Martin Fone's Blog, page 82

The North South Divide

Where does England’s north begin and its south end, a question that has provoked much controversy for several decades. Is it marked by the preference for a short a in words such as grass, glass, and bath or the preferred pronunciation of scone?

Researchers have sought to add some academic rigour to the debate by looking at the relative distribution of Greggs, the first of which was opened in Tyneside in 1951, and Pret, which first established itself in 1984 in Hampstead, through England’s green and pleasant land. The analysis places the critical dividing line, the so-called avocado wrap – sausage roll line, as just a tad above the Watfrod gap services on the M1. On this basis, Midland conurbations such as Birmingham, Nottingham, and Leicester would be deemed northern, a badge of honour in my book.

A secondary analysis was conducted based on the relative distribution of Waitrose and Morrisons supermarkets, again finding the diving line to be just above the Watford gap services.

Perhaps that is an argument settled.

The Beckoning Lady

A review of The Beckoning Lady by Margery Allingham – 230609

This is the fifteenth in Allingham’s Albert Campion series, originally published in 1955, and goes by the alternative title of The Estate of the Beckoning Lady. The eponymous Beckoning Lady is an estate belonging to the eccentric duo, Minnie and Tonker Cassand, in the village of Pontisbright in deepest Suffolk and is the setting for one of Tonker’s famous midsummer parties to which Campion with his wife, Lady Amanda, and son, Rupert, have been invited as well as a motley crew of wonderfully eccentric and varied characters.

Minnie is an artist and Tonker an inventor of, amongst other things, the glübalübalum, a musical instrument made from Perspex with rubber bladders, described as “a very long tube with an immense horn at one end and a cork at the other. In between, so to speak, there were digressions”. The instrument’s improbable success has landed the Cassands with a tax problem and Minnie’s advisor, a former Inland Revenue employee, takes the unusual step of advising the couple to divorce for fiscal efficiency, a satirical reductio ad absurdum to the problem of ever-increasing taxation on the assets of the rich in the aftermath of the Second World War.

To make matters worse, a family favourite, old William Faraday, has just died, apparently from natural causes, the emphasis being on apparently, developers are putting pressure on the beleaguered couple to sell up, and, unbeknown to them, there is another body waiting to be discovered, the Tax Inspector who perished when suffering a blow to his incredibly thin skull. The body is found several days later by Miss Pinkerton who faints and has to be carried to Minnie’s house in the not inconsiderable arms of Magersfontein Lugg.

Despite there being, ultimately, three deaths and Campion, more concerned about the fate of Faraday than the others, convinced that he was poisoned, the presence of two senior police officers, Charles Luke of the Yard, recuperating on leave and falling in love with the Prune aka Prunella Scroop-Dory, and the local inspector, Fred South, the investigation of the murders is very much a subplot, simmering in the background. This is very much a novel rather than a piece of outright detective fiction, yet another post War novel that has a yearning for a long-lost Golden Age. There is more than a touch of the Midsummer’s Night’s Dream about it.

One of the many wonderful characters is Old Harry who bemuses the strangers with his ability to tell how long a ploughshare, the murder weapon that did for the Tax Inspector, has lain in a field by sniffing it and with his encyclopaedic knowledge of floriography allowing him to send messages through carefully selected posies of flowers. The children in the story, and there are a lot, enjoy an idyllic existence, but are beginning to experience the delights and traumas of entering adolescence.

Nevertheless, there are clues casually sprinkled through the text which allow the reader to understand how campion has resolved what seems to be a set of random deaths into a comprehensible whole. Ultimately, it is a tale of misguided zeal, a secretary keen to further her employer’s schemes and an investigator who sees, or at least is believed to have seen, more than is good for him. The third death, an apparent suicide, is wrapped up when Campion finds a carbon copy of a suicide note, the provenance of which is in camera put in doubt when his wife finds a characteristically unique spelling in the text.

This is a character driven novel that borders on the absurd but is great fun. Detective fiction with a difference.

Another Visit To London’s First Department Store

Pall Mall was one of Georgian London’s most fashionable streets and its proximity to St James’ Palace meant that Anthony Harding’s store, Harding, Howell’s & Co Grand Fashionable Magazine, London’s first department store, was not short of royal visitors, for whom he would shut the store so that they could browse undisturbed. George III commissioned Harding to design and make the hangings for his bedroom at Kew and to market the cloth produced from the royal flocks of merino sheep that grazed at Windsor.      

