An quote from Charles Dickens in the 1938 Weekend Book – “Cows are my passion”.
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Edwin Moo’d
Tag: The Weekend Book
What a fantastic phrase to describe sea-sickness.
I love boats myself, but I do have a tendency to become indifferent to their fate quite badly. Unfortunately, not having a 1930s pharmacy available to me, I can’t try out their cure:
A little epigram by Colin Ellis that amused me from The Weekend Book, 1955 edition (but written in the 1930s):
A little digging reveals there was a companion epigram:
Unforgivable
With Peter I refuse to dine:
His jokes are older than his wine.
Colin Ellis had one of those properly varied, illustrious lives that people used to have – he was a poet in his youth, but went on to become Director of Home-Grown Cereals at the Ministry of Food during the Second World War, held various public offices in Leicestershire, was a historian and archeologist, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and an author.
Apparently a Leicestershire man to the core, I rather enjoy another of his poems on the subject, from 1932 – Living in the Midlands. I might have been born 80 years later than Mr Ellis, but I still recognise this bucolic nostalgia (although in my case, it’s for the farms, orchards and oast houses of Kent and my girlhood).
Living in the Midlands
When men offer thanks for the bounties
That they in their boyhood have known
When poets are praising their counties
What ought I to say of my own?
Its highways are crowded with lorries
And buses encumber its lanes;
Its hills are used chiefly as quarries,
Its rivers used chiefly as drains.
The country is all over-ridden
By townsmen, ill-mannered and proud
And beauty, unless it is hidden
Is trampled to death by the crowd
Disforested, featureless, faded-
Describe me a place if you can
Where Man was by Nature less aided
Or Nature less aided by Man.
And yet though I keep in subjection
My heart, as a rule, to my head,
I still feel a sneaking affection
For ___________*, where I was bred.
For still, here and there, is a village,
Where factories have not been planned,
There still are some acres of tillage,
Some old men still work on the land.
And how can I help but remember
The Midsummer meadows of hay,
The stubbles dew-drenched in September,
The buttercups golden in May?
For we who seek out and discover
The charms of my county can be
As proud as a plain woman’s lover
Of beauties the world does not see.
*Shall we say “Middleshire”? (Author’s note)
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An Absurdity of Plurals, 1938
Who came up with the pluralisations of animals? When and, also, why? They are gloriously poetic but useless – you can hardly use most of them in real life without looking like a self-satisfaction of tossers.
And whoever invented “A Singular of Boars” is just taking the piss.
I was an enormous Beatles fan as a teenager (well, I still am). In fact, they’re the reason I live in Liverpool now. I came up here for a University Open Day twenty-two years ago, spent all of ten minutes in the history department, then took the rest of the day off to look for another kind of history – old Beatles haunts around the city.
I remember reading about how their song Golden Slumbers from the 1969 album Abbey Road came about. Paul McCartney was saying he had seen a music book at his dad’s house with a old song of that name in it. He liked the title and, as he couldn’t read music to find out how the tune went, he wrote his own melody instead.
This is the original, from The Weekend Book, 1938. As you can see, Paul kept part of the lyric mostly intact.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4spkG8LizyE
It’s the last hoorah of summer, it’s the weekend, and it’s probably raining. But if you’re planning some time in the great outdoors, here’s some advice on camping cookery and gathering wild food from the 1938 Weekend Book:
I can’t emphasise strongly enough – DON’T MAKE YOUR OWN MICE IN HONEY. That way madness lies.
Also remember “Don’t cook and attempt to eat young bracken shoots because the Japanese do. What suits the hardy races of the extreme East may not suit you.”
Can’t help thinking not only how delicious the breakfast section sounds, but how different the reality would be just a couple of years later.
I have The Weekend Book in two editions, one from 1938 and one from 1955 and I find it interesting to compare the changes between the two. 1938 seems a much more hedonistic time – by 1955 the joys of tobacco are expunged, the first aid section stops looking like the contents of Doctor Dee’s cabinet and turns into something recognisable to us, and most importantly, people apparently don’t eat mice in honey anymore. (That’s unborn mice in honey incidentally. Surely that can’t have been genuinely popular outside of the vendor in The Life of Brian’s wares?)
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.
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.”
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
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Easter Eggsplained, 1938
Ever wonder how the date for Easter is worked out? The Weekend Book from 1938 can help you out.
Simply get a degree in maths and then use the below formula to easily find out the date for any given year.
