Martin Fone's Blog, page 33

The Society For The Diffusion Of Useful Knowledge

With information, often of questionable authenticity, available at a click of a button, it is easy to forget how difficult it was to accumulate knowledge or check a basic fact even thirty years ago. It required thumbing through encyclopedias or going to reference libraries. Two hundred years ago it was even more difficult but the emergence of two technological advances, the development of high speed printing presses and the promise of the railway, gave Henry Brougham and several education reformers of a Whig persuasion an idea.

At Furnivall’s Inn in November 1826 Brougham proposed the foundation of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), whose aim was through exploiting recent advances in printing and distribution to publish cheap, informative works to “supply the appetite which had been created by elementary instruction” and “to direct the ability to read to useful ends”. A series of pamphlets were to published as part of the Library of Useful Knowledge and to reach the widest audience and to minimize controversy they were to steer clear of topics involving political or religious controversy.

The first, A Discourse of the Objects, Advantages, and Pleasures of Science, published in 1827, provided a brief survey of mathematics, natural philosophy, the solar system, electricity, and the workings of the steam engine, had sold 42,000 copies by 1833. In 1828 the Society launched a series of pamphlets written in what was termed an “anecdotal style”, aiming to provide practical information in an easily understood format. Known as A Library of Entertaining Knowledge, its subjects included brewing, insects, and birds.

One of its most successful publications was a two-volume work by George Lillie Craik called The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, issued in 1830 and 1831. It was an account of how several ordinary people had surmounted the difficulties caused by educational disadvantage or physical incapacity such as blindness. Running into several editions over the next decade or so, it even merited a namecheck in chapter 33 of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers when Sam Weller’s father, seeing his son struggling over the composition of a message for a Valentine’s card, remarks “But what’s that you’re a doin’ of? Pursuit of knowledge under difficulties, Sammy?”

In an attempt to widen its reach the Society launched a weekly paper of miscellaneous information called the Penny Magazine in March 1832. It use of innovative and high-quality woodcut illustrations brought it a circulation of over 200,000 in its first year. As Passmore Edwards noted in his autobiography, A Few Footprints (19055), it was the only London periodical that came to his remote Cornish village. He recalled as a boy reading an article on the anatomist, John Hunter, which aroused in him “boyish flutterings of ambition to become known and useful in some way myself”. Edwards achieved his dream and devoted some of his wealth in the 1880s and 1890s to supporting educational projects, including libraries, in both London and his native Cornwall.

However, as we shall see, the Society’s existence was not all plain sailing.

Black Beadle

A review of Black Beadle by E C R Lorac – 241105

It is always a delight when a new reissue of a novel by Edith Caroline Rivett under her nom de plume of E C R Lorac pops up on my recommendation list on the Kindle. Black Beadle, originally published in 1939, is the sixteenth in her Robert Macdonald series and it deals with a subject that was high on the agenda at the time and has contemporary resonance, antisemitism. It almost reads as an exploration of the factors that influence the attitude towards the Jewish race and, because of that, there are some views espoused that many would find distasteful today but, on the whole, Rivett takes a balanced view.

The book starts off with a discussion between an elderly statesman, Sir John Soane, and a friend over the respective merits of Barry Revian, firmly in the anti-Jewry camp, and Gilbert Mantland, a sympathizer, both candidates for an important position on a board tasked with dealing with industrial disputes. The discussion is overheard by a man we later find out to be Garlandt, a leading Jewish businessman.

As the party breaks up, a man on the street enquires after Revian, and is then followed. Later the man, Suttler, a manager of a Building Society, after confronting a employee, Jones, over stealing some petty cash to fund the purchase of a car and forcing him to sign an open commitment to repay the amount from his wages, is knocked down and killed by a speeding car. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to have you car stolen and ten used to kill someone once, Mr Revian, may be regarded as a misfortune; to have it happen twice looks like carelessness. The car belonged to Revian and although he had an alibi, it is not cast iron and he is an obvious suspect.

Suttler’s behavior towards Jones indicates another side to his character, that of a petty blackmailer. Facing imminent ruin, his latest victim, Jones, has an obvious motive for killing him and there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that he had. Garlandt, who had followed Suttler and been using him to wage a campaign to discredit Revian, an example of Jewish over-cleverness, as Macdonald sees it, is also a suspect and the fourth to emerge in an oddly assorted bunch of suspects is an ex-pugilist and now landlord of the Dappled Pig, Giles Granby, another of Suttler’s blackmail victims.

