February 10
This date marks World Pulse Day; not a celebration of life but of that particular pod-bearing strain of vegetable. Here are some facts about peas:
Average pea consumption per head per year in the UK is 9,000.
The oldest pea, found in Thailand, was 3,000 years old.
The UK is the largest producer of peas for freezing.
The Romans grew 37 varieties of peas.
China produces 12.2 million tons of peas a year.
Howard Hughes, the eccentric American billionaire, liked peas. According to whom you believe, he always had just 12 of them with his meal, he measured their size with a slide rule or a special fork, and all failures were sent back.
Lord Mandelson did not mistake mushy peas for guacamole dip in a fish shop in Hartlepool.
I used to know how many peas it took to fill Birmingham Town Hall, and would be grateful if anybody could remind me.
Next!
February 9
Rail travel has always had its longueurs, don’t you find? So I was delighted to come across ‘The Railway Anecdote Book, A Collection of the Best and Newest Tales To The Present Day; Selected for the Reading of Railways Passengers’, published in 1850.
It is, as you would expect, a long book. Here are a few of my gleanings:
There is an etiquette to eating olives. Cardinal Richelieu is said to have detected an adventurer who was passing himself off as a nobleman by his helping himself to an olive with a fork; it being comme il faut to use the fingers for that purpose.
George II preferred stale oysters for their superior flavour; and greatly admired Brentford for its similarity to Germany, which he pronounced ‘Yarmany’.
At George III’s coronation a large emerald fell from his crown; this was much dwelt upon after the loss of the American colonies.
Eleanor of Aquitaine was so disturbed by the sight of Louis VII of France after he had shaved his beard off that she divorced him and married Henry II.
Napoleon was a very fast eater: indigestion was the root cause of his major errors.
Gainsborough’s celebrated portrayal of pigs was criticised by a countryman: ‘To be sure, they be deadly like pigs, but there is one fault; nobody ever saw three pigs feeding together, but what one on ‘em had a foot in the trough.
Ben Jonson, in Surrey, came across a group of poor people weeping over the grave of a public lawyer; much moved, he promised to send them an epitaph to write upon his tomb, which he did:
‘God works wonders now and then,
Here lies a lawyer, an honest man.’
Next railway tales along very soon!
February 8
Nervy, fizzy, angsty, achieving a consummate effect in his comedies nearly equalled in his more serious roles, and almost unique in being able to make weakness attractive: John Uhler Lemmon III, Jack Lemmon, film star, was born on this date in 1925.
You will have favourite roles, from Ensign Pulver in ‘Mister Roberts’ to C.C. ‘Bud’ Baxter in ‘The Apartment’, Felix Ungar in ‘The Odd Couple’, Harry Hinkle in ‘The Fortune Cookie’, any more in which he paired so perfectly with Walter Matthau, Sneezy to his Grumpy; and, of course, Daphne in ‘Some Like It Hot,’ the Billy Wilder classic.
Fascinating, too, how his art imitated his life, starting with his birth, which, in a typical piece of Billy Wilder business, took place in a lift at the hospital because his mother had been reluctant to leave the bridge table. ‘It was going down,’ as he used to say. She was also extremely fond of the Ritz Bar in Boston, and bequeathed it her ashes. His father was general sales manager and vice president of the Doughnut Corporation of America.
Jack had three mastoid and seven adenoid operations before he was 13, which accounted for that unique voice, a simmering sinus permanently on the verge of eruption.
He paid his way through acting school by accompanying silent Chaplin and Keaton movies on the piano in a New York beer-hall (and how easy it is to imagine that all going wrong in best Lemmon fashion).
His gravestone bears his name and a one-word inscription: ‘In’.
Here he is in sublime concert with Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe in ‘Some Like It Hot.’
February 8
‘I am in blood stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.’
Such a lot of death in Shakespeare, don’t you find? No fewer than 22o mentions of ‘kill’ in the works. I am indebted, too, to the Official Shakespeare Page for drawing my attention to this fascinating pie chart drawn up by High Charts, to which the only considered response is: Crikey!
February 6
In such an uncertain world as that of newspapers, you would think there would be many contenders for the world’s most unsuccessful offering. But no: The Commonwealth Sentinel, published on this date in 1965, is the runaway winner, as it closed the same day.
