All Souls Stories by AL Rowse

by Lady Ottoline Morrell, vintage snapshot print, June 1926

A L Rowse (centre), Roger Makins and Evelyn Baring photographed in 1926 by Lady Ottoline Morrell,

We found some pages cut out from an undated issue of The Contemporary Reviewin the Jot 101 archive the other day. These seven pages contain an article by A. L. Rowse entitled ‘All Souls Stories’, and like so many of the historian’s writings on his old college, mix amusing gossip with valuable reflections on academic bad behaviour.

All Souls, as Rowse admits, has always aroused curiosity and astonishment from outsiders, including those from the University itself. Why are some graduate contenders elected and others rejected? Is success in a formal examination the sole route to a life fellowship? What part did the legendary cherry stone problem play in the process? If fellows are the crème de la crème of academic excellence at the University and beyond it, why is it that some Fellows are evidently not of this calibre ?

Rowse gives an example of one particular Fellow whose behaviour suggested that he was not up to the job, Sir ( later Viscount) John Simon. For some reason this nitwit managed to be appointed Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord Chancellor, while being ‘ not much good’ in any of these posts, according to Rowse, who obviously knew the man well enough to make this judgment. Rowse recalls him addressing the Junior Fellows in an attempt at bonhomie, while managing to get their names all wrong. Then there was the time that the newly married Simon and his wife arrived at what they thought was the home of Lord Courtney, a pro-Boer politician, only to find that they had come to the home of W.L.Courtney, then editor of The Fortnightly Review. There was also the time that Simon found himself talking in ‘ labourious’ French to the French Ambassador, who turned out to be Frederick Kenyon, Director of the British Museum. Simon, according to Rowse, also made a mess of handling Hitler and Mussolini. Rowse charitably called this incompetence examples of Simon being ‘ accident prone ‘.Most non-All Souls men would see them as acts of blithering idiocy. Continue reading →

The Amateur as English Man of Letters: the salutary case of Edmund Gosse

Edmund Gosse by John Singer Sargent

There must be very few examples of literary men who have managed to penetrate the hallowed halls as a professor in one of the greatest universities of the world—the University of Cambridge, no less—without a degree. The brilliant orientalist, Samuel Lee, a former carpenter of humble background who taught himself Hebrew, Arabic and a dozen other languages in his spare time while working as a lowly-paid schoolteacher, was one. Lee was appointed Professor of Arabic at Cambridge in the early nineteenth century, having already distinguished himself as an independent scholar, and had to be granted a special MA through an act of parliament before he could take up his post. The literary odds and ends man Edmund Gosse, whose famous father, the naturalist Philip Gosse had seen to it that the Holy Bible had been his principle reading matter as a child, was another. These are two rarities. It’s hard to recall any other contenders in the modern era.

Back in those mid Victorian days, when early advancement in the arena of learning sometimes began with a junior post in some national cultural institution, such as a national library or a museum, Edmund Gosse was given the post of library cataloguer at the British Museum on the strength of a certain verbal facility and ‘a working knowledge of Italian, French and German’. Today, as well as a good degree from a good university, candidates for an equivalent post in the British Library would probably need a diploma in librarianship or in archive administration plus a few years of practical experience. He or she might even need to have passed the dreaded Civil Service Examination.

No such problem for the young Edmund Gosse. In 1866 he breezed at the tender age of seventeen into his cushy ‘opening’ worth £90 a year thanks to the ‘influence ‘of the novelist and cleric Charles Kingsley, a friend of his father. His literary colleagues at the Museum included Richard Garnett, who became a fixture in the Library, the poet Arthur O’ Shaughnessy and the exotic Theo Marzials, later to become a favourite poet of John Betjeman. To his credit, Gosse did not rest on his laurels. Perhaps recognising that he had had a fortunate start to a literary life for someone with no formal qualifications, he worked hard on the two languages—Danish and Swedish– that he guessed might help him progress. Continue reading →

Gilbert Harding—-the ‘rudest man in Britain ‘?

