Author Archives: Jot 101

The BBC Christmas Schedules for 1932

Following on from a recent Jot exploring what the BBC were offering as TV entertainment for Christmas 1932 — half an hour from 11 pm onwards showing either a singer crooning into a microphone, female dancers prancing about in special costumes, or a short poem or play – we at Jot HQ thought it might be interesting to examine what listeners could expect to enjoy throughout the rest of the festive season.

First, we should explain that in the ‘thirties the Radio Times, though ostensibly a guide to radio schedules, was also a kind of feature magazine in which along with the programme information could be found other entertainment in the form of short stories or feature articles. In this particular issue we find material by well-known authors which, in most cases, had little or anything to do with the actual programmes. For instance, in this special Christmas number we find a tale by Compton Mackenzie entitled ‘ New Lamps for Old ‘, a new Lord Peter Wimsey story from Dorothy L. Sayers called ‘ The Queen’s Square, a satirical skit by Winifred Holtby entitled ‘ Mr Ming Escapes Christmas’, a memoir from popular travel writer S. P. B. Mais , a comic confection by D. B. Wyndham Lewis and a rather tiresome faux medieval dramatic piece by Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon. There were also a couple of ‘poems ‘and some similarly light features by a handful of lesser known writers.

It must be said that while the writing sometimes fails to impress, the illustrations that accompany it are usually charming in the best traditions of the Radio Times. For instance the cover ( see earlier Jot ) of the magazine is characteristic art work from book illustrator Edward Ardizonne, while some superb illustrations from the gifted illustrator John Austen , who was to become a favourite of the Radio Times, decorated the borders of the Farjeon piece. Other notable illustrators included Mervyn Wilson, Roland Pym and Clixby Watson. It goes without saying too that the adverts ( some full page) are no less captivating, most notably the wonderful back cover colour advert for Bovril by Alfred Lees featuring the ghost of Jacob Marley. Continue reading →

Richard Hoggart and the Culture Wars of the sixties

I just missed being taught by Richard Hoggart at my University, which is a pity, since I was very
impressed by his arguments in The Uses of Literacyand would have enjoyed listening to him discussing some of the ramifications of his book in lectures and seminars. Never mind.

Jot 101 Richard Hoggart pic

Today the hot subjects of the chattering classes are the Culture Wars, especially those being played out on social media. Hardly a day goes by without some academic or TV presenter being arraigned on Twitter for his or her remarks on cancel culture or identity issues. Back in 1961, however, there were different sort of Culture Wars raging in the columns of newspapers and magazines and Hoggart was one of the commentators whose words carried weight.

So Hoggart’s review of Richard Wollheim’s Fabian pamphlet Socialism and Culture (1961) in the New Statesman, though seemingly passé in today’s overheated political climate remains a perceptive commentary on a raging issue of the time which has implications today for the qualities of intellectual debate in newspapers, on social media and the inherent values ( or non-values) of those producing TV. It is also interesting as being, probably, the last critique on cultural life in which those horrible terms ‘ high brow’ and ‘low brow’ are used, in this case, in a derogatory way.

Hoggart takes issue with the crude, unintelligent and lazy discrimination used by some commentators on social culture in the past that identified ‘ lowbrow ‘ culture with that enjoyed by the ‘ lower orders ‘ ( presumably the working class ) and ‘ mass culture ‘ with that enjoyed by the ‘ 80 per cent who have not been to a grammar school’ ( presumably most of the working class plus a section of the lower middle class).

‘ The crucial distinctions to-day are not those between The News of the World and The Observer, between the Third Programme and the Light Programme, between sex-and-violence paperbacks and ‘ egghead ‘ paperbacks, between Bootsie and Snudge and the Alan Taylor lectures, between the Billy Cotton Band Show and the Brains Trust, between the Top Ten and a celebrity concert, or between ‘ skiffle ‘ and chamber music. The distinctions we should be making are those between the News of the World and the Sunday Pictorial, between ‘ skiffle ‘ and the Top Ten; and for ‘ highbrows’ between The Observer and the Sunday Times, or in ‘ egghead ‘paperbacks, between Raymond Williams and Vance Packard.
Continue reading →

A Christmas number of the Radio Times

Next year the BBC will be a hundred years old. To celebrate this momentous anniversary Jot 101 is looking at the Christmas 1932 number of the Radio Times,which can be found in your Jotter’s private collection.

The issue in question is the ‘ Southern edition ‘,which gives a flavour of the Corporation’s output, although it seems to exclude Northern England and Scotland.

