I happened upon the remarkable, daring exploits of Lt. Edgardo Simoni—the Italian prisoner of war who made a habit of repeatedly escaping from various Australian POW camps during WWII—while reading the non-wartime story of another (very different) ace escape artist, Kevin John Simmonds, a con on the run from NSW cops who bamboozled an extensive manhunt comprising 500-odd police and 300 volunteers in 1959, leading them on a long, fruitless chase through harsh and rugged bush land before being finally being recaptured. To their embarrassment the state’s police officers found themselves lagging far behind the solo fugitive in a catch-up game of “Where’s Wally”, with Simmonds making them at times look like “right” (and not very bright) “Charlies” (They’ll Never Hold Me, by Michael Adams (Affirm Press, Melbourne, 2024).
Kevin John Simmonds
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The theme of valiant escape and valiant escapees from POW camps is a standard trope of cinema and television that has been done to oblivion over the years. This sub-genre has been a recurring feature in cinema for the past seven or eight decades, including a raft of classic war (WWII) features like Escape from Stalag 17, The Colditz Story, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Von Ryan’s Express, The Wooden Horse, The Mackenzie Break and of course the most lauded of all movies subscribing to the sub-genre – 1963’s The Great Escape.
But for me my favourite POW screen vehicle is the antithesis of these largely stark and grim dramas. No, not Hogan’s Heroes but another TV war sitcom, an episode from the Seventies TV series Ripping Yarns (created by two-sixths of the “Monty Python” team, Michael Palin and Terry Jones) called ‘Escape from Stalag Luft 112B’. The protagonist played by Palin (Major Phipps) is a serial escape attempter…during the war to date he has attempted over 560 escapes, 200 of them before he had left England, as a consequence he is transferred to Germany’s most infamous prison camp. At Luft 112B he continues his escape attempts 24/7, all of them ludicrously impossible. Meanwhile the rest of the British POWs frustrate Phipps no end by being perfectly content to sit out the war in their cosy and comfy little gentleman–officer confinement. By the show’s end the other POWs and German guards have all scarpered, leaving Phillips as the only man to never have escaped the “inescapable POW camp”. In his life after the war we learn that escaping is so intrinsically part of Maj. Phipps’ DNA that two years after his death and burial, locals discovered a tunnel dug from his grave to the cemetery fence: his final and “greatest” escape! A gem of a send-up of both the unrelentingly solemn POW film and British upper-middle class and upper class twits𖤓.
Michael Palin, ‘Escape from Stalag Luft 112B’
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Back to the real life POW escapologist Signoré Simoni. Simoni was one of more than 18,000 Italian military personnel captured by the Allies and transported to Australian POW camps, in his case assigned to the Murchison Camp # 13, near Shepparton, Victoria. Unlike the fictional Maj. Phipps’ fellow prisoners and the great majority of his fellow Italian POWs, Edgardo Simoni never content to stay put behind barbed wire and high fences paralleled the fictional Phipps in trying to escape whenever the opportunity presented itself.
Italian prisoners of war arriving at Circular Quay wharf, Sydney, 1941 (source: coasit.com.au)
Simoni’s first shot at freedom failed but undaunted he soon tried again. Swapping uniforms with an Italian private in the prison was his passport to the outside POW work detail. From there he easily managed to slip away from the Murchison guards and head for metropolitan Melbourne. Once there, he took the alias “George Scoto” and got a job selling door-to-door cosmetics (very successfully) which lasted for ten months. Afterwards, Simoni moved to Mildura in country Victoria where he found work on a farm. Here he was recaptured by Australian military police and despatched to a higher security goal in the isolated town of Hay, NSW. Simoni was not intent to accept captivity in Hay and in no time he had escaped by painstakingly filing through the bars of his cell window, becoming the only POW to escape from that supposedly escape-proof incarceration facility. Simoni then walked 300km to Bendigo where he caught a train to Melbourne. His second sojourn in Melbourne was cut short by a stroke of rotten luck when he was spotted and arrested by the same policeman who had arrested him on the previous occasion! (‘Italian POWs in Australia’ by Frank O’Rourke, Newsletter # 580, 02–07–2021, www.melbashed.com.au)✦.
Italian POWs at Myrtleford Camp (photo: Geoffrey McInnes/Aust War Memorial)
Myrtleford, Victoria, was the next POW camp (# 5) to accommodate the peripatetic Signoré Simoni. Edgardo had been an anti-fascist in Italy and had joined Mussolini’s army only after swearing allegiance to the monarchy, but in Australia he started to embrace communism which led to the authorities placing him under special surveillance. Not very successfully it seems because Simoni was still able to regularly abscond from the Myrtleford facility at night-time without much effort to moonlight as an unofficial organiser for the local tobacco sharefarmers exhorting them to agitate for better working conditions (‘Edgardo Simoni oral history interview by Dan Connell’, 06–11–1986, http://archival.sl.nsw.gov.au).
Col. Edgardo Simoni (ret.) in 1974: revisiting his travels around SE Australia
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Endnote: All in all Lt. Simoni—who earned the nickname La volpe (“the Fox”) for his war-time escapades—made 13 escape attempts in the three years he was a POW in Australian detention. At the end of the war, upon release, Simoni returned to Italy and resumed his career in the military, rising to the rank of colonel. In 1974 La volpe re-visited Australia, this time on happier terms, to retrace the steps of his fugitive odyssey around NSW and Victoria.
𖤓 the 2000 Aardman film animation Chicken Run also mines the escape from prison trope, freely parodying WWII POW movies (especially The Great Escape) by exploiting all the familiar cliches
✦ the press closely followed Simoni’s escapades in Australia as if they were tracking “Public Enemy # 1”: ‘Search For Italian’ MELBOURNE. June 10. Police and military authorities searching for Lt. Edgardo Simoni, 25, the Italian who escapedon a bicycle from a prisoner ofwar camp in Gotiburn Valley on Saturday, believe that he has crossed the Victorian border. Detectives and railway enquiry officers are checking; every interstate and country train. and interstate detectives have joined the search ~ Adelaide Advertiser, June 11 1942”
Obscure origins: Like so many things pertaining to the dark realms of antiquity it can’t be said definitively when the crossbow came into existence…at some point between the 7th to 5th centuries BC, the consensus of opinion says. What is pretty much settled is that it first appeared as a combat weapon in China. The Chinese employed it to good effect during the Warring States period (c.475 – 221 BC). Crossbowmen of this period comprised between 30 to 50 per cent of standing Chinese armies. The weapon was still popular during the Han Dynasty (late 3rd century BC to AD 220) but it’s popularity diminished after the Hans lost power, possibly due to the introduction of more resilient heavy cavalry under the succeeding Six Dynasties.
Crossbow from China’s Qin Dynasty, early 3rd century BC. Ancient Chinese crossbows were made from wood, sinew, bronze and bamboo.
The crossbow in Europe, decline and reemergence: From ancient China the crossbow spread to Europe’s early civilisations. Its use was recorded in a battle at Syracuse (Sicily) as early as 397BC. The ancient Greeks were responsible for several early iterations of the crossbow namely the gastraphetes, a hand-held crossbow invented before 400BC, and the ballista, a small assault weapon capable of firing both stones and bolts, which the Romans copied and modified as a composite catapult-crossbow called a scorpio. The scorpio was lethally effective, offering marksman-like precision of its projectiles. The cheiroballistra or maniballista was another Roman variant on the crossbow with specific application as a siege engine. After the fall of Rome the crossbow fell out of use in the West until the 10th to 11th centuries AD when it was revived. The French used crossbows in siege warfare and they were in use during the epochal Battle of Hastings in England in 1066. France’s iconic heroine Joan of Arc was wounded by an English crossbowman in an attempted siege and the famous Plantagenet warrior-king of England, Richard the Lionheart, was killed by a bolt from a crossbow. The crossbow attached considerable prestige especially in England, so much so that only knights were permitted to own and use the weapon in war.
Crossbowman in an AD 1225–1250 English manuscript. BL Royal 12 F XIII The Rochester Bestiary (source: British Library and Manuscript Miniatures)
Crossbow or siege engine? As iron-based crossbows were improved and made more powerful and elaborate, the concept of the crossbow starts to merge with that of the torsion-powered siege engine (the former requiring only one man to work it while the latter needed several men). Certainly medieval sources seem to have conflated the two…different authors writing on the Crusader wars for instance have described the ballista alternately as a crossbow or a siege engine [Stuart Ellis-Gorman, The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King (2022)].
The Ballista: crossbow–cum–catapult
Evolution of medieval crossbows: In the Middle Ages the arbalest was popular in Europe. This was a decided technical advance in crossbows, improved by having a special mechanism for drawing back and releasing the string. Arbalests were larger and heavier weapons with metal-tipped bolts replacing the earlier wood-bolted crossbows, thus achieving devastating impact against the armour of the enemy. By the 13th century further technological improvements in the use of crossbows came with the advent of winches and various spanning mechanisms such as winch pulleys, cord pulleys, gaffles, cranequins, and screws [‘Medieval Crossbow’, Medieval Britain, http://medievalbritain.com]. The crossbow increasingly evolved into a defensive weapon, a composite crossbow–catapult of sorts, used to defend castles during sieges and favoured for its longer range capacity.
Leonardo Da Vinci, design for a crossbow, ca1500 (made of wood and iron)
Crossbow versus longbow? Which weapon was more effective in medieval warfare situations? There is not a straightforward answer to this question because the two lethal projectiles had different strengths and advantages over each other. The (English) longbow had a flexibility and portability edge over the more clunky crossbow which need time (and sometimes assistance) to load. The crossbow however was more accurate including at distances in honing in on the intended target (with a range of up to 300m). The longbow having simpler parts was cheaper to manufacture and where it had clear advantage over the crossbow was in its frequency of shots. In the time it took the crossbowman to launch two or at most three bolts at the enemy, the longbowman could propel 10 to 12 arrows. The crossbow though perceptibly slower to load and much heavier to carry, required appreciably less strength to operate…it’s locking mechanism allowed the crossbowman to handle stronger draw weight so able to hold the bolt for longer with significantly less physical strain, which translated into better precision (‘Medieval Crossbow’). Another plus for the crossbow was ease of use, it required minimal training cf. the traditional bow which took years of training to master. The downside for the longbow in battle was that it couldn’t penetrate medieval armour as the heavier bolts could do. This didn’t seem to be a problem in the two most famous battles of the 100 Years War—Crecy and Agincourt—where the English bowmen triumphed completely over the numerically superior French and mercenary crossbowmen (and cavalry) [‘A quick history of the English longbow’, Notes from the U.K., 17-Jan-2025, www.notesfromtheuk.com].
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Genoese crossbowmen
The crossbow reaches its obsolescence point: By the 16th century the crossbow had seen its best days and was being supplanted by gunpowder weaponry – muskets, cannons, guns. Firearms had greater range, faster reload times and an overall firepower that crossbows could not begin to match. The final fling for the crossbow as a weapon of choice in war occurred in 1644 at the Battle of Tippermuir in Scotland (English Civil War).
ITV television adventure series of William Tell (late 1950s)
Endnote: Crossbow sellers’ greatest marketeer: Hovering at the intersection of history, myth and popular culture is the heroic legendary figure most popularly associated with deadeye expertise in the crossbow caper and a talent for shooting apples off his own son’s head, William Tell. Elevated by Swiss folklore as a symbol of the struggle for liberation from the tyrannical Austrians, baby boomers—opera buffs aside—will associate the mythical hero William Tell with the 1958–59 British television series The Adventures of William Tell in which Tell (played by Conrad Phillips) is portrayed as a sort of Robin Hood clone but with a different kind of bow and the Swiss Alps rather than Sherwood Forest for backdrop𖤓.
William Tell splitting the apple
𖤓 a nexus not coincidental, ‘William Tell’ was created to exploit the success of another highly popular ITV show of the Fifties The Adventures of Robin Hood. ‘Tell’ followed the earlier series’ familiar formula: a brave citizen turned outsider valiantly leading the resistance on behalf of the oppressed masses against a unredeemable evil tyrant
Aside from a handful of dissenting voices, no one in America disputes the ignominious role assigned Benedict Arnold in the annals of American history. Arnold, a general in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, switched sides and took British money to divulge American military intelligence, even offering to trade West Point to the invading British. Benedict Arnold is a name synonymous with treason in the hearts of Americans…needless to say there are no “Benedict Arnold High Schools” in the US! Aaron Burr’s career on the other hand is more complicated. Though also considered a traitor by many, Burr is not as black-and-white a candidate for the US historic hall of infamy. Burr started out, like Arnold, somewhat of a hero during the revolution, then quit the fighting to practice as a lawyer and then enter politics. Burr was successful enough to (twice) run for president of the United States, on the second occasion managing to tie with Thomas Jefferson in the electoral college vote. As vice-president under an increasingly distrustful Jefferson, he found himself on the outer, excluded from involvement in White House politics.
Benedict Arnold, archetype of the American traitor
Plagued by a sequence of political reversals𝕒 and heavily in debt, Burr turned his back on mainstream US politics and changed course to pursue other ambitions of an extra-political and illicit nature. The former vice-president left Washington DC and headed west, this is where the narrative of his controversial activities takes on a nebulous complexion.
Aaron Burr in profile
Burr’s grand scheme X?:No one knows definitively what Burr’s intentions were after 1804, but allegations of nefarious machinations orchestrated by him were legend. Some of his accusers claimed that Burr’s plan was to annex Texas for himself or to incite the southern states and territories (Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana) to secede from the United States, creating a new independent country with the former VP at the helm. Another allegation spoke of a grander plan to conquer Mexico by triggering a secessionist movement and establishing an empire for himself. Some opponents speculated that Burr wanted to attack New Orleans or seize the Florida peninsula from Spain𝕓. Burr’s own version of his post-politics plans was that he was heading south-west to farm 40,000 acres in the Spanish colony of Texas which had been supposedly leased to him by the Spanish Crown.
Spanish-controlled Southwest (incl. Texas) early 19th century (source: pbs.org)
What is known is that Burr sensed the opportunity for wealth and glory in the west, embarking on an “expedition” of sorts with the recruitment of a fighting force𝕔, rather than farming, on his mind. He also sought money for a great “enterprise” from prominent people (Southern planters, sympathetic politicians). Burr engaged a co-conspirator, bringing General James Wilkinson𝕕, a US Army senior officer, on board to give weight to his planned illegal operations. At the same time Burr established international connexions with British officials, Spanish ministers and even Mexican revolutionaries. The British ambassador’s account of their conversation revealed Burr’s offer to the British to wrest control of the Southwest and Louisiana from the US and hand it Britain. The price? A hefty sum of money and an armed force supplied by Britain. The ambassador’s masters in London however showed no interest in Burr’s scheme, nor did the Spanish government in Madrid. Burr also met with a group of criollos whose objective was to capture Mexico from the Spanish, but again nothing tangible came of this.
Burr on the recruiting drive out west, Ohio River (image: Alamy (via smithsonian.com))
A question of definitions:Before Burr could launch any part of his grand and ambitious masterplan he was undone by his co-conspirator. General Wilkinson having lost faith in Burr’s wild scheme sent President Jefferson a confidential, coded letter incriminating Burr. Burr was hunted down and eventually captured by US authorities in Louisiana. A Virginian federal court trial was arraigned in 1807 with the charge against Burr treason. Jefferson was hell-bent on prosecuting Burr and unconcerned about breaking the law to do it, however presiding Supreme Court Justice John Marshall had his own ideas of how things should proceed. Marshall applied the strictest definition of treason in accordance with the Constitution’s treason clause—interpreting it as the accused needing to be guilty of “the act of actually levying war” for treason to be proven —and accordingly found Burr not guilty (‘Aaron Burr’s trial and the Constitution’s treason clause’, Scott Bomboy, National Constitution Center, 01-Sep-2023, http://consitutioncenter.org).
Thomas Jefferson (source: theatlantic.com)
Coda: Having escaped the treason charge Burr was soon to discover he had been convicted in the court of public opinion…across America effigies of him were burned and additional charges were brought by individual states. Faced with such threats and his dreams of”glory and fortune” in tatters, persona non grata Burr, fled this time to Europe where he tried unsuccessfully to convince the English and French to back his new plots to invade North America. By 1812 he had returned to New York and recommenced practicing law in relative obscurity under a different name – “Aaron Edwards” (‘The Burr Conspiracy, PBS, www.pbs.org).
Polar opposites: which Burr do you choose? (image: paw.princeton.edu)
Endnote: Rehabilitating Burr?: Writers and historians since Burr’s time have tended to depict Burr as an unprincipled villain and a betrayer of the Republic. Swimming resolutely against this tsunami-like tide is Nancy Isenberg’s revisionist take on the least admired founding father, she states that “Burr was no less a patriot…and a principled thinker than those who debased him”. She also challenges the popular view that he ever planned a grand conspiracy or intended to instal himself as emperor of Mexico. Isenberg adds that rather than being a womaniser as his enemies claim, Burr was something of a proto-feminist (although this begs a glaring question: how does this assessment square with the flagrant mismanagement of his wealthy second wife’s fortune?). That he has been so comprehensively vilified by historians, Isenberg contends, owes to the usefulness of (a morally flawed) Burr as a foil, making the other founding fathers𝕖 (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, etc.) look virtuous by comparison (N Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, (2007)).
𝕒 his loss in the 1804 New York gubernatorial election and the notoriety and odium heaped on him after his tragic duel with Alexander Hamilton sealed his political demise
𝕓 at one point Burr told Spanish officials that his plan was not just western secession but that he wanted to capture Washington DC itself
𝕔 in which he was only modestly successful
𝕕 himself a double agent for Spain
𝕖 a theme previously pursued in Gore Vidal’s 1973 historical novel Burr…Vidal skewers the founding fathers’ traditionalist, mythical iconography, portraying Washington and his ilk as all too humanly fallible
When the average American movie-going punter thinks of motion pictures he or she thinks naturally of Hollywood. If they know a little bit of US cinema history though, they might stretch themselves to mention New York as well. New York City was the centre of the early film industry (production and distribution)❇︎ – where the whole movie caper started in the very early days before it shifted to sunny California. The place they probably won’t tend to associate with movie-making is Chicago. Yet Chicago did have a thriving film studio in the very early days of motion pictures. Essanay Studios, Chicago, made its first silent movie back in 1907, when Hollywood was still known as a place for growing exotic fruits and vegetables. ,
“Broncho Billy” aka GM Anderson, mainstay of Essanay westerns
Essanay got its name from the initial of the surnames of its two founders, George K Spoor and Gilbert M Anderson (“S–and–A”), the latter a specialist western movie actor acting on the screen under the name “Broncho Billy” Anderson. The first star at Essanay was cross-eyed Ben Turpin (formerly Essanay’s janitor), who specialised in vigorous physical comedy (An Awful Skate, a 1907 short exploiting the roller skate craze).
The three biggest players together at Essanay in 1915
Many future Hollywood stars got their early screen exposure with Essanay, including Francis X Bushman, Wallace Beery, Gloria Swanson and Lewis Stone (and director Alan Dwan behind the camera). Bronco Bill Anderson’s westerns, regularly turned out by Essanay, proved a very popular earner for the studio. In a change of style from the customary westerns and comedies Essanay is credited with the first Sherlock Holmes film made in the US. Because of Chicago’s seasonal weather patterns Anderson moved an arm of the studios west, first to Colorado and later to California, based in Niles in San Francisco.
Sherlock Holmes (1916)
The studio had many of the top silent draws in the 1910s but no one was a bigger star at Essanay Motion Picture Company than Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin who joined the studio in 1915 was poached by Essanay from Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios with the lure of much more money and his own production unit. While at Essanay Chaplin made 14 or 15 shorts (one or two-reelers), the crowning gem of which is The Tramp (1915), which received saturation publicity from Essanay. In this two-reeler Chaplin immortalised his most famous character, the vagabond “tramp”, conveying the right mix of melodramatics and wild slapstick [Neibaur, J. L. (2000). Chaplin at Essanay: Artist in Transition. Film Quarterly, 54(1), 23–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/1213798]. The studio’s star performer however wasn’t happy at Essanay’s locations in either Chicago or Niles and after just one year he departed the studios, moving to LA and Mutual and First National corporations for even more mega-money (his first $1M movie paycheck) and more creative control§.
The Tramp (1915)
Chaplin was far and away Essanay’s biggest money-spinner…with him no longer front-lining for the studio it started a downward spiral. Less than three years after the star draw card defected to Hollywood the Essanay Studios in both Chicago and Niles folded for good. Film historians contend that Essanay could have stayed successful had it been prepared to move with the times. The new trend was towards feature films (five or more reels), which were supplanting the short film as the popular form. Essanay Studio head GK Spoor lacked the necessary prescience to grasp this trend, preferring to stick with the old short film mode [Smith, M. G., & Selzer, A. (2015). Essanay Signs Charlie Chaplin. In Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry (pp. 120–130). Columbia University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/smit17448.16]. Selig Polyscope, William Selig’s rival film studio in Chicago, was more attuned to the future of cinema, producing The Spoilers in 1914, an early full-length feature film starring William Farnum. Selig Polyscope however was also forced to shut down its productions in 1918, bringing Chicago’s role as a hub of American cinema production to a close, leaving Hollywood firmly and permanently in the movie-making ascendency.
Essanay Film Manufacturing Co logo
❇︎ New Jersey was often used to shoot the outdoor scenes, especially for westerns!
§ the other reason Chaplin and other east coast film-makers moved to the west coast and LA was to evade the enforcement of Thomas Edison’s patents on motion pictures [‘A Brief History of Hollywood Before It Was Hollywood’, Silent–ology, (2015), www.silentology.wordpress.com]
Queen Kelly is one of early Hollywood’s most controversial movies…its story is a cinematic journey of a production burdened by recurring misfortune and internal conflicts which is doomed to become the incomplete expression of a would-be silent classic. It’s excruciatingly long drawn-out saga starts in 1928, as a United Artists feature intended as a star vehicle for top silent screen actress of the day Gloria Swanson who had defected from Paramount to go independent. Joe Kennedy Sr, patriarch of the tragedy-soaked, almost self-destructive Kennedy family of jinked and fated politicians, comes into the film’s story at this juncture. In the late 1920s Kennedy shrewdly acquired a string of small movie studios which he consolidated into RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) in 1928.
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Kennedy’s foray into the movie biz led to a meeting with Swanson and a three-year affair between the two. Joe was hoping to launch a successful career as a Hollywood film tycoon and agreed to finance Swanson’s Queen Kelly. Controversial auteur director Erich von Stroheim was brought in to write the original story and to direct, this was the start of everything going pear-shaped. Let loose with a big budget, Stroheim, an autocratic perfectionist by nature, dragged out the filming of what he intended to his personal masterpiece with constant reshoots and delays – amassing enough footage for a five-and-a-half hour epic, but having shot only just over one-third of the film’s scenario (‘Queen Kelly’, Silent Era, www.silentera.com).
Swanson in the title role with co-star Walter Byron (still from Queen Kelly)
With the movie still not finished and the Austrian-American director having drained more than $800,000 from the production budget, Stroheim was finally sacked. Filming done, this is where the machinations started getting really interesting. Swanson discovered that Kennedy has deceived her, instead of being an investor in the project Joe had actually loaned Gloria the capital, leaving Swanson wholly responsible for the loss! To try to recoup her money, Swanson tried to finish the disaster of a movie❇︎. After a savage round of editing, a sound version directed by Richard Bokeslawski with an alternate ending was released by Swanson’s own production company in Europe and South America in 1932. Stroheim, still holding the US rights to the production, had vetoed an American release (‘Erich von Stroheim’s Damned Queen: Queen Kelly’, Michael Koller, Senses of Cinema, August 2007, www.sensesofcinema.com).
Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (“the pictures got smaller…”)
Sunset Boulevard: American audiences finally got their first screen glimpse of Queen Kelly in a curious, twisted fashion some 20 years later. The film Sunset Boulevard (1950) reunited two of the original forces behind Queen Kelly, Swanson and Stroheim (as actor). Stroheim cheekily talked director Billy Wilder into using an excerpt from Queen Kelly in Sunset Boulevard, in which Swanson plays Norma Desmond, a forgotten silent film star. In a delicious irony the interspersed old footage from the doomed 1928 “classic” is presented as one of Desmond’s great silent films! The ensuing interest generated by Sunset Boulevard resulted eventually in a very belated second release of Queen Kelly in 1957.
The 1985 version
In 1985 Kino International brought to the screen a third release of the much maligned and butchered Queen Kelly. The 1985 version—hyped as a “restored masterpiece” and “lost masterwork”—was based on Stroheim’s original script (IMDb, www.imdb.com), but of course remains incomplete as intended. Over the course of the production’s extended lifespan, four cinematographers, five directors (in addition to Stroheim) and three other writers worked on the uncompleted feature.
Queen Kelly’s final release, 56 years after production ceased (source: New York Times)
Swanson and Stroheim
❇︎ timing also contributed to Queen Kelly’s failure…it was in production at the same time as ‘’talkie” movies were starting to make their inexorable rise ultimately to unparalleled popularity. Also, the Hays Code, recently introduced, insisted Stroheim make cuts to the movie’s raunchy content, which Stroheim defiantly and characteristically refused to do
The popularity of Earl Derr Biggers’ Chinese detective creation Charlie Chan triggered a demand for this kind of Asian–American mystery crime fiction, paving the way for a spinoff into a profitable movie series. Biggers’ early death in 1933 after publishing just five Chan books left a void in fiction that other writers were not slow to try to fill. Encouraged by the editor of the Saturday Evening Post, which had serialised the Charlie Chan books, author John P Marquand created his notion of an Asian “detective” hero who triumphs in white society, Mr Moto. Mr Moto is Japanese, quiet, small and seemingly meek of nature, like Charlie Chan he roams the globe solving crimes and exposing murderers. Unlike Chan he uses ju-jitsu as well as brains to overcome and apprehend the bad guys.
Marquand eventually completed six novels centring around the Japanese secret agent/sleuth – Your Turn, Mr. Moto, Thank You, Mr. Moto, Think Fast, Mr. Moto, Mr. Moto is So Sorry, Last Laugh, Mr. Moto (all in the 1930s) and Right You Are, Mr. Moto (1957). 20th Century Fox bought the films rights (as they had with the Charlie Chan novels), and casting Hungarian-American actor Peter Lorre as the Japanese spy Moto🅐, rapidly made eight publicly well-received B-features in two years – Think Fast, Mr. Moto, Thank You, Mr. Moto,Mr. Motor’s Gamble, Mr. Moto Takes a Chance, Mysterious Mr. Moto, Mr. Moto’s Last Warning, Mr. Moto in Danger Island and Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation (the series was variously set in Hawaii, Mongolia, Peking, Cambodia/Siam, Egypt, Devil’s Island, Puerto Rico, at sea, San Francisco and other locations in the US).
Your Turn, Mr. Moto: Book and movie The film is only loosely based on the original novel, retaining only some of the key characters like American Tom Nelson and Prince Tung, introduces new characters and makes the quest for the ancient Chinese scrolls a more central element than in the novel where it is subordinated to the question of Japo–Chinese relations🅑.
Apart from some overlap of titles there are big differences between the books and the movies. One of the most conspicuous is Mr Moto’s presence in the stories. In Marquand’s novels, the character of Mr Moto goes missing for large parts of the books (though he’s always actively working towards his objectives “off-stage”)…meanwhile attention switches to the male (American) protagonist who finds himself in trouble of some kind or other🅒. Moto returns to intervene at a crucial moment, the American is saved and finds redemption (which is the key to the plot). In the films by contrast, Mr Moto tends to “fill the screen and animate the whole series”. In the books Moto is “I.A. Moto”, a secret agent working for the imperial Japanese government, but in the films he is presented as “Kentaro Moto” (as his printed business card states), an Interpol agent. Moreover the two mediums craft quite different types of crime stories, the novels were international espionage adventures which Hollywood turned into formulaic detective stories on the screen, [Schneider, Michael A. “Mr. Moto: Improbable International Man of Mystery.” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 22, no. 1, 2015, pp. 7–16. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43898402. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024].
Marquand’s No Hero (1935)
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Mr Moto’s talents don’t stop at crime solving. He’s also a polymath, polyglot, art connoisseur, a graduate of Stanford University, amateur archaeologist and importer–exporter on the side. In some of these roles he demonstrates his special flair for effecting disguise, a ploy he uses to deflect suspicion from himself, blending in to exotic locales while undertaking dangerous spying assignments [‘Observations on Film Art: Charlie, Meet Kentaro’, Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell; David Bordwell’s website on cinema, 16-Mar-2007, www.davidbordwell.net; “‘Asian Detectives’. An Overview’, Philippa Gates, Crime Culture, www.crimeculture.com].
Mr Moto in clownface (“Mr. Moto’s Last Warning”)
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The Charlie Chan nexus: With two highly bankable screen detectives at its disposal Fox recognised the value of cross-promotion when the opportunity arose. The 1938 Moto movie Mr. Moto’s Gamble was originally meant to be a Warner Oland-starring Charlie Chan feature, however Oland’s ill-health and untimely death squashed those plans. Fox substituted Mr. Moto’s Gamble for the canned Chan movie and the producers kept Oland’s co-star Keye Luke in his No. 1 son role opposition Lorre this time, even allowing Mr Moto to politely inquire with Lee Chan (Luke) as to his honourable father’s health.
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Moto, genial but ruthless: Irrespective of the connexions and references between Charlie Chan and Kentaro Moto, Lorre’s off-centre sense of humour ensures that on screen Moto is “no Chan clone”. Although Moto, like Chan, employs logic and deduction in his policing methods and is quiet, meek exceedingly polite in public dealings (and a milk drinker no less!), he is also very much a man of action, disposing of physical threats to him with his uncompromising ju-jitsu prowess…in the case of the story’s murderer, once revealed, Moto customarily dispenses with the need for trial, having no qualms about liquidating him with 007-like utter ruthlessness, something Chan with his high moral code would never contemplate (Gates).
Moto’s alpha side (“Think Fast, Mr. Moto”)
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Mr Moto‘s personal side is as shadowy as his profession, to the audience it’s a blank slate. He has no family and no love life and his only companion is his cat. The only hint of a possible romance is his liaison with Lela (or Lotus) Liu (Lotus Long) in Think Fast, Mr. Moto and Mysterious Mr. Moto, but she turns out to be an agent like him and their attachment seems to be more a matter of working together to solve the case. Moto is a “lone wolf” when investigating cases, working solo without assistants. Occasionally he does ally with a self-appointed sidekick—usually a naive or gormless American or English idiot—who sometimes inadvertently unearths crucial evidence but as always it’s Mr Moto who unravels the mystery.
”Them Nipponese sure are peculiar birds”: Mr Moto, a Japanese man in 1930s America, is inevitably exposed in the stories to the casual racism of various people he meets, but the prejudice he cops seems more overt than the more subtle racist slurs DI Chan is subjected to. Possibly, this was a reflection of growing pro-Chinese feelings in America then in the wake of unremitting Japanese aggression against China in Manchuria. Moto, unfazed by the jibes, manages to turn the racism back on the perpetrators without their realising it…though he speaks perfectly fluent English he sometimes pretends to indulge their expectations of the stereotypical Asian: “Ah, so!!! Suiting you?”, he mocks in his singsong repartee manner 🅓 (Thompson & Bordwell).
Versatile Mr Moto turns his hand (and voice) to ventriloquism (Mr. Moto’s Last Warning)
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What makes Lorre’s star turn as the mysterious Japanese secret agent so good–even if it’s heavily stereotyped—is that he plays the role absolutely tongue-in-cheek and with considerable charm [‘A Guide to the Mr Moto Films’, Charles P. Mitchell, Classic Images,www.webarchive.org]. Although I wonder if Moto’s ever-smiling, ultra-polite, insufferable smugness with gleaming teeth while correcting lesser mortals as to the error of the misconceptions didn’t start to grate with some movie-watchers after a while?
“Mr Moto…the foxiest detective of them all!!!“
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As the series continued the film storylines and situations predictably became more formulaic. After eight features Peter Lorre called it quits, seeking a release from his Mr Moto contract. The Moto sub-genre was still very popular at the box office but it’s probable that Lorre’s concern was that he was being typecast again as Moto (having previously been stereotyped as a psycho killer), which he felt was limiting his choices of different parts (Gates).
Footnote: Where did Marquand get his inspiration for the character of Mr Moto? Marquand undertook a research tour of the Orient in 1934 to gather material for his Asian detective project. While in Japan he aroused the suspicions of a short, exceedingly polite police detective who started shadowing the American author on his journeys. Eventually the Japanese detective, realising that Marquand was no threat to the country, stopped tailing him. This chance encounter provided Marquand with the spark for the character of Moto.
Pearl Harbour effectively killed off novels for the American market about Japanese spies but Marquand did write a final “Mr Moto” after a lapse of nearly 20 years: a Cold War espionage thriller “Right You Are” with American agents hunting down communist infiltrators in Tokyo
🅐 leaving the series and Lorre open to retrospective criticism for engaging in “Yellowface”, although Moto hasn’t attracted the ire of modern critics to the same extent as the Charlie Chan series has for the steady stream of white actors who have portrayed the Chinese super-detective up until as recently as 1981 – see previous post ‘Charlie Chan, Murder Mystery-Buster Extraordinaire: A Positive Asian Stereotype or an Oriental “Uncle Tom”?’, (29 October 2024)
🅑 Marquand’s focus in the books is on the clash of cultures, European/American vs Oriental (Japanese/Chinese), to a much greater degree that the films
🅒 the first book, Your Turn, Mr. Moto, was originally titled No Hero, a reference to another character, not Moto
One of the favourite characters of the American moviegoing public in the 1930s and 1940s was the affable but inscrutable Chinese detective from Honolulu, Charlie Chan. Some 44 black and white (mostly B) movies were made by Fox Film Corp (20th Century Fox) and later Monogram Pictures spanning the years 1931 and 1949. Budgeted at $200,000 to $250,000 per film Chan pictures regularly returned a million dollars in profit for Fox (‘China and the Chinese in Popular Film: From Fu Manchu to Charlie Chan: 9781350985681, 9781786730640’, (2017), www.dokumen.pub). Bargain-basement Monogram made their Chans for much less than this.
Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935): Warner Oland with a very young Rita Hayworth (billed under her original name, Rita Cansino)
The producers used three non-Chinese actors to fill the eponymous role over the course of the series – a Swede, Warner Oland and two Americans, Sidney Toler and Roland Winters. This recourse to non-Asian white actors presuming to play Asians fuelled vitriolic criticism much later (and rightly so), but back around circa 1940 this was what Hollywood got away with without discernible objection or diminution of the character’s popularity🅐. Before the Fox series started up in 1931 there had been three earlier (1920s) representations of Charlie Chan on screen, two of which were played by Japanese actors.
The House Without a Key ~ the first Charlie Chan novel
It all starts in Honolulu: The life of the literary “Charlie Chan” begins with a midwestern United States writer on holiday in 1920. Earl Derr Biggers, who had already had a measure of success as an author, was relaxing on a beach in Hawaii when he concocted the bare bones of a murder mystery. As for the character of “Chan” himself, Biggers stitched together composite attributes based on what he learned about a brace of real-life Chinese-Hawaiian detectives𖣓. The end-product was Biggers’ novel The House Without a Key, the first Charlie Chan detective fiction, published in 1925. The author explained how he envisaged the character of the brilliant fictional oriental master-sleuth: “I had seen movies depicting and read stories about Chinatown and wicked Chinese villains, and it struck me that a Chinese hero, trustworthy, benevolent, and philosophical, would come nearer to presenting a correct portrayal of the race” (Barbara Gregorich, ‘Earl Derr Biggers’, Harvard Magazine, 03-Jan-2000). Biggers’ intention was an anti-racist creation, an antidote to the villainous yellow peril persona commonly constructed for the screen (as typified by the archetypal Dr Fu Manchu).
Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936): Oland with Boris Karloff
The first four films of the Charlie Chan series including the first in the Fox franchise featuring Warner Oland, Charlie Chan Carries On, are all lost (destroyed in a vault fire), so of the remaining films in the sub-genre, critics generally rate these among the best: Charlie Chan at the Opera, Charlie Chan in London, Charlie Chan at the Circus,Charlie Chan in Shanghai, Charlie Chan at the Olympics, (all Oland); Charlie Chan in Honolulu, Castle in the Desert, Charlie Chan atTreasure Island, Dead Men Tell (all Toler). The quality dropped off alarmingly the longer the series went, especially after Monogram, the “Poverty Row” studio, with its low-budget approach and inferior production values, took charge of the films🅑.
Sidney Toler as DI Chan in his trademark cream suit and matching Panama hat
Pseudo-Confucian wisdom: One of the standard tropes of the CC films is Charlie’s habitual indulgence in oriental fortune cookie-style aphorisms, intoned deadpan in his characteristically truncated syntax. Some of the more memorable ones include “Accidents can happen, if planned that way”; “A soft word does not scratch the tongue”; “Caution sometime mother of suspicion”; “Tongue often hang man quicker than rope”; “Mind, like parachute, only function when open”; “Fish in sea like flea on dog – always present, but difficult to catch”; “Grain of sand in eye may hide mountain”; “If you want wild bird to sing, do not put him in cage”; “Innocent act without thinking, guilty always make plans”; “Motive like string, tied in many knots, end may be in sight but hard to unravel”; “Opinion like tea leaf in hot water – both need time for brewing”; “Optimist only see only doughnut, pessimist see hole”; ”Person who ask riddle should know answer”; “Talk cannot cook rice”; “Waiting for tomorrow is waste of today”; “When money talk, few are deaf”; “Bad alibi like dead fish – cannot stand test of time”. Another stock phrase of Chan’s, oft-repeated in every film, is “Contradiction, please!” Followed by observations such as “Case still open like swinging gate”.
Roland Winters, Keye Luke & Victor Sen Yung together in The Feathered Serpent (1948)
Sons No. 1, 2 and 3: The honourable Inspector Chan is a family man with multiple offspring (the Chan clan numbering 14 at the last count!), but it is his three eldest sons, #1, #2 and #3, that mostly get to share the spotlight with their father, and even play a role (sometimes inadvertently) in the solving of the particular case in question, whilst irritating the bejesus out of Chan. In most of the Warner Oland films Charlie is paired with Son #1, Lee Chan (played by Keye Luke). In the Sidney Toler films Chan is joined by Son #2, Jimmy (portrayed by Victor Sen Yung). By Charlie Chan in the Secret Service (1944) Son #3, Tommy (Benson Fong) is on board, opposite Toler in several of the Chan movies. After the CC baton is passed to Roland Winters in the late Forties, Keye Luke🅒 returns as Son #1 for the last few entries in the sequence. The favourite sons act as foils to Charlie, emphasising the generation gap between themselves and their “Pop” by demonstrating how thoroughly as Chinese-Americans they have assimilated into the dominant white culture (Tino Balio, “Balio on Charlie Chan ‘Grand Design’”, Some critical perspectives on Charlie Chan, (University of Missouri – St Louis) www.umsl.edu). African-American actor Mantan Moreland injected moments of comedy relief (usually working in unison with one of the numbered sons), appearing in 15 of the later mystery whodunnits in the 1940s as Chan’s jittery chauffeur Birmingham Brown.
The Chinese Cat (1944): Charlie Chan team # 2 – Toler, Fong and Moreland together
What made Charlie Chan so popular with Waspish America?🅓 Chan’s portrayal in a positive light (as intended by Biggers) made him something of a novelty for white audiences accustomed to negative depictions of Asians on the screen. Chan was different, it seemed incongruous, here was a rotund, humorous Chinese man who held the senior position of police inspector and the obvious respect of his peers. Endowed with Sherlock Holmes-like acute powers of observation, he solves baffling crimes that no one else can (Elaine Kim ‘Images of Asians in Anglo-American Literature’, Some critical perspectives on Charlie Chan, (University of Missouri – St Louis) www.umsl.edu). Another appealing factor was the movies’ variety of settings…though based in Honolulu, the usual format sees globe-trotting Charlie Chan following the murder trail to a host of exotic international locations—London, Paris, Monte Carlo, Río, Egypt, Shànghâi, Panama, Mexico, Berlin, etc—for a spot of outreach sleuth work. The regular changes of locale/scenery helped to maintain the interest of moviegoers.
Charlie Chan follows the crime trail everywhere, even to the Berlin Olympic Games
Is Chan a transitional figure bridging the divide in cultures?:The Charlie Chan persona has certainly polarised critics in America. Some see the character as having been a positive for changing the perception of Asian and specifically Chinese people. Hitherto American audiences were exposed to the notion of Orientals as “heathen Chinee”, denizens of the squalid opium den or as nondescript types who worked solely in damp, dingy laundries. Det. Inspector Chan is a very different Oriental, his attributes, intelligence, diligence, good humour and loyalty, are qualities much valued in the American cultural ethos. In this context the Chinese-Hawaiian shamus is seen as a good stereotype, countering the bad Oriental stereotype so long ingrained in US cinema. (Sandra Hawley, ‘The Importance of Being Charlie Chan’, www.enotes.com).
Still from Charlie Chan in Paris (1935) (photo: 20th Century Fox/Photofest)
Charlie Chan as “showcase” representative of a “model minority”: Other critics take a more trenchant view of why Americans of the day so readily accepted Charlie Chan. They see Chan as one-dimensional, subservient, kowtowing to white authority, merely a subject for satire. Even when he is demonstrating his superior intellectual powers, meek of demeanour Chan is self-effacing and apologetic (“so sorry to disagree”), he never challenges the power imbalance in the Caucasians’ favour🅔. Culturally assimilated, Chan knows his place in white American society as the “benevolent Other”…always stoical, he cheerfully accepts his assigned status (Shilpa Dave et al, East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture, and Jeffrey Crean, Fear of Chinese Power: An International History, (both cited in Wikipedia); Kim, ‘Images of Asians’). Some critiques see the Chan character as an emasculated figure, a pernicious racial stereotype blocking the articulation of “more credible, self-determined enunciations of Asian American identity” (‘The Hardboiled and the Haunted: Race, Masculinity and the Asian American Detective’, Calvin McMillin, (2012), www.academia.edu). Philippa Gates sees Chan as “existing in a liminal space between Chinese and American culture symbolized by his home: the mid-Pacific territory of Hawaii” (Philippa Gates, “‘Asian’ Detectives. An Overview”, Crime Culture, www.crimeculture.com).
Sky Dragon (1949): the final film in the Charlie Chan series
Resuscitating “Yellowface“ in a more racial diverse and inclusive era: The Charlie Chan films worked for their time and cultural context. Attempts to revive the Charlie Chan mystique in remakes a generation later with The Return of Charlie Chan (1973), and the lame Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (1981), still committing the sin of casting Caucasian actors in the title role, misfired badly and were called out for their cultural insensitivity and political incorrectness🅕. The Curse of the Dragon Queen provoked a vociferous backlash from Asian-Americans who labelled Chan “a yellow Uncle Tom” and organised protests against the film, beginning even before it into production (‘Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen’ (1981), AFI Catalog, www.catalog.afi.com).
Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938): Sidney Toler’s debut as the No 1 detective
Sceptical police inspector: Aren’t you jumping to conclusions? Chan: No, conclusions are jumping at me.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Charlie Chan in London)
𖣓 for more on this see ‘Chan and Chang: The Origin and Cultural Vicissitudes of the Most Famous Chinese-American Literary and Screen Detective’, posted July 2020: https://www.7dayadventurer.com/tag/fictional-super-sleuths/
🅐 from the Forties right through to the Sixties Hollywood westerns dished up to the public Italians, Hungarians, Russian actors with three-day growths, passing them all off as American “Indians”, anyone it seemed was used other than actual native Americans
🅑 relating to the films in the later phase of Toler and his successor Winter
🅒 the popular Luke scored a solo turn in the Chinese-American detective whodunnit caper in Phantom of Chinatown (1940)
🅓 intriguingly Chan was also very popular in China during the 1930s, even seen as a Chinese hero. Warner Oland was feted like royalty when he visited the country. Homegrown versions of the Charlie Chan movies were made in Shànghâi and Hong Kong
🅔 although as Fletcher Chan notes, Charlie doesn’t always passively accept the doormat position. In The Chinese Parrot, confronted with egregious racism he reacts with discernible anger and displeasure towards the offending white person (Fletcher Chan, ‘Charlie Chan: A Hero of Sorts’, California Literary Review, 26-Mar-2007, www.calitreview.com)
🅕 Hollywood’s casting of a “yellowface” Charlie continued into television, a 1957 series, The New Adventures of Charlie Chan, saw fit to feature an American of Irish heritage in the lead role
Wadi: valley; stream; watercourse drying up in summer; oasis[from Arab. wādī, (“river” or “watercourse,”)]
Wadi in Jordan
Wanion: unluckily, due to the waning of the moon [from MidEng. waniand, from wanien, wanen (“to wane”)]
Withershins: in an unfortunate direction [from MidHighGer. wider (“against”)+ –sin (“direction”)]
Witling: a petty smart Alec; a mere pretender to wit (Bowler)[conjunction of wit + -ling]
<word meaning & root formation>
Xenium: a present given to a guest [from Gk. xenial (pertaining to hospitality or relationship between host and guest) (cf. Xenodochium: a building for the reception of strangers; a caravanserai)
Caravanserai in Fars, Iran
Xenogenous: due to an outside cause; of foreign origin [from Gk. xeno]
word meaning & root formation
Yaul: to deviate from a stable course because of oscillation about the longitudinal axis (Rocket science)(Origin unknown)
Yegg: a burglar of safes; safecracker (Origin obscure: one (dubious) suggestion is from German jäger (“hunter”))
The challenge of the Yegg (Chubb advertisement)
Yemeles: negligent; careless; heedless [OldEng. from Germ.]
Yisse: desire or covet (Origin unknown)
word meaning & root formation
Zeigarnik: (Psych.) the theory that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks; the tendency to remember an uncomplicated task [named after Lithuanian-Soviet psychologistBluma Zeigarnik(ZeigarnikEffect]
Zoilism: carping; destructive criticism [from Zoilus, ancient Greekgrammarian andliterary critic… was hyper-critical of Homer (Zoilus the “Homeromastix”)]
Zoilus of Ephesus
Zooerastia: (–asty) the practice of a human engaging insexual intercoursewith ananimal; bestiality [from Gk. zoo + -astia]
Zoopery:experimentation on animals [from zoo + L. –operārī(“to work, labor, toil, have effect”)]
Zugzwang: a state of play in chess where the player is at a disadvantage as hisor her next move will worsen their position in the game (cf. snookering) [fromGer. (“compulsion to move”)]
If you could travel in the Tardis back to my primary school days, you’d find me most lunchtimes in the school library with my head in the fiction section habitually combing through the shelves for any books from my favourite series of reads for kids that I hadn’t yet wolfed down. Precisely I’d have my nose in the ‘C’ section – ‘C’ for Richmal Crompton, the author of the “Just William” series of books. From about the age of nine or ten I was hooked on the rebellious juvenile role model William, a 1920s–1960’s version of Harry Potter in his all-consuming cult appeal🄰…William became as integral to my childhood as Classics Illustrated comics, plasticine and chocolate malted sundaes. With more energy than I could ever summon for my obligatory school home work, I dedicated myself with missionary zeal to reading every single Just William book I could lay my hands on! Fortunately for me there was plenty of scope for that ambition, Crompton having written 39 Just William books in all. In the end I’m not sure if I actually read all of them (did the library hold the entire collection?), but I was certainly exposed to enough of them to become a vicarious member of “The Outlaws”.
The popularity of the Just William books prompted multiple other media spin-offs, including several television series—the 1962 series cast Denis Waterman (above) as William—as well as films and radio serials
William (Brown) is 11, and like Peter Pan he doesn’t age, despite the Just William entries in the series stretching over a period of nearly half-a-century!🄱 William in appearance is scruffy-haired and untidy, in nature straight talking, anarchic and rebellious – which generally lands him and his own small gang of school friends “The Outlaws” in hot water. Guy Mankowski attributes the series’ success (12 million books sold in the UK alone) to the English love of the rebel. My own recollection of the general tenor of mainstream Western society circa 1965, before the societal ripples of the Counterculture and Vietnam were felt, was still very conformist and strait-jacketed. I delighted in the character of William, his rebellious free spirit and sense of fun, constantly waging a war against the rules of adults which stop children like him enjoying the fun things in life (like unlimited ice cream). What also endeared me was William’s sheer inventiveness, constantly coming up with sometimes zany, always hilarious schemes to make money or to teach grown-ups a lesson or two, and the like. And I might add just quietly, William’s loud anti-school rhetoric didn’t diminish his appeal in my books as well.
Early volumes
Two things I only found out about Just William in my adulthood…I had from the start assumed that the author of the William books was a man, he had to be a man to write about a mischievous albeit good-natured boy with such knowing authority, I thought (plus, though “Richmal” was a weird first name, it sounded more like an upper-class toff’s name than a women’s name). Wrong on both counts! Miss Richmal Crompton Lamburn was in fact a school mistress (ironically – in an all-girls school!) who contracted polio and spent the rest of her life writing the William series of books as well as 41 separate adult novels (which she rated as her real true literary work)🄲. The second discovery was that John Lennon also harboured an all-consuming passion for the Just William stories growing up in Forties and Fifties Liverpool. Had I known at the time that no less a global cultural luminary of the Sixties than Beatle John hero-worshipped the fictional rebel William, my own cup of infatuated fandom for “Britain’s favourite naughty boy” may have runneth over even more than it did🄳.
Miss Crompton with juvenile “proofreaders” (photo: Keystone/Getty Images)
Something else that slipped under the radar of my 11-year-old self was the topicality (and sometimes controversial nature) of the William stories. In the 1940s in William and the Brains Trust William responds to the publication of the Beveridge Report—the blueprint for radical social policy change that profoundly affected postwar UK—with a list of his own child-centred demands. William the Dictator reflected the Western world’s concern with the rise of fascism and National Socialism. The US/USSR space race in the Fifties inspired the Just William titles William and the Moon Rocket and William and the Space Animal. Occasionally Crompton strayed onto edgy and even highly controversial turf. In the 1934 short story ‘William and the Nasties’ William and his Outlaws copy Hitler’s jackbooted Nazis by harassing and persecuting a local Jewish sweet-shop owner…passages such “There came to William glorious visions of chasing Jew after Jew out of sweetshop after sweetshop” definitely wouldn’t pass the politics or ethical pub test in our avowedly PC times. The anti-Semitic tone of ‘William and the Nasties’ has ensured its exclusion from modern editions of the William series.
William the Lawless, the final book in the series, published in 1970, the year after Crompton’s death
🄰 perhaps a better analogy is with Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole character although Adrian is way too timid and wimpishly sensitive juxtaposed to William
🄱 2022 was the centenary of the publication of the first Just William book in the series, although William’s debut in print was in a 1919 magazine story
🄲 Crompton Lamburn apparently based the character of William on a combination of her younger brother Battersby and her nephew Tommy
🄳 in William the Lawless (1970) William receives as a present, a Beatles’ LP
Tapinosis: {also made an entry in Logolept’s Diet 1.0 but have added Peter Bowler’s definition} the use of degrading diction [from Gk. tapeínōsis, (“lowering”)]
Tarhood: group of sailors, or state of being a sailor; collective term for sailors [from Dut. teer(?) (“seaman”; “mariner”)]
Tarhood
Tardigrade: slow in movement; microscopic water bear [from L. tardigradus (“slowly stepping”), from tardus (“slow”) + -gradior (“step”; “walk”)]
Tardigrade (source: Front Line Genomics)
Tautegorical: saying the same thing with different words, opposite of allegorical [poss. from MidEng. tought (“distended”) + -gori(?) + -cal]
Tegestologist: a collector of beer mats or coasters [from L. teges (“covering”; “mat”) + -logy]
Tegestologist
Temulency: inebriation; drunkenness [from L. temulentia]
Tetragram: a word containing four letters [from Gk. tetra (“four”). + -grāmma (“letter”)]
Thelyphthoric: that which corrupts the morals of women (Gk. Nonce word (?): coined by English clergyman and writer Martin Madan (1780) poss. from thelus (“woman”) + –phthora (“destruction”; “ruin.”) + –ic]
Thersitical: abusive and foul-mouthed; scurrilous; grossly defamatory [Gk. after Thersites, a minor character in the Iliad who slandered and mocked Agamemnon]
Thersitical (Iliad)
Thigmotaxis: the movement of an organism in response to stimulus [Gk. thigma, thigma (“touch”) + –taxis, (“arrangement”; “order”)]
Thrasonical: bragging and boasting; of, relating to, resembling, or characteristic of Thraso; a vainglorious boaster and swaggerer [L. Thrason-, Thraso, + (-cal): “Thraso”, a braggart soldier in the comedic play Eunuchus by 2nd century BC Roman dramatist Terence]
Thrasonical (Eunuchus)
Tiffin: a snack or light lunch (meaning uncertain)
Tonitruous: thundering; explosive 🧨 [from L. tonitruum (“thunder”)]
Tonsorial: pertaining to barber or hairdressing [from L. tonsor (“barber”) from tondere (“shear”; “clip”) + -al]
Tonsorial (source: ranksmap.com)
Toparch: ruler or prince of a small district, city or petty state [from Gk. (“ruler of a small district”), from tópos, “place”) + –árkhēs, (“ruler”)]
Tralatitious: having a character, force, or significance transferred or derived from something extraneous; passed from one generation to another; handed down (metaphorically) [from L. transferre (“to transfer”) + -itius, -icius (“-itious“)
Tregetour: a magician or juggler 🤹 [from OldFr. tres (“across”) + -geter, -jeter (“to throw”)]
Trilemma: a difficult choice from three options, each of which is unacceptable or unfavourable [modelled on dilemma, with di- (“prefix meaning ‘two, twice, double’”) replaced by tri- (“prefix meaning ‘three’”)]
Tristiloquy: a dull and depressing speech [(?) + -loqui (“speech”)]
Scrivener: a copyist of documents; a clerk, scribe or notary [from OldFr. escrivein from L. scriba (“scribe”)]
Sebastomania: religious insanity or mania [ [Gk. sebastos, (“reverence”) + -mania]
Sermocination: the practice of making speeches; the habit of preaching constantly [from L. sermo (“speech”; “conversation”) + -ion]
Sermocination (photo: David Henry)
Sicarian: a murderer, especially an assassin; mercenary fighter [from Sicarii a group of Jewish zealots/insurrectionists opposing the Roman occupation of Judea; cloak-and-dagger assassination unit [from sicae (“small daggers (sickles) concealed in the sicariis’ cloaks”]
Sicarian (image: EBay)
Sillograph: writer of satires [from the book Gk.Sílloi by Timon of Phlius, (flourished ca.280 BC)+ -graphe]
Sillograph (Timon)
Smatchet: a small, nasty person or child; a contemptible, unmannerly person [Scot. Eng. probably from MidEng. smatch + -et]
Somatoparaphrenia: (Psych. ) a type of monothematic delusion where one denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of one’s body [from Gk. sôma, (“body”) + -para (“beside”) + –phrenia]
Staurophobia: pathological aversion to the cross or crucifix (eg, cinematic portrayals of Dracula) [Gk. staurós, (“cross”) + -phobia]
Stentorphonic: speaking very loudly [from Stentōr, a Greek herald in the Trojan War (Homer’s Iliad)]
Stentorphonic (image: tumblr.com)
Stramineous: strawlike; valueless; consisting of straw [L. stramineus (“of straw”) from sternere (“to strew”; “spread out”; “lay flat”)]
Subderisorious: mocking gently and with affection; ridiculing with moderation [L. sub (“below”; “under”) + L. –dērīdeō (“I deride”) + -ous]
Subintelligitur: a meaning or understanding (as of a statement) implied but not expressed [from L. sub- (“secretly”; “under”) + intelligere (“to understand”) + -al]
Succussion: the action or process of shaking the body or the condition of being shaken especially with violence [L. sucussio, from -cussus, (“to shake up”)]
Supernumerary: (person) in addition to usual or necessary number [L. super- (“above”) + number]
Susurrant: gently whispering and rustling [from L. susurrare (“to whisper”)]
Syncretistic: seeking to identify common features of different belief systems, philosophies or civilisations and assimilate them or merge them into a single system [from syncretise (“to attempt to unite and harmonise”), from Gk. synkrētismos (“joining together of Greeks”)]
Synethnic: of (or together with) same race or country [Gk. syn (“same”; “with”; “together”) + –ethno (“people”; “race”; “tribe”; “nation”)]
Quillet: a subtlety in argument;a subtle distinction [Uncertain, poss from L. quidlibet (“anything”)]
Quinquagesima: pertaining to 50 days [from L. quinquaginta (“fifty”)]
Quisquous: hard to deal with; dubious; of people: having a character difficult to assess [from Scot. Eng. from L. quisquis (“whosoever”)]
Quodlibet: a philosophical or theological point proposed for disputation; a whimsical combination of familiar melodies or texts [from L. qui (“what”) + -libet (“it pleases)”]
Quondam: that once was; (a) former [as that grand dame of words Merriam Webster says: “Looking for an unusual and creative way to say “former”?” Quondam (which came to English in the 16th century from Latin quondam, meaning “at one time” or “formerly”) ~ look no further!]
<Word origin and root formation>
Rampallian: a bold, forward, rampant or wanton woman [Elizabethan term, Henry IV Pt II, Act II)
Rasorial: habitually scratching the ground in search of food [from LateLat. rasor (“one that scrapes”) + -ial]
Rasorial
Recusant: refusing staunchly to comply with some generally accepted rule or custom (Orig. Relig.) [from L. re- + causari (“to give a reason”), from causa (“cause”; “reason”)]
Redivivus: restored to life, or to full liveliness; reborn [L. “reused”]
Remiped: (Zool.) having feet that are adaptable as oars [from L. remiped-, remipes (“oar-footed”)] 👣
Remontado: someone who has fled to the mountains or hills and renounced civilisation; a Northern Philippine’s tribesman; go-back (to the wild) [Galician (Sp.). remontado/remontada]
The “hungry i?” Sounds like a trendy, up-market boîte on Eat Street, but it is—or rather was—a live music and stand-up comedy venue located in the “hip” North Beach neighbourhood of San Francisco. Its original owner, self-styled beatnik Eric “Big Daddy” Nord, sold it to beret-sporting impresario Enrico Banducci in 1951. Under Banducci’s direction the SF joint set about making a cutting edge name for itself. For much of the next two decades the hungry i nightclub became the spot where many of the big acts in American entertainment got their start and others honed their performing skills to perfection❶.
Enrico Banducci rocking a cardy!
Bob Patterson, Examiner columnist (writing as Freddy Francisco)on the hungry i circa 1950s: ❝a basement Disneyland, peopled by beatniks, left-over bohemians, on the nod junkies, and other waifs and strays from reality.❞
Hothouse of new comedy:The roll call of names associated with “the eye” (as it was affectionately known), especially of American comedy, is mightily impressive…it was the launchpad for many famous performers including Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Tom Lehrer and Jonathan Winters. Other iconic comics to perform there at the formative stage of their careers include Woody Allen, Phyllis Diller, Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory, Godfrey Cambridge, Bill Cosby, the Smothers Brothers, (Mike) Nichols and (Elaine) May and Joan Rivers❷. The soon-to-be comedy stand-up legends performed against a red brick wall that later became the standard stage backdrop of comedy clubs across America [‘1960s Folk Music at the hungry i and SF Folk Music Club’, Claire Huang, FoundSF, (2019), www.foundsf.org].
The hungry i at the height of its popularity (source: Barbra Archives)
Banducci embraced the Fifties non-conformism of the emerging “rebel cafe” culture taking root simultaneously in North Beach and in Greenwich Village, NYC. He welcomed musicians, comedians, writers and painters—“bohemians of every stripe, from North Beach bohos to Berkeley brainiacs”—to the nightspot [Stephen Duncan Riley, ‘The Rebel Cafe: America’s Nightclub Underground and the Public Sphere, 1934–1963’, (Unpublished PhD dissertation, 2014, University of Maryland)]. Uncommonly for a nightclub owner Banducci really looked after his charges, unlike many of his contemporaries who were content to sit back and count the night’s takings – Enrico always ensured that the club’s artists performed in a safe and quiet environment…patron chatter during performances was verboten and (remarkably) drinks were not served while the acts were on [‘The hungry i (1963)’, Barbra Archives, www.barbra-archives.info; ‘The ‘I’ That Stormed Through North Beach, Circa 1950’, Art Peterson, hoodline, 06-Jun-2016, www.hoodline.com].
A way-station for aspiring folk and pop artists:The hungry i provided a similar massive leg-up for music performers still in the basement of their careers. The nightspot provided the springboard for some, propelling them on the path to pop and folk music immortality, or at least to national/international recognition. The Kingston Trio, Barbra Streisand (her first gig headlining), Peter, Paul and Mary et al, all cut their teeth at the famous San Fran venue in their early days. The Kingston Trio recorded its first live album at the club (“…from the “Hungry i” (1958)). Glen Yarbrough and the Limeliters were a regular act, John Phillips (of the Mamas and Papas fame) fronted the eye’s house band (The Journeymen) in the early Sixties. By the early 1960s the hungry i had hit its heyday…in 1967 it moved to Ghirardelli Square (San Francisco’s Marina district), by this time it was mainly being used as a rock music venue❸. By 1970, Banducci deep in debt and with a flawed business model was forced to close down his cherished nightclub.
Enrico’s echo of hungry i:Banducci switched his attention to “Enrico’s”, a restaurant-café at 504 Broadway (SF) he had started in 1959. Enrico’s spot played cool jazz and drew in a mixed crowd and was for a time the place in SF to be seen, everyone from celebrities like FF Coppola, Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant to complete nonentities…Banducci’s lack of business acumen again ultimately proved its downfall with Enrico’s folding in 1988. The name “hungry i” lived on somewhat ignominiously in the form of a strip club at 546 Broadway (today operating as a Karaoke bar).
hungry i in its later incarnation
Enrico’s: Banducci’s Broadway café/jazz club (photo: William Martin/Facebook)
Endnote: the Purple OnionThe hungry i, by most observers’ reckoning, was the apex of live venues presenting the new wave of stand-up comics in the 50s and 60s, but it existed very much in a shared universe. The very same up-and-coming but still unknown talents featuring at the eye also plied their trade at other SF venues, most prominently at the hungry i’s local rival the Purple Onion, a small basement club on Columbus Ave with a similar storied history [‘North Beach History: Careers Sprouted For Almost 6 Decades At The Purple Onion’, Art Peterson, hoodline, 20-Jun-2016, www.hoodline.com].
❶ Banducci liked to describe the hungry i as a theatre rather than a nightclub
❷ a less stellar comedy name frequenting the stage at the hungry i was “Professor” Irwin Corey whose unscripted, abstruse improvisational monologues earned him a dedicated cult following
❸ in 1967 you could catch the early Ike and Tina Turner Experience at the eye
Paleomnesia: good memory for events of the far past [Gk. paleo (“old”; “ancient”) + –mnesia (“memory”)]
Palimony: the division of financial assets and real property on the termination of a personal live-in relationship wherein the parties are not legally married (ie, de facto) [formed from “pal” + “alimony” (coined by celebrity lawyer Marvin Mitchelson)]
Palinoia: the compulsive repetition of an act over and over until perfection is achieved [? + Gk. –noia (“mind”)]
Palladian: pertaining to learning and wisdom [from Gk. Pallás an epithet of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom) + -ian]
Palladian: Pallas Athena
Palpebrate: having eyelids; to wink. [L. palpebra, eyelid]
Paltripolitan: an insular city dweller [blending of “paltry” + -“metropolitan”]
Pancratic: (Hist.) an athletic contest called the pankration; athletic; pertaining to or having ability in all matters [Gk. pankratḗs, [“all-powerful”)]
Pancratic Credit: Midjourney for the Greek Reporter
Pandaculation: involuntary stretching and yawning [L. pandiculatus, from pandiculari (“to stretch oneself”)] 🥱
Pangrammatist: a person who composes verses or sentences using all letters of the alphabet [Gk. pan (“all”) + -grammar + -ist]
Pantophagy: a diet that consists of a large variety of foods; ideally, of all possible foods [from Gk. pant (“all”) + –phagein (“to eat”)]
Paracme: (Medic.) a point beyond the greatest or highest (eg, of a fever); the stage after one’s peak [from Gk. para, (“beyond”) + -akmē, (“highest point”; “prime”)]
Paradiastole: (Rhetoric) a form of euphemism in which a positive synonym is substituted for a negative word; to reframe a vice as a virtue [para + -diastolḗ, (“separation”; “distinction”)]
Paronomasia: word-play of the punning kind; playing upon words which sound alike for comic or clever effect [from para + –onomasía, (“naming”)]
Parorexia: a craving or appetite for unusual foods [from Gk. para + -orexia (“desire”; “appetite”)]
Parorexia (photo: taste.com.au)
Passepartout: a master key; a safe conduct or passport (from Fr. lit. (“passes everywhere”)] 🔑
Passepartout (fictional character)
Peculate: to pilfer or embezzle (money, esp public funds) [L. from peculatus]
Pilgarlic: a pitiful bald-headed man [from “pilled”/“peeled” + “-garlic”]
Pleionosis: the exaggeration of one’s own importance [? + Gk. –osis (“disease”; “process”); “condition”)]
Preterist: (Theo.) a Christian eschatological view or belief that interprets prophecies of the Bible as events which have already been fulfilled in history; a person interested in the past [ from L. praeteritus, (“gone by”) + -ist]
Prevenient: anticipating; preceding in time or order; having foresight; preventing [from L. praeveniens (“precedes”)]
Procerity: tallness; height [from L. pro– (“forward”) + –cerus, from –crescere (“to grow”) + –itas (“-ity”)]
Proctalgia: a severe, episodic pain in the region of the rectum and anus; pain in the arse [Gk. prōktos (“anus”) + –algos (“pain”)] (cf. Rectalgia)
Procumbent: lying or kneeling with face down; prostrate [L. pro + -cumbere (“to lie down”)]
Protogenal: pertaining to primitive creatures [NewLat. protogenes, from L. prot (“first”) + –gen (“birth”)]
Psephologist: someone who studies elections and voting patterns [Gk. psēphos, (“pebble”)]
Macrologist: a person who engages in long and tiresome talk; ie, a bore [Gk. makrós, (“long”) + –logo (“word”) + -ist]
Macromastic: pertaining to large breasts; (Med.) (also called gigantomastic breasts) breasts which are usually heavy and pendulous with nipples and areolas facing down [Gk. macrós- (“long”) + -mastia (“abnormality of the breast”)]
Macromastic
Macrophallic: having an unusually large phallus [Gk. macrós- (“long”) + -phallós (“penis”)]
Megapod: having large feet [from Gk. mégas (“great”) + -poús “foot”)] 👣
Menseful: considerate; neat and clean [from mensk, from MidEng. menske (“courtesy”; “honour”)]
Mentulate: Referring to or characterised by a large penis; well-hung [from mentula (“cock”; “dick”; “penis”) + -ātus (“-ed”)]
Merkin: a pubic wig for women (Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: “counterfeit hair for women’s privy parts”) [Origin uncertain but prob. from malkin, a derogatory term for a lower-class young woman]
Merkin (photo: Merkin Museum)
Metoposcopy: using the physical appearance of the face (esp the pattern-lines on the forehead) to judge someone’s character [from Gk. métōpon, “forehead”) + -scopy]
Metoposcopy
Minimifidianism: having virtually no or almost no faith or belief [from L. minimus (“small”; “little”) + –fidian (?) + -ism]
Monandrous: having only one malesexual partner over a period of time [monós (“one”; “single”; “only”) + –androus (“man”; “husband”)]
Mummer: an actor in a traditional masked mime (a mummer’s play) [OldFr. momeur from mommer (“act in a mime”)]
Mummer (photo: sixsellov.live)
Murcid: slothful; shirking work or duty (OU)
Mystagogue: one who instructs in mystical or arcane lore or doctrines [Gk. mystagōgos, from mystēs (“initiate”) + –agein (“to lead”)]
The Zorro story is deeply embedded in western popular culture, especially in the world of Anglophone cinema and television which trades heavily on all the familiar tropes, “carving the ‘Z’ on someone or something (the zigzagging mark of El Zorro)”; “secret identity of the protagonist, the elusive fox”🇦; “masked avenging angel fighting the powerful in the cause of the powerless”, etc. The fictional Zorro inherits the tradition of storied folklore heroes like Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel…in this Zorro is a worthy member of that exalted pantheon of morally-superior righters of heinous wrongs.
