12/12/2009 by scheong

“Betcher a Tanner!…”: Understanding Pre-Decimal British Currency

One of the most famous of British institutions was its currency. Prior to 1971, all British currency was Imperial, and this led to confusion and misunderstandings by people who were not natives of the United Kingdom. We often read old books which tell us that something cost a half-crown, a shilling, a florin, a groat or a guinea…what were all these coins and how much were they worth?

Welcome to the confusing world of pre-decimal British currency. After 1971, British currency was decimalised and revalued so that a hundred pennies equaled one pound sterling. But before that, the British people had a whole array of coins at their disposal. So, what were they?

Pre-Decimal British Coinage

1. Farthing – The smallest coin in pre-decimal currency, a farthing was 1/4 of a penny.

2. Ha’penny – Or ‘Half penny’, it was 1/2 of a penny in value.

3. Penny – Still around today, a penny was 1/12th of a shilling and 1/240th of a pound.

4. Tuppence – ‘Two pennies’.

5. Thripence – ‘Three pennies’.

6. Sixpence – ‘Six pennies’, also known as a ‘tanner’. This was half a shilling.

7. Shilling – Also known as a ‘bob’, a shilling was 12 pence and 1/20th of a pound.

8. Pound Sterling – A pound sterling was 20 shillings, or 240 pence. Colloquially known as a ‘Quid’. Five pound notes and ten pound notes were popularly called ‘Fivers’ and ‘Tenners’ respectively (and still are, today).

9. Sovereign – Another name for a pound.

10. Crown – A crown was five shillings, or a quarter of a pound.

11. Half-Crowns – A half-crown was…half of a crown, or two shillings and sixpence (half a shilling).

12. Guinea – One pound and one shilling (21s).

13. Florin – Was two shillings (24 pence) or 1/10th of a pound.

14. Double Florin – Was four shillings (48 pence) or 1/5th of a pound.

15. Groat – A groat was fourpence, or four pennies, in value. 1/3 of a shilling. Also known as a ‘Joey’.

The justification for minting a four-penny coin came from the fact that back in the Victorian era, London cabbies started rates for transport at four pence. Usually, passengers gave the driver sixpence for tuppence change. This was deemed inconvenient and slow by some, so the fourpence was introduced for speed and convenience. Fourpence was also the price charged by some doss-houses (cheap boarding houses) in London’s disreputable East End for the use of a bed for the night.

L, S, D

“…Oct. 4th, rooms 8s., breakfast 2s. 6d., cocktail 1s.,lunch 2s. 6d., glass sherry, 8d…” – Sherlock Holmes, reading a hotel bill, “The Noble Bachelor”.

LSD. What’s it mean and what do the letters stand for? First, you can forget about drugs, that’s not what it’s referring to. The letters actually stand for “librae”, “solidi” and “denarii”, which stand, in-turn, for Pounds (A loopy ‘L’ with either one or two lines through it, make up the Pound Sterling symbol), Shillings (The “S”) and Pence (the “D”, later changed to “P” in 1971 with the decimalisation of British currency).

Therefore, the bill, as an example, reads as:

Rooms: 8 Shillings.
Breakfast: 2 shillings and sixpence (or half a crown).
Cocktail: 1 shilling.
Lunch: 2 shillings and sixpence (or half a crown).
Sherry, one glass: 8 pence.

Monetary Slang

Two and six, three and four, and so on and so forth. As we have seen, currency in pre-decimal Britain was a maze of coins, banknotes, values and names. Here are some common phrases or slang-terms for old British currency…

‘Ha’penny’, ‘Tuppence’, ‘thripence’, ‘fourpence’ and ‘tanner’.

Stand, respectively, for a half-penny, two pennies, three pennies and four pennies. ‘Tanner’ was a slang-term which referred specifically to the silver sixpence coin.

‘Bob’ was slang-term for a shilling.

‘Two-and-six’ referred to two shillings and sixpence, or a half-crown.

‘Quid’ was (and still is) slang for a pound sterling.

‘Fiver’ and ‘tenner’ referred (and still do refer) to five and ten pound banknotes.

11/12/2009 by scheong

Blackouts, Raids and Rationing: The Blitz and the Home Front of WWII (Pt I)

Part I

The Second World War is one of the greatest and most significant and one of the most important events of the 20th century. It shaped and changed everything that happened after it, from the Cold War to a divided Germany to the United States becoming the next superpower over the United Kingdom. But when we study the Second World War, be it in the classroom at school, in university or in documentries on TV, there’s one major trait which I think you’ll all notice at once…

It’s all about the battles. About Market Garden, Barbarossa, Chastise, Dynamo, Overlord, about the bombing of Dresden, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Berlin…it’s all about the big, history-making events of the War. I think anyone who’s studied the Second World War would know what happened on these dates: 1st of September, ’39, 7th of December, ’41, 6th of June, ’44, 8th of May, ’45, and so on…they’re all famous and important dates, and rightly so. But in times of war, it’s not just the battles, the air-raids, the shootouts and the charging tanks, it’s not about the brave dogfights or the bombing or soldiers being blasted to pieces or charging to victory…it’s also about the ordinary people living on the Home Front, whose lives changed forever with the outbreak of the Second World War. It was about mothers who had to scrape and scrounge and scrabble for every single scrap of food to cook a meal, it was about fathers and grandfathers who remembered the Great War of 1914, barely a generation before, it was about how the war affected the lives of ordinary people, not just the commanders standing over a table with long sticks and toy tanks. So what was it like during the War on the Home Front?

What is the ‘Home Front’?

The Home Front is the civilian side of warfare. Away from the battlefields with the cannons and guns and bullets, the homefront was where ordinary people fought in their own way, to help their boys who were fighting miles away on distant battlefields and it was where great sacrifices were made by ordinary mothers, fathers, wives and relations, to keep their soldiers alive and safe, even though they might be on the other side of the world. The Home Front was important for supplies, information, moral support and intelligence-gathering. The Home Front showed that war touched everyone, not just the soldiers fighting in the field. The Home Front is what this article is about…

The World at War

On the Third of September, 1939, Great Britain, France and Australia (as a part of the British Empire), declared war on Nazi Germany, after its flat refusal to withdraw its troops from Poland, which it had invaded just two days before, on the First of September. The Second World War had started and with the famous words:

“…I have to tell you now…that consequently, this country is at war…with Germany”

– Neville Chamberlin; British Prime Minister; September 3rd, 1939.

The moment war was declared, people began to fear the worst. They feared…invasions…bombings…gas-attacks…night time air-raids…What were they to do? Within weeks, months or even as quickly as days after the attack, things began to change. In England, children of school-age were evacuated from major cities, mainly London, but also other large cities which might be targets for enemy bombers. They were packed into trains and sent north, out of the range of enemy bomber-planes, and put into the care of foster-families or put into boarding-houses set up inside grand, country houses run by the wealthy. Children who were lucky enough, got to stay with relatives already living in the country. Otherwise, to these children, it meant spending weeks and months away from home, away from their parents, staying with strangers with whom they’d had no prior contact or knowledge of.

Mass Evacuations

The evacuations happened months in advance. As early as June, people, fearing war, had already fled north. The official, government evacuations started on the 31st of AUgust, 1939, and they were called “Operation Pied Piper”. Under this operation, children of school age, mothers with young chidlren or newborn babies, or other persons who were in heightened danger, such as the elderly, were packed into trains. It was a massive undertaking; Upwards of three and a half MILLION Britons were evacuated from southern England. Some went north, some braved an Atlantic crossing and sailed to Canada, the United States, or even halfway around the world to Australia, to escape the impending doom. It was suggested, at one point, that the British Royal Family should evacuate, either to the country, and then later, to Canada, for their own safety. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, horrified at the thought of what the Royal Family abandoning its people to its fate, might do to civilian morale, famously declared that:

“The children won’t leave without me, I won’t leave without the king, and the king will never leave!”

– Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.

Operation Pied Piper in action. These are just a few of the 827,000 children who were evacuated from London from 1939-1940. The cards attached to their clothes would allow their carers or relatives to identify the children when they arrived at their destinations.

Many children were understandably terrified of leaving their mothers and fathers and spending months away in some strange place they’d never been to. However, if they’d know what was coming up next, I think they would have left for the country a lot more willingly.

Preparing for War

All over the British Isles, people were preparing for war. They bought miles and miles of sticky-tape to tape neat, diagonal crosses onto the windows of their houses and shops. The tape was to hold the window-glass together so that it wouldn’t shatter and become lethal pieces of flying shrapnel in a bomb-blast. Similarly, people filled sandbags (although usually filled with soil) and stacked them up outside important buildings, around air-raid shelters and Underground railway stations. The sandbags protected buildings against flying shrapnel and absorbed the shock of exploding bombs when they hit the streets. People started digging Anderson shelters in their back yards. An ‘Anderson’ shelter was a partially-buried air-raid shelter, made of corrogated steel, usually placed a few feet into the ground, or in some cases, right under the ground!

Two families of neighbours preparing their ‘Anderson’ shelters. The soil which they shovelled on top was to protect against bomb-blasts.

Anderson shelters were very cramped and small, only six and a half feet long, six feet high and four and a half feet wide! They were designed to hold up to six people, generally the size of a nuclear family at the time: Mother, father and their children. Anderson shelters were not designed to be protection against a direct hit, they were meant to be protection against falling debris and flying shrapnel. When buildings collapsed or caught fire, the window-glass, support-beams or the bricks in the walls, could become dangerous missiles when they were blown away from the point of explosion.

Public Air-Raid Shelters

One of the most enduring images of the Home Front of WWII, was the organsation of public air-raid shelters in London, which centered around London’s famous “Underground”, its subway-system, which had existed since Victorian times.

At first, government officials were against Londoners using the Underground stations as air-raid shelters. The official reasons they gave were that there was a lack of running water, proper sanitary facilities, food and that it would become incredibly cramped down there in the tunnels. They were actually worried that Londoners would ‘chicken out’ and that, once given the Underground stations as bomb-shelters, they would move in permanently and never want to leave. This fear proved to be unfoundd, and in 1940, several of London’s lesser-used Underground stations were converted to bomb-shelters. Bunk-beds, canteens, toilets and chairs were put in for peoples’ comfort. Food was delivered on subway trains towing specially-modified carriages, which rolled into each station at dinnertime, to serve soup, bread, coffee and other necessities. Of course, this rolling restaurant-service wasn’t available to all stations, so actual canteens and kiosks were set up downstairs as well, so that people in the shelters could get a bite to eat.

Londoners sheltering from an air-raid in the Bounds Green Underground station. The men wearing steel helmets are blackout wardens.

Londoners were not always safe in the Underground, even if it was safer than being outside. When an air-raid began, they would charge into the nearest Underground air-raid shelter, wait out the bombing, come out again and go on with their lives. But sometimes, they never made it out. On the 13th of October, 1940, Bounds Green Underground station was destroyed by a bomb! It struck houses slightly to the north of the station and the force of the blast caved in the roof. Part of the station’s tunnel-system collapsed, killing sixteen people immediately, seventeen people in hospital the next day and injuring about twenty others, who later recovered.

Although this incident proved to Londoners that the Underground was not an infallable system of protection, it was the only one that most of them had, and for the most part, the Underground saved many lives.

