinated by Egyptian nationalists who mistake him for a British politician, Lord Pinkerton. It is an easy, light read, By now I have lost patience with Harriet. She is finally doing what she should have done several books ago, leaving Guy to his own devices and live a bit, explore the world.
On to the next one.
July 9, 2019
Stushie Of The Week
I shop at Asda and I am always bemused by the stock of horrendous garden gnomes that they seem to flog. Does anyone really pay £30 for one of them and when they get them home, do they really think that they enhance the image of their garden?
I always shake my head in disbelief when I pass them by, reflecting on the poor taste of certain sections of our society. But they have never riled me to take any direct action unlike an unnamed shopper who took offence at a display of gay pride gnomes painted in the colours of the rainbow in the Estover branch in Plymouth.
He started shouting and was abusive to staff. Four police officers shad to be summoned to calm him down, presumably because he was creating an ‘elf and safety incident.
We live in strange times.
July 8, 2019
You’re Having A Laugh – Part Twenty Three
Johann Beringer and the lying stones, 1725
An unusual and obscure word I dug up the other day was oryctics. It was the name given to the study of fossils in the eighteenth century, what we would now call paleontology. Although in those days there was little understanding of how fossils were created, let alone what it meant to the dating of the Earth and the Creation story, there was an interest in these objects amongst the scientific community.
The Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the German University of Würzburg, Johann Beringer, was one such enthusiast. He had, by the standards of the day, an impressive collection and was always on the look-out for specimens. He probably could not believe his luck when some boys knocked on his door in 1725 and presented him with three pieces of limestone. On one of the stones, in three-dimensional relief, was an image of the sun and on the other two representations of worms. The images fitted the stones perfectly and were not only complete but in surprisingly good condition for something that had been buried for centuries underground.
Within months the boys had brought him some two thousand or so of these artefacts, some of which bore the images of plants, birds, snails, celestial objects and even letters in Hebrew script. Beringer thought that what he had was so astonishing that the discovery deserved a wider audience and so, in the following year, he published a treatise on the subject, Lithographiae Wirceburgensis. This, in a way, proved to be his undoing.
The problem was that to anyone else other than Beringer these stones looked distinctly odd and somewhat suspect. The plants and animals depicted are complete. There is no room for doubt as to what each is and the specimens of plants are complete with roots, stems, leaves and flowers. Each of the specimens are positioned in such a way as to display their specific anatomical features to the best advantage and there is no sign of the pressure and distortion you may have expected from fossils removed from the ground. Careful examination also revealed evidence of chisel marks.
Even Beringer expressed some doubts about their provenance in a throw-away remark in his book; ““he figures expressed on these stones, especially those of insects, are so exactly fitted to the dimensions of the stones, that one would swear that they are the work of a very meticulous sculptor.” Despite this momentary doubt, which he dismissed on the grounds that a modern hoaxer would not have spent so much time on such an elaborate hoax and for what end and, he argued, even more likely to have been due to the hand of God, Beringer pressed ahead and published his book.
The scales fell off Beringer’s eyes, the story goes, when on the day that his treatise was rolling off the printing presses, the boys presented him with a stone bearing his name. In a panic and fearing academic ruin, as well he might, Beringer tried to stop the presses but it was too late. All he could do was buy up as many of the books as he could and destroy them. A first edition, bizarrely a second edition was printed in 1767, is hard to come by.
Beringer suspected that the perpetrators of the hoax were two of his erstwhile colleagues, Ignatz Roderick, Professor of Geography, Algebra and Analysis, and Georg van Eckhart, Privy Councillor and Librarian, and brought criminal charges against them. The case came to court on April 13, 1726 and such was the furore that Roderick was forced to flee Würzburg under a cloud. Quite why they were motivated to perpetrate such an involved hoax is unclear although records from the trial suggest that they hated Beringer because “he was so arrogant and despised them all”.
To this day in Germany Beringer is regarded as the epitome of credulity and a cautionary tale for overbearing academics. Some of the stones, known as lying stones or Lügensteine can be seen in Oxford University Museum and Teylors Museum in Haarlem in the Netherlands.
If you liked this, check out Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
July 7, 2019
Helpful Hint Of The Week (2)
There’s a whole industry out there making a fortune out of peddling stuff that is supposed to eliminate or at least reduce the impact of odours emanating from the human body. Some seem to be more effective than others but often there are simpler remedies that work just as well.
Take stinky trainers.
The heady cocktail produced by the mix of sweat and bacteria has been enough to cause me to eschew this particular form of footwear. Apparently, however, a simple way of reducing their whiff factor is to place two or three tea bags, pristine not used, and place them in each shoe. Leave for twenty four hours and the absorbent nature of the bags take in the moisture and smell from the shoe. If you are lucky, they may even have transferred their particular flavour to your footwear.
As we are encouraged to recycle these days, after taking the teabags out of your trainers, you could use them to make a satisfying cuppa. It may even taste better than lapsang souchong, you never know.
July 6, 2019
Café Of The Week
I like a coffee and probably drink more of the stuff than is good for me but ordering a cup in one of the many trendy gaffs that have sprung up over recent years can be a challenging business. You are bombarded with choices and for those of us longing for just a mug of hot liquid infused with the extract from the caffeine laden beans of a coffee tree it is all too easy to be beguiled by the fancy names of the drinks on offer. Are you really sure you know the difference between an Americano and a flat white? And why can’t we just order a straightforward mug of sticky toffee?
A café in Poole in Dorset has begun the fight to prick the bubble of pretentiousness that seems to surround coffee these days by placing a sign bearing an idiot’s guide to coffee outside their premises or, as they put it, a “no nonsense coffee guide”. Americano has been crossed out and replaced with black coffee, flat white with white coffee, mocha with choccy coffee – you get the drift. At least we all know where we are now
Reactions to the sign, though, have been surprisingly mixed. It has provoked a storm in a coffee cup amongst the coffee aficionados but, if it does get out of hand, at least the owner will know a good barista.
