It feels like there’s always something new to be body-conscious about. A new zone that hair should be entirely removed from or else some hidden part of the body that now, apparently, should be bleached. Of course, there’s always the accompanying new products marketed to solve our problems before we even knew they were problems.
Well, it was always this way. Just like Skin Constipation tried to become a “thing” in 1937, “Stale Foot Acid” was the new thing to worry about in 1939. It was basically the same thing – clogged pores which could be cured by, well, having a good wash.
Daily Herald, 1st March 1939
Here’s the (not-so) science bit – the sweat from your feet, left to become “stale”, turns to acid, blocks up all the pores in your feet and then starts piling up in the muscles, resulting in corns, callouses, stabbing pains, burning and tingling.
“You’ve got to shift that acid or go on suffering!”
So, what can be done to alleviate this dreadful condition? The “modern treatment” is to bathe your foot daily in water with Radox bath salts added. Radox is the best bath salt to use because it “liberates about five times as much oxygen as other bath salts.” Somehow, this “supercharges” the bath water and lets the acid escape through the now unblocked pores. Hooray!
And as a bonus, you now also don’t have people fainting at the vinegary stench when you take your shoes off.
Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 29th December 1928
So it’s back to work for me today. Can’t complain really – it’s in distinct contrast to the days when I was a shop-girl and had to work the busiest day of the year on Christmas Eve, with it all happening again on Boxing Day.
This year it’s been wall-to-wall truckles of brie, salted caramel cream liqueur, marshmallow snowmen and bubble and squeak, and so perhaps it’s time for a more austere diet to kick in. As the recipe below says (before giving the instructions in one, long sentence) “After the surfeit of the festival season it is often a relief to see something that is not garnished with clotted cream or chocolate icing. Wholemeal biscuits seem an eminently suitable change…”
It’s a kind of digestive biscuit which was, as evident in its name, was considered an aid to the digestive system due to the presence of bicarbonate of soda. Notwithstanding the fact that most of it decomposes into sodium carbonate during the cooking process and so having little actual effect, this particular recipe only calls for a pinch of the stuff anyway.
Nb. This is the first time I have come across the concept of a “saltspoon” as a means of measurement. Apparently 1 saltspoon equals 1/4 of a teaspoon so this would mean 1/8 teaspoon of salt in the recipe below.
Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 29th December 1928
After-Christmas Recipe
Wholemeal Biscuits
After the surfeit of the festival season it is often a relief to see something that is not garnished with clotted cream or chocolate icing. Wholemeal biscuits seem an eminently suitable change. Here is a good recipe for them:-
Ingredients:
1/2lb wholemeal flour
1/4 pint milk (about)
1oz caster sugar
1oz butter
1/2 saltspoonsful salt (1/8 tsp)
A pinch of carbonate of soda
Dissolve the butter and soda in the milk by warming, mix the flour, sugar and salt together, add the milk, mix the whole into a stiff paste, roll out thinly, cut in rounds, pierce all over with a fork, place on a greased tin and bake 25 minutes.
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.
It would all be over by Christmas, thought the lads signing up to fight in the Great War in the summer of 1914.
By the time Christmas came, the war was far from over, yet the unofficial Christmas truce between the German and British soldiers over the holiday period produced what must be one of the strangest Christmas experiences ever seen. Hostilities weren’t put on hold everywhere along the Western Front, but in some places on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day soldiers on both sides met each other in no man’s land, mainly in order to bury their dead soldiers who had been laying in the open since the battles of the previous week. Between the two sides there was talking, singing carols, and, famously, games of football.
A statue commemorating this moment appeared in Liverpool’s Bombed Out Church last week. It was on show for a week and now it’s moved, appropriately, to be displayed in Flanders in Belgium.
A letter from one of the soldiers who was there was published in The Dundee Courier in the new year of 1915. It vividly describes the horror, the mud, the social awkwardness of chatting with the enemy, the Christmas trees the German soldiers had erected in their trenches, and the laughter that lightened the most extreme of situations.
6th January 1915, Dundee Courier
6th January 1915, Dundee Courier
6th January 1915, Dundee Courier
6th January 1915, Dundee Courier
6th January 1915, Dundee Courier
“Burying Dead in No Man’s Land.”
Broken Bodies of Friend and Foe Are Reverently Laid in Shallow Graves.
British and German Soldiers Chat During Armistice.
