Are there still gurning competitions? I don’t recall seeing a toothless man pull his lower jaw over his nose recently.
Here, straight from 1936, is a veteran gurner in action, offering advice on how to perfect these two faces. Mr John Richard Richards pleasingly has a comedy name to go with his face (and reminiscent of Rik Mayall’s “Richard Richard” in Bottom).
Nottingham Evening Post, 4th September 1936
The first one doesn’t look too difficult. Apart from the crossed eyes, which I can’t manage. The mouth, though, is pretty much what my two-year-old daughter does when she’s puckering up for a kiss. The effect is achieved by “swivelling the eyes and then applying extreme suction to the cheeks until they meet in the region of the glottis. Automatically, a rabbit lip effect is produced. As a means of applying a stranglehold on a fast-disappearing bull’s eye, this face has great practical value.”
Face two is classic gurning in action. “THIS ONE IS HARDER”, says the sub header. You should ideally be performing this by having a convenient fly on the end of your nose. “Swallow the top lip and push it hard against the tip of the nose. This brings the fly into clearer focus and does not impose so great a strain on the eyes.”
Nottingham Evening Post, 4th September 1936
I think it’s a rare person, or a person reading at work, who will not attempt either of these faces while reading this.
Mr Richards first used his gurning powers to entertain the miners during the 1926 strike in the “Merry Imps” concert party. His talents also lay in bird impressions, and I am in awe of the fact that he had three different sets of false teeth made, “to achieve the more delicate phases of bird song“. He was a pub landlord and I bet he was a good one.
Bircher muesli – an old recipe that has been recently revived, trendified and is probably now available in a independent coffee shop near you. However, it has been modernised a little. The original cream and sugar have largely given way to yogurt and more fruit, but there are a huge amount of different recipes out there now.
It’s one of those nineteenth-century health recipes, served in sanitoriums and spas – like those invented by Dr Kellogg, and Hydropathic Pudding. It was invented by Dr Maximilian Bircher-Benner who considered it to be mainly of use in order to get patients to eat raw apples, believing that raw food contained a high level of energy from solar light. He invented muesli in general, not just adapting it to produce this version – muesli meaning “little mush”, which is a very apt name for this recipe.
It was presented in this 1928 newspaper as “a new breakfast dish” – although Dr Bircher-Benner apparently invented it at the end of the nineteenth century, it was only in the 1920s that it became popularised. This recipe is the authentic version, consisting of oats soaked in water overnight, grated apple, lemon zest and juice, brown sugar, cream or condensed milk, and chopped nuts.
I made the recipe exactly as specified. There is the option to use cream or condensed milk and I went with the condensed milk version as:
1) that was what Dr Bircher originally used,
2) the recipes on my blog are all about the retro, and this definitely adds that element to it,
and 3) frankly any excuse to eat that divine nectar.
It calls for grated nuts to be sprinkled over as a finishing touch, and I toasted some almond flakes for this purpose.
My verdict – “little mush” is very apt for the look of it, brightened only by the grated red skin of the Pink Lady apple I used. Not particularly inspiring appearance-wise. But the taste! Oh, easily the most delicious breakfast I have had in a long time. The fresh juiciness of the grated apple with the soothing oats, the crunch of the toasted almonds, and the sharp lemon and sweet condensed milk deliciously combining to make the overall taste almost like pudding. I had previously only tried Bircher muesli in those pre-made pots you get with a Boots Meal Deal, which are a not unpleasant but blandly sweet slop. This was….well, not like that.
For more information on the infinite variety of Bircher’s muesli, have a look at Felicity Cloake’s recipe from her fascinating “How to cook the perfect…” series, to which I am a devotee. She tries a range of different recipes, old and new, in order to come up with her own, “perfect”, version. Her verdict on using condensed milk is that it makes the dish “jarringly sweet”, which I didn’t find to be the case, although in my recipe there is only one dessert-spoon of the stuff between four portions, a little less than a teaspoon each, which I think was an amount which worked well. She ditches the brown sugar for the same reason, and I’m sure it could happily be jettisoned, especially if you soaked the oats in apple juice rather than water. My main disagreement with Felicity is that she considers the lemon to be unnecessary if you’re not using the condensed milk – the sharpness not needed if the sweetness is not there. While I’m sure her recipe is perfectly lovely itself, it was the lemon zesty-ness that elevated this dish into the realm of the delicious for me, and stayed with me long after the bowl had been scraped clean.
