By about 1200 BC the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean world was in turmoil. War and the movement of peoples around the region abounded as international trade ceased, cities crumbling and civilisations collapsed. With a scarcity of hard evidence for a period of history so very distant from our own, the default explanation of many historians until recent times was that the large-scale collapse and destruction was down to one factor, the emergence of vast hordes of nomadic warriors, enigmatic and mysterious pirates and marauders which have been subsumed under the name “Sea Peoples”𝕒. Very little is known of the Sea Peoples outside of what the ancient Egyptians have recorded about these shadowy invaders of the Eastern Mediterranean littoral…which is problematic for historical enquiry in itself – having “the (hefty) disadvantage of being known only by their enemies” [Duke, T. T. The Classical Journal, vol. 65, no. 3, 1969, pp. 134–37. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3296263. Accessed 15 Feb. 2025]
Late Bronze Age (credit: Finn Bjørklid / creativecommons.org)
The assumption that the Sea Peoples were pretty much wholly responsible for the collapse of civilisations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 12th century BC has been challenged by historians of recent time. This revisionist view maintains that other factors could equally have caused the carnage of that world…drought, grave food shortages leading to a state of famine, the effects of climate change. Research into early agro-economies indicates their vulnerability to drought and long-term temperature change owing to general cooling which truncates their crop-growing season [McCormack et al (2012) cited in Wiener, M. H., FISCHER, P. M., & BÜRGE, T. (2017). Causes of Complex Systems Collapse at the End of the Bronze Age. In “Sea Peoples” Up-to-Date: New Research on Transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean in 13th-11th Centuries BCE (1st ed., pp. 43–74). Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1v2xvsn.7].
Egyptian hieroglyphics
Historian and archaeologist Eric H Cline in particular argues that rather than being the perpetrators of the mega-devastation that befell the region by ca.1177 BC, the Sea Peoples were victims of the collapse as much as anyone else. Cline describes them as refugees fleeing from the drought and famine of cities and civilisations collapsing asunder [‘The Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Aftermath’, Eric H. Cline with Javier Mejia, YouTube interview 2024].
Medinet Habu: Ramesses III’s memorial temple
Primary sources illuminating the identity of the Sea Peoples:The first reference we have to the Sea Peoples is the Amarna Letters of Upper Egypt (ca.1345 BC), clay tablets mentioning, among other things, the existence of and contact with various foreign peoples named as the Sherden, Lukka and Danuna. The richest source of information on the activities of these mysterious seafaring tribes resides in Medinet Habu, Ramesses III’s memorial temple near Luxor. The inscriptions of the scribes tell the Egyptian version of the story of the Sea Peoples who having defeated all other city-states and settlements in their way, launched an armada and land force led by the kingdom of Ekwesh, attacking the Nile Delta with the objective of establishing settlements on its fertile farmlands𝕓. They launched three attempts at invasion of Egypt over a period of 30-odd years and three times they were defeated by the Egyptians. The temple walls reveal the death toll and punishments of the vanquished Sea Peoples and the enslavement of many of them (some of the captured Shardans were incorporated into the Egyptian army to defend the kingdom’s northern frontiers from the Hittites).
Pictorial depictions (above & below) of the Battle of the Nile Delta (ca.1178 BC) (Medinet Habu)
So, who were the Sea Peoples and where did they come from?: In regard to the identity of the Sea Peoples the extant records give us names but little understanding of who they were. There appears to have been at least nine culturally separate tribal groups–including the Sherdan, the Peleset, the Lukka, the Shekelesh, the Tjekker, the Denyen (or Danuna), the Ekwesh, the Teresh, the Meshwesh and the Weshesh—some much better known than others. They formed themselves into a warring confederation (Egyptian records give it the name the “Nine Bows Confederation” whilst under the leadership of King Meryey of Libya). The question of their origins is more problematic to scholars. The Lukka is associated with the region of Lycia (in Anatolia) although they were thought to be highly mobile. Historians have tended to identify the Peleset with the later Philistines (in the Bible also calledPhlishtim (“invaders”) and located vaguely in the region of the Aegean. The Shekelesh have been associated with the island of Sicily although this wasn’t necessarily their original homeland as it’s also speculated that they may have moved there some time during the Bronze Age. The origins of the Sherden (or Shardan) is equally mysterious, with some archaeologists placing them within the Nuragic civilisation of Sardinia. The Tjekker have been variously linked to Canaan, Eastern Crete and the Sicals of Sicily, but without any conclusiveness. The Ekwesh are thought to have been from or based in the land of Libya, as was the Meshwesh. The origins of other groups are even more shadowy, such as the Denyen (or Danuna), the Karkiya and the Weshesh. Balancing these theories, Cline and other noted scholars hypothesise that the Sea Peoples’ migration began from the Western Mediterranean.
The Sea Peoples wearing distinctive feathered headdresses – as depicted on Ramesses II’s temple (source: Texas A&M University)
As Prof. Cline summed up the enigmatic Sea Peoples story: “the simple answer is that there is no simple answer. It remains an archaeological mystery that is the subject of much debate even today, more than 150 years after the discussions first began”.
𝕒 “Sea Peoples” was not a term used by contemporaries—Egyptians called them simply “Northerners”—but arose out of convenience to describe disparate groups of peoples thought to have come from islands and coastal areas of the Mediterranean (in reality, ironically, some came not from the sea at all!). What is established is that the Sea Peoples pursued a systematic pattern of invading and defeating the smaller empires and states of the region (Hittite kingdom, Mycenae (Greece), Syria, the Levant), culminating in a series of invasions of Egyptian Empire between ca.1213 BC and ca.1177 BC. They were repulsed and routed by the Egyptians (according to the Egyptian inscriptions) during the reigns of three succeeding pharaohs. The final Egyptian victory under Pharaoh Ramesses III was a Pyrrhic one. The war weakened the Egyptian economy to the point of bankruptcy, the empire was greatly diminished in size and by ca.1250 BC the Egyptian New Kingdom was finished.
𝕓 the Sea Peoples were atypical invaders, accompanying the fighting men was an entourage that included the families of the raiders and their livestock. The phenomena was a complete package, it’s objective included migration and the settlement of good farming lands…all of this added weight to the theory that the Sea Peoples were refugees in search of a permanent home
THE absence of cars in cities during the coronavirus lockdown has been a boon to cyclists, both for the recreational kind and for commuter cyclists. There has been an “unprecedented surge in popularity” of bicycle traffic—even in the land of the automobile, the United States—with many bike shops reporting a doubling of their average sales…such is the demand now that bike manufacturers can’t build them fast enough [‘Cycling ‘explosion’: coronavirus fuels surge in US bike ridership’, (Miranda Bryant), The Guardian, 13-May-2020, www.theguardian.com; ‘Australia is facing a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ as cycling booms, advocates say’, (David Mark), ABC News, 16-May-2020, www.abc.net.au].
Starley’s Rover (Source: sewalot.com)
The renewed present enthusiasm to take up bike-riding in response to the pandemic recalls earlier periods of “bike-mania”in the West—late 1860s to mid-1870s and the 1890s—as the humble bike was evolving into its modern form. Credit for the basic look of the standard, no-frills bicycle as we we think of it today is generally given to John Kemp Starley for his 1885 invention, the “Rover Safety Bicycle”. The Rover’s similar-sized wheels, chain drive attached to the crankshaft and rear wheel, diagonal frame and relative lightness (20kg) retains the basic design of the modern bicycle [‘Pedal Your Way Through the Bicycle’s Bumpy History’, [Evan Andrews), History, 30-Jun-2017, [www.history.com].
1889 Ladies Rover Safety Bike (Image: bicyclehistory.net)
The Rover was seen as a curiosity at first, but when two years later John Boyd Dunlop manufactured the pneumatic tyre, it was a game changer for the new bicycle. Starley’s prototype and all two-wheelers that followed now had a smoother, cushioned ride on the typically bumpy roads of the 19th century. Being lighter the new bike also went faster [‘How bicycles transformed our world’, (Roff Smith), National Geographic,17-Jun-2020, www.nationalgeographic.com].
Most folk are aware that before the modern bicycle there was the penny-farthing – also known as the high-wheeler or by the all-purpose term, the ‘ordinary’. The farthing, whose feasibility owes much to French mechanic Eugène Meyer’s innovation of the tension-spoked wheel, was popular through to the end of the 1880s but prone to accidents❉. The lineage of the modern bike however goes back still further – to the bulky, all-wood laufmaschine (“running machine”), invented by Karl von Drais in 1817 in western Germany. The laufmaschine⌧ was the first mode of transport to utilise the in-line, bi-wheel principle, but slim-lined and graceful it wasn’t! Bereft of pedals, brakes and chains, it was propelled by the rider pushing against the ground. The addition of pedals came with another German inventor, Philipp Moritz Fischer, and modified by a French blacksmith/ inventor, Pierre Michaux, both contributing to the development of the modern bicycle. The 1860s brought a variant on the velocipede known as the ‘boneshaker’ (aptly describing the experience for the rider). Nonetheless, with its stronger and malleable metal frames it sparked the first bicycle craze in France which then spread worldwide. By the 1870s the ordinary was state-of-the-art in bikes with its hollow steel tubular frames and forks, steel rims and solid rubber tyres. By now the bike epicentre had crossed the Channel to England and the new standard became the ‘Ariel’ model designed by James Starley of Coventry (uncle of John K Starley), who added centre pivot steering, tangent spokes and a mounting step [‘A Beautifully Illustrated History of Nearly Two Centuries of Bicycle Design and Technology’, (Tony Hadland & Hans-Erhard Lessing), Slate, 22-Jul-2014, www.slate.com; ‘From boneshakers to bicycles’, Britannica, www.britannica.com].
The Drais Laufmaschine, 1817
1890s, the world gone crazy for the bicycle
By the 1890s demand for the new safety bicycle saw mass production take off. The earlier “high rollers” were now past tense. Bikes were now practical and stable vehicles with gears and brakes, the earlier serpentine-shaped frame replaced by a diamond pattern. By the decade’s end most bicycles were only 11 to 16 kg in weight (Britannica). Another technological breakthrough making riding easier for the cyclist came in 1898 when Briton William Reilly invented the prototype for variable gears, a two-speed gear called “The Hub”. Columbus Bicycles in Hartford, Connecticut, could make a bicycle a minute due to the speed of its automated assembly line – a technological innovation later successfully copied by the automobile industry⟴. The transfer of technology from bicycles could be seen in various ways. Both Henry Ford and the Wright brothers started as bike mechanics before making the switch to the invention and production of other, more advanced forms of transport (Smith).
Instrument of freedom and independence
The bicycle gave the masses mobility, it no longer mattered that the less well-off couldn’t afford to travel by horse and carriage…bicycles were affordable, lightweight and easy to maintain. Ordinary folk suddenly were able to explore the countrysides, visit towns and places – far and near. Just about everyone, it seems, got into the act of riding bicycles – royalty and rulers in places like Russia, Zanzibar and Afghanistan took up cycling; First-wave feminists – Susan B Anthony declared that “bicycling emancipated women more than anything else”; women were especially enthusiastic as the activity allowed them to escape their voluminous and cumbersome Victorian skirts for more practical attire such as bloomers. When the lighter, less unwieldy safety bicycles came along, police in the UK were quick to adopt them in their work. Likewise, the NYC police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt mounted the city police on bikes to apprehend the new “public danger” of ‘scorchers’ (“speed demon” cyclists ) (Smith).
Source: Pinterest
The new craze for bicycles got the nod of approval from the US medical fraternity as well…advocated by doctors as “a boon to all mankind, a thing of beauty, good for the spirits, good for health and vitality” [David McCullough, The Wright Brothers: The Dramatic Story Behind the Legend, (2015)].
The conventional explanation for the demise of the bicycle boom is the rise of the commercially-viable automobile, but other factors may have contributed to the bicycle’s decline, such as the rapid growth of the early mass transit systems such as streetcars and trams which were a more practical alternative to bikes, especially in bad weather (Britannica).
1971 Tour de France (Source: Profimedia)
Endnote: in 2020 with the wholesale disruption to international sport due to COVID-19, the world’s premier event in the cycling calendar, the Tour de France was in a very select group of major sporting events given the green light to go ahead as normal, albeit delayed.
Columbia Bicycles, Connecticut (Source: etsy.com)
↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜
❉ the penny farthings were inherently unsafe hence the name applied to Starley’s improved-design bike, the Rover safety bicycle. Also appearing around this time were the tricycle and the unicycle
⌧ it also went by other names, draisienne and vélocipède, and by the derogatory name, “dandy horse”
⟴ Columbia Bicycles got into the business in the 1870s when its proprietor and bike enthusiast Albert A Pope starting importing Excelsoir Duplex ordinaries from England, the manufacturer also formed the League of American Wheelmen to advocate for better roads in American for bicycling – the “Good Road Movement” of the 1890s [‘Albert Augustus Pope’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
A quieter side of Moscow to visit—a diversion away from the tourist central of St Basil’s, GUM and the Kremlin¹—can be found at the Russian State Library (RSL) in Vozdvizhenka Street in the Arbat neighbourhood. Moskva’s huge public library (founded 1862) back in the USSR days was called with Soviet originality the VI Lenin Library (with the nickname the ‘Leninka’ or the ‘Leninski’). The library’s facade has the standard CCCP look, monolithic and imposing.
(Photo: rsl.ru)
Modern security, antiquated catalogue
Once inside the entrance we are faced with a surprising level of security…a security cordon more in keeping with Fort Knox or at the very least a central bank, rather than a library – electronic gates and guards in police-type flak jackets. The way the culturally-proud Moscovites look at, it is a house of treasures that can’t be valued in roubles! The Guinness Book of Records ranks RSL as the largest in Europe and the second-largest library in the world behind the Library of Congress, Washington DC². RSL holds upward of 30 million book items (books, magazines, periodicals and other publications (a smaller but very significant number are in other than the Russian language)³.
(Photo: Pinterest)
But everything is big in RSL, collections of rare, historic maps, musical scores, art folios, etc, 36 separate reading rooms, the card catalogue system. Card catalogues? Yes RSL is holding 21st century technology at bay by clinging to row upon row of wooden card catalogue cabinets (Gen Ys and Millennials must puzzle over this furniture from Mars?)…some may scoff at the retention of the “old school” system but I found it quaint, a nostalgic throwback to less sophisticated methodology (although it should be added that the library maintains a digital catalogue system as well).
RSL is part library, part book and document museum. The 160 thousand item-strong maps collection is a cartographer’s “wet dream”, rare historic maps dating back to the 16th century. Rare books, early printed editions, are RSL’s forte, including manuscripts of ancient Slavonic codices.
RSL’s Ottoman collection (Photo: TRT World)
As Russia’s national library–a status comparable to the Library of Congress–RSL has a special role as the nation’s book depository (the recipient of legal deposit copies of all publications in Russia). No cost to enter RSL but tourists have to get a visitor’s badge at the entry gate, cameras and photography inside the library are “no-nos”.
‘Russian State Library’ publication
_____________________________
¹ actually not far at all from the Kremlin walls, but out of sight and earshot of the throng of tourist queues
²measured by catalogue size (number of items)
³ all holdings and collections in the library amount to over 47 million items
In 1953, two years after George Whitman resurrected Sylvia Beach’s famed Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the bookshop that was to become its trans-Atlantic soul mate, City Lights, opened its doors in the North Beach area of San Francisco🄰.
(Photo: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
Two landmark ‘indie’ bookshops
The story of Shakespeare and Company’s evolution into an legendary bookshop has been sketched in a previous blog piece: ‘Hanging Out at Shakespeare and Company’, 21-July-2021. On the other side of the Atlantic another distinctive stand-alone bookshop was staking it’s undeniable claim for iconic status in the world of independent booksellers.
A literary community
Lawrence Ferlinghetti envisaged City Lights as “a literary meeting place”—just like Whitman and Shakespeare and Company—a haven for aspiring writers to hangout and find creativity. A poet himself, Ferlinghetti attracted an emerging group of fiction writers and poets that coalesced into the “Best Generation”, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso. The Beat writers and poets found themselves a comfortable niche hanging out together in the basement reading room of City Lights.
(Image: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
Not only that, Ferlinghetti was proactive in his support for the Beats’ budding careers by starting a publishing arm at City Lights, bringing to the public collections of poetry, offbeat and radical books ignored by the mainstream press. Ferlinghetti’s disavowal of the commercial mainstream saw him promote alternative newspapers and magazines as well (‘Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights bookshop, dies aged 101’, Sian Cain, The Guardian, 23-Feb-2021, www.theguardian.com).
(Image: citylights.com)
Maverick bookseller
City Lights was always an innovator in the bookselling biz. It arose with the onset of the paperback revolution, a wave that the San Fran bookshop happily rode. Hard covers were expensive so City Lights became the first all-paperback bookshop in the US (co-founder Paul Martin’s idea). The bookstore bucked the bookselling status quo – before City Lights came along readers could only buy paperbacks from drugstores, bus stations and newsstands (‘The Beat Generation in San Francisco’, Bill Morgan, www.citylights.com). Ferlinghetti’s store was a democratising force in US bookselling, City Lights’ paperbacks were cheap, all budgets could afford their quality pocket books. City Lights’ innovativeness extended to opening hours. Unlike the bulk of mainstream American bookshops who usually closed early in the Fifties, City Lights stayed open seven days a week and late into the night.
🔺 the ’emperor of City Lights
Bookshop outreach
The bookshop extended outreach activities to the local community. The store maintained a community bulletin board, disseminating info for the North Beach literary set, thus helping to foster the local counterculture community. Ferlinghetti also furnished the City Lights store with letter racks for itinerants who frequented the triangular storefront to collect their mail.
The ‘Howl’ episode
In 1956 Ferlinghetti published and distributed a poem by an unknown Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Police in an undercover sting operation confiscated Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’🄱 collection and arrested Ferlinghetti who was charged with selling “obscene material and corrupting America’s youth”. The subsequent trial became a cause celeb in the industry. The judge found that the publication had “redeeming social significance” and therefore was not obscene🄲. The trial publicity was great for Ginsberg’s poetry and for City Lights. ‘Howl’ became an underground best-seller and a symbol of both the counterculture and the Beat Generation🄳 (Morgan).
🔺 Ferlinghetti outside City Lights, 1950s
Politicalpoetics
The character of City Lights reflected Ferlinghetti’s own political and social activism. The “philosophical anarchist” was a bulwark for left causes, eg, using the bookshop venue to host many sit-ins and protests against the Vietnam War (“books, not bombs”). Ferlinghetti believed that poetry was a social force capable of raising the consciousness of the people.
Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg (Source: SFist)
Precarious business model?
Profitability was not City Lights’ raison d’être. Staying out of “the red” was a constant challenge. To stay afloat sometimes the publishing side needed to bail out the retail sales which was losing money and at other times it was vice versa (Cain). What didn’t help matters financial were the activities of shoplifting gangs in the Seventies which targeted the bookshop. And if it wasn’t them it was insiders like poet Gregory Corso helping himself liberally to the till (Morgan).
