I love picking a newspaper at random from the British Newspaper Archive and reading it all – or nearly all, tiny print in the older papers is tough on the eyes, even with some zooming in.
Living in Liverpool, local papers are the most interesting of course, filling in gaps in local history and locating long-gone establishments, as well as hopefully finding interesting titbits and odd, forgotten stories. There’s mysteries never to be solved – like one note I spotted (but can’t find again) imploring a specific young lady to come to a certain address, “where she might find something to her advantage.”
I’ve been looking at and wondering about a few random things from the Liverpool Mercury in 1841. Like this advert for a talk at the Liverpool Royal Institution (a learned society for science, literature and the arts, which existed until 1948), with the none-more-Victorian title of “Customs, Habits, Dress, Implements, &c., &c. of the less civilised Nations.”
What particularly interests me are the entry costs – for gentlemen, ladies and “strangers“. I’m presuming this may mean non-members of the Institution, but it doesn’t explain.
Liverpool Mercury, 12th March 1841
Talk of a potential discussion on “The White and Black Race” is interesting as it would plan to go into detail on “our argument in support of the position that mind is of no particular colour or climate.”
Liverpool Mercury, 12th March 1841
But this is my favourite bit. I’m an avid reader of the Victorian problem page, usually called “Correspondence“‘, and which draw a veil over the actual questions asked, only printing the answers for the sender’s benefit. Many times the question is obvious in the answer, sometimes the questioner’s handwriting is also critiqued, but, on occasion, you get an unfathomable beauty like this. I can only imagine what inspired the advice of “There is no other course but emigration to adopt under the circumstances presumed by W.S. in his communication…”
In 1949, Christmas and New Year’s Eve fell on Sundays, meaning they were subject to the byelaws that meant dancing must be finished by midnight. That also meant no singing Auld Lang Syne on the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, as that meant the festivities would spill over past 12am.
And so places like Leeds and Harrogate decreed that all dancing should stop at 11.45pm, everyone could sing Auld Lang Syne 15 minutes early and boom, you’re all wrapped up and out of the door for midnight.
Scarborough and Blackpool were no party to this madness, they made a special concession of later timings for the occasion.
I’m not sure why it’s noted that “festivities in the North” will be curtailed. Either it’s because this was The Yorkshire Post, and they didn’t give a monkeys what was happening in the South, or somehow the rules were different across the North-South divide. I haven’t been able to find out…
Yorkshire Post, 1st December 1949
May my evening live up to this lovely home video of a house party on December 31st, 1949, where some very stylishly dressed people in Ontario are getting gently leathered. I particularly like the bowl of baubles being offered round the table, as if he might just be pissed enough to eat them.
And here’s a short film marking the turn of the year from 1949 to 1950 (with Auld Lang Syne as it sounded at 11.45pm.)
The story of the ghost ship the Ourang Medan has never been as famous as that of the Marie Celeste, despite being more gruesome in its details. The entire crew, ship’s dog included, were found dead with their mouths open and their eyes staring, and yet there was no sign of what had been responsible for their deaths, bar some desperate SOS messages sent during the tragedy. It’s a mystery in more ways than one – not only has much time been spent trying to unpick what might have happened on board via many, ever-more fanciful, theories, but there’s a large school of thought that says the story is actually pure fiction.
Nothing’s been conclusively proved either way, except….I think I’ve found some evidence that will change this story for good. As far as I’m concerned, I think my new information proves that it’s merely a modern fabrication, an urban legend, or whatever the nautical equivalent of that would be.
There are a lot of interesting blogs detailing what is known of the story or, rather, what is not known. There’s Seeks Ghosts, and M. B. Forde’s site too. There’s a lot of differing details and speculation, so I’m going to tell the story as it appears on Wikipedia.
The story first appeared in the Dutch-Indonesian newspaper, The Locomotive, or De locomotief: Samarangsch handels- en advertentie-blad in instalments between 3-28 February 1948 and is, in brief, this.
At some point around June 1947, a SOS message in Morse code was sent by the Dutch freighter ship, the Ourang Medan. The ship was in distress in a position 400 nautical miles south-east of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, and the messages were both cryptic and chilling. As received by the US ships the City of Baltimore and the Silver Star, the first message said “S.O.S. from Ourang Medan * * * we float. All officers including the Captain, dead in chartroom and on the bridge. Probably whole of crew dead * * *.” Some morse gibberish followed, and then the second, and final, message sent by a doomed radio operator was received. It simply said “I die.”
