Martin Fone's Blog, page 28

A Closer Look At Mortsafes

The fear of grave robbing was so endemic that various measures were taken to prevent a resurrectionist man from lifting a freshly buried corpse or to detect an attempt. While the rich could afford to entomb their loved ones underneath table tombstones, horizontal rather than the usual vertical, or in vaults or mausolea, the poor would lay flowers and small pebbles on the grave to detect any interference. Alternatively, they would embed heather and branches into the soil to make disinterment more challenging. Sometimes large stones, often shaped like a coffin, were placed above the grave for additional security.

Some communities organized a watch rota or employed people specifically to guard graves through the night. One watching society in Glasgow boasted 2,000 members. Shelters were often built for the watchers, sometimes quite magnificent structures such as one in Edinburgh, a three-storey, castellated building with windows. Despite these precautions, grave robbing still occurred.

From 1816 the mortsafe made its appearance, primarily in Scotland where the problem was rife. Designed to provide protection to individual coffins, often in the form of a cage that surrounded the coffin or a sheath into which it was slid, they were made of iron, a material chosen for its strength and resilience against the elements. While there were broadly two types of mortsafe employed, there seemed to be little in the way of standardization in size. This meant each could be tailor-made, a task often falling to the local blacksmith.

The construction of a mortsafe was a skilled, time-consuming process, forging thick iron plates and rods, and assembling them into a cage-like structure, sometimes with padlocked panels, all meticulously wrought to withstand attacks from the tools of choice of the grave robbers. Designs ranged from simple iron grids to complex structures with layers of iron bars and locking mechanisms.

Two curious features of mortsafes were that they were often a community asset owned by the parish, rented out to the families of the recently deceased for an additional charge at the time of burial, and that they were usually fitted only for about six weeks to two months. This was the period of time after which the body had decomposed sufficiently to render the body unsuitable for dissection.

When the rental period for a mortsafe had expired, it would be carefully removed from the coffin and prepared for reuse. In this way they could be made available to a large number of families and meant that some level of protection against the resurrectionist men could be provided to those of limited means.

The rental period for a mort safe was usually between six weeks and two months, a duration considered sufficient for a body to decompose to a point where it would no longer be of value to those seeking to illegally exhume it for medical study.

Once the deemed period had elapsed, the mort safe would be carefully removed and prepared for reuse, highlighting the functional and reusable nature of these structures. This system not only made economic sense but also allowed for the widespread use of mort safes, ensuring that even those of limited means could afford some level of protection against the resurrectionists.

Ugly as they were, mortsafes became a visible signal to grave robbers that the grave was well protected and the incidence of the practice declined in areas where mortsafes were deployed. The passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832 allowing medical schools to obtain unclaimed bodies from workhouses and hospitals increased the supply of readily available cadavers coupled with improved graveyard security, such as watch towers and nightwatchmen, meant that grave robbing was a thing of the past by the mid-19th century and mortsafes became obsolete.

Mortsafes can still be seen today, primarily in Scotland where the incidence of grave robbing was high. Examples can be found in Edinburgh at Greyfriars Kirkyard and St Cuthbert’s Churchyard, in Glasgow at the Glasgow Necropolis, and at Dalkeith’s Old Parish Church, and Logierait Kirkyard in Perthshire. Even the remote Outer Hebrides was not immune to the fear of if not the practice of grave robbing as the surviving mortsafes in Cladh Hallan in South Uist reveal.   

Coal Posts

The consequences of taxation have made an impact on the British countryside, whether it be attempts to avoid or mitigate tax liabilities in window blocking and building crinkle-crankle walls or building structures as a visible reminder to merchants of their tax obligations.    

Following the Great Fire of London in 1666 the Corporation of London, having debts amounting to around £240,000, was authorized under the First Rebuilding Act of 1667 to levy of one shilling a chaldron, roughly 25 hundredweight, on all coal brought into the Port of London between Yantlet Creek in Kent and Staines in Middlesex. The monies were to be used to widen and rebuild the streets and some buildings and to erect a “Remembrance” of the fire, what we now know as the Monument.

