Craven A cork-tipped Virginia cigarettes – not only does their cork tip prevent “wet end”, but “you’ll not know what real cigarette enjoyment is” without them.
“You should smoke them because they’re made specially to prevent sore throats.”
I presume this means that the cork-tipped filter makes them less harsh to smoke than non-tipped cigarettes. But remember, always check with your doctor before you embark on a cigarette-based sore-throat-cure course.
In the era of corporal punishment and children’s sore bottoms, the search was on for the invention of an effective spanking machine.
American Professor of theoretical mechanics, Duff Andrew, invented one in 1912. The aim was not only to “save time and labour”, but was also an attempt to ensure the punishment fitted the crime. The pain levels could therefore be adjusted in order “to apportion scientifically the proportion of chastisement to the severity of the offence.” It was made of bamboo and aluminium, delivered 35 spanks per minute, and I imagine it looked like something seen in the pages of The Beano.
His wife and kids weren’t so keen on his invention, though. After he tried it out on one of his children, his wife objected and got put in the spanking machine as well for her trouble. Brilliantly, she took him to court for this, where he pleaded guilty. He sounded like a nightmare to live with – his wife complained that “He is always making something new, and will not let me and the children alone.”
But this wasn’t the first spanking machine invention. There were extra-helpings of sadism in this invention from 1903. Not only is it intended that an older boy could be used to inflict the punishment on a younger boy (a REEEEALLY bad idea), but there is phonographic recording equipment attached to it “to take down the solo executed by the small boy during the entertainment.”
Another 1903 version. The “humiliation” of being placed in the machine was said to be a more effective deterrent to the kids than actually being spanked – a modern version of the village stocks, I suppose.
A 1905 electronic version here. Nothing could go wrong with this – “…the flow of electricity starts a series of paddles in operation which play upon the anatomy of the victim.”
“One of the dreams of harassed parents has come true” in 1922. Interestingly, it states that as the spanking can now be administered by the turning of a wheel rather than by hand, that the old line traditionally uttered by parents “This hurts me more than it hurts you”, can’t be used anymore. That line wasn’t based on actual hand-hurt, though, was it?
It was also thought to be a useful punishment for prisoners, as seen in the following 1899 article, the earliest I found. And not only prisoners – a lodge (Masonic?) used one as an initiation ritual for a new recruit, making it extra terrifying by adding blank cartridges to the paddles so it exploded as it spanked. His subsequent death is evidently not the main story here – it’s reported almost as an aside at the end of the piece.
Another peek at a book from the brilliant Forgotten Books website, and one which includes one of my favourite topics – the disappeared art of invalid cookery. This book, “The Art of German Cooking and Baking” by Mrs Lina Meier is a general cookbook from 1922. I like looking at the slight through-the-looking-glass effect of recipes from other countries with their different ingredients and food traditions.
Pre-NHS (in the UK), there were a lot of sick people being looked after in the home, and effective medicines for many diseases were either new or non-existent. If you look at any cookery book from Victorian times to pre-World War Two, you’ll find a chapter on “Invalid Cookery“, aimed to help those looking after sick loved ones, and designed to be appropriately nutritious and easily digestible. However, they are significantly different to what we might think of as food for sick people now. When I’m ill I want either Heinz Tomato Soup, toast and butter or my mum’s mashed potato. When I was a kid the upside to feeling ill was that it was the only time you could have Lucozade. It would have been weird to drink it while not ill in the 1970s. However, if anyone had tried to give me toast water or raw minced beef soaked in lukewarm water, I wouldn’t have considered that my first choice to settle my stomach.
Looking at the Invalid Cookery section, this doesn’t differ much from what was suggested for British invalids – a lot of beef tea and bouillons.
We’re getting on the train to crazy town now, though – with “Fried Calf’s Brain” and “Calf’s Tongue” being offered as suitable sickness foods. Also “macaroni” is classed as a vegetable for some reason.
Mmmm, invalid puddings. It starts off sensibly and recognisably with a kind of rice pudding, but quickly starts getting quite raw-eggy. “Chocolate Cream with Red Wine”, is a strange chocolately-wine cross between a jelly and an uncooked meringue. I object to “Beaten Egg” (ingredients – egg and salt) being classed as a “sweet dish”. Interestingly, there are strict instructions on where to beat the egg – “The egg should be beaten in a well-ventilated room only, because the air in the room influences the nourishment served to the invalid.”
There’s lots of “foam” recipes – “Red wine foam” on this page. Very cheffy, circa 2013. Ice cream “can often be given to invalids without harm”. I think I’ll pick that, please.
I can’t help noticing that invalids were expected to drink quite a lot of wine. It’s in nearly all the recipes. Here there’s the disgusting-sounding “Milk Lemonade” – water, sugar, milk, lemon juice and, of course, white wine. Even the ascetic-sounding “Water with Lemon Juice” contains sherry.