Batman: wardrobe tips from Zorro
Clark Kent aka Superman
Before Batman, Superman and the Lone Ranger: Zorro, he of the rapid rapier and distinctive black mask covering only his eyes, was a precursor to the iconic, quintessential American heroes of comic book and screen. There are transparent linkages between Zorro, the caballero (Spanish gentleman)–cum–rebellious outlaw, and Batman, the crusading superhero of Gotham City…both heroes effect a double identity. Both Don Diego de la Vega (Zorro) and Bruce Wayne (Batman) are wealthy aristocrats who feign unheroic personalities in their open identities🇧(compare Don Diego’s foppish even effeminate affectations with Wayne’s playboy persona). The dual/secret identities trope is also exhibited in the Supermen franchise, in times of great crisis or peril mild-mannered loser-type Clark Kent only has to dash into the nearest phone booth to instantly transform into peerless crime fighter Superman. The parallels extend to popular American TV westerns fare in the 1950s with the masked Lone Ranger who “was little more than Zorro in a western guise”, substituting the swashbuckler Zorro’s black garb and accessories with a lawman’s white outfit, etc. Zorro and Lone Ranger share another similar trait to their makeup, as does Batman. Unlike Superman, they don’t rely on superpowers or extra human strength but utilise “stealth, dexterity and ingenuity” to best the bad guys and end “corruption and abuse, and establish a world of moral justice” [John J. Valadez. (2016). The Lone Ranger Unmasked: Zorro and the Whitewashing of the American Superhero. Filmmaker Essay. Chiricú, 1(1), 135–151. https://doi.org/10.2979/chiricu.1.1.11]. In Batman’s case, he relies on his “scientific knowledge, detective skills and athletic prowess” [Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (1968)].
(source: archive.org/)
Over 40 films, several TV series, novels, a musical, cartoons and comics, and the obligatory merchandise, Zorro as an entertainment phenomenon has been the complete package for over a century. But it all started with a simple and seemingly nondescript adventure story, The Curse of Capistrano by Johnston McCulley, appearing in print in a dime pulp magazine. First serialised in 1919, the template was picked up almost immediately by Douglas Fairbanks Sr (a Zorro tragic!) and his production company and developed into a box office hit silent movie, The Mark of Zorro in 1920. On the strength of The Mark of Zorro’s success McCulley serialised the Zorro tale, producing in all over 60 stories by the time of his death in 1958. The Curse of Capistrano by itself has sold more than 750 million copies worldwide!
Time setting for ‘Zorro’? McCalley’s Zorro stories are vaguely set during the later era of Spanish California (ca.1800–1821), however some of the film adaptations locate Zorro much closer to the gold rushes and the US takeover (late 1840s).
Guy Williams, the iconic Zorro of ‘50s television, and creator Johnston McCulley
Chicano bandit prototypes for Zorro: McCulley drew on sources from literature and legend—primarily Robin Hood and Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel—for inspiration for the Zorro character, but he also gleaned much from the pages of history, especially of early California. McCulley seems to have modelled Zorro partly on various 19th century Californio bandidos, in particular Joaquin Murrieta whose actual historicity is uncertain🇨. The popular legend has Murrieta immigrating to the California gold fields but when gringos committed murderous atrocities against his family, the Mexican wreaks revenge on the American killers and embarks on a short but violent career of robbery and banditry. Murrieta’s “exploits” polarised opinion, Californian authorities identify him an enemy of the state and place a high price on his head while to Chicanos the romanticised outlaw has become a symbol of Mexican resistance to Anglo-American economic and cultural domination in California [‘Joaquin Murrieta’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]🇩.
Moviemakers even roped Zorro into the Italian Sword-and-Sandals (peplum strongman) sub-genre during its apotheosis, with Zorro Contro Maciste (1963)
Another Mexican bandit (more historically authenticatable than Murrieta), Tiburcio Vásquez, provided similar inspiration for fiction author McCulley. Vásquez attributed his 20-year career in crime to retribution for the racist attitudes of the norteamericanos—the white settlers from the US who had taken over Alta California after it had become an American state—and their treatment of non-Anglo (especially Mexican) inhabitants of California. Vásquez’s bold defiance earned him a folkhero following within the 19th century Méxican-American community (Valadez).
William Lamport (by PP Rubens)
An Irish Gaelic Zorro?: A decidedly non-Latino historical influence on the creation of Zorro is attributed to the career of Irish adventurer William Lamport, noted for being both an accomplished swordsman and a ladies’ man. The peripatetic Lamport served as a captain in the Spanish army and was sent to New Spain (Mexico) with a new, Hispanicised name to spy for the Spanish crown. The Eirish adventurer was appalled by the treatment of Amerindians and Black slaves in Mexico and sought to advance their liberation. Lamport was eventually arrested and accused of sedition and intending to set himself up as king of an independent Mexico. The Irishman was tried by the Mexican Inquisition and executed as a heretic in 1659 [‘The Man Behind the Mask of Zorro’, History Ireland, www.historyireland.com].
Banderas & Zeta-Jones in the 2005 sequel to ‘The Mask of Zorro’
TriStar Pictures’ 1998 production, The Mask of Zorro, with a vigorous, athletic Antonio Banderas in the title role, revived interest in the Zorro story and earned a cool US$250,000,000 at the box office. In the 1960s Disney’s television adaptation of the Zorro story (starring Guy Williams, the Anglo-sounding screen name of Armando Catalano) was one of the most popular programs on the box, especially with kids. So is Zorro just some innocuous action-adventure entertainment fare? Well, not according to some critical voices from the Latino community who see the Zorro phenomena as perpetuating Hispanic myths within the wider white-dominated mainstream, reinforcing “classic stereotypes of the Latin Lover (see also Footnote below) fighting endless series of inept Méxican villains” and misrepresenting the “multiethnicity and cultural complexity of of early California [‘Zorro still makes his mark’, Lewis Beale, Los Angeles Times, 28-June-2005, www.latimes.com]🇪. Others are critical of Zorro’s ethnicity, UCLA professor, Rafael Perez-Torres, emphasises the point that the “Robin Hood of the pueblo” is Criollo, a white Spaniard born in the New World of purely Spanish blood, he is always represented as the “honourable good ” against the evil and corrupt Méxican officials (Beale). Novelist Isabel Allende with an unorthodox take on Zorro (El Zorro: comienza la leyenda, 2005) subverts this idea of Eurocentric Zorro by reinventing his origin as a mestizo (mixed parentage: Spanish aristocrat father and Shoshone warrior mother).
The dandy Don Diego & macho he-man alter ego Zorro in the Walt Disney TV ‘Zorro’
Footnote: Celluloid Zorros One of the tropes employed by filmmakers in Zorro’s frequent screen appearances is Zorro as “sexy Latino lover”, as portrayed in the versions (big screen and small) by a bevy of heart-throb testosterone-charged actors – Tyrone Power, Guy Williams, Alain Delon, Antonio Banderas, George Hamilton (though Hamilton in the 1981 Zorro: The Gay Blade, tagline: “Zexy, Zany and Zensational!”, plays the black caped avenger purely for (campy) laughs).
🇦 zorro in Spanish translates as “fox”
🇧 Bob Kane co-creator of the Batman character admitted Zorro—and in particular the Douglas Fairbanks Sr swashbuckling portrayal in Mark of Zorro (1920)—heavily influenced his shaping of the “caped crusader” of Gotham City
🇨 Murrieta’s story is mostly recounted through a contemporary novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit (1854)
🇩Californio Salomón Pico was another historical figure in 1850s California with a similar sounding story embellished by local legend – grievously wronged by white settlers so he turns to banditry against the powers that-be and shares his booty with the local Mexican poor
🇪all of which is not to deny that there are countless other Latinos (and other peoples) who have derived genuine inspiration from the story and legend of Zorro to help fortify them in their very real, everyday struggles against unjust, authoritarian and oppressive regimes
Haptodysphoria: a shiveringly unpleasant feeling experienced from touching certain surfaces, such as peaches or wool [Gk. háptō (“touch”; “hasten”) + -dus (“bad”) + –phérō (“I bear”; “carry”)]
Harpocratic: relating to silence (OU)?
Harpocratic (source: Clipart Library)
Hartal: a general strike of labour, including a total shutdown of workplaces, businesses, courts, etc, as a political protest [Hindi haṛtāl, from hāṭ (“shop”) + -tālā (“lock”)]
Hebesphalmology: study of juvenile delinquency [OU; from Hebe (“goddess of youth and spring”(?)) + ? + -logy]
Henotic: promoting harmony or peace; unifying [Gk. henōtikós, (“serving to unite”)] ☮️
Hesternopotia: a pathological yearning for the good old days (OU)
Heteronym: a word with the same spelling but a different pronunciation and meaning [Gk. héteros (“other”; “another”) + -nym]
Heterotopia: strange or ambivalent places (places that defy the normal logic of ordering) [word popularised by philosopher Michel Foucault, Fr. hétérotopie, Gk. héteros + -topia from “utopia”, (“place”)]
Horrisonant: having an ugly, harsh sound; unpleasant to the ear [L. horrēre, sonānt-em (“to dread”; “shudder”) + -ant]
Humicubation: the act or practice of lying on the ground, esp in penitence or self-abasement [L. humus (“the ground”) + –cubare (“to lie down”)]
Hygeiolatry: fanaticism about health; the worship of health and/or hygiene [ Gk. hygie (“healthy”) + –latry (“worship”)]
Hygeiolatry (image: everydayhealth.com)
Hygrophanous: seeming transparent when wet, and opaque when dry [Gk. hygr- (“wet”) + –phan, -phen (“to show”; “visible”)(?) + -ous]
Hyperhedonia: (Medic.) a condition where abnormally heightened pleasure is derived from participation in any act or happening (no matter how mundane) [Gk. hyper- + G. hēdonē, (“pleasure”)]
Hypobulia: (the procrastinator’s curse!) (Psych.) a lack of willpower or decisiveness [Gk. hypo (“beneath“ or “below,”) + -aboulía (“irresolution”)]
Hypogeal: pertaining to the earth’s interior; subterranean; growing or existing underground [Gk. hupógeios (“underground”)] (cf. Hypogeum: underground temple, tomb or cavern)
Hypogeal (source: wob.com)
Hypothimia: profound melancholy or mental prostration; depressive state of mind; diminished emotional response [Gk. hypo- + Greek -thymos (“spirit”)]
Key: OU = origin unknown
<word meaning & root formation>
Idioglossia: secret speech or language, especially invented by children [Gk. idio- (“own”; “peculiarity”) + -glōssa, (“tongue”; “speech”)]
Idolum: insubstantial image; a spectre or phantom; a fallacy [Gk. eídōlon, (“image; “idol”), from eîdos, (“form”)]
Illuminati: those who claim to have exceptional intellectual or spiritual awareness (orig. a Bavarian secret society founded in 1776) [L. illuminatus (“enlightened”)]
Inexpugnable: that which cannot be taken by assault or storm; unconquerable; impregnable [L. in + -expugnābilis]
Innascible: not subject to birth; without a beginning; self-existent [L. innāscibilitās (“state of being unable to be born”)]
Invultuation: the use of or the act of making images of people, animals, etc, for witchcraft; sticking pins in a wax doll representing someone you wish to inflict pain on [MedLat. invultuāre (“to make a likeness”) from in- + vultus (“likeness”)]
Invultuation (source: etsy.com)
Irrefragable: not able to be refuted or disproved; irrefutable; indisputable; unbreakable [LateLat. irrefragabilis, from L. refragari (“to oppose or resist”)]
Isographer: someone who imitates another person’s hand-writing [Gk. iso- (“same”) + –graphe (“write”)]
Forisfamiliate: (Scot. law) to disinherit; to shed parental authority [Medieval Latin. forisfamiliatus, forisfamiliare, from L. foris (“outside”) + -familia (“family”)]
Fungible: (Legal.) replaceable by or acceptable as a replacement for a similar item [L. fungi (“to perform”)]
Fustian: ridiculously pompous, bombastic or inflated language [Anglo-Fr. fustian (“a kind of fabric”), prob. from L. fustis (“tree trunk” or “club”; “staff”)]
Fustigate: to criticise severely; to cudgel, ie, to beat with a stick [L. fustis + –igare ]
Fylfot: “Saxon” swastika; a type of swastika associated with medieval Anglo-Saxon culture (cf. Gammadion)
Fylfot (source: the Golden Dawn Shop)
<word meaning and root formation>
Gabion: a cage, cylinder or box filled with rocks, concrete, or sometimes sand and soil used as a retaining wall in civil engineering, road building, military applications and landscaping [from It. gabbione (“big cage”) from It. gabbia from L. cavea (“cage”)]
Genarch: (also sp. Genearch) head of family; a chief of a family or tribe [Gk. géniteur (“genitor”) + -arch ]
Genial:¹ diffusing warmth and friendliness; cordial [L. geniālis (“relating to birth or marriage”; from genius (“tutelary”; “deity”)]
Glycolimia: (also sp. Glycaemia) a craving for sweets; presence or level of sugar (glucose) in the blood [from NewLat. glyco- (“sugar”) + -emia (“condition of the blood.”)]
Gormandise: eat greedily or voraciously [from MidEng. gourmaunt, gormond, gromonde, from OldFr. gormant (“a glutton”) + -ise]
Gormandise
Gracile: slender [L. gracilis (“slender”)]
Gramercy: used to thank someone; an exclamation of surprise [Fr. from grand merci (“a special thank you”)]
Grammatolatry: the worship of letters or words Gk. grammato, from grammat-, gramma) + -latry (Grammatolatry could be the motto for this whole project!)
Grampus: a blowing, spouting, whale-like sea creature; a cetacean of the dolphin family [grampoys, from graundepose (“great fish”)]
Grampus (image: facebook.com)
Grandgousier: someone who will eat anything and everything [Fr. grand gosier, (“Big throat”) a fictional character in the story of Gargantua by François Rabelais]
Grassation: the act of attacking violently; living in wait to attack [L. grassatio, from grassatus, grassarito (“go about”; “attack”; “rage against”) + -ion]
Graveolent: having a rank smell; fetid; stinking [L. graveolent-, graveolens, from gravis (“heavy”) + -olent-, -olens ]
Gravid: pregnant (-a: pregnant woman); full of meaning [L. gravidus (“laden”; “pregnant”), from gravis (“heavy”)] (cf. Gravific: that which makes heavy)
Groak: to watch people silently while they’re eating, hoping they will ask you to join them (OU)
Grobianism: rudeness; boorishness [from Middle High Ger. grob or grop (“coarse or vulgar”). 1. a Grobian is an imaginary personage known for boorish behaviour, appearing in works of 15-16th century writers 📑 2. a fictional patron saint of the vulgar and coarse, St Grobian
Gyrovagues: wandering or itinerant monks devoid of leadership. Having no fixed address they were reliant on charity and the hospitality of others [Late Latin. gyrovagus from L. gȳrus (“circle”) + –vagus (“wandering”)]
Ecclesiarch: church ruler (-y: government ruled by clerics) [L. ecclesiarcha, from Gk.]
Ecclesiarch (source: deviantart.com)
Ecmnesia: a form of amnesia in which the patient retains memories of older events but not of recent ones [Gk. ek (“out”) + -mnesis (“memory”)] 🤔
Ectorhinal: pertaining to the exterior of the nose; organ associated with sense of smell [Gk. from ektós (“outside”) + –rhin, -rhinós (“outside”) + -al]
Eldritch: weird, sinister or hideous; ghostly, otherworldly; uncanny [originally from Scot. perhaps rel. to “elf”]
Eldritch town? (source: patheos.com)
Embonpoint: plumpness [Fr. en bon point (“in good shape”)]
Emolument: “salary”; “profit” [from L. emolumentum (“advantage”) from emolere, (“to produce by grinding”) (prob. originally a payment to a miller for grinded corn) 🌽 💰
Empressment: extreme politeness [from L. imperatrix (“emperor”) + MidEng. -ment]
Enchiridion: handbook; a book containing essential information on a subject [Gk. enkheirídion, from en, (“in”) + –kheír, (“hand”) — from ‘The Enchiridion of Epictetus’ by Arrian (2nd cent. AD]
Engastrimyth: ventriloquist [MidFr. engastrimythe, from Gk. engastrimythos, from en (“in”) + -gastr- + -mythos (“speech”)]
Engastrimyth (photo: XiXinXing, Shutterstock)
Entopic: (Anat.) in the normal position (opposite of Ectopic) [Gk. en, (“within”), + –topos, (“place”)]
Ephebic: of a youth just entering manhood, esp in ancient Greek in the context of males aged 18-20 in military training [Gk. éphēbos (“adolescent”), from epí, (“early”) + –hḗbē, (“manhood”)]
Ephebic (source: Eagles and Dragons Publishing)
Epicene: effeminate; unmanly; exhibiting the characteristics of both sexes, or of neither (sexless); lacking gender distinction [Gk. epíkoinos, (“common to many people”) (cf. génos epíkoinon, (“common gender”) from epi-, (“on, upon; on top of; all over”)+ -koinós (“common”; “general”; “public”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European ḱóm (“beside, by, near, with”) + -yós]
Epigone: disciple; follower; imitator (esp one in a later generation) [Gk. epígonos, (“offspring”; “descendant”), from epigígnomai, (“I come after”), from epí, (“upon”), from gígnomai, (“I become”)]
Dippoldism: (Psych.) the paraphilia of deriving pleasure from the implementation of any form of corporal punishment whether it be in the form of beating, whipping, or spanking of another; sexuoerotic arousal derived fron spanking or whipping school children [From Andreas Dippold, German schoolteacher convicted of inflicting abuse on children including manslaughter]
Dismissory: sending away; permit to depart [from L. dimittere (“send away”) (dismiss) + -ory]
Discalceate: barefooted [dis + from L. calceus (“a shoe”)] 👣
Diversivolent: desiring different things [L. diversi (“diverse”) + –volent-, volens, velle (“to will”; “wish”)]
Dolorifuge: that which drives away sadness, mitigates or removes grief [from L. dolere (“to grieve”) + –fugere (“flee”). Coinage modelled on centrifuge, febrifuge, vermifuge, etc.]
Drapetomaniac: a person with an impulse or intense desire to run away from home [Gk. drapetēs, “a runaway [slave]”) + -mania, “madness”; “frenzy”). Coinage: Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright invented the term “Drapetomania” in 1851 to describe what he believed was the “psychological disorder”(sic) that caused a phenomenon of enslaved Blacks to run away from bondage before the American Civil War (masshist.org)
Drapetomania: an 1837 engraving of an escaped slave in the US
Cacestogenous: caused by unfavourable home environment (OU)
Calepin: a notebook; a dictionary, esp a polyglot dictionary [It. calepino, named after Ambrogio Calepino ((15th-16th cent. author of a Latin dictionary]
Callisteia: beauty prizes; originally a festival held by the women of the island of Lesbos, with a prize for the fairest beauty [name of the festival , named in honour of the Greek goddess of Callisto]
Callithumpian: a noisy band parade or demonstration [alteration of gallithumpian)
Cambist: one skilled in the science of financial exchange; a banker [from L. cambire (“to exchange”)]
Cambist (source: Gumpanat/Shutterstock.com)
Campestral: pertaining to or thriving in open countryside [L. fromcampester from campus (“field”; “plain”) + -al]
Canard: a fabricated anecdote; an unfounded sensational report; a phoney yarn; a hoax — or to put it in immediately-recognisable contemporary currency…fake news [Fr. canard (“duck”), in the sense of being a hoax] 🦆
Cancrine: reads the same backwards as forwards; palindromic [From Latincancer (“crab”) + -īnus]
Canatory: pertaining to a singer or singing [from It. cantata from L. cantare (“to sing”) + -ory] (cf. Cantatrice: female singer) 🎤
Caprine: pertaining to a goat; goat-like [L. caprīnus, from caper (“goat”)] 🐐
Carriwitchet: absurd, riddling question; a condundrum; a kind of hoax; pun [uncertain, possibly a humorous alteration of catechism]
Castrophenia: the belief that one’s thoughts are being stolen by one’s enemies (OU, castro- kastron-(?))
Catholicon: a universal remedy or fix; panacea [Gk. katholikós, (“universal”), from katá, “(according to”) + –hólos, “(whole”)]
Charientism: a figure of speech wherein an insult is disguised as or softened by a jest [from Gk. kharientismós]
Chimera: (also spelt Chimaera) imaginary monster; fanciful; impossible idea; a body; an unjustified fear [from Greek mythology: a fire-breathing she-monster having a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail]
Chimera (image: oldworldgods.com)
Circumforaneous: wandering from house to house, from place to place, from market to market [L. circumforāneus (“itinerant”), from circum- (“around”) + –forum (“marketplace”) + -aneus (“-aneous”)]
Claudicant: (Medic.) limping (L. claudicans from claudio (“to limp”) from claudus (“crippled”)]
Claudicant: I, Claudius?
Claviger: club-bearer; key-keeper or caretaker [L. from clavi- (“clavi”) – + -ger (“bearing, bearer”)] 🔑
Comiconomenclaturist: a connoisseur of humorous names; a specialist in the creation of funny names [from L. comicus (“of comedy”) from Gk. komikos (“of or pertaining to comedy”) + L. nōmenclātūra nomenclature (“naming”) + -ist]
Badaud: a person given to idle observation of everything, with wonder or astonishment; a credulous or gossipy idler; an urban bystander who “rubbernecks” (gawks) at some incident [Fr. fromOld Occitanbadau, frombadar, fromMedieval Latinbadare(“to gape”; “yawn”)]
Badaud, a type in French literature (Gérard Auliac, Le Badaud sculpture)
Baffona: a woman with a slight moustache [It. from baffo (“moustache”)]
Balmaiden: a female surface miner [Cornish: bal (“mine”) + -maiden (“a young or unmarried woman”)]
Balmaiden: (Cornwall, Eng. 1890)
Balistarius: a crossbowman [Gk. ballístra frombállō,(“I throw”) + -ius]
Balletomane: a person fanatically devoted to ballet; balletmaniac [fromFr. balletomane]
Balletomane: Billy Elliot (film)
Balneal: pertaining to bathing or baths [L. balneum (“bath”) +-al, -ary] (cf. Balneotherapy: treatment using natural water)
Balneal: Roman Baths, UK (photo: romanbaths.co.uk)
Banausic: common, ordinary, mundane, undistinguished, dull, insipid [Gk. banausikós,(“of or for mechanics”), frombánausos,(“mechanical; ironsmith”)]
Bandobast: protection of a person, building or organisation from crime or attack [Pers. band-o-bast(“tying and binding”), from Urdu. bundobast]
Baryecoia: dullness of hearing; deafness (OU)
Basial: pertaining to kissing (OU) 💋
Battue: the driving of game towards hunters by beaters; massacre of helpless people [Fr. battue, (“beaten”), fromL. battere]
Biverbal: relating to two words; punning [L. bi (“two”) + fromLateL. -verbālis(“belonging to a word”)]
Brachiation: the act of swinging from tree limb to tree limb (as performed by primates) [L. bracchium, (“arm“) + -tion] 🐵
“Y” (pronounced the same as “why” or “wye”) is the 25th and penultimate letter of the English alphabet. “Y” appears in the Semitic alphabet as waw, which it shares with several other Latin letters, namely F, U, V and W. n the Classical Greek alphabet “upsilon” or “ypsilon” represents the letter Y. In mathematics “Y” is the 2nd unknown variable, following “X”. Y is a consonant but also can be a vowel in the articulation of certain sounds (eg, the semi-vowel “yes”).
{word} <meaning> <derivation>
Yale: (Euro. myth.) mythical animal resembling a horse (or antelope) with a tusk in combination with the the tail of an elephant (used in heraldry) [etymology uncertain but believed to be derived from the Hebrew word yael (“ibex“)]
A Pair of yales adorning St John’s College, Cambridge
Yam: (Hist.) was a postal system or supply-point route messenger system extensively used by the Great Khans; a posting-house along a road (Marco Polo: a yam was a waystation where a “large and handsome building” housed messengers and horses in “rooms furnished with fine beds” fit for a king, decorated with “rich silk” and “everything they can want.”) [Mongolian. örtöö, (“checkpoint”)]
The Yam system: described as a kind of “medieval pony express” operating within Mongolia (source: Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Yarborough: hand of cards (whist) or bridge with no card above a nine; a weak hand [Eng. from toponymic surname, from Yarburgh (Yarborough) in Lincolnshire, from OldEng. habitational or topographic nameeorðburg (“earthworks”; “fortifications”)]
A Yarborough hand (source: Science matters)
Yardland: unit of land area equal to 30 acres (¼ of a hide🄰); also called a Virgate) [MidEng. yerdlond, from yerde (“yard”; “measure”) + –lond (“land”)]
Yardland or virgate
Yare: (esp of a vessel) answering swiftly to the helm; easily handled; marked by quickness and agility; nimble; prepared [from OldEng. gearu (“ready”)]
Yaud: a worn out or old horse; a workhorse (Scot. mare) [MidEng.? yald from Old Norse. jalda (“mare”) of Finno-Ugric origin, cf. “jade”] 🐴
Yealing: person of the same age as oneself (of uncertain origin)
Yellowplush: a footman [from character in Yellowplush Papers, a series of satirical sketches by William Makepeace Thackeray (1850s) (compounding of “yellow” + “plush”)]
Yellowplush
Yegg: a burglar of safes; safecracker (origin unknown)
Yegg
Yobbery: hooliganism; characteristic of the (bad) behaviour of a yob; a rowdy, disruptive youth [coined 1970s by inverting the spelling of “boy”]
Yogibogiebox: a container holding the assessories used by a spiritualist [a compound of yogi + –bogey + –box. Coined or introduced by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922)]
Yogibogiebox (Ulysses’)
Yogini female yogi [from yoga from Sanskrit. yuj (“to join or unite”)]
Yoicks: a hunting cry used to urge hounds after a fox or other quarry; expression of surprise or excitement (origin unknown but appears related to fox-hunting) (cf. Yikes: exclamation of alarm or surprise)
Yonderly: mentally or emotionally distant; vacant or absent-minded [from “yonder” from Eng. “yon” and from Dutch. ginder (“over there”)]
Yoni: symbol representing female genitalia [Sanskrit. yoni (“female reproductive organ”; literally “the womb” or (“the source”)]
Yowndrift: snow driven by the wind (Scot. Eng.? origin uncertain)
🄰 English unit of land measurement originally intended to represent the amount of land sufficient to support a household
The letter “X” is the 24th letter of the Latin alphabet, as well as the Roman numerical symbol for “ten”(10). It derived from the Phoenician letter samekh, meaning “fish”, then circa 900BC the Greeks borrowed the samekh letter and renamed it Chi, giving it its present shape, the meaningful symbol of two diagonally-crossed vertical strokes. X is notable for its versatility and is powerfully ingrained in popular culture with so many different applications – it can signify the unexpected in everyday life, the mysterious phenomena or the unknown value of something; X can be defiantly undefinable. “X marks the spot” (see at bottom) or it can be a cautionary viewer-rating for television or films; it can represent a chromosome juxtaposed with its succeeding letter of the alphabet, “y”; it can stand in place of the word “Christ” as in “X’mas”; and it can be a shorthand affectionate or amorous sign-off between two correspondents (XXX or XOXO), the “kisses” in “kisses and hugs”; or the “crosses” in the perennial game of “noughts and crosses”; there’s “Generation X” of MTV-land and there’s “X” the rebranded moniker for the US-based social media website formerly known as Twitter (‘Before X Was X: The Dark Horse Story Of The 24th Letter’, January 09, 2019, www.dictionary.com)
Xanthippe: an ill -tempered woman [Gk. history: Socrates’ Athenian wife]
Xanthippe
Xanthocomic: yellow-haired [Gk. xanthós (“yellow”) + (?)-kómēs (“harmony”) from -kome (“hair of the head”) (?) (cf. Xanthochroic: having yellow skin) 👱
Xenagogue: a tour guide; someone who conducts or directs strangers [Gk. xeno, xenós (“stranger”; “foreigner”) + -agōgos (“to lead”)] (cf. Xenodochy: hospitality; reception of strangers)
Xenarthral: resembling a sloth, an anteater or an armadillo [Gk. xenós (“foreigner”) + -árthron (“joint”)
Xenarthral (image: Encyclopedia Britannica)
Xenodocheionology: (studying) the history of hotels or inns; the lore of hotels or inns [Gk. xenodocheion (“inn”) + -o- + –logy]
Xenodocheionology: The Don CeSar, Florida, AKA “The Pink Palace”
Xenoglossia: supposedly when someone is able to speak, understand or write in a foreign language that he/she has never learnt or studied [Gk. xeno + -glossia (“speak)] (cf. Xenoglossophobia: fear of foreign languages)
Xenoglossia (image: sanaco.com)
Xerothermic: both dry and hot [Gk. xērós, (“dry”) + -thermós, “heat”) + –ic] (cf. Xerarch: growing in dry places) (cf. Xerasia: abnormal dryness of the hair) (cf. Xerostomia: excessive dryness of the mouth)
Xiphias: swordfish; a genus (the type of the family Xiphiidae) of large scombroid fishes comprising the common swordfish [Gk. xíphos, (“sword”)] 🗡️ 🐟
Xylopolist: one who sells wood; a timber merchant [Gk. xylo (“wood”) + –polist (“I barter”; “sell”)] 🪵
Xystus: (Hist.) architectural element in Anc Greece for covered portico of the gymnasium; covered walkway for exercises [from Gk. xustos, (“smooth”) (ie, polished floor of the xystus)
Xystus (source: facebook.com)
◢━■━■◤◢━■━■◢━■━■◤◢━■━■◤
“X marks the spot!” (from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade)
The blog preceding this one addressed the German-American phenomena of Turnverein (gymnastics-cum-social-cum-political associations in the US in the 19th and 20th centuries), detailing how the American Turners movement derived its inspiration from the philosophy and gymnastics theory of the Prussian educator Johann Friedrich Jahn. Jahn and the Deutsch Turnenschafts exerted a similar motivational effect on the Czech gymnastics movement’s genesis. Sokol (a Slavic word meaning “falcon”) was founded as a gymnastics, social and fraternal club by two ethnic Germans (Miroslav Tyrš and Jindřich Fügner) in Bohemia in 1862🅰. Sokol’s approach to physical education derived from Tyrš’ PE system placed an emphasis on mass calisthenics.
Mass calisthenics display at Prague’s Strahov Stadium
Just as Turnverein was transplanted into America and took root there, so did Sokol. In 1865 the first American Sokol was formed, just three years after the parent Bohemian organisation started! By 1937 there was nearly 20,000 members of Sokolsocieties in the US. Back in Europe Sokol became both a catalyst for Czech nationalism and patriotism and an expression of Pan-Slavism with Moravia (Slovakia), Poland, Bulgaria, Russia (including Belorussia and the Ukraine) and the southern Slav (Yugoslav) states all adopting a form of Sokol from the Czech prototype.
Sokol women in a mass calisthenics exhibition (source: Reddit)
Sokol cf. Turnverein: the pursuit of physical fitness through the practice of gymnastics and calisthenics was the raison d’être of both Sokol and the American Turners, both movements were essentially male-focused and geared unequivocally towards the demonstration of masculinity. Underlying the physical educational aims of both were other ideals, a determination to use each’s movement to elevate a sense of group identity…in Sokol’s case, to help forge a sense of Czech nationalism (the practice of gymnastics as a national movement), and for German-Americans, to underpin and preserve the distinctive German-ness and cultural values of the immigrants in an non-German society. The question of politics was a point of departure for the two movements. The Turnverein associations were liberals/socialists by persuasion (at least up until the First World War) and actively supported progressive political causes. Sokol on the other hand in its stated principles was avowedly non-political. This in practice caused internal tensions within Sokol between older Czech members and younger ones, the latter openly advocating for the movement to embrace more direct political participation.
Poster for 1901 Slet (source: sokolmuseum.org)
Slet fests: the pinnacle and showcase of the Sokol phenomena was the Slet🅱 festivals, these were mass, open-air extravaganzas for public consumption. Centrepiece of the Slet fest was thousands of athletes in a stadium exhibition of synchronised calisthenics, accompanied by stirring classical music. Complementing this were competitions in gymnastics and other sporting events, gatherings, parades and rallies, celebrations of culture and the arts. The first Slet was held in Prague in 1882, culminating in a mass calisthenics display. By the 1895 All-Sokol Slet Sokol’s growth and expansion was evident with around 5,000 men and boys performing in the stadium. The 1901 Slet was the first to include women as well as international participants from France and the US. The 1926 Slet (in an independent Czechoslovakia) was the first in the massive, purpose-built Strahov Stadium with a spectator capacity of 250,000 and 182,477 participants taking part (‘History of Prague Slets’, SOKOL Museum Library, www.sokolmuseum.org). After the Second World War the new communist regime in Czechoslovakia permitted only one more Slet to be held (1948) before the Slets and Sokol were suppressed, replaced in 1955 by the first Spartakiad, a mass exercises event and propaganda vehicle for the socialist Czechoslovakian regime, purportedly based on the Soviet Spartakiades. The reality was that the Spartakiads wereadopted from the earlier Czech slets and it was only possible for the authorities to organise such a complex, large scale, mega-event with the expertise and active involvement of Sokol organisers (Petr Roubal) (‘The first ever Spartakiad mass exercise and how it was influenced by the Sokol movement’, Thomas McEnchroe, Radio Prague International, 23-Jun-2020, http://english.radio.cz). After the eclipse of communism in the Eastern Bloc, the Sokol Slet was revived in the early 1990s, albeit on a much smaller scale than hitherto.
1948 Slet (source: sokolmuseum.org)
𖤗 mirrors the Turnenfest/American Turners motto
🅰 then part of the Czech lands within the Austro-Hungarian Empire
🅱 in the Czech language meaning “a flock of birds” – to continue Sokol’s ornithological metaphor
Turnverein (Pl. “Turnvereine”) from German: turnen (“to practice gymnastics”) + –verein (“club” or “union”)
𖥠𖥠𖥠𖥠𖥠
The earnest pursuit or physical exercise and a healthy lifestyle isn’t the first thing you think of in regard to fast-foodified, modern America and Americans. But it was the case for many German-Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These immigrants and sons and daughters of immigrants formed themselves into Turnvereins (German gymnastic/athletic clubs) in the US which, inspired by pioneering early 19th century Prussian physical educationalist and nationalist, JFLC ‘Vater’ Jahn (“the Father of Gymnastics”), promoted physical culture, German cultural traditions, freethinking and liberal politics1⃞.
Cincinnati Turners, 1909 (source: Indiana University Library)
The members of these Turnvereins, known as “Turners”, played leading roles in sponsoring gymnastics as an American sport and a subject for school, helping to popularise physical exercise and callisthenics as a way of life. Turner gymnastics, the centerpiece of the societies’ activity, comprised distinctive calisthenics routines and apparatus exercises which emphasised masculine strength and agility [‘Milwaukee Turners’, Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, https://emke.uwm.edu]. The Turners’ clubs and associations (Vereininigte Turnvereins Nordamerika) spread out from the Ohio Valley throughout the US. At one point, around 1894, Turnerism reached its zenith with 317 societies and approximately 40,000 members. The Turnvereins performed a multi-functional purpose, aside from the physical activities they fulfilled a social role for recent arrivals from Germany, helping them to integrate into their new home while facilitating the retention of German culture (the societies’ halls (Turnhalles) were havens for social get-togethers). In so doing the Turners fostered a form of group solidarity among German-Americans by preserving their ethnic culture and identity [Annette R. Hofmann, ‘The American Turners: their past and present, Revista Brasileira de Ciências do Esporte’, Volume 37, Issue 2, 2015, Pages 119-127, ISSN 0101-3289, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rbce.2014.11.020.]
Central Turner Hall, Cincinnati, Oh.
The Turner societies were politically progressive, supporting the liberal brand of Republicanism in the 1850s and 60s.2⃞. Turners were strong abolitionists, both antebellum and during the Civil War, when many of the members fought for the Union side. Later, the Turnen associations embraced homegrown causes in the US such as the struggle to achieve women’s suffrage and equality3⃞ and workers’ rights under capitalism; in the interwar years the Turnvereins were vocal in their opposition to the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe [‘The Milwaukee Turners at Turner Hall’, www.milwaukeeturners.org).
Milwaukee Turners (source: Encyclopedia of Milwaukee)
By the early 20th century the Turnverein impulse in America was losing its intensity, partly this was generational, the American-born Germans were increasingly less fluent in German and more attuned with the mainstream US culture. The associations were less radical and socialist and more conservative in their outlook and American government WWI hostility to Germany and Germans and Prohibition in the decade-plus after it were factors that further undermined Turner solidarity. The pull of assimilation and an inevitable “Americanisation” process severely weakened the cultural affinity with things Germans within the associations and the number of Turner societies dropped off dramatically from the 1920s on 4⃞ (Hofmann).
Today, the Turnen movement in America, massively diminished in size and influence with the number of active clubs having plummeted to under 50 and shorn both of its political activism and its Teutonic focus, maintains its existence as gymnastics (and other sports) clubs and social associations, while espousing the motto “a sound mind in a sound body” and still advocating the core virtues of physical fitness and exercise.
100th anniversary of Baltimore Turners (source: Indiana Memory Hosted Digital Collections)
Endnote: while the gym and physical fitness remains central to the societies’ ethos, the modern American Turner clubs have diversified their repertoire of group activities beyond the exclusive practice of gymnastics. The Riverside Turners (New Jersey) for instance offers a range of activities including darts, shuffleboard, horseshoes, basketball and golf, while the Milwaukee Turners provide members looking for something more challenging with rock and ice climbing walls.
Photo: Facebook, Milwaukee Turners
1⃞ unfortunately Jahn’s training regimen which tended towards the militaristic had a downside…it also directly influenced the Nazis and the Hitler Youth movement of the following century [‘A History of Gymnastics, From Ancient Greece to Tokyo 2020’, Meilan Solly, Smithsonian Magazine, 26-July-2021, www.smithsonianmag.com]
2⃞ in the 1850s the Turners found themselves in bitter conflict with the short-lived, nativist “Know-Nothing” party
3⃞ which contrasts starkly with the record of gender exclusion within the Turnen societies themselves…women were firmly ensconced in a subordinate role as the Turnvereins remained male preserves right up to recent times
4⃞ German culture was submerged under “Apple pie Americanism” with German references in the organisation’s names such as Demokratischer Turnerbund shelved…from 1938 the national movement officially and permanently became “American Turners”
“W”, letter number 23 in the alphabet, traces its genesis to the Semitic letter vaw (as does f, u, v and y), which the ancient Greeks adopted as upsilon. W’s place in the English alphabet came about indirectly via the prior-existing letters “U” and “V”. At first there was no letter “W”, “W” was represented by two consecutive letter U or V …eventually one single character evolved to represent the “W” sound – “W” or “Double-U”. “It’s this history that gives W the longest name of any letter of the English language—and also means that the acronym www uniquely contains three times more syllables than it does letters” (www.mentalfloss.com).
Why Double-U and not Double-V? In print (but not cursive writing) “W” comprises two Vs (VV), so why wasn’t it called “Double-V”? Basically it’s to do with the timing of the letter W’s evolution in Old English. At the time the “W” symbol was created “V” did not exist in that language, so “W” was rendered as “UU”, and so it stayed (‘Why isn’t a W called a double V?’ Grammarphobia (27-Apr-2011), www.grammarphobia.com).
<word> <meaning> <derivation>
Wafture: (cf. Waftage) act of waving or making a wave-like motion; wafting: to convey or carry lightly and smoothly through the air or over water [from LowGer., Dutch wachter, from wachten (“to guard”, the sense of “convey by water”/“escort a ship”) from wafter (“armed convoy vessel”)] 👋
Waggoner (source: National Maritime Historical Society)
Wagtail: an obsequious person; a harlot (origin unknown)
Wale: to choose; the act of choosing(?) (origin unknown)
Wamble: nauseous; walk unsteadily; a staggering gait; wobbling or rolling motion; churning of the stomach [MidEng. wamlen; (“to become nauseated”), from L. vomere (“to vomit”)]
Wergild: fine paid by family of murderer to family of murder victim (“man-price”) [MidEng. wergeld, from OldEng. wer (“man”) + -geld, alteration of gield, geld (“payment”; “tribute”) 💰
Wertfrei: without value judgement; morally neutral [Ger. wert (“worth”) + -frei (“free”)]
Whangam: an imaginary creature [17th cent. neologism coined by Oliver Goldsmith, Anglo-Irish author]
Whipcat: a person who makes, repairs, or altersouter garments, esp menswear; a tailor (slang: a worker “who whips the cat”) (origin unknown)
Whiskerando: a man with extravagant whiskers [Scand. Iceld. visk (“a wisp of hay”); allusion to Don Ferolo Whiskerando in RB Sheridan’s The Critic] (cf. Whiskerine: beard-growing contest)
Widdershins: counterclockwise, anticlockwise; to walk around an object by always keeping it on the left MidLowGer. weddersinnes, (literally “against the way”, i.e. “in the opposite direction”)] cf. Widersinnen: “to go against”)
Wight: nimble; strong; courageous; a supernatural, man-like being [from MidEng. wight or wiȝt, from OldEng. wiht, from Proto-West Germanicwihti]
Wold: a piece of high, open, uncultivated land or moor (Brit.) [OldEng. wald (“wooded upland”) of Germanic origin; perhaps related to wild]
Wondermonger: one who promises miracles; a person who tells of or exploits strange or freakish things [from MidEng. wonder, wunder, from OldEng. wundor (“wonder”; “miracle”; “marvel”), from Proto-West Germanic*wundr + from L. –mangō (“dealer”; “trader”)]
Woonerf: a road in a residential district which has installed devices (eg, traffic calming, low speed limits, shared space) to reduce or slow the flow of traffic (a living street) [Dutch: wonen (“reside”) + erf (“ground”; “premises”) (literally: “living yard” or “residential grounds”)]
Woopie: an affluent retired person able to pursuit an active lifestyle [derived from the acronym “well off older person” (“woop)”]
V (lower case: v) is the twenty-second letter in the Latin alphabet, it appears in the modern English A—Z as well in as the alphabets of other western European languages. Its name in English is pronounced vee. As is the case with its sequential predecessor, “U”, which was the conduit for V’s linguistic journey, “V” ultimately comes from the Phoenician letter waw.The letter “V” in the popular consciousness is forever associated with “victory”, a symbolic nexus forged during the Second World War as a rallying call for the Allies’ war effort. It’s originator, an obscure Belgian politician, largely forgotten by the overarching giantic shadow of the phrase’s populariser, that wallflower of the shrinking violet variety, Sir Winston Churchill, for which the term “V for victory”, along with its accompanying Winnie trademark two-digit gesture, is eternally associated. Again, as with the letter “U”, Latin root words form the nucleus of “V” words in the following list.
<word> <meaning> <derivation>
Vaccimulgence: the milking of cows [L. vacci- (“cow”) + –mulgentia (“milking”)] 🐄 🥛
Vadelect: serving man, part of the household staff; personal servant [L. vadelectus, vad- (“go”) + unknown (?)]
Valetudinarian: a person who is obsessed with some ailment; hypochondriac [L. valēre, (“to have strength”; “to be well.”) + -ian]
Valuta: comparative value of different currencies (USD: AUD, etc) [[L. valēre]
Valuta (source: 123rf.com)
Vaniloquent: speaking only of oneself or speaking egotistically [L. vanus (“vain”) + –loqui (“speak”)]
Vapulate: to beat with a whip [L. vāpulō [Prob. onomatopoeic in its origin, meaning “cry”; “wail”) from which meaning the attested meaning “be beaten, be stricken” evolved]
Veduta: panoramic view of a town; highly detailed, often large scaled painting or print of a cityscape or other vista [It. veduta (“view”)]
Vellichor: the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time [velli- (unknown?) + -chor (“sing”; “dance”)]
Vellichor (photo: en.japantravel.com)
Velocious: with great speed [L. veloc-, velox (“quick”) + -ious] (cf. Velocipede: swift-footed person)
Velologist: collecting of, study of, buying & selling of vehicle tax discs (UK) [L. velo (unknown?) + -logy]
Velologist
Venator: (also Venerer) hunter; huntsman (cf. Venatrix (Fem.)); (Hist.) a type of Roman gladiator who specialised in hunting wild animals; type of wolf spider 🕷️ [from L. vēnor (“I hunt”) + -tor]
Vendible: capable of being sold [L. vēndere (“to sell”) + -bilis (“capable of being acted upon)”]
Venineman: juror (derivation unknown)
Ventripotent: having a fat belly, or being a glutton [L. ventr-, venter– (“abdomen”) + -potent-, potens, from OldLat. potēre (“to be powerful”)]
Venustaphobia: fear of beautiful women [L. Venus (“Roman goddess of love and beauty”) venust (“beautiful”) + -phobia]
Verbarian: coiner of words[MidLat. verbum (“word”; “verb”) + -arian]
Verbigerate: to continually repeat a word or phrase meaninglessly, usually unconciously [L. verbum (“word”) + -gerare, from gerere (“to carry”)]
Verger: church usher and attendant [L. verge (“rod”; “wand of office”) + -er] ⛪️
Veriloquent: speaking nothing but the truth [L. vērāc– (“true”) + –loqui] (cf. Veridical: veracious; genuine; truthful)
Vernarexia: (also Vernalagnia) a romantic mood brought on by Spring; “Spring Fever” [L. vernal (“spring”) + -orexia (“desire”)]
Vernarexia
Versutiloquent: speaking craftily [ L. versūtus, from vertö, versum (“to turn”) + loqui] (cf. Versute: crafty; wily; artful)
Vertiginous: extremely high or steep; giddy, dizziness (affected by Vertigo) [L. veriginosus, from vertigo (“whirling about”)]
Vertiginous (source: atlasobscura.com)
Vespertine: happening or active in the evening; flourishing or flowering at night [Gk. Hesperus is from (“evening star”) + -ine] (cf. Vesper: evening; the evening star)
Vesthibitionism: the flirtatious display of undergarments by a woman [L. vestimenta, (“clothes or undergarments”) + –exhibeo, (“to show”) +-ism]
Vestigial: a very small remnant of something once greater or more noticeable; rudimentary or degenerate organ/body part [Unknown, possibly from earlier verstīgium, from L. verrō (“to sweep”), or poss. from vē- + stīgō, from Proto-Indo-Europeanstéygeti (“to walk”)]
Vetanda: forbidden things [Vetanda in Sanskritvetanda (? “elephant”)]
Vetust: very ancient [L. vetustus (“old, ancient”)]
Vexillologist: a collector of flags for display [L. vexillum (“flag”) + -logist] 🇧🇷🇧🇮🇬🇱🏴🇨🇽🇺🇬🇨🇼
Viātor: “traveller;” “wayfarer” [from L. via (“track or road”) + -tor] (cf. Viaggiatory: traveling frequently)
Viator: Marco Polo was a viator
Vicennial: occurring every twenty years [LateLat. vīcennium, (“period of twenty years”)]
Vicinage: neighbourhood; residents in a neighbourhood [L. vīcīnus (“neighbour”)]
Victrix: female victor [from L. vincere (“conquer”)]
Victrix (image: lessonplanned.co.uk)
Victualler: one who operates a pub or eatery; supplier of provisions to a naval ship or army; seller of alcohol [L. victus (“food”) + -ler]
Videndum: the thing to be seen [L. vindendus, from videō (“I see”)]
Vigneron: wine-grower 🍷 [from OldFr. vigne, (+ -ron) from L. vīnea (“vines in a vineyard”)]
Vigneron (photo: vigneron-independant.com/)
Vilipend: to treat or regard with contempt; to belittle; to speak slanderously or slightingly of someone [LateLat. vīlipendere, from L. vīlis (“worthless”) + -pendere (“to esteem”)]
Virago: a woman who demonstrates abundant masculine virtues [L. virāgō (“vigorous maiden”) from vir– (“man-like”) + -ago] (cf. Viraginity)
Virgivitiphobia: a fear of being raped [L. virgi (“marriageable girl”?) + -phobia]
Viripotent: fit for a husband; marriageable [L. vir (“man”) + –potens (“fit for”)]
Virvestitism: a preference of some women to wear mens clothing [origin unknown)
Voluptuary: sensualist; person fond of luxury [ LateLat. voluptuārius, from L. voluptārius (“pleasure-seeker”; “agreeable”; “delightful”; “pleasant”; “sensual”), (cf. Volupty: sexual pleasure)
Voraginous: pertaining to something which devours everything [L. vorāginōsus, from vorāgō (“abyss”) + -ous]
Vorago: gulf; chasm; abyss (origin unknown)
Votary: a devoted follower, esp a monk or nun; adherent; a staunch advocate of someone or something else [L. vot (“vowed”) + -ary]
Votary
Vulgus: the common people [L. volvō (“I roll”; “turn over”) (cf. Vulgo: commonly; popularly)
Vulpine: pertaining to foxes; (Literal: crafty; cunning [L. vulpinus, from vulpes (“fox”)] 🦊
As a kid I was wholly immersed in what film critics call ”epic films“…those mega-large scale productions with sweeping scope and spectacle, unfettered extravagance, lavishly costumed, a cast of thousands (actual persons, not a computer-generated substitution of a multiplicity of images for people en masse), exotic locations, loosely set in a far ago historical context which could be Biblical, could be Viking sagas, Sinbad the Sailor/Arabian Nights adventures, 16th century pirates, Spanish Conquistadors in the New World, 12th century Crusaders venturing forth for the Holy Land or from countless other pages in the chronicles of history. Even movies which mix myth with history like the Robin Hood sagas or the Arthurian legend drew me to their flame. But it was the world of antiquity, in particular the BC era as interpreted on celluoid screens large or small that most fired my imagination. My all-time favourite viewing entertainments back then were “sword-and-sandal” movies. Yes okay I admit that when we got a TV set in the late Fifties, watching Westerns started to consume the lion’s share of my leisure time, but by circa 1960 there was just so many damn TV westerns, “horse operas”, “oaters” call them what you like monopolising air time on the box, that you had to be discerning to avoid them (which I wasn’t!).
King of Kings (1961): dubbed “I was a teenage Jesus” by critics upon its release
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The Peplum:
This quintessential term in the epic film lexicon comes from the garment worn by Greek women in the Archaic era, the peplos. What the Hellenic women of antiquity called a peplos—a long outer robe or shawl which hung from the body in loose folds and sometimes was drawn over the head—is a far cry from how moviemakers in the mid-20th century conceived the garment. Peplaⓐ in the Greco-Roman cinematic universe were a much sexier affair, mini-length tunics to show off shapely legs (and worn by both sexes).
Peplum fashionistas
In that less prescriptive age when no one fretted much about the adverse physiological (or psychological) effects on juveniles of their maxing out in front of the idiot box 12 hours a day, my penchant was to get as much Hollywood epic blockbusters into me as I could manage—this included such classic Hollywood biblical and historical fodder as Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments and Spartacus —seeing them in the picture theatre and again on television when they turned up there. If I had to nominate one ancient world epic flick as my all-time favourite though, I’d probably plump for the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts movie– admittedly a smaller scale ‘indy’ production without the big name star drawing power (maybe more “epic-lite?”). It’s stellar appeal lay in part, like its more famous fellow Greek myth story, “The Odyssey”, in the adventure-packed extravaganza of its Classical heroic tale, its virtuous protagonist’s quest and ultimate triumph against the longest of odds stacked against him. But what elevated Jason and the Argonauts above the pack for my 11-year-old self was undoubtedly the film’s fantasy special effects. I was captivated by the myriad of fearsome legendary creatures created by Ray Harryhausen’s ground-breaking SFX wizardry—though to more discerning adult eyes they must have looked decidedly “hokey” and “stilted”—the glorious highlight of which was the iconic scene where Jason single-handedly battles the frenetic army of animated sabre-wielding skeletons – and emerges triumphant of course!
Jason and the Argonauts (1963): Harryhausen’s Special FX
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At some point in my juvenile years I developed a special fondness for Italian-made sword-and-sandal ⓑ flicks, something which I find hard today to rationalise. These are films, made primarily between the late Fifties and the mid Sixties, with trite, ludicrous and meaningless translated titles like Goliath and the Vampires, Hercules Against the Sons of the Sun, Samson Against the Sheik and Ursus in the Valley of the Lions.Most are set in ancient Greece, sometimes in Rome or elsewhere within the Empire (occasionally somewhere more exotic), and characteristically with storylines and events riddled with anachronisms.
Ursus finds himself in the Amazon in this 1960 entry
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The sword-and-sandal formula
Robert Rushing defines the peplum as “depicting muscle-bound heroes…in mythological antiquity, fighting fantastic monsters and saving scantily clad beauties”. Sloppily dubbed into halting English, atrociously woodenly acted, scenes lacking continuity, the plots are ludicrously formulaic, typically involving a superhuman strong man hero who stereotypically runs through his repertoire of superhuman feats of strength, triumphing over all foes while rescuing a beautiful but defenceless heroine (typically wearing the briefest peplum imaginable) and sometimes liberating the oppressed masses to boot at the same time. Unlike Hollywood’s lavish epic spectacles (Quo Vadis?, Cleopatra, Ben-Hur, etc.) , these Italian homegrown peplums were decidedly low-budget flicks which zeroed in on the hero’s beefcake attributesⓒ. (‘Sword-and-Sandal’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org). The Italian cinematic peplum was indeed a curious passion of my pre-teen to early adolescent years.
Hercules (1958) with Steve Reeves: prototype for the Italian sword-and-sandal film
Hercules by another name
The ur-peplum was Hercules (Italian title: Le Fatiche di Ercole), released in 1958, starring American bodybuilder-turned-actor Steve Reeves, an instant hit which pocketed >$5,000,000 profit for the producers and backers and unleashed a steady stream of sequels starting with Hercules Unchained. As a variation to Hercules, other strongman protagonists were added to subsequent peplum movies, including Samson, Goliath, Ursus and Italy’s own folk hero Macisteⓓ. By 1965 the peplum was pretty much passé in Italy, with the void quickly filled by Spaghetti Westerns and Eurospy films.
My fascination with this Continental movie sub-genre was even more remarkable and unfathomable because, even then, I knew that the films were egregiously badly put together! Watching them was like being drawn against your better instincts to look at something as horrific as a car crash…you know it’s wrong but you just can’t resist the temptation. The unequivocal fact that the sword-and-sandal pictures were such thoroughly execrable, absolute turkeys of films perversely had precisely zero impact on my satisfaction quotient during my early impressionable years!
This 1964 ”Sword-and-sandaller” Maciste Contre Les Hommes De Pierre was released in English as Hercules Against the Moon Men, (“Hercules meets Sci-Fi”)
Footnote: Now at an age where I am hurtling towards senectitude I find the grainy and tired-looking footage and the equally tired storylines so unappetising that I couldn’t even stuck it out for 10 minutes, let alone stay the course of a peplum…but even with my profoundly diminished enthusiasm I still hold a soft spot for the deeply flawed sub-genre…I guess that’s simply nostalgia kicking in – the remembrances of things past which seemed better then (ie, in my youth) than they do now guided presumably by a more mature, more measured outlook.⿻⿻⿻
The sub-genre’s popularity in the early ’60s prompted the Three Stooges to get in on the act with a slapstick, farcical take on the Italian peplum The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962)
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ⓐ plural of peplum
ⓑ “sword-and-sandal” and “peplum” are used interchangeably to describe this sub-genre, both terms have a disparaging connotation. The sorcery component of the sub-genre was something I could take or leave
ⓒ so to have the lead convincingly looking the part, professional bodybuilders, athletes and wrestlers were transformed into actors and cast as the Herculean-like protagonist
ⓓ Maciste as strongman in the peplum films was resurrected from a previous incarnation in the silent era of Italian cinema
The letter “U”, 21st letter and ultima vowel of the Latin alphabet, phonemetically one-half of the letter “W” (“double-U”). “U” derives from the Semitic waw, as does F, and later, Y, W, and V. Pictorially its oldest ancestor goes to Egyptian hieroglyphs, and is probably sourced from a hieroglyph of a mace or fowl, representing the sound [v] or the sound [w]. This was borrowed to Phoenician, where it represented the sound [w], and seldom the vowel [u]. The bulk of the U-words that follow reveal the extent of the debt of their Latin roots.
Ubicity: whereabouts [L. ubi (“where”) + -icity] (cf. Ubique: everywhere)
Ucalegon: neighbour whose house is on fire [eponym from ancient Greek. ~ an Elder of Troy, Ucalegon’s house was set afire by the Achaeans during the sack of Troy (the Iliad; the Aeneid]
Ultraist activism: the upsurge in far-right politics (photo: ft.com)
Ultramontane: south of the Alps; other side of the Alps; a Catholic Church belief that supports the pope’s supreme authority [L. ultrā + -mont-, -mons (“mountain”)]
Ultramontane: the Papal cross-keys, symbolising the Papacy
Ultroneous: pertaining to a witness who testifies voluntarily [L. ultroneus, from ultro (“to the further side, on his part, of one’s own accord”)]
Unasinous: equally as stupid as each other [L. ünus (“one”) + -asinus (“ass”) + -ous]
Undecennial: occurring every eleven years [L. undecim (“eleven”) + –ial]
Undinism: the trait of having erotic thoughts when viewing or contemplating water; an awakening of the libido caused by viewing running water or urine [L. unda (“wave”) -ism]
Undinism (image: theseamossharvest.com)
Unicity: the fact of being or consisting of one, or of being united as a whole; the quality of being unique [L. ūnicitās, ūnicus (“uniqueness”) + -ity]
Unigeniture: the state of being the only begotten (ie, fathering a child into existence) [L. unigenitus (“only-begotten”), from unus (“one”) + –genitum (“to beget”)]
Unipara: a woman who gives birth only the once [unus, unius + –parus (“to produce”)]
Unsinew: to take the strength from [un- + from Old Saxon. sinewa]
Untreasure: to despoil [un- + Gk. thēsaurós, (“treasure house”)]
Unwithdrawing: not withdrawing or retreating”; “lavish or liberal” [un- + MidEng. from with from + drawen (“to draw”)]
Upaithric: roofless; open to the sky [Gk. hypaithros, from hypo- + aithēr (“ether”; air”)]
Upas: poisonous or harmful institution or influence [Indon. Malay pohon upas (“poison tree”)] 🌳
Upas: the highly toxic Upas tree (source: naturespoisons.com)
Uraniscus: roof of the mouth; the palate [Gk. ouranískos, (“ceiling”)]
Uranism: male homosexuality [Gk. ouránios, (“heavenly”; “spiritual”)]
Urinator: a diver, especially someone who searches for things underwater [L. ūrīnātor (“diver”), from ūrīnor (“to plunge under water”; “dive”), poss. from ūrīna (“urine”; water(?))]
Urinator (source: Southeast Texas Scuba)
Ursine: of, like or pertaining to bears [from L. ursus (“bear”)] (cf. Ursiform: having the shape or appearance of a bear)
Urticant: (Path.) causing a stinging or itching sensation; irritating [MedLat. urticant-, urticans, from L. urticare (“to sting”)]
Usance: (orig.) habit; custom; firmly established and generally accepted practice or procedure; use, employment; (obs.) interest [L. ūsant-, from ūsāre (“to use”)]
Usitative: signifying a usual act [L. usitari (“to use often”)]
Usufruct: (Civil Law) the right to use and enjoy something; a limited real right which unites the two property interests of usus (usage of or access to) is the right to use or enjoy a thing possessed, directly and without altering it) and fructus (the right to derive profit from a thing possessed: eg, by selling crops (the “fruits” of production), leasing immovables or annexed movables, taxing for entry, and so on [L. uses et fructus (“use and employment”)] 𓍝
Uxorial: of, like or pertaining to a wife [L. uxōrius (“of or pertaining to a wife; overly fond of one’s wife”) from uxor (“wife”) + -al ] (cf. Uxorious: excessively fond of one’s wife) (cf. Uxorodespotic: morbid domineering by one’s wife; wifely tyranny of her husband ➲ (cf. Maritodespotism: tyrannical rulership of a wife by her husband)
The letter “T”/“t”, in English pronouncedtee, numeroventi (20) in the Latin alphabet, like many of its letters owes its advent to the Phoenicians et al. It derives from the Semitic Taw 𐤕 and Paleo-Hebrew script (Aramaic and Hebrew Taw ת/𐡕/, Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic ت Tāʼ) and once again the linguistic go-between is the Greek letter τ (tau). Unlike the English “T”, Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets. The T-words that follow consist of lexemes and morphemes of all shapes and sizes, including the unholy trinity of the trim, the taut and the terrific, not to forget the terras, the teles, the technos, the thermos, the tachys, and a whole lot more!
Tabellary: auditor; carrier of letters [L. tabellārius from tabella (“letter”) + -ārius]
Tabellion: (Hist.) a scrivener under the Roman Empire with some notarial powers; an official scribe or notary public especially in England and New England in the 17th and 18th cent. [from L. tabella + -ion] 🪶
Tabellion: a Roman scribe 📜
Tacenda: things not to be mentioned [from [L. tacëo (“silent;” “shut up”)](cf. Tacent: (“to be silent”; “hold one’s tongue”)
Tachyphrasia: the act of talking very fast [Gk. takhús, (“swift”) + -phrasia (“talk”; “say”)] (cf. Tachyphagia: fast eating) (cf. Tachygraphy: shorthand; literally, “speedy writing” ✍️
Taliped: with a club-foot; with a foot twisted out of shape or position [L. talus (“ankle”) (?) + –ped (“foot”)]
Tambour: (Arch.) sloping buttress wall or fortification [Fr. tambour (“drum”), from Arabic ṭunbūr]
Tantième: share of profits or royalties [Fr. tantième (“percentage”;“proportion”)]
Tapinosis: use of degrading or diminutive diction regarding a topic; undignified language that debases something or someone; deliberately using a base word to diminish a person or thing’s dignity [Gk. tapeinós, (“low”)] (cf. Meiosis – using a euphemism to depreciate an object or thing’s size or significance)
Tarantism: (Psych.) an extreme impulse to dance, esp to overcome a feeling of melancholy [It. tarantismo (from Italian city of Taranto (during (15th-(17th. a spider bite from the tarantula was believed to trigger the dancing mania)] 🕷️
Tarantella, the frenetic dance inspired by Tarantism (source: britannica.com)
Tauromachy: the art or practice of bullfighting [Gk. taurus (“bull”) + –machia (“fight”)] 🐂
Tautochronous: lasting the same amount of time [Gk. tauto (“the same”) + –khrónos (“time”) + -ous]
Tautonym: word composed of two identical words/spellings/sounds (in repetition) eg, paw-paw, yo-yo 🪀[Gk. tautó, (“the same”) + –onuma (“name”)]
Technopole: place where high-technology industries are located; tech hub [Gk. tékhnē, (“skill”) + –pólis (“city”)] (cf. Tectiform: shaped like a roof) (cf. Tectonic: structural component of a building/construction)
Technopole (image: mixcloud)
Telegenic: having an appearance and exhibiting qualities thought to be attractive to televisionviewers [Gk. têle, (“at a distance”; “far off”; “far away”; “far from”) + -genḗs, (“offspring”; “kind”)]
Telekinetic: (Psychic.) supposed skill to move objects at a distance by exercising your mental power only [Gk. têle + –kinēsis (“motion”) from -kinein (“to move”)]
Telos: ultimate object or aim; provides the moral justification [Gk. télos, (“end”; “purpose” or “goal'”)]
Temporality: (Philos.) linear projection of past, present and future; existing within or having some relationship with time; temporal [L. temporālis (“of time”) + –itāt, itās]
Tempore: in the time of; in historical literature, denotes a period during which a person whose exact lifespan is unknown, was known to have been alive or active, or some other date which is not exactly known, usually given as the reign of a monarch [L. tempus (“time”; “period”)] (cf. Temporise: to delay; to procrastinate) 🕰️
Teratology: study of monsters, freaks, abnormal growths or malformations [Greek terat-, téras– (“sign sent by the gods”; “portent”;“marvel”; “monster”) + –logie (“-logy”)] (cf. Teratoid: resembling a monster) (cf. Teramorphous: of abnormal or monstrous form)
Teratology (credit: GregLuzniakArt/Etsy)
Terdiurnal: three times per day [L. ter (“thrice”) + LateLat. –diurnalis “daily”)
Terebration: a pain that feels as though a drill is boring through some body part [L. terebro, (“to bore”) + -ion]
Tergal: of, like or pertaining to the back; (Zool.) relating to the terga of an arthropod [L. terga (“the back”)]
Termagant: a violent, nagging, brawling woman; a shrew [MidEng. termagaunt, earlier tervagaunt, alteration of OldFr. tervagan (“name of the imaginary deity”)]
Terraneous: of, like or pertaining to the earth [L. terrenum (“land”; “ground”), from terra (“earth”) + -ous] (cf. Terrigenous: produced on land; produced by the land)
Terremotive: (Geology) relating to an earthquake; seismic [L. terra (“earth”) + –mōtus (“movement”)]
Terremotive (Diagram: worldatlas.com)
Terrisonant: having a terrible sound [L. terrëo (“frighten”; “terrify”; “scare away” + -ant]
Tessaraglot: a person who is capable of speaking in four languages [Gk. téssara (“four”) + –glôssa (“tongue”)] 👅
Tessellation: fitting together exactly; leaving no spaces; surface tiling with no gaps or overlays [L. tessella (“small square”) from Gk. tessera, (“four”)]
Tessellation (source: tilewizards.com.au)
Tesserarian: of, like or pertaining to games of dice [Gk. tessera + -ian] 🎲
Testicond: having the testes concealed within the body [L.testis (“testis”) + –condere (“to hide”)]
Thalassic: marine; of seas; of inland seas [Gk. thalassa (“sea”)] (cf. Thalassography: science of the sea) 🌊
Thaumaturgic: performer of miracles, esp a magician or a saint [Gk. thaumatourgós (“performer of wonders (as an acrobat”) + -ia– y]
Theandric: divine and human at the same time [Gk. theandros (“God-man”)]
Thelemite: one who does as he or she pleases; libertine [Fr. thélémite, from L’Abbaye deThélème, imaginary abbey with the motto “Do as you please” in Gargantua (1535) by François Rabelais (1553) + -ite] (cf. Thelemic: allowing people to do as they wish [Gk. thelema (“will”) + -ic)
Thelemite: L’Abbaye de Thélème, Rabelais’ fictional “anti-monastery”
Thelyotokous: having only female offspring [Gk. thêlus, “female”) + –tókos, (“birth”)]
Theologaster: petty or shallow theologian [Gk. theológos, (“one who talks about the gods”; “theologian”) + L. –aster (“inferior”; “shallow”, etc.)