The Blitz and the Blackout

All over the world, not just in England, but in Asia, Europe, out on ships at sea, in Australia, even in the United States, people observed the ‘blackout’. The blackout was the mandatory electrical blackout which governments enforced on their populations, for their own safety. After sundown, every single person, every home, every business, had to either turn off its lights, or it had to cover its windows with heavy, jet-black blackout curtains. In the streets, public streetlamps were turned off. Cars had their headlamps covered, allowing only a tiny slit of light to shine onto the road, windows were shuttered and billboard lights were turned off.

The purpose of the blackout, which happened every single night for the duration of the war, was to disorientate enemy fighter and bomber aircraft. In late 1940, the Blitz began. The Blitz was the intense, night-by-night bombing of London (and other cities, such as Coventry), by German Luftwaffe bomber-planes. It was supposed to pound the British into submission, all it did was wreck London, kill people and waste valuable German war-materials. By blacking out their houses and streets, Londoners hoped to confuse German planes. Without radar, the enemy planes were not able to detect where key targets were, without lights below, to guide them. To combat this, bombers dropped incendiary bombs first, which set buildings on fire, and giving the bombers a sight-reference. With this established, they then moved to more damaging high-explosive bombs, which exploded, either on impact, or after their fuses had burned out.

Despite the nightly bombardment, which ran from 7th September, 1940, until 10th May, 1941, several of London’s most famous buildings such as St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London, St. Stephen’s Tower, home of Big Ben (which kept time down to the second, despite being bombed every other night of the week) and Tower Bridge, all survived. Buckingham Palace also escaped relatively unscathed, despite being bombed no less than seven times during the Blitz. It was a deliberate target by the German Luftwaffe. One bomb fell into the palace courtyard and detonated on impact. The force of the explosion blew out all the inside windows of the palace, but still, the King and Queen refused to leave London, except on very special occasions. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother famously said, after the palace had been bombed:

“I’m glad we’ve been bombed. Now I feel as though I can look the East End in the face!”

– Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.

London’s East End, then, as now, was the industrial, working-class heart of the English capital. Located here were factories, docks and warehouses. It was bombed mercilessly by the Luftwaffe, and the Queen’s comments must’ve made people feel glad that their majesties had chosen to stay in London, to be with their subjects at such an incredibly dangerous time in their nation’s history.

The front page of the Daily Mirror, dated Saturday, September 14th, 1940. Five bombs were reported dropped on the palace on that day, and yet King George VI and Queen Elizabeth escaped unscathed.

It was the job of blackout wardens, during the Blitz, to make rounds of their neighbourhoods, to ensure everyones’ safety. All lights had to be turned off or covered over. In the event of air-raids, wardens would direct civilians to air-raid shelters and help to provide first-aid in the event of injuries. The next day, teams of men who were part of special, civilian work-brigades, would help the severely overworked firemen to put out fires, shift rubble, clear away dead bodies, or rescue people trapped under their bombed houses.

The Air Raid Siren

The air-raid siren is one of the most famous sounds of the Second World War. Its haunting, undulating, wavering, screaming, shrieking wail of danger and distress could be heard for blocks in every direction. When aircraft-spotters on the south coast of England or in towns near to London spotted German bombers coming over from France, they sent messages to London, where the air-raid sirens would be turned on, to warn everyone of the impending danger.

The most famous air-raid siren signal was the one called ‘red danger’, characterised by regular, high-low tonal changes in the siren’s distinctive, wailing sound. This indicated that the air-raid was imminent and that civilians should make for cover as soon as possible. After the air-raid, the sirens sounded ‘all clear’, a single, long, high-pitched tone.

The siren remained a fixture throughout the War and even today, it is still used to warn of danger, although these days it’s used to warn of cyclones, bushfires or massive storms.

“There’s a War on, You Know!”

Finding food, clothing, water and other essential supplies was a constant, daily struggle during the War. On the Home Front, housewives in the UK, but also in other countries such as America, Canada, Australia and various British colonies in Asia, all had to be incredibly resourceful when it came to making ends meet when there was barely anything to eat. Rationing became a way of life for everyone, rich or poor. When someone complained about the rationing, the common reply was: “There’s a war on, you know!”, or “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” All kinds of things were rationed during WWII, here’s a list of just a few things which were rationed:

Milk,
Eggs,
Butter,
Bread,
Meat,
Poultry,
Flour,
Chocolate,
Sugar,
Cloth,
Gasoline/petrol,
Cigarettes,
Coal,

If mothers, wives, girlfriends, fathers and younger brothers ever heard of their soldier boys complaining about their lack of food, I don’t think those boys would’ve been complaining for much longer once their folks back home were done with them! At the height of rationing in England, around 1942, this was an ENTIRE WEEK’S rations in food for one adult:

It’s not much, is it? Four small pieces of meat, one egg, a little bit of butter, a bit of flour, sugar, and precious little else. Housewives had to stretch their cooking-skills to the max, if they intended to feed their families. The government even issued special ‘ration-recipes’, giving suggestions to wives on how to use their rations effectively, to cook delicious meals. Foods such as meatloaf, popular during the Depression, came back ‘into style’, as it were. The popular dessert, Apple Crumble, was invented by British housewives during the War. Without sufficient ingredients (YOU try making a pie out what you see in that photograph!), women would just chop up apples, throw on cinnamon, flour, oats and raisins, and bake the mixture in an oven.

Other things that were rationed included cigarettes, makeup, plastics and certain metals, such as steel. During the War, more fountain pens were made with gold nibs than steel, because steel was needed in the war-effort. Pen-companies even advertised that people should take better care of their pens, because pen-repair materials, such as metal (for nibs), plastic (for pen-barrels and caps), and rubber (for the ink-sacs), were all now valuable wartime resources.

This was the official list of food-rations for one week allowed to adults living in England, during WWII:

BACON and HAM ……… 4ozs ( 100g )
MEAT …………………… to the value of 1s.2d ( 6p today ). Sausages were not rationed but difficult to obtain : offal was originally unrationed but sometimes formed part of the meat ration.
BUTTER ………………… 2ozs ( 50g )
CHEESE ………………… 2ozs ( 50g ) sometimes it rose to 4ozs ( 100g ) and even up to 8ozs ( 225g )
MARGARINE ……………… 4ozs ( 100g )
COOKING FAT …………… 4ozs ( 100g ) often dropping to 2ozs ( 50g )
MILK …………………… 3 pints ( 1800ml ) sometimes dropping to 2 pints ( 1200ml ). Household ( skimmed, dried ) milk was available. This was I packet each 4 weeks.
SUGAR …………………… 8ozs ( 225g )
PRESERVES ……………… 1lb ( 450g ) every 2 months
TEA ……………………… 2ozs ( 50g )
EGGS …………………… 1 shell egg a week if available but at times dropping to 1 every two weeks. Dried eggs —– 1 packet each 4 weeks.
SWEETS …………………… 12 ozs ( 350g ) each 4 weeks.

Of note…

Fish and chips, the ‘national food’ of Great Britain, was never rationed, during the war! Restaurants were expected to be thrifty with the food offered to them, and could not charge over 5/- (that’s five shillings) for each meal, no matter WHAT it contained. People had to make do, eating things which they wouldn’t normally eat. For example…how about powdered scrambled eggs for breakfast? It’s a real egg…dried out…into a powder. You added water, beat it up…put it into the frying pan…cooked it…and ate it! Or how about banana custard? No real bananas, it was smashed up parsnips with banana flavouring mixed in!

When the United States entered WWII in 1941, there was even more rationing. Perhaps not quite to the same extent as the British, but there was rationing, nonetheless, of basic foodstuffs, clothing, cigarettes and gasoline (petrol). Starting in 1942, all motor-vehicle owners in the USA, had to have one of various lettered cards on their windshields, indicating how much gasolnie they were allowed to buy.

An A card was given to drivers whose car was nonessential to their work, meaning that they didn’t have to use their car all the time. People with ‘A cards’ on their windshields could buy 4gal (about 16L) of gasoline a week. A WEEK. And absolutely NO MORE. You can be people didn’t do much driving during the War!

A B card was given to drivers who needed their cars for work and whose work was essential to the war-effort. They were given 8gal. a week, or about 24L.

Other cards included C, T, R and X gasoline ration-cards. C cards were given to people who required their cars for regular work, and who performed important duties. People such as medical doctors, railroad workers and postal-employees, were allowed to carry ‘C cards’. ‘T cards’ were given to drivers who drove long-haul trucks which carried important war-supplies around the nation. ‘R cards’ were used by rural folks, such as farmers, who needed gasoline for their tractors and delivery trucks. You couldn’t feed the nation if you didn’t have gas to drive your tractor to plough your fields! The ‘X cards’, the rarest of the lot, were used in extra-special circumstances, and were given to vehicles used by VIPs and members of the American government.

Victory Gardens

To supplement their tiny food allowances, civilians were encouraged to “dig for victory”, by making what were called ‘victory gardens’. A victory garden was a vegetable patch, essentially. Here, the housewife and her husband had to grow their veggies: Lettuces, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots and if they were lucky…a few fruits, such as apples and pears. A lot of England’s fruit was imported from other countries at this time; as it was too dangerous to ship food across the ocean with U-boats on the lookout, England was cut off from its regular supplies of food and had to make do with what it had.

This cartoon from ‘The Bulletin’, an Australian magazine, was published in 1942, and shows how much the war and rationing affected everyone. The original caption, if you can’t read it, says: “Money my foot, she’s marrying him for his tea-ration!”

11/12/2009 by scheong

Blackouts, Raids and Rationing: The Blitz and the Home Front of WWII (Pt II)

Part II

All a Jumble

Clothes were scarce during the Blitz, and throughout the war. It wasn’t possible for people to really go out and buy new clothes. Wool and cotton was needed for the soldiers socks, clothes and uniforms. Silk for women’s stockings was needed for parachutes, and cloth and thread were both needed for making army kitbags. Due to this severe lack of clothing, people had to exchange clothes, rather than buy new ones. While you COULD go out and actually buy a brand new suit, dress, pair of socks, a new trilby, a tie or a winter coat, it would now be a lot more expensive, and it was better to buy clothes second hand. People organised big ‘jumble sales’ where people offloaded all their unwanted clothes. The clothes would then be sorted out and examined by other people who wanted ‘new’ clothes. The slogan became known as “make do and mend”.

The Black Market

Of course, there were some people who just became war-profiteers. Throughout the war, people had to buy everything through a strict system of rationing. You recieved a ration-book for each month. In that book were little tickets which you ripped out, to buy certain things. There were ration-tickets for everything from eggs, flour, coal, cigarettes, meat and clothing.

Ration-book for Mr. John E. Court.

People who wanted more than their fair share, would go to the black market to get what they wanted. They could get extra food, extra clothes, more cigarettes…but this was very risky. People working the black market were seen as war profiteers…and worse. Although very few people were hanged for treason during the war, running the black market might be considered, by some, to be just that.

“Oversexed, overpaid and over here!”

If you’re English, this is something your grandfather might say! During WWII, thousands of American soldiers poured over to England and Australia, starting in 1942. They caused all kinds of hell for people on the Home Front. Some people viewed the Americans as loud, noisy, obnoxious and ignorant…not much has changed in 70-odd years, has it?