Whitman & Ferlinghetti (seated) in 2002 (Photo: Mary Duncan/Paris Writers Press)
Footnote: the extent to which Shakespeare and Co and City Lights can be called sister bookshops comes down largely to the personal visions of their founders Whitman and Ferlinghetti🄴 who were both lifelong book tragics🄵, “(sharing a) love of literature and poetry (and a) devotion and commitment to the power of words” (‘The Beats go on…’, Alix Sharkey, The Guardian, 02-Mar-2002, www.theguardian.com). For Whitman and Ferlinghetti however, the bookshop was more than a receptacle for selling books, it filled the roles of haven and incubator in nurturing new writers as well as a hub for the local literary community. Sister bookstores they may be but they are clearly not identical twins when it comes to the interiors and decors of the two bookshops…City Lights’ book displays are neatly-ordered and arranged whereas Shakespeare and Co is clutter central to the max!
City Lights (Photo: Literary Hub)
𓂉𓂊𓂉
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti, poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights. The New York born, Paris educated, bookseller and publisher, died on 22nd February 2021, aged 101.
⊞⊟⊠⊡⊞⊟⊠⊡
🄰 City Lights’ address, 261-271 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco 94133, places it technically within Chinatown but the store identifies with the adjoining precinct of North Beach
🄱 ‘Howl’, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’ was a thunderbolt against the conservative poetry establishment of Fifties America, the prototype for a new poetry which immersed itself in “wide-eyed truth-telling”
🄲 the basis of the acquittal was a precedent called on in later attempts to overturn bans on works like Tropic of Capricorn and Naked Lunch
🄳 although often associated with them, City Light’s publishing arm never confined itself to the beat writers, it also publishes the work of non-Beat luminaries like Charles Bukowski, Sam Shepard and Malcolm Lowry
🄴 strictly speaking Ferlinghetti wasn’t the founder of City Lights, that was sociology academic Paul D Martin but Ferlinghetti got into the business on the ground floor in 1953 and took sole charge of the bookshop within two years after Martin left
🄵 Whitman literally slept in a room in the store overflowing with books
Beach on the SeineA must-visit in Paris for the literary and artistic set or even the mildly book-curious is the iconic “Shakespeare and Company” bookstore situated near the Latin Quarter and across from Notre Dame. It’s address is 37 rue de la Bûcherie 75005, V, but it wasn’t always there. Shakespeare & Co founder, American expat Sylvia Beach, started the legendary Left Bank bookshop at 8 rue Dupuytren in 1919. Within three years Beach moved the shop to the 6th Arrondissement at 12 rue de l’Odéan, across the street from La Masion des Amis des Livres owned by Beach’s future ‘bestie’ and amour Adrienne Monnier. This bookshop was the template Beach used for her own serious literature bookshop-cum-lending library.
𐅉 Ulysses – Joyce and Beach at Shakespeare & Co
Beach’s lifeline for Joyce’s untouchable manuscript
Beach is probably best remembered for giving James Joyce his big breakthrough in the literary world, publishing Ulysses in
1922 when nobody else would touch it…the abstruse, controversial novel went on to become a masterpiece of modern literature. Over time Shakespeare and Company acquired a more lasting fame as the hub of Anglo-American literary culture and modernism in Paris. Aspiring British, Irish and American writers, prompted by a post-WWI favourable pound and dollar exchange rate against the French franc, flocked to the creative milieu of Paris where they discovered the unique appeal of Beach’s Anglophone bookshop🄱 (The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kevin Birmingham, 2014).
𐅉 Hemingway & Fitzgerald (www.pinterest.fr)
“The Lost Generation”
In the interwar years Beach’s bookshop became a haven for the Anglophone literati…habitués included the likes of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, and the “Lost Generation” of American intellectuals, modernist writers and artists including Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Ford Maddox Ford, Man Ray, etc. Hemingway and other illustrious names belonged to the store’s lending library, borrowing books when they couldn’t afford to buy them. At the same time French intellectual writers such as Gidé and de Beauvoir also benefitted from Sylvia’s efforts to get their work better known in the US. The bookseller also gave crucialassistance to various avant-garde ‘little magazines’in getting their publicationsoff the ground by distributing their editions (Shakespeare and Co: The world’s most famous bookshop at 100‘, Cath Pound, BBC, 19-Nov-2019, www.bbc.com).
𐅉 a young George Whitman
Shakespeare and Company redux
In 1941 with occupied Paris under the Nazi swastika, the shop was closed down and Beach interned for a period after Sylvia refused to sell the last copy of Finnegan’s Wake to a German officer. The closure was permanent but the phoenix of Beach’s bookstore did rise again, reinvented by another American expat a decade later. In 1951 WWII veteran George Whitman opened a new, independent English-language bookshop – effectively “Shakespeare and Company Mach II“, though originally called Le Mistral. Later Sylvia Beach apparently anointed Whitman’s bookshop as the true and worthy successor to her original Shakespeare and Company (after Beach’s death in 1962 Whitman renamed the bookshop “Shakespeare and Company”) (‘Bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Paris’, by Els, www.flickr.com).
(Source: another mag.com)
“The Beat Generation”
Within a short time Whitman’s Mistral bookshop was fulfilling the same service to Paris-based Bohemians as Beach’s had for the Lost Generation of writers. Le Mistral, the second coming of “Shakespeare and Co”, became a mecca for a new literary generation in the Fifties, the ’Beat’ Generation and its writers including Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs and Greg Corso. Other English-language expats to frequent the bookshop at this time include Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell and Ray Bradbury (‘Shakespeare and a Company (Bookshop), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).
𐅉 Quote from medieval Persian poet Hafiz of Shiraz
Tumbleweed Hotel‘s quirky tariff
George Whitman maintained Sylvia Beach’s tradition of putting aspiring young writers up for the night (or several nights)…in return for a very basic cot or even a bench, the guests were required to work in the store, read a book and write a one-page autobiography🄲 (‘A Brief History of Shakespeare and Company, Paris’ Legendary Bookstore’, Alex Ledsom, Culture Trip, 26-Feb-2018, www.theculturetrip.com.
𐅉 Sylvia Whitman (Photo: nicethingspalomas.com)
Generation-and-a-half change
George Whitman died in 2011 at 98…the last 10 years of his life was a struggle of wills as the increasingly wildly eccentric George sought to push back against the attempts of his daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman🄳 to modernise the bookshop🄴. Since becoming sole proprietor, Sylvia has moved Shakespeare and Company forward with the times—web-based online transactions, modern accounting practices, the addition of a café, etc—but she still runs a lending library and a second-hand book section, hosts book launches and regular author readings by Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, etc in the shop (‘In a bookstore in Paris’, Bruce Handy, Vanity Fair, 21-Oct-2014, www.vanityfair.com).
(Photo: www.minute.net)
📚📚📚
Some takes by visitors on the physical layout of Whitman’s bookshop:
° “a Tardis – modest enough on the outside, a labyrinth on the inside” ~ Jeanette Winterson
° “Shakespeare and Company has the rambling lucidity of an unkempt boudoir” ~ Penny Watson, ‘A tale of two bookshops’ [SMH, Dec 1-2, 2007]
° “a literary octopus with an insatiable appetite for print, taking over the beat-up building … room by room, floor by floor, a veritable nest of books” ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti
📚📚📚
𐅉 Sylvia Beach (Source: ricorso.net)
Footnote: for the literary expatriates who frequented Shakespeare and Company, the bookshop served a number of purposes. It functioned as a sort of support network club where the expat writers could meet other members, could draw inspiration from its environs, they could read a wide range of quality literature including books banned in the US and UK, and they could write in its rooms🄵.The bookshop was a “sanctuary for progressive writers and a hub for innovative publishing” (Pound). Some of the expat artists and writers even used Beach’s bookshop as their postal box for receiving mail in Paris (Birmingham).
▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫
🄰 Joyce ‘repaid’ Beach by later defecting to a new publisher at a time the bookseller was in a financial jam
🄱 Beach couldn’t however replicate the triumph of getting Ulysses into print with DH Lawrence’s controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover
🄲 the senior Whitman described these blow-in visitors as ’Tumbleweeds’, estimated to number around 30,000 since 1951
🄳 named in honour of the original Sylvia Beach
🄴 George was resistant to changing even one iota of the seemingly chaotic structure of the shop; he didn’t believe in phones or credit cards or computers (Handy)
🄵 Whitman gave the store’s rooms whimsical names like “Old Smoky Reading Room” and “Blue Oyster Tearoom”
In his semi-autobiographical, Australian novel Kangaroo, DH Lawrence’s protagonist Richard Somers remarks that he’ll “probably repent bitterly going to America”. This echoes Lawrence’s own equivocation about America. In correspondence, Lawrence thought America “the land of his future” but this was tempered by a pessimism that the United States would be ‘barbaric’ and he would hate it⌖ (Letters IV:141, 151, ‘Manuscripts and Special Collections’, D. H. Lawrence Research – The University of Nottingham, www.nottingham.ac.uk).
The call of Pueblo lifestyle
In the end what clinched it for Lawrence was an invite from New York art patron Mabel Dodge Sterne to visit Taos, New Mexico. The promise of Taos captured DHL’s imagination…remote (7,000 feet-high, 23 miles from the nearest railway), 600 free Indians unspoilt by western capitalism and modernity, “sun-worshippers and rain makers” (D. H. Lawrence and the American Indians’, Jeffery Meyers, Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol 56, Issue 2, Spring 2017, www.quod.lib.umich.edu).
DHL was enchanted with the idea of the primitive lifestyle of native Americans, their spiritual faith and traditional connexion with the earth.
Taos Pueblo (Source: http://ahistoryofthepresentananthology.blogspot.com/)
Lawrence envisaged that this could be the utopian community, the free and open, instinctive society, ‘Rananim’, that he had been trekking around the world trying to find. Mabel also lured Bert to Taos with the prospect of dazzlingly spectacular scenery.
Mabel Dodge (Luhan) & her Amerindian husband (Photo: Santa Fe New Mexican)
In search of healthy air
DHL had another motive for choosing New Mexico, being potentially beneficial to his precarious health. His tubercular condition was not diminishing at allq. The climate in Taos—high and dry with famously good and clean air— was one that might bring about a cure for his infected lungs (‘Looking for Lawrence’, Henry Shukman, New Mexico Magazine, (nd),www.newmexico.org).
Desert Rananim?
As his letters show, Lawrence was in love with the desert landscape of New Mexico to an intoxicating degree – overwhelmed by the strangeness and beauty of the place, even a bit awestruck and fearful. When the writer visited the wilderness of Western Australia earlier, he experienced similar vibes from the bush environment (‘Looking for Lawrence’).
DHL waxed lyrical on the experience later, ” I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever …. the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend”: he wrote how the person who lives there “above the great proud world of desert will know, almost unbearably how beautiful it is, how clear and unquestioned is the might of the day” (‘Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers is D. H. Lawrence’, (2017)).
At Taos Lawrence found himself the unwilling object of a love triangle with host Mabel vying with wife Frieda for his attention, which stiffled his creativity somewhat. He did however manage to finish the final chapter of Kangaroo during his initial sojourn in Taos.
The Lawrence Ranch
Ranch life in the high country
Lawrence returned to England in 1923 keen on recruiting members of the British artistic fraternity for his New Mexico ‘Rananim’. He returned the next year but with only the one recruit, artist Dorothy Brett☼, whose presence added a further tension to the feminine rivalries at Taos. This led to Mabel giving the Lawrences their own ranch way up in the mountains (8,600 feet above sea-level) and about 20 miles from Taos—the only property the couple would ever own—the Kiowa Ranch (now the D.H. Lawrence Ranch)✪. When not beavering away on new manuscript projects, Bert kept busy at the ranch chopping wood and constructing log cabins, as well as taking hikes in the mountains.
(Photo: www.taos.org)
Ambivalence towards Amerindian culture
Once Bert got to see Amerindian religious ritual and customs up close, much of his pre-visit enthusiasm dissipated (“not impressive as a spectacle”, he noted). He still admired the “Red Indian” but felt the native American culture had been debased by American ‘progress’ and modernity, reduced in Taos to that of a tourism attraction (essay ‘New Mexico’, (1928); ‘D.H. Lawrence and the American Indiana’s, Jeffery Meyers, Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol 56 Issue 2, Spring 2017, www.quod.lib.umich.edu).
⇪ ‘St Mawr’ set partly in New Mexico mountains juxtaposes the vitality of nature with modern degenerate civilisation
Lorenzo’s literary output in the Southwest
DH Lawrence visited Taos, NM, three times during the period 1922-25 but only for a total of 11 months altogether. ‘Lorenzo’, as his patron and admirer Mabel Dodge fondly called him, never fulfilled the fervent hopes of Mabel by writing the great novel of the Southwest or even of New Mexico…but he did manage to produce a solid body of work while residing in NM including the novellas St Mawr and The Woman Who Rode Away, the travel book Mornings in Mexico, as well as writing part of the novel The Plumed Serpent at the ranch (after research conducted in Mexico).
Lawrence’s TB condition worsened in Europe and the novelist died in 1930 in the south of France, still proclaiming to friends a heartfelt desire to return to his beloved Taos. Frieda, who returned to live in Taos, afterwards had her late husband’s remains exhumed and shipped back to be interred on Taos soil.
Kandy, 1925 (Photo:www.lankapura.com)
End-note: Lawrence in the tropics
Lawrence’s global search for an alternative to modern, industrialised ‘civilisation’ landed him in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) on route to America. Lawrence’s anticipation of a good time in Ceylon was dealt a harsh blow by reality. The Lawrences stayed on the edge of the forest in Kandy, their attempts to sleep plagued by unbearable heat—”the terrific sun … like a bell-jar of heat, like a prison over you”, and the local fauna —“horrid noises of the birds and creatures … hammer and clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day” (Letters IV: 214, 227 Notts U). The one bright spot was the Raj Pera-Hera festival which DHL enjoyed, inspiring him to write a poem, ‘Elephant’, the sole literary fruit of his five weeks in Ceylon.
Huxley & Lawrence in Taos
⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑⁌⁍⋐⋑
⌖ San Francisco, the Lawrences’ entry point to the US, Bert, pernickety as ever, found less than prepossessing – “noisy and expensive”
☼although writer Aldous Huxley did visit Lawrence in NM
✪ in return the Lawrences gave Dodge the MS for Sons and Lovers, which proved to be far more valuable than the ranch
Next year marks the centenary of the visit of acclaimed writer DH Lawrence to the Antipodes … the author of Sons and Lovers and Women in Love spent some 99 days on the southern continent travelling from its west to its east coast and writing the bulk of his great Australia novel, Kangaroo. The 1922 visit by the English novelist and poet has attracted new interest both within Australian literary circles and the general public over the past couple of decades. The tortuous saga of the vicissitudes of Lawrence and his wife Frieda’s house in Thirroul, NSW, after the Lawrences departed Australia, has been canvassed elsewhere on this blog site – “Lawrence of Thirroul: Creating Kangaroo at ‘Wyewurk’”, November 10, 2014.
DHL at Taos (Source: New Mexico Magazine)
Lawrence”s Weltanschauung (World view and moral vision)
Lawrence’s unquenchable wanderlust emerged from a disavowal of the dehumanising and degenerating effects of modernity and industrialisation. To his moral eye, people’s natural feelings including sexuality had been “dulled by the mechanical routine of ‘civilisation'”, making their responses coldly cerebral, not warmly instinctive and spontaneous. Lawrence’s answer to the dilemma was for society to embrace the anima (vital energy or spirit force) to be found in primitive cultures (eg, among the ancient Etruscans)…only by doing this would modern civilisation achieve the necessary revitalisation (‘D.H. Lawrence World Literature Analysis’, upd.05-May-2015, www.enotes.com). Later after the Australasian leg, DHL believed he had discovered in Taos, New Mexico, the utopian place he had been searching for (“a new part of the soul woke up suddenly and the old world gave way to a new”)⌖.
⏏ ‘Women in Love’, set against the modern industrial Britain so loathed by Lawrence
Travels with DHL
DH Lawrence’s arrival in Australia was a stage in the writer’s global quest to find a new world in tune with his sensibilities. Dissatisfaction with his homeland had prompted voluntary exile from the industrialised rat race of Britain and launched Lawrence on a country to country “savage pilgrimage” across the world.
Coming to the southern continent, DHL’s hope was that Australia, free from the old society’s ills, would deliver the ‘nirvana’ he was seeking (a utopian construct he called ‘Rananim’) (D.H.Lawrence’s Australian Experiment’, Susan Lever, Inside Story, 21-Oct-2015, www.insidestory.org.au).
Deep dissolution down under
As the text of Kangaroo reveals, these hopes were swiftly extinguished during the sojourn in Australia. Taking an instant dislike to urban Sydney Lawrence swiftly escaped to the south coast town of Thirroul. Though the beauty and awe of the Australian bush and landscape (its “spirit of place”) left a deep impression on him, Lawrence found disfavour in what he took to be the Australian character. What galled Lawrence was the “profound Australian indifference” … “hollow, modern people, living in a society so democratic that it denied all superiority and depth of intellect and feeling”… “exemplifying the degenerative nature of industrial society” that DHL abhorred (David Game, DH Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire, 2015).
DH Lawrence, technophobe
Australians’ material modern-ness irked Lawrence, their slavish craving to be up-to-date with the most modern conveniences, be it electric lights, tramways or whatever (‘The beard of the prophet’, Tom Fitzgerald, Inside Story, 30-Oct-2018, www.insidestory.org.au). Australians, Lawrence/Somers opined, were too materialistic, too outward-looking, to the exclusion of their inner lives…”like so many mechanical animals” (“‘Harmless Eden”: Revisiting D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo“, Julian Hanna, 3:am Magazine, 28-Oct-2014, www.3ammagazine.com).
In Kangaroo, Richard Lovat Somers’ dalliance with the right wing paramilitary Diggers movement serves as a warning of the coming peril of fascism. But Somers is equally distrustful of democracy in modern, industrial society⧆ and is also alienated from socialist sentiments he encounters – embodied in the character Willie Struthers※. Typically contrarian (and at times contradictory) in his views, DHL was notorious for being what one journalist called “something of a world champion in hypercritical, hard-to-please invective (Fitzgerald)֎.
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)
Lawrence in New Zealand, hit and run
The Lawrences left Sydney in August 1922 , sailing “four days to New Zealand over a cold, dark and inhospitable sea”. A minor run-in with an immigration official upon arrival in Wellington prompted in Bert an instant negative reaction to New Zealand. Spending just one day in “cold and stormy Wellington” and seeing very little of the place♤, the couple left abruptly for San Francisco via Rarotonga and Tahiti (also not to DHL’s taste, Papeete: “dead, dull, modern”). Lawrence’s parting shot at NZ/Aeotoroa (based on a single day’s stay in the capital city) was that he had no desire “to stay in a cold, snobbish middle-class colony of pretentious nobodies” (‘Katherine Mansfield: DH Lawrence’s “Lost Girl”. A Literary Discovery’, Sandra Jobson Darroch, Rananim, 2009, www.dhlawrencesocietyaustralia.com.au).
♠ ♠ ♠
A note on place names in ‘Kangaroo’
Lawrence freely identifiesthe various places the Somers come across on their travels—Manly, St Columb (Collaroy), Narrabeen, the Quay, North Sydney, Murdoch Street (Cremorne), Mosman Bay, Como, Bulli, etc—but he alters the names of where the couple live…Thirroul becomes ‘Mullumbimby’ and their beach-cliff bungalow on the Illawarra coast, Wyewurk , is renamed ‘Coo-ee‘ in the novel.
