A Treasure Hunt in London 1973

Samuel Charters was a London based American writer on the Blues and ethnic music. He was also a poet and on Sunday, February 11, 1973 he decided to publicise his latest book of poetry with a treasure hunt around London where people found the various poems. This is a transcription of the leaflet he distributed about the hunt. In the case of Speaker's Corner he writes 'I'll be near fence by Park Lane from 11 to 2. I won't be arguing with anybody and will be wearing poems. If it's really raining I'll leave about 1.' At the end of the day Charters would be at the Holly Bush pub in Hampstead from 7:30 onwards with extra copies of poems. A merry enterprise, one wonders how it went...London has changed a bit since then.

"FROM A LONDON NOTEBOOK"

Instructions for the treasure hunt

A Note

Most of these poems were written while I was going from place to another place in London over the last year and a half. Sometimes I finally got there, sometimes I just stood around looking at something else and never got there at all, Sometimes I was just getting out of a pub or just going to a pub. Somewhere early in the time this started I bought a notebook in a stationer's in Camden Town, and the poems were scribbled into it as I went along. Since I wrote the poems in so many parts of London it seemed most natural to publish them by scattering them back across London again, in the places where I'd written them, The place where they were written and the poems themselves, in a way, were too closely bound together to be separated.

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Coloured pyjamas in Alassio

From Gone Abroad (London 1925) by the somewhat forgotten travel writer Douglas Goldring. The chapter 'In Liguria' has much on the beach resort of Alassio at the time much favoured by the English. However according to Goldring they tended to leave at the beginning of June when the heat was becoming too much, to be replaced by native Italian tourists. Goldrings notes on fashion are interesting, portraying a lost world of men and women walking around the town in coloured pyjamas and screaming Italian bathers with exotic swan shaped rubber rings:

Then follow the two months of its "grand season," when prices are nearly doubled and the town makes more money than during the whole half-year of the English occupation. On July 1st, from Milano and Torino, comes the first train-load of holiday-makers, and from then onwards till the end of August the town is gradually packed to suffocation with Italian business people and their wives and families. The transformation is amazing. As if by magic the sands become covered with bathing-tents and thronged with bathers, from Santa Croce almost to Laigueglia. The sea is studded with little white-sailed yachts, canoes and motor-boats. Inside the town, caffés one had scarcely noted during the winter blossom out with bands and concerts and are filled with visitors eating gelati, spumoni and cassate, or drinking their "caffea espresso." The narrow Via Umberto Primo—nicknamed by the English "'the main drain "—swarms with young men in brilliantly coloured pyjamas. The shops are freshly stocked, and many of them display fantastically shaped bathing bladders of red india-rubber, some in the form of fishes, others fashioned like swans. And everywhere one sees pyjamas—purple pyjamas, blue pyjamas, pink pyjamas, striped pyjamas. So attached are the Italians to this form of costume that, despite the entreaties of the hotel-keepers, they often wear their pyjamas at dinner, and even dance in them afterwards. . .

To the traveller familiar with a French or English plage the bathing at Alassio, from the spectacular point of view, is depressing. Anyone expecting to find dark-eyed houris tripping about on the sands in brightly coloured maillots would be doomed to disappointment. To begin with, unlike her brothers, the middle-class girl of Northern Italy, in my experience, is rarely blessed with charm or comeliness. For ten Apollos, with bronzed skin and rippling muscles, you will not encounter more than one passably good-looking female. And whereas the men are allowed to bathe in comfort in short drawers, the girls are forced, by Italian prudishness, to clothe themselves in thick, voluminous and unbecoming garments of which the predominant colour is a dingy black. Their method of bathing is for a group of about a score to enter the sea together. They walk in up to their knees, form a circle, and bob up and down, uttering the while shrill screams of terrified delight. They can continue doing this for about two hours at a time.

Case Study on Arcturus IV (MIT 1950s) for the year 2951

A rare object, just catalogued...

