Martin Fone's Blog, page 293
June 10, 2017
Sangfroid Of The Week
Here’s a question to mull over. If you were in the fortunate position of having a little bit of warning before disaster struck, what would you do? For some it would be to check that they had clean underwear on and, perhaps, a freshly laundered shirt. For others it might be to eat your favourite food or a glass of hooch. But, I must confess, it has never crossed my mind to go out and give the lawn that final cut.
This astonishing picture shows Theunis Wessels cutting his lawn in Three Hills, Alberta in Canada whilst in the background there is a fully formed tornado only a couple of kilometres away. The twister headed away from the house and five minutes later was gone.
Hardly worth putting the mower away for.
Filed under: Humour, News Tagged: man mows lawn with tornado in background, sangfroid, Theunis Wessels, Three Hills in Alberta
June 9, 2017
What Is The Origin Of (131)?…
Busman’s holiday
This phrase is used to describe someone who is on holiday but is actually engaged in doing what they normally do during their working week or rather than putting their feet up, are engaged in some form of work. So, if I was a doctor who took time off to do some voluntary medical work, then I may be described as having a busman’s holiday.
For such an innocuous phrase, its origins seem steeped in controversy but I think I have been able to navigate my way through the many twists and turns to arrive at the definitive version. Bus is an abbreviation of omnibus which was the name given to a large, enclosed, usually sprung, horse-drawn vehicle. In London George Shilibeer in 1829 introduced a horse-drawn service between Paddington and Regent’s Park which ran to a strict timetable and could carry up to 22 passengers. The carriage was drawn by three horses and there was a driver and a conductor, our busmen. By 1832 the monopoly of hackney carriages was broken and by 1834 there were 620 licensed horse vehicles plying their trade through the streets of London.
The bus became a popular means of transport in London and it prompted some wag to pose the humorous question, “what does a busman do on his day off? He takes a bus ride with a pal, of course”. This quip, mildly amusing by Victorian standards, seems to fit our purpose. On his day off, the busman would travel around London like any other denizen of the metropolis, on a bus. The joke may have slid off into well-merited obscurity, but the term and the concept has remained with us.
In 1893 in the English Illustrated Magazine, an actor described his forthcoming holiday arrangements. “It will be a Busman’s holiday. The bus driver spends his “day off” in driving on a pal’s bus, on the box-seat, by his pal’s side…I shall never be happy except when I am watching some theatrical piece”. The London Chronicle reported in 1913 an encounter with a happy bus conductor. Why was had he done to make himself happy? “Why what he always does when on a day off!…for the man gets on the top of another man’s bus and has a good long ride into the country and back. It cured him of his insomnia, he said”. According to an edition of Punch from July 1920, the habit of doing what you do for day job on your day off was not restricted to busmen. It was a custom adopted by cabbies.
There are some more fanciful theories as to the origin of the phrase. Busmen were supposedly so attached to their team of horses that on their day off, they would visit the stables in the morning to see that they were harnessed properly and in the evening to ensure that they had not been abused. Another reported that the more caring drivers would spend their day off riding on the bus observing the relief driver’s treatment of the nags.
That may be the case but I think all we need to believe is that on their days off, busmen would use the cheapest and most popular form of transport, something which inspired a whimsical retort and gave birth to a phrase which over time was extended in its usage to other occupations. And the phrase did travel, appearing in Sydney’s Sunday Times in 1896, the Auckland Star in 1902 and crossing the pond in 1909.
As I have retired, there is no risk of a busman’s holiday for me.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: George Shilibeer, meaning of busman's holiday, origin of busman's holiday, the first horse-drawn omnibus route in London, what does a busman do on his day off
June 8, 2017
There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part Seventy One
Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1875 – 1932)
Self-publishing can be an interesting experience. As well as writing your magnum opus you need to market it and the temptation is to come up with some cunning stunt to boost sales. The sorry tale of Edgar Wallace, the latest inductee into our illustrious Hall of Fame and Britain’s most prolific author, illustrates what can go wrong.