Harding was never slow to exploit an opportunity. After designing some dress silks for Queen Charlotte, he marketed them to the public as “Queen’s silk”, while he ensured that a piece of the chintz produced for the Prince of Wales was pasted to every issue of Ackerman’s Repository of Arts alongside the advertisement for his shop. Samples of the chintz were also sent to every entrant in Debrett’s Peerage to remind them of his royal patronage.

Although at pains to reassure his customers that “all their furnishing fabrics were made in England”, Harding was not oblivious to what the wider world could offer, claiming to be able to supply “every article of foreign manufacture which there is any possibility of obtaining”. A demand for lace led him to establish a lace factory on the premises, headed by a Flemish expert who would instruct “young women respectably connected and of good conduct” in the art of lacemaking for a fee of £10 each. He would also export goods around the world.

Harding was also saw innovation as a means of keeping ahead of his competitors. A newly patented permanent green dye for chintz, for which he secured the sole trading rights, was advertised as “a discovery never before offered to the public”. In 1807 he quickly recognised that the newly installed gas lighting in Pall Mall, the first street to be so illuminated, would show off his printed chintzes and textiles to great effect if they were displayed in the window. Some of his claims, though, strained credulity. A hair dye was advertised as “the best Dye in the universe for immediately changing red or grey hair”.

Shoplifters felt the full force of the law. In 1799 Mary Wilson, aged forty-seven, was found guilty of stealing goods to the value of twelve shillings, namely some black ribbon, two pairs of cotton mittens and a silk handkerchief, a crime for which she was sentenced to seven years transportation. She died in Newgate prison two months after her trial.

However, by the standards of the time, Harding was remarkably lenient towards crimes committed by his own employees. In 1817 Samuel Arnold stole £74 in cash and £35 in promissory notes, a crime punishable by death. At his trial at the Old Bailey, he was found guilty, but a director of Harding’s spoke in his favour, describing him as a trusted employee who had always “acted honourably” and whose lapse was down to the malign influence of his new wife. When he declared that Harding’s would have Arnold back, there was “a buzz of applause” in the court room, moving the judge to spare the prisoner who was promptly re-employed.

In December 1819 the business moved to 9, Regent Street, opposite Carlton House. Shoppers were by now buying goods on a whim rather than out of necessity, an appetite fed by Harding’s willingness to be “quite prepared to offer a regular succession of novelty throughout the season”. Their fame spread as far as China where a correspondent in 1834 reported a demand for things “pretty, odd, and new at Howell’s and Harding’s”. The company’s Royal Warrant as “Silk Mercer by Appointment” to Queen Victoria was a major feather in his cap.

The last man in London to wear a queue, a type of ponytail added to a wig, and a prodigious drinker who, “although never drunk, lost the use of his legs after the sixth bottle”, an occurrence so frequent that a special chair had to be constructed to carry him to bed, Harding died in 1851 aged eighty-nine. His shop soldiered on for a few years but had closed by 1859 when the War Office took on the premises.

As department stores continue to fight for their existence, it is timely to think of the man who first brought them to London’s streets.

Lost Word Of The Day (48)

These days I am more if a trootler than a tripudiator.

To trootle is to walk in slow or short steps, rather like a child learning to work. To tripudiate on the other hand, or should it be the other foot, is to dance or leap for joy or to stamp your feet in joy and celebration. Its origin is from the Greek for three and for feet and is likely to have referred to a dance move in which the dancer’s foot would strike the ground three times in a row.

Lost Word Of The Day (47)

An archetypal image of an English country village is a green surrounded by thatched cottages. Idyllic it might look, but a thatched roof does not last for ever. It is generally accepted that a water reed roof, which lasts anything between thirty to 50 years, is longer lasting than a combed wheat or long straw which have an expected life of between 20 to thirty years. There are over 60,000 properties with thatched roofs in the UK and while there are about 800 thatchers working in England, there is only one in Scotland.  

It is an art that comes with its own distinct glossary of terms. Yelm is both an intransitive verb meaning to prepare bundles of straw for thatching and a noun meaning a bundle of straw used for thatching. It comes from the Old English gelm or gilm meaning a sheaf.

As I have a tiled roof, I’m not sure it is a word I will be using much.