Bircher Muesli, 1928-style
For four people
Three-quarter teacup of rolled oats, soaked overnight, the cup being filled up with water.
Four medium-sized apples.
Grated rind of one lemon and half the juice.
One dessert spoon brown sugar
One dessert spoon thick cream (or condensed milk)
Grated nuts
Grate the whole of the apples, leaving out only the stalk and the pips. Add the lemon juice and grated rind. Pour off any superfluous water, and add the soaked rolled oats. Lastly, add the sugar and cream, and mix all well together. Grated nuts may be sprinkled over it if wanted – or taken with it at table. This may be made with bananas or other fruit in place of the apples.
A salutory piece of advice to husbands from General Booth, leader of the Salvation Army, in 1908. It is in line with their attitude to women in general, which was cheeringly based on equality, even at that time. William Booth wrote a book “Messages to Soldiers” also in 1908, which stated:
“I insist on the equality of women with men. Every officer and soldier should insist upon the truth that woman is as important, as valuable, as capable and as necessary to the progress and happiness of the world as man. Unfortunately a large number of people of every tribe, class and nationality think otherwise. They still believe woman is inferior to man.”
Nottingham Evening Post, 31st August 1908
ADVICE TO HUSBANDS
GENERAL BOOTH AND MARRIAGE
In every Salvation Army place of worship yesterday a “Final Message on Woman”, by General Booth, was read out, the General’s instruction being that it should be “read straight through without comment.”
“A higher estimate and a more generous treatment of woman as a wife is needed,” he wrote, and he gave the following advice to husbands:-
“Let him make her realise that he regards her as a being of equal value with himself.
“Let him use all reasonable effort for her support and maintain her as generously as his income will allow.
“Let him have all reasonable care for her health.
“Every husband should love his wife. Without love for her, he ought not to have married her; and if love be there, let him see that he cultivates it.”
You can’t give a baby booze, to quote Vic and Bob.
Oh, you can with this one, it’s “temperance”, non-alcoholic “Kops Wine”. Kids wine. Edinburgh Evening News, 13th November 1924
Plus, a slagging off in 1891 for temperance “Kops Ale”, below. They are making a joke on the old phrase “a good wine needs no bush” which means, I think, that a good product doesn’t need to be advertised or promoted. “Kops” was so rubbish it didn’t only need a bush, it needed a whole copse (do you see what they did there?)
It doesn’t sound like it was much “kop”! Haha! Well, that’s a better joke than the one below anyway. Lichfield Mercury, 10th July, 1891
I’ve been hearing a lot of late about body shaming, fat shaming, and all the ways that women (well, mostly women) can be derided physically. I remember quite clearly the first time I became aware that imperfections in my appearance were apparently fair game for mockery. I was fourteen and a devotee of Mizz magazine, which I’d read ever since my mum found a copy on a bus and gave it to me, correctly thinking I would enjoy it. This was the late 80s and I loved all the 1950s revival fashions, beauty advice and mildly scandalous problem pages. Even now I still think about some of those features – a fairground fashion shoot where the models all seemed to be wearing clothes inspired by Ace from Doctor Who, a vox pop by Candida Doyle from Pulp, a tweed waistcoat I coveted and a beautiful coppery-coloured lipstick modelled (I think) by Terri Seymour (now better known as Simon Cowell’s ex).