Theotherapist: faith-healer; treatment of illness or disease by prayer and other religious exercises [Gk. theó, (“god”) + -therapeía, “(service”; “medical treatment”)]
Thereology: the art of healing; therapeutics [Gr. therein=therapeuein, (“totendthesick”) + -logy]
Theriacal: (Medic.) of, like or pertaining to antidotes [Gk. thēriakḕ, “of or related to poisonousreptiles”), from thēríon, “littlebeast”) from thḗr + -al]
Therianthropic: combining human and animal forms [Gk. thērianthrōpos (“beast-man”)]
Theriatrics: the science of veterinary medicine [Gk. thḗr, (“wild beast”) + iatrós, (“doctor”)]
Thesmothete: law-giver; (Hist.) a juniorarchon or magistrate responsible for legislation in Ancient Greece [from Gk. thesmothétēs]
Thirdborough: petty provincial constable [MidEng. thridborro, probably by folk etymology, from frithborg (“frankpledge”)]
Thooid: resembling a wolf; (Zool.) relating to an obsolete group of carnivores including wolves, dogs and jackals [Gk. thōs jackal + -oid]
Threnody: a lament for the dead (poem, speech, song) [Gk. thrēnōidia, from thrēnos, (“dirge”)]
Threpterolagnia: A lust for female nurses [Gk. threptero(?) + –lagnia (“coitus”; “lust”)]
Thyestean: cannibalistic [from Greek mythology, Thyestes, a king of Olympia, was served his own children’s flesh by his vengeful twin brother Atreus as revenge for adultery]
Thygatrilagnia: an incestuous desire by a father for his own daughter [Gk. thygatro (“daughter”) + –lagnia]
Tibialoconcupiscent: having a lascivious interest in watching women put on stockings [L. tibia (“shinbone”?) + -lo (?) + –concupiscēns, –concupiscere (“to conceive an ardent desire for”)]
Timbromaniac: an avid stamp collector; a passionate philatelist [Fr. from timbre (“postage stamp”) + -o- + -mania]
Timbromaniac (credit: istockphoto.com)
Tirocinium: a soldier’s first battle; military baptism of fire [L. tirocinium (“first military campaign”; “inexperienced raw recruit”; “first attempt”]
Tmesis: a word compound that is divided into two parts, with another word infixed between the parts for emphasis, thus constituting a separate word compound, eg, “Absar—bloody—lutely!”; “in—fucking—credible!” [Gk. tmēsis (“a cutting”) from temnō, (“I cut”)]
Tolutiloquent: pertaining to a smooth talker, characterised by fluency or glib utterances [L. tolutim, “trotting along”) + –loqui (“speak”)]
Tomecide: the act of “murdering” or destroying a book, esp by the act of book burning [Gk. tomḗ + -cide]
Tomecide: Book burning by the Pinochet regime after the 1973 coup in Chile
Toponym: (Onomastics) a name by which a geographical place is known or a word derived from a place name or from a topographical feature eg, cashmere from Kashmir, lima beans from Lima [Back-formation from toponymy Gk. topos (“place”) + -nym] (cf. Toponymics: the study of place names)
Toxophilite: archer; fond of or an expert in archery [Gk. toxon, (“bow and arrow”) + -phil + -ite]
Toxophilite (source: allkpop.com)
Tranch: a portion (literally: slice) of something [OldFr. trenche, (“slice”)]
Tritavia: (Ancient Rome) the female ascendant in the sixth degree; the great grandmother of one’s great grandmother; the mother of either an atavus or atavia [L. trēs (“three”) + –avus (“(“grandfather;” “uncle”)] (cf. Tritavus: great grandfather of one’s great grandfather)
Tropoclastics: the science of breaking habits [Gk. trope᷄ (“a turning”) + -klastos (“shattered”) from –klan (“to break”)
Tuism: apostrophe; reference to or regard to a second person [L. tu (“thou”) + -ism]
Turgescence: act or process of swelling; swollenness [L. turgescent-, turgescens, turgescere (“to swell”)] (cf. Tumefy: to swell)
Turnverein: (Hist.) (19th-(20th. German-American association of gymnasts (members called “turners” promoted German culture, physical culture, and liberal politics); athletic club [Ger. turnen (“to practice gymnastics”) + verein (“club”; “union”) ]
“S” is the 19th letter of the Latin alphabet. Pronounced [ess] the letter is a veritable wellspring of onomatopoeic worddom – (alliterative indulgence follows for effect) sizzling, screeching, slithering, swaying snakes alive! As with other entries in the sequence, the symbol corresponds to the Semitic sin (“tooth”). The cool shape of the Latin “S” came about from the Greek Σ (sigma) by dropping one out of the four strokes of that letter. The (angular) S-shape composed of three strokes existed as a variant of the four-stroke letter Σ already in the epigraphy in Western Greek alphabets, and the three and four strokes variants existed alongside one another in the classical Etruscan alphabet. Trust the ‘truscans to always bob up in the linguistic story somewhere! In other Italic alphabets (Venetic, Lepontic), the letter could be represented as a zig-zagging line of any number between three and six strokes. The lower-case “s” used to be rendered as ∫¹ (sometimes called a medial S or a “long-s”) and looking more like a fancy f sans the cross stroke) but this went of vogue in English sometime in the 18th century and was eventually phased out like pounds, shillings and pence. Neato!
____________________
¹ sometimes written with a slight cursive tilt to the left
<word> <meaning> <derivation>
Sabulous: sandy; gritty; growing in sandy places [L.sabulosus, from sabulum (“sand”)]
Saccadic: a rapid movement of the eye between fixation points; jerky; twitching [OldFr. saquer (“to pull”)]
Sadogue: fat; easy-going person (origin unknown))
Salsipotent: ruling the salt seas; having the power of/over the sea (ref. to Neptune, Roman god of the sea [L. salsipotentem (as if from salsum (“salt”), (a false reading for salipotentem, from salum (“salt water”) + -potentem (“potent”)]
Neptune, salsipotent of the seas (image: empirerome.com)
Sargasso: a mass of floating vegetation, especially sargassums (seaweed); gulfweed [from Port. sargaço (flowering plant related to the rockrose)] originally from L. salicastrum (“kind of wild vine found in willow-thickets”) ➾ Sargasso Sea (tract of still water with masses of thick seaweed in Nth Atlantic) ➾ which is prob. the source of Sargasso’s second meaning: a confused, tangled mess or situation]
Sarmassant: pertaining to sexual caressing or any such form of love-making (origin unknown) (cf. Sarmassate: to make love by handling, fondling or squeezing organs and tissues of a female)
Sartorial²: of or relating to a tailor or tailored clothes; (broadly) of or relating to clothes [L. sartor (“tailor”) + -ial]
Sarwan: a person who drives and guides a camel [Pers. sārwān, from sār (“camel”) + -wān (“keeping”; “guarding”)] 🐫
Satisfice: to aim for or achieve that which will suffice; (Heuristics) a decision-making strategy that aims for a satisfactory or adequate result, rather than the optimal solution [blend of satisfy and suffice]
Satrapess: A female satrap; an official who acts like a petty tyrant [from satrap Gk. satrápes, from OldPers.khshathapavan (literally “protector of the province”) + -ess]
Saturnalian: riotously merry or orgiastic; behaviour like the Saturnalia: an ancient Roman holiday/festival honouring Saturn, the god of seed-sowing, a time of jovial merrymaking with many social norms were relaxed and inverted; riotous merry-making [L. Saturn (Roman god of agriculture among other things)]
Scamander: to take a winding course; to meander [Gk.from Skamandros (also called Xanthos), a river god in Greek mythology. Origin uncertain ➠ poss. from skázō (“to limp”; “to stumble (over an obstacle)”) or from skaiós (“left(-handed”; “awkward”)]
Scamander River (Türkiye)
Scanderoon: homing pigeon (origin unknown)
Scansorial: relating to, capable of, or adapted for climbing [L. scansus + -orius -ory) + –al]
Scapegrace: an incorrigible rascal; a mischievous or wayward person, esp a child [Eng. scape (Literally) one who escaped the grace of god]
Scaphism: form of execution (alleged relating to ancient Persia) by covering someone in honey and abandoning him in the sun or leaving him tethered between two boats [Gk. skaph (“boat”) + -ism]
Scazon: : a classical verse with a limping or halting movement; limping verse [Gk. skázō (“I limp”)]
Schesis: deriding an opponent’s argument by referring to his or her way of thought; mocking the habitude of an adversary [Gk. skhésis, (“state”; “condition”; “attitude”)]
Schoenobatist: a tight-rope walker [origin unknown(?) poss. from MidDutch. schoe, (“shoe”; “footwear”)]
Schoenobatist
Sciapodous: having large feet [Gk. Skiapodes, from skia (“shadow”) + -pod-, -pous (“-foot”) + -ous] (cf. Sciapods: (aka Monopods) (Greek mythology) a tribe of one-legged, giant-footed Libyan (some references say Ethiopian or Indian) men whose foot was so big they could raise it in the air to provide shade against the hot southern sun)
Sciapodous: the Sciapods/Monopods
Scholarch: head of a school; (Hist.) the leader of an Athenian school of philosophy [LateGk. scholarchēs (“scholar”)] school 🏫
Scible: that which is knowable (origin unknown)
Scientaster: a petty or inferior scientist [L. sciēns (“knowing”), from sciō (“know”) + -aster] 👨🔬
Sclerotic: grown rigid or unresponsive especially with age; unable or reluctant to adapt or compromise; hardening (eg, of emotions) [Gk. sklērōtos, from sklēroun (“to harden”)]
Scoliotropism: a diminished desire to attend school [origin uncertain(?), Gk. skoliós (“crooked”) + –tropḗ, (“turn”); “solstice”; “trope”) + -ism] ✎ᝰ.📖
Scolist: (someone) who pretends to have more knowledge than they really do; a superficial show of learning [LateLat. sciolus (“smatterer”; “pretender to knowledge” from L. scius “possessing knowledge”; “expert”) derivative of scīre (“to know”) —perhaps as back-formation from nescius (“ignorant”)— + –ist]
Scopophile: a person whose sexual pleasure is derived from watching others in a state of nudity, undressing, or engaging in sexual activity; (Psych.) one with a sexual dependency on openly observing genitalia and sexual acts (distinguished from a voyeur who watches in secret) [Gk. skopós, “watcher”) + -phile] 👁️👁
Scortation: fornication; lewdness [L. scorṯarī (“to consort with or like a harlot”)]
Scriniary: archives-keeper; archivist [from L. scriniarius “keeper of the scrinium” (“chest or box for keeping books, papers, letters”, etc)]
Scriniary: on the records (source: planitplus.net)
Scriptory: by, in or pertaining to writing [L. scriptorius, from scriptus, scribere (“to write”) + -orius (“-ory”)] (cf. Scripturient: having a violent desire to write) 📝 ✍️
Scurrier (also sp. Scurriour): a scout (origin unknown, possibly French)
Sebastomania: religious insanity [Gk. sebastos, “reverenced”; “mania”; madness”) + -mania]
Sectiuncle: a little or petty sect [nebulous etymology: L. secare (“cut”)(?) + –uncle (“small”; “little”)]
Secundogeniture: custom where second-oldest child inherits property; a dependent territory given to a younger son of a princely house and his descendants [L. secundus (“following”; “second”) + –genitus (“born”)] (cf. Tertiogeniture: third-oldest child is a beneficiary (rarely applied))
Sederunt: sitting of an ecclesiastical court (in Scotland); gathering; long discussion (cf. Sedent: seated or inactive) [L. from sedēre (“to sit”)]
Sedulous: accomplished with careful perseverance (craftsmanship); diligent in application or pursuit [L. sedēre (“meaning”; “to sit”) + -ous]
Selenic: of, like or pertaining to the Moon [Gk. selḗnē, (“moon”)] 🌒
Semelincident: (of a disease or ailment) occurring only once in the same individual [[L. semel, (“once”), + -incido, (“to happen”), from cado, (“to fall”)] (cf. Semelparous: reproducing only once in its lifetime)
Sempervirent: evergreen; always fresh [L. semper (“always”) + –virent, -virēre (“to be green”)]
Sempiternal: of never-ending duration; eternal [L. from semper + –æternus (“eternal”)]
Sempster: (also Seamster) a man who sews; tailor [OldEng. seamestre “sewer”; “tailor”; ”person whose work is sewing”)]
Senectitude: old age [L. senectus (“aged”; “old age”), senex (“old”)] (cf. Senectuous: very old)
Senient: conscious; perceiving; able to perceive or feel things [L. sentient-, sentiens, (“to perceive”; “feel”)]
Septentrional: to the north; northern [L. From septem (“seven”) + –triō (“plow”; “ox”)]
Septimanal: weekly [L. septi- + -manal(?)]
Sequacious: ready to follow a leader or authority; (pliant) compliant; tractable [L. sequac-,sequax– (“inclined to follow”) from sequi, (“to follow”) + -ous]
The sequacious will inherit a leader (photo source: esquire.com)
Seraglio: harem [It. serraglio, modification of Turkish saray (“palace”)]
Sermuncle: a little sermon [L. sermo, sermonis—serĕre, (“to join”) + –uncle]
Sesquipedalian: (of a word) polysyllabic, long [L. sesquipedalia verba (“words a foot and a half long”) from sesqui- (“one and a half times”)]
Sexdigitated: (Med.) six-fingered or -toed [L. sex, six, + -digitus, finger or toe]
Sexotropic: obsessed with sex [L. sexus + –tropḗ]
Shenango: a casually employed dock worker [probably from the Chenango river and canal in south-central New York state]
Shunamitism: (Med./Psych.)) the rejuvenation of an old man by sleeping with a young woman, although not necessarily having sex with her [from Hebrew. Shunem (small village mentioned in the Pentateuch) + -ite]
Sialoquent: spitting or emitting saliva excessively while speaking [blend of sialic + –eloquent, from Gk. (“síalon”; “spittle”; “saliva”)]
Sibylline: characteristic of a sibyl (a pagan female oracle); prophetic; oracular; mysterious [Gk. Síbulla + -ine]
Sibylline: a matter of sybils
Sicarian: murderer; assassin (origin unknown)
Siffleur: whistler, esp an animal (such as the whistling marmot) that makes a whistling noise [Fr. siffler (“to whistle”) + -eur -or] (cf. Siffilate: to talk in a whisper)
Signate: distinct; distinguished; designated; identified; having markings like letters [L signatus, signare (“to mark”; “seal”; designate”)]
Significs: (Semiotics.) science of meaning [L. from significare (“to indicate”; “signify”) from signum (“sign”)]
Sillograph: one who writes satires; a satirist [Gk. from Sílloi (satirical poem) of Timon of Phlius, (circa 280BC) + -graph; etymology uncertain, poss. relating to “silhouette”]
Simous: having a flat; upturned nose [L. simus (“snub-nosed”)]
Skoptsy: self-castration [from Rus. skopets (“castrate”) (the Skoptsy were a Christian Spiritualist sect during the Russian Empire who practised male castration and female mastectomy in accordance with their beliefs]
Smellfungus: a person who finds faults with everything; a grumbler; a complainer [after Smelfungus, a hypercritical traveler in Laurence Sterne’s 1768 novel A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy]
Smellfungus
Sociogenesis: origin of human societies[NewLat. from socio- + L. genesis]
Soldatesque: soldierlike; soldierly [from It. soldatesco]
Somnambulist: a person who walks about in their sleep; a sleepwalker [from L. somnus (“sleep”) + –ambulō (“to walk”)] (cf. Somniloquent: someone who talks in their sleep) (cf. Somnophile: someone who’s sexually aroused by the sight of sleeping or unconscious people) (cf. Somnifacient: sleep-inducing ⟺ Somnorific: causing sleep; soporific)
Soubrette: coquettish and intriguing maid; a female theatrical role in opera and drama [from L. superare (“be above”)]
Spadassin: swordsman; fighter [from It. spadaccino (“swordsman”)]
Zorro was a master spadassin
Specious: superficially plausible but actually wrong; having deceptive attraction or allure [L.speciosus, (“beautiful”); “plausible,”)]
Sphairist: (cf. Sphairistikè: game that evolved into “tennis”) tennis-player [Gk. sphairistike techne, (“the skill of playing with a ball” (coined by Maj. Walter Wingfield (1874) inventor of a form of modern tennis incorporating aspects of earlier ball and racket games Badminton and Rackets)
Sphairist: Lawn tennis player from the pioneering era (photo source: Getty Images)
Splenetic: bad-tempered; malevolent; spiteful [L. splen, (“bodily organ responsible for storing and filtering blood”)]
Stagiary: a resident canon; a law student [MedLatin. stagium, estagium (“term of residence”) + –arius (“ary”)]
Stallenger: (Hist.) keeper of a markets stall (Scotland (18th.) [OldScots. stallangear, from O.Fr. estalagier, (“one who pays stallage, a stall-tax at a fair”)]
Stasiology: study of political parties [Gk. stasis (“faction”; “discord”) + -ology]
Sthenolagnia: sexual arousal from displays of strength or muscles [Gk. sthénos (“moral or emotional strength”; “might”; “power”)+ -lagnia (“lust”)]
Stochastic: of, like or pertaining to a sequence of random events; having a random probability distribution [Gk. stochastikos (“skillful in aiming”) from stochazesthai (“to aim at”; “guess at”) from stochos (“target”; “aim”; “guess”)] 🎲
Stomatiferous: having an orifice or mouth [Gk. stóma (“mouth”) + –ferous (“bearing”)]
Storiograph: writer of folk tales [LateLat. storia from L. historia (“history”; “account”; “tale”; “story” (+ Gk. –graphia (“writing”)]
Stratocrat: a military ruler; despot [Gk. stratos (“an army”)] (cf. Stratonic: of or relating to an army)
Struthious: of, relating to, or resembling the ostrich or related ratite birds [from Gk. strouthos (“ostrich”)] 𓅦
Suggilate: to beat until bruised [L. suggillo (“to beat until bruised”)]
Supernaculum: drink to the last drop; wine or alcohol so good you want to drink to the last drop; (Hist.) a drinking game [from L. super (“over”; “on”) + NewLat. nagulum, naculum (“nail”) from German nagel (“fingernail”)]🍷🗿
Sybarite: person devoted to pleasure and luxury; hedonist [Gk. Subarī́tēs, (“inhabitant of Sybaris (city in Magna Graecia (ancient Italy); (adj.) (“decadent”; “self-indulgent”)]
“Lux” lifestyles of the ancient Sybarites (image: calabria-mediterranea.tumblr.com/)
Symmachy: an alliance of disparate parties fighting jointly against a common enemy [Gk. sym (“with”) + –machy (“fight”)]
Symposiarch: (Hist.) master of a feast (Ancient Greece); a master of ceremonies [Gk. from symposium ➠ sumpósion, (“drinking party”) + -arch] (cf. Symposiast: someone engaged in banqueting and merrymaking with others; a fellow-drinker)
² “Sartorial”, specifically the phrase “sartorial elegance” became such a cliche in the 1970s that it almost doesn’t qualify to be a compendium of obscure and unusual words – except for the fact that its usage as a stock phrase has greatly diminished now
“R” is the 18th letter of the modern Latin Alphabet. It corresponds to the ancient Semiticresh and is perhaps derived from an earlier hieroglyph representing a human head. From the Egyptian symbol the letter evolved into a triangular flag shape and then to a rounded “P” under Greek influence, before the descending, angled stroke of “R” was added in the 3rd century BC, giving the letter the form we recognise today. The standard English pronunciation is ar. R-words can be fun and surprising – “r” is the letter of the dictionary we turn to when we decide to open the dictionary at random! Or they can be positive and uplifting – why else would we describe a day that signifies a special significance or opportunity to us as a “red-letter day”?
<Word> <Meaning> <Derivation>
Rabelaisian: coarsely humorous; bawdy; ribald [after Francois Rabelais, (16th cent. French writer and satirist]
Rabelaisian: Rabelais’ most famous comic novels (Gargantua and Pantagruel)
Rebus: picture puzzle representing a word (a combination of a picture and an individual letter prompts a particular word) [from L. res (“thing”)]
Rebus: (playbill.com)
Reciprocornous: (Zool.) having horns that turn backward and then forward (like a ram’s) [L. poss. from re- (“back”), prō(“forwards”) and -que (“and”)╰┈➤ (“back and forth”) + -ous]
Recondite: out of the way; little known or obscure; difficult or impossible for one of ordinary understanding or knowledge to comprehend [L. from recondere, [“to conceal”)]
Rectigrade: moving or proceeding in a straight line or course [L. rectus (“straight”) + -gradus (“step”)]
Rectopathic: one who is easily hurt emotionally [L. rectus + –pathic (“suffering”)]
Recumbent: lying down; representing a person (or effigy) lying down [L. re– (“back”; “again”) + -cumbere, “to lie down”]
Recumbentibus: a knockout blow, either verbal or physical [L. recumbent-, recumbens + -ibus (?)] 🥊
Resipiscent: (Literary) acknowledgment that one has been mistaken; to learn from experience and have one’s sanity restored; a change of mind or heart (often prompting a return to a sane, sound, or correct view or position) [LateLat. resipiscere (“to recover one’s senses”; from L. “sapere (“to know”)]
Redact: edit for publication, esp censoring or obscuring part of a text for legal or national security reasons [L. redigō (“to lead back, collect, prepare, reduce to a certain state”)] (cf. Redactophobe: someone who has a fear of editing or editors)
Redact: the editor strikes through ✍️ (photo: alamy)
Remontado: a person who lives in the forest or mountains and avoids civilisation [Spanish. remontado (“to flee or go back to the mountains”)]
Rittmaster: captain of a troop of horse (cavalry) [part. transltn. of German rittmeister, from ritt (“troop of horsemen”) from reiten (“to ride”), from Old High German rītan + -meister (“master”)]
Rittmaster
Rixatrix: a scolding or quarrelsome woman; a common scold [L. rixārī (“to quarrel”) + –trix (Latinate fem. agent noun)]
Rurigenous: one who has been born in the country [L. rus, ruris (“the country”) + –genere, –gignere (“to bring forth”; “to be born”)]
Rusticate: go, live in the country for a time; live a rustic life [L. rūsticor (“live in the countryside”)] (cf. Rusticity: rustic manner; simplicity; rudeness)
Ruth: (also Ruthful) a feeling of pity, distress or grief [Hebrew. Ruth (“friend” or “companion”) Biblical figure (Old Testament)]
“Q”, (pronounced cue), is the 17th letter of the alphabet. The letter is from the Phoenician equivalent of Hebrew koph, qoph, which was used for the deeper and more guttural of the two “k” sounds in Semitic. The letter existed in early Greek (where there was no such distinction), and called koppa, but it was little used and not alphabetized; it mainly served as a sign of number (90). Correspondingly, the root base of English Q-words is uniformly Latin and characterised by the total absence of Greek prefixes and suffixes, which is in sharp contrast to other letters. The form of the letter “Q” could have been based on the eye of a needle, a knot, or even a monkey with its tail hanging down… /q/ is a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in many European languages. One view is that the form of the letter “Q” is even more ancient: it could have originated from Egyptian hieroglyphics. And “Q”, like “M” before it, is of course a character in the never-ending James Bond franchise.
<Word> <Meaning> <Derivation>
Qua: in the capacity of [Latin. qua “which way”; “as”. From qui (“who”)]
Quab: something unfinished or immature (origin unknown)
Quacksalver: one who falsely pretends to knowledge of medicine
Quadratary: relating to a square [L. quadrātus from quadrō (quadrat),(“make square”) + -ary] (cf. Quadrate: to make square; to make to agree)
Quadrigamist: someone who has been married four times or is married to four people simultaneously (polygamy?) [L. from quattuor (“four”) + -gam (“married”) + -ist]
Quadriliteral: relating to a word with four letters; a 4-letter word [L. quadri + –littera, –litera (“a letter”)] (cf. Quadrilateral: a four-sided figure)
Quaestuary: seeking money or trying to make money; concerned with profit 💰[L. quaestus , quaerere (“to seek”; “gain”; “ask”) + -arius (“ary”)] (cf. Quomodocunquize: to make money by any means possible)
Quaestor: (Hist.) magistrate; a medieval pardoner (in ancient Rome an official in charge of public revenue and expenditure) [L. quaestor (“investigator”); quaesit (“submit”)]
Temple of Saturn, site of the Roman Treasury, workplace of the Quaestor
Qualtagh: first person you meet after leaving the house; first person you meet on New Year’s Day [from Manx. quaaltagh, cognate with Old Irish. com (“co”) + -dál (“meeting”)] 🏠
Qualtrayle: one’s great, great, great grandfather (origin unknown)
Quantophrenia: obsessive reliance on statistics and mathematical results [LateLat. quantitātīvus (“quantity”) + –phrḗn (“mind”) + -ia]
Quantophrenia (image: proprofs.com)
Quantulum: a very small quantity [L. quantus (“how much”) + -lum]
Quaquaversal: facing or bending all ways [L. quaquaversus (“turned wheresoever”)]
Quassation: act of shaking or being shaken [L. quassō (“shake repeatedly or violently”) + -tiō]
Quatch in Shakespeare
Quatch: a word, a sound; squat, plump (Shakespeare) (origin unknown) (cf. Sasquatch: (in Canadian folklore) a hairy beast or manlike monster said to leave huge footprints)
Quarternity: fourness; any set of four things [L. quattuor (“four”) + -ity]
Quean: a lewd woman; hussy; an impudent or badly behaved female of ill-repute [Old English. cwene (from “queen”)]
Querulant: (Psych. & Legal) a person who obsessively feels they have been wronged, particularly about minor cases of action [L. querulus (“complaining”)] (NB: a Querimony is a complaint) (cf. Querent: one who asks a question)
Questmonger: one whose occupation is to conduct inquests [L. quaesta (“tribute”; “tax”; “inquiry”; “search”) + –mangō (“dealer”; “trader”)]
Quickhatch: a woverine [from East Cree (Algonquian language) kwi˙hkwaha˙če˙w]
Quidditch: fictional sport for broomstick-riding mavens in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter fantasy book series [NB: the etymology of “quidditch” long predates Harry Potter, poss. derives from Anglo-Saxon cwæō-dīc (“mud-ditch”)]
Quidditch (source: Forbes.com)
Quiddity: (also Quidditative) eccentric; quirky; unique essence; (a sort of “x-factor” — whatever makes something the type that it is) [MedLat. quidditat-, -quidditas (“essence”) from L. quid (“what”) neuter of quis (“who”) + -ity]
Quidfather: father-in-law (origin unknown)
Quidnunc: an inquisitive and gossipy person; a person who always wants to know what’s going on (the latest news and gossip) [L. quid nunc (“what now?”)]
Quincaillerie: hardware store [Fr. clincaille, akin to clinquer (“clink”)]
Quindecad: set of fifteen things [L. quīnque (“five”) + –decem (“ten”)]
Quinquagesimal: consisting of 50 days; a 50-day period [MedLat. quinquagesima + -al]
Quisling: a traitor who collaborates with an enemy force occupying his country; a “puppet” leader propped up by an invading foreign power [after Vidkun Quisling, Norwegian military officer, Nazi Germany’s puppet ruler of Norway during their WWII occupation]
Quisling (source: norwegianamerican.com (drawing by Stig Höök))
Quisquous: difficult to deal with or settle; perplexing; (of a person) of dubious character (origin unknown)
Quixotic: extravagantly and romantically chivalrous; enunciator of wildly impractical, lofty ideals to the point of being ludicrously out of touch with reality [after Don Quixote, eponymous protagonist of Cervantes’ The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha (publ. 1605)]
Quixotic: the daydreaming Don
Quizzacious: satirical; mocking [Eng. quiz (“to mock”), poss. from L. qui es? (“who are you?” + -acious]
Quodlibertarian: a person who is happy to discuss any subject at pleasure [L. quodlibet (lit. “that which is pleasing”) + -arian]
“P” is numerus XVI in the English alphabet letter of sequence. The letter has a special place in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)…the symbol ⟨p⟩ represents a type of consonantal sound used in most spoken languages, the voiceless bilabial plosive or stop (sometimes called the unvoiced labial stop). “P” corresponds to the Semitic pe, perhaps deriving from an earlier sign for “mouth.” The early Greeks renamed this form pi(Π). The rounded shape of the “P”(“p”) is thought to be a Latin borrowing from the ancient Etruscan language. Another feature of the letter p is its use in combination with h in words of Greek origin to denote the unvoiced labiodental spirant expressed in other words by the letter f—e.g., philosophy, phonetics, and graphic (www.britannica.com)
{word} | {definition} | {derivation}
Padrone: (in Italy) an innkeeper; employer, esp one who exploits immigrant workers [It. (“protector”; “owner”) from L. patronus (“patron”)]
Pagophagia: the eating of ice [Gk. pagos (“frost”) + phagō (“to eat”)] 🧊
Palzogony: foreplay; love-play (origin unknown, It. ?)
Pancratic: accomplished all-rounder, good at many sports or games; having a mastery over numerous subjects) [Gk. pankratḗs, “all-powerful”) + -ic]
Pangloss: one who is optimistic regardless of the circumstances [Gk. pan (“all”) + –glossa (“tongue”) from the character “Pangloss”, optimistic tutor in Voltaire’s Candide (1759)] (cf. Panglossian: excessively optimistic; marked by the view that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds)
Pangloss
Pannapictagraphist: collector of comic books (origin unknown)
Pannapictagraphist
Panoply: a collection or assortment of things; an impressive or extensive array [Gk. panoplia (“full suit of armour worn by hoplite warriors in Ancient Greece”) ]
Pantagamy: married to everybody: practice of intra-communal marriage of all members to each other in some proto-communistic societies such as in certain Amerindian tribes [Gk. pan + -gam + -ic]
Paraethesia: a prickly feeling one gets when your limbs fall asleep; a sensation of “pins and needles” [L. para- (“alongside”, “irregular”; ie, “disordered”) + -aisthēsis (“perception”; “feeling”)] 📍 🪡
Paralian: a person who lives near the sea [Gk. parálios, (“coastal”; “maritime”)] 🌊
Paralipsis: (also called Apophasis) a rhetorical device whereby the speaker emphasises the point they are trying to make by (calculated) denial…example: “I’m not saying that…“ (assertion). By merely suggesting it, they are inferring that it is in fact the case; the ploy involves drawing attention to some issue by denying that you talking about it [Gk. pará, (“by”; “near”) + -leípō, (“I leave”)]
Donald Trump, grandmaster of the artifice of Paralipsis (photo: The Globe and Mail)
Paramnesia: (psych.) a disorder prompting someone to recall events that never happened [Gk. par, para (“beside”; “next to”) + -mnesia (“memory”)]
Paranymph: the best man or bridesmaid at a wedding; a ceremonial assistant or coach to the best man/bridesmaid at a wedding [Gk. para- + -nymphē. (“bride”)]
Parapraxis: a memory lapse, a slip of the tongue, usually revealing a hidden thought (“Freudian slip”) 👅 [Gk. para– + –praxís (“doing”)]
Parateresiomaniac: a compulsive voyeur 👁️ 👁️ [Gk. para + -teresio(?) + -maniac]
Parergon: a piece of work that is supplementary to or a by-product of a larger work [Gk. párergos, (“beside the main subject”; “subordinate”; “incidental”)]
Parthenolagnia: the desire to copulate with virgins [ Gk. parthenos (“maiden”; “virgin”) + –lagneía (“sexual intercourse, -lasciviousness”)]
Partialism: (psych.) a sexual fetish with an exclusive focus on a specific part of the body other than genitals [L. pars (“part”) + -ism] (cf. Paraphilia: a form of sexual arousal caused by objects, situations, or targets that are considered atypical or not of the norm)
Pauciloquent: using a few words as possible when speaking [L. paucus (“little”; “few”) + –loqui, loquor (“to speak”)]
Patavinity: the use of local slang expressions or dialects when writing [L. patavinitas, from Patavium (Padua), Italy (birthplace of Livy) + -itas -ity]
Pedotrophy: the art of raising children properly [Gk. paîs, (“child”) –tréphō, (“I congeal”; “thicken”)] 👧 👦🏽
Pentapopemptic: a person who has been divorced five times [Gk. pent, penta + -apo (“off”; “away”) + –pempē (“to send”) + -ic]
Peristerophilist: one who collects pigeons (origin unknown) (-phily: the art of training pigeons)
Peristerophilist (photo: irishtimes.com)
Pernoctation: someone who stays up all night to work or to party [L. pernoctātus (“having spent the night”) + -iōn (cf. Pernoctator: someone who stays up all night to study) 🎆🌃
Pervulgate: to publish something [L. pervulgo (“to publish”; “to make public”)]
Phanerolagniast: a psychologist who studies human lust [Gk. phaneros (“visible”; “evident”) from phainein (“bring to light”; “cause to appear”; “show”) + –lagnia]
Phillumenist: collector of matchboxes and their labels [Gk. phil- + L. -lumen (“light “) + -ist]
Philodox: one who loves his or her own opinions [Gk. phílo– (“beloved”) + –dóxa (“glory; “opinion”)] (cf. Philoxenist: a person who loves to entertain strangers)
Phosphene: the phenomenon of seeing light without light entering the eye; what occurs when you see ”stars and dots” after rubbing your eyes [Gk. phōs- (“light”) + -phainein (“to show”)] 💡
Phrontifugic: helping to escape from one’s thoughts [Gk. phrēn, (“diaphragm, mind”) + It. -fuga, from Latin, “a running away”; “flight”]
Phrontistery: a place for thinking or study [Gk. phrontis (“thought”; “care”; attention”) + -ery]
Picayune: of little value or significance; petty; a small coin in (18–(19 th. Louisiana with a low monetary value [Occitan. picaioun (“small coin”) from pica (“to jingle”)] 🪙
Picayune
Pictophile: one who gets sexual gratification from pictorial porn or erotic art [ + -phile]
Pictophile: connoisseurs of “adult magazines” (source: AFP via Getty)
Plangonolist: [origin uncertain, one suggestion: Gk. plangon from plaggon (wax dolls in ancient Greek theatre substituting for female roles(?)) + -ist]
Planiloquent: talking plainly about some subject or other [L. planus (“flat”) + –loqui]
Platypygous: having a broad bottom [Gk. platys” (flat or broad) + -pygous, -pugē (“buttocks”)] (cf. Pygephanous: displaying one’s buttocks)
Pleonasm: using more words than necessary; redundancy of words [Gk. pleōn (“more”) + -asm]
Pogontrophy: the practice of grooming a beard or moustache [Gk. pogon (“beard”) + –trophy (“nourishment”; “growth”)(cf. Pogontomy: cutting or trimming a beard)
The art of Pogontrophy (photo: freepik)
Polemologist: student of war [Gk. pólemos (“war; battle”) + -logy]
Polemologist: a war pundit
Politicaster: 2nd-rate or inferior or petty, contemptible politician [polī́tēs (“citizen”; “freeman”) + -aster§](cf. Poetaster: an inferior poet)
Politicaster (source: frankfuredi.substack.com)
Polyoquent: garrulous; loquacious; discourse on many topics [Gk. poly + -loqui (“speak”)]
Polyphage: someone who eats many kinds of food [Gk. poly + –phage]
Polyphasic: consisting of two or more phases [Gk. poly + -phase + -ic]
Propinquity: physical proximity or similarity between things (like attracts like); close kinship [L. prope (“near”) + -quity]
Prosopolethy: inability to remember a face [Gk. prosōpon (“person”; “face” + -lēpsis (“act of taking hold or receiving”; “acceptance”) + -ia -y]
Protean: ever-changing: versatile; mutable; able to change frequently or easily [Gk. from Proteus, in Greek mythology a sea-god with a tendency to shape-shift)]
Protean: from the shape-shifting god of rivers and oceans
Pseudandry: use of a masculine pseudonym by a woman [Gk. pseudēs (“false”) + –andrós (“male”)] (cf. Pseudogyny: use of a feminine pseudonym by a man)
Puellaphilist: (Psych.) one who loves girls (and perhaps sexually desires them) [L. puella (“young girl”) + –phil]
Pusillanimous: lacking courage or resolution; timidly cowardly [Latin pusillus (“very small”) (diminutive of pusus (“boy”) + -animus “spirit”)]
Pyknic: being of stocky physique and a rounded body and head; thickset [Gk. puknos (“thick“) + -ic]
Pysmatic: always asking questions and inquiring (origin unknown)
Pythogenic: coming from garbage [Gk. pytho– from pythein (“to cause to rot”) + -genic]
Pythogenic
Standout P-word in the ALDOOCDO catalogue of lexical merit: Pernickety: fussy, particular; extensive attention to esp trivial or minor detail (an OCD candidate?) [Scots. pernickety, persnickety, of uncertain origin; (resembles in form per- (“intensifying prefix”) + –nick, but might be derived from particular + -finicky)]
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§ the suffix –aster, whenever it pops up tacked on to the end of some base word is invariably pejorative, meaning something that is inferior, small or shallow
ALDOOCDOW reaches one of the key letters in lexicon entries, “O”, the great connector of syllables. The story of “O”, the 15th letter and fourth vowel in the alphabet, is an interesting one. Circular in shape like the number zero, the letter “O” surfaces for the first time in writing systems in the Semitic languages some time around 1,000BC as a consonant (the cognate Arabic letter ayin which possibly evolved earlier from a hieroglyphic sign representing an eye). When it reached the archaic Greeks “O” morphed into the vowel we recognise in English today.
Obeliscolychny: a lighthouse [Gk. obelískos (“obelisk”) + –lukhníon (“lamp-stand”)]
Obeliscolychny (source: BlueKnot)
Obelise: to condemn as spurious, doubtful or corrupt [Gk. obelós, (“obelus” – a sharpened stick, spit, or pointed pillar)]
Obequitate: to ride about; to ride aimlessly on a horse 🐎 [L. ob + equito (“to ride”)]
Obganiate: to irritate someone by constantly repeating oneself [It. ostinato (“obstinate”; ”persistent”)]
Obsolagnium: waning sexual desire due to age [L. ob- (“in the way”) + –sol (?) + Gk. -lagneía (“sexual predilection”) ]
Obtenebrate: to cast a shadow over; to darken as if by shadowing [L. ob-(“to”; “toward”; “over”) + -tenebrae (“darkness”)] (cf. Obumbrate: to overshadow)
Obvert: to turn; to alter; to change the appearance or seeming of [L. ob- + vertere (“to turn”)]
Obvert: like the chameleon (source: The Indian Express)
Occlusion: closing or blocking off of an opening, passage or cavity [L. -ob (“in the way”) + -claudere (“to close or shut”)]
Oecist: founder of a colony [Gk. from oîkos house + -istēs (“-ist”). The oíkistēs was the citizen chosen by an ancient Greek polis as the leader of any new colonisation quest
Oecodomic: of, like or pertaining to architecture [(?) Gk. oec (“house”) + L. –dom (“house”) + -ic(?)]
Oenologist: a person who studies wines and winemaking [Gk. oînos (“wine”) + -logia (“study of”)] 🍷
Ogee: a double curve, resembling the letter S (or serpentine shape or sigmoid shape); S-shaped [MidEng ogeus (?)]
Ogee
Oikofugic: a desire to leave home; an urge to wander or travel [Gk. oîkos (“household”) + L. fugere (“to flee”); coined by psychologist G Stanley Hall, 1904 (cf. Obambulate: (“to wander about”) 🧳 (cf. Oikotropic: the desire to stay put at home)
Oikology: the science of houses and homes, especially in respect of their sanitary conditions [Gk. oîkos + -logy] 🏠
Oikonisus: desire to start a family [Gk. oîkos + -nīsus (“planting one’s feet firmly on the ground”)]
Oleaginous: oily; resembling oil: marked by an offensively ingratiating manner or quality [Gk. elaia (“olive”) + -ous]
Olecranon: a bony prominence at the elbow, on the upper end of the ulna; the tip of the elbow; the funny bone [Gk. ōlenē (“elbow”) + -kranion (“skull”)]
Olecranon
Olent: having a scent; fragrant [L. olere (“to smell”)]
Olio: miscellany; potpourri [L. olla (“cooking pot”)]
Ollamh: (or Ollam) (hist) in ancient Ireland, a man of science or learning, considered equivalent to a university professor [Old Irishollam (“doctor”)]
Ololygmancy: fortune-telling by the howling of dogs 🐕 [Gk. ololuzō (“howl”) + -manteia (“prophecy”)]
Ololygmancy (source: mediastorehouse.com.au)
Ombiblous: a person who drinks everything, alcohol/non-alcohol 🍸 [Gk. om (?) + –bibere (“to drink”) coined by HL Mencken]
Ombrophilous: tolerant of large amounts of rainfall [ómbros (“rain”) + -philos (“love”)] 🌧️
Omneity: state of being all; allness [Gk. ómnis (“all”) + -ity]
Omnify: to make large or universal [Gk. ómnis + –fy]
Omniloquent: speaking on all subjects [Gk. ómnis + loqui (“to speak”)]
Omnivert: a personality trait that alternates between introvert and extrovert polarities [L. omnis (“all”) + –versus, -vertere (“invert”)] (cf. Ambivert: similar, but more of a balance between the two extremes)
Omphaloskepia: navel-gazing; the contemplation of one’s navel as an aid to meditation [Gk. omphalós, (“navel”) + sképsis, (“perception”; “reflection”)] (cf. Omphaloslopsychite) 👁️
Omphalos: the navel; a boss; the centre or hub of something [Gk. omphalós (“navel”)]
Onanism: masturbation; gratify oneself through sexual self-stimulation NewLat. onanismus, from Onan, son of Judah (Book of Genesis)]
Onanism (image: from R. Crumb’s Illustrated comic Book of Genesis)
Oniomania: uncontrollable urge to shop; a retail therapy preoccupation and compulsion [Gk. ṓnios, (“for sale”) + -mania]
Oneirodynia: nightmare; unpleasant or painful dream [Gk. oneiros (“dream”) + -odynē (“pain”)] (cf. Oneirology: the scientific study of dreams)
Onomasiology: study of nomenclature [Gk. onomázō (“I name”) + -logy]
Onomatous: bearing the author’s name [Gk. onomat, onoma (“name”) + -ous]
Ontocyclic: returning to an infantile state or character in old age [Gk. ont + -kuklós (“circular”)]
Ontological: based upon being or existence [Gk. ontós (“existing”; “being”) + –logia (“study”) + -al] (cf. Ontology: (metaphysics) science of pure being; the nature of things)
Onymous: having a name [back-formed from “anonymous”]
Ophelimity: economic satisfaction; the ability to please another [Gk. ōphelimos “useful”; “helpful”. Coined by Italian polymath Prof Vilfredo Pareto]
Opiniaster: (someone) obstinately attached to their opinion; (obsol.) an opinionated person [MidFr. opinionastre, opiniatre, from L. opinio (“opinion”; “conjecture”) + -aster]
Opisthosomal: of, like or pertaining to the posterior region of the body [New Latin, from opistho– (“back”; “rear”; “behind”) + –soma (“body”)]
Oppidan: an urbanite, a resident of a town, townsman; (formerly) an inhabitant of a university town not a member of the university or a university student residing in the town but not in the college [L. oppidum (“chiefly walled or fortified town”)]
Opsigamy: one who marries late in life [Gk. opsi (“late”) + –gámos (“marriage”)]
Opsimathy:learning or education that occurs late in life [Gk. opsi + –manthanein (“to learn”)]
Opsiproligery: the ability to still have children late in life [Gk. opsi + (?) -proligery(?)]
Opsomaniac: a person with an extreme enthusiasm for a particular food, esp a delicacy [Gk. opson (“rich food”; “delicacy” + -mania] (cf. Opsophagy: the eating of delicacies)
Opsomaniac (photo: cebutrip.net)
Orarian: coastal; a coast-dweller [L. ōrārius (“ora”, “of or belonging to the coast”)]
Orgulous: proud; haughty [Anglo-Fr. orguillus, from orguil “pride” of Germanic origin]
Ornithoscelidamania: an obsession with dinosaurs 🦖 [Gk. ornís (“bird”) + –celida(?) + -mania]
Orthographer: a person who is skilled in orthography (the conventions of the spelling system of a language); an expert speller [L. orthós (“straight”) + LateLat. -graphus (“grapher”) + -er]
Oscular: of, like or pertaining to the mouth or to kissing [L. ōscul(um) kiss”; “mouth”) + -ar]
Ostiary: doorkeeper; doorman; porter 🚪 [L. from ostium (“door”; “mouth of a river”) + -arius (-ary)]
Ostiary: the Porter in Macbeth (image: gsaarchives.net)
Otiose: lacking use or effect; producing no useful result; idle, reluctant to work or exert oneself [L. ōtiōsus (“idle”), from ōtium (“ease”)]
Outlier: (orig.) a person whose residence and place of business are at a distance; something (someone) that lies outside the main body or entity; person or thing that is atypical within a particular group, class, or category [Eng. (17th. out + -lier (“to lie”)]
Oxyacaesthesia: extreme sharpness of senses [Gk. oxús “sharp”; “pointed”) + -aisthēsis (“sensation”)] (cf. Oxyblepsia: extremely keen sight/ Oxygeusia: extremely keen sense of taste/ Oxyphonia: sharpness or shrillness of voice)/Oxyesthesia: being extremely sensitive to touch)
Ozostomia: bad breath [Gk. ózein (“smell”) + –stóma (“mouth”)]
The 14th letter in the alphabet is “N” (pronounced en). It is the sixth” most-common letter in the English alphabet. The written form of “N” (“n”) traces its genesis to Egyptian hieroglyphics and the symbol for snake 𓆓 . N’s etymological ancestors are the Semitic letter Nun and the Greek letter Nu. N-words are especially germane to the compilation of the topic of this blog series – including as they do, nomen (meaning “name”), nomenclature (the devising or choosing of names for things) and nomenclator (lexicon; word-list; one who assigns names).
Nacket: meaning>(hist.) a ball-boy at tennis (16th. ; a pert or smart child; snack; light lunch derivation>[Obsolete Scots nacket(t) “caddie at tennis”, from MidFr naquet “valet”)] 🎾 👦🏽
Naiant: (of a fish or marine creature) swimming horizontally [L. natare (“to swim”)] fish 𓇼 ⋆｡˚ 𓆝⋆｡˚ 𓇼
Nanoid: dwarf-like [Gk. nanos (“dwarf”) + -oid]
Napoo: to destroy; something finished, ruined, inoperative or dead [from Fr. “there is no more”; “it’s over”]
Narcoleptic: a sudden, involuntary deep sleep; pathological drowsiness [Gk. nárkē (“numbness”) + -, –lēpsia, (“seizure”)]
Naskin: prison [origin unknown] ⛓️⛓️
Nassologist: taxidermist [origin unknown]
Nassologist (image: classroomclipart.com)
Nasute: keen-scented; critically discerning; having a big nose [L. nasus (“nose”)] 👃🏽
Natation: the act or art of swimming [L. natare (“to swim”)] (cf. Natatorium: swimming-pool) 🏊♀️
Nates: the buttocks [L. natis (“buttocks”)]
Naucify: to despise; to hold in low esteem [L. naucum (“a trifling thing”)]
Naufrageous: in a state of danger or ruin; threatened [L. naufragium (“a shipwreck”) from navis (“ship”)] (cf. Naufrague: shipwrecked person)
Newspaperacious: of a form or style usual in newspapers [coined 1843; first appeared in Fraser’s Magazine]
Newspaperacious
Nexility: compactness of speech [L. nexus (nectō) (“bind”) + -ity]
Nimrod: a skilful hunter [Hebrew. Nimrōḏ (from hunter-warrior biblical personage in Book of Genesis]
Nimród
Nippaitaty or Nippitatum: particularly good and strong liquor, esp good good ale [origin unknown] 🍺
Niveous: snowy; white [L. niv, nix (“snow”)] ⛄️
Noctambulist: someone who walks late at night [L. nox, noct (“night”) + –ambulare (“to walk”) + -ist] (cf. Noctivagant: wandering in the night; a night-walker)
Noctidiurnal: comprising one day and one night [L. nocti (“night”) + -dies (“day”) + –urnus (denoting time)]
Nomiatrist: a lawyer who specialises in medical cases [Gk. nomos (“law”; “arrangement”) + –iatris (“physician”; “heal or cure”; “treat”; “medical healing”)] ⚖ 🚑 ☤
Nomographer: a writer of laws 📝 [Gk. nomos (“law”) + –graphos (“write”; “scribe”)]
Nonage: legal infancy; legal minority; time of immaturity [L. non + -age]
Nonparous: a woman without children; not having given birth [L. non (“not”) + –parus (“bearing”)]
Novenary: based on the number 9 [L. novenus (“nine”) + –arius (“ary”)]
Nosism: use of the Royal “We”; assumption of role of group mouthpiece [L. nos (“we”)]
Nosocomium: (hist. an ancient hospital; hospital (cf. Nosocomial: of, like or pertaining to a hospital) [Gk. nósos (“disease”; “suffering”) + –koméō (“to tend”)] 🏩
Nostrum: medicine of secret composition recommended by its preparer but usually without scientific proof of its effectiveness; a quack medicine or dubious remedy [L. noster (“our” or “ours”)]
Novercaphobia: an irrational fear of one’s step-mother [from L. novus(“new”) + -phobia] (cf. Novercal)
Nudiustertian: relating to the day before yesterday [L. nū̆diū̆stertiānus (“taking place the day before yesterday”) coined by Nathaniel Ward (1647)]
Nullibicity: the state of being nowhere [LateL. nullibi (“nowhere”) (from L. nullus (“null”) + -ibi (“here”; “there”) + -icity] (cf. Nullibiquitous: existing nowhere)
Nullifidian: having no faith or religion; one who is faithless [L. nullus (“null”) + -fides (“faith”) + -an)
Nulliverse: universe devoid or any plan or organising principle [L. nullus + (adapted from) universe. Coined by William James, American philosopher)]
Numinous: arousing spiritual or religious feelings; emotional; mysterious or awe-inspiring [L. numen (“nod of the head”; “divine will”) + -ous]
Numismatist: a person who collects and studies coins and paper currency [L. numisma (“coin”) + -ist] 🪙 💴
Numismatist (corporate finance institute.com)
Numquid: an inquisitive person [ L. num (“whether”; “if”) + –quid (“something”)]
We arrive at “M”, lucky letter number 13, the midway or median point in the Latin alphabet. “M” is also the Roman numeral for 1,000. The “most powerful letter in the world”, according to those renowned linguistic authorities, BMW car manufacturers! “M”’s etymological antecedents are the Semitic mem and the Ancient Greek mu (M). M-words don’t tend to go in for half-measures, there’s a million of them and they are inclined to span the full gamut of dimensions…from “mini” or “micro” up the scale to “macro” or “maxi”.
Mandament: a command or order [L. mandare (“to command”)] (cf. Mandative: of, like or pertaining to commands and government and Mandarism: government with a large bureaucracy)
Mandriarch: founder or leader of a monastic order [Gk. mandare(?) + –arch (“rule”)]
Manducate: to chew or eat [L. mandūcarē (“to chew”, “eat”)]
Manège: the art of horsemanship [It. maneggiare (“to control (a horse”;)]
Manochlous: (also Monoculus) one-eyed person [origin unknown]
Manqué: having had unfulfilled ambitions; failing to achieve expectation [L. manco (“having a crippled hand”; “lacking”; “left-handed” Manicism(?))]
Manuduction: careful guidance; leading by hand [L. manus + –ductio (“action of leading”)]
Mappemond: medieval map of the world [L. mappa (“map”) + -mundi (“world”)]
Mappemond
Maricolous: living in the sea [L. mar (mare) (“sea”; “ocean”) + -cola (“inhabitor”) + -ous] (cf. Marigenous: produced by the sea) 🌊
Maritodespotism: ruthless domination of one spouse by another within a marriage (usually by the husband) [L. marītus (“husband”) + –despótēs (“lord”; “master”; “owner”) +-ism]
Martymachlia: sexual arousal resulting from having others watch a sexual act being performed (a form of paraphilia) [origin unknown]
Mascaron: grotesque, frightening (usually human, sometimes chimeric) face on a door-knocker, originally to supposedly ward off evil spirits [LateLat. mascara (“mask”) + -on]
Maskirovka: (hist.) Soviet use of deception or camouflage as military stratagem [Rus. mácka (“disguise”; “mask”)]
Mattoid: (Psych.) a person displaying eccentric behaviour and mental characteristics that approach the psychotic; someone bordering between sanity and insanity [It. matto (“insane”) + -oid (“likeness or resemblance”)]
Matutinal: of, occurring in or relating to morning [LateLat. matutinalis (Roman goddess of morning — see following entry)]
Matutolagnia: antemeridian (am) sexual desire [L. Mātūta, (Roman goddess of morning or dawn) + Gk. –lagneía (“sexual predilection”)]
Matutolypea: getting up on the wrong side of bed; the state of being in a bad mood and easily annoyed, esp in the morning [L. Mātūta, from Gk. lúpē (“sadness, suffering, affliction”) ]
Mechanolatry: worship of machines [Gk. mēkhanikós (“pertaining to machines or contrivance, mechanic”; “ingenious”; “inventive”) + –latreía (“service”; “worship”)]
Medianic: of, like or pertaining to spiritualists, mediums and prophets (origin unknown)
Megathermic: surviving only in tropical climates [Gk. mégas (“great”; “large”; “mighty”) + –thermal (“to heat”; “warm”)]
Mehari: a type of fast-running dromedary camel, used for racing or transportation [Arab. mahara, (“to be deft or skillful”)] 🐪
Meliorism: the belief that human progress is a real concept, improvement in the world can be made by human intervention and effort [L. melior (“better”) + -ism]
Melliloquent: speaking harmoniously or sweetly [L. mel, mellis (“honey”) + –loqui (“to speak”)] cf. Mellisonant: pleasing to the ear; sweet-sounding[L. –sonare (“to sound”)]; cf. Mellivorous: honey-eating) 🍯
Melomania: abnormal fondness for music [Gk. mélos (“musical phrase”; “melody”; “song”) + -mania] 🎵 🎶
Mensal: of, like or pertaining to the dinner-table; monthly, occurring once a month [L. mensis. (“month”)]
Mercedary: a hirer, one who hires staff; pertaining to the giving or receiving of wages [L. mercēdārius (?)]
Meretricious: apparently attractive, esp in a flashy or vulgar way, but having no real value; characteristic of a prostitute [L. meretrīx (“harlot, prostitute”) from mereō (“earn, deserve, merit”) + -trīx (“female agent”)]
Mésalliance: unsuitable marriage; marriage with a socially-inferior partner [Fr. mésallier (“to misally”)]
Mesomorph: person with a compact, muscular build [Gk. mesos (“middle” ) + -morphē (“form”; “shape”)]
Metagnostic: incomprehensible; beyond understanding [Gk. meta (“beyond”) + –gnōstós (“known”)]
Metempirical: beyond the scope of knowledge [Gk. meta (“after” or “beyond”) + –empeirikós “based on observation (of medical treatment”; “experienced”) + -al]
Metonym: (descriptive) name used instead of the (proper) name, as a substitute because it is close associated with it (eg, the White House for the US Presidential (POTUS) Residence/Office of the Executive [Gk. meta (“among”; “with”; “after”) + –onyma (“name”)]
Metoposcopy: foreign-telling or judgement of character divined by the lines of the forehead [Gk. meto (“measure”) + –scopéō (“examine”; “inspect”)]
Metronym: system of kinship and naming that follows the female line [Gk. mėtēr (“mother”) + -name]
Micropolis: small city [Gk. mikros (“small”) + –polis (“city”)]
Microsomatous: having a small body; small-framed [Gk. mikros + sōma (“body”)] (cf. Macrosomatous) (cf. Mignon: small and dainty)
Mien: air or look; manner; bearing [ME. demean (“ to conduct or behave (oneself) usually in a proper manner”)]
Militaster: soldier without skill or ability; pretender to possess military expertise but lacks actual experience or knowledge. [L. militaris (“of soldiers”; “warlike”) + –aster)]
Milquetoast: very timid; very unassertive person [from character Caspar Milquetoast of the comic strip The Timid Soul (1920s on)…fictional name derived from US dish “milk toast”]
Meek as Milquetoast
Minatory: threatening; having a menacing quality [L. minari (“to threaten”)]
Mimetic: imitative; of, like or pertaining to mimicry [Gk. mimos (“mime”)]
Minutious: (or Minutiose) paying undue attention to minutiae [L. Latin minutia (“thorough”; “detailed”) + -ous]
Miothermic: of, like or pertaining to temperature condition on earth at the present time [Gk. mi + -therm (“heat”) +-ic] 🔥
Misocainea: hatred of new ideas [Gk. miso (“hatred”; “hater”) + –kainos (“new”; “recent”)]
Misocapnic: an aversion to smoking, tobacco and its smoke [miso- + capno- (kapnós (“smoke”)] 🚭 (cf. Acapnotic: someone who doesn’t smoke; a non-smoker)
Mnemonist: one from whose memory nothing is erased; someone who can memorise long lists of data [ Gk. mnēmē (“memory”; “a remembrance”; “record”) + -ist]
Mofussil: provincial; rural; non-urban regions [Bengalimophośśol (“to divide”; “classify”]
Moiety: each of two parts into which a thing can be divided; a part or portion (esp lesser) [L. medius (“middle”; “half”)]
Mollescent: softening; tending to soften [L. mollis (“soft”) + -cent]
Momus: satirist; critic [Gk. Momus (Greek myth. personification of satire and mockery)]
Momus
Mongery: the trading or trafficking of some commodity of a specific type (eg, “ironmongery”; “fishmongery”); a person who tries to stir up or spread something usually of a petty or discreditable nature (eg, “scandal-mongery”) [Gk. mánganon (“contrivance”; “means of enchantment”)]
Mononym: a person’s name consisting of the one, single word, typically a first name sans a surname [Gk. monós (“alone”; “only”; “sole”) + -name]
Monopolylogue: dramatic work in which one actor plays many roles [neologism coined from “monologue” Gk. monólogos (“speaking alone”) + –poly (“many”)]
Mouchard: a police spy, esp in a Francophone country; an undercover investigator [Fr. mouche (“a fly”) + -ard] 🪰
Motherlode: (alt. Mother lode) a rich source of something; (geol.) a principal vein of an ore or mineral [L. māter + MidEng –lode (“a burden” (orig. “a way”; “a course”)
Mournival: a set of four things; (arch.) a hand of four (aces, kings, queens, knaves) in card game Gleek [MidFr mornifle (?)]
A Mournival hand of cards
Mugwump: (hist.) dissident Republicans (1884); one who politically-neutral, aloof or independent of party politics [from Amerindian (Massachusett) “war leader”]
Mulctuary: punishable by a fine [L. mulcta (“fine”)]
Multanimous: having a many-sided mind [L. multus (“many”) + –animus (“mind”)] (cf. Multeity: manifoldness; very great numerousness)
Multifarious: having great diversity; manifold [L. multi + -farius (“diverse”)]
Multiloquence: talkative; garrulous; using many words [L. multi– + –loquēns(“speaking, talking”)]
Multiparous: (of a woman) having given birth to multiple offspring [L. multi + -parere (“to give birth to”; “bring into being”)]
Multipotent: having the power to do many things [L. multi + -potis, pote (“able”)] (cf. Multivious: offering many different pathways; leading in many directions; and Multivocal: having many meanings]
Mumpsimus: adherence to or persistence in an erroneous use of language out of habit or obstinacy; a person who persists in a mistaken expression or practice [coined erroneously by an illiterate mass-priest in place of the correct Latin term sumpsimus…despite being corrected he stubbornly refused to change his choice of words]
Munificence: magnificent liberality in giving; bestowing great generosity [L. munus (“gift”; “duty”; “service”) + -cence]
Myrmecoid: ant-like, resembling an ant [Gk. -myrmēk (“ants”) + -oeidēs (“oid”) / Myrmex, Gk goddess of ants] 🐜
Myrmidon: a follower or subordinate of a powerful person; one who carries out orders unquestioningly (typically unscrupulous) [Gk. Myrmidon (from Greek myth.) eponymous ancestor of the Myrmidons]
Myrmidon
Mysophobic: someone with a pathological fear of contamination and germs; a germophobe; a compulsive hand-washer [Gk. mýsos (“pollution”; “defilement”)] + -phobia] 🦠
Mysteriosophy: system of knowledge concerning secrets and mysteries [L. mustḗrion, (“mystery”) + -sophy (“knowledge or wisdom”)]
Mythogenesis: origin of myths [Gk. mûthos (“myth”) + –génesis (“origin”; “source”; “beginning”)] (cf. Mythoclast: destroyer of myths; Mythopoeic: giving rise to myths)
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Malaxophobia: a morbid fear of seduction, love play or love games (esp in women)[Gk. malax– (?) (cf. Sarmassophobia)
Matronolagnia: an attraction to older women, esp women who have children [L. māter (“mother”) + –lagneía (“lust”)]
Microlipet: someone who gets upset about trivial stuff [micro (“small”) + ME -lippē(?) (“a little bit”(?)]
Misopolemiac: a hater of war and strife [miso (“hatred”) + pólemos (“war”)]
Sign of a Misopolemiac
Misoxene: one who hates strangers [miso (“hatred”) + xénos (“stranger”)] (cf. Xenophobe)
Monomath: someone who knows all about a single subject and nothing else [Gk. monós + –máthēma (“that which is learnt”)]
“L” is the twelfth letter of the alphabet while doubling as the Roman numeral for 50. The letter “L”’s ancestors can be traced to the Semiticlamedh, which may have derived from an earlier symbol representing an ox goad, and the Greeklambda (λ), itself adopted from the Phoenician letter lamed. In English “L”/“l” represents a voiced alveolar lateral continuant. “L” is for “logomaniacs”, “logolepts”, “logophiles”, “logonik”, call them by whatever label you prefer, the following are some worthy additions to the vocabulary of word aficionados from the unorthodox “L” word department.
Labeorphilist: <meaning> a collector of beer bottles, but also of their accoutrements – brand labels, can openers, books on the topic <derives from>[Gk. origin unknown] (cf. Tegestologist who collects beer mats)
Labiomancy: lip-reading; a form of divination by reading lips [MedLat. labiālis (“pertaining to the lips”) + -manteíā (“divination”)] (cf. Labrose: having large or thick lips)
Laconicum: sauna, specifically a dry sweat room; a room in an ancientRoman baths used for hot-air or a steam bath [L. laconicus from Gk. lakōn (“laconic”)]
Lairwite: (also Legruita) (hist.) fine paid to the lord of the manor by his villein in instances where the serf’s daughter committed adultery or fornication (in medieval times it was a punishment for sexual misconduct while maintaining the lord’s authority over his female villeins) [origin unknown]
Lambent: flickering; softly radiant; marked by brilliance of expression [L. from lambere (“to lick up”)] (cf. Lucent: glowing; giving off light)
Laodicean: being lax or lukewarm in one’s religious beliefs; indifferent to religion or politics [L. from Laodicea (“a city in Asia Minor”) + -an]
Laodicean: the ancient city of Laodicea
Lapidate: to stone someone to death [L. lapidātus (“to throw stones at”)] 🪨
Lapidicolous: living under a rock (or stone) [L. lapis (“stone”) + -colere (“to inhabit”)]
Latrocination: the act of robbing or pillaging from someone; overcharging people [L. Latrocinium (“highway robbery”)]
Lavacultophilia: the desire to stare at someone in a bathing suit [L. lavere (“to bathe”) + –culto (uncertain) + -philia] 🩱
Lecanoscopy: to hypnotise yourself by staring into a pool of water, eg, in a basin [Gk. lekane “dish-pan” + –scopein (“examine;” “look at”)]
Lector: a lecturer or (academic) reader at university (UK); a reader of lessons in a church service [L. legere (“reader”)] (cf. Letrice: a female reader in church)
Leguleian: like a lawyer; underhand and legalistic; a petty and argumentative lawyer [L. lēguleius (“pettifogger”) from lēx, lēgis (“law”)]
Lethologica: inability to recall a precise word or name for something or someone [Gk. lḗthē (“forgetfulness”) + -lógos “word”]
Levirate: marriage of a widowed woman to her deceased husband’s brother (practiced in particular cultures) [L. levir (“brother-in-law”)]
Lexiphanicism: showing off by using pretentious words or language (in fact what this blog post may be accused of doing!) [Gk. Lexiphanes (a character in the works of Lucian) + -ic]
Libidinist: a lewd or lustful person; oversexed lecher [L. libidinor (“I indulge”) {🔜 “libido”} + -ist] (cf. Donjuanism: (esp of a man) exhibiting compulsive sexual behaviour)
Litterateur: professional writer; a person interested in and knowledgeable about literature [L. littera (“letter”; “writing”)] ✍️🪶
Logicaster: a person who is pedantic in argument; a petty logician [Gk. lógos (“speech”; “reason”) + -aster (“little”; “petty”; “partial”; “incomplete”)]
Logodaedalus: artificer in words; one manipulates words with skill or cunning; skilled in coining words [Gk. logos (“word”) + –daidalous (“cunning worker; “skilful”)]
Logomachy: a battle about words; a verbal war [Gk. logos (“word”) + –machesthai (“to fight”)]
Lotologist: someone who collects lottery tickets as a hobby [origin unknown]
Lubberland: a mythical paradise reserved for the lazy [poss. from Swed. lubber (“fat lazy fellow” + -land] (cf. Cockaigne: an imaginary land of plenty, supposedly a medieval paradise of extreme luxury, comforts and easy life)
Lucubrator: a person who studies during the night [L. lūcubrō (“work by candlelight”) + -or] 🌃
Lupanarian: pertaining to a brothel [ L. lupanar (“brothel”), from lupa (“prostitute”; literally “she-wolf”), from lupus (“wolf”)](cf. Lupine: pertaining to wolves) 🐺
Lustrum: period of five years; (hist.) a ceremonial purification of the people of Rome undertaken every five years [L. lūstrum (“a purificatory sacrifice”)]
Lychnobite: a person who works at night and sleeps during the day [Gk. lúkhnos (“lamp”) and bíos (“life”)🏮
Lygerastia: a condition of someone who is amorous only when the lights are turned out [Gk. lyge (“twilight”) + –erastes (“lover”)] (cf. Amaurophilia: a preference for having sex blind-folded or in total darkness)
Lysistrataphobia: (path.) a fear that women will subvert men and take over the world [Gk. fromLysistrátē, (“Army Disbander”), 5th cent. BC play by Aristophanes about a woman (Lysistrataphobia) who hatches a plan to have Athenian and Spartan women withhold sexual privileges from their men-folk until the men bring the Peloponnesian War to an end]
The letter “K” is derived from the Semitic letter kaph, possibly from an earlier Egyptian hieroglyph for a hand. In Greek it became “kappa”, and in that form passed into the Roman alphabet. In English it generally represents a voiceless velar plosive consonant with the same sound as the “hard” form of “c”, as in kitten. That’s the skinny on how the letter “K” found its way into the English alphabet, now for word nerds here’s a selection of uncommon, archaic, quirky, even strange and weird words which begin with “K”.
Kakistocracy: <meaning>government by the worst, less qualified and most unscrupulous citizens <derived from>[Gk. kákistos, (“worst”) + -cracy]
Kalogram: a monogram which uses the person’s full name [origin unknown)
Kalokagathia: combination of good and beautiful [Gk. kalós kaì agathós (“beautiful and good”)] (cf. Kalopsia: the delusion that things are more beautiful than they really are)
Kareeza: sexual intercourse which avoids climax (a method of coitus reservatus) [It. carezza (“caress”) neologism coined 1896 by US obsterician Alice Stockham]
Katabasis: (myth.) Ancient Greek hero journeying to the underworld; a downward journey; a retreat especially a military one [Gk. katá “”downwards”) + –baínō (“go”)] cf. Anabasis (a going or marching up; esp a military advance (from book by Xenophon)
Katabasis
Katoptronophile: a person aroused by having sex in front of mirrors [Gk. katopron (“mirror”) + –phile] 🪞
Katzenjammer: confusion; uproar; a severe headache due to a hangover [Germ. katze (“cat”) + –jammer (“distress”) (19th. popularised by American cartoon “Katzenjammer Kids”]
Katzenjammer Kids
Kenodoxy: the love, study or desire of vainglory [Gk. kenos (empty” + -doxy]
Kerdomeletia: an excessive desire for material wealth [Gk. kerdo (“gain”; “profit”) + unknown origin]
Kinesipathy: the practice of treating illness with exercise [Gk. kinēsis (“movement”; “motion”) + -pathy (“suffering”; “emotion”; “therapy”)]
Klebenleiben: a pathological reluctance to stop talking about a particular subject [Germ. kleben (“to glue”) ?+ unknown]
Kleptocracy: government by thieves; government by people who exploit their hold on power to steal the country’s resources [Gk. kleptēs (“thieves”) + -cracy]
Korophilia: an attraction to young men or boys [kóros (“boy”; “youth”) + -philia]
Kosmokrator: (alsoCosmocrator) the ruler of the world [Gk. kosmo (“world”) + –kratos (“the god and personification of power and strength”)]
Kosmokrator: a mantle ascribed to Alexander the Great
Kouros: statue of young Greek nude male [Gk. kouros (“youth”; “boy, esp of noble rank”)]
Kraken: enormous, legendary sea monster (said to have appeared off the coast of Norway) [Norway. krake (“malformed or overgrown, crooked tree”)]
Kraken (source: medium.com)
Kritarchy: rule by judges in Ancient Israel [Gk. kritēs (“a judge”)]
Krukolibidious: a person who’s aroused by staring at someone’s crotch [origin unknown]
Ktenology: science of putting people to death [Coined by US psychiatrist and neurologist Leo Alexander, etymology unknown)]
Kurveyor: (South Africa: a trader who transports goods by ox cart); a travelling merchant who sells dry goods from a cart [Dutch. origin unknown)]
Kyle: narrow strait or channel of water between two separate formations of land [Scot. Gaelic. caol (“narrow”; “thin”; “strait”) ]
A Kyle
Kyphorrhinos: humped nose [origin unknown] 👃🏽
Kyriology: (also Kyriolexy) the use of literal or simple, expressions rather than figurative or obscure ones [Gk. kúrios (“literal”) + -logy]
The letter “J” (pronounced “Jay”), the 10th letter of the Latin alphabet, has got an interesting history as a Johnny-come-lately “bookend” of sorts…”J” is the English alphabet’s “Hawaii”, the last to achieve letterhood. This 26th and final letter was introduced as a swash, a typographical embellishment for the already existing “I”. Phonetically, the vowel “I” and the consonant “J” used to sound the same and were interchangeable until a clear phonetic distinction between the two was made by an Italian grammarian (GG Trissino) in 1524. When Roman numerals were in their heyday “J” or “j” were used on the end of a sequence of numerals…so for “123”, instead of writing CXXIII, it be could rendered as CXXIIJ. Here’s a scattering of “J” words unlikely that you will find popping up in everyday intercourse.