The Silver Star located the Ourang Medan and its crew boarded the ship, which appeared to have suffered no damage. They found the crew were dead to a man, and all the corpses lay on their backs in the aforementioned manner – eyes staring, mouth open as if screaming, looking as if they were “horrible caricatures” of themselves. The crew of the Silver Star found nothing that explained the situation and planned to hook up the ship to tow it into the nearest port. But before they could do this, a fire broke out in one of the cargo holds and the would-be rescuers evacuated back to their own ship. Shortly afterwards, they saw the Ourang Medan explode and sink into the water, never to be seen again.
Other, later, versions of the story conclude that the date was actually February 1948, and the position of the ghost ship was instead in the Straits of Malacca, in Indonesian waters. The tale had apparently originated from a surviving German crew member of the Ourang who swam ashore to Toangi atoll in the Marshall Islands. There, he told his story to a missionary, who in turn told it to Silvio Scherli of Trieste, Italy.
Mr Scherli was the source of the story in the Dutch newspaper. The reason the crew member gave for the mystery was that the ship had been carrying an illicit load of sulphuric acid, and fumes escaping from broken containers had overpowered the crew. There have since been many other theories about what other top secret cargo the ship may have been carrying instead – being not long after the end of the Second World War, a cargo of poisonous gases has been suggested.
There are a few issues with the story – not least that there is no official registration for a ship named the Ourang Medan and, while the Silver Star did exist, by 1948 it was renamed the SS Santa Cecilia and more often to be seen around Brazil, not the Strait of Malacca.
Following the 1948 Dutch articles, there appeared the earliest known English reference to the story, published by the United States Coast Guard in the May 1952 issue of the Proceedings of the Merchant Marine Council. The original narrator Silvio Scherli also apparently wrote a report on it for the Trieste “Export Trade” publication of September 28, 1959.
Wikipedia, December 2015
1952 was the earliest known mention of the story in English – that is, until now.
If the incident occurred in 1947-48, the first reporting of it was in 1948, and the first mention in English was in the US in 1952 – then how come I’ve found British newspaper articles on the subject from 1940? Written at least 7 years before the tragedy was even supposed to have happened. Peculiar, eh?
I’ve found mentions in two UK newspapers – The Yorkshire Post and The Daily Mirror, dating from subsequent days in November 1940. Here they are:
From the Yorkshire Evening Post, 21st November 1940:
Yorkshire Evening Post, 21st November 1940
Yorkshire Evening Post, 21st November 1940
And The Daily Mirror, 22nd November 1940: The Daily Mirror, 22nd November 1940
The full pages, just to show they are indeed from 1940 – Yorkshire Evening Post, 21st November 1940 Yorkshire Evening Post, 21st November 1940
And – The Daily Mirror, 22nd November 1940 The Daily Mirror, 22nd November 1940
These articles are available on the endlessly fascinating British Newspaper Archive, if you want to check yourself.
The details in both reports are the same, although it’s more expanded in The Yorkshire Post. The reason for this is that they’re both from the same source – The Associated Press. As the AP says, it’s “the world’s oldest and largest newsgathering organization.” If it originated there, I would speculate that there must be an awful lot more newspapers in the world who reported this story in November 1940.
Many details are the same as the 1948 version, with notable exceptions. There’s nothing of the lurid details of how the dead crew looked; the ship is a steamship, not a freighter; and the location has changed again. In this first report, the ship was found south-east of the Solomon Islands.
Here’s a map of that Pacific area, I’ve marked the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands and the Strait of Malacca:
See how they’re a very long way away from each other, although admittedly in a sparsely populated region? In 1940, it’s the Solomon Islands, in 1948 it’s suddenly 1300 miles north in the Marshall Islands, and finally it’s located a whole 4000 miles further west in the Strait of Malacca. I think it would be hard to have been so mistaken as to where this ship was found.
Significantly, the SOS messages are markedly different. This is very interesting.
The first says “SOS from the steamship Ourang Medan. Beg ships with shortwave wireless get touch doctor. Urgent.” The second – “Probable second officer dead. Other members crew also killed. Disregard medical consultation. SOS urgent assistance warship.” The article says the ship then gave her position and ended with the final, incomplete, message “crew has…”
I suppose there was no need to mention warships the next time the story was dusted off, in post-war 1948.
Another notable difference is that the story claims to come directly from a merchant marine officer from the rescuing ship. Not a washed-up survivor from the sunken ship telling his story to a missionary. That rescuing ship wasn’t named here, and for that matter it wasn’t named in the 1948 version either. The detail of the Silver Star was thrown in later down the line, on its journey from newspaper report to legend.
BUT, and I think this is the crux of the story, we have the same detail that the information comes from Trieste, and was dated that very Thursday morning as well – in other words, that same day it appeared in the evening paper.
