Martin Fone's Blog, page 90

A Breath Of Fresh Air

Peppermint (Mentha x piperita), an indigenous natural hybrid of water mint and spearmint, was first cultivated here in the late seventeenth century. Britain’s epicentre of peppermint cultivation was Mitcham and its environs, nestling in the Wandle’s sleepy headwaters, it provided perfect conditions for the plant to flourish.

Of the 250 acres cultivated by physic gardeners in Mitcham, freeholders who grew medicinal plants, such as lavender, wormwood, camomile, aniseed, rhubarb, and liquorice, more than one hundred were given over to peppermint, according to David Lyson’s The Environs of London vol 1 – County of Surrey (1792). “Forty years since, “he observed, “a few acres only were employed in the cultivation of medicinal herbs in this parish. Perhaps there is no place where it is now so extensive”.

Peppermint was harvested during July and August with yields of around four to six tons of oil per acre. The plant’s size was no indicator of how much oil it would produce. “When the summer has proved wet and cold”, a writer in the Canadian Pharmaceutical Journal, Volume IX (1875-6) noted, ”the plants, although bulky, have been known to produce only a small proportion of oil, and in other years, when the season has been warm and dry, the reverse has been the case, and small plants have yielded a double quantity of oil”. The aroma of peppermint was a distinctive feature of Mitcham’s lanes.

In Lyson’s day the peppermint was sold fresh to be distilled into oil elsewhere but by the early 19th century Mitcham and Wallington had their own stills, smoke from their chimneys billowing into the sky during the harvest season. Even the celebrated Bond Street perfumer, Messrs. Piesse and Lubin, had a distillery on the high road to Mitcham.

As well as for its scent, peppermint was valued for its medicinal properties, the Egyptians using it as a digestive aid and a cure for stomach pains caused by flatulence. By the 18th century it had become a panacea for a wide range of ailments from nausea, vomiting, respiratory infections, and menstrual disorders to cholera, diarrhoea, and laryngitis. It made its first appearance in Sir Hans Sloane’s London Pharmacopoiea in 1721, the definitive list of drugs that English chemists were authorised to sell.

From mediaeval times peppermint was also used as an anaesthetic for toothache and as a mouth freshener, either chewed raw or mixed with vinegar and taken as a mouthwash. The wide availability of sugar in the 18th century led to a dramatic rise in dental decay, fuelling a demand for breath fresheners. Mitcham peppermint made hay, Lysons noting that “it being much used in making a cordial well-known to the dram-drinkers”.

Initially, these early mouth fresheners were taken in liquid form, making them inconvenient for maintaining fresh breath when out and about. In 1780 a confectioner based in Fell Street in the City of London, William Smith, hit upon the idea of making lozenges from sugar, gum arabic, oil of peppermint, gelatin, and glucose syrup.

Called Altoids and marketed as a “stomach calmative to relieve intestinal discomfort”, they were considerably stronger than other mint products around at the time, thanks to the generous quantity of real peppermint oil called for in the recipe. Portable and convenient to take, these curiously strong mints soon became popular both for their medicinal properties and as a piece of confectionary to maintain fresh breath. Altoids, still using the original recipe, remain one of our leading mints.

Lost Word Of The Day (26)

With the revival of fruit and vegetable markets as an antidote to the supermarket, perhaps we will see a revival of the noble profession of the oporopolist. Used in the 17th and 18th centuries to describe a fruit-seller, it gave an appropriate sense of gravitas to a role that was once vital in feeding the nation.

Lost Word Of The Day (25)

Oncethmus was a 17th century noun used to describe the loud and hard cry of a donkey. It has now been superseded by braying, more’s the pity, but there might just be a use for it to describe the ejaculations of politicians as they add background commentary to the words of wisdom falling from the mouth of one of their peers.

The Brading Collection

A review of The Brading Collection by Patricia Wentworth – 230318

At their most basic Patricia Wentworth’s novels have two dominant themes – a murder mystery and some romantic interest. Sometimes the two are stitched seamlessly together while in others the joins are painfully evident. Miss Silver’s seventeenth outing, originally published in 1950 and which goes by the alternative title of Mr Brading’s Collection, is one where the two seem to run in parallel and it is difficult to determine whether it is a romance with a murder thrown in or whether the murder mystery was intended to be the main focal point.

The book opens with Miss Silver turning down a commission. Mr Brading, the owner of a large collection of valuable jewels which he houses in a specially built strongroom, seeks her help as he is convinced that there are some rum but unspecified goings on. She takes a dislike to him and feels that his behaviour towards his secretary, Moberley, is tantamount to blackmail and that he deserves what he gets.