Joking aside…the Americans were both welcomed and unwelcome in the British Commonwealth. The popular slogan of British ‘Tommys’ was that Americans were “oversexed, overpaid and over here!”, meaning that they got all the hot chicks because they had better-looking uniforms, they got paid more money and had more ration-cards, and they were over here in England, stealing all the good-looking English ladies, much to the Brit-boys’ fury. The Yanks often replied that the Brits were: “Undersexed, underpaid and Under Eisenhower!”

On more than one occasion, American and British, or American and Australian soldiers actually started massive riots in the streets of cities such as London, Melbourne and Sydney, because Australian and British soldiers felt that their ‘allies’, these…snotty, alien Yanks…were stealing their women and their resources! Fortunately, these events were few and far-between.

Wartime Entertainment and Morale

At home, civilians didn’t always have to put up with half-rations, blackouts, fuel-shortages, air-raids and a lack of clothing. Occasionally, they did have some fun. Then, as now, people headed out to the cinema to watch the latest movies, they danced the night away in ballrooms, hotels and nightclubs. Many of big-band jazz’s most famous and iconic tunes, now synonymous with the Second World War, became popular during this time. How many of these famous, wartime jazz-songs do you recognise?

Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.
In the Mood.
Moonlight Serenade.
Chattanooga Choo-Choo.
We’ll Meet Again.

‘In the Mood’, published in 1939 and made famous by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, was almost the ‘theme-song’ of WWII. Thousands of Americans, Aussies and Brits jitterbugged and lindyhopped the night away to this fast-paced and energetic jazz-tune. Ladies resident at my grandmother’s retirement home testified to the fact that during the War, when they were teenagers, they used to go out nightclubbing and the house band always ended the night playing “In the Mood”, encouraging everyone to get up one last time and dance the night away, to forget their wartime troubles for a few more hours.

Morale was a big issue to the people back home. If you expected to win the war, you had to feel good about doing it! Hollywood and the American and British music-recording industries pumped out dozens of wartime propaganda songs, satrising the Germans and the Japanese, the two main enemies of the Allies during the War. Famous wartime propaganda songs, included…

“You’re a Sap Mr. Jap”.
“Der Feuhrer’s Face”.
“Hitler Has only Got One Ball”.
“Goodbye Mama (I’m Off to Yokohama)”.
“Run, Rabbit, Run!”
“Any Bonds Today?”
“There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Town of Berlin”.
“The Victory Polka”.

“Der Feuhrer’s Face” was probably the most famous of all the wartime propaganda songs. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It goes like this…

(To the tune of “Land of Hope and Glory”):

Land of soap and water,
Hitler’s having a bath,
Churchill’s looking through the keyhole,
Having a jolly good laugh,
Beee-caaaauuuuse…

(To the tune the Colonel Bogey March):

Hitler, has only got one ball!
Goering, has two, but very small!
Himmler, has something similar!
But poor old Gobbels,
Has no balls at all!

Frankfurt, has only one beer hall,
Stuttgart, die Munchen all on call,
Munich, vee lift our tunich,
To show vee chermans, have no balls at all!

Hans Otto is very short, not tall,
And blotto, for drinking Singhai and Skol.
A ‘Cherman’, unlike Bruce Erwin,
Because Hans Otto has no balls at all.
Whistle Chorus:

Hitler has only got one ball,
The other is in the Albert Hall.
His mother, the dirty bugger,
Cut it off him when he was still small.

She tied it, upon a conker tree,
The wind came, and blew it out to sea,
The fishes, took out their dishes,
And had scallops and bollocks for tea!

(Another ending line was: “She threw it, out over Germany…”)

Keeping morale high was very important during the War. Many people lived in constant fear of one thing.

The Telegram.

During both World Wars, opening the door to meet the messenger from the local telegraph-office, meant only one thing. That your husband, brother, son or father, had been killed in action. Wives, sisters, daughters and nieces lived in constant fear of opening the door to an official messenger, who would have been given the painful message of delivering a telegram, much like the one below, to the widow of the dead man:

A telegram informing a widow about the death of her husband during WWII.

Telegrams were used to inform next-of-kin and immediate family, of a loved one’s death in action, or other important events concerning their relations, such as significant injuries or if they were Missing in Action. Telegrams were a cheap, effective, simple way of sending important news quickly to the recipient. The messages were short, and brutally to the point. The message above was what a woman would have recieved in the United States if her husband had been killed in action.

Throughout the war, charity dances were held to raise money for the war. People were encouraged to buy war bonds to help fund the war so that the United States, which was supporting Great Britain, could win the war in the Pacific. Popular celebrities of the day encouraged thriftiness of use with household commodities and encouraged people to save up things which they would usually throw away, like used cooking fat! Fat was used to make soaps and oils and other necessities.

“Trash for your Cash”

‘Trash for your Cash’ was a jazz-song popularised by Fats Waller, the famous 1930s and 1940s jazz pianist. In it, he describes how people can help the Americans win the war-effort, by saving up their old newspapers and scrap metal and other rubbish. While this was a fun way to get a message out to the American public, it was no laughing matter.

Throughout the war, there were serious shortages of almost everything imaginable. Old food cans for fish, fruit, vegetables, old bottlecaps, old glass, old wastepaper, which nobody wanted, wasn’t just shoved into the landfill. Oh no. It was far too valuable. What started out as volunteer scrap-drives soon became a regular thing, as people donated their scrap metal and other, recyclable rubbish, to recycling plants to melt down the metal, reconstitute the paper and reshape the glass. During the War, people didn’t waste anything. Any food scraps you didn’t eat, you gave to the pigs. The pigs had to grow nice and fat so that there would be enough meat to feed everyone. People didn’t slaughter chickens for the table…you had to keep them alive so that you had the eggs! Every inch of your garden was turned into a vegetable patch for growing crops and you did anything and everything you could to save a bit here, scrimp a bit there.

Military Intelligence

Depending on who you were, knowing what was going on in the War was either very important…or very unimportant. Civilians were strongly urged not to gossip. The mantra “loose lips sink ships” became the rule of the day. You weren’t to tell anyone anything that they were not supposed to know. Public service cartoons, such as the famous “Private Snafu” series, graphically and comically illustrated what would happen if people started blurting out, seemingly innocent pieces of information.

The title-card of the black and white ‘Private Snafu’ cartoons, shown during WWII. These were screened to American servicemen to teach them about what to be mindful of, now that they were fighting for their country. They covered topics such as camoflage, booby-traps, censorship, discretion and the importance of maintaining one’s fighting equipment.

Censorship was high, and you couldn’t just send anything in a letter or a telegram. Letters were posted, intercepted, read, censored, edited, re-written, and then sent on to their addresses. In his autobiography, RAF fighter pilot and famous children’s author, Roald Dahl, recalls his mother’s shock at hearing his voice on the telephone after he was invalided back to England. He said that:

“…My mother couldn’t possibly know that I was coming [home]. The censor didn’t allow such things…”

– Author and pilot Roald Dahl.

09/12/2009 by scheong

Queens of the Sea: The Golden Age of Ocean Liners

Ocean Liner. The very word conjours up images of grand, majestic, enormous, powerful, luxurious metallic beasts, powering their way through the oceans of the world, delivering their fragile and all-important human cargo safely and comfortably to their destinations. Most of us seem to forget that, prior to the early 1950s, ocean-liners were the only way to cross the Seven Seas to distant parts of the globe. Commercial, long-haul airplane flights of the kind we know and love today, did not take off (literally) until the postwar boom of the 1950s, when aircraft technology (spurred on by the Second World War), had advanced enough for large numbers of people to fly through the air from country to country. While flying as a form of transport had existed before the 1950s, it was still rather experimental at the time, and flights were short, city-to-city or state-to-state stopovers, rather than planes which flew halfway around the world. It was because of the fact that nobody was sure of the long-haul abilities of aircraft, that ocean liners retained their dominance for so very long. But where did ocean liners come from?

The First Ocean Liners

An ocean liner is defined as a large, sea-going ship, capable of crossing great stretches of water in long voyages, in relative ease, speed and safety. They’re defined as carrying large numbers of passengers and having passenger comfort and satisfaction-of-service as being a key priority in their operation. Given these criteria…what were the first ocean liners?

The ocean liner as we know it today, was born around the middle of the 19th century. It was at this time, in the 1840s-1860s, that steam-power was gradually overtaking the soon-to-be-outdated wind-power of sailing-ships. Initially, steamships were only marginally faster than sailing ships travelling the same distance, and people took little notice of which kind of vessel was better, if indeed, one was. However, improvement in steam-powered engineering allowed steamships to travel faster and further than their sail-powered competitors and soon, stiff competition had arisen.

Early ocean liners were slow, coal-fired paddlesteamers which made slow, choppy, unsteady progress through the seas. These early ships were prone to mechanical failure, shortage of fuel and having only a barely-noticable advantage of speed over similar, wind-powered clipper ships of the period, which were the fastest sailing-ships then in existence. Furthermore, paddlesteamers were loud and noisy and they were dangerous to use in rough seas. Indeed, some early paddlesteamer ocean liners even had a full arrangement of masts, rigging and sails, such was early steamship captains’ mistrust of this new technology.

As time passed, however, steam technology improved and steamships were now significantly faster than sailing-ships, to the point that they were a practical way of crossing the Seven Seas. Added to this, without the necessity of having to store spare wood, spare rope, spare sails and spare other things, that a sailing-ship needed, shipbuilders were able to concentrate more on passenger comfort and ammenities, rather than the storage of provisions. Early ocean-liners, such as the RMS Britannia, the S.S. Great Britain and the S.S. Great Eastern and the Great Western, soon began to steal passengers from other, sail-powered shipping-lines, and people began to realise that steam was the thing of the future.

The Cunard line’s RMS Britannia (1840); one of the world’s first true ocean liners.

The Power of Steam

Once steam-power had proven itself to the shipbuilding masses, sailing ships became increasingly, a thing of the past. By the 1880s and the 1890s, leading up to the turn of the century, great steamship companies or shipping-lines, such as Cunard, White Star Line, Red Star Line and the French Line, were all in stiff-competition with each other for the greatest slice of the passenger pie. Cunard and White Star were the two most famous shipping lines of the turn of the last century, and they were constantly trying to outdo each other with grander, faster, more luxurious, more powerful ships. By the early 1900s, paddlesteamers were a thing of the past; as early as the late 1850s, ships started being powered through the world’s oceans by propellers, having first one, then two and in some cases, even three or four propellers!

Ships which were built for the various steamship companies all had their own, very distinct characteristics, typically regarding a ship’s name. For example, all ships owned by the White Star Line, ended in ‘-ic’. Titanic, Britannic, Olympic, Baltic, Oceanic, etc. Cunard’s ships all ended in ‘-ia’. Carpathia, Lustiania, Mauretania, etc. The Red Star Line’s ships all ended in ‘-land’: Finland, Kroonland, Lapland, and so on. Just like car-manufacturers today, steamship companies printed advertisments in magazines, on posters and in newspapers, all trying to boast…the most luxurious crossings, the fastest crossings, the most passenger ammenities, fast express-trains from the docks to major cities, automobile hire and almost anything else you can think of!

By the early 20th century, the ocean-liner had truly taken on the image which we think of today: Large, metal ships with tall smokestacks, with staterooms, berths, boilers, coal fires and communicating to each other across the seas using the Edwardian equivalent of MSN Messenger: Morse Code wireless telegraphy.

