Martin Fone's Blog, page 51

The Shropshire Distillery Navy Strength Gin

There is a well worn path made by people moving from Lancashire settling in Shropshire; it was, in part, what the A49 was built for. My parents did so in the 1960s, albeit via Anglesey and Nottinghamshire, and, by implication, so did I. Emma and Gareth Glynn made the move in 2012, settling in the beautiful north Shropshire town of Ellesmere and in 2018 set up the “Gin Shed” in their house.

They launched their first offering, Shire Gin, on July 1, 2018, which was then followed by Shire Spiced Gin in the December, Shire Cherry Gin in February 2019, and then The Shropshire Distillery Navy Strength Gin in 2020. Each of the gins in their range has received an LSC silver award.

They use a one shot distillation process, which means that all the botanicals go into their copper pot still and are macerated together rather than separately. What comes out is what they bottle. According to their website, they have four stills, Jean and Anne which are used to create their gins, named after their respective grandmothers, together with Hermione, a vacuum still, a type of still that allows the spirit to retain more of the texture and taste of the botanicals, and Eileen, a still used for development. They also have a reverse osmosis system which they use to purify the water used in the distillation process.

The popular conception of a Lancastrian is someone who is larger than life, vibrant and bold and the Shropshire Distillery Navy Strength pumps up the volume of their original Dry Gin to great effect. It is definitely juniper led but also allows the smooth floral notes of rose – red, I trust – the warmth of liquorice and the zest of the citric notes from sweet orange and grapefruit a stage to play on. Clear in the glass, it louches with the addition of a tonic and with an ABV of 57% a long lasting peppery aftertaste. It is a gloriously bold, no-nonsense gin that has quickly established itself amongst my favourites.

The bottle itself is made from circular clear glass with a slightly flattened but rounded shoulder, and a medium sized neck which leads to a wooden top and a real cork stopper. The labelling is minimalist but uses a white and navy blue background to good effect so that the print, black on a white background and white on blue, stands out and is very legible. A nice touch is that the front label features a silhouette of the map of the county of Shrophire which is transparent so that the illustrations of the principal botanicals on the back of the rear label can be seen.

While the bottle design might be understated, there is nothing bashful about this gin and, if you like Navy Strength gins, is well worth seeking out. You will not regret it.

Until the next time, cheers!

Murder In The Family

A review of Murder in the Family by James Ronald – 240425

Moonstone Press have reissued James Ronald’s 1936 novel, Murder in the Family, also known as The Murder in Gay Ladies, and a welcome addition to the canon of Golden Age detective fiction now readily available it is too. There are some familiar murder mystery tropes, an unpleasant relative who meets their just desserts, a contentious will, and a closed murder with relatively few suspects, all of whom have motive enough to carry out the deed, confessions galore, and a surprising twist at the end.

While this might sound all painfully familiar, James Ronald gives the tried and tested formula quite a jolt. This is no cosy country house mystery not, frankly, does the investigation into the whodunit feature very highly in the narrative, matters are wrapped up in a fairly brusque manner with the fourth confession, the only one that stands up to scrutiny. And the revelation of the culprit comes not as a result of the deductive brilliance of the investigating police, led by the bumptious Major Blackett, as a logical conclusion drawn by the most distant, in every sense of the word, of the unfortunate Osborne family.

What James Ronald is principally interested in portraying is the psychology of a family, firstly in how it reacts to a set of circumstances which threatens its financial security and happiness and, then, to being at the centre of a murder investigation. This introduces a radically different perspective to what would otherwise be a hackneyed tale and lifts the book to another level.

The Osbornes, Stephen and Edith with their five children, are not living in a gilded cage. Rather theirs is a hand to mouth existence, barely scraping by on the salary that Stephen brings home from his office job but, for all that, they have managed to create a loving environment in which to bring up the children and to foster their various interests. Then disaster strikes as Stephen is made redundant and the prospects of a 50-year-old with no obvious talents finding alternative employment when one in four males are out of work are bleak.

The only salvation seems to be Stephen’s elder sister, Octavia, to whom their father left all his considerable fortune with the implicit understanding that she would share it with her brother when he was old enough. Octavia had no intention of following this tacit understanding and, disapproving of the marriage with Edith, a strong mother hen figure, has gone out of her way to deny any requests for financial assistance. Providentially, when the news of Stephen’s misfortune breaks, Olivia, together with her put upon companion, Miss Mimms, are due to make their annual visit.

