Cricket (not so lovely), Cricket

With yet another Ashes rout predictably under our belts, an opportunity arises to crowbar a very obscure but still striking cricket reference into this blog. Alec Bedser was, from what I can gather, a rather austere and chilly man, although that did not do him any harm on the cricket field. He also had something of an aptitude for business, which is why he crops up in J 13/19201 at The National Archives. This file documents the financial collapse of a film studio (Walton Studios), and brothers Alec and Eric Bedser (Surrey & Middlesex) Ltd were one of the firm's creditors - owed £25 for service charges on four typewriters. Howzat for mundane detail! 

Moby-Dick

It is long voyage in itself re-reading this leviathan of a book, but here is a curious thing. On page 131 of my edition (the old Penguin edition with the amazing pictures of whaling scenes and the supporting notes and commentary which are more difficult to understand than the book itself), we find this chilling line:

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling - a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity.

And then the very same day as reading this, I am at the British Library in the Newsroom and spot this grim account in the St Vincent Witness of 2 May 1878:

Grenada [Chronicle, n.d.]: Boat Accident: On Monday last, whilst the boats attached to Mr Tardieu’s whaling establishment (at present under the direction of Mr J. B. St Louis) were in a chase of a whale a few miles distance from the Bay, an accident occurred to the foremost boat, which we regret to say resulted in the loss of a man. It appears that after the whale was struck, the securing of the line was so clumsily effected that the boat heeled over, and it got entangled with other ropes. The boat, as a matter of course, was hauled under water, and the crew thrown overboard. After, however, a few minutes had elapsed the whale rose to the surface, and with it the boat which was fortunately cut adrift, and taken in charge by the men. The capsizing of the boat has been a great drawback to the enterprising owner for added to the loss of one of his men and a patent gun harpoon, lances, and paraphernalia are missing. The whale which caused all the damage was of an average size, and would have yielded about forty to fifty barrels of oil. The body of the lost whaler has not been recovered. 

It begs the question of whether I was subconsciously looking for this, or if it was just simple coincidence - if there are such things. Either way, the two things - one pithy and poetic, the other dry and factual - paint a picture alright of a terrifying business. 

Hastings Rarities Scandal

A recent edition of the excellent Birdwatch magazine had a remarkable piece on a historic ornithological scandal that is known as the 'Hastings Rarities' fraud. At the centre of it all was an East Sussex taxidermist named George Bristow, who seems to have been tempted by the financial gain to be had from selling on rare birds that had supposedly been shot in Britain. It got me thinking about local press coverage of this and other bird-related matters (local press coverage that is, as it is truth universally acknowledged that the real value of newspapers as a historical source lies there and not with the national press). There followed the inevitable visit to the online British Newspaper Archive, quite possibly the single most valuable historical source currently available - it really is addictive.

And although there is nothing about the scandal, there Mr Bristow, taxidermist and gunsmith,  most certainly is; quite the regular in the pages of the Hastings and St Leonards Observer in fact, until his death in April 1947. But as is the way with the BNA, one search led to another and before I knew where I was I had found literally 100s of historic reports about rare birds turning up in Britain - all needless to say promptly blasted to kingdom come by people who had nothing better to do. Somebody should collate these reports and match them against existing records of natural history societies and so forth; bird-watchers are a methodical lot, what with all their lists, and I'd be willing to bet that a sustained trawl of the BNA would turn up some new records. Just as a taster, how about this, from the Weymouth Telegram, 8 June 1865:

The correspondent of a Wiltshire paper states that a hoopoe has just been shot near Swanage, in Dorset; that an osprey has been seen in that neighbourhood for several days; and that a pair of peregrine falcons are now breeding on a solitary rock on the Swanage coast. 

Of course quite how you'd verify this and other records I can't say, but they are surely worthy of note.

 

Dig For Plenty

More on the agricultural/food-growing theme.