Gilbert Harding manners cover 001 The recent sudden fall from grace of Tudor historian and broadcaster David Starkey over his remarks on the Black Lives Matter campaign recalls to mind another broadcaster of an earlier decade whose detractors also dubbed him ‘ the rudest man in Britain’—Gilbert Harding. This shared reputation comes to mind as we discovered a copy at Jot HQ of the very funny and often wise treatise on good behaviour, Gilbert Harding’s Book of Manners(1956).

The two men had a number of other things in common. Both were from humble backgrounds and both were graduates of Cambridge University. Starkey came from Kendal, where his Quaker father worked as a factory foreman and his mother was once a cotton spinner. Harding was born in Hereford, where his mother and father were the ‘matron’ and ‘master’ of an orphanage in the city. When his father died aged thirty the young Gilbert was sent to a charitable educational institution. In contrast, Starkey, who considered studying science before opting for the humanities, had a somewhat easier path to academic distinction, though he had a breakdown at age 13. Starkey is openly gay, whereas Harding had to hide his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was illegal.

Both men became broadcasters, almost by accident. While teaching at the LSE Starkey, having obtained his Ph D on the household of Henry VIII, became a panel member of BBC Radio’s ‘Moral Maze ‘, which is where he obtained his reputation for plain speaking. By this time Harding had been dead for over twenty years, but it possible that the young Starkey might have been impressed enough by the broadcaster’s irascible performances on ‘What’s My Line ‘in the fifties to have thought about modelling himself on him at some future time. Harding had entered the BBC in his late twenties after short spells as a schoolteacher, policeman and foreign correspondent. Continue reading →

Rupert Croft-Cooke—-novelist and dealer in rare books

In an earlier Jot we discussed the prison ordeal suffered by the prolific novelist Rupert Croft-Cooke for homosexual activity with two sailors, comparing it to the conviction of British hero and computer genius Dr Alan Turing for a similar offence at about the same time. We are now going to look at Croft-Cooke’s brief period as a second hand bookseller between the wars.

Working in a second hand bookshop is, for obvious reasons, a popular means of earning a crust for struggling writers. George Orwell is probably the best-known bookshop assistant, but there are others, including Brian Aldiss, whose debut publication, The Brightfount Diaries, was a fictionalised account of his days working in an Oxford antiquarian bookshop. However, more than a few writers actually ran bookshops themselves, including an American novelist. Another was the diminutive film director and actor- turned thriller writer Brian Forbes, who owned a rather glamorous bookshop in Virginia Water, just a mile or so from his distinctly swanky home near Wentworh golf course.

Some of these bookshop owners/writers began as collectors and, as in the case of Forbes, earned enough from their other occupations, both past and present, to continue their collecting activity. However, it seemed that Croft-Cooke was never a book collector in the classic sense when in 1928, at the age of 24, before he had established himself as a novelist, he decided to open a shop with his brother in Rochester High Street. Continue reading →

The Jesuit and the poet

Inscribed on the inner board and flyleaf of a copy of the posthumously published collection Songs of Peace(1917) by the Irish poet and soldier Francis Ledwidge is this note and commemorative verse composed by Father Francis Charles Devas, the Jesuit chaplain of his battalion who had befriended him.

Corporal Ledwidge was just thirty years old when, ‘ on the morning of the feast of St Ignatius of Loyola’ ( in the words of Devas ) he was ‘ blown to bits ‘ by a German shell while sitting on a mud bank in a Belgian trench drinking a mug of tea with his mates in the 1^stBattalion Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Just a few hours before, Devas had conducted Mass in a wood not far from the battlefield. Ledwidge was there and Devas had heard his confession, given him absolution and performed Holy Communion with him.

Back in London, Ledwidge’s publisher, Herbert Jenkins, who had brought out his debut collection, Songs of the Fieldstwo years earlier, were preparing Songs of Peacefor the press. It eventually appeared a few weeks following the poet’s death, with a Introduction by his great supporter in Ireland, Lord Dunsany, dated September 1916, in which he praised the simplicity of his protege’s verse, his yearning for Ireland and his courage in fighting for the cause of peace.