Morse Code wireless telegraphy…more commonly known as ‘wireless’, allowed ships to communicate with each other in realtime, and everything from important weather warnings, ice-reports, distress calls and seasons’ greetings were exchanged between ships and land-stations. It became such a part of shipboard life, that people would even be able to buy newspapers which had all their content, courtesy of the telegraph-machine.

The Blue Riband

No article on ocean liners could possibly be complete without a mention of this, most famous of industry prizes.

The Blue Riband.

For most of its life, the Blue Riband was a sort of unwritten competition held between various ships and shipping-lines, and it was awarded to the ship which could make the fastest overall crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, and maintain the fastest average speed during its crossing. Winners of the Blue Riband were given the privelige of hoisting a long, bright blue banner…the blue riband…on the masts of their winning ship, to indicate proudly to prospective passengers that by boarding THIS SHIP with the blue flag…YOU would get the FASTEST crossing across the Atlantic Ocean! It was amazing publicity and one hell of a marketing-boost. Cunard was particularly famous for winning the Blue Riband and its ships held the Riband for several years.

The actual Blue Riband ‘Hales Trophy’, as it’s called, commissioned by British MP Harold K. Hales, in 1935.

In time, the Blue Riband became more than just a bit of cloth flapping in the wind, it became an actual, real-life, solid gold trophy! The trophy was awarded to the ship which made the fastest crossing of the Atlantic Ocean while maintaining the highest average speed…or at least, that’s it in a nutshell; there were a mountain of rules abut how to win the trophy and what was considered a proper or an improper win, rules too complicated to try and explain here!

Throughout its existence, the Blue Riband was won by a total of 35 ocean-liners, of these, twenty-five were British, three were American, five were German, one was Italian and one was French. Of all the shipping-companies whose ships won the Blue Riband, the highest total was 14 ships, belonging to the Cunard line. I wasn’t kidding when I said they played to win!

Getting an Ocean Liner Underway

Away from the world of glamour, of luxury, of grand prizes, marketing hype and technological advancements, there was another, earthier, more grimey side to ocean liners which few people think about on a daily basis…and this was just what it TOOK to get an ocean liner ready for a voyage. These days, it’s easy, you pack it all in, you press a button and off you go! 80 years ago, it was a LOT harder.

These days, the food is all pre-packed and it’s driven onto the ship with massive forklifts and cranes. Back in the 1920s, this was all done by hand. Some cargo might be hoisted onto the ship by cranes, but most of the crates and barrels with food and drink and linen and crockery and cutlery and glassware and towels and napkins and tablecloths and pots and pans and all the other, billions of things that ocean liners needed, were all loaded by dozens of dock-workers. These days, everything is loaded onto pallets and driven onto ships with trucks and forklifts, and it still looks hard. Imagine doing it without all that stuff.

Apart from the provisions, ships needed fuel. In the 1910s and 20s, fuel meant…coal. Lots of coal. Tons and tons and tons of coal. It was all shovelled and craned and tipped and carted into the ship’s massive coal-bunkers, from which stokers and firemen would have to get it, to fire up the ship’s boilers.

This leads us to our next big thing in getting a ship going…firing it up…literally.

These days, ships are all powered by fuel-oil and it’s relatively easy to get them going. 80 years ago, all the ships were powered by steam. Firing up an ocean liner such as the Mauretania, for example, or the Olympic or the Titanic, took hours…even days…to do. If a ship was to sail on the 10th of the month, stokers, firemen and engineers, would have to be firing up the boilers at least two days in advance, before they could get going. But what exactly had to be done?

Well…first, the boilers had to be filled with water. Then, the furnaces had to be lit. Then you shovelled the coal in. The coal was brought from the coal-bunkers by wheelbarrows. Once the fires were burning, you had to feed them even more coal. The fires had to glow absolutely white hot. As the heat built up, the water in the boilers would start to boil. This could take hours to do, and lighting the fires already took hours! Once the water was boiled, it made steam. Constant heat was needed to keep the steam from cooling off and condensing again, so fires had to be kept lit and stoked up at all times. Once the steam was produced, you had to wait for steam-pressure to build up. This could take the better part of a day. Steam-power ran everything on an ocean-liner back in the 1910s, so if you didn’t get the boilers fired up…the ship didn’t move. The steam-pressure not only powered the pistons, which drove the driveshafts, which spun the propellers, which pushed the ship through the water, the steam-pressure also powered the ship’s generators, which ran the dynamos, which gave the ship its electrical power! You couldn’t even switch the lights on if the boilers weren’t lit!

Apart from that, you had to make sure that the steam-pressure didn’t get too high. If it did, the boiler could explode from the pressure, killing everyone! A buildup of steam-pressure caused great damage to a smokestack of the S.S. Great Eastern when it exploded; several of the crew were killed in the blast. Stokers had to keep the fires burning, but they also had to make sure that the fires were laid and built correctly; out on a rocking, rolling ocean, you couldn’t risk having piles of burning coal spilling out of the furnace onto the floor because you forgot to rake the fire correctly and prevent buildups of unsteady coal!

Speed was paramount onboard steamships. Ocean liners, much like jumbo jets today, had strict schedules to keep. They were all expected to be able to sail from A to B within a certain time, dop off their passengers, recoal, reprovision and then turn around and sail back, within a couple of days. As a result, the ‘black gangs’, the stokers and firemen who lived in the bowels of the ship, all worked in shifts, in very hot, very sweaty, very trying and noisy environments, twenty four hours a day, for weeks at a time.

But just how fast were ocean liners?

This varied. Most people think of ocean liners as big, grand vessels with lots of funnels, belching out smoke and slicing through the water. Yes, there were ships like this, but they all belonged to the wealthier lines, the less-prominent steamship lines, of which there were many, did not have such grand vessels, and they could not go as fast. But to give you an idea of just what kinds of speeds ships were expected to make…

The RMS Mauretania, of the Cunard line. Top speed: 24kt.

At 24kt, the RMS Mauretania was expected to be able to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a week. Today, the RMS Queen Mary 2 is expected to cross the Atlantic (going at a speed of 30kt) in six days or less. Voyages on smaller, slower ships could take ten days or two weeks, but on the really fast ships, a week was generally the expected crossing-time of the Atlantic.

Changing Times

Up until the mid 1920s, all ocean liners were coal-fired, water-boiling monsters which took on tons of coal for each crossing. In the 1920s and 1930s, new technology allowed ships to have boilers which were fuelled by oil instead of coal. This was more efficient and it needed fewer people to work the ship’s engines. Newer ocean liners coming out in the 1920s and 30s started looking more modern and more sleek than their aging, Edwardian and Victorian running-mates. One example of this was the S.S. Normandie.

The SS Normandie, launched in 1932 and entering service with the French Line in 1935.

The Normandie was different in many ways; she was sleeker and more aerodynamic than the earlier, more boxy and angular Edwardian ocean liners of the 1900s and 1910s. She was faster, boasted better engines and more modern, up-to-date appointments. Earlier ships boasted interiors which were modelled after great palaces, hotels and grand manor houses of European royalty and aristocracy. By comparison, the Normandie had more modern decorations, in keeping with the then, very popular Art Deco and Streamline Moderne art-movements, which emphasized sleek lines, flashy colours, glass, metal and graceful curves.

The main dining-saloon of the SS Normandie. In comparison with earlier ships which had carpets and wrought iron and lots of wood carving, this dining-saloon is brighter and more modern, with more modern carpet-patterns, tiles, mirrors, and flashy, glass light-fixtures.

The Depression and the War

Like almost everything, the shipping-industry was hit in the crotch by the Great Depression. Several famous shipping-companies collapsed completely, or had their ships reduced from grand, ocean-going superliners, to coast-hugging cruise-ships. Cunard and White Star had to perform a merger, just to keep each other afloat, literally and figuratively. They became ‘Cunard-White Star’ in December of 1933. The Depression meant that people couldn’t afford to take casual, week-long pleasure-crossings on grand ocean liners anymore. Passenger numbers plummeted and company big-wigs had to do some fast thinking if they didn’t want their ships to go under along with the money they brought in.

The RMS Queen Mary in her heyday.

The Second World War, starting in 1939, changed a lot of things, including the shipping-industry. Ships such as the SS Mauretania (a later Cunard ship, launched in 1938), the RMS Olympic, the RMS Queen Mary and the RMS Queen Elizabeth, all famous ocean liners, soon found themselves as troop-transport vessels, which were badly needed to ship soldiers to battlefields in Europe and Asia. Their enormous passsenger capacities, together with superior speed, meant that these ships were excellent for transporting combatants across the globe quickly and efficiently…and most importantly – fast enough to outrun any German U-boat submarines.

The SS Normandie, like the ocean liners listed above, was also to be converted to troop-transport, however during conversion in New York Harbour, a fire broke out in the ship. Attempts to put the fire out meant that there was a severe weight-imbalance, caused by the water pumped into the ship to put out the blaze. This imbalance caused the Normandie to capsize. Too busy with other wartime efforts to salvage the ship, the American authorities left the Normandie in the harbour for nearly a whole year. It was finally righted and refloated in 1943 (it was capsized in ’42), but the ship was, by that time, so damaged that it was considered a write-off, and was sent to the scrapyard.

Ocean Liner…or…Cruise Ship?

If you went up to the captain of an ocean liner and told him he had a nice ‘cruise ship’…he’d probably slap you in the face. Despite what some people think, there are actually significant differences between what constitutes an ocean liner, and what constitutes a cruise-ship. Ocean liners are large, powerful, ocean-going ships (hence the name…OCEAN liner), designed to transport vast numbers of passengers in comfort, over long distances. They are designed to be faster, larger, stronger and more luxurious. Their lifeboats are situated higher up on the ship’s side, to protect them from rogue-waves when out at sea.

By comparison, cruise-ships are smaller, less luxurious and slower. Their lifeboats are located further down on the ship’s hull and they are not expected to have to cross vast oceans on a regular basis. Cruise-ships sail from port to port, while ocean liners sail from country to country, covering several hundred miles of ocean. Cruise-ships carry fewer provisions, given the fact that they don’t spend as much time away from land. Ocean liners had to carry enough food and other necessities, to keep people fed for up to two weeks at a time.

The End of the Ocean Liner

With the rising popularity of commercial airplanes in the 1950s, with their faster travel-times, ocean liners began to find themselves running short on passengers. Most lines had crumbled in the Depression of the 1930s, but the few which remained, such as the Cunard Line, struggled to hold onto what passengers they had. By the 1970s, the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 was one of the few ships still making regular, transatlantic crossings. Eventually, however, airliners won out, and the grand days of the ocean liner were but a memory. Today, Cunard, with its grand ocean liners, is one of the very few shipping-companies which still plies the transatlantic route, with new ships such as the RMS Queen Mary 2 and the MS Queen Victoria.

Few of the grand ocean liners of yesteryear exist today. Ships such as the RMS Acquatania, the RMS Olympic, and the Normandie were scrapped. Ships such as the Britannic and the Titanic were either destroyed during service as troop-transport or hospital ships, or were sunk during accidents at sea. Today, the original RMS Queen Mary is the only one of the original ocean liners still intact, which plied the oceans of the world in what was the Golden Age of Ocean Liner.

The RMS Queen Mary as she appears today, docked in Long Beach, California.

07/12/2009 by scheong

Obscure Origins of things we know, but never think of.