The 'Dig For Victory' campaign of WW2 is well established in folk memory; in people over 40 it is every bit as much a part of the historical consciousness of the war as the beaches at Dunkirk, storm-tossed merchant convoys, the Blitz, the Home Guard and so forth. But - and it was news to me - there was also a 'Dig For Plenty' campaign in the immediate post-war period, as the nation faced serious food shortages. More on this can be found in WORK 16/1718 at The National Archives: much of the rationale behind the campaign - national food insecurity and an inability to feed ourselves, political chaos, supply-line disruption - still makes sense in 2024, although it's hard to imagine an equivalent campaign today, more's the pity. Still, the 'Dig For Plenty' campaign might be worth researching further; and contemplating the state of the world (admittedly never a good idea), we might need all the help we can get in dealing with what's coming down the track.

Here's a shot of the campaign leaflet cover:

 

Hop-Picking and Pea-Picking in East London

I believe that the well-known tradition of East End families decanting to Kent to spend a few bucolic weeks in late summer hop-picking persisted into the post-war period; and to judge from photographs and other accounts, the whole thing seems to have been thoroughly enjoyed by everybody involved. 

There seems to have been something of an equivalent in the farther reaches of east London - way out in the Barking and Dagenham area. However, there it was not hops that were being picked but peas - presumably to supply the London market. This curio came to light after a recent trip to look at some school records at Barking & Dagenham Archives. The detailed logbook of Beacontree Heath School (presumably kept by a very diligent Headmaster (ref. BD213/2/2)) records very low attendance in July in the mid-1920s, and disapprovingly notes that many of the pupils were off pea-picking. 

Perhaps pea cultivation in Essex never became as established as hop growing in Kent, or maybe pea-picking by children was undertaken purely out of hard economic necessity and it never acquired the golden, quasi-holiday aura that seems to have become attached to the hop-picking excursions. Whatever the reason, summer pea-picking as a tradition hereabouts seems to have faded entirely from the popular consciousness: I had never heard of it prior to browsing the school logbook, which is perhaps no surprise in itself, but nor had any of the staff at the archives - surely an indication of just how deeply summer pea-picking had become buried in the unexcavated past.

Names, names, names

Sometimes the name just leaps off the page, and there is a breathless moment where one asks: 'Really? Is that him/her?' Try these recent examples, both of which relate to architectural history:

TNA, SP 78/105/85 [f. 327]: Battière to Coke, 11/21 May 1638, wherein we find mention of Inigo Jones, shortly to be sent some test moulds of a bust by a Mr Borrard (who, by the by, is feeling under the weather and 'keepes his bed').

Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/MUN/5/1: two meetings of the Stepney Reconstruction Group in April and May 1942 which where attended by the unforgettably named Erno Goldfinger (cue blaring James Bond theme music). The great man is recorded offering free technical advice on housing to the Group.

And always when this happens, I think: do the biographers know about this? Because they should.

The not-so gentle pursuit of natural history

I was glad to read that the Linnean Society has recently catalogued the vast collection of correspondence (around 1200 letters!) of the physician and botanist Richard Pulteney (1730-1801). The coming together of medicine and botany in the person of Pulteney got me thinking about how the quest to find and exploit new species of plants and animals is one of the hidden motors of history, a driving force largely unknown to most people. 

For those who are interested in this sort of thing there is definitely a romantic appeal in the idea of the dauntless field naturalist enduring privation and danger in some distant spot, the prize being a species as yet undescribed by science. That's the myth: it all depended on the knowledge of local people who never got any credit, of course, and it could all end badly anyway. Witness some sombre 1902 correspondence in Foreign Office papers (FO 118/258, f. 280 to be precise), between Michael Rogers Oldfield Thomas of the Natural History Museum and the British Consul at Valparaiso Sir Thomas Berry Cusack-Smith, which records the brutal murder in Chile of one of Thomas's most valued field collectors - a Perry O. Simmons. Poor Perry was apparently foolish enough to flash his cash among the locals, and that was it - followed to some lonely spot and unceremoniously bumped off. Curiously, this correspondence is the only sign that the man ever existed - can't find a thing about him.