Case Study on Arcturus IV (Product Design 2.734)

Massachustes Institute Of Technology ( Department Of Mechanical Engineering) Circa 1952-1955 First Edition. Wraps., 1955. 4to. About 100 pages printed recto only. A curious production with the printed monogram of M.I.T. on the cover and stapled at the spine like an official report or script. It is a collection of memos, missives and communication from the years 2951 and 2952, mostly about the Massachusets Intergalactic Traders and concerning opportunities for export business with the newly discovered planet Arcturus IV (in the Methania galaxy 36 light years away). There are diagrams, an illustration of an Arcturus native ('Sub Human type') and detailed plans for a food mixer suitable for 'Methanians' (also a carriage incubator and other machinery. )

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Mortimer on British Class System 1969

A typed signed manuscript with ink corrections by Raymond Mortimer and a typed signed letter of rejection from the then Sunday Times editor Harold Evans.

Mortimer's article is now somewhat outdated, although a class system still exists in Britain. 'The Nobility' has now been largely replaced by celebrities and there is now, as in America, a much greater emphasis on money. It seems at the time the Sunday Times was running a series of articles on class by well known writers.

April 18th, 1969

Mr. Raymond Mortimer, CBE,
5 Canonbury Place,
LONDON N.1.

Dear Raymond,

  I'm sorry that I agree with you that I don't think it is quite pointed enough. I think it would need to have some specific symbols of class. The Snowdon observation about class and motoring is the sort of thing I mean:

Saloon car with two husbands in front, their two wives behind = lower class.

Ditto with mixed couples in front and back = middle class.

Ditto with no one in back, husband and somebody elses wife in front = upper class.

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It’s Time you Knew

From a 1944 book It's Time You Knew - a sort of Ripley's 'Believe it or Not' book produced by Bulova and, it seems, given to customers in American watch shops. This copy has the stamp of one Jack Conner, a jeweller from Oroville California.  The answers are below - in the case of Errol Flynn the Bulova answer is wrong- this was a piece of fake publicity dreamed up by the Hollywood studios in the 1930s that seems to have stuck. He was not an Olympian (also he was Australian.)

ANSWERS

 It is approximately 186,000,000 miles to the Sun and back again.

66 men flew non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean before Lindbergh. Sir John Alcock and Sir A. Whitton-Brown flew from Newfoundland to Ireland, in 1919. Later the same year, the English dirigible "R-34," with 31 men aboard, crossed from Scotland to America and returned. In 1924, the German "ZR-3" flew from Friedrichshafen to Lakehurst, N.J., with a crew of 33 men–totaling 66 men, who flew the Atlantic before Lindbergh, and making Lindbergh the 67th man.

Watch-rate variation recorders, used to test every Bulova Watch upon its completion, take 30 seconds to tell how fast or slow a watch would run in 24 hours.

Errol Flynn represented England, as a boxer, in the 1928 Olympics at Amsterdam.

George Barker on MacLaren Ross

At some point in the 1990's we bought a lot of books and papers from the Norfolk based poet George Barker. This catalogue entry is worth preserving. For some reason it seems a bit down on Barker, possibly because Barker is very hard to sell whereas novels by Julian MacLaren Ross go, as they say in Canada, 'like snow off a dyke.'

Barker, George. ( J. Maclaren Ross.) Manuscript of a review by George Barker of the autobiography of  J. Maclaren Ross. 1960s. Typed MS with notes in Barker's hand and a signed note at the top saying that he wrote the review for The Tatler. 800 words with many hand written additions and corrections. It begins 'I remember him as a rather melancholy Malvolio drawling away in a high pitched nasal monotone to which no one in the Wheatsheaf, or the Highlander or the French Pub ever paid any attention at all...' Barker grudgingly admits that his memoirs are not 'entirely unmemorable'. Most of the review is spent putting the boot in and, apart from the envy a  minor writer might feel for another who has become a major cult, it appears that most of GB's animosity came from the fact that JMR borrowed a tenner from him and never repaid it.