The Lawrences’ mini-Odyssey in Sydney through the lens of ‘Kangaroo’
In DHL’s Roman à clef Australian novel, Richard and Harriet Somers re-trace Bert and Frieda’s perambulations from the city to the Northern Beaches on their first full day in Sydney, before the escape to Thirroul .
Royal Botanic Garden
”A bunch of workmen were lying on the grass beside Macquarie Street … they had that air of owning the city that belongs to a good Australian”❧
Circular Quay ferry across the harbour
“The harbour … was an extraordinary place … like a lake among the land, so pale blue and heavenly, with its hidden and half-hidden lobes intruding among the low, dark brown cliffs”
⏏ The Corso
The Corso, Manly
“You land on the wharf and walk up the street , like a bit of Margate with seaside shops and restaurants … at the end … is the wide Pacific rolling in on the yellow sand”
⏏ Lagoon at Narrabeen (Source: DH Lawrence Society Aust.)
Narrabeen Lagoon, beach
”They seemed to run to leg … three boys, one a lad of fifteen or so, came out of the warm lagoon in their bathing suits, to roll in the sand and play … extraordinary like real young animals, mindless as opossums”
Footnote: what ultimately comes through in the pages of Kangaroo is an ambivalence about Australia. In the final chapter added when living in New Mexico, Lawrence talks about loving Australia but at the same time needing to rail against it. There’s a constant struggle in Somers’ mind, a tension between his love of the place (the bush)⌧ which is “in his marrow”, and the suffocating apathy of the people surrounding him.
▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫
⌖ Taos’ native pueblos, the “earth-centred culture”, Lawrence’s new ‘elemental’ civilisation, the wellspring of regenerative potential for contemporary civilisation (‘Looking for Lawrence’, Henry Shukman, New Mexico Magazine, (nd), www. newmexico.org)
※ possibly modelled on Australian communist agitator and unionist Jock Garden (Robert Darroch, Rananim, Dec 1999)
⧆ “a self-convinced opponent of the levelling-off effects of democracy“ (John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider 2005)
֎ DHL’s hyper-critical reflex was seemingly boundless – California on first impression was summarily dismissed as “a queer place…turning its back on the world (looking) into the Pacific void …absolutely selfish, very empty” (DH Lawrence, 1923 letter)
♤ the experience was mutual, Lawrence’s fleeting stopover in the “Land of the Long White Cloud” went unnoticed by the New Zealand press or public
❧ the overt egalitarian ‘mateship’ of workers in Australia was a trait that certainly got stuck in Lawrence’s craw
⌧ love, that is, mingled with a sense of dread of the bush both in Western Australia and the “bush-covered dark tor” of the Illawarra escarpment
Pyrmont on the edge of Sydney’s CBD is one of those inner-city suburbs which has undergone the dramatic effects of intensive urban renewal since the turn of this century – the traditional industries such as sugar refining, brewing, ship and boat-building, the old working class pubs, the modest workers” cottages have all given way to media and IT firms and high-rise apartments. One of the relatively few industry survivors in Pyrmont is the Sydney Fish Market on Blackwattle Bay.
Fish Market, Woolloomooloo (Photo: State Lib of NSW)
Rudimentary beginnings at Woolloomooloo
The city’s fish market has been a local Pyrmont landmark, a continuing presence since 1966, but the city fish market’s history extends back much further than that. It was originally located on the corner of Bourke and Plunkett Streets, Woolloomooloo, on the eastern fringe of the CBD…the selling of fish here in a methodical fashion of sorts commenced in 1871 (some references give the year as 1872).
Eastern Markets, Wolloomooloo: an absence of tables (Photo: SFM)
These Woolloomooloo “Eastern Markets”, according to newspaper reports of the time, show that it was much maligned for its deficiencies. The litany of complaints included its position, deemed far from central; the “barbarous nature of internal arrangements”, ie, the unsanitary practice of laying fish for sale on the uncovered market floor; logistics and transportation shortcomings, ‘transhipment’ was inordinately lengthy: hauls were transferred from catcher to small steamer to large steamer, dumped on the wharf at Botany port until carted to the market by wagon❈ and subjected to pilfering and deterioration on route; the whole process necessitating “maximum amount of handling (of) a peculiarly delicate commodity which suffered from unnecessary pulling and hauling” [‘City of Sydney Improvements’, Evening News (Sydney), 21-Nov-1891].
A developing fish market rivalry
With dissatisfaction with the Woolloomooloo markets palpable, a second fish market was established at Redfern in 1891 which came to be known as the “Southern Fish Markets”. The Redfern enterprise was a clear improvement on Woolloomooloo which had come came under the control of the City of Sydney Council circa 1907-1908. Redfern was conveniently situated adjacent to the railway station. Rail-transporting the fish eliminated the need to load and reload the goods several times, the process was more timely so the fish arrived fresher and in “marketable condition” (plus it meant lower freight charges by rail). Other advantages were new features like cool storage chambers and dedicated rooms for “smoke curing”. Redfern also had the bonus of being elevated, necessary to facilitate the draining of the seafood. Most crucially Redfern was a step up on hygienic fish presentation, placing them not on the floor but in specially constructed tables (around this time Darling Harbour was also mooted as a alternate venue for the fish markets but was considered not as good a site as Redfern)(‘Evening News’).
(Image: Dictionary of Sydney)
Redfern residents however were not enamoured of the fish market in their suburb, as a result of the uninvited 4am “wake-up calls” each morning: the approaching “rumble of fish carts and the vulgar ejaculations and rude raillery of the hawkers” [‘1872 First Sydney Fish Market’,
Australian Food Timeline, www.australianfoodtimeline.com.au].
Fish market built in Haymarket, 1910 (Source: City of Sydney Archives)
Council market v private market
Sydney Lord Mayor, Alderman Taylor, in 1909 advocated relocation from Woolloomooloo to the Belmore Fruit and Vegetable Markets (where Capitol Theatre is situated today) [‘Sydney Fish Market. its Early History’, by Mary Salmon, Evening News, 02-Jul-1909]. This subsequently came to nought, instead in 1910 a new fish market was built a short distance from there at Quay Street, Thomas Street and Thomas Lane, Haymarket (today housing the Prince Centre), and run by the City Council Fish Market in direct competition with the privately-run Redfern operation.
Woolloomooloo continued for a time after Haymarket got going but in a much reduced form with some confusion about its status, as a contemporary article in the Sydney Sun pointed out, the Woolloomooloo manager in 1915, rejecting its description as a fish market, in a piece of double-speak referred to it as a “distribution centre”, adding that it was “merely a market incidentally. If there is any surplus of fish for sale it will be sold” [‘Not a Fish Market: Woolloomooloo Depot”, The Sun, 28-May-1922. In 1926 high profile businessman John Wren purchased the “old Fish Markets” premises at Woolloomooloo (Daily Telegraph, 04-Dec-1926) which was demolished in the 1960s, making way for the Astor Apartments.
Squeezing out the private market
The Council was determined to end the fish market rivalry with Redfern. The state government did its part to assist by refusing to renew the licenses of fish agents at the Southern Markets. Despite a view that the Quay Street fish market was not a paying concern (it was claimed that it handled only 20% of the consigned fish coming to Sydney), a bill was passed in state parliament in 1922 which allowed the City Council Market to acquire the assets of the Redfern fish exchange, which forced its closure the following year [‘Fish Fight: Council v. Redfern Markets’, The Sun, 03-May-1922. Woolloomooloo continued for a time but in a much reduced form with some confusion about its status, as a contemporary article in the Sydney Sun pointed out, the Woolloomooloo manager in 1915, rejecting its description as a fish market, in a piece of double-speak referred to it as a “distribution centre”, adding that it was “merely a market incidentally. If there is any surplus of fish for sale it will be sold” [‘Not a Fish Market: Woolloomooloo Depot”, The Sun, 28-May-1922].
FMA fish monopoly
The Haymarket fish market continued as the sole conduit for fish trading in Sydney until 1945 when their monopoly was expanded…the government transfered the marketing and selling of fish to the NSW Chief Secretary’s Department (hitherto unlicensed operators could sell fish outside of Sydney) which established a regulated and centralised market for the entire state. The central fish market’s control was consolidated in 1964 with the creation of the Fish Marketing Authority, a NSW statutory authority under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture¶ (‘Market History’, Sydney Fish Market, www.sydneyfishmarket.com.au]. The FMA’s role was to bring the seller’s fish and the buyer together, charging a percentage fee for this service.
(Photo: sydneyfishmarkets.com.au)
“Next up, same boat mullet!”
Relocated to Pyrmont in 1966, the fish market management employed a ‘voice’ auction system, buyers would position themselves around the selling bay and as the auctioneer’s called each lot’s sale, they would verbally bid. Disputes among buyers were not uncommon given the din of noise present and with such a capricious arrangement.
Dutch auction system (Photo: flowercompanies.com)
Dutch flower market auction
In 1989 the FMA introduced a computerised Dutch auction system used in Amsterdam to sell tulips, replacing the old manual system. It works by setting the start price approximately $3 higher than the anticipated selling price and then lowering it until a registered bidder electronically lodges a bid [‘Sydney Fish Market’, www.pyrmonthistorygroup.net.au]. This innovation has made the auction process more efficient and quicker.
Privatisation and de-regulation
The state-run markets were privatised in 1994 and renamed Sydney Fish Market P/L. In 1999 full de-regulation meant catchers in NSW could now sell directly to any buyer with a Fish Receiver’s Permit, bringing to an end the Pyrmont market’s long monopoly over the sale of seafood in Sydney (private ownership of the market made the continuation of monopoly untenable) (‘SFM’).
The SFM at Pyrmont in 2021 is the largest seafood market in the Southern Hemisphere and one of the biggest in the world. Every hour of it’s commercial operation about 1,000 crates or 20,000 km of seafood gets sold (‘SFM’).
End-note: An intriguing sidelight to the operation of the fish market at Pyrmont during the 1980s (and I suspect before then as well) was the existence of a black market. As well as bona fide fish buyers, other individuals would frequent the daily markets with a view to unloading ‘hot’ merchandise or goods of a distinctly un-piscine nature for a ‘special’ price. Such shady transactions would often occur concurrently and even alongside the auction bay itself. It was that sort of place which drew all sorts of dodgy characters looking to make a quick buck, no questions asked.
Postscript: Future plans
(Image: The Bays Precinct Sydney)
The fish markets are moving again but this time staying on Blackwattle Bay, the new site will be 15,500 sq m in size, more than two-and-half times the present market, with a scheduled finish date of 2024. The new SFM promises to make the auction area more visible and accessible (off-limits to the public since the change to the computerised system).
↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬↬
❈ a long six mile-plus haul to Woolloomooloo
¶ the FMA took over the marketing of fish outside Sydney which had prior to 1964 been the purview of individual fishermen’s co-operatives in coastal regions
About one kilometre north of Shanghai’s famous riverside Bund, at No. 10 Shajing Road, Hongkou District, is a most unusual building. Grey, monolithic and coldly forbidding in countenance, it is known today as Shanghai 1933 (上海1933老场坊) or “Old Millfun”…here in Shanghai’s former “International Settlement” is what was once “Slaughterhouse No. 1”, the Far East’s largest slaughterhouse.
(Source: Flickr)
The 31,700 sq m circular roof landmark building has been described as an “eerie Gotham-Deco achievement in concrete, glass and steel” (Atlas Obscura). In 2021 it is home to a fashionable collection of boutique shops, offices, restaurants and cafes, and an event venue, though for some wary locals the reputation of its past convinces them it is haunted by bad spirits (‘1933: The Slaughterhouse of Shanghai’, Monica Luau, Culture Trip, 05-Dec-2017, www.theculturetrip.com).
Architecture
The slaughterhouse was designed in the Art Deco style with Beaux-Arts and Bauhaus influences. This was a marked departure from hitherto abattoir designs which had studiously avoided any suggestion of decoration or aesthetics (‘From slaughter to laughter: the renovation of a slaughterhouse in Shanghai by IPPR’, Austin Williams, Architectural Review, 22-Oct-2018, www.architectural-review.com; ‘A Brief History of Shanghai’s Old Slaughterhouse 1933’, Emily Wetzki, that’s Shanghai, 03-Jul-2014, www.thatsmag.com). The primary building material used was poured concrete (Portland cement) imported from Britain.
🔺 “The gigantic parasol” (Photo credit: Architectural Review)
The unorthodox basic form of the Shanghai Slaughterhouse comprises an outer four-storey high square building enclosing a round inner building—with a 24-sided dome roof—the core of which is a central atrium into which light is admitted. The facade consists of iconic lattice windows with circular motifs. The stylised geometry of the lattice windows allows for much-needed ventilation and natural cooling (Williams)
🔺 A multiplicity of interlocking staircases & ramps (Source: Shanghai Art Deco)
The congested and convoluted interior presents a seemingly Byzantine confusion of elements obscuring what was in fact a revolutionary abattoir design. The interior was an Escheresque¶ maze of compartments, winding passages and corridors, scattered rooms, narrow spiral interlocking staircases, bridged walkways (26 sky bridges), twisting ramps, 50cm-thick walls, (300) Gothic columns and (four) verandahs (‘Shanghai’s charmed revealed’, Mu Qian, China Daily, 27-Oct-2011, www.chinadaily.com.cn; Williams).
🔺 Labyrinthine work of MC Escher
The “state-of-the-art” (for its day) slaughterhouse had many advanced features: the latticework exterior circulated air and, along with the extra thick walls, made the building cooler in Shanghai’s summers; safety measures were incorporated into the design – textured floors in the ramp made them slip-proof, and built-in escape niches for workers to jump into in the event of a cattle stampede (‘1933 Shanghai Slaughterhouse’, Hidden Architecture, www.hiddenarchitecture.net).
The abattoir’s design controlled the speed and flow of cattle from one area to the next. The unique multi-storey slaughterhouse made for a rational and hygienic method of working – situating the killing spaces on the highest level “allowed gravity to drain the blood, to lower the carcasses, to drop the waste, collect the hide” below. Such efficiency allowed for more than 1,200 heads of cattle, sheep and pigs to be processed in a single day (producing 130 tons of meat for human consumption) (Williams).
(Photo: Flickr)
Building history
The slaughterhouse continued to function until the 1960s, although between 1937 and 1945 it fell under the control of the occupying Japanese military. After the communist takeover of China in 1949 it officially became “Slaughterhouse # 1”. After the abattoir was closed, the building was converted into a cold storage facility and then a medicine factory.
(Source: Randomwire)
Reborn as a “creative industry zone” Abandoned in 2002, the Old Millfun building was heading for decay and destruction when it was saved in 2008 by a RMB100 million renovation [Architect: IPPR (Shanghai) – Engineering and Design Research Institute] and eventually transformation into a trendy entertainment❂ and shopping hub (Mu).
Architect: Balfours Master Architects (UK). Some sources attribute the building design to CH Stableford, Shanghai Municipal Council architect at the time (construction by Yu Hong Ki Construction Co).
𓃟 𓃟 𓃟 𓃟𓃟𓃟𓃟𓃟𓃟𓃟𓃟
✥ China before 1933 used the unit of weight, the tael applied to silver, as the unit of currency. A tael was usually equivalent to 1.3 ounces of silver
¶ bringing to mind the intricate, implausibly dense lithographic prints and drawings of Dutch graphic artist MC Escher
❂ among its upmarket tenants is the Ferrari Owners’ Club of China
The “Groundhog Day” existence of coronavirus, with people ‘sentenced’ to indeterminable periods of isolation and lockdown inside four square walls, has been a boon to the pursuit of leisure activities※. Social media platforms have gone “gang-busters” – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Zoom, and Snapchat and TikTok (for the Gen-Zs) among others. Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Stan, ditto. In this year like no other, Audible tell us that audio books are more popular than ever – a trend promoted undoubtedly by Audible’s own deft marketing (eg, during Covid-19 they are streaming a selection of children’s stories free to the public). The uptake of Borrow Box loan activity in 2020 underscores this assertion.
Cohen & Roney 1952: taking the 1st steps for audio booksellers (Photo: Lib of Congress Blogs)
𖠜𖠜𖠜
Audio books (ABs) in one form or another have been around a long time, arguably the pioneer in the area of spoken-word records was Caedmon Records, the first to hit the mark with a mainstream audience. The Caedmon company evolved out of the initiatives in 1952 of two 22-year-old female college graduates (Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney) in the US to record a poetry reading by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. The popularity of the poetry album which included A Child’s Christmas in Wales laid the groundwork for today’s AB industry. The development of technology assisted the progression of “spoken books”… from the first LPs (Long-playing records), emerging in the 1930s, which gave way to tape cassettes in the 1960s and 70s, which in turn lead later still to compact discs [‘Caedmon Records and Audiobooks, (HarperCollins), www.200.hc.com].
My own personal history as a consumer of spoken-word records begins with the aforementioned Caedmon, circa 1977. In the mid-Seventies I had watched several films in a series of commercial releases under the title “American Film Theatre”, film adaptations of a number of well-known plays…the series which utilised Lord Olivier as its promotional face included Galileo (Brecht), Rhinoceros (Ionesco), Luther (Osborne), The Homecoming (Pinter) and The Iceman Cometh (O’Neill).
At the time I came across vinyl 78s of two of the plays-to-films in the series—Butley (Simon Gray) and A Delicate Balance (Edward Albee)—in a tiny spoken-word section of a second-hand record shop. Snapping them up, this marked my first foray into the (at that time) still embryonic world of collecting ABs.
Audio books then were pretty much unknown in retail record departments and shops… major book retailers were yet to cotton on to the potentiality of thus broadening the market for their products, and online goliaths like Amazon were yet to come into existence. I remember that I got my first spoken-word cassette by (pre-online) mail order from the Royal Blind Society in 1978. The RBS had more incentive than anyone else to embrace “talking books”⋓, an innovation which opened up a whole new world of leisure for the visually-impaired. The first (double cassette) AB that I purchased was a BBC recording of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard.
Since that time the audio book industry has exploded with heavyweights like Hachette Audio, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon and Schuster, all with significant “skin in the game”. Lording over all these competitors is Audible (Amazon), unchallenged as the dominant market leader. Even before the pandemic the global AB market was valued at US$2.67 Bn in 2019 (wwwgrandviewresearchcom/]. The coronavirus is sending that worldwide sales trajectory even higher (US audio unit sales are up 16% dwarfing the book market growth of the industry as a whole (wwwthenewpublishingstandardcom/)).
The success of audio books has been welcomed by the book industry as a positive addition (cf. the advent of Kindle and e-books which raised fears of ‘cannibalisation’ of the main product)⊞. The takeaway from the AB phenomena is that the aural experience is a different one, and that ABs (according to a Deloitte report) tend to attract a younger demographic that is less inclined to read print books [‘A word in your ear…why the rise of audiobooks is a story worth celebrating’, (Alex Preston), The Guardian, 02-Aug-2020, www.theguardian.com].