Reuter has received the following letter from a subaltern at the front:-
“Christmas Day dawned on an appropriately sparkling landscape. A truce had been arranged for the few hours of daylight for the burial of the dead on both sides who had been out in the open since the fierce night fighting of a week earlier. When I got out, I found a large crowd of officers and men, British and German, grouped around the bodies, which had already been gathered together and laid out in rows. I went along those dreadful ranks and scanned the faces, fearing at every step to recognise one I knew. It was a ghastly sight. They lay stiffly in contorted attitudes, dirty with frozen mud and powdered with rime.
The digging parties were already busy on the two big common graves, but the ground was hard and the work slow and laborious. In the intervals of superintending it, we chatted with the Germans, most of whom were quite affable, if one could not exactly call them friendly, which, indeed, was neither to be expected nor desired. We exchanged confidences about the weather and the diametrically opposite news from East Prussia.
The way they maintained the truth of their marvellous victories was positively pathetic. They had no doubt of the issue in the east, and professed to regard the position in the west as a definite stalemate. It was most amusing to observe the bland innocence with which they put questions, a truthful answer to which might have had unexpected consequences in the future.
On charming lieutenant of artillery was most anxious to know just where my dug-out, “The Cormorants”, was situated. No doubt he wanted to shoot his card, tied to a “whistling Willie”. I waved my hand airily over the next company’s line, giving him the choice of various heaps in the rear. Time drew on, and it was obvious that the burying would not be half finished with the expiration of the armistice agreed upon, so we decided to renew it the following morning. At the set hour everyone returned to the trenches, and when the last man was in the lieutenant and I solemnly shook hands, saluted, and marched back ourselves.
They left us alone that night to enjoy a peaceful Christmas. I forgot to say that the previous night – Christmas Eve – their trenches were a blaze of Christmas trees, and our sentries were regaled for hours with the traditional Christmas songs of the Fatherland. Their officers even expressed annoyance the next day that some of these trees had been fired on, insisting they were part almost of a sacred rite.
On Boxing Day, at the agreed hour, on a prearranged signal being given, we turned out again. The output of officers of higher rank on their side was more marked, and the proceedings were more formal in consequence. But while the gruesome business of burying went forward there was still a certain interchange of pleasantries. The German soldiers seemed a good-tempered, amiable lot, mostly peasants from the look of them.
One remarkable exception, who wore the Iron Cross and addressed us in slow but faultless English, told us he was Professor of Early German and English Dialects at a Westphalian University. He had a wonderfully fine head. They distributed cigars and cigarettes freely among our digging party, who were much impressed by the cigars. I hope they were not disillusioned when they came to smoke them. Meanwhile the officers were amusing themselves by taking photographs of mixed groups.
The digging completed, the shallow graves were filled in, and the German officers remained to pay their tribute of respect while our chaplain read a short service. It was one of the most impressive things I have ever witnessed. Friend and foe stood side by side, bare-headed, watching the tall, grave figure of the padre outlined against the frosty landscape as he blessed the poor, broken bodies at his feet. Then with more salutes we turned and made our way back to our respective ruts.
Elsewhere along the line, I hear our fellows played the Germans at football on Christmas Day. Our own pet enemies remarked that they would like a game, but as the ground in our part is all root crops and much cut up by ditches and as, moreover, we had not got a football, we had to call it off.
That night the frost turned abruptly to rain. The trenches melted like butter on the fire, and all was slime and water instead of good, hard surface. A shuffle of company lines has now given me a captain as stable companion at “The Cormorants”, a gay young soul, with a penchant for building improvements. He constructed a top-hole fireplace inside with a real chimney and an up-to-date sloping fire-back, and utilised the last hour of the armistice to make the roof seaworthy with an ingenious arrangement of derelict waterproof sheets. We had a homely evening, and towards midnight were blissfully rejoicing in our dry spot amid the welter of mud.
Suddenly a horrible crackling like two or three clips of cartridges firing off made us jump. It was not a German infernal machine, as our first intuition told us, but merely a centre prop of the dug-out and the beam it supported had given way. The roof sagged threateningly three inches from our heads. A hasty retreat with a few valuables was beaten, and a digging party put on to clear off the earth to save a complete collapse. In the course of the next night the carpentry part was made as firm as a rock, but the waterproofing was a farce, and we never knew a dry moment till we were relieved. It was a lesson in trying to be too comfortable, but as usual, when things seem quite hopeless all we could do was to indulge in shrieks of laughter.
January 1, 1915.