Lament For A Maker

A review of Lament for a Maker by Michael Innes – 230608

During my peregrinations around the world of the ginaissance I came across a wonderful gin produced by the Glasgow Distillery called Makar, Gaelic for a bard or poet. The Maker in Innes’ title is the Anglicisation of this Gaelic word and refers to a poem written by the 16th century Scottish poet, William Dunbar, entitled Lament for the Makaris. Excerpts of the poem are cited throughout the novel, the third in Innes’ Inspector Appleby series, originally published in 1938, and the refrain, timor mortis conturbat me, sets the tone for an exploration of the consequences of a premonition of an impending doom.

There is something of the Gothic about this book, a forerunner of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast (1950), a dank, dusty, neglected castle occupied by an eccentric recluse, Ranald Guthrie, who goes through an astonishing character transformation before plunging to his death from a tower. Was he pushed or did he fall and if it was murder, who did it? Suspicion falls on a local man, Neil Lindsay, whose family had a longstanding feud with the Guthries and who wants to marry Guthrie’s niece. but the case is more complex than that. In fact, the reader is treated to three possible solutions.

Innes has chosen to narrate the story through the eyes of several observers, the book opening and closing with an account narrated by a local shoemaker, Ewan Bell. Innes makes no concessions to his reader. As well as assuming that his reader is literate enough to spot the literary allusions in his text, is comfortable with schoolboy Latin, Bell’s account is sprinkled with words drawn from Scots dialect. For the Sassenach this can be hard going, but it is worth persevering as the story as it unfolds is intriguing, convoluted, and perplexing.        

Noel Gylby, who appeared in Hamlet, Revenge!, provides the second perspective and his jaunty letters written in a quasi-public school vernacular come almost as a welcome relief, but more than that, build up the atmosphere, detailing the dank and dark castle and its mad occupant. The third narrative, from the pen of the Edinburgh lawyer, Wedderburn, is written in a rather pompous, florid style. By this time it is clear to the reader that each of the narratives are not entirely reliably, painting part of a picture and there are strands in each that if extracted and pieced together that would make sense of what happened on that night at Erchany Castle, which for such a remote and isolated castle, had so many visitors on a very snowy night as to resemble Piccadilly Circus.

It falls to Appleby, who only appears at just over the two-thirds mark of the book, to come up with a rational explanation, suggesting, as is the wont of someone from the Yard, that the local police have got the wrong end of the stick. However, for all Appleby’s ability to conjure up a solution, finding significance in remarks and observations that others had let lie dormant, the final two narratives suggest that he too had missed the mark. To say much more would spoil what is intriguing climax which Innes masterfully builds up to as his story picks up pace.

Innes has provided a literary tour de force in the guise of a rather hackneyed Golden Age detective setting, a gloomy castle in the depths of winter with the snow lying thick on the ground making travel difficult, using different voices, unreliable narrators, and plunging in, as Ewan Bell said, in medias res, allowing the backstory to slowly percolate through. The book is not without its humour and biting social comment, the rats and Mrs Hardcastle in particular, and her revenge on her creepy and domineering husband is a diverting but amusing side story.

Once I had got into the book, I realised it was one of the masterpieces of the genre.

Penis Of The Week (2)

A stushie has broken out between a cheesemaker and a brewer over the representation of the Cerne Abbas Giant on a logo. A 180-foot-high figure etched cut into a hill near the Dorset village of Cerne Abbas and backfilled with chalk rubble, it features a standing nude male with a prominent erection and a large club in its right hand.

Cerne Abbas Brewery, not afraid of Brewer’s Droop, proudly display the giant in all his glory on the logos that adorn their products. The Oxford Cheese Company have a cheese in their range called Cerne Abbas Waxed Cheddar which also features the giant. However, at the request of a major supermarket, they have not only given him a full Brazilian but emasculated him.

The Brewery, who seem to be self-appointed guardians of the giant’s todger, claim that a company not even based in Dorset has no right to tamper with its manhood. The cheesemakers claim that only their supplies to the supermarket have the offending penis-free image.

In an age where we are increasingly used to cover ups, this seems a cover up too far. When the image is there for all to see on a hill, are we really so precious that we need to hide it on the cheese counter?

Off With His Head

A review of Off with his Head by Ngaio Marsh – 230602

The nineteenth book in Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn series, originally published in 1956, has a whiff of Gladys Mitchell about it, although it is a more accessible story. The book, which also goes by the alternative title of Death of a Fool, explores the world of Morris Dancing and the death and resurrection rituals in the English folk tradition. The Dance of the Five Sons, which is only practised in the village of South Mardian on the first Wednesday following the Winter Solstice, features a display of swords, the decapitation of the Fool and his resurrection.