It was conceived by Lionel Burleigh, an interesting man not least because he knew absolutely nothing about newspapers but, as with many other of his lively ventures, had an implacable confidence that it didn’t matter.
He claimed, for example, to be a ‘speed painter’, and persuaded a Chelsea antique shop owner to let him use his premises to produce several hundred pictures in one day with the aim of selling them off to passers-by for a few shillings each.
The drawback to this scheme was that he was a terrible artist; he sold about two and the antique dealer threw the rest of them away as soon as Lionel left.
There were more of these entertaining but catastrophic characters around before social media allowed their bogus credentials to be more easily checked. My father used to call them ‘plausible’.
Anyway, The Commonwealth Sentinel. Lionel’s plan, if it can be so dignified, was to tap the growing market of people from the Commonwealth now living here. For reasons unclear, like so much else about Lionel, he commissioned the Stockport Express group of newspapers to print around 10,000 copies of his 12-page brainchild.
But with two hours to go before printing, he had failed to provide any stories, beyond a short front page editorial outlining a less than pellucid vision.
Enter - again - my old editor, Michael Unger, of the Liverpool Daily Post and The Manchester Evening News (see January 10), who was unfortunate enough to encounter Lionel very early in his career, when he was given two hours to print The Commonwealth Sentinel in the absence of any copy.
Sensibly realising there was no time to commission any material, Unger simply filled the 12 pages with stories that had already been set in type but not used. And so the readers of The Commonwealth Sentinel stood ready to read some very interesting articles about flower shows in Wythenshawe, beetle drives in Macclesfield, and golden weddings in Urmston. The back page was of course for Sport, a thrilling encounter between the group’s printers and journalists.
Run complete, Unger then accompanied the copies in a Stockport Express van to the only address Lionel had provided, Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair. Lionel, naturally, proved uncontactable on arrival, so they started unloading the papers outside the hotel’s front door, to the porter’s understandable consternation. Eventually, a woman claiming to be Lionel’s daughter came out, and, although unable to offer any advice, bought a copy.
This was the only one The Commonwealth Sentinel ever sold. With the encouragement of the porter, the other 9,999 ended up in a convenient Westminster Council refuse truck.
Of course Lionel tried to order another run for the next week, but although journalists must be open to the unlikely, they are not stupid.
Lionel seems then to have faded away from public note, although it’s claimed he did manage to smuggle one of his dreadful paintings onto the wall of a Tate Picasso exhibition.
Next!
February 5
A reminder of more relishably sophisticated times today: Adlai Stevenson was born on this date in 1900. Stevenson was the Princeton lawyer who took principles more seriously than politics and so lost to Eisenhower twice in presidential elections, twice in (genuine) landslides.
He had much going for him: charm, wit, eloquence, intelligence and reliable moral positions. But, familiarly, this left him open to a now familiar and successful line of attack on elitism and estrangement from the concerns of the common man.
And so, prompted by this and the high dome of his forehead, he was dubbed an ‘egghead’, intellectuals being as suspect in America as in England. He and his supporters embraced it: when the criticism was put to him, he responded: ‘Via ovum cranium difficilis est,’ ‘the way of the egghead is hard’. It didn’t work, but it was rather brave.
There was, too, as he himself ruefully pointed out, another factor crucial to his failures: ‘Never run against a war hero’.
Here are a few more of his apothegms and aphorisms.
‘A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.’
‘With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?’
‘The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.’
'Whenever I hear one of these old guard leaders on the other side talking about cutting taxes, when he knows it means weakening the nation, I always think of that story about the tired old capitalist who was driving alone in his car one day, and finally, he said "James, drive over the bluff; I want to commit suicide”.’
‘If [a candidate] purported to know the right answer to everything, he would be either a knave or a fool.’
‘There is nothing to fear in difference; this is in fact one of the healthiest and most invigorating of human characteristics without which life would become lifeless.’
‘Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.’
He also liked this: ‘The speaker beginning his talk at a club meeting advised: “My job, as I understand it, is to talk to you. Yours, as I understand it, is to listen. If you finish before I do, just hold up your hand.”’