 'I found reading them both evocative and faintly shameful. Evocative because Maclaren Ross really did possess a door-to-door salesmen's eye for snap evaluations, and faintly shameful because he had an eye for almost nothing else.' Barker (who got by on academic work  from which, it is said, that he tended to be dismissed for drunkeness, lechery or indolence) is referring to JMR's job working for several years as a vacuum cleaner salesmen, an experience of which JMR writes brilliantly in Of Love and Hunger. SOLD

Vegetarian Instructions

From the Vegetarian Handbook (London 1970). The last 8 pages consist of instructions to show to your hosts in hotels and restaurants so that they understand your diet requirements. The style of non meat food is possibly now slightly dated (nut rissoles, vol-au-vents) and even a little joyless, but the leaflet makes pretty sure that the food provider gets the picture. Serious Veggies could well use it, or modify it...We have added the Spanish version and tried to OCR (read digitally) the Esperanto - but it scrambled.

VEGETARIAN FOOD HINTS
FOR CONTINENTAL HOTELS

The following pages, in seven different languages, may be useful to visitors in hotels that do not normally cater for vegetarians. Translation has been kept as literal as possible so that the various items can easily be identified.

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Walt Whitman Parody

From a Ignes Fatui, a Book of Parodies by Philip Guedalla (Oxford 1911) Parodic poems and playlets written while Guedalla was at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford. Some of the parodies are of slightly forgotten authors like W.E. Henley and Maeterlinck (a piece that sounds like  Beckett's Godot) but he also lampoons Macaulay, Swinburne, Kipling, Baedeker, Omar Khayyam, Hardy, Shakespeare and Shaw. Here is his Whitman squib - at the time Whitman's reputation was still breaking in England.

'Walt Whitman, Inciting the Bird of
Freedom to Soar' by Max Beerbohm 1904

Canzonette to Democracy

I sing the song of me mendacious and the lies of
me mendacious:

I see God give the Land to the People, and the
grasshoppers on the Land,

I see double! Libertad, Americanos, Libertad I
cry. (No, I will not keep quiet.)

I want Eight, Votes for Women, brilliantine, a half blue,
one Man one Pub., Home Rule for Wales and a National Theatre.

Allons, camerados, let us tax the foreigner; let's
tax him in Paumanok, Manhattan, Oswego
and Illinois, but especially in Illinois.

I care nothing, or comparatively nothing for 
Second Chambers, Revising or otherwise. I 
am not a Peer: are you?

How hot you all look, the En Masse, the Tout
Ensemble: I too am hot from my unkempt
hair-thatch to the ten curling toes, each self
-contained with its individual nail.

O Columbia, how hot I am!

[Oxford 1910]

The tone is reminiscent of Rick the 'people's poet' from The Young Ones but it passes the first test of parody - i.e. you know who is being parodied...not sure what 'Eight' was however.

Bolan in Cyclops

From the first issue of the Norwich based literary magazine Cyclops (Wild Pigeon Press 1968). Other contributors included Jeff Nuttall, Snoo Wilson and Bill Butler. There is a full page portrait of Marc by Harriet Franklin, the wife of the magazine's editor Dan Franklin. Cyclops says of Marc: 'Sings with Tyrannosaurus Rex. First book of poems is appearing soon.' Indeed this poem appeared soon after in his Warlock of Love. Untitled (as it is titled) is  a prose poem so abstract it might turn into mist and float out to sea. It seems probable that rare and exotic herbs were consumed during its creation...Take it away Marc:

Tall as the truth the creature coughed in the clouds, 
feeding on mountain tips and the rare winged eagle lords 
that journeyed higher than the memory of man. Its claw, caked in mist and wishes, ripped at a pillar of fear 
masoned long ago by terrible forgotten Titans, to
 prevent the dreams of man from floating in the valleys 
of the diamond.
 Its eyes, like women and sand, shifted ever searching 
for the perilous horn of plenty. A foolish colossus 
it looked, ragged and unworshipped. Solitary on the 
roof of the world, a remaining nightmare in a plateau 
of fair thought.
It moaned and clumsily spewed spells of fear on the 
storm stallions grazing in the temple of pearls. And 
the years danced on. And all that moves returns to 
stone, eventually.

