Categories
1950-1999 Adverts Ephemera

Hidden Treasures – Liverpool Echo, 1951

Liverpool Echo, 1951

I’m happy to hold, read and buy any old Victorian book, really. I’m quite a visual, tangible person in general – I can’t concentrate very well on audio books and need to see the words on the page to really get into a story. I never much liked Jackanory as a child because of that (apart from Rik Mayall’s one obviously). And I’m the same with history. I’ve read so many history books (well, I do have a history degree) but seeing an old building, reading an old book, holding a piece of ephemera that has survived against the odds – they’re what brings the past to life to me.

So, when I found this 1889 book, Charles Stuart Calverley’s Fly Leaves, in a charity shop, I was interested at first purely because of its age. But I bought it mainly because, flicking through, I found that a torn page of a Liverpool Echo from 1951 had been used as a bookmark. And I really wanted to read that page. Any newspaper given time is fascinating. The most commonplace of things, the events, the layout, the adverts (especially the adverts) suddenly represents a time in a way you don’t realise while it’s your present.

Fly Leaves itself wasn’t especially interesting to me. Or at least it wasn’t until years later, when I found an appendix at the end with a spoof Charles Dickens exam on The Pickwick Papers which really made me laugh. With questions such as naming all the component parts of a dog’s nose and deducing Mr Pickwick’s maximum speed:

But the Echo was fascinating. It’s the front page, folded up for 60 years.

Along with a strangely high number of adverts for Private Detective agencies, here are some highlights from the so-very-closely printed page.

“What colour did you say you wanted your crease-resisting chiffon velvet gown, Mrs Clarkson?”

An advert to remove hair, moles and veins by Myra Howell’s diathermy techniques. She was a long standing presence in Bold Street – I’ve also seen adverts of hers from 1919. (An interesting side note – medical diathermy machines were used in the UK in the Second World War to jam German radio beams used for nighttime bombing raids in what was called “The Battle of the Beams”)

An advert for E Rex Makin’s Solicitors, that must surely have been newly set up in 1951, seeing as he’s still going, and I saw him in town not too long ago. A slightly legendary figure in Liverpool life, he is. Not only has his firm been going a very long time, but he was Brian Epstein’s solicitor and involved in setting up the Beatles contract with him. Plus, he’s supposed to have invented the word “Beatlemania”.

“Wednesday night is Landing Craft Night”

I love this advert – a wallpaper company gegging in on an upcoming General Election.

Categories
1900-1949

Edwin Moo’d

The Weekend Book, 1938

An quote from Charles Dickens in the 1938 Weekend Book – “Cows are my passion”.

Categories
1900-1949 Food & Drink War Women

Steady, Girls, Steady! Wild times in 1940.

PTO Magazine, February 1940

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.

PTO Magazine, February 1940
PTO Magazine, February 1940
Categories
Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – Tom and Jerry (and Daffy)

The Slang Dictionary, 1865

Tom and Jerry – a slang term that has made its mark, perhaps like no other, throughout popular culture. And one intertwined with The Slang Dictionary itself.

Tom and Jerry are now most famously the cartoon cat and mouse, of course, but the term was also used to refer to British and German soldiers in the Second World War – or the “Tommies” and the “Jerries”. In popular culture, it was the original stage name of Simon and Garfunkel and also the male characters in The Good Life.

But perhaps the phrase originated in 1821 from a journal called Life in London by Pierce Egan, which had a couple of flash characters called Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn who embarked on laddish sprees around London. They were also accompanied by another friend, Bob Logic, but he’s rather gone by the wayside in slang terms. Life in London ran until 1828 and was hugely popular. There was an offshoot stage show, and even a drink called “Tom and Jerry” devised by Egan to promote the show. This cocktail – a kind of hot eggnog and brandy concoction – is actually still around as a traditional Christmas seasonal drink in parts of the US.

Pierce Egan was also the editor of the 1823 slang dictionary Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. This preceded the slang dictionary I own, which was compiled by John Camden Hotten in 1865.

Corinthian Tom refers to the dictionary in Life in London,

“A kind of cant phraseology is current from one end of the Metropolis to the other, and you will scarcely be able to move a single step, my dear JERRY, without consulting a Slang Dictionary, or having some friend at your elbow to explain the strange expressions which, at every turn, will assail your ear.”

