NEVIN'S FUNNY OLD THINGS: a marvellous miscellany of past wit, wisdom and whimsical curiosities
- Charles Nevin
- Jan 1
- 44 min read
Updated: Jan 31
January 31
Born on this date in Hanover in 1707, Frederick, Prince of Wales, eldest son of George II, father of George III, and a prince of the ill-behaved kind. It was difficult to discern which he favoured most, drink, gambling or women; all combined to estrange him from his father and led to his setting up an alternative court from his Carlton House and Cliveden homes.
He was, though, highly cultured, and some of his borrowing at least was spent on the patronage of painters - he was a lover of rococo - and music. He commissioned James Thomson and Thomas Arne to write a masque, ‘Alfred’, linking him, preposterously, with England’s greatest king and founder of the Royal Navy, an abiding interest of the Hanoverians, which I mention only because it introduced ‘Rule Britannia’, prime patriotic prop ever since.
A more unlikely enthusiasm was cricket: he must surely be Surrey’s only royal German representative. The game was responsible for his death at the age of 44, as recorded in the nineteenth century by Sir Charles Frederick Lascelles Wraxall, a wonderfully gossipy writer also responsible for the novels, ‘Wild Oats: a Tale’, and ‘Married in Haste: A story of Everyday Life’:
‘On a March evening, in 1751, the beau monde of London was gently agitated by the news that Frederick, Prince of Wales, had just expired, at his house in Leicester Fields.
‘He died somewhat suddenly, and in the arms of one Desnoyers, a French dancing master, who, having been called in to soothe the prince's mind by playing the fiddle at his bedside, had the honour of holding him in his arms during the final struggle…
‘The prince had received a blow in the side from a cricket-ball some months previously, while playing at that game on the lawn of Cliveden House. This had formed an internal abscess, which eventually burst, and the discharge suffocated him.
‘But, granted this merit, the remaining qualities that make up the character of Frederick are of the most negative type. He was a spendthrift: he borrowed money unblushingly, careless as to where he obtained it, and with the very faintest expectation of repaying it.
‘Though a father of seven children, he lived in open adultery with a lady, whose house in Pall Mall had a secret communication with Carlton House. He was pretty frequently in the habit of paying visits to fortune-tellers; and would go in disguise to see the bull-baiting at Hockley-in-the-Hole.
‘Such is the residuum, when we take away the prestige of princely birth. Nor had Frederick the good fortune to excite a hearty detestation, except in the case of his father: the people, generally, treated his death with the most profound contempt…But his memory will live forever, in connection with the stinging epigram…
Here lies Fred,
Who was alive, and is dead.
Had it been his father,
I had much rather.
Had it been his brother,
Still better than another.
Had it been his sister,
No one would have missed her.
Had it been the whole generation,
Still better for the nation.
But since 'tis only Fred,
Who was alive, and is dead,
There's no more to be said.’
January 30
And now, back to 1998 for some more stops along the information byways and the far reaches of old newspaper pages.
At Home:
From the newsletter of the Women’s Institute branch in Newick, Sussex: ‘We are happy to report that the village hall is back to normal after the excitement last week, but, please, don't send any chemical or electrical items of a doubtful nature to future jumble sales.’
A man who stole a security camera from outside the Job Centre in Petersfield was tracked down by police officers watching the pictures on the camera.
Pensioner Alf France of Wrexham got a shock when he went to post a letter and a hand came out of the pillar box to take it. Then a voice shouted: ‘Help! Get me out of here!’ It was a postman who had been trapped inside the large box when the wind blew the door shut.
Italy:
Francisco Rivera, of Pisa, was on his way to a fancy dress party dressed as a gorilla when he was shot and knocked unconscious for the evening by local zoo keepers using guns with tranquilliser darts.
France:
Denis Dulo, who was let out of a Marseilles jail to run a marathon, hasn't been seen since.
Alain Boucher made a successful escape from a prison in Orleans, but was spotted a little later when he returned wearing a false beard to visit a friend.
Germany:
Two muggers in Ingolstadt who stretched condoms over their heads as a disguise fainted because the condoms were too tight. They were arrested when they came round.
Mention of Wrexham makes this unavoidable, I’m afraid:
‘I say, I say, I’ve just been to Wales.’
‘Wrexham?’
‘Doesn’t do them any good!’
Next!
January 29
A good time of the year to contemplate those not as well regarded as they should be. And on this date in 1985, comedy lost one of them, Charles Thomas McKinnon Murray: Chic Murray, of Greenock, possessor of the most delightfully batty sense of humour you could ever come across.
Chic acted a bit, but he was at his supreme on his own, up on the stage, a tall man in a suit meant to be smart, and a range of headgear, Scots or just odd, contemplating his audience with a sideways smile and a small wince, inviting them in on the jokes, riffing on artfully artlessly whether they did or didn’t.
This relaxed, benign, take-it-or-leave-it approach perhaps explains why Chic never became as big as he should have. That and a suitably chaotic approach to managing his career, and a lack of the luck showbiz requires. The best example of this would be the sudden death of his big break, the Royal Variety Performance of 1956, cancelled by the Suez Crisis. Liberace burst into tears; I do hope Chic was there to see it.
But, the jokes. You really have to watch Chic delivering them. Sadly, because of the fame thing, not many of his performances are easily available. Below is the best I could find.
Try some of them:
‘It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to have to paint it.'
‘I felt as out of place as a left-handed violinist in a crowded string section.’
‘I went to the butchers to buy a leg of lamb. Is it Scots?’ I asked. ‘Why?’ said the butcher in reply. ‘Are you going to talk to it or eat it?’
‘Do you know the Battersea Dogs Home?’ I said, ‘I didn’t know it’d been away.’
He came from a line that includes Joey Grimaldi, Dan Leno, Max Wall, and Ken Dodd. They too had some of that quality I am forced to call surreal, as with this Dodd favourite: ‘Men's legs have a terribly lonely life – standing in the dark in your trousers all day.’
Chic, you won’t be surprised to learn, was a touch eccentric off stage, at home, with or without his wife, Maudie, in their original double act, ‘The Tall Droll with the Small Doll’, before they split up in every way. A visitor noticed that Chic had a shower at either end of the bath and asked why. 'You never know,’ was the reply.
But my favourite of his, loved by a Scots aunt-in-law with an equally relishable sense of humour, and by my distinguished former Guardian crime-corresponding colleague, Duncan Campbell, is Chic’s response to being given the extremely modest amount of breakfast honey that you might expect at a guest house in the famously delicate and genteel Edinburgh district of Morningside: ‘I see you keep a bee’.
There are other claimants - Ronnie Scott and Jimmy Shand - but it was made for if not by Chic.
On!
January 28
The remarkable Charles Marie de la Condamine was born in Paris on this date in 1701, a mathematician rather removed from the accepted image of head down and abacus. Not just theory for Condamine: a spell soldiering, then ten years in South America measuring the length of a degree of latitude at the equator to prove Newton was right about its bulge; investigating quinine; becoming the first man to map the Amazon; and all the time having spectacular arguments with his colleagues on the expedition. Later he also pioneered and championed inoculation as treatment.
And then there was the lottery. When Louis XV introduced one based on bonds to increase his revenues, Condamine spotted a flaw: the purchaser of the smallest denomination of ticket had as much chance as winning as those of the largest. Along with 12 others, including his always canny friend, Voltaire, he bought up large numbers of the cheapest every month: by the time the scam was spotted, they had won several million francs, and to add l’insulte à l’affronte the courts declared it legal.