‘…this devotion to the fields of Meath that, in nearly all his songs, from such far places brings his spirit home, like the instinct that has been given o the swallows, seems to be the key-note of the book…’ Continue reading →

Lousy condition / Cold climate

Found in our old blog Bookride from 2011 this piece about a quest for the world’s worst condition book. Below (right) is a pic of a particularly lousy LOTR found in a holiday rental college. Compared to the books we found this copy is quite acceptable.. We wrote:

…have been trying to build a set of books by Nancy Mitford for a customer who wants to have them bound in leather. In these cases you require no jackets, the covers can be worn but the text must be clean. I have dismissed all the nice copies at silly prices and all the lousy copies at whatever price, although as usual some of these were pricier than the ones in exemplary condition. Some were so bad they reminded me of the Dada knife (lacks handle and blade). They lacked pages, spines, boards, some even had missing title pages – mentioned as an afterthought as if it was no big deal.

Inspired, motivated, energised and exasperated I started on a search for the worst condition book on the entire web. In 2007 there had been a legendary Webster’s dictionary on Ebay that was basicaly a pile of ruined, frayed and crumbling paper — it looked like, as Jimmy Webb would say -‘Someone left a cake out in the rain…’ It attracted no bids but was a fun item for a while. That was a yardstick. There are not that many truly appalling books on the web as they take a long time to describe and you cannot charge much for them. There are some eighteenth century and earlier books in laughably bad state often with huge loss and every indignity a book can suffer, presumably catalogued because of their antiquity. There is a type of customer who thinks old books should be a bit worn and distressed, even a few dealers. It should be noted that old and ruined books can have their uses as door stops or draught excluders etc., Continue reading →

ABC of Plain Words Revisited

Plain Words cover pic 001 When some BBC journalists don’t know the difference between reticent and reluctant, and use the word enormity to mean an enormous event, popular grammarians, such as Liz Truss or Ernest Gowers, who was her equivalent in the 1950s, are needed more than ever. That’s if these pisspoor journalists can be bothered to read their books.

Sir Ernest Gowers was a senior civil servant whose best-selling popular grammar Plain Words (1948), was devised to help his fellow civil servants write clear and correct English. In 1951, admitting that its format could be improved, Gowers brought out ABC of Plain Words.Nearly 70 years on this guide can still be used alongside other more recent grammars, such as Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Most of the advice proferred by Gowers still applies, but some might raise a few eyebrows among the journalists of today. Here are a few words and their definitions that might provoke discussion today.

Deadline.This is a word known to all hacks, but Gowers chooses to define deadline conventionally as ‘ a line drawn round a military prison beyond which a prisoner may be shot down’. I don’t know which dictionary Mr Gowers was using, but the Chambers dictionary we use here at Jot HQ gives two definitions besides this one—1) ‘ the time that newspapers, books etc going to press’ 2) ‘a fixed time or date terminating something’. Gowers doesn’t even mention what ninety percent of people nowadays (and probably in 1951 too) would recognise as the most common definition of deadline.

Decimate.Gowers is right about the word decimate, however. He defines it as meaning to reduce by one tenth, not to one tenth. No writer today should get away with saying that troops were decimated, mainly because no-one would possibly know that soldiers in a battle could be reduced by exactly one tenth !

Dilemma.This is another word of precise meaning. It does not mean that someone has a number of difficult courses of action. He or she has exactly two. Continue reading →

The scented novel: early twentieth century book publishing in the USA

In the May 1909 issue of Bookman,the correspondent ‘ Galbraith ‘ in his ‘ American Letter ‘ compares the brash exploits of American publishers to the more sedate efforts of their British confreres.

