Martin Fone's Blog, page 256
July 7, 2018
July 6, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (187)?…
Toe-rag
Toe-rag is used pejoratively these days to indicate a worthless, disreputable, deceitful type of person, someone rarely worth bothering with. I’m sure we have all come across people to whom this epithet would not be out of place.
For the well-dressed person, having a piece of hosiery between one’s bare feet and shoes is de rigueur. Of course, for those with very few possessions, there is often a need to make do. A toe-rag was a piece of cloth or rag wrapped around the foot as a sort of ersatz stocking. J F Mortlock was transported to Australia for a twenty-one year stretch in 1843. He survived and in 1864 published an account of his experiences called Experiences of a Convict, in which he wrote about the practice of binding one’s feet with rags; “ stockings being unknown, some luxurious men wrapped round their feet a piece of old shirting, called, in language more expressive than elegant, a toe-rag.”
In the late 1920s and the 1930s there was a prurient interest amongst the better sorts in the lot of the so-called down and outs. One who made his name out of this sort of thing was the Reverend Frank L Jennings who produced a series of talks for the radio, subsequently published in 1932 as Tramping with Tramps, described at the time as an exhaustive and first-hand study of the vagrancy problem. He spent a month living the life of a vagrant, begging for his food and doing odd jobs. When back in his comfortable normal life he entertained the great British public with tales of his racy and illuminating experiences, earning himself the sobriquet of the Doss House Parson. Naturally, he was concerned about apparel. “Socks”, he noted, “are very seldom worn. Instead you get a winding of cotton rag round the ball and toes of the foot as a safeguard against blisters. Toe-rags, the tramp calls them.”
Another purveyor of this poverty porn, although his fame has outlasted that of Jennings, was Eric Blair aka George Orwell. In his Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933, he noted “less than half the tramps actually bathed…but they all washed their faces and feet, and the horrid greasy clouts known as toe-rags which they bind round their toes.”
This style of hosiery having been adopted by and associated with vagrants and other down and outs, it was inevitable that toe-rag would be used figuratively to describe those whom the speaker finds beneath contempt. One of the earliest examples of this usage is to be found in Thomas Frost’s Circus Life and Circus Celebrities, published in 1875; “toe rags is another expression of contempt…used…chiefly by the lower grades of circus men, and the acrobats who stroll about the country, performing at fairs.” D H Lawrence, in a letter in 1912, wrote, “Remember, whatever toe-rag I may be personally, I am the person she livanted with. So you be careful.” And Harold Pinter, in The Caretaker from 1960, included the line “All them toe-rags, mate, got the manners of pigs.”
The link between poverty and moral deficiency has been a difficult one for those without much money to break since time immemorial.
July 5, 2018
Gin O’Clock – Part Forty One
The fortunes of social media platforms seem to wax and wane with astonishing rapidity. Who remembers Friends Reunited? Facebook has lost its appeal for many and LinkedIn with pretentions to be the medium of choice for professionals to stay in contact with each other or to rediscover long-lost colleagues is on a downwards slope. But occasionally, they have their uses and you can unearth someone you have lost track of and who is now doing something exciting and interesting. Bear in mind, my contextual framework is insurance and the financial services sector!
Take Tim Boast. I used to work with him in London about ten years ago. I knew he had gone back down-under and had assumed he was beavering away in some financial institution over there. But no. His name came up on one of those irritating prompts that plague social media sites, bringing attention to people with whom you share mutual connections.
What intrigued me about Tim was that he is now the head distiller at Never Never Distilling Company in South Australia. Indeed, he is described on their website as the Fermentalist. Mind you, he has a pedigree in this line; his great, great, great-grandfather was Alfred Gilbey, who founded along with his brothers Gilbey’s of wine, spirits and, of course, gin fame.