The Estate of the late F.Scott Fitzgerald

After his death, there was $706 cash in hand, Frances Kroll wrote Judge Briggs; $613.25 would go for burial expenses: “casket and services $410; shipping $30; city tax $1.50; transportation (to Baltimore) $117.78.” His worldly goods consisted of:

1 trunkful of clothes

4 crates of books

1 carton of scrapbooks and photographs

1  small trunk with some personal effects—the Christmas presents sent him, personal jewellery (watch, cuff links), several scrapbooks and photographs

2  wooden work tables, lamp, radio

Is this how a man ends? — a few crates “dumped to nothing by the great janitress of destinies” (from the brief verse found in his desk after his death).

From College of One: The Story of How F. Scott Fitzgerald Educated the Woman He Loved (1967) by Sheilah Graham.

John Cowper Powys’ Bookshop Rant

Found on a late 1960s bookmark from the renowned Holland Park bookseller Peter Eaton adapted from essays of John Cowper Powys in his 1938 work Enjoyment of Literature.

An over the top rant with a lot of incendiary keywords... but a rant would not be a rant if it wasn't slightly unhinged: take it away JC!

What a history of human excesses a second-hand book-shop is! As you 'browse' there– personally I can't abide that word, for to my mind book-lovers are more like hawks and vultures than sheep, but of course if its use encourages poor devils to glance through books that they have no hope of buying, long may the word remain!–you seem to grow aware what a miracle it was when second-hand book-shops were first invented...it too often happens that the books an ordinary man wants are on the 'forbidden shelves'. But there is no censorship in a second-hand book-shop. Every good bookseller is a multiple-personality, containing all the extremes of human feeling. He is an ascetic hermit, he is an erotic immoralist, he is a Papist, he is a Quaker, he is a communist, he is an anarchist, he is a savage iconoclast, he is a passionate worshipper of idols. Though books, as Milton says, may be the embalming of mighty spirits, they are also the resurrection of rebellious, reactionary, fantastical and wicked spirits! In books dwell all the demons and all the angels of the human mind.

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The 100% office (1930)

This is from an uncommon self improvement work from circa 1930 The 100% Office (Efficiency Magazine, London) by the prolific Herbert N.

Casson. He had obviously been taking his own medicine as he appears to have written over  60 books on these lines, as well as producing a monthly magazine on efficiency, not to be confused with Health and Efficiency.

Among his works are 52 Ways to be Rich, The Meaning of Life, The 12 Worst Mistakes in Business, The Romance of Steel, 12 Tips on Window Display, Will Power in Business etc., He was at the beginning of a business that is still going strong. Below is a sample of his advice to the 1930's office worker. The office appears to have a machine for addressing letters but otherwise no technology as we know it...

The 100% Office 

 How to use the present moment as it flits past – that is the eternal problem, for all ambitious workers want to make the best use of their lives. There is in reality no time but NOW.

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The correct British way to make tea

From The New Illustrated Universal Reference Book (Odhams, London 1933). It called itself 'the book of a million facts' and was a sort of Google of its day. It advertised itself as covering 'the main interests of humanity…no essential subject is left out.' To test this I checked if it had instructions for making tea, as few things are more essential. Sure enough a third of the way through at page 414 it has this:

TO MAKE GOOD TEA

It is the easiest thing in the world, yet nine people out of 10 do not manage to make a success of it. First of all the water must be freshly drawn from the tap. That left already in the kettle is flat and lifeless. It must be quickly boiled and poured over the tea just as it reaches boiling point. Give preference to a pot of either earthenware or aluminium ware, as the two kinds that make the best brew, and let the pot be thoroughly heated before the tea is put in. This is generally accomplished by pouring boiling water into the pot and then pouring it out again. A way that comes to us from China, and an excellent way too, is to put the tea into a perfectly dry pot, and let pot and leaves get hot together by leaving it on the rack or any other warm place.