American publishes and booksellers are remarkable in that they apploy the same ingenuity and audacity to book advertising that it is customary to use in the selling of soap and breakfast foods. Where the English publisher inserts in the newspaper a genteel announcement to the effect that “ So and So is Mr Such and Such ‘s finest book , and is really a remarkable story, the American publisher charters a full page in a popular daily, and prints upside down in the middle of it, something well near as striking as this:

“YOU ARE A LIAR

if you deny ‘So and So’

is the finest Novel

Ever Printed !”

Moreover, Galbraith contends, publishers don’t miss a trick when it comes to marketing gimmicks. When the American edition of Gaston Leroux’s The Perfume of the Lady in Black (published originally in France in 1908) appeared in 1909, the publishers Brentano’s , decided to perfume ( it was not said how they did it) ‘ every copy of the book with an almost overpowering fragrance so strong…that one may handle the book at a shop with gloves on, go back through the air of the streets to find one’s fingers still smelling strongly…’ Continue reading →

The Cinema Serial —-early twentieth century verse in praise of a silent film

Found interleaved in an exercise book inscribed ‘ Recitations ‘, which contains a variety of both original material and copies in different hands of extracts from published recitations that were the staple of Music Hall acts from the late Victorian period to around the time of the First World War, is this piece of doggerel entitled ‘The Cinema Serial’.

The piece, which is probably original, describes the experience of viewing the ninety–third episode of an imaginary thriller entitled ‘ Philip’s Phantom Quest’ in a ‘large suburban’ picture palace, probably in Scotland. The whole item is of interest to historians of the Cinema, not only because the film’s subject matter reflects the contemporary panic surrounding the ‘ Yellow Peril ‘, but also because the preamble to the filmic action tells us something about the experience of visiting a cinema in the early twentieth century:

‘ In a large suburban palace with the

Latest films portrayed,

Where in darkness hands are clasped

And cupid’s hits are often made

Fair maids their heads on manly shoulders

Ceased awhile to lean

For the title of the next film

Has appeared upon the screen

There’s a buzz of approbation

From the young folks one & all

In excitement one wee laddie

Swallows half a butter ball.

Love’s whisperings subside

As folks prepare to gaze with zest

For ‘tis Episode the ninety-third

Of Philip’s Phantom Quest…’

The verse continues with an account of Philip’s enemy, a Chinaman humorously named Ah Choo, whose ‘average of weekly murders stands at four point three’. This villain is evidently modelled on the protagonist of Sax Rohmer’s famous novel The Mystery of Fu Manchu, which had been published in 1913. Continue reading →

Thorpe’s Water Frolic of 1824

‘Water Frolic’ is a new term for us at Jot HQ. But according to the art historian Trevor Fawcett, who was perhaps a Norfolk man ( he attended the University of East Anglia), these events were common festive occasions on the Norfolk rivers and broads, at least in the early years of the nineteenth century.

In his short article published in Norfolk Archaeology ( XXXVI, Part IV, 1977), a reprint from which we found in a pile of ephemera at Jot HQ, Fawcett writes about the Thorpe Water Frolic of 1824, which was captured in a superb oil painting by the provincial artist Joseph Stannard, himself a keen oarsman and the owner of a skiff—the Cytherea — the following year.

Thorpe is today a riverside place on the Yare immediately adjoining Norwich, whose station is named after it. In 1824, however, it was a picturesque hamlet ( dubbed the ‘Richmond of Norfolk’) on an important trading route to foreign markets; and on this particular occasion all the various commercial vessels on the Yare would have been immobilised to enable the ‘ frolic’ to take place.

Although annual frolics had been common events in Norfolk over the years, the Thorpe frolic had only been established in 1821 by local cloth-merchant and manufacturer John Harvey, who had bought and developed the Thorpe Lodge estate. Originally, it was attended only by the wealthy and influential in Norwich and its vicinity. In 1822 nine cutters had raced for a silver cup and five rowing boats for another trophy. But in 1823 Harvey decided to open the event to everyone—from the humblest loom-worker, farm labourer and shop assistant, to the wealthiest businessmen and landowners. Continue reading →

The Whitest Man I Know

Larkin’s ‘Sympathy in White Major ‘ ( High Windows 1974) is one of his best known poems. It begins with a lip-smacking description of a gin and tonic being poured and ends with the poet drinking the health of ‘Here’s to the whitest man I know, though white is not my favourite colour.’