I have been unable to discover whether Nöel Coward had him in mind when he chose the name of his leading character in ‘Blithe Spirit’, but if he didn’t it seems a little, well, spooky. Cecil Parker played Charles Condamine in the original production, but Rex Harrison is the one you can still savour in David Lean’s 1945 film of the writer whose difficult first wife is summoned up by a singularly energetic medium, Madame Arcati.
Coward didn’t like it, though. ‘You have just fucked up the best thing I ever wrote,’ he said to Lean after seeing it for the first time. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Lean. Very harsh. Margaret Rutherford is bewitching, and Harrison is perfect as the harassed husband, intrigued and irritated at the same time.
He was, in best unlikely fashion, from Huyton, near Liverpool and now a byword for outer urban troubles.His family, depending on whether you asked Rex or somebody else, were lawyers, insurers or butchers. He was also the local champion ballroom dancer.
When I asked him about it many years later, in his fine suite at the Ritz, and even finer suit, a shimmer of dark green, he wasn’t very forthcoming, but then he wasn’t very forthcoming about anything, including why he had been married so many times (six). ‘I married my mistakes,’ he said, eyeing me coldly through the magnificent wreckage of the face he deserved. ‘I didn’t have to live with them.’
Robert Morley fared better; to him, Rex lamented ‘my wretched marriages’, continuing, ‘How different from you, only one wife ... and, if I may say so, only one performance.’
Not an easy man, despite being able to suggest effortlessly the opposite.
Disappointingly for one of these brief lives, he did also demonstrate it, as when he cared for his third wife, the beautifully vivacious Kay Kendall when she was dying. Even so, think Henry Higgins, only less obliging. Another wife, Elizabeth Harris, said Rex was the only man she had known who sent back the wine in his own house. When he was knighted, he complained that, ‘The Queen wasn’t properly briefed, she didn’t seem to know who I was’. He had a house in Italy, where he insisted on driving mostly on the left. On his deathbed, he told one son, Carey, to drop dead, and the other, Noel, the one who had a great success with ‘Windmills of Your Mind’, ‘You never could play the guitar.’
On with the show!
January 27
The body of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, was placed in a wooden mausoleum in Red Square, Moscow, on this date in 1924, where the preserved remains are still on display, but in a magnificent construction of red-faced granite brought from every part of the old USSR.
This literal idolising of the dead leader was and is controversial, ancient and alien from the rule of The People. Even more discussed has been what remains of the remains. The answer is very little. The popular suggestion is that it is mostly wax, but the truth, even though always a particularly tricky concept in Moscow, is more interesting.
It was realised very shortly after the hastily embalmed body went on display that, despite exceptionally cold weather, it was beginning to decay. After an amount of discussion remarkable even for the Politburo, it was decided that appearance was more important than authenticity.
A team of scientists was commissioned to keep the body looking lifelike, in effect to transform it into a ‘living sculpture’. This ‘Lenin Lab,’ which also still exists, has gone to remarkable and ingenious lengths to keep the old boy spruce. Years of re-embalming, re-sculpting and substituting have meant that the body today has changed so much from its original biological composition that it’s more representation than original.
It is closely monitored and removed for complete examination every 18 months. All embalming liquids are drained from the body and replaced with a new solution. Improvements researched on other cadavers are made. Professor V. L. Kozel’tsev, a veteran scientist at the Lab, has explained: ‘Every new wrinkle, cavity or protrusion must be fixed. We are talking about tiny dimensions. Some amount of artificial substitutes has to be introduced, which is quite difficult. One needs experience and artistic sense to perform this work.’
The Lab has also worked on and maintained Ho Chi Minh, Georgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian Communist leader, and, naturally, North Korea’s Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Stalin was another job, but he was removed and buried in 1961. Dimitrov’s mausoleum was blown up in 1999 (he’d already been removed, too).
Lenin is now less visited than the Moscow Zoo, but this is all very impressive, even if that slight Moscow uncertainty persists, particularly as I was told in the 1980s that a British tourist filing past the body observed an ear drop off.
Move along, please!
January 26
On this date in 956 took place one of the most striking events in English history, and one our history teacher, Mr Keenan, did not tell us about even though it would certainly have cured the lack of attention.
Eadwig, King of the English, a handsome fellow and elder son of Edmund I, was crowned at Kingston-on-Thames with requisite pomp. One of those familiarly lively Anglo-Saxon feasts followed, at which it was noticed that Eadwig had gone missing.
Intelligence arrived that the new king, only 15, was enjoying himself in another room and in another fashion with a high-born Saxon lady and her daughter. In what was surely an unwise move, the saint and statesman, Dunstan, then Abbot of Glastonbury, later Archbishop of Canterbury was asked to investigate, accompanied by the Bishop of Lichfield.
Dunstan’s hagiographer wrote: ‘They went in and found the royal crown, brilliant with the wonderful gold and silver and variously sparkling jewels that made it up, tossed carelessly on the ground some distance from the king's head, while he was disporting himself disgracefully between the two women as though they were wallowing in some revolting pigsty…
‘…Dunstan first told off the foolish women. As for the king, since he would not get up, Dunstan put out his hand and removed him from the couch where he had been fornicating with the harlots, put his diadem on him, and marched him off to the royal company, parted from his women if only by main force.’
Well. Interesting if true, as we used to say in journalism. Possibly against it is that Eadwig went on to marry the daughter, Aegilfu (although it was later annulled on grounds of consanguinity), and that there is little else to sustain the claim that the mother, Aethelgifu, was a wanton, licentious, scheming woman. Also, that Dunstan fell out of favour with Eadwig, and that the hagiographer was settling scores, as well as indulging in some early anti-feminist shaming of the Jezebel kind.
But then I suppose they would fall out, after that. And you know what modern historians are, dry relishers of any opportunity to assert inconvenient truth. Whatever, it is probably what they call ‘a highly coloured account’; and the heaviest weight against is that the anonymous author was a monk, a body who, how can I put this delicately, told some quite tremendous porkies in their chronicles. Yes, I’m looking at you, Gildas, Nennius, Ralph of Wendover, William of Malmesbury, and Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Eadwig has not been much revisited by history. Fanny Burney wrote ‘Edwy and Elgiva,’ a very free rendering of Eadwig and Aegilflu, but it closed after just the one night at Drury Lane in 1795 despite the presence of those thespian titans, John Kemble and Sarah Siddons, in the leading roles.
Burney’s work was a tragedy in which Elgiva is foully treated and ultimately killed; it nevertheless ‘did not fail to keep [the audience] in the height of good humour, by frequent irresistible claims on their risible faculties.’
This height reached a peak, apparently, during Elgiva’s dying scene on a lonely country lane, when the expiring Mrs Siddons was carried off behind a hedge, then brought back declaiming on a chaise longue to die, then carried off behind the hedge again.
This might explain why Burney is now much better known as a diarist.
Next!
January 25
Fancy a dance? I recommend Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore performing ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ in the big MGM musical of Cole Porter’s ‘Kiss Me Kate’ (1953).
Yes, it is an adaptation of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, which remains at best, vogue word, ‘problematical’ despite brave attempts to claim it for Feminism by employing the familiar current argument that Big Bill was being ‘satirical’; but, well, you know, really?
The film is not a great one, either, but, being Porter, there are some terrific song and dance numbers, even allowing for the acquired taste that is Ann Miller, the 3D, and the lurid colour. The choreography is by Hermes Pan and the young and also problematical Bob Fosse (me too, too), and shows it.
Wynn and Whitmore, however, playing a pair of gangsters in a touch iffy sub-plot, were not dancers, and were allegedly too embarrassed to rehearse much. The result is criticised by dance purists but is exactly how you want gangsters to dance: pure joy of the Hecht and MacArthur, Wilder and Diamond, Runyon and Detroit kind.
