Martin Fone's Blog, page 55

Hardwick’s Great Hall

The success of the London and Birmingham line prompted other lines from the Midlands and the North East to use the Euston terminus as their gateway to London, putting pressure on the already rudimentary facilities of the station. It might have had an impressive but purely decorative propylaeum but the directors of the newly formed London and North Western Railway Company (L&NWR) wanted to build equally imposing but utilitarian facilities. In 1846 they approached Philip Hardwick once more to use his architectural acumen to design a waiting room for its passengers and a boardroom for the company’s directors.   

Passing the responsibility to his son, Philip Charles, the younger Hardwick showed he was a chip off the old block, designing a waiting room like no other, an iconic expression of the power and innovation of the railway age. Based on the proportions of a double cube, rather like that deployed by Inigo Jones in his Whitehall Banqueting Hall in 1622, it had the largest ceiling span of any building in the world, 61 feet and 3 inches.

The room, known as the Great Hall, was surrounded by Ionic columns, sumptuously lit, by the standards of the time, with a diamond-shaped staircase at the foot of which was placed a statue of George Stephenson. The walls were richly decorated with carved consoles and two panels at each corner with plaster reliefs representing the key destinations from the station, London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Carlisle, Chester, Lancaster, and Northampton, together with oil paintings of prominent landmarks.

Placed above the Doric portal framing the entrance to the Directors’ meeting room was a high-relief sculptural group, showing Britannia accompanied by a lion, a ship, and the Arts and Sciences, while the ceiling was inspired by the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome. The walls were finished in grey Martin’s cement to give the impression that they were granite, while the columns were finished in red granite with white marble caps and bases.

Immediately north of the Great Hall was the proprietors’ meeting room, a hall five bays long and three bays wide, divided by Doric columns, with a coved ceiling pierced by lunettes, and, at either end of the room were grey marble fireplaces surmounted by busts. East of this room was the board room, panelled in stained and polished oak and with Corinthian pilasters and columns at each end. Above a fireplace made of purplish-grey veined marble was the L&NWR monogram in a roundel surmounted by busts of three eminent engineers associated with the Company, Robert and George Stephenson and Joseph Locke.

While many used the Great Hall to while away the time before their train departed, some just came to marvel at the splendour of the architecture and others, as this anonymous piece in the Daily Mirror from 1931 shows, sought inspiration from the quiet. “Years ago, when hard up, I had the largest study any author had. It was the Great Hall of Euston Station, which was then set with tables and chairs; many of my early poems and stories were written there”.

The Great Hall opened on May 27, 1849, but the constraints of the site meant that it did not line up precisely with the Arch. Arrivals were funnelled to the east of the Hall and departures to the west. Over time as the station expanded, it increasingly resembled a ramshackle rabbit warren and, inevitably, plans were laid to start afresh. Plans to merge Euston and St Pancras into a new mega-station were scotched by the advent of the Second World War but in 1959, ironically only a few years after the Great Hall had been comprehensively restored, British Rail submitted plans to completely redevelop Euston in readiness for the newly electrified West Coast main line.

While the focus of the objectors’ campaign was the Arch, the fate of what was considered to be one of the finest examples of Victorian railway architecture flew under the radar. The battle was lost and in late 1961 the site was completely demolished. The station’s ornate iron gates, a dedicatory plaque from the Great Hall, and the statue of George Stephenson were relocated to the National Railway Museum in York while all that remains on the original site are two lodges, one of which houses the Euston Tap pub.    

The Sharp Quillet

A review of The Sharp Quillet by Brian Flynn – 240303

After Conspiracy at Angel had been almost universally panned by critics Brian Flynn went back to basics and starts The Sharp Quillet, the thirty-third in his Anthony Bathurst series, originally published in 1947 and reissued by Dean Street Press, with quite a bang. In the prologue there are no less than fifteen bodies, the sex worker who was murdered, the judicial murder of Arthur Rotherham Pemberton who was found guilty of the murder in both the court of first instance and in the Court of Appeal, and then the twelve jurors plus the Clerk of Court for good measure who were killed when an enemy bomb destroyed the restaurant in which they were a post-trial meal. Quite a riposte!