Some vital information is withheld by Lorac which makes the reveal of the culprit and the reasons behind why they were keen to get rid of Suttler all the more surprising, although as the investigations proceed the attentive reader does begin to get the feeling that there is something else lurking in the background. Granby’s involvement and Suttler’s back story of being a beadle at the Church of St Mary the Less where, as Bagster, he was dismissed for embezzlement prove to be the key to unlocking the mystery which is less about political maneuverings and more about good old-fashioned bigamy.

Macdonald is an empathetic and diligent detective but within his calm exterior lies an all-action hero, more than capable of knocking out a former boxer and braving the fierce currents of the Thames to fish out a man thrown over a bridge who turns out to be the culprit. He is also philosophical at times, ruminating that his main objection to capital punishment is that it creates the office of hangman, to murder that it creates a murderer, and that whoever murders, does it for their own profit at the last resort.                

Whilst it is not one of Lorac’s stronger mysteries, the main interest in the book, aside from her treatment of the Jewish issues, is the psychological reaction of the suspects to events as the case unfolds, their secrets and how they collaborate to thwart Macdonald’s chances of success. This is well done and makes the book well worth a read. A word of warning, though, about the Kindle edition: the OCR process has produced a very inferior and frustrating edition with -rn often interpreted as -m, a problem when the fatal accident occurs on a corner, making it a yam that might well have been sold in a corner shop rather than a bookstore.

Good Idea Of The Week

Inviting pupils to show their classmates and teachers some unusual object they have collected is potentially a good idea but can be fraught with problems, as the staff at Orchard Junior School in the Hampshire village of Dibden Purlieu found out.

One of their little dears brought in what the police described as “a potentially unexploded ordnance”, an unexploded bomb to you and me, to thrill and amaze their friends. The school took an altogether more serious view and range up the police who called in the bomb squad.

The school was evacuated at 1.30 pm, the item taken away and then subsequently destroyed as a precaution.

Top that!

Mince Pie Of The Week

With the advent of Advent for traditionalists like me it is almost time to turn my thoughts to mince pies. I usually stick to ones on sale at the local supermarket, but I was intrigued to hear of those produced by the Pump Street Bakery in the Suffolk village of Orford.

The pies, produced in a specialist bakehouse just outside the village, contain mincemeat made from apples grown on a local farm, and the moulds used ensure that the pies are deep-filled with a thin pastry. They have won a number of accolades, but come at a price, a batch of six setting you back £25. If you cannot get to the village, they are available on home delivery, for an extra £8, although at the time of writing the website was suggesting that they are sold out.

If the Pump Street pies are a bit beyond your means, the Orford Meat Shed, just down the road, offers all-butter, luxury, deep-filled mince pies for just £1 each.

It is good to see that artisan pies are making a come back and Orford seems to be a mince pie hot spot.

The Belting Inheritance

A review of The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons – 240211  

The Tichborne case, a cause célèbre in Britain in the 1860s and 70s involving a man emerging out of the blue claiming to be the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy, has cast its spell over writers ever since. Both Mary Fitt’s Death and the Pleasant Voices and Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar are their idiosyncratic takes on the theme and Julian Symons’ later The Belting Inheritance, originally published in 1965 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, is another addition to the sub-genre.

The book starts off with very much of a cosy country house murder feel about it. Belting, a country house, is owned by Lady Wainwright, a bit of a tyrant in her own right who keeps her family on a tight rein by dangling the prospect of a share of a presumed large inheritance. Of her four sons, two, Hugh and David, went missing during the Second World War, presumed dead. Stephen and Miles’ prospects of dividing the spoils are dealt a blow when someone claiming to be David suddenly turns up. His mother immediately accepts him as her lost son, but the other members of the family are less certain, even though, like Brat Farrar, he is able to answer most of their most searching questions. To add further frisson to the plot, Lady W is changing her will.

Unsurprisingly, the focus of the book is on whether the supposed David really who he says he is but suddenly in the second half veers off into an escapade into bohemian Paris on the search for potential Nazi collaborators who operated in Kent and the murderer of Hugh’s business partner. It is all a little disconcerting but it all makes sense when the storyline settles down and at least gives the narrative a bit of pace and action. There is an earlier murder, at least in terms of its place in the book rather than chronologically, that of Thorne, the old gardener, shortly after the return of David. While the reader might deduce that his demise is down to something to do with the returning son, his death is not investigated and is little more than a plot device to move the story on.