The poem is essentially about the doubtful virtues of unselfishness. Larkin lists all the virtues of his ‘white ‘altruistic protagonist: he ‘devoted his life to others ‘, ‘and was ‘a real good sort ‘, implying that these are qualities that are generally admired. However, as Larkin suggests in another poem, ‘Self’s the man ‘, someone who marries and has children is making a selfish choice rather devoting ‘himself to others’. Larkin looks at his own life as a non-white bachelor who has rejected this ‘ family man ‘ lifestyle, and contends that by being a poet and a novelist he has contributed more to society in general than has the ‘ white ‘ family man with responsibilities to others.

But placing its possible interpretation aside, where did Larkin get the phrase ‘the whitest man I knew‘? We know that he was an enthusiast for ‘ trad’ jazz. He owned a large collection of mainly traditional jazz records and some of his writings on jazz were collected in All What Jazz. But was he also knowledgeable in the field of Music Hall recitations and the music that often accompanied them? Was he familiar with the poem ‘The Whitest Man I Know’, which was written in 1913 in the era of Dixieland by the English actor and poet J.Milton Hayes, who also performed it to the music of R. Fenton Gower. Continue reading →

Marie Corelli in 1909

Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria, Tennyson and William Gladstone admired her; Mark Twain and most of the Press did not. She is said to have outsold Dickens. Some of her novels went into twenty-five or more editions. In an era when writers like H. G. Wells were promoting the New Woman, she reviled this modern phenomenon, and yet some of her heroines could be said to have embodied the virtues—a sense of adventure, a resoluteness and a curiosity– of this type . She promoted Christianity and yet wrote about occultism and transcendence. In her private life she dressed as a rather twee lady, but was a hard-nosed businesswoman in her dealings with publishers and the Press. She had a reputation for ostentation. Owning the grandest house in Stratford-on-Avon ( now an outpost of the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute ), she had acres of trim garden, a tower for writing and a gondola on the river. Her readers adored her, so why, nearly a hundred years after her death is Marie Corelli, arguably the best-selling female author of all time, now almost totally forgotten ? If you wish to buy a first of her many novels today, you need not part with more than a tenner—often much less. From being a former Queen of the subscription libraries Corelli has become a literary curiosity, fit only for examination in academic studies on the cult of celebrity and the role of the popular novel in society.

Corelli sold millions of books, but was she ever any good ? The Bookman, a serious middlebrow literary journal, certainly saw her as a significant writer. In May 1909, at the height of her fame, a whole issue was devoted to an appreciation of her life and work by A.St John Adcock, the magazine’s editor, who called on various admirers to support his view of her greatness. Firstly, Adcock takes aim at those ‘cocksure’ critics who set themselves up as the final arbiters of good writing: ‘ There are a thousand times as many critics who have never written a line of criticism, but are not therefore the less cultured, impartial, competent.’ Adcock then turns to the ‘ superior ‘ critics of Marie Corelli:

No living author has been more persistently maligned and sneered at and scouted by certain members of the Press—by the presumptuous and struttingly academic section of it particularly—than has Miss Marie Corelli; and none has won ( by sheer force of her own merits, for the press has never helped her) a wider, more persistently increasing fame and affection among all classes of that intelligent public which reads and judges books, but does not write about them… Continue reading →

Edward Baker, the Demon Bookfinder General of Birmingham

In some of our past bulletins recording the nefarious dealings of Edward Baker, who called himself the ‘ most expert bookfinder extant ‘, but who we prefer to dub ‘The Demon Bookfinder General of John Bright Street’, we credited him with what today might be regarded as generosity. He had the habit of selling quality deleted books, including works by Oscar Wilde and Dowson, at knock down prices that in today’s market might sell for decent profits. After all, because a book is deleted it doesn’t follow that it loses its value. Thomas Hardy was deleted, as were many other celebrated novelists. On the debit side, however, as a buyer Baker was niggardly to the point of criminality.