The focus then turns to the Bar Point-to-Point at Quiddington St Philip at which Justice Nicholas Flagon, the favourite to win the race for the third year running, is killed close to the winning post in a most unusual fashion. He has been struck by a pub dart whose tip had been dipped in curare. Flagon had received a death threat on the morning of the race and the dart bore a message referring to a sharp quillet. There are a number of plausible suspects for the murder, including some accomplished darts players, but with the police making little headway, Sir Austin Kemble calls in his A-team, Anthony Bathurst and Chief Detective Inspector MacMorran.

No sooner have the two arrived on the scene, then there is a second murder, this time of Justice Theodore Madrigal, who attending Flagon’s funeral collapsed and died instantaneously, having been struck by a poisoned dart tipped with curare. He too had received a death threat and the dart bore a similar reference to a sharp quillet. Madrigal’s demise clearly meant that there was something that connected the two judges with the killer and that those who only had an animus against Flagon were unlikely to have been the culprits. The focus of the investigation has to be recalibrated.

It is at this point that Bathurst has one of his flashes of inspiration. The working assumption had been that quillet was an archaic term for a dart. However, dredging the depths of his mind, Bathurst recollects that Shakespeare had used the phrase “sharp quillet” in both Henry the Sixth and Love’s Labour’s Lost to indicate a false accusation or a piece of trickery. As the reader has already realised, courtesy of the prologue, Flagon and Madrigal were judges who heard the Pemberton appeal and the connection is cemented when the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Fifoot, the third judge, also receives a death threat.

The pace of the book ramps up as Bathurst develops a high-risk plan that will bait the murderer to show their hand at a dinner over which Fifot is presiding, and allow the authorities to catch them red-handed. The plan goes awry and it is only two pieces of quick thinking from Bathurst that saves Fifoot’s bacon and allows the murderer to be arrested. The sense of urgency is emphasised in the final chapter by the continual reference to the time.

There is very little that is left field or genre-bending in this book. It is an enthralling and intriguing murder mystery that has a very old fashioned feel about it. It could almost have come out of the canon of Conan Doyle and Bathurst’s methodology is more a mix of intuition and elimination than deduction. While allowing the reader to establish a lead of several furlongs over the sleuths at the start with their knowledge of the trial, Flynn turns the tables in the sprint to the finishing line. While there are gentle clues here and there, the identity of the killer came as a bit of a surprise.

Flynn allows some rather large herrings to slip the net and swim off over the horizon, not least Fothergill’s wager with Flagon and the mysterious behaviour of Harcourt on the afternoon of the race. It is in keeping with the structure of the book with characters drifting in and out. One intriguing character to emerge from the shadows is Helen Repton, a female, yes female, member of the Yard who as well as being an extremely able assistant seems besotted by Bathurst who, in his way, seems to reciprocate her feelings.

This is Flynn back at his best, constructing a plot in a porting milieu that with its twists and turns never allows the reader to settle, and producing a fine piece of entertainment. The moral of the story is never meet a sleuth wearing the same clothes as you did when you murdered someone. It gets them thinking.

The Flying Dutchman

The fate of a merchant ship owned by the Dutch East India Company, which went missing off the Cape of Good Hope in 1641, was the source of increasingly more lurid tales. By May 1821, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was telling how its captain, Van der Decken, after searching vainly for the Cape and caught in a storm, swore that he would round it, even if it took until doomsday. The ship was condemned to sail the seven seas for eternity either as punishment meted out by an angel for his blasphemy or because he had made a pact with the devil to survive the storm.

The Flying Dutchman, a ship that seemed to come out of the horizon sailing on air, became a harbinger of doom. According to some, its ghostly crew would crowd on to the deck, waving letters to be delivered to their, by now long lost, relatives, which, if accepted, would bring misfortune. Some seafarers believed that if they saw it, they too would never reach land again.

The first record of a sighting of The Flying Dutchman appeared in John MacDonald’s Travels in various parts of Europe, Asia and Africa (1790), but perhaps the most famous occurred at 4am on July 11, 1881 somewhere in the Bass Strait between Melbourne and Sydney. On board HMS Inconstant were Prince George of Wales, the future George V and his brother, Prince Albert Victor of Wales.

In their joint diary they recorded that The Flying Dutchman crossed their bows. “A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars, and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief as she came up on the port bow” The quarterdeck midshipman was sent to the forecastle “but on arriving there was no vestige nor any sign whatever of any material ship was to be seen either near or right away to the horizon”.