Obviously, the festive period was a chance for the BBC to broadcast some of its best wireless programmes, but the magazine is also significant in that it tells us about the latest development of the period, which was Television. In the UK (other countries seem to have been more advanced in this area) the BBC were committed to the Baird system of ‘ low definition ‘ Television. This used a rather primitive method of revolving discs to scan an image of performers standing between two sets of photo-electric cells. Because the apparatus was comparatively rudimentary the result was a distinctly blurred image. The performers also needed to apply heavy make up and adopt a certain costume in order to convey their presence across the ether. Television broadcasting using this basic system began in August 1932, essentially as an experiment. Radio was king at the time and Television was relegated to a mere half hour of ‘ entertainment ‘ tagged on to the end of the day’s programmes at around 11 pm.

The TV fare offered by the BBC for this half hour was pretty basic and usually consisted ( in late 1932 at least) of a short dramatic reading and some singing or dancing. On December 27^th, for instance, viewers were treated to a ‘Christmas Puppet Play ‘ entitled ‘Robinson Crusoe’ in which a certain Nell St John Montague was accompanied by a dancer called Priscilla Sarsfield. On the following evening ‘Donald Peers, Collins and Annette ( a Song and Dance Trio)’ did their thing accompanied by the dancer Rosemary Reynolds. Continue reading →

Some pubs in Festival of Britain London and the same pubs seventy years on

The Prospect of Whitby

1951 Here ‘ we can sit on a balcony built over the edge of the Thames and watch the barges slip down on the tide and the big ships come and go while we drink beer and sample the cooking for which this pub is famed. It’s not what you call smart and elegant, but it is old established and generally crowded.

It has survived and now boasts of being the oldest pub in London ( est. 1520), though there are other contenders. Customers can still sit out over the Thames, though with the Docks having closed, most of the craft are tourist boats going to and from Greenwich. The food is hardly noteworthy, being mainly homely steak and ale pies, chicken pies and roasts. There are few veggie options, according to one customer, but there wouldn’t have been any in 1951!

The Eagle, City Road

The public house, once run by the Salvation Army and immortalised in the ditty:

‘Up and down the City Road,

In and out ‘The Eagle’

That’s the way the money goes.

Pop goes the weasel’.

The pub still dispenses ‘ good cheer , excellent draught ‘Worthington’ beer, to be exact. City Road used to be the centre of the tailoring trade, and towards the end of a week the little tailors often found it necessary to put their pressing iron—or “ weasel”—into pawn with the Salvation Army publicans until pay day. You can see a “ weasel“ on show in the bar to this day.

It’s still there, but rather more glamorous than it was in the fifties. Its website doesn’t mention its colourful past, so one must go to Know Your London for its history, which includes spells as a Music Hall, where Marie Lloyd performed. Earlier on in its life, the Eagle was mentioned by Dickens in his Sketches by Boz.

The George, Borough.

Just down from London Bridge station, with its’ waterfront façade of warehouses, behind which lie rows of mean streets and little homes which suffered heavily in the Nazi blitz bombing of London’, is the Borough. On the left going southwards can be found a ‘historic gem’ of an inn, the George, once ‘a terminus for stage coaches’. As we enter the coachyard we really do jump back a century. It’s not mere a question of the setting …Who is this Sam Wellerish figure, a real ostler ? And bless my heart, there’s Mr Pickwick himself about to take coach to Dingley Dell. All right, it’s no hallucination. We just happen to have arrived when the admirers of Charles Dickens use the coachyard as a stage to act scenes from his works ‘

Continue reading →

Amber and Cameos in post-war London

The Good Time Guide to London is a book of surprises and delights. Earlier Jots have focussedmainly on its evocative descriptions of the now disappeared Docklands and the disreputable world of seedy nightclubs and ‘ dives ‘. But the book is also a handy guide to the world of old books and antiques in post war London. In one antiquarian bookshop ‘ near Davis Street ‘ a friend of the Guide writer picked up a book that interested him and asked the price, ‘thinking that a few guineas would be plenty to pay.” That will be £1,500 “, murmured the assistant, without turning a hair.

md22477754488

Our friend put that volume down as if he had been shot.’ One wonders what that book could have been that cost the equivalent of a quarter of a million quid today. And which shop might charge such a sum? That incident occurred in Mayfair. Chelsea and Kensington were the places to go for antiques before the trade expanded. In 1951, before the serious antiques arrived in Portobello Road, you were more likely to find the serial killer John Christie ( of nearby Rillington Place ) strolling along in search of victims than a French ormolu clock or a Georgian wine glass.