Trieste is the crucial link, as we can therefore assume that Silvio Scherli of Trieste is the same person involved in this story, as he was in the later version. If he was the source of the 1940 story, then there’s simply no way he could have truthfully reported on the matter in 1948, describing it as a new incident. It could be the case that there was another source of the story in Trieste in 1940 – perhaps someone who told it to Silvio? If the story came from Indonesia, say, then the sources could be numerous. But Trieste seems too specific, and too distant, to have many witnesses or other people who knew about this story from far away. The Associated Press archives, or other newspaper stories which blossomed from their reports, might be the key here.
The Locomotive stated clearly that the entirety of its information came from Scherli – it ended its series with a very sceptical “This is the last part of our story about the mystery of the Ourang Medan. We must repeat that we don’t have any other data on this ‘mystery of the sea’. Nor can we answer the many unanswered questions in the story. It may seem obvious that this is a thrilling romance of the sea. On the other hand, the author, Silvio Scherli, assures us of the authenticity of the story.”
What’s that I can smell? Is it a broken casket of sulphuric acid, or is it somebody’s pants on fire?
It seems a likely theory that this “romance of the sea” began and ended with Mr Scherli. And if so, perhaps he got the taste for embellishing his story as the years went on – adding the staring eyes and gaping mouths and changing the location. Ourang Medan translates as “Man from Medan” in Indonesian or Malay and perhaps the city of Medan in Indonesia, which is directly adjacent to the Malacca Strait, may have belatedly felt like a more suitable location for a ship bearing its name.
It’s an area where mysteries could, and obviously did, thrive – in fact the Marshall Islands have also been proposed as the site where Amelia Earhart crash-landed.
In the end, my theory is that Silvio didn’t get quite the notoriety he sought the first time round, the news buried by the events of the ongoing world war. Perhaps he sat on it until the war ended, world news quietened down, and tried again. But maybe there’s more still to be found in how this story got off the ground.
Either way, don’t believe everything you read in the papers.
Going to school in the 1980s, the year 2000 was a popular subject for homework on predictions about the state of the world by the turn of the new millennium. It was just far enough away to be an effective exercise, but soon enough in our lifetimes to guess at where things were heading.
I remember going on a school trip to Hastings when I was about 10, in the mid-80s, where we visited what I remember to be some kind of cave. In one of the walls there was an arrow half-buried in the stone, point-first, Excalibur-like. The guide told us that the arrow pointed to a chamber where a copy of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that described the death of King Harold was buried, and that this time capsule was due to be opened in the year 2000. Of course, it would have to be opened very carefully, as the delicate paper of the document could likely crumble to dust. This I found to be extremely frustrating – just open it now, while I’m here, I thought, not at some point in the distant future, when I’m the grand old age of 26! I can’t imagine that far ahead!
I’ve always remembered this trip and the desire to see exactly what was buried in the wall, and I’ve tried a number of times to search on the internet to see if it was indeed opened in 2000. Oddly, I can’t find any reference to it at all, and now I wonder if it was real at all, or just some kind of faux-tourist attraction.
Later, in 1990, my class were asked to write an essay about “The World in Ten Years Time”. I found it in an old schoolbook a few years ago and I was left slightly thunderstruck on reading it again. Alongside my predictions about the Queen Mother having died (I thought, wrongly, that was a certainty) and stamps having been abolished for some reason, I had written that Princess Diana had died in a car crash in 1997, with a mysterious unidentified car being involved in some way. Funnily enough, I remember writing the bits about the Queen Mother and the stamps, but had no memory of writing about Princess Di at all. Extremely peculiar. And now, after my parents moved house, I don’t know where that book is, so I can prove exactly nothing.
Still – predictions of the year 2000 have been going on for a long time. Here’s a handful, as they appeared in the local press over the last couple of hundred years.
I wonder when the first year 2000 prediction happened? I certainly haven’t seen one earlier than this, from the 1833 Taunton Courier, although I bet there’s loads of Age of Enlightenment philosophers that considered it.
“An Author of Romance, foreshadowing the events of the year 2000, among other wonders, predicts that pens will write of themselves; and the Patentee of the Hydraulic Pen may be said to have all but accomplished the anticipated miracle. The invention will be invaluable to book-keepers, authors, and reporters; to all, especially, who wish to keep a clean hand either in court or counting house.”
I think they mean a non-dipping pen, an alternative to the quill and inky fingers, so a successful prediction there, what with ink cartridges and biros.
The Taunton Courier, 17th July 1833
The Hull Daily Mail in 1901 told a joke about the battle of the sexes in the year 2000, and the shocking notion of women wearing trousers, inspired by the Suffragette movement.
“Here,” said the husband of the New Woman, entering a tailor shop and laying a bundle on the counter, “you will have to alter these trousers. I can’t wear them as they are.”
“Really,” replied the tailor, as he opened the bundle, “you must excuse me, my dear sir, those are your wife’s.”