A Happy New Year to you! We are awakened in the middle of the night by a frantic outburst of musketry. We instinctively thrust out a hand towards our boots and gazed apprehensively at the door, expecting every moment the arrival of a messenger to summon us instanter to the trenches to repel a furious attack. But nothing happened, and presently we relapsed into slumber. This morning we heard it was merely a mutual feu-de-joie to celebrate the New Year.”
Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat. Unless you’re having mock goose instead.
Mock versions of various meat dishes used to be fairly common in recipe books of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but you don’t tend to see recipes that seriously do this anymore. Thanks to Lewis Carroll, Mock Turtle Soup is probably the best-known example now.
I think the most recent recipe book I have that includes a mock creation was a 1970s Linda McCartney, which had a mock turkey for Christmas, mainly made of textured vegetable protein if I remember rightly. But there weren’t too many options for veggies in those days, you had to make your own fake meat if you wanted it. I was a vegetarian for seven years, during which time Linda McCartney first brought out her food range and it’s fair to say she was almost entirely responsible for bringing ready-made, specialised vegetarian food into the mainstream. I’m a big fan.
On that subject, in my vegetarian days, I remember eating something I bought from an international supermarket which was called “Mock Duck”. You can still get it, if you really want it. On the tin it says it’s made from “abalone”, but as I didn’t know what that was, I thought it must be something like tofu. Because why would you bother mocking meat unless it was to make it meat-free? Now I know that abalone is actually a kind of sea snail and so it was not only non-veggie, it was massively more hideous to boot. It did taste pretty bad, I have to say.
Oh, and to round up my knowledge of mocked food, there was also “mockolate” in Friends, as sold by the divine Michael McKean. That was disgusting too.
Anyway, it turns out then that the duck wasn’t being mocked for veggie reasons, but possibly for cost reasons instead (unless it was for “vegetarians” who still ate seafood, I suppose. That’s something I’ve never understood the reasoning for.) And cost used to be the reason these types of recipes existed at all. Which is why the mock goose below, from the 1930 Essex Cookery Book, is designated “Poor Man’s..”
Essex Cookery Book, 1930
I’m not too sure how much like goose it would actually have been as it’s mainly made from liver and potatoes. In fact, it’s not just liver, the recipe specifies a strangely non-specific “pig’s liver, etc”. There’s a lot of room for manoeuvre in that “etc” – it could contain pretty much anything. Apart from sea snails, hopefully.
Essex Cookery Book, 1930
Poor Man’s Goose
1/2 lb. pig’s liver, etc
1 lb. potatoes
2 small onions
Pepper and salt
1/2 tsp chopped sage
Water
Prepare potatoes and onions, cut into slices.
Wash liver and cut into slices.
Put all ingredients in layers in a pie-dish.
Cover with potato, add sufficient water to half fill the dish.
Put layer of caul or greased paper on the top.
Cook for 2 hours.
If covered with paper, remove 1/2 hour before serving and brown the potato.
If you fancy making a Christmas Pudding with a real vintage pedigree, here it is, a recipe from the Savoy in 1925. It might be too late to make a proper Christmas Cake, but it’s never too late to make a pudding – as long as you have 10 hours boiling time to spare.
Good luck finding both the specified large and small raisins.
27th November 1925, Ballymena Observer
A Christmas Pudding Recipe
The Chef of the Savoy Restaurant has been persuaded to reveal another of his famous recipes.
Although not quite so elaborate as that of the puddings he makes himself, it is of a fine, rich flavour, and simple to make.
He was kind enough to write it out for me, and here it is. It is a recipe for a seven-pound pudding.
Twelve ounces of large raisins, twelve ounces of small raisins, twelve ounces of currants, twelve ounces of crystalized peel, four ounces of chopped apple, one ounce of orange peel, one ounce of citron peel, two ounces of crystalized ginger, twelve ounces of suet, nine ounces of flour, ten ounces of bread crumbs, eight ounces of brown sugar, one teaspoonful of salt, six eggs, half a pint of milk, quarter of a pint of brandy or sherry.
All the dry ingredients should be mixed together. A little extra mixing well repays the trouble, he says. Beat the eggs and add them to the milk and brandy, then pour over the dry ingredients and again thoroughly mix. Pack into greased moulds and boil for six hours at the time of making. The puddings should be boiled for a further four hours when wanted for use. The best sauce is white, custard or brandy sauce.