There is very much of a literary feel to the book. “La Comédie de l’ Amour” by Henrik Ibsen provides some of the clues to the mystery and the poems of John Donne and a couple of extracts from a book detailing experiences in a Russian prisoner of war camp go some way to establishing David’s identity. The book ends with two glorious twists, one which I will not divulge, but the other analogous to Captain Flint’s treasure chest in Treasure Island, both in their different ways symptomatic of the Wainwright’s famed sense of humour.

While the first half of the book is cosy murder mystery territory, albeit with an underplayed murder, the rest of the book is very much a rite of passage in which our narrator, the eighteen-year old Christopher Barrington, experiences casual sex, the joys and perils of drinking pastis, a dip into the world of actors and artists, and the pleasure of falling in love. The juxtaposition of these two worlds rather jars and the use of a first person narrative, especially one so naïve, was presumably intended to bridge that gap but did not succeed. A first person narrative does limit the range of a novel.

That all said, it was an enjoyable read and while none of Symons’ characters are particularly likeable, the reader has the satisfaction of knowing that they all get their just desserts, even the somewhat detached observer, Christopher Barrington.

Santa Ana Gin

Occasionally I come across a bottle that is so stunning that I just must have it, irrespective of what the contents are like. This happened as I was perusing the shelves of the Constantine Store, the spiritual headquarters of Drinkfinder UK, and came across a bottle of Santa Ana Gin. Its label is an eye-catching riot of colourful tropical images in a distinctly Art Deco style. It is a work of beauty.

The bottle itself is squat and dumpy, made from glass that has a blueish hue, and widens as it reaches its broad and flattish shoulder. The neck is moderately long, leading to a copper coloured cap with a real cork stopper. The coppery gold colours compliment the label to give a very lavish and extravagant feel to the product.

The gin takes its name from the Santa Ana Cabaret in the capital of the Philippines, which in its heyday in the late 1920s and early 1930s was famed for being the “largest cabaret in the world with the best dance music in the Orient”. Opened by a former US soldier and backed by local businessmen, it was strategically positioned close to an American military base, it drew its clientele from American visitors, its allure heightened by the Prohibition which the USA was enduring, and rich Manilenos. A temple to elegant decadence, it epitomized the Art Deco movement with its ceilings dripping in chandeliers and its tables covered with crisp linen tablecloths. It became a playground to the rich and famous and was the place to be seen.

Surprisingly though, Santa Ana Gin is French, made in the Charente region, and its only real Filipino connection, aside from the use of the famous night club’s name, is the use of four Philippine botanicals, Ylang-Ylang (used in the manufacture of Chanel no 5) and Alpinia (a member of the ginger family) which bring delicate floral notes and Calamansi (a sour citrus used extensively in Filipino cuisine) and Dalandan (a cross between Pomelo and mandarin orange) with their soft, tropical citric elements, to a base laid down by classical gin botanicals such as juniper, coriander, orange, angelica, fennel, and orris root.    

On the nose this is a very floral gin, delicate, for sure, but smelling quite like a high-class perfume. In the glass with an ABV of 42.3%, the floral notes are not quite so overpowering with hints of citrus and liquorice to provide some contrast and balance. No fan of floral-heavy gins, I could not get away from the impression that I was drinking a potpourri and there was a certain astringency that I associate with French gins. I do not know but perhaps the base spirit was wine-based.

Certainly unusual, I suspect it is a gin that will linger on my gin shelf, one to taste occasionally, but that does not matter. The bottle is just so beautiful to look at, it will never outstay its welcome.

Until the next time, cheers!

Appointment With Death

A review of Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie – 241030

Originally published in 1938 and the nineteenth in her Hercule Poirot series, Appointment with Death has all the hallmarks of a classic Christie tale. The victim is an extremely unlikeable woman, Mrs Boynton, who takes delight in ruling her family with a rod of iron and suppressing their freedom and individuality, a death which could have passed as accidental but for the suspicions of a doctor, Dr Gerard, who spotted a puncture mark on her wrist, family members each of whom had reason enough and opportunity to kill their mother, and a glorious twist in the story’s tail.

The story starts in Jerusalem where purely by chance Poirot overhears Richard Boynton telling his sister, “You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?” The action then moves to Petra where, to everyone’s surprise, completely out of the blue Mrs Boynton gives her family permission to leave her and do what they want. During the course of the afternoon, she dies. As she is a woman with health problems, was the death natural or murder?