That's it. They might have added the measurements - usually one heaped teaspoon for each person and 'one for the pot.' Once the water has been poured (during a 'rolling boil') 4 or 5 minutes is the brewing time and a tea cosy can be used - but they seem to have fallen from favour. The fresh water should be taken ('drawn') from the cold tap; the Queen Mother is said to have had her tea made with still Malvern water. The pouring of the water while it is boiling is the quintessential bit. The writer Kyril Bonfiglioli, in one of his Jersey based thrillers, has a character say something along the lines of 'you can kill me or you can give me tea made with water that hasn't come to the boil…'

Hope Mirrlees The Counterplot (1925)

Found in the Donald Rudd collection of detective fiction at the back of Death of a Millionaire (Collins 1925) amongst the publishers announcements of forthcoming books this summary of the plot of the very rare Hope Mirrlees novel The Counterplot. These publishers advertisements  are useful to dealers, scholars, collectors etc., as they are able to ascertain what a book is about without the tedium of reading it. Also they are particularly useful for collectors of fantasy to see whether there is any supernatural content. Hope Mirrlees did write one fantasy Lud-in-the Mist published by Collins in 1926. This novel was described by Neil Gaiman as 'one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written.' Her novel The Counterplot contains within it a 100 page play. Hope is also celebrated for her ultra modernist long poem Paris (Hogarth Press 1919).

The Counterplot

The Counterplot is  a study of the literary temperament. Teresa Lane, watching the slow movement of life manifesting itself in the changing interrelations of the family, is teased by the complexity of the spectacle, and comes to realise that her mind will never know peace till, by transposing the problem into art, she has reduced it to its permanent essential factors. So, from the texture of the words, the emotions, the interactions of the life going on around her, she weaves a play , the setting of which is a Spanish convent in the 14th century, and this play performs for her the function that Freud ascribes to dreams, for by it she is enabled to express subconscious desires, to vent repressed irritation, to say things that she is too proud and civilised ever to have said in any other way.

The Perils of Irony

From a Bookman's Budget by the estimable Austion Dobson (OUP 1917). The case was reported in the Westminster Gazette of 1916 but has a slightly  Dickensian ring.

THE PERILS OF IRONY 

Irony, which Byron described as a ' master-spell ', 
and Mrs. Slipslop called 'ironing'* is at times an 
awkward edged-tool.There is no better illustration 
of this than an anecdote of the late Lord Justice
Bowen. Once, when acting as a Puisne Judge, there 
came before him the case of a burglar who, having
entered a house by the top-story, was afterwards 
captured below stairs in the act of sampling the silver.
The defence was more ingenuous than ingenious. The 
accused was alleged to be a person of eccentric habits,
much addicted to perambulating the roofs of adjacent 
houses, and occasionally dropping in 'permiscuous' 
through an open skylight. This naturally stirred the
judge to caustic comment. Summing up, he is reported 
to have said : "If, gentlemen, you think it likely that
the prisoner was merely indulging an amiable fancy for
midnight exercise on his neighbour's roof; if you think
it was kindly consideration for that neighbour which led
him to take off his boots and leave them behind him before
descending into the house ; and if you believe that it was
the innocent curiosity of the connoisseur which brought him
to the silver pantry and caused him to borrow the teapot,
then, gentlemen, you will acquit the prisoner!" To Lord 
Bowen's dismay, the jury did instantly acquit the prisoner. 

*Byron must have remembered this when he said that the 
irrepressible Mme de Stael was ' well ironed ' by Sheridan at 
one of Rogers's breakfasts. 

Barbarossa’s Pike

On this day 5th of October 1162 the Emperor Barbarossa threw a tagged baby pike into a pond. Weighing 350 pounds, the same pike was caught and eaten in 1397, having lived for 235 years.

Source: The Gourmet's Companion by Ross Leckie (Edinburgh 1993) Actually Leckie gives the dates decades after Barbarossa's death so have adjusted the dates (from 1262 to 1162). Possibly file under myths and legends -

or fisherman's tales...

London’s first boutique

From Gear Guide (Hip Pocket Guide to London's Swinging Fashion Scene) published in London in May 1967.