In all, thirteen members of the crew reported seeing it. Inevitably, tragedy struck. “At 10.45 am”, they reported, “the ordinary seaman who had this morning reported the Flying Dutchman fell from the foretopmast crosstrees on to the topgallant forecastle and was smashed to atoms”.   

Members of the British navy off the Cape of Good Hope on January 26, 1923 saw a phantom derelict ship, luminous with two masts and a thin mist where the sails would have been. Second Officer Bennett later reported the incident to Sir Ernest Bennett, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, who included an account in his book Apparitions and Haunted Houses: A Survey of the Evidence (1934).

Landlubbers were also gripped by the myth. Heinrich Hesse romanticised the story in From the Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski (1831) by allowing the captain to go ashore once every seven years to try to gain his freedom by winning the hand of an unsullied maiden, a version Richard Wagner used for his opera, Die Fliegende Holländer (1840), van Derdeeken and Senta being the protagonists.

Despite its association with seafaring disaster, curiously, the first steamship to enter the Stikine River in British Columbia in 1862 was called The Flying Dutchman. It was also the name of an express steam locomotive which from 1849 until 1892 ran between London and Bristol and of an English thoroughbred racehorse which won all but one of its fifteen races between 1848 and 1851.

Impact Of Evidence

A review of Impact of Evidence by Carol Carnac – 240301

For its February 2024 reissue the excellent British Library Crime Classics series has chosen Impact of Evidence, originally published in 1954, a welcome addition to the canon of Edith Caroline Rivett’s work that is available once more to those without the patience or deep pockets to seek out the originals. Rivett wrote under a number of pseudonyms, most famously E C R Lorac, but for his Julian Rivers’ books, of which this is the eleventh in the series, she used the nom de plume of Carol Carnac. It is up to her usual standard and makes for an enthralling read.

The story is set deep in and high up the Welsh Border country, although the precise location seems to change as often as the border country changed hands between the English and Welsh. The book is subtitled a Welsh Borders mystery but the road linking the isolated communities is described as the worst in England. Wherever it is precisely, it has just experienced its own mini-Armageddon, being cut off after heavy snowfall followed by precipitate thawing causing the rivers to flood and cutting off the bridge. Just to put the tin hat on it all, the telephone lines are down, making it ideal conditions for murder most foul.

As someone about to have to reapply for my driving licence for age-related reasons, I recognise that there is a natural suspicion about the capabilities of elderly drivers. Dr Robinson is a case in point, blind as a bat and deaf as a post but insists on going out for a daily drive. The locals turn a blind eye to his driving skills, reassured by the fact that his route and the time he goes out are broadly the same each day. However, it comes as no surprise that on the first day that motoring is possible, the Lambtons, an old established family described as the salt of the earth, hear a metallic crash. Battling through the elements they find that Robinson’s car had collided with a jeep driven by Bill Parsons.

Despite the inevitability of the crash and Robinson’s death at the wheel, there are some surprising features. There is a body of a person unknown wrapped up in the back seat and Parsons who had accelerated to avoid the collision miraculously survives going over the bonnet with relatively minor injuries. Showing astonishing skills of endurance Henry Lambton and Michael Dering battle the elements to report the deaths to the local magistrate, Colonel Wynne, who in the morning saddles his steed to cross the river and organise some assistance.

The investigation is initially handled by the local Inspector, Welby, but he falls down some stairs and is rendered unconscious. Was he pushed, or did he just lose his footing to evade a cat? This is the cue for Chief Inspector Rivers of the Yard, ably assisted by Inspector Lancing, and using the resources available to them discover through fingerprints the identity of Robinson’s passenger, Brown, and that both have a criminal record, the latter for blackmail.

Rivers is an empathetic sleuth and soon wins the confidence of a tightly knit community and discovers that the newcomers all have a dark past. Rivett is at her best in creating a sense of place, with beautiful descriptions of the bleak landscape and a finely attuned ear for the closeness of a remote community, their petty jealousies and rivalries. A skinned pig convinces Rivers that he is on the right track and sets an ambush that leads him to the killer.

With relatively few credible suspects, who are eliminated one by one, and the careful placement of a few red herrings along the way, Rivett shows great skill in slowly unravelling her mystery and while the means of getting the body into the car seems a little contrived, all the loose ends are tied up, even Welby’s unfortunate accident which is due to his aversion to cats. The identity of the killer might strike some of the readers as surprising but there are enough clues lightly sprinkled in the text to direct the diligent reader in the right direction. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and look forward to the day that all Rivett’s books are back in circulation.