When Edith makes a plea for financial assistance, at a tense lunch not only does Olivia reject the idea of helping them out but, vindictively announces that she is cutting the family out of the will and will give the money to various charities together with an annuity of £1,000 a year to Miss Mimms for as long as she lives, the cruelty of this seemingly single act of kindness only becoming apparent at the end. Inevitably, while Octavia is waiting in a room with Anna, one of the children, engrossed in Shakespeare’s Henry V, someone comes into the room, wraps a distinctive scarf belonging to Dorothy, another of the Osborne clan, around her neck and the shock induces a heart attack from which she dies instantaneously. Anna apparently was unaware of what happened and the scarf was soiled with oil. Michael, the eldest son, is a mechanic.

No sympathy is spared for Octavia. She was a nasty piece of work and deserved her fate. The focus is on the family, under suspicion, the focus of local and media attention, the children being picked on at school. Ronald’s concern is to show in detail how being at the centre of the storm affects their daily existence and their mental well-being, especially as the implicit assumption is that their claims of innocence are well founded.

Eventually, Edith cracks under the pressure, bringing to a head the denouement. Fans fo fair play mysteries will rightly claim foul as Ronald brings into play an important piece of information right at the end which would clarified matters sooner, but that it is not the point of the story. It is not a murder mystery per se, rather a study of how murder affects a family and a rather good one at that.

As an added bonus (?) the Moonstone Press reissue also includes the long short story, The Monocled Man, a pot boiler in which a gang of Chicago gangsters pit their wits against an aspiring London detective, not unlike a young Bobby Owen without the propensity to make catastrophic errors, and a short short story, The Second Bottle.

Pedestrianism

The Olympic Games offers a quadrennial opportunity to shine the spotlight on some sports that would otherwise languish in obscurity. One such is race walking, which made its first appearance in the 1904 Games with a half-mile race that was part of the early forerunner of the decathlon, the ten-event “all round championship”. In Paris there will be events over 20 kilometres for both men and women and over 50 kilometres for men only.

It is a relatively simple sport, a test of endurance for sure, with only two rules. The competitor’s back toe cannot leave the ground until the heel of their front foot has touched and the supporting leg must straighten from the point of contact with the ground until the body passes directly over it. Infractions are judged by eye – no VAR here.

A filler in the Olympic TV schedules between the more popular track and field events it might be but competitive walking, known then as pedestrianism, was, along with boxing and horse racing, one of the first organized competitive sports in Georgian England. Despite all its grimness the Industrial Revolution did at least provide the masses with some free leisure time and a little spare money and organized sporting events sprang up to give them some entertainment.

In an age when everybody walked, it required little recherche knowledge to appreciate the style and stamina of a good walker and, unlike other sports, there were no barriers to participation. It was a sport that required no equipment and was, at least in theory, open to both rich and poor. Successful competitors could walk away with purses of a size beyond their wildest dreams, certainly more than could hope to have earned over several years.

Pedestrianism aldo provided spectators with an opportunity to participate in two of their favourite pastimes, drinking and gambling. Throughout the first half of the 19th century publicans would organize pedestrian matches, putting up the competitors, taking care of the advertisement and running a book in the sure and certain knowledge that the event would draw in the crowds, enhancing takings over the bar and providing him with a tidy profit.

Looking over the growth of the sport in his book Pedestrianism (1813), Walter Thom attributed its fashionable status was the result of the “patronage of men of fortune and rank” from the 1760s onwards. Some likened it to an emulation of the noble traditions of the athletes of ancient Greece. The Bristol Gazette in 1815 commented on the number of gentlemen infected by “the rage for walking”. Others adopted a more censorious tone, a correspondent to the Cambrian fulminating that “a whole race of fifty miles a day men had arisen, and what…before was the disease of an individual is now become an epidemic” while the Morning Post called it a “pedestrian mania”.

Victorian distaste for gambling and the consequences of excessive alcohol consumption, at least in public and amongst the masses, together with the suspicion that feats of astonishing endurance were prone to fakery saw pedestrianism fall out of favour. Instead, middle and upper class athletes began to form athletics clubs, from which members of the working class were excluded, and football and cricket clubs. By the end of the 19th century football rather than pedestrianism had become the opium of the masses.