Jabberwock: nonsense; gibberish [from “Jabberwocky”, dragon-like creature in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871)]
Janiform: having two faces looking in opposite directions [L. Janus “”Roman god”) + –fōrmis (“having the form of”)]
Janizary: (also Janissary) a follower or supporter; (hist.) member of Ottoman Turkish infantry, (14—(19th. [Turk.Yeni (“new”) + -çeri (“troops”)]
Janizary (source: Pinterest)
Jargonaut: one who uses excessive jargon [comb. Of “jargon” and Gk. -naut (“sailor”)]
. Jejunator: one who fasts [L. Jejunus (“fasting”) + -ator]
Jejune: dull; insipid; lacking in substance; superficial; naive; simplistic (of writing or ideas) dry and uninteresting [L. Jejunus (“fasting” – ie, being empty in a figurative sense)]
Jentacular: relating to breakfast; specifically to one taken early in the morning or immediately upon getting up [L. from ientō (“to have breakfast “) 🍳
Jeremiad: prolonged complaint; angry or cautioning harangue; lamentation; catalogue of woes [Fr. jérémiade, after Biblical prophet Jeremiah (Old Testament)]
Jeremiad of Jeremiah
Jesuitical: cunning; equivocating; quibbling [Fr. jsuitique (pertaining to the Jesuits)] (behaviours once attributed to the Jesuits)
Jovialist: a convivial person [L. ioviālis (“relating to the Roman god Jupiter”) + -ist]
Jumboism: admiration for bigness [(19th. circus elephant, Jumbo + -ism]
Jumentous: smelling strongly of horse urine or of some similar beast of burden [L. jumentum (“yoke-beast”)]
Jurisconsult: legal expert [L. jus (jur) (“law”) + consultus (“skilled”)]
Jurisconsult
Juvenescence: state of growing younger [L. juvenis (“young”) + -cence (?)]
Juvenilia: the works (literary, artistic, musical) of one’s youth (cf. Juvenal: a youth) [L. iuvenīlia (“of or pertaining to youth”)
I, that single vertical stroke, is the most selfish letter in the entire English alphabet. It’s all about “I”, “I”,”I”! By which we mean “me”, “me”, “me”. The opposite of “U”, its more outward-looking brother vowel. No surprise we get “individual”, “idiosyncratic”, “intransigent” and “IPhone” from the letter “I”…”I” is all about “Isness”. Linguistically, “I” corresponds to the Semitic yod (early symbol for hand?) and the Greek iota (I). Anyway, having impugned I’s reputation, let’s accentuate the positive side of the letter—also the Roman numeral for “1”—by feeding the word-maniacs and lexical tragics out there with a sampler of I-words almost none of which succumbto the pitfall of self-centredness.
Iamatology: <meaning> study of remedies [<derivation>Gk. iama (“remedy”) + -logy]
Iatrarchy: government by physicians) [Gk. iatros (“doctor”; “healer”) + –arkhein (“to rule”)] (cf. Iatramelia: medical neglect)
Iatrarchy (image: kansaz.in)
Ichthyic: of resembling or pertaining to fish [Gk. ikhthús (“fish”) + Eng. -ic]🐠
Ichnogram: footprint [Gk íkhnos (“foot imprint”) + -gramma (“that which is drawn”)] 🐾 👣
Iconolagny: sexual stimulation from pictures or statues [Gk. eikon (“likeness”; “image”, “portrait”) + –lagnia(“lust”)]
Ideopraxis: one compelled to carry out an idea [Gk. ideo (“idea”) + –praxis “doing”)] 💡
Idioglossia: private, idiosyncratic language developed between children [Gk. ídios “own”, “personal”, “distinct”) + -glôssa (“tongue”)]
Idiolect: distinctive, individual form of speech [Gk. ídios “own”, “personal”, “distinct”) + légō (“I speak”)]
Impecunious: little or no money [L. pecūnia (“money”) + -ōsus (“full of”)]
Imperator: ruler; military commander [L. imperare (“”to order”; “command”)]
Imperator source: http://www.roman-empire.net/army/army-pictures.html
Ineluctable: irresistible or inescapable [L. in (“not”) + -eluctari (“struggle out”)]
Incivism: neglect of duty as a citizen [Fr. incivisme (“non-compliance”; “anti-social behaviour”)]
Incondite: not well assembled; poorly constructed; unpolished [L. un (in) (“not”) + -conditus (“to put in”; “restore”)]
Incult: uncultivated; coarse [L. in + –cultus (“to till”; “cultivate”)]
Incunabulist: (cf. Incunabulum) one who collects early books [L. in (“into”) + -cunae (“cradle”) + Eng. -ist] 📚
Infelicious: unhappy, unlucky [Gk. in (“not”) + L. -felicitas (“happiness, fertility,”)]
Infonaut: a voyager in cyberspace/virtual reality; a frequent or habitual user of the internet [ “info” from “information” [L. īnfōrmātiō (“formation, conception; education”) + Gk. –nautēs (“sailor”)]
Infracaniniphile: someone who champions or favours the underdog [Neologism, L. infra (“below, under, beneath”) + -canino (“dog) + -phile (“to prefer”)
Interamnian: situated between or enclosed by rivers [L. inter- (“in between”; “amid”) + amnis (“river”)]🏞️
Intercolline: situated between hills [L. inter “between”; “amid”) [L. inter- (“in between”; “amid”) + coll (“hill”) + Eng. -ine]
Intercrural: the area between one’s legs [L. inter (“between”; “amid”) + -crūs (“leg”)]
Interstices: small spaces (figuratively as well as literally) [L. inter- (“in between”; “amid”) + –stes (“standing”)
Irenic: peaceful; conducive to peace; non-confrontational (cf. Irenology: the study of peace [Gk. eirēnē (“peace”) from Eirene, Greek goddess of peace] ☮️
Iridal: of, like or pertaining to the rainbow [origin unknown]
Irresiant: having no residence [origin unknown]
Irrison: the act of laughing at another [origin unknown]
Isagogic: introductory (cf. Isagoge: academic introduction to a subject, chiefly to do with Christian theology) [Gk. eisagōgē (“lead-in”) + -ics)]
Isorropic: (geom.) of equal value [Gk. isos (“equal to”; “the same as”; “equally divided”) + –rropic (?)]
Ithyphallic: indecent; immoral; esp a statue with the representation of an erect penis [Gk. ithúphallos, “Bacchic phallus,” lit. “straight penis” + -ic)]
Ithyphallic symbol
Itinerarian: traveller [Neologism: Late Lat. Itinerari (“to journey”) + an]
Itinerarian Marco Polo
Ivresse: drunkenness; intoxication [OldFr. ivre (“drunk;” “inebriated”) + –esse (fem. form of noun)]
Izzard: an archaic word for Z [OFr. et zede (lit. “and zed”)]
A Logolept’s Diet of Obscure, Obsolete, Curious and Downright Odd “H” Words
H, the whispering onomatopoeic sound whose pronunciation is debated by different tribes of Anglophone peoples…is it “Aitch” or “Haitch”? Well, it depends to some extent on your linguistic-cultural sub-group and which national flag you fly under. “H” came to the Latin alphabet from the Semiticcheth via the Greeketa (Η), which possibly derived from an early symbol for a fence. Words starting with the letter “H”, however you say it, can run the gamut of extremes, at one pole they can be “hyper” (high, beyond, above normal, excessive), at the other end they can be “hypo” (beneath, below normal, under) Here’s some seldom-uttered “H” words you may not have not encountered before.
Habilatory: <meaning> of, like or pertaining to clothes or dressing (cf. Habile: dextrious; adroit) <derivation> [MedLatin habitualis (“pertaining to habit or dress”)]
Habromania: a form of delusional insanity characterised by cheerful or joyous imaginings [ Gk. habros (“graceful”? + -mania]
Hagiocracy: government by holy men (cf. Theocracy) [Gk. hagios (“holy”; “saint”) + -cracy]
Hagiocracy (image: dreamtime.com)
Hagridden: worried or tormented, as by a witch; affected by nightmares or anxieties [OldEng. hægtesse, hægtis (“a fury”, “witch”) + -ride (“that has ridden”)🧙
Halibiotic: like or pertaining to the entirety of life under the sea [Gk. hali (“indication of salt or the sea” + bio (“life”) + -ic (“like”)](cf. Halieutics: the study of fishing) halieutikós (alieutikós), (“of or about fishermen”)] 🐠 🎣
Hamartia: a fatal flaw leading to the downfall of a tragic hero or heroine (Gk tragedy, Aristotle Poetics) [Gk. hamartánein (“to miss the mark”)]
Hamlet’s Harmartia (source: themarginalian.org/)
Hapax: word or expression which occurs only once within a given context (eg, in an author’s oeuvre; in a single text) [Gk. translit. from “being said once”)]
Haptic: of, like or pertaining to the sense of touch [Gk. haptesthai “to touch”)]
Haussmannize (or Haussmannise): to destroy the old in order to build the new; to rebuild an area , esp on a massive scale [coined after Baron Haussmann, 19th. French public official]
Hawkshaw: detective (cf. Shamus) [19th. coinage, from play “The Ticket of Leave Man”] 🕵🏾
Hebdomadally: every week [Gk. hepta (“seven”) (Hebdomad= period of 7 days) [
Hebetic: of, like or pertaining to puberty [Gk. hēbē (“youth”) + –tēs (“agent”) + –ikon]
Hecatomb: slaughter of 💯 (people, animals, etc); (hist.) in Rome and Ancient Hellas, a public sacrifice of 100 oxen [Gk. hekaton (“hundred”) + –bous (“ox”)
Hedonics: part of ethics or psychology dealing with pleasure (cf. Hedonism) [Gk. hēdon(é) (“pleasure”) + –ikon]
Heliolatry: sun worship (cf. Heliosis: exposure to the sun; sunburn) [Gk. hēlio (“sun”) + –latry (“worship”)] 🌅
Helixophile: someone who collects corkscrews [Gk. hélix (“something twisted or spiral”) + -phile]
Helixophile: collector-mania for the humble corkscrew
Hellion: a rowdy or mischievous person, esp a child who behaves thus [Nth Eng/Scot. hallion (“scamp, worthless fellow”)]
Hemiolic: based of a ratio of 3:2 [Gk. hēmiolios (from hemisus “half”) + Eng -ic)]
Henotic: tending to unify or reconcile; promoting harmony [Gk. henōtikós (“serving to unite”)]
Heptamerous: divide into parts of seven [Gk.heptá (“seven”) + -merēs (“having parts”)]
Heresiarch: leader of a heretical movement [Gk. hairesíarchēs (“leader of a school or sect”) + –archēs)
Hereticaster: a petty or contemptible heretic [heretic + L.-aster (“little, petty, partial, incomplete”) cf. Criticaster (“a petty or contemptible critic”)]
Hermetic: of, like or pertaining to sorcery and alchemy (mod. sense: (1) seal or close completely airtight) (2] solitary) [Gk. From mythological god Thrice-great Hermes, via MedL hermeticus]
Heterist (alt. Hetaerist): one who indulges in extra-marital sex; a general system of temporary and continued sexual relations outside wedlock (concubinage) [Gk.hetaira (“female companion”) + -ismos]
Heteroclite: one who deviates from the ordinary forms or rules; irregular; an abnormal thing or person [Gk. héteros (“other”; “different”) + –klinō (“lean”; “incline”)]
Heterophemy: accidental use of word different to that meant [Gk. héteros (“other”; “different”) + –phemia (“speech”; “talk”)]
“Arthur Daley” from TV’s Minder: a skilful exponent of the art of Heterophemy
Heterotrichosis: having hair of varied or mixed colours [Gk. héteros (“other”; “different”) + -trichōsis (“growth of hair”)]
Heuristic: enabling someone to discover or learn something for themselves [Gk. heuriskein (“find”)]
Hexamerous: divide into parts of six [(Gk. hexa (“six”) + -merēs (“having parts”)]
Hibernaculum: winter retreat; (zool.) a place where an animal seeks refuge from winter (eg, a cave for members of the Ursidae family) [L. hibernāculum (“tent for winter quarters”)
Hidrotic: causing or exuding sweat [Gk. hidrōs (“sweat”)]
Highbinder: a scheming or corrupt politician; a swindler or gangster; a ruffian [Amer. Highbinders, Chinese gang in NYC (19th.]
Highbinders gang depicted in comic book form
Hipparchy: rule or control of horses (cf. Hippoid: equine, Hippodamist: horse-tamer) [Gk. hippo (“horse”) + –archy (“rule”)]🐎
Hirci: armpit hair [Proto-Finnish. hirci, poss. from L hirtus (“hairy”, “shaggy”)] (cf. Hircine: “goat-like”)]
Hodiernal: of, like or pertaining to the present day [L. hodiernus from hodie (“today”) + Eng. -al].
Hodometry: measurement of the distance of a sea voyage (cf. Horometry: time measurement) [?uncertain + –metrein (“to measure”)]
Hodophile: a lover of travel; a travel aficionado [Gk. hodos (“journey”; “road”; “travel” + -philia (“love”)]🛬
Hodophile heaven
Holobenthic: passage of entire life in the deep ocean [Gk. holo (“whole”) + -bénthos (“the depths”)]
Humgruffin: terrible or repulsive person [neologism, blending of “hum”; “gruff”; “griffin”]
Hybristophile: someone who is sexually attracted to individuals who have committed crimes, particularly cruel or outrageous ones [Gk. hubrizein “to commit an outrage against someone”, from hubris + –phil (“preference for”)]
Hyoid: having a “U” shape [Gk. hyodeides (”shaped like the letter Upsilon (U)”
Hypalgesia: diminished susceptibility to pain (cf. Hyperalgia: extreme sensitivity to pain) [Gk. hypo (“under”) + -algos (“pain”) + -ia
Hyperacusis: abnormally good sense of hearing 👂 [Gk. hupós (“over”) + -ákousis, (“hearing”)]
Hyperborean: an inhabitant of the extreme north [Gk. hupós (“over”) + –borean (“northern”)] (cf. Heteroscian: inhabitant of a temperate zone [Gk. hetero + –scian “shadow”(?)]
Hyperborean dwellers in the Arctic (source: reindeerherding.org)
Hypermetropia: long-sighted person; can see objects far away but not up close (cf. Hyperope: far-sighted person) [Gk. hupós (“over”) + metron (“measure”)]
Hyperosmia: very keen sense of smell [Gk. hupós (“over”) + osmē (“odour”)]
Hyphaersis: omission of letter or sound from a word (eg, “around” becomes “round”) [origin unknown]
G-words, words starting with the letter “G”, like “G-men” can be gritty, exacting and uncompromising…sometimes they salaciously and lustfully invoke “the beast with two backs”. Here’s some fairly unorthodox, non-mainstream “G” words you quite possibly have not encountered before.
Gallimaufry: a mixture of different things; a hodge-podge [MFr galimafree (“a kind of stew concocted from various ingredients)]
Galluptious: (or Goloptious) wonderful, delightful, delicious; provocative and sexually alluring [origin uncertain, perhaps alteration of “voluptous]
Geophilious: live in or near the ground [Gk geo (“earth”) + -phil (“love”)]
Gewgaw: a showy trifle; a trinket; useless, worthless [ME. giuegaue (orig. meaning uncertain)]
Gigantology: the study of giants [Gk. “giant” + -logy]
Glabrous: without hair; smooth [L. glaber (“smooth”; “bald”; “hairless”)] 👨🏾🦲
Glossoid: like a tongue [Gk. glōssoeidēs + -oid] 👅
Gnomic: a phrase that’s short, catchy and clever; puzzling, enigmatic and ambiguous yet seemingly profound [Gk. gnome (“an opinion”)]
Goliard: a learned person, esp in the humanities; (hist.) a wandering, fun-seeking scholar/clerical student in medieval Europe who wrote goliardy (irreverent , satiric Latin verse) [MF, origin uncertain)]
Medieval Goliards (Image: faculty.sgc.edu)
Grallator: someone who walks on stilts (taking quite long strides); an ichnogenus dinosaur [L. grallotores (“stilt-walker”)] 🦕
Gremial: pertaining to the lap or bosom; intimate [L. gremium (“lap”)]
Gymnogynomania: urge to rip women’s clothes off [Gk. gymnos (“naked”; “bare”) + gyn (-“wife”; “-woman”) + -mania
Gymnophoria: the sensation that someone is mentally undressing you [Gk. gymnos (“naked”; “bare”) + -phoria (“to bear”)
Gynotikolobo-massophilia: a proclivity for nibbling one’s earlobes [Gk. gyn + –lobos (“earlobe”) + -masáomai (“to chew”) + -phile] 👂
The sixth letter in the alphabet is the consonant “F”. Pre-English, the Phoenicians used to write “F” with a symbol that looked a lot like “Y,” and pronounced it waw. The ancient Greeks changed it into digamma and put a tip on the “Y”, transforming it into the sixth letter in the alphabet we readily recognise today. The “f” sound has a kindred spirit in the “ph” as the two can be interchangeable in spelling, eg, people who live in the Philippines are called “Filipinos”. “F” for frank and forthright and “F” for frivolous and fickle…it would however be remiss of us to not acknowledge that the expression “F-word” has another, polarising, connotation which for many in society is still is a taboo one, as, to use a somewhat old-fashioned-sounding term, a “swear” word… “fuck” and its many derivatives such as “motherfucker”, “fucker”, etc. ad nauseam. So there you have it, “F”, all in all a letter for all seasons and dispositions!
Falerist (or Phalerist): someone who collects and studies medals, badges, pins, ribbons and other decorations [from the Greek mythological hero Phalerus: Gk. Phaleros]
Farraginous: consisting of a confusing mixture, orig. of grains for cattle feed (cf. Farrago); jumbled; messy; heterogenous[L. far “spelt” (ie, grain)]
Favonian: pertaining to the west wind (esp mild, gentle) 💨 [L. fovēre (“to warm”)] (cf. Zephyr)
Firmament: (Relig.) the vault or arch of the sky; the heavens; the field or sphere of an interest or activity [Late Latin. firmamentum, from L. firmare (“support”)]
Firmament
Flâneur: a man who saunters around observing society; a stroller (fem: approx comparable to Flaneuse). [Old Norse. flana (“to wander with no purpose)]
A metropolis full of flâneurs (image: The Art Story)
Flexiloquent: speaking evasively or ambiguously [L. flexibilis (“that may be bent”) + –loquēns (“speaking”; “talking”)]
Florilegium: an anthology esp excerpts of a larger work; collection of flowers [L. flos (“flower” +-legere (“to gather”)] 🌺
Frotteur: (Psycho-sex.) a person who derives sexual gratification—Frottage—thru contact with the clothed body of another person in a crowd [Fr. frotter (“to rub”)]
Funambulist/Funambulator: a tightrope walker; an acrobat who performs balancing acts on a taut, high horizontal rope (also known as an Equilibrist [L. funis (“rope”) + –ambulare (“to walk”)]
Funambulist ice-veined Philippe Petit with his flares at full mast, at his day job, Twin Towers 1974 (photo: Alan Welner/AP)
Fusilatelist: someone ( with a lot of time on their hands) who collects phone cards from telcos (origin unknown)
Fuselatelist: UK £5 telco cards (source: chinarfidfactory.com)
Futilitarian: a person devoted to futile pursuits; one who believes that human striving is futile [(19th neologism, a portmanteau word formed from blending “futile” and “utilitarian”]
Fysigunkus: a person devoid of curiosity [Scot. Eng, (19th. origin unknown]
The fifth letter and second vowel in the modern English alphabet, “E” can trace its ancestry to the ancient Greek letter epsilon, which in turn has its source in the Semitic letter hê. Words beginning with “E” can be positive and affirmative—energetic, empathetic, etc—but they can also exclude, excise and excommunicate. Here’s some fairly unorthodox, non-mainstream “E” words you possibly have not encountered before.
Eccendentesiast: an insincere person who fakes a smile [L. ecce (“I present to you’) + –dentes (“teeth”) + –iast (“performer”)]
Ecdysiast: a striptease artist; erotic dancer [Gk. ekdysis(“a stripping or casting off”). Coined 1940 by HL Mencken]
Gypsy Rose Lee, famous US ecdysiast
Ectomorph: a person with a lean and delicate build of body; also can refer to someone with an introverted, thoughtful personality [Gk. ecto (“outside”, “external”) + –derm (“skin”) + –morphē (“form”; “shape”). Coined 1940 by WH Sheldon]
Eleemosynary: relating to or depending on charity; charitable [Gk. eleos (“mercy”; “pity”; “compassion”; (pertaining to alms)]
Encomium: a speech or piece of writing which praise someone or something highly (cf. eulogy) [Gk. en (“within”) + –komos (“revel”)]
Endomorph: a person with a heavy, rounded (big-boned) build of body [Gk. endon (“in”; “within”) + –morphē (WH Sheldon 1940)]
Endonym: (also known as Autonym) the native name for a national group, an individual, geographical place, language or dialect; used inside a particular group or linguistic community for self-identification [Gk. endon (“within) + –ónoma (“name”)]
Ennad: any group of nine; orig. a group of 9 deities in Egyptian mythology [Gk. ennea (the number 9)]
Epeolatry: the worship of words [Gk. epos (“word”) + -latry (“worship”)]
Epicrisis: something that follows a crisis, specifically a secondary crisis; a critical or analytical study, evaluation or summing up, esp of medical case [Gk. epíkrisis, (“determination”, “judgment”, “award”)]
Epigamic: attractive to the opposite sex, esp in zoological context [Gk. epi (“upon”; “on”; “near”) + –gamus (“wedding”; “marriage”)]
Epistolographer: a writer of epistles (elegant, formal didactic letters); a letter writer [Gk. epistellein (“send news”) + –graphe (“write”)] ✍️📝
Ergatocracy: rule by the workers [Gk. ergátēs (“workman”) + –crazy]
Ergatocracy (source: libcom.org)
Eschatological: theological considerations relating to death, judgement and the finality of the soul and humankind [Gk. éskhatos (“last”) + -logy]
Excoriate: to denounce or berate severely; verbally flay; to strip or remove the skin (Gk. ex (“out”) + –coríum (“skin”; “hide”)
Excursus: a diversion or digression in a book from the main subject which involves a detailed side-discussion [L. excurrere (“run out”)]
Exonym: (also known as Xenonym) the non-native name for a national group, an individual, geographical place, language or dialect [Gk. exo (“outside) + –ónoma (“name”)]; eg, the exonym for Deutschland (Germany) in Spanish is Alemania
Expiscate: to find out thru scrupulous examination or detailed investigation; fish out (something) (usage Scot.) [L. expicatus from Gk. ex (“out”) + –piscari (“to fish”)] 🎣 🐠
Continuing the A–Z series of out-of-the-norm, non-mainstream quirky words…this time exploring lexical items starting with the ostentatiously curvy letter “C“, the third letter and second consonant of the modern English alphabet. “C” comes from the same letter as “G”. TheSemitesnamed itgimel. The sign is possibly adapted from anEgyptian hieroglyphfor astaff sling, which may have been the meaning of the namegimel. Another possibility, contested by some classical scholars, is that it depicted a camel, the Semitic name for which wasgamal.The utility of “C” extends to the Romans’ numeral system where it represents the number for “100”, “C” for century!
Word
Meaning
Derivation
Cacodoxy
bad doctrine or wrong opinion
Gk caco ("bad") + -doxia ("opinion")
Cacogen
an anti-social person
Gk caco ("bad") + -genēs ("offspring")
Cacophemism
a perjorative expression used instead of a mild one
Gk caco ("bad") + -logía ("speech")
Cagamosis
an unhappy marriage
origin unknown
Calcographer
one who draws with crayons and pastels✍️
L calco ("thread", "trample on") + graphe ("write")
Callpygous
having beautiful buttocks
Gk kallos ("beautiful") + -pūgē ("buttocks")
Camelot
newspaper vendor ️
F origin unknown
Carpophagous
fruit-eating
Gk karpós ("fruit") + -phágous ("eating")
Catapedamania
an impulse to jump from high places
Gk cata ("downward") + -ped ("ground") ⛰️
Catchpole
sheriff's deputy, esp one who makes an arrest for failure to pay a debt
OE cace ("catch") + Med L pullus (a chick")
Celerity
swiftness of movement
L celer ("speedy"; "swift")
Celsitude
loftiness, esp in rel. to position or standing
L celsus ("high"; "lofty")
Cenobite
monk; member of religious order
Gk koinos ("common") + -bios ("life")
Cereologist
someone who studies crop circles, esp one who believes they are not man-made or formed by other terrestrial processes ⭕️
L Ceres (Roman goddess of agriculture ") + -logy ("study")
Chaetophorous
having bristles
Gk khaítē ("hair") + -phoros ("bearing")
Chasmaphilous
fond of nooks & crannies
Gk chasma ("abyss"; "cleft") + phil
Chiliad
divide into parts of 1,000; Millennium
Gk khilioi ("thousand")
Chorizent
someone who challenges the authorship of a major work, esp one who believes that the Iliad & the Odyssey were not penned by Homer ✍️
origin unknown
Chryosophist
a lover of gold ⚱️
Gk chrys ("gold") + -philos ("phile")
Cicisbeo
male companion of a married woman
origin unknown
Cicerone
a guide for tourism information ℹ️
L from Cicero, agnomen of Roman orator, (2th BCE
Clerisy
class of the intelligentsia; group of learned & literary people
Gk klēros ("heritage")
Concision
tenseness & brevity of speech & writing; saying much in a few words
L concīsus ("cut short")
Consign
deserved & appropriate, esp a fair & fitting punishment
L con ("altogether") + -dignus ("worthy"; "appropriate"
Copacetic
completely satisfactory; in good order
origin unknown
Coruscating
sparkling; glittering
L coruscatus ("to vibrate", "glitter")
Cosmocracy
rulership of the world; global government ️
Gk cosmo ("universe")+ -krátos ("rule"; "power")
Coterminous
having the same boundaries
Eng, (18th.
Crepuscular
resembling or rel to twilight
L crepusculum ("twilight")
Cruciverbalist
one who is skilled at or enjoys solving crosswords 里
L cruci ("cross" + -verbum ("word"). Neologism, 1977)
The letter “B” has quite a backstory on route to its destination in the English alphabet. Its equivalent second letter in Phoenician, beth, was part of that ancient language’s alphabet more than 3000 years ago. It looked a little different, but it made the same sound as “B”/”b”. The shape of the letter resembled the floor plan of a house, and the word beth meant “house.” In Hebrew, the letter was called beth, bet or bayt which also means “house.” (‘The Letter B Once Had A Much Longer Name’, (2014), www.dictionary.com). Here’s a far from definitive selection of unusual, obscure and archaic words beginning with “B” – useful additions to the vocabulary of any budding lexiphile, logophile or verbivore out there.
Word
Meaning
Derivation
Babeldom
a confused sound of noise
ME babble + OE -dōm ('state')
Bacchanal
drunkard; reveller
L bacchanalis (from the god Bacchus)
Bahadur
self-important official
Persian bahādur ('brave', 'valiant')
Balatron
joker; clown
L balatrō ('jester'; 'buffoon') 嵐
Barmecide
an insincere benefactor (someone who promises but doesn't deliver)
Per Barmeki ('The Arabian Nights', family name)
Barratry
inciting riot or violence
OF Barraterie (der from 'deceive')
Bathykolpian
deep-bosomed
Gk bathys ('deep') + kolpos ('breast')
Bedswerver
an unfaithful spouse
Eng (17th, Shakespeare
Benedict
benign; a newly-married after being a long-time bachelor
L bene ('good') + -dicte ('speak')
Bersatrix
babysitter
Fr berseaux ('cradle') + trix (fem. suffix)
Bibliognost
well-read individual: person with a wide knowledge of books
Gk biblio ('book') + -gnōstēs ('one who knows'j
Bodacious
remarkable; unmistakable; sexy; voluptuous
Eng 'bold' + 'audacious'
Boursocrat
Stock exchange official
origin unknown
Brio
enthusiastic vigour
It 'mettle'; 'fire'; 'life'
Bromaphile
lover of food; a "foodie"
Gk brôma ('food') + -phile ('lover')
Bromopnea
bad breath
Gk brômos ('stink') + nea
Brumal
wintry; of, like or pertaining to winter 略
L brūmalīs ('relating to the winter solstice')
Burrole
an eavesdropper
origin unknown
Bywoner
agricultural labourer
Afrikaans from Mid Dutch bi + ('dweller')
ADDENDUM
Barbigerous
bearded; bearing a beard 倫♂️
L barbiger ("beard"; + -gero ('bearing')
Bavian
baboon; insignificant or unskilled poet
D baviaan
Belliferous
bringing war
L bellum ('war') + ferō ('to bear')
Bloviate
talk at length in empty, pompous, inflated fashion
Eng (19th. 'blow' (as in boasting, orig. to describe politicians)
“Words, Words, Words”, mused Shakespeare’s brooding and enigmatic eponymous protagonist in Hamlet [Act II, Scene II]. Indeed, for those wordsmiths, verbivores and aficionados in the grips of logolepsy (fascination or obsession with words), words, lexemes, morphemes, lógos, verba, call it whatever you like, are the very stuff of the world. If you are like me and take a delight in being exposed to new words, always looking to add to the building blocks of your vocabulary, then your interest might be piqued enough to browse the following list of words, a select lexicon with entries which include the obscure, the archaic, the unusual, the peculiar and (sometimes) the downright creepily weird. To begin at the beginning, the letter “A”, primus intra pares among the strictly-ordered glyphs. “A” in the Latin alphabet is similar in shape to theAncient Greek letterAlpha, from which it derives.
Word
Meaning
Derivation
Abactor
cattle thief or rustler
L Late Latin abigō ('drive away')
Achloropsia
[cf. Acyanopsia colour-blind blue]
colour-blind green
Gk a + clor ('green') + -podia (rel. to 'sight')
Acephalous
lacking a (clearly defined) head
Gk akephalous ('headless')
Acersecomic
one who has never had his or her hair cut
Gk akersekómēs ('young with unshorn hair')
Acrologic
pertaining to initials; using a sign to represent a word denoting its initial letter or sound, assoc with hieroglyphics & acronyms
Fr acrologique
Adelphogamy
a form of polyandry; marriage of 2 or more brothers & 1 or more wives (context: Royal marriages in Ancient Egypt, usually between siblings)
occurring as a result of an external factor or by chance, rather than by design or inherent nature; coming from outside, not native
L adventicious (coming to us from abroad")
Agelast
someone who never laughs; a humourless person
Mid Fr agélastos ('not laughing')
Agersia
not growing old in appearance
Gk a ('not') + geras ('age')
Agnomen
an epithet; an appellation appended to a name (eg, Rufus the Indolent)
Anc Rome a 4th name occasionally bestowed on a citizen in honour of some achievement
Agnosy
ignorance esp universal ignorance; unenlightened; bereft of spiritual understanding or insight
Gk agnōsia ('ignorance')
Aleatory
something dependent on the throw of dice or on chance; random; (esp in indurance)
L alea a kind of dice game
Amanuensis
Iiterary or artistic assistant, in particular one who takes dictation or copies manuscripts
L amanu + -ensis ('slave at handwriting') + 'belonging to')
Ambivert
someone who a balance of extrovert & introvert features in their personality
L ambi ('on both sides') + vertere ('to turn')
Aneabil
unmarried; single
origin unknown
Anecdotage
someone with a tendency to be garrulous; anecdotes collectively
Gk anekdota ('unpublished') + -age
Anemocracy
government by the wind or by whim
Gk anemo ('wind') + -cracy ('rule')
Anhedonia
inability to feel pleasure in normally pleasurable activities
Fr anhédonia+ ('without pleasure')
Animadvert
criticise or censure; speak out against
L animadvert-ere ('to notice or remark on a subject')
Antanaclasis
a literary trope whereby a single word is repeated, but in 2 different senses (for effect, a common form of punning)
Gk antanáklasis ('reflection'; 'bending back')
Antelucan
pre-dawn
L ante ('before') + luc ('light')
Antemundane
existing before the creation of the world
L ante ('before') + Fr mondain ('of this world')
Antipudic
covering one's private parts
anti + L pudendum ('genitals'; shame')
Apodysophilia
feverish desire to undress (a form of exhibitionism)
origin unknown
Appurtenance
accessory associated with particular lifestyle, eg, luxury
OFr from L appertinere ("belong to")
Aptronym§
the name of a person which neatly matches or is amusingly appropriate to their occupation or character (eg, possessor of the highest-ever recorded IQ, Marilyn vos Savant; a Russian hurdler by the name of Marina Stepanova)
neologism, purportedly coined by US columnist Franklin P Adams
Archimage
great magician, wizard or enchanter 慄♂️
New Latin from Late Gk archimagus
Aristarch
a severe critic
after Aristarchus of Samothrace, a Greek grammarian, (2nd BC)
§ the concept of aptronym gives legs to the theory of nominative determinism which hypotheses that people tend to gravitate towards jobs that fit their surname, eg, a BBC weather presenter with the name Sara Blizzard ️
With hundreds and hundreds of feature films being churned out of Hollywood every year, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise too much when two separate production companies, unrelated to and independent of each other, find themselves working on a version of the same subject at the same time. Nonetheless it does seem something of an oddity, or at least a novelty, when it does occur, which isn’t very often in the history of cinema.
Source: pastposters.com
At least three instances of identical subjects being simultaneously made into features spring to mind. Who doesn’t know that the mythical or semi-mythical (depending on your point of view) English hero of Medieval fable and legend, Robin Hood, has been the subject of American and British feature films almost too many times to count? Ever since the early days of silent movies the silver screen (and later the TV screen) has been awash with iterations of Robin and his Lincoln green-daubed coterie of “Merry Men” locking horns with the Sheriff of Nottingham, Sir Guy of Gisborne and other assorted knaves and villains. But in the year 1991 moviegoers got two Robin Hood sagas🄰 to choose from, a big budget Hollywood number, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner in the eponymous role. In a film stolen by Alan Rickman’s outrageously over-the-top, campy Sheriff of Nottingham🄱, apple pie American Costner’s non-attempt as an appropriate English accent was a talking point of the film. The behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt was that his initial plan to try to pull off a passable English accent was vetoed by the director (‘Actors who gave up on accents halfway through a movie’, Ben Falk, Yahoo, 13-Nov-2020, www.uk.movies.yahoo.com).
Flashy ‘Prince of Thieves’ vs gritty, shadowy ‘Robin Hood’
The other 1991 RH vehicle, simply entitled Robin Hood, a UK production, was a smaller scale, more modest affair than ‘Prince of Thieves’. The two filmic versions—Hollywood vs Britain, Kevin Costner vs Patrick Bergin—were expected to go head-to-head in a battle at the box-office, but this was averted when the producers of the UK Robin Hood decided to send their version straight to cable (Fox) TV.
A surprising lack of rivalry existed between the two concurrently-working production teams. Because a number of the shoot locations were reasonably close to each other (Buckinghamshire, Cheshire, West Yorkshire, North Wales) there was a good bit of collaboration, eg, crew swaps between each movie’s SFX and stunt teams (‘The Surprise Cooperation between 1991’s two Robin Hood films’, Dan Cooper, Film Stories, 09-Apr-2021, www.filmstories.co.uk).
🏹 🏹 🏹
𝔻𝕦𝕖𝕝𝕝𝕚𝕟𝕘 ℍ𝕒𝕣𝕝𝕠𝕨𝕤: ℂ𝕒𝕣𝕠𝕝 𝕧 ℂ𝕒𝕣𝕣𝕠𝕝𝕝
𓃯𓃯𓃯
Two films about Hollywood’s original “Platinum Blonde”
1965 saw the release of two biopics about Jean Harlow, star Hollywood actress and screen sex symbol of the 1930s, both were titled simply Harlow. The first, a Magna Distribution Corp TV biopic starred Carol Lynley in the titular role and the second, from Paramount released five weeks later with a budget more than double. Carroll Baker played the Thirties sex siren. Magna and Paramount subsequently countersued each other alleging unfair competition. Both movies were critical and box office failures with nary a good word to say by anyone about either of them…DVD Talk summed them up as “two smutty movies” with little resemblance to the real Jean Harlow (‘Harlow (1965) v Harlow (1965)’, www.realtoldmovies.blogspot.com).
𓃭𓃭𓃭
Dual Doomsday message
The third concurrent double act on the screen has the most interesting relationship. In 1964 Hollywood made two Cold War-inspired films with a storyline about the US military launching a Doomsday bomb aimed at the Soviet Union. The tones of the respective movies are diametrically opposite however, Dr Strangelove is a farce and satire, comically lampooning the absurdity of the global nuclear standoff, whereas Fail Safe is a grimly serious dramatic thriller which plays it very straight. Dr Strangelove director Stanley Kubrick was alarmed to discover that Sidney Lumet was making a near identical movie…so concerned was Kubrick that Fail Safe with its similar content might undermine his pet project he got the production company Columbia Pictures to buy the distribution rights to Lumet’s film in order to delay its release for nine months. The wash-up from this head-start was that Dr Strangelove did far better business at the box office than the similarly themed Fail Safe and is the much better-known of the two movies today.
Images: Columbia Pictures
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🄰 there were actually three Robin Hoods in the works simultaneously at that time. The third RH intended to have Liam Neeson in the role ended up being canned prior to production starting
🄱 as one critic summed it up, “While Costner had been robbing from the rich, Rickman had been stealing the movie“, ‘Behind-the-scenes trouble during ”Robin Hood”’, Garth Pearce, Entertainment Weekly, 21-Jun-1991, www.ew.com
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 dark satire Dr Strangelove is a classic of the genre which comically probes the collective anxieties triggered in the West by the Cold War at its height in the early 1960s. Kubrick hammers home the utter absurdity of the prevailing nuclear standoff between the US and the Soviet Union and the consequential existential threat to the planet from the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and “Doomsday bombs”. The movie’s plot involves the unilateral unleashing of a preemptive strike on Moscow by a deranged US Air Force general and the Pentagon’s shoddy attempts at “management” of the crisis.
Sellers as Dr Strangelove
˚
Kubrick and his film co-writers Terry Southern and Peter George give us three dangerously over-the-top, lunatic fringe characters – two gung-ho hawkish military types, generals Turgidson and Ripper, and the eponymous “Dr Strangelove”𝟙. The central figure in the nuclear nightmare scenario, Dr Strangelove (played by Peter Sellers), is a former German Nazi technocrat turned US strategic weapons expert and scientific advisor to the US president Merkin Muffley (also Sellers). Strangelove is creepily sanguine about the prospect for humanity post-nuclear Holocaust, expanding on his vision of a 100-year plan for survival (for some)…a male elite ensconced in an underground bunker where they can sire a selective breeding program with a plurality of desirable females [‘Dr Strangelove (character)’, Kubrick Wiki, www.kubrick.fandom.com].
Wernher Von Braun (Photo: Mondadori via Getty Images)
˚
Strangelove a composite of various personagesThough characterised by caricature and satire, the film’s three wildest characters are recognisable among the actual political, military and scientific figures of the day in America. The heavy Middle European accent of Dr Strangelove, his authoritarian-Nazi mannerisms and regular references to “Mein Führer”, has led some observers to conclude that the character was based on German aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, instrumental in the Nazis’ V-2 rocket project and after 1945 in the US designing space rockets for NASA (a view given countenance by one of the screenwriters Terry Southern). Others have added émigré Hungarian scientists John von Neumann and Edward Teller as models for Strangelove. Both men worked on the Super-bomb projects (A-Bomb, H-Bomb, C-Bomb) for the US government in the 1940s and 50s, and both were rabidly anti-communist and anti-Russian [P.D. Smith, Doomsday Men (2007)]. Teller in particular shared a number of Strangelove’s traits, eg, volatile nature, Soviet-fixated and obsessed with bombs, possessed of a prosthetic limb. It’s probably a reasonable bet that the there was something of the personality of all three men in Dr Strangelove, but other individuals were also sources of inspiration for the character.
Herman Kahn (Source: Alchetron)
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A Megadeath influencer from RANDAnother real-life figure widely associated with the Strangelove character is Herman Kahn, who was a physicist and military strategist with the RAND Corporation𝟚. Kubrick got the idea of a “Doomsday Machine” from Kahn whose 1960 book On Thermonuclear War posited the possibility of a winnable (sic) nuclear war. Kahn has been described as a “Megadeath Intellectual” with his robust insistence that the dangers of nuclear war were exaggerated (this also accords with the outlier position of General Buck Turgidson – see below)𝟛.
Gen. Jack Ripper (Photo: Columbia Pictures)
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Military madnessMaverick general in the Strategic Air Command Jack D Ripper (played by Sterling Hayden) is gripped by the all-consuming communist conspiracy hysteria. His belief in the loony notion that the Soviets have been fluoridating American water supplies to pollute the “precious bodily fluids” of Americans leads him to initiate a H-Bomb onslaught on the USSR without consulting the Pentagon. Ripper’s wild rhetoric and blustery style has been compared to Robert Welch, the rabid anti-communist founder of the ultra-conservative and reactionary John Birch Society. Ripper’s loopy claim about Soviet water contamination echoes Welch’s baseless anti-fluoridation allegations (‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying’).
Gen. LeMay (Image: Mort Kunstler / Stag)
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“Expendable dead”
Gen. Buck Turgidson (played by George C Scott) was largely modelled on four-star air force general Curtis LeMay𝟜. Turgidson is an unrepentant war hawk who wants to escalate Ripper’s nuclear attack on the Soviets, justifying it with the outrageous claim that it will result in only “limited” casualties from the ensuing superpower war, which in his estimate equates to 10 to 20 million dead! Like Turgidson LeMay danced to the beat of his own drum, he was well disposed towards a preemptive strike on the Russians and vociferously advocated nuclear strikes on Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis and on North Vietnam during the Indo-China War.
Gen. Turgidson (Scott) in the War Room (Columbia Pictures)
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The actions and statements of the clearly psychotic Ripper and morally reprehensible Turgidson convey insights into the level of paranoia gripping the real-life military commanders in the climate of the nuclear arms buildup in the Sixties. [Fred Kaplin, “Truth Stranger than ‘Strangelove‘“, New York Times, 10-Oct-2004, nytimes.com].
Fail Safe (1964)
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Footnote: Satirical Dr Strangelove v Serious Fail SafeIntriguingly, at the same time Kubrick was making Dr Strangelove there was a separate film in the works also about an American nuclear attack on the USSR. Fail Safe dealt with the same subject but as a straight-up drama. In this second film about nuclear Armageddon the trigger to the catastrophic event however is not rogue generals but a technical glitch. Strangelove’s equivalent morality-free scientist character in Fail Safe is Professor Groeteschele (played by Walter Matthau) who draws similar comparisons with Herman Kahn.
𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝟙Dr Strangelove is broadly based on George’s novel Red Alert (1958), although the character of Dr Strangelove doesn’t appear in the novel
𝟚mimicked in Dr Strangelove as the BLAND Corporation
𝟛another Strangelove comparison is Henry Kissinger…suggested by a shared “eerie poise, lugubrious German accent and brutally pragmatic realpolitik” [Gary Susman, ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’, Time, 11-Feb-2013, www.entertainment.time.com]
𝟜although behaviourally the Ripper character (“cigar-chomping, gruff-talking”) also resembles LeMay’s style
SUCH is the fixation in the West with everything Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, the story of the Third Reich’s dramatic rise and fall is just so familiar to everyone that it seems like we all have our own little piece of the megalomaniacal German dictator. Hitler is the most talked about/written about public figure of the 20th century. The obsession with Hitler and the Nazis since the end of the Second World War, now into its eighth decade—in cinema, in television dramas and documentaries, in popular literature, in scholarly dissertations and books from academe, in popular culture, in social media—is not only not abating but on the upsurge if anything🄰.
Hitler the demagogue in full flight (Source: Correo.com)
It seems as if every aspect, every scintilla, of the Nazi regime and every chapter of Hitler’s life, before and after attaining power, has been turned over, sifted through and scrutinised diagnostically to the nth degree. One explanation for the blanket coverage is the sheer volume of available material on the subject. We might not have the personal letters exchanged between the Führer and his mistress Eva Braun and we know that the existence of the Hitler Diaries was an outrageous sham fiction, but the Nazis, unlike other mass misery-inflicting, totalitarian regimes, left behind a plethora of filmic, photographic and written documentary evidence, to enable a compelling picture of the nature of the Third Reich to be pieced together [‘Why are we still fascinated by Hitler?’, John Jewell, Journalism, Media and Culture, 11-Sep-2013, www.jomec.co.uk].
Pages from the fake Hitler Diaries (Source: Times of Israel): though palpably bogus it’s “discovery” only fuelled the Nazi mania
Why does Hitler and Nazism continue to exercise this central role in the thinking of so many people? This question has continued to exercise the minds of international scholars, historians, political scientists, not to mention the average punter, ever since the 1940s.
The fact that the Third Reich remains relevant to our contemporary society—illustrated in a number of ways and forms—is a factor that keeps Hitler and his extreme right cronies in the forefront of peoples’ consciousness. There is the moral objectionableness of the Nazi regime per se. The nature of the regime was horrifically egregious to a degree that is sui generis, and the catastrophic consequence of its rise as a world power, total global war and mass destruction, stands as a lesson and a reminder for all nations of what happens when a hitherto cultured and advanced, democratic nation loses its moral compass and goes madly off the rails .
Source: Times of Israel
Hitler and the Nazis were not your ordinary garden variety mass murderers…when you weigh up the mega-scale and severity of the Nazis’ atrocities its hard to escape the conclusion that Hitler personified absolute evil. He and his vilified movement represent a moral abyss. Moreover, Hitler and by association German Nazism is the yardstick by which we measure the very essence of evil! Whenever someone or some institution acts in a brutal manner which we find anathema we tend to reach by reflex for the Nazi card (it might be prompted by something as everyday basic as an encounter with overbearing officialdom or a neighbourhood bully). As Roger Moorhouse put it, these “simple stereotypes (have made the term ‘Nazi’) part of the cultural furniture” [‘Why is the Public so Obsessed with the Nazis?’, Roger Moorhouse, History Today, Vol. 1, Issue 3 (Mar 2020), www.historytoday.com].
Der Führer launching the VW, 1938 (Photo: AP)
We are reminded of the magnitude of the Nazis’ criminality whenever the media outs some elderly individual who is accused of having been a Nazi functionary or collaborator and is (sometimes) brought to trial – the most recent, nonagenarian Oskar Groening, “the bookkeeper of Auschwitz” in 2015. At such times Nazism is thrust back into the spotlight once again (assuming it has ever left it)🄱. Then there’s the raft of large corporations who were associated with and in many instances benefitted from the dominance of the Nazi Party in the Thirties and Forties—household names from the business world such as Hugo Boss, Volkswagen, Porsche, Bayer and Siemens—all still operating profitably today.
Although the German state capitulated in May 1945 and the Nazi empire was completely dismantled, the spirit of Nazism didn’t end with WWII. The postwar era has seen a rebirth of the movement in the form of neo-Nazi groups which sprang up across Europe and beyond🄲. Many of these far-right organisations still operate, espousing racist, antisemitic and anti-immigrant views, including in democratic Germany itself (Alternative for Germany – AfG), their continued existence a reminder that the ashes of an abhorrent past are not entirely extinguished.
Neo-Nazi protest march, US (Photo: The Guardian)
Endnote: “The Nazi cinematic universe” Hollywood and European cinema in the postwar era has been awash with Nazi war movies, by far the biggest contributor to the war genre movie. Moviegoers have been assailed with a constant bombardment of films with various Nazi themes and stories…victims of the Holocaust; Allied POWs escaping from Nazi prisons; the Nazis invading Britain, France, Norway, etc; and so – a veritable avalanche of wartime action capers, many borrowing freely from popular fiction to embellish the history with fanciful tales of supposed Nazi plots.
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🄰 a good example pertaining to social media of the Nazi fixation is Godwin’s Law (AKA Godwin’s Rule of Analogies) – it states that the longer an internet discussion goes on, the more likely it is that someone will bring up the subject of Hitler or the Nazis
🄱 this aspect of the Nazi memory does of course have a tangible end-date, given every active participant in WWII war crimes still alive would today need to be nearly 100-years-old or older
🄲 including in Allied countries who had fought against the Third Reich such as US, UK, Australia and France
Film star Errol Flynn was a larger than life character of mythic proportions, on-screen he was an authentic Hollywood legend. But his attention-getting off-screen personal life embellished his aura of notoriety and fame even more than the many Hollywood adventure film roles he played. On the silver screen Flynn embodied the heroic, swashbuckling celluloid figurepar excellence as Robin Hood, Captain Blood, Don Juan, General George Armstrong Custer, Gentleman Jim Corbett and Major Geoffrey Vickers, just some of his many celebrated roles. In his private life—most of it though was pretty public—the rebellious Tasmanian had a legendary playboy reputation for debauched behaviour and manoeuvrable morality…excessive drinking, brawling, drug-taking, wild partying, famously prodigious sexual exploits and a proclivity for underage girls culminating in rape trials. But even before his Hollywood period Flynn’s episodic life in New Guinea and New Britain was an incident-packed cavalcade of adventures that wouldn’t have been out of place in an Indiana Jones movie. Young Errol clearly had a compulsion to try different things, bouncing from one knockabout job to another – shipping clerk to tobacco planter to colonial agent to would-be gold prospector to tour guide, etc. During all this Errol escaped crocodiles and native headhunters, womanised indiscriminately, shot and killed a local for which he was tried for murder and subsequently acquitted. Damningly as well, Flynn was also an absconding serial debtor, an inveterate liar and an alleged slave-trader.
Father & son together
So, given Flynn’s Brobdingnagian reputation, any offspring of his, especially a male, would have a lot to live up to. Flynn’s three marriages produced only one male heir, Sean, born in 1941 to Flynn and his first wife Lili Damita. Almost inevitably as fate would decree it Sean Flynn, 6’ 3”, with a similar athletic build and inheriting Errol’s good looks, did attempt to follow in his far from model pater’s footsteps. Sean got an initial taste of acting in his teens appearing in Flynn Senior’s TV show The Errol Flynn Theatre𝕒. Sean inherited a small sum when his father died suddenly in 1959 and with it enrolled at Duke University but did not complete his degree. The beckoning call from Hollywood or “imitation” Hollywood was not far away.
Son of Errol
The Son of Captain Blood In 1961 the highly predictable happened! Sean was cast as the swashbuckling lead in a sequel of sorts to his dad’s spectacular breakthrough role in Captain Blood which had catapulted Errol into instant, universal stardom in 1935. Son of Captain Blood, an Italian–Spanish–British co-production (with some of the action scenes shot in Spain). The script was penned by Casey Robinson, writer of the original 1935 film. Prior to production the neophyte Sean received instruction in how to fence, fight and fall safely and convincingly on screen from Tarzan actor and stuntman Jock Mahoney𝕓 (Gene Freese, Jock Mahoney: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Stuntman (2013). Unfortunately Sean’s foray into cinematic pirate territory didn’t reproduce the family sparks – as the LA Times pithily summarised the movie, “the old magic isn’t there.”
Sean with Pili…or is it Mili? (Source: briansdriveintheater.com)
Ephemeral B-movie star Though Sean failed to set the screen alight in The Son of Captain Blood he did make a few more minor adventure films in Europe the mid-1960s, such as Duel at the Río Grande (as Zorro), followed by a couple of forgettable Spaghetti Westerns, the second playing opposite a popular Spanish teenage comic duo, Pili y Mili, AKA the Bayona Sisters (Sharp-Shooting Twin Sisters).
The last photo of Sean Flynn (left) & colleague on the day they disappeared (Photo: Perry Deane Smith/MCT/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Frontline Flynn, the Gonzo war photographer When Flynn Junior became bored with acting, perhaps channeling Hemingway more than his father, he took himself off to Africa to work as a guide for safaris and big game hunting. Sean’s final movie was a 1967 French–Italian action picture Five Ashore in Singapore. By this time Sean had taken up a new career as a freelance photojournalist, basing himself in Vietnam with the Indochina war in full swing. This work was much riskier than anything Errol ever tackled in his tumultuous life…Sean went on patrols with the Green Berets, getting shot at by the Viet Cong (being wounded on one occasion), all in the name of getting the best pictures of the raging war𝕔. In 1970 Flynn went to Cambodia to cover the spread of the Vietnam War into that neighbouring country. Sean and another American photojournalist disappeared on 6th April 1970, never seen again, after they ventured into Communist-held territory in Cambodia. In 1984 Flynn was declared dead in absentia, his exact fate remains a mystery but most think that the two Americans were executed by either North Vietnamese guerrillas or the Khmer Rouge.
Sean Flynn on patrol (Photo: Tim Page)
Sean’s willingness to repeatedly put himself in the path of extreme danger in the Vietnam conflict led some observers to conclude that the combat photographer harboured a “death wish”. Certainly, Sean seemed to have inherited Errol’s reckless gene, always looking to push the envelope without regard for self. Both father and son seemed to be guided during their lives by a Byronic impulse, their lives inextricably linked to the romantic and the tragic (Jeffrey Meyers, Inherited Risk: Errol and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam (2002).
𒈝𒈝𒈝𒈝𒈝𒈝𒈝𒈝
𝕒 hosting this British anthology series was one of the jobs the former matinee idol had to resort to after his Hollywood film career took a nose dive
𝕓 who had earlier stunt-doubled for the older Flynn
𝕔 Flynn was one of a group of Vietnam War “Gonzo” photographers including Tim Page and John Steinbeck IV who were committed to going anywhere, putting themselves into extreme risk situations to get the best combat photos
1964 was the year the Beatles made their first world tour. The year they transformed from a UK/West German phenomenon to a global sensation. It was, to obviously understate it, a very busy year for the band. Two of the very many international places the Liverpool lads performed at that hyper-hectic year were Hong Kong and Sydney. The venues in both locations played by the Four Moptops—as is the case with many of the venues they played—no longer exist.
The Beatles without drummer Ringo Starr⌧ touched down at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong in early June of ‘64 and booked into a suite recently vacated by the President of Indonesia in the President Hotel in Kowloon. The band only stayed in the British crown colony for a couple of days while they played two concerts at the Princess Theatre (130 Nathan Road, Tsim Sha Tsui) on the 9th June…long enough though for Beatle Paul and road manager Neil Aspinall get themselves bespoke tailored suits made up in 24 hours.
Note concert date, incorrectly printed as 10-06-64 (Source. ha.com)
The Princess Theatre (above), built in the early Fifties, was better known for screening first-run flicks than teen-hysterics pop concerts. On the bill supporting the Beatles was a New Zealand group, the Māori Hi-Five. Instrumental backing for the headline performers was provided by Sounds Incorporated. The concerts were surprisingly not a sell-out, basically because tickets were priced exorbitantly high, the equivalence of a full week’s wage for the average Hong Kong worker (the best seats fetched HK$75).
The Beatles didn’t find the smallish, old-fashioned venue very vibe conducive and McCartney remarked that the band’s performance at the Princess was pretty flat accordingly. The full complement of Beatles came back to Hong Kong in 1966 on their Far East tour, but only for a stopover on route to the Philippines where the performers and their handlers ran into trouble with a capital T❈❈.
Ownership of the Princess Theatre changed hands in 1970 and the building with theatre seating for 1,722 was demolished in 1973 to make way for a new hotel.
Early boxing bout at the Old Tin Shed (Source: Nat. Lib. of Aust.)
Next destination after Hong Kong for the Beatles was Sydney Airport for a three-week tour of Australia and New Zealand. Sydney’s allotment was six concerts over three nights (18–20 June) at Sydney Stadium in Rushcutters Bay, a venue affectionately known as the “Old Tin Shed”, and hitherto the arrival of Beatlemania probably better known as a boxing stadium. At that time the Stadium was the city’s only large-capacity concert venue. Again, as they did in Hong Kong, the Beatles bedded down close to the concert venue, at the Sheraton Hotel, Potts Point.
Supporting the Beatles on that tour were several local (trans-Tasman) artists including Johnny Chester, Johnny Devlin and The Phantoms, along with Sounds Incorporated who had made the trip from Hong Kong with the Beatles.
Jimmy N, all alone at Melbourne Airport, end of the fairytale
By now Ringo sans tonsils had rejoined the quartet in time for Sydney and Jimmy (or Jimmie) Nichol was unceremoniously cast off and sent home, abruptly closing the door shut on his 15 minutes of fame…it was all downhill in the music caper from there for the Ringo stand-in, less than a year later poor Jimmy was forced to declare himself bankrupt.
Source: ha.com
After some initial hesitancy from audiences the Sydney Stadium concerts were all massive sell-outs with frenzied young women the most conspicuously vocal of fan attendees. Seeing the band in Sydney seemed comparatively more affordable than in Hong Kong, Tickets started at 15s & 6d, ranging up to £1, 17s & 6d.
Boxing matches and rock ‘n roll concerts at Rushcutters Bay are long a thing of the past. In 1970 the six decades old-stadium on the corner of Nield Avenue and New South Head Road closed and was demolished in 1973 to make way for the construction of the Eastern Suburbs Railway.
After Sydney the Beatles headed across the Tasman, taking most of their Australian support acts with them, to shake up the hitherto seemingly hebetudinous youth culture in New Zealand. Just like in Australia, mass turnouts of fans posed the same crowd control problems for Kiwi authorities and level of teen-generated frenzy at the concerts in the four main NZ cities made for deja vu.
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⌧ stuck back in a London hospital with tonsil trouble and substituted by previously unknown drummer Jimmy Nichol
❈❈ see earlier blog on this site ‘Beatles Not For Sale: Public Enemy # 1 in the Philippines’, March 2022
Bibliography
‘The Beatles arrive in Hong Kong’, The Beatles Bible,www.beatlesbible.com
‘Beatle Place: Hong Kong, Princess Theatre‘, FAB4tracks, www.fab4tracks.home.blog
‘Meet Jimmy Nicol, the forgotten Beatle, stand-in drummer for Ringo’, Craig Cook, The Advertiser, 11-Jun-2014, www.adelaide now.com.au
Anyone who grew up in the golden age of milk bars in Australia, from the 1940s to the 1960s, will have a memory of or an association with these erstwhile hubs of suburban and small town social life…for many of that vintage it’d be hanging out inside with friends, indulging in their favourite flavoured milkshake, ice cream or other sweet tooth delight. My own fond recollection is of salivating over chocolate malt sundaes with nuts and taking turns at playing (or tilting) the pinball machine in the back corner of the shop. This treat was an exhilarating antidote to the aftertaste of having spent the preceding six hours toiling away in school confinement.
B&W 4d Milk Bar with mechanical cow & Red Cross-like symbol
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They were such an integral institution during my salad days that I was under the assumption that milk bars had been around forever. In fact they only surfaced in Australia for the first time in the early years of the Depression. The first bonifidé milk bar is generally considered to be the Black and White 4d. Milk Bar which opened its doors at 24 Martin Place, Sydney, in 1932𝕒, it’s conception was the idea of a Greek migrant to the Antipodes, Joachim Tavlaridis, who had Anglicised his name to Mick Adams. Mick had visited the US and had drew on the American diner/soda parlour concept that was flourishing in the US for his inspiration (including American menus, ice creams and chocolate). The distinguishing feature of the Black and White Milk Bar was its singular purpose, it exclusively sold just sodas and milkshakes (in the iconic silver-coloured metal milkshake cups with actual fruit in the shake). Mick was an early entrepreneur in the field, later adding Wollongong, Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane shops to his milk bar “empire”. (‘1932: Australia’s first milk bar’, Australian Food Timeline, www.australianfoodtimeline.com). Mick Adams and other Greek-Australian small businessmen like him were the pioneers of the milk bar trade in Australia…typically the shops operating as open-all-hours family businesses, cf. postwar migrant Italians in the vanguard of delicatessen culture in Australia𝕓.
Golden Star Milk Bar, Perth (Photo source: M. Coufos)
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Greek cafes with a large dollop of Hollywood glitz The Greek owner-operators in Australia added glamour to their milk bars by infusing the decor with an vibrant American feel…gleaming chrome, neon illumination, plush leather chairs, mirrors, curvilinear Art Deco interiors, soda fountain pumps, snazzy uniforms, American jukeboxes. These early Greek milk bars (and cafés)𝕔 were purveyors of American dreams along with confectionery and sugary flavoured chilled beverages. Macquarie University history academic Leonard Janiszewski describes the agency of the early milk bars as “a kind of Trojan horse for the Americanisation of Australian culture” (‘The story of Australia’s Greek cafes and milk bars’, ABC Radio, Conversations (broadcast 02 May 2016). The milk bar caught on like wildfire—by 1937 there were around 4,000 in Australia, with names like “Olympia”, “The Orion” and “The Paragon”—as they did across the Tasman in New Zealand where the milk bar is known as “the Dairy”.
Milk bars passéBy the 1970s the heyday of the Australian milk bar was well and truly past its use-by-date. Faced with an inability to compete with supermarket chains and multinational-owned petrol stations plus high rents, milk bar closures (together with that of the community corner store) became an increasingly common sight. 7-Eleven-style convenience stores started to pop up everywhere across suburbia to fill the void (‘Remembering the Milk Bar, Australia’s Vanishing Neighbourhood Staple’, Matthew Sedacca, Saveur, 18 January 2018, www.saveur.com).
Olympia, tea and milkshakes (Source: Daily Mail Australia)
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One Greek milk bar that did manage to defy extinction for much longer than most was the Olympia Milk Bar in the inner-Sydney suburb of Stanmore. Taken over by the Fotiou brothers in 1959, the Olympia under surviving brother Nick achieved a kind of local iconic status in recent years for its anachronistic novelty…open late, and always dimly lit, ancient chocolate bar wrappers plastered all over, a yesteryear-looking shop locked in a time warp. The Olympia somehow survived to 2018, until the Council decided to close down the dilapidated milk bar.
Postscript: Green plaque fiascoAttempts since 2017 to commemorate the Black and White Milk Bar as “the world’s first modern milk bar” with a green plaque have met with a roadblock. The plan had been to place the plaque on the original site of the proto-milk bar in Martin Place, Sydney, now the ANZ Tower. The spanner in the works has been the overseas corporate owner of the building who has steadfastly refused to allow the plaque to be mounted on the structure. The matter remains deadlocked with the City of Sydney Council unable to find an alternate, close-by location acceptable to Mr Adams’ relatives (“‘Disrespect’: Frustration grows over plaque for world’s first modern milk bar in Sydney”, Adriana Simos, Greek Herald, 05-Oct-22, www.greekherald.com.au).
Green plaque in limbo!
۵۵۵۵۵۵۵۵۵۵۵۵۵۵
𝕒a staggering 5,000 customers fronted up on the opening day!
𝕓Mick’s concept of a modern milk bar was later replicated overseas in various places within the Commonwealth and Europe
𝕔the nouns “café” and “milk bar” seem to be interchangeable in describing these Greek-Australian run establishments
When human rights principles buttressed by international law took root across the globe, slavery in both its traditional and modern forms became ever more of a dirty word in First World societies like the US. Little wonder then that faced with the stark realities of such a repugnant and vilified practice staining their own country’s history, some might seek to lay a euphemistic guise over the unpalatable nature of the institution.
⊳ Texas, 1835-36 (Source: texashistory.unt.edu)
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“Involuntary relocation”, denial, whitewashing?
One topical example of this involves Texas and its long and vexed relationship with slavery. A conservative group of Texas educators in 2022 proposed that schoolchildren should be taught about the state’s history of “involuntary relocation”, which enables teachers to neatly avoid the dreaded word “slavery” altogether (on the pretext that references to slavery might be too confronting for the tender ears of small children). Needless to say this attempt “to blur out what actually happened in that time in history” has been heavily criticised by progressive historians (‘State education board members push back on proposal to use “involuntary relocation” to describe slavery’, Brian Lopez, The Texas Tribune, 30-Jun-2022, www.texastribune.org)ⓐ.
⊳ The Alamo, San Antonio (Photo: age fotostock)
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Texas creation myth
Conservative groups in Texas have good reason to try to bury the spectre of slavery as the institution is very much connected to the state’s most sacred historical symbol, the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. The traditional Alamo story—brave American freedom fighters against the far superior forces of tyrannical México, their heroism inspiring the (Anglo-led) Texians under Sam Houston to achieve independence—is ingrained on the consciousness of all Texans and all flag-waving Americans…it is in fact a story central to the creation myth of Texas. The defenders of the Alamo, so the conventional Anglo narrative goes, made the ultimate sacrifice for liberty. The heroic Alamo myth has been reinforced by fictionalised screen versions of the Alamo’s leaders: Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and William Travis come across as courageous martyrs for the Texians’ cause (largely thanks to Walt Disney and John Wayne)…in reality they were far from lily-white, Crockett was a slaveholder and an unsuccessful politician who resorted to buying votes, and his glorified death at the Alamo as portrayed on the screen—going down valiantly fighting “evil” Méxicans to the very end—was a fiction (first-hand accounts verify that Crockett surrendered and was executed). Bowie and Travis were both slave traders and the morally dubious Bowie also made a living through smuggling. Hardly 19th century model citizen stuff (Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson & Jason Stanford, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, (2021)).
⊳ The Alamo according to the John Wayne movie
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Slaveholder rebellion, Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism?
Similarly, the traditional view of why the American colonists revolted—because they were supposedly being oppressed by a tyrannical regime in Mexico City—is at variance with the inconvenient facts. American colonists came to Mexico’s Tejas with the purpose of making money through from cotton, the only viable cash crop in the territory at that time. For this to happen, black slave labour was a necessityⓑ. Once the Texians declared their independence in 1836, the centrality of slavery in the new republic became even more apparent with the institution being enshrined in the Texas constitution. Numbers of slaves in the republic grew exponentially, doubling every few years in the period from 1836 to 1850ⓒ. By 1860 slaves made up nearly one-third of the state’s population. As James Russell noted, rather than being “martyrs to the cause of freedom” as claimed, the defenders of the Alamo could more truthfully be tagged “martyrs to the cause of freedom of slaveholders”(‘Slavery and the myth of the Alamo’, James W. Russell, History News, 28-May-2012, www.historynewsnetwork.org)ⓓ.
꧁꧂꧁꧂꧁꧂
Slavery, mythology and the Civil War
When I went to school in the 1960s I learned that slavery was the cause of the American Civil War, clear and simple, the Southern states wanted to retain the practice and the Northern states wanted to end it. But in the US itself there has been no such consensus. As early as 1866 the defeated South had cobbled together its own, alternate narrative for America’s most costly war.
⊳ The post-bellum myth portrayed a society of happy, docile slaves and benevolent masters as conveyed in the classic film Gone With The Wind
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“Lost Cause of the Confederacy”
Southerners depicted the Civil War as a noble “lost cause”, romanticised its soldiers (Robert E Lee the chivalrous Christian gentleman) and constructed a pseudo-historical myth that the war was all about states rights, not slavery, the South was just protecting its agrarian economy against Northern aggression, trying to defend its way of life against the threat posed by the powerful industrial North. In reality, when South Carolina, the first of the Southern states to secede, did so in 1860, it complained that the national government had refused to suppress the civil liberties of northern citizens (ie, its failure to halt Northern interference in the South’s slave industry) (Finkelman, Paul (2012) “States’ Rights, Southern Hypocrisy, and the Crisis of the Union,” Akron Law Review: Vol. 45: Iss. 2, Article 5.
Available at: https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/akronlawreview/vol45/iss2/5).
Confederacy based on the principle of white supremacy
The Confederacy’s (CSA) philosophical underpinnings rested on an unquestioned sense of white supremacy and black subservience, bolstered by pseudo-scientific ideas of race gaining traction at the time. Suffrage was a right afforded only to CSA’s white males. The South fought to safeguard its “right to hold property in persons”, and to do so in perpetuity (‘The Confederacy Was an Antidemocratic, Centralized State’, Stephanie McCurry, The Atlantic, 21-Jun-2020, www.theatlantic.com).
⊳ Slaves in the cotton field (Artist: John W Jones)
𖧧𖧧𖧧𖧧𖧧𖧧𖧧𖧧𖧧𖧧𖧧𖧧
ⓐ it didn’t go without notice that this development is occurring at a time that Tejanos (Texas Latinos) are poised to become the majority in the Lone Star state
ⓑ the government for its part had originally invited American migrants to Méxican Texas to populate the vast province and to counter the indigenous peoples, especially Comanches and Apaches, who freely raided and plundered Méxican settlements and ranches
ⓒ fulfilling the founder of Anglo Texas Stephen F Austen’s prediction that the Texas Republic would become “a slave nation”
ⓓ Burroughs et al dismissed the Texas Revolt as “a sooty veneer of myth and folklore”
ROTUND, sardonic Anglo-American auteur Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre comprised over 50 feature films but he was no stranger to unfinished or unrealised film projects. Starting with what was meant to be his directorial debut in “Number 13” (AKA “Mrs. Peabody”) in 1922, for the next 57 years Hitch was at the helm for upward of twenty aborted films. Hardly any of the score of unmade movie projects ever got beyond the pre-production stage[1̲̅].