Unsurprisingly, two at least of the dealers mentioned in the Guide have now disappeared. One is a shop in Bond Street selling ‘ rare old amber ‘. This was the premises of S.J. Phillips, who boasted ( I seem to recall ) that it was the only shop devoted to amber in Britain. Your Jotter must have passed it twenty or more times, but did not go in, which he now regrets. The family that owned it produced the famous and very eccentric pure mathematician Dr Simon P. Norton, subject of that fascinating book, The Genius in My Basement. He lived in Cambridge, and until his death of a heart attack in 2019, was a campaigner against cars and a veteran champion of local transport systems. Wedded to a diet consisting of little else but pasta and oily fish, he worked on huge numbers, having earlier in his life achieved perfect scores in two Maths Olympiads. S.J. Phillips moved a few years ago to smaller premises in Bruton Street, just around the corner from their former Bond Street site, which is now occupied ( I think) by yet another posh frock shop. Continue reading →

The Moon is Up—an anthology for older people

With commentaries by Dorothy Saunders. Jot 101 older Moon is Up cover 001

Anthologies are not rare publications; they have appeared regularly for two hundred years or more. However an anthology of prose and poetry accompanied by commentaries on the material anthologised is pretty unusual in English. The well read Dorothy Saunders first brought out The Moon is Up, an anthology on the subject of old age, as a private publication for her friends and family in 1954. A year later a commercial publisher, Phoenix House, were impressed enough to take it on themselves, and a copy of this book is what we found among the piles of volumes at Jot HQ the other day.

One supposes that the publisher saw in this book something unusual—commentaries that outnumbered in words the actual passages anthologised—and these commentaries, though not particularly intellectually demanding, possess a certain appeal in their commonsensical and occasionally perceptive flavour. Saunders was obviously a philosophical and reflective person—the sort of woman you might turn to for comfort at a moment of personal crisis—a serious illness or injury, perhaps—but her reflections generally lack the wow factor. For instance, responding to passages from Walter de la Mare, Wilfred Scawen Blunt and Gerald Bullett she has this to say:

‘ When we were in love we walked on air, exalted, and that is why we sometimes long to be in love again. With no specific object in mind we desire to live once more in that exquisitely heightened climate of the senses. Young men in battle, I have been told, have known this sharpened view of life…Mere existence gains depth and colour when its tenure is precarious…’

Hardly revelatory! Saunders also seems to be very conventional in her views of work/play.

‘ A man who can truthfully say : My work is my hobby, in an exceedingly lucky fellow , for most people have little choice of the way they earn their daily bread in this machine age, and only a minority have interesting and congenial jobs ‘. Continue reading →

Great Restaurants of the World

No 3: The Colony, New York City

In the days before Michelin starred restaurants there were places where the well heeled went to eat —not only for the food, which was obviously excellent, but perhaps not always the most innovative—and of these the Colony, at the intersection of Madison Avenue and Sixty-First Street in Manhattan, became by 1948, when a biography of it was published by Iles Brody– arguably the best known in the world. Indeed, the owners of the Colony called their eating place ‘the greatest restaurant in the world.’

The Colony began in 1920 as a small and rather seedy and ‘disreputable ‘ bistro that served good food to customers of the night club above it, many of who were men who brought their mistresses. Then in 1922 its two chefs, Glen Cavallero and Hartmann, plus Head Waiter, Cerutti, brought out the owner, one Joe Pani, for $25,000 and set about making the new Colony a swanky resort of the rich and famous. Despite the quality of the food, takings were poor for the first few months. The Colony could not shake off its reputation as a ‘ cat house ‘. However, before too long, without any help from Gordon Ramsay, things began to look up thanks to the presence at one of the tables of famous society hostess Mrs Vanderbilt. The multi-millionaire Vanderbilt, encouraged by his wife, came to see what the fuss was about and later brought his sixteen-year old daughter. Word got about and before too long the Colony became a regular haunt of New York Society. Within three months the daily takings grew from one hundred dollars to ten times that amount. By 1927 – 8 the restaurant cleared over half a million dollars yearly. By this time the Colony had moved to the more ‘ aristocratic ‘ Sixty-first Street, just around the corner.

There were problems though for a high-class restaurant that sold ‘ liquor’ at a time of Prohibition, but the chief barman had a cunning ruse. He kept his wines and spirits in an elevator and when he was alerted to the imminent arrival of Federal agents he simply ran the elevator car to the top story. And when agents disguised as customers enquired pf the liquor that was being served at table they were informed that it was brandy, but of superior quality to the stuff that was habitually confiscated. A few tots freely donated to the same agents convinced them to keep their mouths shut regarding this blatant violation of Federal law. Continue reading →

Oddities of London

Abstracted from The Good Time Guide to London(1951)

The statue of George IV in Trafalgar Square shows the king, without boots or spurs, riding a horse without saddle or stirrups.

True. Incidentally, Sir Francis Chantrey’s bronze of 1829 was originally made for Marble Arch.

On the floor of the entrance hall of the National Gallery is a mosaic of Great Garbo.

True .The Bloomsbury set mosaic artist Boris Anrep was commissioned to provide a number of art works for the Gallery based on specific themes and featuring a number of contemporary figures. On the half-way landing the actress Great Garbo appears as Melpomeme in ‘ The Awakening of the Muses ‘.