Wallace wrote his first book, The Four Just Men – to be reviewed in July – in 1905 but struggled to find a publisher. His solution was to establish his own publishing company, Tallis. So far, so good.
The structure of the book is slightly odd in that we are told several times throughout the book that Thery, the fourth just man, had been recruited because he possessed the requisite skills required to carry out an assassination but we are not told what those are. And how the murder is accomplished is only revealed in the final pages. The reason for this is that Wallace decided to promote his book through a major advertising campaign in conjunction with the Daily Mail across Britain and the Empire – we still had one in those days. A prize of £1,000 was made available to anyone who guessed the murder method before the solution was revealed.
£1,000 was an enormous sum in those days and Wallace was prevailed upon to lower the prizes on offer to £250 for the first prize, £200 for the second and £50 for the third. Wallace blitzed the world with an extensive marketing campaign, posting advertisements on buses, hoardings and flyers and ran up a bill of £2,000 in the process. So he needed to sell £2,500 worth of books before he saw a penny of profit.
The advertising campaign worked well and copies of the book flew off the shelves. Wallace wrote over 500 books but his first was one of his best sellers. Entries to the competition, many of which were correct, flooded in. But as befitting an inductee of our Hall of Fame, Wallace had made a disastrous mistake. He had omitted in the terms and conditions of the competition to restrict the number of winners of each prize to just one. Just before the competition closed, the lawyers of the Daily Mail told him that he was legally obliged to pay all the winners of his competition. To say that this put a hole in his financial projections is an understatement.
Wallace’s initial approach was to adopt the stance of Emil Savundra and refuse to pay out. The problem was that the final chapter of the book with the revelation of how the deed was accomplished had now been published and everyone who had entered the competition would know whether they had had a correct answer or not. The size of the prizes, particularly for the sort of people who devoured crime fiction, was of a size that they would not willingly let it go. Indeed, by early 1906 considerable doubts were being expressed about the probity of the competition and the Daily Mail, who had hosted the competition and in those days cared about their reputation, was getting increasingly concerned. Eventually, Lord Harmsworth, the proprietor, put his hand in his pocket to the tune of £5,000 to rescue the situation.
As for Wallace, he had to declare himself bankrupt and sold the rights to Sir George Newnes for a measly £75 in order to throw some scraps to his creditors. His financial situation prompted his phenomenal literary output.
Edgar Wallace, for turning a best seller into a financial disaster, you are a worthy inductee.
If you enjoyed this, why not try Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone which is now available on Amazon in Kindle format and paperback. For details follow the link https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=fifty+clever+bastards
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Edgar Wallace, Emil Savundra, Fifty Clever Bastards, Four Just Men, Lord Harmsworth, Martin Fone, Sir George Newnes, The Daily Mail, Wallace's advertising campaign bankrupted him
June 7, 2017
Book Corner – June 2017 (1)
The Gallows Pole – Benjamin Myers
The title of Ben Myers’ latest novel reminded me of the Led Zep track of the same name on their third album. In the song, the protagonist’s attempts to delay the hangman from doing his ghastly duty until friends and family ride to the rescue come to naught. And likewise in Myers’ book, despite all the efforts of David Hartley’s family and extended gang, the self-styled King of the North cannot avoid the noose.
The book is based on a true story and tells of the Cragg Vale Coiners who operated in the Calderdale valley region of West Yorkshire. They collected coins, often using violence against those who refused to co-operate, and would remove their genuine edges, milling them down and collecting the shavings. From the shavings, they would make new coins which the gang would put into circulation again. As well as providing a modest return to the counterfeiters, the fake coins destabilised the local economy. Counterfeiting coins was a hanging offence and once the authorities got wise to what was going on, they took steps to eradicate the gang.
The story tells of how the authorities curtailed the gang’s operations and along the way we are treated to a tale of intrigue, violence, intimidation, betrayal and revenge. In some ways Myers would like us to see the gang in a rather idealistic light, bringing succour and money to the local communities who supported them and fighting against the imminent threat that industrialisation brings to their traditional way of life – the book is full of references to the factories that are on their way and the canal and turnpike that are to scar the landscape – but for me it was hard to get past the idea that they were just vicious thugs on the make.