Women now wear trousers – correct.
Hull Daily Mail, 6th June 1901
The Yorkshire Evening Post of 1936 had a surprising article on predicted population growth by 2000. Instead of overcrowding and spiralling numbers, Dr S.K. Young of Durham thought that the birth rate would fall on account of women joining the workplace (if this is what he means by “amazons”) and what’s more, being needed in the workplace.
His calculations figured that the population of the whole of the UK in 2000 would be no more than that of 1936 London (which was around 4.3 million). This wasn’t a crazy thought – the population of London had indeed been decreasing since the turn of the century and the birth rate of the UK was about as low as it has ever been in 1936. 1920 still holds the record for the highest birth rate and it had tumbled dramatically over the next decade so it was a justifiable, if incorrect prediction – the population of London alone is now 8.5 million. Some interesting information on the ups and downs of the UK birth rate and baby booms is here.
Yorkshire Evening Post, 4th December 1936
Still in The Yorkshire Evening Post, the paper published a quite detailed consideration of what 2000 might look like. It was December 1949 and the imminent new year bringing the second half of the twentieth century with it, provoked a look ahead at what this half-century would bring.
Yorkshire Post, 30th December 1949
Here it is in more detail. It predicts “Extensive use of helicopters to take business men almost from doorstep to doorstep; The disappearance of trams from city roads; Segregation of different forms of traffic; A tendency for housing and industry to be concentrated in more compact areas to conserve agricultural land; In the home, television, refrigerators, washing machines and labour-saving devices as commonplace as radios; Open fireplaces replaced by cleaner and more economic forms of heating.”
Apart from the helicopters, this is pretty astute predicting. Although the death knell of most of the trams was pretty evident by then.
Yorkshire Post, 30th December 1949
Yorkshire Post, 30th December 1949
Yorkshire Post, 30th December 1949
And finally, still from The Yorkshire Evening Post, comes a prediction from 1955. The British Newspaper Archive only goes up to the mid-50s, and I expect as the century went on, there were many more such articles.
Here, an exhibition at Olympia which envisioned a 2000-era Soho is described. It’s a very futuristic vision, “a city clothed in glass“, edging towards the kind of dystopian future seen in 1960s and 70s sci-fi. Soho is encased in a glass dome, on top of which (on top!) are 24-storey blocks of flats, made of glass in the shape of stars. Helicopters land on the roof of those flats, and there is no traffic, people getting around by gondola on a system of canals.
“A rather soulful commentary….added a hope that man, in this new Soho environment, “might be no longer vile”. The paper concludes that while “Soho at rooftop height looked uncomfortably like Aldous Huxley’s vision in “Brave New World”, it was more interesting than some of the features seen in “the bad old one”. Although this didn’t come to pass, it was successful if boiled down to the essential fact that glass was probably the most important feature of architecture in the second half of the century.
The Yorkshire Post, 17th November 1955
In short – I think the transport systems of today might come as a bit of a disappointment to the people of the past. Not too many personal helicopters and gondolas.
This is an area I could research for years, really. I’m endlessly fascinated by future predictions – and I’m especially amused by the not-entirely-serious 100 years of fashion I found in an old Strand magazine here, and one of my favourite childhood books on what life would be like in 2010 here.
I’ve got a rather strange prediction for the year 2000 in a book of inventions from 1949 too, now I come to think of it. I’ll need to dig that out…..
This August the most zeitgeisty thing you could be doing was voting in the Labour Party leadership election. Specifically, voting for Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party leadership election, if the “Jez We Can” polls are to be believed.
That his campaign has steadily grown in strength while press coverage for him has been relentlessly negative is fascinating – even The Guardian of all papers ran article after article warning of the disaster to come if he was elected. But who knows what will happen? We learned how unreliable polls could be a few months ago on the day of the General Election. And if Corbyn does win, maybe it will be a disaster, maybe it will be the start of a new era, or maybe it will be less interesting than anyone currently thinks. As far as I’m concerned though, this is an exciting time for grass-roots Labour supporters right now.
As we’ve seen though, the press is overwhelmingly against Corbyn. And I can’t see that changing if he is elected leader. The furore of the last few days over the idea of reinstating women-only train carriages reminds me of the 1980s, where “looney left” was thrown around as a conversation-ending, ridicule-inducing tactic for left wing policy ideas. Notice how there wasn’t this furore when Tory Transport Minister Claire Perry mooted the idea herself not too long ago?
“Some women have raised with me that a solution to the rise in assault and harassment on public transport could be to introduce women only carriages. My intention would be to make public transport safer for everyone from the train platform, to the bus stop to on the mode of transport itself. However, I would consult with women and open it up to hear their views on whether women-only carriages would be welcome – and also if piloting this at times and modes of transport where harassment is reported most frequently would be of interest.”