But it was one uncharacteristically bitchy little article giving advice on how to get back on a hussy who had stolen your boyfriend that stuck with me. One of the ways in which you could do this, apparently, was to “laugh at her open pores.” Never mind that this mythical boyfriend-stealer might well have flawless skin, or that the boyfriend-less girl may not. What was certainly the case was that I had (and still have) oily skin and the accompanying open pores, and until that point it didn’t occur to me that it was something that you could (or even should?) be ashamed of. I remember it in a kind of eating-the-forbidden-fruit kind of way, in that I suddenly became negatively aware of myself physically, having been unaware and unbothered by what I looked like up until that point.
But that’s small fry compared to the gruelling grooming regime that is currently seen as the new normal among young women of today. Waxing, tanning, all manner of eyebrow atrocities. These are frankly a step too far for me to be arsed with, but girls much younger than fourteen are now exposed to such things. Ever since Heat magazine’s “Circle of Shame” a woman’s body has been fair game for general ridicule. And I am still annoyed about the episode in Friends where the perfect Rachel was disparaged for her “chubby ankles”. If Jennifer Aniston can’t escape this, then who can?
Having said that – I’ve never come across an example of “ear-shaming”. Until now, in this rather odd little piece quoted in The Lancashire Daily Post in 1929. I’m glad I didn’t read this as a fourteen-year-old as well. It would have depressed me, as I very soon became incredibly self conscious about my one weird ear. I know now that it’s called Stahl’s ear deformity – I have a extra rib on the top bit of the ear that makes it a bit pointed. Hence the other much cooler (and actual official and medical) names for it being Vulcan Ear, Spock’s Ear, or Elfin Ear. Age fourteen it was a nightmare that meant I never wanted to wear my hair up. Now I love it, although admittedly a turning point to getting to this point was when Lord of the Rings came out and I realised I was basically half-Hobbit. Short, a bit scruffy, and a weird ear that sometimes sticks out of my hair. It’s also very rare in Caucasians, apparently, so that’s interesting.
So, hang on to your ears for a wild and crazy ride into why women should ideally just manage to not have any ears at all, thank you very much. Not even weird ears like mine, just any ears. Incidentally, despite the title of the piece, men don’t escape scot-free. Men’s ears are also hideous but “in men this matters little: the majority of men have no pretensions to beauty, and one unlovely feature more or less can hardly make much difference.”
Lancashire Daily Post, 29th October, 1929
Women and Their Ears
Is there anyone who would dare to maintain that men and women would not be improved in appearance if it were possible to do away with ears, or at any rate to fix them in some less prominent part of the anatomy than the side of the head (writes W.H.U. in the “Birmingham Post”)? The modern generation of womankind, recognising that ears are rarely beautiful, sensibly hides the offensive feature from sight, and one could wish that all her elder sisters would copy her example. For at present a state of topsy-turveydom exists.
Young girls, whose ears, if not actually pretty, are at least tolerable, invariably hide them under their hair, whilst grandmothers and great-aunts display theirs with the utmost abandonment. And it is unfortunately true that the human ear, like the human nose, tends to get larger and more fleshy as it gets older. In men this matters little: the majority of men have no pretensions to beauty, and one unlovely feature more or less can hardly make much difference. But women are the ornamental sex and it is a shame to see old ladies of handsome and dignified mien spoiling their appearance by exposing their ears when they might just as easily train their hair to cover them up.
And how useless, too, is the ear as a feature. Admittedly it provides a useful support for spectacles and equestrian bowler hats, but otherwise what useful purpose does it serve? It is capable of showing no emotions, save shyness and embarrassment, and this only in the young (whoever heard of an elderly man’s ears turning pink?)
It is not event expert at the job for which it is intended by Nature, for when a man desires to listen with unusual intentness he generally finds it necessary to enlist the help of his open mouth. And everyone knows how much keener hearing a dog has than a man.
The ears do not even denote character to any great extent. If they stick out prominently they make a man look foolish; if they are flat and inclined to bulge in at a certain point they encourage the suspicion that their owner was once a prize-fighter in a boxing booth. Moreover, does not the ear contain the projection called “Darwin’s Point,” an ever-present, and perhaps a little humiliating, reminder that in some remote age it tapered in the manner of those of most animals?
