Ugh. Now this is one thing I don’t get at all. Mink coats, well, that’s one thing – I don’t think they look nice, quite apart from the skinning of a huge number of minks for each coat. But at least you’re not walking round with a whole gang of little mink heads staring at you all day.
The classic fox fur is just an entire fox without its stuffing – tail, bum and head and all draped round you, in a hideous “Silence of the Foxes” kind of way. Is that just one fox? It looks enormous.
If I was a 1937-era housewife, this advert would definitely work on me. The thought of spending one whole day a week washing all the dirty laundry in one big go, the hard way, is a tiring thought. It’s bad enough having to handwash the essentials on those occasions when my washing machine has given up the ghost, but adding towels, bedding and baby-stained clothes to the mix – well, I’d be pretty happy with someone giving me advice on how to make it all end faster so I could go to the theatre instead.
Oxydol has a bit of a history as a pioneering product – it was the first commercial washing powder produced by Proctor and Gamble, introduced in 1927. And it’s left a lasting impression as the original “soap” behind the term “soap opera” as it became the sponsor of the “Ma Perkins” radio show in 1933, considered to be the world’s first soap opera.
The Mirror, 1937
Maybe that’s why their adverts are little soap operas themselves. Here’s another from 1937:
Lancashire Evening Post, 25th February 1937
If you want the details on what exactly “wash-day” consisted of in the 30s, see my post here of instructions on how to manage it in 1938.
And then there’s this rather lovely little film also from 1938, produced by the American HQ of Oxydol, with the “Scientific Tintometer” mentioned in the advert above, shown in action. I’m rather fascinated by the washtub set up with the electric mangle.
Ping Pong – what a great name for a sport. Although I should properly be calling it Table Tennis, as I’ve recently (and unexpectedly) ended up wading deep through Table Tennis England’s online archives.
Now, this isn’t a sport I know anything about. In fact, there’s only one sport I do know anything about (if you don’t count maypole dancing, and why would you?), and that’s tennis of the non-table variety.
But I’m a sucker for a mystery to solve – and I’ve been pretty successful of late as well (just call me Scooby Doo). Look at this! Today’s puzzle came in the shape of this little medal, tucked inside the box of my Grandad’s wartime memorabilia.
R.B.S.C. Lord Cup Runner Up 1937 medal
R.B.S.C. Lord Cup Runner Up 1937 medal
Engraved on the back is R.B.S.C. Lord Cup Runner Up 1937. And that’s all the information I have. I love having a starting point for some history-surfing, though, so I was off to investigate. I thought it wouldn’t be too difficult to find out about whatever the Lord Cup was, and what R.B.S.C. stood for, but it took quite a lot of searching to find anything.
The only place that currently has those initials is the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, and as it was founded before 1937, I thought I was onto something. That is, until I actually thought about it for a second. I realised that Grandad wasn’t a jet setter, he lived in Lancashire, and this was 1937 – so pre-war and any wartime related travelling hadn’t yet happened. Not that he was in Asia anyway, as far as I know.
But “Sports Club” is probably right for the last two initials, as it sounds like a sporty kind of thing. More searching on “Lord Cup” was rather hampered by the fact that it’s so similar to “Lord’s” and therefore lots of cricket stuff comes up. I’d assumed that the medal was something to do with cricket anyway, just because of the name, even though there was no reason to think so.
Eventually, I found one tiny reference, buried in the aforementioned Table Tennis England site. It turns out that they have an absolute joy of an archive – all their monthly magazines from 1935 to 2000 are beautifully scanned and available to view (although it looks like it was out on hold from 1939-1947 for war time reasons. I guess there wasn’t much table tennis going on during those years.)
Here they are, and very lovely they are too, especially from a design point of view, seeing how aesthetics changed over the years – TTE Archive
In issue 23, from April 1938, there’s a little nugget of information in a piece about events in North East Lancashire. All it says is:
No issue of 1937 mentions The Lord Cup, however – I read them all, and now I feel quite au fait with the personalities and issues of 1930s table tennis. But it’s the right name, and the right place (Ribblesdale and Burnley Sports Club? Rawtenstall and Blackburn Sports Club?) and, importantly, it’s ever so slightly more plausible than my Grandad flying off to Thailand to take part in a tournament. Only slightly though – Mum says he never mentioned table tennis ever, and he wasn’t a sporty man. So, it’s all still a bit of a mystery.
Never mind. It’s a little bit of information, at least, and that makes the medal more interesting to me. BUT! Brilliantly, I also discovered that the England Table Tennis Association magazine was an unlikely arena for satire. Issue 24, May 1938, is rather in a huff with Mr Hitler. The recent Anschluss, the official joining of Germany and Austria, had an extra bonus – Germany could now claim that the women’s world table tennis champion, the Austrian Trudi Pritzi, was, in fact, officially German. Was this cricket? No, it bloody well was not! (In a number of ways.)