Along the way, though, pedestrianism had created some of Britain’s earliest sporting heroes, some of whom we shall meet over the next few weeks.

The Arsenal Stadium Mystery

A review of The Arsenal Stadium Mystery by Leonard Gribble – 240423

There is a long history of media tie ups with football clubs which often do not end up as the parties had anticipated. Leonard Gribble’s The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, originally published in 1939 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, is an early example of such enterprises and was also made into a film in the same year, cashing in on the popularity of Arsenal Football Club, one of the leading clubs at the time. Interestingly, it features as some of its characters members of the then Arsenal team, household names then although only familiar now to those ardent students of the game. There is even a page devoted to facsimiles of the players’ autographs at the start of the book.

The set up is a game between Arsenal and the leading amateur team, the Trojans. Disaster strikes when the newest member of the Trojan team, John Doyce, after receiving a parcel at half time, collapses on the field, sadly not so unusual an occurrence these days but a rarity then, and dies shortly afterwards in the treatment room. No one was near him at the time he collapsed and it is soon established that he was the victim of foul play, having been killed, to quote the book, “by a little prick” coated with poison.     

The police team, led by Inspector Slade and assisted by Sergeant Clinton, and with the assistance of the respective team managers, George Allison of Arsenal, he was the real manager at the time, and Francis Kindilett of the Trojans, tries to get to grips with the mystery and bring the culprit to justice. Strip away the footballing milieu and it is quite a conventional murder mystery, with the usual stock of herrings, perhaps dressed in red and white, secrets from the past, and revenge.

The victim, Doyce, is a philandered and an insurance broker by trade, often the two go hand in hand in my experience, and has recently fallen out with his business partner, Morring, who stands to gain £10,000 from an insurance policy on his partner’s death, over a girl. Morring was overheard threatening Doyce and there is enough circumstantial evidence to put a noose around Morring’s neck, his case not being helped by the vindictiveness of his former fiancée, Pat Laruce.     

However, Slade is not convinced. Why was Kindilett so reluctant to have Doyce in the team and why was there a press clipping in the fatal parcel delivered to Doyce at the stadium referring to the apparent suicide four years earlier of Kindilett’s daughter? It was sufficiently traumatic to cause Kindilett to leave Ryechester and abandon his previous amateur project, the Saxons. Is there a link between the tragic events in Ryechester and the philandering Doyce?

Slade is an engaging sleuth, diligent, striking up a good rapport with Allison, and with a good sense of psychology and theatrics, gathering the Trojan squad together and making them show their hands, having banked that one of their number would have taken the opportunity presented by the unsealing of the treatment room to retrieve the murder weapon and get a tell-tale dye stain on their fingers. Of course, it worked a treat.

I was not surprised by the identity of the culprit as there were only three credible suspects and my money is always on the outsider. Slade does seem prone to wild leaps of faith but his intuition, naturally, wins out.

It is not necessarily a book for the football fan. The game just happens to be the setting that Gribble has chosen but for those nostalgic for the game of old there are plenty of opportunities to wander down memory lane. The teams are produced in the old programme format, the crowd surges forward and backwards as the action on the pitch unfolds, there is a brass band for entertainment, a feature that was still part of the Arsenal pre-match entertainment when I first visited Highbury in the 1970s, and the crowd slowly dispersing anxious to learn the other results and to check their pools coupons. There was no television showroom or chap with a transistor radio to crowd around in those days, just a wait for the sporting edition of the local newspapers.

There is much to appreciate in the book although, as a murder mystery, it is more of a regulation home win than a classic encounter.   

Mock Turtle Soup

A clue to the solution to the shortage of live green turtles for turtle soup is provided in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which Lewis Carroll’s eponymous heroine is famously introduced to the Mock Turtle by the Queen of Hearts. John Tenniel’s accompanying illustration shows him as a mélange of various creature’s parts, a calf’s head on the body of a turtle and feet which look suspiciously like pig’s trotters.

Even at the height of the British turtle soup mania, recipes began to appear for mock turtle soup, a soup which supposedly mirrored the taste of turtle but was made from more economical and readily available ingredients. Of the five turtle recipes in the 1773 edition of Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife, or, Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion, two were for mock turtle.

The principal ingredient was a calf’s head, which offered an equally varied range of flavours and textures. Most recipes were particular about the need to keep the skin on to ensure that the soup benefited from its fats. Of course, the humble calf’s head soup had been around for centuries but rebranding it as mock turtle gave it extra cachet.