Stylistically, the book has two narrative strands running through it. The main story is told in a third-party narrative and is well-paced. His description of the scenery brought the area, with which I am vaguely familiar, to life – a gloomy, desolate place where nature is elemental. There are some oddities though – Myers is a master of the convoluted simile and his frequent listings of all who turn up to meetings became as tiresome as those choruses that plague folk songs.
The other strand to the narrative is provided by italicised excerpts from David Hartley’s diary. That no such document exists is no matter. It enables us to get a sense of Hartley’s thoughts and despair as he realised that he has been betrayed and abandoned and a record of his indomitable spirit. For the reader, the phonetic, dialectical, unpunctuated stream of consciousness, whilst enlightening, proves hard going.
Myers’ tale is light on characterisation. I would have liked to have known more about William Deighton, or Dighton as he seems to have been in the historical records. What made him tick and why was he so determined to stamp out the coiners? At the very least, his ghastly end warranted that. And the most intriguing character is the rather ethereal Grace Hartley who has the good sense to stash some of the money away and after her hubby’s demise is able to move from the area and buy a new farm, cash on the nail. This is a man’s tale and, indeed a man’s world – women just serve the ale and provide sexual companionship – but it would have been nice to get things from her perspective.
All that aside, it is a riveting read and rather like the Zep song after a slow start it builds up to a crescendo. But I did miss the banjo!
Filed under: Books, Culture Tagged: Ben Myers, Benjamin Myers, Cragg Vale Coiners, David Hartley, Gallows Pole on Zep 3, Grace Hartley, Led Zeppelin, The Gallows Pole, William Deighton, William Dighton
June 6, 2017
Quacks Pretend To Cure Other Men’s Disorders But Rarely Find A Cure For Their Own – Part Fifty Five
Quaff-aid
For the seasoned toper a hangover is an occupational hazard. Some regard it as nature’s way of saying that you overdid it a bit last night, old boy. A real humdinger may provoke the resolution never to let a drop pass your lips ever again but, in my experience, these thoughts are even more short-lived than the resolutions we make at New Year. Many of us have our tried and tested methods of dealing with the problem – mine is to have a hair of the dog as quickly as I can – but wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could pop a pill that inured from the effects of a hangover?
Well, this is what Quaff-Aid purported to do. It was manufactured by Amber Laboratories in Milwaukee , a subsidiary of yeast processor, Milbew Inc, who were looking around for new uses for the by-products from the brewing process. The pills, made from concentrated brewer’s yeast, were launched in the state of Wisconsin in the Spring of 1955. The adverts, as you might expect, were fulsome in their praise of the efficacy of the tablets. “No regrets tomorrow for feeling good today”, they screamed. They went on to promise “a wonderful time…every time. You’ll be poised, assured, relaxed; have a wonderful sense of light-hearted freedom from worry because you know your fun won’t be spoiled”. “Goodbye to hangovers!” Indeed.
Not unsurprisingly, packets of Quaff-aid flew off the shelves of local pharmacists and bars. Why wouldn’t you? For just 98 cents you could get your hands on a Carry Home Party Pak, which consisted of five two-tablet packs. What’s more the Party Pak came with some paper napkins and the helpful advice that a party hostess could hand the tablets out to her guests before the evening’s festivities got into full swing. I’ve been to a few parties where dubious looking tablets have been handed out, but never Quaff-aid. And I’m not sure why you need a napkin to help you ingest a tablet/ Perhaps they were envisaging a crowd of Sir Les Pattersons.
So encouraging were sales that Amber Laboratories were girding their loins to launch their miracle potion nationwide when disaster struck. In October 1956 the Amber Laboratories in Buffum Street were visited by officials from the US Food and Drug Administration. They seized around a quarter of a million tablets, claiming that the product was no damn use. Perhaps one of the officers had had a skin full and was rather disappointed, despite having summoned the assistance of Quaff-aid, to have a thumping head. Who knows?
