Martin Fone's Blog, page 67

Lost Word Of The Week (87)

Lord Ellenborough, whose birthname was, by a piece of nominative determinism, Edward Law, was Lord Chief Justice from 1802 until 1817, earned a reputation for being harsh and overbearing towards counsel and sometimes showed remarkable bias against the accused in his summing ups to the jury. In a judgment that resonates today, in R v Inhabitants of Eastbourne, he ruled that destitute French refugees in England had a fundamental human right to be given sufficient means to enable them to live. In Cary v Kearsley he held that “a man may fairly adopt part of the work of another for the promotion of science…..one must not put manacles on science”, a judgment that introduced the concept of fair use into copyright law.

So synonymous was he with English law at the time, that his name was used for a bit of slang. Ellenborough’s lodge was defined in the Chester Courant of July 29, 1806 as “vulgarly denominated as the King’s Bench prison” on the north side of Borough Road in Southwark, while Ellenborough’s teeth was used to denote the spiked chevaux-de-frise that topped its walls.     

The Village Twinned With Paris

Many of the best ideas occur in a public house, so they say, and one of the most audacious occurred to a group of regulars of The Noel Arms in the tiny Rutland village of Whitwell one Friday evening in 1980. Searching for a way of boosting the profile of the village, which boasted 41 residents and nineteen houses, the pub’s outside toilet, dubbed the pissoir, provided a flash of inspiration. They would write to the then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac proposing that Whitwell twins with Paris and to ensure that the proposal received the attention that it merited, stated that if no response had been received within fifteen days, it would be assumed that Paris had accepted the offer.

As the deadline had passed and no response received, the regulars, now formed into a committee, assumed Paris had accepted and pressed ahead with plans to mark the occasion with a French-themed parade held on June 13, 1980. A “mayor” was elected whose badge of office was a toilet chain and a local French teacher, the only French person in the area, was pressed into service, dressed in a Napoleonic bicorne, and driven in some style in an open-top Citroen to the pub, where he duly cemented the relationship by using the pissoir. A speech declared the twinning to be “a historic day in the development of a united Europe” and a plaque was hung up in the pub to commemorate this quaint piece of English history.

When Chirac’s response was finally received, it was a firm Gallic “Non”, but by then the Whitwell bandwagon was unstoppable. Wooden signs at the entry points to the village proudly announced that it was twinned with Paris, later to be replaced with metal signs by Rutland County Council. For the record, Paris’ official twinning partner is Rome.     

For all its worthy aspirations, the twinning movement has been viewed with some scepticism, often accused of frittering away tax payers’ money on “jollies” and “junkets”, sentiments enhanced by the rise in Euroscepticism and isolationism in Britain. But for every cavil, there are examples of the positive impact that a successful twinning partnership can bring in fostering relations, understanding, and respect for other peoples, cultures, and traditions. In emergencies, the strength of the ties can come to the fore; when Barnsley, during the Covid pandemic, was running short of Personal Protective Equipment, officials from its German twin, Schwäbisch Gmünd, sent over supplies which were handed out in the town centre.      

The Keighley-based soldiers returning from Poix-du-Nord would be astonished to see what they had started.

Death At The Villa

A review of Death at the Villa by Moray Dalton – 231101

The last of the batch of five Moray Dalton novels reissued by Dean Street  Press in 2023, Death at the Villa was originally published in 1946. It is a stand alone story which reveals the author’s love of, despair, and hopes for Italy. By 1943 the country was ravaged by war, the Fascists and the Nazis in occupation and the Allies trying to get a foothold there. For many an English Italophile, that the two countries were on opposite sides of the conflict was a matter of profound sorrow.    

Amalia Marucci rules the roost at Villa Gualtieri, having made herself indispensable by nursing the sick wife of the marchese Gualtieri in the last months of her life, and organising the house as the marchese spends more time in Rome, following his interests and paying court to her mistress. His two young female relatives, Chiara and Alda Olivieri, live a quiet but frustrated existence at the Villa, while Amalia’s son, Silvio, has ingratiated himself with the Germans and has an ill-defined role in the Italian secret service.

Life at Villa Gualtieri is changed by two dramatic events. A British plane on a mission to land insurgents to blow up a rail link crashes and one of the two crewmen to survive, Richard Drew, is given assistance by Alda. He is sheltered in the family’s abandoned tomb and is given provisions through the agency of the local priest. Alda and Richard meet briefly on a couple of occasions, write to each other, and, predictably, fall in love. The priest, though, has a stroke and Richard loses both his source of food and his means of communicating with Alda.