To enhance its flavour, other ingredients were added, the White House cookbook of 1887 recommending sherry, cayenne pepper, lemon, sugar, salt, and mace. Crosse and Blackwell marketed “a special selection of Herbs for Turtle Soup”, initially intended for use in the preparation of real turtle soup but by the early decades of the 20th century a valuable addition to the mock version.

Fancy restaurants also got into the act of passing off a soup made from cheap cuts that might otherwise have been discarded as a high-end dish and charging accordingly. In 1900 the Manhattan restaurant, Sullivan’s, was offering its diners a bowl of mock turtle soup for fifteen dollars in 1900 compared with the ten charged for tomato, chicken or oxtail.

More manageable than a whole turtle to prepare in a household kitchen, it was still a painstaking operation, the meat having to be extracted from the skull, boiled to tenderness and then left standing overnight. With the dawn of convenience foods in the 20th century, soup manufacturers such as Heinz and Campbell’s added mock turtle soup to their range, the latter promising a product with a “tempting, distinctive taste so prized by the epicure”. 

By the 1960s, though, even mock turtle soup had fallen out of favour, perhaps because the idea of eating anything vaguely associated with a turtle had become abhorrent. One who mourned its fall from grace was Andy Warhol, who, in a 1962 interview, confessed that mock turtle was his favourite. “I must have been the only one buying it”, he lamented, “because they discontinued it”.

While the luxury passenger liner, SS United States, was still offering its passengers mock turtle soup in the 1960s and real turtle soup even appeared on the menu for the Independence day celebrations on board the SS Canberra in 1973, public taste had moved on. However, not in Cincinnati.

With many of the major abattoirs in the Mid-West situated there to ensure a plentiful supply of calves’ heads and a large German migrant population who valued its sweet-sour taste, Cincinnati became the mock turtle soup capital of the United States. Made from ground beef rather than offal, it is still served today in restaurants and at festivals. For those yearning for a bowl at home, a local Cincinnati company, Worthmore, has been making a canned version of the soup since 1920 using a recipe, which includes lean beef, hard-boiled eggs, lemon zest, and ketchup. They are still selling hundreds of cases a week.

This is the nearest the curious are going to get to the taste of turtle, a mania that, thankfully, has long passed and surely will never return.   

The Whisper In The Gloom

A review of The Whisper in the Gloom by Nicholas Blake – 240420

The eleventh in Nicholas Blake’s Nigel Strangeways series, originally published in 1954 and going by the alternative title of Catch and Kill, is more of a thriller than a conventional murder mystery. And quite a thriller it is too.

One of the interesting features about looking at a book from another era through the lens of modern day life is how attitudes have changed. Children these days have a sheltered and, some would say, rather mollycoddled existence but in Blake’s novel, three young boys, Bert Hale, Foxy, and Copper, the former two the principal protagonists, lead a fairly feral existence and unwittingly get caught up in a plot to assassinate a Soviet minister who is visiting Britain to improve the prospects of world peace. They have quite and adventure, both Bert and Foxy being kidnapped and threatened within an inch of their life. This is no Famous Five walk in the park, there is real jeopardy and while Blake paints them convincingly and in a sympathetic light, he is not overly sentimental in his depiction.     

Blake understands their psychology, the thrill of the chase, the desire to bring the adventure that they have got entangled in to a successful conclusion, their mistrust of officialdom and, indeed, adults as a whole, and the opportunity to escape the humdrum nature of their existence with a spot of derring-do. Foxy is inspired by a sermon about self-sacrifice in the Second World War and willingly sacrifices himself to save his friend, Bert, with almost disastrous consequences. Their reward is fitting, a ride in and, for Bert, a budding scientist, the chance to pilot, a helicopter.

There are moments of high drama, Strangeways himself getting coshed over the head, a shoot- out involving police and army personnel and a mob of gangsters at an isolated Suffolk country house, Stourboys Hall, and a desperate search for a would-be assassin at the Royal Albert Hall at  concert in honour of the Soviet minister. It is a race against time to thwart an assassination plot sparked off when Dai Llewellyn, just before he is killed, hands Bert a scrap of paper which, bizarrely, seems to have the boy’s name and age on it. The import and content of the message is misinterpreted twice and the plot to destabilize world politics almost succeeds.