You will be interested to learn that Whitmore, a keen gardener, was for many years the face of Miracle-Gro garden products.
January 24
Those Romantics, eh? Samuel Taylor recorded this of a meeting with Wordsworth and Coleridge when the latter ‘talked uninterruptedly for about two hours, during which Wordsworth listened with profound attention, every now and then nodding his head as if in assent. On quitting the lodging, I said to Wordsworth, “Well, for my own part, I could not make head or tail of Coleridge's oration: pray, did you understand it?” “Not one syllable of it” was Wordsworth's reply.’ Splendid.
January 23
The Principality of Liechtenstein was created within the Holy Roman Empire on this date in 1720. You will of course already know that the small Alpine state and Uzbekistan are the only two landlocked countries in the world surrounded by other landlocked countries. Otherwise:
It has an area of 60 square miles, a population just smaller than Caerphilly’s and the second highest GDP per capita in the world, behind Monaco.
Every sixth frozen pizza eaten in Germany comes from Liechtenstein.
In 1867, Czar Alexander III offered to sell Alaska to the Prince of Liechtenstein, who declined.
In 2007, Switzerland invaded Liechtenstein when 170 Swiss infantry soldiers wandered across their unmarked border for more than a mile. Liechtenstein, which has no army of its own, didn’t notice the Swiss invasion and had to be informed that it had occurred (the country enforces no border control with Switzerland). The Swiss soldiers were armed with assault rifles but no ammunition.
Until recently, when it was undertaken by San Marino, it was the least-visited country in Europe.
Liechtenstein’s national anthem, ‘Oben am jungen Rhein,’ (‘Up above the young Rhine’) is sung to the same melody as ‘God Save The King,’ which resulted in the same tune being played twice before Northern Ireland beat Liechtenstein in Belfast in the 2008 Euro qualifiers.
The Principality of Liechtenstein has the third longest name in Europe, behind the Federal Republic of Germany, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is also, you will be proud to learn, is the longest country name in the world, world beating, in fact.
January 22
On this date in 1901, Queen Victoria died and her eldest son became King Edward VII. This is an edited extract of the factual afterword that follows my short story featuring the king on a rather sticky country house visit where he encounters, among others, Mrs Freddie Eynsford-Hill (née Doolittle).
'King Edward VII (1841–1910), known to his family as Bertie after his first name, Albert, and to many others as Tum-Tum after his generous girth, was – is – a difficult character to pin down. He was, by turns, and often in the shortest space of time, kind, unkind, sensitive, insensitive, thoughtful, thoughtless, irascible, attentive, snobbish in small ways, generous in larger, intensely loyal, dismissive, wise, and foolish.
He was a stickler for protocol, correct dress and medals who bowed to servants and allowed himself to be addressed by his mistresses’ children as ‘Kingy’ and played games with them involving racing buttered toast soldiers down the stripes of his trousers. He owned large estates but would picnic by the side of the road. He mixed happily with Jews, and was far more critical of Russian pogroms than his Government. He hated rudeness to Indians, but opposed self-rule for them. He seemed essentially English, but spoke it like a German, rolling his ‘r’s. He was as happy, if not happier, in the company of women, but opposed votes for them. He had numerous pets but slaughtered prodigious numbers of birds and animals.
He was bluff, prickly and relentlessly lowbrow, probably thanks to the ridiculously rigorous educational regime his father insisted upon for him. He rarely read a book, preferring to turn the library at Sandringham into a skittle alley. He loved the opera, but the social aspects of it seem to have been at least equally important; he is also said to have complained at a more avant-garde offering that he had been woken up four times by "that infernal noise".
It’s possible to see the contradictions in his character as a reflection of the deeper conflict between personal privilege and public duty that continues periodically to trouble our monarchy; a conflict that is the result of the irresistible introduction over centuries of regulation and consistency into personal will and whim, the evolution from absolute to constitutional, the introduction of consent by the ruled to be ruled.
Bertie shifted the balance to duty decisively, but where his strong sense of it came from, and how it matched his extravagant appetites is as unclear as what changed the young Prince Henry into the old Henry VIII, a similar figure in more ways than the physical. The easy answer is, of course, Victoria and Albert, his extraordinary parents. But their sense of duty was predominantly to themselves. Bertie somehow acquired one to his country, and passed it on to his descendants with one obvious exception, his namesake, Edward VIII.
When he finally came to the throne at the age of 59, he proved over the next ten years to be a far more sensible constitutional monarch than his capricious mother, despite her having steadfastly, unreasonably and insecurely limited his role as Prince of Wales. His part in achieving the important Entente Cordiale between Britain and France was exaggerated, but still influential because of his charm, shrewdness and relation to most of the crowned heads of Europe
He is now best remembered for his curious but considerable libido. His loss of virginity to the Irish ‘actress’, Nellie Clifton - ‘his fall,’ as his horrified parents put it, significantly - was almost directly responsible for Albert’s death after the insanely over-anguished consort caught a cold on a walk while he was lengthily remonstrating with his son, leading to typhoid fever and death. Bertie’s womanising continued relentlessly thereafter; you can make what you will of his paramours tending to be ample, exemplified by the social adventuress and celebrity, Lily Langtry, and even matronly, as with the aforementioned Alice Keppel, unlike his lissom wife, the relishably eccentric Danish princess, Alexandra.
Anecdotes abound: my favourite would be the newspaper photograph of the king in earnest conversation with his prime minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman. ‘Peace or War?’ read the caption. In fact, as Campbell-Bannerman later revealed, ‘The king wanted to have my opinion whether halibut is better baked or boiled’.
From ‘Tum-Tum Trouble,' the first story of ‘So Last Century,’ Short Stories, 1900-2000,’ by Charles Nevin.
January 21
Conductors, of the orchestral kind. Musical maestros, possessors of extraordinary ear, timing, memory and command, but forever questioned for their egos, alleged dictatorial tendencies, and, even, utility: what exactly do they do?
André Previn used to have a framed cartoon on display of a conductor standing at a podium and reading a set of instructions: ‘Wave the stick until the music stops, then turn around and bow.’
This is not the place for further learned discussion of the efficacy of varied styles with the baton. For my small, deeply unqualified and undistinguished part, I love a flamboyant conductor.
Yuri Simonov, born in 1941, was the youngest-ever chief conductor at the Bolshoi, appointed in 1970. Here he is conducting the Moscow Philharmonic playing Chopin’s Polonaise No 3, Op. 40-41. Irresistible, surely?
January 20
John Ruskin died on this date in 1900. The life and work of the great Victorian polymath would, did and does fill countless volumes, even excluding the rather creepy concentration on his failed marriage to the beautiful Effie Gray, who left him after falling for John Everett Millais in the Trossachs.
Not quite so well known is Ruskin’s roadbuilding. While Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford where he had also founded The Ruskin School of Drawing, he discovered the picturesque village of North Hinksey while riding and was much taken with its rustic beauty.
One of the most restless minds ever would clearly not be satisfied with mere admiration: he conceived a plan for the village that would demonstrate both the high nobility and the social utility of labour.
This was to take the clever young men of Oxford away from such pointless activities as cricket, tennis and rowing and have them build a road across the marsh between North and South Hinksey, provided a much-needed (in his view) link between the two villages.
Bemusement at such an idea, so foreign to our age in just about every way, becomes wonder when contemplating his work force, which included the imperial administrator to come, Alfred Milner, the future historian and philsopher,Arnold Toynbee, Hardwick Rawnsley, a founder of the National Trust, and…Oscar Wilde, 19.