Waiters Of The Week

If you are in Paris and are looking for fast café service in Paris, perhaps you should seek out Pauline van Wymeersch at the Le Petit Pont café facing the Notre Dame cathedral or Samy Lamrous who plies his trade at La Centrescarpe in Paris’ 5th arrondissement. They were the winners of the women’s and men’s sections of the revived Course des Cafes, a two kilometre race through the streets of the historic Marais district around City Hall.

Wearing traditional aprons and white shirts and carrying a tray bearing a traditional breakfast of croissant, coffee and a glass of water, around 200 waiters set off with the goal of completing the course without running or spilling spilling a crumb or a drop. Lamrous completed the race, run for the first time since 2011, in 13 minutes and 30 seconds while Ms van Vymeersch finished with a time of 14 minutes and 12 seconds.

Apart from the prestige, they were presented with medals, two tickets each for the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, and a night’s stay in a Paris hotel.

Let’s hope this traditional race is back to stay.

Vanishing Point

A review of Vanishing Point by Patricia Wentworth – 240228

In the twenty-fifth book in her Miss Silver series, originally published in 1953, Patricia Wentworth blends two familiar topics, an incipient romance between an impoverished relative used as a skivvy by her mean-spirited benefactress, Rosamond Maxwell, and a dashing all-action hero, Craig Lester, with a murder mystery, although the murders are more collateral damage than the key component of the mystery.

Two women have mysteriously vanished from a village that is close to an Air Ministry’s experimental station. There have been some information leaks and the bigwigs want to make sure that there is no connection to the data loss and the disappearances, call in the Yard in the form of Frank Abbott. Fortunately, he has one of his many relatives living in the neighbourhood and he can hunt around unobtrusively and unofficially. Maud Silver, too, has an old school friend living in the village and she is invited to assist using her almost supernatural facility to pick up local titbits and assess their relevance.

There is a distinct sense of wistfulness about the book. It is another post war novel in which the loss of the old ways of life is mourned and the modern ways of life are lamented. Miss Silver is seen as an anachronism as are those who attempt to maintain the old standards with their servants and rooms packed full of furniture. The motive behind the mystery is a fanatical desire to maintain the old ways of life that an established county family has enjoyed for centuries. This is certainly not a paean to progress or minimalism!

Lydia Crewe, the controlling and domineering woman who rules over her house and her friends with a rod of iron has more than a touch of Miss Havisham about her. She has never recovered from being jilted in love and now that her former fiancé, Henry Cunningham has returned to the village to write a book on etymology, she, ostensibly, makes a point of cutting him dead at every occasion in public. However, his skill in preparing etymological specimens for despatch abroad is put to an ingenious and nefarious end.

Rosamond, whose sense of entrapment and despair is epitomised by the dark wood in which she finds solace. She has accepted her role in life to protect her sister, Jenny, who had been seriously injured in a car accident. Despite her tender years, Jenny is an aspiring author and sends her derivative romantic guff complete with a photograph of her sister to a publisher, whose agent just happens to be Craig Lester who is immediately smitten by the image. Jenny’s literary attempts allow Wentworth to satirise the genre of romantic fiction. When, to Rosamond’s horror, Miss Crewe proposes sending Jenny to school almost immediately, Craig steps up to the plate, as all gentlemen do, by offering his hand in marriage to Rosamond so that he can whisk them both away to safety and to sunny uplands.

The crucial parts of the plot involve midnight perambulations. Jenny wanders about and discovers beads and a hand sticking out of some sacking, Miss Crewe flits from her house to the Cunninghams in the middle of the night and Miss Silver, having an intuitive belief that Lydia Cunningham is in danger wanders around at night to ensure that the culprit is unmasked. Her habit of being at the right place at the right time to hear the guilty unburden themselves of their secrets pays dividends, but I prefer my sleuth to use intuition and deduction rather than snoop around keyholes.

Mr Selby, about whom much is hinted, has a role to play in the goings on at Hazel Green, the data leakage is solved and is an attempt to stitch another member of the unfortunate Cunningham family, but when all is boiled down this is a plot inspired by greed and where a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

As ever, Wentworth deploys her mastery of the art of storytelling to good effect and while it is probably overlong and rabbits do seem suddenly to be pulled out of hats, it is entertaining enough.   