They jokingly suggest that England should follow suit, here:
“Perhaps the E.T.T.A. Selection committee should look around and select a promising country. We could get a few world champions. Say, Hungary. Or, perhaps, take over U.S.A. After all, that was once British territory.”
They are not happy at all that the correct procedure was not followed – surely the obvious next step after notifying the League of Nations about the forthcoming Anschluss was to make sure the tennis table situation was all agreed happily? And, more seriously, I presume that the last paragraph references Jewish Austrian players:
“The matter has not been regulated with proper courtesy to the International Federation. No doubt at all that, as in the case last year of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State, the Federation will willingly recognise the desire of two associations for joint representation, when application is made.
Meantime the high-handed attitude is a slight on the I.T.T.F. (International Table Tennis Federation). Even in the matter of the Anschluss of the two states. The German Government notified the League of Nations of what had taken place. In taking over the Austrian T.T.A., however, as far as we know the German T.T.A. has not yet thought it necessary to inform anyone.
When it does the question will probably be raised of the position under Article 2 of many Austrian table tennis players who are well known and are popular in this country and who were expelled from their association within a few hours of its annexation.”
My washing machine is slightly on the blink at the minute. The drying cycle keeps stopping every 20 minutes so you have to keep pushing the button again. And sometimes I forget that I need to do this so it can take hours to get a load dry. Plus, since having a second child my laundry pile has grown so fast! I’m washing every day and yet there’s still a full basket of towels, babygros and felt-tip covered school shirts pretty much all the time.
“Well, boo bloody hoo!” I can hear a 1930s housewife called Elsie saying to me, quite tetchily.
These were the days when you had to have an entire day a week to get your washing sorted – Tuesday is recommended as you’re clearing up after the weekend on a Monday. Soap flakes, blue to get the whites white, cracked hands and all, this is how to do it 1938-style, from Titbits Book of Wrinkles.
Not that they’re grumbling – this is a positive piece emphasising how things have got so much easier for the housewife these days. I dread to think how much harder it must have been before their “labour-savers” were developed. Although reading the piece I’m not entirely sure what they are – soap? A mangle? I remember my Grandma’s mangle, sat on the end of the worktop in her tiny kitchen in Morecambe. I was fascinated by it, and I wish I had it now. But, oh, my RSI-impaired wrist is aching just at the thought of all this effort…
I love boats myself, but I do have a tendency to become indifferent to their fate quite badly. Unfortunately, not having a 1930s pharmacy available to me, I can’t try out their cure:
Who came up with the pluralisations of animals? When and, also, why? They are gloriously poetic but useless – you can hardly use most of them in real life without looking like a self-satisfaction of tossers.
And whoever invented “A Singular of Boars” is just taking the piss.
I was an enormous Beatles fan as a teenager (well, I still am). In fact, they’re the reason I live in Liverpool now. I came up here for a University Open Day twenty-two years ago, spent all of ten minutes in the history department, then took the rest of the day off to look for another kind of history – old Beatles haunts around the city.
I remember reading about how their song Golden Slumbers from the 1969 album Abbey Road came about. Paul McCartney was saying he had seen a music book at his dad’s house with a old song of that name in it. He liked the title and, as he couldn’t read music to find out how the tune went, he wrote his own melody instead.
This is the original, from The Weekend Book, 1938. As you can see, Paul kept part of the lyric mostly intact.
It’s the last hoorah of summer, it’s the weekend, and it’s probably raining. But if you’re planning some time in the great outdoors, here’s some advice on camping cookery and gathering wild food from the 1938 Weekend Book:
The Weekend Book, 1938
I can’t emphasise strongly enough – DON’T MAKE YOUR OWN MICE IN HONEY. That way madness lies.
Also remember “Don’t cook and attempt to eat young bracken shoots because the Japanese do. What suits the hardy races of the extreme East may not suit you.”
Can’t help thinking not only how delicious the breakfast section sounds, but how different the reality would be just a couple of years later.
I have The Weekend Book in two editions, one from 1938 and one from 1955 and I find it interesting to compare the changes between the two. 1938 seems a much more hedonistic time – by 1955 the joys of tobacco are expunged, the first aid section stops looking like the contents of Doctor Dee’s cabinet and turns into something recognisable to us, and most importantly, people apparently don’t eat mice in honey anymore. (That’s unborn mice in honey incidentally. Surely that can’t have been genuinely popular outside of the vendor in The Life of Brian’s wares?)