There is an image repeated through the book of anglers throwing bait into the water and then sitting back to watch happens. It is apposite as the initiative is entirely with the conspirators and they succeed in luring the authorities, including Nigel, into traps and blind alleys which almost destroy the credibility of the investigators. As well as our old friend, Superintendent Blount, the police efforts are led by Inspector Wright, who is a new character as is Nigel’s new clutch, Clare Massinger. Unaware of Nigel’s detective demi-career, the sculptress – shades of Roderick Alleyn’s Agatha Troy, perhaps – throws herself into helping, her own piece of self-sacrifice being to take the odious Gray out to allow Nigel to burgle his flat. Curiously, she drops out of view as the book hurtles to its conclusion.

There is no mystery over the whodunit, there are a couple of murders along the way, or, frankly, the motivation. The thrill of the book is in the chase and whether the plot will be thwarted in time. Perhaps because of the subject matter, there is a change of tone in the book. It is not one in which Blake, the pseudonym deployed by Cecil Day Lewis, overtly shows off his erudition. Its style suits the earthy, gritty subject matter – there is even a couple of effin’s, quite a contrast to Miss Silver’s occasional “Dear” – and it is pacy, gripping, sweeps the reader along to the extent that they find themselves emotionally invested in the outcome.

Thoroughly recommended.

Whittaker’s Navy Strength Gin

It all started out in a former 1950s pig shed at Harewell House Farm in the heart of Nidderdale in North Yorkshire, from which Jane and Toby Whittaker launched their award winning Original Gin, ISWC silver medalist in 2016.

The success of their gin coupled with the space limitations of their original distillation area, now used for storage, bottling, and labelling, persuaded the duo to build a state of the art distillery, complete with a still, Jezebel, which was opened in 2019 and is open to the public. The extra space and enhanced facilities have enabled the Whittakers to expand their range to include a whisky and Whittaker’s Navy Strength Gin, a variant of their 42% original.

Their aim was to create a spirit which reflected the Yorkshire countryside in a bottle. Upon a traditional base of juniper, coriander, and angelica, they layer bilberries, aka whortleberries, which provide a sharpness while complimenting the juniper, the sweetness of hawthorne berries grown on the hedges of the Yorkshire countryside, and the spicy bitterness and balsamic qualities of bog myrtle, used in mediaeval times as an alternative to hops in brewing. To complete the roll call they add fresh lemon peel garden thyme which is freshly picked from the Whittaker’s garden on the day of distillation and sits in the gin basket just above the still. Naturally, fresh spring water is used in the distillation process.

The Navy Strength version, with an ABV of 57%, comes from the same distillation as the Original but is the very last cut of the heart, giving it a different and more intense flavour profile. It is Original with the volume turned up to at least eleven and my concerns that the juniper would be drowned by the local botanicals were soon assuaged. The spirit, clear in the bottle but which louches in the glass as the natural oils are released by the tonic, has a very herbaceous feel about it and this is the initial sensation, but the peppery juniper, ably assisted by the zesty lemon, fights back to produce a very rounded, complex spirit with a difference.

What took my eye when I was browsing for a Navy Strength gin was the marvellous illustration taken from a Thomas Bewick wood carving of a hare on the front label of the bottle. Although Bewick had no particular association with the area, he was a Northumbrian by birth, he nevertheless was a countryman at heart and, I guess, there are hares in the countryside around the Whittaker’s distillery. There might not be a direct relevance to the product, but, as a fan of Bewick’s work, I could not resist.

The bottle itself uses clear circular glass with a rounded shoulder and a medium sized neck leading to a wooden cap with an artificial stopper. Aside from Bewick’s hare, the labelling is crisp, clear, informative, and legible against a white background. It is a product that has been thought about and created with passion and a welcome addition to my shelf of Navy Strength gins.

Until the next time, cheers!

The Benevent Treasure

A review of The Benevent Treasure by Patricia Wentworth – 240418

I am wearing a beige granddad collar tee shirt, a quarter zip black specked lambswool sweater, a pair of blue Levi 501s and moccasin slippers as I sit at the PC to compose this review. My apparel might seem irrelevant to what I have to say about The Benevent Treasure, the twenty-sixth in Wentworth’s long-running Miss Silver series, originally published in 1954, but its pages are full of detailed descriptions of what her characters are wearing. For fans of clothing from the Golden Age of detective fiction, and there are some, this might be manna from heaven but most readers will after a while regard it as tiresome padding.