This prompted a furious response from the Director of Research at Amber, Sheldon Bernstein, who was reported by the Milwaukee Journal as saying that the vitamin Bs in Quaff-aid were essential for a speedy recovery from a bout of over-indulgence. But the FDA would not be budged and the product disappeared as quickly as it arrived and, doubtless, more speedily than a hangover.
Amber Laboratories, despite this setback, prospered, generating by the mid 1980s sales in excess of $10 million from manufacturing yeast extracts and animal feed supplements and distilling alcohol for industrial and domestic use. It was acquired by Universal Foods in 1983.
Filed under: Culture, History, Science Tagged: Amber Laboratories, Buffum Street in Milwaukee, Carry Home Party Pak, hangover cures, Milbew Inc, Quaff-aid, raid on Amber Laboratories, Universal Foods, US Food and Drug Administration
June 5, 2017
The Streets Of London – Part Fifty Nine
Fore Street, EC2Y
There are two major catastrophic events which have made their mark on the City of London over the last 500 hundred years – the Great Fire of 1666 and the German bombing raids during the Second World War. I’m not sure why but I had the sense that so sustained was the rain of bombs that it would be impossible to determine where the first bomb fell but I was wrong.
I was wandering along Fore Street which runs from Wood Street to the north and parallel with London Wall which it joins at its eastern end via Fore Street Avenue. At the western corner with Wood Street my attention was drawn to a stone tablet on the wall of a rather ugly, concrete modern building called Roman House. The inscription which is below the window on the ground floor required me to stoop to read it but the information it contained was fascinating. It read, “on this site at 12.15 am on the 25th August 1940 fell the first bomb on the City of London in the Second World War”. So there we have it. This was probably a practice run as the blitz as we know it didn’t start until 7th September 1940 and ran for 56 of the next 57 days.
Cripplegate, the ward of the City of London in which Fore Street is situated, was so extensively bombed that hardly any buildings were left standing. In the post war reconstruction Fore Street was rather shortened, having originally run from Redcross Street to Finsbury Pavement. The principal building on the street, the wonderful church, St Giles-without-Cripplegate, rather overshadowed now by the monstrous Barbican building, was showered with so many incendiary bombs in December 1940 that even the cement caught alight. That the shell, the arcade in the chancel, the tower and the outside walls survived the onslaught is testament to the quality of mediaeval builders.
Although Fore Street escaped the ravages of the Great Fire, it hosted a fire underwriter’s worst nightmare, the London rag trade, with its rickety warehouses crammed together into what became known as Fire Island. The worst fire broke out at lunchtime on November 19th 1897 in an ostrich feather warehouse. By the time the fire was brought under control – it took 45 steam fire engines to tame the flames – 56 buildings were totally destroyed, 15 burnt out and 20, including St Giles, damaged by fire.
The street got its name because at the time it was just outside or before (shortened to Fore) the city walls. Its fortunes took an upswing in 1654 when a postern gate was built in the wall at the northern end of Aldermanbury. Fore street became a popular shopping venue, its popularity only waning during the 19th century. On the corner with Milton Street – this has now been built over to accommodate the Barbican – was to be found in the 1880s Bianchi’s which advertised milk, ices and sherry for sale.
In the mid 17th century a prosperous tallow chandler, James Foe, lived in the street. His son, who was born there around 1660, is better known to us as the writer, Daniel Defoe. In 1850 a confectioner on the street became the father of Ebenezer Howard, who led the garden city movement. And before we leave the street we should note the rather hideous Salter’s Hall, designed by Basil Spence, home to the Worshipful Company of Salters. The street has not been well served by post Second World War architecture, methinks.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Bianchi's in Fore Street, Cripplegate, Daniel Defoe, Ebenezer Howard, Fire Island, Fore Street EC2, St Giles-without-Cripplegate, the Cripplegate Fire of 1897, the first bomb to fall on the City of London in WW2
June 4, 2017
Drugs Of The Week
If you want to get high, use your loaf, I learned this week. TV presenter, Angela Rippon, failed a routine drugs test after eating a loaf of poppy seed bread and a poppy seed bagel over a three-day period. The test picked up the presence of morphine in her system, enough to have got her fired, if it hadn’t have been a controlled experiment. You’ve been warned.