Let’s start with what he was prepared to offer for one of the rarest titles in American literature. Edgar Allan Poe is now regarded as a key writer in the American Romantic idiom. ‘The Raven ‘ is a staple of most Americans’ childhood education, and his creepy tales were pioneer works . He is even credited with inventing the detective story. Poe’s debut, Tamerlane and otherPoems ( Boston, 1827) was privately published when Poe was just 18. The edition was around fifty, which made it so rare that today perhaps only twelve copies have survived. In 2009 one of these fetched $662,500, a record for a work of American literature. In 1907, when he offered just £2 for a copy, Edward Baker, who knew the book was a great rarity , would not have expected to buy a copy in Birmingham, but being a shark, he offered a ludicrous price anyway. If he had been a better businessman, an offer of £20, might have interested someone in Europe. To compound his criminal offence Baker offered a measly 25/- for The Raven and other Poemsand the same price for Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. We at Jot HQ would love to know if Mr Baker ever managed to acquire any of these incredibly rare Poe firsts.

It gets worse. Today, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell isa rarity that most Bronte fans would love to acquire. It is nothing like as scarce as Tamerlane,but today you’d need to shell out at least £2,000 for a decent copy. .In 1909 Ed Baker would give you 25/-.There are more horror stories. Baker seemed to have a penchant for Shelley, or at least one of his well-heeled clients did. Perhaps one of them was A.M.D. Hughes , author of The Nascent Mind of Shelley, who later became a professor of English Literature at Birmingham University, just down the road from Baker’s shop. There are twelve very rare Shelley titles in Baker’s ‘wanted ‘ list, but only two of these ( the Adonais, which was printed in Pisa following Keats’ death, and Queen Mab(1813), would he give more than £3 for. Today, many Shelley firsts will fetch up to £2,000, some much more.. Continue reading →

George Hutchinson—Mass Observer

Rescued from the archive of his son are some typed copies of short articles and reports by George Hutchinson ( 1921 – 1980), one time active member of that valuable organisation Mass Observation. Founded in 1937 by poet Charles Madge, journalist Tom Harrisson and film-maker Humphrey Jennings, Mass Observation was set up to record the opinions and observations of ordinary people on national as well as day-to-day events through the UK. It continued throughout the Second World War and folded in the fifties, though it was revived in the eighties.

A journalist by training, Hutchinson ( as a previous Jot noted ) began as a volunteer observer and later became a ‘ whole-time investigator’ while conscripted into the Navy during 1941. The Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex contains some of his wartime interviews and reports as well as evidence of his long association with Tom Harrisson. His time in the Navy gave him an opportunity to collect examples of naval language which he put to good use in two of the articles we found at Jot HQ—‘The Andrew’s the Navy’, which he submitted to Lilliputmagazine, and ‘Naval Language’, which he wrote in Bradford and which may have been submitted to The Yorkshire Post. Another piece, entitled ‘The Barrel Organ: will it survive a growing indifference ?’ was also written in Bradford and may also have been meant for the same newspaper. It has been said that Hutchinson worked for The Yorkshire Post,but his article entitled ‘ Stevenage: a new design for living’, which must date from c1946, is inscribed ‘ originally written for John Bull: not used ‘, which suggests that he wasn’t a staff member of the Postat this time.

The two articles on Naval Language will be considered in a later Jot. This particular Jot will look at his piece on the Barrel Organ. In it he attributes the decline in popularity of that distinctly old-fashioned street instrument partly to the ‘ increasingly popularity ‘of the radio, but mostly to the depredations of the Aliens Act of 1912, which discouraged mainly Italian immigrants from setting up as organ grinders in the UK. Interestingly, Hutchinson observes that the Act ‘accounts for a recent estimate that, of all the hundred barrel-organs remaining in London, all are pre-war models.’ Continue reading →