On October 23^rd, 1843, a few days before the statue of Nelson was erected, 14 persons ate a rump steak dinner on the top of Nelson’s column

True .Doubtless Punch ( founded 1841) would have had something witty to say about this matter. Continue reading →

Destroyed manuscripts— horror stories to chill the blood

1280px-George_Hamilton_Gordon,_4th_Earl_of_Aberdeen_by_John_Partridge

Found at Jot HQ, the pamphlet published by Winfred A. Meyers ,a well known dealer in autograph letters and manuscripts, containing the talk she gave at the ABA Book Fair at Albemarle Street, London, in 1961 on ‘ How to Collect Autograph Letters and Manuscripts ‘.

Meyers sets off by making a good case for collecting autograph letters from a historical point of view. She argues that a letter or set of letters may help a ‘professional’ scholar piece together episodes in the life of a particular person, possibly solving a puzzle that has perplexed other scholars for years; letters can also immediately connect an amateur with the author of a work in that person’s library. So far, so good. These are obvious benefits of collecting autograph letters. Meyers then comes to the horror stories of letters and historical documents lost, irretrievably damaged through neglect, or deliberately destroyed. What she tells us is indeed a litany of terrible losses:

‘…it is amazing after what has befallen letters and documents in the not so distant past, how much has survived. The rats that gnawed the letters from Elizabeth’s favourite courtier, at Belvoir Castle; the parish registers that turned into solid glue in the wet cellars of another stately home; Somerset House in 1840 sending the Exchequer Accounts of Henry VIII and the Secret Service Accounts of Queen Elizabeth to the waste paper merchant: the old India Office turning out the records of the Indian navy to the paper mills; the French Revolutionaries destroying and dispersing the papers of the Monarchy, and the restored Monarchy destroying the papers of the French Revolutionaries; the British army destroying the White House papers in 1812; the Southern States destroying their records before the advancing Union Army in the Civil War; the Sinn Feiners’ destruction of Dublin Castle records; the salvage drives and bombing of two wars; the mouldering records in a pigsty at Arundel Castle; the toy-drum and lampshade-makers’ part; Cassandra Austen tearing up the letters of her sister Jane, and George Washington’s widow tearing up all George’s letters to her and a terrible story I just heard of a collection of Emily and Charlotte Bronte letters that were torn up only last week…’

Continue reading →

Some nightclubs and ‘dives ‘ of post-war London

Jot 101 Night club dancing pic

We at Jot HQ know our audience. We know, for instance, that Jots on long-departed restaurants and pubs in London are popular. Presumably, Jots on seedy night clubs and ‘ dives ‘ ( do people still use this word to describe such resorts ?) will also prove popular. People are certainly curious about the London drug culture of yesteryear. They are aware that drugs like opium and cocaine have been around, thought not always easily available, for two centuries or more. They know that S. T. Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey were slaves to laudanum and that Sherlock Holmes was a cocaine addict. They are perhaps not so sure about the history of marijuana consumption in the UK before it became the drug of choice among hippies in the swinging sixties.. One of the most interesting sides of The Good Time Guide to Londonis the candour with which the more disreputable and sleazy pleasures of the flesh— from sex , (the while slave trade and prostitution)— to hard drinking and drug taking are discussed in 1951. This is such a contrast to a guide like Dining Out in London, published in the same year, which merely covers restaurants. In fact, The Good Time Guide to Londonseems to revel in the seamier side of London.

Take the general introduction to the section on night clubs:

‘…In theory all the clubs are for the use only of members and their guests. Some of them stick to this rule, and it isn’t easy to get in without preparation ( though nothing, of course, is impossible). Others are, shall we say, less insistent on the letter of the law. A day ticket is produced from somewhere, or the secretary may discover you are a life-long friend of his…The dives vary a great deal. Some have specialised clienteles—artists, coloured folk, poets or crooks. Some play be-bop all night; others prefer poker. A sniff of marijuana. Not all of them places to go with your wife. Whatever happens, you’ve been warned !’

The writer then proceeds to make notes on individual night clubs, which we shall discuss under various headings:

The Pigalle

‘…just opened in Piccadilly, offers the disturbing attraction of 40 pretty girls, properly dressed to be undressed, accompanied by a really lavish stage show. You can dance between times, and enjoy yourself for the remarkable small sum of 17/6 which you pay for your dinner…Original idea was provided, it is said, by the world famous Tabarin in Montmartre…’

The Society

Sited in Jermyn Street ‘…with its tiny dance floor and its beautifully panelled walls, ( it) is an excellent rendezvous if you are in the mood to appreciate an intimate, relaxed, unmistakably French atmosphere. Here the gypsies will leave their stand to sing just for you; here the rumba-drums mix with the ripple of whispered conversations and subdued laughter…’ Continue reading →

The Ionesco/Tynan controversy of 1958

Jot 101 Ionesco pic

Found among the papers of the academic and writer Joseph O’Donoghue are some press clippings covering the Ionesco/Tynan controversy of 1958. In the history of British drama the debate between the supporters of Eugene Ionesco ( above), Romanian pioneer of the ‘ Theatre of the Absurd ‘on one side, and the defenders of the ‘ realist ‘ theatre proponent , Kenneth Tynan, on the other, that took place in the Arts pages of the Observerin June and July 1958, remains one of the more significant literary debates of the twentieth century, perhaps only rivalled by the Leavis—Snow altercation a few years later.

