English etiquette by an Indian Harley Street doctor

Most books of etiquette published seventy or more years ago. have comic value .If they were written by foreigners anxious to ‘ educate ‘ their compatriots in the ways of the English there is a strong likelihood that they will be occasionally hilarious. Such a book is English Etiquette, which was published at St Christopher’s, Letchworth, a radical and culturally significant independent school that had established a printing press by the late 1920s. Its author, a certain Dr R. U. Hingorani, an Indian who was active from 1928 to 1930, according to the records, and appears to have been a Harley Street practitioner around that time. The booklet’s aim was to familiarise Indian immigrants with the customs of the English.

Here is the good doctor’s advice on :

Personal habits

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It is a social crime to lick your fingers when turning over the pages of a book. An educated Englishman values his books as part of his personal property—he looks after them and keeps them clean. If he lends them to a friend it is a personal favour and he expects that friend to return the books in the same condition as they were lent. Licking the fingers while turning over the pages, besides being considered a dirty habit, will, if persisted in, soon spoil the appearance of a book, giving it a ‘dog-eared’ look and detract from its value…

You should never overlook another person’s newspaper or book…It is quite in order to ask for a loan of a newspaper or book but you should wait until he owner has completely finished reading and then politely make your wish known…

In England, as in other countries, an attractive personal appearance is a great asset in any walk of life but to attend to one’s toilet in public is a very bad social error. For instance, finger nails must always be kept scrupulously clean—this is a very important point as dirty finger nails are taken as evidence of a person’s bad upbringing—but they must never be cleaned in public. Ears and nose should always be attended to in private and you must never play about with your fingers when talking to another person…

Another bad error is to talk to a lady with your hands in your pockets. This shows that you are not so accustomed to talk with well-bred ladies and that your primary education has been defective…

European and Far Eastern people lend emphasis to their speech when talking with friends and acquaintances by gesticulating with their hands. This is quite incorrect in English eyes. A person who continually uses his hands in conversation is considered to have had an inadequate education…Pointing with the hands should always be avoided as this is considered a very rude habit…

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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.
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Snobs in the Arts

Portrait of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll circa 1931 Gerald Leslie Brockhurst 1890-1978 Presented by Tate Patrons 2009 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T12796

Portrait of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll circa 1931 Gerald Leslie Brockhurst 1890-1978 (Tate Patrons 2009)

Here are some more selections from Jeremy Beadle’s own copy of The Book of Total Snobbery (1989) by Lynne and Graham Jones. The quotes bearing asterisks were marked in ink by Beadle.

Actor Michael Hordern on Glyndebourne
*There’s not the quality of audience today. The stalls should be in dinner jackets or tails, and they’re in singlets and bomber jackets. Quite awful! They come from places like Milton Keynes…
Sir Michael Hordern, Sunday Express Magazine.

Socialite Margaret, Duchess of Argyle. on opera singer Luciano Pavarotti
*Would you ever invite to your party people who weren’t “society”, but stars from another world—Luciano Pavarotti, say?
‘—Oh you wouldn’t ask a dancer. I mean, he can contribute nothing. All he can do is dance…’
Margaret, Duchess of Argyle, Sunday Express Magazine.

And on novelist Graham Greene.
‘Graham Greene? But he’s just a writer, isn’t he?’
Margaret, Duchess of Argyll.

Howard Jacobson on himself.
‘I’m not talking about Tom Sharpe or David Lodge. I’m talking about Shakespeare. That’s the kind of writer I should be compared with.’
Novelist Howard Jacobson, interviewed by Cherwell.

*Actor Robert Morley on Bertolt Brecht.
‘Brecht has not only never had an original thought, he takes twice as long as the average playgoer to have any thought at all.’

* Gore Vidal on Truman Capote.
‘A republican housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices’.

*Thomas Carlyle on John Keats.
‘His poetry is the fricassee of a dead dog. ‘

*Oscar Wilde on George Meredith.
‘As a writer he has mastered everything except language; as a novelist, he can do everything except tell a story; as an artist, he is everything except articulate.’