Meanwhile Stacy Mainwaring is facing a dilemma. She has been commissioned to paint the portrait of a larger-than-life stage artist, but it means returning to the area which she fled from a month into her marriage and running the risk of meeting her estranged husband, Charles. Stacy decides to take the commission and, inevitably, runs into Charles. Despite her better instincts, she still has feelings for Charles, portrayed as a masterful character, and goes weak at the knees in his presence.

Stacy is an exasperating character, the sort of woman who does the cause of feminism no favours. She is weak, impressionable, and easily swayed. It turns out that the reason why she fled from her husband was down to a simple misunderstanding and she was too weak or not confident enough to confront him. As a result, the couple endured three wasted years. As far as I was concerned, they were welcome to each other.

As for the murder mystery, inevitably Lewis Brading’s suspicions are well-founded. By the time that Miss Silver receives his cri de coeur, he is dead, shot in his strongroom. On the day of the murder, he had been overheard having a couple of heated telephone conversation and in the afternoon, unusually, he had a string of visitors, the last of whom was Charles who upon finding him dead raised the alarm. Brading’s new will, which left everything to his fiancée, was found in ashes on the desk.     

As the last person to visit him, Charles is the prime suspect and it looks black for him when it is discovered that it was his gun rather than Brading’s that was used to commit the murder. The growing sense of doom surrounding Charles sends Stacy into a tizzy as she fears the worst. Fortunately, Miss Silver is at hand and she directs her old charge from her governess days, Randall March, now Chief Constable, to pay particular attention to the two phone calls that put Brading into a bad mood and the two letters that he received that morning.

After all the fruitless testing of alibis, these hold the keys to unlocking the mystery. The resolution sees an increase in dramatic tension with a car chase, a plunge over a cliff near Catherine Wheel, the setting of the fifteenth novel, and a death bed confession. There are enough clues for the reveal not to be too much of a surprise and with Charles and Stacy finding a way to patch up their differences, Wentworth ensures a happy ending.

One of Wentworth’s strengths is her story-telling, he ability to engage her reader and keep them interested, even if the material is not the best. This book is a case in point.

Delivery Of The Week

According to Kantar 12.6% of UK grocery sales were carried out online in March 2022 compared with 8% three years earlier. Clearly this is a trend that is set to continue, but putting the fag of selecting your weekly shop into the hands of someone earning the minimum wage is not without its dangers. How do you know that what you are going to get is what you ordered and that the fruit and vegetables you receive are the best available and not old stock that the store is desperate to get rid of?

Almost half of supermarket deliveries in the last twenty-three months, a Which? Survey reveals, have included a substitute item. Some are just plain bizarre, dog chews instead of chicken breasts, toilet rolls instead of bread rolls, a bag of onions instead of a loaf of bread, shoe polish instead of fruit, an Easter egg instead of hot dog rolls, while others are just dangerous. One shopper with food intolerances reported having their gluten-free product of choice substituted for one containing wheat while vegans and vegetarians reported receiving meat and dairy products instead of their free-from choice.

If you are going to play the lottery of online shopping product substitution, which supermarket is the best and which is the one to avoid? The survey marked the major supermarkets on their choice of substitution items. Waitrose fared best, receiving four stars. Aldi, Amazon Fresh, Sainsbury’s and Tesco scored three stars, while Asda, Iceland and Morrisons scored just two.

Call me old fashioned, but I will continue to do my weekly shop in person. You cannot beat seeing what you are getting before you buy.

The Lost Gallows

A review of The Lost Gallows by John Dickson Carr – 230315

The third of five novels in Carr’s Henri Bencolin series, The Lost Gallows was originally published in 1931 and has now been reissued as part of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series. There is a dark, gothic atmosphere and a distinctly absurdist, surreal feel to the story. After all, we have a disappearing street, a variation upon which Edmund Crispin was to use to better effect in The Disappearing Toyshop, Egyptian curses, a car which careers through the streets of London with its driver dead at the wheel, a gloomy, rabbit-warren of a London club, a shower of ominous gifts including a model of gallows complete with noose and a victim, and the brooding presence of Jack Ketch, the original hangman of Tyburn.

The story is narrated by Bencolin’s side-kick, the American Jeff Marle, and begins when Bencolin’s friend, the British Assistant Police Commissioner, Sir John Landervorne, narrates a strange tale of a young man getting lost in a London pea-souper – there is a lot of fog in this novel which adds to the sinister atmosphere – and sees the shadow of a gallows reflected on a wall and man climbing up some stairs towards the noose. Later the trio witness an astonishing sight – a car careers through the streets of London and comes to a halt outside the Brimstone Club, its driver dead, having been stabbed and dead for some time. How had the car been driven?