Essentially, Ionesco, the author of such classic ‘ absurdist’ pieces as ‘ The Bald Prima Donna ‘ and ‘ The Chairs’, argued that theatre should have nothing to do with the social and political issues that concerned the average man in the street. Such writers as Sartre, Osborne, Miller and Brecht were representatives of a ‘ left-wing conformism ‘ and offered nothing ‘ that one does not know already through books and political speeches ‘. Theatre should in contrast promote the artist’s aesthetic and philosophical perspectives, particularly as they reflected the absurdity and futility of existence. The critic should only be concerned with how successful the artist’s methods were in conveying his ideas to the audience.

Tynan’s vision of the theatre was demonstrably opposed to that of Ionesco. To him a play was only successful as art if it effectively reflected the social and political issues of the time. A play should not be an abstract philosophical debate on the absurdity of existence, but should engage with the audience’s experience of everyday life. To Tynan, politics was part of life in which ‘ even buying a packet of cigarettes was a political act ‘. He accused Ionesco of a sort of solipsism in which distortions of reality ( as in Cubism ) become more valid and important than ‘ the external world it is their proper function to interpret’. Continue reading →

A working class household in early twentieth century Norwich

Found among the O’Donogue papers at Jot HQ is a long letter dated 3rd August 1977 from 1, Chalk Hill Road, Norwich by a certain Elsie Grint. We do not know the exact circumstances of the letter, but it seems likely that O’Donoghue placed a letter in a local paper asking if anyone who grew up in Norwich in the early years of the twentieth century could write to him with their reminiscences.

Elsie replied and her memories of that time are particularly detailed:

‘ I lived at 109 Midland St ( off Heigham St) from 1917 to 1934…We lived at the end of a row of houses ( I think the rent was 10/- weekly) but we always paid 6d. extra because of the gable end & the very small piece of garden which ran alongside it. Our house had 2 small rooms downstairs & 2 upstairs, with a very tiny kitchen which held a copper & sink. A small ( & we had gas lighting before electricity was installed ) door in the living room opened onto the steep stairs to the 2 bedrooms. Another small door in the living room opened to the coal house under the stairs & the other door in this small room was the larder. All the houses were built like this & we had a small yard at the back, opening onto a passage which led to about 8 other houses, & in this yard was a toilet, which had a wooden seat from wall to wall ( very inconvenient if needed during the night).

I went to Heigham St School , which I think was demolished after the war & my first memories of the infant school was a sand tray, which we all had & made pictures in the sand with our fingers. We moved up to the junior school & then at the age of 11 years were separated—the boys to the boys school & the girls to the girls school until about 2 years later when we were moved to Wensum View School because of a new policy of education. If naughty we were made to stand in the corner for long periods & the cane was given if we were very naughty. Our heads were looked regularly for fleas & nits & we also visited the school dentist. Many poor children attended this school & did not have adequate footwear. Many wore odd shoes belonging to adults, which didn’t fit at all & school uniform was never thought of . Wensum View School sold berets for girls & caps for boys in around 1930 of the school colours , but they were not compulsory ( 2/- was a lot to pay for a school hat I was told). Next to Heigham St School was a large tannery which at times smelt awful. The owner had a large family & one of the daughters told me none were even allowed to speak at meat times. Continue reading →

The Good Time Guide to London (1951) — a post-war perspective

Francis Aldor, author of a book on Hitler, and also a publisher, considered compiling his unusual guide to the lesser sights of London after meeting an American tourist from Los Angeles in Venice. When asked if he had visited the city’s ghetto, where Shakespeare’s Shylock was supposed to have lived, the American confessed that he had not. Alas, there was no time for Aldor to show him, as the American’s plane was due to leave the following morning, but the encounter did give Aldor the idea of a book on London, one of the cities he knew most intimately, that would uncover a city whose ‘attractions are innumerable, but notably shy and elusive’. Another reason to publish such a book in 1951, although Aldor doesn’t admit it, was, of course, to cash in on ‘The Festival of Britain’.

