A letter from an Oslo publication printed in PTO Magazine, 1940.
I’ll confess, I’m confused. I thought flea circuses were basically a mime act. And yet this goes into quite some detail on how to train your flea.
Were they ever…..real?
Postscript – mind blown. Here’s some British Pathe footage of a real 1940s flea circus:
“Don’t get too close. Those microbes are man-eaters!”
A lovely clipping about the astronomer Herschel (most famous for his Uranus, of course). This is his supposed last wish on his death-bed, which was in Slough, 1822. All he wanted was to see the dark side of the moon.
The future Queen Elizabeth helped the war effort in 1940, knitting a pair of socks for one “lucky” soldier. And another Tommie got perhaps a slightly racier pair, knitted by Princess Margaret Rose.
From PTO Magazine, 1940.
This week I’m going to be posting up bits and pieces I have dating from the Second World War, in honour of Remembrance Sunday on 9th November. Of course, this is particularly poignant this year, being 100 years since the start of the First World War.
And on Sunday I’ll be posting some of my own family history – my Grandad’s memorabilia, stuffed inside the most sinister book I own.
Today’s piece is from PTO Magazine, 1940. George Bernard Shaw was a devoted vegetarian, and in a letter to the Daily Express, he pleads that veggies are given sufficient rations, lest they lose their singular ferociousness:
It’s a woman’s life in the Frontier Nursing Service of Kentucky. In 1940 they held a cocktail party ON HORSEBACK. And not only that, but Mrs Edwin Allen Locke jumped her horse over a table after four of said cocktails. Rock and very much Roll.
A letter from the Daily Express, 1940, printed in the digest magazine, PTO.
Not entirely sure what would have changed “if only he’d known” in the situation, really though….
I love an old advert. The pictures, the phrasings, the products….you can often deduce a lot about the time period from very little information. Which is why www.gypsycreams.org is one of my favourite corners of the web – its interesting magazine adverts and articles from the 50s to the 70s were a big influence on me doing a similar thing with my old books.
Having said that, I’m not quite sure what to make of this advert for “Gland therapy” from the February 1940 issue of PTO Magazine.
But I am reminded of the euphemisms in Monty Python’s Tobacconists sketch:
Personality tests and analysis have been going from strength to strength since Carl Jung published “Personality Types” in 1921. And, as spoofed in Monty Python’s Papperbok, I remember religiously reading them in my teenage magazines and being slightly confused that the conclusions were pretty wide of the mark, as if I was deficient in some way from what the all seeing eye of the test proclaimed. I didn’t really consider it was just a journalist scribbling something together for a deadline. Today, if you’re on Facebook, you’re bombarded by the things, and they get more and more ridiculous. This post is inspired by the stupidest one I’ve seen, Which Classic Rock Band are You? As determined by what you like with your coffee and which sport you’re most interested in. (I’m Creedence Clearwater Revival). So, have a go at this one from PTO Magazine, February 1940, “Are You Frustrated?” And I hope for your sake you’re not a psychopath Type C. Although, frankly, there are no winners here.
PTO was a digest magazine of the month’s news from various outlets and this edition has a fantastically confident cover for wartime: