Martin Fone's Blog, page 95

Lost Words (11)

For those tempted to take an unauthorised day off work, you might try telling your boss that you are egroting. It will probably take them a day to work out what you are talking about. A long-lost verb from the 18th century to egrote meant to feign an illness in an effort to avoid work.

So much classier than skiving or throwing a sicky, don’t you think?    

Opening Night

A review of Opening Night by Ngaio Marsh – 230208

This is the sixteenth in Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn series, originally published in 1951 and going under the title of Night at the Vulcan. It is a return to Marsh’s home from home, the theatre. Curiously, it is also a sequel to a short story of Marsh’s from 1946, I Can Find My Way Out, which featured a murder in the same theatre, although it was known as The Jupiter at the time, and involving some of the same characters, including Alleyn who carried out the investigations.

This time the newly renamed Vulcan is the scene for a full-length novel. Its strength is its opening sections in which we are introduced to a down-and-out actress, Martyn Tarne, newly arrived from New Zealand and having had her money stolen, who is desperately trying to find some form of paid employment. She arrives at the Vulcan where she meets one of Marsh’s better character creations, the nightwatchman, Fred Badger, who lets her stay overnight in the theatre.   

Although there is no part going in the play which is just about to open, the leading lady, Ella Hamilton, needs a dresser and, in the right place at the right time, Martyn secures the position. As is to be expected from a writer who spent part of her working career as a theatre director, Marsh depicts backstage life superbly, a maelstrom of bitchiness, rivalry, camaraderie, and one-upmanship. While Badger takes a more minor part in the narrative after the opening, his place is taken by the wonderfully characterised Frenchman, Jacko, who is everybody’s friend and seems to do more than his fair share of work as well as being the cast’s confidante.

There are romantic undercurrents within the cast; Ella Hamilton is married to Bennington but in love with the leading man, Adam Poole. Part of the theme of the play revolves around the similarity between Poole and his daughter, a role played by the flighty and nervous young actress, Gay Gainsford. What strikes the cast, though, is the remarkable physical resemblance between Martyn and Poole. A couple of days before the opening night, Martyn is offered the role of understudy to Gainsford, an appointment that spooks Gainsford so much that she refuses to go on stage. With little over thirty minutes notice, Martyn has to tread the boards, a remarkable and almost fairy tale-like transformation in her fortunes.

However, this does not last long. As the cast leave the stage, they are aware of the smell of gas and Bennington is found asphyxiated by gas fumes and beyond any attempts of resuscitation. Was it suicide or was it murder? It is at this point, well beyond the midway point of the story, that Alleyn arrives to take charge of proceedings.

His knowledge of the way that the previous murder at the theatre was carried out proves invaluable. As for motive and whodunit, this proves a little trickier. In the end it proves to be a case involving intellectual property and copyright, a seemingly obscure reason for committing murder but one, nevertheless, I came across in another Golden Age crime novel I read at around the same time.

I have always found Marsh a little bit of a mixed bag, sometimes trying my patience and sometimes bowling me along. Here, I found the book enjoyable, one of her best that I have read to date. The theatre is where she clearly seems comfortable and has produced a wonderful array of characters and a narrative that is fast-paced and leavened with wit. Alleyn’s exchanges with his sidekick, Fox, can be sometimes wearying, but if you have read some of her books before they soon merge into the background. It was also good to see a walk-on part for Charles Lamprey, last seen in a Surfeit of Lampreys, who has now joined the police.

Thoroughly recommended.

Skincare Product Of The Week

Good news for whisky distillers. A significant by-product of the distillation process is pot ale, the residue of fermented wort left in a still after distillation. About two-thirds of the charge – the liquid being distilled – remaining in the boil pot is pot ale and is normally used for animal feed.

However, there might be an alternative and potentially more profitable use for pot ale, according to a study conducted by Robert Gordon University’s School of Pharmacy and Life Sciences in Aberdeen. They have discovered that it provides antioxidant benefits in skincare. They claim that it helps to reduce inflammation and puffiness, calms redness, and provides protection against skin damage from the environment.

Natural skincare manufacturers, Zaza and Cruz based in Inverness, were involved in the study and now use pot ale in their products.

The irony, of course, is that one of distinctive characteristics of a hardened whisky drinker is their tendency to develop a whisky or potato nose, red, bulbous, and pitted. The medical term for this condition is rhinophyma, the consequence of untreated rosacea, a long-term skin condition which affects the face.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was some way of introducing the skincare benefits of pot ale into a wee dram and then everybody would be happy?

The Case Of The Kidnapped Colonel

A review of The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel by Christopher Bush – 230113

The transformation of the character of Ludovic Travers continues apace in The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel, the twenty-fourth in Bush’s Travers series, originally published in 1942 and reissued by Dean Street Press. It is the second of his wartime trilogy and sees our hero transferred to command Camp 55 in Dalebrink Park in Derbyshire. It also includes a secret base where important research is being conducted which could transform the fortunes of the war. There is more to Travers’ appointment than meets the eye as it allows him to work alongside his old mucker, George “The General” of the Yard.