But perhaps the comment that in a way best sums up Stevenson, or, in particular, explains why he was such a glorious failure, is this, from Lyndon B Johnson: ‘Adlai Stevenson squats to piss.’
Sadly, though, respect for his principles narrowly compels me to acknowledge that doubt has been cast on his authorship of this most perceptive and pertinent remark: ‘In America anyone can be president. That’s one of the risks you take.’
You might also enjoy the refreshingly innocent quaintness of the two rival campaign slogans, ‘I like Ike’, and ‘Madly for Adlai’.
Next!
February 4
Septimius Severus, Roman Emperor, died on this date in 211 in Eboracum (York), following some harrying of the Scots and Picts up as far as Dundee. He was from Leptis Magna in Syria and the last one standing in the famous Year of the Emperors, 193, after killing his predecessor, Didius Julianus. A soldier, he fought all over the Empire, from Perth to Parthia. His dying words to his two sons, Caracalla (of the Baths) and Geta, whom he proclaimed joint Emperor, were, ‘Bribe the soldiers, scorn all others’. They seem not to have taken his advice, as Caracalla had Geta murdered and was himself stabbed to death by a soldier while taking a comfort break in Anatolia.
A surprising number of Roman emperors (at least to me) came to Britannia either while emperor or clawing their way there. Besides Julius Caesar (not strictly an emperor) they were:
Claudius (41-54). You know him: limp, deaf, stutter, looked like Derek Jacobi. Sent four legions to invade Britain in 43, arrived himself when it was safe, bringing elephants (the first recorded in northern Europe), stayed a fortnight. Probably poisoned, by his wife.
Vespasian (69-79). Campaigned in Britain earlier in his career. First member of the lower orders to take the imperium: his father was a debt collector. Early public job was overseeing street cleaning in Rome, for which he he had dung stuffed down his toga by a dissatisfied Nero. Clearly influenced by this experience, introduced a tax on urine collected from public urinals for toga cleaning and tanning processes; as a result honoured with public urinals in Italy and France named after him: vespasiano and vespasienne respectively. Good sense of humour: his dying words mocked the divine ambitions of his predecessors: ‘Oh dear, I fear I’m becoming a god’.
Titus (79-81) came with his father to Britain. His dying words were, ‘I have made but one mistake.’ Unfortunately, no one has ever been able to work out what that was.
Hadrian (117-38). Spaniard, that Wall. The first bearded emperor. He wrote a poem on his deathbed musing on the separation of the soul from the body. Aelius Spartianus, his biographer, commented that he ‘wrote also similar poems in Greek, not much better than this one.’
Pertinax (193-193). Former Governor of Britannia, first of the Five Emperors. He bribed the Praetorian Guard, but not enough, and then made the further mistake of trying to reason with them: they killed him.
Albinus (193-197). Pretender. Crossed from Britannia to Gaul in 96, taking most of the legions with him. He was killed by Severus at the Battle of Lugdunum (Lyon) by Severus, who sent his head to Rome.
Gordian I (238-238) Another Governor of Britannia. At 22 days, shortest reigned emperor. Hanged himself after his son and joint emperor, Gordian II, was defeated and killed at the Battle of Carthage.
Carausius (286-293). Belgian. Emperor of the North (Britain and Gaul), has a milestone in Carlisle named after him. Rose to power by promising to make Britannia great again, issuing coins bearing such legends as Restitutor Britanniae (Restorer of Britain) and Genius Britanniae (Spirit of Britain). He was besieged at Boulogne and defeated by Constantius I (qv), and then killed by his chancellor of the exchequer.
Constantius I (305 to 306). Probably a bastard, from Shakespeare’s favourite, Illyria. Nicknamed ‘chlorus’, ‘the very pale’. Father of Constantine the Great (qv), he also died in York after another crack at the Scots.
Constantine the Great (306-337). Declared Emperor at York on his father’s death. You know him, too: converted himself and the empire to Christianity and founded Constantinople. His mother, Helen, searched for and found the true cross and an industry in relics. Believed by many to be British, she was in fact an innkeeper’s daughter from Bithynia.
Constans (337-50). The Great’s son. Tricky trip to Britannia in 343, later cornered trying to seek sanctuary in a temple in the Pyrenees and assassinated.