Aside from bread, according to this year’s Global Drugs Survey, magic mushrooms are the safest recreational drug of choice. Of the 12,000 who fessed up to ingesting the psilocybin hallucinogenic ‘rooms in 2016, only 0.2% needed emergency medical treatment, a rate five times lower than those who had taken Colombian marching powder or LSD. The bigger risk, it would seem, is eating the wrong sort of fungi.
Mushrooms on poppy seeded toast for lunch, I think!
Filed under: Humour, News, Science Tagged: Angela Rippon, Global Drugs Survey, magic mushrooms, opiates present in poppy seeded bread, psilocybin
June 3, 2017
Pipeline Of The Week
Heavy metal festivals are not my thing – a line up including Megadeth, Alice Cooper and Trivium would have me running for the hills– but details of The Wacken Open Air festival to be held in early August in Germany caught my attention this week.
Festival goers consume on average 9 pints of beer each over the three day event and ensuring there is enough hooch to drown out the racket coming from the stage is of paramount concern to the organisers. To meet demand and ensure that the only hiccups are from drinking the beer too quickly, this year they are installing a four mile long pipe network to bring in the beer. 35 centimetres in diameter, it will deliver beer at a rate of six glasses every six seconds and as an added bonus will mean that beer trucks will not need to clog the roads and churn up the field.
Pipelines are also being laid down to bring in water and to remove effluent. Let’s hope they don’t mix them up, although lager drinkers may not notice the difference.
Filed under: Humour, News Tagged: Alice Cooper, beer pipeline to be installed at WOA festival, Megadeth, Trivium, Wacken Open Air Festival
June 2, 2017
What Is The Origin Of (130)?…
Claptrap and balderdash
Occasionally this blog may be accused of talking claptrap, a term we use to denote rubbish or pompous, pretentious nonsense. But what is claptrap?
Thespians thrive on applause and a warm glow of appreciation emanating from their audience. Those who have been around the block a few times know how to milk their audience. To feed the self-importance of an actor a wise playwright would conclude a scene with a few words which would amuse the audience and ensure that the thespian left the stage with applause or laughter ringing in their ears. A claptrap was nothing more than a dramatic device to generate applause, as Nathan Bailey revealed in his Universal Etymological Dictionary of 1721, “a clap trap, a name given to the rant and rhimes that dramatick poets, to please the actors, let them get off with: as much as to say, a trap to catch a clap, by way of applause from the spectators at a play”.
By the mid 19th century the word began to escape the close confines of the world of grease paint. Although still in a theatrical context, the Harper’s New Monthly Magazine complained in 1855 about the puffery and promotions of other journals to attract an audience for a play; “all the clap-traps of the press were employed to draw an audience to the first representation”. And in 1867 we find one of the first usages of the word to denote the sense that we now attribute to it. In Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes, Thomas Wright wrote, “the Waggoners’ entertainment..embraced the usual unauthenticated statistics, stock anecdotes, and pieces of clap-trap oratory of the professional tee-total orators”. Sounds like a Brexit debate.
Balderdash is perhaps a slightly stronger term for senseless talk or writing or nonsense, bringing with it a sense of exasperation or invective. It was certainly in this sense that Thomas Macaulay used it in a footnote to his History of England from James II, published in 1848; “I am almost ashamed to quote such nauseous balderdash”. Unusually for a historian, there is no doubting where he stands there.
Where there is doubt, though, is where the word comes from. It was used in the late 16th century to describe a jumbled mixture of drinks such as beer mixed with milk or wine mixed with beer. It was this sense of jumbling and mixing which allowed the noun to move in the 1670s from the specific to the more general as a description for jumbled speech or writing which, in turn, is often nonsense. We have seen before that the move from noun to verb is not a new phenomenon and to balderdash was to adulterate or to mix up, to jumble. In his Travels through France and Italy, published in 1766, Tobias Smollett described French wine. “That which is made by the peasants, both red and white, is generally genuine: but the wine-merchants of Nice brew and balderdash, and even mix it with pigeons’ dung and quick-lime”. Not very nice!