As a prolific writer, Wentworth is prone to repeating passages throughout her books. If she quotes the rhyme about the Benevent Treasure once she repeats in extenso at least five times. At times her style seems to be like cut and paste for the pre word processor package era or, charitably, an attempt to ape the Homeric epic style with its repetitive epithets and set phrases which gave the narrator the opportunity to catch their thoughts before launching into the next section. I have noticed this tendency before but it struck me as too prevalent in this book not to comment on.

There are also some of Wentworth’s familiar plot lines in the story. There is a young woman who is on her own in life, who falls into the grasp of an evil, domineering old distant relative, and who comes within an inch of losing her life only to be rescued by a young man with whom she has fallen in love and marries. There is a family which has been split asunder by a quarrel – one of the three Benevent sisters having the audacity to marry someone tainted with trade, even though he is a cleric – and a contentious will which passes, upon the death of the eldest sister, Cara, the house of Underhill, the estate and the Benevent treasure, should its whereabouts be located, to the surviving relative of the estranged sister, Candida Sayle.

The book opens with a prologue in which the fifteen-year old Candida finds herself marooned on a cliff edge after going for a walk along the shoreline, having been assured by two old women, whose identities soon become clear, that the tide did not turn until later in the evening. She is rescued by a knight in shining armour, Stephen Eversley. Five years later, after the death of her guardian, Barbara, whom she had nursed, she receives an invitation from her grandmother’s sisters, Cara and Olivia Benevent, to stay with them at Underhill. As she is without anywhere to stay and low on resources, Candida accepts.

There is a very gothic feel about Underhill, a rambling old property with its secret passages, peculiar servants, the domineering Olivia and the doormat that is Cara and a hoard of family treasures, which is cursed, anyone touching it doomed to a violent death, and its whereabouts unknown. Cara is still distraught about the disappearance of the former secretary whom she intended to marry, supposedly having been dismissed by Olivia for stealing a jewel and some money. It is his disappearance that Miss Silver is brought in to investigate.

Inevitably, Cara dies a violent death, the position of the corpse suggests that she was murdered rather than simply fell down some steps while sleepwalking, some tell tale cobwebs quickly brushed off from her shoes confirming that, and the estate passes, to Olivia’s chagrin, to Cara. Fearing for Cara’s safety, Stephen Eversley asks Miss Silver to stay in the house with her, but Cara still goes missing. Olivia then tries to reassert her control over the house.

The avid knitter, empathetic and observant amateur sleuth that Miss Silver is soon realizes that the disappearance of the secretary, Cara’s death, and Candida’s disappearance are linked and, frankly the culprits are not to difficult to detect. However, despite her best efforts there is not enough evidence to convict the culprits, although some sort of natural justice prevails as they both dies, leaving Candida to live happily ever after. Oh, and the treasure is found.

For all Wentworth’s stylistic idiosyncrasies, she is a consummate storyteller and if you are prepared to go with the flow, you are in for an entertaining read. It is one of the better Miss Silver stories.

Why Dumbbells?

14% of the UK population, around 10 million of us, are currently members of a gym, according to a recent survey, although whether all are active is a moot point. Pumping iron, lifting dumbbells, has a long and ancient tradition, with Greek soldiers and athletes spending time with a haltere. Semicircular with a hole in it through which the user would place their fingers to grip it, it was made of either stone or metal. Alternatively, halteres were made from wood and wax, allowing the athlete to add lead to increase their weight. They would either be lifted or swung around like Indian clubs.

In early 18th century London, the essayist Joseph Addison was an enthusiastic adopter of physical exercise. Writing in his magazine, The Spectator, in 1711 he described an exercise which he called “the fighting with a man’s own shadow”. It consisted of “the brandishing of two short sticks, grasped in each hand, and loaded with plugs of lead at either end. This opens the chest, exercises the limbs and gives a man all the pleasure of boxing without the blows”. What he seems to be describing is a form of shadowboxing using a form of handheld weights which we might recognize today as dumbbells.

