Martin Fone's Blog, page 260
May 29, 2018
A La Mode – Part Two
The Bloomer Suit
In the 19th century women’s attire, at least amongst the better sorts, consisted of long, weighty skirts and restrictive boned fashion bodices. They were restrictive but for the male they served the purpose of protecting the modesty of the fairer sex.
Women wearing trousers was a known phenomenon, being a popular and immensely practical garb in the Middle East, earning them the sobriquet of Turkish trousers. Some American utopian communities, starting with the Community of Equality in Indiana’s New Harmony, espoused the wearing of straight-legged trousers under knee-length skirts. Similarly, trousers were recommended for women engaging in callisthenic exercise or taking cures at sanatoria. The fact that they were worn in closed communities provoked little public comment.
The game changed, though, in early 1851 thanks to the efforts of three women’s rights activists, Elizabeth Candy Stanton, Elizabeth Smith Miller and the editor of the Lily, a Ladies’ Journal devoted to Temperance and Literature, Amelia Jenks Bloomer. Bloomer used the pages of her journal to expound the virtues of a new form of dress, the invention of which she attributed to Miller, although history has bestowed them with her surname.
In the May edition, Bloomer wrote, “Our skirts have been robbed of about a foot of their former length, and a pair of loose trousers of the same material as the dress, substituted. These latter extend from the waist to the ankle, and may be gathered into a band … We make our dress the same as usual, except that we wear no bodice, or a very slight one, the waist is loose and easy, and without whalebones … Our skirt is full, and falls a little below the knee.”
They were an overnight sensation, selling out, particularly after the three ladies sported them on the streets of Seneca Falls in New York State. The Richmond Dispatch of 8th July 1851 gives a sense of the reaction wearing the attire caused; “Yesterday afternoon, Main street was thrown into intense commotion by the sudden appearance … of a pretty young woman, rigged out in the Bloomer costume-her dress being composed of a pink silk cap, pink skirt reaching to the knees and large white silk trousers, fitting compactly around the ankle, and pink coloured gaiters…. Old and young, grave and gay, descended into the street to catch a glimpse of the Bloomer as she passed leisurely and gracefully down the street…” The journo could not resist commenting that she was a fourth-rate actress.
The Rational Dress Reform Society, amongst other more radical women’s groups, adopted the bloomer but soon found it was rather counterproductive, their garments capturing all the attention rather than their rationale for the improvement of the woman’s lot. So by the mid-1850s it had fallen somewhat out of favour, the death knell perhaps being sounded in 1858 by Amelia Bloomer’s decision to forsake the trousers that bore her name for the new-fangled cage crinoline which eliminated the need for heavy petticoats.
What gave women’s trousers a second wind was the uptake in cycling as a pastime in the late 19th century. As early as 1880 The Girl’s Own Paper was recommending that for tricycle dress, there must no trailing garments to get entangled in the cog wheels of the cycle. The obvious solution was to wear trousers or at least bloomers and by 1895 they were accepted as the garb of choice for the enterprising female cyclist. The front cover of the Girl’s Own Paper in 1897 featured women cyclists wearing bloomers. Trousers had arrived but even their association was restricted to the narrow world of cycling.
It is remarkable to note that it was only in the mid-1960s that women wearing trousers became generally accepted.
May 28, 2018
Quacks Pretend To Cure Other Men’s Disorders But Rarely Find A Cure For Their Own – Part Sixty Seven
Baron Spolasco
One of the most remarkable of the early 19th century British quacks was the self-styled Baron Spolasco who first saw the light of day as plain John Smith in Yorkshire in the early 1800s. What’s in a name, after all?
Adopting an exotic name, blackening his hair and wearing theatrical rouge, Spolasco wandered the country, scattering his seed – he fathered a number of illegitimate children during the course of his peregrinations – and claiming to have the answer to pretty much any complaint known to mankind. His calling card claimed that he could ensure “the Consumptive cured – the Cripple made to walk – the Deaf to hear – the Dying to live – the Blind to see, and every other affection treated incidental to the human frame.” After all, if you have such powers, why bother to list the particular diseases for fear that you may have missed some and narrowed your potential market.