It wasn’t his idea, and it’s not even something he’s definitely proposing. He’s simply listened to women giving their opinions and offered a consultation process on their brainstormed ideas to solve a problem.
It might well be decided to be an ineffective idea, in the end, but shouting down the debate before it even starts, well, it’s doesn’t feel very helpful – a sign of a media that is encouraged to be full of fully-formed, strongly-held opinions on everything, immediately. If we don’t have the space to consider new ideas without ridicule, then nothing much will change.
Well, I say “new ideas”, but this isn’t new, as has been repeatedly stated by opponent of the concept, worried that the way forward wouldn’t involve such a retrograde move. Railway carriages marked “Ladies Only” were finally withdrawn in 1977, when the old type of corridor-less train became obsolete. The old-style train was made up of a series of compartments with no access between them, and so was potentially a dangerous trap for a woman alone with a predatory man. Because of this style of carriage, and an increasing number of assaults suffered by female travellers on the trains, the concept of the women-only carriage was discussed from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards.
This article from 1874 shows that the Metropolitan railways had already introduced ladies’ carriages – but there was some debate as to whether this was legal. This was the first mention I found of women eschewing the ladies’ carriages in favour of sitting in the smoking compartments instead – an issue that men complained about for the next half century at least. I don’t know why women intuitively flocked to the smoking carriages for fifty years or more, but I would guess that it was because they were popular and so routinely full of travellers. Perhaps there may have been both less chance of being left alone with an unknown man, and a higher likelihood of other women travellers there as well. If not all train companies designated separate carriages for women, then it may have been easier to adopt this method instead.
Staffordshire Sentinel, 16th November 1874
There were a lot of reports of assaults on women on the railways in the nineteenth century, and the debate on ladies’ only carriages became a hot topic of the day. Here’s a letter from 1876 referring to recent attacks and calling for ladies’ carriages to be introduced in all trains.
Dundee Evening Telegraph, 5th September 1887
And another, where Ellen Johnson was saved from attempting to jump from the train to escape her attacker, by another passenger walking along the outside footboard to reach her carriage.
Huddersfield Chronicle, 6th June 1891
This is a fantastic piece, quoted from the Queen – this wasn’t Queen Victoria wading into the debate, that wouldn’t have been quite her style. It’s Queen magazine – which is still around, although these days it’s called Harper’s Bazaar. It points out that the cases of assault on women that the public hears about are the dramatic ones – where the woman has fought off her assailant, or else felt forced to take the dramatic step of jumping from the train to escape. But “We hear nothing of the cases, probably far more numerous, where the woman, whether successful or not in keeping off her assailant, has afterwards from dread of publicity kept silent….The risk that a woman travelling by herself runs is not one whit less to-day than it was yesterday; indeed it is rather greater, for the opportunities for attack are greater.”
This piece describes how the Victorian communication cord used to work – it consisted of a cord on the outside of the train linked to the guard’s van. So a woman, mid-attack, would need to open the window, and attempt to reach the cord far above her head on the outside of the train, then pull it hard enough to attract the attention of the guard. The article calls for other means of instantaneous communication to be introduced, which could now be electrically-powered, and that this should be enforced by Parliament if the train companies did not agree of their own volition.
Dorking and Leatherhead Advertiser, 16th April 1892
This article in The Morning Post from 1896 says that ladies didn’t tend to make use of specially-designated carriages very often, when they were available. Although there was apparently a litle known, and therefore little-used, policy of the railway staff being obliged to provide any women who asked with a suitable carriage to sit in which would then become a carriage where only women would be allowed to be admitted.
Morning Post, 5th August 1896
Morning Post, 5th August 1896
An MP, Mr Ritchie, confirms to a correspondent that The Board of Trade has written to all railway companies to encourage the introduction of women-only carriages on all their trains, in 1897.
Edinburgh Evening News, 26th March 1897
Commercial travellers complain about the long-standing “problem” of women sitting in the smoking compartments. This was evidently the Victorian and Edwardian equivalent of the person having a loud conversation on their phone in the “quiet carriage” today. Here, the problem is that “Travellers could walk up and down a train, and find every compartment labelled “smoking” packed with women and children, who gleefully looked out of the windows and smiled at those who wanted to smoke.” Smiling and gleefully looking out of the window – the cheek of it! Mr R. Mitchell, making the complaint, says that “he knew women often preferred to travel in smoking compartments because they said they felt safer; but he thought railway companies should prohibit women or children travelling in smoking compartments unless they were accompanied by a male adult.” Priorities, there.