Travers plays second fiddle to Wharton, distinctly less assertive in his theories and investigative style and is reduced to providing valuable information, even if he is not aware of its import at the time. The other major change in the book is that Travers narrates the story, a first but an approach which, I am told, Bush continues throughout the rest of the series. I am usually less than convinced of the wisdom of a first party narrative bit here it works as Travers is integral to the action and not unreasonably can be portrayed as someone who has his finger vaguely near the pulse.

Another unusual feature is that the murder only occurrs relatively late in the story and the victim’s identity for many might have been a surprise. As is to be expected with Bush it is an elegant and complex plot, with plenty of twists, red herrings and not everyone or everything being quite what they initially seem. There are some fascinating insights into wartime Britain which intrigued this reader perhaps more than Bush’s contemporary readership and the tone was less jingoistic and patriotic than I might have expected. Indeed, Bush delights through Travers in pointing out some of the absurdities and pomposity of army life.

The kidnapped colonel is Colonel Brende whose wife attended Travers’ nuptials and who heads up the scientific establishment which our hero is supposed to be protecting. How did someone sneak into a heavily guarded military establishment and why did an experienced military officer allow himself to be taken without putting up much of a fight? Then there is the mysterious army officer who made an audacious escape worthy of mention in the newspapers and then turns up in Derbyshire. Is he friend or foe and why does a Nazi sympathiser, Pamela Craye, seemingly allowed untrammelled access to the camp?

The New England Group, a left-wing band of pacifists, and an over enthusiastic band of the Home Guards add to Travers’ problems, and he suffers a blow to the head at a crucial moment just to add to his woes and discomfort. In an about turn on the usual course of events Wharton is there to put the pieces into a coherent whole.

It was an enjoyable book which stood on its own merits but for those who have followed the series from the beginning is a marked and not unwelcome departure from the norm.

The Bells At Old Bailey

A review of The Bells at Old Bailey by Dorothy Bowers – 230107

The setting of this, the fifth and final crime novel by Dorothy Bowers, originally published in 1947 and now reissued by Moonstone Press, is the small English town of Ravenchurch where Miss Bertha Tidy has a hat shop cum beauty parlour cum café called Minerva’s. Together with its neighbouring village, Long Greeting, where Miss Tidy lives, it has had an unusual spate of suicides in recent months, five in all. If that was not enough, there has been a rash of threatening letters, two of which Miss Tidy has received and which lead her to believe that her life is in danger. She decides to go to the police and is surprised to find that they are already taking an interest in the deaths and that Inspector Raikes of the Yard has been called in.

Inevitably, Miss Tidy is murdered, strangled while she stayed overnight at Minerva’s, and the police have a real case to get their teeth into. Much of the book involves their investigations as they discover that there is more to Miss Tidy and her retail establishment than met the eye. They discover a web of past indiscretions, secrets, hatred, and greed, laced with a healthy dose of blackmail with Tidy acting as the puppet mistress and extorter-in-chief.

There is no shortage of suspects and Bowers takes delight in bringing one to the fore only to knock them down in favour of another. The misdirection is playful and keeps the suspense going. A further murder, of someone who possibly knew too much, brings Raikes closer to the solution of the puzzle, but his light bulb moment is when he asks Jane Kingsley, one of two writers who play a prominent role in the story to read the anonymous letters, particularly the one that is unpunctuated.

Lurking in the background, ever present but little regarded, is Tidy’s Breton housekeeper, Leonie, who attracts the unwanted attention of the local vigilantes and who set fire to Miss Tidy’s fire. In a dramatic finale the truth comes out and while I felt I knew who the murderer was, I was never entirely sure, which added some spice to the story. That said, Bowers is scrupulously fair with her clues and it is all there if the reader is clever and attentive enough to sort the wheat out from the chaff.

I found the book hugely entertaining but its ambition in attempting to understand why five local worthies found it necessary to end their own lives while also addressing the mystery of the identity of Tidy’s killer made it a little unwieldy at times. I found her machinations much more interesting than the hunt for her killer.

The book takes its title from the old nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons which feature the bells of Old Bailey. It is well chosen, the urgency with which the Old Bailey’s bells require settlement of debts incurred by the other church bells mirrors Miss Tidy’s blackmailing style. It also features in the sampler that she has hanging in Minerva’s which she is reluctant to part with even when her neighbourly bookseller, Miss Weaver, another potential suspect, offers her a generous price.

Bowers took a brave step in replacing her previous series detective, Pardoe, with Raikes who is altogether a more refined, almost debonair character, in keeping with the milieu in which he is mixing. She also makes some sharp observations, particularly at the expense of her female characters – no proto-feminist she – and her observations of the stifling nature of provincial life, which after all gave Tidy her ammunition, are well made.

It is well worth reading and makes even more tragic her early death which robbed detective fiction of a writer of considerable talent.

You Can Call Me Al

Aluminium, despite being the third most abundant element on the earth’s crust after oxygen and silicon, and the second most used metal after iron, is, curiously, one of the more recently discovered metals. Chemically bound to other ores, particularly bauxite, it is not found in its purest form naturally. However, alums, hydrated salts containing aluminium and sulphur, have been used for almost five thousand years as a mordant to fix dyes, to preserve leathers, for dressing wounds, and as an early form of deodorant.

When, in 1750, Andreas Margraff developed an alum without sulphur, scientists began to speculate whether there was a previously undiscovered base metal within it, tentatively named “alumine” by Guyton de Morveau in 1761. These suspicions were not confirmed until 1807 when Humphrey Davy used his newly developed electrolysis process to try to isolate aluminium from its mineral source.

Although he failed in his objective, he wrote in a paper published in the Royal Society’s Philosphical Transactions the following year that “had I been so fortunate as to have obtained more certain evidences on this subject, and to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium”.

By the time he penned his Elements of Chemical Philosophy in 1812 Davy was calling it aluminum, a name that the Americans use to this day. The suffix -um rather than the more pleasing -ium offended the classically trained sensibilities of the British scientific community, who coined “aluminium”, a term first appearing in the Royal Society’s review of Davy’s experiments in 1811 and used this side of the Atlantic ever since. 

Davy’s dream of producing a sample of elemental aluminium was realised in 1825 by Hans Christian Ørsted, although it was too small to conduct even the most basic analysis on and his methodology was difficult to replicate. It took until 1845 for Fredrich Wőhler to produce a “grey metallic powder…[with] small tin-white globules [of aluminium], some as large as pins’ heads”, by heating potassium and aluminium chloride together. 

By 1854 Henri Deville, a French chemist, had developed a chemical process for extracting aluminium from bauxite, an expensive process which yielded small quantities of metal, leading him to lament that “every clay bank is a mine of aluminium, and the metal is as costly as silver”. It was even more expensive than that, its use reserved for ostentatious displays such as the aluminium breastplate, spoons, and baby’s rattle commissioned by Napoleon III, and the 100-ounce aluminium pyramid at the tip of the Washington Monument.

Siblings Charles and Julia Hall, intrigued by Deville’s methodology, thought that harnessing the power of the industrial-sized batteries that were now available through electrolysis would produce larger quantities of aluminium more cheaply than Deville’s chemical separation method. They were right, Charles producing marble-sized pellets of aluminium on February 23, 1886, by running an electric current through a solution of aluminium oxide mixed with melted cryolite would ease the process of extracting aluminium and bring down its cost.

Lost Words (10)

In the run up to Valentines’ Day I have been musing about the difficulties writers have in adding some spice and variety to their stories. An adjective that could add an air of mystery to their pre-coital descriptions is dodrantal. It was a term used between the mid-17th century and the late 19th century to describe something that was of nine inches in length.

There might also be a bit of dilorication, a 17th century term used to describe the ripping of a sewn piece of clothing. I will leave the rest to your imagination.

Lost Words (9)

While we all like to think we live in a dichearchy – a just government, a term used in the mid 17th century – in truth, the current administration continues to defedate – pollute or defile, a verb used in 1669 – our constitution.

Love Lies Bleeding

A review of Love Lies Bleeding by Edmund Crispin – 231204

Love Lies Bleeding, the fifth in Edmund Crispin’s Gervase Fen series and originally published in 1948, is a great read and thoroughly entertaining. The characterisation of Fen has been toned down a little, as he admits he has matured, and the narrative seems more focused than in other Crispin novels I have read. There is a lot for your money, three murders, the third seemingly unconnected with the first two, a kidnapping, two thefts and a rather chilling chase episode in a wood and a car chase in which Fen’s pride and joy lets him down and rather comes off worse at it is used to blockade the road in an attempt to apprehend a culprit.

The action centres around Castrevenford School which is preparing for its speech day. A play is being co-produced with the Girls’ School and one of the girls, on a romantic assignation, sees something nasty in the woodshed or rather the science laboratory which discombobulates her to such an extent that she disappears, presumed kidnapped and possibly murdered. Then two of the masters, Love and Somers, are murdered, both around the same time and with some gun, although some distance apart from each other.

It is into this scene of disarray that Fen walks in as a stand-in to deliver the speech and dish out the prizes. The headmaster, Dr Stanford, is keen for the show to go on as planned and Fen, aided by Inspector Stagge who readily admits is out of his depth conduct their enquiries in the background. There are some intriguing clues. Why was the fire on in the room Somers was killed in in the height of summer, why was he wearing his watch the wrong way round, and what was he doing with a fresh piece of blotting paper in his pocket?