The versatility of audio books is behind its blossoming into an integral part of the literature landscape for ‘readers’. ABs can be integrated easily into one’s life in all manner of ways that are not confined to a sedentary or stationary state – while exercising, walking, jogging, cycling, in the gym, while cooking, doing housework, driving a car, commuting, etc [‘Audiobooks: The rise and rise of the books you don’t read’, (Clare Thorp), BBC, 06-Jan-2020, www.bbc.com].
For many buyers of audio books a factor in choosing a title is the reader itself. Having “A-list talent” and the “dulcet tones of a familiar voice” as reader certainly can add value to the product✦, but big names only work if they have a genuine connexion with the material (Thorp). Some ABs work better when the author doubles as reader, this particularly applies to memoirs and non-fiction titles. Having this can convey to the listener a more authentic experience of the subject’s journey. For myself, the AB experience that I most enjoyed was John Lithgow’s brilliant reading of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Character actor Lithgow brought such an energy to the reading, greatly enhancing the flavour and tone of Wolfe’s biting satire on greed and status in NYC (in marked contrast to the disappointing Tom Hanks movie version), probably my all-time favourite AB.
Another memorable audio book collection I would place high on my AB order of merit are the recordings of Samuel Pepys’ Diaries (readings by Kenneth Branagh and a BBC dramatisation). From both sets of recordings I got a real “living history” insight into Pepys’ thought processes and compromised behaviour—flaws and virtues, so redolent of that of the modern bureaucrat—and of the everyday life of an event-filled London in late Stuart Britain.
One of the reasons I took to audio books is that it offered me a way into critically acclaimed works of fiction that in print form I had found Sphinx-like and impenetrable. Back in the 1970s I made several attempts at reading the 754 abstruse and puzzling pages of Joyce’s Ulysses before raising the white flag in defeat. Ulysses’ emergence in the AB format in the, must be late Eighties/early Nineties (albeit in an abridged four-CD form) was the key I needed to unlock the stylistic labyrinth of Joyce’s prose. ABs also let me get a handle on that other Irish author of literary complexity Flann O’Brien, and his convoluted metafiction maze The Third Policeman.
Ftnote: CædmonCaedmon, the name chosen by Cohen and Roney for their revolutionary business enterprise, was the name of the first known English poet (flourished late Seventh century AD), a Northumbrian cowherd turned exponent of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) verse poetry.
※ another pastime, gaining impetus in the lockdown and perhaps capturing the zeitgeist of 2020 is doomscrolling – the social media practice of continuing to read long streams of news feeds which are disheartening in content
⋓ the term as I recall more in currency at the time than audio books
⊞ print books managed to repulse the challenge from e-books in part due to pricing strategies which disincentivised e-book purchasing [Amazon’s Audiobook Boom’, (Alex Shepard), The New Republic, O3-Jul-2018, www.newrepublic.com]
✦ the rise of ABs has provided a source of peripheral work for some actors, a very welcome and in some cases lucrative sideline
The absence of cars in cities during the coronavirus lockdown has been a boon to cyclists, both for the recreational kind and for commuter cyclists. There has been an “unprecedented surge in popularity” of bicycle traffic—even in the land of the automobile, the United States—with many bike shops since March reporting a doubling of their average sales…such is the demand now that bike manufacturers can’t build them fast enough [‘Cycling ‘explosion’: coronavirus fuels surge in US bike ridership’, (Miranda Bryant), The Guardian, 13-May-2020, www.theguardian.com ; ‘Australia is facing a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ as cycling booms, advocates say’, (David Mark), ABC News, 16-May-2020, www.abc.net.au ] ⇧
The renewed present enthusiasm to take up bike-riding in response to the pandemic recalls earlier periods of “bike-mania”in the West—late 1860s to mid-1870s and the 1890s—as the humble bike was evolving into its modern form. Credit for the basic look of the standard, no-frills bicycle as we we think of it today is generally given to John Kemp Starley for his 1885 invention, the “Rover Safety Bicycle”. The Rover’s similar-sized wheels, chain drive attached to the crankshaft and rear wheel, diagonal frame and relative lightness (20kg) retains the basic design of the modern bicycle [‘Pedal Your Way Through the Bicycle’s Bumpy History’, [Evan Andrews),
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The bike by various other names
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1890s, the world gone crazy for the bicycle
(Image:
Instrument of freedom and independence
Health-wise physicians gave their approval. And ordinary folk suddenly were able to explore the countrysides, visit towns and places – far and near. Just about everyone, it seems, got into the act of riding bicycles – royalty and rulers in places like Russia, Zanzibar and Afghanistan took up cycling; First-wave feminists – Susan B Anthony declared that “bicycling emancipated women more than anything else”; women were especially enthusiastic as the activity allowed them to escape their voluminous and cumbersome Victorian skirts for more practical attire such as bloomers. When the lighter, less unwieldy safety bicycles came along, police in the UK were quick to adopt them in their work. Likewise, the NYC police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt mounted the city police on bikes to apprehend the new “public danger” of ‘scorchers’ (“speed demon” cyclists ) (Smith).
The conventional explanation for the demise of the bicycle boom is the rise of the commercially-viable automobile, but other factors may have contributed to the bicycle’s decline, such as the rapid growth of the early mass transit systems such as streetcars and trams which were a more practical alternative to bikes, especially in bad weather (Britannica).
The Luddites of Britain’s Industrial Revolution: Technophobes with an Excessively Destructive Bent or Practitioners of Last Resort Workplace Bargaining?
We’veall heard the term bandied round—anyone who is reluctant to embrace new technology or the world of computers gets labelled aLuddite. TheCambridge Dictionarydefines it as “a person who is opposed to the introduction of new working methods, especially new machines”. Many of us would also have an inkling of the term’s origins, deriving from the group of English workers in the early 19th century whose method of resisting new work technologies in Georgian factories and mills took on a very “hands-on”, destructive manner. Beginning with weavers in the textile industry in Nottinghamshire taking to the new machines with sledgehammers in protest, the movement soon spread to other parts of the Midlands and the North of England.
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Rampage against the machine provokes a repressive reaction
The British government wasted little time in sending in an army of soldiers(𝓪 ) in defence of capital. Their assignment was to protect the factories and quell the workers’ revolts. Parliament enacted laws making the workers’ trail of destruction against the machines a capital offence, and many of the offenders were summarily and violently dealt with (shootings, hangings, transportation to New Holland for 14 years). Consequently, the Luddite movement lost energy and cohesion and petered out within a few years [‘The Original Luddites Raged Against the Machine of the Industrial Revolution’, (Christopher Klein), History, 04-Jan-2019, www.history.com].
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Class loyalty
The ruling elite of the day viewed the actions of the workers in attacking the private property of employers as merely bloody-minded vandalism, a perspective that still held an attraction for some modern conservative historians in the 20th century… eminent historian JH Plumb for instance dismissed the Luddites’ revolts as nothing more than “pointless, frenzied industrial jacquerie”. But was that all there was to it, nihilism, the mindless, purposeless, random savagery of working class vandals?
In a ground-breaking article in the early Fifties radical historian EJ Hobsbawn took issue with the conventional “nihilistic sabotage” view of historians like Plumb. Hobsbawn places the rebellious workers’ actions in their proper context, that of the Industrial Revolution and the economic vicissitudes of the period. The machine-breaking by the weavers and other workers was a direct action form of industrial strategy initiated by labour, Hobsbawn calls it “collective bargaining by riot” [EJ Hobsbawn, ‘The Machine Breakers’,Past and Present, No 1,(Feb., 1952), pp.57-70]. EP Thompson describes Luddism as “a violent eruption of feeling against unrestrained industrial capitalism” [E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (1966)](𝓫).
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The threat accompanying automationWorkers such as the weavers in Nottinghamshire around 1811/12 foresaw the dire implications for them of the introduction of new inventions like the mechanical loom. The economic downturn Britain experienced during the drawn-out Napoleonic Wars resulted in loss of profits for the merchants who owned the mills and factories. But it harmed working families even more…unemployment was widespread, food became scarce and therefore more expensive. Magnifying the problem, trades like the stocking knitters and the lace workers were in decline. By using the new technology, employers could increase production allowing them to engage untrained workers at lower wages. This directly and adversely affected the weavers and other artisans who had spent years learning and honing the skills of their craft. Now the new machines were being taken over by untrained workers who produced inferior work. The job security of textile craftsmen were thus imperilled, by the use of the (new) machinery in (as they saw it) “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to circumvent standard labour practices(𝓬). The danger identified, the textile workers found themselves limited in the forms of protest available to them—they could not legally form trade unions and they could not strike(𝓭 ). Smashing knitting frames and other machines was conceivably the only effective way to protest the inevitable erosion of their economic livelihood [George Binfield, quoted in Klein; ‘What is a Luddite?’, wiseGEEK, www.wisegeek.com].
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Not technophobes of the Industrial Revolution
Hobsbawn is at pains to stress that the protesting mill and factory workers bore no hostility to the machines per se(𝓮). Notwithstanding that the concept of trade unionism was inchoate and still barely nascent at this time, Hobsbawn describes the “wrecking (as) simply a technique of trade unions in the period before (and during) the early Industrial Revolution“. A more contemporary historian George Binfield concurs with Hobsbawn’s central thesis, stating that the derisory ‘technophobe’ tag is a mischaracterisation of the movement—the textile artisans were not against the new technology of the Industrial Revolution, but against the use of it to produce shoddy clothing and depress the wages of skilled workers (Binfield in Klein)(𝓯). Actually, far from being inept, many of the Luddites in the textile industry were highly skilled machine operators [‘What the Luddites Really Fought Against’, (Richard Conniff), Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011, www.smithsonianmag.com].
Poster notice offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the frame-breakers who attacked George Ball’s Notts. workshop in 1812🔻
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Antecedents and successors of the Luddites
Luddism, as Donald MacKenzie put it, “was neither mindless, nor completely irrational, nor completely unsuccessful” [DA MacKenzie, ‘Marx and the Machine’, Technology and Culture, Vol 25, No 3, July 1984, pp.473-503]. Hobsbawn scuttles any suggestion that the Luddites’ movement was a one-off phenomena. Arguing that it’s antecedents can be traced back as far as the 17th century, he details instances of other English workers utilising the same industrial tactic as the Luddites—West of England clothing industry , 1710s-1720s; weavers in Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Devon, 1726/27(𝓰); rioting of textile workers in Melksham (Wilts), 1738; and not confined to the textiles business – coal miners employed the same wrecking tactic in the Northumberland coal-field in the 1740s (𝓱). Hobsbawn notes that the Luddites’ tactic of destroying the tools of production in a calculated fashiondid not end with the movement’s swift demise. He cites the riots in Bedlington (Durham) in 1831 in which strikers wilfully wrecked the capitalists’ winding-gear.
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No unmitigated failure; the preventative measures tactic
Although the Luddites’ revolt ended in suppression and broken dreams, Hobsbawn makes the case that there were successes in the workers’ efforts in other episodes of machine-breaking. In some instances, the mere threat from disgruntled craftsmen to wreak havoc on factories and mills was sufficient to dissuade some employers from introducing the machinery as planned, eg, this was the case earlier with weavers in Norwich and shearmen in Wiltshire. Hobsbawn concludes that “invariably, the employer, faced with such hazards” decided to delay or not implement the new technology, cognisant of the latent threat to his property and even his own life. In several of the cases cited by the historian, the threats were a successful bargaining tool to stop employers from cuttingworkers‘ wages, and in the instance of the Northumberland coal miners, their provocative action in burning the mine’s pit-head machinery actually won themselves “a sizeable pay rise”.
🔺‘Ned Ludd’(sometimes transcribed as Ned Lud) (Image: Granger Collection, NY)
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Footnote: The eponymous ‘leader’ of the movement
The Luddites’ leader was supposed to be one “Ned Ludd”, sometimes referred to as ‘General‘, ‘Captain’ or even ‘King’ Ludd. Purportedly he was an apprentice in the late 1770s who was either beaten or berated by his master and took revenge by damaging the factory’s stocking frame. It seems that in all probability Ned is apocryphal in the fashion of Robin Hood, the English personification of the mythical figure invoking social justice. Ned can be viewed as a symbolic leader for the wrongly-treated to rally round in pursuit of righting (in this instance) the workplace injustices foisted upon skilled industrial craftsmen (Ludd was even said to reside in Sherwood Forest, another nod to the inspiration of the Robin Hood legend in hisinvention).
(𝓪) some 12,000 troops in total were despatched, more than the number under the command of Wellington concurrently in the Peninsula War, a classic, heavy-handed overkill by the British authorities
(𝓫) one writer applies the term “labor strategists” to the Luddites as a de factovocational appellation, [Brian Merchant, ‘You’ve Got Luddites All Wrong’, (Tech By Vice), 03-Sep-2014, www.vice.com]
(𝓬) being prevented from forming trade unions left industrial workers already behind the eight-ball when IR mechanisation came along—they were unable to establish a minimum wage, establish workers’ pensions and set standard working conditions
(𝓭) the technology the Luddites railed against did not necessarily need to be new, the stocking frame for instance had been invented 200 years earlier (Conniff)
(𝓮) nor were they “heroic defenders of a pre-technological way of life” – as romantically portrayed later in some quarters (Conniff)
(𝓯) as Binfield contends, the Luddites were in fact willing to adapt to mechanisation…it was the direction that enhanced productivity was heading—enriching the merchant owners, not the workers—that was their beef. Their objective was a share of those profits, or at the very least, a decent wage
(𝓰) their attack on the property and materials of masters and blacklegs had the positive outcome of gaining them a “collective contract” of sorts
(𝓱) workers in the East Midlands hosiery trade also resorted to frame-breaking as part of the riots in 1778 to protest wage erosion…Hobsbawn calls these hose-makers “the ancestors of Ludditism”
Canadian political philosopher John Ralston Saul is the secular high-priest of doubters and cynics, a non-believer in “the gospel” of the modern corporate state, constantly debunking the conventional wisdoms offered up as “absolute truths” in Western society✲. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Saul would produce a guidebook for other secular agnostics. Wedged between his treatises on his personal philosophy ‘superstar’ Voltaire, his studies of modern Canadian society and his excursions into the realm of fiction, is JR Saul’s The Doubter’s Companion, or to give it his full title:
The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense (Viking, 1994)¹
Although Saul calls his volume “a dictionary”, the term applies more to the book’s format (utilising the standard A-Z form of the dictionary) than to its content or purpose. The Companion goes on to define Dictionary as “Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order”. And Answers are merely “a mechanism for avoiding questions”. Saul decries the trajectory of modern dictionaries and language (which have been captured by the forces of a rational orthodoxy), yearning instead for a return to the Humanist dictionaries of the 18th century (Voltaire, Diderot, Johnson, etc)².
When I first delved into The Doubter’s Companion (around 1995), my mind took me to that other great cynic’s dictionary of the early 1900s, Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. Both works, albeit very different books, are idiosyncratically unconventional takes on language and meaning in their respective societies, and both proffer a contrarian view of the established wisdom of the day. Both Saul and Bierce are provocateurs, each with their own personal axe to grind⁌.
The Doubter’s Companion, by its polemical nature is unequivocally meant to shake up orthodox thinking (TDC was described by one reader as “an abecedarium of subversion”). The dictionary form of the book is a device Saul employs to launch into short philosophical essays on topics about modern post-industrial society that concern him—corporatism, individualism, leadership and managerialism, freedom of expression, communication, public relations, advertising and the way language is distorted to control communications (see his definition of ‘ideology’). In so doing, Saul skewers the accepted veracity of many of the words, phrases and terms you will find in today’s dictionaries.
And as it is an instruction manual to help doubters navigate their way through a linguistic maze of (in Saul’s opinion) mis-defined terms, the central tenet is thus affirmed:
Doubt: The only human activity capable of controlling the use of power in a positive way. Doubt is central to understanding.
Wisdom: The purpose of doubt … wisdom is life with uncertainty, the opposite of power or ideology.
Ideology: Tendentious arguments which advance a world view as absolute truth in order to win and hold political power.
The Corporate executive “is not a capitalist but a technocrat in drag”.
Economics is “the romance of truth through measurement”.
Level playing field: An ideological abstraction adopted as a universal value by the management of large corporations.
Saul the provocateur infuses the dictionary with a regular diet of “outrageous statements and provocations”:
Marxist: The only serious functioning Marxists left in the West are the senior managers of large, usually transnational corporations.
Neo-Conservatives are the Bolsheviks of the Right (“the exact opposite of a conservative”).
Modern (that should be “post-modern”) fads of intellectual thinking such as Deconstructionism get short shrift from Saul:
Deconstructionism: Can also be seen as a school of light comedy.
Calm: A state of emotion which is overrated except in religious retreats. Calmness for Saul has a decidedly political connotation today, “it is used to control people who are dissatisfied with the way those in authority are doing their job”✬.
Public relations: A negative form of imagination. In Mussolini’s phrase, “invention is more useful than truth”.
Saul savages that that most universal institution of American fast food, MacDonalds:
A Big Mac: The communion wafer of consumption. (Itis) not really food but the promise of food.
He goes on sardonically to bracket it with “Perrier, one of the last sacred objects of the leading philosophical school of the late-twentieth century—public relations”…one of Saul’s greatest bête noires.
Elsewhere, in a similar vein, he brands Ronald McDonald as a “Post-modern philosopher”…the “face and voice of consumer culture”.
Contemporary education doesn’t escape a broadside from Saul, especially the American form:
SAT: A system of standardized American college entry exams designed to nurture and reward functional illiteracy.
Universities find themselves in Saul’s cross-hairs as well. Within the “exclusive territories” of the university that knowledge is divided into, the principal occupation of academics is “to invent dialects sufficiently hermetic to prevent knowledge from passing between territories”.
Happy Hour is “a depressing comment on the rest of the day”.
At different points Saul diverts momentarily from his philosophical musings to give historical clarification on certain pertinent terms of interest to him. Having defined Depression as “a form of economic disaster common throughout history”, he goes on to contend that “in 1973 the word was deleted from all Western languages and replaced by the term recession”, a softer word which in Saul’s mind allows economists to maintain the myth of appearing to “manage real situations”. The author expands his point: “to admit to the existence of anything as uncontrollable as a depression would be to admit failure”.
The book’s dictionary entries allow space for brief commentaries on individuals from the pages of history who attract Saul’s interest. These are usually philosopher-figures but not always. He has an interesting take on the great turn-of-the-century novelist Joseph Conrad, “The essential modern writer…demonstrated that the novel could have a third century of relevance if the story was transformed into metaphysics disguised as reality”.
Sigmund Freud, who in America would be described as the “father of shrinks”, gets a guernsey in the dictionary, albeit a cynical and disparaging reference – “a man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would just listen—or better still, talk—that they’re parents were just as bad”.
Air Conditioning: An efficient means for spreading disease in enclosed public spaces.
Muzak: A public noise neither requested nor listened to by individuals. It is the descendant of a school of public relations invented by the Nazis.
For one so articulately cynical of human nature, politics, economics, most things in the modern world (except of course doubt), Saul’s definition of that attitudinal standpoint seems contradictory:
Cynicism: An effective social mechanism for preventing communication.
Pessimism on the other hand is “a valuable protection against quackery”. More beneficial than ‘scepticism’ “which slips easily into cynicism and so becomes a self-defeating negative force”.