For 22 shillings and sixpence, irrespective of what was wrong with you, you would be supplied with two pills wrapped in pink and blue paper and some powder folded in some white paper. These remarkable panaceas were probably composed of aloes and jalap and probably worked as strong laxatives. So busy and popular was Spolasco that when he was in Bristol as a “consequence of the number of sufferers who daily crowded around Baron Spolasco’s consulting rooms, he has found it necessary, in order to save his valuable time, to charge an admission fee of 5 shillings, which admission fee, if the patient be poor, will be received as consideration for the Baron’s advice, the wealthy will, of course, have to pay the usual fee of one guinea.”
Another of the enterprising Baron’s sidelines was rhinoplasty. His advert for this particular service claimed that “any individual who has lost his, or her nose, can be supplied with a real one, Grecian, Roman or Aquiline, perfect and natural as by nature.” The procedure involved bringing down a flap of skin from the patient’s forehead with which to reconstruct the snout. Worryingly, the Baron expressed surprise that it involved the shedding of so much blood.
But it was not all plain sailing – the Baron was one of the lucky thirteen to survive a shipwreck en route to Ireland, although his son went down with the Killarney. Then a year later in 1839, he was up before the beak on a manslaughter charge, after Susannah Thomas had died. When accompanied by her mother to consult the Baron, he claimed he didn’t need to hear her symptoms and gave Susannah the usual two pills and powder. Susannah did not pick up and her mother foolishly summoned Spolasco’s assistance again. Within a quarter of an hour of the second consultation, the poor girl was dead, an autopsy revealing that her intestines were inflamed and her stomach ulcerated and gangrenous. But as it could not be proved conclusively that the Baron’s medicament hastened her demise, he was acquitted.
Spolasco spent a few months in jail in 1840 for forging government stamps on his pills but on his release he moved to London. He cut quite a dash with a flashy coach and a servant of colour dressed in uniform and cockades but the London folk had seen it all before and he was soon run of town.
He ended up in New York, living in penury and dying around 1856 from a cancer that his panacea could not help him with. By this time he was being described in the press as an outright quack who “wore a mountebank costume” and fitted Walt Whitman’s withering denunciation of such people in Street Yarn; “what a bald, bare, wizened, shrivelled old granny he would be.”
May 27, 2018
Training Course Of The Week
For some the arrival of a fireman in full uniform when you are chained up with an object sticking out of an orifice might just be the icing on a pretty exotic cake. But such is the frequency of emergency calls involving men who have damaged or trapped their penises or had objects stuck up their backsides that firemen in the Dresden area of Germany are going through a special training exercise to show them how to handle the situation.
Some 600 polesliders have undergone the training course called, rather prosaically in the Teutonic fashion, Maschinenunfaelle or machine failures. According to the trainer, Eric Forberg, “sensitivity and delicate work counts”, which is good to know, and one of those on the course commented, “the training is not fun for us, but rather requires the utmost concentration. The patient is in enough pain, after all.” Quite.
With training in the correct procedures, removing a penis ring with a grinder should take less than fifteen minutes. But a word of warning; in Worms it took three hours to remove a weightlifter’s penis from the central hole of a 2.5kg iron weight.
The mind boggles.
May 26, 2018
Car Boot Of The Week
For some Scots the introduction in May of a 50p minimum price per unit of alcohol is a bitter pill to swallow. Some are content to shrug their shoulders and get on with it but others are more enterprising.
Take Craig Mitchell from Yoker in Glasgow. His favourite tipple is Hawksridge Cider – me, neither – and he was horrified to find that a two-litre bottle had jumped in price from £2.15 to £5.75. Showing the spirit that made the Scots inveterate explorers he decided to take a 300-mile round trip in his car to terra incognita or as we Sassenachs call it, Asda in Carlisle.