*George Orwell on Jean Paul Sartre
‘A bag of wind.’

T.S.Eliot on Arnold Bennett
When Bennett joined Eliot’s circle at a Bloomsbury party he left for another part of the room, bristling at the novelist’s “ lower middle-class accent “.

Janet Street-Porter on her TV image.
‘I hate being this “Cheery Janet” character on the Six O’Clock News. It wasn’t me at all. I don’t shop down the street market and I’m not riveted by the price of bloody fish. I go to the opera. My friends are artists. I live in a big house.
Janet Street-Porter, Q Magazine

Radio personality Gilbert Harding at an engagement in Hounslow in 1953.
‘I have been dragged along to this third- rate place for a third- rate dinner for third-rate people’.

[R.M.Healey]

Focus—a magazine for the alternative lifestyle

Utopian fiction— as purveyed by H. G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford and Aldous Huxley ; the vegetarian movement, calisthenics and other health –promoting practices, including naturopathy and hydrotherapeutics, and psychoanalysis—were all increasing in popularity among the chattering classes of England in the years that followed the end of WW1. And Focus,which advertised itself as ‘to the point in matters of health, wealth and life’, was one of the magazines that catered for this new demand.

Rooting through the archive at Jot HQ we found two copies of this ‘little’ magazine ( it was only the size of a prayer-book) and one of the first things that struck us was the high proportion of adverts in them. In the issue for June 1928, out of its sixty pages a quarter were adverts. And these ads told you a lot about the magazine’s readership. Perhaps the most interesting advert was for the famous Stanboroughs Hydro, near Watford. Here among 200 acres of parkland the Hydro offered cures of all kinds, including Electric Baths, Ionisation, Diathermy, Phototherapy, Artificial Sunlight, Massage and X –Rays. Incidentally, Stanborough is still there. Other adverts were for similar health farms , such as Uplands, the ‘Nature Cure’ retreat near Hereford. This establishment offered such regimes as the Exclusive Milk Diet and way-out psycho therapies, such as Auto-Suggestion by the Coue method. Focus also gave space for the alternative life-style gurus, such as Dr H Valentine Knaggs (1859 – 1954), whose self-help booklet, Blood and Superman,was less to do with the influence of Nietzsche and more to do with the purity of the blood stream in the attainment of the higher faculties. Other titles from Knaggs included The Mischief of Milk(1920), The Salad Road to Health (1919), and the Right and Wrong Uses of Sugar (1923). Such warnings seem amazingly prescient to us in 2019. But as if to prove that Focus
was not the whacky reservoir of alternative medicine that some of its content appeared to suggest, the editor also included an article by the Swiss nutritionist who popularized muesli, Dr M. Bircher-Benner ( 1867 – 1939) entitled ‘Into the Interior of the Atoms, ‘ a survey of the latest discoveries in particle physics, and in particular the recent theories of Niels Bohr, which was illustrated by an amazing diagram of the electron paths of a radium atom.

But Focus was nothing if not eclectic. In the same issue we find a piece by Patrick Braybrooke, who as well as being the father of Neville, who became a prominent literary figure in the neo-romantic movement of the 1940s, was also an authority on G. K. Chesterton, H.G.Wells and Thomas Hardy. In part six of his series of features on ‘ Philosophies in Modern Fiction’ Braybrooke examines the philosophy of Chesterton, which he sees as being inimical to a rational view of society, but which instead promoted an essentially humanitarian sense of wonder towards the ‘ picturesque, the glories of the old legends (and ) the glamour of the Middle Ages’. In this, Braybrooke suggested, he opposed ‘any superman ideas ‘.This invocation of the idea of ‘ superman ‘ was probably a dig at the atheistic, ‘ progressive ‘George Bernard Shaw, whose play ‘Man and Superman’ dealt with the philosophical implications of Nietzsche . It is likely that Braybrooke saw Chesterton’s old school Catholicism both as a corrective to these notions and part of the movement towards the attainment of a simpler, alternative lifestyle which was underpinned in his case by religious faith. Continue reading →