Theodosius (379-395). Another Great, campaigned in Britannia in his youth. Last emperor to rule the entire empire, west and east, which he managed for four months. Great friend of St Ambrose, one of the Church Fathers, who refused to allow him into his church in Milan for eight months until he had made public penance for massacring 7,000 revolting Thessalonians. Died in Ambrose’s arms.
There was also an usurper who was probably the closest to a Brit, Constantine III, (407-11), a common soldier here who declared himself Emperor and tried to stay so by taking the last legions out of the country. He was eventually defeated, surrendered, and took holy orders, but to little avail: his head was chopped off, displayed in Rome on a plate and ended up on a pole outside Carthage.
Other deaths in York have included Dick Turpin, hanged there in 1739. Births: W H Auden, Dame Judi Dench, and Frankie Howerd, who, possibly inspired, played Lurcio in the ‘Up Pompeii!’ situatio-com. I had thought I might share one of his famed nudge, meaningful-glance, purse-lips and raise-eyebrows Prologues, but, on inspection, they have not worn well.
Until next time.
February 3
A digest of vintage food-related news culled from the prints of yore, 2005-16.
A passenger at Guangzhou Baiyun airport in southern China attempted to smuggle his pet turtle on board a plane by disguising it as a hamburger. The x-ray machine detected some ‘odd protrusions’ from his sesame bun. In a piece of self-incrimination reminiscent of the late William Bunter, formerly of Greyfriars School, Mr Li told security staff, ‘There’s no turtle in there, just a hamburger’.
Bryan Rocco was choking to death on an onion ring when he blacked out and crashed his car into a tree in New Jersey, releasing an airbag which dislodged the onion ring.
The wife of the late Jerry Colaitis failed in a claim for $10m in damages following Mr Colaitis’s death from complications during surgery after he wrenched his neck dodging a prawn thrown at him by a chef in a Japanese restaurant in a New York suburb.
Soja Popova, 93, of Klaipeda in Lithuania, held on to a robber by his testicles ‘with a grip like iron’ until police arrived. Mrs Popova said her grip was down to years of milking goats.
Vera Dudas, of Duga Resa, Croatia, claimed in 2006 to have the oldest pickled cucumber in the world. It was pickled in 1930 by her mother-in-law to celebrate the birth of Mrs Dudas's late husband, Pavao. ‘Unfortunately, the cucumber has survived longer than Pavao,’ said Mrs Dudas.
Also in 2006, Betty Hamilton of St Austell revealed that she had kept a Christmas pudding on the top of her television since 1992 to improve reception.
Lastly, if you missed ‘Posh Nosh’ the 2003 julienne-edge cookery programme featuring Richard E Grant and Arabella Weir, here’s an amuse-bouche.
February 2
Born on this date in 1754, one of history’s most charming, loved, hated, plausible, serpentine and foxy rogues: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Bishop of Autun, First Prince of Benevento, Prince of Talleyrand: ah, yes, the man from whom Diplomacy has never really recovered.
Talleyrand advised, led and subverted his nation’s foreign policy through monarchy, revolution, republic, empire, exiles, coups and back again, all the while happily bribed by rulers who believed he was furthering their interests when his concern was his own - and, to be fair, those of France (or, more accurately, his view of them rather than that of his masters).
Born into a distinguished if fraying aristocratic family, he was barred from a career in the military by the limp he was born with. This disqualification was just as well, since he would never have committed to anything as straightforward as a battle.
Instead, he took the other traditional route, the Church, his contrary, enlightened views no bar and a keen foreshadowing of his future. He was ordained in 1779 and a bishop by 1788.
With good judgment for once, Louis XVI distrusted him; came the Revolution and Talleyrand was a leading anti-clerical cleric, resigning his bishopric in 1792. He was used, if not trusted, by Mirabeau, one of the early revolutionary leaders and a rival in duplicity. After Mirabeau’s death, it would have taken very little of Talleyrand’s acumen to see how the wind was blowing: it took him into exile in England in 1792.
There he stayed for a year, renting Juniper House in Surrey, a former pub which had also come up in the world. It was a properly exotic party which included his great friend and intellectual Mme de Staël and sundry other more liberal members of the displaced ancien regime. In an unlikely twist, Fanny Burney, the author and diarist whom we met a little unhappily on January 26, fell in love with one of them, General D’Arblay, and married him.