9th December 1941, Berwickshire News and General Advertiser
As the mother of a little girl who has a whole array of food allergies, including eggs, the eggless baking of the Second World War is a rather useful inspiration. Rationing meant only one egg a week for an adult, and it seems a bit of a waste to use it in a cake if there’s other ways around it.
9th December 1941, Berwickshire News and General Advertiser
Here’s an eggless Christmas Cake recipe, from the Berwickshire News in 1941. The moisture and binding properties are replaced by milk and golden syrup, and vinegar is added to help the rise. Vinegar is also a key ingredient in the vegan “wacky cake”, which originated during the Depression, a version of which the lovely cook at my daughter’s nursery makes for her every Monday.
9th December 1941, Berwickshire News and General Advertiser
Christmas Cake (without eggs)
10 oz flour
4 oz margarine
4 oz sugar (brown or caster)
8 oz currants
8 oz sultanas
4 oz raisins (chopped)
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp. golden syrup
1/2 tsp mixed spice
3 level tsp Royal baking powder
1 dessertspoonful vinegar
1/2 pint milk
Peel on 1 orange
Clean and prepare the fruit
Sift the flour, salt, baking powder and spice together, and rub in the margarine.
Chop the orange peel very finely.
Add all dry ingredients and mix well.
Bind with the syrup and the milk mixed together and slightly warmed.
Lastly, stir in the vinegar.
Turn at once into a greased and lined cake tin (best size 7 ins.) and bake in a moderately slow oven (Regulo 3 or 325 degrees) for 3 1/2 – 4 hours.
2 oz of chopped nuts may be added to the cake if desired.
Blanched and split almonds may be used to decorate the cake and should be added after the cake has been in the over 15 minutes.
It’s the time of year where every magazine and newspaper has its gift guides – for him, for her, for the kids, presents under £50, under £10, inexplicably expensive stocking presents, even stocking presents for adults (do grown ups really get stockings, still? If so, I want one.)
Ever wonder what kind of presents people would get in centuries past? I generally imagine a kind of Dickensian setting where the kids are getting an orange, some nuts, a hoop and stick and maybe some kind of improving book.
So I was interested to find this advert from what sounds to be a bookseller or general stationer, from the Norfolk Chroncicle in 1791, advertising potential gifts to include in “Christmas boxes”. It’s also fun to see that you can still get a lot of them now, if you wanted to recreate Christmas in 1791. Actually, I do kind of want to do that.
Norfolk Chronicle, 24th December 1791
There’s card games, such as Cent Dix, there’s a book that I really want to read called “A New Moral System of Geography“, the Bible and various history books, something else called “The Royal Engagement Atlas” and almanacs for the coming year of 1792. There’s also some ideas for the ladies – thread cases, “etwees” (or “etuis”, decorative needle cases) and purses. There’s dictionaries, ink stands and paints. “Reeve’s Cake” sounds a like a historic curiosity, but you can still buy this now – it’s Reeve’s watercolour paints.
Reeve’s were a market leader in these watercolours as they had successfully found a way to prevent the paint cakes from cracking in storage by adding honey to the mixture.
My favourite item is the “La Partie Quarree” (which means “foursome”) conversation cards for ladies. Conversation cards were cards with pictures and vague suggestions to be used to break the ice and start conversations. I love the idea of it, it’s like a parlour game without the actual game, like feeling you’re playing “Just a Minute” while having a chat.
I found some 18th century conversation cards, from this antique dealer also in Norfolk, appropriately enough. Small talk begone, let’s talk about some meatier subjects – death, crimes and punishments, the passing of time and the wheel of fortune.
Conversation cards, 18th centuryConversation cards, 18th century
Beautiful pictures in that 18th century satirical style. Not sure why the fop is what seems to be some kind of goat-man, but he looks a bit like an enlightenment-era hipster. The doctor has a huge wig, which I presume is a comment on his wealth. “Hymen or Marriage” – well, there’s a topic and a half.
The idea is still very much out there – this link will give you some ideas for the conversation round a family dinner table, but there’s loads of variations out there. And, strangely enough, as often happens when I find something for this blog, I happen to come across other relevant bits of information from completely unrelated sources. The Pool have just advertised some absolutely lovely conversation mugs, with exactly the same idea, except for a chat over a cup of tea. They’re from the brilliantly-named shop Dept. Store for the Mind
My first thought on conversation cards, though, was this, from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, which was possibly the first thing of theirs I ever saw. A rather unsuccessful conversation on philosophers (which is also very 18th century).