The friends of John Michell

Found in a book called Michellany: a John Michell Reader (2010) a list of subscribers. John Michell, whose most famous book was The View Over Atlantis (1969) was an esotericist and a major figure in the development of the counterculture /Earth mysteries movement.
A senior figure from the Hippie era and scion of a wealthy family (Eton, Cambridge, Glastonbury) he had died in 2009 aged 76 and the book was a memorial anthology. Our copy had the small attractive bookplate, showing a bookish owl, of ‘Oz’ publisher, later media tycoon, Felix Dennis (1947 -2014) The lengthy subscriber’s list is worth recording- it brings together the great and the good of bohemian/ eccentric British, mostly upper class, society…

Ahmed Ainsworth, The Lady Ashcombe, Patti Baker, A. D. Bakewell, Michael Balfour, Richard Barnes, David Batterham, Opi Bell, Gerard Belleardt, David Benedictus, Phyllis Benjamin, Mary Berg ,Elizabeth Best, James Birch, Charlotte Black, Sir Peter Blake, Ralph Blum, Jill Bond, Laura and Harry Boothby, Joe Boyd, N. Van Den Branden, Mr and Mrs Michael Briggs, Theadora Brinkman, Paul Broadhurst, Alex Brown, Sir Anthony and Lady Shelagh Montague Brown, Peter Browne, Sally Burgess, Dr Aubrey Burl, Simon Buxton, David Cadman, Joseph Caezza, Tarquin and Sophie Campbell, Chung Yee Chong, Mrs O.D.H. Claus, Lord and Lady Patrick Conyngham, Prof Pierre and Helene Coustillas, Keith Critchlow, Paul Cullivan, Major General and Mrs Andrew Cumming Bronwen Cunningham, Karen D’Arc, Michael R. Davies, Robert Dudley, Belinda Eade, Mrs V. A. Ehlers, Jacquetta Eliot, Prof Richard England, Ness Eyre, David Fideler,
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Don’t!

Books on social etiquette have always proved popular. People are naturally curious about the manners of other ages. Such books also produce good talking points at parties or other social events. Don’t, a copy of which was recently discovered at Jot HQ, purports to deal ‘ frankly with mistakes and improprieties more or less common to all ‘, is no exception. Although undated, the dust jacket illustration and general design places it firmly in the early fifties, and an AA leaflet dated August 1953, which has been tucked into it, confirms this guess.

‘Censor’, the pseudonymous author of Don’tmakes no apologies for the book’s distinctly proscriptive tone. ‘ Manners maketh man ‘, he/she quotes, adding rather severely that if the rules appear ‘ over-nice’, ‘ everyone has the right to determine for himself at what point below the highest point he is content to let his social culture drop’. Ouch!

Reading certain parts of this book will make most people cry out in protest at an unreasonable ‘don’t’. For instance, why shouldn’t people wear jewellery that is ‘ solely ornamental’. What’s the point of jewellery unless it is ornamental ? Then there’s the request not to drink outside of meal times. Does this mean that one shouldn’t drink in pubs, hotels or at parties? Obviously absurd. ‘Censor’ is equally unreasonable concerning the shaking of hands: ‘Don’t …offer to shake hands with a lady. The initiative must always come from her. By the same principle DON’T offer your hands to a person older than yourself, or to anyone whose rank may be supposed to be higher than your own, unless he has extended his.’ Totally irrational. Then there is the faux gallantry: ‘Don’t forget that the lady sitting at your side has the first claim upon your attention. A lady at your side should not be neglected, whether you have been introduced to her or not.’ Even in 1953, this must have appeared preposterous, although another ‘don’t’—that men must not remaining sitting when a lady leaves the table —was still observed in some circles. Continue reading →

Portrait of the Beatnik

Discovered in the June 1959 issue of Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender and Melvin J Lasky, is this extraordinary pen portrait by Caroline Freud of that fifties phenomenon the Beatnik.

Subtitled a ‘letter from America ‘the article is ostensibly a view of the Beatnik from an American perspective, and indeed it would probably have made greater sense to someone who was studying the Beat movement as it was developing in fifties America, than it would to a casual observer of the scene in the UK. However, looking back at it today, as a piece of social anthropology, it is fascinating. It is particularly interesting to see how the argot of the beatnik in 1959 had so much in common with that of the hippy movement, both here and in America, that flourished from around 1966.

