Category: 1900-1949

1900-1949 Food & Drink

Velveeta Cheese Advert, 1937

Post author By Estelle
Post date April 8, 2015

Velveeta isn’t a product I associate with either the UK or the 1930s, so I was surprised to see an advert for it in The Yorkshire Post from 1937. I don’t think it was sold for long in the UK though, not post-war anyway. It’s not cheese, it’s “cheese food”.

“The phosphorus in Velveeta makes it an important brain-food”, it says.

I first came across Velveeta processed cheese while living in Kentucky during a so-called “exchange year” in the early 1990s – I was a vegetarian at the time and I ended up eating quite a lot of it. It does make an amazing easy cheese sauce in the microwave, even though I’m not entirely sure exactly what it is, apart from being described as “American cheese”. Apparently, the official description of it now is “Pasteurized Recipe Cheese Product”. Mmmm.

I didn’t know it was as old as all that though, I thought of it as one of the convenience foods that sprung up in the 1950s. It always reminded me of Willy Loman complaining about American cheese in Death of a Salesman – “How can they whip cheese?” – and it being an indication of the zeitgeist, moving away from the traditional ways of life after the end of the War.

As every foodstuff apparently was, it’s presented here as being not only nourishing and good for you, but also suitable for invalids – very well catered for, the invalid demographic was.

More on that soon – invalid champagne, anyone?

Tags 1937, advert, cheese, food, The British Newspaper Archive, Velveeta

1900-1949 Pharmaceuticals

Cocaine for Asthma, 1935

Post author By Estelle
Post date April 7, 2015

Cocaine used to be used for all kinds of medicinal uses. In 1935, it was given as a nasal spray to treat asthma by Dr Stanley Rowbotham, who was subsequently sued by his patient for becoming addicted to it. Here’s the article about the court case:

The court found in favour of the doctor, thinking the patient’s story unlikely. One expert said that “drug addiction is comparatively rare in this country,” which sounds like they were doubting it was possible for him to be addicted at all. With all the strong medication is was possible to get hold of at this time, I’d guess that drug addiction was commoner than they recognised.

Here’s close ups of the article to make it easier to read:

Dr Rowbotham was to become a key pioneer in the development of anaesthetics and plastic surgery, operating on facial disfigurements, and given the Bronze star for his work during World War Two.

The patient, Kenneth Rhodes, had a less happy future ahead of him. He didn’t survive the year, apparently shooting himself dead a few months later.

Western Daily Press, 23rd December, 1935

Tags 1930s, 1935, Doctor, pharmaceuticals

1900-1949

A Mammoth Mistake, 1922

Post author By Estelle
Post date April 5, 2015

The Children’s Newspaper confidently declaring the mammoth a “mistake” in 1922, there.

Wikipedia tells me that mammoths lived through the Pliocene epoch (5 million years ago) to the woolly mammoths of the Holocene epoch (dying out 4,500 years ago – although we are still in this epoch). As a species, they lived through multiple epochs, over millions of years, and were still around when Ancient Egypt was a well established civilisation. In fact, if the mammoth died out around 4,500 years ago, that is around the same time as the Great Pyramid of Giza was being built. I know that Egypt got started on the whole civilisation thing earlier than most of humanity, but it blows my mind that mammoths were roaming the earth at the same time as the Pharoahs were strapping on their false beards.

Seems a bit harsh in the circumstances to dismiss them as a mistake, especially as they seem to have died out largely because of either climate change or being hunted by humans. And seeing as modern humans have been around a mere 200,000 years.

And there’s also a good chance that one day the woolly mammoth will be resurrected, Jurassic Park-style, by cloning frozen DNA found in a Siberian specimen, the 40,000-year-old Buttercup.

On another note, look at this! A real, live teddy bear from Edinburgh Zoo, from the same issue. Awwww. Not a mistake, this one.

Tags 1922, Bears, dinosaurs, Mammoths, The Children's Newspaper

1900-1949 Food & Drink Games

Vintage recipes – Old Fashioned Cherry Cake, 1948

Post author By Estelle
Post date April 3, 2015

All the old school “Family Fun” games that I post from time to time remind me of just one thing – old fashioned cherry cake. Especially Up Jenkyns and Ghosts because those were the games we played with Grandad and Nan, and Nan generally provided the aforementioned cherry cake for tea. Proust had his madeleines, I have cherry cake.

Funny really, I’m not generally a fan of the glacé cherry, despite fresh cherries being maybe my favourite food ever – they’re what summer tastes like. But you need glacé cherries for this kind of cake. I had a hankering for one and searched through my old cookbooks for a suitably non-tarted-up recipe. I decided on one from The Radiation Cookery Book – originally published in the 1920s but updated and reissued for decades. I have the 1948 edition.