A second Act, passed in 1670, increased the duty to three shillings, the monies raised to fund the rebuilding of the structures of fifty-one of the 86 churches destroyed in the fire and some city properties such as Guildhall, the City’s markets, and Newgate Prison. During the next couple of centuries the tax on coal continued to be levied, the rates varying from to time, and the monies raised were used to further improve London, including building Blackfriars Bridge, Holborn Viaduct, making improvements to Temple Bar and, appropriately, a new Coal Exchange, opened in 1849.

When the original Acts were passed, coal was only brought to London by sea. Known as seacoal, duties were paid at the Port of London before the ships were unloaded. However, the emergence of new form of transport, initially barges and then steam engines, offered merchants different ways to transport coal to the capital. This posed the tax authorities a dilemma: how were they to collect the duties for coal transported this way?

Initially, the Grand Junction Canal, whose existence was bitterly opposed by the east coast shipping companies, was precluded from carrying coal any further than Langleybury in Hertfordshire. However, by 1805 they were allowed to carry up to 50,000 tons of coal, culm, or cinders per annum past that point subject to the payment of the appropriate coal duties. A boundary mark was erected on the tow path at the north-east point of Grove Park in Watford and officials were stationed there to collect the duties and record the tonnage. A similar arrangement was put in place west of Staines bridge on the Thames for coal transported from the west.

As for the railways, the London and Birmingham Railway Act (1845) required a stone obelisk bearing the City’s coat of arms in cast-iron to be erected at the southern entrance to the Cashio Tunnel north of Watford Junction station to mark the spot where coal duties became due. A similar obelisk, on the east bank of the River Colne near West Drayton station, was erected by the Great Western Railway and, before 1851, any other railway company bringing coal into London, had to follow suit.

The railway companies were responsible for paying the duties on coal brought beyond these points and to pay them to the Clerk of the Coal Market, the quid pro quo being that they were allowed 500 tons of duty free coal a year to fuel their locomotives in the London area.

As we shall see next time, 1851 marked a sea change in the arrangements.

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas

A review of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie – 241214

Continuing the theme of Christmas murders, I finally got round to reading Agatha Christie’s take on a Yuletide murder mystery, her twentieth novel in the Hercule Poirot series, originally published in 1938, also known as A Holiday for Murder and Murder for Christmas. Curiously, though, but for the title and the titles of the chapters, it is not a particularly Christmassy story. There is a family gathering, as the multi-millionaire Simeon Lee calls his various family members, some of whom have not graced the house for twenty years, together, but, frankly, that could have happened at any time of the year.

Simeon is now frail, spending most of his time in his room, but it is clear he was a bit of a jack the lad, making his fortune in South Africa and not caring too much how he got it, and boasting that he sired offspring out of wedlock. One of his characteristics, which he passed down to his family, is his willingness to bide his time before exacting his revenge, a major factor behind this mystery.

He treated his wife abominably, something his sensitive son, David, never forgave him for and was estranged for twenty years. George, now an MP, is in financial difficulties due to his spendthrift wife, and is horrified to learn that his allowance is going to be cut. Alfred, the eldest son, has been under Simeon’s thumb for too long and Harry, the black sheep of the family, who had passed off a forged cheque and left under a cloud, getting into one scrape after another in foreign parts and being bailed out by his father, makes a sudden reappearance.

There are two strangers in the midst, whom we meet as the novel opens, travelling in a train. There is the beautiful Pilar Estravados, who claims to be Simeon’s only granddaughter, the offspring of his daughter, Jennifer, and Simon Farr who claims to be the son of Simeon’s long-term business partner in South Africa, Ebeneezer Farr. Pilar makes an instant hit with the old man who unwisely announces to the family that he is going to change his will. Before he has time to do so, he is found in his room murdered.

Christie in the preface reveals that she was challenged by her brother-in-law to produce “a good violent murder, with lots of Blood” and she certainly meets the brief. Simeon is found with his throat cut from side to side and there is oodles of blood, prompting the quote from Macbeth “yet who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him”. The room shows signs of a violent struggle, the family heard an eerie scream, but the room was locked and there was no sign of entry or egress, a veritable locked room mystery. How and by whom was the violent murder committed?