The Lost Art of Advertising fliers

Found, among some papers at Jot HQ is this very long and thin flier for The Bookseller advertising pic 001 Beauchamp Bookshop of 15a Harrington Road, which was once located by South Kensington station in SW London. Its most striking quality is the boldness of the two colours ( red and black) used for the various period typefaces on display. To someone who grew up in the Swinging Sixties, when designers took inspiration from Victorian (and even older) typefaces and decorative flourishes, it could date from that time. However, the telephone number featured (KEN 6904) might quite equally suggest a slightly earlier date, though the fact that the all-number system began in London in 1966 doesn’t help us much. Some specialist magazines devoted to design, such as Signatureand the Penrose Magazine, were experimenting with typefaces in the forties and fifties. Indeed, the fact that the Beauchamp Bookshop wished to buy books on bibliography and printing suggests that the owner, Mr Philip Pearce, had an active interest in book design. It is telling too that his special need to acquire ‘ late 18^thand early 19^thcentury books ‘ betrayed a fondness for well printed and well designed books from this pioneering era of fine printing.

As to the bookshop owner, we at Jot 101 must confess an ignorance of Mr Philip Pearce and his shop. South Kensington has always been a haven for book collectors of large and small purses, but the Beauchamp Bookshop has long gone. Nor does the Net record anything about it or its owner, who seems not to have made a mark on the world outside of selling books. We at Jot HQ have asked a leading rare bookseller in the district, but he cannot remember Mr Pearce. Perhaps some collectors in the Jottosphere might recall bookshop and/or owner. If they do, we’d like to hear from them. [RR]

One Hundred Years Ago

In the current issue of the TLS Nicholson Baker reviews what was being published a hundred years ago. In this Jot we look at what was happening in the world of home appliances and gracious living, according to the May 1920 issue of The Ideal Home.

As always, it’s the adverts that entertain the most. The first that greets the reader is a full page colour ad for the O-Cedar Polish Mop which shows twenty or more tiny maidservants admiring the wonderful effects produced by a giant charlady manoeuvring this mop around a giant room. It makes one wonder how many middle-class supporters of the Women’s Suffrage movement employed female cleaners in their large, comfortable houses. Quite a few, one would have thought.

In contrast, on the following page we have an advert meant, we presume, for male readers, who are urged to save on average £30 by buying a machine designed to make concrete roofing tiles ‘ on the site’.

Mains electricity for lighting and power was patchy in this immediate post-war period and relied on local council-run generating stations. An Act of 1919 gave the go-ahead for a more nationwide supply system, but this wasn’t established until the National Grid came into being in 1935( remember that poem ‘ Pylons’ by Spender ?). For those who afford it in 1920, a petrol driven domestic generator was one source of electricity. Home owners would hide away their generator, in this case a ‘ Delco-Light ‘ available from F. S. Bennett of Oxford Street, in a shed or outhouse to minimize the noise and fumes produced by it. Continue reading →

The fatal effects of reading Dutch

Found in a copy of Montague Summers’ Restoration Theatre is this typed copy of a poem entitled ‘The Dutch Mail or The Tragic Fate of Examiner 3X22.’ It is dated February 27th 1918 and signed E. de K, which suggests that it is an original composition. The corrections in black ink bear this out. It is most likely to have been sent to a magazine editor.

It tells the story of a polyglot censor named Examiner 3X22 whose job it was to censor outgoing mail during the First World War. Though happy to be dealing with mail written in many languages, he is forced to admit one day that he couldn’t read Dutch. He quickly remedies this defect until he becomes so fluent in the language that he is mistaken for a native. Unfortunately, his mastery means that he is now forced to censor ‘stacks’ of letters from the Dutch East Indies. The cumulative effect on the censor of dealing with these ‘verbose effusions vapid’ results in a rapid decline. One day he faints from the effort, falls from his chair onto the floor where he rapidly expires.