At the moment, Never Never produce three gins, which, I understand, are heavily juniper-orientated but with balance restored by a careful selection of botanicals. Sounds my type of gin. I have not tasted any of their wares but Tim told me via e-mail, as he was running off another batch – social media does have its uses – that they are expanding rapidly, have their sights on the Asian market but with no current plans to tap into the English ginaissance. If that changes, I’m sure he will let me know.
In the meantime, more power to his elbow.
Another welcome entrant to the ever-growing field of gins is Berry’s London Dry Gin, which is as you would expect from London’s oldest wine merchants, Berry Brothers and Rudd, definitely a gin of the old school. Relaunched this year (2018) it is based on what was previously known as Berry’s Best. Only one bottle of the original gin remained, dating from the 1950s, and from this the distillers, rather like scientists recreating an extinct animal from DNA samples, have produced a spirit which they believe matches the original.
The bottle is a rather stubby wine bottle with an artificial stopper. My bottle was marked 2018/002, presumably meaning it was from the second batch that they made commercially. The label is black and white with the firm’s two royal warrants proudly printed in gold and bears an illustration of their wine merchant shop at No3, St James’s Street in London in days of yore.
Was the effort worth it?
It is a relatively simple blend of juniper berries, coriander seeds, angelica root and winter savory, a cure, amongst other things, for flatulence, which might be helpful. On opening the bottle, the primary sensation was of juniper – always a good start in my book – with a sweeter, more floral smell coming through. Crystal clear in the mouth it was smooth, very moreish and with a slightly sweet aftertaste. Competitively priced, weighing in at 40.6% ABV and not to be confused with their already well established no 3 gin, this is a welcome addition to the traditional, juniper led gin stable.
Off to Cornwall to fill my boot and boots with gin. Until the next time, cheers!
July 4, 2018
Coincidences Are Spiritual Puns – Part Seven
Tsutomu Yamaguchi (1916 – 2010)
I don’t know what constitutes a bad week at work but the one that Japanese engineer, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, had in August 1945 must be pretty high up there.
Working for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, 6th August 1945 was Tsutomu’s last day of a three-month long secondment to the Hiroshima office working on the design of a new oil tanker. He could be excused for thinking about his home in Nagasaki and his wife, Hisako, and baby son, Katsutoshi, as he walked towards the docks to work.
At 8.15 am his thoughts were disturbed by an unusual sight – a bomber looming in the distance and two small parachutes. Then there was an almighty flash and an explosion, the force of which bowled him over. Tsutomu’s ear drums were ruptured, he was blinded temporarily and he sustained serious burns to the left-hand side of his upper torso. What he had witnessed and experienced was the atomic bomb that the Americans had dropped on Hiroshima from the Enola Gay.
Fortunately, he was able to crawl to a nearby shelter, rest a while and then set out to find some of his colleagues. After finding them, he spent the night in an air-raid shelter and decided to make his way home to Nagasaki. Arriving there in the early hours of the morning of 8th August, he presented himself at the local hospital where he was patched up and swathed in bandages. Once he got home, his family barely recognised this spectral figure that walked through the door.
But Tsutomu was a trooper and dragged himself to the Mitsubishi offices in Nagasaki on 9th August. His boss wanted a full account of what had happened in Hiroshima, expressing some doubt that so much death and destruction could be caused by a single bomb. So at 11 am Tsutomo was recounting what he could recall when the landscape suddenly exploded with a flash, sending broken glass and debris into the room. Yes, the Americans had dropped their second atomic bomb – it was almost as if they were following Tsutomu around.
A combination of Nagasaki’s hilly landscape and the reinforced stairwell of the office block muffled the intensity of the blast and so Tsutomu escaped relatively unscathed, f you ignore the fact that his bandages had been blown off and he had been subjected to another dose of radiation. He made his way home and was horrified to find that it had been flattened. Miraculously, at the time of the blast his wife and son were out, getting some ointment for his burns, and had found refuge in a tunnel. If Tsutomu had not been caught up in the Hiroshima blast, it is likely that his immediate family would not have survived the Nagasaki bomb.