History is all about the origins of things…where did it come from? When? Why and How? People are fascinated with the origins of things and they’re constantly trying to find out more. People are fascinated with the origins of their families, which is why they draw up family-trees and hire geneologists to research their family past. Historians are interested in the origins of great events and archeologists are fascinated with the origins of great societies, which is why they go on archeological expeditions to find out more.

But here I’ll be looking at the origins of some of the more obscure, everyday things which we see every day, which we think about every day…but of which we probably have no idea where they came from.

The Christmas Tree.

The festive season is nigh upon us and it is at this time of the year that we have presents and crackers and roast meat and parties and booze and…of course…the family tradition of…decorating the Christmas tree. Awwww.

…It may surprise you to know, then, that the Christmas tree is actually fairly recent addition to the traditions of Christmas celebrations! Prior to the mid 1800s, very few people had Christmas trees and it had never entered upon many peoples’ minds to have them, either! So where did they come from?

The Christmas tree originated in Germany, of all places, where it had been a Christmas tradition since the 1500s, to chop down a tree, haul it home and decorate it in a manner similar to what we know today. Originally a fixture of nothern Germany, the tradition of the Christmas tree spread through Germany and Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Visiting noblemen were impressed by these trees with decorations and candles and other frilly things on them; they decided they looked pretty and that this was a fitting way to celebrate the season of giving. At this time, however, the Christmas tree was still largely unknown to the English-speaking world, remaining very much a continental European tradition. So…who brought the Christmas tree to England? And by extension…the English-speaking world?

The Christmas tree was a tradition in the British Royal Family from the early 1800s. The family had a branch in Germany, you see, so when the English married the Germans, the Germans brought their own traditions to England. A young Princess Victoria mentions the Christmas tree in her diary as a child. But for nearly half a century until the 1840s, the Christmas tree remained strictly a royal family tradition. Who was it who made it popular for everyone to do it?

Interestingly enough, this can be traced to one man. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? He was known as His Royal Highness, The Prince Consort…better known as Prince Albert, wife of Queen Victoria. There is a belief that Albert brought the first Christmas tree with him to England when he married Victoria…he didn’t. It was a well-established tradition in England by that time. What HE did was make it fashionable for everyone ELSE to have a tree. A woodcut picture of the British Royal Family standing around the Christmas Tree, which was published in the Illustrated London News of December of 1848 was what spread the tradition through England, and later, the rest of the world (given England’s vast empire at the time). It was Albert’s wish that his children should enjoy some of the German Christmas traditions which he had grown up with. This had ensured the survival of the Christmas tree in England and by extension, its introduction to the masses.

Thanks, Bertie! See? It pays to be a good father. You might be remembered for something.

It was this picture (though, black-and-white in its original publication), that introduced the Christmas tree to the masses and started a tradition that lasts to this day.

The Olympic Flame

Aaah, the Olympic Flame. Nothing like seeing athletes running around carrying a big, flaming pole, the world’s biggest matchstick. Nothing like watching them clmb the steps of the podium or the dais, to light the bowl and start the Olympic Games with the ancient and mystical ceremony which started centuries ago with the ancient Greeks…right?

Wrong.

Well…partially wrong.

The Olympic flame does indeed have ancient origins. It supposedly commemorates the theft of the gift of Fire, from the god Zeus, king of the ancient Greek gods. In the ancient world, a fire was lit at the start of the ancient Olympic Games and was kept burning throughout its duration. When the Modern Olympic Games started again in 1896, the flame had long since been forgotten. It was reintroduced in 1928 for the Games of that year…but what about the famous relay-run which goes from Greece, around the world to the location of the Games, to symbolically light the bowl which starts the games!?

Sorry folks. That has no ancient or fantastical origin whatsoever. It was a propaganda stunt organised by the Nazis in 1936 during the Olympic Games in Berlin. It was supposed to look cool and amazing…and it was…but it wasn’t an actual, ancient Olympian tradition…So Hitler made it so! Or rather, Carl Diem, the man who came up with the idea, made it so. He must’ve had some pretty good marketing sense, because over 70 years later, it’s still an Olympic tradition today.

Traffic Lights.

Traffic lights. They regulate traffic movements and they keep us safe. They frustrate us and mock us when we’re in a hurry. But where do they come from? Why is it that Green is Go and Red is Stop? Who on earth thought this was a good idea?

Traffic lights have maritime origins, would you believe it? They originated from the bow lamps of ships at sea. When travelling at night, ships needed to be aware of other ships out on the oceans. Before the days of radar, the only way to spot other ships was to see their lights. Ships hung a green lamp on the starboard side of the bow (right) and a red lamp on the port side of the bow (left). Two ships sailing together head on would spot each others’ lights and be able to turn away from each other. Having different coloured lights meant that there was no possibility of it looking like two ships sailing side by side.

A pair of ship’s navigation lamps, from the turn of the last century. The green lamp goes on the Starboard side, the red lamp on the Port side.

If two ships were sailing closer and closer together, perpendicular to each other, the lights indicated right of way. Two ships are sailing east and north respectively; they meet at a point. The ship sailing north would see the starboard side of the ship sailing east and would spot their green lamp. They had right of way, and could sail on northwards. The ship sailing east, which would spot the other vessel’s port side, and by extension, red lamp, would be obliged to stop and give way. This is the origin of traffic lights, and how it was established that green was Go and red was Stop. Ships still have red and green bow lights today, and they still serve the same purpose.

Port and Starboard

Port and Starboard are Left and Right onboard a ship. Most people know this. But why are they CALLED ‘Port’ and ‘Starboard’?

Back in ancient times, when early ships were powered by sails, they had no rudders. Instead, they had a large paddle, strapped to the stern of the ship, which was called the ‘steerboard’. The steerboard was strapped to the RIGHT side of the ship, which gradually became known as ‘starboard’. Because it was dangerous to dock a ship against a wharf with the right side, which would possibly cause damage to the steering-paddle, ships were tied up on the left side, which gradually became known as the ‘larboard’ side, which was later changed to ‘Port’, since ‘starboard’ and ‘larboard’ sounded too similar and might have been misheard during a storm or other occasions when loud noise might cause an instruction to be heard incorrectly.

Dalmations and Fire-Stations.

In the United States, at least, fire houses, station-houses or fire-stations, are famous for many things. Big, red, flashy firetrucks with those old-fashioned air-sirens, big, burly firemen, the object of many women’s sexual fantasies…and…dalmation dogs…firehouse pets and mascots since time immemoriam.

But…Have you ever wondered WHY dogs are associated with station-houses? And why Dalmations of all breeds? Why not Rottweilers or terriers or Great Danes or German Shepards?

This is one of the more obscure origins, that goes waaaaay back to 18th century Europe. Back in the Georgian period, and probably before that (although I’ve read nothing which stated that specifically), wealthy aristocrats would ride about town in grand carriages. These carriages were usually pulled by a pair of horses and would have a coachman and footmen to drive them and attend to them. They also had an animal known as a coach-dog or a carriage-dog. The coach-dog, an ancestor of the modern Dalmation breed, was there to protect the carriage against thieves and to protect the carriage’s two horses, in the event that the footmen or the coachman had to leave the vehicle unattended.

A Dalmation carriage-dog running alongside a horse-drawn fire-engine on its way to a fire, in this plate painting showing a scene, supposedly from 1910.

With the rise of professional firefighting in the early 1800s, station-houses needed to be protected at night from thieves and pranksters, who might want to damage or steal the station’s valuable firefighting equipment. When a fire was reported and the horse-drawn fire-engine was sent out to combat it, the station’s dalmation, the descendant of the 18th century coach-dog, went with it. Usually, one or two dogs would run alongside the fire engine, or out in front of the carriage, to clear the way for the horses. Once at the fire, their job was to protect the horses and the firefighting carriage, much like their ancestors did, as well as to keep people back from the blaze, or to go into the structure as rescue-dogs, looking for survivors.

It was damn hard, but…I finally found a photograph! Dated 1901, it shows firefighters and their horse-drawn fire-engines outside a station-house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. And what’s that sitting in the middle of the photograh? It’s the station’s dalmation carriage-dog! At the time this photograph was taken, the carriage-dog was becoming a thing of history, but until the introduction of actual modern firetrucks, it was common for carriage-dogs such as the one pictured, to follow the horse-drawn fire-engines to the scenes of major emergencies.

While dalmations no-longer run alongside fire-trucks on their way to an emergency, they have remained a fixture of fire-stations for the past 200-odd years in a tradition that continues to live on to this day.

04/12/2009 by scheong

The Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties

I’ve read frequently in the past, that professional historians (as opposed to the person writing this article), have often dubbed the decade of the 1920s, to be the decade of the 20th century, the decade which was most interesting, most exciting and the most culturally significant, both in the United States and elsewhere.

What Were the Roaring Twenties?

The 1920s are known to history as the Roaring Twenties (taken from the Roaring 40s, 40 degrees south latitude), and it was a name aptly given for one of the most vibrant and tempestuous decades in world history.

The Roaring Twenties essentially saw the birth of modern society as we know it today. The consumer. The homeowner. The driver. The moviegoer or the nightclub patron. While all these people existed before the 1920s, it was in this decade that they really took off. The 20s saw rapid technological changes and innovations and all kinds of flashy new inventions and new cultural phenomena which would change the world and affect it for the next 80 years.

The postwar boom (that’s the First World War, folks; some people forget that there were two of them!) saw America and other countries (such as the United Kingdom and Australia and various European countries) enter a golden age. The age of radio, crime-sprees, prohibition, jazz-music, the Charleston and a new innovation in filmmaking technology: The Talkie!

All of these things are instantly associated with the 20s, a time when many of our grandparents (or if we’re old enough…parents!, or young enough, great-grandparents!) were growing up. People tend to think that before television, folks did the housework, read, sewed, knitted, chatted, had dinner and then went to bed with the chickens. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Just because the sun went down at seven o’clock was no reason for people to do the same, and this was when people started going to what some people probably think is a brand-new invention…the nightclub.

Music of the 1920s.

Then, as now, nightclubs had loud music, smoke, drinks and well-dressed customers…well perhaps that bit hasn’t lasted the test of time….but the rest has. Nightclubs and restaurants of the 1920s were a bit more formal than what we would recognise today, but it was all still there: the dance-floor, the tables, the partying patrons and the cigarette-smoke. Famous nightclubs in the 1920s and 30s included the Stork Club and the 21 Club in Manhattan and the Empress Club in London. The 21 Club still exists today, although it’s now more of a restaurant rather than the speakeasy nightclub it would’ve been, back in the 1920s.

Jazz was the pop music of the 1920s and it was as popular in its day as rap is today. Neither was considered cultured or polite and both took considerable time to be accepted by the more conservative peoples of the world. Jazz was loud, vibrant, fast and raunchy, thoroughly unlike the more delicate parlour-songs of the early 1900s. It was born out of ragtime piano-music of the turn of the century and gradually evolved into its own, distinct genre by the late 1910s. Many famous songs still widely known today, were published in the 1920s…How about…

The Charleston.
Puttin’ on the Ritz.
Blue Skies.
Ain’t Misbehavin’.
There’ll Be Some Changes Made.
I’m Sittin’ on Top of the World.
The Sheik of Arabay.
Tootsie.
It Had to be You.
Let’s Misbehave.