In this regard, it is significant that certain words which originated with the beatniks –such as ‘ cat ‘ , ‘dig ‘, ‘ wigs ‘, ‘ wail’, ‘ bends’ and ‘ muggles ‘ had dropped out of use by the mid sixties, whereas other beatnik slang, notably ‘ chick’, ‘ far out’, ‘pad’,‘ split’, ‘ square ‘ etc continued to be popular within the hippy culture, and indeed has become accepted today. I don’t know whether other terms, notably ‘ down beat ‘, ‘ and ‘hustle’ ( which has changed its meaning slightly from doing paid work to looking for opportunities to do something, not necessarily paid work ) originated with the Beat movement. Certainly, the term ‘down beat‘ has entirely lost its slang status.

The Beat term ‘hipster’, of course, has recently been revived and applied to men who might share some, but by no means all, of the characteristics described by Ms Freud. Continue reading →

More Bright Young Thing Parties

In an earlier jot we referred to a Schoolboy Party held at the Punch Club in 1932 which was attended by the cream of young society but there are many more such parties covered in the now rare book Society Racket: A Critical Survey of Modern Social Life (Long, London 1933). Patrick Balfour (Baron Kinross) was a journalist, at the time of this book he was ‘Mr Gossip’ at the Daily Express and the character Adam Fenwick-Symes in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, who works for a while as ‘Mr Chatterbox’ at ‘The Daily Excess’ may have been partly based on him.

Balfour traces this style of party back to the ‘freak’ parties of the nineteenth century citing Lady Castlereagh’s parties where guests took chloroform. In the era before the BYT’s many parties were marked by extreme drunkenness among the young toffs and women were either excluded or fled to their rooms rather than risk an encounter with ‘drunken gentlemen.’ Balfour writes “..right up until the war, in the days of the Empire Promenade, young men used to behave drunkenly in public.’ By the late 1920s this was disapproved of. He notes that the themed parties started in a modest way with things like ’Treasure Hunts’ and ‘Midnight Chases’ as a reaction to the dullness of the sozzled, dowager-ridden previous generation.

They set the Thames on fire at Henley, they held a false surrealist exhibition of a hoax artist called Bruno Hat, the leaflet for which -‘Approach to Hat’ is now extremely collectable. Among the parties recorded by Balfour were a Circus Party, A Russian Party, A Baby party, A Wild West party and the famous ‘bottle and bath’ party put on by Brian Howard and Elizabeth Ponsonby. The two hired St. George’s Baths at the height of a heat-wave, so that their guest might swim between dancing and supping. This do caused a shock in the media, mainly because the music was provided by a ‘negro’ band. David Tennant gave a Mozart party where guest wore 18th century costume, there was a wild party in Royal Hospital Road in ‘fancy undress’…

In Vile Bodies Waugh writes: –“…Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies…”

The Evil Girls behind the Teddy Gangs

Apparently, there are now academic papers on the ‘Teddy Girls’ of the late 1950s. One paper submitted by a woman from a liberal arts college in the middle of the Canadian grain belt defines Teddy Boys and Girls as ‘passionate spectators of urban life who incorporated aspects of the Baudelarian dandy with a more vigorous embodied relationship to the city.’ Or not…

Anyway, forget Baudelaire; here is a real story of one of these Teddy Girls, plucked from the ever-giving Peter Haining archive. It’s a contemporary account that appeared in the sensationalist weekly ‘ Fling ‘ c 1959 by a self-confessed ‘moll’ who calls herself ‘ Mary Grange ‘ and who entitles her salutary story ‘ I was a Gang Queen ‘.

Mary Grange isn’t my real name. I’m twenty, but I’ve got to conceal my identity to escape from my past—-an ugly, shameful past which landed me in a magistrates court and might have sent my friends to Borstal.

To-day you might meet me while making your holiday arrangements. I work as a receptionist in a travel agency. It you’re a man, you’ll admire my long dark hair, blue eyes and model-girl figure. You’ll classify me as pretty, eager, hardworking and full of fun.