Whereas Optimism to Saul is double-edged. When applied to oneself it is “a pleasant and sometime useful distraction” to reality, but “when encouraged as a social attitude … it is the public tool of scoundrels and ideologues” (as is patriotism).
World Class: A phrase used by provincial cities and second-rate entertainment and sports events … to assert they are not provincial or second-rate, thereby confirming that they are.
Saul includes in the alphabetical list a number of surprising and disparate entries for a reference book on philosophical common sense. These include Ants (Saul makes the unexpected and unverified statement that the members of the Formicidae family of eusocial insects “do nothing 71.5 per cent of the time”)⊡; Apple (the fruit not the corporation); Armpits (which is curiously cross-referenced to Reality); Nannyism (not sure why this topic warranted nine paragraphs and over 400 words but Saul interweaves a discourse on Margaret Thatcher, bullying and sex appeal into the entry); Urban weather patterns (wtf?); White bread (“the sophisticated product of a civilization taken to its logical conclusion … continually refined until all utility has been removed”).
Among the many asides Saul offers an interesting reflection on the city-state of Venice – he declares it “the original model of modern dictatorship, in which commercial power finds its cultural expression in painting, architecture and music … (but not) language”. And on Benito Mussolini: “the nascent modern Heroic leader (who) combined corporatism, public relations and sport together, while replacing public debate and citizen participation with false popularism and the illusion of direct democracy”.
JRS humorous and glib
The philosopher’s serious message aside, Saul produces a regular line of humorous explanations of terms, some of these are dazzlingly economic epigrams or bon mots:
Museums: Safe storage for stolen objects.
Cosmetic surgery: Cosmetic perjury.
Biography: A respectable form of pornography.
Other descriptors and definitions however are quite glib:
René Descartes is thus presented “gave credibility to the idea that the mind exists separately from the body, which suggests he didn’t look down while writing” [ba-dum-tss!].
Anorexia: A condition aspired to by most middle-class women (a subject taken much more medically serious today!).
JRS’s extensive catalogue of pet bugbears include ideology (and ideologues), applied corporatism, applied civilisation, conventional wisdom, , economic determinism, technocrats, absolute truth and certainty, dry, sectarian ‘definitions’, rigid scholasticism and structure, superstition, public relations and advertising.
Footnote: it’d be interesting to see an update of the Companion. A chance to find out what the perspicacious John Ralston Saul makes of early 21st century concepts such as social media, iPhones, fake news, drones. climate change deniers and the nanny state, to name just a handful.
╰━━⋅𖥔⋅━━✶━━⋅𖥔⋅━━⋅𖥔⋅━━✶━━⋅𖥔⋅━━✶━━⋅𖥔⋅━━✶━━⋅𖥔⋅━━╯
✲ whether that be from the left or right
⁌ though where Bierce is acerbic, Saul is out and out incendiary
✬ adding the rider that “calm incompetence” has risen to become a quality of high professionalism”
⊡ in case this isn’t enough on the subject, JRL follows up with an entry for ant-eaters (Myrmecophaga Jubata)
¹ Amazon‘s “dust-jacket” review summarises the book as full of “renegade opinions”; (it) uses “guerrillalexicography to reclaim public language from stultifying dialects of modern expertise”
² ‘Doubter’s Companion’, www.freelistbooks.com
⏏³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁰⏏
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓
✲ whether that be from the left or right
⁌ though where Bierce is acerbic, Saul is out and out incendiary
✬ adding the rider that “calm incompetence” has risen to become a quality of high professionalism”
⊡ in case this isn’t enough on the subject, JRL follows up with an entry for ant-eaters (Myrmecophaga Jubata)
𖥶𖥶𖥶𖥶𖥶𖥶𖥶𖥶𖥶𖥶𖥶𖥶𖥶𖥶𖥶𖥶
¹ Amazon‘s “dust-jacket” review summarises the book as full of “renegade opinions”; (it) uses “guerrillalexicography to reclaim public language from stultifying dialects of modern expertise”
From near Changchun’s central train station we waved down a cab to take us to the site of the city ‘s cinematic claim to cultural eminence in China, the Jilin province city’s pioneering film studios. Although it looked fairly close on Google Maps it took an eternity to get to the former movie site of CFS, Changchun Film Studios. Road distance in China is measured in the conventional way by metric length, but also by the number of motor vehicles they’re are between point A (where you are) and point B (where you want to go).
The setting for the film studios is an impressive one. From the street front you enter a big green park and walk up a grand, sweeping drive. At the top of the drive is the film studio complex, but before you reach the studio entrance, you have to contend with Mao Tse-tung. There he is, “the Chairman”standing erect, as he was in life, larger than the life of any one Chinese person. A gigantic, white statue of Mao, waving benignly at every human figure passing within the shadow of his massive, seemingly immovable image※.
It was quite late in the day by now but we were still keen after travelling that far, to see inside the CFS Factory/Museum. The callow youth on the turnstiles gate had other ideas…he point-blank refused us entry because it was after 4 o’clock, less than an hour till the museum closed. Unable to dissuade him, we went away disgruntled but decided to explore the outside parts of the site anyway.
This bore unexpected fruit as we discovered a nice little courtyard adjacent to the factory with an overt military touch (statues of heroic patriotic types and other martial figures, battle-green painted artillery guns, etc). The factory’s military theme is continued in the forecourt which exhibits a fighter plane of 1950s vintage.
Before leaving altogether we chanced a quick look-through of the CFS gift shop which was still open. This proved a fortuitous diversion on our part…while unenthusiastically perusing the shop’s uninspiring assortment of predictable souvenirs on the shelves we noticed a side door ajar which we took advantage of by slipping through it and into the exhibits area. Thus, through a combination of arse-lucky opportunism and devious initiative we did gain entry to the factory after all and for gratis!
The public CFS Studios display comprised a long, darkly-lit corridor which threw the lighted exhibits down one side into relief. These exhibits were a miscellany of items reflecting the film company’s past productions, the result undoubtedly of a raid on the props department and the costume wardrobes (old military weapons, uniforms and paraphernalia), old style 35mm film cameras and sound recording machines, etc.
The military theme of the factory exhibition was further underscored in the choice of film posters to display…war movies galore! The impression that CFS’ most popular movie genre was war was hard to ignore on this evidence.
Peaking inside a few of the rooms running off the main corridor revealed that the complex was still a hub for contemporary film-making. Production tech staff could be seen working on documentary and TV projects using modern technical equipment (not the antique stuff in the corridor).
Another room off the corridor held a small viewing theatre…surprisingly to me the projector was running a 1930s British B & W film starring Larry Olivier (not dubbed into Chinese and no one watching!). Elsewhere in the room there were pictures and bios of Chinese film-makers, dubbers and other behind-the-camera personnel who had made a contribution at CFS Films during its halcyon days.
The props displayed were for the most part interesting and authentic-looking (authentically old too!), but I did find the stuffed tiger mounted and encased in glass right at the end of the passageway rather incongruous and something that didn’t add to the CFS collection.
Changchun Film Studio Group Corporation (Ch: 长春电影集团公司) (to give it its formal title) was the first film production unit registered by the PRC in 1949 after the communist victory. Changchun Film Studios was chosen to fill the cinema production void left by the Japanese Manchukuo Film Association and the Northeast Film Studio. The Corporation also operates the somewhat maligned Changchun Film Theme Park elsewhere in the city.
❝❞❛❜❝❞❛❜❝❞❛❜❝❞❛❜❝❞❛❜❝❞❛❜❝❞❛❜
※ Mao’s Goliath-proportioned statue and other plaques in the park are transparently propaganda pieces for the government commemorating the communist state’s establishment (October 1, 1949)
⇩ Cobb & Co coach at Scarborough, NSW(Photo: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney) ⇧
See also the preceding post The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co – Part I
By the 1880s Cobb & Co’s coach lines had become so successful in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland that most of its competitors had been either relegated to the ranks of commercial obscurity, gone out of business altogether or been swallowed up by the ubiquitous, dominant transport market leader (or all three!)
Overreach and eventual decline
Cobb & Co’s foray in new areas of enterprise led it, and specifically company boss James Rutherford, into more and more diverse fields – everything from gold and copper mines to horse-breeding to newspapers. The inevitable downside of over-diversification was diminishing success…moreover the failures were often the result of bad and even disastrous investments (a Lithgow iron ore mine, a 1880s railway construction project connecting Glen Innes and Tenterfield)💮and in this the blame lay squarely with Rutherford. Rutherford as GM had some glaring shortcomings – he was often impetuous in business when he should have been measured, and made important (and increasingly unwise) decisions without consulting his partners [Kathy Riley), Australian Geographic, 18-Oct-2011, www.australian geographic.com.au].
⇩ A fully loaded six-horse Cobb & Co coach
(Photo: www.visityuleba.com.au) ⇧
Other factors contributing to Cobb & Co’s downfall
In addition to the instability of taking on too muchconcurrently, the company was a victim of misfortune and circumstance. The 1890s was a decade that brought drought and a depression to the colonies. The drought hit Cobb & Co like a sledgehammer – the cost of feed for their thousands of horses sky-rocketed! During just the four years from 1898-1902, the cost was £70,000, which was nearly half of Cobb & Co’s total revenue. Compounding this was further devastation arising from the drought – losses of livestock, plummeting of the values of company’s properties [ibid.].
The introduction of commercial railways in the inland regions of Australia from the 1870s was a forewarning that the demise of coach transport was on the horizon. Cobb & Co in Victoria and NSW survived the new competition from the railroad for a time – in part because the coach line adopted the strategy of providing a complimentary service to it (joining the dots between the rail routes)✪. It also pushed its operations further westwards into NSW to service new localities and communities beyond the rail terminus [‘Coaching days in NSW’, (Cobb & Co in NSW), http://www.orange.nsw.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Cobb-Co-Resource.pdf].
UltimatelythoughCobb & Co was simply delaying the inevitable in the two southern colonies…Victoriaceased its company operations in 1890. The NSW operations’ decline led to itsBathurst and Bourke factories closing down not long after…all later coach-making was done through the CharlevilleCoachPlant in Queensland. By 1897 all the NSW lines ceased except those in the Bourke area [ibid.]. In 1902 Cobb & Co experienced a net loss of over £18,000 and owed considerably more than that to bankers and creditors [Riley, op.cit.]. Liquidation of the company soon followed. The following year the company was reformed but this wasn’t able to revive its flagging fortunes.
Queensland, the last outpost for Cobb & Co coaches
Only “vast and untrammelled” Queensland held out against the railways’ dominance, maintaining “a solid demand for coaching” beyond Federation and into the new century, with routes in the colony peaking at more than 7000km in 1900. Queensland Cobb & Co lines lingered on, gradually losing business to the railways, their routes shrivelling up bit by bit. The advent of motor vehicles, while still at a rudimentary stage, foreshadowed that horse coaches were dinosaurs as a long-term prospect. Cobb & Co itself dabbled in automobiles and in store-keeping, but these ventures brought it no success [ibid.].
Air mail anyone?
The embryonic development of commercial air travel was another sign of the imminent end of the road for Cobb & Co. In 1922 QANTAS (Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services) launched its inaugural air mail and passenger flying service (based in central west Queensland). Cobb & Co made its final trip in 1924 on the Yuleba to Surat (Qld) route. Thus the curtain was drawn for good on what had been Australia’s first ever privately-owned public transport system [ibid; Simpson, loc.cit.].
Endnote: A television series rip-off
In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a fictionalised TV take on the Cobb & Co story…made in Australia by ITV Britain♚. A fairly unexceptional piece of television adventure and light on historical accuracy, Whiplash was marketed in Australia and the US as “an Australianised Western”, it starred the serviceable American TV actor Peter Graves as the fictional “Chris(sic) Cobb”. Some of the episodes were written by the future creator of Star Trek Gene Roddenberry [‘Whiplash’, Classic Australian Television, www.classicaustraliantv.com].
⇧ ‘Whiplash’: Peter Graves in a scene (Photo: www.nostalgiacentral.com)
Fittingly, given that Queensland was the state that maintained the Cobb & Co tradition the longest, it has a museum dedicated to the memory of the Cobb & Co pioneers. Located in country Toowoomba, the museum houses historic Cobb & Co coaches as part of an extended collection of horse-drawn vehicles – the ‘National Carriage Collection’. (Source: www.queensland.com)
⥰⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽⥰
💮 which left Cobb and Co a very sizeable £130,000 in debt
♚ filmed on location at Scone, NSW, and at Artransa ParkStudios in French’s Forest, (northern Sydney) which then contained a suitably bushy backdrop
✪ this contrasted markedly with the fate of coach transport in England – where the introduction of railways, occurring from the 1830s, killed off the coaches in quick time [‘Cobb and Co coach’, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, (Margaret Simpson, Curator, Transport), 12-Jun-2013, http://maas.museum]
❝Such days as when the Royal Mail was run by Cobb & Co❞ ~ Henry Lawson
🌀-🌀-🌀
Cobb and Co is a name that still has much currency within Australian and New Zealand society. In New South Wales in the rural tourist industry there is the “Cobb & Co Heritage Trail” which invites travellers to take the “historical self-drive” following the outback route from Bathurst to Bourke that the celebrated erstwhile coach service once trekked. Queensland holds a Cobb & Co festival each year to honour the historic Surat to Yuleba route. There are touring bus and coach businesses operating that have also appropriated the name…in addition there are “Cobb & Co hotels” and “Cobb and Co bottle shops” scattered around regional areas of the eastern states※.
⇓ Cobb & Co Heritage Trail
All of this is testimony to the fame of the original Cobb & Company which was once a household transport name, etching for itself a place in the folklore of Australia’s outback regions. The company’s story begins in the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s. In 1853 the American Adams & Co coach firm despatched Freeman Cobb and three American colleagues⚀ to Melbourne with the objective of establishing a local operation which would capitalise on the hordes of fortune seekers flocking to the Victorian gold rushes. As things transpired, Cobb ended up starting his own coach service together with the other Americans🔰, thus was born Cobb & Co.
Freeman Cobb ⇑ (Photo: www.geni.com)
The first trip (January 1854) of Cobb & Co carrying passengers, goods and equipment went from Collins Street (Melbourne city) to the Forest Creek goldfields (now Castlemaine) and to Bendigo✫. Cobb & Co was a winner pretty much from the outset…by 1856 the company was worth £16,000 (in 2011 values around $2.1 million). Freeman Cobb however didn’t stick around to see the full flowering of it’s success, after three years he sold out of his eponymous company, moving on to other (less successful) ventures. Cobb & Co changed hands a couple of times, and then in 1861 it was purchased by a consortium of nine US and Canadian businessmen for £23,000 ($3.4m in 2011) [‘Cobb & Co: historical transport’, (Kathy Riley), Australian Geographic, 18-Oct-2011, www.australian geographic.com.au].
The driving force of the firm under the consortium was another American immigrant, James Rutherford. Rutherford began by organising all of the company’s lines (the different routes), making them more profitable concerns. Under his leadership Cobb & Co expanded into NSW and Queensland (the NSW operations were based at Bathurst). At the company’s peak in the 1870s, it’s coaches were covering a distance of nearly 45,000km a week with routes stretching from the very top of Queensland (the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cooktown) down to southern Victoria [ibid.; ‘In the Days of Cobb & Co’, Sydney Mail, 20-Apr-1921, www.trove.nla.gov.au]. As one one chronicler of the iconic transport company’s story observed, Cobb & Co was many things combined – “the Qantas, the Australia Post, the TNT and the Holden of its day” [Sam Everingham, Wild Ride, The Rise and Fall of Cobb and Co, (2007)].
James Rutherford⇓
(Photo source: State Library of Queensland)
What accounted for Cobb & Co’s spectacular success in the coach transportation business?
The decisive factors were manifold but basically Cobb & Co beat it’s competitors in several logistical areas. It’s coaches were faster and more efficient…while the rivals used heavy, rigid English coaches for their runs, Cobb imported American Concord coaches (made in New Hampshire and used in the American West) which were rounded and lightweight and had supple coach bodies – far more suited to the rugged Australian landscape than the cumbersome English coaches. Consequently Cobb & Co’s coaches gave a smoother, faster ride [Riley, loc.cit.] (the Concords, though superior, apparently didn’t always deliver that smooth a ride as they were known colloquially as the “red bone-shakers”).
A replica C & C Concord coach on display at Timbertown, NSW ⇓
The Concord coaches were fitted with leather braces and straps in place of the inflexible iron ones used on other horse-drawn vehicles which had a tendency to snap too easily (leather also provided greatly superior suspension for the carriage). Concord coaches were made to last the rugged journey and so contributed to a reputation for reliability that the Cobb service was able to establish [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.].
A master stroke by Cobb was to establish a series of changing stations every 16-32km along the routes. This gave Cobb & Co journeys the big advantage of always having fresh horses, enabling the drivers to maintain high speeds over long distances.
Cobb & Co coachmen – risky adventures, pitfalls and hazards of the job
The drivers themselves employed by the company were possessed of extraordinary skills in managing their horses and vehicles. They had to be to negotiate all the difficulties and obstacles in their paths and still keep on schedule…atrocious roads made worse by inclement weather, flooding of creeks and rivers, and unpredictable encounters with dangerous bushrangers◘, were all recurring events that challenged the mettle of the coach drivers. The dangers aside, experiencing the thrills and (near) spills and the full-on ‘wildness’ of a Cobb & Co journey through “the bush”, must have been an exhilarating experience for colonial travellers in the day.
Many of the drivers, some of which Cobb and (later) Rutherford recruited from the US, were colourful characters in addition to being accomplished horse handlers…blokes such as Dick Houston, Jim Conroy, ‘Silent’ Bob Bates, H Barnes, and not least “Cabbage Tree” Ned Devine. Devine, with his team of distinctive light grey horses, was by all accounts a particularly exceptional driver (earning himself a very good wage of £17 a week)…when the first English cricket team toured Australia (HH Stephenson’s, 1862), Devine was their driver on the Victorian leg of the tour [K. A. Austin, ‘Devine, Edward (Ned) (1833–1908)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/devine-edward-ned-3405/text5169, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 31 May 2019].
Ned ‘Cabbage Tree’ Devine ⇓
(Photo source: State Library of Victoria)
Similarly, Cobb & Co’s grooms played an integral role in the highly organised operation…each groom was personally responsible for eight to ten horses and for their gear. The clockwork operation saw the drivers sound a bugle when they were one mile from the next staging post, this alerted the grooms to have the fresh team of horses primed and ready the minute the coach arrived. The pay-off for such a high level of efficiency, superior speed and dependability was that Cobb & Co scored lucrative mail contracts from the colonial governments [ibid.].
Cobb diversifies from its passenger and goods transport base
General manager Rutherford was the catalyst for Cobb & Co’s diversification into new businesses. Initially this payed dividends with its first move, appropriately enough, into coach and buggy building at Bathurst, NSW. Just four years into this activity Cobb & Co could boast that it was the largest coach-maker in Australia [ibid.].
Rutherford also acquired pastoral properties for the company, another profitably step for Cobb & Co. By 1877 they had nine sheep and cattle stations across NSW and Queensland covering an area of 11,000 square kilometres and turning a net profit of £77,500 (equivalent to $11.3M in 2011)…this was at a time that the company’s revenue from coaching – the principal business – was yielding only £11,500 ($1.7M) a year by comparison [ibid.].