Although his is a remarkable story, Tsutomu wasn’t the only person to endure and survive the two atomic bombs. Two of his colleagues, Akira Iwanga and Kuniyoshi Sato, were in the wrong place at the wrong time twice as was a kite-maker, Shigeyoshi Morimoto, who was only half a mile from the epicentre of the Hiroshima bomb when it fell. It is thought up to 165 people experienced both attacks but Tsutomu was the only one recognised by the Japanese government, belatedly in 2009, as a nijyuu hibakusha, a twice-bombed person.
Sadly, in Japan hibakusha, atomic bomb survivors, and their progeny were (and still are) discriminated against socially and in the workplace because of fears that radiation sickness was both hereditary and contagious. Although seriously ill with radiation sickness, Tsutomu survived and lived to the grand old age of 94 before succumbing to stomach cancer.
I will never complain about a bad day again!
July 3, 2018
An Eye For An Eye Will Only Make The Whole World Blind – Part Five
The Märket Lighthouse
As a result of the Treaty of Fredrikshamn, signed on 17th September 1809, the defeated Swedes were forced to concede the whole of Finland, as well as all its territory east of the Torne River, to the victorious Russians. A new border between the two countries had to be established and as is often the way a line was drawn between Sweden and the Aland archipelago, bisecting the tiny, uninhabited island of Märket, all 8.2 acres of it.
That part of the Baltic Sea is particularly treacherous. In 1873 alone, eight ships foundered as they overcorrected their course to avoid the rocky outcrop. Something had to be done and the obvious course of action was to build a lighthouse. Finnish architect, Georg Schreck, was commissioned to erect the structure in 1885.
The point he chose was, not unnaturally, the highest spot on the island, some 3 metres above sea level. There was only one tiny problem – it happened to be in the Swedish part of the island. But the Russians ploughed on regardless and on 11th November 1885 the lighthouse was commissioned. Perhaps reluctant to provoke the Russian bear again, bearing in mind what happened in 1809, the Swedes accepted this illegal encroachment on to their territory but it was a festering sore.
Fast forward to 1917 and following the disintegration of the Russian Empire, the Finns gained their independence and with it, the Russian half of the island of Märket. They manned the lighthouse and carried on as if they owned the spot of land upon which it stood.
From time to time the illegal Finnish occupation of the lighthouse was a source of friction with the Swedes but the matter wasn’t pressed hard as the lighthouse was serving a useful service to passing ships. It was not until 1985 that the thorny problem was resolved and the solution was something that only experienced diplomats could dream up.
The answer was to redesign the border so that the Finns retained the lighthouse – by now it was unmanned, the last lighthouse keeper having departed in 1977 – and the Swedes gained an equal amount of territory to that which they ceded. Rather like an inverted S the new line started in the middle of the island, veering into the Swedish area to ensure that the lighthouse remained under Finnish control and then into the Finnish area to give the Swedes some additional territory. To ensure that the new border was correctly recognised, holes were drilled into the rocks marking the spot.
Just to add some further unnecessary complications, the Swedish portion now falls into two separate municipal jurisdictions. But at least as both countries are subscribers to the Schengen agreement, there is no need for any passport control.
Having legalised their claim to the lighthouse, that seems to have been it as far as the Finns were concerned. It is still operational but is suffering from what can only be described as a lack of tender love and care. It is crumbling and badly needs some maintenance work. Since 2007 groups of volunteers have spent their summers on the island patching it up and showing intrepid visitors to the island.
If you are thinking of paying it a visit, check the weather.
July 2, 2018
Double Your Money – Part Thirty One
The New York County Courthouse scandal, 1871
The building standing at 52, Chambers Street in Manhattan was designed in 1858 by John Kellum as a statement of the greatness of New York and the esteem in which the law was held. By 1871 it stood as the living embodiment of one of the most egregious examples of municipal corruption. The villain of the piece was William Magear Tweed, who headed the Tammany Hall, the Democratic party’s organising committee in New York from 1858 and was elected to the New York senate in 1867.
