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.

It's a small (historical) world

It's a small world, so they say, and it can sometimes seem like that in the field of historical research: people crop up in the most unexpected places, and entirely separate casework can suddenly coincide in very curious ways. The following example of this would be hard to beat.

A current project has me looking for the papers of the eminent scholar Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge - now there's a name - and yet just today, working on an entirely different case, the same man leaps off the page of a 19th-century gossip magazine called The World. Said magazine was the work of the author and journalist Edmund Hodgson Yates; in fact it made his fortune, and he obviously had a keen sense of what sold as it was very much the Hello! of its day, complete with 'at home with' type articles and breathless accounts of the doings of various celebrities of the day. Not then, the sort of publication where one would expect to find a severely intellectual man such as Sir Ernest, but there he was alright, twice mentioned in a lengthy puff piece about the novelist Henry Rider Haggard. Budge apparently wrote letters to Haggard in Egyptian hieroglyphics - I'd have been disappointed if he had not.       

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. 

Fake News 1662-Style

Found and copied - word for word - from CO 5/1380: Acts passed by the Virginia Legislature 1662-1715

23 March 1662: [Act] XCI

Divulgers of False News

Whereas many idle and busy-headed people do forge and divulge false rumours and reports, to the great disturbance of the peace of His Majesty’s liege people in this colony [Virginia]: be it enacted, that what person or persons soever shall forge or divulge any such false reports, tending to the trouble of the country, he shall be, by the next Justice of the Peace, sent for, and bound over to the next County Court; where, if he produce not his author, he shall be fined two thousand pounds of tobacco, or less, (if the Court think fit to lessen it) and besides, give bond for his behaviour, if it appear to the Court, that he did maliciously publish, or invent it.

I would not have believed this had I not read it, and would have dismissed it as fake news about fake news...

Medical woes, but then again maybe not

Things medical have been uppermost in everyone's mind for most of 2020, and it will doubtless continue this way for many months to come. It has been a grim period, but I've got off lightly and whenever I get to moping about how I haven't been able to go to the pub or a gig (shame about the Las Kellies show at the Shacklewell Arms on 26 March being cancelled, but there we are) I force myself to read again the following document, which I happened across at TNA shortly before lockdown.

SP 78/100/102 f. 331

Viscount Scudamore to Sir John Coke, Paris, 18/28 April 1636

Sir Francis Crane was cutt this morning. Within an hour after, the stone was brought to mee. It is almost as big as an ordinarie hen-egg; & of that shape; & rough well neere all over. Hee went to it cheerfully, & so endured it. They were not in the operation longer than you may judge I have been writing thus farre. Some 7 hours after I sent to congratulate wth him. And then he spake heartie, & said hee had lived now so many houres, meaning that his freedom from his former payne made him think his present being different as life & that wch is not life or worse. But when the urine passeth through the wound his payne is great. In a word, Mr Davison thinks him as well as could bee expected hee should bee now.

Enough to make you shudder; the modern world may be a cesspool and getting worse, but at least we - or at least some of us - have medicine (for the time being).

(Poor Sir Francis's ordeal was all in vain - he died from gangrene on 26 June.)   

London American Civil War Veterans

A remarkable - to me at least - snippet of information emerges from the murky pages of the South London Press, 16 May 1919, in the form of a short report on a meeting of the London Association of American Civil War Veterans, held at the Bermondsey Ragged School, Gedling Street. Salient details as follows:

• Colonel Bevington, treasurer of the Association, provided tea, while Mr F. W. Smith, secretary, took the chair (Mr Ambrose Pomeroy JP, the vice-president, was unable to attend). The business before the meeting included arrangements for decoration day and also organising a visit Windsor.

Of course a quick search of Google reveals that those in the know have long known about this Association, but its existence came as a surprise to me; hopefully this fragment will add a little more to the scholarly knowledge about the organisation. (And it goes to show, yet again, that if you really want to drill down through the layers of historical sediment forget The Times etc. and go for the local press - much more interesting and useful.)

The Great James Robertson Justice - a vignette

Bearded and booming, James Robertson Justice was the sort of memorable screen presence that we just do not have these days, and we are all the poorer for it. Everyone remembers him as the domineering Sir Lancelot Spratt in the Doctor films, but I like him as the appropriately named Captain Boomer in Moby-Dick - a brief but noteworthy appearance in a great film.

I came across JRJ at TNA recently in a most surprising way; not, as one might expect, in connection with his fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War (although I've often wondered if that story is apocryphal), but as a passing reference in PREM 13/2774 which confirms that JRJ had a passion for falconry - apparently he pursued the pastime with Sheikh Zaid bin Sultan al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi. I wonder how that worked in practice: the same briefing note confirms that the Sheikh spoke no English.