Nottingham Evening Post, 28th October 1912
In 1924, the introduction of women-only carriages on all trains is still being discussed in the House of Commons – showing that it was still a far from widespread practice. Again, the issue of women in smoking compartments is raised, but this time it’s stated that this is quite likely to be on account of the lack of aforementioned ladies’ carriages. Mr “Not All Men” Becker was standing up for men’s rights here with his “May I ask whether carriages could be provided for men only?”
Gloucester Journal, 26th July 1924
As the old-style trains were replaced with the new designs, so the debate lessened. The issue has raised its head again now, because of the increased number of attacks on women on the railways – the number of sex offences on UK railways rose by a quarter last year. The idea of women-only carriages is still a current one in some countries – Japan, Brazil and India still have them, after all. My twopenn’orth is that this could only really be enforced, particularly on night trains, by guards on the train, and if there’s guards on the train, then why do you need the separate carriage? But I’m open to the discussion.
Most of my assumptions about what visiting time at hospitals used to be like I’ve gleaned from the Carry On films. That, and the 1959 episode of Hancock’s Half Hour I was listening to on the bus earlier, “Hancock in Hospital”, where the lad is kept in for weeks with a broken leg and visiting time lasted for a mere two hours, once a week.
The most I’ve been in hospital was for 3 nights after a cesarean section and that felt like plenty long enough, quite apart from the insane situation of having major surgery, which you recover from by immediately having to look after and feed a newborn all through the night. And in fact I first listened to that Hancock episode while I was in hospital for another operation three years ago, but it turns out morphine injections rather hamper your concentration and I couldn’t remember any of it, so it was nice to listen to it again while I was in sound mind.
Anyway, in short, I don’t really know how visiting time worked for sure. But I have become fascinated by the infectious patient reports in old newspapers. Local newspapers used to print information about such patients, who presumably weren’t allowed visitors at all as a general rule – each patient had a number and their friends and family could consult the paper to check their progress.
So many stories there, reduced to the bare bones of information. I find myself worrying about the dangerously ill patients. Considering the information needed to be with the paper to be printed the day before, did the friends and family find out and get to the hospital in time?
I think my favourite post so far on my blog is this one – my bit of history detective work on Josephine Joseph, the Half-Man Half-Woman from the 1932 horror film, Freaks, and which gave me my first presence on Wikipedia to boot.
There was almost no information available on Josephine, including what her name really was. Josephine Joseph was her stage name and is absolutely in line with other Half-Man, Half-Women acts (and, oh yes, there were a number of these). But not only that, it wasn’t even clear whether Josephine was really a woman or a man, although it was thought by many that it was likely that he/she was a man, as such acts usually were. It’s easier for a man to develop muscles on one side, leaving the other side flabby, than it is for a woman to disguise her figure. Finally, one piece of information that Wikipedia did have, was that Josephine was aged 19 in Freaks, which I did find hard to believe.
I made a lucky find though – newspaper reports from 1930 on the appearance of Josephine and her husband George Waas before Blackpool Magistrates on the charge of fraud, relating to their Half-Man Half-Woman stage act in the town. This has proved to be the key to unlocking at least part of the mystery. Ray Mullins has done sterling work on digging up more in his excellent post on Finding Josephine, that I am happy to spread far and wide. He’s cleverly identified Josephine and her husband from ship passenger lists, and found out that the “George Waas” of the newspaper reports is actually “George Wass”, for one thing. Click the link to read more on his amazing detective work.
Incidentally, in my original post, the newspaper article I found says this is “Another Half Man-Half Woman Case”. And I’ve found out why this was. Another similar act was summonsed in Blackpool, just two weeks earlier, with the same policemen investigating. This chap (and it sounds like it was a man this time) was an act called Phil-Phyllis. I think we’re done on the half-man half-woman detective work for now though….
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this blog (well, there’s a ton of things I’ve learned, in fact, everyday is a school day here) it’s that there’s an awful lot of people still interested in Owbridge’s Lung Tonic. My last post on the subject here is one of my most popular pages. It’s really a rare day that there’s no hits on that post, which I wasn’t anticipating at all. As far as I was concerned, it was one of those pharmaceuticals lodged firmly in the past, like the mercury-containing Blue Pills of another post.
But Owbridge’s was a medicine that people obviously remember taking and are googling nostalgically for. And so I checked when it last was available, and I was surprised that production only ended in 1971 – no wonder so many people know of it still.
One thing I have to say – the British Medical Association’s “Secret Remedies” book of 1909 that I linked to in my previous post states that an analysis of Owbridge’s shows the medicine to contain ipecacuanha wine, honey and, alarmingly, a quantity of chloroform. But the formula did change again over the years and so the version that people had in the 1960s was (presumably) not the same as that analysed in 1909. Having said that, I haven’t found anything to state what exactly the last incarnation consisted of.