This is obviously a squib, possibly ridiculing both the Dutch language and in particular employees of the Dutch East Indies Company whose language it was . On the surface Examiner 3X22 seems to be working for the Netherlands government, but this cannot be so if he is unable to read Dutch. On the other hand, if he is working in Britain, how is it that so much mail from the Dutch East Indies is being censored in Britain? A possible alternative to either of these scenarios is that the censor is working in South Africa, which during the First World War was a self-governing dominion of the British Empire and as such contributed troops to the war effort in Europe and suffered many losses. The writer’s surname de Koch/ Koch/Klerk was a common enough one in South Africa, which had been colonised by the Dutch as well as the British. In addition, an online postal history site records a letter sent to Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies (now known as Indonesia), being censored in 1915.

The squib may have political undertones. After all, the Boer War was a recent memory for both the defeated Boers and those of British heritage, though the exact nature of the tensions in South Africa that prompted the satire remain to be discovered. We welcome comments from the Jottosphere on this issue. [R.M.Healey]

Fay Inchfawn

Inchfawn cover pic 2 001 Discovered at Jot HQ is this first edition of one of the ‘Homely Woman’ pocket volumes by the prolific female writer Fay Inchfawn ( aka Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, 1880 – 1978), whose work is forgotten now, but whose books, which included popular verse, religious works and children’s literature, were once, to quote the blurb from her publisher Ward, Lock & Co in 1947, ‘to be found in countless homes, for more than half a million have been sold’.

To further quote from her publicity department:

‘everyone of Fay Inchfawn’s delightful little books rings with a true sincerity from cover to cover. She can extract joy from the scullery, yes, even from the wash tub…If Fay Inchfawn cannot bring some compensation to you in your humdrum daily toil—well, nobody can ! She has certainly done so for countless wives and mothers, and if you do not happen to be one of those so fortunate, it is up to you to see what she can do for you. Surely she cannot fail ! ‘

Inchfawn, who lived in Freshford, near Bath, for most of her life, also contributed to women’s magazines, and if she didn’t write for my grandmother’s favourite magazine, The People’s Friend, she should have done. The Day’s Journey, which is one of her ‘ religious works‘, seems perfumed with peppermint creams and Werner’s Originals.

A Day’s Journeyis a homily which takes its inspiration from The Pilgrim’s Progress. Its homely message seems to be that like Bunyan’s pilgrim, the wanderer through life will overcome all the difficulties that confront him by applying the self-reliance and common wisdom that God has conferred on him and by ignoring all the vices and distractions placed in his way by the ‘Prince of Evil’. Continue reading →

Autograph Collecting hints

[Found at Bookride 2010 -our first site, this wise piece about autographs.] Try to avoid forgeries! To my mind the ‘blink’ test is a good start in testing for authenticity. If on very first seeing it the autograph doesn’t feel right don’t touch it. As Malcolm Gladwell details in over 300 pages of his book Blink. The Power of Thinking Without Thinking the unconscious mind often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and protracted ways of thinking. If the seller doesn’t pass the blink test either, drop it like a hot brick. Kenneth Rendell, purveyor of manuscripts to the great and the good, advises avoiding the kind of dealer who brushes you off when probed, he adds: “The real expert will bore you with answers.” I also like what he says about how forgers often fail to get the feel of a signature right -the “flying starts and endings of the pen”.

Avoid signatures that look more like a drawing than writing and ones that seem to have stops and starts. Also signatures in cheap editions of books can be suspect, most forgers will not risk screwing up a signature in a four figure book. Forgers often stick to a plain signature so a date or sentiment is useful (belying the tiresome ‘flat signed’ schtick.) Also beware the desirable signature that is seriously underpriced, you may be lucky but it is often a sign of a grifter at work. If it is very cheap, of course, it may be real but unrated or unrecognised. Age is no guarantee of authenticity, forgers have been around since Heraclitus stood in the river. Ebay is a minefield. Bad Salinger forgeries appeared there after the writer’s death and usually made a few hundred dollars. Like the curate’s egg they were ‘good in parts’ but if it is wrong it’s worthless, if it’s right it’s a few thousand. In one of the online signatures Salinger appeared to have misspelled his own name…a bad start. Continue reading →