The initial legislation specified that the new courthouse should not cost more than $250,000 but by 1871 more than $13 million had been spent on the building, with Tweed instrumental in pushing through the requisite increases in budget. And there was remarkably little to show for such the money and what there was far from impressive, consisting of a collection of gloomy rooms and dark halls, decorated with ugly, fake marble. One of the largest rooms, reserved for the Bureau of Arrears of Taxes, had no roof. The crowning glory of the building, the grand dome atop the temple of justice was never built.
Many smelt a rat but such was Tweed’s hold over the levers of power that he considered himself above the law. It took a combination of a disgruntled Tweed ring member, ex-Sheriff James O’Brien who supplied evidence, the investigative journalism of the New York Times and the indefatigable lampoonery of Thomas Nast whose cartoons were published in Harper’s Weekly to bring Tweed and his associates down in the autumn of 1871. Although Tweed tried to buy the Times off, it was the cartoons of Nast he feared most, famously commenting, “I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles; my constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures.” The Tweed Ring offered Nast $500,000 to go to Europe to study art but the cartoonist refused.
The mountain of evidence pointing to wrongdoing grew ever larger and a meeting at the Cooper Union established a 70-strong committee, under the leadership of Samuel J Tilden, to bring about the fall of Tweed and his associates. The Tammany was crushed in the elections that autumn and Tweed’s associates did what all fraudsters do – upped sticks and fled to Europe or Canada. Only two faced trial – Mayor Hall, whose defence was “an ineradicable aversion to detail”, was acquitted whilst Tweed was tried and convicted of forgery and larceny in 1873 and sentenced to a 12-year stretch.
Tweed’s sentence was reduced to a year on a legal technicality but he did not enjoy his liberty for long, being arrested a second time on a charge of stealing six million dollars from the state of New York. Although under arrest, Tweed was allowed to visit his home under guard and on one such visit, in December 1875, he managed to elude his escort and fled to Spain via Cuba. But Nast was to prove his nemesis again – he was recognised thanks to a Nast caricature and in November 1876 was returned to New York and held in Ludlow Street Jail awaiting trial where he died on 12th April 1878.
At the time it was estimated across all their activities the Tweed Ring pocketed some $20 million but later estimates put the figure at anywhere between $40 and $200 million.
So how did they do it?
Such was Tweed’s insouciance that it was not very sophisticated. Companies under the control of the Tweed Ring would bill the city for work not done or if they did do some work, would submit vastly over-inflated invoices. The work which was done was deliberately substandard requiring it to be put right. And who did that? You guessed it, other Tweed Ring controlled companies. The fraud was committed with an element of humour. A cheque was made out to Fillippo Donnoruma and endorsed by Phillip Dummy, another to T C Cash and a ledger entry for brooms etc was for a whopping $41,190.95.
A popular pastime at the time was to calculate how far the furnishings and materials charged to the city would have stretched – one newspaper reckoned from New York to New Haven.
The courthouse finally opened in 1881.
July 1, 2018
Old Codgers Of The Week – Part Ten
Not that I’m an expert in these matters but it seems to me that to carry out the perfect robbery you need a clear plan, some way to get your message across and a speedy getaway. What let 69 year-old Kenneth Dodds down in his attempted crime spree in Newton Aycliffe in County Durham was his reliance on his bus pass.
The frail-looking pensioner allegedly terrified shop workers in Café Pronto and Young’s Newsagents at around 8.30 am on 22nd February, demanding £100 and brandishing what looked like a Colt-type revolver. He shuffled out of both premises empty-handed, save for his walking stick and imitation pistol, and had his collar felt at the nearby bus stop whilst waiting for his getaway charabanc.
