Tag: history-surfing

Categories
1900-1949 Ephemera War

Hitler’s effect on International Ping Pong, 1938

Ping Pong – what a great name for a sport. Although I should properly be calling it Table Tennis, as I’ve recently (and unexpectedly) ended up wading deep through Table Tennis England’s online archives.

Now, this isn’t a sport I know anything about. In fact, there’s only one sport I do know anything about (if you don’t count maypole dancing, and why would you?), and that’s tennis of the non-table variety.

But I’m a sucker for a mystery to solve – and I’ve been pretty successful of late as well (just call me Scooby Doo). Look at this! Today’s puzzle came in the shape of this little medal, tucked inside the box of my Grandad’s wartime memorabilia.

Engraved on the back is R.B.S.C. Lord Cup Runner Up 1937. And that’s all the information I have. I love having a starting point for some history-surfing, though, so I was off to investigate. I thought it wouldn’t be too difficult to find out about whatever the Lord Cup was, and what R.B.S.C. stood for, but it took quite a lot of searching to find anything.

The only place that currently has those initials is the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, and as it was founded before 1937, I thought I was onto something. That is, until I actually thought about it for a second. I realised that Grandad wasn’t a jet setter, he lived in Lancashire, and this was 1937 – so pre-war and any wartime related travelling hadn’t yet happened. Not that he was in Asia anyway, as far as I know.

But “Sports Club” is probably right for the last two initials, as it sounds like a sporty kind of thing. More searching on “Lord Cup” was rather hampered by the fact that it’s so similar to “Lord’s” and therefore lots of cricket stuff comes up. I’d assumed that the medal was something to do with cricket anyway, just because of the name, even though there was no reason to think so.

Eventually, I found one tiny reference, buried in the aforementioned Table Tennis England site. It turns out that they have an absolute joy of an archive – all their monthly magazines from 1935 to 2000 are beautifully scanned and available to view (although it looks like it was out on hold from 1939-1947 for war time reasons. I guess there wasn’t much table tennis going on during those years.)

Here they are, and very lovely they are too, especially from a design point of view, seeing how aesthetics changed over the years – TTE Archive

In issue 23, from April 1938, there’s a little nugget of information in a piece about events in North East Lancashire. All it says is:

“…while the closing rounds of The Lord Cup are arousing widespread interest.”

Table Tennis, April 1938
Table Tennis, April 1938

No issue of 1937 mentions The Lord Cup, however – I read them all, and now I feel quite au fait with the personalities and issues of 1930s table tennis. But it’s the right name, and the right place (Ribblesdale and Burnley Sports Club? Rawtenstall and Blackburn Sports Club?) and, importantly, it’s ever so slightly more plausible than my Grandad flying off to Thailand to take part in a tournament. Only slightly though – Mum says he never mentioned table tennis ever, and he wasn’t a sporty man. So, it’s all still a bit of a mystery.

Never mind. It’s a little bit of information, at least, and that makes the medal more interesting to me. BUT! Brilliantly, I also discovered that the England Table Tennis Association magazine was an unlikely arena for satire. Issue 24, May 1938, is rather in a huff with Mr Hitler. The recent Anschluss, the official joining of Germany and Austria, had an extra bonus – Germany could now claim that the women’s world table tennis champion, the Austrian Trudi Pritzi, was, in fact, officially German. Was this cricket? No, it bloody well was not! (In a number of ways.)

They jokingly suggest that England should follow suit, here:

“Perhaps the E.T.T.A. Selection committee should look around and select a promising country. We could get a few world champions. Say, Hungary. Or, perhaps, take over U.S.A. After all, that was once British territory.”

They are not happy at all that the correct procedure was not followed – surely the obvious next step after notifying the League of Nations about the forthcoming Anschluss was to make sure the tennis table situation was all agreed happily? And, more seriously, I presume that the last paragraph references Jewish Austrian players:

“The matter has not been regulated with proper courtesy to the International Federation. No doubt at all that, as in the case last year of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State, the Federation will willingly recognise the desire of two associations for joint representation, when application is made.

Meantime the high-handed attitude is a slight on the I.T.T.F. (International Table Tennis Federation). Even in the matter of the Anschluss of the two states. The German Government notified the League of Nations of what had taken place. In taking over the Austrian T.T.A., however, as far as we know the German T.T.A. has not yet thought it necessary to inform anyone.

When it does the question will probably be raised of the position under Article 2 of many Austrian table tennis players who are well known and are popular in this country and who were expelled from their association within a few hours of its annexation.”

Table Tennis, May 1938
Table Tennis, May 1938
Categories
Ephemera Victorian

The Grecian Bend, 1870

The Grecian Bend

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:

The Young Ladies Journal, February 1870
The Young Ladies Journal, February 1870

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:

The Grecian Bend
The Grecian Bend

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.

Categories
1900-1949 Adverts Ephemera Pharmaceuticals

The Liverpool Virus, 1913

Pharmacist's receipt for The Liverpool Virus rat poison, 1913

I’ve recently discovered the thrills of the “ephemera” section of Ebay. Not least, the word “ephemera” itself which is now vying for the position of my favourite word, alongside “nebula”.

I was looking for old playing cards, and am now the proud owner of some gloriously grotesque Edwardian Happy Family sets. But I was enthralled by the other random and delicate stuff that has survived, almost by accident.

I now have all manner of old bits and pieces, including Liverpool pharmacy receipts from 1913 – the days when names were taken and logged on the paperwork, all the better to know who’d suspiciously been purchasing arsenic after a case of poisoning. They included this receipt for “The Liverpool Virus” rat poison:

Which feels rather like crucial evidence at the start of either an Agatha Christie, or a zombie film.

But the thing I really like about the ephemera is that they are a handy jumping off point into history. A little tangible clue to inspire a bit of history-surfing.

I’ve discovered resources I didn’t know of, like the joys of the Old Bailey’s archive of court case transcripts. I’ve found out about the ship SS Homeric from a letter written on board to a friend in 1932. Leatherhead bus routes in the 1920s from an old bus leaflet. And I’ve been perusing the British Medical Journal archives on account of an outbreak of severe enteritis caused by this “Liverpool Virus” rat poison in 1908. It turns out despite the manufacturer’s claims that it was safe for humans, it very likely contained some form of salmonella.

Advert for The Liverpool Virus
Advert for The Liverpool Virus

I’m especially fascinated by the pharmaceuticals of the Victorian and Edwardian era – the hard drugs you could buy over the counter, and the potentially dangerous snake oils that promised to fix you up and paint the garden gate while they were at it (and I’m speaking as someone who was rather severely quizzed by a doctor last week as to why I even owned a bottle of Piriton).

Some more information is on this blog (another bonus, discovering so many of the informative blogs people are writing out there): http://jsbookreader.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-liverpool-rat-virus-strikes.html