On arrival at the store there, he bought around fifty bottles of the cider, saving himself around £180 in the process. Storage may have been a problem but one of his mates has offered some space in a garage – I bet he did. I hope Craig’s stock control system is up to scratch.
Even allowing for the cost of travel, Craig has saved some money but the greater satisfaction, surely, is bucking the system.
As Theresa May will tell you, borders are tricky things.
Talking of travelling a long way to make a point, if I had known it in time I would have made a trip last Saturday to visit the Alexandra Hotel in Derby where landlady, Anna Dyson-Edge, introduced a Royal Wedding free zone. Anyone talking about the nuptials was asked to contribute to a swear-box, the proceeds of which are going to a local charity.
Instead, I contented myself with commemorating the 479th anniversary of the beheading of Anne Boleyn, an omen if there ever was one!
May 25, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (181)?…
Grass-widow
Here we have another term with a long history, one in which the sense that it conveys has changed over time, but today it is a phrase languishing in some obscurity. When it is used nowadays it generally refers to a woman whose husband has gone away or who is divorced. Even from the time it first appeared, in the 16th century, the one constant in its meaning was that the woman’s husband was not dead.
The first recorded usage of the term was in a religious treatise penned by Sir Thomas More in 1529. There he wrote “for then had wyuys ben in his time lytel better than grasse wydowes be now.” Even if you didn’t know the precise meaning, from the context you could deduce that it was a rather pejorative term. Grass widows were not respectable women, either a discarded mistress, an unmarried woman or a single woman who had cohabited with one or more men.
It is thought that the grass referred to temporary or impromptu bedding which may have been the lot of a mistress who was involved in a furtive assignation with her beau. There was an equivalent term in German, strohwitwe, and around the turn of the 15th century, in Chemnitz, brides who were married whilst expecting a child were known as straw brides, strobrute. By 1580 to give a woman a grass gown was to roll her playfully on the grass and presumably have their wicked way with her.
According to the town records of Stoke-by-Nayland in Suffolk from 1582, “Marie the daughter of Elizabeth London graswidow” was buried. Elizabeth was an unmarried mother and this usage was helpfully confirmed in the anonymous B.E’s A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew from 1699 where a Grass-widow is defined as “one that pretends to have been Married, but never was, but has Children.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle referred to Maria Fitzherbert, George IV’s bit on the side, as a “grass widow” while the Glossary of Yorkshire Words and Phrases in a characteristically blunt northern way as “a female of easy virtue, a prostitute.”
But by the mid 19th century grass widow was being used in another context, to denote a wife whose husband was absent. Ellen Clacy in her A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia, published in 1853, noted that the menfolk’s obsession with pursuing gold nuggets resulted in many deserted wives; “the wives thus left in town to deplore their husbands’ infatuation are termed grass-widows.” In the British Raj women were often left to their own devices while their hubbies administered India. As John Lang noted in his Wanderings in India, published in 1859, “grass widows in the hills are always writing to their husbands.” Conversely, the arrival of their wives to India engendered great excitement amongst their husbands who had been keeping the Empire going as Lady Dufferin noted in 1889 in her Viceregal Life in India; “expectant husbands come out to meet the grass widows who have travelled with us.” There is no hint of impropriety or condemnation in these usages.
However, there is clearly a hint of disapproval in Hobson-Jobson, an Anglo-Indian dictionary compiled by Henry Yule and Arthur Burnell and published in 1886. There a grass widow is a term used to describe wives stationed up in the hills during the summer whilst their husbands sweated it out in the lowlands and, the lexicographers note, it is used “with a shade of malignancy.” The inference is made but not substantiated. Perhaps it notes a transition between the earlier and later usages.
And then there is grace widow. This is a relatively later term, defined in Edward Moor’s Suffolk Words and Phrases of 1823 where it is defined as “a woman who had a child for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed.” The rather puritanical lexicographer notes in a rider “it ought rather to be grace-less,” rather missing the point of its development over the centuries.