The chauffeur was employed by a wealthy Egyptian, Nezam Al Moulk, who is being hounded by messages, gifts and calling cards from Jack Ketch, leaving him fearing for his life…and then he disappears. Jack Ketch seems to be operating from Ruination Street but there is no such street in the London gazetteer either at the time the story was set or over the previous couple of centuries. It seems that that the key to solving the mystery and stopping Jack Ketch is to discover the whereabouts of the street that has vanished into thin air.

Bencolin is a hard sleuth to like. Cold, unerringly right, always challenging his acolytes, and by implication the reader, to keep up with him and join up the dots and follow the trail of the clues. There is little sense of how he gets to where he does in his thought processes and the next breakthrough in the case is presented as something that has come almost out of the blue, thanks to the Frenchman’s deductive powers. When there is a development, he is always suggesting that he was aware of it, a trait that becomes a little wearing after a while.

Although Carr’s reputation was later founded on his mastery of both the locked room mystery and the impossible crime, there is precious little of either in the book and what there is rather mundane by his later standards. How ingress is achieved to Al Moulk’s locked apartment is relatively easy to deduce as is the necessity for an accomplice to help Ketch in his devilish machinations. Carr does a much better job, though, on the identity of Ketch. The number of coincidences at key moments and the golden rule of suspecting the least obvious got me close to establishing the identity of the culprit but I was not absolutely sure until the final reveal.

For all the fiendish plotting, the culprit made some fatal errors and when the plot is boiled down to its basics, it is a story of revenge on behalf of the person that Al Moulk brought to an untimely and unjustified end. There is a nice twist at the end to ensure that justice is served all round.

It was an entertaining enough book and kept me interested throughout. It was atmospheric and teetered just on the right side of the ludicrous but Bencolin is too cold a fish for my liking.

Murder In Vienna

A review of Murder in Vienna by E C R Lorac – 230313

The last time I was in Vienna, the city centre was knee deep in snow which made an enchanting backdrop to the stunning architecture that graces the Austrian capital. One of Lorac’s strengths as a writer is her sense of place, her ability to convey an impression of the grandeur of the buildings, the delightful expanses of the parks in a few short sentences. I felt I had been transported back, minus the snow.

This is one of the later books in Lorac’s Robert Macdonald series, the forty-second, originally published in 1956. It is set in contemporary Vienna, which had just emerged out of occupied control. However, the vestiges of foreign occupation and the slightly surreal impression of a defeated and once proud country feeling its way towards freedom linger on. There is not the menace that lurks on every page of Graham Greene’s Third Man but, nonetheless, this is not a city that is at ease with itself.

This is another piece of crime fiction involving a busman’s holiday. Macdonald is taking a well-earned holiday to Vienna – not the most obvious holiday destination at the time, I would have thought – but, as is the way with these stories, is soon dragged in to help out in an investigation that results in three murders and two serious assaults.

That Macdonald chooses to fly to Vienna on a Vickers Viscount seems to be a novelty, a fascinating insight into the advances in air passenger travel in the 1950s. The Viscount, the turboprop powered airliner, went into service in 1953. Even so, it had to make a scheduled stop at Zurich. It was there that the chain of events that led to mayhem on the streets of Vienna began.

As is the way with these stories, the central characters in the story are fellow passengers on the Viscount flight, who all seem to bump into each other when they are staying in Vienna. A young woman, Elizabeth le Vendre, who had befriended Macdonald on the flight, is found unconscious, having been attacked in a Viennese park during a thunderstorm. It emerges that a girl wearing Elizabeth’s coat had been menaced earlier. Then a celebrated writer, Walsingham, is killed, ostensibly having been knocked down in a road accident, but later it transpires that he was murdered earlier, and his body dumped so that it would be run over. A chauffeur by the name of Pretzel is also murdered, his death collateral damage.

The murder of a British subject leads Scotland Yard to cancel Macdonald’s leave and detail him to help the Viennese authorities with their authorities. A ubiquitous press photographer, Webster, also a passenger on the flight, seems to be helpful and offers valuable information, although is he really what he appears to be and is his aunt as innocently naïve as she seems?

The plot is engaging enough and the mystery, although not one of Lorac’s best, boils down to a competition to secure the rights to what were considered to be valuable memoirs from the Nazi era. The key takeaway is how valuable the ability to recognise faces is, although it can lead you into trouble. The finale is tense, and it has its moments of humour, particularly in the way that one of the characters protects themselves from the fatal consequences of a savage attack. What I missed, though, was any sense of character development. Only Webster really seemed to come alive on the page.