Still, for those Owbridge’s fans still out there (although it is apparently a love-hate kind of memory, I gather), here’s some more vintage adverts I’ve found.
It sounds like there was some dispute going on here between The Pharmaceutical Society and patent medicines. “No one has the right to attach poison labels” to Owbridge’s, it says. That wouldn’t have helped business. The Aberdeen Journal, 14th January 1893
A double page advert celebrating the “thirty-third season” of Owbridge’s. The Yorkshire Post, 1908
“Please remember we can produce originals of all these letters”: The Yorkshire Evening Post, 1910
This 1914 typeface reminds me of the opening credits of a black and white “Carry On” film. Daily Mirror, 2nd November 1914
Emphasizing the honey in this advert (rather than the chloroform): Yorkshire Evening Post, 19th January 1926
Finally, a celebration of the 80th anniversary in 1954. It was around for nearly 100 years, just missing the centenary in 1974. The Luton News, 1954
Brown Windsor Soup – surely the stuff that the British Empire was built on? I know of it through Tony Hancock ordering it in an unappetising 1950s canteen, the Carry On team being served it for dinner it like unadventurous Brits in Carry on Abroad, and, well, in numerous other comedy settings from the 50s to the 70s. It’s famously the dull embodiment of dreary British cuisine and looks a bit like sludge. Although I can’t remember the ingredients ever being specified, I imagined it as a kind of thin, liquidised beef stew.
So it rather blew my mind to learn on Wikipedia that, in all likelihood, Brown Windsor Soup never actually existed as an actual, real thing from Victorian or Edwardian times. It was first included on the odd menu in the 1920s and 30s and thereafter apparently mainly used as a jokey kind of reference to terrible, dull British food.
Michael Quinion has investigated, and makes the claim that Brown Windsor Soup is first mentioned in print as late as 1943 – in the book The Fancy by Monica “great-granddaughter of Charles” Dickens. He has a few theories as to where the name came from. Firstly, there was White Windsor Soup, an undeniably real Victorian dish. Secondly, Brown Windsor Soap was also a definite, very famous, type of soap. And so there might have been some kind of confusion between these two items, or possibly a deliberate mashup of them both, for satirical purposes or otherwise.
I decided I wasn’t going to take Wikipedia’s word for this. I was going to uncover some true Brown Windsor Soup, as enjoyed by Queen Victoria. Wading through The British Newspaper Archive, the extensive search results that immediately popped up looked promising. However, on closer investigation, it was a quirk of the reading software of the Archive, which isn’t always entirely accurate on account of the age of the papers scanned, and the tiny typefaces that can be used. Every result referred to Brown Windsor Soap, not soup.
However. There is another type of Victorian soup that may have been the Brown Windsor in all but specific name – the vague-sounding “Brown Soup”.
In basic form, this could be “Beef Tea” – either in invalid cookery form or as a kind of Bovril drink, like this one, “Bouillon Fleet” from 1889: Aberdeen Journal, 16th March 1889
Or here on this restaurant menu in 1890, which was probably a more substantial version: Shields Daily Gazette, 24th March 1890
And it was served as a starter at the New Year’s Dinner at a “Home for Old Men and Women” in Glasgow, 1895. This stereotypical Victorian menu consisted of brown soup, beef-steak pie and plum pudding. Glasgow Herald, 2nd January 1895
Talking of pudding – look! A recipe for “Brown Windsor pudding” in 1897. It’s a spiced fruit steamed pudding which sounds gorgeous. I’m guessing that this was a reference to the aforementioned soap, which was also advertised as containing spices such as cinnamon. If there was spiced food based on the soap, then maybe “Brown Windsor Soup” should properly also be cinnamonned, gingered and cloved, a bit like Mulligatawny soup? Dundee Courier, 22nd December 1897
Here’s a 1913 recipe for brown soup. It’s made of beef and vegetables, but made extra brown with the addition of Bovril and browning. None more brown. Northampton Mercury, 26th December 1913
And one from 1916, with instructions on how to make the soup extra brown, by browning the flour in front of the fire. The People’s Journal, 4th November 1916
And another one. It all sounds quite nice to me. The Arbroath Herald, 1th September 1925
The first actual mention of “Brown Windsor soup” I found, on a Hartlepool menu from 1928. It was from Binns’ Restaurant – perhaps they invented it? Hartlepool Mail, 1st February 1928
A 1928 recipe for Brown Soup here, using vermicelli to thicken, if wished. Western Gazette, 13th April 1928
Brown Windsor still being served at Binns’ in Hartlepool in 1931: Hartlepool Mail, 2nd October 1931
A prize-winning brown soup recipe from 1931. I suspect that the winner, Mrs G. Walker, had seen the “Everything That Is Good” recipe above, in 1928. Veeerry similar. The Western Gazette, 17th April 1931
Windsor soup was finally commercially available in the 1940s. Batchelor’s version is here, although it wasn’t called “Brown”. Tinned foods were handy in wartime, it’s “A meal in itself” and could be heated “at the minimum of fuel cost”. Although “quantities are rather limited and a little patience may be needed,” in order to obtain some. Emphasizing its potential scarcity makes it sound more desirable, of course. Nottingham Evening Post, 2nd June, 1942
Finally, the last reference I found. Because The British Newspaper Archive only goes up to the mid-1950s, so far. I love the Britishness of the “If you must eat out…” Berwick Advertiser, 17th March 1955
I wonder when the very last bowl of Brown Windsor soup was eaten? Maybe there are people still making it out there, although what their recipe is, who knows? I couldn’t find anything specifying what makes “Brown Soup” different from “Brown Windsor”, if there even is a difference. And so, now I feel the need to invent my own version – a very gently spiced, very brown, beefy, vegetabley kind of concoction. Watch this space.