While Superintendent Sugden is quickly on the scene, too quickly some might think having previously been summoned 75 minutes earlier by Simeon who suspected that his uncut diamonds which loved to fondle to remind him of South Africa had been stolen, fortunately Hercule Poirot, a guest of the local Chief Constable, Colonel Johnson, is on hand to apply his little grey cells to the matter.

There are suspects galore, especially as the credentials of the two unexpected guests come under question and Simeon’s valet, Horbury, is a blackmailer, but Poirot is struck by a painting of the young Simeon. A false moustache leads to a dramatic conclusion, revealed in characteristic and somewhat long-winded Poirot-fashion to the assembled suspects. A big hint was given in a remark made by Pilar but the surprise element was well done. A rock garden deals with the diamonds element of the story.

Rather like the orchestra members in Haydn’s Farewell Symphony (no 45), the final chapter sees each of the family members depart to their various fates and there is even a happy ending for Farr and Pilar.

An enjoyable read, even if it relies too heavily on coincidences.

Insurance Scam Of The Week

Insurance companies get a bad press, and often deservedly so, but occasionally they are presented with a claim that gives them paws for thought. Take these made against unnamed motor insurers in California.

In January 2024 the claimants alleged that a bear had broken into their car, which just happened to be a 2010 Rolls Royce Ghost, when it was parked in Lake Arrowhead, a region in the San Bernardino Mountains, known for its black bear population. The bear climbed in through a side door and left scratch marks on the leather interior and door, damage amounting to $141,839. They even supplied a video which showed images of a furry figure causing the damage.

The insurers, though, smelt a rat or rather a bear-faced lie. Firstly, the fur of the creature on the video was a light brown colour while black bears, which are mainly (ahem) black, although some can be brown and tan, are the only wild bears in the state. Grizzly bears became extinct in California in the 1920s.

Secondly, they discovered that the same claimants had made the same claim for wild bear damage on the same date and the same location with different insurance companies, albeit involving different cars. The total amount claimed for the three “incidents” was $141,839. They had also provided video evidence. When the footage was shown to a biologist from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, they confirmed that the furry creature was a human in a bear suit.

The police raided the suspects’ homes and found a bear costume, complete with a furry snouted head, paws and metal tools in the shape of claws. The four have been arrested and subsequently charged with insurance fraud and conspiracy.

Irony Of The Week (7)

If, like me, you are suffering from podcast fatigue, then check out the One on One with Mike D podcast which certainly went with a bit of a bang. While discussing making the right life choices with his host, the rapper 2 Low accidentally fired his gun through the pocket of his jeans at around the 47 minute mark.

Fortunately, no one was injured but it just shows the importance of making the right life choices.

Murder After Christmas

A review of Murder After Christmas by Rupert Latimer – 241214

Being the contrarian that I am I read this well before and posted my review well after Christmas. Originally published in 1944 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, this is quite an interesting take on the Christmas murder mystery theme with a rather delicious vein of humour running through it. It is not often that I laugh out when I am reading but Latimer achieved this rare distinction.

The set up is full of well worn tropes. There is a gathering of friends and relatives at the Redpaths and the star attraction is their uncle, Sir Willoughby Keene-Cotton, whose usual sojourns on the continent have rather inconveniently disrupted by the war. He is rich and elderly and his imminent demise would be a godsend for his impoverished relatives. He also makes the fatal mistake of announcing that he is going to change his will just as soon as a solicitor can visit him after the Christmas festivities.

Inevitably, Uncle Willie is found dead outside in the snow, close to a snowman in which the body had, like in Nicholas Blake’s earlier The Case of the Abominable Snowman, been hidden inside. Seasonably, the victim is dressed up as Father Christmas, there are puzzling footprints in the snow, and the cause of death appears to be the consumption of some poisoned mince pies.

The list reads as though the novel has been compiled from a tick list of must-haves in a Christmas murder, but to Latimer’s credit he does manage to make something quite interesting and unusual out of these ingredients. Much of the mystery and thus the motivation for the murder rests upon when precisely Sir Willoughby died in relation to his fourth wife, who also dies on Christmas Day. The precedence of death would determine the destiny of the estate.