Indeed. There’s little point me telling you about it when we have Oscar’s account: ‘So out we went, day after day, and learned how to lay levels and to break stones, and to wheel barrows along a plank - a very difficult thing to do. And Ruskin worked with us in the mist and rain and mud of an Oxford winter, and our friends and our enemies came out and mocked us from the bank. We did not mind it much then, and we did not mind it afterwards at all, but worked away for two months at our road’.
You will have your own thoughts on this eerie precursor of Reading. And on the fate of the road: ‘Well, like a bad lecture it ended abruptly - in the middle of the swamp. Ruskin going away to Venice, when we returned the next term there was no leader, and the “diggers,” as they called us, fell asunder.’
Even so, Oscar wrote glowingly of the inspiration the road had given him: ‘And I felt that if there was enough spirit amongst the young men to go out to such a work as road-making for the sake of a noble ideal of life, I could from them create an artistic movement that might change, as it has changed, the face of England.
Some have doubted the extent of Wilde’s involvement, but they are not looking up at the stars.
January 19
Some famous dogs from the world of entertainment.
Rin Tin Tin, the noted German Shepherd actor, was found by an American soldier on the battlefield in France in 1918 at an abandoned kennels used to train dogs for the German Imperial army. He was named after a female French doll.
He became a star of the silent movies, but like many others, his film career was killed by the talkies, because he couldn’t.
He appeared in a radio series, ‘The Wonder Dog,’ in the 1930s; most of his dog noises were provided by a dog imitator called Bob Barker who later hosted ‘The Price is Right’.
Greta Garbo owned one of his sons (Rin Tin Tin, not Barker).
Herman J. Mankiewicz, the famed scriptwriter of ‘Citizen Kane,’ refused to work on Westerns. When a studio attempted to assign him to a Rin Tin Tin picture, he submitted a script featuring the dog being frightened by a mouse and then taking a baby into a burning house.
Mrs Gaskell wrote a short story in which a collie called Lassie was with two brothers who become lost in a snow storm. When the younger one can no longer carry on, his brother ties a handkerchief round Lassie's neck and sends her home. The dog then leads a search party to the boys; the younger brother is saved, but the older one is dead. The later Lassie, long-running star of film and television, clearly owes much to Mrs G, apart, of course, from death.
Lassie, although a bitch, was played by a dog called Pal, and subsequently by his son, two grandsons and two great-grandsons. They all wore a hairpiece to cover the incongruous area.
The nephew of the man who used to train the dogs played Pugsley in ‘The Addams Family’.
Toto in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ alongside Judy Garland - ‘We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto’ - was played by a female Cairn Terrier calledTerry, who appeared in 21 other films, less distinguished. She was paid $125 dollars a week, which was more than the Munchkins.
Moose was the scene-stealing Jack Russell who played Martin Crane’s dog Eddie in ‘Frasier’. As he got older, his son Enzo acted as his stunt double.
Nipper, the dog listening to his master’s voice on the record label of that name, was not, contrary to common belief, a Jack Russell. He was part bull terrier and part fox terrier, and is buried under what became the rear car park of the Kingston-upon-Thames branch of the Trustee Savings Bank.
January 18
Today is of course Winnie-the-Pooh Day, it being the date AA Milne was born in 1882. It is also a black day for punctilious punctuationists as they all know Disney abandoned the author’s hyphens for their popular film adaptations of the the rambling adventures of the delightful little bear.
Who has not thrilled to his amusingly disingenuous escapades with his charmingly eccentric group of chums, Christopher Robin, Piglet, Kanga and Roo, Tigger, and Eeyore?
Well, quite a few people, sadly. Most famously, Dorothy Parker, tiny sage of the Algonquin Round Table, that acclaimed lunch of insecure American literary egos that must surely have been a touch wearing: every day?
When she wasn’t making very funny wisecracks or lamenting her fate, Miss Parker was writing very funny articles for the New Yorker, often with book reviews in the guise of ‘Constant Reader.’
In 1928, she took a look at Milne’s latest, ‘The House at Pooh Corner’. On page five she encountered Winnie’s famous ‘special Outdoor Song which Has To Be Sung In The Snow,’ beginning, ‘The more it snows, tiddley-pom...‘Tiddley what?’ asks a perplexed Piglet. ‘Pom,’ replies Pooh, ‘I put that in to make it more hummy.’
‘And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings,’ wrote Miss Parker, ‘that makes the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.’
I might point out here that Dorothy did not actually coin her other famous critical remark, ‘This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force’. But the epitaph she suggested for herself is genuine, and rather marvellous - ‘Please Excuse My Dust’ - and all the finer for knowing that this was a popular phrase among early motorists.
But in the works involving the fetching inhabitants of The Hundred Acre Wood, one reigns supreme: the I Alan Coren’s Hemingway spoof.
‘It snowed hard that winter. It was the winter they all went up to the Front. You could get up early in the morning, if you were not wounded and forced to lie in your bed and look at the ceiling and wonder about the thing with the women, and you could see them going up to the Front, in the snow…
‘…Pooh got up and he went out into the snow and he went to see Piglet. Piglet had been one of the great ones, once. Piglet had been one of the poujadas, one of the endarillos, one of the nogales…
‘Piglet was sitting at his usual table, looking at an empty glass of enjarda.“I thought you were out,” said Pooh.“No,” said Piglet. “I was not out.”“You were thinking about the wound?” said Pooh.”
Now when’s Toad Day?
January 17
Mondegreens are mishearings. The word was coined by Sylvia Wright in a 1954 essay in ‘Harper’s Magazine’; as a child she heard lines from the ballad, ‘The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray,’ dealing with the Earl’s tragic demise as ‘They have slain the Earl Amurray and Lady Mondegreen’ when in fact his slayers had ‘laid him on the green’.
Notable mondegreens include Bob Dylan’s ‘The ants are my friends’ for ‘the answer my friend,’ ‘There’s a bathroom on the right,’ for Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘There’s a bad moon on the rise,’ and ‘I can see clearly now Lorraine is gone,’ for Johnny Nash’s ‘I can see clearly now the rain is gone.’
In prayer, ‘Hail Mary, blessed art thou amongst women,’ has been heard as ‘blessed art thou, a monk swimming.’ And you will of course remember the little boy who called his teddy bear ‘Gladly’, after hearing the hymn, ‘Gladly, my cross I’d bear,’ as ‘Gladly, my cross-eyed bear.’
Sir Jack Hayward, ‘Union Jack Hayward’, the property developer whose extravagant patriotism extended to insisting that only Elgar be played on the telephone system at Wolverhampton Wanderers when he owned the club, was memorably misreported as declaring when the team achieved promotion, ‘We’ve got the worst team in the First Division and I’ve no doubt that we’ll have the worst team in the Premiership.’ He was, in fact, referring to the tea.
The Guardian newspaper found itself in trouble when it reported the singer, Patti Boulaye, the singer and actress, a Conservative party member, had said, ‘This is a time to support apartheid...’ She had actually said, ‘This is the time to support a party...’
Nixt!
January 16
Shakespeare weather. Big Bill, as Alexander MacMillan, publisher and grandson of Harold, likes to call him, is good on the cold. ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind…Freeze, freeze thou bitter sky…’
I argue that this owes much to the bard’s time spent in Lancashire, during the so-called Lost Years, between Stratford and London, when he was in service with the Hoghtons of Hoghton Tower, near Preston, probably teaching the younger members of the family, and mentioned in Alexander Hoghton’s will. I won’t bore you with the arguments of those who dispute this; safe to say it is mostly typical southern establishment snobbery.
No, I will clinch it with the obvious inspiration of Lancashire: ‘I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw’: Hamlet’s droll cry is a clear reference to the county’s unique gift for producing comedians - ‘I’m mad me’ - from Bill himself by way of Formby, Fields, Morecambe, Dodd, Dawson and many, many more.