May 24, 2018
Gin O’Clock – Part Thirty Eight
The ginaissance seems to have spawned a bit of a competition at the moment – who can come up with the strangest combination of taste sensations to mix up into a gin. I suppose it helps to raise the profile of my favourite spirit but I find that the search for eccentric or outlandish mixes of botanicals comes at the expense of the more traditional tastes that we associate with gins, principally juniper, as also rans.
Here are two that have almost kissed juniper goodbye but in their different ways provide us with flavoursome contemporary styled gins. Such is the popularity of chocolate – for many it is the ultimate comfort food – that it was inevitable that a chocolate based gin wouldn’t be too long in making an appearance. When it emerges with the imprimatur of the master chocolatiers that are Hotel Chocolat, then it is one to take note of. So I was intrigued to try Hotel Chocolat’s Cocoa Gin which, as far as I can tell, is only available via their outlets (and the web, of course).
The grey labelled dumpy 50 ml bottle, which was of two which Santa kindly brought me, informed me that the gin uses seven botanicals – juniper berries, lemon peel, macadamia nuts, angelica, coriander, roasted cocoa shells and minneola aka tangelo which is a hybrid of a Dancy tangerine and a Duncan grapefruit, some of which come from Hotel Chocolat’s Rabot Estate in St Lucia. The base spirit is a vodka made by the English Spirits Company and the label states that this “small batch artisanal gin” with an ABV of 42% is “infused with cocoa shells.” From this I can only deduce that this is done after the gin has been distilled which would account for the slight discolouration of the gin.
As you might expect having perused the list of botanicals, the aroma upon removing the black wax cap is heavily citrus-orientated but there were hints of chocolate coming through. To the taste it had a strong citrus flavour with a smidgeon of chocolate coming to the fore. The juniper was very much in the background but spices did come to the fore as it moved to the back of the throat, leaving a pleasant, mellow aftertaste. It certainly seemed well made but without a very strong chocolate taste or, indeed, a more traditional juniper-heavy feel to it, it seemed to me to be neither one thing nor the other. It did complement the chocolates that accompanied well, though.
I’m not much of a cake eater but I do like a Bakewell tart. A gin which boasts the principal ingredients of the tart, cherries and almond, was bound to pique my interest and I was lucky enough to be offered a sample of Bakewell Gin. This is a craft gin which features juniper, cubeb peppers, sweet gale, cardamom, hibiscus flowers and cherries and almond. It has a very distinctive pinkish-red colour to it and at 40% ABV has enough kick in it to tickle any palate. The cherry and almond are to the fore but not at the expense of the more traditional flavours and the aftertaste is a subtle mix of cherry and pepper. It is not as sweet as you might think and if you are after something very different, then it is well worth a try.
I was looking at my rapidly diminishing gin supply and I may well have to make a trip down to Cornwall soon. Until the next time, cheers!
May 23, 2018
Our Crime Against Criminals Lies In The Fact That We Treat Them Like Rascals – Part Five
Valerio Viccei and the Knightsbridge Vault Robbery, 1987
Valerio, the son of a lawyer, already had previous before he masterminded what was dubbed the crime of the century. Quite a bit of form as it turned out, having skipped his homeland of Italy for England because he was wanted for fifty armed robberies. He enjoyed la dolce vita and carried out robberies to fund his lavish lifestyle. It was this taste for the luxuries of life that led to Valerio’s undoing.
The robbery was simple enough, Viccei targeting the Knightsbridge Safe Deposit Centre where the great and the good deposited their valuables. The centre was managed by Parvez Latif who was heavily in debt and a cocaine user. Viccei pressurised Latif to be co-operative.
On 12th July 1987 Viccei and his accomplices walked into the Centre which was on Cheval Place on the pretext of renting a safe deposit box. They were shown into the vault and whilst there brandished their guns and overpowered the manager and the security guards. This achieved, the gang let in more of their members who were dressed in security guard uniforms and carrying walkie-talkies. They then hung a sign on the door saying that the Centre was temporarily closed.