Alfred’s hitch in making ‘Hamlet’⟡There were various reasons why the films never got made…difficulties in location (Walt Disney, the man, not the corporation, wouldn’t let Hitchcock film ”The Blind Man” at Disneyland supposedly because of his disapproval of Psycho); Hitch’s dissatisfaction with scripts[2]; Hitchcock’s ”Titanic” project was waylaid by a string of obstacles including objections from the British shipping industry; some projects were vetoed by producers and studio heads; Hitchcock couldn’t get the female lead he wanted for ”No Bail for the Judge” (Audrey Hepburn)[3]. Hitch’s great success with The 39 Steps prompted him to try to direct film adaptions of other John Buchan novels featuring spy Richard Hannay, eg, ”Greenmantle”, however he couldn’t afford the rights to the book. He even wanted to direct Shakespeare, his enthusiasm to do a modernised version of Hamlet (with Hitchcock favourite Cary Grant cast as the “Melancholy Dane”) was ultimately blunted by the threat of a lawsuit from a writer who had already penned a modern-day version of Shakespeare’s great tragedy (‘Every Unmade Alfred Hitchcock Movie Explained’, Jordan Williams, Screen Rant, 12-Jun-2021, www.screenrant.com).
The final project pursued by Hitchcock was ”The Short Night”—based on a novel of the same name by Ronald Kirkbride and on the exploits of real-life double agent George Blake—which was to be Hitchcock’s red-hot crack at making a “realistic Bond movie”. In an interview with John Russell Taylor for Sight and Sound Hitchcock outlined the story’s great allure for him: ”It’s a situation that fascinates me: the man falls in love with the wife of a man he’s waiting to kill. It’s like a French farce turned inside-out. If he sees a boat coming across the bay with the husband on it, he can’t hop out of the back window, he has to wait and do what he has to do. And of course he can’t take the wife, who loves him, into his confidence. And so the whole romance is overshadowed by this secret, which gives it a special flavour and atmosphere. That’s what I want to convey”.
Poster for the movie that never materialised⟡Originally conceived in the late 1960s (after two uninspiring earlier Hitchcock Cold War espionage features Torn Curtain and Topaz were coolly received), the director scouted locations in Finland. Hitch wanted the “real deal”, Sean Connery, to play the Bondesque double agent protagonist, the director must have been keen on the film…while the project was still parked in pre-production, without anything about the movie being nailed down, Hitch had a poster designed for the movie (‘Alfred Hitchcock’s unrealized projects’, Wikipedia). Alas, scripts were again a problem, Hitch churned through a bunch of writers and a number of different treatments in the search for the ‘right’ script, but an even bigger problem was Hitch himself! Now 80, Hitchcock‘s health was failing badly, he was unfocused and listless on the set[4], he simply was no longer up to it. Towards the end of 1979 Hitchcock quietly retired from the business and ”The Short Night” project was shelved for good.
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[1̲̅] Hitchcock managed to shoot only a few scenes of “Mrs. Peabody”,before a lack of budget brought the production to a close
[2] the prickly and demanding Hitchcock had fractious relationships with his scriptwriters, he even fell out with his favourites like Ernest Lehman (over Family Plot, contributing to Hitchcock ditching “The Wreck of the Mary Deare” and starting work on the espionage classic North by Northwest
[3] Hitchcock’s uber-creepy obsessiveness with many of his leading ladies (Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren, Ingrid Bergman among others) has been well documented, eg, Spellbound by Beauty, Donald Spoto (2008)
[4] ”moving in and out of senility” in the view of the last screenwriter parachuted into the project, David Freeman
🇬🇧🔫🇬🇧 THE phenomena of James Bond in both book and movie form was meant to be purely escapist entertainment, bereft of the slightest pretension that they were anything remotely cerebral. Interesting then that Bond has gleaned so much serious academic enquiry and analysis over the years. A sample of articles on JSTOR reveals a feast of scholarly entries on the subject of James Bond — “Shaken, Not Stirred Britishness: James Bond, Race, and the Transnational Imaginary”, “The Marketable Misogyny of James Bond“, “Paradoxical Masculinity: James Bond, Icon of Failure”, “Why James Bond Villains Prefer Post-Soviet Architecture”, “The Spy Who Loved Globalization”, ”How safe do you feel?: James Bond, Skyfall, and the Politics of the Secret Agent in an Age of Ubiquitous Threat”, and so on it goes.
The James Bond film franchise is certainly sui generis among English-language movie series. October 5 this year marked the 60th anniversary of the introduction of James Bond to cinema screen audiences (Dr No, 1962), and the cinematic sequence remains as yet unbroken, notwithstanding ”the elephant in the room” of last year’s No Time To Die in which the indestructible James Bond actually dies! Virtually all other elongated movie series have ultimately reached a natural (or unnatural) termination point – even the long-running, prolific and increasingly unimaginative Carry On comedy series ran out of steam by the Eighties 🄰.
Ian Fleming ‘Casino Royale’, 1st 007 novel (Image: bondfanevents.com)
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Box office El Dorado Over a six-decade period the 25 movies🄱 constituting the James Bond industry made by Eon Productions (Broccoli and Saltzman’s production company) have earned a total somewhere north of US seven billion dollars. Boosted undoubtedly by the mass popularity of screen Bond🄲 the James Bond spy novels written by former WWII naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming, on which the cinema franchise is based, have themselves racked up sales of more than 60 million copies.
If you came anew to the Bond movies looking for a healthy dose of gritty social realism based on the world of espionage a la John LeCarre, you’d be sadly disappointed. The franchise’s entries are all about fantasy and high-adventure escapism. Unlike the shadowy cloak-and-dagger characters that the real world of spies and secret agents (apparently?) inhabit, James Bond 007 in his public persona is an open book, he doesn’t use a fake name, he doesn’t try to disguise his appearance or furtively hide in dark corners. He’s direct, brash, brutal and recklessly undisciplined in his actions and antics, with a propensity to be easily distracted from the assignment at hand by the happy prospect of a spot of horizontal folk-dancing.
Though wildly successful at the box office over an extraordinarily long shelf life, James Bond is not everyone’s cup of tea. An early critic Judith Crist described the series’ first vehicle Dr No as “an updated comic strip of the Fu Manchu school, fast moving, faster shooting, utterly fantastic”. JB has been pilloried by feminists for his unrepentant chauvinism—especially in Sean Connery and Roger Moore’s interpretations of the character—and four decades of “Bond Girl“ objectification of women. The backlash against JB’s misogyny compelled producers to tone down the blatant sexism in the most recent incarnation of the most famous of all British secret agents played by Daniel Craig. Bond has also been excoriated as a “thug trained to wear a tuxedo”…007’s “license to kill” green-light unleashes the agent’s deep predilection for perpetrating extreme, lethal violence in cold blood.
Predictable Bondery Then there’s the plots! The storylines are more than fanciful…James Bond’s arch-villains hatch mind-bogglingly ludicrous schemes which suggest that they have been maxing out on the Kool-Aid – such as nuking Fort Knox’s gold reserves; constructing a massive capsule-gobbling rocket to capture the space crafts of both superpowers; detonating explosives along the Californian fault lines to destroy Silicon Valley; ad nauseum. The franchise has also been lambasted for being BORING! Agent 007 has been called out for living “the same story over and over” (Elizabeth Winterhalter). Repetition is a constant motif…we see Bond right on cue rendezvous with a typically crotchety “M” to be briefed on his latest world-rescue mission, flirting with Miss Moneypenny in their regular tête-à-tête ritual, and getting a rundown on the very latest weapon gadgetry from an equally irascible “Q”. In every second scene, just about, JB is pursued by a posse of miscellaneous henchmen only to miraculously escape certain death by the barest of margins every time. The movies almost invariably end in the same formulaic fashion: Bond infiltrates the arch-villain’s impregnable lair, triumphs over the likes of Blofeld and Goldfinger and numerous assorted henchmen, and finishes by bedding his leading lady on an inflatable dingy, in space, a balcony, etc and signing off to “M” with a corny double entendre🄳.
Bond with “Jaws”, larger than life henchman-turned-ally
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Cultural relevance to the West Some Bondphiles have an altogether different take on this Groundhog Dog trait in James Bond of repeating the same basic plot structure infinitum…they see it as a key ingredient of the franchise’s success: ”the simplicity of the plot arch allows the films to seamlessly transcend and become culturally relevant to the audience” (‘What is the Secret of James Bond’s Eternal Success?’, www.undandy.com). Another explanation of James Bond’s allure contends that the fictional MI6 spy instantly resonated with Western audiences in the climate of the Cold War, being seen as a kind of antidote to the prevailing morass of the social order (especially in the US). 007’s talent as a fixer of “global crises” casts him in the guise of a saviour salvaging the world from an inevitable downward spiral into chaos and discord (‘James Bond and America in the Sixties’, Drew Moniot, JUFA, Vol.28, No.3, 1976). Moniot also attributes JB’s popularity in America to the existence of a vacuum of real-life heroes in 1960s society, the emergence of 007, a mythological hero who was invincible, fulfilled that psychological need at that time.
British Bond and foreign Blofeld
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Vicarious🄴 charm of the bon vivant lifestyle Part of the appeal lies in the character of James Bond. Fleming visualised 007 as fit, sensual, with superior grey matter and a technical wiz, a model of “red-blooded heterosexuality”. He also emphasises Bond’s “Britishness” in the novels, JB’s 100% success rate on missions and in the romance stakes presents Bond as representing the “Best of British”… Fleming’s idea of an antidote to the sad realities of a declining Britain denuded of empire. Leaving aside the ever-present mortal danger to his very existence, Bond leads “a ridiculously good lifestyle (by) any man’s standards”🄵(Undandy), his appearance is akin to a “GQ cover model”; an endless supply of the best alcohol (which the MI6 agent knocks back with worryingly frequency); the best cars (trademark Aston Martin DB5); his apparently irresistible sex appeal to women (‘Bond by rules’, Tim Brayton, 2012, www.alternateending.com). As crime doyen Raymond Chandler neatly put it, “Every man wants to be James Bond and every woman wants to be with him”.
Tropeville central Aside from JB’s personal magnetism, the series’ catalogue of recurring tropes helps to cement the franchise’s appeal. Familiar ingredients include the default opening sequence depicting 007 in action through the prism of a gun barrel; over-the-top hi-tech gadgets; a smorgasbord of diverse exotic locations; a brisk cocktail of action stunts (car chases, boat chases, ski pursuits, etc); the centre-stage presence of the Bond Girls and of a megalomaniacal arch-villain mastermind; all eagerly anticipated by James Bond‘s legion of rusted-on fans. Also adding value and lustre to the films are the high quality title-songs – like the utterly unforgettably iconic Goldfinger theme, and not far behind that Shirley Bassey classic, Live and Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever, and You Only Live Twice, etc, etc.
Bond, tapping into the zeitgeist of the day One (insider) view on the longevity of James Bond comes from those at the helm of the multi-billion dollar franchise today, Cubby Broccoli’s daughter Barbara and his step-son Michael Wilson. Broccoli’s heirs attribute the success to the family having managed to keep hold of the franchise’s reins throughout its entire history, and to JB’s and the franchise’s adaptability, 007 being able to change with the times🄶 (‘Why James Bond Has Endured For So Long, According to the Franchise Producer’, Joshua Meyer, Film, 8-Dec-2021, www.slashfilm.com).
Footnote: James Bond, books v films
The early James Bond movies kept pretty faithful to the plots of Ian Fleming’s crime thrillers, however as the series went on, the screen adaptations bore increasingly less resemblance to the novels (eventually everything except the Fleming titles were jettisoned). Other differences relate to the protagonist himself, 007’s proclivity for terminating with extreme prejudice (and without a skerrick of compunction) the various henchmen aligned against him increases tenfold from the books to the movies, as does his appetite for sexual conquests whilst on the job. Another point of departure from the novels for the films is the lack of story continuity from one picture to the next (eg, Bond in a grieving state at his wife’s murder at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service doesn’t get a mention in the follow-up Bond feature).
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🄰 probably the closest to it is the Star Wars franchise (1977 to the present)
🄱 there was in addition one non-Eon Bond film, Never Say Never Again, a Taliafilm production
🄲 even Bond’s snobbish swipe at the Beatles in Goldfinger at the height of Beatlemania in 1964 didn’t dent his appeal with the public
🄳 with one or two notable exceptions…On Her Majesty’s Secret Service ends with the death of Mrs James Bond and No Time To Die ends with the death of 007 himself
🄴 in creating the overachieving superspy Fleming was in fact acting out his own vicarious impulses…endowing 007 with the sort of ideal, action-man hero lifestyle that the writer dreamt of
🄵 one writer characterised it as “elegant lifestyle porn” (Brayton)
🄶 one example: in the rebooted Skyfall (2012), the film and JB concern themselves with the very real and very contemporary threat of the ubiquity of the internet and cyber-terrorism
Mention the topic of classic European comic strips and the names Astérix and Tintin spring instantly to mind. Previously I delved into the stupendous comic book institution that is Astérix the Gaul in the blog ‘The Astérix Series: High Comic Art with a Few Dark Shadows’ (19 November 2022). The Tintin comic strip shares with Astérix the same high pedestal of best-selling popularity, enduring iconic status and attendant cult following. Tintin is a boy reporter❶ of unspecified age with a distinctive (carrot) blond quiff of hair and trademark plus-fours who embarks on numerous adventures to exotic locations accompanied by his companions: a white wire fox terrier Snowy (Fr: Milou), Captain Haddock the good-hearted dipsomaniac seafarer and Professor Calculus, a genius if absent-minded inventor. Since the publication of the first Tintin comic book in 1929 total sales of Tintin books have clocked up more than 200 million copies, with an appeal that reaches both adults and children❷.
Hergé with a cinematic clone of his fictional boy hero࿏
Graphical style
Tintin’s creator wrote and published under the name of Hergé (real name: Georges Remi)…the Belgian cartoonist pioneered a distinctive drawing style for comic strips which later became known as Ligne claire (“Clear line”) (coined by Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte in 1977). This comprises ”uniform strong lines, flat saturated colour” and “clearly delineated shapes and volumes” (‘The Afterlife of Tintin’, Jenny Hendrix, LA Review of Books, 27-Dec-2022, www.lareviewofbooks.org).
Blighted by propaganda, racism and chauvinismTintin was instantly and massively popular right from the cartoon’s onset—boosted by Hergé’s innovative use of speech bubbles, an American invention unfamiliar to the European comic scene at the time—despite this the comic has garnered its fair share of flak as has Hergé, the author. The first three books, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in America, in particular drew the ire of critics. The first with its unsubtle anti-communist message was much disparaged as “cheap right-wing propaganda for small children” (Harry Thompson, Hergé: Tintin and his Creator (2011). The Congo and America books were pilloried in some circles for blatantly racist depictions of native populations. The youthful Hergé, swayed by a conservative Catholic upbringing, was very much a creature of the time and his crude depictions of the Black African tribes in particular reflected a prevailing Eurocentric sense of superiority and prejudice. Tintin Au Congo praises the virtues of colonialism and missionaries and expresses a wholly patronising view of the local Africans who are portrayed as primitive, lazy and infantile❸ (‘Hergé’, Lambiek Comiclopedia, www.lambiek.net). Another criticism of the Tintin comics is the charge of sexism, women are almost completely erased from the stories – the one female figure with anything like a steady presence in the books is operatic diva Bianca Castafiore who is portrayed unflatteringly as foolish and imperceptive (Hergé pointedly is on record as saying women have no part in the stories which “are all about male friendship”).
In the early Sixties there were 2 French-made film adaptations of Tintin࿏Other discordant voices against Tintin’s author surfaced during the Nazi occupation of Belgium during WWII. Hergé worked for collaborationist pro-Nazi newspapers Le Petit Vingtième and Le Soir and elements of Anti-Semitism emerged in his presentation of Jews. Unfortunately it didn’t end with the war, Jewish racial stereotypes also reappear in postwar Tintin stories, eg, Vol 714 pour Sydney (‘Flight 714 to Sydney’). A parody by Belgian cartoonist Dubus depicting a captive Tintin begging businessman Rodwell for his liberty (Source: Sydney Morning Herald)࿏
”Kidnapping” a children’s icon?
Since Hergé’s death in 1983 Tintin’s artistic providence and the author’s estate has been rigidly controlled to the nth degree by his widow Fanny Vlamynck and her second husband Nick Rodwell. Hergé’s heirs through their management firm Moulinsart S.A. Moulinsart spearheaded by an unflinching Rodwell have obsessively pursued a crusade, suing everybody who uses Hergé or Tintin’s name or image without their permission. Not content with cracking down on bootleggers, plagiarists and copyright infringers, perversely they have targeted Tintin parodists, students, collectors, fan clubs, comic stores and people auctioning original artwork as well. They even tried to block journalists from taking unauthorised photographs at the Hergé Museum opening event (Lambiek). Individuals subjected to Moulinsart’s trigger-quick lawsuits include a French novelist who reproduced a drawing of Tintin in a book with a print run of only 200 copies and an elderly artist (and friend of Hergé) who painted the image of Tintin on some old bottles (‘Meet Nick Rodwell, Tintin heir and least popular man in Belgium’, Julien Oeuillet, Sydney Morning Herald, 30-Oct-2015, www.smh.com.au). Bart Beaty, a professor of comics at the University of Calgary, described Moulinsart as being “relentless in the protection of the Tintin copyrights even to the point of discouraging academic study of the Tintin books” (‘Moulinsart Lost A Legal Case At The Hague Over Tintin Rights’, Comics Reporter, 08-Jun-2025, www.comicsreporter.com). Other detractors including Hergé’s nephew have pointed out how under Moulinsart‘s direction “a hero dedicated to children has become the lynchpin of a profit-minded machine that is stifling the enthusiasm of Tintin admirers“ (‘Fans of Tintin cry foul’, Stanley Pignal, Financial Times, 08-May-2010, www.ft.com).
Moulinsart have mined the full depths of Tintin’s merchandising potential, many spin-off items priced at the luxury high-end
Genootschap (Source: www.hergegenootschap.nl/)࿏A small win for Tintinphiles and Tintinologists
The pattern shifted a few years ago when Moulinsart and Rodwell’s attempt to prosecute a small Dutch fanzine of Tintin Hergé Genootschap (Hergé Society (or Fellowship)) for including Hergé’s strip in its newsletter backfired badly❹. In a surprise twist a Dutch court in 2015 ruled that a 1942 contract between Hergé and his publisher Ediciones Casterman presented by the defence gave Casterman, NOT Moulinsart, the rights to publish the 22 Tintin albums. The right “to exploit extracts of the books and pictures” however still belong to the Hergé heirs (‘Tintin and the Copyright Mystery, Carolina Sánchez, Lady Trademark, 06-Oct-2015, www.ladytrademark.blogspot.com).
Fmr Australian prime minster Kevin Rudd satirised as Tintin
Endnote: Imitating Tintin
Parodies and pastiches satirising Tintin have been around since the 1940s. When Hergé compromised his reputation by publishing (Tintin) in a collaborationist-run Belgium newspaper” in war-time, it provoked a satire of Tintin, ‘Tintin au Pays des Nazis’ (‘Tintin in the Land of the Nazis’). Other parodies featuring Tintin include as a disaffected working class English youth who turns to political radicalism; ‘Tintin in Lebanon’ and ‘Tintin in Iraq’, embroiling Hergé’s “golden boy” in the intractable maze of Middle East conflicts; ‘Tintin in The Shire’, Tintin as a stereotypical Sydney bogan, etc.❺
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❶ though he acts more like a detective, investigating crimes and mysteries and at times carries a pistol and even makes arrests
❷ according to Tintin’s publishing house the books are marketed for “the youth between 7 and 77 years old” demographic
❸ to his credit Hergé did redress some of the crude and xenophobic representations of the earlier books in Le Lotus Bleu (‘The Blue Lotus’, 1934-35) in which Hergé depicts China and the Chinese people with more accuracy and evenness (Lambiek)
❹ Rodwell’s attempt to sue a French artist who did mash-ups of Tintin and Edward Hopper paintings was also thrown out of court with the judge determining that the artist’s works were legitimate parodies of Tintin which was fair game
❺ “most of these parodies would probably have remained obscure curiosities, if it weren’t for Moulinsart’s active attempts to hunt the makers down, giving them more publicity” (Lambiek)
“The year is 50BC. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely . . . One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders.”
𓆸✱✝✱✝✱✝✱✝𓆸
The “indomitable Gauls” in question are the tribe of Astérix, pint-sized Gallic hero of the long-running eponymous French comic strip with its legion of dedicated fans. Like all classic literary modes, be they of a pop cultural kind or more highbrow, the Astérix comic can be read on more than one level. On the surface the impossible but highly comical escapades of its principal cartoon characters (Astérix and his sidekick Obélix) are much loved and savoured by aficionados across the globe. On another level some observers have detected various allegorical meanings delving within the cartoon series.
Astérix’s debut, 1959
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The Astérix comic strip (in France known as a bande dessinée – literally “drawn strip”) made its debut in 1959 in the Franco-Belgian comic magazine Pilote under the the strip title Les aventures d’astérix. The Astérix phenomenon that followed that unassuming beginning was the result of a long and harmonious collaboration between writer René Goscinny and illustrator Albert Uderzo.
Getafix, Druid & grandmaven
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What a Gaul! The basic plot of the comic is that Astérix and his XXL-sized friend Obelix reside in the sole remaining village in Gaul which has not been conquered by the might of the Roman war machine. The reason enabling its continued freedom is that Astérix has access to a magic potion supplied by the village’s Druid Panoramix (in English translations: Getafix) which gives him temporary, superhuman strength (Obelix is already endowed with extraordinary strength courtesy of having fallen into the cauldron of magic potion as a baby). The two companions, usually accompanied by Obelix’s little dog, Idéfix (English: Dogmatix), spend their time roaming around the countryside of Armorica (modern-day Brittany) bashing countless numbers of heads, mostly of the hapless and unsuspecting Roman legionnaires. In many of the books the magic potion-fuelled duo venture out on escapades to lands both far and near from Gaul.
Dubbleosix in ‘The Black Gold’
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Undisguised punnery Much of the humour in Astérix revolves around Goscinny’s and translator Bell’s (see below) use of puns and in-jokes which abound in the character names, Astérix, the comic’s central protagonist is of course “the star” (for which “asterisk” is another word); the monolithic-like Obelix is a carter and shaper of menhirs which are also known as “obelisks”; Bell translated Obelix’s dog’s name as…Dogmatix – what else! A spy Druid in Astérix and the Black Gold with more than a passing resemblance to Sean Connery is given the name Dubbelosix.
Nomenclature of the dramatis personae When sketching out the framework of their fictional First century BC Gaul Goscinny and Uderzo decided on a formula for the names of each of the groups of characters. The Gauls’ men’s names would end in -ix (the inspiration for this was the real-life Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix who revolted against Julius Caesar’s Rome in 52BC), so we have Vitalstatistix (chief of Astérix’s tribe) and his brother Doublehelix; Assurancetourixൠ (English: Cacofonix) (bard and scapegoat of the village); Geriatrix (oldest member of the village); Unhygienix (village fishmonger); Cétautomatix (village smith) (Eng: Fulliautomatix); Saingésix (wine merchant) (Eng: Alcoholix), etc. etc. The Romans mostly are identified by names with the suffix “-us” (although “Julius Caesar” (Fr: Jules César) appears as a fictional character under his own name)…as the “bad guys” the Romans all tend to have derogatory or demeaning names, eg, Pamplemus (Arteriosclerosus); Cadaverus; Caius Fatuous; Caius Flebitus …you get the idea!
‘Astérix and the Normans’
Goscinny employed suffix-identifiers for other national groups in the books. For instance, the names of the fearsome Norman tribesmen were all given -af endings, so we get lots of joke names like Psychopaf, Riffraf, Autograf, Nescaf and Toocleverbyhaf, ad tedium…basically anything preposterous enough Goscinny and Bell could think of that would raise a laugh. The device extends to Britons (-ax)(usually puns on taxation, eg, “Valueaddedtax”), Germans (-ic), Greeks (-os) and Egyptians (-is).
‘Astérix and Cleopatra‘
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Stereotyping and racial tropes
One of the preoccupations of the Astérix comics and the source of much of its humour is ethnic stereotyping. Uderzo and Goscinny delight in lampooning the perceived national traits of different groups of Europeans. The English are depicted as phlegmatic, love to drink lukewarm beer and tend to speak in a chipper, upper-class way. The Iberians (Spanish) are displayed as being full of pride and tend to have choleric tempers. The Normans (Vikings) drink endlessly and fear nothing. Goths (the Germanic tribes) are disciplined and militaristic, but are not unified and fight among themselves. This all reads as a bit problematic especially in this age of political correctness. In the case of the Spanish the generalisations are compounded by Uderzo’s unflattering drawings of them. But the most disturbing element of the books’ stereotyping of races exposing the creators to considerable criticism relates to the bigoted portrayal of Black Africans. Slaves in the series are always Black and sometimes they have have bones through their hair and other cliches (eg, Astérix and Cleopatra). Uderzo also introduced the character of a caricatured Black pirate (Baba)—notoriously depicted with exaggerated racial features, enormous, full red lips—who appears in several books including Astérix in Corsica and Astérix and Obélix All At Sea. For this reason American cartoonist Ronald Wimberly has described the Astérix comics as “blatantly white supremacist” in nature and thus unsuitable for children (’Race and Representation: Relaunching Astérix in America’, Brigid Alverson & Calvin Reid, PW, 19-Aug-2020, www.publishersweekly.com). In recent versions of the comic edited for the US market the overt racialist profiling has been toned down a bit (‘Asterix Comes to America‘, Jo Livingstone, Critical Mass, 17-Jun-2020, www.newrepublic.com).
Black pirate lookout in ‘Astérix in Corsica’
Bravura and the village women in revolt
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Uderzo contra feminism Similarly, Astérix has attracted criticism for its negative portrayal of women in the strips. Asterix and the Secret Weapon for instance introduces a female bard Bravura from Lutetia (Paris) who incites the women of the village to revolt against their husbands and the patriarchy. ’Secret Weapon’ unsubtly parodies feminism and gender equality. By 1991 when the album was published it might have been hoped that Uderzo would have expressed a more enlightened and nuanced perspective on sexual politics, but he and Goscinny were very much products of their time so it probably shouldn’t surprise that the artist/storyteller was still implacably fastened on to his old ideals of male chauvinism and hegemony.
The ludicrous amount of violence dished out in Astérix—the heroic Gallic duo are constantly bashing Roman skulls senselessდ—has also opened the comic strips up to criticism from some quarters. In 2007 the Swiss-based organisation Defence for Children International echoed Wimberly’s sentiments, saying that Astérix, Obélix & Co set a bad example for the young by constantly fighting with everyone, never at peace with their neighbours…adding that the comic series was “too monocultural” in its obsession with “invaders” (The Guardian).
‘Astérix and the Great Crossing’: Astérix & Obélix tango with native Americans – more sterotyping of ”the other”࿏࿏࿏
With Goscinny’s untimely early death in 1977 Uderzo took on responsibility for the Astérix scripts as well as the artwork. Uderzo solo added another nine comic books to the Asterix oeuvre, although he retained the late M Goscinny’s name on the covers as co-creator. The Astérix‘s scripts written by Uderzo were not in the same class of storytelling as Goscinny’s—lacking René’s incisive wit and punchiness—but even so, the Uderzo-penned comic albums still proved bestsellers, such was the lustre of the Astérix brand.
Enter the new generation of Astérix comic artists By 2011, Uderzo in his eighties, was ready to pass the Astérix baton on to two cartoonists who he had been mentoring. The new team, Jean-Yves Ferri (writer) and Didier Conrad (illustrator), having got the master’s nod of approval, produced Astérix and the Picts in 2013, followed by four more Astérix albums thus far. Ferri and Conrad have even introduced new characters with contemporary and topical resonance, eg, Confoundtheirpolitix, a muckraking journalist, spoofing Julian Assange (Astérix and the Missing Scroll). Unfortunately, since becoming custodians of the world’s most famous cartoon Gaul, Messieurs Conrad and Ferri have missed the opportunity to redress the earlier derogatory depiction of Africans drawn by Uderzo. Instead Conrad tactlessly reprised Uderzo’s Black pirate lookout character in 2015 in ‘Missing Scroll’) with the same racist depiction of Baba with bulbous red lips.
‘Astérix en Bretagne‘
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Astérix for AnglosTranslations into English of the iconic comic books began in 1969. Anthea Bell, in collaboration with Derek Hockridge, was the gifted translator who worked with the full sequence of Astérix creators. Bell’s distinctly English expressions and puns as translated won much praise “for keeping the original French spirit intact” (‘Anthea Bell’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org). Bell also shared with Goscinny a delight in the humour of historical anachronisms which filter through the various books.
The Astérix industryAs at 2021, with the publication of the 38th Astérix comic book Astérix and the Griffin, the books have sold a staggering combined total of 385 million copies worldwide. They have been translated into 111 languages and dialects including Afrikaans, Welsh, Hebrew, Occitan, Arabic, Urdu and even Latin. Astérix adaptation to the screen comprise 10 animated films and four live action films (of which only Mission Cleopatra merits any accolades at all). There’s the usual accompaniment of merchandising of course and even a theme park, Le Parc Astérix, north of Paris. The comic books’ following spans the globe, in their heartland, France and Belgium, in Germany, Britain, just about everywhere they have been in vogue with the notable exception of the US.
What’s the secret of the Asterix comics’ success?To M Uderzo the endearing nature of Astérix’s popularity remained a puzzle that he couldn’t fathom, best left to others of which there has been no shortage of opinions aired over the years. Clearly, the character of Astérix is deeply rooted in French popular culture. Two-thirds of the French population had read at least one Astérix books according to a 1969 national survey (‘Going for Gaul: Mary Beard on 40 years of Astérix’, The Guardian, 15-Feb-2002, www.amp.theguardian.com . Some observers put the appeal down to the escapism the comics represented – providing “a world of joyful innocence born in the aftermath of (world) war” ‘My hero: Asterix by Tom Holland‘, The Guardian, 26-Oct-2013, www.amp.theguardian.com . This sentiment is echoed by those who have called the series ”the most brilliant antidote to (the catastrophe of) Vichy in French literature”. Many French people identify with the petit Gaul as a symbol of rebellion, standing up for the “little guy“ against Goliath. To them Astérix’s steely determination to defy the juggernaut of Roman power mirrors the impulse in the hearts of many modern-day French citizens to hold out and not succumb to the all-conquering globalisation driven by the United States⚘. While the French feel an inextinguishable pride in Astérix (“simply French”), to many outsiders the comics personify what they take to be the French character, such as the trait of “infuriating, occasionally endearing contradictions” (John Thornhill, Lunch with the FT: Asterix the national treasure’, Financial Times, 24-Dec-2005, www.financialtimes.com). Another take on Astérix’s popularity beyond the borders of France is that the idea of an heroic “native freedom-fighter” defying Rome struck a resonant tone in countries which had once been subjected to the tyranny of the Roman Empire (Beard).
Footnote: In Astérix in Belgium, the 24th volume in the series໒꒰, village chief Vitalstatistix, Astérix and Obélix head off to Belgae to tangle with an equally fierce tribe of Belgian Gauls. As usual, the comic is saturated with cultural references, Goscinny weaves in a series of gently digs at the Belgians, spoofing famous national celebrities like Walloon actress/singer Annie Cordy and cyclist Eddie Merckx. The comic’s battle scene is a riff on the historical Battle of Waterloo and Uderzo draws in a cameo appearance by fictional detectives Thomson and Thompson from Belgium’s most honoured cartoon strip Tintin (‘Asterix v24: “ Asterix in Belgium”’, Augie De Blieck Jr, Pipeline Comics , 25-Jul-2018, www.pipelinecomics.com).
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ൠ some sort of pun on “insurance”
დ although it should be noted that no one is actually killed in the comics
⚘ shared by Uderzo himself who said in 2005, “the more we are under the sway of globalisation, the more people feel the need to rediscover their roots”, which is what he hoped connecting with France’s ancient Gallic past via his cartoon creation might help achieve
໒꒰ Goscinny died during the comic’s production and this was also the last Astérix that Albert Uderzo’s artist brother, Marcel, worked on
❝I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream❞
~ the words of a popular 1927 novelty song…prompting numerous later references to the refrain dotted throughout American popular culture, eg, ads for Hersey’s ice cream; a prison chant in Jim Jarmusch’s cult 1986 indy film Down by Law; etc., etc.
‘Down by Law’.
🍦🍦 🍦 🍦 🍦 🍦
Source: truelocal.com.au
For anyone growing up in suburban Melbourne or Sydney or one of the larger conurbations in 1960s and 1970s Australia, the familiar strains of the “Greensleeves” tune permeating the local neighbourhood in Spring or Summer-time could mean only one thing – the approach of a Mr Whippy ice cream van. Within seconds queues of animated parents and children would form in anticipation of indulging in their favourite soft-serve frozen ice delight.
Like most popular commercial trends the mobile ice cream van was an import to these shores. The archetype Mr Whippy emerged from the English Midlands city of Birmingham in 1958, starting with a modest six vans and copying the formula, look and business plan of America’s Mister Softee ice cream trucks (see below). By 1961 the homegrown Mr Whippy fleet on the road had extended to 150 vehicles. Mr Whippy came to Australia when company founder Dominic Facchino shipped six pink and white Commer Karrier vans out to Sydney in 1962. Two years later Mr Whippy vans landed on the shores of New Zealand. By this time Facchino had sold the business which was eventually acquired by industry giant Unilever. By the 1970s the Mr Whippy franchises down under were sold to private operators who varied the vans’ styling and colours (‘1962 Mr Whippy arrives in Australia’, Australian Food TimeLine, www.australianfoodtimeline.com.au). The NZ Mr Whippy operators switched vehicles (to Isuzu Elfs) as well as colour schemes (a common choice became orange and white with a yellow stripe)𝟙.
The ubiquitous Mister Softee (Photo: Elena Kadvany)
1956 was Year Zero for the mobile ice cream vendor. The first soft whip ice cream truck to venture onto the streets of suburbia✱ was the brainchild of two Irish migrants to America, William and James Conway, living in Philadelphia. The initial ice cream run was prompted by St Patrick’s Day celebrations with the two brothers selling green-coloured ice cream in cones to the local West Philly community𝟚. The single van quickly morphed into a franchise business under the name “Mister Softee”, with headquarters in Runnemede, New Jersey, since 1958. At the height of the Mister Softee phenomena (late 1960s) they were operating 1,000 trucks across 15–18 American states. Today, the Mister Softee operations, still owned today by the Conway family, has scaled back the number of trucks as a consequence of both the growth of competing business and a national drop in the consumption of ice cream𝟛 (‘A Brief History of Mister Softee’, Daniela Galarza, Eater, 17-Jul-2015, www.eater.com).
Marchetti Bros ice cream van, 1980s Glasgow
A deadly serious side to the business
The sensory pleasures, the nostalgia, associated with the iconic ice cream van masks a darker chapter in its history. Glasgow in the UK in the 1970s and 80s was blighted by the growth of vast housing estates in its peripheries. With massive unemployment and a lack of infrastructure servicing these estates, the city’s ice cream van vendors experienced a boom in business𝟜. The success elicited interest from Glasgow’s organised criminal gangs who sought to muscle in and use the trade’s popularity to sell drugs, bootleg commodities like cigarettes and even weapons. Rival gangs vied for a piece of the action, resulting in turf wars. The gangs employed intimidation and violence to coerce van drivers and owners into cooperation…in a notorious incident one local driver, Andrew Doyle, refused, with fatal consequences. Doyle worked for one of the “competing ice cream factions” (Bloomberg) in Glasgow, Marchetti Bros. After a failed attempt to kill Doyle on his ice cream van route, a rival gang succeeded in murdering the recalcitrant driver along with five members of his family in an arson attack on their home. Two men were convicted and sentenced, but were ultimately released on appeal after spending two decades in prison.
Mr Whippy Clones (Photo: 9Nine.com.au)
Generic Mr Whippy and the Clone Cone Vans
The popularity of Mr Whippy unsurprisingly has spawned numerous imitators wherever the original has had a retail impact. So much so that the name “Mr Whippy” today is a generic term for any ice cream truck selling the familiar soft-mix in single cones. Trademark holders of the name—such as Mr Whippy P/L/Franchise Food Co in Australia—have attempted to make small, independent operators in the field comply with their exclusive right to use the name and the playing of ‘Greensleeves’. Consequently, many imitators resort to using names that echo the famous original, eg, “Mr Softy”, “Mr Soft Serve”, and “Miss Whippy”, whilst continuing to offer up the standard menu of soft-serves, sundaes and milkshakes.
NYC’s ice cream turf war
Across the Pacific the premier US soft-mix seller Mister Softee has been embroiled for years in an acrimonious turf war with an upstart competitor. A disgruntled former employee started his own rival ice cream truck business which infringed Mister Softee‘s trademark by blatantly copying it’s blue and white colour scheme, cursive lettering, mascot and distinctive jingle, not to mention ripping off its name. Mister Softee took the copycat “Master Softee” to court, forcing it off the road. Master Softee responded by rebranding itself as “New York Ice Cream” and allegedly launching a campaign of intimidation against Mister Softee drivers (‘As Summer Begins, NYC’s Soft-Serve Turf War Reignites’, Stefanie Tuder, Eater, 30-May-2017, www.eater.com). For its part, Mister Softee hasn’t been entirely squeaky clean in the affair, it resorted to hiring private eyes to spy on the movements of New York Ice Cream’s drivers.
early Good Humor vending truck (Source: mahoninghistory.org)
Endnote: From special treats for the elite to mass consumption item
The ice cream van made the frozen confectionary more accessible to more people but it wasn’t responsible for its popularity with the public. The treat itself goes way back. Imperial rulers in antiquity such as Alexander the Great and Roman emperors Nero and Claudius were known to have a sweet tooth for snow and ice concoctions flavoured with honey and nectar and other fruits. “Cream Ice” desserts graced the royal dinner tables of English and French monarchs in the 1600s. US presidents Washington and Jefferson were big fans (‘The History of Ice Cream’, IDFA (International Dairy Foods Association), idfa.org ). In the 20th century the imposition of prohibition in America—together with technological improvements—more efficient refrigeration and better ice cream production methods—were a catalyst for the widespread popularising of ice cream in society…the nationwide ban on booze and bars left a void which ice cream and ice cream parlours rapidly filled (‘Why Ice Cream Soared in Popularity During Prohibition’, History Channel, 28-Jan-2021, www.history.com).
Photo: Manchester Evening News
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✱ not necessarily the first mobile ice cream vehicle though…in 1920 Harry Burt in Youngstown, Ohio, began selling his “Good Humor” chocolate-coated ice cream bars from Ford trucks equipped with rudimentary freezers
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𝟙 in New Zealand the franchise passed into the hands of ice cream manufacturer Tip Top
𝟚 William and James at the time worked for Sweden Freezer, a leading manufacturer of ice cream machines in the US
𝟛 to about 350 franchisees and 625 trucks
𝟜 the ice cream vendors also were purveyors of household staples (milk, bread, newspapers, etc) for the estates’ residents
When it comes to Hollywood horror cinema, zombies, vampires and Frankensteinish monsters seem to take pride of place in the Pantheon of celluloid supernatural “baddies”. The werewolf𝟙 on the other hand has tended to be find himself assigned to a backseat in the screen horror caper, often consigned to a secondary role, “second banana” to some other omnipotent monstrous brute, eg, as in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)𝟚.
Wolfmania ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ Cinema-goers got their first glimpse of werewolf horror in 1935 in a Universal film called Werewolf of London…storyline: an English botanist contracts lycanthropy after being bitten by a Tibetan werewolf, result, werewolf terror in London. But it was another Universal movie six years later, The Wolf Man𝟛, written by Curt Siodmak, that elevated the werewolf character to horror flick star status, making its star Lon Chaney Jr into an icon of the genre. The Wolf Man is a sympathetic “portrayal of a man who has no power over the raging beast within “ (Jim Vorel, ‘The 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time’, Paste, 5-Oct-2022, www.pastemagazine.com.
Chaney & Evelyn Akers in ‘The Wolf Man’
The premise in The Wolf Man and its various spin-offs is that the main character (Larry Talbot) is transformed into a therianthropic (hybrid) wolf-like creature, the result of either a curse or a bite or scratch. The film popularised many of the planks of werewolf mythology. The lycanthrope’s metamorphosis is triggered by a full moon; the werewolf is killed only by a silver bullet; the protagonist’s silver-headed walking cane, etc. Although there has been werewolves depicted on the silver screen before The Wolf Man, Chaney’s portrayal was “the incarnation that solidified much of the (werewolf) lore as we know it today” (‘The Werewolf Classic That Defined A Genre’, Stephanie Cole, Nightmare on Film Street, 28-Jan-2019, www.nofspodcast.com).
The Wolf Man formula was eminently copyable…Chaney reprised his Wolf man role in a sequel Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, described as Universal’s first “Monster Mash”𝟜 (‘Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man’, TV Tropes, www.tvtropes.org), and then in 2010 there was a remake of Wolf Man with Benicio Del Toro in the title role. All three movies are serious flicks, straight-up pure horror movies. Many other Hollywood versions of the werewolf legend however have been out and out comedies or horror/comedies. Box office-topping comedy duo of the Forties and Fifties Abbott and Costello were unenthusiastic about a Monster Mash movie, however the producers wanted to exploit the emerging screen popularity of “Franky” and “Wolfie” – the result: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) (with the Wolf Man thrown into the mix). The movie didn’t radiate much joy with the critics but proved a massive hit with fans, spawning a series of Abbott and Costello horror-themed comedies.
One werewolf comedy-horror flick emanating out of Hollywood that has scored some critical kudos is John Landis’ 1981 An American Werewolf in London 𝟝. The film’s successful blending of comedy and humour and its innovative if grisly makeup made it a cult classic and a box office triumph, returning over ten times its original outlay. More blandly prosaic is Teen Wolf (1985) with Michael J Fox as an average high school kid who shape-shifts into a werewolf. Described as a romantic, coming-of-age fantasy movie, it got mixed reviews but struck gold at the box office, taking in over $US80 million on a budget of just $US1.2 million.
Folklore: Werewolves in the popular psyche⌖ ⌖ ⌖ The werewolf may have been a subject for fun and even derision in the world of cinema, but in past times it has been viewed with total seriousness, especially in Europe. The genesis of the werewolf legend is nebulous, but the notion of a human taking a (malevolent) animal form is millennias old. Depictions of and references to men taking on a lupine appearance goes back to antiquity. From Medieval times folklore-driven fear of the werewolf was common in Europe and led to werewolf panics, especially in areas such as France and Germany which contained large populations of wild wolves (“A German Werewolf’s ‘Confessions’ horrified 1500s Europe”, Isabel Hernández, National Geographic, 13-Oct-2022, www.nationalgeographic.co.uk).
While Hollywood favoured the view that potent curses, wolf bites and full moons were the transformative agents for human to werewolf form, German folk tales from centuries ago reveal that all a man needs to do to turn into a ravaging lupine monster doing the Devil’s work is to don a belt or strap made from wolf’s fur (‘Werewolf Legends from Germany’, edited & translated by D.L. Asliman, www.sites.pitt.edu).
Lycanthropy/witchcraft nexus ⌖ ⌖ ⌖
In the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern era the hunting down and persecution of alleged werewolves and alleged witches to some extent went hand-in-hand. It was not uncommon for people accused of being witches by the church to be vilified for supposedly also being werewolves. The supposed ability of both to “shapeshift” seems to be at the nub of this guilt by association (‘Werewolves and Witchcraft’, Danny Sargent, Llewellyn, 13-Oct-2021, www.llewellyn.com).
London pamphlet (1590), primary source for Stumpf trial
Werewolf of Bedburg ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ If you were outed as a putative werewolf in this age of werewolf hysteria you could expect swift and savage, even barbaric, retribution from inquisitors, witchfinder-generals and other coercive control mechanisms of the state. One of the worst instances came from the Nordrhein-Westfalen region of Germany in the late 16th century. Peter Stumpf (or Peeter Stubbe), an alleged serial killer was accused and tried for werewolvery, witchcraft and cannibalism in 1589. Stumpf’s execution was one of the most brutal recorded – torn apart limb by limb on a wheel, beheaded and his body burned𝟞. Stumpf may or may not have been a serial killer𝟟, what he wasn’t is a werewolf. The wealthy farmer’s “confession” was extracted under torture and there is a suggestion that he might have the victim of political sectarianism. At a time of heightened Catholic/Protestant antagonisms, Stumpf is believed to have been a convert to Protestantism, so it may have been payback (‘Peter Stumpp: The Werewolf of Bedburg’, Darcie Nadel, Exemplore, 17-Aug-2022, www.exemplore.com; ‘Zum Fall Peter Stump’, www.elmar-lorry.de).
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𝟙 Old English: “wer” + “wulf”, literally “man/wolf”
𝟚 not to neglect a raft of others, minor supernatural fiends on the big screen, such as The Invisible Man, The Mummy and Gillman
𝟛 highly commended for its special effects by makeup artist maestro Jack Pierce who had provided FX for earlier classics of the horror genre, Frankenstein and The Mummy
𝟜 a coming together of monsters
𝟝 influential critic Roger Ebert was a dissenting voice on the movie’s merits
𝟞 it was believed that burning was another of the very few ways a werewolf could be killed
Considering how universally popular and well-known Elvis Presley was𝕒, during the entertainer’s heyday there was much conjecture about why “the King” of the music entertainment industry failed to capitalise on his phenomenal record sales by not touring internationally – like virtually every other successful pop and rock music act did. In fact Elvis only left American shores a couple of times during his entire lifetime, once for a tour of duty in West Germany as part of his compulsory military service, and the other briefly to northern neighbour Canada for two shows each in Toronto and Ottawa in 1957, followed later that year by a single performance in Vancouver (Elvis was not accompanied on his Canadian trips by his manager Tom Parker). At the time Presley’s reluctance to journey overseas was attributed by a number of observers to the singer’s fear of flying – notwithstanding the fact that Elvis regularly took domestic flights within the US to shows.
Elvis For Beginners♬ ♬ ♬
Light was shed on the puzzle of Elvis’s non-event international performing career for me many years ago when I was thumbing through a copy of Elvis For Beginners𝕓 one day at a bookshop. The reason for this striking anomaly in the Elvis career path was apparently all about Elvis’ ubiquitous manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker. The ex-carny Parker was notorious for several things, among them his vice-like grip on Elvis’s career; his way over-the-top fee for managing Elvis’ career (25%, later increased to an outrageous 50%); his insistence on Elvis getting a 50/50 cut in songwriting royalties even though Elvis contributed zero to the actual writing of the songs he recorded, and who hasn’t heard about the story of his “exemplary ethics”(sic) long, long before he got his avaricious mitts on the goldmine that was Elvis – the colonel started his business career by painting sparrows yellow and selling them as canaries! But there was a much darker, clandestine side to Parker’s past that explained the curiosity of Elvis’ stay-at-home career. “The Colonel” was not actually “Tom Parker”, an assumed identity he adopted. Parker’s real name was Andreas Cornelius van Kuijk (alternately rendered in some articles as “Kuijk-Dries” or “Kuyk”) and he was born not in West Virginia as he always claimed but in Breda in the Netherlands. Van Kuijk entered the US illegally (probably via Canada) in the late 1920s and took on the assumed name (and identity of a Southerner) after a short stint in the US Army. Altogether quite a revelation! Seismic even for the history of popular music.
“Elvis the Pelvis” and the “Colonel” (Photo: Getty)♬ ♬ ♬
For reasons only known to himself Parker never tried to acquired an American passport, so he remained an alien all his life in America. Without a passport Parker was housebound within the US, and as keeping a tight rein on Elvis was essential to the Colonel Parker business plan, there was no way he’d let his golden egg go off overseas without him. So apart from the brief trip early on to Canada Elvis the entertainment industry’s number one pin-up boy never got to tour the globe and show international audiences his swivelling hips and velvet voice. As a consequence Parker “turned down dozens of offers, totaling millions of dollars, to have his famous client tour the world”𝕔 (Dash).
Breda, Netherlands♬ ♬ ♬
It was van Kuijk’s own relatives back in the Netherlands who first twigged to Elvis’ manager’s grand deception. Van Kuijk’s sister stumbled by chance upon a photo of Andreas in a Belgian magazine. A subsequent visit by Kuijk’s brother to him in America threatened to blow the Colonel‘s cover but Parker managed to hush it all up, for the time being at least. The truth only emerged very gradually after Elvis’ death. The revelation that Parker was actually Dutch doesn’t get a mention in Peter Guralnick’s acclaimed biography of Elvis Last Train to Memphis which was published as late as 1994.
“Colonel” Tom, 1960♬ ♬ ♬
Footnote: The Colonel’s darkest secret? Rumours about Parker’s mysterious past in Holland have floated around for decades. One theory about the reason for van Kuijk’s sudden departure for America—developed from journalist Alanna Nash’s research—is that the Dutchman brutally murdered a grocer’s wife in Breda in 1929 when he was about 20, and thus was on the run from the law. Van Kuijk was first connected to the crime via a tip-off given to Dutch reporter Dirk Vellenga in the 1970s while he was investigating the Colonel’s past (Giles). Evidence of van Kuijk’s culpability is at best circumstantial (he left the Netherlands for the US the same day as the murder) and nothing has ever been proved.
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𝕒 when Presley died in 1977 a Western news crew visited a village in a very remote part of Siberia to discover that uneducated peasants there—without the aid of modern communication devices like the internet and social media (or even TV)—somehow still knew who Elvis was!
𝕓 a book in the Readers and Writers series of documentary comic books (graphic books)
𝕔 such as an invitation from Buckingham Palace for Elvis to perform at the Royal Variety Show in London
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Bibliography
Jill Pearlman, Elvis for Beginners (1986)
’Colonel Tom Parker (1909-1997)’, New Netherland Institute, www.newnetherlandinstitute.org
‘Colonel Parker Managed Elvis’ Career, but Was He a Killer on the Lam?’, Mike Dash, Smithsonian Magazine, 24-Feb-2012, www.smithsonianmag.com
Rosemary Giles, ‘Who Was the Colonel Before He Met Elvis?’, Vintage News, 27-Jun-2022, www.thevintagenews.com
Anyone brought up on a diet of American comics or television since the 1960s would have come across that ultimate icon of juvenile mischief, “Dennis Mitchell”, better known as Dennis the Menace. Fictional Dennis from “Middletown” USA imprinted himself on the public consciousness first as a character in cartoons and comic books from the early Fifties, later as the subject of a popular American TV series (1959-1962), and then as a movie in 1993{a}.
Source: Pinterest
But if you happen to live on the opposite side of the Atlantic and are a similar consumer of comic strip popular culture then you are probably going to be more familiar with another and rather different “Dennis the Menace”. To generation after generation of Britons Dennis the Menace is not American, but a beloved, homegrown comic character who emerged out of a classic Scottish-based comic weekly The Beano in the 1950s.
The coincidence of two identically named sub-adult comic book characters evolving separately and independently has an even more remarkable, almost unbelievable, parallel. The two Dennises debuted as comic strip characters on either side of the Atlantic on the exact same day, 12th March 1951. Which “Dennis“ was conceived first by his respective creator cannot be known, but the two Eureka moments were certainly distinctively different.
Ketcham (1953), not dissimilar to Dennis Mitchell’s father in appearance
Genesis story of Dennis I and II
George Moonie (Britain) and Hank Ketcham (US) were the creators of their respective “Dennises”. For The Beano editor Moonie the idea and the name came to him when he heard the chorus of a music hall song…”I’m Dennis the Menace from Venice” and the name stuck. In American Hank Ketcham’s case his wife was the catalyst when she complained to the cartoonist about their four-year-old son Dennis‘ errant behaviour, describing him as “a menace”.
Source: Beano Studios
Both the British Dennis and the American Dennis have a talent for creating mayhem in the neighbourhood. Physically though they bear little resemblance to each other. Ketcham’s Dennis is a yellow-haired four (or five)-year-old, cherub-like boy with freckles, perpetually garbed in red overalls, whereas the British Dennis–as drawn by cartoon artist David Law—is a ten-year-old tearaway with a thatch of black spiky hair, shown always wearing his trademark red and black striped jumper.
Just WilliamPersonality-wise the two Dennises are also quite a bit different. American Dennis’ mischievous ways annoy the hell out of adults, especially the Wilson’s’ long-suffering next door neighbour Mr (George) Wilson, but this Dennis is affable and basically a well-intentioned if compulsive-obsessive little boy. British Dennis on the other hand is real juvenile delinquent material, his full-on troublemaking antics mark him out as an unreformed and unrepentant bad boy, a hooligan in the making. Dennis can be seen as part of an Anglo tradition of naughty boys in kid’s lit connecting with the likes of famous fictional schoolboy Just William and Horrid Henry , [‘Dennis at 60’, BBC, 07-Mar-2011, www.bbc.com]
Sidekicks
British Dennis’ “besties” are Curly and Pie-Face (fellow “menaces”) but also prominent in the story is Dennis’ girl cousin Hermione Makepeace AKA Minnie the Minx, a rival to Dennis in the carnage creation stakes with a reputation as Beanotown’s “wildest tomboy”. Dennis Mitchell’s friends are the rather nondescript and naively loyal Joey and the feisty Margaret Wade who’s more of a frenemy and occasional nemesis to “The Menace”.
Canine deuteragonists
Boy’s best friend…both Dennises have a dog companion although Moonie/Law’s Dennis’ dog Gnasher—an Abyssinian Wire-haired Tripe Hound with black spiky hair to match its owner—didn’t get to make an appearance in the strips until Issue 1362 in 1968. Dennis Mitchell’s dog Ruff is a dog of a very different proportion, a Briad (a large French sheepdog{b})
Postscript: Bringing Dennis into line with the modern world
The arrival of the UK’s Dennis the Menace strip was a godsend to The Beano, boosting the comic mag’s flagging sales at the time. Today it is still The Beano‘s star vehicle{c} although the editors have had to tone down Dennis and some of his rougher edges. The 21st century Dennis the Menace is less anti-social, his more unsavoury traits such as bullying have been eradicated to conform to modern sensitivities [‘Beano hero: Dennis the Menace turns 70’, Alison Flood, The Guardian, 17-Mar-2021, www.theguardian.com]
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{a} not to neglect several other iterations of Menace-Dennis in TV movies including at least one animation feature
{b} a Briad on the screen at least, in the comic strips Ruff’s breed is not clarified
{c} the British Dennis has also made it onto the TV screen but to a more modest extent than his American counterpart
Gobeithio y gwnewch chi fwynhau eich arhosiad yma.
“We hope you have a pleasant stay in Portmeirion.”
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Image: nytimes.com
British architect Sir (Bertram) Clough Williams-Ellis spent half a century (1925 to 1976) on a pet construction and town planning project in the Snowdonia region of North Wales, handcrafting his ideal of a village from scratch. The eccentric, autodidactic architect with a penchant for wearing knickerbockers called his back country village “Portmeirion”, drawing inspiration for his Welsh labour of love from the Italian Riviera fishing village of Portofino. What Williams-Ellis created was a scaled-down village comprising a picturesque patch-quilt of individual buildings built primarily for decoration, known in the architectural business as follies.
Photo: Pinterest / M Serigrapher
Piecing together the mosaic
Architecturally, Portmeirion is “an eclectic pastiche” (Gruffudd 1965) with stylistic borrowings from Gaudi, the Mediterranean and the Italian Renaissance, from the Arts and Crafts Movement and from Nordic Classicism et al, juxtaposed and intertwined together. Trompe l’oeil windows, Baroque murals, gargoyles, inverted copper cauldron, Classical details, all contributing to a quirky, multi-coloured panorama of buildings with a Mediterranean feel – in North Wales. Williams-Ellis sourced materials from disused estates and ruined castles across the UK for the village. (“Portmeirion Village: Fifty Years Since The Welsh Resort Starred In TV’s Iconic ‘The Prisoner’”, John Oseid, Forbes, 22-Mar-2017, www.forbes.com). Williams-Ellis’s use of salvaged fragments led him to describe his creation as “a home for fallen buildings”.
Reconciling structures with landscape
Williams-Ellis was a champion of preserving rural life, inspiring a Welsh movement, CPRW, guardians of Cymru Wledig…his philosophy applied to architecture was that “the development of a naturally beautiful site need not lead to its defilement”, new buildings, done well, could enhance the landscape (‘Portmeirion: A Passion for Landscape and Buildings’, Rachel Hunt, Gwanwyn, Spring 2018, cprw.org.uk). For the site of his cherished Italianate village William-Ellis choose a “neglected wilderness” which had formerly been part of the Aber Iâ① estate. Over the years the constituent parts of the village took shape – the Citadel (an Italianate campanile (bell tower)), Battery Square, Village Green, Gothic pavilion, Bristol Colonnade, blue-domed Pantheon and statue of Hercules, Italianate landscaped gardens. The Victorian manor from the old estate was transformed into the village hotel. The plan had been to incorporate a 19th century castle, Castell Deudraeth (named after an extinct 12th century castle in the locale), but this didn’t happen in Clough’s lifetime. Since 2001 the castellated building has functioned as a hotel for Portmeirion tourists.
Source: wheretogowithkids.co.uk
Academic architecture hasn’t rated Portmeirion highly, tending to dismiss it as an “idiosyncratic playground of little interest”, a mere “hodge-podge” of differing styles (Manosalva, M.A., 2021. One-man-band: Clough Williams-Ellis’ Architectural Ensemble at Portmeirion. ARENA Journal of Architectural Research, 6(1), p.3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ajar.268). Not that this in any way deflected Williams-Ellis from single-mindedly pursuing his own peculiarly personal architectural vision of a “fantasy village”②… the architect freely admitted to taking what he described as “a light opera approach”, wanting to give people architecture that was pleasurable and fun to behold and enjoy.
‘The Prisoner’ being filmed on site (Source: radio times.com)
Sixties‘ TV spy culture augments the Village’s celebrity and tourism
While Portmeirion’s uniqueness guaranteed its fame and its standing as a niche holiday resort, its selection as the set for a cult 1960’s TV series magnified that fame exponentially. The Prisoner, a Sci-fi dystopian series, created by and starring Patrick McGoohan, was filmed in and around the village in 1966-67. The 17-episode series about a government agent who finds himself mysteriously transported to a beautiful, charming but bizarre community—where for inhabitants, imprisoned betwixt mountains and sea, there is no escape — a community impersonalised to the point where everyone is a number and no one knows who’s in charge. The Prisoner‘s enduring cult status has ensured a constant stream of loyal fans from far and near making the pilgrimage to Portmeirion each year (Covid permitting). The local tourist industry has done its bit to capitalise with a Prisoner souvenir shop, tours of the film locations, etc. The giant chessboard in the square which appeared in the TV show has been (permanently) reconstructed to further cash in on the series’ appeal.
Beatle George visits the Village – “fab!” (Source: North Wales Live)
Endnote: Enticing the rich and famous
A host of celebrities can be numbered among the endless throng of visitors to Portmeirion over the decades…GB Shaw, HG Wells, Bertram Russell, Frank Lloyd Wright③, Brian Epstein, George Harrison, to name but a few. Noel Coward wrote the first draft of his comic play Blithe Spirit during a stay at the seaside resort.
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① Welsh: “ice estuary”
② when his architectural “day job”, designing other people’s houses and buildings in various parts of the UK and Ireland allowed it
③ apparently FLW approved of the architecture of the place
The chances are most folk with a passing interest in words and language have come across the odd Malapropism and Spoonerism in their travels. For these two terms for errors in natural speech (or if you prefer, modes of original linguistic inventiveness) we have the fictional “Mrs Malaprop” and the real life “Reverend Spooner” to thank. Myself, I tend to associate Malapropisms (the accidental substitution of a incorrect word in place of another, usually similar-sounding one) in fiction with Arthur Daley, the small-time, dodgy as-they-get wheeler dealer in TV’s Minder (“From now on the world is your lobster”, the “Arfur” Daley variation on “oyster”) and in real life with former Australian PM Tony Abbott (“the suppository of all wisdom” (should have said “repository”)). Spoonerisms are another type of verbal misstep where the speaker makes a “slip of the tongue”, accidentally transposing the initial consonants of two consecutive words, often with humorous results. One of the most referenced examples is “you have hissed my mystery lecture”, instead of “you have missed my history lecture”.
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Would the latte-sipping, smashed avocado inner city set recognise a Mondegreen, Mumpsimus or Eggcorn when they see one? Probably not, these three linguistic odd fellows are the domain of dedicated language buffs and word nerds. If the ABC conducted a vox-pop in Martin Place “Mondegreen” would likely draw a blank, however the concept itself is a different story…anyone exposed to popular music would have at some point either unknowingly committed a Mondegreen or observed someone else in the act. A Mondegreen is where you mishear or misinterpret a phrase—especially a song lyric but it could also be a line from a poem—with the result that you give it a new and different meaning. I can hear the ranks of the slightly incredulous intoning “I didn’t know there was a word for that!”
Hendrix “excuse me…”
Given the associated factors of diction and high volume noise, Mondegreenisms in modern pop music are legion, one of the most iconic is the misinterpretation by untold number of listeners of Jimi Hendrix’s line, “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” (“Purple Haze”) as “Excuse me while I kiss the guy“. Two more classic confusions warranting honourable mention are The Beatles’ “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes” transformed by an erring ear into “The girl with colitis goes by” (from “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) and Johnny Nash’s “I can see clearly now, the rain has gone”, reinterpreted as “I can see clearly now, Lorraine has gone”. As these examples indicate, where the lyrics come unstuck it’s a fair chance that the culprit is a quasi-hononym.
Coining of Mondegreen: the word (but not the act) originated in 1954 with American writer Sylvia Wright…as a girl listening to her mother readIng a 18th century romantic poem she erroneously heard “Lady Mondegreen” instead of the actual lyric, “layd him on the green”. On being advised of her error Sylvia thought her interpretation “better than the original” and stuck to it, even inserting a character named “Lady Mondegreen” into her published stories.
Incoherent or indecipherable words in a song can be the source of “great storms in a teacup”. The Kingsmen’s 1963 recording of “Louie Louie”—incomprehensibly vocalised by Jack Ely—prompted an avalanche of complaints from outraged parents of teenagers about a supposed litany of obscene and pornographic lyrics in the single. Knee-jerk misinterpretations abounded from the morally-incensed in mid-century Middle America. One irate father even wrote to US attorney general Bobby Kennedy moaning about the lyrics’ “moral degradation” leading bizarrely to the FBI investigating the song (while wasting public funds the Bureau failed to unearth any such obscenities)! All of which lends credence to the axiom that “people will hear what they want to hear” – which goes to the very heart of Mondegreens※.
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Mumpsimus are a different kettle of aquatic, craniate gill-bearing animals. Practitioners of Mumpsimus stubbornly insist on an incorrect usage…even after being proven wrong” (Fritinancy). Mumpsimustas obstinately cling to an error, bad habit or prejudice, even after the foible is exposed. Examples include the use of “all intensive purposes” in lieu of the correct phrase, “all intents and purposes”; the verbal substitution of “nuclear” with “nucular” (a proclivity of George W Bush)§.
The Eggcorn: slight of hand or sleight of hand?
Another, related form of expression that derives from mishearing and involves reinterpretation is “Eggcorn”. Eggcorns, like Mondegreens revolve around the near-homonym while differing from Mumpsimus in that their use is unconscious and unintentional. It often occurs when people are ignorant of the precise words in stock phrases and substitute what they erroneously believe to be the correct words or expression. Examples are manifold – saying “mute point” instead of “moot point”; “tenderhooks” instead of “tenterhooks”; “pass mustard” instead of “pass muster” etc ad nauseum. An essential feature of the eggcorn is that it must retain some of the original meaning as the speaker understands it (eg, Alzheimer’s disease is rendered into “Old-timer’s disease”). The term itself is an “Eggcorn”, it’s genesis can be traced back to a creative utterance from an anonymous individual who inserted the word “eggcorn” where the similarly sounding “acorn” would conventionally go (Mark Lieberman, 2003).
°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡°°°
※ Steven Connor suggests that cognitive dissonance is in train in the creation of Mondegreens – the brain is constantly trying “to make sense of the world by making assumptions to fill in the gaps when it cannot clearly determine what it is hearing” (‘Earslips: Of Mishearings and Mondegreens’, 2009)
§ the word Mumpsimus, a confused misinterpretation of the Latin term “Sumpsimus” (“we have received”), was accidentally coined by an old monk who doggedly persisted in using the invented word. Mumpsimus first appears in the correspondence of famous humanist scholar Erasmus Roterodamus, dating from 1516
IN a 1966 double-A side single the Beatles sung “we all live in a yellow submarine” but in real life the Fab Four (or at least, 75% of them) did want to live together on a secluded Greek island that they intended to buy. It happened the following year, 1967, the boys were holidaying in the Greek islands and were island-hopping when they came upon an ideal island location. Or at least that was what George, John and Paul thought while on acid the whole time of the “inspection”{𝔸}. The island that their eyes lit on was roomy enough, some 80-acres with a fishing village, a large olive grove and four beaches. In addition to the main island there were four smaller islands surrounding it (one for each Beatle!)
The prime mover for the island home scheme was Beatle John. At that point in his life Lennon was edging his way into his glorious hippie phase. The Aegean “Arcadia” represented a chance to live communally, an idyllic place where he and the other three celebs could escape the overwhelming pressures and attentions of superstardom. The plan was for the four musicians and the group’s entourage (manager Epstein, the roadies and the inner circle of assistants plus relatives) to all live together on a huge estate on the island hideaway. Paul and George seemed to have been on-song with John at that hazily propitious moment in time…McCartney: (the island was the means of achieving) “a sort of hippie community…where nobody’d interfere with your lifestyle”…Harrison concurred: “we’ll buy the island, we’ll just go there and drop out” (‘The Beatles in Greece’, Daily Beatle,, 03-Jul-2014, www.wogew.blogspot.com).
Team Beatles hit Greece (Source: Greek City News)
What prompted such an extravagantly fanciful and surreal notion?The short answer would appear simply to be drugs! Narcotic substances may have inspired the germ of the highly romantic and improbable idea. As Beatle Paul explained later, the boys saw in the island jewel a place where they could smoke pot unhindered, without fearing the consequences of the law. Paul attributed the island acquisition project to “drug-induced ambition”. Certainly drug consumption was part of the agenda in coming to Greece – if you accept the word of NEMS staffer Peter Brown. According to Brown, a Beatle associate Yannis Mardas (AKA “Magic Alex”) had brokered a deal with the Greek authorities giving the Fab Four the green light to bring personal supplies of drugs secreted in their carry-on bags into the country in return for photo ops in aid of Hellenic tourism (Daily Beatle).
The rich celebrity artists’ communeRoadie (and later Apple Corps head) Neil Aspinall’s recollection of what John, Paul and George (but especially John) had in mind was a configuration of individual villas for the four Beatles which would all be linked to a central dome of some description. There would also be a recording studio on the main island, plus an entertainment complex and some “knock-up” housing for Beatle staff and visiting friends.
Trinity Is (Source: Culture Trip)
The decision to buy the island paradise was pretty much made on the spot and another NEMS assistant Alistair Taylor was sent back to London to seal the deal. This necessitated the boys buying £90,000 worth of special export dollars to complete the international transaction. But by the time the deal was set up, the Beatles’s initial enthusiasm had waned and they had changed their minds…or maybe they just forgot about the whole grand scheme. Taylor then had to sell the export dollars back to the Greek government, which resulted in an unexpected windfall for the group, courtesy of a favourable exchange rate for the UK£{𝔹}.
Trinity Is is commonly referred to as “guitar-shaped” but with such a profound bend in its “neck” it looks more like one of Pete Townshend’s well-thwacked Fender guitars
In the application to purchase document (held in the British National Archives) the name of the would-be Beatle island—described as “300,000 square metres of arable land, olive trees, beaches and rocks”—is given as “Aegos, Konstadinos”(?), however no such island can be identified among the multitude of Aegean offshore islands. Another name ascribed to the heavily-wooded island fancied by the Liverpudlian musos is “Leslo” which also unfortunately does not exist. The more likely candidate which most people favour is Trinity Island{ℂ}, located to the east of Athens and just off the larger Euboea Island in the Western Aegean ‘The Beatles visit a Greek island they intended to purchase’, The Beatles Bible, Updated 13-Sep-2021, www.beatlesbible.com .
