An easy little trick with matches from The Weekend Book, 1938.
The idea is to make two matches “kiss” with the “lady match” being lifted up, as if swept off her feet, Hollywood-style. Whittling legs is optional.
From the Pelham Pop Annual in 1970, an interview with Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees on his new record company, started with his brother Barry Gibb. Their first signing was Billy Lawrie, the brother of Maurice’s new wife Lulu. This interview is mainly a call out for talent to be signed up by them, with a little look into the domestic life of Maurice and Lulu – they are trying to be a traditional couple and he even gives her housekeeping money.
An aside, see here for the incredible Lulu-mania scenes at their wedding as recorded by British Pathé in 1969 – http://www.britishpathe.com/video/lulus-wedding
He talks about the names they were thinking of for the company “Lemon” (discarded for being too similar to the Beatles’ “Apple”) or “BG” but fails to mention its chosen name – all he says is “the title you all know it as”. It took a bit of digging to find out the name, as there are very few references to this company now. It turns out it was originally called “Diamond” but changed when they realised there was a record company of that name in the US. It then became “Gee Gee” for the two Gibb brothers involved. But, unfortunately for the Pelham Pop Annual, this was already old news by 1970, with Maurice and Barry splitting up in December 1969 and the record company going by the wayside.
Interestingly, Maurice talks about their film Cucumber Castle here, except at the point of the interview it was a 13-week series. In the event, it became a one off television special. It was only released on video for a very short space of time, and was considered one of the rarest commercial releases ever. Now, though, you can see the whole thing on Youtube. It has quite a cast – as well as Maurice and Barry, there were Frankie Howerd, Vincent Price, Eleanor Bron, Ginger Baker, Lulu and Spike Milligan, to name a few. Maurice talks about the tens of thousands he’s spent on video equipment for the film, but looking at it, perhaps it needed a little more – although the songs are lovely, of course.
“Unutterables”, “Inexpressibles”, “Unwhisperables” – what do you think they might be referring to?
In what seems excessively modest even for the Victorians, it means “trousers”. God knows what they called their underpants.
Nb. On this page there’s also “Vardo”, meaning to see, which obviously developed into the Polari word “Vada”.
I remember reading about blackcurrant tea in old children’s books when I was a kid. I really wished that I could try it myself, it sounded so delicious. It was most famously a favourite of Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven, but despite what they seem to imply it wasn’t invented by them.
Here’s a 1910 recipe from “Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book” that I have tried:
Blackcurrant tea
3 tablespoons Blackcurrant jam
1 tablespoon sugar
Boiling water to make the whole 1 pint
Stir well, pressing the fruit.
Let it stand 1/2 hour before using any.
Strain off the liquid as required.
It comes under the heading of invalid cookery, but was also a children’s nursery drink for a treat. The taste – well, Blackcurrant cordial really. My small son is a fan, although he forgets what it’s called and asks me if he can have some of that lovely raspberry coffee.
This game needs a group of people large enough to be split into two teams (to make any number of hunters and two hunted), the great outdoors and a pub lunch – what could be better?
From “The Weekend Book”, 1938.
“Outdoor active games
Man-Hunt
This is strenuous and any number can join in. It is more exciting than a paper chase, and does not litter the country with paper.
First mark out an agreed area, say six miles by one, on the map, limited by recognisable natural features, outside which the men must not go, with your starting point on one end line and a suitable pub, as your objective, in the middle of the other end line. The hunters set off later and the two men a quarter of an hour later. The hunters may not blockade the starting point nor the objective but should stretch a cordon across the area and ambush likely points in the attempt to stop the men from passing through.
You have lunch at your objective and man-hunt home. It is unsuitable for crowded suburban areas.”
I love a spot of history surfing. Looking through some old book or piece of ephemera, coming across something I’ve never heard of, and then going investigating. (With extra points awarded if I somehow manage to cross-reference this with another old book I already have).
I was reading the problem page of The Young Ladies Journal from February 1870, which is enduringly interesting as problem pages always are, no matter if they’re from 100 years ago, or last week. This one is especially intriguing on account of the fact that only the answers to the questions appear, which sometimes involves a bit of imagination as to what the questions might have been – more of this in another post I’ll be putting up shortly.
One of the young ladies had asked about “The Grecian bend”, which elicited the following sensible response:
M.J.D.- Every age has its absurd fashion. The Grecian bend, as it is now called, is the present one. Avoid it, and anything else that has a tendency to deformity. You cannot walk too upright to widen the chest and give free play to the lungs.
It turns out that, much like wearing your trousers so low that you reveal most of your underpants (or like one bloke I saw, with his trousers belted right under his bum, all of his pants on show, and only able to shuffle along Pingu-style), the Grecian bend was a stupid fashion of the time. It involved pushing lots of skirt fabric into your bustle and bending your body forwards while walking. It was also known as a dance move. The reasoning behind the name is generally considered to be that it refers to the depiction of dancers on friezes from Ancient Greece, although historian David McCullough has a much ruder explanation – that it comes from “Greek” or anal sex.