Aldor gathered together some talented writers to help him lift the lid on the metropolis– people like navy expert Commander Trevor Blore, K. Kay, G. de Semley, Lee-Howard, Sheila Bridgeman, and Michael Pechel, among others. More extraordinary is the list of artists Aldor and the art editor Imre Hofbauer (1905 – 89), a Serbian immigrant whose brilliant expressionist vignettes had been published in many magazines, called upon to provide the text illustrations—including book illustrator Edward Ardizonne, Terence Bowles, M and V. Bulkely-Johnson, Ray Evans, the caricaturist Fougasse, art critic William Gaunt, Peter Jackson, the gifted painter Fortunino Martania, Francis Marshall, Feliks Topolski, Vertes and some of the best artists of the Grosvenor school of lino cutters. Many of the drawings had already appeared in other books or magazines on London, but their reappearance in this new guide was a stroke of genius.

Many followers of Jot 101 over the age of 75 might recognise some of the aspects of London described in the guide, but for much younger Jotters Aldor’s London of 1951 seems another world away. Take the description of the Dockland district. Aldor is quick to dispel the colourful and somewhat sensational image of Chinatown painted by Thomas Burke in his Limehouse Nights (1916), the Fu Manchu novels of Sax Rohmer and films of the time:

‘Sinister Chinese slinking silently through luminescent fog, with the moan of foghorns in the background; shoreside sharks and tough dames skinning poor sailors home from the sea; ruthless smugglers shooting their way out of police traps; East End dives where” master-minds “ plan commando raids of crime and send out their swarthy plug-uglies to get the Crown Jewels. Continue reading →

The baked mirror hoax

Found in Edmund Gosse’s 1894 edition of Hazlitt’s Conversations with James Northcote R.A. (Bentley, London 1894) this amusing prank. The name MynHeer might have been a warning… This would have been well before the birth of photography – Hazlitt wrote the book in 1830. For more on the great Northcote (self portrait below) see his Wikipedia page.

Northcote told an anecdote of Sir George Beaumont**,

to show the credulity of mankind. When a young man

lie put an advertisement in the papers, to say that a

Mynheer , just come over from Germany, had found out

a method of taking a likeness much superior to any

other by the person’s looking into a mirror and having

the glass heated so as to bake the impression. He stated

this wonderful artist to live at a perfumer’s shop in Bond

Street, opposite to an hotel where he lodged, and amused

himself the next day to see the numbers of people who

flocked to have their likenesses taken in this surprising

manner. At last he went over himself to ask for

Monsieur , and was driven out of the shop by the

perfumer in a rage, who said there was no Monsieur

nor Monsieur Devil lived there.

**’Possibly Sir George Baker, the Devonshire physician, famous for his successful raid against the leaden vessels used for cider-mking’ (Edmund Gosse’s note)

Tenure or no tenure: a case from 1972

‘Publish or perish ‘ has long been an accept truism among academics; those University staff hoping for promotion will only achieve it if they are judged to have published a sufficient amount of published research to justify it. After all, university teachers are expected to researchas well as teach.

There must be many examples of University teachers failing to progress along the road towards a professorship, but your Jotter can think of two glaring cases. At my own University a certain expert in textual criticism, who was taken on by the department of English on the strength of a degree and a B. Litt in English , from Oxford University and who proved to be a popular teacher among his students ( his classes on bibliography and his lectures on Bob Dylan as a poet were highly appreciated) , failed to climb the greasy pole of academic promotion mainly because he published little or anything throughout his forty or so years in the department. He began as a Lecturer and retired (I believe) as one.

Another better known example was Monica Jones, the lover of Philip Larkin, who while a Lecturer in English at the University Of Leicester, failed to publish a single research paper or book, although she was regarded as a well-respected teacher with a particular interest in Sir Walter Scott. While her colleagues were promoted she remained firmly ensconced in the position as Lecturer, and retired holding that post. In her case, it wasn’t a lack of energy or intellectual capabilities that held her back. Like Larkin she left Oxford with a first class degree in English, but like Larkin, who in .’Vers de Societe’ resented having to ask an ‘ ass about his fool research ‘, didn’t see any point in publishing learned papers or books within her field. She preferred teaching, and according to those who attended her lectures and classes, was a gifted communicator. Continue reading →

Michael Tippett as book reviewer

Among the large archive of newspaper clippings from the 1950s collected by the late Patrick O’Donoghue , a former lecturer in English at the University of Manitoba, who ended up teaching in his adopted county of Norfolk, is a review of Richard Ellman’s The Identity of Yeats (1954) by the greatest British composer of the twentieth century, Sir Michael Tippett.