What’s more, there are 198 references to said wind in the works, 66 to rain and 212 to cold.
I will leave you now with Kenneth Branagh and Ian McKellen in the film, ‘All is True,’ as Shakespeare and Southampton, competing with Sonnet 29, longing, regret and consolation never better put.
January 15
Ernest Thesiger, the actor, was born on this date in 1879. He was the first cousin once removed of the great and anachronistic explorer, Wilfred Thesiger, and a dedicated embroiderer.
His was a varied acting career, taking him from London stage farce to Ealing comedies via work for the cult director James Whale; he played Dr Septimus Pretorius in ‘Bride of Frankenstein’.
He was wounded in the trenches on the Western Front in 1915, and took up embroidery while he was recovering. He embroidered with Queen Mary, and was painted by John Singer Sargent; George Bernard Shaw wrote the part of The Dauphin in ‘St Joan’ for him.
There was little attempt to disguise his campness: when he asked Somerset Maugham why he wrote no parts for him, Maugham replied, ‘But I am always writing parts for you, Ernest. The trouble is that somebody called Gladys Cooper will insist on playing them.’
I remember him for the unimproveable response when he was asked what it had been like in the trenches: ‘Oh, my dear - the noise - and the people!’
January 14
On this date in 1900, Puccini’s ‘Tosca’ opened in Rome. It is the most marvellous, moving piece of work, for many the very acme of opera in all its exaggeratedly tragic glory.
I wouldn’t like to detract from that in any way, but ‘Tosca’ is also a renowned source of operatic anecdotes of the lighter kind. None is more famous than those featuring the desperate diva’s fabulously dramatic demise when she hurls herself from the battlements of the Castel Sant’Angelo at the back of the stage after killing the villain and the death by firing squad of her lover.
As related, it was decided in one production to give Tosca a gentler landing by replacing the traditional mattress with a trampoline. Unfortunately, owing to a failure by the production staff to calibrate correctly both the spring in the trampoline and the weight of the tumbling soprano, she almost immediately reappeared back above the battlements, to much ribaldry from the more vulgar elements in the audience.
This is alleged to have happened variously in Chicago, Vienna, and Havana to various singers. But the great Dame Eva Turner (1892-1990) laid claim to it on ‘Desert Island Discs,’ telling Roy Plomley that it happened to her at the Alexandra Theatre in Hull in the 1920s.
I wouldn’t presume to doubt Dame Eva, especially as she was from Oldham, that fine Lancashire mill town that has also given us William Walton, Mick Jagger’s dad and, even more remarkably, the mother of that non pareil of Frenchness, Jeanne Moreau (Moreau mere was a Tiller Girl). And that’s without mentioning Christopher Biggins, and, from nearby Blackburn, Kathleen Ferrier.
Nor can we leave ‘Tosca’ without visiting the other great story, involving the students with no previous knowledge of the opera forming the firing squad. They were instructed to ‘exit with the principals,’ and after shooting Tosca’s lover they took their cue from her exit by also throwing themselves off the castle.
Next, pronto!
January 13
Returning to my Junior Pears Encyclopaedia (1961) after quite some time, I discovered some intriguing information I had forgotten:
‘The distance to which you can see depends on the height at which you are standing.
At 5ft: 2.9 miles
50ft: 9.3 miles
100ft: 13.2 miles
500ft: 29.5 miles
1000ft: 41.6 miles
5000ft: 93.1 miles
20,000ft: 186.2 miles'
Next!
January 12
Nearly halfway through January and there are still eight days to go before we reachthe pseudo-scientifically calculated most depressing day of the year, always calculated to give a lift, even when it’s not Inauguration Day in the US.
Let me help. Beginning with this, from the celebrated American abolitionist and man of God, William Rounseville Alger: 'After every storm the sun will smile; for every problem there is a solution, and the soul's indefeasible duty is to be of good cheer.’
Something a touch more bracing? Try Captain Scott: ‘We are very near the end, but have not and will not lose our good cheer’.
Still no? Well, then, we shall turn to the said United States and remember the other gifts that great country has given us, specifically its unique way with song and dance, the cleverly controlled exuberance that defies you not to smile.
Here, for example, is the genius of Fred Astaire combined with the talents of Gracie Allen and George Burns in ‘A Damsel in Distress’, the 1937 film also managing to feature the music of the Gershwins and the writing of that noted usophile, P G Wodehouse.
Burns and Allen were a celebrated double act, with Gracie the zany comic and George the dry feed. Gracie did things like run for president against Roosevelt in 1940; in today’s climate she might have won, which would have been unfortunate. George long outlived her, becoming celebrated for being old and dying just after reaching 100. The attention was worth it for the wisecracks: ‘When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick’.
Enjoy:
January 11
Fred Archer, the great Victorian jockey, was born on this date in 1857. An unrivalled rider by all reports, he was perhaps the first celebrity sportsman appealing to all classes. Legendarily mean, sporadically generous and spectacularly wealthy, he rode nearly 3,000 winners and left a fortune of nearly £10 million in today’s money. His life ended in grim headlines, with London buses halted so passengers could buy the evening papers reporting his suicide at 29 from grief at the death of his wife and the toll of a near-starvation diet required to keep his tall frame at the required weight.
A touch melancholy for January, perhaps: better to remember the pleasure Fred gave, and the overwhelming confidence in him that led to a common saying of the day indicating that all was and would be well: Archer’s Up!
That hasn’t survived, but some of the same ilk have, just about:
‘Bob’s your uncle’: success guaranteed, our equivalent of voila, named after Arthur Balfour, the Edwardian prime minister whose first government appointment was seen as entirely the result of his being the nephew of the then premier, Robert Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury.
‘Life of Riley’: most of these phrases have disputed origins, but this one seems to come from Pat Rooney, a Victorian music hall artist who found fame in America. His signature tune featured a hotelier called O’Reilly - as in, yes, ‘Blimey, O’Reilly!’ - who was having a marvellous time
‘Before you can say Jack Robinson’. This one has no clear source, but it was in popular use before 1782, when the witty rascal, Sheridan, had the trademark cheek to upbraid John Robinson, the treasury secretary, in the Commons for corrupt practices: ‘I shall not name the person. It is unpleasant and invidious to do so, and therefore I shall not name him. But don’t suppose, Sir, that I abstain because there is any difficulty in naming him; I could do that, Sir, as soon as you could say Jack Robinson.’
‘Gordon Bennett!’ Again uncertain, but often identified as the rich American playboy again of the Victorian era given to outrageous behaviour such as turning up at his engagement party drunk and then relieving himself into the fireplace.
You might, by now, have become slightly distracted, and might even have taken to musing about the derivation of ‘Blimey’ in ‘Blimey, O’Reilly.’ It is what that those Victorians called a minced oath, and may well be the subject of another learned discourse at a later stage.
Next!
January 10
Today in 1942, there took place one of the most remarkable coincidences in history when the last bombing raid on Liverpool scored a direct hit on the house in Upper Stanhope Street where Adolf Hitler stayed with his sister-in-law, Bridget, in the winter of 1912-13.
While some might be pondering on Jung’s theories of synchronicity - the paranormal is proved by inexplicable conjunctions - others of a possibly more practical turn are wondering if this can really be true.
Well, yes, very probably if not almost certainly. There is no postcard wishing Germans were here from the future Fuhrer, but there is the memoir of his aunt, ‘My Brother-in-Law Adolf’.
I
ndeed. Michael Unger, my old boss at that great lost newspaper, the Liverpool Daily Post, was sent Bridget’s unpublished manuscript in the 1970s by a friend who’d come across them in the New York Public Library. Unger edited them and they were published in 1979.