This unique dance has been practised for centuries with the generations of the same families playing the same roles. There are nine principal parts in what can be best described as a cross between a series of Morris dances and a mummer play, five sons who are played by the Andersen sons the first letter of whose first names spell out the acronym DANCE, a Fiddler played by the Doctor and for a part of the story Alleyn’s Dr Watson, Dr Otterly, a Betty, Roger Stayne, a Horse called Crack played by Simmy-Dick Begg, and the Fool, a part played by the Old Guiser, William Andersen, the curmudgeonly paterfamilias of the Andersen clan. The dance has attracted the attention of a German refugee, Anna Bünz, who writes learned articles about the folk tradition in England and Europe, and she is intent on finding out all she can about this unique dance.

In essence, this is an impossible and closed murder mystery. At the climax of the Dance, the Fool, having been decapitated, is supposed to rise again. Instead, William Andersen is found slumped behind the Mardian Stone, his head severed from his body, but there is not enough blood at the scene for it to have happened there and then. How was the murder of William Andersen carried out in front of an audience enthralled by the performance and how was the body then decapitated and placed behind the Stone which was the centrepiece of the performance? Logically, only one or more of the cast could have done it.

Alleyn, accompanied by the faithful Fox and the rest of his team, dutifully investigate the crime. Needless to say, there are a number of people who have a grudge to bear against the Old Guiser who has thwarted the march of progress, ambitions, and love. After an excellent beginning the pace of the book slows down as Alleyn, who is nothing if not thorough, interviews all of the suspects and forms a picture of where they all were at the critical moments.

However, it is after a dinner at Lady Mardian’s, execrable food served with the finest of wines and spirits, that he obtains a crucial clue from an 18th century description of the dance and the lines that the Fool mumbles. A recreation of the dance leads to the solving of the mystery and a thrilling ending.

As usual, Marsh has come up with another ingenious way to commit murder and, while to my mind the motive seemed barely strong enough to drive someone to commit murder, the resolution of how the murder was committed and the body transferred to its resting place involves an amazing example of what can only loosely and technically incorrectly described as a form of legerdemain. There is much humour in the book and Marsh’s love of theatre and the theatrical shines through.

An interesting leitmotif is the impact of the Second World War on some of the characters. Begg, somewhat troubled before the conflict and at a loose end afterwards, was only happiest when biffing the Germans in a distinguished war career as a fighter pilot while Eddie, the youngest of the Andersen sons and an epileptic, can only be controlled by the former airman, whose batman he was. Anna Bünz, whose obsession with discovering every last detail of the dance leads her into a dangerous alliance, has her attitude to the police shaped by her experiences with the German authorities before the war and her reception in Blighty as a refugee.

I have not always been enamoured with Marsh, but this is one of her better ones.

Death In The Forest

A review of Death in the Forest by Moray Dalton – 230531

Another walk on the wild side with Moray Dalton who seems to specialise in exploring the more outlandish or just plain odd sides of human behaviour and psychology. It is unusual if not a little refreshing to pick up what is ostensibly a Golden Age murder mystery to find that it has an (un)healthy slice of lycanthropy to spice thing up. Dalton’s ninth novel in her Hugh Collier series, originally published in 1939 and now reissued as part of a batch of five by Dean Street Press, is a bold, unusual tale which ultimately, for all its ambition, does not quite come off.

There are two distinct strands to the tale, conjoined through the characters of Celia Holland and Roger Frere. Celia Holland, engaged as a governess to a family in the fictional South American republic of San Rinaldo, is caught up in a revolution just at the time that Roger Frere, a close friend from Blighty, has landed there on a cruise he has taken to recover from the tragic death of his step sister, Sybil, in a car crash in a car which he had bought her as a present. The two seek to escape but are split up, Roger helped by a local woman, Nina, whom he subsequently marries on the trip home in what quickly becomes a loveless marriage.   

In England, in a village in the New Forest, Roger has inherited Frere Court where he lives with his stepmother and his step brother. It is an unhappy household, content to live off Roger’s money but brooding with resentment and thwarted ambition. Nina has not made any attempt to integrate herself into family life and seems only interested in eating more than her fair share of meat and living in the semi-dark.