Power

BUT ONLY A FEW MONTHS AGO I WAS A GANGSTER QUEEN

I was boss of ten Teddy Boys. I saw myself as one of those women you read about in books, whose beauty casts a spell over the men around her. I loved exerting my power. I loved excitement and adventure.

I used to “dare” the boys to steal gifts for me, just for the thrill of it.

First it was bottles of gin, then dresses, then the week’s taking from a shop till.

At the time they seemed like daring games. Now I see them as the stupid, criminal antics they were.

Warning

Why, you’ll ask, am I reviving a past that’s best buried and forgotten? Because I want to warn others against the pitfalls which put my name on police records.

I can’t plead the excuse of a slum home, a pavement playground. I live in what you might call a “select neighbourhood” in the suburbs of a large town in the north of England.

A to Z of Zowie (Hippy Slang)

Found in an old Sunday Observer colour supplement from December 1967 this glossary of (then) very recent hippy and 'underground' slang, apparently known as 'Zowie.' In Britain 'Zowie' is mostly associated with David Bowie's son Zowie Bowie (born 1971) now known as Duncan Jones...For a comprehensive online dictionary of hippy slang check out Skip Stone's Hippy Glossary. Since the Summer of Love some of the words below have entered the language (groovy, happening, trip, vibrations, riff) and some like 'Zowie' itself and 'grey' have had very little currency. Slang authority Eric Partridge imported most of Peter Fryer's glossary into later editions of his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.

A TO Z OF 'ZOWIE' Peter Fryer offers a selective glossary of the Underground.

acid/LSD. Acid-head/one who uses LSD.
be-in/hippy meeting.
bread/money.
bust/police search, raid.
cool/unruffled, admirable (but see groovy); not carrying illegal drugs.
crazy/admirable.
dig/understand. Diggers/idealist hippies undermining capitalist economies by giving away free clothes, washing-machines to needy.
drag/bore, dissapointment.
drop-out/one who opts out of society.
flip/arouse enthusiasm. F. one's wig/lose one's head.
Flower Power/from Flower Children or Beautiful People.
Revolutionary philosophy akin to ideas of Young Liberals, e.g. Make Love Not War. Characteristic: bell.
freak/arouse or share collective enthusiasm (freak-out).
fuzz/police.
gig/single paid performance.
grey/middle-aged, conventionally dressed/minded person (orig. US Negro term for a white).
groove/make good progress, co-operate.
groovy/admirable, sexually attractive.
happening/spontaneous eruption of feeling/ display.
hippy/product of Haight-Ashbury ('Hashbury') dist. of S. Francisco. Anarchic successors to Beat generation. Essential beliefs: protest, legalised drugs, opting out. Not to be confused with plastic hippies/mostly conventional youth who like to dress up at weekend.
hung up/annoyed.
love-in/gathering associated with groovy scene.
mind-blowing/ecstasy producing.
naturals/non-hip people.
plug-in/turn or switch on.
psychedelic/mind-expanding. Psychedelia/drugs, flashing lights, sound, colour, movies, dance – usually experienced simultaneously.
riff/repeated background phrase in music.
scene/Underground, or specific part of it.
stoned/very high on cannabis.
straight/conventional person, one who does not use cannabis.
teeny-bopper/anything from 11–16–average age of record-buying public.
think-in/poetry session, discussion group.
trip/LSD experience.
turned on/(1) accustomed to cannabis. (2) aware.
UFO/(pronounced 'yoofo'). Unlimited Freak Out – a hippy club.
vibrations/atmosphere; reactions, with sexual overtones.
Zowie/a new import from San Francisco, meaning hippy language.