Alda has her own problems. On the day that she prepares the family’s food and Chiara’s lemonade, Chiara has violent convulsions and dies, the victim of arsenic poisoning. Amalia quickly seizes the opportunity to point the finger of blame at Alda, pointing out her suspicious behaviour, and suggesting that Alda and Chiara had quarrelled over the discovery of Alda’s secret lover.  Alda is promptly arrested. Having set up her story, Dalton skilfully weaves these two strands of plot into an enthralling and compelling novel which follows the fates of Richard and Alda.      

The result is a book which is more a thriller set in a novel than a conventional murder mystery. Indeed, the investigation into why Chiara was killed and by whom takes up a relatively small part of the story and is revealed not by clever deduction but by a visit to the marchese from a Venetian friend of Chiara’s. Amalia and Silvio had a shady past in Venice, running a gambling den and then trying their hand at blackmail, before having to leave the area and it emerges that they have a plan to get their hands on the marchese’s fortune by aping the Medicis and indulging in a spot of murder, framing, and strategic marital alliances.

Of all the characters, the marchese undergoes the most significant transformation. He slowly realises that his unwillingness to engage in the day to day running of his household has allowed an unscrupulous Amalia to take advantage. He even suspects her of hastening his wife’s demise.  Once the scales have fallen from his eyes, he takes terrible revenge.

Richard Drew, who plays the role of the archetypal British hero, plays his own part in the downfall of Silvio Marucci and join forces with Gualtieri to spring Alda from prison and deliver her to the supposed safety of a convent where the marchese’s sister is the Mother Superior. It is tempting to view Dalton’s novel in allegorical terms with the Maruccis representing the evil side of human nature, taking advantage of a terrible situation for their own benefit and showing the depths that humanity can plunge to, the marchese and his staff as the representatives of the true Italy that has been lost to the ravages of war, and Alda and Richard as symbols of hope for the future in which relations between Italy and Britain will be restored to their former glory.

However you choose to view the novel, it is an impressive piece of work, a captivating thriller which gives the reader much to think about. Great stuff!

Holborn London Dry Gin

My third purchase on my recent trip to the Constantine Store, home of Drinkfinder UK, was one steeped in the history of gin, Holborn London Dry Gin. The development of the continuous still by Aeneas Coffey in the 1830s was a ground-breaking moment for distillers as it meant that they could make a consistent pure grain spirit at a predetermined strength. No longer did they need to mask inferior spirits with strong spices and sugar, instead creating a clear, unsweetened spirit using subtler aromatic botanicals such as angelica, cassia, coriander, and orris root.

This new type of gin was known as “dry gin” and because it was mainly produced in the capital was soon referred to as “London Dry Gin”. Today, the accepted definition of a London Dry Gin is that it has an ABV of at least 37.5%, is clear, and has nothing added to it after the distillation process. Based in the heart of London at 12, Gate Street in Holborn and producing a clear Dry Gin with an ABV of 43%, the Holborn Gin Company are firmly part of this tradition.

However, they go farther back than that. In developing their particular gin, they experimented using recipes from the gin masters of the 18th century. Impressed by the simplicity and purity of the process, they decided that the basis of their gin, which they claim to be the purest, finest London Dry Gin available anywhere – some boast – was to use the finest hand-foraged wild botanicals, quality berries, and carefully selected spices. As Holborn is a bit of a wasteland when it comes to foraging most botanicals, they source their ingredients from local markets.

There is no definitive list of botanicals that go into their copper still, but from the taste profile of this beautifully clear spirit, there is a strong dose of punchy, peppery juniper with a hint of fresh pine, with orange and lime peel bringing in the citric notes, and vanilla offering an earthy sweetness. There is also a hint of nutmeg along with coriander leaf and cassia. The aroma is an inviting mix of juniper, citrus, and vanilla, and in the mouth it is well-balanced, each botanical working in harmony and yet given a little space to break through on their own. It is remarkably smooth and elegant, almost living up to the high standards that they have set themselves.

The bottle, made of clear glass, is a circular bell shape, with domed shoulders, a medium sized neck which leads to a wooden top and an artificial stopper. The labelling makes use of copper, white and pale blue lettering against a black background and has more than a little feel of solid antiquity about it.

I am an unashamed fan of London Dry style gins and this lived up to my expectations. It oozes class and elegance, a satisfying end product that reflects the hard work and research that has gone into producing it.

Until the next time, cheers!