As to its root, you pays your money and takes your choice. The Welsh have a word, baldorddus, which is used to describe idle, noisy chatter, although the pronunciation is somewhat different. Others favour the claims of verbs that appear in Dutch, Icelandic and Norwegian such as balderen which meant to roar or thunder. The problem I have with either of these theories is that the original meaning in English had nothing to do with noise or verbiage – it was all about mixing up liquids. I hesitate to go all Macaulay-like but perhaps, for once, it is enough to say we just don’t know.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Nathan Bailey, origin of balderdash, origin of claptrap, Thomas Macaulay, Tobias Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy, Universal Etymological Dictionary
June 1, 2017
Everything Is Possible For An Eccentric, Especially When He Is English – Part Eight
Sir Tatton Sykes (1826 – 1912)
Near Driffield in the East Ridings of Yorkshire (as was) is to be found a rather imposing Georgian house set in grounds designed by Capability Brown, Sledmere House. It was and is home to the Sykes family.
The fifth Baronet, Sir Tatton Sykes, by anyone’s standards was a bit of an eccentric cove. As another famous resident of the area, Philip Larkin, once said “they fuck you up, your mum and dad” and part of Sir Tatton’s problems could be laid at the door of his parents as he grew up even by the standards of the day “in an atmosphere devoid of love”. His mother used to hide herself away in the orangery and his father spent most of his time with his racehorses. As soon as he inherited the estates on his father’s death in 1863 Sir Tatton wrought his revenge, demolishing the orangery and selling the racehorses for £30,000. Revenge, after all, is a dish best served cold.
As a landlord Sir Tatton had some rather peculiar traits. He could not abide seeing women and children loitering about at the front of their rented cottages and so he ordered his tenants to bolt their front doors and only use the back entrances. He had a pathological dislike of flowers and if he ever saw one whilst out walking, he would flog it mercilessly with his walking stick. Inevitably, his tenants were banned from growing flowers – “nasty, untidy things” – in their gardens. “If they had to grow something”, he fulminated, “grow cauliflowers”.
As he grew older, Sir Tatton developed what might only be termed hypochondriac tendencies. He was obsessed with maintaining a constant body temperature and used to order his coats and trousers in varying sizes. He would put the smaller ones on first, the medium-sized ones next and finally the largest so that he resembled a matryoshka doll. As he got warmer through his exertions he would simply remove a layer of clothing, letting it fall to the ground to be picked up by one of local children who would receive a small reward for their troubles.
Perhaps he had got a taste for revenge because towards the end of his life he lived almost exclusively on cold rice pudding. When his house caught fire in 1911 – the house was pretty much destroyed and what we see today is the result of careful reconstruction – he would not be moved until he had finished his bowl of food. His poor servants and tenants were left to save what they could of the artefacts in the house.
Sir Tatton had a disastrous marriage, to Jessica Cavendish-Bentinck aka Lady satin Tights who was thirty years his junior. Although she bore him a son in 1879, by the 1890s the couple were estranged, Jessica running up enormous debts. In a spectacular court case Sir Tatton refused to honour her debts which caused a major scandal at the time and Jessica died prematurely in 1912, ironically the same year as her husband.
For all his eccentricities, Sir Tatton was a shrewd business man and the sale of his father’s horses enabled him to build up a stud of winning horses and increase his landholding. By 1892 he had 34,000 acres and his estate turned in a profit most years despite the prevailing agricultural depression. He built or restored 18 churches at a cost of £10,000 a time, employing some of the greatest architects of the day, monies which he funded from his own purse. I just hope the grateful church didn’t present him with a bunch of flowers.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: church restoration by Sir Tatton Sykes, Driffield, great English eccentrics, Jessica Cavendish-Bentinck, Lady Satin Tights, matryoshka doll, Philip Larkin, Sir Tatton Sykes, Sledmere House