This is what it looked like:
There were even special corsets made to keep your back in the correct bent position, which must have been incredibly painful. It was widely ridiculed as an absurdity, and music hall songs were sung to much amusement.
Here’s a few verses of a song called “Grecian Bend’:
‘Tis fun to see a lass so tall,
Lean forward ’till you’d think she’d fall,
Or pitch against a tree or wall,
Because of her Grecian bend.
E’en bashful girls are forward now,
So forward that the people vow,
They’ve been all day behind a plow-
To give them a Grecian bend.
What next we’ll have we do not know,
For novelty is all the go;
And when designs begin to flow,
Where will the follies end?
Perhaps you’ll see them by the scores,
Down on their knees upon your floors.
To try to get upon all fours,
And cut the Grecian bend.
Interestingly, as with all good history surfing sessions, it also uncovered another unknown fact for me. Widespread cases of decompression sickness were first seen during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge – it was termed “caisson disease” in 1873, after the underwater structures used while building its foundations. But at some point during the project, caisson disease became popularly known as “the bends” because sufferers looked like they were doing the Grecian bend themselves.
If a person wearing advertising boards (or a “human advertising medium”) front and back is a “Sandwich” then what other food-based item are they called if the boards enclose them on all four sides? A “Toad in the hole”, of course!
From 1961, the time of the Vietnam war, the Berlin Wall and great Cold War paranoia, comes this Civil Defence Pocket Book – in this case it’s the one for Wardens of the Civil Defence Corps. The organisation was set up in 1948 as a response to the rise of the Cold War, which was first termed in the previous year. This was a new idea – a permanent civilian volunteer unit during peacetime. It was designed to be a force to take control during a time of national emergency, and in particular, following a nuclear attack.
The Wardens duties were to cover local reconnaissance and reporting, and the leadership, organisation, guidance and control of the public. This handbook is supposed to be an aide-memoire of their duties, so not a complete account of all their training. In the end, they might not have had to spring into action during a nuclear war, but the Corps did help with train and flooding emergencies, as well as the primary school tragedy at Aberfan in 1966. The Civil Defence Corps were disbanded in 1968, with the government saying that the threat to national security had now reduced.
The fact it goes straight into the Warden’s duties during a nuclear attack, dictated with a stern simplicity, gives this book an unreal feeling of terror to me. The planning was for a future that didn’t happen, thankfully.
Some interesting information on the history of Civil Defence in the UK can be found here – http://www.civildefenceassociation.org.uk/HistCDWebA5V5.pdf
Some Friday No Fun today. It’s not just swearing that was a no-no in the 1930s. Here are some card, dice and wheel games that were designated illegal way back in the midsts of time. They are “Ace of Hearts”, “Faro” (or “Pharoah”), “Bassett”, “Hazard”, “Passage” and “Roly-Poly”.
All the games have hundreds of years of provenance. “Passage” (also known as “Passe-dix”) was an ancient dice game and “Ace of Hearts” and “Roly-Poly” formed elements of what is now “Roulette”.
The card game “Faro” was once the most widely played gambling game in England. My 1950 edition of game bible “Hoyle’s Games” says it is “rarely met with in the domestic circle…..chiefly, it may be said, because the game has for long been in pretty bad odour through the large sums of money that may be lost at it and through the almost unlimited opportunities that are afforded to (and often taken by) an unscrupulous banker to “fleece the lambs”. It is a pity; because Faro, when honestly played, is one of the best of all the banking games.” “Bassett” was a variation of this.
“Hazard” was a dice game mentioned in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”, with rather complicated rules – http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_(game). Not a million miles from the League of Gentlemen’s wonderful Go Johnny Go Go Go Go:
A judge’s ruling upheld their illegality in 1935, as well as all card games that were not based on pure skill (therefore meaning all card games would technically be illegal according to this judgement, as there is always the element of chance with cards).
Some info on the ruling is here in The Spectator’s archive – http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/4th-october-1935/11/when-bridge-is-illegal
There’s no mention of the games in the latest gambling legislation, however. But they’re not on the list of games approved for play in casinos, although this is probably because they’re not played anymore anyway – http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/pdf/list%20of%20approved%20casino%20games%20%20-%20july%202008.pdf
Categories
Vintage recipes – Gruel, 1930
I always thought gruel was a slightly thinner version of porridge.
But I found this recipe in the “Essex Cookery Book” of 1930 by K. A. Willson and Margaret Hussey, and it turns out it’s almost homeopathic porridge, so tiny is the quantity of oatmeal – 1 tablespoon to a pint of water or milk.
It’s featured here as invalid cookery, which admittedly sounds like a perfectly fine use for it. But those having to actually survive on versions of this were pretty hard done by. No wonder Oliver Twist wanted more.
(As a side note, you may be interested to learn that the tradition survives these days in the form of the old favourite Horlicks which is technically gruel – http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruel)