Most of my assumptions about what visiting time at hospitals used to be like I’ve gleaned from the Carry On films. That, and the 1959 episode of Hancock’s Half Hour I was listening to on the bus earlier, “Hancock in Hospital”, where the lad is kept in for weeks with a broken leg and visiting time lasted for a mere two hours, once a week.
The most I’ve been in hospital was for 3 nights after a cesarean section and that felt like plenty long enough, quite apart from the insane situation of having major surgery, which you recover from by immediately having to look after and feed a newborn all through the night. And in fact I first listened to that Hancock episode while I was in hospital for another operation three years ago, but it turns out morphine injections rather hamper your concentration and I couldn’t remember any of it, so it was nice to listen to it again while I was in sound mind.
Anyway, in short, I don’t really know how visiting time worked for sure. But I have become fascinated by the infectious patient reports in old newspapers. Local newspapers used to print information about such patients, who presumably weren’t allowed visitors at all as a general rule – each patient had a number and their friends and family could consult the paper to check their progress.
So many stories there, reduced to the bare bones of information. I find myself worrying about the dangerously ill patients. Considering the information needed to be with the paper to be printed the day before, did the friends and family find out and get to the hospital in time?
Brown Windsor Soup – surely the stuff that the British Empire was built on? I know of it through Tony Hancock ordering it in an unappetising 1950s canteen, the Carry On team being served it for dinner it like unadventurous Brits in Carry on Abroad, and, well, in numerous other comedy settings from the 50s to the 70s. It’s famously the dull embodiment of dreary British cuisine and looks a bit like sludge. Although I can’t remember the ingredients ever being specified, I imagined it as a kind of thin, liquidised beef stew.
So it rather blew my mind to learn on Wikipedia that, in all likelihood, Brown Windsor Soup never actually existed as an actual, real thing from Victorian or Edwardian times. It was first included on the odd menu in the 1920s and 30s and thereafter apparently mainly used as a jokey kind of reference to terrible, dull British food.
Michael Quinion has investigated, and makes the claim that Brown Windsor Soup is first mentioned in print as late as 1943 – in the book The Fancy by Monica “great-granddaughter of Charles” Dickens. He has a few theories as to where the name came from. Firstly, there was White Windsor Soup, an undeniably real Victorian dish. Secondly, Brown Windsor Soap was also a definite, very famous, type of soap. And so there might have been some kind of confusion between these two items, or possibly a deliberate mashup of them both, for satirical purposes or otherwise.
I decided I wasn’t going to take Wikipedia’s word for this. I was going to uncover some true Brown Windsor Soup, as enjoyed by Queen Victoria. Wading through The British Newspaper Archive, the extensive search results that immediately popped up looked promising. However, on closer investigation, it was a quirk of the reading software of the Archive, which isn’t always entirely accurate on account of the age of the papers scanned, and the tiny typefaces that can be used. Every result referred to Brown Windsor Soap, not soup.
However. There is another type of Victorian soup that may have been the Brown Windsor in all but specific name – the vague-sounding “Brown Soup”.
In basic form, this could be “Beef Tea” – either in invalid cookery form or as a kind of Bovril drink, like this one, “Bouillon Fleet” from 1889: Aberdeen Journal, 16th March 1889
Or here on this restaurant menu in 1890, which was probably a more substantial version: Shields Daily Gazette, 24th March 1890
And it was served as a starter at the New Year’s Dinner at a “Home for Old Men and Women” in Glasgow, 1895. This stereotypical Victorian menu consisted of brown soup, beef-steak pie and plum pudding. Glasgow Herald, 2nd January 1895
Talking of pudding – look! A recipe for “Brown Windsor pudding” in 1897. It’s a spiced fruit steamed pudding which sounds gorgeous. I’m guessing that this was a reference to the aforementioned soap, which was also advertised as containing spices such as cinnamon. If there was spiced food based on the soap, then maybe “Brown Windsor Soup” should properly also be cinnamonned, gingered and cloved, a bit like Mulligatawny soup? Dundee Courier, 22nd December 1897
Here’s a 1913 recipe for brown soup. It’s made of beef and vegetables, but made extra brown with the addition of Bovril and browning. None more brown. Northampton Mercury, 26th December 1913
And one from 1916, with instructions on how to make the soup extra brown, by browning the flour in front of the fire. The People’s Journal, 4th November 1916
And another one. It all sounds quite nice to me. The Arbroath Herald, 1th September 1925
The first actual mention of “Brown Windsor soup” I found, on a Hartlepool menu from 1928. It was from Binns’ Restaurant – perhaps they invented it? Hartlepool Mail, 1st February 1928
A 1928 recipe for Brown Soup here, using vermicelli to thicken, if wished. Western Gazette, 13th April 1928
Brown Windsor still being served at Binns’ in Hartlepool in 1931: Hartlepool Mail, 2nd October 1931
A prize-winning brown soup recipe from 1931. I suspect that the winner, Mrs G. Walker, had seen the “Everything That Is Good” recipe above, in 1928. Veeerry similar. The Western Gazette, 17th April 1931
Windsor soup was finally commercially available in the 1940s. Batchelor’s version is here, although it wasn’t called “Brown”. Tinned foods were handy in wartime, it’s “A meal in itself” and could be heated “at the minimum of fuel cost”. Although “quantities are rather limited and a little patience may be needed,” in order to obtain some. Emphasizing its potential scarcity makes it sound more desirable, of course. Nottingham Evening Post, 2nd June, 1942
Finally, the last reference I found. Because The British Newspaper Archive only goes up to the mid-1950s, so far. I love the Britishness of the “If you must eat out…” Berwick Advertiser, 17th March 1955
I wonder when the very last bowl of Brown Windsor soup was eaten? Maybe there are people still making it out there, although what their recipe is, who knows? I couldn’t find anything specifying what makes “Brown Soup” different from “Brown Windsor”, if there even is a difference. And so, now I feel the need to invent my own version – a very gently spiced, very brown, beefy, vegetabley kind of concoction. Watch this space.
Update – thanks to Steve in the comments below, who let me know that there was now a date of 1926 as the first reference on Wikipedia. This is it:
Portsmouth Evening News, 24th February 1926
And after some more research I’ve found a 1926 reference to Brown Windsor in Binns’, earlier than the 1928 version above. Still a few months later than the one in the Portsmouth Evening News though.
Hartlepool Mail, 21st May 1926Hartlepool Mail, 21st May 1926
Inspired by my mum handing me an envelope recently which contained a lock of hair from my very first haircut in about 1975 (a family hairloom, I suppose you could call it), I’ve been thinking about the little bits of history that surround me day to day. I didn’t know this lock of hair existed until a few weeks ago so to suddenly be presented with my hair (pale, gingery brown and wavy, entirely unlike my hair now) from 40 years ago was a slightly strange experience. Especially as I now have a one-year-old daughter myself and her hair is redder but much the same.
Baby hair from my first haircut
I can never quite understand those Cash in the Attic type programmes that zoom round someone’s house, gathering up armfuls of family heirlooms to sell at auction so they can put £400 towards going on a holiday that they were probably going on anyway. Firstly, the surprise that people emit from being presented with their own possessions, as if they knew nothing about them beforehand. I can only imagine most of these things were inherited by a largely disinterested family who shoved the house-clearanced bits in a cupboard and feel utterly unattached to them. Because, secondly, they are pretty happy to just get rid of this stuff for £10 a pop at an auction house.
Me, if I owned those antiquey odds and ends, I would know about it and I certainly wouldn’t flog them for buttons just so I could stand next to Angela Rippon (delightful as I’m sure she is) and get on daytime telly.
The programme of that ilk that I still think about, and which continues to annoy me, concerned some parents who wanted to sell their heirlooms in order to buy a new heirloom for their children. Which is a pretty strange thing to do in the first place, but hey ho. What was incomprehensible though, was that the heirlooms they sold were a large set of family silver cutlery pieces, with an incredible history. They came from some Jewish ancestors who had escaped Fascist Italy during World War Two with only these bits of silver, stashed all over their body. They were lovely old pieces, and I especially loved some long spoons used for ice cream floats, with a straw incorporated in the handle. Now, the family had three children, and you’d think this would be an ideal heirloom to share around fairly, what with there being lots of separate pieces. But no, they sold them to buy one (ONE) modern art painting that the parents obviously just wanted to buy anyway. I’m not a mega fan of a lot of modern art (unless it makes me laugh) so disregard my opinion…….but it was complete rubbish. Good luck kids, sharing that.
I also have what is probably the most common 100-year-old-thing generally owned now – a brass Princess Mary tin given to the troops as a Christmas present in 1914. My Grandad carried it in World War Two to keep his tobacco and spare uniform patches in, so he probably got it from his step-dad, who’d been in the First World War. Household tip – some brown sauce polishes old brass up a treat.
Princess Mary’s brass tin
Some various wartime ephemera – a handkerchief sent to my Grandma, uniform patches and badges:
While I am in France, my heart is with you
Patches and badges
This made me realise that there must have been a brand new industry in wartime France – manufacturing souvenirs and tokens for the soldiers stationed there to send home. Although possibly only for a short time during the phony war period, I presume.
Oh, and what appears to be a live bullet Grandad brought back with him at the end of the war. Not too sure what to do with that. Or if I’m even allowed to own it.
What’s great is finding things in your house, though. Not in a Cash in the Attic way, I mean things actually as part of your house. Like when we found a newspaper from 1986 lining the shower base when we redid the bathroom. Or the general oddness of discovering a still-unexplained small bone in the plaster of the bedroom wall. And best of all, taking off some wallpaper to discover the previous, previous owners the Doyle family had written their family tree on the wall, and scribbled “The Doyles are the best!” in big letters before covering it up like a living room time capsule. This was especially great as I was captivated by a similar thing in Hancock’s Half Hour when I first saw it as a kid, when he “finds” poems by Lord Byron on his walls in East Cheam:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eAhd1Xs0kb0
What’s fascinating is that there’s so much stuff hidden away, things that may be of great importance, just unknown, in people’s houses. What do you have passed from the past?
I’m in no way a crime fiction expert, for that you need my friend Dave’s site What are you reading for ?Incidentally, it was this excellent post of his that inspired me to just bloody well get on with starting up my own site, so thank you, Dave – Six things I learnt from my blog.
Anyway, I bought this book for the cover and I’ve never, you know, actually read it. But what a cool, pulpy, noiry cover it is:
Dames Don’t Care, Peter Cheyney, 1937
As I haven’t read it, in my imagination, this book is the legendary “Lady Don’t Fall Backwards” that Tony Hancock and Sid James were eternally trying to get out of their library. Mixed with a touch of Woody Allen’s detective stories. And Lemmy Caution – what a brilliant detective name right there.
I got this in a library too, from the discarded 10p pile in Anfield library. As an old book aficionado, what I find sad is that Liverpool libraries don’t sell off their old stock anymore. I don’t know what happens to them, but apparently such sales didn’t fit into their new computer system. And the charity shops willing to sell dusty old tomes are getting fewer and farer between – most shops I go in now sell for the most part an identikit collection of still-current paperbacks, loads of biographies and the endless, multiple copies of “The World According to Clarkson”.
So where are the old books going? There’s the (seemingly growing ever smaller) number of antiquarian booksellers, still. And the double edged sword of eBay, Abe books, Amazon marketplace as well as the wonders of the free ebook scans available on demand. On the one hand, what a dream for the book buyer who knows what they are after (and I say this as someone who spent years on end looking in every second-hand bookshop I could see, in vain, for Marc Bolan’s book of poetry). Nearly everything is there, somewhere.
But the rummaging, the stumbling upon the hidden delight, is much diminished. And I particularly love the tangible hidden delight, the extra tucked in between the book pages, the piece of old newspaper used as a bookmark, for example. I have a few such things I will be posting about shortly (as well as my Grandad’s hidden treasure, kept between the leaves of what is most definitely the most singularly sinister book in my collection). As a history-lover I am a sucker for any little marker of previous ownership. Even the library page from my copy of The Weekend Book, and 1950s card markers:
Library plate, The Weekend Book, 1955
I find it sad that this excellent book sat on the library shelves for 24 years, from 1966 to 1990, only to then be discarded. But I love the fact that I can see this now. Hell, even at school I loved reading the names and dates of previous owners of my school books, as if I’d discovered some particularly interesting archive. This is partly why my favourite subjects are history and physics – what links these two is trying to make sense of time which, to me, is the biggest subject of all. As well as who is buying all those Clarkson books.