The Norwich Victims

A review of The Norwich Victims by Francis Beeding – 231030

Death Walks in Eastrepps was my introduction to Francis Beeding, the nom de plume under which two British authors, John Palmer and Hilary Saunders, wrote and a fine book it was too. The Norwich Victims, originally published in 1935, is equally as good. It is an inverted murder mystery with a significant twist in its tail. I had my suspicions but the surprise was carried off with considerable aplomb.

Ostensibly the story is about a crooked stockbroker, John Throgmorton whose surname resonates with vibes of London’s financial heart. He constructs an elaborate plan to relieve a Norwich school matron of her unexpected win of 750,000 Francs on the French lottery and to use part of the money to buy a valuable reliquary which has a hidden emerald and could be sold on for a considerable profit. The plan involves the murder of poor Miss Hallett, whose naked body is found in a sack in a railway waggon in Brighton, the impersonation of the victim, who, as luck would have it has a distinguishing mark on her face, by his secretary, Hermione Taylor, who travels to Paris to collect the winnings and the passing of the money to Richard Feiling, whose uncle owns the reliquary, who brings the money back to England.

The plan seems to work well, but there is a fly in the ointment, a colleague of Miss Haslett’s, Joseph Greening. Living beyond his means and escaping to London from Norwich on occasions to sample the high life, he gets a loan from Throgmorton. While in London he bumps into a woman who bears the same distinctive mark as Miss Haslett, was wearing her clothes but who, he was sure, was not his colleague. Because his visits to London are a secret – he has constructed an elaborate alibi to give the impression that he had spent the weekend watching birds of the feathered variety – and feels unable to pass on this information when the murder is discovered.

Unfortunately for Greening, on his next dealing with Throgmorton, Hermione Taylor recognises him as the man she bumped into. Realising that he is a threat, Throgmorton follows him back to Norwich and murders him, making it look like a suicide.  

Conducting the investigation for the police is Inspector George Martin of the Yard, who happens to be the fiancé of Elizabeth Orme, another colleague of Miss Haslett’s at St Julian’s Preparatory school, which her uncle, Headlam, owns. Despite having the inside track on Haslett’s backstory and realising that all roads lead to Norwich and Throgmorton, he is thwarted as Throgmorton proves to be a slippery fish. Even when Headlam gives him a perfect analysis of the crime and why Throgmorton is the culprit, the blighter cannot be traced. Inevitably, a simple error, some holes in a briefcase, give the game away but not before Richard Freiling has been murdered and an attempt is made on Elizabeth Orme’s life. The latter is telling.

Throgmorton is a fabulous character, ruthless, cold-blooded, capable of anything to achieve his goal. One of the highlights of the book is the gradual realisation amongst his partners in crime just what a monster he is. Hermione Taylor is a nuanced character, she is in the middle of a love triangle with Throgmorton, with whom she unconventionally lives, and Freiling whom she really loves, and whilst she is an accessory to Throgmorton’s murderous plot, she grows to be repelled by what she has got into.      

The opening chapter which sets the story up from the perspective of the three female protagonists is impressive, the subplot involving the reliquary saves the pace of the book from suffering the usual midway dip, and the twist is masterful. If you like well-constructed stories with realistic characterisation written with the minimum of fuss, this will suit you down to the ground.

The Rise Of The Leylandii

Leylandii an evergreen coniferous tree of very fast rapid growth

In 1911 at Leighton Hall, Christopher’s nephew, Captain Naylor, after picking up a cone from a Monterey cypress growing fifty yards from a Nootka, noticed that two of the resultant seedlings were markedly different from the rest. The difference from the 1888 seedlings was that the Monterey was the female parent. The seedlings were planted half a mile apart on a hill behind the house. Cuttings were sent in 1916 to Bicton and Inverary Castle and, probably, Headfort, all of them growing extremely quickly and to heights in excess of thirty metres.

News of these monster conifers, which the family called Leyland cypresses, only reached a wider audience when a Cambridge University Professor, William Dawson, stayed as a guest at Leighton Hall in 1925. He was so fascinated by the unusual conifers that he sent samples of their foliage to the eminent botanists, Bruce Jackson and William Dallimore, for classification.

The new hybrid, given the botanical name of Cypressus x leylandii, was announced in the Kew Bulletin in March 1926. On a visit to Haggerston Dallimore and Jackson collected material from the by now enormous six trees for propagation. From these cuttings the first leylandii at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and Edinburgh, at Wisley, and Bedgebury Pinetum were grown.