In them, Bridget, who married Adolf’s half-brother Alois Hitler after they met when he was working as a waiter at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, tells of Adolf’s arrival at Lime Street to become an ‘unwanted and disagreeable guest’ in Upper Stanhope Street, where he loafed about, refused to get a job or learn English, spent a lot of time studying his horoscope, which had been drawn up by Bridget’s friend, a Mrs Prentice, and certainly never helped with the washing-up. Frustratingly, Bridget does not reveal Mrs Prentice’s predictions.Eventually, Alois bought him a ticket back to Germany.
The details I like best are that it was Bridget who persuaded Adolf to trim his moustache, even if she did think he went a bit far, and that later, when she visited Berchtesgaden, the scatter cushions were decorated with little swastikas.
And this is Bridget musing on the stay: ‘“At this point, I pause to ask myself a question. Should I have been more sympathetic to Adolf? Would it have made any difference in the course of events, when Adolf was in Liverpool? I was young and thoughtless. Certainly I didn’t concern myself with his future. If I had exerted my influence over him, it is quite possible he might have remained in England. At this time the country was full of Germans. Barbers, hairdressers, carpenters, all varieties of skilled workmen came looking for work. Many of these visitors settled comfortably in England, never to return to the Continent. If I had insisted that Adolf learn English, instead of practising German on him, he might have shared their obscurity.’
But why did Hitler never mention this English sojourn, which included trips to London? Simple: he was avoiding military service in the Austrian Army at the time, not something he cared to advertise later.
Hmm, you might think, while also tempering this jolly speculation with remembrance of the 4,000 Liverpudlians who died in the German raids. But Bridget Hitler definitely existed: even though Alois left her in 1914 (and went on to contract a bigamous marriage in Hamburg), she kept the name Mrs Hitler and later had a boarding house in Highgate.
Further, Unger cites, alongside later family members, an impressive source confirming the stay in Liverpool: William Stephenson, the legendary wartime spymaster.
We You could also try Beryl Bainbridge’s novel, ‘Young Adolf,’ featuring some splendid Scouse explanations for several Hitlerian attributes, including his shirt.
Jungians will reflect, with further wonder, on the great man's famous dream of Liverpool as 'the pool of life’, which gave birth to a whole alternative arts scene in the city in the 1970s, centred round the wonderful Liverpool School of Dream, Language and Pun.
And should you need any more convincing, go to Liverpool, where anything seems possible.
Next!
January 9
Died on this date in 1873 at Chislehurst, Kent, Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, first president, second emperor, and last monarch of France.
Why Chislehurst? Well, there was about this Napoleon, perhaps inevitably, given the glory of his great uncle, an inescapable anticlimax, and a persistent bathos, pathos, and even farce.
He was there in exile, after the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War, when all the pretensions of his Second Empire were punctured by Germanic iron, steel and efficiency.
But things had never augured well: his first two attempts at a coup to restore Bonopartism and install himself failed miserably: the first when he became cut off from his supporters after someone simply closed the gates behind him at the Parisian garrison he was attempting to foment; the second saw him swimming to a buoy off Boulogne when the rowing boat in which he was escaping back to Britain overturned.
There was some gloire in between, though, not least the magnificent reconstruction of Paris which saw the introduction of the famous boulevards. Which is where my interest in the Emperor began: unlikely as it might seem, there is a persuasive (!) theory that they were inspired during a stay in Southport, Lancs, by the town’s elegant thoroughfare, Lord Street.
I will not attempt to convince you of this here; suffice to say that I once visited Paris and asked Parisians, not renowned for their friendly gullibility, to inspect a photo of Lord Street: nearly all of them were prepared to entertain the thought that they lived in the Southport of the South (although that is not exactly how I phrased it).
Those two failed attempts also set me thinking that there was something of Lancashire comedy and whimsy about the Emperor; consider, too, for example the afternoon promenade in Dorchester, when, for a joke, he thrust his walking stick between the legs of the man walking in front of him.
He’d thought it was a friend, it wasn’t, and the affronted stranger soon had his coat off and fists up. ‘The Prince immediately apologised,’ writes Ivor Guest in his ‘Napoleon III in England’, ‘and finally managed to calm the irate gentleman, to the great relief of the nervous ladies crowded near with their prayer books and bibles, and the disappointment of the boys and less genteel of the townsmen.’
Now if that is not a Stan Laurel (Lancastrian, of course) moment, I don’t know what is. I also like his attendance at a cricket match near Chislehurst, when he enjoyed a fine catch at long-on so much he sent a servant to ask if it could be done again.
You can learn much more, if you choose, in my book, ‘Lancashire, Where Women Die of Love,’ (the title, naturally taken from Balzac). I will leave you now with an almost perfect piece of trivia, being absolutely useless: British telephone numbers, it will be recalled, if you’re old enough, used to be preceded by a name, as in Whitehall 1212. The old Chislehurst & Bickley exchange code was named in his honour: Imperial.
Next!
January 8
Apocrypha. Always a bit of a test for the lover of good stories with an inconvenient if occasionally hard pressed sense of duty to the truth. Some stories are clearly too good to be true. But others are too good not to be told. I also often detect too much sport-spoiling relish in the rush to rubbish. Let’s not forget that apocryphal means doubtful, not necessarily untrue.
With that caveat, as this is the date in 2004 when the late Queen launched the last great ocean liner, Queen Mary 2, I’d like to remind you how the original Queen Mary, heroic carrier of myth and men in wartime, now marooned in California, got her name.
In 1934, a delegation from the new ship’s owners, Cunard, called on King George V to ask his permission to name the ship, up until then known simply as Number 534, after his grandmother, Queen Victoria. (The names of Cunard liners traditionally ended in ‘ia’.)
In one of those fits of over-elaboration often brought on by contact with royalty, they said they wished to honour ‘England's greatest queen.'
‘My wife would be delighted,’ replied the king, and so the Queen Mary it was.
Today is also the date in 1959 on which Charles de Gaulle was proclaimed President of the Fifth Republic. And it would take a stronger will than mine to resist the reported conversation between the wife of the American ambassador and Mme de Gaulle after his resignation and retirement in 1969:
‘Your husband has been such a prominent public figure, such a presence on the French and International scene for so many years! How quiet retirement will seem in comparison. What are you most looking forward to in the coming years?’
To which Madame replied: ‘A penis.’
General De Gaulle then leant over and said: ‘No, my dear, in English it is pronounced happiness.’
The following, by contrast, is almost certainly not true. George Brown is largely forgotten now, but he was Harold Wilson’s deputy prime minister, a hugely able man undone by drink, to the extent that the ‘Private Eye’ phrase, ‘tired and emotional,’ was coined for him.
And so it was told that in the later stages of a reception while on a South American tour as foreign secretary, he asked a figure dressed in scarlet for a dance, to be told, ‘I’m sorry, you are blind drunk, this is the Peruvian national anthem, and I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima.’
Next!
January 7
Owing to an unavoidable clash with rather more significant events, I was unable to note another anniversary yesterday - the opening in Chicago in 1960 of ‘Scent of Mystery,’ starring Denholm Elliott, Peter Lorre and Elizabeth Taylor.
Even this distinguished cast was overshadowed by the film’s remarkable innovation: Smell-O-Vision.
Indeed: at various points as the action unfolded, relevant aromas would be pumped into the cinema. These included coffee, roses, wine, gunpowder, shoe polish, fresh sea air, bananas, wood shavings, perfume, and Peter Lorre’s pipe smoke.
The plot of ‘Scent of Mystery’ was serviceable, but the Smell-O-Vision was a disappointment: the smells were indistinct and the overall effect was described as ‘cheap eau-de-cologne’. Technical improvements followed, but the impracticalities and expense proved fatal.