Meanwhile, there are rumours of something nasty in the wood which scares the horses and dogs and is said to have led to the death from heart failure of a stranger who was cutting through the forest. It does not take much imagination on the reader’s part to work out that the identity of the stranger has a direct link to San Rinaldo and the escape from the revolutionary coup.

Celia, whose father is the local village, is back in the village on a break from her role as governess, resumes her friendship with Roger. She receives an unexpected gift of dates but is prevented from eating them by a neighbour, Major Enderby, who had been something in the Indian police, and now is seeing out a quiet retirement in the village. Enderby has the dates analysed and finds that they were coated not in sugar but in powdered glass, a South American form of murder. Using his contacts at Scotland Yard he voices his concerns at what is going on and Hugh Collier is sent down with the unenviable task of solving the intriguing mystery.

Collier, an empathetic policeman but probably not the brightest, soon finds he has another problem on his hands, the death of a maid at Frere Court from poisoning. It would be fair to say that he struggles to make sense of what is going on and, whilst he has his suspicions, he is as much a victim of Dalton’s misdirection and shoals of piranha as the reader might be. It takes a gripping denouement with a car smash to bring matters to a head.     

What seems to be a story straight from the world of the supernatural turns out to be something more conventional, a tale of jealousy and revenge for previous wrongs. It is not a fair play novel by any stretch of the imagination and even the solution(s) offered leave too many loose ends hanging to be entirely satisfactory.

Nevertheless, it is a great read from an author who has too long fallen into obscurity, perhaps because she was not content to follow the conventions of the genre but saw it as a framework to bend to wherever her imagination took her. She is not content to give the reader an easy ride and demands some attention otherwise witticisms such as calling the reporter Tom Smith Crackers after the inventor of the Christmas Cracker will pass you by. Rather like a cracker the excitement of this book is more in the build up to pulling it apart than what is inside.

London’s First Department Store

Speculation over the future shape of the John Lewis Partnership has once more brought into sharp focus the prospects of the physical retail sector in general and the department store in particular. Despite often occupying prime sites in the centres of cities and towns, their fortunes are in sharp decline, CoStar revealing in August 2021 that with the collapse of BHS, the closure of Debenhams, and the restructuring of other companies, the number of major department stores in the UK had fallen by 83% from 467 in 2016 to seventy-nine. This trend shows no sign of abating.

While William Fortnum and Hugh Mason opened their eponymous store at 181, Piccadilly in 1707 and William Clark his shop at 44, Wigmore Street before bringing William Debenham in as a partner in 1813, they were originally a grocery store and a draper’s respectively, only becoming department stores in the 19th century. The man who developed the department store concept, Anthony Harding, is barely remembered and his store, Harding, Howell’s & Co Grand Fashionable Magazine, ceased trading over 170 years ago.

Founded in 1789 and located in Schomberg House on Pall Mall, now the site of the RAC Club, it was aimed at the newly affluent middle-class woman, offering them the opportunity to shop for a wide range of goods without the inconvenience of walking chaperoned from one shop to another on the public highway. Designed to be as attractive and enticing as possible, it featured glass chandeliers, tall ceilings from which fabrics were hung and large glass-fronted cases in which merchandise was displayed.

The ground floor was divided by glass partitions into four departments. The first, immediately by the entrance, Ackerman’s Repository of Arts enthused in 1809, was “exclusively appropriated to the sale of furs and fans. The second contains haberdashery of every description, silks, muslins, lace, gloves etc. In the third…you meet with a rich assortment of jewellery, ornamental articles in ormolu, French clocks etc, and on the left, with all the different kinds of perfumery necessary for the toilette”.

The fourth department contained millinery, dresses, and textiles, especially chintzes and their accessories. There was “no article of female attire or decoration, but what may be here procured in the first style of elegance and fashion”, the article concluded. “The present proprietors have spared neither trouble nor expense to ensure the establishment of a superiority over every other in Europe, and to render it perfectly unique in its kind”.

Neither did Harding forget his customers’ creature comforts. After ascending the Schomberg’s magnificent painted staircase to the second floor, the first given over to workrooms employing around forty staff, the shopper found Mr Cosway’s breakfast room. “Wines, teas, coffee, and sweetmeats” were available for consumption and the café offered a pleasant environment in which to compare purchases and catch up on the latest tittle-tattle. A “noble apartment [was] used as a shawl room” and, perhaps most importantly, there were public toilets, a rare convenience for women at the time.