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{𝔸} Ringo wasn’t on the real estate expedition, he bailed after the Greek mainland part of the trip to return to his Weybridge (Surrey) mansion
{𝔹} a profit of £11,400 was forthcoming for the band
{ℂ} sometimes erroneously called Agia Triada (“Holy Trinity” island)
1966 was indeed a watershed year for the world’s most popular band the Beatles. It was the year that at its end the fabled foursome called it quits on overseas touring and live performances. This followed a demanding 12 months of touring, including Germany, Japan, the Philippines and America (the third visit but this time as reluctant tourers). The constant grind, the heavy work load, the culmination of five years of more or less nonstop touring, had left the group exhausted.
Nihonjin cultural lesson for Ringo & John (Source: nippon.com)
This was only one factor in the ultimate decision to pull the plug…increasing dissatisfaction with sound quality at the various venues they played contributed as well as fears about their personal security and safety on tour1⃞ which escalated after John Lennon’s controversial comments about the Beatles being “more popular than Jesus Christ” and his stated prediction that Christianity will wither away.
Fateful words of the leader
John’s spontaneous act of hubris had profound ramifications as the year unfolded. On the “reunion” visit back to Hamburg, Germany, the Beatles received a death threat. In Japan though fans at concerts were rapturous, Japanese traditionalists voiced opposition to them, and were incensed that the Beatles’ gigs were held at the Nippon Budekan, a Japanese shrine for the war dead. But this was all mere turbulence compared to the tsunami greeting them in Manila, the Philippines’ capital. Moments after the boys stepped foot on the tarmac they were separated from manager Epstein and abruptly whisked away by military types to visit some local plutocrat VIP they didn’t know. The two concerts scheduled for the Rizal Memorial Football Stadium for that day (before a Beatle record combined audience of 80,000) though went exceedingly well.
The Marcoses in 1966 (with an American “friend”) (Photo: Yoichi Yokamoto/National Archives)
“Enemies of the state” snubbing the First Family
What brought the tour undone and turned it into a nightmare for the Beatles was Epstein’s declining an invitation for the boys to attend a brunch reception at the presidential palace organised by “First Lady” Imelda Marcos 2⃞. After the no-show by the Fab Four things turned ugly. The Philippine media castigated the Beatles for their grievous insult to the Marcos family, whipping up an instant public frenzy of Beatlephobia in the country.
Manhandling the teen icons
Beatles Alis Dayan!3⃞
All the chickens came home to roost the next day when the Beatles and their entourage tried to leave the country. First, the local promoter refused to pay the group for their performances, then they weren’t allowed to leave the hotel until Epstein coughed up nearly 75,000 pesos in taxes on the performance fees they were never paid! Meanwhile bomb and death threats against the Beatles were phoned in. But it was when they got to the airport that Filipino vengeance displayed its real venom. The Beatles found their protection had disappeared and the airport refused to handle their baggage and gear, forcing them to carry their own luggage (and their roadies to lug all the equipment themselves) to the plane. As they struggling to make their way to the plane, guns were brandished and the entourage was jostled and attacked by thugs (Mal Evans copped a beating, Epstein was hit, even Ringo got clocked with an flailing uppercut!). They were seen off into the aircraft with an equally hostile reception from hundreds of irate Filipinos wishing them good riddance!
But that wasn’t the end of the ordeal for the Beatles and their minders. The authorities suddenly discovered that some of the group’s flight paperwork was awry and roadie Mal and press officer Tony Barrow were forced to leave the safety of the Beatles’ KLM plane and return to the terminal to make amends. So the Beatles’ jet sat idly on the tarmac for another 40 minutes before it was finally allowed to depart. When they arrived back in London (via a stopover in India) the Beatles vowed never to return to the Philippines – an oath that all four musicians kept.
Talking it down…or up? (Photo credit: AP)
Footnote: The Religious Right’s war on the Beatles
The last tour, which Epstein had long pre-committed John, Paul, George and Ringo to was back to the USA. Lennon’s perceived slight on Jesus and Christianity–although he tried to walk the comments back once he arrived in the US—plagued the entire tour4⃞. Southern fundamentalists and the Ku Klux Klan demonstrated against the “degenerate and blasphemous” Liverpool band. More death threats, some radio stations in the South banned Beatle records from the air, some even organised bonfires, inviting listeners to burn the group’s discs and merchandise. Security became a more pressing issue the longer the tour proceeded, crowds of fans broke down barriers on several occasions. The four band members harboured a genuine fear that they may be the victim of an assassin’s bullet while performing on stage. By the tour’s end all four had hardened their resolve to draw a curtain on touring (‘The Beatles’ 1966 US tour’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).
Postscript: Hello/Goodbye! The Beatle’s final ever concert (leaving aside the impromptu rooftop jam in London in 1969) at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, didn’t play to a full house, resulting in a loss for the local company organising the event.
𒆜𒆜𒆜𒆜𒆜𒆜𒆜𒆜𒆜
1⃞ for which the four performers to some extent blamed Brian Epstein resulting in a loss of confidence by them in his managerial skills
2⃞ “Go Home Beatles!”
3⃞ a disastrous PR move as Epstein had been advised by the British ambassador to accept the invitation as the band’s security while in the country was in the hands of President Marcos (‘A Hard Day’s Night in Manila’, www.beatlesnumber9.com)
4⃞ John in fact proceeded unhelpfully to pour petrol on the fire by criticising the American military intervention in Vietnam which added to the backlash (at that time 90% of Americans still backed the US’ war in Indochina)
This is a story about how Israel missed a golden opportunity to get the Beatles, then on the cusp of greatness, to perform live before Israeli audiences. The “Fab Four” were supposed to tour the country in 1965, concert tickets were even printed for what became a non-event. At the time the official account of why the Israeli government didn’t let the concert tour proceed was the fear of the deleterious effects that the Liverpool band were likely to have on the local youngsters. Citing the teen frenzy created by Cliff Richard’s 1963 concert hullabaloo in Israel, the authorities deny entry to the ‘Rhythm’ Beatles (as they were called in Hebrew) less they ”corrupt the minds of Israeli youth”. A follow-up investigation by a Knesset finance committee finds that “the band has no artistic merit” and reinforces the assertion that they were liable to “cause hysteria and mass disorder among young people” (Resolution 701). The local conservative press echoes the ’outrage’, describing the band’s music in hyperbolic vein as “yeah-yeah–yeah howls which are capable of striking dead a real beetle”.
▪ ▪ ▪ Cliff Richard: not wholesome enough for Israel?
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Thus the Beatles’ fans in the Jewish state never got to see the biggest band on the globe play live⍟. No doubt the desire of Israeli politicians to keep out the ‘pernicious’ influences of “sex, alcohol and rock‘n’roll” in the early 1960s was part of the thinking, however evidence emerged during the Aughts demonstrating that the (official) narratives presented in 1964/1965 were in fact apocryphal. A 2007 Israeli musical documentary Waiting for Godik by Ari Davidovich and subsequent investigations by Israel historians Yoav Kutner and Alon Gan unearths more personal considerations guiding the decision.
▪ ▪ ▪ Giora Godik, Theatrical promoter (Source: Lama Films)
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The true story—apparently—starts in 1962 with the mother of the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein✥, she apparently makes an offer to Israeli music promoter Giora Godik for the not-quite-yet famous Liverpool band to perform in Israel. Godik rejects the offer and instead invites the better known-internationally Cliff Richard to do a concert the following year. Fast forward two years and Godik’s rival Israeli promoter Yaakov Uri trumps him by securing the rights to a Beatles’ concert in the country. To get back at Uri for being “one-upped”, Godik successfully lobbies the Israeli authorities to veto promoters from taking out foreign currency (thereby making the whole undertaking financially unsustainable)…Godik persuades the bureaucrats by apparently playing up the bad publicity engendered from the Cliff Richard concert. A dispute between rival Jewish music promoters – and neither of them got the Beatles!
▪ ▪ ▪The four “Mop Tops”, 1965 with medals
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End-note: In 2008 the state of Israel issued an official apology to the Beatles via a letter to the surviving sister of John Lennon for the 1965 snub, citing lack of budget and the contemporary concerns of some members of the Knesset⌖ as the reason for pulling the tour.
Retro McCartney sparking a mini-Beatlemania revival in Tel Aviv (Source: abc.com.au)
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⍟ though they did finally get to see one-fourth of the band, Paul McCartney, perform there solo in 2008, triggering a new, short-lived wave of Beatlemania in Israel
✥ an Ashkenazi Jew
⌖ at the time of the incident some insiders within the country pointed the finger at Israel’s matronly prime minister Golda Meir
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Articles and sites consulted
‘The Beatles and Israel’, The Beatles Bible, Updated 16-Mar-2018, www.beatlesbible.com)
‘Truth after 42 years: Beatles banned for fear of influence on youth’, Toni O’Loughlin, The Guardian, 22-Sep-2008, www.amp.theguardian.com)
‘A Beatle (finally) coming to Israel’, Matti Friedman, The Inquirer, Aug 28-Aug-2008, www.theinquirer.com
When the Beatles at the top of their fame reflected back on their climb to the summit of pop/rock music, they didn’t understate the early contribution to their success of exceedingly long periods of time spent playing in seedy, red-light night spots in Hamburg, West Germany. John Lennon summed up the immeasurable value of the Hamburg gigs phase to the early Beatles’ development, quipping to a journalist that though he was “born in Liverpool, (he) grew up in Hamburg”. George Harrison echoed John’s sentiments, saying that the band “didn’t have a clue” before the German experience, “Hamburg was really like our apprenticeship, learning how to play in front of people”. Paul McCartney concurred that playing to inebriated and often hostile German sailors “galvanised the band into a musical form”. The boys’ repertoire expanded by necessity, forced to learn countless new songs so as to fill in the marathon eight-hours sets in the Reeperbahn precinct clubs (“George Harrison Said The Beatles ‘Didn’t Have a Clue’ Before They Went to Hamburg, Germany”, Hannah Wigandt, Showbiz CheatSheet, 08-Dec-2021, www.cheatsheet.com).
ʰᵃᵐᵇᵘʳᵍ ¹⁹⁶¹ ⁽ᵖʰᵒᵗᵒ﹕ ᵍᵉᵗᵗʸ ⁱᵐᵃᵍᵉˢ⁾
Just before departing for their first stint in Hamburg in 1960, the Beatles (still calling themselves the Silver Beatles) needing a regular drummer to fulfil their contractural obligations took on ex-Blackjacks drummer Pete Best (hired by the band’s manager of sorts Allan Williams). Williams’ business associate Harold Adolphus Phillips (who promoted the band during its Silver Beetles days and occasionally performed himself as “Lord Woodbine”) drove the now five-piece group to Germany.
The band first played at the Indra Club in August 1960 (while sleeping rough in “pigsty” accommodation behind the screen of the nearby Bambi Kino). Later in the year they moved from the Indra down the street to the larger Kaiserkeller, performing late-night to sailors and sex workers, and the more appreciative art students. Both nightclubs were owned by Bruno Koschmider who was paying each of the five Beatles the princely sum of £2.50 a night to perform (although they did score an accommodation upgrade to actual hotels)🏴.
ᴷˡᵃᵘˢ, ᴬˢᵗʳᶦᵈ & ˢᵗᵘ, ¹⁹⁶¹ ⁽ᴾʰᵒᵗᵒ: ᴳᵉᵗᵗʸ ᴵᵐᵃᵍᵉˢ⁾
While they were doing their night sets at the Kaiserkeller, John, Paul and George met Ringo (Starr), also working the club with the (then) more highly regarded Hurricanes band. The Kaiserkeller was also where the boys met Astrid Kirchherr, a Hamburg local who was to have a profound influence on the band’s look …from Astrid they got their signature “mop-top” style haircut. In Hamburg the Beatles wore black leather jackets and cowboy boots, but Astrid’s influence has an effect here too with the rounded collarless jacket she made for Stu Sutcliffe🏴 which became a prototype of the famous 1963 collarless suits worn by the Beatles🇮🇹. Astrid’s Hamburg art college student friends Klaus Voorman and Jürgen Vollmer also formed lasting associations with the Beatles from the Kaiserkeller days (especially artist and session musician Voorman who designed art covers for Beatles’ albums and played bass on post-breakup Beatles’ individual records).
ᵀᵒᵖ ᵀᵉⁿ ᶜˡᵘᵇ . ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ: ᴷ & ᴷ ᴴᵃᵐᵇᵘʳᵍ
The following year, while still contracted to Koschmider, the boys were enticed by Peter Eckhorn (Koschmider’s Reeperbahn rival) into defecting to the Top Ten Club on the offer of better money and conditions. Koschmider found out and it’s likely that it was he who turned the underage Harrison in to the police, leading to George’s deportation. When Paul and Pete went back to the Kaiserkeller to get their equipment a fire lit by them caused minor damage to the club. The seriously “pissed-off” Koschmider had McCartney and Best arrested for arson and they too were deported back to England…Lennon eventually followed them back to Liverpool, bringing the Beatles’ engagement at the Top Ten Club in 1961 to an abrupt close.
The Beatles’ residency at the Top Ten did result in a breakthrough of sorts in their career thus far, albeit a low-key one at the time…the boys managed to cut their very first record – backing singer Tony Sheridan (who was also on the Hamburg club circuit at the same time) on a German 45 for the Polydor label. The recording “My Bonnie” at Ernst-Merck-Halle listed the Beatles on the label as the “Beat Brothers”🇦🇺 (‘Tony Sheridan’, The Beatles Bible, Upd. 15-May-2017, www.beatlesbible.com).
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The following year they were back however, this time performing at the Star-Club, operated by Manfred Weissleder and Horst Fascher🇩🇪. By now the band members’ nightly fee had been upped to £67 each. They did three stints at the Star in 1962—the last two with Ringo in the drummer’s seat for the first time—undertaken reluctantly as the band had already released their first UK single on Parlophone and were champing at the bit to get on with consolidating their burgeoning recording career in the UK. The last live performance by the soon-to-be “Fab Four” in Germany was on New Years Eve 1962.
The tyro Liverpudlian band’s musical education in the north coast German city got a terrific leg-up from getting up close and personal with legendary US rock ‘n roll performers—such as Little Richard, Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis—also working the same St Pauli clubs at the time…Little Richard later recounted helping to hone Paul’s vocal style backstage while the Beatles were opening for the pioneering American rock performer at the Star.
The Chronology of the Beatles’ gig venues in Hamburg, 1960–62Indra Club, Große Freiheit 64, St Pauli. 48 nights, August—October 1960 (37-hr week)Kaiserkeller, Große Freiheit 36, St Pauli. 56 nights, October—November 1960 Top Ten Club, Reeperbahn 136, St Pauli. 92 nights,April—July 1961 (51-hr week)Star-Club, Große Freiheit 39, St Pauli. April—May, November, December, 1962
Live at the Reeperbahn (image: Spotify)
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The intense schedule imposed by the Hamburg club management, forcing the Beatles to play live for hours on end (with the aid of copious amounts of booze and a regular diet of ‘uppers’)🏁 formed the band into a tight musical outfit. This and the band’s increasingly fetzig (“wild”) and unpredictable stage antics and the decibel-shattering volume and raw energy of their playing earned them a loyal following in Hamburg (‘Breaking the Illusion: Hamburg and The Beatles’ Gritty Roots’, Riley Fitzgerald, Happy, 13-Oct-2021, www.happy mag.tv). And when they came back to Merseyside at the very beginning of 1963, the Beatles (–Pete/+Ringo) didn’t come back as nobodies, Hamburg gave them an international reputation to trade on in the future.
Postscript: Return to their roots
The Beatles returned to Hamburg one more time, this time as the hottest musical act on the planet. In 1966 at ‘Beatlemania’s” high-water mark, the group played two nights in Hamburg, not at any of the old haunts they had played as young scruffs but at the more respectable Ernst-Merck-Halle. This was part of the German leg (tagged the “Bravo-Beatles-Blitztournee“) of the band’s ‘66 world tour, which also included concerts in Munich and Essen.
🏴 their booking agent Allan Williams was getting three times what the musicians were!
🏴 Sutcliffe left the group and became engaged to Kirchherr in 1961 before his premature death the following year
🇮🇹 based partly on Pierre Cardin’s design
🇦🇺 it was a customer request in the Liverpool NEMS music store for ‘My Bonnie’ that first alerted Brian Epstein to the existence of the Beatles
🇩🇪 Fascher, a West German amateur boxing champion, doubled as the Beatles’ bodyguard
🏁 “800 hours in the rehearsal room” McCartney called it
There have been untold zillions of words written or spoken about the Beatles—in books, in music mags, in newsprint, on the web, in doco films and videos—over the last six decades. Anyone vaguely following the Liverpudlian Foursome’s stellar musical journey would be familiar with the major secondary personalities that feature prominently in the Beatles’ narrative (manager Epstein, producer Martin, the various wives and girlfriends, a few of the band’s musical peers like Jagger and Clapton, the so-called “Fifth Beatles” and so on), but after wading through weighty Beatles biographies by Hunter Davies and Phillip Norman and others, I’m more curious about the lesser dramatis personae who feature peripherally in the Beatles saga. As the Beatles journey on their irresistible path from provincial obscurity to global mega-celebrity, these less well-known names pop in and out of the various accounts of John, Paul, George and Ringo’s formative days on the nascent Liverpool rock scene…so let’s shift the spotlight away from the quartet of pop music icons momentarily on to some of the background players to note their particular part in the Beatles’ back story — most were fleeting and insignificant, others flitted in and out of the Beatles’ orbit without impact and a few were important participants out of the limelight.
⥉ Lennon & Shotton (Source: forums.stevehoffman.tv)
The bulk of the minor figures getting a mention in the early Beatles story tend to connect directly with John Lennon, not surprisingly as he was the band’s founder and driving force in the rise of the Beatles phenomena. John’s best friend in childhood was Pete Shotton, who attended the same schools as the future ‘First’ Beatle (Dovedale Infants School and Quarry Bank Grammar). Shotton was there at Lennon’s earliest foray into musical bands, initially in John’s mid-1950s skiffle boy band which became the “The Quarrymen”. Other friends of John joined them in the band including Nigel Whalley, Rod Davis Ivan Vaughan, Len Garry, Eric Griffiths, Ken Brown, Colin Hanton, Chas Newby, Bill Smith, John Duff Lowe…and a little later of course Paul McCartney and his baby-faced pal George Harrison and Stu Sutcliffe (Quarrymen membership history was very fluid). Vaughan’s not insignificant claim to fame resides in his being the member/friend who introduced Paul to John at that famous 1957 church fete. Shotton, Vaughan and Whalley had the further distinction of forming the nucleus of John’s “Woolton Gang”…a mischievous, juvenile ”gang of four” imitating and paying homage to Lennon’s all-time favourite hero of children’s fiction, ’William’ from Richmal Cromwell’s Just William books. Of his many childhood friends and associates, John’s connexion with Pete Shotton lasted the longest. When the Beatles achieved fame and fortune Shotton was a beneficiary, managing first a supermarket owned by the Beatles and then the Apple Boutique. Eventually Shotton severed his business nexus with the band and founded his own chain of restaurants, Fatty Arbuckle’s.
⥉ The Quarrymen performing in 1957 (pre-Paul & George)
In 1958 Lennon, having abjectly failed his ‘O’ Level exams at Quarry Bank High, shuffled off to Liverpool Art School. Lennox’s art school period was a key phase in the formation of the scruffy “Teddy boy’s” relationships, meeting his first girlfriend Thelma Pickles, his first wife Cynthia (née Powell) and close friend and early Beatle Stu Sutcliffe whose gifted artistic merit influenced him greatly. John formed other friendships at the art school including with Jeff Mohammed who took on a older brother sort of role in helping John try to cope with the trauma of his mother Julia’s sudden death; and with Bill Harry who went on to create Mersey Beat , a local music publication which helped the band gain early traction in Liverpool music circles. Harry also published Lennon’s poems and drawings in the newspaper.
⥉ Allan Williams (Source: Meet the Beatles for Real)
Before Brian Epstein stumbled upon the Beatles the lads had another manager of sorts, Allan Williams. Williams owned The Jacaranda club in Liverpool which the young John and Paul frequented. Williams‘s role as booking agent and manager for the early Beatles (known variously as “The Quarrymen”, “Johnny and the Moondogs” and “The Silver Beetles” before settling on “The Beatles”) was a somewhat informal relationship, coming to an abrupt end in 1961 over a fee dispute, leaving the way clear for Epstein to assume the grid position and steer the Beatles’s career trajectory⦑1⦒. Williams did make an important contribution to the band’s early development as a musical force, he was the one who arranged for the band to undertake the first of a series of nightclub performances in Hamburg, West Germany, where the Beatles over three visits between 1960 and 1962 really honed their musical skills.
The Cavern Club in Liverpool was synonymous with the early Beatles who debuted in its damp, dingy warehouse cellar as the Quarrymen in 1957⦑2⦒. Ringo Starr then in another skiffle band had already made his first appearance in the club a week earlier (Ringo went on to join Liverpool’s top ‘beat’ band prior to the Beatles’ ascendancy – “Rory Storm and the Hurricanes”). A key Cavern figure was its longtime emcee/DJ Bob Wooler, instrumental along with Bill Harry in helping arrange Brian Epstein‘s first visit to the Cavern to see John, Paul, George and Pete play.
⥉ Pete & Mona (Photo: John Smart/Associated Newspapers/Shutterstock)
Another regular Liverpool venue for the Beatles in their various early incarnations was the Casbah Coffee Club, owned by the mother of the band’s drummer pre-Ringo (Pete), Mona Best. Not only were the Beatles able to perform there on dozens of occasions (tallies differ as to the exact number), Mrs Best allowed the fledgling band use of the Casbah’s basement to practice in.
After Epstein and his NEMS Company⦑3⦒ took over managing the four Liverpudlian ‘Moptops’ he recruited Tony Barrow from Decca to handle publicity for the group. In the full flush of Beatlemania fame Barrow found the task easier with the press now scurrying after him, but he was still there to extinguish any Beatles crises that might occur, such as John’s incendiary “more popular than Jesus” claim. Barrow wrote liner notes for the Beatles’ EPs and albums and was also the one who came up with the “Fab Four” tag.
⥉ Neil Aspinall filling in for George in the “Fab Four” lineup (Source: independent.ie)
When the Beatles started getting bookings outside of Liverpool they got themselves a road manager, Neil Aspinall, who had gone to high school with Paul and George at the Liverpool Institute. An accountant by training, Neil’s main attribute for the ‘roadie’ job—which he scored by being ‘besties’ with Pete Best at the time—was that he owned a battered old Commer van which was used to ferry round the boys and their amps to venues, and to London for their famous Decca audition on New Year’s Day 1962. After Epstein’s death Aspinall became CEO of the flagship Apple Corps and ran the Beatles’ business empire for 40 years⦑4⦒.
Another Beatle backgrounder Epstein put on the payroll was Tony Bramwell. During their Liverpool school years Bramwell was “besties'” with George Harrison and also a friend of Paul McCartney. From roadie in the Beatlemania days Bramwell rose to become CEO of Apple Films. Today, Bramwell is one of the very few surviving Beatles’ insiders.
⥉ Paul & Bodyguard Mal return from safari in Kenya
When Aspinall got promoted to Beatles’ PA in 1963, the doorman at the Cavern, the 1.98m-tall Mal Evans got the ‘roadie’ gig. As well as being ‘roadie’ for the Beatles’ 1964 and 1965 US tours, Mal copped the brunt of the violent backlash by enraged Filipinos against the “Fab Four” during the notorious 1966 tour of that country. Evans also served as the band’s bodyguard and in-attendance ‘gofer’ for any personal items required by any of the four musicians.
⥉ Derek Taylor (Source: Pinterest.co.uk)
While Mal Evans took care of most of the Beatles’ simple day-to-day needs, NEMS employee Derek Taylor was tasked with organising holiday trips for the boys as well as taking care of more complicated matters like copyright issues and acquiring personal properties on behalf of the four members, plus acting as “spin doctor” for the Beatles, for all of which he earned the sobriquet “Mr Fixit”.
Someone else behind the scenes who did very well from his connexion with the Beatles was music publisher Dick James. Just as the Beatles’ juggernaut was starting its ascent in 1963 James brokered a deal with Lennon and McCartney through their manager Epstein which enriched the publisher and his business partner but more crucially resulted in the two principal Beatles songwriters losing control of their own songs for ever!
⥉ George Martin (Source: USA Today)
Footnote: The Fifth Beatle
Beatles watchers have long speculated on particular individuals whose contribution/ role in the band’s story warrant, justified or not, the appellation fifth Beatle…the “would-be” candidates for the title are so manifold that it invites comparison with the list of numerous contenders regularly thrown up for “eighth wonder of the world“. Those ascribed the Fifth Beatle label over the years include George Martin, Brian Epstein, Neil Aspinall, Stuart Sutcliffe, Peter Best, Chas Newby, Jimmy Nichol, Tony Sheridan and Billy Preston.
🎵🎶🎼🎼🎸♫♬
⦑1⦒ securing for Williams the unenviable epithet, “the man who gave the Beatles away”
⦑2⦒ the band didn’t actually play the Cavern as the Beatles until February 1961, but within two-and-a-half years had racked up close to 300 appearances at the venue
⦑3⦒ North End Music Stores
⦑4⦒ after the band broke up Neil became the closest confidant of each of the ex-Beatles
Any Sydneysiders born in or prior to the 1890s would have been aware of the opening of Sydney Stadium. 1908 was the year this iconic boxing arena on the eastern outskirts of the city’s CBD first saw the light of day…literally saw the light of day as it was originally built as an open air stadium. The brainchild of promoter Hugh D McIntosh who constructed a ‘temporary’ outdoor boxing ring on the site of a former Chinese market garden in Rushcutters Bay to hold the world heavyweight boxing contest featuring Canadian title-holder Tommy Burns and Australian challenger “Boshter Bill” Squires. The fight was however just a warm-up for a legendary pugilistic bout in the same arena four months later between Burns and African-American fighter Jack Johnson. The fight garnered a lot of attention in Australia and internationally as Johnson was the first black boxer to contest (and win) a world title… and the heavyweight title at that!
The Australian press of the day predictably invoked the race card in the lead-up to the fight, racist descriptions of Johnson abounded, “coloured pugilist” was one of the few politer characterisations of Johnson (Bush Advocate, 28th December 1908). Burns’s thrashing at the hands of his much bigger black opponent—physically it was a real “David and Goliath” mismatch—prompted a backlash from white supremacists. Writer Jack London (ringside at the fight) put out the call for a “Great White Hope” to restore the white man to his ‘rightful’ place atop the professional boxing tree. The decisiveness of Jack Johnson’s triumph tapped into the prevailing currents of eugenic belief of the day, doing nothing to soothe anxieties about the “moral decay and decline” of the white race.
𝔖𝔶𝔡𝔫𝔢𝔶𝔖𝔱𝔞𝔡𝔦𝔲𝔪 (𝔓𝔥𝔬𝔱𝔬: 𝔑𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫𝔞𝔩𝔏𝔦𝔟𝔯𝔞𝔯𝔶𝔬𝔣𝔄𝔲𝔰𝔱𝔯𝔞𝔩𝔦𝔞)
Stadiums Ltd
For almost its entire lifespan (from 1915 to its closure) Sydney Stadium was owned by Melbourne entrepreneur and gambling identity John Wren’s Stadiums Ltd…during that epoch the company enticed most of the top Australian professional boxers including Vic Patrick, Fred Henneberry, Dave Sands, Jimmy Carruthers and Tommy Burns (not the Canadian heavyweight champion) as well as renowned international prize-fighters such as Emile Griffith, Freddie Dawson and ‘Fighting’ Harada, to Sydney Stadium (‘The Wild Ones: Sydney Stadium 1908-1970’, Sydney Living Museums, www.sydneylivingmuseums.com).
“The old tin shed”
In 1912 the stadium was given a lid, an octagonal shaped roof of corrugated iron, and equiped for a capacity of 12,000 seated patrons. As the decades passed, hosting countless boxing and wrestling matches (in operation several nights a week at one point), it acquired the affectionate sobriquet “the old tin shed”❈. From the 1950s while boxing was still its core entertainment, the Sydney Stadium became a venue for popular music entertainers and television stars (eg, Frank Sinatra, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Walt Disney’s Mouseketeers, and so on⚘. This continued into the Sixties with “The Samurai” star Koichi Ose, and perhaps its pinnacle, the Beatles performing there on their 1964 Australian tour (‘Sydney Stadium’, Milesago – Venues, www.milesago.com; ‘World Heavyweight Boxing Championship Title Fight 1908’, Woollahra Municipal Council), www.woollahra.nsw.gov.au).
𓂀𝓣𝓱𝓮“𝓕𝓪𝓫𝓕𝓸𝓾𝓻” 𝓪𝓽𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓸𝓵𝓭𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓼𝓱𝓮𝓭1964
Leichhardt Stadium in Sydney’s inner west never managed to capture the limelight of Rushcutters Bay but was still very popular in its time, it’s Thursday night boxing events regularly ”packed to capacity” (‘Packing a punch’, James Cockington, 01-Jul-2009, SMH, www.smh.com.au). Leichhardt was Sydney pro boxing’s ‘Medina’ to Sydney Stadiums’ ‘Mecca’, together, this brace of stadiums was the home of professional pugilism in Sydney in the early to middle part of the 20th century. The suburban stadium on Balmain Road, Leichhardt, first opened its doors in 1922. The two Sydney stadiums featured many of the popular active Aboriginal fighters, typically stepping up from the touring boxing tents to try to earn their livelihoods inside their square rings, including Ron Richards, Jack Hassen, George Bracken, the Sands brothers and many more. Other names regularly featuring on Leichhardt Stadium’s draw cards included Jack Carroll, Jimmy Kelso, ‘Kid’ Rooney and Hockey Bennell.
‘Blood’ sports and ”show biz” mash-up
Like it’s older relative at Rushcutters Bay, Leichhardt Stadium’s “bread-and-butter” remained pro-boxing and wrestling. However, during the Depression, the suburban stadium, perhaps anticipating Lee Gordon, innovated by incorporating the prevailing popular form of stage entertainment…Saturday night featured a program of boxing contests intermixed with “Vaudeville entertainment” acts (‘Leichhardt Stadium. 1922.’, Sydney Morning Herald, 08-Dec-1930 (Trove); Milesago).
𝔖𝔬𝔲𝔯𝔠𝔢: 𝔉𝔞𝔠𝔢𝔟𝔬𝔬𝔨
ஓ๑ஓ
By the mid to late 1960s Australian professional boxing was in the doldrums and the stadium itself at Rushcutters Bay closed in 1970. Three years later the complex was demolished to make way for the Eastern Suburbs Railway. Leichhardt Stadium’s demise as a boxing venue occurred not long after in 1975.
Footnote: White City’s fleeting existence
In 1913 another landmark was erected in Rushcutters Bay, a 9-iron’s distance from Sydney Stadium. The White City Amusement Park, also built on former Chinese market gardens, was a precursor of Sydney’s better known Luna Park. White City offered pleasure-seekers a smorgasbord of lakes, canals, river caves, “pleasure palaces”, “fun factories”, the city’s first roller coaster and it’s pièce de résistance, a gigantic (Pennsylvanian-constructed) carousel. White City lasted less than four years before being burnt to the ground after a lightning strike in 1917 (‘Lost Sydney : White City Amusement Park’, Pocket Oz, www.visitsydneyaustralia.com.au). In the early 1920’s the White City tennis complex was erected on the site.
𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬
❈ also known as ” the old barn”
⚘ expat American promoter Lee Gordon was the brains behind this move into pop music, bringing out big US bands, singers and duos for concerts at Rushcutters Bay, backed by Australian support acts
‘Coniston’ Ashfield, Bea’s first home (Source: hafs.org.au)
You’dbe hard pressed to come up with a personality that epitomised 20th Century Sydney eccentricity more than the legendary Bea Miles who died in 1973. When the subject arises even today, so many Sydneysiders of a certain vintage have a Bea Miles anecdote to tell. Either it’s a chance (and sometimes disconcerting) encounter they had as a school kid—usually on inner Sydney public transport—with the larger (and louder) than life character herself, or one recounted to them by their mother or father. Such was her profile in this city that newspapers in the Forties and Fifties claimed that Bea (or ‘Bee’ as she later insisted it be spelt) was “more widely known than the prime minister” of the day. Bea’s popularity was rooted in that honoured tradition of Australian larrikinism, the unusual thing about this was that she was female※.
Early days, the athletic Bea Miles
Born into a wealthy merchant family, young Beatrice Miles was already exhibiting the rebellious nature that made her buck against the straitjacketed proprieties of conservative Sydney (and specifically North Shore) society, when the illness befell her that would profoundly change her forever. Contracting Encephalitis Lethargica at 21, Bea over time changed physically from a tall, trim and athletic young woman to a seriously overweight, matronly-looking woman.
(Photo: Daily Tele)
Going rogue
More immediately and crucially, Bea underwent a complete personality change, becoming totally disruptive, hyper-kinetic, manic and basically uncontrollable§. When her father couldn’t cope any more with her behaviour he had her committed to an asylum, she was shuffled around between psyche facilities in Gladesville, Kenmore (Goulburn) and Callan Park. After her last escape attempt a Sydney tabloid,Smith’s Weekly,ran a story which exposed Bea’s dire plight in the psychiatric gulag of Callan Park (with sensationalised headline “Mad House Mystery of Beautiful Sydney Girl”) which helped secure her release.
No fixed address
Unable to return to the family home in St Ives, Bea had a sojourn in Sydney’s Kings Cross where she mixed happily with the locale’s Bohemian artists and writers. After this she lived rough in Sydney, finding shelter where she could – a Rushcutters Bay stormwater drain, a cave above a Sydney beach, a park bench opposite Central Station, the steps of a church rectory, etc. Ratbags author Keith Dunstan called her “very nearly the first drop-out, the first hippie”.
Bea with men of the press, circa 1946
CV: Enemy of authority, laws and law-enforcers, habitually disruptive public presence
Bea revelled in being controversial and confrontational, especially towards political and social authorities…abusing police, doctors and magistrates came instinctually to her, and she certainly had plenty of practice at it! By her own (not necessarily reliable) count she was “falsely convicted 195 times, fairly 100 times”…Bea defiantly refused to pay for public transport or to enter cinemas. Other offences earning her the ire of the law included swearing in public and vagrancy.
Bea’s recital services board
Bea Miles, literary oratorBea loved pulling stunts and making a spectacle of herself, some she did for the heck of it—like riding a man’s push bike through the streets while wearing a formal evening dress—other stunts were to earn money after her grandmother’s inheritance allowance dried up – on the street she would hold a sign up to passing punters advertising her declamatory services, for a set “schedule of fees” she would verbatim quote passages from Shakespeare.
Main Reading Room, NSW State Library (Flickr)
Rogue scholar
Under the rough edges of Bea’s (very) public persona, was a formidable intellect. She had excelled at school (Abbotsleigh Girls) and gained admission to medicine at Sydney University. In her post-illness nomadic years, the “wayward waif” as one article called her, never held a formal job and generally gave her occupation as ‘student’. Bea was a habitué of public libraries, especially the State Library in Macquarie Street¶…a life-long voracious reader and produced her own collection of writings, such as “Dictionary by a Bitch”φ.
Bea in the driving seat? (Photo: Daily Telegraph)
Scourge of taxi drivers
The stunts Bea is best remembered and most notorious for involved her with taxis and their drivers. Her propensity for refusing to pay for taxi trips and commandeering taxis to demand that they take her to vastly distant locations has gone into folklore. Legendary instances of this were the 19-day taxi trip she took to Perth (fortunately for the female cabbie involved Bea paid her £600 for the assignment), as well as trips to Broken Hill via Melbourne and Adelaide). As is the way with legendary public figures, some of her outrageous taxi exploits were more urban myths than actual events, like the tale that used to circulate of Bea taking a taxi to Broken Hill and then on approaching the outskirts of the town she was supposed to have done a runner leaving the poor hapless driver fleeced of his massive fare. Bea’s most dramatic encounter with a cab, one that did happen, saw her respond to the driver’s refusal to take her by wrenching the door completely off the taxi’s hinges (she was a big woman!). This legendary “Bea-act” landed her in Long Bay Gaol for a spell (and a rest).
“Bee in charcoal”, Roderick Shaw (Source: portrait.gov.au)
Terror of trams
Tram drivers didn’t escape the attentions of Bea either…the popular press labelled her the “Terror of Trams” and on at least one occasion her antics flirted with real danger as one tram driver who refused to move until Bea paid the fare discovered. Bea, never one to back down, hijacked the tram, seizing its controls and piloted it to Bondi, even stopping to pick up passengers on route.
The Bea Miles “signature look”: The original “bag lady” apparel
Bea’s unorthodox ways made her a Sydney institution and an unmissable sight. Her irregular and unkempt mode of dress made her readily recognisable wherever she went…Bea’s regular ‘outfit’ described by the Sydney Morning Herald as a “down-at-heel uniform” of tennis shoes, white (or was it green) tennis sun visor and ever more scruffy overcoat. Always pinned to the overcoat’s lapel was a £5 note (Bea’s idea of countering any notion the police might get about arresting her for vagrancy).
Years of homeless living, sleeping rough, took its toll on Bea and in 1964 she was taken in by the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged in Randwick. Those last nine years of her life allowed Bea a clean, dry bed and gave the inveterate bookworm that she was joyous access to another library (borrowing an average of 14 books a week from the Randwick branch library).
(Sydney Morning Herald)
Footnote: Deviating from the mainstream, inheriting some of her father’s idiosyncrasies
Despite the love-hate conflict with her father and his eventual disowning of her, Bea gained quite a number of her radical and non-conformist predispositions and beliefs from him. In his own right, wealthy businessman William J Miles was also an individualist and an eccentric. Miles was a rationalist and a secularist (Bea herself was a staunchly committed atheist❡)… from him she also got her love of Shakespeare and her anti-British imperialist/strident Australian patriotism). In the late 1930s pater Miles’ odd brand of political extremism found its voice in The Publicist. Funded and edited by Miles, the journal advocated fascism (curiously in tandem with Aboriginal rights), wholeheartedly embracing German Nazism and anti-Semitism𝄢. Bea endorsed his pro-Aboriginal and anti-British stand but never enunciated far-right or racist sentiments during her life, although at the end she did express some views that inferred the supremacy of the “white race”.
✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠
※ one of precious few non-male Aussie public larrikins, Dawn Fraser also comes to mind
§ though she still retained her sharpness of intellect afterwards
¶ until she was barred from the library in the late 1950s for being a nuisance (What, Bea?!? Never!)
φ example of an entry, “Duty: an excuse for showing unwarranted interference in somebody else’s business”
❡ there’s some dispute over whether her deathbed conversion to Catholicism was genuine or merely Bea’s way of thanking the church for taking her in off the streets in her twilight years
𝄢 it was a forerunner of the Australia First Movement. William’s dalliance with fascism prompted Cunneen’s assessment that, “with dangerous obsessions and money to spend, Miles represented an unstable element in Australian society”
ℼℼ~ℼℼ~ℼℼ
Articles and websites consulted:
Chris Cunneen, ‘Miles, William John (1871–1942)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/miles-william-john-7576/text13225, published first in hardcopy 1986, accessed online 27 October 2021.
Judith Allen, ‘Miles, Beatrice (Bea) (1902–1973)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/miles-beatrice-bea-7573/text13219, published first in hardcopy 1986, accessed online 27 October 2021.
Pip Wilson, ‘Bee Miles One of Sydney’s favourite individualists’, Wilson’s Almanac, 18-Feb-2012, web.archive.org
Robert Kaplan, ‘Miles From Her Father’, Quadrant, 07-Aug-2016, http://quadrant.org.au
Last year the US cable channel Comedy Central cancelled its totally left-field “educational comedy” program Drunk History after six seasons. On the surface it might seem improbable that a program with such a flimsy premise would have had such a good run in the cut-throat world of American TV. When the show started in 2013 I wouldn’t have put the ancestral home, or even the rustic “lean-to”, on its chances of surviving into a second season. My initial impressions—apparently mistaken (see below)—were that the actors were pretending, not very convincingly and in fact somewhat ham-fistedly, to be drunk.
ˢᵏᵉʷᵉᵈ ﹠ ⁱⁿᵉᵇʳⁱᵃᵗᵉᵈ ᵒᶻ ʰⁱˢᵗᵒʳʸ
࿏࿏࿏
It’s relative longevity aside, another thing that surprises me about Drunk History was that the show didn’t really attract much knee-jerk flak from the Temperance Society, AA, fundamentalists of the Religious Right, the Puritan elders or other moral crusaders for its portrayal of people in states of intoxication bordering on the point of being ‘legless’. In the Australian version of ‘Drunk History’ there were some mild rebukes in the media, mostly a bit of tut-tutting from viewers about the dangers of “glamorising excessive binge drinking” in a country with an extensive history of problems with the Demon drink§(David Knox, TV Tonight, 2019).
ᵈᵉʳᵉᵏ ʷᵃᵗᵉʳˢ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ᶜˢᵗ ᵒⁿˡⁱⁿᵉ⁾
The germ of the idea for Drunk History came from, of all things, a late night drinking session its co-creator Derek Waters had with a fellow actor (who’d have guessed!) It premiered under the name Funny or Die as a web series in 2008, the debut webisode featured a liberty-taking retelling of the famous Hamilton-Burr duel in 1804. From an unorthodox educational point of view Drunk History is a kind of adult version soulmate of the British children’s comedy series Horrible Histories, a similar serving of factually-based, humorously told anecdotes for junior viewers, which itself is a quantum leap forward pedagogically from 1950s children television fare of this ilk, eg, Peabody’s Improbable History, which consisted of an anthropomorphic cartoon dog who time travels with a naive and extremely annoying boy companion to earlier epochs to do a bit of history mangling.
The format’s opening gambit presents Waters in relaxed drinking mode with guest storyteller…with very little coaxing from Waters the narrator in no time descends into a boozy state and starts to unfurl a rambling, episodic, partially incoherent account of some historical event (the majority but not all from the pages of American history)…then it segues into a scene where actors in appropriate period costume act out the story while lip-synching the narrator‘s words with hilarious results. The narrators are usually stand-up comedians…possessors of the right skillsets for rambunctious story telling of course! Who better to do it than the dudes for whom off-the-lease manic ranting in booze-soaked establishments is second nature?
¹⁸⁰⁰ ᵖʳᵉᶻ ᵉˡᵉᶜᵗⁱᵒⁿ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ᵖⁱⁿᵗᵉʳᵉˢᵗ⁾
࿏࿏࿏
Given the cavalier narration and fabricated and anachronistic dialogue littered with liberal snatches of “hipster-speak” and “dude-speak”, you might suspect Drunk History to be sloppy as to historical accuracy. The producers however went to some pains to be accurate with dates and names and what actually happened in the stories. This can be put down to the efforts of hired UCLA PhD students who did the research heavy lifting to keep the history on the tracks. Special care was also taken with the narrators, tasked with getting sufficiently inebriated to capture the desired mood. As host Waters plies them with drink medics are on hand during the shooting—which took place within the familiar and safe milieu of the narrators’ own homes—just in case the alcohol was getting the upper hand over the comics (apparently this was the case on more than one occasion!) (Justin Monroe, ‘The Sober Reality of Drunk History’, Complex, 01-Sep-2015, www.complex.com).
ⁱⁿᵛᵉⁿᵗⁱⁿᵍ ᶜᵒᶜᵃ⁻ᶜᵒˡᵃ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ⁱᵐᵈᵇ⁾
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But from being initially sceptical about Drunk History, my opinion mellowed (perhaps helped by imbibing a snifter or two myself during viewing) and I slowly warmed to the series. Ultimately I came to appreciate the novel things it brought… introducing me to hitherto low-profile, perhaps minor historical figures and little known events from the past, eg, invention of Coca-Cola, the birth of Hip Hop, Nikola Tesla’s breakthroughs, Tunnel 57 (1964 Berlin Wall incident), “Dr Feelgood”, Lawnchair Larry flight, Typhoid Mary, “Night Witches” (German WWII military aviatrixes)✪. The storytellers raise a glass or three to forgotten women chauvinistically airbrushed from history, one such ‘minor’ figure unearthed in an episode was 16-year-old Sybil Ludington who made an heroic night-time dash by horse to alert New York citizens of the impending threat from the British forces during the American War of Independence (sound familiar?), and alerting us to the fact of how very differently history remembers Sybil and other females (or doesn’t remember!), compared to the immortal glory and reverence heaped on Paul Revere for his famous ride. Another female heroine getting her due recognition in history from Drunk History is Rose Valland, a Parisian art curator in WWII who thwarted the occupying Nazis’ heist of a huge haul of priceless first rank artworks.
ˢʸᵇⁱˡ’ˢ ʳⁱᵈᵉ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ⁱᵐᵈᵇ⁾
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Giving an extra layer of lustre to the series are the various celebrities appearing in episodes of Drunk History – including “Weird Al” Yankovic as Adolf Hitler, Laura Dern as Nellie Bly, Jack Black as Elvis Presley, Will Ferrell as Abe Lincoln and Ben Folds as Nathan Cherry.
“ʷᵉⁱʳᵈ ᵃˡ ʰⁱᵗˡᵉʳ” ⁽ᵖʰᵒᵗᵒ﹕ ᶜᵒᵐᵉᵈʸ ᶜᵉⁿᵗʳᵃˡ⁾࿏࿏࿏
Postscript:Drunk History InternationalThe runaway success of the US prototype has spawned a number of international versions, at last count the franchise has extended to the UK, México, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, Argentina and Australia.
The first two decades of the 21st century have been witness to a raft of passing fads and rages, we’ve seen the likes of Planking, Twerking and Tebowing, etcad nauseam, it makes me wonder whatever happened to the wholly sedentary craze of pole-sitting? Like most crazes, I guess, it was of its time and the shelf life is never infinite. It’s day, or its heyday, was in the 1920s up to around the early 1930s when the peak of the craze subsided.
‘Shipwreck’ Kelly at work ▙
Pole-sitting
The initial exponent of pole-sitting or specifically flagpole-sitting, so far as we know, was New Yorker Alvin ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly. Prior to his preoccupation with pole-sitting, Kelly was a jack-of-all-trades, trying his hand as a steelworker, steeplejack⋖a⋗, high diver, boxer and movie double. He also was a naval ensign during WWI and held a pilot’s licence and performed aerial stunt flights. Opinions differ on how ‘Shipwreck’ got into the business of pole-sitting, one view goes that the habit came early, scrambling up a pole at the tender age of seven, others attribute it to a dare or to a publicity stunt for a Philadelphia department store [‘Body of ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly Lies Unclaimed in Morgue’, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 13-Oct-1952, (Google News Archive)]. In January 1924 his ‘career’ took off with a record-setting sit atop a pole for 13 hours and 13 minutes to help promote a Hollywood film. Kelly’s best-ever effort was 49 days and one hour, Atlantic City 1930.
AK keeping up with the news at ground-level ▙ (Photo: Everett/Fine Art America)
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At the height of his popularity Kelly was earning $500 a day, coming from charging money to people to watch his feats of endurance, from books about his life, from endorsements and personal appearances. His fame also led to a 28-day tour of the United States, sitting on poles in a different city on each day of the tour. But the glory days did not last, the onset of the Great Depression saw his popularity plummet rapidly, Americans quickly lost interest in spending precious money watching men sit on poles with more serious and urgent concerns taking centre stage in their lives (Saratosa Tribune).
▙ ‘Dixie’ Blandy (Source: Facebook)
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Pole-sitting became competitive with Richard ‘Dixie’ Blandy challenging and even besting Kelly’s 49-day record. Brandy’s accomplishment, 77 days, was the stuff of legend, sustained as it was on a diet of bottles of whiskey and three packs of cigarettes a day [‘The Mad 1920s: Fad of Pole-Sitting’, Messynessy, 25-Sep-2020, www.chic.com]. Interestingly, prior to being bitten by the pole-sitting bug Blandy, like Kelly, tried an assortment of jobs including circus worker, boxer, house painter, steeplejack, riveter, merchant marine, salesman and (wait for it) flagpole painter. Unlike Kelly though, the Louisiana-born Blandy didn’t become inactive because of the Depression, continuing the activity and even breaking his 1933 record twice more, the second time in Stockholm, Sweden, added to Dixie’s legend – a sit of 125 days in a chair affixed to a pole 200-feet above the ground, while consuming 92 bottles of whiskey and his customary diurnal 3 packs of cigs⋖b⋗.[‘Richard Ernest “Dixie” Blandy’, Findagrave, www.findagrave.com]. Blandy actually died on the job, killed in 1974 when the flagpole supporting him collapsed.
▙ Publicity shot: Dixie was popular with the ladies, married 6 times (all his wives met him via the phone at his pole-sitting events) (Source: Dayton Daily News)❕
▙ Paalzitten (Noordwijkerhout)
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Blandy notwithstanding, the fad had seen its day after the Depression bit hard. Since then there have been attempts from time to time to revive the pole-sitting caper. In the Netherlands for example pole-sitting became a competitive sport In the 1970s – the Dutch call it Paalzitten (literally “sit tight”). This is a world away from the pursuit that made Alvin and Dixie famous, the poles in the Netherland sit above not solid ground but water and nose-bleeds are uncommon as Dutch derrières are perched barely two arm lengths from the level of the water…“a tourist attraction more than a spectator sport”. [‘Paalzitten Is A Dutch Competitive Sport Where You Have To Sit On A Pole For Hours’, The Engineer, www.wonderfulengineering.com].
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Stylites
The fad of Pole-sitting originated in the 1920s as we have seen, but there are historical precedents for this curious pastime. In the early Christian period certain ascetic monks of a particularly fanatical bent practiced something broadly analogous to pole-sitting. These holy men of Late Antiquity were called ‘Stylites’ (from Greek stylos, ‘pillar’). Stylites were “pillar-dwellers” not pole-sitters, and their motivation was spiritual salvation rather than money and fame which spurred on ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly and his ilk. Stylites’ also differed from the pole-sitters in modus operandi, standing on the pillars was their preferred position. Sitting was something they tended to resort to only when overcome by fatigue or perhaps sleep.
▙ 6th century depiction of Ur-Simeon Stylites
The ‘poles’ in question were in fact narrow columns or towers atop which were small platforms which housed the Stylite. The platform were usually encircled by a railing of sorts to prevent the hermit-preacher from falling off. The most famous of the practitioners—the ur-Stylite—was Simeon Stylites the Elder whose early zeal for Christianity led him to ascend a pillar in Syria in AD 423. Later he relocated to a second, nearby pillar more than 15 metres above the ground, apparently staying in it till his death 37 years later⋖c⋗.
▙ Icon depicting both Simeon the Elder & Simeon the Younger
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Simeon’s devotion to the practice made him quite a celebrity in the Christian world, he corresponded with the high and mighty including the Eastern emperors Theodosius II and Leo I, even exerting some influence on ecclesiastical matters, such was his standing. Visitors flocked to observe him praying, preaching and fasting on his high platform. Pilgrims and sightseers sought spiritual counselling, healing for the sick, intervention on behalf of the oppressed, etc. Simeon was too popular, a double wall had to be constructed around his pillar to keep the thronging multitudes from getting too close and disturbing his prayer sessions [‘St. Simeon Stylites’, Britannica, www.britannica.com].
▙ Luke the Stylite
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The pre-Medieval Christian lifestyle caught on among the more ascetically inclined of the early Byzantine clergy (including women) with many following the prototypical Stylite, some even adopting his name. The more notable of these include St Daniel of Constantinople, St Simeon Stylites the Younger (Antioch), St Alypius of Paphlagonia (north-central Anatolia) and St Simeon Stylites (III) of Lesbos. As this list shows, prominence in the Stylite calling was a passport to sainthood. The Stylites needed to be a stoical lot as they were exposed to all kinds of weather at the top (although some were fortunate enough to be furnished with a small hut to escape into in time of severe inclemency).
▙ Georgian hermit headquarters (Source: Vintage News)
Footnote: If you think the Stylites were confined to the so-called “Dark Ages”, think again! The practice has not entirely been extinguished in the 21st century. A monk in Georgia (Maxime Qavtaradze) in 2013 celebrated 20 years of lofty solitude as a ascetic hermit atop a mountain pillar a la the Stylites⋖d⋗. The original Stylites however would not recognise their barest of existences in the Georgian pillar set-up…Maxime lives in a small cosy cottage with adjoining church house on the top of his pillar, and the monk descends twice a week to the village below to say prayers with his parishioners [‘Georgian Monk Renews Tradition, Lives Atop Pillar’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 11-Sep-2013, www.rferl.org].
⋖a⋗ perhaps serving as a kind of altitude training for his later pole-sitting marathons
⋖b⋗ to avoid a calamitous outcome in marathon stints, the pole-sitters tied their legs to the vertical structure when wanting to sleep
⋖c⋗ meagre parcels of food were fetched to Simeon by his disciples
According to Guinness World Records the pop song that has been covered more times than any other record is the 1965 Beatles’ 1965 Paul McCartney-penned Yesterday (a staggering 1,600-plus recorded versions). Conversely The Lion Sleeps Tonight trails far behind the record-holder with a mere 160 or more covers (still a very large number of covers), but few popular songs in the modern era of music can match it’s convoluted, controversial and even tragic history.
The Evening Birds, 1939 (Solomon Linda on the far left)
Ripped off from the debut single
The story starts in the Gallo Recording Studio in Johannesburg in 1939. Migrant labourer Solomon (Ntsele) Linda and his troupe of a capella singers (the Evening Birds) cut a record in the Zulu asisicathamiya style. The tune with its spartan lyrics is called Mbube or perhaps more correctly Imbube (‘lion’ in the Zulu language). The tune they sing is not a particularly remarkable piece of music except for Solomon’s melody. As Cape Town music journalist Rian Malan, who is to play a key role in the Mbube story as it develops, puts it, “there was something terribly compelling about the underlying chant, a dense meshing of low male voices above which (soprano) Solomon yodeled and howled (“a blood-curdling falsetto”) for two exhilarating minutes” improvising as he went along…“a haunting skein of fifteen notes” (’In the Jungle: Inside the Long, Hidden Genealogy of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”’, Rian Malan, Rolling Stone, 14-May-2000, www.rollingstone.com). Recorded, the song sells over 100,000, copies in South Africa by 1948. Linda’s cut, 10 shillings for the recording plus a menial job in the record company (in the process signing over all rights to the song to company proprietor Eric Gallo).
Pete Seeger (Source: Mother Jones) Image: the78prof (YouTube)
From a humble back room recording in Sub-Saharan Africa’s only recording company to the American Top 40
This pattern of exploitation, injustice and racism (both overt and by omission) escalates when the story moves to America. Struggling folksinger Pete Seeger hears Solly and the Original Evening Birds’ 78 record, digs the sound and records it with his group the Weavers. But Seeger misinterprets what Solomon Linda is singing, changing the Zulu refrain ‘Uyimbube’ (“You’re the Lion”) to ‘Wimoweh’ on their recording (‘Mbube’ becomes the song ‘Wimoweh’). It’s a hit in the US in 1952 and Seeger’s career receives a big boost. No credit and no royalties for composer Solomon – although later Seeger motivated by pangs of guilt sends Linda a cheque for $1,000 via TRO/Folkways, however it gets siphoned off on-route and never reaches the impoverished Linda in the slums of Soweto in Jo’burg.
“Paul Campbell” is the only writing credit on ‘Wimoweh’ (a common nom-de-plume ploy used to claim royalties on public domain songs)☥
In 1961 a new chapter in the story opens, “doo-wop” band the Tokens, like all pop music enthusiasts in the US, are familiar with the super-catchy “Wimoweh” refrain and want to record it. Their RCA producers get songwriter George David Weiss to revamp the song. Weiss adds new lyrics (“In the jungle, the mighty jungle”, etc) and shifts the focus of the song on to Linda’s chanting melody. ‘Mbube’ having previously morphed into ‘Wimoweh’ is repackaged by Weiss as ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’, all three versions still bearing the essential imprint of Solomon Linda (Malan). The Tokens’ single—with singer Jay Siegel’s distinctive high falsetto—reaches # 1 in the US and internationally, eventually selling more than three million copies§. Again, no credit and no moolah for Linda who dies destitute in 1962 with just $25 in his bank account, leaving a widow and a half-dozen young children behind.
The Tokens (Source: singers.com)
Spreading the largesse to TRO
While credited songwriters Weiss and RCA’s Creatore and Peretti cash in big time on ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’s’ soaring sales, other formidable industry figures in the US were getting in on the act from another angle – again to the exclusion of the song’s original creator. Eric Gallo in South Africa injudiciously trades his rights to Linda’s song in America to big international music publishers TRO, (The Richmond Organisation) cutting himself off from benefitting from the ongoing “gravy train” and enriching TRO founder Howie Richmond and his partner Al Brackman.
Industry eyes only on the prize
Rather than making an act of goodwill or perhaps an atonement of sorts for the wrongs done to Solomon Linda by shuffling a financially meaningful sum in the direction of Linda’s daughters, the major stakeholders, fixating on the riches they see before them, at the beginning of the Nineties dig their heels in, even resorting to wrangling among themselves. TRO and Richmond on one side and Weiss and co-writer Creatore on the other end up fighting each other in arbitration presided over by copyright law judges…”rich white Americans squabbling over ownership of the most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa” (Malan).
‘The Lion King’ jackpot
Disney’s turn to exploit the melody’s popularity
The “golden egg” of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ explodes to new astronomical heights in 1994 when the Disney Corporation releases The Lion King, a blockbuster of a a movie—using ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ song—which by 2019 has raked in $1.65 Bn at the box office, plus spin-offs such as videos and merchandise. Not stopping there, Disney follows it up with a 1998 sequel Lion King II and a Broadway musical theatrical release (highest grossing Broadway production of all time – >$1 Bn). Added to all this is about another thirteen films that includes ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ song, plus its use in television commercials, endless airplay on radio and so on.
The two remaining Ntsele sisters looking at the 1939 photo of their father’s band (Source: Netflix)
The long quest for justice and some light at the end
An amelioration of the unconscionable plight facing Linda’s family only emerges after Rian Malan takes up their cause in the Nineties, writing a penetrating exposé (published in 2000) which gets their predicament publicity and legal support, and also embarrasses the “fat cat” beneficiaries who make some insultingly meagre financial concessions to the family. A series of court cases ensue but untangling the complicated web of ownership of the three versions of ‘Mbube’ is not straightforward – for one thing both Linda and his two surviving daughters have already signed over their rights to ‘Mbube’ in transactions which were legal, also there are issues with expiry of copyright in both RSA and America. In 2004 the Ntsele sisters with the aid of copyright lawyers initiate a lawsuit against Disney. The 2006 ruling acknowledges that ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight‘ was of South African origin and rooted in Zulu culture (‘Copyright in the Courts: The Return of the Lion’, Owen Dean, Wipo Magazine, April 2006. www.wipo.int). In an (undisclosed) out-of-court settlement Disney (keen to avoid a PR disaster) and Abilene Music❆ agree to make an equitable and substantial payout to Linda’s surviving daughters. (’The Lion Sleeps Tonight’, Lydia Hutchinson, Performing Songwriter, 01-May-2017, www.performingsongwriter.com; ‘In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory’, Sharon LeFraniere, New York Times, 22-Mar-2006, www.nytimes.com).
Rian Malan (Source: Writers Write)
Malan estimates (2002) that given the seeming limitless sales potential of ‘Mbube’/‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight‘ in all its versions and forms, the royalties owing to the song’s composer would lie in the region of US$15 million, a figure that Solomon’s descendants won’t ever see in their bank accounts…however through the unflagging, dogged persistence and refusal of Malan not just to grasp the nettle but to never let go of it⇼, and the stirling pro bono services of lawyers stirred to action by the injustice, the future is now secure for them, and credit for the classic song is now rightfully attributed to their father. One of those South African copyright lawyers Owen Dean expresses optimism that royalties will be secured for “the use of Mbube in all its derivatives, including ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight‘, for the benefit of the family” (Malan), noting also that there is “some pride in having successfully championed the cause of the small creator among entertainment industry giants” (Dean).
Source: Definitely Owen on YouTube
Postscript:Remastered: The Lion’s Share, a 2019 documentary shows writer and documentarian Malan’s quest to trace the roots of the mega-successful ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight‘ song, one of the most instantly recognisable pop melodies in American music, and his untiring efforts to help get fair compensation for the surviving daughters of the Black South African composer air-brushed from his part in music recording history.
🎶➿🎶➿🎶
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§ artists to cover ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ include the Springfields, Roger Whittaker, The Tremeloes, Robert John, Glen Campbell, Brian Eno, R.E.M., They Might Be Giants and Tight Fit
☥ another go-to pseudonym—one used by Al Brackman to grab a cut of the songwriting royalty payments pie—was “Albert Stanton” (www.secondhandsongs.com)
❆ who licensed the song to Disney for the movie
⇼ The Guardian aptly summarises this irrepressible trait of the controversial RSA journalist: “Malan is at his best when he finds a story that allows him to employ the full power of (his) instinctive reluctance to take yes for an answer” (Tim Adams, 2nd March 2013).
When I first heard about the Limp Falling Club✪ and it’s fanatical penchant for bizarre, nonsensical public (and pub) antics, it sounded like the physical humour of a very silly Monty Python skit. It turns out I wasn’t the only person to make the association between the Limp Fallers’ shtick and the Surreal sketches of the legendary Monty Pythons. No less a practitioner of his own unique brand of cutting satire than John Clarke joined the dots between the Limp Falling Club and Monty Python … channeling John Cleese’s “Minister of Silly Walks” Clarke went on to advocate the formulation of a new ministerial office, an appropriately absurd (given the lunacy that is Canberra politics) “federal Minister of Limp Falling”.
The “spontaneous public theatre” of the LFC was the brainchild of Australian political cartoonist Paul Rigby, circa. late 1950s⍟. The ‘ritual’ proceeded like this, a group of neatly-dressed white collar workers (mainly journalist types) would convene, typically in a pub or a bar or perhaps a restaurant. After consuming copious quantities of beer, on a signal they would suddenly and ‘spontaneously’ drop to the floor singularly or holus-bolus in a collapsed heap, no doubt startling nearby onlookers. I found a slim handful of grainy You Tube videos on the internet demonstrating the technique (sic), including one which shows a score of Limp Fallers including Rigby tumbling haphazardly down a staircase with scant regard to their safety.
At the time Paul Rigby was living in Perth, WA, where the “art form” took off. The cartoonist’s favourite “watering hole”, the Palace Hotel in the Perth CBD became the epicentre of the performance art of limp falling, the epicentre of the activity in Australia at least. A 2013 article by Aleisha Orr suggested the spectacle of limp falling “swept across many parts of the world in the 1950s and 60s”. In the same article one of the few surviving, octogenarian members of the club had his own take on the mysterious origins of the art of limp falling, the result of a house party accident when one of the journos—well-lubricated at the time no doubt—fell through an asbestos wall❂
Palace Hotel, Perth
I don’t think that limp falling has ever quite reached the international heights of “fad-dom” of say the Rubik’s Cube or “Flash Mobbing”, but I can testify to the quirky practice having some degree of international currency. Going back some 30 years I remember seeing a story on the nightly news about the “All Fall Down Association”. A different moniker but dedicated to the same peculiar pastime – a group of respectable looking middle class ‘suits’ (all males again) from various parts of the compass coming together at London’s Heathrow Airport. On the intoning of a special code word, in synch all collapsed to the ground with dramatic effect.
‘President’ Rigby (Source: AMHF)
After Rigby’s death in 2006 the LFC’s presidency eventually passed to his son, although the Club (Perth chapter) appears to have been inactive for some years now.
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✪ AKA the Limp Falling Association
⍟ according to the Australia Media Hall of Fame, the concept of “limp falling” was the result of a collective meeting of minds of Rigby and Ron Saw and Steve Dunleavy, two of his journalist colleagues from Sydney’s Daily Mirror
❂ the other partygoers found the incident hilarious and a new fad was thus born
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
Every age produces its share of literary hoaxes, it’s a practice to deceive that has been around for ‘yonks’. A Irish hack writer back in the 18th century claimed to have discovered (and subsequently published) a ‘lost’ play purportedly penned by Shakespeare. Jonathan Swift dabbled in it in his time, and in recent times we have seen the surfacing of false claims of a ‘lost’ autobiography of Howard Hughes and the emergence of the so-called “Hitler Diaries”.
▲ Pranker J McAuley
The Antipodes’ most celebrated entrant in the canon of great literary hoaxes occurred in 1944. The perpetrators were two nondescript conservative young poets serving in the Australian army, (Lt.) James McAuley and (Cprl.) Harold Stewart (both Fort Street High old boys), who “shared an animus towards modern poetry” (Lehman). The two desk soldiers, intent on “deflat(ing) the egos of the pretentious literary avant-garde“𝟙, honed in on the most conspicuous target, Max Harris, Adelaide publisher of the modernist literary mag Angry Penguins.
▲ Pranker H Stewart
McAuley and Stewart’s prank𝟚 was to write to Harris pretending to be one “Ethel Malley” from Croydon NSW, informing him of unpublished poems written by her brother Ern, a working class soldier whose life had been cut tragically short. Harris, taken in by the fraud lock, stock and barrel, called “Ern’s poems” modernist gems and was only too eager to publish the 18 “Ern Malley” poems in a 1944 volume of Angry Penguins. ⿻ ⿻ ⿻
▲ Cover art by Sidney Nolan
Malley’s “magnum opus“, entitled ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’, according to the hoaxers was written in a single afternoon in a random manner, a pastiche of fragments patched together from widely disparate sources of inspiration – Shakespeare, the classics, a dictionary, a book of quotations, a tome on tropical hygiene, a US Army treatise on mosquito infestation…all mixed in together with snatches of McAuley and Stewart’s own poetry. Consisting of abstruse, flowery, high-sounding verse, to the minds of the hoaxers they were simply creating nonsensical, bad modern poetry:
❝ Though stilled to alabaster
This Ichthys shall swim
From the mind’s disaster
On the volatile hymn. ❞
𓂎𓂎𓂎
❝ The swung torch scatters seeds
In the umbelliferous dark ❞
𓂎𓂎𓂎
❝ I am still
the black swan of trespass on alien waters. ❞
𓂎𓂎𓂎
▲ Max Harris with his Heide Circle friends (Source: literaturelust.com)⿻⿻⿻
After a Sydney tabloid exposed the poems as a hoax and McAuley and Stewart fessed up to the deed, the fallout for Harris was caustic, the publisher was publicly humiliated for being duped so completely. And to add insult to injury, he was charged, tried and convicted on obscenity grounds (“indecent advertisements” the police prosecution charged). The trifecta of misfortune for wunderkind Harris was that his publication Angry Penguins folded within two years of the episode. Harris relocated to Melbourne, becoming a bookseller (fronting the Mary Martin’s chain of bookshops).
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Afterwards Harris reproached himself for not picking up on the several clues McAuley and Stewart embedded in the text, eg, “It is necessary to understand that a poet may not exist”; (alluding to earlier incongruous stanzas) “these distractions were clues” (Parezanović). Interestingly though, Harris never backtracked from his initial evaluation that the ‘Darkening Ecliptic’ poems were works of genius𝟛. Despite being pilloried by the press he also elicited support from the literary world for his stance, most notably from influential critic Sir Herbert Read who contended that “it was possible to arrive at genuine art by spurious means – even if the motive of the writer was to perpetrate a travesty” (Lehman).
▲ No. 40 Dalmar St Croydon: the Malleys’ supposed address, actually the home of Harold Stewart⿻⿻⿻
Read’s anti-clockwise take on the controversy points to a debate that continues to this day over the merit or otherwise of the “Ern Malley” poems. Critics at home and abroad praised ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’ for its literary merit – including Robert Hughes. American poets John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch both lauded the poems’ surrealist qualities and even taught Ern’s work in their college literature classes (Wertheim). Even a poet of the highest calibre, TS Eliot, had positive words, wiring his support for the poems.