It’s the rich Madeira cake recipe, which has various alterations to make different cakes.

Cherry Cake

4oz/115g butter or margarine
4oz/115g caster sugar
4oz/115g glace cherries
2 eggs
6oz/170g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
Grated rind of a lemon
Milk as needed

Beat the butter and sugar to a cream, add the eggs one at a time, and beat until the mixture is stiff and uniform.

Stir in the sifted flour and baking powder, adding milk if necessary to form a soft mixture which will shake easily from the wooden spoon.

Transfer to a tin lined with greased paper and bake in the middle of the oven for 1 hour and 5 minutes with the Regulo at Mark 4 (but I baked it at 180C for around 45 minutes).

This was how it turned out. It’s an art ensuring the cherries don’t sink to the bottom – an art I have not mastered, although it doesn’t really look that way from the picture. Tasted nice though, although I’d used fancy morello glacé cherries, which new-fangled it up a bit too much. Plus, the ones I used to have were round cakes, but there wasn’t enough batter for my cake tin and so it became a cherry loaf. To be fair, the recipe does say to double the quantities for a larger cake, which you would need to do for a 20cm cake tin.

Next time I’m trying the reliable Mrs Rea’s 1910 version, below.

Mrs Rea's Cookery Book, 1910 — Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book, 1910

The Radiation Cookery Book contains hidden treasure in the form of this scribbled recipe by the original owner for coconut ice, a none-more-Blyton kids treat, that I am planning to make soon:

Tags 1948, cherry cake, Mrs Dora Rea's Cookery Book, recipe, The Radiation Cookery Book, Vintage recipes

1900-1949 Games

Thursday Fun – April 1st Party, 1934

Post author By Estelle
Post date April 1, 2015

Happy April Fools Day! Who’s having an April 1st party? What do you mean, you’ve never heard of it?

Here’s Sid G. Hedges’ ideas from The Home Entertainer for such a party. “You must be careful, however, that all the guests are congenial and chosen carefully”, as this is not a party for those who take themselves particularly seriously. It’s a practical joke made into a party, really – motor horns under the front door mat, rubber coat pegs so your coat falls on the floor, serving fake food and luring your guests down dark corridors strewn with balloons and bells.

The games suggested are idiot-themed – “Dunderheads”, where people and professions are all mixed up and you have to identify them correctly, and “Hat Dance”, where you “Fit two players with dunces’ hats, and let them see who can first knock off the other’s.” I’m not sure if you have to use your hat to knock off the other hat like rutting idiot stags, or if you can just punch it off instead. A thought – did people used to actually manufacture dunce’s hats?

Tags 1934, April Fools Day, Friday fun, Games, Sid G Hedges, The Home Entertainer

1900-1949 Adverts Pharmaceuticals

Phosferine Tonic, 1940

Derby Evening Telegraph, February 28th, 1940

More of the old pharmaceuticals today. I find these old fashioned remedies fascinating, although it seems they were mostly snake oils to varying degrees. Anything described as a “tonic” is probably not up to much, and so it seems with this, “Phosferine Tonic”, seen here in an advert from 1940.

In line with standard “cure-all” advertising, Phosferine is claimed to help with a list of ailments as long as your arm – depression, headache, indigestion, brain fag, neuralgia, sleeplessness, influenza, rheumatism, sciatica, anaemia, debility and neurasthenia. Because all those things have the same treatment, of course. I thought “Brain fag” was one of those diagnoses that didn’t exist anymore, like hysteria and brain fever, but apparently it’s a thing in Nigeria now, suffered by overworked students.

Here’s an advert especially interesting to me as it includes a testimonial from a man living in Hall Carr, Rawtenstall, which is the place where my mum grew up.

The British Medical Journal was on the case of anything calling itself a “secret remedy”, and was looking at the composition of this and other tonics back in 1911. It analysed it and found it to be mainly water, alcohol, quinine and phosphoric acid. And a bit of sulphuric acid thrown in as well – I’m not a chemist, but that’s not good as an ingredient, is it?

I also like the damning nature of the rather sensible 1917 issue of the Seventh Day Adventist publication Herald of Health – The Indian Health Magazine, which states that “the quantities are quite insufficient to be of any use as a tonic.”

Herald of Health also has much to say on the subject of tobacco, even in 1917 – it’s the “greatest of all curses of modern times.”

Tags 1940, advert, advertising, British Medical Journal, Cigarettes, Lancashire, pharmaceuticals, The British Newspaper Archive

1900-1949 Adverts Food & Drink

Mercer’s Meat Stout, 1940

Post author By Estelle
Post date March 26, 2015

Mercer's Meat Stout, The Lancashire Daily Post, 1940

Here’s a curious advert I stumbled across in The British Newspaper Archive – it’s for Mercer’s Meat Stout. “Tastes good, does you good.” Now, I’ve heard of milk stout (Ena Sharples springs to mind), but…..meat stout?