This is an interesting recipe – “Iron and Wine“. Iron deficiency was a big problem then, as it still is now. In fact, I recently read about a simple remedy to combat endemic anaemia seen in parts of the world today – an Iron fish which you add to your cooking pot, and which leaches out small amounts of iron into the food. In 1922, you could either have your Pink Pills for Pale People or you could cut to the chase and add iron filings directly into your wine, like the kind of reckless experiment I would have done with my chemistry set aged 9. Ignoring the iron, which I imagine would give the wine a bit of a bloody tang, wine with ginger and horseradish sounds pretty exciting.
More for the alcoholic invalid here – “White Wine Soup”, “Red Wine Soup” and “Beer Soup”.
“Cow Udder”, anyone?
Moving on from Invalid Cookery, some general baking now. The directions for “1 1/2 cents’ worth of yeast” in the ingredients didn’t make these recipes very time-proof.
Berliner pancakes, of John F. Kennedy fame:
I object to to this one – “English Cake“. It contains ammonia as a raising agent, not something I believe is traditional in English cookery, but is seen in German and Greek baking. Ammonia, though. Apparently, it smells as a raw ingredient but the aroma bakes off during cooking. I don’t think I’d chance it, to be honest – the fear of ending up with “Cat Litter Cake” would be too much.
“English Bride’s Cake” here – still the traditional wedding fruit cake.
I like this recipe for “natural” green food dye – soaking coffee beans in egg white to produce a green colour.
Finally, another “English” recipe – “English Chow Chow”, . It’s a kind of piccalilli, although I think the name “chow chow” only lives on in parts of the US now.
Here’s a striking little article in the Children’s Newspaper from May 1922. This is it in its entirety:
“Eleven dynamite cartridges were exploded in the South American lake where the plesiosaurus was said to have been seen. It did not appear.”
Well, you can’t blame it, but there’s obviously a back story that was so well known at the time that further elaboration was unnecessary. I looked it up as I hadn’t heard of Nahuelito, the South American version of Nessie before. A supposed sighting of a lake monster in Nahuel Huapi Lake in Patagonia, Argentina was hot news in 1922. There’s some “photographic evidence” such as the picture below (taken later than 1922) – and they look pretty much the same as the ones of Nessie. But Nahuelito remains unfound just the same.
This was a big time for monsters of lake and sea, apparently. In another article a year later, a Mr Mitchell-Hedges “described his extraordinary battles with the giant fish of the ocean,” and “began by stating his belief that in the depths of the Pacific terrible monsters, survivors of the Mesozoic age, still exist.”
A bit of investigation about Mr Mitchell-Hedges reveals him to have been the owner of the strange crystal skull which featured on the cover on one of my favourite childhood books, Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. He led quite the Boys Own-style life – his job description was pretty much just “adventurer”. Some say he was the inspiration for the character of Indiana Jones, too, although not George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, to be fair, who you would expect to know such things. I’ve been tracking him in The British Newspaper Archive, and it’s quite a wild ride. But that’s another adventure for another post….
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.
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.
From The Children’s Newspaper in 1922 comes a riddle:
Jack and His Apples
Jack was a very good natured boy and, meeting his younger brother just after he had purchased some apples, he gave his brother one third of the total number and one third of an apple. Jack then had one apple left. How many did he have in the first place?
Any ideas? I have to say, I was foxed by this, and cursed the fact that the solution was only available in the next issue, which I don’t have.
So, hooray for finding another online archive! The Children’s Newspaper was amalgamated into Look and Learn magazine in 1965 and the Look and Learn site has put up archived issues of the paper here
So I found the answer in the next issue. It’s right at the bottom of the below image, so as not to spoiler the answer if you’re doing it….
Arthur Mee founded The Children’s Newspaper in 1919 and it continued after his death, until its final issue in 1965. At this point the sixties started to swing, it looked a bit too old fashioned and was integrated into “Look and Learn” magazine. He also presided over The Children’s Encyclopaedia, despite claiming to have no particular affinity to children. His aim wasn’t so much to entertain children as to produce upright citizens of the future, and The Children’s Newspaper was a proper newspaper aiming to keep pre-teens up to date with world news and science. I’ve got a couple of issues from 1922, and they’re still interesting to read today. Especially this article, which I love, from the issue dated 13th May 1922.
Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement and its first Chief Scout, invented a word – “goom”. It’s a great word.
B-P (as he was known) says,
“Who knows how to goom? It’s a funny word isn’t it? And you won’t find it in the dictionary; but I know its meaning, and when I’ve told you how to go gooming you will agree with me that that is the word for it.”
Essentially, the “goom” is the time just before daybreak, when the songbirds start chattering and before the rest of the world is awake. Once the cocks crow and signs of human life start to appear,
“Man is awake; the sun is up; and gooming is at an end…..Good morning. The goom is over.”
Here’s the article:
I think he’s right, “goom” is a brilliantly descriptive, yet silly, word and one I will always use in future (and you do see quite a lot of the goom with tiny kids in the house).
It’s a shame it didn’t stick around, well, apart from in Gracie Fields’ vernacular anyway….