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Ern Malley and the intentional fallacy
The Ern Malley controversy focuses attention on the issue of authorship. Sasha Grishin argues that where an author is “unknowable” and the author’s intentions irretrievable and perhaps irrelevant…once a work of art has been created…it is largely a fruitless task…to try to determine what an author may have intended by it“. Michel Foucault gives credence to this perspective: “we can imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author” – a prime example of this is Homer, the unknowable but putative author of western literature’s ur-canon. ⿻⿻⿻ Nolan’s “Ned Kelly” series ▲
Like the poems or loathe them, the Malley hoax continues to fascinate critics and writers. US poet and critic David Lehman calls it “the greatest literary hoax of the 20th century”. Sidney Nolan (who contributed the cover artwork for the Ern Malley volume) credits the phenomenon with giving him the nerve to embark on his iconic “Ned Kelly” series of paintings. Garry Shead is another artist who produced his own idiosyncratic visual take on the Malley poems. In Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake the Malley hoax influence—along with the influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein— shows itself in the novel’s character ‘Christopher Chubb’.
A cause célèbre with staying power
Undeniably, the creation of the fictitious Ern Malley far surpassed the literary significance of his creators (Grishin). As Lehman noted, “Malley escaped the control of his creators (enjoying) an autonomous existence beyond and at odds with the critical and satirical intentions of McAuley and Stewart”.
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𝟙 Stewart late in life described the deception as “a wonderful jape (which would) absolutely slay Max Harris”
𝟚 some have suggested that the Australian anti-modern poet AD Hope was behind the prank to deceive Harris but Hope vigorously denied any involvement (McCulloch)
𝟛 Stephen Orr suggests that Harris’ eagerness to take the Ern Malley discovery at face value and run with it was in part due to his being on the lookout for something authentic and new to take the place of bush poetry in Angry Penguins, something “modern, anti-Adelaide, anti-Australia-as-a-talcum-scented tea shop”
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Papers and published pieces consulted:
‘The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax – Introduction’, David Lehman, Jacket, 17 — June 2002, www.jacketmagazine.com
‘The Poet Who Never Was’, David Lehman, Washington Post, 06-Mar-1994, www.washingtonpost.com
‘Garry Shead and the Ern Malley series by Sasha Grishin, 2003’, Gagprojects, www.gagprojects.com
“It is Necessary to Understand That a Poet May Not Exist: The Case of Ern Malley”, Tijana Parezanović, SIC – A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, Dec 2012, www.sic-journal.org
‘The Fall and Rise of Ernest Lalor Malley: The Poet who wasn’t’, Christine Wertheim, Cabinet, Issue 33, Spring 2009, www.cabinetmagazine.org
‘In Dialogue with A.D. Hope – Dialogue Three Politics & Poetics of Australian Literature’, Ann McCulloch, Double Dialogues, Issue 5 2003, www.doubledialogues.com
Say the word ‘Prohibition’ and people think of those years in the early 20th century when America went dry with a blanket ban on hard liquor consumption, but much less well known is its connexion to that most popular of frozen desserts, ice cream.
(Source: Flickr)
The Volstead Act in 1920 outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution invalidated the licences of brewers, distillers, vintners and sellers of alcoholic beverages✴. The anti-alcohol legislation had its roots in the formation of the Anti-Saloon League (1893) supported by et al the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, sharing its alarm at the growing prevalence of hard drinking and the development of a culture of drink. These like-minded groups coalesced into a national movement which successfully lobbied Washington for the desired reform (‘Why Prohibition?’, Temperance & Prohibition, Ohio State University, www.ose.edu)❂.
(Source: Flickr)
Nature (and business opportunism) abhors a vacuum
Into the void left by plummeting alcohol consumption (in the early 1920s consumption of beverage alcohol was around 30% of the pre-prohibition level (‘Why Prohibition?’), came ice-cream, marketed partially as a “comfort food” for those committed drinkers bereft of the booze. The advent of Prohibition was thus a boost to the ice cream business. Americans didn’t simply stop drinking beer, wine and spirits and take up iced confectioneries…over the nine years from 1916 ice cream consumption increased 55%, against a population increase of only 15% (‘Thanks, Prohibition! How the Eighteenth Amendment Furled America’s Taste For Ice Creams’, Rachel Van Bokkem, AHA Perspectives on History, 08-Aug-2016, www.historians.org).
(Image: Omaha World Herald, CooksInfo Food Encyclopedia)
Even before Prohibition the ice cream business surge started, due to improvements in technology which boosted ice cream’s popularity. Improved methods led to mass production of ice cream; improved refrigeration preserved the product better. Other recent innovations in the industry enhanced ice cream’s appeal to the public, eg, the development of single-serve products (the chocolate ice cream bar, the Popsicle, the Dixie Cup), notably the Eskimo Pie (marketed initially as the “I-Scream-Bar”) by Christian Nelson; Harry Burt’s “Good Humor Bar” which added a wooden stick to the frozen confectionery…a further advance by Burt was the introduction of a mobile service (trucks with freezers bringing the bars to the neighbourhoods) (Van Bokkem). Another factor was the spike in the number of soda fountains in American drugstores (the New York Times estimated that there were over 100,000 soda fountains in 1922, generating $1B in sales (‘Why Ice Cream Soared in Population During Prohibition’, Farrell Evans,
History, 28-Jan-2021, www.history.com).
Coors Porcelain Co (Source: coortek.com)
Breweries’ strategies responding to Prohibition
When the bans were enforced, the bulk of breweries went to the wall. Research by Maureen Ogle indicates that of the 71,300 American brewers in 1915, no more than 100 survived Prohibition (Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, 2007). The big names in US brewing stood more chance of surviving, but only by diversifying. This they did by branching into the manufacture of everything from ceramics (Coors) to dyes to farm equipment to police vans. Beer giants Anheuser-Busch and Yuengling followed the trend into ice cream production (as did Stroh Brewing), contributing to the estimated 40% growth in consumption in the 1920s (Evans). Pabst Brewing went into making cheese (“Pabst-ett” spread), which was sold to Kraft after Prohibition ended. A number of the brewers made the logical switch to soft drinks, malted milk and malt syrup. Busch also produced frozen eggs, infant formula, carbonated coffee and tea (‘How America’s Iconic Brewers Survived Prohibition’, Christopher Klein, History, 16-Jan-2019, www.history.com).
The alcohol drought prompted the big brewers to fall back on their substantial real estate property holdings to stay afloat and generate ongoing income. Miller resorted to selling off its chain of saloons when things got tight. Some enterprising ice cream parlours bought the disused equipment and facilities of liquor businesses (Van Bokkem).
Ice cream mania…a health food?
US newspapers got in on the public’s ice cream craze, ascribing purported but unspecified health benefits to be had from eating the product. Some dietitians also sought to give the frozen confectionery validity with claims that ice cream was one of the best foods for children’s physical development (Van Bokkem). The Anti-Saloon League added its endorsement to the dairy industry’s marketing campaign for its sweet frozen cream and milk treat, declaring it a “refreshing and palatable food” (Evans).
At its peak during Prohibition New Yorkers were consuming 300 million gallons of ice cream a year by themselves. Among those businesses seeking to cash in, a number of confectionery and butter factories starting manufacturing ice cream as a by-product (Van Bokkem).
Cotton Club, NYC’s premier speakeasy
Speakeasies, drugstores and “Near beer”
For the aficionado or the hardened drinker there were ways, illegal and legal, to get round Prohibition’s national ban on liquor. With the ingredients still obtainable for backyard stills moonshiners and bootleggers benefitted from an upsurge in demand for the home-brewed stuff. As formerly legal saloons were closed down in 1920, the void was filled by the mushrooming of ‘speakeasies’ (unlicensed bar rooms) selling ‘hooch’. These operations were commonly run by city gangsters, organised crime ‘luminaries’ such as Al Capone and his lucrative Chicago racket.
Brewers like Pabst, Busch and Miller were able to exploit a small window of opportunity—beverages containing less than 0.5% alcohol were legal—to produce a concoction described as “near beer” (Miller’s equivalent brand was called ‘Vivo’). Busch manufactured a non-alcoholic malt cereal beverage, ‘Bevo’, which apparently tasted much like actual beer. Genuinely serious drinkers ultimately rejected “near beer”, opting for real beer which could be procured from Speakeasies and bootleggers (Klein).
(Source. vinepair.com)
Another, legal avenue for sourcing alcohol were drugstores. Licensed druggists were allowed to sell liquor for “medicinal purposes” – or to clergymen for “religious reasons”, eg, “Kosher Wine” was available to rabbis for “sacramental purposes” (‘Speakeasies Were Prohibition’s Worst-Kept Secrets’, Prohibition, www.prohibitionthemob.org).
In 1933 Prohibition was repealed and brewers and drinkers went back to doing what came naturally, although the taste for ice cream was by then “permanently engrained in US culture” (Van Bokkem). As it remains today with Americans, who per capita consume 20.8 litres of ice cream a year, second only to sweet-toothed New Zealanders.
(Photo: US Naval Institute)
End-note: The Navy jettisons liquor
The US Navy was the first arm of the government to move against the “demon drink”, banning alcohol from its ships and ports in 1914 (Secretary for the Navy Josephus Daniels was a fervent supporter of the Temperance Movement). Later on the Navy replaced it with ice cream – building two floating ice cream factories on concrete barges during WWII (‘How Ice Cream Became America’s Native Treat Because of Prohibition’, Cleveland Whiskey, 16-Jan-2019, www.clevelandwhiskey.com).
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✴ Prohibition legislation did not ban the consumption of alcohol, just its production and distribution. Nor were the ingredients for making beer prohibited
❂ there were prior American moves, initiated by Temperance activists, to outlaw alcohol at state-level, the earliest to succeed was in Maine (1846)
The image stereotype of the Sherlock Holmes character (Source: Culture Livresque)
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Few characters from modern literature pop up on cinema screens and TV sets as frequently as Sherlock Holmes does. Some observers have stated it more firmly. Christopher Redmond estimates that Sherlock Holmes is the most prolific screen character in the history of cinema (A Sherlock Holmes Handbook (1994)). Just how many different Sherlock Holmes screen adaptions have been made is too large and elusive a number to pin down accurately, but screen vehicles of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous super-sleuth and Mensa-alumni certainly number in the hundreds✱.
(Photo: CrimeReads)
A publishing can of worms
When Arthur Conan Doyle (ACD) died in 1930 the author left his literary works in Trust to his widow (Jean Conan Doyle) and immediate family. But in excluding his daughter Mary from his first marriage, ACD opened the door to an ongoing family rift, decades of squabbles, strife and litigation by his heirs, descendants and their spouses.
As the intra-family ‘Barney’ over who controls the copyright to the Sherlock Holmes works deepened, the imbroglio entangled an investment company specifically set up to manage the windfall (aptly named “Baskervilles Investments”) and even the Royal Bank of Scotland (‘History of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Copyrights’, (2015), www.arthurconandoyle.com).
1954 Holmes TV series with Ronald Howard (Photo: dvdfr.com)⌖
The upshot of the kerfuffle was that each of the competing parties claimed to be the rightful holder of the rights to ACD’s literary estate, and then attempted to sell it notwithstanding the prevailing uncertainty over ownership. American TV producer-director Sheldon Reynolds acquired a licence from two of Arthur’s sons to make a Sherlock Holmes series in the 1950s. When, 20 years later, Reynolds tried to get a licence for a follow-up series on TV, he found that the legal landscape had changed. The rights were now held by the Royal Bank of Scotland who had acquired them after the previous owner defaulted on a loan. Eventually, with funds provided by his Pfizer heiress mother-in-law, Reynolds secured the rights to the Holmes stories.
Andréa Plunket (Source: goodreads.com)
Culture of litigation
Since 1990 the main battle for control of the copyrights has pitted Reynolds’s ex-wife, Hungarian-born heiress Andréa Milos (née Reynolds, née Plunket) versus the Conan Doyle Estate and others. Plunket has doggedly claimed to hold the rights to the name “Sherlock Holmes” and the stories, despite a lack of legal support for the claims. Lawsuits were exchanged between her andthe Estate. Plunket also threatened tosue the BBC over its Sherlock television series for allegedly infringing ‘her’ trademarks (‘The Scandalous Sherlock Holmes Copyright Issue’, Mattias Boström, I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, 30-Jul-2015, www.ihearofsherlock.com).
The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Estate for its part has been particularly litigious in defence of its literary legacy. The Estate has consistently striven to maintain water-tight control over both the Sherlock Holmes stories and the characters. In 2013 it demanded author Leslie S Klinger pay a fee to license the Sherlock character for an anthology he was planning to do. Klinger’s response was to sue the Estate on the basis that most of the Sherlock material was in the public domain. In court the judge upheld Klinger’s position, while reaffirming that some late works were still covered under copyright (‘Sherlock Holmes Copyright: An overview’, Brogan Woodburn,www.redpoints.com). In 2020 it sued Netflix over its upcoming film Enola Holmes. The grounds? The film apparently depicts Holmes as having emotions and respecting women. This, the Estate contends, breaches Conan Doyle’s copyright (‘Lawsuit over ‘warmer’ Sherlock depicted in Enola Holmes dismissed’, Alison Flood, The Guardian, 22-Dec-2020, www.theguardian.com).
‘The Red-Headed League’ story (Golden Press edition, 1963)
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End-note: An additional complication over the Holmes copyright issue is a demarcation between the UK and US laws. In the UK copyright lasts for 70 years after an author’s death (in Conan Doyle’s case, the copyright expired in 2000). Conversely in the USA some copyrights extend for 95 years from the date of the work’s first publication⍟. This has proved a stumbling block for TV series and film-makers trying to adapt one of the Sherlock stories in recent years (‘Sherlock Holmes And His “Copyrighted Emotions”‘, Copyright House, 28-Sep-2020, www.copyrighthouse.org).
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✱ including works for film, music, radio, stage, video games, there are over 25,000 products that are related to the famous detective (Woodburn)
⍟ the last of ACD’s published work expires in 2023
For as long as most consumers in the West can remember, it’s been Coca-Cola versus Pepsi-Cola, vying for the public’s preferred carbonated soft drink. Just how long is that? Well, the Pepsi-Cola Company was established in 1902, ten years after Coca-Cola did, so the rivalry got going pretty much early on in the 20th century. It was a long gestation period however for Pepsi before it got close to being competitive with Coca-Cola✱. PepsiCo struggled so much in the early years that in 1923 the company was even declared bankrupt – basically due to WWI sugar rationing in the US. Eight years later it filed for bankruptcy again! Pepsi never actually went away though, slowly and methodically rebuilding itself as a significant player in the industry, albeit for a long time it remained as one observer put it, a “persistent gadfly” in a lake dominated by Coca-Cola (Kahn).
In its early days Coke was marketed both as a medicinal drink and as a “refreshing tonic”
While Coca-Cola powered on with innovatively marketing (using high profile sportsmen) its product to kids with Santa Claus’ help, and expanding Coke overseas, Pepsi didn’t really get its act together until the middle of the 20th Century. PepsiCo shifted its branding and marketing (moving from bottles to cans and adopting patriotic red, white and blue colours for the product). Another direction Pepsi goes in at this time is product diversification … the company’s 1965 merger with Frito-Lay Inc marks Pepsi’s foray into the snack food field. It also acquired other soft drink brands like Mountain Dew in 1964. Coca-Cola on the other hand confined itself to the beverage field with the introduction of TaB (a sugar-free diet version of Coke), then Sprite and Fresca.
Pepsi’s watershed year was 1975 when it mounted the “Pepsi Challenge”, a series of filmed blind-taste tests in which the majority of participants chose Pepsi over Coke as their preferred soda. This boosted Pepsi sales and escalated the rivalry between the two “Big Sodas”, kicking off what became known in America from the Sixties on as the “Cola Wars” or the “Soda Wars”. Until the Pepsi Challenge happened Coca-Cola had been coasting somewhat, complacently presenting itself as “the real thing” in contrast to the upstart pretender. Coca-Cola’s response to PepsiCo’s move was to promote the then most popular personality on US TV Bill Cosby as “the face of Coke”.
Pepsi embarked on a marketing campaign which depicted itself as a younger, hipper brand than its outmoded rival. Drinking Pepsi was a cool thing to do (so proclaimed the marketers), when stacked up against the tired, same old, same old Coke alternative. Integral to PepsiCo’s campaign was the recruitment of celebrities to endorse the beverage, the centrepiece of which was Michael Jackson. Other pop music icons followed the success of Jackson’s involvement with the product – David Bowie, Madonna, Lionel Ritchie, etc. Ad men heralded Pepsi as “the choice of a new generation”.
In the early Eighties, under pressure from Pepsi’s inroads into the market, Coca-Cola introduced diet Coke, a caffeine-free soda, followed by a complete redesign of Coke—given the secret codename “Project Kansas”—the outcome in 1985 was a sweeter Coke, New Coke. To counter Pepsi’s sweeter, more syrupy taste, Coca-Cola replaced sugar with corn syrup (which also reduced the production cost). New Coke however proved a disaster for the company, provoking a huge backlash from loyal consumers, some described the new taste as like “two day old Pepsi”. Southern fans of Coke, where Coca-Cola (and Pepsi) had its origins, were especially offended.
Faced with an avalanche of criticism, Coca-Cola brought back the old formula under the name “Coca-Cola Classic”. New Coke for its part got rebranded but never really took off and was eventually discontinued. Disappointment that it was, New Coke did provide one unanticipated positive – it managed to reawaken in many Coca-Cola drinkers suffering from a bout of ennui a new craving for the original taste (Little).
The feud between Pepsi and Coke has continued to the present, in contemporary times reaching social media and outer space. In 2011 the hardball rivalry saw PepsiCo target Coke’s famous, family-friendly mascots, the polar bears and even every child’s favourite stranger Santa.
Vintage 1950s ad: “Pepsi-Chic” before it went “Pepsi-Hip” (Robt Levering)
The battle between the brown carbonated sugar beverages has seen Pepsi and Coca-Cola go tit-for-tat. Coke had the contour bottle so Pepsi introduced the swirl bottle, Pepsi had Gatorade so Coke had Powerade, Coke had Fanta so Pepsi had Tropicana, and so on. Only the decision by Pepsi to branch into non-beverage fields has not seen Coca-Cola follow suit. Some industry observers attribute Pepsi’s declining market position commensurate to Coke (2008–2018: Pepsi’s market share fell from 10.3 to 8.4 per cent, while Coca-Cola’s rose from 17.3 to 17.8 per cent) to it’s preoccupation with diversification leading to the company losing its focus on its flagship product (Weiner-Bronner; Beverage Digest).
World domination through the prism of “Coca-colonisation”
Both Coke and Pepsi are deeply embedded in American culture and psyche as national icons. Coca-Cola’s brand recognition goes beyond this, embodying a universality that is global in reach. Mid-century Coca-Cola officials gleefully crowed that the drink is the “most American thing in America”. Robert W Woodruff, Coca-Cola president for over three decades, declared it to be “the essence of capitalism”. World War II enabled Coca-Cola to spread the word via US servicemen by cleverly promising (and delivering) them the sugary product in overseas theatres of war. The seemingly unstoppable postwar expansion of Coke as the company sought to extend its market to all corners of the world met with some international pushback. Certain European states like France (spurred on by agitation by the French Communist Party) staunchly resisted the drink’s introduction to their domestic markets, an attempt as they saw it to “Coca-colonise” other sovereign nations. In such countries the arrival of Coca-Cola bottles on their city shop shelves was seen as a pervasive evil, a symbol of American cultural imperialism, an all-consuming Americanisation which undermines the way of life and values of their society⍟.
Footnote: the Big Sodas rivalry had ad companies of second-half 20th century working overtime to come up with the jingle or tagline that would give their client the edge … from Coca-Cola’s early go-to “The pause that refreshes” to the TV age’s standards “Things Go Better with Coke” and “It’s the Real Thing” (the words “real” and “real thing” recur over the decades in Coca-Cola’s ad campaigns). Pepsi for its part, went from “more bounce to the ounce” in 1950 to its 1960s accent on youth, “Come Alive! You’re in the Pepsi Generation” and numerous variations over the years on this theme (“young” and “generation” are the key Pepsi words that recur through the jingles and slogans).
Photo: George Marks/Retrofile/Getty
Postscript: The taste difference!
Most people know that Coca-Cola originally used small amounts of cocaine in the famous beverage (scandalous as that may seem to modern sensibilities), but what is it that makes the two brown-coloured soft drinks taste a bit different? They both have carbonated water, sugar, colour Caramel E150d, phosphoric acid and natural flavourings. Well, according to Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, 2005), its the hints of citrus acid that is added to Pepsi that sets the drinks apart – cf. Coke’s citrus-free, sweet vanilla and raisin flavours.
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✱ Pepsi was always coming from behind in the formative period, by the time PepsiCo was founded the Big Coke was already selling about one million gallons a year
⍟ the familiar bottle of Coke is boundless as well as ubiquitous, having been carried under the North Pole and into outer space
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Articles and sites consulted:
‘Why Coke is winning the cola wars’, (Danielle Wiener-Bronner), CNN Business, 21-Feb-2018, www. money.cnn.com
‘COKE VS. PEPSI: The Amazing Story Between the Cola Wars’, (Kim Bhasin), Business Insider, 02-Nov-2011, www.businessinsider.com
‘Ever Wondered What’s The Difference Between Coca-Cola and Pepsi? It’s Literally ONE Ingredient’, (Bobbie Edsor), Delish, 03-Dec-3020, www.delish.com
‘The Universal Drink’, (E.J.Kahn Jr), The New Yorker, 06-Feb-1959, www.newyorker.com
‘The Cola Wars’, (Melissa Santore), Ranker.com, 20-Feb-2020, www.ranker.com
The story of Robin Hood is one of those enduring English chronicles from the distant past, which like the Arthurian legend has continually provided rich fodder for the screen. The basic story is an all-too familiar one with universal appeal: a virtuous Saxon nobleman in Mediaeval England, fleeced out of his estate and title by powerful villains, responds by mobilising an heroic and effective resistance against the status quo, on the way freeing the poor and oppressed peasantry from their yokes. That the legend is known throughout the Anglophone world and Europe, is testimony to the fact has there been so many film and television goes at retelling the legend – starting with the first silent one in 1908.
It wasn’t until the 1922 silent version with Robin Hood played by the lead Hollywood actor of the day Douglas Fairbanks Sr that the Robin Hood movie achieved serious cinematic recognition. Fairbanks’ athletic prowess and spectacular stunts elevated the movie and captured the imagination of audiences. With a budget of nearly one million dollars (one of the biggest in the silent era) the 1922 Robin Hood helped to establish the ‘swashbuckler’ sub-genre in cinema.
The next version of note, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) is considered by many to be the best movie on the iconic Saxon hero. Errol Flynn in the title role brings the energy and verve to the film that largely accounts for The Adventures of Robin Hood’s standing as one of the great swashbucklers of Hollywood. As one critic observed: “Flynn’s Robert of Locksley, dripping with sexuality, good humor, panache and swagger, captures not only the derring-do character, but also the more dramatic side of his fight for injustice” (Susan King, ‘Classic Hollywood: 100 Years of Robin Hood movies’, LA Times, 12-May-2010). The use of (Technicolor) colour, still not widely used at that time, added to the film’s freshness and appeal.
R Todd in the Lincoln Green
For most Flynn’s performance and the 1938 classic has remained the benchmark. Of the numerous subsequent RH iterations, none have really stacked up against The Adventures of Robin Hood but some of the efforts do warrant a degree of favourable mention. The modest 1952 low-profile Disney flick, The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men is a sleeper of a movie compared to the blockbusters above, but it proved popular in the US (good performance by Irish actor Richard Todd in the lead) and was in the main well received by the press: “an expert rendition of an ancient legend”; “as lively as a sturdy Western” (New York Times); a “zesty, colorfully retelling of the familiar story” (Leonard Maltin); and for its authentic English locations.
One of two 1991 feature film versions of Robin Hood was the much hyped Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves which did well at the box office but was not critical well received. Kevin Costner was lambasted for his less than credible impersonation of an English noble as was the screenplay, though Alan Rickman won plaudits for his deliciously hammy Sheriff of Nottingham — “wicked, droll, sly, eye-rolling, witty one-liners and put-downs” (Roger Ebert). The second film entitled simply Robin Hood, starring another Irish thespian Patrick Bergin, tries for more modern touches. The movie tones down the traditional “rob from the rich, give to the poor”, socialist-leaning revolutionary Robin, opting for a more out and out impudent anti-authoritarian (Tom Jicha, SunSentinel, 13-May-1991). Another innovation is the replacement of Hood’s traditional nemeses, the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne, with two new baddies, Sir Miles Folcanet and Baron Deguerre. The Maid Marian role in RH adaptions are usually passive objects of attention, but this film has Uma Thurman attempting to redress this by actively participating in the climactic sword fight, (one critic was dismissive of this as “a contrived nod to present-day feminism”, Tom Shales, The Washington Post, 13-May-1991).
Crowe’s band
Two more recent iterations of RH have sought to give the story a modern twist. Both Ridley Scott’s revisionist 2010 Robin Hood and the 2018 version analogised the time-honoured legend with the post-9/11 West’s preoccupation with the war on terror. The critical consensus was that Ridley Scott’s version was dour and joyless with the essential adventure ingredient of the tale drained out. Russell Crowe playing Hood as a hardened war veteran was singled out for specific criticism by some – too old to play the role, his accent sounded more Irish or even Scottish than Nottinghamshire, etc. The 2018 Robin Hood depicts the Merry Men, clothed in half-modern costumes, as if they are SAS commandos entwined in a Middle East-type scenario picking off terrorists with automatic weapons (’14 Big Scren Robin Hoods’: Ranked’, (Mary Sollosi), 14-Jun-2019, EW.com).
The 1950s was the first decade that television really impacted on the public and popular culture in advanced Western countries…for countless viewers in Britain, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand, this meant a new opportunity to indulge in the perennial classic adventure story of the Lincoln-green set. In those pioneering days in the new medium Associated Television’s Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-59) was compulsory viewing in grainy black and white. Richard Greene was a reassuringly efficient “righter of wrongs” and appropriately English in pedigree. His presence as Hood aided by interesting stories and an enticingly catchy theme song, saw the production through 143 episodes. The success of the Greene “Robin Hood” inspired a new wave of TV series on the Nottinghamshire archer extraordinaire from the Seventies on🅐. The pick of these is probably the 1984 series Robin of Sherwood which had the novelty of two different incarnations of Robin Hood. The ITV series was widely praised as a “gritty, authentic production design with real-life history, 20th century fiction and pagan myth” (‘Robin Hood’, Wikipedia). World expert on Robin Hood literature Stephen Knight described it as “the most innovative and influential version of the myth in recent times”. A haunting soundtrack by Clannad helped the “moody and atmospheric” vibe of Robin of Sherwood. Personally, I’m a bit partial to a more recent Robin Hood series (2006-09), largely for Keith Allen’s high camp, deeply sarcastic performance, replete with a range of exaggerated often incredulous facial gestures as the Sheriff of Nottingham (one episode spoofs the Bob Marley song in its title, “Who Shot the Sheriff?”).
So deeply embedded in film and popular culture is the Robin Hood story that inevitably someone would lampoon it and that somebody was Mel Brooks in his 1993 parody Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Brooks makes fun of other (serious) iterations of RH like Costner’s Prince of Thieves. In fact Brooks has already roamed into this territory in television in 1975 with his sitcom on Hood and co, When Things Were Rotten. Both were replete with one-liners, sight gags, literal humour and anachronisms (something the non-humorous versions were also very prone to).
One of the funniest alternative iterations of Robin Hood came out of late Eighties children’s television. Creator Tony Robinson‘s Maid Marian and her Merry Men as the title suggests inverts the roles of the legend…Marian is the de facto leader and the brains of the Sherwood Forest outlaws, while Robin, an incompetent ex-tailor (“Robin of Kensington”) is a complete airhead. Another comic inversion of the traditional legend seen here and in Men in Tights is the presentation of Robin as being far from heroic.
Marian’s outfit
Footnote: One of the quintessential personal traits of Robin Hood is his prowess as a master archer which features in all RH screen versions. Given the character’s mythic status this prowess is typically grossly exaggerated – Russell Crowe manages to hit a fleeing soldier on horseback hundreds of yards away with an arrow flush on the back of his head; Taron Egerton in the 2018 film shoots nearly 20 arrows in the trailer alone! (Max Tenenbaum, ‘The 10 Best Archers From Film and TV’ Screen Rant, 07-Apr-2020).
Postscript: Political HoodThe Adventures of Robin Hood TV series was clearly intended as good fun, a vehicle of commercial escapist entertainment, nonetheless buried in the storyline are snatches of political commentary on contemporary events in the UK during the strait-jacketed postwar decade after 1945. An analogy can be made between Robin’s return from serving in the Crusades to find his property and titles confiscated, and the shabby treatment of British veterans returning from the WWII conflagration. The Adventures‘ political messages were not confined to contemporary Britain. The TV program was the brainchild of a blacklisted US producer Hannah Weinstein. Weinstein hired leftist American writers such as Ring Lardner Jr similarly persecuted by the McCarthyism scourge in the US. Lardner and the others were not slow to draw comparisons between the fictional Robin Hood’s plight and their own ongoing victimisation by the zealous American Right. According to Lardner, writing for the show afforded “plenty of opportunities for oblique social comment on (the assault on liberties in) Eisenhower-era America” (Allen W.Wright, ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood 1950s TV Series Page 2’, (Sept 2005), Robin Hood: Bold Outlaw of Barnsdale and Sherwood, Spotlight, www.boldoutlaw.com).
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🅐 not to mention the similarly themed 1958 TV series William Tell which might be summed up succinctly as “Robin Hood with a crossbow”
In 1937 the Nazi regime organised two art exhibitions in Munich concurrently, separated only by a park and a few hundred metres. One was intended to hammer home to the German volk the inequity of the type of art that the führer Adolf Hitler found abhorrent, ie, anything in art that even hinted of modernity. The other representing all that Hitler found good in art was the complete antithesis of this – a paean to traditional, realistic painting and sculpture and art that conformed to classical themes and forms.
⇧ A Hitler, landscape (Source: Widewalls)
Hitler’s early experiences and his perceived emotional pattern suggest a motive of personal revenge contributing to the Nazis’ fanatical war on the modern and the avant-garde in art. As a young man Hitler dreamed of a career as an artist but a double rejection by the Vienna art academy saw those aspirations dashed. His paintings were summarily dismissed as passe by the art establishment in favour of abstract and modern styles (Burns), leaving the future Reich leader with a bitter aftertaste and a grudge①.
In Mein Kampf Hitler avers that “Cubism and Dadaism are symptoms of biological degradation threatening the German people”, Werckmeister, O. K. “Hitler the Artist.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 2, 1997, pp. 270–297. JSTORwww.jstor.org/stable/1343984. Accessed 2 March 2021.
The purging of so-called “degenerate art”
The Degenerate Art Exhibition (Entartete Kunst) in 1937 was the culmination of a concerted campaign waged by the Nazis to root out all manifestations of avant-garde art in Germany. The first efforts by Hitler’s henchmen were a reaction to the preceding liberal and permissive Weimar era which had embraced the modern style in art and especially Expressionism. In 1933 the Nazis held their first art exhibit of the supposed “degenerate art” in Dresden. Allied to this, the systematic confiscation of modern artworks from museum across Germany took place. Hundreds of thousands of the plundered art pieces including works by modern masters were sold by the Third Reich (some of the proceeds were siphoned off into armament production)②. Much of the minor, less marketable art works were ultimately burnt.
⇧ Beckmann: ‘The Night’
The “wrong type” of art
Hitler rejected the avant-garde and modernity in part for aesthetic reasons. Hitler like many of his Nazi followers had an innate conservative aesthetic taste in art. Politics and ideology also played a part, the führer associated modernism with Jews and communism, and by extension, with democracy and pacifism. Jewish influences, Hitler held, had contaminated the classical art styles so beloved by him. At the same time he denounced what he called “cultural Bolshevism” for weakening German society. Modern art, the Nazis believed was an evil plot against the German people, a “dangerous lie” which would poison German minds. In chilling words given the Nazis’ later unbridled lethal use of eugenics Hitler stated that “anyone who paints a green sky and fields blue ought to be sterilised”.
⇧ Kokoschka: ’Portrait of a Degenerate Artist’
“Sick art” and culture as a propaganda tool
Hitler and the Nazis believed that art played a critical role in defining society’s values. Expressionism③ and the group Die Brücke (“The Bridge”) and artists like Oscar Kokoschka and Ernst Kirchner got singled out for extra repressive measures. The Nazis depicted avant-garde art as the lowest of the low—”impure and subversive”, it’s artists ‘diseased’ specimens corrupted by mental, physical and moral decay—conversely they elevated classical Greek and Roman art to a sublime place, the highest of cultural planes.
⇧ Hitler viewing the ‘Degenerates’
The Degenerate Art Exhibition
The Nazis’ 1937 exhibition was carefully stage-managed as a propaganda vehicle to mock and deride the modern art Hitler so detested. The exhibition comprised Expressionist, Dada, Cubism, Abstract (allocated its own room designated the “Insanity Room”) and New Objectivity artworks. Paintings were hung in a careless, haphazard fashion, with graffiti scrawled on the walls which defamed the artists. Actors were hired to prowl through the gallery loudly denouncing the “Modernist madness”. Adolf Ziegler, the Reich”s top arts bureaucrat and Hitler’s favourite artist, declared the displayed works “monstrosities of insanity, insolence, incompetence and degeneration”. And to ram home the degeneracy point, the vilified artworks were juxtaposed alongside paintings by the enfeebled and the disabled, by psychotic patients and the like. According to the Nazis, degenerate art was the product of Jews and Bolsheviks, but interestingly only six of the 112 artists whose work was displayed in the exhibition were Jewish. The 650 paintings, prints and sculptures included works by Grosz, Dix, Klee, Beckmann, Nolde, Chagall, Picasso, Wandinsky, Marc and Mondrian.
⇧ Führer taking in the “good art”
Exhalting in the “pure Aryan art”
To provide Germans with a favourable point of comparison, the Nazis simultaneously held the Great German Art Exhibition in the same Munich neighbourhood. This displayed ‘Ayran’ art➃, the type of art Hitler approved of. Often gargantuan in scale⑤ – statuesque blond nudes, idealised heroic and duty-bound soldiers and imagined pastorals and idyllic landscapes (reflecting Hitler’s predilection for realistic paintings of outdoor rustic settings). Characteristically the favoured Nazis’ male figures in art represented the concept of the Übermensch (an idealised ‘superman’). Hitler’s intention was that the Groß deutsche Kunstausstellung propaganda would help mobile the German people behind the Nazis’ values.
Footnote: The outcome of the dual 1937 exhibitions was not anticipated by Hitler and the Nazis: Entartete Kunst proved wildly popular, attracting more than two million visitors, whereas Groß Kunstausstellung only managed less than a third of this number. The “Degenerate Art” show was such a hit that it was toured on display throughout the German Reich after the Munich premiere closed.
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Postscript: German artists deemed ‘degenerate’ understandably were more at risk of persecution from the Nazis from those outside the country. Special attention was given to artists like George Grosz and Oscar Dix who were openly critical of the totalitarian regime. Grosz mocked Hitler on canvaswhile Dix earned the enmity of the Nazis for his excruciating depictions of the horrors of war. As one writer put it, “the Nazis labeled Dix a ‘degenerate,’ but the term is better applied to the society he depicted—cannibalizing itself and hurtling toward destruction” (Alina Cohen).
Dix’s ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ (1933)
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① Hitler’s own preference for subject matter as an artist was for painting buildings and largely unpopulated pastoral landscapes (the future “world leader” had no talent for capturing the human form)
② Hitler and the National-Socialists’ notion of modern art as being the product of entartung (degeneracy) can be traced to a Jewish Austro-Hungarian social critic Max Nordau who decried the new art and literature in 1890s Europe as being the work of diseased minds
③ the focus on Expressionism as a target for the Nazi “culture police” proved a particular problem for Joseph Goebbels. The propaganda minister had early on championed the Expressionist movement and had to backtrack swiftly on this to avoid the führer’s opprobrium
➃ Ayran art uniformly infuses a celebration of youth, optimism, power and eternal triumph
⑤ the Nazi taste for mega-scale art reached its apogee in architecture, massive structures like ‘Germania’. “Monumentality and solidity (exuding power), simplicity and timeless eternity” were the bywords of Nazi architecture
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Bibliography
‘Degenerate art: Why Hitler hated modernism’, (Lucy Burns), BBC News, 06-Nov-2013, www.bbc.com
‘Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937’, (Jason Farago), The Guardian, 13-Mar-2014, www.theguardian.com
The ardent British football fan while waiting for match day or counting down the off-season days to next August can often be found lapping up all the available literature he or she can get their hands on about the beloved round ball game. The appetite for football fiction extends to the graphic novel and it’s predecessor the comic book. The perennially popular exemplar of this quintessential “Boy’s Own” exploits genre is Roy of the Rovers.
[R] 17-y-o Roy Race on his ‘debut’
The comic Roy of the Rovers had its debut in Tiger magazine in 1954…the strip follows the fortunes of fictional football team Melchester Rovers, with the spotlight very much on its star centre forward Roy Race. Captain Roy and his team invariably find themselves the underdogs, battling adversity, foul play, injuries and bad luck, somehow in the end they manage to beat the odds and spectacularly win the game in the last minute usually with a corker of a goal by Roy (for supposed ‘underdogs’ Melchester Rovers are decided overachievers – over the years racking up eight fictional FA cups, three European cups and one UEFA cup!).
Roy on the field epitomises fair play (often in contrast to his opponents), his personality embodies all the virtues of “sportsmanship, etiquette and why a fractured ankle, a broken rib and an early case of polio should never stand between a determined team captain and victory in FA cups” (McGinty). Roy’s Rovers competed against the other teams in the League—like their arch-rivals Tynefield United—who never come close to ever matching up to the ethical pedigree of Melchester Rovers.
Roy of the Rovers momentsRoy of the Rovers permeates English football culture to the extent that it is a standard trope for fans of the game to invoke the comic strip to describe memorable sporting incidents, unexpected comebacks, miraculous wins from behind, etc.
Roy is beyond the slightest doubt the absolute gun player in Melchester’s colours, however it’s not quite a one man band. He gets stirling assistance from teammates, most notably from Johnny Dexter the team’s “hard man” and goalie Gordon (“the safest hands in soccer”) Stewart (cf. Gordon Banks).
The créme de la créme, the “Roy of the Rovers Annuals” were a staple for boys each year…over the years of the publication Roy and his team go through all the highs and lows – relegation to Second Division; kidnapping of players; a terrorist attack; the club experiences financial calamities and so on. In the process Roy briefly defects at one time to a rival club before returning to the fold before losing a leg in a skiing accident. After enforced retirement he becomes Melchester manager and his son Rocky assumes the mantle of the side’s star striker.
[B] Roy with his Prince Valiant hairstyle
By the early 1990s, with the inevitable ebbing of ROTR’s popularity, the publication folded. However, at several intervals, the comic, phoenix-like, has been resurrected for the diehearts, most recently in 2018.
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Socialism in one football club
In 1988 the BBC produced a two series radio program drawing inspiration from the legendary Roy of the Rovers comic but taking it in a very different direction. Lenin of the Rovers, “the story of Britain’s only communist football club”, written by Marcus Berkman, is both spoof and affectionate satire, sending up the football comic classic while retaining a sliver of nostalgia both for Roy of the Rovers and the British game of yesteryear. Lenin of the Rovers conversely takes a massive swipe at the contemporary (that is, as at 1988) world of Brit soccer, ridiculing big game commentators and pundits alike, skewering top-flight players for being overpaid, pampered show-ponies with their “in-car leopard skin yoghurt dispensers” (nothing’s changed!). Also in the program’s cross-hairs is the run amuck degree of football sponsorship (eg, the “Heinz Sandwich Spread FA Cup”) and stockbroker hooligans (Hughes). The LCD gutter press also gets a pummeling for its bald-faced lies and facile and trivalising reporting (eg, “Curvy Corinne’s” tabloid article in The Daily Tits: “My night of lust with Ralph Coates”✧).
The story line is pure farce, supposedly detailing the experiences of communist East European football player Ricky Lenin (Alexei Sayle in a heavily accented voice which appears to be channelling his Balowski family character from The Young Ones) at Midlands club Felchester Rovers. Lenin is portrayed as a “tactical mastermind/balding midfield maestro” but more accurately might be described as thick as two planks. Through constant rhetorical flourishes Lenin lectures the team on dialectical materialism, the inevitable destiny of Felchester Rovers football club*, but he is exposed as a faux Marxist for covertly trying to enrich himself through football connexions. Lenin launches a proletarian coup which removes the club’s manager Ray Royce (a transparent pun on Roy Race), and then himself has to ward off a challenge from Felchester’s “burly defender” Stevie Stalin and “hard nut” henchman Terry Trotsky.
A riotous hoot
Many misadventures follow as Lenin and the club bungle their way through sex scandals, corruption and dodgy business deals, and a disastrous mid-season holiday in a war-torn Central American banana republic (El Telvador)+. The latter episode spoofs cult movie Apocalypse Now (“I love the smell of shin-pads in the morning”), with a side reference to the WWII football plot of Escape to Victory!
In the episode where Felchester travel to Germany to play Borussia Mönchenpastry (cringe!), they encounter diabolical German tabloid publisher Max Gut, a thinly disguised Robert Maxwell. Piss-taking comes fast and furious in LOTR, another episode involving Ricky putting out feelers for a move across the Irish Sea to represent the Republic of Ireland national whose team sheet reads like the United Nations with not a solitary Gaelic name in it! One of the team apparently qualified for Ireland due to having once read a James Joyce novel!
A recurring device sprinkled liberally through Lenin of the Rovers has Ricky Lenin speaking random lines from well-known pop songs – “We are family! I have all my sisters with me”; “A rebel to the core”, “Don’t go breaking my heart“, etc. ad nauseum.
From go to whoa it’s a pun bonanza, reminding me a lot of those exquisite Sixties radio comedies like I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. Felchester’s Euro opponent is Swiss club FC Toblerone (groan!). Their arch-rivals in the English comp is the thuggish Crunchthorpe United, however the Felchester team itself triumphs in the Cup employing the same tactics of illegal crunching tackles and skilless brawn. Needless to say that in the computer football universe, Felchester Rovers would be Melchester’s Crunchthorpe United.
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✧ LOTR takes no prisoners with the reputations of past FA stars with a constant flow of running gags at their expense (particularly cruel on Ralph Coates)
* with ideological fidelity he also devises a “five year goal plan” for the club, prompting his teammates to slag Arsenal for its “five goals a year plan”
+ there’s a reference to Terry Venables here, the former English manager’s nickname was “El Tel”
Reference material:
‘A teen magazine for boys — but will they buy it?’, The Scotsman, Stephen McGinty, 15-Jan-2004, www.thescotsman.co.uk
‘Lenin of the Rovers’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
‘Radio revolution’, Rob Hughes, When Saturday Comes, November 2010, www.wsc.co.uk
‘Lenin on the goalpost’, Paul Shaffer, Lion and Unicorn, 2017, www.thelionandunicorn.wordpress.com
During the Cold War not many people outside of the USSR knew of the Russian penchant for it’s ideological rival’s second most popular cola drink. The Soviet Union’s love affair with Pepsi-Cola started with a meeting between Premier Khrushchev and US Vice-President Nixon in 1959. As part of what was a rare cultural exchange for the time, Khrushchev was introduced to the sugary, carbonated beverage, the taste apparently meeting with the Soviet premier’s approval.
⏏️ Pepsi’s role in the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate
So began a novel bilateral trade. With Russian rubles not valued outside of the USSR, a barter system was forged. The Russian and other Soviet people got to drink Pepsi, in return vodka (in the form of the state-owned brand Stolichnaya) was made available in the US market.
Things went smoothly enough until 1980…the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan threatened the Pepsi deal. Americans boycotted Soviet goods including Stolichnaya…the popular vodka’s sales plummeted in the US. In the late 1980s the Pepsi company—mindful that seven billion Russians were drinking Pepsi each year—hit upon a new and more unorthodox US/Soviet exchange deal.
To keep the Pepsi flowing to Russian consumers, Pepsi accepted a flotilla of ageing Soviet warships in lieu. Taking possession of 17 rusty Soviet warships plus a few other auxiliary naval vessels. The fleet was far from being in A1 shipshape condition, but it enabled the soft drink giant to boast that it possessed the world 6th most powerful navy at the time – on paper if not on water!
(Source: www.naval-encylopedia.com)
Pepsi’s move earned the displeasure of the US military but the company CEO’s slightly disingenuous rejoinder to the Pentagon was that it was dismantling the Soviet fleet faster than they were!*
Pepsi didn’t hang on to the decidedly decrepit Russian fleet for long, selling the warships to a Swedish scrap-recycling business in the early 1990s. A few years later Coca-Cola usurped it’s place in the Russian market.
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* undoubtedly Pepsi’s billion-dollar stake in the USSR remained it’s primary motive
Sites/works consulted: 👁🗨👁🗨👁🗨
’When the Soviet Union Paid Pepsi in Warships’, (Anne Ewbank), Atlas Obscura, 12-Jan-2018, www.atlasobscura.com)
‘ How Pepsi became the 6th largest military in the world‘, (Tom Kirkpatrick, We Are The Mighty, 28-Jan-2019, www.wearethemighty.com
‘Pepsi Navy: When the Soviets Traded Warships for Soft Drinks’, Sandboxx, 06-Nov-2020, www.sandboxx.com
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)
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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 second in our brace of reclusive authors of American fiction is Thomas Pynchon (see preceding blog on his the similarly publicity-shy JD Salinger). Long Island-born Pynchon came to the full-time vocation of fiction-writing via short stints in the navy and for Boeing as a technical aide. By the time Pynchon writes his first novel, V. in 1963, he is domiciled in México City, and the persona of Pynchon as an “Invisible Man of Letters” has already started to take root.
PYNCHON
If there were slim pickings for inquisitive fans of JD Salinger wanting more biographical information about their ‘fave’ reclusive writer, then comparatively there’s an absolute famine when it comes to the lack of ‘goss’ on Thomas Ruggles Pynchon! Pynchon has managed to weave an airtight web of mystery around his personal life – no interviews, no attendance of literary prize awards, no memoirs, no hobnobbing with fellow celebrities at ‘A’ list gatherings, no teaching post in academia. In Pynchon’s (loosely) historically-based novel Mason & Dixon one of the characters is castigated for “the least tolerable of Offences … the Crime they styl’d ‘Anonymity’” – the very state of existence that Pynchon craves. The reclusive and ubër-private New Yorker differs from the equally reclusive Salinger in not having had to suffer the ignominy of family ‘betrayal’ as Salinger was subjected to. Pynchon’s family (agent/wife, son, brother and sister) and friends have all closed ranks, drawing down the cone of silence on the subject of the famous recluse＊.
‘Mason & Dixon’
Pynchon very much belongs to the “why make it simple, when you can make it complicated” school of literary communication. His books, popularly subsumed under the labels ‘postmodern’ and metafiction are typically characterised by over-elaborate and often open-ended plots, dense and hard to follow, labyrinthine sentences (Mason & Dixon meanders a full 122 words before it reaches its first full stop on page 2!) Pynchon offers up a mixed grill of cultural references to sex, drug culture, science and tech stuff, historical info and comic-book fantasy (with a raft of quirky and zany characters), etc. Beginning with The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), the first of Pynchon’s “Californian trilogy” novels, the author turns a critical eye on the counterculture…although Pynchon evinces a consonance with its core values and communitarian ideals he voices a concern that the American counterculture may be an accessory of the dominant culture rather than a genuine reaction to it [‘American Modernity and Counterculture’, (The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon), www.litcharts .org]. In ‘Lot 49’ protagonist Oedipa Maas accidentally stumbles into Trystero, a shadowy world of convoluted conspiracies, unearthing a centuries-old conflict between rival mail distribution companies.
Political Pynchon?
A central motif that comes through in Pynchon’s novels is a distrust bordering on paranoia of government agencies and private corporations. In Gravity’s Rainbow he expresses deep suspicions about the motives of the military/industrial complex. But Pynchon seems also to distrust the established political left in its empirical authoritarian form. Instead, his natural orientation and sympathies seem to be towards the anarchists and the preterites (ie, those controlled by the elite). One scholar notes that anarchists or allusions to them are present in all of the Pynchon books … anarchism, Pynchon seems to suggest, might be the best non-authoritarian and non-hierarchical social configuration for the future [‘Riding the Interface: An Anarchist Reading of Gravity’s Rainbow’, (Graham Benton), www.pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org]. Politics also run through Pynchon’s next, Vineland (1990), a novel which some dismissively dispatched as “Pynchon-Lite”. Vineland is an absurdist fable— punctuated with numerous references to drugs, 1960s music and TV pop culture, especially Star Wars—through which Pynchon provides a commentary on several key issues of the Eighties (the culture war debates, reading, television and mass communications). Set against the backdrop of the Republican Party’s re-election in 1984, Pynchon also takes a hefty swipe at American politics in the age of Reaganomics with a warning to America about “encroaching fascism” [Meinel, Tobias. “A Deculturated Pynchon? Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” and Reading in the Age of Television.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 58, no. 3 (2013): 451-64. Accessed November 26, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43485900].
❝ Then again, it’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it—dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity—I don’t like the way it came out … someday, with the right man in the White House, there will be a Department of Jesus.❞
~ Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
Guesting on ‘The Simpsons’
While resolutely keeping his guard up Pynchon maintains control of his world by choosing when and what of himself he gives up to the world at large. Famously Pynchon has appeared (in animated form) on two episodes of The Simpsons (a clear sign that the couch-surfing literary hermit is up on mainstream pop culture※), having dictated the terms of his guest spot. Obviously the idea of the Simpsons gig tickled his humerus wildly, as he is shown(sic) wearing a paper bag on his head and gets to say that he loves Marge Simpson’s book “almost as much as he loves cameras”.
Navy boy Tom
The “no selfies” author Tom Pynchon has been incredibly successful over many decades—especially living in a metropolis of over eight million people—in scrupulously avoiding the lenses of the ubiquitous paparazzi. Until fairly recently there was virtually no new photos of the reclusive writer floating round⍟. Media outlets when running a story on Pynchon almost invariably fall back on the one or two photos taken during his navy days (when Pynchon was aged around 19 or 20!). Pynchon’s legendary antipathy to having his photo taken has been explained away as self-consciousness about his protruding buck teeth (something that a sequence of sessions in the dentist’s chair early on could surely have fixed). Whether this explanation holds water or not is of course, like everything else, a topic Pynchon is deafeningly silent on. On the issue of Pynchon hermetically sealing himself off from the world, a more plausible speculation is that it may be a reflection of Pynchon’s disapproval of the modern trend of writers embracing, even rejoicing, in the role of being celebrities, eg, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote et al [‘Thomas Pynchon Returns to New York, Where He’s Always Been’, (J.K. Trotter), The Atlantic, 17-Jun-2013, www.theatlantic.com].
A method in the madness? The lengths Pynchon will go to avoid being photographed have a paranoia-like tinge to them, and some are legendary. Once in México during the Early Sixties V. period, when surprised by a random photographer, Pynchon apparently jumped straight out of his apartment window to escape being snapped [‘Hiding in Plain Sight: On the unobservable Thomas Pynchon’, (Alex Gilvarry), Topic, Issue No. 04, October 2027, www.topic.com]. The failure to pin down the identity of a famous but reclusive novelist contributes to the creation of myths … the enigma of an “invisible literary man” exudes more intrigue. Pynchon would understand that having a mystique about him, another layer of interest for his ‘gonzo’ fan base to engage with, would have a bonus marketable spin-off for the author’s sales [‘Meet Your Neighbor, Thomas Pynchon’, (Nancy Jo Sales), New York, 27-Jun-2008,www.nymag.com].
Pynchon Inc personnel: the ministry of silly names Pynchon novels are typically peopled by a vast array of (usually odd) characters. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pychon rolls out no fewer than 400 named characters in 760 pages (most with fleeting walk-on, walk-off parts). Pynchon also revels in preposterous nomenclature, inventing lots of outrageous puns like Joaquin Stick, Benny Profane and the Marquis de Sod (a Californian lawn-care specialist!), and an inexhaustible supply of downright silly names – including McClintic Sphere, Tyrone Slothrop, Rachel Owlglass, Weed Atman, Yashmeen Halfcourt, Mike Fallopian, Scarsdale Vipe, Doc Sportello, Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke and Pig Bodine. Counterculture names abound – Zoyd, Frenesi, Prairie, etc. Needless to say from the jokey nature of this Pynchon nomen-sampler that fleshing out a character’s multi-layered depths is not really the New Yorker’s bag [‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
An orgy of exegesis: Conspiracy la-la landAs someone with a lofty literary profile in the US and beyond (regularly scores a mention in the mix of annual Nobel Prize contenders), the utter paucity of biographical information on Pynchon has given rise to some pretty wild speculation about who he really is? Outré theories abound on the internet about the novelist’s identity, one of the most persistent is that Thomas Pynchon is really JD Salinger! Presumably the germ of this notion was the commonalities between the two, both perceived as hermits with a pathological allergy to attention, and each shared a fierce insistence on their personal privacy. But what gave added weight to the imaginative coupling in people’s minds was Salinger’s early removal from the public gaze and the supposed drying up of his literary output as evidenced by the complete cessation of his published work post-1965. This baseless ‘theory’ holds that Salinger invented “Thomas Pynchon” as an “elaborate authorial personality” to hide behind (Trotter). Even more ludicrous was the allegation that Pynchon was in fact the Unabomber! Another speculation has him as an airline pilot in real life (motivated by Howard Hughes adulation perhaps?). Other theories, rather predictably, conclude that Pynchon has to be a drug smuggler or a CIA agent (“its all there in the stories!”) [‘Authors reveal their Thomas Pynchon conspiracy theories’, Bookish, 03-Oct-2013, www.usatoday.com]. And so it goes, with more and even crazier notions. There’s something very apt that so many loopy conspiracy theories circulate about the identity of an author whose fiction is littered with accounts of loopy conspiracy theories✫.
Footnote: Lost in Pynchon Given my own often bewildered reaction to much of the fiction of Pynchon, and the palpable frustration that I see exhibited by others seeking despairingly to decode Tom Pynchon’s idiosyncratically personal brand of hieroglyphics◪, I often wonder why so many of us punters keep making the self-flagellating effort…I’m reminded of the cynic’s definition of a classic book, “something that everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read” (Mark Twain, who else?). Echoing this is one critic’s pithy summation of Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s most praised book, as the “least-read-must-read” book in American history (Sales). For the marginalised multitude denied enlightenment there is some comfort in mockery. The title of the 2009 “Po-Mo” take on TRP’s ‘gumshoe’ novel, Inherent Vice⍉, offers a pyrrhic get-square (‘Incoherent Vice’) [‘Incoherent Vice’, (Sam Anderson), New York, 31-Jul-2009, www.nymag.com].
PostScript: Absurdist and Fabulist?Pynchon is a black belt when it comes to telling the “shaggy-dog” story. Early critics described his novels V. and Gravity’s Rainbow as “high-caliber shaggy dog stories, full of digressions and possibly pointless details converging to a climax that revolves little” [‘Thomas Pynchon: A Primer’, (Jack Joslin), 25-Apr-2012, www.litreactor.com]. This description also applies to the later Mason & Dixon, a long rambling tale full of rollicking in taverns and absurdly inconsequential humour. Pynchon concocts a mixture of fact and fiction, the actual historical personages of Mason and Dixon blended into the “obvious lies, rumours and outright fantasies of their travels” while surveying the boundaries of colonial North America [Thomas Pynchon: Novels & Concept.” Study.com, 25 June 2013,study.com/academy/lesson/thomas-pynchon-novels-lesson-quiz.html]. This shaggy dog, picturesque style of Pynchon brings to mind Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, but more contemporaneously it reminds me of Peter Carey (especially Illywhacker) and John Barth (The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy) who both write in a Fabulist/Magic Realism vein.
＊the scarcity of biographical material on Pynchon doesn’t stop the “Pynchon-curious” from trawling through the texts to turn up whatever “auto-fiction” they can find…the protagonist of V., Benny Profane, “a schlemihi and human yo-yo” is ex-navy, just like his creator
※ Pynchon, and for that matter, JD Salinger in his time, would undoubtedly have no trouble writing a treatise on daytime television had either wished to do so
⍟ even the photos supposed taken of the septuagenarian/octogenarian Pynchon out shopping can’t be confirmed as being genuinely of him
✫ Pynchon once famously said “every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength”
◪one reviewer likened Pynchon’s cryptic first novel V. to a Hieronymus Bosch triptych
⍉thus far the only Thomas Pynchon novel to make it to the silver screen
In the contemporary world of fiction-writing and publishing, maximising one’s media exposure in such a highly competitive market is considered essential for commercial success in the industry. A regime of TV talk shows, book tour circuits, getting your face out there, meeting and greeting the fans, is what authors do, its their bread and butter.
Two American novelists whose careers have followed an altogether different trajectory are JD Salinger and Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Junior. As modern writers of fiction, what Salinger and Pynchon have in common are a seemingly reclusive nature, or at the very least a pronounced aversion to publicity, or if you prefer to look at the obverse side, a fanatical even pathological commitment to guarding one’s own privacy from prying eyes.
SALINGER
❛What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.❜※
~ JD Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
꧁꧂꧁꧂꧁꧂
The ‘Catcher’: the unbearable heaviness of fame
JD (Jerome David, but went by the name of Jerry) Salinger had a remarkably slim output for a literary career that spanned over half a century. Between 1965 and his death in 2010 Salinger published nothing at all, although he continued to write in this time, prolifically it seems⚀. 1951 was the seminal year for Salinger with the dazzling success of his debut novel, Catcher in the Rye…the story of teenager Holden Caulfield struck a profound chord with American adolescence, articulating a sense of angst and alienation from adult (mainstream) society. The ensuing torrent of fame, the intense media and fan preoccupation with the book and in its author, drove Salinger to ground, relocating for good to a rural retreat in Cornish, New Hampshire.
Salinger, in the words of the New York Times, “elevating privacy to an art form”, bunkered down, refused interviews, and clammed up about his personal life and past – leaving the press and other interested parties to try to piece together the autobiographical parts of the novelist’s existence. Some observers have speculated that Salinger experienced some sort of identity crisis or nervous breakdown after ‘Catcher’, that triggered his publicity-shyness. As a result of Catcher in the Rye’s impact Salinger thereafter set a determined course to studiously avoid future publication, including no follow-up novel to capitalise on the success✧. Eventually a handful of shorter works were published, the most significance of which was his 1961 novella/short story collection Franny and Zooey (adventures of the Glass family). On the dust jacket of that book Salinger wrote, “a writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years”… elsewhere he has spoken of “the joys of not publishing” [‘Salinger, Pynchon & Co.: When writers are recluses’, (Scott Timberg), LA Times, 02-Sep-2007, www.latimes.com].
Salinger troppo bizarro
While Salinger kept schtum over the years, striving vigilantly to fend off unwanted attention, others within the author’s family and associates provided personal insights to whet the biography-starved appetites of the public. Both Salinger’s former live-in lover Joyce Maynard (who at 18 shacked up with the 50-something literary recluse in the New Hampshire hideaway) and the author’s own daughter Margaret wrote their own “tell-all”, unfavourable memoirs of Salinger (eg, “a scowling martinet who drank his own urine and clung to outmoded racial stereotypes drawn from old Hollywood movies”)¤ [Robert Schnakenberg, Secret Lives of Great Authors, (2008)]. Margaret’s hatchet-job on Dad provoked a sibling feud as Salinger’s son Matt (an occasional actor) rushed to his defence dissing Margaret’s memoir, Dream Catcher, as mere “gothic tales of our supposed childhood” [‘The odd life of Catcher in the Rye author JD Salinger’, (Martin Chilton), Independent, 01-Jan-2019, www.independent.co.uk].
A young Salinger (photo: AP)
Catcher in the Rye has consistently charted as a best-seller✪, but its critical reception has been controversial and reviews mixed. Some critics of the novel, taking a highbrow view (Joan Didion, George Steiner) have deemed it too pessimistic in its message, too obscene, sincere admittedly, but nonetheless mawkish. Other readers, more low-key in their response, have wondered what all the fuss was about [‘J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Aging Gracelessly’, (Jonathan Yardley), The Washington Post, 19-Oct-2004, www.washingtonpost.com]. The ever-acerbic Gore Vidal questioned whether “Salinger’s enigmatic exile lent his work a seriousness it didn’t deserve” (Chilton). Salinger biographers Shields and Salerno saw ‘Catcher’ less as a coming-of-age story than allegorically as a “disguised war novel”◘ [‘Book Introduction to Salinger’, American Masters, 24-Dec-2013, www.pbs.org/].
A manifesto for the criminally unhingedA notorious side-effect of the public’s (or sections of it’s) infatuation with Catcher in the Rye is that it has been the motivational vade mecum of choice for some assassins (or would-be assassins) of celebrities. The novel had an inspirational role in the (separate) shootings of John Lennon and Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. Mark David Chapman (who murdered Lennon) and John Hinckley Jr (who shot Reagan) both over-identified with Holden Caulfield to the point of being delusional and both were found to be in possession of a copy of ‘Catcher’at the times of their crime.
PostScript: How reclusive are these literary hermits?
Salinger and Pynchon et al have been described as “recursively reclusive”, and this seems to be the majority opinion among fervent Salinger and Pynchon-watchers [‘The People Behind the Pen – T. Pynchon, J.D. Salinger and J.R.R. Tolkien’, Cision, 25-Sep-2015, www.prweb.com/]. But this view has been challenged – in Thomas Pynchon’s case, by himself! In 1997 Pynchon told CNN (by phone) that he believed that ‘recluse’ was “a code word generated by journalists … meaning, ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters’” – the “media-shy recluse as an invention of the media” [“The endangered literary ‘recluse’”, (Brian Joseph Davis), The Globe and Mail, 07-Aug-2009, www.theglobeandmail.com]. But if Pynchon—dubbed by the US media as the “Invisible Man”—is a recluse and a hermit, he’s one who is hiding in plain sight, having lived for about 30 years in the same apartment (the precise address can be openly accessed by a simple online search) in the dense metropolis of New York City!
In regard to Salinger, Shields and Salerno contend that he was never actually a recluse – their evidence? While in Cornish, NH, he travelled, he had friends, family, relationships, he consumed the popular culture of his day, he expressed political opinions (not necessarily positive ones…Reagan was “the outgoing dummy” and George HW Bush was “the incoming dummy”)(Chilton). Another biographer, Paul Alexander, asserts that Salinger played up the role of loner, that he was originally quite a keen socialiser when he lived in NYC…and in “another life” in his youthful pre-literary career, ‘Jerry’ had been “entertainment director” for a cruise liner, making the fun happen for 1,500 passengers on MS Kungsholm! As has been noted, Salinger and Pynchon (and Harper Lee and others) are “not recluses in the true sense of the word … they simply have different ways of being public figures” (Davis).
※ Salinger’s words proved incredibly prescient in light of his own literary career
⚀ in 2019 Salinger’s son indicated that the family will release much of his father’s large body of unpublished work
✧from the 1950s on Salinger also refused all offers to sell the film rights to ‘Catcher’, backing it up with a ready willingness to sue in any instance of unauthorised use of his creations
¤ other allegations of ‘oddball’ behaviour directed at Salinger include his practice of glossolalia, his use of an orgasmatron, his dabbling in Scientology (and Vedantaism) and embrace of extreme homeopathy (Schnakenberg)
✪to date the novel has sold somewhere in the vicinity of 70 million copies worldwide
◘ Salinger was a WWII veteran (active in D-Day, Dachau), had PTSD; postwar he was “perpetually in search of a spiritual cure for his damaged psyche” (Shields & Salerno)
France’s penal colony network in New Caledonia (see preceding post) was not exactly a summer camp for delinquents, it was a brutal, unforgiving and unrelenting environment for existing rather than living. Comparatively though, it pales into lesser significant when stacked up against the unimaginable inferno of its South American equivalent in the colonies pénitentiaires of Guyane française.
The Napoleonic manoeuvre In 1851 Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoleon, elected president of the French Republic, staged a coup from above. With army backing he neutralised the national parliament and enacted a new constitution giving himself sweeping new dictatorial powers, a decisive step on the road to emulating his uncle by declaring himself emperor, Napoleon III, in 1852. With France’s jails and hulks overflowing with the incarcerated multitudes, swollen further by the emperor’s defeated opponents, much of the surplus prison population was transported to France’s Algerian colony. At the same time Louis-Napoleon took the opportunity to establish a new penal colony in French Guiana and send out the first lot of transportés. Transportation to penal colonies, especially to Guyane, to New Caledonia and to Algeria, allowed France to rid itself of dangerous and incorrigible offenders at home, and to punish them for their sins by subjecting them to a life of hard labour❋ [Jean-Lucien Sanchez. ‘The French Empire, 1542–1976’. Clare Anderson. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, Bloomsbury, 2018. hal-01813392. HAL Id: hal-01813392].
Economies of labourAside from cleansing France of the criminal element, transportation served another purpose for Napoleon III. Slavery had been the engine of growth for France’s colonial empire, but France’s abolition of the institution in 1848 resulted in a massive shortage of cheap labour. Turning French Guiana (FG) and other French colonies into penitentiaries—replacing the lost plantation workers, the freed black African slaves (known as Maroons) with convicts in FG—neatly solved the problem [‘France’s “dry guillotine” a hell on earth for convicts’, (Marea Donnelly), Daily Telegraph, 22-Aug-2018, www.dailytelegraph.com.au].
Bagne le plus diaboliqueThe penal system in Guyane française revolved around two principal locations⧆, one was the Prison of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni which functioned as the destination of first arrival for transportés (and usually only a temporary home for the majority). From here, the worst of the bagnards (convicts), the recaptured escapees and the relégués (recidivists), were relocated down the coast to the other Guyane penitentiary, Bagne de Cayenne. Here, a small group of off-shore islands, Îles du Salut (Salvation Islands) comprised the penal colony on which French Guiana’s dark reputation hangs. Better known as Devil’s Island, a collective descriptor for three distinct islands, the farthest away and most inaccessible of which, Île du Diable, was reserved for a select group of prisoners⦿.
(Image: www.thevintagenews.com)
The history of Devil’s Island is one of notoriety and longevity (operating from 1852 to 1946). Conditions for inmates were horrendous… hard labour from six in the morning to six at night (including being assigned to endlessly building roads that were never intended to be finished); working and living in a malarial coast and tropical jungle environment; susceptibility to a host of diseases including yellow fever, typhus, cholera and malaria; the more dangerous prisoners solitarily confined to tiny cells 1.8m x 2m indefinitely, and often exposed to the elements [‘French Guiana Prison That Inspired “Papillon”, (Karin-Marijke Vis), Atlas Obscura, 11-Aug-2015, www.atlasobscura.com].
Île du Diablo (Photo: Romain Veillon / www.thespaces.com)
A tropical death camp A sense of mortality in the penal colony was ever-present – convicts fought and murdered each other, punishment by execution (by guillotine) was regularly meted out❂. For those who could no longer stand the psychological and physical torture of incarceration in such a sub-human hell hole, driven to near-insanity, the urge to escape (“Chercher la belle”) exerted a powerful pull. This however was virtually a suicidal course of action as would-be escapees faced shark-infested waters and jungles teeming with jaguars, snakes and other deadly beasts [‘The story of the world’s most infamous penal system – ever?’, (Robert Walsh), History is Now Magazine, www.historyisnowmagazine.com]. In the first 14 years of the Guyane prisons’ operation, two-thirds of the convicts perished (Sanchez) At its worst point Devil’s Island had a 75% death-rate.
The sentencing regime was particularly harsh…bagnards transported to FG were subjected to the penalty of ‘doubleage’. This meant that on the expiration of a prisoner’s sentence, he or she✦ had to remain working in the colony for an additional period that was equivalent to the original sentence. And if prisoners were sentenced to terms of more than eight years, this automatically became a life sentence (Donnelly).
⌂ the Dreyfus Tower
Dreyfus Affair puts the spotlight on Devil’s Island Among the over 52,000 déportés sent to Devil’s Island/Cayenne from its inception to 1936, its most famous inmate was Alfred Dreyfus, who had been wrongful arrested on a trumped-up charge of selling military secrets to Germany. Dreyfus endured over fours years on solitary Île du Diable before his case became a cause célèbre taken up by prominent citizens like novelist Emile Zola. Protests forced the French government—in a convoluted set of developments—to reopen Dreyfus’ case, retry him, re-convict him then free him and eventually exonerate him. The Dreyfus affair exposed entrenched anti-Semitism in the French military and in society [‘Devil’s Island Prison History and Facts’, Prison History, www.prisonhistory.net/].