With Latif’s complicity the gang set about rifling as many of the deposit boxes as they could. In under two hours they had forced open 114 boxes and had got a haul estimated to have a value of over £60 million. Those who were relieved of their possessions included royalty, celebrities, millionaires and other criminals. No one was injured during the raid and no shots were fired. Only around £10 million was ever recovered.
An hour after the thieves had left the Centre, there was a change of shift and the robbery was discovered. During their forensic investigations, the police found the traces of a bloody fingerprint. Tests showed that it belonged to Viccei. The police had something to go on but by this time Viccei skipped the country to settle temporarily in South America.
Some of his accomplices were not so prudent, remaining in Blighty hoping to ride out the storm. But after extensive surveillance operations a number had their collars felt in a series of co-ordinated raids on 12th August 1987. They all appeared before the beak and spent some time in prison for their misdemeanours.
But it was his love of the finer things in life that allowed Viccei to fall into the hands of the police. He had bought a Ferrari Testarossa and returned to England to make arrangements to have his pride and joy shipped to South America. It was true to character as Justine Marr, Latif’s secretary, noted; “I found him boring, showing off his Rolex watch and talking about his fast cars.” The police were not going to miss him this time and set up a roadblock and dragged him out of his car.
At his subsequent trial Viccei was sentenced to 22 years in chokey, which he served in Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight. In November 1992, under the Treaty of Strasbourg, he was transferred back to Italy where he served the rest of his time. For most of the time there he seemed to be able to live a normal life, the only restriction being that he had to be back in his cell by 10.30pm. Viccei was gunned down by the police in a shoot-out in April 2000 when he was on day release, after acting suspiciously.
Viccei was clearly a complex character. One detective remarked that “he wanted to be known as the mastermind of the world’s biggest robbery. He had the ego the size of the Old Bailey.” At the trial Viccei told the judge “maybe I am a romantic lunatic but money was the last thing on my mind.”
Perhaps he was right.
May 22, 2018
An Eye For An Eye Will Only Make The Whole World Blind – Part Two
The Pig War of 1859
Geography is no respecter of human logic.
It should have been quite simple. The aim of the Oregon Treaty, signed by the United States and Britain, was supposed to settle for once and for all the long running border dispute as to where the States ended and British America, later to become Canada, began. The 49th parallel was established as the border and it remains so to this day.
There was just one problem though – the islands to the south-west of Vancouver, particularly San Juan island, which commanded a strategic position at the mouth of the channel. The treaty gaily drew a line down the middle of the channel along the 49th parallel, bisecting the island into two. Both countries claimed sovereignty and by 1859 the Brits had a sizeable community there and the Hudson’s Bay Company had established a salmon-curing station and a sheep ranch there. There were some 20 to 30 American settlers, including a farmer, a certain Lyman Cutlar.
On 15th June 1859 Cutlar noticed a pig rooting among his potatoes and in a fit of pique shot and killed the porker. The pig’s owner, a Brit called Charles Griffin, confronted Cutlar and sketchy contemporary reports record the conversation as going something along the lines of; “Cutlar: “…but it was eating my potatoes!” Griffin: “Rubbish. It’s up to you to keep your potatoes out of my pig”. One can imagine this is a somewhat bowdlerised version of the actual conversation. Griffin was offered $10 by the American farmer but refused the compensation.
Instead Griffin reported the incident to the British authorities who threatened to arrest Cutlar, prompting the American settlers to petition to their authorities for protection. The recipient of the petition was the commander of the Department of Oregon, General William S Harney, who was well-known for his anti-British views, and on 27th July he despatched a 66 man company of the 9th Infantry to the island.
The dispute quickly escalated, the governor of British Columbia, James Douglas, dispatching three British warships to the channel in a display of Palmerstonian gun-boat diplomacy. The Americans refused to back down and during the summer the number of forces on each side steadily increased, although the Brits held the numerical advantage. By the time the Commander-in-Chief of the British Navy in the Pacific, Robert Baynes, had arrived with his vessels, there was something like 5 warships, 84 guns and over 2,600 men involved in the stand-off.