It was produced by Mike Todd, a less flamboyant figure - it would have been difficult not to be - than his father, also Mike Todd, although born Avrom Goldbogen. Todd senior was famously married to Elizabeth Taylor and produced the hugely successful ‘Around The World In 80 Days,’ in 1956, filmed in his Todd-Ao widescreen format.
The way to these triumphs included numerous bankruptcies and burlesque shows, including ‘Flame Dance,’ which used gas jets to burn away the dancer’s costume. His first film in Todd-Ao was another big hit, ‘Oklahoma!,’ made despite his view on the try-outs of the original Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical, ‘No jokes, no legs, no chance.’
An equally larger-than-life death was inevitable: Todd’s private plane crashed in New Mexico in 1959, killing everyone on board. One of the others was Art Cohn, a journalist and screenwriter who was writing Todd’s biography, ‘The Nine Lives of Michael Todd’.
Todd junior did inherit some of the father’s touch: his publicity line for ‘The Scent of Mystery’ was, ‘First they moved (1895)! Then they talked (1927)! Now they smell!’
It was just a pity it stank.
January 7
On this day in that fateful year, 1066, Harold Godwinson assumed the English throne. How much authority he had to do so has been disputed ever since; but the haste with which he had himself crowned, the day after his predecessor, the saintly Edward the Confessor had died, and on the same day and in the same place where Edward was buried, Westminster Abbey, has not helped his cause.
And then there is the famous did he or didn’t he promise that he would support Duke William of Normandy’s claim to the English throne after being shipwrecked on his shore: altogether, it's surprising that Harold has earned such admiration, fairly unqualified since Hastings.
But then the British, and the English specifically, have always liked a loser, surprisingly perhaps in such an ostensibly unromantic people. Perhaps we should remember that our legendary founder, Brutus, was on the wrong side at Troy,
Harold's essential history is of course very well rehearsed. But some myths, legends or what you will have always concerned what happened after Hastings, his burial at Waltham Abbey clearly a little too mundane for the hero.
No, a belief persisted, mostly thanks to a single, anonymous work, ‘Vita Haroldii,’ written around 150 years later, that Harold survived, had many adventures overseas seeking support for a bid to regain the throne, but, after coming to accept this was not God’s will, ended his days as a hermit in Chester.
‘Vita Haroldii’ has been dismissed as a work of hagiographic fiction, possibly by someone keener on Cheshire than Essex, even though the counties have certain similarities, both being popular with footballers. It also conflicts with the poignant legend that Harold was identified on the field at Hastings by his beautiful common law wife, Edith Swan Neck, or Edith Gentle Swan, from marks on the slain king’s body known only to her.
However, there is always something in early and less recorded history upon which to set, however unsteadily, an alternative theory, and here it is the allegedly mysterious disappearance from history of Harold’s other, beautiful and legitimate wife, Ealdgyth, sent after Hastings to, yes, Chester.
Even more exciting to amateur historians with a preference for beguiling speculation over aggregated wheat production tables is the idea that Harold led the exodus of Anglo-Saxon warriors after Hastings all the way to Byzantium, where they joined the famous Varangian Guard, varying successful mercenary protectors of the Eastern Emperors.
Certainly, there is (fairly) good evidence that the Anglo-Saxons did take over the Guard from the Vikings at about this time, but sadly less so for the defyingly exciting reports of Nova Anglia, the settlement supposedly founded by the exiles in the Crimea, which is supposed to have survived into the 14th century. Two names on nautical maps of the time were Susaco and Londina, said to be variations of Sussex and London. But nothing has survived.
Nevertheless, I think Vladimir Putin should be told.
January 5
Welcome, or not, to Twelfth Night, a fine example of human confusions.
It is the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas, but different traditions number it differently, either from Christmas Eve, making it today, or from Christmas Day, making it tomorrow.
How did it come about? Is it connected with the 12 apostles, and where do the Three Wise Men come into it, exactly?
Well, the drier historians will tell you it was simply an administrative reform by the Roman Empire to co-ordinate the solar Julian calendar (introduced by J Caesar) with the lunar calendars of the eastern provinces, which by the first century (AD, or CE) was resulting in the winter solstice in the east being 11 to 12 days later than in the West.
Other sources will insist that it marks the time between the birth and baptism of Jesus Christ. I am not entirely sure how the mysterious kings, or wise men, became caught up in it. Whatever, the 12 days became an officially sanctioned, lively and lengthy celebration.
If the Romans hoped thereby to cure calendar confusion, they miscalculated. The Julian calendar was based on a year of exactly 365.25 days when it is in fact closer to 365.2425 days. The Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582 to correct this, but because it was a Papal initiative the newly Protestant northern countries rejected it, meaning that by 1750, Britain was lagging 11 days behind and still insisting that the administrative year began on March 25 while most of the population were marking it on January 1. (See, still, the tax year.)
The Calendar (New Style) Act corrected this at a stroke, meaning that Wednesday, September 2, 1752, was followed by Thursday, September 14. Disappointingly, the common belief that there were widespread riots by an outraged populace demanding ‘Our Eleven Days Back’ was a joke by Lord Chesterfield illustrated by Hogarth.
You will by now not be surprised that take-up of the Gregorian system remained patchy (Saudi Arabia came on board in 2016, Greece in 1923 and, earlier, the German states in different years, which must have been interesting).
A
nd, of course, there are still other calendars in operation: it is now, respectively, 2569, 1387, 5785-6, 1446-47, 4723 or 4516 in the Buddhist, Burmese, Hebrew, Islamic, and Chinese calendars.
Other old traditions should not feel ignored, either: the riotous Roman feast of Saturnalia lent much to our Twelve nights of celebrations, which were far more lively in the past, involving Lords of Misrule, the Abbots of Unreason, and Kings of the Bean, although they did not suffer the fate of The King of Saturnalia, who was ritually killed. But you might be getting a Panto vibe.
F
inally, here in the West Country, in a splendid example of jovial synthesis, they still celebrate Old Twelvey on January 17, respecting the lost days and conducting the Anglo-Saxon pagan Wassail ceremony to drive out evil spirits and protect the apple crop.
January 4
Another chance to marvel at my awards for the more interesting news items of 2005:
The Pulling Things Award, in, naturally, reverse order:
3) Wang Xiaobei, 71, of Jinan, in China's Shandong province, for pulling a car 65 feet with her teeth.
2) Zhang Xingquan, 38, of Dehui, in Jinlu province, for pulling a car 67 feet with his ears while walking on eggs.
1) Tu Jin-Sheng, Qigong Iron Crotch Grandmaster, who pulled a furniture van only a few feet, but with his penis.
Achievement Award:
3) Mr Gilberto Cruz, 42, of Brazil, who can manage a full hour without blinking.
2) Paul Hunn, of London, world's loudest burp (118.1 decibels).
1) The driver of the Paddington to Exeter express who plugged a fuel leak with a wine cork from the buffet bar.
Innovation of the Year: The plan to power the Blackpool lights with donkey dung collected from the beach. Take that, Silicon Valley!
Fascinating Fact of the Year: The Rat Surveillance Department in New Delhi, employing 97 rat catchers, hasn't caught a rat since 1994.
Spooky Story of the Year: The haunted deck shoes in the shoe shop in Padstow. Father Chris Malkinson, a local clergyman, said: "Sometimes there is evidence of a sole trapped between this world and the next. I am sure it will disappear over time." Sorry, that should be soul.
Transport Story of the Year: The train driver in Neuwied, Germany, who mistook a giant toy penguin on the line for a dead man in a dinner jacket. NFE
Balzac Award (named after the great novelist's view that ‘irony is the essential character of Providence’): Lucky the Chicken, so christened because it had helped its owner pick out winning lottery numbers, was eaten by a fox.