As investigations proceed, there is a third murder, a alcoholic woman who lives in a hovel. In her pocket is an Elizabethan miniature and despite the poverty of her surroundings, she has recently had a new stove fitted. According to the plumber, a great comic character, various documents were found there, a piece of information that allows Fen, in what, taxonomically might be described as a bibliomystery, to piece together the disparate pieces and clarify in his own mind what connected the murders and who did what to whom and when and why. Invisible ink, jealousy and strong moral principles all have a part to play.

The plot is complex and intriguing and while the reader might be clever enough to work out the solution, even Fen admits that his ability to associate each murder with a murderer is uncertain and open to other interpretations. In the end, it matters not a jot as all the potential culprits manage to evade the hangman’s noose. The finale is overlong, Fen taking two lengthy chapters to explain his theories to the intrigued Stanford.

However, this is a minor cavil as the rest of the book is glorious, a riot of wit, strong and slightly eccentric characters, and some genuinely comedic episodes. Crispin’s comic writing is at its best when he describes scenes involving the erratic but essential bloodhound, Mr Merrythought, and a “gross and evil smelling” duck with a “truculent gaze”. Add into the mix Crispin’s at times challenging vocabulary and his literary erudition and you have a couple of evenings of pure escapist entertainment that challenges the mind as well as tickles your sense of humour.

I enjoyed it as much as, if not more than, The Moving Toyshop.  

How Charity Shops Took Over The High Street

Charity bazaars, elaborate themed events to raise monies for charitable causes, continued to be part of the social scene until the Second World War, although they were increasingly replaced by less elaborate “pop up” charity fundraising events, such as jumble sales, and, later still, bring-and-buy sales. The first recorded jumble sale was held in Wollaston to raise funds for “church paraphernalia”, as the Northampton Mercury noted on January 5, 1889.

The earliest known fundraising shop was sited in Mayfair, selling flowers to support a mission in East London from 1870. The Salvation Army combined the two prevailing strands of charitable endeavour in the latter part of the 19th century, establishing “salvage stores” to provide cheap second-hand clothing and furniture to the poor while giving Salvationists the opportunity for gainful employment by making and selling high-quality, branded goods, ranging from musical instruments to razor blades. The charity shop opened by the Wolverhampton Society for the Blind on Victoria Street in 1899 sold baskets, chair seating, and mats made by visually impaired men and women in their Alexandra Street workshop.

One of the very first charity shops as we know them now, the Edinburgh University Settlement’s “Everybody’s Thrift Shop”, opened in 1937 at 79a, Nicholson Street. Public reaction was astonishing, the Scotsman reporting on April 27th that people had queued for an hour before it opened its doors and police were present to ensure that the crowds did not overwhelm stallholders. Crystal, evening shawls, and furniture were among the goods on offer and one woman delightedly bought a handsome suit once worn, it was whispered, by a professor.

War spurred a boom in charity shops, the Red Cross opening their first on Old Bond Street in 1941, followed by over two hundred “permanent” and around 150 “temporary” gift shops. A condition of their licence from the Board of Trade was that purchase for re-sale was forbidden. The escalating humanitarian crisis in Nazi-occupied Greece led to the formation of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief in 1943, which the following year organised it first “Greek Week” campaign, soliciting donations from the public and raising £13,000 for the Greek Red Cross to assist the relief effort in Greece.

By 1947 as order was slowly restored to war-torn Europe, the committee, now referred to as Oxfam, converted its surplus stocks of clothing and other goods into cash by opening their first permanent shop in December 1947 on Broad Street in Oxford.  

It was a model that proved successful and by the 1960s many charities had opened their own shops to raise funds mainly through the sale of second-hand clothing. They were beneficiaries of the rising standard of living coupled with the demise of the old “mend and make do” attitude engendered by clothes’ rationing and the rise of throwaway consumerism. The public were now more willing to part with redundant clothing and make impulse purchases.

In the 1980s with supermarkets increasingly forcing specialist shops out of business, the Government gave charity shops significant incentives to take up redundant retail space, providing exemptions from Corporation Tax on profits, putting a zero VAT rating on donated goods sales and discounting property taxed by 80%. This led to them taking over more prime retail locations and spurred a discernible improvement in the way goods were presented and a rise in expertise and professionalism.

Although ideally placed to capitalise on 21st century concerns over sustainability and waste, they are not immune to modern pressures. That bellwether of real life, Mumsnet, reports the impact of rising prices in charity shops, an area of concern when consumers are increasingly buying out of necessity rather than on a whim.

The focus of their charitable endeavours might have changed over time, but charity shops are needed more than ever.