Is it me, or does this look exactly like a mock advert from Viz? Meat and beer, together at last.

This wasn’t just a quirky name, it was stout that actually included meat extract in some form. It was sold (as every food-and-drink-stuff was, even chocolate) as being good for you. It was also advertised as a nourishing drink for invalids. Invalid cookery and care was a big deal pre-NHS and a special invalid recipe section was in nearly every cookbook up until around 1950. I’ve got some recipes here if you’re feeling a bit peaky.

The Zythophile blog has more information on Meat Stout. It turns out it might have had some offal chucked in during the brewing process. Mmmm. Well, one of the aforementioned invalid recipes was raw beef tea – raw mince steeped in lukewarm water – so I guess it might not have seemed so strange at the time.

Tags 1940, advert, advertising, alcohol, invalid cookery, Lancashire Daily Post, Mercer's Meat Stout, The British Newspaper Archive, Vintage recipes

1900-1949 2000 onwards Space

My Favourite Photographs – 1891, 1925, 1949 and 2014

Post author By Estelle
Post date March 24, 2015

After writing my recent post about The Edge of the Universe, I was thinking about one of my heroes, Edwin Hubble. He’s (kind of) responsible for two of my all-time favourite photographs.

Firstly, the lad himself. Hubble, looking every inch the gentleman scientist, pipe in mouth, looking through the 48″ Schmidt Telescope at Palomar Observatory, 1949. This photo feels to me like the past and the future colliding.

And then there’s this, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image, produced by the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s not exactly a photo, but an image put together from a lot of pieces of information. It was created from data gathered in 2003-04, but was released most recently in June 2014 – the new image including the full range of ultraviolet to near-infrared light for the first time. It’s as mind-bending as it’s possible for a picture to be. This is only a small area of space, and yet it contains about 10,000 galaxies. And the light from the galaxies stretches all the way back 13 billion years – some of these came into existence not that long after the Big Bang. The telescope was named after Hubble, and this image is an incredibly appropriate tribute to him, as the first man to realise that there were galaxies separate to our own and that what we thought was the whole universe was just our little Milky Way.

On a completely different vibe, here’s my favourite photo from my blog so far. A woman letting the darning fend for itself while she loses herself in a book – from The Mother’s Companion, 1891.

What is there to prevent a woman from enjoying a good book?

The Mother's Companion, 1891 — The Mother’s Companion, 1891

And finally there’s this photo of Buster Keaton’s beautiful face, taken from Go West in 1925. What a unique talent this man had. If you haven’t seen his film Sherlock, Jnr, I would recommend it very highly. It’s hilarious, astounding and a beautiful piece of work, and it’s also my joint favourite film ever, along with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Back to the photo – his eyeliner, dark silent-film lips, the unsettlingly sinister look giving a slightly different take on his usual stone-face expression….it’s just perfect. We did have this picture up in the kitchen until my small son complained that it “freaked him out”.

History, comedy, space and reading – I think these pics pretty much sum me up.

Tell me or show me yours! Or send me a link and I’ll put them in a new post for you.

Tags 1891, 1925, 1949, 2014, astronomy, Buster Keaton, Comedy, Hubble, photograph, Space, The Mother's Companion

1900-1949 Ephemera Future Predictions Space

The Edge of the Universe, 1922

Post author By Estelle
Post date March 22, 2015

The Children's Newspaper, 10th June 1922

This is my copy of The Children’s Newspaper from June 10th, 1922. I confess to mainly buying it as that date is also my birthday. The June 10th bit anyway, not the 1922 part.

A couple of interesting, on-the-brink-of-discovery, articles in this. Firstly this one, which talks of the difficulties before nuclear energy becomes possible:

But this one I find fascinating, given just how near it lurks to a reality-altering discovery.

A very distant star cluster, N.G.C. 7006, had been observed by astronomers, and was thought to be 220,000 light years from Earth (it’s now measured as being 135,000 light years away). The Children’s Newspaper wonders if this, possibly the most distant thing yet seen, is actually on the edge of the universe. In a way they were right, given that the Milky Way was then actually the known universe – this star cluster is on the outskirts of our own galaxy. The concept of other galaxies was still undiscovered. But not for long. In fact, it was the very next year, 1923, that Edwin Hubble, one of my all-time heroes, concluded that the extremely distant Andromeda star cluster was actually the Andromeda galaxy. One of those shifts in perception that fundamentally change the way we view the universe as a whole, and an incredible mental feat.

He expanded our idea of what the universe is, and then followed that up in 1929 with the discovery that the universe was actually expanding to boot. Whaddaguy.

Tags 1920s, 1922, astronomy, Edwin Hubble, ephemera, The Children's Newspaper