Much is made of who knew what when and who had the greater motivation for murder. There are mince pies galore, apparently it is bad luck to consume them before Christmas Day, some bigamous marriages thrown in to add to the confusion, a principal who stands to gain whose paternity is a secret, some do-gooding interference from the well-meaning Miss Redpath, and a general feeling that Uncle Willie’s demise should be swept under the carpet lest it interferes with the long-awaited Christmas Tree celebrations.

The mystery is further complicated by the presence of two Father Christmases and the Redpaths suddenly going off their food and the fact that many of the guests and some of the prime suspects had never met Uncle Willie in the flesh before. No wonder poor Inspector Culley struggles to make sense of it all.

As is the way with these things, it all becomes clear in the end, although not without more than a little twist. A rather long book, but then Latimer has a lot to pack in, but one that makes for an enjoyable, light read, just what Santa ordered in the run up to Christmas. It is a shame that Latimer, dogged by ill-health, did not live long enough to write more, but as Neil Young noted, it is better to burn out than fade away.

The Lost Art Of Whistling (2)

Visitors to La Gomera and El Hierro in Spain’s Canary Island chain can still hear the local inhabitants, particularly shepherds, communicating with each other in Silbo, a whistled version of Spanish, across mountain valleys that would otherwise take hours to cross. It is one of the last vestiges of a more widespread practice with some eighty traditional cultures worldwide, mainly found in mountainous terrain or dense jungle, using whistled versions of their local language. They do so for a very good reason.

Reaching 120 decibels, louder than a car horn, and with a frequency range of between 1 to 4 kHz, well above the pitch of most ambient noise, whistled speech can carry up to ten times further than the spoken or shouted word, according to research published by Julien Meyer in the Annual Review of Linguistics (2021).

We distinguish one speech sound, known as a phenome, from another through detecting slight variances in their sound frequency. A vowel such as a long “e”, Meyer explains, is formed higher in the mouth than a long “o” and these complex changes in timbre are easily replicated in a whistle. Similarly with consonants, a “t”, for example, being richer in high frequencies than a “k”, giving the sounds a different timbre, and there are subtle differences in the tongue’s movement, distinctions that can be captured by varying the pitch and articulation of a whistle.

Learning to whistle your native language, he claims, is relatively straightforward, a group of students mastering the technique to achieve fluency both in communicating and understanding whistled Spanish within eight months. However, it only works successfully in non-tonal languages, where pitch is not crucial to the word’s meaning.

Most European languages, including English, are non-tonal, but in tonal languages, such as Chinese, the meaning of a sound depends on its pitch relative to the rest of the sentence. Unlike whistling which does not use the vocal cords, tonal speech deploys them to make the pitch modulations that form the tones while the front of the mouth makes most of the vowel and consonant sounds. To whistle a tonal language, the whistler can only mimic the tones or the vowels and consonants, not both, thus losing much of the nuance of the language.

Whistling in the street or at the workplace was commonplace during the 19th and much of the 20th centuries. Often it conveyed a sense of jauntiness, even nonchalance, someone who was at the ease with the world but could also mask a degree of nervousness, the whistler summoning up the courage to face a tricky situation, or bravado which would be missing in a face-to-face encounter, such as the wolf whistle. For Jiminy Cricket in Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) it was a cure for a moral failing, his advice being to “take the straight and narrow path and if you start to slide – give a little whistle”. It is claimed to be a great stress-reliever and strengthens the lungs.

For the auditor, though, it could be profoundly irksome, especially if it was out of tune or goes on for a long time. Some employers, like Henry Ford, sought to ban it from the factory floor, making whistling an act of defiance against the forces of capitalism. Nowadays, though, I struggle to remember the last time that I heard someone whistle in the street.

Opinion seems to be divided as to why this should be the case. Some commentators suggest that it is simply an indictment of popular music’s inability to turn out memorable melodies, earworms that simply demand replication. Others claim that whistlers have finally got the message that it is no longer socially acceptable to whistle in public.