However, he confuses the matter later by describing another exercise in which he uses a piece of apparatus consisting of four arms with lead balls on their ends. The apparatus was installed above the user who would pull a rope up and down, turning the weighted arms like a flywheel. This he describes as using a dumb bell, presumably because the movement was not unlike that deployed by a campanologist but no sound resulted, no doubt to the relief of his landlady and daughters who were “so well acquainted with my hours of exercise, that they never come into my room to disturb me whilst I am ringing”.

The mystery is why the term dumbbells, which Addison clearly associated with his Heath Robinsonish bell ringing contraption, later came associated with the handheld weights of his other exercise. Perhaps it was Addison who caused the confusion, the two apparati conflated into one reference, or the bell frame might have fallen into disuse or it might be that both involve moving the arms up and down like a bell ringer without the attendant sound.

Whatever the reason a dumbbell is now associated with a hand held weight. It was to be another century before the term “barbell” gained currency.

The Case Of The Corner Cottage

A review of The Case of the Corner Cottage by Christopher Bush – 240415

There is a distinctive change of tone in this, the thirty-eight novel in Bush’s long-running Ludovic Travers series, originally published in 1951, twenty-five years after the publication of the series opener, The Plumley Inheritance, and reissued by Dean Street Press. This is an investigation fuelled by personal revenge as Travers seeks revenge for the murder of one of his colleagues, Godfrey Prial.

Travers’ affairs have moved on as he is now the owner of Bill Ellice’s Broad Street Detective Agency, a long held ambition although his hand was rather forced by Ellice’s death from a massive heart attack. His original vision was to run it in tandem with his old mucker, George Wharton of the Yard, the Old General, but Wharton shows no sign of retiring from the force. Indeed, one of the unusual aspects of the book is that save for a couple of name checks, Wharton is absent from its pages, a disappointment for those who enjoy the repartee between the two and the sparring to get to the truth before the other.    

However, what the book lacks in that respect, it more than makes up for the quality of the mystery that Travers sets out to solve. Godfrey Prial is the agency’s star turn and while he is away on holiday in the East Anglian town of Shireton, he seems to have got on to the trail of a mystery which he is investigating on his initiative. Prial sends Travers a cryptic message and a little while later he is found, shot dead in The George, a hotel to which he seems to have transferred in haste.

The book falls into two parts, the first and shorter sets up the scenario and details Travers’ initial investigations, which, apart from introducing the reader to some of the principal characters of story and picking up some clues which ultimately become important, lead to no satisfactory conclusion. The pace picks up in the second part with the appearance of Myra Cowle, a hairdresser who nervously seeks to employ Travers to find a set of diamonds which were stolen from her uncle during a robbery in which he was struck over the head and having the customary weak skull died from the resultant wounds. The culprit was quickly apprehended and hung but the jewels were nowhere to be found. Myra, though, is soon knocked over and killed by a car. Accident or murder?

There are some intriguing characters in the case, none more so than the elderly James Monagan who was so traumatized by an assault and the ransacking of his cottage that he lost his mind and is consigned to a mental asylum where he spends all day clutching a rosary and muttering to himself.

The archetypal baddies are represented by a shady London businessman, Henry Laver, who has acquired Monaghan’s cottage, Copley’s Corner, the eponymous corner cottage, and thoroughly renovated it and excavated the garden as if he was searching for something, and his thuggish henchman, Alf. The local vicar, Comfort, is also acting suspiciously and taking an unusual amount of interest in Monaghan, despite being of a different faith.

The resolution of the mystery becomes a case of cherchez la femme as Travers, assisted by Jack Norris, formerly of the Yard, seek the elusive Eileen Masters. As often is the case in a Bush mystery, not everyone is quite who they seem to be and there is quite a twist over the identity of one of the principal characters in the reveal. Travers’ wife, Bernice, is pressed into service and much hangs on whether and how quickly a woman can change their hair colouring.  

While the whereabouts of the diamonds is easy to spot and there is no real attempt to disguise who the culprits are, I found this an enthralling book, one of Bush’s better ones, probably because there is a greater intensity to the tale. It is a personal matter, not just a dry academic investigation. I could not help thinking, though, that despite his enthusiasm for crossword puzzles, Travers made quite a hash of interpreting Prial’s cryptic missive and for all his perspicacity, he fell quite easily into a trap.

Look out for Prial’s snuff box, bequeathed to Travers. Squeeze the ends and it reveals a pornographic image, but it also reveals more, clues from which the resolution of the mystery can be gleaned. Great stuff!