Hardwick’s Euston Arch

The circularity of history. When George and Robert Stephenson conceived their plan for what was to be the world’s first long distance passenger railway, they planned to run the line from Euston Square to Birmingham, which did not gain city status until 1889. However, in order to get their bill through Parliament, which they did in May 1833, they had to bow to objections from local land owners and relocate it to Chalk Farm.

George, though, was made of sterner stuff and by 1835 he had overridden objections and received permission to revert to the original plan of building a terminus at Euston Square. It was a fairly simple affair, consisting of a train shed with two, one for departures and the other for arrivals, with tracks in between for carriages. Euston station, which takes its name from the Norfolk family seat of the Dukes of Grafton, Euston Hall, was opened on July 20, 1837 with the line initially only going as far as Boxmoor in Hertfordshire. The first journey all the way to Birmingham was made fourteen months later, on September 17, 1838.

The London and Birmingham Railway Company employed the architect, Philip Hardwick, to design two landmark buildings at the line’s termini. Drawing inspiration from classical Greek architecture, he designed an Ionic portal building for Curzon Street in Birmingham; it is still standing and is likely to be incorporated into the design for the refurbished station in readiness for its role as end point of one leg of the ill-starred HS2 project.  

At the Euston end Hardwick designed an entablatured Doric archway or more correctly a propylaeum, as it was intended to stand on its own without supporting any other structure, an impressive landmark that passengers would have to pass on their way to and from the station. It was phenomenally expensive, costing £35,000 to build in 1838, a sum for which Thomas Cubitt, an architect at the time, reckoned could build an entire mainline terminus. It was also massive, standing seventy feet tall and dwarfing the city’s other arches. By comparison Marble Arch is only forty-five feet tall.   

Euston’s arch was not universally liked. In the 1850s Augustus Pugin called it a “Brobdignaggian absurdity”, a sentiment echoed by a tourist guide to the Great Exhibition of 1851 which called it “gigantic and very absurd”. Its popularity did not improve as time wore on, George Lynch calling it in 1902 a “sepulchral prison-like portico” and The Advertiser dubbing it in 1939 as “a rather gloomy portal”.

To compound its problems, as the station expanded over time to cope with the increase in passenger numbers and the expansion of services running from the station, the Arch rather got in the way and was completely obscured from the main Euston Road which ran outside the station. Its fate was sealed when plans were made to redesign the station to cope with the electrification of the lines. With an estimate of £190,000 to reposition it, a figure opponents claimed that was plucked out of thin air, compared with £12,000 to demolish it, its dismantling seemed the obvious option.

Despite a vigorous campaign waged between January 1960 and October 1961 by groups including the Royal Fine Art Commission, the Georgian Society, the Victorian Society, the editor of the Architectural Review, several backbench MPs, and two discussions at Cabinet, British Rail was given the go ahead to demolish it.

Demolition work began on November 6, 1961 and what was dubbed at the time as one of the biggest examples of cultural vandalism was soon completed. Hardwick’s Arch would have stood on what is now the southern end of what is now platforms 8 and 9. A stylised representation can be seen on the walls of Euston’s Victoria line station..

What happened to the stones from the arch was a mystery not solved until 1994 when architectural historian, Dan Cruickshank, discovered that some of the decorative outer stones had been used in a garden rockery, and the rest dumped into a canal off the River Lea. They have been fished out and hopes remain that the Euston Arch which technically not an arch will be restored somewhere sometime.

Spotted Hemlock

A review of Spotted hemlock by Gladys Mitchell – 240225

The first thing to say about Spotted Hemlock, the thirty-first in the Mrs Bradley series and originally published in 1958, is that by Gladys Mitchell’s standards it is a pretty accessible and entertaining read. The plot is predictably bonkers, a melange of rats, more rats, cellars, hemlock, rhubarb, ghostly horsemen and mistaken identities. Whether it is convincing, especially its denouement, is another matter.

Mitchell returns to a familiar setting for her murder mystery, an educational college, this time Calladale College, an agricultural college for women, which neighbours a men’s college, Highpepper Hall. The students play tricks or rags on each other and the book opens with plans being laid by the Highpepper men to plant rhubarb and dead rats on the Calladale grounds. When the girls decide to retaliate by gathering up the rhubarb, they decide to hide it in an ornamental carriage which serves as a sign for a nearby public house, but when they open the carriage up they find a badly decomposed body wearing a Calladale blazer.