Douglas ordered Baynes to invade San Juan and engage the 9th Infantry in combat. Sensibly, Douglas refused, commenting that he would not “involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig.” Instead, the governments in Washington and London stepped in as word of this bizarre squabble reached them and agreed a temporary solution, restricting the number of people on the island to one hundred apiece. The Brits occupied the north of the island and the Americans the south.
And there they stayed until the dispute was finally resolved in 1872 by an international commission led by Kaiser Wilhelm I. They ruled in the favour of the Americans. Today, San Juan island is the only bit of American soil where a foreign flag is regularly hoisted, the Union Jack having been donated by the British as a peace gesture.
I have no idea what happened to Cutlar and Griffin or whether the pig was eaten, for that matter.
May 21, 2018
The Streets Of London – Part Seventy Three
Marylebone Road, NW1
Traffic congestion is nothing new to Londoners. What is now known as Marylebone Road, running in a westerly direction from Euston Road at the south-eastern corner of Regent’s park to the A40 Westway at Paddington, can be fairly described as London’s first bypass.
For centuries the only approach into London from the north was via St Giles, High Holborn and Newgate. The growth of wheeled traffic in the 18th century which mixed with pedestrians and droves of animals en route to be sold and slaughtered at Smithfield meant that travel times deteriorated dramatically. A coach journey from Grosvenor Square to the Bank of England could take upwards of two hours to complete. Something had to be done.
It is salutary to remember that at the time, 1755, St Marylebone, Paddington and Islington were each separate villages, yet to be absorbed into the great wen that the metropolis was to become. Worthies from the three villages petitioned Parliament for the construction of a turnpike road for the use of drovers and their animals, the route designed to steer them from the crowded thoroughfares of central London and offering a more direct route to the Smithfield market.
Despite opposition from the Duke of Bedford, the bill received Royal assent in May 1756. Responsibility for the upkeep and the collection of tolls was split between two existing turnpike trusts, St Marylebone for the stretch running from Edgware Road to Tottenham Court and the Islington trust for the road between Tottenham Court and the Angel. Construction requirements were specified – the road had to be a minimum of 40 feet wide, although when it was built it was 60 feet wide and no building was allowed to encroach within 50 feet of the road. After all, you wouldn’t want cows nuzzling against your front door.
The New Road, as it was known, proved an instant success, raising £400 in tolls for the Marylebone Trust in 1757, an amount which rose to £700 in 1764. In 1769 the road was extended south-eastwards to Old Street and terminated near Moorgate. The Trusts employed watchmen to guard travellers against the predations of highwaymen who lurked in the neighbouring countryside.
Inevitably the road became the new northern boundary for the City and soon properties were built north of Oxford Street and High Holborn to create what we know today as Marylebone and Bloomsbury. The prohibition of building within 50 feet of the road was studiously upheld. But the growth of population and the demand for accommodation was such that in the 1780s Somers Town and Pentonville were built beyond the boundaries of the New Road. The urbanisation of rural London was underway.
The road, which originally was little more than a gravelled track, was eventually metalled and by the time George Shilibeer launched London’s first horse omnibus service from the road, it was bordered by fashionable houses. From that time onwards it became one of the main arterial routes for London’s traffic and the optimistic thoughts that it would relieve traffic were thwarted. It is ever ths with by-passes.
In 1857 the New Road was renamed and split into three, becoming Marylebone Road, Euston Road and Pentonville Road. Its route was followed by London’s first underground line, built in 1863, the Metropolitan Railway which linked up Paddington and Kings Cross stations.
The road was at the forefront of London’s growth.
May 20, 2018
We Call Upon The Author To Explain
The Eric Hoffer Book Award is one of the top and most prestigious American literary awards for independent books. Last Monday (May 14th) the results of the 2018 Book Award were announced.
I am delighted to reveal that my latest book, Fifty Curious Questions, made its way through a packed field to be named as a Category Finalist. If nothing else, it is gratifying to know that a quirky piece of English whimsy written firmly in a tongue-in-cheek style has transferred successfully across the Atlantic.
The book is available in all formats via http://www.martinfone.com