Poetry and Jazz at the Festival Hall

A press-cutting for June 1961 found among the papers of Daniel (‘Dannie’) Abse, CBE, FRSL (1923 – 2014) well respected Welsh and Jewish poet who worked as a doctor much of his life. From the days of poetry and jazz, duffle coats and beards. The Tribune (a left -wing weekly) emphasises the youth of the audience, this is from a time when ‘youth’ meant under 30 – the youth movement didn’t really begin until 1963 (see Larkin’s poem Annus Mirabilis.) Another press-cutting notes the presence of the ‘irrepressible’ Spike Milligan ‘the eminent goon poet.’ Press cuttings, like Poetry and Jazz, are surely a thing of the past. Are there agencies still cutting up (and pasting) newspapers that mention their clients?

The Hampstead Poets and Jazz Group whose first recital was such a success at Hampstead Town Hall last February, greatly daring,took the Festival Hall on Sunday for another performance of their unique form of entertainment. Their optimism was well justified, as the hall was just about full; again the majority of the audience was under 30, and they were given the mixture of poetry and jazz much as before, although unavoidably, the intimate atmosphere of the first occasion was lost in the vast auditorium.

The one newcomer was Laurie Lee, himself a young poet in the thirties when the chief pre-occupation was the Spanish Civil War, as these young men, Adrian Mitchell, Dannie Abse, Jon Silkin, Pete Brown, and Jeremy Robson, the organiser, are poets of the sixties under the H-bomb’s shadow. Cecily Ben-Tovim’s drawing shows Mrs Harriet Pasternak Slater reading to the audience…her poems and her translations of her brother Boris Pasternak’s poems… created a sense of quiet lyricism and nostalgia among the young voices of protest and dissent. The jazz group, helped by Laurie Morgan and Dick Heckstall-Smith, added their own special contribution to the atmosphere.

Samuel Fuller and 144 Piccadilly

Found- a British paperback 144 Piccadilly (NEL, London 1973) a novel by the American film director Samuel Fuller. It concerns a group of London hippies who barricade themselves inside a decaying Mayfair mansion and resist all efforts to evict them. One cataloguer notes that the American edition rather obscures the fact that it was based directly on an actual event — “ripped from the headlines,” as Fuller might have put it. In September of 1969 a radical group known as The London Street Commune, formed to highlight concerns about rising levels of homelessness in London, took over a large house at the corner of Piccadilly and Park Lane (just across from Hyde Park); they occupied the building for six days before being forcibly evicted by the police. Fuller’s literary conceit was to insert himself into the situation, “playing” the narrator, a cigar-smoking American film director (in London for a BFI retrospective of his films) who gets involved with the squatters by accident. Unlike most of Fuller’s books, it’s not just a novelization of one of his own film treatments; as he tells it in his posthumously -published memoir, he actually had been in London when the occupation was taking place, had witnessed the initial break-in while out on a late-night walk, and with his “newspaperman’s nose,” had contrived to have a chat with the occupiers. “The disheveled squatters invited me to stay on,” he wrote ‘(if)…I hadn’t had prior commitments, a wife, and a flight back to the States the next day, I would have.” He subsequently got “damn mad” about the treatment accorded the squatters by the British media and the police, and knocked out a novel in which “an American film director very much like me participates in an illegal entry in London, then tries to bridge the generational gap by becoming the group’s mascot and witness. The fictional ‘me’ does what I was tempted to do but couldn’t, abandoning his hotel suite for a mattress on the floor with the flower children.” He never made a movie of the book.

Loosely inserted in the book is a typed postcard (27/11/71) from Fuller “Am writing ‘Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street’ which I’ll shoot here in Feb. My book 144 Piccadilly just came out… Am at Senats Hotel 5 Koln 1 – Unter Goldschmied”. Fuller has not signed the card but the words ‘Mit Luftpost’ are handwritten in red ink, presumably by the great man… At the front of the book is the ownership signature of Phil Hardy, the recipient of the card- he wrote a book on Fuller published by Praeger ( N.Y. 1970)

The Beatles as a religious cult

Found in Photoplay- A British Film Magazine from March 1964, this piece by Ken Ferguson who appears to have been the magazine's editor. It was called 'Are the Beatles a Religion' and has soundbites from fans, vicars (who had more of a voice in 1964) teachers, impresarios and the lads themselves. The 'Adam' referred to is Adam Faith, a pop star of the time. 'Cliff', of course, is Cliff Richard…here is an abridged version:

Beatlemania, is a form of hysterical worship instigated by four young men who call themselves The Beatles. John, Paul, George, Ringo have written themselves into musical history with their savage, pulsating, hypnotic sound.