Another hybrid cross appeared around 1940 from seed collected from a Monterey cypress growing in Ferndown in Dorset and was sown at Barthelemy’s nursery in Staplehill. Curiously, there was no evidence of a Nootka cypress in the area.

The Leighton Hall leylandii might not have been the first, conifer expert Alan Mitchell of the Forestry Commission unearthing evidence of an even earlier hybrid, which was planted in the early 1870s, based on estimates from its size, by a gardener in Rostrevor in Northern Ireland. No formal records of its origin exist and the tree itself blew down in a storm before the First World War, but not before cuttings were taken from it in 1908 and grown on. These in turn provided cuttings which were planted at Castlewellan in 1949.

The first to capitalise on the public appetite for conifers that were hardy, fast-growing, and tolerant to a wide range of climatic and soil conditions was Hilliers, who began selling leylandii commercially in 1930. Leylandii now account for around 10% of garden centres’ sales. Pandora’s box had well and truly been opened.

Subsequent attempts to raise the hybrid by controlled pollination of Nootka and Monterey cypresses had all failed until 2011 when James Armitage seemed to have achieved the impossible by growing a seedling from seeds he had collected from a female Leylandii in Wisley Gardens. This seemed to disprove the commonly held view that they were sterile and needed a compatible pollen donor. However, some believe that the presence of a Nootka cypress growing nearby might have had something to do with it.

Armitage’s success seems to have been a one-off. Indeed, every one of the more than forty forms of Leylandii in cultivation today is a genetically identical clone or cultivar produced from one of the original plants. Most are derived from one of the six seedlings that were taken by Christopher Leyland to Haggerston, including the Haggerston Grey, from clone 2, which produces the tallest individual specimens and the Leighton Green, from clone 11, which is used for hedging.

Other popular forms of leylandii are Castellan Gold, raised as a seedling at Castwellan in Northern Ireland in 1962 as a cross from the golden forms of the Monterey and Nootka cypresses, and Leylandii 2001, developed in the 1990s by Van den Dool nurseries in the Netherlands. It is not clear whether the latter is a new hybrid cross or the product of a random genetic change. One failure was the Staplehill 20 cultivar, grown commercially for a few years but withdrawn when it was found to be susceptible to drought in the 1970s.

Love them or loathe them, leylandii are truly freaks of nature.

Italian Kiss Of The Week

An “Italian Kiss”, for those who do not know, was introduced into what is known as popular culture by a famous scene in the 1955 film, Lady and The Tramp. It involves two people sharing a single strand of pasta until it either breaks or ends with the eaters’ lips touching.

In 2020 to celebrate the launch of a new dish called “Italian Kiss” a German restaurant chain, Vapiano, set a Guinness World Record for the most people eating a single piece of spaghetti simultaneously. They subsequently lost the record when a group of 433 couples in Belgium performed the feat which requires each couple to eat the strand within 30 seconds and complete the process within 30 seconds.

Not taking their defeat lying down, Vapiano recently gathered 463 couples, appropriately enough on International Kissing Day (July 6th) at at the Tempelhof airport hangar in Berlin and reclaimed their record. Spaghetti eating will never be the same again.    

Lost Word Of The Day (86)

With the popularity of card games over the centuries and with a pack containing fifty-two different cards, it is unsurprising that individual cards bear unusual names. Are you like Mr Squander in William Carleton’s Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, published in 1830, who asked “what do you mean by the Earl of Cork?

His respondent, who by the tenor of his response was from the lower orders and might even have been up before the beak, enlightened him. “The ace of diamonds, your honour. It’s the worst ace and the poorest card in the pack and is called the Earl of Cork because he’s the poorest nobleman in Ireland”.

The term probably was not peculiar to Ireland although the migration from the island in the mid-19th century is likely to have contributed to its spread. The Durham County Advertiser, in its edition of November 14, 1851, featured an article called Popular names for certain Playing Cards and the Earl of Cork as the Ace of Diamonds duly appeared.   

The Rise Of Town Twinning

Nowadays it is a familiar sight when entering a British town or city to see a sign greeting the traveller with the words “Welcome to…twinned with…”, and the chances are that their twins will be from France or Germany. By 2018 over 4,000 French communes had embraced jumelage, twinning with municipalities in other countries, principally Germany (2,322), the UK (1,890), and Italy (986). Despite having just over 2,800 inhabitants, the twinning star is Cissé in Haute-Vienne, twinned to no less than twenty-eight other towns, one for each member of the European Union and the UK. Its British partner is Desborough. Their enthusiasm must make for an impressive sign.