The truth, perhaps, is simpler. Public whistling has become another victim of the digital revolution. We are able to cocoon ourselves in our own little world, staring zombie-like at a little screen, oblivious to our surroundings, or listen to music of our choice at the swipe of a finger or conduct a telephonic conversation, practices equally as annoying in their own right to those around us as whistling once was.

Pockets of resistance can still be found, there is even a World Whistlers Convention held in Japan, but the heyday of the whistler seems to be over. Truly, a case of o tempora, o mores.

Mortsafes

In its edition of March 31, 1759, the Oxford Journal informed its readers that “yesterday morning, an attempt was made in open day to rob a churchyard in the neighbourhood of London. A wretch … seeing a grave dug, and a coffin already in it, broke it open, and took out the bodies (there happening to be more than one) with which he was making off; but being seen … he was seized and committed to Bridewell”.

The arrival of grave robbers or resurrection men filled communities with dread during the 18th and early 19th centuries, and, although this grave robber was apprehended, many were able to earn good money by handing over freshly buried cadavers to anatomists and medical schools. The demand was high for a very good reason.

Advances in medicine and surgical procedures could only advance with a deeper understanding of human anatomy and in the absence of equipment like X-ray machines and CT scanners, the level of understanding that was needed had to be obtained by dissection. By law only the cadavers of executed criminals could be dissected but the supply was insufficient to meet the demands of the medical schools that were springing up. This demand gave rise to the grisly profession of grave robbing.

Not only were grave robbers content to lift fresh corpses from what they had supposed to have been their last resting places, but some were even prepared to increase the supply by murdering victims. The infamous trial of William Burke and William Hare in Edinburgh in 1828 lifted the lid on this particular practice. It was not until the passing of the 1832 British Anatomy Act that anatomical schools were allowed to use unclaimed bodies of the dead for dissection.

Even so, the fear of the resurrectionists lingered on, stoked by the boasts of the likes of the London anatomist, Sir Astley Cooper, who claimed that “there is no person, let his situation in life be what it may, whom, if I were disposed to dissect, I could not obtain”. Curiously, when it came to his turn to meet his maker in 1841Cooper was taking no chances, being interred in several coffins entombed in a sarcophagus.

Relatives did not take the threat of grave robbing lying down and took steps to ensure that the graves would remain undisturbed. One device used from around 1816 was the mortsafe which came in two principal styles. Cage-like iron frames were fitted tightly around the coffin, forming an additional barrier which would mean that the grave robber would have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to dismantle, thus increasing the chances that someone would be alerted to their activities. Alternatively, an iron sheath was fitted snugly over the coffin to form an almost impregnable barrier.

We will look at the mechanics and use of mortsafes next time.

Barcodes

It was a significant moment in retail history when shortly after 8am on June 26, 1974 when in the Marsh Supermarket in the Ohioan town of Troy when the supermarket’s head of research and development, Clyde Dawson, pulled out a packet of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum and presented it to the cashier, Sharon Buchanan. It was the first item to be scanned bearing a Universal Product Code (UPC), aka Barcode, and proved that they could be printed successfully on so small an object.

The origins of the Barcode can be traced to Joe Woodland, who, challenged with finding a solution to improve efficiency at burgeoning supermarket checkouts, began to consider the possibilities offered by Morse Code. Along with his colleague, Bernard Silver, he took familiar dots and dashes and extended them to produce a series of broad and narrow lines which were then put into a circle, not dissimilar to a target.

The pair applied for a patent in 1949 for what they called the Bull’s-Eye and its linear version which were granted in 1952. The patent also shows a machine that Woodland and Silver had invented to read the Barcode, a powerful 500-watt incandescent bulb and an oscilloscope the size of the desk, but there is only anecdotal evidence to suggest that it was actually constructed or worked. It was not until 1967 that a Kroger Grocery Store used the Bull’s-Eye, but it proved to be of limited value because it took up a lot of space to print on a package and the round shape limited the amount of data that could be stored.

Curiously, an early experimenter with Barcode technology was British Railways, according to the December 1962 edition of Modern Railways, which revealed that they had perfected a barcode-reading system capable of correctly reading rolling stock travelling at 100 mph, From the grainy illustration, the code seemed to be in linear format.    