Don't Relax Because No Matter How Unlikely It Could Still Happen Award: The woman in her 50s who had an attack of vertigo while sitting in a deckchair on North Fistral beach in Newquay.
Farewell Of the Year: To Goldie, the world's oldest goldfish, won at a fair in 1960, who died aged 45 in Bradninch, Devon. Goldie's owner, Tom Evans, said: ‘He'd not been well.’
Happy Ending of the Year: In Shanghai, Granny Zheng, 78, accidentally toppled out of an open window in her fourth-floor flat. She landed on top of the building's awning before reaching the pavement. She then bounced up and off of it, before landing on Granny Sun, 85, who had been having a stroll on the path below. Both survived with only minor injuries. Marvellous.
And finally, the It's Never Too Late Award goes to Norma 'Duffy' Lyon, 75, who, after 50 years of carving pigs out of butter for display at the Iowa State Fair this year broke with tradition and carved a life-sized butter statue of Tiger Woods.
Happy New Year!
January 3
Today: Ducks.
It used to be believed, and paraded in collections such as this with appropriate wonder, that duck quacks don’t echo. Quite some research has now taken place, showing that they do echo, but only very faintly.
Trevor Cox, Professor of Acoustic Engineering at the University of Salford, one of the leaders in the field, spent some time out there near some promising echo hot spots, listening.
He concluded: ‘In none of these places could I hear a clear, audible quack separate from the original call. In the end, I came to the conclusion that the phrase should say, “A duck's quack might echo, but it's impossible to hear unless the bird quacks while flying under a bridge”.’
It is also claimed that there is not a single reference to ducks in the Bible. I mentioned this in that late and much lamented adornment of an organ, the Independent on Sunday, and was challenged by several of its erudite readers.
Mr Hinchcliffe of Shipham referred me to Deuteronomy 22:11, which mentions ‘a garment of divers sorts'.
Mr Bassett of New Malden thought that Revelations 18:21 refers to a concerted attack with duck feathers when it records, ‘Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down’.
And Mr Foy of Royston wrote tersely: 'Duck. What Absalom specifically failed to do.’ He had a point: Absalom, the beautiful and beloved third son of David, was trapped in the branches of a tree and killed when he did, indeed, fail to duck.
More duck news as I have it.
January 2, 2025
You will have noticed that stars, horoscopes and all manner of predictions are popular at this time of the year. Here are some past reports in the area:
1929: Mikette Cuba, a New York clairvoyant, failed to foresee that the client whose tea leaves she had just read, predicting a trip across water and a meeting with a dark handsome stranger, would turn out to be an undercover police woman investigating charging for telling fortunes.
1994: Mrs Denise Bakewell, a clairvoyant from Bracknell, had her crystal ball stolen.
1997: On, Wednesday, 12 October, the late psychic, Romark, drove a yellow Renault blindfolded down Cranbrook Road, Ilford, to demonstrate his powers; unfortunately, after 20 yards, he ran into the back of a police van.
2005: An unexpected power failure left at least 15 clairvoyants in the dark for 20 minutes at the Psychic Fair in North Sydney.
2005: The Intuition Astrology Gallery in Chicago failed to foresee a licensing crackdown on fortune telling.
2005: Herve Vandrot's crystal ball focused sunlight on a pile of laundry in his Edinburgh flat and started a fire.
2014: Psychic medium June Field was forced to cancel a performance at Darwen Theatre in Lancashire due to 'unforeseen circumstances'.
2018: Clairvoyant Maureen Smith, of Aberdeen, didn’t predict that an online scammer would impersonate her and attempt to extract £10 from him for an online consultation.
2020: Some predictions by Jessica Adams, physic astrologer, for cats:
Aries: During this week your cat will turn full hunter.
Cancer: Your cat is going to seem really needy this month.
Sagittarius: Your cat is very spiritual and this month will enjoy sensual smells like burning candles and incense.
Will you come back tomorrow?
January 1, 2025
Some firsts:
Fine first lines in poetry:
‘Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight.’ Omar Khayyam, his 'Rubaiyat'.
‘Had we but world enough, and time,’ Andrew Marvel, ‘To His Coy Mistress’.
'Much have I travelled in the realms of gold.’ John Keats, ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’.
First human to fly:
Slightly complicated; it would perhaps be better to add ‘and land safely’, as Icarus would instruct, and Elmer of Malmesbury, who took flight from the top of his abbey tower around 1000CE, equipped with wings. He managed around 200 yards before crashing and breaking both legs.
St Joseph of Cupertino, 17th century Italian monk, was seen to fly towards the altar in meditation and is the patron saint of aviators.
Marquis d'Arlandes and Pilatre de Rozier went up in a hot-air balloon on November 21, 1783 for a flight lasting 20 minutes. I shall never get a better opportunity to tell you about the balloonists who lost their way and landed in a field in Norfolk. They asked the local who had watched them land where they were: ‘You’re in a field,’ he replied.
In 1853, Sir George Cayley, MP, of Brompton Hall, Yorks, sent his coachman into the air in a kite-shaped glider which travelled 423 ft before crashing and breaking the coachman’s leg. He complained he was ‘hired to drive not to fly’.
First film to feature a flushing toilet:
Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’.
First food to be microwaved: popcorn, in October, 1945, by Percy Spencer, an engineer with the US firm, Raytheon. He also tested it on an egg, which exploded in his face.
First Roundabout: the Arc de Triomphe, Spring, 1907, all traffic to pass in an an anti-clockwise direction.
First (and last) Film provide accompanying smells:
The Scent of Mystery, 1960, starring Denholm Elliott, Peter Lorre, Elizabeth Taylor and a machine in cinemas that could pump out aromas crucial to the plot, such as those of wine, bread and pipe smoke. This was the publicity: ‘First they moved (1895)! Then they talked (1927)! Now they smell!’ Sadly, it stank.
First Recorded Joke:
A Sumerian proverb warning new husbands about their flatulent brides, 1900BCE.
First ATM:
The ATM was invented in 1967 by John Shepherd-Barron, a former Indian Army parachute instructor, in his bath. The first machine was installed at Barclays in Enfield, and the first withdrawal made by Reg Varney, cheery conductor star of ‘On The Buses’, chosen more because he lived nearby rather than aptness. A large crowd watched him take out the maximum allowed, £10. (As it happens, the second ever UK mobile phone call was made by Ernie Wise in 1985.)
First Speeding Charge:
Walter Arnold of East Peckham was accused of travelling in his car at a speed of eight mph through the town of Paddock Wood. He was apprehended by a police constable on a bicycle after a five-mile chase.
First Recorded Complaint:
A cuneiform tablet written by Nanni, a customer of the trader Ea-nāṣir, c1750CE, alleging that he had sold sub-standard copper to his servant and complaining about poor service to and treatment of said servant.
Fine First Lines of a Novel:
‘Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.’ Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote.
First TV Sitcom:
British, again: ‘Pinwright’s Progress’ debuted on November 29, 1946, on the BBC and chronicled the adventures of the smallest store in the world, starring James Hayter as the proprietor of the smallest store in the world, assisted by his pretty daughter and staff who only made things worse. It ran for one series.
First Parking and Ride: Well, walk, really: Julius Caesar decreed that anyone wanting to enter Rome during daylight hours needed to park their carriage up at the city gates and complete the rest of the journey on foot.
First Recorded Conversation Between Hairdresser and Customer:
A barber asked King Archelaus of Macedon (413-399BCE) how he would like his hair cut. The king replied: ‘In silence’.
Happy New Year!
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