The Charleston is considered the ‘theme song’ of fhe 1920s, much like how ‘In the Mood’ was considered the theme-song of the 1940s. It claimed to be the most popular and instantly-recognisable of all the tunes of the 20s and was synonymous with the popular dance known as the Charleston (named for the city of Charleston in South Carolina). Both the song and its accompanying dance were brought to public attention in the musical play ‘Runnin’ Wild’ which premiered in 1923. They were an instant hit! Like the music, the dance was also considered scandalous and offensive, while others saw it as something fresh, bold and fascinating to watch. Actress Ginger Rogers was considered one of the best Charleston dancers ever.

The 20s saw the rise of commercial radio, where people could sit back, turn on the set and enjoy listening to radio serials, the news or popular music. The first commercial radio-station in the USA went on the air in November, 1920 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For the first time, people were able to listen to public messages and eletronic entertainment from the comfort of their own homes, without having to go hunting for a newspaper. More information on the Golden Age of Radio can be found here.

Films of the 1920s.

The 1920s saw the rise of the film-industry as we know it today. While film or ‘moving pictures’ had existed since the 1890s, it wasn’t until the 1920s that it really started taking off. Early films were short and the actors remained anonymous. By the 1920s, the idea that the people in the films should *gasp!* be recognised for their talent!…had taken hold, and film-credits were introduced, to tell the viewers who played which part, who had produced the film, who had directed it, and so-on. The era of the movie-star had been born!

Famous early movie stars included such notables as…

Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin.
Mary Pickford.
Rudolph Valentino.
Clark Gable.
Buster Keaton.
Harold Lloyd.

Some were successes, some were failures, some made the successful transition to talkies in the 1930s (such as Gable and Chaplin), some were sad failures. Valentino didn’t even make it to talkies, he died in 1926!

A Changing World.

The 1920s saw incredible changes, not just technologically, but also culturally. People started taking to the road in their flivvers, Stutzes, Mercers, Stanleys, Pierces, Maxwells and…dozens of other motor-cars whose brands you probably also have never heard of. The Road Trip became the new craze, and families packed up their picnic baskets and went for long adventures around the country, visiting seaside resorts or quaint villages or going fishing and hunting. The availability of the automobile to the common man (and later, woman) allowed people a new kind of freedom which they had not previously known. No-longer restrained by horses, timetables and trains, they could hop into their cars and drive off whenever they liked.

Looks kinda cute, doesn’t it? This is a 1920 Stanley Steamer. All cars manufactured by Stanley were steam-cars, meaning they worked like locomotives: You boiled the water, the water made the steam, the steam-pressure drove the car. They took forever to get going, but cars like these lasted from the dawn of motoring until the late 1920s. Steam cars were the fastest cars in their day, capable of reaching upwards of 100mph when most gasoline cars struggled to make 60.

Women changed a lot in the 1920s, they wore shorter, more revealing skirts, they started smoking cigarettes, they started drinking, hanging out in nightclubs and even driving motor-cars. Men didn’t believe that women were able to handle such technologically advanced machines such as cars, so this was quite a change.

A new kind of superhero was invented in the 20s as well: Pilots. People could now see that airplanes were here to stay, and that they could serve a practical purpose in the civilian world, delivering mail and packages and helping people fly from A to B. Aerial stunt-pilots and the stuntmen (and women!) who worked with them…colloquially known as ‘barnstormers’ were popular fixtures at fairs and carnivals, where people would come to watch daring aerobatics. Barnstorming was a fad or a phenomenon which is almost fixed in the 1920s, unfortunately. Though it proved very popular, both to participate in as well as to observe, safety regulators put all kinds of rules and guidelines on pilots and barnstormers in the late 1920s to prevent them from hurting themselves. In the end, barnstormers had had enough and stopped performing altogether, because they couldn’t do their tricks AND satisfy the safety-requirements at the same time.

Two men playing tennis on top of a biplane in this 1920s barnstorming photograph. Note the lack of almost all safety equipment.

The End of the Roaring Twenties.

The celebrated, much-loved and sorely-missed 1920s came to an abrupt end in October of 1929. The Wall Street Crash left millions out of work worldwide and the lack of money meant that the postwar extravagance of the 1920s was, to many at least, soon nothing but a distant memory of what life once was.

03/12/2009 by scheong

“23 Skiddoo”: Jazz Age Slang of the 20s and 30s.

Most people grow up thinking that slang or colloqiual expressions are something totally modern. Nobody had alternate names for things before they came along. Before they came along, a girl was a girl, not a ‘chick’ or a ‘ho’ or a ‘slut’ or a ‘looker’. A car was a car, not a ‘ride’ or a ‘hummer’ or a ‘lemon’. But slang has been part of humanity and part of the English language for decades, indeed, even centuries. The 1920s and 30s, the Jazz Age and the Age of Depression, gave us many of our most famous, and at times, still-used slang-words. Some of these have fallen out of regular use, some are still used as frequently today as they were 80 years ago when our grandparents were still children. Words like ‘soused’, ‘spiffed’, ‘Ritzy’ and ‘ciggie’ or ‘smoke’ are probably just as easily understood now as they were in 1925.

The 1920s were a colourful time in world history with its own, unique brand of colourful, suggestive language to go along with it. The 1930s were dark times where even more language, brought on by the problems of the Depression, started to make an appearance. Maybe you’ve watched old movies or listened to Old Time Radio shows? Perhaps you’ve seen modern movies set in the 1920s and 30s, like “Road to Perdition” or “Once Upon a Time in America”, and you’ve heard period-slang which you don’t understand? Some of the words are pretty easy to figure out, some, not so easy. Here are a few slang-words from the 20s and 30s, which you may or may not recognise…

23 Skiddoo.
Meaning: To leave in a hurry.
Possible origin: From 23rd Street, Manhattan. The famous Flatiron building is located here, and the underground ventilation-grilles had a way of blasting up hot air from below which lifted up women’s skirts as they walked over them. Men wanting an impromptu peepshow would hang around here to get a gander. If a policeman showed up, the men would leg it sharpish, or else be arrested for loitering or inappropriate behaviour in public. This quick departure became known as doing the ’23 skiddoo’.

Bootlegger.
Meaning: A smuggler of alcohol.
Possible origin: Comes from large, old-fashioned cowboy boots or gumboots, the sides of which went right up to the wearer’s knees. Crafty smugglers would slip slim, easily-concealed bottles down the loose sides of their boots so that they would not be found if a policeman or other lawman decided to frisk their person.

Torpedo.
Meaning: Henchman.
Possible origin: Honestly not sure, probably because they got to the point really quick!

Chopper.
Meaning: Thompson submachine-gun.
Possible origin: Well…when you see what a Tommy gun can do to the human body, you’ll understand. At 600rpm, the Tommy gun delivered death in a quick and messy way which could leave a human body totally butchered and pumped full of holes.

Flatfoot.
Meaning: Policeman, usually a beat-cop.
Possible origin: Fallen arches or the pedal condition known as ‘policeman’s foot’, which some officers were prone to contracting after hours pounding the beat on the streets.

Certifiable.
Meaning: Looney, mad, crazy, insane.
Possible origin: From the phrase ‘certifiably insane’, meaning that someone was clearly nuts and this qualified for their swift and probbaly permanent placement in a lunatic asylum.

Sore.
Meaning: Upset, resentful.
Possible origin: Unsure. Generally used in a reproachful way. Eg: “Hey bud I didn’t mean it! Don’t be sore on me…”

Sugar-Daddy.
Meaning: Older boyfriend (or just a boyfriend) who showers his girlfriend with gifts in exchange for sex.
Possible origin: Rather obvious. A boyfriend who acts as sweet as sugar in order to get what his girlfriend can naturally give him.

Slang from the 1920s lasted for a surprisingly long time in popular speech. TV shows and radio-shows from the 50s were still using terms created up to 30 years earlier, as if they never went out of style. Some terms from the Jazz Age are still used today…like…Gold-Digger, Sugar-Daddy, Killjoy, knock up or fag (meaning either a cigarette or a homosexual…this term started being used interchangably around the early 20s).

In time, I hope to start a small index of archaic slang-terms. Slang is part of our language and our history and how it changes mirrors how society and vlaues have also changed over time. A hundred years ago, if you were ‘gay’, you were happy. Today you’d be a homosexual. Eighty years ago, a ‘bimbo’ was a real tough-guy. These days, a ‘bimbo’ is a derrogatory name for a stupid, air-head blonde.

01/12/2009 by scheong

“I never guess, it is a shocking habit!”: The Myths of Sherlock Holmes.

Holmesian Myths.

“…Any truth is better than indefinite doubt…”

– The Yellow Face.

As with any great person, there have been all kinds of myths and legends and suppositions about Holmes. How many of them are actually true? Here are some of the more common ones:

1. Holmes took drugs.

Yes he did. Holmes did occasionally take morphine and cocaine. Don’t forget, when Doyle was writing these stories in the 1880s and the 1890s, cocaine was legal. You could buy it over the counter at a chemist’s shop just as easily as Panadol today.

2. Holmes was a drug-addict.

No. Holmes was never a drug-addict, per-se. At least, not in the sense that most people would understand the term. Holmes shot himself up with cocaine because he required an artificial stimulus when he had not his natural one (which was of course, a case, to keep his mind occupied).

3. Holmes wore a deerstalker hat.

No. No stories mention Holmes ever wearing such a hat. The hat was the invention of Sidney Paget, the illustrator that The Strand Magazine commissioned, to illustrate the Holmes stories. In one publication, he read of a hat, to which Doyle had given no specific name, and imagined it to be a deerstalker.

4. Holmes smoked a calabash pipe.

No. Holmes never smoked such a pipe in his life. He smoked cigars, cigarettes, clay pipes, briar pipes…but not calabash. This was an invention of Hollywood.

5. 221b Baker Street really exists!

Yes and no. Certainly, it never existed in Doyle’s time. Doyle deliberately exaggerated or falsified addresses in his stories, because they were set in (then) contemporary London, and he couldn’t risk having people knocking on actual doors, looking for his detective. He originally had Holmes living at 21 Baker Street, but when he realised that that particular address was occupied, he changed it to ‘221b’, an address which, in his lifetime, did not exist. Later, when Baker Street was lengthened and the houses were all renumbered, there did come into existence, a ‘221 Baker Street’, which still exists today.

6. Holmes & Watson were gay lovers.

You’d be surprised how often this one pops up. They were flatmates, colleagues, friends, partners…but not lovers. Holmes was so detatched and at times, inhuman, it’s nearly impossible to think of him loving anyone at all. In Watson’s case, he was constantly jumping from one wife to another, ending up, as some believe, with the grand total of six wives, throughout the run of the canon.

7. Holmes once said: “Elementary, my dear Watson!”.

No. Never once in all of the sixty original publications that he appears in, did Holmes ever say that line. While he certainly said “my dear Watson!” dozens, if not hundreds of times, and “Elementary” just as frequently, the phrase never appears in its entirety throughout the entire Sherlock Holmes canon. It did appear at the end of a 1929 film called “The Return of Sherlock Holmes”.

8. Holmes owns a Stradivarius violin.

Yes. Holmes does own, and play, a violin, and he mentions it as being a Stradivarius worth at least “five hundred guineas”, and which he bought from “a Jew broker in Tottenham Court Road for fifty-five shillings” (The Cardboard Box).