It was not until 1973, though, that the barcode made a major leap forward. By this time an IBM engineer, George Laurer, had looked again at the possibility of storing product details on a scannable label. He was given a very specific brief: it had to be small and neat, taking up no more than 1.5 square inches, printable with the existing technology used to print standard labels, capable of storing ten digits in a format that could be readable in any direction and at speed with fewer than one in 20,000 undetected errors.

Laurer’s solution was a reimagining of the Bull’s-Eye, but instead of using a circular format, data was represented by varying the widths, spacings, and sizes of parallel lines which were capable of being read by using an optical scanner, which IBM’s research department was developing. Laurer’s one-dimensional or linear Barcode was adopted as part of the UPC, the global standard for machine-readable codes, and, unsurprisingly, IBM became one of the first suppliers of point-of-sale scanners that were needed to read the codes.

The sound of the beep of items going through a scanner would soon be a familiar sound in retail outlets.

The Case Of The Benevolent Bookie

A review of The Case of the Benevolent Bookie by Christopher Bush – 241210

Originally published in 1955 and reissued by Dean Street Press, The Case of the Benevolent Bookie is the forty-sixth in Bush’s long-running Ludovic Travers series. In characteristic Bush style there are three strands to the story.

As owner of the Broad Street Detective Agency Travers is contacted by Lord Tynworth, described somewhat pejoratively as the son of a Labour peer with the implication that he has no breeding. Insisting that Travers drives him to the airport, on the journey Tynworth tells him that his wife, a former crooner, has disappeared taking some “valuables” and gives him an advance of £200 to find where she is. Once located, Travers is to make contact with a Henry Balfour by means of a personal advert and leave the rest to him.

Despite his misgivings, and deprived of a full frontal view of his client – he can only remember a mole – Travers takes on the case and relatively easily discovers her whereabouts. Then, as a hired investigator on behalf of an insurance company, he is called in to locate the Lammaford jewels insured for £50,000. Of course, these are the jewels that Tynworth claimed his wife had taken, but by this time Tynworth too had disappeared to America and as he was in financial difficulties, the assumption is that he took the stones either to sell or as collateral for a loan. There is a replica set of jewels and so another key consideration is who has which set and an attempt to pass one set off for the other leads to the demise of one of the principals.

The third strand sees Travers resume his old role as a consultant to George Wharton of the Yard as the jewellery twist takes a macabre turn and the body of Tynsworth is found under the remains of a burnt haystack and then a second body, that of Ronald Fane, is discovered. Meanwhile someone takes the trouble to have a pop shot at Travers, grazing his shoulder, and in the denouement bot he and Wharton have a gun waved at them.

Of course, all three strands are inter-related and it takes the mole and a teddy bear for Travers to unravel the mystery and point the finger conclusively at the culprit. Frankly, the identity of the culprit is pretty obvious and while there is some ingenuity in the plotting, this is not one of Bush’s better efforts.

Tynworth runs a racing stable and gambling, or at least the consequences of it, hence the book’s title, forms much of the motivation for the pickle that he finds himself in. Curiously, though, Bush makes little of the racing theme, making it just another setting, a little more exotic, say, than a business or a country house but just a backdrop nonetheless. One imagines that Brian Flynn, for example, would leave the reader with the smell of the turf permeating their nostrils. Then there is Bush’s tendency to repeat major plot devices. This is another story where a double from the acting profession is used to confuse, a tendency that began with the second Travers novel, The Perfect Murder Case, and where a physical characteristic or tic proves telling.

Bush is at least consistent with his moans about high levels of taxation and his down on crooners, which had been evident since The Case of the Housekeeper’s Hair. I got the sense, rightly or wrongly, that he was a bit curmudgeonly when he wrote this and it made me a bit grumpy too. Still, the saving grace was the return of the Wharton-Travers double act. Nothing seemed to have changed, Wharton a little too eager to jump to conclusions and, of course, to claim credit for an inspired theory of Travers’ and just as anxious to distance himself from anything that flops. Their interrelationship brightened up the novel for me.

A tale that kept its momentum but, ultimately, one that missed being a winner by a length and a half.