For a British composer to review a book about a poet is unusual to say the least. It is hard to imagine Edward Elgar reviewing a book about, say Tennyson, or Benjamin Britten, despite his association with George Crabbe, finding time in his busy schedule to seriously review a critical work on the Suffolk poet. But Tippett was no ordinary composer. According to his biographer Ian Kemp, Tippett developed a number of non-musical interests from an early age, from poetry and philosophy, spiritual development, and left wing politics. He published two books that had little to do with music. At one point in his life he became very interested in antique furniture and in 1951 moved to Tidebrook Manor, a crumbling mansion in Sussex. While teaching at a private school in Limpsfield, Surrey he bought some land and built a bungalow for himself on it. It was tiny (your Jotter has visited it) and badly designed, so perhaps architecture wasn’t his forte, but one can’t imagine Britten building a bungalow. It could be argued that all these non-musical activities may have distracted Tippett from wholeheartedly pursuing a career as a composer, for unlike the prodigy Britten, he was a notoriously late starter and destroyed all his early work. But there is something rather appealing in a composer interesting himself in a variety of disparate fields besides music, discovering at last what he was placed on this earth to do, while still retaining an interest in some of his earlier passions. In the case of Tippett, all these non-musical activities seemed to have informed his music.

We don’t exactly know how deeply Tippett was influenced by Yeats, but it is obvious in his review of Ellman’s book that he saw a correlation between Yeats’s views on symbolism in poetry and their application in music. Ellman contends that in his youth Yeats was affected

‘ by the practice of his contemporaries , among whom the rose then had the currency which the bone attained in English poetic symbolism during the 1920s ‘

‘ I am sure’, Tippett contends, that ‘ this could be paralleled in music, where certain chords and certain intervals dominate whole periods. Or ideas behind the images can span centuries.’ Continue reading →

Ferlinghetti the Beat is given the Boot

Lawrence Ferlinghetti pic

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died a few months ago aged 101 was a hero to many in the fifties — as publisher, spokesman, and owner of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookshop, he became the eminence griseof the Beat generation. He was also a best-selling poet with his second collection, A Coney Island of the Mind(1958). It is less well known that in the UK this collection was received far less enthusiastically, to say the least. In fact it was pummelled by fellow poet and critic Al Alvarez, who reviewed regularly for the Observer, where this review appeared in 1958.

Alvarez, like Geoffrey Grigson, who despised him for promoting the ‘ confessional school ‘ and for approving suicide, among other things, had a reputation for physical and mental toughness. A rock-climber and poker-player, who published books on both subjects, he despised Romanticism in poetry, and the genteel perspective of poets like Larkin and Betjeman, preferring the gritty world view of writers such as Lowell and Berryman. And like any tough guy Alvarez spoke his mind. If a poem didn’t measure up he said so without equivocation. And in his view, Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mindwas bad. In fact it was ‘extraordinary bad’. Alvarez’s review is worth reading, not only for what he says about Ferlinghetti:

Mr Ferlinghetti’s reputation largely depends on his extra-literary activities; he has stage- managed many of the San Francisco Beatniks; he owns the City Lights Bookshop where they sometimes meet; from it he has published some of their verse. He has also fooled around with that latest sub- literary form of publicity, poetry and jazz…’

But also how he saw the Beatnik movement.

‘ The Beatnik’s pose is one of rejection and eccentricity; they say ‘ no’ to society, daddy and sense, and ‘yea ‘ (Whitman’s word) to the great exploited body of Mother America and to what Jung, had he seen them, might have called ‘ the collective inertness. ‘ None of this, of course, makes up a literary revolution. It is simply a minor revolt, another scrabbling for fame and rewards with different slogans. And Mr Ferlinghetti is, at least, less belligerent than his colleagues. At heart he is nice, sentimental, rather old-fashioned writer who, he admits, ‘ fell in love with unreality’ early and has since developed a penchant for words like ‘ stilly’, ‘shy’, ‘sad’, ‘ mad’, and ‘ ah’. He also has a pleasant little talent for verbal whimsy—‘ eager eagles’, ‘ the cat with future feet ‘, ‘foolybears’ and the like—which no invoking of the usual private parts will change from low-level Edward Lear into tough surrealism.
Continue reading →

Fifty Works of English and American Literature We Could Do Without (2)

Brigid Brophy (right), Michael Levey and Charles Osborne let rip in their iconoclastic 1967 book.

Extracts chosen by publisher Nicholas Parsons in his Book of Literary Lists (1985)

‘ The Hound of Heaven’, Francis Thompson ‘…all the teasing femininity suggested by romantic films, or illustrated by advertisements for high quality soaps and shampoos, is caught in the lines:

With thy young skyey blossoms heap me over

From this tremendous Lover!

Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see.

The History of Mr Polly, H.G.Wells ‘The History of Mr Polly may be Wells’ revenge for having to serve an apprenticeship in a draper’s shop.’

The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy ‘…a thoroughly middle-class substitute for real literature.’

South Wind, Norman Douglas ‘A good book is not automatically written by composing a Platonic dialogue of un-Platonic length, spicing it with pastiche history and would-be witty hagiography and assembling a cast of sub-intellectual speakers.’