Bill 'Vince' Green was a stage portrait photographer who specialised in taking shots of body-builders. One of  his problems  was finding briefs that were brief enough and close fitting to show off the body beautiful to the best effect. There seemed to be no solution to his problem until Vince started making the briefs himself. He tried using stretch material intended for women's roll -ons and other unlikely cloths.  it was really only a part time activity for Vince, but his name spread -  people started turning up and asking for briefs to order in unusual materials. Even visiting royalty  sought him out and were fitted with swimwear.  In 1954 he visited Paris  and was struck by the clothes of the beat Left Bank student fraternity  and cafe society - young people who lived it up through the night in the cafes wearing dark glasses and a lot of denim.

Denim took Vince Green's fancy. He discovered that  people  were actually bleaching their denims and sitting in baths to shrink them to body-hugging shapes. It seemed a great idea and Vince  decided to sell denim made like this. In October 1954 he opened up a boutique selling pre-shrunk pre-bleached clothes. At the beginning the trade was highly amused and though it a quickly passing gimmick. But soon he was supplying his denim wholesale to big stores like Harrods. Today over a decade later, this particular gear style is still very popular in many different forms. Is not surprising  and new as Vince probably thought. In the days of the great army of the Russian Czar's the officers were known to sit in  the hot baths to soak their sealskin trousers before a big parade or ball.

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King Kong’s Vital Statistics

Found in Mostly Monsters by John Robert Colombo (Ontario 1977). A curious work of 'found' poems mainly from monster books and movies. For example, this piece extracted from Gustav Meyrink's 1915 novel The Golem:

But this I know-
That there is something here
In our quarter of the town...
Something that cannot die,
And has its being within our midst.
From generation to generation
Our ancestors have lived here
In this place,
And no one has heard more tales
About this reappearance
Of the Golem-
Happenings actually experienced
As well as handed down-
Than I have.

Another 'poem' is taken from a publicity handout for Merian Cooper's 1932 movie King Kong:

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Boon Haw’s Tiger Balm Car

Aw Boon Haw was the founder of the Tiger Balm fortunes.  His splendid sports car is shown in Carveth Wells 1940 book North of Singapore. 75 years later it is on display in the Tiger Balm mansion Haw Par Villa in Singapore. Aw Boon Haw used to drive the car (a customised Humber) around Singapore, a tiger head on the radiator, fangs protruding, wire whiskers. Red bulbs were in the eyes, and the horn sounded like a tiger’s roar. Great publicity - way before Shell's  "tiger in your tank."

There is a story of a road rivalry between Boon Haw and Sultan Ibrahim of Johore. Sultan Ibrahim was a sportsman and hunter. The incident took place when the Sultan, enraged at being overtaken by Boon Haw in his famous Tiger Car. Sultan Ibrahim shot at the Tiger Car on Bukit Timah Road. It was considered lese-majesté to overtake royalty even on foreign roads*. Notwithstanding, the British colonial administration forbade the Sultan thereafter from visiting Singapore ever again except for purpose of going to and from the Singapore airport.

* This tradition of royal road rage still persists among plutocrats - for example Aristotle Onassis's biographer notes that he detested anyone who overtook his Porsche...

A Mussolini Howler

Mussolini by Marinetti

From a book of  of schoolboy howlers collected by Colin McIlwaine and published in London in 1930. Most howlers are short and many are online already ('a polygon is a dead parrot') , some rather odd ('A Molecule is a girlish boy') and some very silly ('The highest peak in the Alps is Blanc Mange'.) This is the last entry in the book and one of the longer howlers.

Mussolini is an ugly man. He wears the shirt of the Madonna, and when he smiles he makes people weep. He has been killed four times. The first time they wounded him in the nose, the second time in the forehead, but he himself they never wounded. He is a phenomenon, a thing that comes only once in 1000 years. He hardly ever sleeps, but shuts his eyes for 10 minutes, then goes and has a good wash and returns to work as fresh as a rose. He is a man of mystery. He can do everything and knows everything and loves playing the saxophone with his family. Galileo was charged with High Treason because he said that Mussolini moved round the sun, and not the sun around Mussolini.