By the end of the 1870s Cobb & Co had been in business for 25 years and had already established itself in the eastern mainland states as something of an institution in the “wide, brown land”. It had undergone diversification and experienced growth, but as I will show in Part II, the remarkable good fortunes of Cobb & Co was about to take a decided turn for the worse.
💫–💫–💫
PostScript: Exporting the Cobb & Co model
Unsurprisingly, the spectacular trajectory of Cobb & Co’s rise in fortune and fame drew imitators elsewhere. A number of coaching services, some using the same name (although totally unrelated to the original eastern Australian company), sprang up independently in South Australia, Western Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Africa. This last concern was started up by Freeman Cobb himself in 1871, hoping to cash in on the discoveries of diamonds and gold in the Kimberley and the Transvaal (unfortunately Cobb couldn’t reproduce his Australian success, dying in South Africa still in his 40s) [K. A. Austin, ‘Cobb, Freeman (1830–1878)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cobb-freeman-3237/text4883, published first in hardcopy 1969, accessed online 29 May 2019].
‘Kiwi’ Cobb & Co
The New Zealand version was begun by Charles Cole, who’d previously ran Cobb & Co’s Smyth’s Creek to Ballarat line in Australia❎. As in Victoria and NSW the impetus for the initiative in NZ was the gold rush in Otago (1861). Cole’s Otago coach proprietorship was in partnership with the Hoyts brothers (operating as Cole, Hoyt & Co., proprietors of Cobb & Co. Telegraph Line of Coaches)…later the service was extended to Christchurch and Canterbury. The legendary Ned ‘Cabbage Tree’ Devine worked at one time for the New Zealand outfit, driving the Dunedin to Palmerston and Oamaru routes [Austin, ‘Ned Devine’, loc.cit.; ‘Cobb & Co (New Zealand)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛
※ in fact there are all manner of commercial enterprises in Australasia using the “Cobb & Co” handle as a trading name – restaurants, bars, B ‘n Bs, screen printers, clockmakers, kitchen manufacturers, etc.
⚀ the others were James Swanson, Anthony Blake and John Murray Peck (who later became a successful stock and station agent in Melbourne and a vice-president of the Essendon Australian Football Club)
🔰 the average age of the four American founders was just 22 – although they did have combined experience working for Adams, Wells Fargo and other coach companies in the US
✫ Cobb charged £5 per passenger for the roughly 110 ml journey [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.]
◘ one of the best known bushranging incidents involving Cobb & Co was the 1863 holdup at Eugowra (in the NSW central west)…notorious bushranging gang led by Frank Gardiner and Ben Hall robbed a Ford & Co coach (the firm was takes over by Cobb & Co one week later) of £14,000 in gold and banknotes from the goldfields [‘Details of the Robbery’, (Welcome to Eugowra in the heart of bushranger country), www.eugowra.aus.net]
❎ Colebrought one of the custom built Concord coaches across the Tasman with him to Otago
Monopoly: (n.) a market situation where one producer (or group of producers acting in unison) controls supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted; “exclusive possession” of the commodity is customarily implicit in the term [www.businesssdictionary.com; www.en.oxforddictionaries.com]
⌖⌖⌖⌖⌖⌖
As a kid my favourite board game wasn’t Monopoly, it was an old Milton Bradley game called Pirate and Traveler✱, however I certainly did play Monopoly an awful lot of times growing up (and it seemed like every game went for an interminably long amount of time!). So, having clocked up that amount of wasted Monopoly game-time, I was more than mildly interested to revisit my youth via a recent book on the universal and ubiquitous board game, and even more intrigued that its author, Mary Pilon, presents a radically different take on the genesis and development of Monopoly to what hitherto was been the received orthodoxy.
Pilon’s book starts with two very different Americans, one an out-of-work Eastern Seaboard “average Joe” wallowing in the depths of the Depression, the other a fairly nondescript, left-leaning economics professor at a Californian public university –– Charles Darrow, the individual identified as the putative inventor of Monopoly, and Ralph Anspach, the man who almost inadvertently exposed Darrow as the faux inventor of the game. The unemployed Darrow learned the game from friends during his enforced leisure time…then with the germ of an idea in his head, got other friends to provide artwork (especially political cartoonist FO Alexander) and a written set of rules. Darrow crafted a version⊚, copyrighted it and eventually sold “his” game of Monopoly (without acknowledging or recompensing the contributions of his friends) to games manufacturers Parker Brothers who mass-produced and distributed it – and the rest is blockbuster games sales history!✥
Ralph Anspach comes into the story in 1973, six years after Darrow—made a multi-millionaire by the runaway success of Monopoly—had died. Anspach is an avowed anti-monopolist, by conviction a “trust-buster” who is mightily annoyed at the OPEC oil cartel’s stranglehold over that essential world commodity at the time (the 1973 Oil Crisis). He pursues his ideals by creating an Anti-Monopoly game in opposition to Parker Brothers’ über celebrated game. Parker Brothers sues Anspach for breach of copyright and so begins nearly ten years of legal battles with Parker Bros (in fact by this time the company was controlled by the General Mills corporation)…Anspach’s tireless research for the case leads him to the true, albeit convoluted, origins of Monopoly☸.
The Monopolists recounts Anspach’s monumental efforts and endlessly time-draining “detective work” in minute detail. Anspach traces the game back to one Elizabeth (Lizzie) Magie (long pre-dating Darrow), and here’s where the story gets really interesting! Magie, an independent-thinking, politically progressive Midwestern woman, was a staunch supporter of Henry George. George was the author of Progress and Poverty, a widely influential text which fuelled the introduction of the Progressive Era in the US (1890s-1920s). George advocated the introduction of a Single Tax on land and property (AKA Land Value Tax). Ms Magie invented and patented a board game in 1903-1904☯, called the Landlord’s Game, based on Georgist principles of wealth redistribution. Magie’s game was in her words, “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all the usual consequences” [Single Tax Review, 1902], the Landlord’s Game was intended to educate Americans about the dangers of unbridled capitalism (ie, ultimately resulting in the monopolisation of business, benefitting only one player)⌑.
When I played Monopoly in the 1960s the takeaway message for me always aligned with the “Gordon Gecko/Greed is Good” world view…gold standard instruction on how to win at capitalism – with ruthlessness and a certain degree of luck! Pilon points out the fundamental irony of Magie’s “thought-child” – once Parker Bros got their hands on Monopoly, the company left not a single stone unturned in the pursuit of eliminating any rival claims to “their game”⊡. Monopoly, under the aegis of Parker Bros, a game with the sole raison d’être of annihilating all business competitors, leaving a solitary victor, was the complete opposite of what the game’s prototype inventor intended it to be! Moreover, to further underscore the irony, the game became controlled by a company (Parker Bros) that “fought tooth and nail to maintain its own monopoly over it”.
Back to Ralph Anspach’s anti-monopoly crusade – as well as introducing or reintroducing Lizzie Magie to the world, the economics professor’s years of searching, digging in archives, interviewing people of interest across the United States, word-of-mouth, friend-of-a-friend, sometimes down blind alleys, etc, revealed that the games (or games) of Monopoly had been played in various forms and under various names for decades before Charles Darrow’s Pennsylvanian neighbours introduced him to the game. Pilon ties together all the threads of Monopoly’s antecedents – as unearthed by the indefatigably never-say-die Ralph Anspach. What came to light was that Magie’s game, either in its original published form (‘The Landlord’s Game’) or in derivative ‘backyard’ versions, had been played (prior to the publication of Darrow’s Monopoly) as follows:
⌲ among members of the early 20th century rural community of Arden (Delaware), an “alternative lifestyle” arts and crafts colony of “Single Taxers” (including the influential writer Upton Sinclair and the radical economist Scott Nearing who spread the word about Magie’s game to other locations)
⌲ among members of the Quaker community residing in Atlantic City in the 1920s (many Quaker families held “Monopoly nights”)
⌲ among left-wing university students and college “frat boys” on the Eastern Seaboard
⌲ among couples and families in urban Philadelphia (including those neighbours who first taught the game to Charles Darrow)Unbeknownst to Lizzie Magie, many versions of her ‘Landlord’s Game’ had sprung up in the North-East of the country, often these early, widely dispersed players made their own homemade versions of Monopoly using hand-painted oil cloths, local street names and substitute tokens. In addition George Layton created and sold his own commercial version (which he called ‘Finance’) in the early 1930s. By the thirties a version of the game had spread to Texas – Rudy Copeland’s published board game of ‘Inflation’.
Parker Brothers’ whole claim on Monopoly was based on the contention that the game had no precedents to its 1935 patent with Darrow. Anspach’s pains-taking spade work proved that the game in various guises and forms existed “in the Public Domain” years and years before the Parkers and Darrow came on the scene!
Pilon injects many diverse strands in the narrative, even Abraham Lincoln makes a brief (oblique) appearance in The Monopolists – in the late 1850s Lizzie’s father James Magie, a newspaper editor and abolitionist, was an instrumental part of Lincoln’s political campaigns for office…this digression has a very tenuous connexion with Monopoly! The various currents traversed by the author takes the story beyond the purview of being a straightforward account of plagiarised copyrights and game inventions. The book illuminates the position of women in late 19th/early 20th century American society by positing what made Magie stand out from others of her sex at the time and what she was able to achieve – taking on a number of vocations and pursuits, retaining her autonomy and avoiding the “marriage trap”, becoming an inventor (in addition to the Landlord’s Game she held patents for inventions in the realm of stenography as well).
The three Parker Brothers➚
Another strand follows the career of George S Parker, the founder of the eponymous games empire. Parker published his first board game (‘Banking’) at 17, and from the get-go was determined to establish a monopoly, systematically building up a catalog by buying up other manufacturers’ games (leading him headlong into an ongoing rivalry with fellow games giant Milton Bradley). In Parker’s zeal to totally tie down the company’s ownership and control of Monopoly, the company even went round buying up old (Pre-Parker) Monopoly sets. Eventually George Parker talked Lizzie Magie (by this time now Elizabeth Magie Phillips) into parting with her patent for the Landlord’s Game, and paying her a pittance for it with no residuals (despite inventing the archetypical business game Magie lacked business acumen and naively trusted Parker’s intentions to do the right thing by her and her invention, which he didn’t!)
The author takes the reader on another diversion, straying away from the origin controversy to surprisingly explore Monopoly’s role in World War II! The US Military purchased Monopoly sets to be sent to POWs detained in German prisons (and elsewhere in Europe). The intent behind this practice had a dual purpose: to boost morale for the imprisoned soldiers, but also a practical one –
Coda: The after-affects of Ralph Anspach’s 1983 victory over Parker Brothers in the US Supreme Court (including the ruling that the word monopoly was in fact generic) hasn’t brought any sense of closure to supporters of Elizabeth Magie Phillips. The public acknowledgement warranted her as the true and original inventor of Monopoly has not been forthcoming. Pilon points out that in the 1980s Parker Bros “quietly began to massage its Monopoly history”…a 1988 history of the company by a former Parker Bros R & D head admits that Darrow was not the game’s inventor, but neglects to mention Lizzie Magie. Similarly, on the official Monopoly website in the Nineties, Hasbro, Inc, which purchased Parker Brothers in 1991, starts the Monopoly story at 1933 with Darrow and scantly acknowledges the influence of the Landlord’s Game (again without mentioning Lizzie by name!) No plaque for Lizzie’s prototype of the Monopoly game exists anywhere (although there is one in Atlantic City recognising the contribution of that city’s Quaker players to the invention of the game!)
FN: Mary Pilon’s research for The Monopolists is nothing if not thorough. In the end-piece she includes a long, long list of acknowledgements of her sources, helpers and supporters, she even gives a hearty shout-out to coffee shops in seven different cities (I said she was thorough!)…one very notable exception missing from the author’s acknowledgement of research help is Hasbro! Hasbro denied Pilon’s request to access the Parker Brothers’ archives and outright refused to answer any of the many fact-checking queries she submitted to the world’s largest toy and games company. Zero marks to Hasbro for the cause of corporate transparency…ummm, given how much she gleaned from other sources, I wonder what else they didn’t want her to discover?
The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, by Mary Pilon [Bloomsbury New York: 2016 p/b ed.]
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✱Pirate and Traveler later got relaunched with some modifications and an updated aviation theme as a game called Pan American which I played with equal relish. The idea of these two games was to spin a number or roll a dice, collect a destination card and progress from one city to another city somewhere in the world. When you completed a requisite number of destinations, you hightailed it back to a home base city (Godthab, Greenland), first one there was the winner! The games educated me on political geography and I learnt the distance (in miles in those days) between different places on the world map
⊚ with Atlantic City street names on the earliest editions of the Monopoly sets (later editions of the game utilised New York City streets and London streets on their boards)
✥ a comparison of the visuals of Magie’s original 1904 patented game and Darrow’s 1935 patented Monopoly reveals profound continuities…Darrow’s replicates essential features of Magie’s – a square board, a space “for the emblematic GO TO JAIL”, a “Public Park” space (anticipating the Parkers’ “Free Parking”), ‘chance’ cards, the use of tokens representing money, deeds and properties
☸ Parker Bros, when taking on Darrow’s game, accepted and promoted the myth that Darrow had fed them, ie, HE invented the game from his own head in the early 1930s, and that there were NO precedents for it
☯ by a remarkable happenstance of history Lizzie filed her patent claim on the same day in 1903 as the infinitely more famous Wright brothers filed their “flying machine” patent
⌑ interestingly Magie devised two versions of the Landlord’s Game – version 1, the objective was to crush all of your opponents (= the contemporary game of Monopoly produced by Parker Bros), and version 2 – the objective was to create wealth for all to share
⊡ the three Parker brothers (especially George) were evangelically zealous about this because, as the author explains, the company had been “badly burnt” twice before with two products that they had thought that they held exclusive control and ownership of – ‘Tiddlywinks’ and ‘Ping Pong’
Pneumatic tubes transit (PTT): a system that propels cylindrical containers through networks of tubes towards a chosen destination using compressed air or by partial vacuum [‘Pneumatic tubes’, Wikipedia, http://www.wikipedia.org]
PTT, “Whoosh✱ and Go!” technology, the 19th century’s version of “Tap and Go!”Jason Farman has described the application of pneumatic tubes to postal services in the 19th century as “the instant messaging systems of their day”. According to Farman, being able to use pneumatic post to communicate, gave people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries an “instant connexion”…pneumatic post meant that they were able to “keep in touch all day long”⊡. Moreover people saw the pneumatic tubes’ facility to deliver articles rapidly as “a symbol of modernity” [‘Pneumatic tubes: the instant messaging technology that transformed the world’, James Farman, interview with ABC Australia, 13-Jun-2018].
Sketch of AE Beach’s pneumatic transit tunnel
America’s first pneumatic-powered subway
American entrepreneurs were following developments in pneumatic tube transport in Europe in the second half of the 19th century and were keen to move into the field. It fell to inventor and publisher of the magazine Scientific American Alfred Ely Beach to lead the way. Beach was less interested in the postal service than in moving people. In 1867 he trialled the first subway passenger service, later named the Beach Pneumatic Transit, in New York City. Initially the service was popular with the public, but Beach experienced opposition from Tammany Hall♉ and its notorious head ‘Boss’ Tweed, and from other vested business interests. Beach got round opposition by flagging that he would also construct a pneumatic tube to cart mail underground around NYC. Unfortunately Beach ran into both technical difficulties and funding issues (exacerbated by the financial crisis of 1873) and the project to extend the subway was stillborn.
PPT system despatch point (Washington DC, early 1940s)
Manhattan mail transfer – the eastern seaboard subway
It wasn’t until 1893 that an urban mail service in the US introduced the PTT system, and this was in Philadelphia (beating New York by four years). The New York City system linked the General Post Office with 22 other post offices covering an area of 27 miles. At its optimal level of output, five capsules each containing around 500 letters could be despatched in a minute (one every 12 seconds travelling at 30-35 mph). A government estimate in the day put the total transmitted by tube at 20,000 letters per day![‘The Pneumatic Mail Tubes: New York’s Hidden Highway And Its Development’ (Robert A Cohen, Aug 1999), www.about.usps.com]. Several other American cities followed Philadelphia and New York in establishing underground mail networks – Boston, Brooklyn (a separate entity to New York before the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge), Chicago and St. Louis.
Manhattan pneumatic mail route
Despite the clear advantage PPT had in speed of delivery over conventional mail despatch, it did not make the hand-delivered mail system redundant. At its zenith in New York PPT never accounted for more than about one-third of the Post Office’s total mail delivery. Other cities in the US were similar although Boston reached about 50 per cent at its maximum output!) [Cohen].
PPT systems, limitations and drawbacks
By the early 20th century the cost for US service providers using the pneumatic tube system had become prohibitive. By 1918 the Post Office was forking out $US17,000 per mile per year [‘Underground Mail Road: Modern Plan for All-but-forgotten Delivery System’, (Robin Pogrebin), New York Times, 07-May-2001]. In addition to cost there were other flaws in tubal delivery that made it impractical. Many mail items were too large and bulky to fit into the tube carriers, and when they did fit, the system was far from seamless. It took critical time to unload heavy items at the receiving end and sometimes the system would clog up during periods of high traffic (requiring delays in the delivery process while workers located the obstructing parcel and dug up the street to get to it) [‘Pneumatic Tubes’, Dead Media Archive, (NYU – Dept of Media, Culture and Communication), www.cultureandcommunication.org].
A maze of tubing
In addition to cost, other early 20th century factors that prompted the decline of the pneumatic post in America include the growing volume of mail, limited system capacities, and the belief that the advent of the automobile made the tubes “practically obsolete” [Annual Report of the Postmaster General, (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1918. pp. 19–22. Retrieved 8 June 2015, cited in ‘Pneumatic tube mail in New York City’, Wikipedia, http://www.en.m.wikipedia.org].
Pneumatic tube systems tend to work better on a smaller, more localised, scale – as evident in the type of enterprises and institutions that productively employ the pneumatic tube technology today (as outlined in the PostScript following)…they are also more effective (and more economical) over shorter distances, such as encompassing a single city only.
PostScript: Pneumatic tubes in the contemporary world
In the age of fiberoptics and the internet, it might be thought that there is no place for old technologies like PTT. But pneumatic tube systems today still play a vital function in the everyday workings of organisations and institutions including banks, hospitals, supermarkets, department stores, libraries and other public utilities♮.
Technology watchers have hinted at the possibility of a Renaissance of pneumatic technology. Jacob Aron has made the perceptive point that even in an age where online communication is paramount, there is still the physical necessity of transporting goods by road. This is where pneumatic tube networks have a competitive edge…Aron poses the question: “can tubes be (a) more efficient and greener” way of delivery❂ [‘Newmatics: antique tubular messaging returns’, (J Aron) New Scientist, 13-Aug-2013, www.newscientist.com]
Roosevelt Is: narrow stretch of land 3.2km long in NY’s East River
Many areas of society unrelated to postal systems currently use PTT…on Roosevelt Island (NYC) the locals have used pneumatic tubes to dispose of its garbage since 1975 (something similar has been proposed for Manhattan to tackle its mountains of trash) [‘Proposal maps out pneumatic tubes system to take out New York’s trash’, (Dante D’Orazio), The Verge, 24-Sep-2013, www.theverge.com].