Update – thanks to Steve in the comments below, who let me know that there was now a date of 1926 as the first reference on Wikipedia. This is it:
Portsmouth Evening News, 24th February 1926
And after some more research I’ve found a 1926 reference to Brown Windsor in Binns’, earlier than the 1928 version above. Still a few months later than the one in the Portsmouth Evening News though.
Hartlepool Mail, 21st May 1926Hartlepool Mail, 21st May 1926
Do you do anything deliberately that annoys you, for fun? I’m not sure why exactly, but getting aerated about some bugbear of yours, in a safe kind of way, is quite cathartic in the same way that crying can be.
It’s why I read the Daily Mail’s Sidebar of Shame and it’s why my husband watches “The Big Question” on a Sunday. We would be disappointed if suddenly either one was populated with reasonable points of view that coincided with our own.
And, being completely honest, it’s why I initially started researching old marital advice columns for an intermittent series I will be doing on the blog, and which started with this post. I was heartened to see that much of the advice was actually quite wise and even applicable now, sometimes with a bit of tweaking. But, yes, I was irrationally disappointed that huge swathes of outrageous archive sexism weren’t as widespread as I expected.
Apart from this one. It’s from the Isle of Man Times in 1895, and, you know, nothing against the Isle of Man and everything, but….
I’m a feminist. I would be a card-carrying one if that was possible and I don’t really understand why any woman wouldn’t identify as one, although I know some that don’t. It’s all about being treated equally to men, socially and economically, and I’m not sure why anybody wouldn’t want that for themselves. So this article is the Euro Millions jackpot for outraged feminism. I love it, while being sincerely glad I never met the author.
Although I rather suspect there’s more than a few individuals who might agree with its sentiments even today – just witness the experiences of various well-known women on Twitter these days. It’s so outrageous – “He’ll probably think you an idiot; but that’s inevitable anyway,” – that I couldn’t work out if it was actually serious. But the author anticipates this – “don’t think this is a Joak,” he tells us. I still can’t decide whether it really is, though. I suspect not – this was a topical issue, after all, and attitudes like this were no doubt why The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was founded two years later, in 1897.
A final note – I would rather like to see my husband’s face if I’d made some delicious hash for dinner, only to eat it myself and give him his own dinner of green turtle instead.
Isle of Man Times, 8th October 1895
Advice to Wives
Don’t argue with your husband: do whatever he tells you and obey all his orders.
Don’t worry him for money, and don’t expect a new dress oftener than he offers to buy you one.
Don’t sit up till he comes home from the club; better be in bed, and pretend to be asleep. If you must be awake, seem to be glad that he came home so early. He’ll probably think you an idiot; but that’s inevitable anyway.
Don’t grumble at him because he takes no notice of baby; men weren’t built to take notice of baby.
Don’t mope and cry because you are ill, and don’t get any fun; the man goes out to get all the fun, and your laugh comes in when he gets home again and tells you about – some of it. As for being ill, women should never be ill.
Don’t be mad because he smokes in bed, and goes into the best room with his dirty boots: your’s is the only house in which he can do these things, and you mustn’t be disagreeable.
Don’t talk to him of his mother-in-law; he’ll like it better if you talk to him of yours.
Don’t give him hash for dinner, eat the hash yourself and get him green turtle and chicken.
Don’t answer back, don’t spend money on yourself, don’t expect him to push the perambulator, don’t expect him to do anything he doesn’t want to do, don’t do anything he doesn’t want you to do. Then if you’re not a happy woman, your husband will at least be comfortable, and his friends will all be mad with envy.
And don’t think this is a Joak. It isn’t; it’s gospel, and the only way to have a happy home.