The natural assumption is that the body is that of Norah Palliser, a student who has disappeared without trace and whom Dame Beatrice, as Mrs Bradley is now known, has been called in by the college principal, Miss McKay, to track down. Even her mother identifies the corpse as that of her daughter, but there are two intriguing points that unsettle our saurian sleuth. First, the post mortem establishes that the body is of a woman somewhat older than Norah and that the victim died of hemlock poisoning which suggests murder. Oh, and while a female student was getting back to college late, she was frightened by a ghostly horseman riding by. While seemingly random, this event is germane to the murder.

Dame Beatrice is on the case, assisted by her slightly annoying secretary, Laura Gavin, and aided and abetted occasionally by Laura’s husband, Gavin of the Yard. Dame Beatrice’s investigations are languid, leisurely affairs with little sense of urgency or momentum. She even has a trip to Naples and the surrounding area to check up on the Italian aspect of the case – Norah’s mother had married an Italian who is portrayed in a characteristically stereotypical and somewhat xenophobic manner and is assumed to be both a bad hat and a lothario. His innocence comes as a relief.

The bad hat in the family turns out to be Norah’s sister who is older but very similar in looks. Norah uses this happy coincidence to carry out a light subterfuge of her own, marrying an impoverished art student, Coles, and having an affair with a lecturer, Piggy Basil, who is conveniently absent from college with a broken leg, while maintaining the fiction that she is continuing with her studies at the college. It eventually dawns on our sleuth that the wrong sister had been murdered and that the ghostly horseman was the means to remove the body from the College’s rat-infested cellars.

While there are several potential candidates to fill the role of murderer, Mitchell’s choice and motivation seems at best a little weak and possibly even random. Being pressganged into something you regret can rouse feelings of ire, but murder? And the amount by which the murderer would benefit from their crime is negligible and how they came upon their knowledge of the poisonous characteristics of spotted hemlock seemed far-fetched. The murder sets in process a complicated chain of events to cover it up and remove the body and, while Dame Beatrice’s reconstruction does fit all the key facts that she has established, it seems a tad unlikely.

Written with no little humour and with some of the erstwhile Mrs Bradley’s irritating characteristics toned down, it was a delightful romp but one in which one’s critical instincts needed to be toned down.

The Lieutenant Conundrum

Noah Webster might have radicalised the way that words were spelt in America, but some of his suggestions fell on stoney ground, such as tung for tongue, wimmen for women, and iland for island. He also waded into the debate around which letters should be included in the alphabet. Benjamin Franklin had argued that c, j, q, w, x, and y were unnecessary and that they should be replaced by symbols to reflect the sounds of a as in ball and o in folly, th as in think, th as in thy, sh as in ship, ng as in repeating, and u as in unto.

Webster begged to differ with his former mentor, including each of them in his meisterwerk, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), while reviving the fortunes of j and v, hitherto seen as simply alternative forms of i and u, by giving them sections in their own right. His dictionary was not a commercial success, forcing him to mortgage his home to raise the monies to fund an expanded second edition, which was published in 1840. In 1843, the year of his death, rights to his dictionary were acquired by George and Charles Merriam and his name lives on in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Potato, and tomato, amongst others, might have been the acid test for pronunciation for George Gershwin in Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off (1937), but in my formative teenage years it was lieutenant. Conducting a straw poll on its pronunciation, my English teacher was appalled to find that the majority of the class, sated on a diet of Hollywood blockbusters, plumped for lootenant, prompting a tirade on the insidious attack on all things British by American “culture”.     

Lieutenant, a compound of two French words, lieu meaning “place” and tenant “holding”, describes someone who fulfils the role of someone more senior or who functions as their deputy, the military equivalent of the civilian locum tenens. The earliest examples in English are Scottish, John Barbour’s The Bruce (c1375) using luftenand and the first syllable appearing in other 15th century variants as leeft, luf, leyf, and leyfe. A letter found in the records of the Swiss canton of Fribourg, dated May 29,1447, and signed by Ly Leuftenant douz Chastellant Davenche, seems to accord with the Scots spelling.