Many hospitals rely on networks of tubes for their internal communications – the prestigious Stanford Hospital in California uses the technology to move blood, lab samples and medicine around the facility. Pneumatic tubes systems today are of course computer-driven and much more complex, Stanford Hospital’s network contains 124 stations. Future applications for PTT continue to be visualised…entrepreneur/inventor Elon Musk has proposed that his pneumatic-powered ‘Hyperloop’ will be capable of transporting passengers in a pod between cities at 800 mph [‘Underground Mail’, (2017), www.computerimages.com/musings].
⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸
✱ the sound the pneumatically propelled mail capsules made when they went down the shute
⊡ a characterisation very familiar to today’s social media dominated world
♉ the Democratic Party political machine which had a stranglehold on NYC politics at the time
♮ such as the Library of Congress (US) and the Russian State Library in Moscow. The ongoing utility of pneumatic networks contrasts with the bad wrap pneumatic tube systems have received from writers of fiction over the years, eg, works such as 1984 and the movie Brazil have tended to equate them with “creaking, bureaucratic dystopias” [Jacob Aron]
❂ although the other x-factor player here is 3D-printing – if it realises its full commercial potential it would tick those same boxes with perhaps greater utility
In this modern world of 24/7 online global communications and instant messaging systems, it is interesting to take a look at an earlier age’s emerging technology which had the objective of fast-tracking communications between people in different parts of rapidly modernising cities. This novel way of moving mail around drew on the subterranean reaches of urban centres to create channels for transporting them.
Wm Murdoch
It started with the London Stock Exchange in the 1850s…traders trying to buy and sell at the most propitious times of the trading day relied on telegraphs to communicate quickly with their people. The problem at the time was that telegraphs were regularly subjected to delays and hold-ups. A swifter way to communicate was needed for business success, and the technology to do so already existed in Scottish engineer William Murdoch‘s invention of the pneumatic tube in the 1830s.
Enter J Latimer Clark, an electrical engineer, with a patent “for conveying letters or parcels between places by the pressure of air and vacuum”. Clark’s delivery system powered by compressed and depressed air was implemented to connect the London Stock Exchange with the HQs of the Electrical Telegraph Company through a 660-foot long pneumatic tube. By the 1860s the stock exchanges in Berlin and Paris had followed London’s lead. Postal services for both commercial and personal transmittances were a natural fit for the pneumatic tube. Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Dublin got their own networks, whilst on the Continent, Berlin’s Rohrpost was introduced in 1865 and Paris went public with Poste Pneumatique in 1879. Other cities got in on pneumatic post and the practice spread to places as far away as Melbourne and Buenos Aires, and most anywhere in between.
The London pneumatic tube mail train at its formative stage!
London Pneumatic Despatch Company
In 1859 Latimer Clark with Thomas Webster Rammell put forward a proposal for an underground tube network in Central London. The city’s General Post Office was chosen as the nucleus of the network because it was “the routing hub of the whole country’s” transport system [Julian Stray]. The two engineers with cashed-up and influential backers formed the London Pneumatic Despatch Company to build a large-scale, underground pneumatic railway✱ with the purpose of transporting mail bags and small parcels on railcars through tunnels. At first LPDC’s prospects of success looked promising, but several developments and reversals (a financial crisis in 1866, logistics problems, technical drawbacks, and the Post Office getting cold feet over the project) saw the Company fold and its operations close in the 1870s [‘London’s Lost Pneumatic Railway: The World’s 2nd Oldest Underground’, (Long Branch Mike, 12-Apr-2015), Reconnections London Transport and Beyond, www.londonreconnections.com].
(Photo: Science Photo Library)
Despite its failures LPDC’s underground railway did capture the public’s imagination and inspired other imitators. There were experiments elsewhere in the 1860s to try to establish a viable pneumatic train network – at Croydon, Devon and Dublin. Ultimately though, for a variety of reasons, these came to nothing [‘London’s Victorian Hyperloop: the forgotten pneumatic railway beneath the capital’s streets’, New Statesman, 18-Dec-2013,www.newstatesman.com].
Capsule [National Postal Museum (Smithsonian)
The principles of “blow and suck”
The pneumatic post services of the day used pressure and air vacuums to transmit mail through a network of tubes. The process went like this: people wanting to expedite the delivery of an important document would take it to the post office where it would be rolled up and placed inside a metal or aluminium capsule. A postal clerk (in New York these employees were known as ‘rocketeers’) would drop the capsule into a hatch which corresponded to the marked lane for its intended destination…by pressing a button the capsule was transported by compressed air through a network of tubes beneath the pavement. Air from the transmitting end blew the capsule in a forward direction along the tubes. At the receiving end of the line a machine would suck the propelled capsule towards it (in the same way the suction of a vacuum cleaner functions!).
A cutting edge over conventional 19th century delivery modes
Using pneumatic power to transport letters (subterranean mail) and other items had readily apparent advantages in its unfettered immediacy…the reliance on horse-drawn vehicles and messengers on bicycles meant that delivery was impeded by the ever-increasingly congested streets of burgeoning cities, pneumatic post transported underground had no such obstacles and delivery was infinitely faster!
Parisian Poste Pneumatique network (Musée de La Poste)
Paris: Poste Pneumatique
Paris, as much as any modern metropolis, wholeheartedly embraced pneumatic tube transportation from the get-go! By the 1930s, when the service was at its peak, Paris had some 466 kilometres of pneumatic tubes. Cost was and remained an issue though…in 1975 the cost of sending one pneu☯ in Paris was eight-times that of having a posted letter delivered. As the 20th century rolled on patronage of the pneumatic post system dwindled, in 1984 Poste Pneumatique closed down for good! It’s inevitable demise was a combination of the service’s high cost and the superiority of newer communications technology (fax, telex) which made it obsolete [‘Pneumatic tubes and how mail was moved in Paris for more than a century’, Larry Rosenblum, (World Stamps), 02-Oct-2016, www.linns.com]
Prague PTT engine room
Bohemian Express Post: Prague’s pneumatic post system
Prague’s pneumatic post is the only surviving post system of this kind still intact in the world. It entered service in the Czech capital in 1889, the fifth in the world to be connected, after London, Vienna, Berlin and Paris. The Prague system operated from a central point, the main post office in Wenceslas Námêstí, and conveyed letters, documents and information to other post offices in the city, to government offices, to banks and to other important institutions. It started with the despatch of mainly telegrams, later telexes were sent through this medium. The city network of tubes covered a radius of 60km. Around 1970 a test was done of its speed of service vis-vís an on-road messenger delivery service. The pneumatic tubes won, delivering a capsule of 50 telegrams to Prague Castle in eight minutes✾ [‘Pneumatic Post System in Prague’ (Jakob Serÿch, June 2004), http://www.capsu.org/features/pneumatic_tube_system_in_prague.html]. In the 1990s Prague pneumatic post was despatching up to 10,000 documents a day! Unfortunately the European floods of 2002 put paid to the Czech pneumatic postal service, Telefonica decided the repairs needed to the tubes was too costly and in 2012 sold the system to Czech software entrepreneur Zsenêk Dražil, an enthusiast of old technologies. Dražil’s ultimate plans for the service are still unclear, but he has hinted at the tourism possibility of it being opened up to the public as a “national technical monument” [‘Radio Praha ❘ in English’, (Daniela Lazarová, Czech Radio, 11-Oct-2003 and Jan Richer, ‘New Owner Promises Bright Future for World’s Largest Pneumatic Post System’ Czech Radio, 08-Aug-2012)].
PostScript: A sample of anecdotal stories associated with pneumatic tube systems
Stories abound about the unauthorised and unorthodox uses of the pneumatic tube networks in different countries by postal workers. Its a trait of human nature that employees in the familiarity of their work environs are known to “push the envelope” and try to get away with things wherever they possibly can, and this sphere of work was no different. Staff of the Prague pneumatic tube system for instance (according to some of the stories told) were known to use it to send sausages and bread rolls to each other! Similarly in New York it was an open secret that post office workers on Manhattan used the system to receive their daily lunch orders from a well-known Bronx sandwich shop…the shop would dispatch the lunches via the tubes from the Bronx PO to the Manhattan PO! The pneumatic tubes were also sometimes utilised to play jokes on staff at another PO, eg, live mice sent through the tubes to get a predictable reaction from the startled female employees receiving the canisters at the other end; a live tortoise-shell cat returned in the same mail bag in which it had been sent, and so on.
Receiving point with collection trays
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✱ the world’s second underground railway after the limited line from Paddington to Farringdon opened in 1863
☯ an item sent by pneumatic post in France was known as a pneu
✾ a similar test was conducted earlier on the New York PTT system where the underground tube delivery easily eclipsed a motor vehicle delivery which had to contend with heavy Manhattan traffic
In the 1950s and ’60s just about every self-respecting teenager and pre-teen (the term “teeny-bopper” was still awaiting the onset of the ’70s) in New South Wales joined the Argonauts Club. Or so it seemed…I say “just about everyone” because although the Argonauts had mass appeal to children, when I was a kid, strangely its existence barely registered on my consciousness, let alone leading to my actually joining up! There was probably a couple of reasons for this: in that distant, Neanderthal era of communications, my parents habitually never rested the wireless dial on the ABC (they were not part of the ABC ‘listenerati’ as far as I recall). The only time the dial ever got within cooee of the 2BL frequency was when I switched over ritualistically to the ABC during a cricket test match.
Another factor in the Argonauts Show passing pretty much right under the radar for me was that it was a late afternoon children’s radio program (we spelt it ‘programme’ in those more formal, longhand days) and post-school afternoon and nights during my youth were incontestably reserved for television, then still a relatively novel phenomena. When it came to the wireless I was an avid morning listener to commercial networks like 2UE and 2UW. Gary O’Callaghan and “Sammy Sparrow” was more my style in the sixties. I can’t be sure if there had been a Sammy Sparrow radio club but as I’ve still got a Sammy Sparrow badge kicking round the house somewhere which probably confirms it.
ref=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/image-7.jpg”> The CC club pin[/ca
So, no Argonauts Club for me, in its place was the Charlie Chuckles Club. I was a very juvenile member in the 1960s, eagerly looking forward every week to the Sunday Telegraph where “Charlie” brought us contests and drawings to colour in. If you were privileged enough to own one, you coloured them in with that Rolls Royce of coloured pencils, a set of Derwents. In addition I was fully signed up for Nestlés, being in both their Car Club and their Sky Club. Membership of the Sky Club entitled you to a ‘flying wings’ badge and an Air Picture Logbook. The wings and logbook were free but you had to contribute to Nestlés sales figures by buying their small chocolate bars, each one of which contained a picture of different aircrafts you could then paste in the book.
Your (early) ABC ⇓
The Argonauts Club in Australia had a long history, it’s first manifestation in the early 1930s run from Victoria was short-lived. The club was revived in 1941 as a Sydney-based entity and continued until it was disbanded in 1972. Today it lives on in the vast repertoire of fond and nostalgic memories of middle-aged and older Australians.
The Argonauts’ format on radio was a six day-a-week segment, part of a radio program called The Children’s Session, later rebranded as the ‘Children’s Hour’ (the Session’s catchy song which introduced the program each week was very familiar to me). The program’s presenters were assigned Argonaut-themed pseudonyms, foremost among these was former English actor Atholl Fleming who was ‘Jason’. Others were given on-air personas such as ‘Phidas’ (artist Jeffery Smart who had a kids’ art appreciation spot), ‘Argus’ and ‘Icarus’. Founding compere Ida Elizabeth Lea was ‘Argo 1’. Co-compere, Actor John Ewart, was ‘Argo 29’. Guest presenters on the show included Australian poets AD Hope, Mary Gilmore and actor Peter Finch.
⇓1950 ABC blurb for the Argonauts: handily ‘Jason’ had a Sydney address – 55 Market St – so children could write to him!
Young Australians between seven and 17 (club membership was restricted to this age range) were invited to join the Argonauts Club, and join they did! The fifties were the pinnacle of Argonautdom, national membership reached 43,000 in 1953 [Sydney Morning Herald, 19 November 1953]. Upon joining the club youngsters would be allocated an imaginary place on one of the boats commanded by Jason and his Argonauts in their mythical quest for the Golden Fleece. The new member would become one of the “Merry Band of Rowers”, receive an enamel badge, take a pledge and be assigned to a ship with a Greek mythic name and an oar number on the vessel. On the radio segment members were referred to only by their Argonaut name and integer. Interestingly this anticipated the practice of anonymous usernames and avatars, a dominant symbol in this age of the internet [‘The Argonauts Club’, Cat Politics, www.catpolitics.blogspot.com].
Some of the youthful members went on to be prominent names and celebrities (especially in the arts) in their adult lives in and beyond Australia – including:
Tony Morphett (screenwriter) Antiphon 39
John Barron (Premier of South Australia) Charops 37 with Golden Fleece
Margaret Throsby (ABC broadcaster & icon) Androcles 26
Nick Enright (dramatist & playwright) Alastor 35
Michael Dransfield (poet) Eumolphus 24
Mike Walsh (TV presenter & theatre owner) Pontos 7
Anne Summers (writer & columnist) Pytheus 41 with Dragon’s Tooth
Christopher Koch (writer) Gaza 16
Margot Oliver (filmmaker) Herodotus 31
Allan Humphries (ABC weatherman) Ampelus 38
Peter Sculthorpe (composer) Jason 50
Joanna Mendelssohn (academic, art & design) Roxana 38
Rolf Harris (disgraced celebrity painter & entertainer) Echo 32, Perth Club
Barry Humphries (entertainer, writer, cross-dresser) Ithome 32
[Rob Johnson, ‘The Golden Age Of The Argonauts’, The Age, Friday September 13, 1996, reproduced in www.urania.com.au]
17th cent. map of the Argonauts’ route
The Argonauts wireless segment always began with the stirring club song extolling the youthful audience to “Row! Row! Merry oarsmen, Row!” … followed by the greeting from “ship captain Jason”: “Hello Argonauts, good rowing!” – which became a sort of pass or codeword for the Argonaut brethren to greet each other by, much in the way that secret brotherhoods do.
In the Argosy part of the show Argonauts were encouraged to submit drawings, stories and poems to the program, the best of which, presenters would read out aloud on air. ‘Rowers’ could earn marks or points which if accumulated sufficiently, would afford the member certain honours and status such as a Dragon’s Tooth Certificate, a Golden Fleece and the even more meritorious Golden Fleece & Bar. Holders of certificates often were rewarded with prizes, usually books. Children’s stories like Ruth Park’s The Muddle-headed Wombat were read on the radio, many former argonauts have recalled that their life-long listening habits were formed whilst their ears were ‘glued’ to the Children’s Hour [Urania, ibid.]. Stories were serialised on the Argonauts Show, serials such as ‘The Country of the Skull’ were compulsory listening for teenage devotees of the Children’s Hour. Similarly the ‘Melody Man’s’ segment helped foster the musical interests of school-age listeners.
One thing that strikes me is just how many of the ‘Rowers’ remember their Argonaut alias, given how long, and in some cases very long, ago it was! Obviously it was a huge thing in the lives of so many school-age children around the middle third of the 20th century. The number of former members (Panthea 32, Sisyphus 16, Erechtheum 33, Polybus 21, Hecuba 12, Sestus 50, Theseus 44, Equestor 3, etc. etc.) who lovingly comment on ABC Message Boards and similar online platforms is a testimony to this [ABC Message Board HYS – Messages, www.abc2b.net.au].
Trireme
Footnote: A bit pendantic to mention but there was a curious anachronism about the mathematics to do with the ships – triremes in the Heroic era of Greece (when the Argonauts legend is set) had a rowing galley of 170 oarsmen, however none of the ships fabricated by the ABC radio program ever had more than 50 places allocated to them.
The Argonauts radio show was a blessing and even maybe a salvation for many children especially for those living in remote parts of Australia. Many in fact were listening from outside Australia in places as far afield as Port Moresby and Aotearoa! It helped all of them in their isolation, compensating for the loneliness they were experiencing in the country. As one emeritus Argonaut put it, it gave isolated listeners “a sense of belonging to a community”. This was even more the case during World War II for children in rural northern Australia who gained a tremendous solace from the program at a time of anxieties about the possibility of Japanese invasion [Urania, ibid.]. A lot of children who migrated to Australia in the immediate years after the War (in that era more or less exclusively from the UK and Ireland) joined up with the Argonauts and it is clear from their recollections that the program softened the impact somewhat in trying to settle in to a new and unfamiliar land.
Inevitably, the popularity of the Argonauts program waned. In the late sixties the segment was cut to just one hour a week at 5pm on Sunday. In 1972 ABC Radio pulled the plug entirely on the show, apparently because a survey found that most of those still listening were over the age of 40! The inexorable encroachment of television into the lives of children also would have been a massively-significant factor in its ultimate demise [Urania, ibid.].
A few years ago FNFSA (Friends of the National Film and Sound Archive Inc) set up an online form to allow former Argonauts to record their membership details and recollections of the program [www.archfriends.org.au]. The response was impressive. The Argonauts Registration Form lists a vast range of ship names, an armada far greater than Jason’s meagre sum of triremes. The overwhelming response further illustrates what a phenomenal impact the Argonauts had on the formative lives of young Australians from the forties to the early seventies.
The deprivations imposed on Australian families by the Depression followed closely upon by WWII were great on children (as on the community at large). The Argonauts radio program gave youngsters an outlet to escape these harsh realities. It afforded them a chance to imagine themselves as members of a magical, mythical world, it entertained them and it inspired them to delve more into the worthy pursuits of reading and writing. For many of them it became a lifelong habit.
Starley’s Rover (Source: sewalot.com)
1889 Ladies Rover Safety Bike (Image: bicyclehistory.net)
Fischer’s pedal-bike: Tretkurbelfahrrad
(Photo: www.schweinfurtfuehrer.de)
The Drais Laufmaschine, 1817
Sturmey-Archer, 3/4-speed gears (Image: www.sturmey-archerheritage.com)
Source: Pinterest
1971 Tour de France (Source: Profimedia)
Columbia Bicycles, Connecticut (Source: etsy.com)
(Photo: rsl.ru)
‘Russian State Library’ publication
(Photo: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
(Image: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
The ‘Howl’ episode
In 1956 Ferlinghetti published and distributed a poem by an unknown Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Police in an undercover sting operation confiscated Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’🄱 collection and arrested Ferlinghetti who was charged with selling “obscene material and corrupting America’s youth”. The subsequent trial became a cause celeb in the industry. The judge found that the publication had “redeeming social significance” and therefore was not obscene🄲. The trial publicity was great for Ginsberg’s poetry and for City Lights. ‘Howl’ became an underground best-seller and a symbol of both the counterculture and the Beat Generation🄳 (Morgan).
Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg (Source: SFist)Whitman & Ferlinghetti (seated) in 2002 (Photo: Mary Duncan/Paris Writers Press)
Taos Pueblo (Source: http://ahistoryofthepresentananthology.blogspot.com/)
Mabel Dodge (Luhan) & her Amerindian husband (Photo: Santa Fe New Mexican)
DHL waxed lyrical on the experience later, ” I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever …. the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend”: he wrote how the person who lives there “above the great proud world of desert will know, almost unbearably how beautiful it is, how clear and unquestioned is the might of the day” (‘Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers is D. H. Lawrence’, (2017)).
