Advertising

'Persuading the publick to part with money they do not have in exchange for goods or services they neither need nor require.' 

Thus Dr Johnson's definition of advertising in his famous dictionary, published after much labour in 1755. Well not quite (although the word is there, differently defined), but I like to think it's the sort of thing he might have come up with had he witnessed the modern advertising industry in the full vigour of its operations. Rather than the deception and malevolent guile which we are accustomed to today, I prefer the rather blunter methods of an earlier age - this no-nonsense advertising gem aimed at the farming community appeared in the Buckinghamshire Herald of 16 December 1949, and made me smile:

Rats cannot resist RODINE

They eat it greedily and die!

All it needed was a picture of one of the brutes writhing in its death throes, but the editor of the Herald spared us that. 

  

A sobering thought

I'm one of the rather rare breed that is fascinated by the history of local government, but even I will concede that you don't start reading the annual reports of the St George-in-the-East Metropolitan Vestry (established, as you will all know,  by the 1855 Metropolis Management Act) expecting much in the way of historical interest or drama. Yet then on page 31 of the Vestry report for the year ending March 1861 - the Medical Officer's list of 45 coroner's inquests for that year - you come across six simple words:

'No. 23. From exposure and want - a Chinaman'

And it seems to me that there is a whole world of life and tragedy here. Who was he, this Chinese man who succumbed to a lonely death on the streets of Wapping over 150 years ago.? Did anyone, anywhere, mourn his end? I would like to think that there was someone, but this terse and unforgiving statement in the 1861 annual report of the St George-in-the-East Vestry is probably the only evidence - and faint at that - that he ever lived upon this earth. Without it, he would have gone down in utter silence. A sobering thought indeed.

Natural History in the Middle of London

 'What's hit is history, what's missed is mystery.'

A rather gnomic comment, unless you are a birdwatcher who knows something of the history of their hobby. For rather than the simple, unalloyed pleasure of watching birds, your Victorian/Edwardian naturalist seems to have felt that his day (and it was inevitably a he, of course) was not complete without having shot a number of the objects of his study out of the sky.

The phrase immediately came to mind while poking about in the stacks of Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (where I am lucky enough - still - to work part-time) when I chanced upon L/SMB/E/5/2, the accessions book of the Stepney Borough Museum covering 1904-1933. An unremarkable volume perhaps, but I couldn't resist a peek and there under 15 May 1911 was confirmation that the Museum paid four shillings and took receipt of two specimens of the Blue-headed Wagtail (Motacilla flava flava)! These unfortunate Motacillas had been shot by one R. M. Presland at Walthamstow (Marshes, presumably) in August 1910, along with a Grey Wagtail (what did the man have against Wagtails I wonder). I immediately took against this Presland character, forming a mental picture of a mustachioed, trigger-happy oaf in tweeds, apt to blast away indiscriminately at anything that came in range. My dislike increased when I saw, with incredulity, that Presland also sold the Museum other specimens: a Red-backed Shrike, a Little Stint, a Brown Owl - a Tawny Owl presumably - a Blackcap and a Tree Pipit, the latter purchased for six old pence!

But personal dislike of this hitherto obscure historical character aside, a couple of points are worth making about this archival curio; firstly, who would have thought that the collections at THLHLA, with their overwhelmingly urban bias, would have furnished us with such a fascinating nugget of natural history. And secondly, were these specimens really Blue-headed Wagtails -  a pretty rare bird I thought, and the Wagtails are easily confused.