30/11/2009 by scheong

“Come Watson, come! The game is afoot!”: The Elementary Fame of Sherlock Holmes.

“Come Watson, come! The game is afoot! Not a word! Into your clothes and come!”

And so begins one of Holmes and Watson’s most famous and interesting adventures, ‘The Abbey Grange’.

For over 120 years, men, women and children have been fascinated and enchanted, amazed and delighted, by the adventures of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and his friend and colleague, Dr. John H. Watson. But nearly all their stories were written over 100 years ago, the last ones were not completed until 1927, and even those are over 80 years old by now. All their exploits happened well over a century ago in a completely different world to our own. That being the case, why, after all these years, are the immortal duo, Holmes and Watson, still alive and well in literary circles? Why is it that there’s a movie on Holmes and Watson coming out this Christmas, in just a few weeks’ time? What is it about Holmes and Watson that keeps them forever coming back for people to read and wonder about?

Undying Popularity.

The Guiness Book of World Records states that:

“…the most frequently portrayed character on the silver screen is Sherlock Holmes…The Baker Street sleuth has been portrayed by around 75 actors in over 211 films since 1900…”

– Guiness World Records (2003).

There has to be SOMETHING about Mr. Holmes which makes us all love him. What is it? Or indeed, is it possible at all, to nail it down to that ONE some…THING? Or are there, in fact, dozens, or hundreds of reasons why Holmes and Watson have enjoyed undying popularity for the past 100+ years? The very name ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is synonymous with crime, detection, good against evil and…the um…calabash pipe and deerstalker hat. Why has Holmes remained so famous when other fictional detectives disappeared into the mists of time and history? He’s up there with Miss Jane Marple or Monseiur Hercule Poirot…but what is it about him that means he deserves to be placed up on a pedestal like this?

It was not just the man himself, it was the world in which he lived in. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the British doctor who started writing about Holmes in his spare time while waiting for patients to show up at his surgery for their appointments, captured a world which is, in the 21st century, an intricate and detailed and minute portrait of late Victorian London, as complete as any encyclopedia. The stories contained all these fascinating little details which bring Holmes to life. The infamous London fog, the gaslight, the clattering horses hooves, the hansom cabs, the beggars, the filthy docks, the disreputable East End. Posh, West End gentlemen’s clubs, horse-racing and scandals. All these features transport us back to a time where we can lose ourselves in the smoke and chill of Holmesian London and to follow the great detective as he charges off into the mist, in search of another killer, thief or desperado. London was the perfect setting for crime and for the criminal agents who brought them to justice.

“The Only One in the World”.

“…I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”
“The only unofficial detective?” I said, raising my eyebrows.
“The only unofficial consulting detective,” he answered. “I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection…”

– The Sign of Four.

One of the chief reasons why Holmes has remained popular for so long, is because the man who created him, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, did something to detective fiction which had been almost unknown at the time of his writing, in the late 1880s. That something was to have a detective who actually solved his cases and who explained every single step along the way. Until Doyle came along, no other writer had managed to do this. In his own words, Doyle said (in the one and only filmed, audio-recorded interview that he ever gave, literally months before he died):

“…it always annoyed me, how, in the old-fashioned detective story, the detective always seemed to get at his result, either by some sort of lucky chance or fluke, or else, it was quite unexplained how he got there! He got there, but he never gave an explanation how! Well that didn’t seem to me, to be quite ‘playing the game’. It seemed to me that he’s bound to give his reasons!…”

Before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came along, detective fiction was weak, boring, uninteresting and generally poorly written, with writers having no idea how to successfully get their detectives to solve a crime convincingly. What Doyle did was to create a detective who not only solved his crimes, but could show every single step he took, in order to solve it, through the ‘science of deduction’ and the ‘art of observation’, as they were called in the Holmesian canon. For the first time ever, readers could read a detective story and they could follow this detective through his entire case and learn how he solved his crimes. Such a thing had never been seen before; it was a revolution! This, in a nutshell, was what made Holmes so immensely popular to begin with.

The Man Behind the Man.

But who was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?

Doyle was a Scotsman born in 1859. He studied medicine at the University of Edinbrugh and spent his younger years as a ship’s surgeon, sailing around the world. When he was a bit older, he turned his medical skills to becoming a civilian doctor and set himself up in practice in Southsea, England, near the town of Portsmouth. While Doyle was a skilled physician (for the day), he had constant financial struggles. In fact at one point, he was so poor, he had only just enough money to furnish the rooms in his house that his patients would see! In his spare time between patients, Doyle wrote stories to pass the time. He had little else to do, and having his younger brother, Innes Doyle, who helped in the surgery, always nearby, meant that Arthur had a lot of spare time.

Struggling to make ends meet, Doyle decided to try his hand at detective fiction, dissatisfied with the detective-fiction then in circulation. He based his legendary sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, on Dr. Joseph Bell, who was one of his lecturers at the University of Edinbrugh. Bell had introduced Doyle to the science of observation and deduction, and had the uncanny ability to diagnose patients’ ailments the moment they stepped into his office. Doyle was much impressed by this skill, and decided that it could just as easily be transferred from medical diagnosis to the detection of crime. One does not have to look far to see that Doyle based Dr. Watson, Holmes’s medical colleague, friend, chronicler and narrator of most of the stories, on himself. In 1887, Doyle published his first Holmes story: “A Study in Scarlet”. It was a runaway success. Within a few years, Doyle had made a name for himself as a detective-fiction writer and he was now living very comfortably from his royalties from his Holmes stories as well as his other writings.

Doyle got his ‘Sir Arthur’ title, his knighthood, in 1902, due to services rendered during the Boer War. He gave up writing Holmes in the early 1900s and only started writing about Holmes again when publishing-houses paid him big money to resurrect the character. He had initially killed Holmes off when he decided that his character was distracting him from what he considered his better and more important writings. In a letter to his mother, Mary, Sir Arthur wrote that:

“[Sherlock Holmes] keeps me from better things”.

Doyle wrote his very last volume of Holmes stories, ‘His Last Bow’, in the mid 1920s, just a few years before his death in 1930.

The Science of Deduction and the Art of Observation.

“…You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles…”

– The Boscombe Valley Mystery.

Sherlock Holmes solved his cases through what was called the ‘science of deduction’, where one examined minute details and drew conclusions from them. But one could not examine minute details if they did not first observe them. Mr. Holmes was like a radar or a heat-seeking missile dressed in a three-piece suit with a top hat and cane. He had the ability to seek out tiny details about his clients’ dress, appearance and accessories, to tell him who they were, why they had come to see him, and what their occupations were. He first observed them and then drew deductions and inferences from what he had observed. From one item, he could deduce its entire history. Using these skills, he was able to read into things, information that had eluded less observant investigators. And it’s not that hard to do. I’ve done it myself and, with practice, it does work. Think of this for example:

A letter with smudged handwriting with deep troughs in the paper from where the pen-point has been pressed into the page, combined with bleedthrough of the ink. What inferences might be drawn from this?

1. The writer is left-handed. Only a left-handed writer would smudge his ink, as his hand moves across the page (and thus, across the ink) as he writes.
2. He wrote with a ballpoint pen on a soft surface (perhaps on top of some newspaper or a notepad). Only a ballpoint pen requires such force in writing that it leaves trenches in the paper. And yet, these trenches would not exist if the paper had been on a perfectly hard, flat surface, like a desk. The ‘give’ provided by the padding of the extra sheets of paper, allowed the fibres of the page to crease under the pressure of the pen-point.
3. The paper is cheap notepad paper. If it was expensive or of a better quality, the ink would not stain all the way through.

It’s really not that hard.

Despite the fact that deductions, observation and inferences had existed before Doyle famously made them the traits of his master detective, nobody had ever thought to use them for the detection and solving of crimes before. This was what made Sherlock Holmes so revolutionary. It made his cases seem believable, possible…it made them seem…real. It was this realism that made him a success. It made people believe that it was possible to solve crimes, if one just spent enough time observing and studying the things that were in front of them every single day.

Having observed all the little details, it was then necessary to make the correct inferences and to draw the correct conclusions from the clues given to you, by applying various theories, until you found a likely one that held all the facts together.

“…It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts…”

– A Scandal in Bohemia.

Drawing the correct inferences could be easy, or it could be almost impossibly hard. It’s like trying to put together a puzzle and getting everything to fit together correctly, by removing what is obviously not possible, and examining all the real probabilities.

“When you have elminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.

– The Sign of Four.

Sherlock Holmes: The Man.

“My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know”.

– The Blue Carbuncle.

Although Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made him seem incredibly real and again, it was this realism that led to his fame. Sherlock Holmes wasn’t some secret sleuth or caped crusader who lived in a cave in a mountain on the other side of the Valley of Doom, sitting on a throne made of marble…he lived in London. At 221b Baker Street, in the well-to-do West End, in a nice, central, normal-sounding address. He wore ordinary clothes, he ate ordinary food. He had a housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson, an elderly Scotchwoman. He had his older brother, Mycroft. He even had his best friend: John Watson, M.D. This homely and seemingly real portrait of Sherlock Holmes endeared him to his readers as a real, physical being whom they could visit, talk to and whom they could go to for help.

Sherlock Holmes had his vices, like any other man would. He was rude, he was arrogant, he drank, he shot himself up with morphine and cocaine. He would stay awake for days and nights at time, he chain-smoked, he denied himself food when on a case, and he got injured during the course of his investigations, as any detective might. He carried firearms and other weapons and he had his enemies who wanted to kill him. Holmes never married and he rarely spoke of his family. The only one of Holmes’s relatives whom Doyle explicitly mentions (and even introduces the reader to), is Holmes’s brother, Mycroft, who is described as being seven years older than Sherlock and possessing even greater deductive and observational powers than his younger and more famous brother.

Holmes was described as being tall (6′-6’3″), lean, hawk-like, pale and with black hair. He said himself, that he was ‘exceptionally strong in the fingers’ (Beryl Coronet) and that he had ‘some knowledge of Baritsu’ (Empty House). He was able to hold his own in a fight and he had considerable acting ability, being able to fool Watson (and others) into thinking that he was…an Italian priest…a clergyman…a bookseller…an old man…and a common loafer.

Sherlock Holmes’s very name was a mix of the real and the fantastic. Holmes is an ordinary enough surname, but with a name like ‘Sherlock’, he was bound to stand out, the same with his brother, with a name like ‘Mycroft’. And yet, I suppose we should be thankful that Sherlock is just plain old…Sherlock. Early drafts of his first story had Doyle naming him Sherrinford Holmes! In the end, he decided this name was too flowery and flamboyant and that a simpler, but still stylish name, might be better-suited.

Behind every Good Detective is a Sidekick.

You coudn’t have a detective without a sidekick, a partner in crime-detection, someone whom you could rely on to assist you in your investigations. Holmes’s investigative partner was a man named Dr. John. H. Watson, whom Doyle based on himself. Doyle’s original name for Holmes’s friend and colleague was…Ormond Sacker, however, good taste and common-sense prevailed, and Doyle decided that such a name was unrealistic and too colourful. He decided that his narrator and Holmes’s colleague should have a simpler, more down-to-earth name. Something which everyone could relate to. An everyman name…such as…John Watson. Simple, plain, unpretentious and which could belong to any man in London.