Some were less keen: Horace Walpole described Talleyrand as ‘that viper who has cast his skin’; Pitt, the then prime minister, ordered his expulsion, after which he went to the US, where he supported himself by land speculation.
Returning to France when the wind turned again, he quickly realised the force that was Napoleon: their relationship dominated French politics as Napoleon rose and rose, aided by Talleyrand at one turn and then hindered as he recognised the folly of the Emperor’s ambitions: among much else, he secretly advised Russia and Austria.
Perhaps the acme of his achievement came in 1815, after Napoleon’s final defeat, when at the Congress of Vienna he manoeuvred acceptance of a Bourbon constitutional monarchy in finest Talleyrand style.
Britain and Austria first needed convincing of a new France’s respectability and reliability: Talleyrand persuaded Lord Castlereagh, the British prime minister, and Metternich, Austrian foreign minister and the next wiliest man in Europe, to sign a treaty guaranteeing a combined retaliation if Prussia and Russia continued with their feared plans to expand mightily into Germany and Poland.
The treaty was a fake, drawn up with the express purpose of leaking it to the Prussians and Russians, who then compromised, ensuring some sort of peace in Europe for the next 50 years. Should you need further illumination of the Talleyrand approach, try his response to Tsar Alexander’s complaints at Vienna about the past perfidies of a German ruler, that loyalty is merely a question of dates.
Unsurprisingly, his private life was as dismissive of convention and clerisy as his public one. He had no legitimate children but fathered an estimated 25 bastards. He married his mistress, the noted Franco-Indian courtesan, Mme Grand, after the prudish Napoleon ordered it, but dispensed with her after the Treaty of Vienna and took up with and then married the wife of his nephew. (Not uniformly prudish, the Bonaparte: he also called Talleyrand ‘a shit in a silk stocking’ to his face.)
He contrived to advise, in his unique way, three kings; two Bourbons and then an Orléanist after, naturally, switching sides in time for the 1830 Revolution, becoming ambassador in London. Equally naturally, he reconciled with his Roman Catholic faith on his deathbed in 1838. His death, of course, was greeted by Metternich with the famous remark, ‘Now I wonder what he meant by that’.
Judgments on Talleyrand tend to divide between seeing him as a clever, duplicitous, self-serving cynic or a true patriot dedicated above all to the best interests of France above those of his mercurial masters. There seems no reason why both shouldn’t be true.
Avant!
February 1
The library at Chatsworth House, seat of the Dukes of Devonshire and famously chatelained by Deborah ‘Debo’ Devonshire (née Mitford), wife of the 11th duke, contains one of the few surviving examples of a great 19th century fad, fake books with beautifully tooled and engraved spines with (some) amusing titles to relieve all that learning.
There are over 90 of them with titles originally suggested by Thomas Hood, the author, engraver and keen punner, and some more at the Duchess’s prompting by her great friend, the war hero and gifted travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Part of the joke was that the mistress of a library containing more than 17,000 books claimed never to have read one.
A few from Hood:
‘Cursory Remarks on Swearing’
‘John Knox at Death’s Door’
‘Percy Vere’ (in 15 large volumes)
‘Reflections on Suet,’ by Lamb
And Leigh Fermor:
‘Gloucester in All Weathers,’ by Dr Foster
‘Intuition,’ by Ivor Hunch
‘Experiences in China,’ by Earl Grey
Dickens was also very keen, and had fake books at both Tavistock House, his London home, and at Gad’s Hill, where they can still be seen:
Hansard’s Guide to Refreshing Sleep (as many volumes as possible)
History of a Short Chancery Suit
Catalogue of Statues of the Duke of Wellington
The Gunpowder Magazine
You might not be altogether surprised to learn that I have my own favourites in a (notional) collection:
‘Insomnia,’ by Eliza Wake, ‘The Judge With No Thumbs,’ by Justice Fingers, ‘The Stolen Chestnut,’ by Nick McConker, ‘The Fall Over The Cliff,’ by Eileen Dover, and Claude R Andoff's seminal ‘Lion Taming For Women’.
Next, quickly!
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