Poirot is called in by Colonel Carbury and flamboyantly boasts that he will get to the bottom of the mystery within twenty-four hours simply by interviewing the members of the party who were at Petra that day. Although he has no definitive way of knowing that it was murder, his little grey cells tell him that it is. During the course of his investigations, he constructs a timetable showing the movements of the Boynton family and when they claimed to have last seen Mrs Boynton alive. His analysis shows that their stories contradict that of Sarah King, a newly qualified doctor who places the time of death as being earlier than the last supposed sighting of the victim alive. Were the Boynton’s covering up for each other?

The mystery of a hypodermic needle – there are three all told – the use of digitoxin, a drug that Mrs Boynton already took for medicinal purposes, and the sight of an altercation between a Bedouin servant and the victim coupled with a remark that she made in the direction of Sarah King before the party set out to Petra gives Poirot a different perspective of what happened. In classic Poirot style he convenes a meeting of all the suspects, lays out reasons why each of the family could have been the murderer and the reasons why the were innocent, before dramatically revealing who really was the murderer and why. Instead of a story of a family trying to break out from the shackles imposed upon them by a cruel mother, it is one of blackmail and revenge.  

The story is well told in Christie’s usual bright and breezy style, which holds the reader’s attention without ever overtaxing them. Poirot is his usual bumptious self and Colonel Carbury, an Englishman to his very core, bristles at his lack of modesty. Nevertheless, as we always knew he would be, Poirot is as good as his word, unmasking the true culprit within the allotted time. The ending is a little too sentimental for my taste with each of the Boynton family finding in their own way the happiness that they had long been denied. The killer, meanwhile, a wonderful character in their own right and for whom this reader had more than a little sympathy, takes their own life.

This is one of the better Poirot stories and thoroughly enjoyable it is too.

More Tiddlywinks

Commercial and societal success of Fincher’s Tiddledy-Winks came with perils. First there were counterfeiters, Jaques and Son having to resort to affixing a notice on the inside of the box warning of cheap imitations. Then there were competitors, with a surge in games launched on to the market which were based on counters and flippers.

One such was Flitterkins devised by Harold Wilson and Alice Margary and also published by Jaques and Sons, described as “A Modification of Lawn Tennis Forming and Indoor Game”, played with a counter rather than a ball. It was granted a patent (GB 1888/18789A) on March 16, 1889, seven months before Fincher received his, making it the first tiddlywinks-based patent to be issued in the world. However, Fincher’s provisional submission was made a month and a half before the Flitterkins submission.

Another variant was Spoof, produced by F H Ayres of 111. Aldergate Street in London, copyrighted on November 6, 1888 and first published six days earlier, a week before Fincher’s initial provisional submission. Described as “a new and interesting game”, players had six counters (Men) of the same colour which they tried to flip with a larger counter (the Spoof) into a Spoof cup. Each player would take it in turns to shot all their men, the winner being the player who shot the most in an agreed time into the cup. Sporting variants such as Spoof Golf, Cricket, Tennis, Croquet, and Quoits were marketed until the turn of the century.

The third patent granted in England for a tiddlywinks-style game was for George Scott’s Golfette or Table Golf, awarded on March 22, 1890, shortly after Fincher’s. It consisted of a course made from felt or other elastic material, a series of hazards to be placed across the course and some “springers” or clubs used to propel counters around the field of play. The object, as in golf, was to sink the counter in the hole in the fewest shots. Scott also secured the first US patent for a tiddlywinks game.

Another notable games manufacturer, J W Spear & Sons, published variations around the tiddlywinks theme including Sweet Wedding Bells where winks were shot to ring a bell in a bell tower, North Pole where players fired their counters on to a map with the aim of getting to the pole, and Over the Garden Wall where counters were propelled over a wall with players scoring a point if they landed on the grass, two in the flower beds, three on the path, and five in the pond. Chronowinks added some jeopardy in 1891, with each game limited to the time it took all of the sand to drop from the top of an hourglass.

From tiddledywinks and then tidley winks, the spelling soon settled down as tiddlywinks. Perhaps there was an initial reluctance to use tiddlywinks as it was a slang term for an unlicensed public house selling beer and hard cider, a “wayside mart”, observed Bailey’s Magazine of Sports and Pastimes in October 1863, “where poachers congregated and flash men came to make inquiries about the architectural contrivances of the neighbouring mansions”.