The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham ‘ One gets from reading this book, not the portrait of a genius but merely a string of theatrically cynical refection on life and human behaviour, tacked onto an unconvincing story. ‘

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf ‘ We are all conducting Virginia Woolf novels inside ourselves all day long, thinking how sunset clouds look like crumbling cheese, wondering why the dinner party guests don’t go, puzzling about children growing up, noticing for the first time the colour of a bus ticket. This famed sensitivity is everybody’s birthright, and probably Virginia Woolf was applauded first by those who were delighted to find literary expression of their own commonplace sensations. To have those put in a book and called a novel…only dots can do justice to their delight.’ Continue reading →

Conscious and unconscious erotica

Some writers knowingly produced erotica; others unknowingly published smutty material. Here are a few examples

Conscious

Pietro Aretino (1492 – 1556), Sonnetti Lussuriosi(1524)

The Sonnetti Lussuriosiof this poet, gossip and writer of witty plays was a collection of verses and erotic drawings that, like the Kama Sutra, demonstrated positions for sexual intercourse. Though the book proved very popular, it earned the wrath of the Pope, an erstwhile patron of Aretino, along with Emperor Charles V. Aretino lost his papal patronage, but he also was taken to task by the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, Dr John Donne, who objected that some of the sexual positions were missing.

Norman Douglas (1868 – 1952), Some Limericks(1928)

The author of Old Calabria and South Wind, also compiled Venus in the Kitchen, a collection of aphrodisiac recipes, and the privately printed Some Limericks. The latter, which has been described as ‘ irreverent, scatological and erotic ‘ , was accompanied by ‘ scholarly ‘ notes that sent up the sort of po-faced critical apparatus so beloved of Ph D candidates.

W S. Gilbert ( 1836-1911) and Arthur Sullivan ( 1842 – 1900) . ‘ The Sod’s Opera’.

The humorous double act that gave us so many wonderful operettas also composed The Sod’s Opera , among the characters of which are Count Tostoff and the Brothers Bollox ( a pair of hangers on) and Scrotum, a wrinkled old retainer. Oddly, there are no records of a public performance, though it would be refreshing if some village Opera society put on their version of it.

Anais Nin ( 1903 -77 ) The Delta of Venus.

The friend of pornographer Henry Miller got together with Nin and an army of hard up writers to form a sort of porn factory which turned out several erotic works, some commissioned by an anonymous tycoon. Ms Nin was also a novelist and a prolific diarist.

Felix Salten aka Siegmund Salzmann ( 1869 – 1949) Josefine Mutzenbacher.

The apparently wholesome author of Bambi(1929), a children’s story which recounted the struggle of an orphaned deer, which was later immortalized by Walt Disney, also penned an extremely well received erotic novel that painted a very accurate picture of the life of a prostitute among the petit bourgeoisie in fin de siecleVienna. Today it is regarded as equal in status in the German-speaking word to our own Fanny Hill. Continue reading →

John Betjeman and a Home Counties Anthology

Home counties anthology cover pic 001 Even today, thirty six years after his death, John Betjeman can still surprise us with his wisdom and original mind. In 1947, less than two years after the end of a war that brought the prospect of a radiation death to the innocent citizens of Great Britain, destroyed some of finest Georgian terraces in London and Bath, that peppered landmark buildings, including St Paul’s Cathedral and the Dulwich Art Gallery with shrapnel, and pock-marked the pastoral landscapes of Surrey, Middlesex and Essex, the editors at Methuen asked the rising poet of the suburbs to provide an Introduction to their new anthology by someone called J. D. Mortimer ( who he?) on the Home Counties.

Betjeman duly obliged and what he wrote is redolent of his unique perspective on southern England. A writer of an earlier generation—a Walter-de-la Mare, a Blunden, a S. P. B.Mais say—would have come up with the usual nostalgic picture of the Home Counties as places of elm-shaded inns, haystacks, cricket on the green and dusty lanes, and left it at that, but Betjeman while regretting that much of Middlesex and parts of Surrey were now unrecognisable from their nineteenth and early twentieth century appearance, thanks to the depredations of the car, , and the presence in the sky of the aeroplane, suggests that the melancholy induced by such realisations could be assuaged by an anthology that celebrates the appeal of the suburbs

The Home Counties of the L.P.T.B. and the Southern Electric and Green Line buses, of Ritz cinemas and multiple stores and trim building estates must have this literature. There has been little poetry of the suburbs, possibly because they are so raw and new. But since the suburbs are there for as long as atomic energy will allow them, and since there are still poets , they will be eventually turned into poetry so that we can enjoy urban Gidea Park as once Hood enjoyed countrified Epping. Already much prose has appeared which has glorified the suburbs into something beautiful—Gissing, Machen, W.B.Maxwell were pioneers of suburban descriptive prose. Suburban social life at the end of the last century has been immortalised by George and Weedon Grossmith in the Diary of a Nobody.
Continue reading →