The Kindle edition does her no favours as it is littered with typos. One for the completist, I would say.

Another Taste Of Big Mac

Having patented his new waterproof fabric, Charles Macintosh initially just produced the cloth, leaving tailors in Glasgow and then London to fashion it into garments. Initial reactions were mixed. Tailors found the material difficult to work with. Customers found that while the coats were undeniably waterproof, they became stiff in the cold, tended to become sticky in the heat, and gave off a strong, unpleasant smell. The rubber layer would leak through stitching holes and would deteriorate rapidly when it met the natural oils of wool. Nevertheless, Charles scored some notable early successes, including equipping the crew of Sir John Franklin’s 1824 Arctic expedition with waterproof garments.

Thanks to Thomas Hancock, Macintosh was able to solve the problem of the material’s unpleasant odour and sensitivity to temperature. A pioneer of rubber technology, Hancock had invented a “masticator” in 1819 which transformed scraps of rubber into blocks or sheets and, in 1825, a process to produce artificial leather with masticated rubber.

The acknowledged superiority of the fabric produced by Hancock’s process led to the two men agreeing to collaborate by 1830, merging their businesses, and opening a factory in Manchester where garments were made. They also developed an automatic spreading machine which replaced Macintosh’s paint brushes. It was only in 1837 when Macintosh’s patent had expired that Hancock patented his masticator and spreader (no 7344).

Perhaps Macintosh’s greatest early commercial success came in 1841 when the British army placed an order to equip all its troops with waterproof clothing. So functional and hard wearing was it that it soon became standard army issue.

The company’s fortunes temporarily dipped after Macintosh’s death in 1843, curiously in part due to the boom in rail travel. Enclosed railway carriages instead of exposed horse-drawn coaches meant that the hardy traveller barely had to protect themselves against the weather. It was just a temporary blip, a successful appearance at the Great Exhibition of 1851 rejuvenating the fortunes of Macintosh’s material to such an extent that his name became the portmanteau word for all rainwear, even if the insensitive Sassenachs had inserted an unwanted k into it.

James Syme (1799-1870), As a boy Syme was a chemical enthusiast. At 18 he discovered and published a method of waterproofing cloth by rubberizing. A Glasgow chemist, Charles Mackintosh, patented the technique, gave his name to it and made a fortune.

Macintosh, though, was not the first to recognise that a rubber solution could repel water. Fellow Scot, surgeon and chemist, James Syme had noted, as he described in a letter written on March 5, 1818, and published in Thomson’s Annals of Philosophy, that “as coal tar in every respect bears the strongest resemblance to petroleum, it occurred to me that by distilling it a fluid might be procured which, like naphtha, should have the property of dissolving caoutchouc [natural rubber]”. His account detailed his success in producing “a valuable substance which may be obtained from coal tar” and concluded by hoping that his discovery would extend “its use to the many purposes for which it is so peculiarly well adapted”.

A surgeon at heart, Syme did not pursue the idea further, but his process was identical to that which Macintosh patented five years later, leading to suggestions that Macintosh had familiarised himself with Syme’s work before conducting his own experiments. There was once crucial difference though; Syme had not considered the concept of sandwiching a layer of rubber between two layers of fabric.

Even that was not unique to Macintosh. The Aztecs had used natural latex to waterproof fabrics, an idea adopted by Spanish scientists who used a rubber lining to leak-proof containers used to store mercury. The eminent British balloonist, Charles Green, had made a balloon envelope that was waterproofed with a rubber inner in 1821, a variation on the French practice of making the fabric of their balloons gas tight by impregnating it with rubber dissolved in turpentine.

Macintosh’s genius was to pull together these various strands, making a fabric that was not only truly waterproof but also easy to fashion and to wear and exploiting it commercially for all he was worth. That macs are still part of our wardrobe after two centuries is worthy of celebration.

Lost Word Of The Day (24)

Every now and again I come across a word that is so marvellous that I wonder how we were so foolish to allow the sink into obscurity. One such word from the 17th century is obrumpent, an adjective used to describe the act of breaking or bursting. The noise made by obrumpent balloons is one to cherish, methinks.

Lost Word Of The Day (23)

Have you felt the need to make a powerful change to your life, behaviour, or situation? Me neither, but if you did, you could be described as novaturient. The 17th century adjective was used to describe the compelling need to make a change. Its root comes from the Latin verb “novare”, meaning to make new.

With the shelves of book shops groaning with self-help manuals, there is clearly a market to feed the desires of the novaturient.