There is no definitive explanation why the lieu part of the compound was pronounced leff rather than loo. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) tentatively suggests that the letters “u” and “v” were interchangeable in Middle English with “v” often used at the start of a word and “u” elsewhere. However, it recognises that logically it should mean that lieutenant was pronounced with an “oo”. Alternatively, the “f” and “v” pronunciations, it opines, “may be due to association” with the noun “leave” or the adjective “lief” or, more likely, “that the labial glide at the end of the Old French lieu as the first element of a compound was sometimes apprehended by English-speakers as a v or f”.     

While the spelling of lieutenant settled down in the 17th century, the question of how to pronounce it rumbled on. John Walker in his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1793) gave the “actual pronunciation” of the first syllable as “lef” or “liv” but expressing the hope that “the regular sound, lewtenant, will in time become current”. Naturally, Noah Webster waded in, recommending only one pronunciation, lutenant.

Any suggestion that the preferred British pronunciation is due to an innate reluctance to refer to officers using the term “loo” can be put to rest. The slang expression for a toilet did not appear until around the First World War, the first citation in the OED being from Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), and only gained wide usage in the 1930s.

Walker’s hopes that the pronunciation of the word would be standardised across the two countries were dashed and the two distinct forms persist to this day. Vive la difference!

The Mirror Crack’d From Side To Side

A review of The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side by Agatha Christie – 240223

The ninth book in Christie’s Miss Marple series, originally published in 1962, is distinctly average, overlong and one where you could almost just read the final chapter and get the gist of the mystery and how it is solved. True to form, we are treated to three murders, although the second and third are merely incidental and really serve little purpose than to keep up the author’s average. For good measure, we are treated to a fourth death, which might have been suicide although Miss Marple hints, and the reader knows, that the victim was helped along their way.

The book has two principal drivers. The first is the reaction of movie actress Marina Gregg’s reaction when, as part of the welcoming party at a reception held at Gossington Hall and in conversation with Heather Badcock, a strange look crossing her face, echoing the lines from Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot from which the book takes its title. What had she seen?

The second is the character of Heather Badcock herself. When the astute Miss Marple first meets her, in her inimitable fashion, Mrs Badcock reminds her of another character who died. Heather is one of those characters who is self-obsessed and socially unaware, unable to appreciate the impact of her behaviour or comments on others. It is while she is recounting the occasion when she rose from her sickbed as an adolescent in Bermuda to meet Marina and get her autograph that, first, Marina has her strange turn, and then Heather’s glass of daiquiri is spilt, Marina gives her another one which contains a lethal dose of Calmo, and Heather collapses and dies. Was Marina the intended victim and Heather just an innocent victim?    

Much depends on Marina’s backstory. In true movie star tradition, she has had a number of husbands, the latest being the seemingly devoted Jason Rudd, and a sad personal life, her natural child having a mental disability as a result of an illness she contracted during pregnancy and left in a home, and three adopted children who were capriciously abandoned although well provided for. Her first husband appears at the party and his identity really comes out of nowhere although has nothing germane to add to the plot, one of her abandoned children is a photographer at the reception, and two ghosts from the past, Ardwyck Fenn and Lola Brewster, the latter from whom Marina “stole” one of her husbands, are potential suspects. Miss Marple is convinced that the key to the mystery lies with Marina’s children and, of course, she is right.

Astute readers will recall Gossington Hall and its former owner, Dolly Bantry, from The Body in the Library, although for those who are new to the series, Dolly provides an elliptical precis of the case. Miss Marple is showing the affects of advancing old age, taking time to recover from a bout of pneumonia, her eyesight too poor to allow her to knit, and under the care of the suffocating Miss Knight. Miss Marple has to adopt various strategies to elude her carer and the prospect of getting her teeth (dentured?) into a murder mystery peps her up no end, leading her to do extensive research through the medium of gossip magazines into the lifestyles of those involved in the “moving pictures” industry.

Detective Inspector Frank Cornish from the local police and Chief Inspector Dermot Craddock of the Yard lead the investigations for the police but it is really Miss Marple, with her helpful hints and suggestions, that moves the case along and saves one innocent victim from their death.

The book could be seen as a half-hearted satire of the changes that were sweeping villages like St Mary Mead – the arrival of grotesque housing developments on the outskirts of a quaint village and the arrival of the nouveau riche who modify old mansions out of recognition – but that is being charitable. It is an entertaining, easy to read piece of escapism, not one of Christie’s best nor her worst, but a good enough companion to spend a couple of evenings with.