Dodds was hauled before the beak on two accounts of attempted robbery and one of possession of an imitation firearm, I read this week. He was bailed to return for sentence at a later date.
A sorry tale in many ways.
Looking at the photo of Dodds it is hard to imagine that he cut a terrifying figure but in the heat of the moment who knows? You have to admire his chutzpah, even if his plan was less than perfect.
Perhaps a pint and a trip to the bookies would have been a better idea.
June 30, 2018
Pooch Of The Week
I’m no dog lover so I’m rather immune to the supposed charms of the creatures. It is rather gratifying to read, though, that we are encouraged to celebrate diversity in the shapes, sizes and behaviour traits of pooches, just as we do with humans.
Take the World’s Ugliest Dog competition, now in its 30th year, which was held in Petaluma in California last weekend. The winner was an English Bulldog – are you surprised? – going by the rather unlikely name of Zsa Zsa. The slobbering creature with a lolling tongue, chin that thrusts upwards and resplendent with nails painted a shade of pink, scooped the $1,500 prize for her owner, Megan Brainard from Minnesota. I’m reliably informed that the dog is on the left of the photo.
Last year’s winner was a Neapolitan mastiff called Martha whose stand-out features were her massive cheeks that drooped almost down to her knees and flapped around in a rather disturbing fashion when she moved her head.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as someone once said.
June 29, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (186)?..
Fit as a butcher’s dog
If I was to come back as a dog, perhaps being assigned to a butcher would be the dog’s bollocks. After all, there would be all that food around and surely even the most curmudgeonly of purveyors of meat wouldn’t begrudge me of some scraps. The upside would be that there would be a veritable feast to enjoy and I would be as full as a butcher’s dog, as the Australians so eloquently describe someone who has indulged in a substantial meal.
The simile, fit as a butcher’s dog, emerged in the 20th century, probably in Lancashire, to describe someone who is the epitome of rude health, fitness and robustness. In a sense there is a bit of an oxymoron in its current usage because having access to and being fed so much meat is likely to make the pooch fat and unhealthy, unless it is exercises vigorously.
The reason behind this disconnect is that the attributes to be sought in a butcher’s dog have changed over the years. The phrase butcher’s dog originally described an animal that could stay impassive amongst all the temptations of a butcher’s emporium or, as John Camden Hotten put it in his Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words, published in 1859; “To be like a butcher’s dog, that is, lie by the beef without touching it; a simile often applicable to married men.” This sense of stoically resisting something close at hand has disappeared into the mists of time.
Being a butcher’s dog, though, has to be better than a barber’s cat. Being confined to a barber’s shop would mean that other than for the odd stray rat or mouse there would be nothing for the moggy to feed on. No wonder then that the barber’s cat was a scrawny thing. It was used figuratively to describe someone who was full of piss and wind, unnecessarily loquacious, a blatherskite. This figurative meaning caused the inestimable Hotten some difficulty when he came to define it in his Dictionary, commenting that it was “an expression too coarse to print.”
The Dundee Courier and Argus in its edition dated 8th September 1877 was almost as bashful, using a carefully bowdlerised euphemism, but the sense is clear; “He should be the very last man in Dundee to call anyone a windbag, for it is a well-known fact that…he is generally considered the very Prince of Windbags. Indeed, it is often remarked about him that he is all wind and water, like the barber’s cat.”
James Plunkett’s 1969 historical novel, Strumpet City, set in Dublin, gives us probably the rationale behind the phrase; “Do you know the expression – wet and windy, like the barber’s cat? I know it well, Matthews confessed. Why the barber’s cat, I wonder? A consequence of frugality, the poet explained, its staple diet is hair and soapsuds.” James Joyce used a variant of the phrase in Ulysses; “all wind and piss like a tanyard cat.” –
But are we barking up the wrong tree in thinking that the barber’s cat is a moggy? One commentator has noted that a barber’s cat was a bottle of water with a pump which when operated by the barber sprayed water finely over the hair of his customer. I recall them but never knew them by that name and, of course, they operate by wind and water. But Joyce was clearly thinking of a cat and other phrases in which the barber’s cat appears – as poor as a barber’s cat to describe someone who was painfully thin and starving and as conceited as a barber’s cat to paint the picture of someone who fancies themselves – tend to suggest that we are thinking of felis catus here.