The other evening I felt the full blast and fury of Beatlemania as I sat in a theatre along with almost 2000 screaming, hysterical worshippers of the Beatles. It was fantastic. On stage, the four boys moved their lips and went through the motions of a performance but nothing could be heard above the roars of mass appreciation. How did it begin? Why did it begin? Where will it end?

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Live poetry 1967 (Pete Roche)

Found - a 1967 Corgi paperback Love, love, love: the new love poetry. It was edited by Pete Roche the subject of a recent jot where he wrote disparagingly of the Cavern Club (1964). Three years later in the height of the Hippie era we find him editing this attractive book with psychedelic covers by Haphash and the Coloured Coat. His introduction celebrates the revival of 'live' poetry - which is still going strong. There follows a poem by him, other contributors included Adrian Henri, Adrian Mitchell, Roger McGough, Carlyle Reedy, Libby Houston, Spike Hawkins, Brian Patten...

… the recent increase in the popularity of poetry readings, particularly among younger people. The success in this respect of the Liverpool poets (all of whom are included here) and of what has been called The Great Liverpool Experiment have already been well documented. But this new interest in oral poetry is by no means confined to Merseyside: the readings organised by Tom Pickard in Newcastle, by Alan Jackson in Edinburgh, by Mike Horovitz and Pete Brown in London and the growing number of readings in other towns and cities throughout the country - all bear witness to the increasing demand for living poetry, poetry that talks to people in the direct and comprehensible way. It is no coincidence that virtually all of the poets in this book, when discussing their work, are quick to stress the value of these live performances.

And it is this quite novel situation - young poets reading their work to predominantly young audiences - that is giving the poetry of the mid-sixties its distinctive character, is investing it (whatever faults in technique one may find in individual poems) with a vigour and a feeling for the realities of life that have been absent from English poetry for too long.

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‘The Young Have No Time’ – a fumetti (1960)

Fumetti is an Italian word (literally 'little puffs of smoke' in reference to speech balloons) which refers to all comics. In English, the term often signifies photonovels or photographic comics, a genre of comics illustrated with photographs rather than drawings. These were often taken from movies or television. Photonovels were popular on the continent, especially in Italy and further afield in Mexico. They had a life in England, especially in romantic stories for young girls. This photo novel which appears to be from 1960 was in a series designated 'Continental Film Photo Stories.' It is taken from the Danish movie Ung Leg a tale of wealthy/ elite youth in post war Copenhagen. While promising (from the cover) a sort of Leopold and Loeb plot of senseless/ existential murder it does not get more daring than a game of 'chicken' on a railway line. A Pan paperback film tie-in novel by Johannes Allen, Young Love, appeared in 1966. The film The Young Have No Time was also directed by Johannes Allen.

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Jots. Information. Facts, Data,Trivia, Ephemera, Knowledge from any source - Letters, Diaries, Manuscripts, Journals, Notebooks, Recipes, Anecdotes, Reports, Art, Files, Snapshots, Documents, Formulas, Catalogues, Press cuttings, Memoirs, Trouvailles, Tales, Travel Diaries, Eyewitness accounts ('I was there'), 'I once met...', Quotations,Earwitnesses, Found Objects & Total Trivia

PLUS original info found in printed matter including books, media, databases & ephemera on any subject - reminiscences, lore,legend,travel, narratives & chronicles...

A vast ocean of knowledge. Jots.

Please send items of interest. SUBMIT here. Terry-Thomas explains.

'Nothing is trivial.'
(Aldous Huxley)

'When found, make a note of.'
(Captain Cuttle)

'I never met a bore.'
(James Joyce)

'Thou, Trivia, Goddess, aid my song: Through spacious streets conduct thy bard along.'
(Gay's Trivia, or New Art of Walking the Streets of London.)

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MR. DUNNE'S THEORY OF TIME

'IMMENSELY IMPORTANT' FOR MAN

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