The Lawrence Ranch
(Photo: www.taos.org)
‘St Mawr’ set partly in New Mexico mountains juxtaposes the vitality of nature with modern degenerate civilisation
Lawrence’s TB condition worsened in Europe and the novelist died in 1930 in the south of France, still proclaiming to friends a heartfelt desire to return to his beloved Taos. Frieda, who returned to live in Taos, afterwards had her late husband’s remains exhumed and shipped back to be interred on Taos soil.
Kandy, 1925 (Photo:www.lankapura.com)
Next year marks the centenary of the visit of acclaimed writer DH Lawrence to the Antipodes … the author of Sons and Lovers and Women in Love spent some 99 days on the southern continent travelling from its west to its east coast and writing the bulk of his great Australia novel, Kangaroo. The 1922 visit by the English novelist and poet has attracted new interest both within Australian literary circles and the general public over the past couple of decades. The tortuous saga of the vicissitudes of Lawrence and his wife Frieda’s house in Thirroul, NSW, after the Lawrences departed Australia, has been canvassed elsewhere on this blog site – “Lawrence of Thirroul: Creating Kangaroo at ‘Wyewurk’”, November 10, 2014.
⏏ ‘Women in Love’, set against the modern industrial Britain so loathed by Lawrence
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)
Circular Quay ferry across the harbour
“The harbour … was an extraordinary place … like a lake among the land, so pale blue and heavenly, with its hidden and half-hidden lobes intruding among the low, dark brown cliffs”
⏏ The Corso
⏏ Lagoon at Narrabeen (Source: DH Lawrence Society Aust.)
Fish Market, Woolloomooloo (Photo: State Lib of NSW)
Eastern Markets, Wolloomooloo: an absence of tables (Photo: SFM)
(Image: Dictionary of Sydney)
Fish market built in Haymarket, 1910 (Source: City of Sydney Archives)
FMA fish monopoly
The Haymarket fish market continued as the sole conduit for fish trading in Sydney until 1945 when their monopoly was expanded…the government transfered the marketing and selling of fish to the NSW Chief Secretary’s Department (hitherto unlicensed operators could sell fish outside of Sydney) which established a regulated and centralised market for the entire state. The central fish market’s control was consolidated in 1964 with the creation of the Fish Marketing Authority, a NSW statutory authority under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture¶ (‘Market History’, Sydney Fish Market, www.sydneyfishmarket.com.au]. The FMA’s role was to bring the seller’s fish and the buyer together, charging a percentage fee for this service.
(Photo: sydneyfishmarkets.com.au)
Dutch auction system (Photo: flowercompanies.com)
Privatisation and de-regulation
The state-run markets were privatised in 1994 and renamed Sydney Fish Market P/L. In 1999 full de-regulation meant catchers in NSW could now sell directly to any buyer with a Fish Receiver’s Permit, bringing to an end the Pyrmont market’s long monopoly over the sale of seafood in Sydney (private ownership of the market made the continuation of monopoly untenable) (‘SFM’).
The SFM at Pyrmont in 2021 is the largest seafood market in the Southern Hemisphere and one of the biggest in the world. Every hour of it’s commercial operation about 1,000 crates or 20,000 km of seafood gets sold (‘SFM’).(Image: The Bays Precinct Sydney)
(Source: Flickr)
(Photo: Flickr)
Cohen & Roney 1952: taking the 1st steps for audio booksellers (Photo: Lib of Congress Blogs)
The versatility of audio books is behind its blossoming into an integral part of the literature landscape for ‘readers’. ABs can be integrated easily into one’s life in all manner of ways that are not confined to a sedentary or stationary state – while exercising, walking, jogging, cycling, in the gym, while cooking, doing housework, driving a car, commuting, etc [‘Audiobooks: The rise and rise of the books you don’t read’, (Clare Thorp), BBC, 06-Jan-2020, www.bbc.com].
⇧
Canadian political philosopher John Ralston Saul is the secular high-priest of doubters and cynics, a non-believer in “the gospel” of the modern corporate state, constantly debunking the conventional wisdoms offered up as “absolute truths” in Western society✲. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Saul would produce a guidebook for other secular agnostics. Wedged between his treatises on his personal philosophy ‘superstar’ Voltaire, his studies of modern Canadian society and his excursions into the realm of fiction, is JR Saul’s The Doubter’s Companion, or to give it his full title:
Although Saul calls his volume “a dictionary”, the term applies more to the book’s format (utilising the standard A-Z form of the dictionary) than to its content or purpose. The Companion goes on to define Dictionary as “Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order”. And Answers are merely “a mechanism for avoiding questions”. Saul decries the trajectory of modern dictionaries and language (which have been captured by the forces of a rational orthodoxy), yearning instead for a return to the Humanist dictionaries of the 18th century (Voltaire, Diderot, Johnson, etc)². 
When I first delved into The Doubter’s Companion (around 1995), my mind took me to that other great cynic’s dictionary of the early 1900s, Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. Both works, albeit very different books, are idiosyncratically unconventional takes on language and meaning in their respective societies, and both proffer a contrarian view of the established wisdom of the day. Both Saul and Bierce are provocateurs, each with their own personal axe to grind⁌.
The Doubter’s Companion, by its polemical nature is unequivocally meant to shake up orthodox thinking (TDC was described by one reader as “an abecedarium of subversion”). The dictionary form of the book is a device Saul employs to launch into short philosophical essays on topics about modern post-industrial society that concern him—corporatism, individualism, leadership and managerialism, freedom of expression, communication, public relations, advertising and the way language is distorted to control communications (see his definition of ‘ideology’). In so doing, Saul skewers the accepted veracity of many of the words, phrases and terms you will find in today’s dictionaries.
Saul savages that that most universal institution of American fast food, MacDonalds:
Happy Hour is “a depressing comment on the rest of the day”.
Saul includes in the alphabetical list a number of surprising and disparate entries for a reference book on philosophical common sense. These include Ants (Saul makes the unexpected and unverified statement that the members of the Formicidae family of eusocial insects “do nothing 71.5 per cent of the time”)⊡; Apple (the fruit not the corporation); Armpits (which is curiously cross-referenced to Reality); Nannyism (not sure why this topic warranted nine paragraphs and over 400 words but Saul interweaves a discourse on Margaret Thatcher, bullying and sex appeal into the entry); Urban weather patterns (wtf?); White bread (“the sophisticated product of a civilization taken to its logical conclusion … continually refined until all utility has been removed”).
Museums: Safe storage for stolen objects.
From near Changchun’s central train station we waved down a cab to take us to the site of the city ‘s cinematic claim to cultural eminence in China, the Jilin province city’s pioneering film studios. Although it looked fairly close on Google Maps it took an eternity to get to the former movie site of CFS, Changchun Film Studios. Road distance in China is measured in the conventional way by metric length, but also by the number of motor vehicles they’re are between point A (where you are) and point B (where you want to go).
The setting for the film studios is an impressive one. From the street front you enter a big green park and walk up a grand, sweeping drive. At the top of the drive is the film studio complex, but before you reach the studio entrance, you have to contend with Mao Tse-tung. There he is, “the Chairman” standing erect, as he was in life, larger than the life of any one Chinese person. A gigantic, white statue of Mao, waving benignly at every human figure passing within the shadow of his massive, seemingly immovable image※.
It was quite late in the day by now but we were still keen after travelling that far, to see inside the CFS Factory/Museum. The callow youth on the turnstiles gate had other ideas…he point-blank refused us entry because it was after 4 o’clock, less than an hour till the museum closed. Unable to dissuade him, we went away disgruntled but decided to explore the outside parts of the site anyway.
This bore unexpected fruit as we discovered a nice little courtyard adjacent to the factory with an overt military touch (statues of heroic patriotic types and other martial figures, battle-green painted artillery guns, etc). The factory’s military theme is continued in the forecourt which exhibits a fighter plane of 1950s vintage.
Before leaving altogether we chanced a quick look-through of the CFS gift shop which was still open. This proved a fortuitous diversion on our part…while unenthusiastically perusing the shop’s uninspiring assortment of predictable souvenirs on the shelves we noticed a side door ajar which we took advantage of by slipping through it and into the exhibits area. Thus, through a combination of arse-lucky opportunism and devious initiative we did gain entry to the factory after all and for gratis! 
The public CFS Studios display comprised a long, darkly-lit corridor which threw the lighted exhibits down one side into relief. These exhibits were a miscellany of items reflecting the film company’s past productions, the result undoubtedly of a raid on the props department and the costume wardrobes (old military weapons, uniforms and paraphernalia), old style 35mm film cameras and sound recording machines, etc.
The military theme of the factory exhibition was further underscored in the choice of film posters to display…war movies galore! The impression that CFS’ most popular movie genre was war was hard to ignore on this evidence.
Peaking inside a few of the rooms running off the main corridor revealed that the complex was still a hub for contemporary film-making. Production tech staff could be seen working on documentary and TV projects using modern technical equipment (not the antique stuff in the corridor).
Another room off the corridor held a small viewing theatre…surprisingly to me the projector was running a 1930s British B & W film starring Larry Olivier (not dubbed into Chinese and no one watching!). Elsewhere in the room there were pictures and bios of Chinese film-makers, dubbers and other behind-the-camera personnel who had made a contribution at CFS Films during its halcyon days.
The props displayed were for the most part interesting and authentic-looking (authentically old too!), but I did find the stuffed tiger mounted and encased in glass right at the end of the passageway rather incongruous and something that didn’t add to the CFS collection.Changchun Film Studio Group Corporation (Ch: 长春电影集团公司) (to give it its formal title) was the first film production unit registered by the PRC in 1949 after the communist victory. Changchun Film Studios was chosen to fill the cinema production void left by the Japanese Manchukuo Film Association and the Northeast Film Studio. The Corporation also operates the somewhat maligned Changchun Film Theme Park elsewhere in the city.
(Photo: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney) ⇧
(Photo: www.visityuleba.com.au) ⇧
⇧ Vic Museums (Photo credit: https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/1256058)
⇧ Cobb & Co Charleville coachworks (Qld) (Photo: www.qhatlas.com.au/) 
(Source: www.queensland.com)
Freeman Cobb ⇑ (Photo: www.geni.com)
The Concord coaches were fitted with leather braces and straps in place of the inflexible iron ones used on other horse-drawn vehicles which had a tendency to snap too easily (leather also provided greatly superior suspension for the carriage). Concord coaches were made to last the rugged journey and so contributed to a reputation for reliability that the Cobb service was able to establish [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.].
Many of the drivers, some of which Cobb and (later) Rutherford recruited from the US, were colourful characters in addition to being accomplished horse handlers…blokes such as Dick Houston, Jim Conroy, ‘Silent’ Bob Bates, H Barnes, and not least “Cabbage Tree” Ned Devine. Devine, with his team of distinctive light grey horses, was by all accounts a particularly exceptional driver (earning himself a very good wage of £17 a week)…when the first English cricket team toured Australia (HH Stephenson’s, 1862), Devine was their driver on the Victorian leg of the tour [K. A. Austin, ‘Devine, Edward (Ned) (1833–1908)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/devine-edward-ned-3405/text5169, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 31 May 2019]. 
(Photo source: State Library of Victoria)
As a kid my favourite board game wasn’t Monopoly, it was an old Milton Bradley game called Pirate and Traveler✱, however I certainly did play Monopoly an awful lot of times growing up (and it seemed like every game went for an interminably long amount of time!). So, having clocked up that amount of wasted Monopoly game-time, I was more than mildly interested to revisit my youth via a recent book on the universal and ubiquitous board game, and even more intrigued that its author, Mary Pilon, presents a radically different take on the genesis and development of Monopoly to what hitherto was been the received orthodoxy.
Ralph Anspach comes into the story in 1973, six years after Darrow—made a multi-millionaire by the runaway success of Monopoly—had died. Anspach is an avowed anti-monopolist, by conviction a “trust-buster” who is mightily annoyed at the OPEC oil cartel’s stranglehold over that essential world commodity at the time (the 1973 Oil Crisis). He pursues his ideals by creating an Anti-Monopoly game in opposition to Parker Brothers’ über celebrated game. Parker Brothers sues Anspach for breach of copyright and so begins nearly ten years of legal battles with Parker Bros (in fact by this time the company was controlled by the General Mills corporation)…Anspach’s tireless research for the case leads him to the true, albeit convoluted, origins of Monopoly☸.
The Monopolists recounts Anspach’s monumental efforts and endlessly time-draining “detective work” in minute detail. Anspach traces the game back to one Elizabeth (Lizzie) Magie (long pre-dating Darrow), and here’s where the story gets really interesting! Magie, an independent-thinking, politically progressive Midwestern woman, was a staunch supporter of Henry George. George was the author of Progress and Poverty, a widely influential text which fuelled the introduction of the Progressive Era in the US (1890s-1920s). George advocated the introduction of a Single Tax on land and property (AKA Land Value Tax). Ms Magie invented and patented a board game in 1903-1904☯, called the Landlord’s Game, based on Georgist principles of wealth redistribution. Magie’s game was in her words, “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all the usual consequences” [Single Tax Review, 1902], the Landlord’s Game was intended to educate Americans about the dangers of unbridled capitalism (ie, ultimately resulting in the monopolisation of business, benefitting only one player)⌑.
When I played Monopoly in the 1960s the takeaway message for me always aligned with the “Gordon Gecko/Greed is Good” world view…gold standard instruction on how to win at capitalism – with ruthlessness and a certain degree of luck! Pilon points out the fundamental irony of Magie’s “thought-child” – once Parker Bros got their hands on Monopoly, the company left not a single stone unturned in the pursuit of eliminating any rival claims to “their game”⊡. Monopoly, under the aegis of Parker Bros, a game with the sole raison d’être of annihilating all business competitors, leaving a solitary victor, was the complete opposite of what the game’s prototype inventor intended it to be! Moreover, to further underscore the irony, the game became controlled by a company (Parker Bros) that “fought tooth and nail to maintain its own monopoly over it”.
Back to Ralph Anspach’s anti-monopoly crusade – as well as introducing or reintroducing Lizzie Magie to the world, the economics professor’s years of searching, digging in archives, interviewing people of interest across the United States, word-of-mouth, friend-of-a-friend, sometimes down blind alleys, etc, revealed that the games (or games) of Monopoly had been played in various forms and under various names for decades before Charles Darrow’s Pennsylvanian neighbours introduced him to the game. Pilon ties together all the threads of Monopoly’s antecedents – as unearthed by the indefatigably never-say-die Ralph Anspach. What came to light was that Magie’s game, either in its original published form (‘The Landlord’s Game’) or in derivative ‘backyard’ versions, had been played (prior to the publication of Darrow’s Monopoly) as follows:
Unbeknownst to Lizzie Magie, many versions of her ‘Landlord’s Game’ had sprung up in the North-East of the country, often these early, widely dispersed players made their own homemade versions of Monopoly using hand-painted oil cloths, local street names and substitute tokens. In addition George Layton created and sold his own commercial version (which he called ‘Finance’) in the early 1930s. By the thirties a version of the game had spread to Texas – Rudy Copeland’s published board game of ‘Inflation’.
Pilon injects many diverse strands in the narrative, even Abraham Lincoln makes a brief (oblique) appearance in The Monopolists – in the late 1850s Lizzie’s father James Magie, a newspaper editor and abolitionist, was an instrumental part of Lincoln’s political campaigns for office…this digression has a very tenuous connexion with Monopoly! The various currents traversed by the author takes the story beyond the purview of being a straightforward account of plagiarised copyrights and game inventions. The book illuminates the position of women in late 19th/early 20th century American society by positing what made Magie stand out from others of her sex at the time and what she was able to achieve – taking on a number of vocations and pursuits, retaining her autonomy and avoiding the “marriage trap”, becoming an inventor (in addition to the Landlord’s Game she held patents for inventions in the realm of stenography as well).
The author takes the reader on another diversion, straying away from the origin controversy to surprisingly explore Monopoly’s role in World War II! The US Military purchased Monopoly sets to be sent to POWs detained in German prisons (and elsewhere in Europe). The intent behind this practice had a dual purpose: to boost morale for the imprisoned soldiers, but also a practical one – 
Coda: The after-affects of Ralph Anspach’s 1983 victory over Parker Brothers in the US Supreme Court (including the ruling that the word monopoly was in fact generic) hasn’t brought any sense of closure to supporters of Elizabeth Magie Phillips. The public acknowledgement warranted her as the true and original inventor of Monopoly has not been forthcoming. Pilon points out that in the 1980s Parker Bros “quietly began to massage its Monopoly history”…a 1988 history of the company by a former Parker Bros R & D head admits that Darrow was not the game’s inventor, but neglects to mention Lizzie Magie. Similarly, on the official Monopoly website in the Nineties, Hasbro, Inc, which purchased Parker Brothers in 1991, starts the Monopoly story at 1933 with Darrow and scantly acknowledges the influence of the Landlord’s Game (again without mentioning Lizzie by name!) No plaque for Lizzie’s prototype of the Monopoly game exists anywhere (although there is one in Atlantic City recognising the contribution of that city’s Quaker players to the invention of the game!)
PTT, “Whoosh✱ and Go!” technology, the 19th century’s version of “Tap and Go!”
Jason Farman has described the application of pneumatic tubes to postal services in the 19th century as “the instant messaging systems of their day”. According to Farman, being able to use pneumatic post to communicate, gave people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries an “instant connexion”…pneumatic post meant that they were able to “keep in touch all day long”⊡. Moreover people saw the pneumatic tubes’ facility to deliver articles rapidly as “a symbol of modernity” [‘Pneumatic tubes: the instant messaging technology that transformed the world’, James Farman, interview with ABC Australia, 13-Jun-2018].
Sketch of AE Beach’s pneumatic transit tunnel
PPT system despatch point (Washington DC, early 1940s)
Manhattan pneumatic mail route
A maze of tubingRoosevelt Is: narrow stretch of land 3.2km long in NY’s East River
Wm Murdoch
The London pneumatic tube mail train at its formative stage!
(Photo: Science Photo Library)
Capsule [National Postal Museum (Smithsonian)
Parisian Poste Pneumatique network (Musée de La Poste)
Prague PTT engine room
Receiving point with collection trays
Another factor in the Argonauts Show passing pretty much right under the radar for me was that it was a late afternoon children’s radio program (we spelt it ‘programme’ in those more formal, longhand days) and post-school afternoon and nights during my youth were incontestably reserved for television, then still a relatively novel phenomena. When it came to the wireless I was an avid morning listener to commercial networks like 2UE and 2UW. Gary O’Callaghan and “Sammy Sparrow” was more my style in the sixties. I can’t be sure if there had been a Sammy Sparrow radio club but as I’ve still got a Sammy Sparrow badge kicking round the house somewhere which probably confirms it.
Trireme
Inevitably, the popularity of the Argonauts program waned. In the late sixties the segment was cut to just one hour a week at 5pm on Sunday. In 1972 ABC Radio pulled the plug entirely on the show, apparently because a survey found that most of those still listening were over the age of 40! The inexorable encroachment of television into the lives of children also would have been a massively-significant factor in its ultimate demise [Urania, ibid.].