Like Doyle, Watson was a physician with a military background. Doyle was a ship’s surgeon and a medical officer during the Boer War. Watson was a medical officer during the Second Afghan War of the 1880s. Watson’s physical description closely mirrored Doyle’s, being a man of average height, solidly built and who sported a neat moustache across his upper lip. Like his creator, Watson had money-troubles, betting his army pension on the horses and losing it in gambling. In “The Dancing Men”, we learn that Holmes keeps Watson’s chequebook locked in a drawer of his desk, where the good doctor cannot get at it, to spend his money unwisely.

The Holmesian canon is a peep into Victorian era medicine, thanks to Watson. In this Watsonian world, brandy is a cure for everything from fainting to suffocation to physical exhaustion. Tuberculosis is still called by its archaic name of ‘Consumption’ and sulphuric acid is still called ‘Oil of Vitriol’. Horrendous wounds such as having one’s fingers hacked off with a butcher’s cleaver are treated professionally and quietly, and Watson’s medical skills have come to the aid of Holmes and other canon characters on numerous occasions, whether it be injuries from being mauled by a dog, being beat up in a pub brawl or being set upon by a group of streetpads (an old, Victorian term for muggers).

The Ultimate Villain.

Doyle had created the ultimate sleuth, the ultimate sidekick…and now, he had to create the ultimate villain. Professor James Moriarty.

Prof. Moriarty is Holmes’s arch-nemesis, and the leader of a large and powerful gang which operates all over London. Holmes called him the ‘Napoleon of Crime’, and considered him his intellectual equal. Like Holmes, Moriarty was brainy, sly, careful, calculating and observant. This made him an excellent criminal. It also meant that it was very hard for Holmes to ever catch him, and they played a constant cat-and-mouse game throughout the canon. Moriarty meets his end in “The Final Problem”, the story in which he had wanted to kill off Sherlock Holmes as well. Moriarty, apart from being crafty and evil, also encapsulated the physical appearance of a master criminal. He was tall, thin, hawk-like, gruff, dangerous and uncompromising.

Immortal Holmes.

Even though he was created so many years ago, even though his world seems alien to us, he remains, as Holmes himself once said to Watson: “…the one fixed point in a changing age”. His world, his skills, his cases and the man who created him, will remain legendary for decades to come. His very, phyiscal profile is instantly recognisable, the world-over; the deerstalker hat, the cape and the curved, calabash pipe.

29/11/2009 by scheong

Ebony and Ivory: The History of the Piano.

One of the most beloved, one of the most expensive and one of the most versatile and influential instruments in the world, the piano has been part of our lives for the past three hundred years. It has shaped Western music in innumerable ways and has influenced endless genres of music from classical to jazz to rock and roll, filmscore music and classic pop. But what is the history of the piano? Where did it come from? Who made it? And what does the name ‘piano’ actually mean? This article will cover the history and influence that one of the most famous musical instruments in the world, has had on Western civilisation from the start of the Stuart Period, up to the modern day.

Before the Piano.

Keyboard instruments have existed for centuries. Before the piano, there was the harpsichord and clavichord. Before the harpsichord, there was the hurdy-gurdy. Of these three instruments, the piano most closely resembled the harpsichord, which could be considered the modern piano’s birth-instrument. Before the piano came along, keyboard instruments worked by pressing on the keys, which moved a series of wooden pegs (called ‘jacks’) which sprung upwards, pluckng strings inside the instrument-case. Clavichords and harpsichords worked like this. There was one jack for each key, and each jack had a small spike or ‘quill’ in it, which plucked (and vibrated) the string as it went up, and which dampened (or dulled) the string as it came down again. Instruments such as the harpsichord and clavichord produced very twangy, metallic-sounding music, a cross between a piano and a guitar, lute or a harp. The sound of harpsichords is commonly associated with grand, European royal courts in the 17th and 18th centuries.

An 18th century harpsichord. Note the lack of pedals underneath the keyboard.

While such instruments as harpsichords and clavichords looked very much like pianos, and while they worked similarly to a piano, they differed greatly in the sounds they produced. Harpsichords, as I said, produce sound by plucking the strings, not striking them, like a modern piano. This plucking sound creates a sharp, metallic ‘twang!’, a bit like a guitar-string. Furthermore, as the harpsichord-jack fell the moment you removed your finger from the key, the damper in the jack immediately dulled the the string, preventing harpsichordists from holding notes for very long. This limited the kind of music which people could produce on these instruments. Sooner or later, someone was going to get fed up with all this stuff, and do something about it…and that someone was an Italian instrument-maker…

The Birth of the Pianoforte.

As we’ve seen, while keyboard instruments existed before the piano, they had deficiencies in how they produced sound and how well that sound could be manipulated and used by the musician, to create music. Something better and more conducive to musical creativity was needed. Something with more variety and possibilities. Something that could allow the instrumentalist to control every facet of how he played the instrument and that would allow him to get the most out of his playing. That something, was a newfangled invention, called, in its native Italian, the clavicembalo col piano e forte. Literally: Clavichord with soft and loud (capabilities). It was called this because it was the first keyboard instrument (a clavichord), which allowed the instrumentalist to control how hard or how softly he desired to strike the keys and how loud, or how soft the resultant notes would sound. It was an incredible invention!

So…who invented the piano?

Thorough musical historical research has attributed the invention of the fortepiano (later changed to the pianoforte and later still, to just ‘piano’) to one man. This one man was an Italian instrument-maker who lived in the 17th and 18th centuries. His name was Bartolomeo Cristofori. Signor Cristofori was born in the Republic of Venice (modern day Venice, Italy), in 1655. By the time of his death in 1731, he had created one of the most legendary instruments ever known.

Reliable historical documents date the first mention of Sig. Cristofori’s new instrument to the year 1700. By that stage, he had invented a keyboard instrument which worked by having hammers strike the strings, instead of having jacks which plucked them. The inclusion of pedals allowed musicians who tried out Sig. Cristofori’s new toy, to regulate how long a note hung in the air for, before releasing their foot (and lowering the damper), to muffle the vibrating piano-strings.

The piano was an incredible success. By the time a young man named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart appeared on the scene, Europe had been living with the piano for some fifty-six years. Indeed, by 1728, the first commercial piano-manufacturer had set itself up in business. John Broadwood & Sons is the oldest piano-manufacturer in the world…and nearly 300 years later…it’s still making pianos!

Piano made by John Broadwood & Sons, dated 1799. Note the two pedals jutting out of the two front legs.

Such was the piano’s popularity that by the 1790s, Mr. Broadwood and his sons had given up making harpsichords entirely. Prior to that date, they manufactured both pianos and harpsichords, but the Broadwood family must’ve been pretty brainy, for they saw rather quickly that the piano was the new thing that everyone wanted. The harpsichord’s days were now numbered and in 1793, the firm stopped making harpsichords altogether and concentrated on creating the best pianos that they possibly could. As of the year 2000, J. Broadwood & Sons holds a Royal Warrant from the British Royal Family, as official supplier (and tuner) of pianos provided to the Queen’s court and household.

The Rise of the Piano.

Such was the popularity of Sig. Cristofori’s new invention that by the early 1800s, the harpsichord was more-or-less obsolete. Nobody wanted them, and new piano-manufacturers were popping up almost overnight. While Mr. Broadwood and his family paved the way, being the first commercial manufacturer of pianos, they would not be alone for very long. Following closely behind the Broadwoods were the manufacturies of Erard (France, 1777), Challen (England, 1804), Chappell (England, 1811) and eventually, one of the most famous piano-manufacturers of all…Steinway & Sons, in 1853.

The impact of the piano on society was immense. Once the toys of only the rich, famous and powerful, towards the middle and end of the 19th century, the piano, now produced in significant quantities in factories and workshops around the world, started being made available to the upper and middle-classes of society, which were formed with the rise of the Industrial Revolution.

By the early 19th century, piano had firmly cemented its place in Western music. By this time, there were three distinct styles of pianos…

The Upright Piano. The most common, domestic piano today, the upright piano is characterised by having the soundboard and strings placed vertically, perpendicular to the keyboard.

The Grand Piano. This style of piano had its origins in the 17th and 18th centuries. Early pianos copied the case-styles of pre-existing harpsichords which were similarly shaped. Grand pianos are generally associated with larger homes or with institutions such as concert halls, schools and musical academies.

The Square Piano. Also called a square grand. The square piano was a style of piano manufactured in the earlier days of the piano’s existence and this case-style was made from the 1700s until the first half of the 1800s, when it finally died out. Very few, if any people, still make square pianos, and the majority you see today would all be antiques at least 150 years old.

The Influence of the Piano.

The rise of the piano was fast and phenomenal, and its influence on Western popular culture and the musical scene was just as intense. For the first time, an instrument with almost endless musical possibilities, was placed within the reach of ordinary men and women. Prior to the 19th century, pianos were expensive and carefully made, meant only for the wealthy and powerful. The rise of the Industrial Revolution, however, allowed pianos to be made more rapidly and more cheaply, and people started buying them and putting them in their homes, their schools, community halls and other places of social gathering. The range of notes on the piano allowed for endless musical possibilities and this saw the rise of the popular song during the last quarter of the 19th century.

The Rise of Popular Music.

With pianos now becoming more abundant and more accessible to the average man and woman, people began to see that there could be a booming music industry just over the horizon, that clever composers could make millions out of. And so, the first mass-produced, popular songs started coming onto the market.

The center for popular piano sheet-music in the United States (at least), from around 1880 until the 1950s, was a small section of Manhattan on West 28th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues…colloqually called…Tin Pan Alley.

The name was originally a derrogatory one, and reflected the sounds of dozens of pianos being played on, all at once, which supposedly sounded like a bunch of idiots beating away at a heap of tin pans. Despite the fact that people passing through Tin Pan Alley might not have liked the din of all the clashing pianos, Tin Pan Alley produced and published some of the most famous songs of late 19th century and early 20th century popular music. These are all Tin Pan Alley songs…how many do you know?

In the Good Old Summertime.
Give My Regards to Broadway.
There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.
Danny Boy.
Alexander’s Ragtime Band.
Hello Ma Baby.
Come Josephine in my Flying Machine.
Yes! We have no Bananas.
Under the Bamboo Tree.
Chinatown, My Chinatown.
Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two).
Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

You may recognise a few of them. These were all popular songs of the late 19th and early 20th century, and they all came from Tin Pan Alley. None of this would have been possible without the invention of the piano. Without the piano, popular music as we know it today, simply could not, and never would have existed. Tin Pan Alley’s popularity was assured in the turn of the century because the middle-class people of New York, who had pianos in their apartments, were always on the lookout for new and better and more interesting songs to play. Broadway musicals and vaudeville shows, together with popular ragtime music (which was the mainstay of American popular music from the 1880s until the 1910s), kept Tin Pan Alley in business for years. It wasn’t until the rise of Rock and Roll in the early 50s that classical popular music began to gradually slide away, out of the public consciousness.

The Piano Today.

But, none of this stuff. Not the jazz, the ragtime, the pop music, rock and roll, classical, classic pop, classic rock or showtunes would be possible today, if not for that one instrument…the piano, which was invented over 300 years ago, by an Italian keyboard-manufacturer known as Bartolomeo Cristofori. The piano remains an immensely popular instrument today, both for commercial and private residential musical enjoyment.

Throughout History

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