On the B4039 near the village of Yatton Keynell, about three miles northwest of Chippenham lies the hamlet of Tiddlywink, so called, apparently, because beer was sold from one of its cottages to passing cattle drovers. Having had their bid for recognition “squopped” by the Bartholomew Gazeteer of Places in Britain and its successor, Collins British Atlas and Gazeteer, the residents finally “squidged” their wink when they were granted permission to erect two road signs in February 2003.

There is more to tiddlywinks than meets the eye.  

A Hearse On May-Day

A review of A Hearse On May-Day by Gladys Mitchell – 241028

Well, here is a curiosity, a novel by Gladys Mitchell that is not only accessible but also has a plot that develops in a linear fashion. Another unusual feature is that it is almost devoid, aside from a brief encounter, of the Gavins, Dame Beatrice’s Marmite-like secretary Laura, her son Hamish, and completely absent is her pet detective, Laura’s husband. Instead, Dame Beatrice, as Mrs Bradley is now known as, operates on her own with some assistance from her great niece, Fenella Lestrange. On the other hand, originally published in 1972 and the forty-fifth in her long-running Mrs Bradley series, it is reassuringly bonkers.

The book falls roughly into two parts, the former infinitely the better. Fenella Lestarnge, en route to Douston to complete preparations for her imminent wedding – she calls it off when she discovers that her intended prefers to seal a business deal than tie the knot – takes a detour to lunch at the tiny village of Seven Wells. After lunch at the More to Come she discovers that her car has been tampered with and it will not be until the next day that it will be repaired. She is forced to stay overnight at the inn.

It is at this point that Fenella enters what is almost a parallel universe. It is Mayering Eve, April 30th, which the villagers take particularly seriously. Despite dire warnings to stay in her room and bar the door, Fenella’s curiosity gets the better of her and she witnesses a bizarre ceremony in which thirteen people are dressed up in costumes representing each of the signs of the Zodiac – Pisces wears a particularly fetching hat shaped like a salmon which comes in particularly useful later –  reading cards. Her intrusion leads to the group turning hostile.

Intrigued, Fenella watches more of the Mayering Eve ceremonies, including a sacrificial skeleton being sprinkled with a cockerel’s blood while the group chants a pagan fertility poem before the bones are carried to their resting place in a hillside grave. She also a man dressed as Jack O’Green with whom, unaccountably, she falls in love and quickly marries.

Dame Beatrice is particularly interested in Fenella’s adventures in Seven Wells as she has been called in to investigate the murder of the local squire, the wonderfully named Sir Bathy Bitton-Bittadon, a few days before and, to the consternation of the village and against local custom, is to be buried on Mayering Day. The second part of the book follows her progress.

The weirdness of life in Seven Wells continues apace as the landlord of the More to Come has disappeared along with his wife and three members of staff, to be replaced by a new management team. Bodies are taken from Sir Bathy’s family’s mausoleum, laid to rest in the crypt under the pub, disappear again and then three reappear in the family tomb. They are fresh victims, all coshed over the head with a heavy instrument, but they are not the obvious victims.

A slip of the tongue and the sending of a message to Sir Jeremy, Sir Barthy’s son out in India, informing him of the death of his father before he had even been killed, leads Dame Beatrice to suspect that the murder was not only premeditated but that the perpetrator was closer to home. While the resolution of the case is relatively straightforward and the culprit is easy to spot, Mitchell moves things along at an admirable pace.

The highlights of the book for me were Mitchell’s portrayal of life in a rural outpost where things have stayed the same for decades and where the locals resent any intrusion and her revelling in the bizarreness of  English folk lore and customs which she uses to great advantage.

A word of warning, though. If this is your first encounter with Mrs Bradley, this is very atypical of her adventures but it is great fun nevertheless. It shows that Mitchell could write a (relatively) straightforward piece of crime fiction if she really wanted to but, to her credit, she did not often want to, preferring to test the genre to breaking point and, with it, her reader’s patience.

Ban Of The Week (5)

Aside from sexual inequality you would have thought that a Gender Equality Minister would not have a downer on anything. But not in Sweden.

The current holder of the post in the Swedish government, Paulina Brandberg, has an extreme form of banana allergy. Her staff, according to a report in the Swedish daily, Expressen, had to send an email to the Norwegian Judicial Agency ahead of a VIP lunch saying that she “has a strong allergy to bananas, so it would be appreciated that there are no bananas in the areas where she will be staying”. A similar email, reportedly sent to the County Administrative Board, said: “No bananas are allowed on the premises either.”

Brandberg told the newspaper that she was getting professional help with the affliction and I wish her well. On the positive side, the ban applies to all bananas, irrespective of gender!