The brass neck of some people

So, slavery is abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834 and the so-called apprenticeship scheme - intended to ensure that the former slave-owners had access and continued control of a supply of labour - collapses in 1838. Your slaveowners have pocketed some £20m as compensation, while the drudges on whom the whole system rested get nothing. And yet what do we find in CO 321/81, a volume of official Colonial Office documents from 50 years later? We find one F. B. Byar writing to the Colonial Office because he is considering instructing his solicitor to bring a case that he is due further compensation for the two slaves he had owned in Barbados. In exquisitely polite terms, Byar wants to know about the compensation payments from 50 years previously. People can, of course, rationalise anything to themselves, but this? The mind reels at the sheer audacity.

WW2 Rubber Neckers

I chuckled at this item, found among some press-cuttings at Westminster City Archives concerning civil defence in London in WW2 (ref: CD 146.8); the Borough's Civil Defence collection, of which these cuttings form a small part, is a remarkable collection, incidentally. This was from the Daily Sketch of 1 July 1940:

Don't Rush to Incidents

Sightseers with nothing to do are still hampering the Civil Defence Services personnel working after flying bombs have fallen. This anti-social behaviour was the subject of comment in the Daily Sketch yesterday.

Immediately after one bomb fell yesterday morning sightseers collected. 

For some time they were responsible for delaying ambulances and rescue parties trying to reach buildings with injured people in them.

Thirty minutes after the bomb fell a police loudspeaker car arrived and a police announcer added his pleas to those of the other police for the public to move on.

A police car, making continuous appeals, pushed its way through the crowd to clear the way for an ambulance.

Not exactly in the Spirit of the Blitz, but it could have been worse: these days they'd all be taking selfies.

Deputy Director of Biscuits...

We seem to be stuck in a never-ending loop of political absurdity at the moment, but the archives furnish us with numerous examples that confirm that the absurd has - thankfully - always been with us.

I call as my next witness one Mr W. H. Phillips, but first consider:
November 1943 - British troops continue their advance in Italy; Berlin is pounded by the Allies from the air; the Cairo Conference considers ways to defeat Japan; the Tehran Conference gets under way, attended by the big three; fighting continues unabated in all of the major theatres of war...

And Mr Phillips? Well he's just been promoted from Assistant Director of Biscuits to Deputy Director of Biscuits in the Bakery Division of the Ministry of Food. Lest there be any doubt about the truth of this momentous event check the MoF's 'Bulletin of Staff and Accommodation Changes (No. 48)' in MAF 84/670.

Simple joys

So, we are in the mid 18th century, and after a punishing stint in India working as a physician for the East India Company our man - one Edward Ives - sets out on the long, long journey home and decides to keep a detailed diary. Not surprisingly, Ives and his companions endure appalling hardship and a series of heinous travails as they trudge slowly across the Arabian peninsula. In fact, such is the misery that at several points the members of the party look all set to lose their minds; and then this, noted in the desert outside Diarbekir:

25 July 1758
'... we saw a wild goldfinch, which settled upon a thistle close to our tent; the sight of this little, agreeable songster gave us exquisite pleasure, owing to the single consideration that birds of this kind are inhabitants of Great Britain.'
'We could not help looking upon this tuneful goldfinch, as a fellow citizen who had kindly flown thus far to bid us welcome, to raise our drooping spirits, and signify to us that we were drawing nearer to our native country, that land of liberty after which we had so long and so passionately sighed.'

How wonderful and life-affirming is that? And I'm pleased to say that Ives and all of his friends did manage to stagger home, allowing the good doctor in his declining years to work up from his journal the following publication:

A voyage from England to India, in the year 1754, and an historical narrative of the operations of the squadron and army in India, under the command of Vice-Admiral Watson and Colonel Clive, in the years 1755, 1756, 1757 ... Also a journey from Persia to England by an unusual route (London, 1773).

I can confirm that it makes modern travel writing seem pretty pallid in comparison.

Oscar's literary remains

Saw The Happy Prince the other day; a superlative performance by Rupert Everett of course, but if we didn't know it to be a true story it might be tempting to dismiss it as overwrought melodrama. But it is a true - and quite appalling - story that I confess left me rather shaken at times.

Before seeing the film, and quite coincidentally, I came across two of Oscar Wilde's calling cards in the British Library, sitting quietly (possibly unobserved up till now?) among Add MS 81733. They simply read:

        Sebastian Melmoth: Hotel de la Plage, Bernaval-sur-Mer, Dieppe

Unbearably poignant, obviously, but the chance to hold something that Oscar Wilde possessed, even something as mundane as a calling card! Not many get that chance.