June 28, 2018
Everything Is Possible For An Eccentric, Especially When He Is English – Part Twenty Three
Richard Whately (1787 – 1863)
An economics professor at Oxford in the 1820s who made his name with two hefty tomes, Elements of Logic and Elements of Rhetoric, sartorially Richard Whately cut quite a dash. Eschewing the traditional academic gown he favoured a long white cloak and a beaver hat, earning himself the sobriquet of the White Bear. To his astonishment, not least because he was sympathetic to the Catholic cause, he was plucked from the groves of academe in 1831 by Lord Grey and appointed Archbishop of Dublin in 1831.
Already regarded with suspicion by the Protestants in Ireland, Whately’s character failed to endear him to the locals. He enjoyed an argument, peppering his conversation with puns and word play, but always had to have the last word. Perhaps his most famous contribution to what passed as 19th century humour was this rather contrived quip; “Why cannot a man starve in the desert? Because he can eat the sand which is there. But how did the sandwiches get there? Noah sent Ham and his descendants mustered and bred.” Boom, boom.
Whately could also be insensitive and rude. When a cleric asked his Grace’s permission to go to New Zealand for health reasons, he responded; ““By all means go to New Zealand; you are so lean that no Maori could eat you without loathing.” Annoyed by a cleric who was droning on, Whately suddenly piped up and asked the poor man, “Pray, sir, why are you like the bell of your own church?” The Archbishop then enlightened him by revealing the answer to the riddle; “it is because you have a long tongue and an empty head.”
Perhaps more disconcerting to the great and the good of Dublin society were some of Whately’s physical traits. He seemed unable to keep his feet still. He would pace up and down whilst waiting for his dinner, sometimes take out a pair of scissors and trim his nails or, if the pre-dinner small talk was particularly annoying, he would take the calling cards and fling them across the room. Another pre-prandial trick was whilst talking to whirl a chair round on one of its legs. Sometimes the leg would break – Lady Anglesey, a regular hostess, is said to have lost six of her best chairs this way.
It was perilous to be seated next to the Archbishop at a dinner as Provost Lloyd found out on one occasion. Whately was giving the after dinner speech and was in full flow, telling stories and cracking jokes. But what caught his fellow diners’ attention was what was happening to his right foot. Somehow Whately had managed to double it back over his left thigh, grasp the instep with both hands as if to strangle it and then placed it on the poor Provost’s lap. And there it stayed for the duration of his speech. The stoic Provost is said not to have turned a hair.
Chief Justice Doherty was sitting next to Whately at a Privy Council meeting and felt the need to sneeze. Reaching down to his pocket for his handkerchief he was astonished to find Whately’s foot already nestling in there. Perhaps even more alarmingly for society hostesses, Whately would often draw a chair up to the fireplace and rest his legs up on the mantelpiece, oblivious to any valuable objets d’art that may have been deposited there.
Regarded as pro-Catholic by the Protestants and a wolf in sheep’s clothing by the Catholics, Whately’s attempts to reform the Irish education system and enhance the lot of the poor were stymied. His spirit was broken and he lived out his final decade almost as a recluse. His beloved wife died in 1860, plunging him further into depression. He became reclusive and with his health failing, he turned to homeopathy. He finally met his maker in 1863 and there is a rather splendid memorial to him in Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral.
These days Whately would have been diagnosed with some fancy syndrome, perhaps autism, but at the time his eccentricities gave his enemies plenty of scope to make mischief.