Despite paving the way for town twinning, from an historical perspective Keighley was very much an outlier. The main thrust of the twinning movement began shortly after the end of the Second World War, when municipalities vowed that Europe should never again be ravaged by war again and sought to create greater understanding between towns and cities that had, until recently, been enemies.

Shared experiences made Coventry and Dresden natural partners, while Reading’s 76-year association with Düsseldorf arose from a request from the Royal Berkshire Regiment, who were based in the German city, to the Mayor of Reading for assistance for the local people. As a glass manufacturing centre, St Helens was in a prime position to help its twin, Stuttgart, an alliance forged in 1948, to reconstruct its Cissé bomb-ravaged centre. According to the British-German Association, there are 445 British-German twinning partnerships.

Others arose from geographical similarities, Poole and Portsmouth twinning with the large ports on the other side of the English Channel, Cherbourg and Caen respectively. Tourism has paired Edinburgh and Nice since 1958, both cities welcoming a similar number of visitors, whereas architectural splendour, spas, and annual cultural festivals have made Bath and Aix-en-Provence natural bedfellows.

The 1950s saw a huge increase in the number and range of twinnings, especially as the Council of European Municipalities and Regions, founded in 1951, made it one of its principal objectives. With the expansion of what became the European Union, partnerships with towns from a wide range of countries developed.

Some enterprising towns went further afield for their partners, Cognac pairing up with Bozhou, the Chinese city famous for its white spirits, and Limoges, the porcelain capital, with Seto in Japan, famed for its fine ceramics. The movement had a further boost when the European Commission, in 1989, provided financial support to those partnerships which could demonstrate a European added-value.

Murder On The Orient Express

A review of Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie – 231028

So famous is it that Murder on the Orient Express, originally published in 1934 and the tenth in her Hercule Poirot series that it would not be a pointless answer to the question name a novel by Agatha Christie. Also going by the title Murder in the Calais Coach, it has been the subject of several films, TV and radio adaptations, and a stage play. This was the first time I had actually read the book and it is better than any of the versions I have seen or heard.

It has all the hallmarks of a classic murder mystery story. There is a train which allows for a motley collection of characters to be assembled in one place. There is a snowstorm which blocks the train’s passage which means that there is no escape and no means to summon external assistance. And then there is a locked room murder. The victim, Samuel Ratchett, is found dead in his cabin, having stabbed twelve times, some of the wounds were made with vigour and some feebly done. Dr Constantine, who along with the Director of the Compagnie Internationale de Wagon-Lits, M.Bouc, assists Poirot in the investigation, opines that the murder occurred between midnight and 2 am.

Prior to the murder Ratchett had approached Poirot offering him a large amount of money to find out who was threatening. Not liking the cut of his jib, Poirot refuses. Unusually for the time of year, the Stamboul to Calais carriage of the train is fully booked and it is only through the offices of his good friend, Bouc, that Poirot secures a berth in the carriage. Earlier, Poirot had overheard a conversation between two English people, who are subsequently passengers on the train, in which the phrase “not until it is over” is uttered. All these curiosities in their own way are significant.

Structurally, the book falls into three parts, the facts the evidence gathering, and the deductions. There is little doubt that Christie uses the story to illuminate the brilliance of her eccentric little Belgian with the astonishing little grey cells as he analyses every statement that each of the passengers he interviews, looking for inconsistencies and trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. Some of the conclusions he draws are obvious, some masterly, and others beyond comprehension. Nevertheless, Christie plays reasonably fairly with her reader and most of the clues are there, even if deep mining is required to extract them.

The central section, in which Poirot interviews each passenger in turn and goes over the same ground albeit from different perspectives, could, in other hands, have been a bit of a grind, but Christie brings a light touch to the process which saves it and sucks the reader in to join the sleuth in working out what really went on. There is a filmic quality about the book, particularly this section, which shows why it is an adapter’s favourite.  

When it is all boiled down, it is a tale of revenge for a horrendous crime which led directly and indirectly to four deaths. In classic style, Poirot gathers all the parties together and demonstrates his brilliance by working out what went on and offering not one but two solutions. Even then, Christie is not done, introducing an astonishing final twist.

Poirot’s second solution poses a moral dilemma; can a crime be so horrific that it is reasonable for the affected parties to take the law into their own hands? Is there any justification for justice to be done outside of the courtroom? The modern consensus might be no, but this was written at a time when the death penalty was the sentence usually associated with murder. Through Poirot, Christie takes an ambivalent stance to the rule of law, the foundations of a civilised society.

That said, it is a rattling good read and warrants its reputation as one of her best.