Brighten up your lino by painting it with “Darkaline” stain.
Hull Daily Mail, 4th May 1932
Judging by a number of posts about attempting to remove 1930s “Darkaline” stain from wooden beams and the like, on DIY talk boards, it seems it did indeed provide a very lasting, highly-polished finish. It possibly contained shellac to give the hard-wearing shininess.
For other shiny floor options, why not just spray some wax on your floor?
Yorkshire Post, 30th December 1949
The modern equivalent for me is attempting to cover shoes with “protector spray” from the shoe shop, which provides a helpfully lethal, friction-free surface coating for the floor.
Anyway – no wonder a public information film had to be circulated about the dangers of the “fatal floor”. “Polish a floor? You may as well set a man trap.”
A public information advert on how to get rid of rats during the Second World War. They were eating food supplies and so “were doing Hitler’s work”
Aberdeen Journal, 19th March 1941
I find myself quite uncomfortable with this advert. I suppose because this wasn’t a million miles away from German anti-Jewish propaganda itself, which used the rat analogy. The fact that the rat has a little Hitler face instead almost emphasizes that for me. I wonder if that reference was intentional at all?
I was rather taken by this advert for Seigel’s Syrup. It’s from 1902, but the swirling shapes and squidgy font could easily fit in with the design on a 1960s music poster.
Nottingham Evening Post, 24th December 1902
The book Patent Medicines and Secret Formula analysed branded pharmaceuticals and revealed the previously top-secret formula of Seigel’s Syrup consisted mainly aloe and borax. Aloe is still a very popular soothing ingredient of course, but Borax is more familiar to us now as an ingredient in cleaning products and insecticides. In fact, Wikipedia lists quite an interesting range of uses for borax – everything from mothproofing, making flames burn green, treatment for thrush in horses hooves, as a curing agent for snake skins and to clean the brain cavity of a skull for mounting. Useful stuff.
The text of that Patent Medicines book is fascinating. I especially like the particularly potent-sounding Grandmother’s Own Cough Remedy. That apparently involved rubbing liquid tar with hemlock (eek) and sugar, then adding alcohol and chloroform. I suppose the cough would be the least of your worries after that.
It’s another entry for my series of historical marital advice articles today.
This time – advice from an Austrian newspaper, as reprinted in The Berwickshire News in 1939, a few months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. It’s almost the counter advice to a previous post of mine – a policeman’s advice to wives from 1912. There, the policeman counsels a wife to “Have your own way by letting him think he is having his.” Here, it says that the husband should let his wife think she is in control of his life, without actually being so.
The phrase – “A woman’s happiness always wears the face of a man,” stands out for me here. What I have deduced so far from all this marital advice is that the wife wants to be in charge and the husband wants his ego boosted, and that each should act in such a manner as to let the other think they are getting what they want, without really letting them have it. Exhausting, this battle of the sexes.
Berwickshire News, 2nd May 1939
If your wife is unbearable, take it with a smile and remember that the woman who never nags you or reproaches you for anything most certainly does not love you any more. If your wife is pretty don’t tell her so, because she knows it. But if she isn’t – and this is often the case – insist that she is and she will think; “He has the soul of an artist.”
If you are on a little holiday with your men friends and you have a good time, don’t admit it in your letters. On the contrary, say that you think of her all the time, that you miss her and are bored without her. Women do not believe that men have the right to be happy with something because they can only be happy with somebody. A woman’s happiness always wears the face of a man.
Let a woman think she regulates and directs your life, but do not let her do it.
A husband should not compare his wife’s looks with those of slimmer and richer women – for that matter not even with her own in the dear days of their engagement.
Nor should he neglect using the hair tonic she’s bought at great expense to prevent a threatening baldness on her darling’s head. And he must never say “I won’t have to shave to-day. It’s going to be just the two of us so I guess it’s all right.”
Never forget the fundamental truth: you will only be happy if your wife is happy.
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.