In more intertwining, John Camden Hotten himself brought out a reprint of Life in London in 1869. And by the time he had published his own slang dictionary in 1865, Tom and Jerry meant a lowdown drinking den, a gin palace (probably because these were exactly the types of places frequented by Corianthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn). And, to add to the cartoony slang, Daffy meant gin.

The Slang Dictionary, 1865
The Slang Dictionary, 1865

Pictures of Life in London can be found on the brilliant Spitalfields Life blog – http://spitalfieldslife.com/2012/03/28/tom-jerrys-life-in-london/

Categories
1900-1949 Food & Drink

How to Make Tea, 1930

The Essex Cookery Book, 1930

So, is this instruction, from “The Essex Cookery Book”, the definitive way to make tea? With tea leaves, of course, old chap.

The Essex Cookery Book, 1930
The Essex Cookery Book, 1930

It seems so simple and yet, if you’re British, getting it right is so bloody important. Otherwise, you’re in the realms of Arthur Dent’s nightmare:

 

Categories
Victorian

Legitimate Laziness, 1891

Laziness isn’t exactly a trait we associate with the Victorians. The work ethic was lauded, days off were few and sloth was, after all, one of the seven deadly sins.

Poor sloth.

Nooo! I iz not a deadly sin!
Nooo! I iz not a deadly sin!

On the other hand, I’m a big fan of laziness. I remember, in a life I had pre-kids, that I used to be a very big fan of sleeping. I wish I could do more of it now. And people banging on about how very busy they are just makes me tired on their behalf. So I rather enjoy children’s author Isabel Suart Robson’s paean to laziness in The Mother’s Companion, 1891. It’s also interesting to see that workers never fully detaching from work isn’t just a modern problem caused by email and mobile phones. In 1891, there were still those businessmen who couldn’t go on holiday without being a slave to their letters and telegraphs too.

The Mother's Companion, 1891
The Mother’s Companion, 1891
Categories
1900-1949 Women

How to Do Your Laundry, 1938

Titbits Book of Wrinkles, 1938

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…

Categories
1950-1999 Music Uncategorized

Radio Luxembourg’s Hit Parade, 1976

Fab 208 annual, 1976

Did you know that the early independent radio station Radio Luxembourg used to work out its own pop charts? Wanting to stay ahead of the game, they’d base their chart on what they thought was shortly going to be popular rather than the usual one based on actual record sales. I wonder if they ever got it terribly wrong?

I’m pleased to see David Essex is happy, there – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/david-essex-is-sad-1976/

Fab 208 annual, 1976
Fab 208 annual, 1976

Also, 1970s Noël Edmonds. “Oh no, it’s a picture of me looking slightly different!”

 

Categories
Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – Snobstick and a lot of Snot

The Slang Dictionary, 1865

This is a great page of The Slang Dictionary.

First you’ve got Snob-stick – a worker who refuses to join in strikes, and what would now be termed a “scab”.

Then there’s Snooks-and-Walker, a number game I was certainly still playing in the 90s, except it was a drinking game called “Fizz Buzz” (and the entry also says “see Buz” so that variant is also an ancient one).

Then there’s a glorious variety of snot-based words. Snottinger for a pocket handkerchief is a good one. But Snotter or Wipe-Hauler is a peculiar one. In other slang books, these terms are simply referred to as meaning a pickpocket who has a particular fancy for the aforementioned snottingers (it takes all sorts). But here it goes into a little more detail:

Snotter, or Wipe-hauler, a pickpocket who commits great depredations upon gentlemen’s pocket-handkerchiefs.

Well, maybe that just means nicking them. But is that all it means? It sounds strangely fetishistic to me.

Lastly, my fave – Snooze. Obviously this slang stuck around and still means the same thing now, but just look at the vulgar pronunciation of it – Snoodge. Isn’t that wonderful? I’m planning to bring this one back, ideally as Rowan Atkinson would say it.

Anyway, it’s Monday morning and I’ve already pressed snoodge twice. Time to get up….

The Slang Dictionary, 1865
The Slang Dictionary, 1865
Categories
1900-1949 Ephemera

If Only He’d Known, 1940

PTO Magazine, February 1940

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….

PTO-if-only-he'd-known