⌂ the Devil’s Island story became widely known after ex-inmate Henri Charriere’s published account of his escape, ‘Papillon’, was made into a Hollywood movie in the early 70s
An anachronism of incarceration historyThe penitentiaries at Cayenne and Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni persisted for an inordinately long time, considering that apart from absorbing the overflow from the prison system in Metropolitan France they didn’t achieve all that much that was positive. The penal colonies were not only a humanitarian catastrophe, but an economic disaster…the planted crops failed badly and self-sufficiently was never achieved, signalling a complete failure in the objective of transforming the bagnards into settlers. In one year alone, 1865, the soaring cost of the FG enterprise reached in excess of 3.75 million francs! (Sanchez). After Salvation Army adjutant Charles Péan exposed the horrors, the utter inhumanity, of France’s Devil’s Island in a damning investigation⌽, the French authorities dragged their feet for another 25 years before they finally drew the curtain on this shameful chapter of their penal history [‘Devil’s Island’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
(Map: BBC News)
Endnote: These days France calls Guyane française an overseas department rather than a colony, and the colonial prisons are barely a distant memory. Instead today FP hosts the Guiana Space Centre (close to the town of Kourou), a Spaceport run in conjunction with the European Space Agency.
Changing pattern of deportations from metropole to colonies1852-1866: majority of deportees sent to French Guiana From 1866: deportees from Europe sent to New Caledonia From 1866: deportees from North Africa, Asia and the Caribbean sent to French Guiana
§§ a rider to the system was that the ultimate destination of deportees could also depend on whether they were common or political prisoners
▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂.▂▂▂▂▂
❋ while lightening the burden on the government for domestic prison expenditure
⧆ plus a scattering of sub-camps of convicts located around different parts of French Guiana
⦿ mainly traitors (or accused ones like Dreyfus) and political dissidents. In WWI it housed spies and deserters (Donnelly). Others falling foul of French colonial justice ended up in Caribbean penal holdings on islands such as Guadalupe and Martinique
❂ the macabre pet name of inmates for Devil’s Island was the “Dry Guillotine” (“it kills it’s victims more slowly than the actual guillotine but kills them just as certainly”)
✦ women convicts were transported to FG, but there were only just shy of 400 deported in the duration of the penal colony
⌽ in 1928 duty of care was still non-existent: the prison administrators’ gross negligence was still resulting in 400 inmates dying each year and 2,400 freed prisoners left to fend for themselves
Romanians, especially those from the region of Transylvania, must view Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula with at best mixed feelings. On the one hand, the immense popularity of Stoker’s imaginative work of fiction helped put Transylvania on the international tourist map…on the other hand, its dark and ghoulish tale of chilling evil with its genesis in the mountains and forests of trans-silvae (“the land beyond the forest”), projects a negative and deceptively gloomy picture of the country. The association of one of the greatest heroes in Romanian history and a defender of Christianity, the Medieval ruler Vlad Ţepeş III, with the fictional Dracula, would be displeasing to many patriotic Romanians.
Dracula’s transformation into a classic of the Gothic horror genre captured the imagination of film-makers, inspiring numerous silver-screen interpretations of Dracula – from the silent German feature Nosferatu to countless Western film versions which made actors such as Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee famous – and typecast. The Dracula character’s pervasion of especially American popular culture has seen the trope extend to parody cartoon versions on TV (Duckula), to female teen “vampire-slayers” (Buffy) and even to “blaxploitation” movies asserting the emergence of a self-conscious black culture in the US (eg, Blacula).
Vlad’s signature punishment
In some screen interpretations of the novel, like the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the identities of Dracula and Vlad Ţepeş are presented as if they are one and the same person! (see also PostScript). Entirely fanciful of course but Stoker’s character did draw inspiration from the real-life Vlad Ţepeş III (or Vlad Împalatul). Vlad was the voivode✱ of Wallachia in the mid-15th century, infamous for impaling victims such as his own troublesome boyars or foreigners captured in conflicts (Ottomans, Bulgarians, Saxons, Hungarians▣). Such an horrific torture technique earned him the nickname “the Impaler”.
⇩1499 woodcut, Vlad the Impaler
Vlad Ţepeş, voivode and resident of Wallachia, not Transylvania
Stoker did get the name ‘Dracula’ from the Medieval Romanian prince, or at least from his family. Vlad’s father—Wallachian voivode before him—was Vlad II, also known as Vlad Drâcul…Drâcul (or Drâc) was a word for ‘dragon’ in the 15th century※, today in Modern Romanian it means “the devil” – something noted by Stoker in his research for the book as an apt descriptor for his fictional arch-nemesis. There is however a great deal of the character of Count Dracula that Stoker didn’t derive from the circumstance of Vlad Ţepeş. The Impaler had nothing to do with vampires or any supernatural beings and his associations with Transylvania were largely peripheral and tenuous. Vlad was supposedly born within Transylvania in Sighişoara although there are some doubts about this (an alternative view has his birthplace in Wallachia). Bran Castle, a Transylvanian tourist attraction identified with Stoker’s Dracula, has no connection with Vlad at all [Florin Curta, referenced in ‘The Real Dracula: Vlad the Impaler’, (Marc Lallanilla), Live Science, (2017), www.livescience.com].
⇩Bran Castle (Photo: Daniel Mihailescu/AFP/Getty Images)
Constructing the Ur-vampire
Transylvania, being to outsiders, “a mysterious land of vampires and other supernatural things”, handed down a long tradition of folklore and legends, it’s not surprising that Stoker drew on this source for inspire and inform his vampire story. Superstitions and beliefs of Romanian peasants in Stoker’s time fuelled a plentiful supply of tales about vampiri (vampires), vârcolaci (werewolves) and other supernatural monstri. Stoker’s library research would also have acquainted him with the strigol, a Romanian figure of legend—“a reckless spirit that returns to suck the lifeblood from his relatives”—the type of vampirish “undead souls” that would find a place in Stoker’s horror novel [‘The Use of History in Dracula Tourism in Romania’, (Tuomas Hovi), www.folklore.ee].
⇧Whitby, England (Imagecredit: www.visitwhitby.com)
Non-Romanian influences on Dracula
In the Dracula novel the undead Count travels to Britain in search of more victims, journeying to Whitby in Yorkshire. This echoes Stoker’s own earlier visit to Whitby in which the author was reportedly quite taken with the town, its colony of bats circling round the churches, its whole creepy atmosphere, all of which he would have found good material for a Gothic novel [‘How Dracula Came to Whitby’, English Heritage, www.english-heritage.org.uk]. Stoker apparently found more inspiration in Port Erroll (these days, Cruden Bay) in Aberdeenshire – Slains Castle with its “fang-like rocks” is thought to have also inspired the Transylvanian Dracula castle home in the book [‘Slains Castle’, www.visitabdn.com].
Vampires: not the exclusive preserve of Transylvania⦿Bram Stoker was Irish and never visited Romania in his lifetime, prompting some to speculate that the Dracula story may equally have been influenced by the author’s own experiences growing up in Ireland. Stoker would have been exposed to homegrown myths of the supernatural (such as those involving the sidhe, the fairy people of Irish folklore), as well as to the nightmarish ordeal of living through a cholera epidemic [‘How Bram Stoker creates Dracula with the aid of Irish Folklore’, (Leonie O’Hara), Irish Central, 04-Oct-2020, www.irishcentral.com].
PostScript: Vampire tourism
Vampire tourism in Transylvania has not been waylaid by coronavirus, tourist operators in Romania are still offering up a raft of tour packages—with titles like “7-Day Dracula Highlights Tour” and “Fun With Fangs: Vampire Tours in Romania”—to lure the “vampire-curious”. The tours, tend to wallow in all the predictable cliches and stereotypes, milking the prevailing craze for all things vampire, staying in Dracula-themed hotels, etc. Vampire tourism is an intriguing admixture of history, tradition and fiction…taking a leaf from Hollywood some of the tours indulge in considerable conflating of the historic Vlad Ţepeş with the fictional Count Dracula (Hovi).
▣ Prince Vlad’s political fortunes generally hovered in the vacuum between the two regional powerhouses Hungary and the Ottomans, who he fought both with and against at different times
※Drâculeşti is the patronymic – Vlad Ţepeş was also known as Drâculea, “son of the dragon”
☒ descendants of Saxon (German) merchants and craftsmen who migrated to Romania, commencing in the 12th century
⦿ though the tradition is a strong one in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, eg, Greece vrykolakas, Albania shtriga
The James Bond film series, is the world’s most successful and enduring movie franchise, since 1962, 24 completed feature films and with another currently cooling it’s post-production heels in Covid lockdown…a franchise that seemingly has not yet run out of steam. The 007 phenomenon has inspired countless imitations in cinema and television. This has ranged from blatant rip-off imitators trying to capitalise on its impetus in the Sixties (“Matt Helm”, “Our Man Flint”, “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”, etc.) to playing it for laughs parodies (“Get Smart”, “Austin Powers”, “Johnny English”).
(Photo: Britannica)
But where did the original creator of the James Bond novels, Ian Fleming, get his inspiration for the iconic character from? We know that Fleming’s own lived experience and background—as a British naval intelligence officer in WWII—made him an insider in the world of espionage, double deceptions and counter-agents. Obviously when the Caribbean-domiciled Fleming came to put pen to paper and create the fictional James Bond in the early Fifties, he drew on many of the real-life acquaintances he had met in the ‘workplace’❋.
In his lifetime Fleming never said definitively who the principal model for 007 was, but the consensus seems to gravitate towards a Serbian double agent Dušan (‘Duško) Popov, someone Fleming came across in the course of his own intelligence career. A famous scene in Casino Royale (Fleming’s first James Bond novel) further advances the association of the world’s most celebrated fictional spy with Popov. Bond’s besting of a powerful Russian criminal at the baccarat table in Casino Estoril (Portugal) in the book/film mirrors an exchange Fleming observed first-hand when the real-life spy spectacularly called the bluff of a boastful Lithuanian gambler in a baccarat game at the same location.
Popov stumbled into the espionage game after being arrested by the Gestapo. To get out of that pickle Popov agreed to spy for the Abwehr (German intelligence agency). While in England he was recruited by MI6 and turned double agent✫. During the war Popov managed to feed a steady stream of misinformation to the Nazis about the Allies’ movements, strength, etc. Most productive for the Allies was his role in Operation Fortitude – Popov helped to convince German military planners that the D-Day invasion of France would occur in Pas de Calais, not Normandy, the actual landing point. As a consequence of Popov’s disinformation, when Operation Overlord was launched in 1944 there were seven German divisions stuck in Calais and unavailable to the Reichswehr in Normandy [‘My name is Popov, Duran Popov’, (Marta Levai), www.0011info.com].
(Image: Getty)
The Serbian counter-spy also tried in August 1941 to alert the US military as to high-level Nazi and Japanese interest in Pearl Harbor, however the critical information which could have averted the military disaster on 7th December was blocked from reaching its target by CIA director Hoover. Hoover distrusted Popov as a double agent, an attitude not allayed by Popov’s reputation as a womaniser and playboy.
(Source: www.newspapers.com)
After the war Popov’s services were rewarded by the Brits with an OBE, but it wasn’t until 1974 that Popov himself lifted the cover on his war-time espionage activities when he published his autobiography. When asked about comparisons between himself and 007, Popov was dismissive of the hedonistic, jet-setting spy as portrayed on the big screen, remarking that “a spy who drank like Bond would be drunk the first night and dead the second” [‘From the archive: the real James Bond, 1973’, (Observer archive), (Chris Hall), The Guardian, 22-Mar-2020, www.theguardian.com].
_____________________________________________ ❋ and on those Fleming only knew of, such as the legendary master spy Sidney Reilly [‘Novel Man’, (William Cook), New Statesman, 28-Jun-2004]
✫ at one point Popov was also spying for the Yugoslav intelligence service, making him a triple agent
After Wonder Woman’s creator Bill Marston dies in 1947, Robert Kanigher takes over the writing duties, the first of many subsequent writers to take on pop culture’s most famous female superhero. DC Comics wastes little time in ringing the changes with Wonder Woman, both to her physical appearance and to her abilities, disposition and purpose.
There are several reasons for the change. One motive is simply commercial, Wonder Woman like her male superhero counterparts, experiences a fall-off in popularity after the war. Another relates to expectations of gender roles in America. So much of America’s manhood is away during the world war on the front line engaging the enemy. Born of necessity, American women move into the work force, invading traditional male domains of employment as never before. With the war’s end, men return to their jobs relegating thousands of women back to unpaid work in the home. There is a re-solidifying of the traditional gender roles. A casualty of this is Wonder Woman herself. In Marston’s hands she reflects empowerment, ie, freedom from male domination. The feminist overtones she embodies are a challenge as the US attempts to re-establish the status quo ante order [‘The Fitful Evolution of Wonder Woman’s Look’, (Diana Martinez), The Atlantic, 07-Jun-2017, www.theatlantic.com].
Superhero Nazi hunters
Wonder Woman’s superhuman exertions and physicality—as with everyone else in the superhero comic universe—have an aptness during WWII. The superheroes in the comics spearhead the fight against the Nazis, promoting a patriotic agenda and helping to boost morale. When the war is won, this agenda loses its relevance for the American readership [‘Women of Comics: Objectified, Sexualize and Disempowered’, (Nia Aiysha), Wild Black Orchids, 07-May-2016, www.wildblackorchids.wordpress.com].
Making the iconic feminist warrior a bit less super
In wanting to rein in Wonder Woman’s powerful persona DC Comics are responding to prevailing (male) society’s anxieties about women’s independence. By 1950, the toning down is well underway, WW’s crime-fighting exploits are taking second fiddle – in Sensation Comics #97 she is the editor of a newspaper lonely hearts column❋. During the decade WW becomes a reluctant superheroine, love-struck and longing to settle down with her beau Steve Trevor [‘Publication history of Wonder Woman’, Wikipedia,http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine, Tim Hanley (2014)].
Wonder Woman is not just a feminist, she’s also a sexy feminist! Accordingly, there is a lot of scrutiny on her salacious attire as well by the “morally self-appointed” in society. Eventually, the raunchy bathing suit and sexually-confident red boots will be traded in for a more demure look. Psychologist Fredric Wertham’s full-on crusade against the deleterious effects of comics on children in the early 1950s includes WW in its cross-hairs. WW’s sexually provocative bondage fetish (involving herself or other females) leads Wertham to ‘blacklist’ the depicted character as a promoter of lesbianism (which he took as evidence of misandry)(Martinez), pressuring DC Comics to remove Marston’s message of WW as a harbinger of matriarchy (Hanley).
The Amazonian princess returns to ‘civies’ – “Emma Peeled”
In the 1960s other comic book action heroines come forward such as secret agent Modesty Blaise. Reflecting the early rumblings of what would evolve into the second wave feminism of the Seventies, Blaise exhibits Wonder Woman-like “badass fighting capabilities” to triumph in a male world. At this time however WW loses that same original verve✪, getting a Sixties ‘mod’ makeover which transforms her into an Emma Peel clone (from the cult British TV series The Avengers), complete with martial arts moves, jumpsuits and Carnaby Street attire〥 [‘Four-Colour Yesteryears: Wonder Woman – the Emma Peel Years’, (Rob N), Paradox Comics Group, 22-Aug-2009, www.paradoxcomicsgroup.com; Hanley].
1970s, the women’s movement and empowerment
Gloria Steinem and the burgeoning women’s movement comes into the story at this time. Steinem, dismayed at DC Comics’ relegation of Wonder Woman to a “powerless 1950s car hop”, lobbies DC to restore WW’s superheroine stature. Steinem puts WW on the cover of the first edition of Ms. magazine in 1972, tagging it “Wonder Woman for President”. [‘How Gloria Steinem Saved Wonder Woman’, (Yohana Desta), Vanity Fair, 10-Oct-2017, www.vanityfair.com]. WW in Ms. becomes a kind of masthead to promote sisterhood and equality among women (the magazine depicts WW confronting store owners who deny their female employees equal pay and defending abortion clinics against male thugs [‘How A Magazine Cover From The 1970s Helped Wonder Woman Win Over Feminists’, (Katie Kilkenny), Pacific Standard, 21-Jun-2017, www.psmag.com]. Steinem and Ms.’ agitation on behalf of WW forces DC to restore her special powers including the “Lasso of Truth” and re-draw her in her original voluptuous form.
With the critical spotlight turned on DC’s portrayal of Wonder Woman, DC made further concessions to the comic. Diversity was introduced —a nod to the Black Power Movement in the US and perhaps belated recognition of a lack of ethnic diversity in its comics—with the inclusion of Nubia, WW’s African half-sister (Martinez). The perception of Wonder Woman as a feminist icon is given a further boost along by the cult success of the 1975-79 television series. WW, played by Lynda Carter, embodies the qualities of strength, fearlessness, wisdom and determination, restored in the comics post-1972✧.
PostScript: The Wonder Woman comic books over the past 40 years has seen the WW character and image undergo sundry transitions, a procession of “conflicting and seemingly incompatible versions” of WW – alternating between ramped-up raunchiness and less overt sexuality, between a muscular Amazonian physicality and a “heroin chic” fashion model (Martinez).
❋ in other Fifties comics Wonder Woman or her alter ego Diana Prince appears as a model and a film star
〥 WW becomes younger and thinner too. She also gets labelled as a “female James Bond” during this period
✪ DC Comics’s hegemony in the superhero comic popularity stakes in the late Sixties is seriously being challenged by Marvel Comics, a factor in the decision to revamp WW along with the entire ‘stable’ (Rob N)
✧ subsequent interpretations of Wonder Woman on the screen follow, the most recent in 2017 (with a sequel slated for release this year) sees WW reconnect with her Amazonian roots
The United States over the years has had a mania about banning lots of things—there’s been an unspoken exemption granted to bad taste—but one of the more curious prohibitions in the 20th century was that on the seemingly innocuous pinball machine.
In the early 1930s the Gottlieb Company of Chicago introduced the first coin-operated, machines, the “Baffle Ball”. The timing was right, the Great Depression had hit, playing pinball was a cheap and accessible form of entertainment for the financially impoverished masses, and the machines caught on. A few years later machines became electromechanical and automatic score counters were added, making games more appealing [“The History of Pinball Machines and Pintables”, BMI Gaming, www.bmigaming.com/].
The moral legislatorsBy the time of America’s entry into WWII pinball’s popularity had grown exponentially. Not all sectors of American society however were enthusiastic about the game. Churches and school boards harboured a perception of pinball as corrupting the morals of American youth, asserting that children would steal coins and skip school to play❋. Lawmakers too viewed pinball negatively because they saw it a game of chance and thus was a form of gambling. They shared the view that it “a time and dime-waster for impressionable youth”. Legislators were also suspicious that it may be a “mafia-run racket” because of Chicago’s centrality in pinball machine manufacturing, a “hotbed of organised crime” [“That Time America Outlawed Pinball”, (Christopher Klein), History, upd. 22-Aug-2018, www.history.com ; “11 Things You Didn’t Know About Pinball History”, (Seth Porges), Popular Mechanics, 01-Sep-2009, www.popularmechanics.com].
⍌ City authorities vandalising the machines
(Source: Chicago Sun-Times)
New York City’s crusade against the pinball
The mayor of NYC, Fiorello LaGuardia, took these perceptions to heart, launching a very proactive approach to rid the city of these “insidious nickel-stealers” by ordering the police force to make “Prohibition-style pinball raids” on candy stores, bowling alleys, speakeasies, cigar stores, drugstores, amusement centres, etc [“The Mayor Who Took a Sledgehammer to NYC’s Pinball Machines”, (Conor Friedersdorf), The Atlantic, 18-Jan-2013, www.theatlantic.com]. Illegal pinball machines and slot machines were confiscated and some were smashed in staged, publicity-conscious showcases (Klein).
LaGuardia’s anti-pinball machine crusade took on extra zeal after Pearl Harbour, which allowed him to characterise it as a patriotic cause…the line run by the NYC mayor was that the copper, aluminium and nickel components of the outlawed machines could be better utilised in the materiel requirements of America’s war efforts (Klein). This didn’t prevent many machines ending up dumped in NYC harbour.
⍌ 1963 ‘Swing Time’ Gottlieb machine
Banned, but not eliminatedOther cities were quick to follow NYC’s example, Including Chicago, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and New Orleans, with pinball bans extending across the country. Other cities like Washington DC didn’t go as far but prohibited children from playing it during school hours. The inevitable consequence of banning was to drive pinball activity underground (resurfacing in places like the back rooms of ‘porno’ book shops). Thus marginalised, pinball become “part of rebel culture”⧆ (Klein).
⍓ Roger Sharpe, “calling the shot!”
(Source: IFPA)
The long ban, ended by a ‘Sharpe’ player Remarkably, the outlawing of pinball machines persisted until the 1970s – despite the technical innovation of “flippers” (pivoted arms activated to propel the ball back up the table) introduced in Gottlieb’s 1947 “Humpty-Dumpty” machine which made the game more one of reflexes (skill) than of chance. Finally, in 1974 the Californian Supreme Court, accepting the skill component, overturned the prohibition in that state. In 1976 NYC councillors were still skeptical about pinball and it took a spectacular courtroom demonstration by one of the game’s top exponents, Roger Sharpe, to break the impasse. Sharpe won over the doubters by nominating beforehand which lane he would propel the ball through and then making the shot, demonstrating that patience, hand-eye coordination and reflexes, not luck, were the ingredients for success in the game◰[“How One Perfect Shot Saved Pinball From Being Illegal In The US”, (Matt Blitz), Gizmodo, 19-Aug-2013, www.gizmodo.com.au].
⍓ An “Indiana Jones” Williams machine with revolver for plunger
With the ‘liberation’ of pinball, player interest revived in the late Seventies, but it was a short-lived triumph. The advent of video games provided compelling competition (the newer technology requiring fewer repairs and less space). By the Nineties the writing was on the wall for arcades and the coin-op industry, as home video-games and the internet were rendering them obsolete [“The First Family of Pinball: Meet the local wizards behind the game’s huge resurgence”, (Ryan Smith), Reader, 03-May-2018, www.chicagoreader.com]. In any case, the repealing of the prohibition wasn’t uniformly implemented…Chicago city authorities resisted, still associating pinball machines with “nests of gangs and drugs” for juveniles [“Chicago once waged a 40-year war on Pinball”, (Ryan Smith), The Bleader, 03-May-2018, www.chicagoreader.com]. Prohibition in Kokomo, Indiana, was not ended till 2016✦ [“Pinball—once a source of vice and immorality—now, legal in Kokomo, Ind., after 61-year ban”, (Ben Guarino), Washington Post, 15-Dec-2016, www.washingtonpost.com].
PostScript: Surviving if not exactly thrivingToday, the Stern Pinball Co (Chicago) is the only manufacturer of machines left in the business in America. If not played by casual gamers in anything like its numbers in the “Baby Boomer” era (except in video game mode), it has experienced a resurgence of sorts – as an annual series of professional tournaments (Stern Pro Circuit) (among its internationally ranked seeds are Roger Sharpe’s two sons).
⍓ Roger Daltry (Tommy “Pinball Wizard”) at the controls
❋ Seth Porges identifies something quasi-religious in the anti-pinball position, a “temperance-fuelled” belief that the activity was “a tool from the devil” corrupting young people (Friedersdorf)
◰ the councillors were also persuaded to overturn the ban by the eloquent testimony mounted by Sharpe, who went on to be a pinball star witness in subsequent, successful hearings in other states. Another factor in the outcome may have been revenue-raising, eg, Mayor Daley in Chicago wanted to lift the ban so as to tax individual machines and licensing operators (Smith, “Chicago once waged”)
⧆ the rebel image remained into the late 1960s and ‘70s with the anti-establishment tone of The Who’s rock opera about a “pinball wizard”, Tommy
✦ it was a similar story in Nashville, TN, for anyone under 18, and in some places and times it is still illegal – such as on Sundays in Ocean City, N.J. (Porges)
In a way the Wonder Woman story starts in Medford, Massachusetts, at Tufts University, in the 1920s. William M Marston, a young progressive and unorthodox psychology professor, teaches his own DISC theory＊ to his students. One particular female student takes a shine to Marston’s DISC ideas and to the professor himself. Next thing we know Marston immerses himself in a ménage a trios with the student (Olive Bryant) and his (initially quite reluctant) wife Elizabeth. The polyamorous relationship◵ allows Bill to explore a latent interest in BSDM and arrive at the conclusion that women are the “love leaders” of society, predicting that women would “take over the rule of the country, politically and economically, within the next hundered years” [Tim Hanley, Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine, (2014)].
(Source: www.money.org/)
⍋ 1st sighting of the pioneering super-heroine: Marston uses the pseudonym “Charles Moulton” for the Wonder Woman comic books
Marston over the years tries his hand at many things in addition to psychology —inventing a systolic blood pressure test (which contributes to the development of the polygraph); writing screenplays for early silent films; authoring self-help books—without ever really attaining a measure of lasting success in any. Marston’s venture into creating comic books in 1940 turns that trend around. Always looking for a new business opportunity, especially after finding himself on the outer in academe, Marston finds a new way to champion his faith in female superiority by creating Wonder Woman, the first super-heroine in comics.
⍒ Wonder Woman on the lie detector
Marston’s ‘superwoman’
Having successfully pitched the idea to DC Comics boss Max Gaines, Marston’s Wonder Woman debuts in 1941 in All Star Comics #8, with cartoonist HG Peter supplying the pencilling which have a touch of art nouveau about it. Marston embodies WW with all the attributes and values that added up to his idea of perfect femininity (based seemingly on an amalgam of the brace of women in his life, Elizabeth and Olive). The make-up of WW’s character reflects Marston’s fascination with Greek mythology. She is depicted as an Amazonian princess◘ , as “strong as Hercules”, “wise as Athena” and “beautiful as Aphrodite”. Garbed in a sexy but patriotic suit of star-spangled red, white and blue, her accoutrements are distinctively martially potent – including the “Lasso of Truth”, a device to compel people to tell the truth (an idea germinating from Marston’s lie detector prototype). WW wears indestructible bracelets which deflect bullets, a golden tiara which doubles as a projectile and an ‘invisible’ jet to whisk herself away from danger [Wonder Woman Psychology: Lassoing the Truth, edited by Travis Langley & Mara Wood (2018)].
Wonder Woman, a comic book gender transgressorIn the comics of the 1930s prevailing cultural norms are reinforced,superheroes are male by gender and violent in method – the stereotypical depiction of women was commonly restricted to evil seductresses, the girlfriends of heroes (eg, Lois Lane) or their ‘helpmates’. Wonder Woman represents a radical departure from the norm, her shtick is fighting fascism in America wherever she finds it – using her brains rather than the heavy-handed brawn exhibited by Batman, Superman and co. [‘A Psychologist and A Superhero’, (Margarita Tartakovsky), Psychology Central, updated 15-Mar-2019, www.psychcentral.com].
Wonder Woman, “deer-hunting” ⍋
Comic bondage and a moral backlash
Marston is able to indulge one of his most cherished psychosexual beliefs through Wonder Woman, that “women enjoyed being bound”. In the comics it appears as a standard contrivance, we find WW being tied up by villains as some point or other in the story line. Sometimes WW herself ties up women, and to accentuate the kinkinessof her character, dresses them in deer costumes for a mock cervid hunt through the forest⁌ [‘Wonder Woman (comic book)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The BSDM preoccupation reflects a personal fetish of Marston’s but also can be linked back to the powerful influence the suffrage, feminist and birth control movements has on him (pioneering birth control activist Margaret Sanger was Olive Byrne’s aunt) ⌖. Wonder Wonder is an instant hit for the comic book-reading public (eventually reaching a weekly readership of five million), drawing the opprobrium of America’s moral guardians who object to the torture motif running through the stories, also considering WW’s outfit to be far too skimpy [‘The Surprising Origin Story of Wonder Woman’, (Jill Lepore), Smithsonian Magazine, October 2014, www.smithsonianmag.com].
⍒ Justice Society of America
At DC Comics Wonder Woman is invited to join the Justice Society of America (DC’s superhero team in the “Golden Age of Comic Books” as the period was known). WW’s elevation is hardly a step forward for gender advancement however as her designated role in the JSA is that of secretary for the male superheroes, while the ‘boys’ get on with the heroics of protecting the world from the designs of global criminal masterminds [‘The Truth About Wonder Woman’, Robert Kirkman’s Secret History Of Comics, (US documentary)].
Marston doesn’t get to appreciate the success of Wonder Woman for long, he contracts a form of cancer and dies in 1947, still in his early fifties (for the last two to three years he has an assistant, Joye Hummel, who helps ghost-write the WW stories when he is too ill). With the reins of the Wonder Woman comics passing from its originator to new hands, the iconic super-heroine’s persona and fortunes would undergo a number of transformations over the decades to follow.
Initial sketch of WW by HG Peter (1941) ⍒(Source: Smithsonian Libraries)
︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵︵
＊Marston believes that the behavioural expression of emotions could be divided into four primary types – Dominance, Inducement, Submission and Compliance [‘William Marston’, www.discprofile.com/]
◵ Elizabeth and Olive each have two children to Bill and everyone live under the same roof
◘ like Superman, Batman, etc, WW has a civilian alias – Diana Prince
⁌ such scenes may also have inspired by Byrne givingMarston a window into the activities of her sorority at Tufts University – “baby parties” where dominatrix women bind and discipline submissive sorority members [‘Curious Traditions of Times Past: Baby Parties’, (Yim Walsh), Tufts, 18-Sep-2014, www.dca.tufts.edu]
⌖ from this exposure Marston learns that the breaking of chains is “a powerful feminist symbol of emancipation” [‘A look back at Wonder Woman’s feminist (and not-so-feminist) History, (Michael Cavna), Independent, 30-May-2017, www.independent.co.uk].
As all of us are only too aware, COVID-19 has cut a swathe through public gatherings, large aggregations of people are a “no-no” in 2020. Across the globe all manner of events have been on the receiving end of a different sort of cancel culture treatment. The superhero-studded world of comic book conventions has not been immune to this contagion. Comic-cons everywhere, including the San Diego Comic-Con International, America’s oldest comic book convention, have been red pencilled in this year of the plague. But if we turn the clock back some 70 years we might observe a time when the existential threat was directed at the product itself, the actual comic books.
There were no organised comic-cons in the more cautious and conformist 1940s and 50s, but this in no way equated with a lack of popularity of comic books. In fact the Forties had been a Golden Age, especially for American comic books, Comic strip creators were riding high with a slew of superhero characters—including Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and Captain America, the Avengers and Captain Marvel—proving lucrative for companies like Detective Comics (DC Comics), Entertaining Comics (EC Comics) and Timely Comics (Marvel Comics). By mid-decade comic books were the most popular form of entertainment in the US (with 80 to 100 million copies being sold per weekBy the late 1940s comic books were well and truly being marketed towards adults as well…”fed by the same streams as pulp fiction and film noir, titles (began to tell) lurid stories of crime, vice, lust and horror” [David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, (2008)].
♦️ Wonder Woman (Sensation Comics, 1942)
‘Seduction of the Innocent’ Dark clouds appeared over the comics industry’s blue skies in 1954 with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent by a Bavarian-born neurobiologist Fredric Wertham. The book was “a full-throttled attack on the lurid contents of various crime, horror, and even super-hero titles, (with an emphasis on) graphic illustrations of wife-beatings, sado-masochism, and gruesome murders”⁕ Sean Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, (2012)]. Wertham’s inditement of the American comics of the day was that they corrupted impressionable youth, inveigling them into fanaticising about evil, leading them on a ruinous path to criminal behaviour, etc.[‘History of Comics Censorship, Part 1’, CBLDF, www.cbldf.org/].
♦️ Crime SuspenStories, 1950
1940s, North and bonfires Wertham was not the first critic to take aim at the US comic book industry. In the view of CBLDF✥, since the 1930s “the comics medium has been stigmatized as low-value speech”. In 1940 conservative commentator Sterling North urged parents and educators to guard against the influx of “mayhem, murder, torture and abduction—often with a child as the victim” in contemporary comic strips. North also decried the incidence of “voluptuous females in scanty attire, machine gun (-wielding hoodlums) and “cheap political propaganda” in the comics. The effect on children, he went on to say, of these “badly drawn, badly written and badly printed” strips was “a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems” as well as constituting “a violent stimulant” to them [North, Sterling. “A National Disgrace”. Childhood Education. 17.1, 1940: 56. Print.]. During WWII religious and patriotic organisations conducted public burnings of ‘disapproved’ comic books in American neighbourhoods – in ironic juxtaposition of the war being fought overseas concurrently against Nazi Germany (’Comic Censorship, Part 1’).
♦️ Dr Wertham, researching
“>
“Pop culture McCarthyite” But it was Seduction of the Innocent that struck the strongest chord in a 1950s America “looking over its shoulder” for real or imagined enemies of society in the grip of a hysteria heightened by McCarthyism. It triggered a public outcry, prompting an investigation into the industry by a Senate sub-committee. Publicity from the hearing was damning and the fallout was devastating. Comic books were denounced by Wertham and other moral crusaders as contributing to juvenile delinquency⚉. At the height of the moral panic, comic book publishers were sometimes treated as though they were mobsters, and the cartoonists, as if they were pornographers [‘The Caped Crusader’ (Jeet Heer), Slate, 04-Apr-2008, www.slate.com; ’Comic Censorship, Part 1’].
The emasculated comic book Threatened with both public and government censure, the comics industry choose to self-regulate, introducing the Comic Code Authority, “a censorship code that thoroughly sanitized the content of comics for years to come”. The new code (something analogous to the film world’s draconian Hays Code) was taken to ridiculous lengths, it forbade comics from showing zombies, vampires, ghouls and werewolves; words like ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ couldn’t be mentioned in the story lines; nor could criminals be portrayed sympathetically and the institution of marriage could not be seen to be disrespected (Howe).
♦️ The imprimatur of the self-censor
Comic book publishers were forced to produce ‘purified’ comics suitable for a younger market—more infantile and tamer stories, squeaky-clean but ‘dopey’ heroes replacing the previous super-overachievers—in short, “safe fantasies” for the youngest readers (’Comic Censorship, Part 1’).
The economic and human toll The new reality of the world of comic books decimated the industry’s hitherto prosperity…between 1954 and 1956 the number of titles produced was cut by more than half – from 650 in 250 over that two-year period!✧. By summer 1954 15 comics publishers in the US went belly-up. EC Comics, up to then one of the market leaders, discontinued all its comics lines…its much-vilified publisher William Gaines switching production solely to the satirical Mad magazine. Over 800 jobs in the industry vanished more or less immediately (Howe; Hajdu). Many talented inkers and pencillers left the industry for good, many for economic reasons but others due at least in part to the stifling of their creative artistic output.
Endnote: Demise of adult comics Both Wertham and North in their hatchet jobs on the comics genre made the error of completely disregarding the significant adult readership of comic books. The recovery of the industry, the winning back of that readership, took many years…it didn’t really happen until the emergence of ‘Underground’ comics in the 1960s with publications like Zap Comics and comic artists like R Crumb§ [‘History of Comics Censorship, Part 2, CBLDF, www.cbldf.org/].
♦️ Detective Comics, 1945
PostScript: The Wertham thesis unpacked After it became accessible in 2010 Wertham’s research on comics books was investigated and his conclusions found largely baseless…Wertham was said to have manipulated data, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence. A further weakness of his work was that he used non-representative samples as the basis for his conclusions. Scorn was also poured on Wertham’s contentions that the comic character Superman harboured Nazi SS tendencies, that the Batman/Robin relationship had homoerotic overtones, and that Wonder Woman was a lesbian role model (Wertham saw this as wholly undesirable)[‘Fredric Wertham’,Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Heer].
________________________________________________
⁕ that serious comics of the period were laden with violence, misogyny and racism, could not be disputed (Heer)
✥
⚉
dislike of popular comics. Wertham considered their consumption blocked children from an appreciation of literature and fine arts(Hajdu; Heer)
✧
§ the fashionability of adult readership was further advanced by the advent of graphic novels
Captain Marvel and protege
⁕ that serious comics of the period were laden with violence, misogyny and racism, could not be disputed (Heer)
✥ Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
⚉ a sense of elitism also coloured Wertham et al’s dislike of popular comics. Wertham considered their consumption blocked children from an appreciation of literature and fine arts
✧ in excess of 100 pieces of anti-comic book legislation came into effect in the Fifties (Hajdu)
§ the fashionability of adult readership was further advanced by the advent of graphic novels
Who’d have thought that it’d take a pandemic to bring to light just how many cynics and crazies are out there? Before COVID-19 we only had the climate change deniers and the occasion conspiracy peddler to cope with. Since the virus first descended, coronavirus deniers have been coming out of the woodwork, a contagion not confined to the USA.
Human rights or human life?
Recently, a new phenomena has popped up on social media and TV screens – from the “Republic of Covididiocy”. Provocateurs have taken to filming themselves confronting police and retail shop personnel during lockdown – provocatively refusing to wear masks, not giving their personal details and declaring loudly that their human rights were being transgressed. The extreme position adopted by these protesters connects them to conspiratorial views held by fringe extremists in the US✱.
Conspiracy heaven ⍌
A universal scofflaw mindset
These individuals are part of a loosely-organised movement of people who call themselves “Sovereign Citizens” (or “Sov-Cits” or just ‘Sovereigns’, for short), whose purpose is to assert some set of existing natural rights which, they purport, places them outside of the jurisdiction of the government and the law. In a climate of pandemic-induced restrictions many of these people may just be (over)reacting to the state’s clampdown on their freedom of movement and activity, a knee-jerk libertarian impulse. However the concept of Sovereign Citizenry long pre-dates the current pandemic as a conspiracy-driven stratagem, with its origins, unsurprisingly, found in America.
The world according to Sovereign Citizens
“The Sovereign Citizens Movement promotes the tantalising fantasy that anyone can declare himself or herself above and beyond the jurisdiction of the government by invoking arcane legal terminology”.
~ Southern Poverty Law Center
(Source: www.radicalisationresearch.org)
In the 1990s the SCM picked up the earlier Posse Comitatus movement’s baton of unrelenting enmity towards the federal government, portraying themselves as the “true defenders of the Constitution”. Sov-Cit beliefs rest on the same premise as that established by Posse Comitatus. They believe that the US government is illegitimate…it is, they say, a corporation that has duped ‘natural’ citizens (read “Sovereign Citizens”) into an unlawful contract. Sovereign theorists cite the 14th Amendment in 1868 and FD Roosevelt’s 1933 abandonment of the gold standard as a back-up to the paper currency as historical ‘proof’ of federal deception.
Gurus and methods
The SCM is a loosely organised group of litigants, commentators, tax protesters/deniers and financial scheme promoters…leadership comes from “redemption gurus” who advise Sovereigns to use ‘legal’ phrases to remove themselves from the jurisdiction of government (BBC).
Prison recruitment, outreach and education Gurus and other Sovereign ‘mentors’ incarcerated for fraud or for not paying taxes have found prison an ideal environment to indoctrinate and recruit new adherents. Imprisoned drug dealers and embezzlers were particularly willing recruits to the cause, jumping at the chance to put Sov-Cit theories into place in the hope of getting out of jail, or to retaliate against the public officials and law enforcement officers who put them there! The pseudo-legal strategy employed by Sov-Cits (again following Posse Comitatus) is based on the ludicrous “Theory of Redemption”—a secret (and mythical) fund of money created for everyone at birth by the US government—which Sov-Cits can supposedly redeem or claim to pay debts [‘Sovereign Citizens Movement Resurging’, Southern Poverty Law Center, Spring Issue 2009, 26-Feb-2009, www.splcenter.org].
“American National”, the preferred nomenclature for Sovereigns ⍌
Before the advent of the internet training of Sov-Cits took place at seminars held at remote extremist compounds. Now recruits learn via online videos and forums (like You Tube and MySpace) which disseminate SCM doctrine and tactics. Some Sovereign groups sell booklets like “The Prison Packet” which purports to guide inmates towards the realisation of their freedoms. Religious outreach, through the agencies of numerous Christian fundamentalist fringe organisations in the US, is another avenue for recruiting Sov-Cits into the fringe fold (Southern Poverty Law Center).
Paper terrorism
Sovereigns employ what are saturation methods, submitting countless bogus court filings containing hundreds of pages which are virtually indecipherable. The purpose? “To punish, to harass and mislead public officials”. The paper terrorism may take the form of elaborate scams, the generation of fake letters of credit or tax forms, frivolous law suits or other faux legal documents [‘Understanding the sovereign citizen movement: a guide for corrections professionals’, The Free Library, www.thefreelibrary.com/].
Law-enforcement officers in the Sovereigns’ cross-hairs
Some Sov-Cits are out and out “con artists”, transparently pure 100% charlatan, but as Michael Barkun warns, others are politically-motivated anti-government extremists⧆…and dangerous! In 2010 a Sov-Cit duo, father and son, killed local police officers in West Memphis, Arkansas. A New Hampshire shootout in 1997 resulted in the death of five people including the Sovereign provocateur acting as a “lone wolf”❂. Cop killing by Sovereigns is not confined to America – in 2016 a Reichsbürger, the German version of the Sov-Cit, shot dead a policeman in that country. The FBI has declared some Sovereign Citizens to be domestic terrorists. Often inmates utilise the Sov-Cit strategies from within the prison system to carry out protracted vendettas against judges, IRS officials, prosecutors and local sheriffs (Southern Poverty Law Center).
(Source: www.bbc.com/)
The lengths a Sov-Cit will go to
Your dedicated Sovereign is not adverse to creating fake car licence plates or printing his or her own currency and then trying to pass it off as real money. One SCM provocateur in Florida, in acrimonious conflict with his local Bank of America branch, sent it a bogus foreclosure notice and even barricaded the branch during opening hours (SPLC).
Francis: “It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression”
Reg: “Its symbolic of his struggle against reality”
~ Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Sovereigns don’t believe they need to hold a licence in order to drive (or to fish for that matter). When stopped by police patrols they have been known to deny that they are driving and affirm rather that they are in fact merely travelling⚅ (Dr Kaz Ross, interview, ABC Radio). And travelling, Sovereigns insist, is “a God-given right”. Some Sovereigns go even further than just mouthing the mantra that they are outside of federal jurisdiction, proclaiming to be citizens of other entities, eg, the Montana Freemen, the “Republic of Texas” (The Free Library)✫.
Anti-government protest in Oregon ⍓(Source: http://m.dk.com)
Endnote: Sovereign Citizens are one of a panoply of Alt-Right, conspiracy-obsessed fringe hate groups in the US which might loosely be subsumed under the umbrella term “patriot movement”. There is a lot of blurring of the lines between SCM, QAon, the Three Percenters, the Boogaloo Bois, the Proud Boys, the Anti-Vaxxer groups and various others of a similarly contrarian ilk. In particular, the Sov-Cits’ emphasis on the duality of US citizenship echoes the philosophy of another group – the Freemen-on-the-Land movement. The latter proclaim that “with special knowledge and careful language, we can circumvent these laws and regulations and live freely as an alternative vision of ourselves under our own ‘natural‘ laws” (a virtual identikit image of the SCM’s credo and tactics) [’What is the ‘sov cit movement?’, BBC News, 05-Aug-2020, www.bbc.com; ’The seriously weird belief of Freeman on the Land”, (Shelley Stocken), News, 09-Jul-2016, www.news.com.au].
xxxx
PostScript: Black separatism
On the surface you might think Sov-Cits would be an exclusively Caucasian phenomena, given its links to White Supremacist outfits like Christian Identity. But there is an African-American separatist subset that adheres to the Sovereign Citizens credo. Given their disproportionate representation in US prisons, Black inmates not surprisingly have been attracted to the SCM ideology. A clique of African-American drug-dealers on trial for murder in the 2000s in Baltimore employed its obstructionist ploys to delay proceedings for years [‘Too Weird for The Wire’, (Kevin Carey), Washington Post, May/June/July 2008].
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✱ the great danger here “is when fringe beliefs and proponents begin to slip into the mainstream”, eg, President Trump’s spruiking of alleged coronavirus cures which are not scientifically proven and possibly harmful, ‘The threads that don’t connect: Covid gives Australian conspiracy theorists a home’, (Michael McGowan), The Guardian, 02-Aug-2020, www.theguardian.com.au]
⊞ a right to hold possession of property owned by another until they discharge the debt (www.lexico.com/)
⧆ Barkun describes them as “a stubbornly resilient sub-culture, a community of the alienated”
❂ many Sovereign groups are thought to be aligned with militia groups
⚅ ‘driving’, they assert, is what a truck driver or a taxi driver does for a living
✫ it’d be stating the obvious to say that Sovereigns have a cockeyed notion of the rule of law, one based on the false premise that an individual can choose which law they consent to, and which they don’t (SPLC)
When testosterone-charged visitors to coastal Belgian towns began strolling around the shops and cafes bare-chested in 2015, locals objecting to this aesthetic blight on the landscape took to labelling the offending blow-ins “Tarzan tourists”. References to that archetypical, mesomorphic white hero of amorphous jungle habitats, Tarzan, have permeated popular culture for over a century. Since the time pencil-sharpener salesman Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) turned his hand to writing his first story in 1912, the aura of Tarzan, carefully cultivated by the author into a cultural icon, has extended from pulp fiction, to various media including comic strips, films (over 90!), radio shows, TV series, Broadway musicals, computer games and a raft of commercial merchandise𝓪.
Celluloid Tarzan – from urbane gent to LCD savage
The phenomenal success of ERB’sTarzan of the Apes and follow-up pulp novels provided prime adventure material for a rapid transition into cinema, starting with a silent movie in 1918. Later sound film interpretations, especially those with former American Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, departed radically from Burroughs’ original conception of the heroic jungle adventurer as a cultured, multilingual, erudite aristocrat (John Clayton II, Viscount Greystoke). Weissmuller’s “dumbed-down” depiction of Tarzan was as an innocent and noble savage, the “strong and silent” type given only to monosyllabic utterings (“Me, Tarzan, you, Jane”).
⇩ERB at home in Tarzana, California
White skin, white supremacist
As successful as the books and later franchises have been, Tarzan’s character has engendered a persistent stream of controversy. ERB’s creation, from the start, was an obvious target for accusations of racism – a white boy/man𝓫 thrown into a dangerous and alien environment (the “dark continent”), who manages not only to survive but to triumph over hordes of dark-skinned peoples and over numerous wild animals. Tarzan emerges from the pages as a “consummate colonial-era adventurer” – “a white man whose novel civility enabled him to communicate with and control savage peoples and animals…using appropriate technology” to help natives who “cannot solve their own problems” [RJ Gordon in Tarzan was an Eco-Tourist … and Other Tales in the Anthropology of Adventure, (edited by Luis A Vivanco & Robert J Gordon), 2006]. The world that Tarzan creates in the jungle is in effect a “white supremacist Eden parable”, the books and films completely omit the point-of-view of the indigenous people who live in the African jungle (or the Amazonian rainforest𝓬) ‘[‘The Only Good Tarzan is a Bad Tarzan’, (Aaron Bady), Pacific Standard, 08-Jul-2016, www.psmag.com; ‘From Tarzan to Avatar: the problem with “the white man in the jungle”’, (Steve Rose), The Guardian, 06-Jul-2016, www.theguardian.com].
⇧TV Tarzan (loin-clothed Ron Ely) translocated to Mesoamerican climes (Source: www.nbc.com)
A white world of comfortable racial assumptions Tarzan’s brand of chivalrous “white masculinity” precludes him from engaging in sexual violence against women, but he is utterly implicated in the negative racial stereotyping of Africans, an explicit feature of the books – black men aredescribed as “lithe, ebon warriors, gesticulating and jabbering”, Arabs are “surly looking”. Without holding back, ERB tells us, Tarzan is “a killer of many black men”, revelling, shockingly for modern sensitivities, in the act of ‘lynching’ blacks [Gail Bederman, quoted in ‘Tarzan’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
The mystique of Tarzan: Green mascot, eco-warrior and proto-expat
Part of Tarzan’s durability as a cultural icon might lie in his versatile utility. It has been noted that Tarzan possesses an “ability to adapt to the zeitgeist of different eras”. In seamlessly managing an environment that is unnatural and unfamiliar to him, he demonstrates a flair for “ecological sustainability”, we are shown the ape-man’s apparently impeccable “green credentials” [‘The Untamed Image of the Perfect Savage’, (Bram Wicherink), Efnofoor, vol. 22, no. 2, 2010, pp.90-97. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25758188. Accessed 10 July 2020]. For Paul Theroux, who hadhands-on experience of being part of the ‘invasion’ of Africa by Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s, Tarzan is “in the jungle, but notof the jungle”…therefore he was the “first expatriate”𝒹[Theroux, P.“Tarzan Is an Expatriate.” Transition, no. 32, 1967, pp. 13–19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2934617. Accessed 10 July 2020].
⇩The first screen Tarzan, Elmo Lincoln, 1918
Tarzan as metaphor – defender of masculinity
The period in which ERB wrote the first Tarzan books (just before, through and after WWI) saw the emergence of a challenge to the hegemony of white masculinity – from the Suffragette Movement…according to Robert Gordon, Burroughs’ creation of the all-conquering jungle superhero constituted a buffer against that perceived threat. This held sway again in the 1960s and 70s when the advent of women’s, LGBT and civil rights movements loomed as a threat to (white heterosexual) masculinity. Tarzan, as “the archetypal white-manhood fantasy” represented a “refuge of sorts for white audiences”. What they could observe in the story of Tarzan was an ideal of manliness, a he-man proving himself physically in the most testing of circumstances [Gordon; ‘Me, Tarzan. You, Really Still Doing This?’, (Devon Maloney), Mel, 11-Jul-2016, www.melmagazine.com.
PostScript: An attempt at a politically-corrected Tarzan
The talkies motion picture era has seen a string of mostly forgettable actors taking on the role of Tarzan, as well as a TV series or two and even Disney animation versions of the vine-swinging king of the jungle. In recent decades the Tarzan phenomenon has appeared to be running out of steam, although a recent entry, a 2016 screen production, The Legend of Tarzan, sought to present a Tarzan with ‘woke’ politics and more psychological complexity. Tarzan is this time avowedly anti-colonial, taking to task the odious slave-based Congo empire of Belgian king Leopold II, and displaying his capacity for “racial sensibilities” in the endeavour. Resurrecting a Tarzan who is more nuanced is still in itself problematic for its contemporary tone-deafness – “propagating…a white saviour narrative during the charged era of Black Lives Matter” is not the most prudent or politically savvy card to play [Glenn Kenny, ‘The Legend of Tarzan’, (01-Jul-2016), www.rogerebert.com]. The hero’s mate Jane departs from her character’s standard “eye-candy” function and exhibits a “feisty proto-feminist” defiance and the film gives a nod to environmental and conservationist concerns. Unfortunately the movie got at best only mixed reviews and basically bombed at the box office [‘The Legend of Tarzan’ Falls Well Short of the Tree Tops’,(David Edelstein), Vulture, 01-Jul-2016, www.vulture.com].
Footnote: Tarzan, very much “all-American”
Oddly, in all the graphic representations of Tarzan—in films, on book covers and illustrations—he is presented as clean-shaven, always sans beard, somewhat of an anomaly considering he is almost always off the grid, cut off from all the usual paraphernalia and comforts of life.
⇧Just your average Middle American family – the Weissmullers
𝓪 Tarzan was “the first fictional character to be multi-mass-media marketed…the growth of a veritable Tarzan industry, with “Tarzan Clubs” rivalling the Boy Scouts (Gordon). But not just boys, famed ethnologist and world chimpanzee authority Jane Goodall was captivated by the mystique of Tarzan, his impact on the primatologist’s childhood imagination “set her on a path to Africa to work with wild animals” [‘How Tarzan created Jane Goodall and how Goodall then repaid the favour’, (Shawn Thompson), The Ethical Ape, (2013), www.news.mongabay.com]
𝓫 in the books Burroughs explains that the name given the eponymous hero, ‘Tarzan’, means (in African “ape language”) “white of skin”
𝓬 occasionally for plot variety the setting for Tarzan’s adventures diverts from the customary (vaguely) African location to Latin America and India
𝒹 apparently he was the inspiration for future adventure junkies – for many restless souls in the West who flocked to join the Peace Corps in an Africa emerging from colonialism, as well as for later devotees of the ongoing craze for adventure tourism (Gordon)
The literary character Charlie Chan, created by Earl Derr Biggers, is best remembered in numerous cinema representations from the 1930s and 1940s. While the obsequious but sagacious Chinese-American detective became one of the enduringly nostalgic fictional figures of US popular culture, his creator in fact based him on a real life-and-blood Hawaiian-Chinese policeman – Chang Apana (his name is Hawaiianised but he was born “Chang Ah Pang” of Chinese migrant parents).
⍐ Downtown Honolulu, circa 1935
(Source: www.reditt.com)
Over the first three decades of the 20th century, the diminutive and slightly-built Chang Apana, a paniola(Hawaiian cowboy) before entering the Honolulu police service, patrolled the dingy and dangerous Chinatown district of Honolulu armed only with a 1.5m-long bullwhip. Chang’s detective escapades were legendary, involving – audacious, single-handed arrests of members of gambling dins, mastery over disguises in working undercover and shrewd and meticulous powers of sleuthing on murder cases (a cornucopia of material for Biggers to drawn on). Biggers’s own account of Charlie Chan’s genesis, is that he happened upon the existence of the “real Charlie Chan” after reading about Chang’s exploits in a Honolulu newspaper one day in the New York Public LibraryA.
⍐ ‘The House Without a Key’ (1925): the first Charlie Chan novel, although Chan appeared in it only as a minor character
A wellspring of a literary character
The portly Chinese detective with a penchant for “Confucius says”/fortune cookie-style aphorismsB appeared in six crime novels—initially serialised in the influential American magazine Saturday Evening Post—in the 1920s and ‘30’s. Biggers’ premature death in 1933 cut short the Chan literary sequence but not the film adaptations which continued to proliferate with a series of extremely popular Fox mystery filmsC. Charlie Chan‘s first screen appearances were in obscure silent movies with Japanese and Korean actors playing the leads before Walter Oland, a US actor with Swedish-Russian parents, took over and played Chan in 16 pictures. Upon Oland’s death American Sidney Toler assumed the mantle for 22 more CC movies,and lastly, Roland Winters, the son of German and Austrian parents, for a further six films.
⍗ ED Biggers
Life inextricably entwined with artThere were some interesting connexions arising from ED Biggers’ magnum opus…firstly, Chang and Chan’s creator actually met – in 1928. By then, such was the fame of CC, people in Honolulu had started to call the real detective ‘Chan’. The local newspaper recorded their meeting at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel as “AUTHOR MEETS ‘LIVE’ CHINESE DETECTIVE”. Three years later there was the even more improbable meeting of Chan and Chang when 20th Century Fox shot The Black Camel on location in Honolulu. The meeting between sleuth Chang and actor Walter Oland and obligatory photo op occurred during filming…Chang was invited to watch the action and ended up coming every day apparently totally engrossed in the unfolding film [‘Chan, the Man’, (Jill Lepore), The New Yorker, 02-Aug-2010, www.newyorker.com].
⍗Chang and Oland (Chan) meet at Waikiki
The dragon’s embrace of Chan
Charlie Chan’s international cinematic popularity extended, perhaps surprisingly to observers looking at it with the greater cultural sensitivity of the present time, to the Chinese themselves. Walter Oland, at the height of his CC fame, visited Shanghai in 1936 on a promotional tour – to widespread acclaim. Local Chinese newspapers even presented the event in terms that suggested that Biggers’ literary creation was in fact a real person: “Great Chinese Detective Arrives in Shanghai”D. And of course the Chan movies spawned home-grown imitators within China [‘Charlie Chan in China’, The Chinese Mirror: A Journal of Chinese Film History,08-Jul-2011, [http://web.archive.org]. Chinese-born American academic Yunte Huang’s hunch as to why people in China took so whole-heartedly to the clearly faux-Chinese film character is to do with a tradition you see in Chinese operas of performing “the other”. He explains, there’s an acceptance of this “kind of imitation (be it opera or cinema) as part of the artistic culture of China” [‘Investigating The Real Detective Charlie Chan’, NPR, 07-Sept-2010, www.npr.org].
(Source: www.movieposters.ha.com)
🀂🀂🀂Charlie Chan, detective at largeAs the series progressed and the search for plots to accommodate the oriental ace detective widened, Charlie Chan took on a ”globe-trotting” role à la the “Road to“ series. Hence the public were served up increasingly formulaic offerings in a variety of exotic locales – Charlie Chan in Shanghai, Charlie Chan in Egypt, Charlie Chan in Panama, Charlie Chan in Paris, Charlie Chan in Rio, Charlie Chan in Reno, Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo, etc, etc.
Backlash against the honourable Mr Chan in an era of PC sensitivityWhat passed—unchallenged in a ‘whitebread’ society—for innocuous humour in the 1930s and ‘40’s was viewed very differently in the more pluralistic and multicultural milieu of the 1980s and ‘90s and beyond. Many Asian-Americans looking back have found the Charlie Chan depiction objectionable, a Chinese racial stereotype of subservience and pidgin English, a relic of ‘yellowface’ (a kind of “Yellow Uncle Tom”, much akin to the contemporary view of ‘blackface’ minstrel entertainment in the US) [Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History, Yunte Huang (2010); Lepore].
⍗Chan (Sidney Toler) with #1 son and #2 son
Yunte Huang has sought to redress or balance this jaundiced perception of Charlie Chan, arguing that the fictional Asian-Honolulan super-sleuth is “as American as Jack Kerouac” – “precisely because of (Chan’s) theatrical implausibilities and mixed-up origins”. To Yunte Chan “epitomises (both) the racist heritage and the creative genius of (America’s) culture”, and he notes that while Chan himself is Chinese, “his methods and his milieu are American”, eg, the books and films’ settings are Hawaiian/American mainstream, not set in Chinatown [‘Watching the Detective’, (Pico Iyer), Time, 23-Aug-2010; Yunte].
Assuaging the perception of ‘Orientals’ in AmericaThe dominant literary precedent to Charlie Chan in American (and Western) popular culture of Asians was the figure of Fu Manchu. The creation of English writer Sax Rohrer (Arthur Henry Ward), the Fu Manchu novels (1913-48), exploited the “Yellow Peril” conspiracy image prevalent in the West of an Asian stereotype of evil – Fu was depicted in literature and on-screen as a mad scientist–cum–archvillain hellbent on a mission to rule the world. Yunte points out that Charlie Chan fulfilled a purpose of refuting or challenging the negative Fu Manchu image in the minds of many Americans. In contrast to the iniquitous Fu Manchu wreaking havoc everywhere, Chan is a “man of logic” (as are his fellow detectives extraordinaire Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes), Chan’s personal qualities are that of moral rectitude, observation and logic (Yunte). Biggers himself derided the Fu Manchu portrayal as “sinister and wicked” and “old stuff”, compared to his creation, “an amiable Chinese on the side of the law (which) has never been used (before)” (1931) [‘Creating Charlie Chan’, Popular Culture, 1975].
Other observers concur that the amiable Chinese detective was a departure from the old, more overtly racist stereotypes in US fiction at the time – supplanting the “heathen Chinee” with a more positive image of a Chinese person [‘The Importance of Being Charlie Chan’, (Sandra M Hawley), in Jonathan Goldstein, Jerry Israel & Hilary Conroy (Eds), America Views China: American Images of China Then and Now, (1991)]. Fletcher Chan notes that the books and movies “were a big factor in softening the attitude of white Americans towards Asians”, Charlie Chan as a sort of “goodwill ambassador” [‘Charlie Chan: A Hero of Sorts’, Fletcher Chan, Californian Literary Review, 26-Mar-2007, www.calitreview.com].
Where the Yellow Peril stereotype of Fu Manchu personifies the evil, scheming and immoral Asian in popular culture, the character of Charlie Chan presents—albeit with the retention of some truly cringeworthy ethnic stereotyping—an equal, at least intellectually, to the whites in the world he traverses [Yunte; ‘Charlie Chan’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
⍐Mr Wong: Charlie Chan rip-off with Boris Karloff
Endnote: Hollywood imitators, Moto and WongThe success of Charlie Chan on the big screen led other filmmakers to try their hand at using European actors to portray Asian-American crime fighters, however these were pale imitations of the original and lacking the Chan series’ success and its longevity. Fox’s “Mr Moto” series had Hungarian-American Peter Lorre as a Japanese secret service agent with a Viennese accent. Monogram Pictures, a low-budget specialist, also tried to emulate the success of Chan with its copy/interpretation of a Chinese-American detective Mr Wong, with British horror specialist Boris Karloff in the title role. The last in the series of Mr Wong flicks, Phantom of Chinatown, was a first…in place of Karloff, Chinese-born Keye Luke (previously Charlie Chan’s “Number One Son”) featured in the role of Wong, avoiding the then standard ‘Yellowface’ casting for Asian-American roles.
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A Biggers’ story of reading about a slick piece of detective work by Sergeant Chang Apana and another Hawaiian-Chinese detective Lee Fook has been extensively investigated by Yunte Huang who could not confirm the said article appearing in the Honolulu media of the day. An alternative explanation is that Biggers discovered the local police celebrity on a holiday he took to Hawaii in 1919 or 1920
Beg., “Tongue often hang man quicker than rope”; “Mind like parachute – only function when open”; “Front seldom tell truth. To know occupants of house, always look in backyard”; “Truth is like football – must receive many kicks before reaching goal”; ad nauseam. This idiom or element of Chan’s persona is known today as a ‘flanderisation’ – where a single (often minor) trait or action of a character is increasingly exaggerated or accentuated until it becomes the character’s defining characteristic [www.allthetropes.fandom.com]C as well as a regular stream of radio shows, comics and television series
D mind you, contestants on a 1980s US quiz show asked to name some historical or contemporary Chinese persons came up with “Charlie Chan” as their fifth response (‘The Chinese Mirror’)
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).
We all know that those much maligned flying mammals, the bats, were at the centre of the COVID-19 outbreak. With definitive evidence still proving elusive however, the jigsaw is still incomplete. Did the bats, as some experts hypothesise, transmit the disease directly to humans? Or did bats tag-team with an intermediary host—the keratin-armoured pangolin is the most likely suspect for some other experts—who in turn transmitted the infection to humans? The non-experts on the other hand, particularly those in the vicinity of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, cling to an alternative view which sees the coronavirus escaping, either accidentally or deliberately, from a biotech lab in Wuhan – a theory that does not entirely let the much-besmirched bat off the hook as the lab was known to be experimenting with the creatures.
(Source: www.theatlantic.com)
How have other animals, the ones not blamed for the virus outbreak, fared in the time of pandemic? One of the most intriguing developments first reported back in March (seems a long time ago now!) is the curious phenomena of human-to-animal transmission of the virus…a case of the humans fighting back? The Bronx Zoo in New York, in the midst of all the human carnage triggered by the outbreak, reported that nine of their non-human residents had tested positive for COVID-19. Five tigers and four lions—including the animal world’s “patient zero”, a Malayan tiger called Nadia—apparently contracted the disease from an asymptomatic handler. The zoo was closed to the public on 16th March (‘Seven more cats tests positive for coronavirus at Bronx Zoo’, (Natasha Daly), National Geographic, 22-Apr-2020, www.nationalgeographic.com). Since then, some domestic cats and dogs (in Kong Kong and Belgium) have also tested positive for the disease. Veterinarians have said that all of the affected Bronx Zoo felines were expected to recover.
Unfortunately there are concerns for other members of the Felidae family in the US from the novel coronavirus. This involves a bunch (an ‘ambush’?) of tigers at the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma. The Tiger King” zoo, formerly owned by the notorious, and now imprisoned, “Joe Exotic”, recently reopened after the lifting of pandemic precautions. Visitors are now being offered the chance to participate in (pricey) tiger cub petting sessions and the punters are doing so in droves, all day, raising concerns after the Bronx outbreak that the operators are placing the baby felines in distinct danger of the virus (as well as upping the contagion risks for the huge crowds of humans attending)❇ (‘Tigers, humans at risk for coronavirus as ‘Tiger King’ zoo reopens’, (Teresa Bergen), Inhabitat, 12-May-2020, www.inhabitat.com).
(Photo: Getty Images)
The pandemic has resulted in a very different, “feel-good” story concerning the world’s fauna. Twitter is awash with videos of animal sightings in unexpected places. City centres, once teeming with tourists and vendors, are now massively de-peopled due to the lockdowns. These instant “ghost towns” have not gone overlooked in the animal kingdom. All manner of wild fauna have swarmed in to claim the run of the towns, and almost certainly driven to do so in search of food. We have seen penguins waddling through empty Cape Town streets, coyotes roaming through a largely deserted San Francisco, wild boars taking over the Centro of Barcelona and the streets of Bergamo, Italy (probably not the same wild boars), Kashmiri mountain goats nonchalantly strolling through Llandudno (where?) in Wales, and so on and so on (‘Wild Animals have taken over the streets of major cities because of the coronavirus’, (Chris Ciaccia), Fox News , 03-Apr-2020, www.foxnespws.com)✴.
Siberian husky visits Beluga whale
(Photo: www.wtnh.com)
The most touching coronavirus animal story is the upside from the closure of zoos and aquariums – the opportunity for new animal interactions. During the enforced downtime some zoos are allowing non-dangerous animals (including visits from shelter animals) to roam around the enclosure, coming face-to-glass with other animal inhabitants (‘While aquariums are closed amid the coronavirus, animals get to play.” (Joshua Bote), USA Today News, 04-Apr-2020, www.usatoday.com).
While many zoo residents have experienced loneliness with the disappearance of human visitors, Hong Kong Zoo’s giant panda couple luxuriated in the new privacy so much that they overcame their typical reticence and mated for the first time in a decade (‘Two pandas tried to mate for a decade. With the zoo closed due to coronavirus, they finally did it’, (RW Miller), USA Today News, 08-Apr-2020, www.usatoday.com)
(Photo: Antony Dickson, AFP/Getty Images)
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❇ cross-contamination back to humans from the tigers has been ruled out by medical experts
✴ some of the alleged sightings of animals have turned out to be bogus claims, such as the myth of Russian President Putin unleashing 500 lions onto Russian streets to ensure people observed lockdown
The Coronavirus outbreak has brought out both the good and bad in human nature, but as everyone tries with varying success to cope with the strange and new reality of lockdowns, closures, social distancing and restrictions on movement, it has brought out the downright weird and bizarre as well. In 1929 when Wall Street collapsed, triggering the Great Depression and a devaluing of the money currency, there was a run on the banks as people desperately tried to salvage their evaporating savings. In March when people in the ‘burbs heard the pandemic was not likely to go away any time soon, there was a run on the supermarkets, efficiently stripping the shelves bare (like locusts in a corn field) – of toilet paper! Somehow, the crux of what is needed for civilisation to sustain itself during an enforced hibernation has been reduced to this, apparently now the most precious of household commodities in a lockdown survival strategy. Widely circulated media footage of shoppers coming to blows in supermarket aisles over the providence of a single roll of loo paper and profiteering hoarders trying to flog bog rolls on eBay at an insane $100 a shot, is surely proof of the arrival of a new and dynamic currency (what price the toilet roll futures market?)✥.
(Source. www.mix1023.com.au)
Once the epidemic got in full swing, the demand for face masks, especially in those countries with a culture of wearing protective masks, quickly outstripped supply. Accordingly some people have resorted to ‘improv’, mask substitutes – scarves and bandanas, face shield visors and so on. Sometimes people are a bit creative, eg, converted bras, vacuum bag filters, and sometimes grossly inappropriate (and utterly gross) or bizarrely impractical.
KKK hood shopper, an injudicious choice of replacement for a face mask, San Diego, Ca. (Image: Tiam Tellez (FB))
A comfy 15L plastic bottle-head in lieu of face mask (Source: www.dailystar.co.uk)
Agencies tasked with enforcement all over the world struggle to come to grips with the need to make everyone social distance. India’s efforts at least have resulted in some comical outcomes (light relief perhaps from all the descending gloom). In India’s west coast tourist spots, foreigners found at the beach by local police have been forced to write out apologies 500 times for breaching the stay-at-home rules. Elsewhere, in southern India, in one village the mandated use of umbrellas outside (in any weather) is the prescribed method for enforcing social distancing.
(Photo: Hindustan Times, source: UGC)
Meanwhile, officials in the Swedish city of Lund, confronted with the Herculean task of stopping the multitudes ignoring voluntary social distancing guidelines, have gone for the unorthodox! To discourage people from crowding together in outdoor recreational areas, a frustrated LundsKommun (city council) has resorted to the somewhat “left-field” measure of dumping chicken manure all over the city’s main park.
(Source: www.internewscast.com)
Has any other natural or unnatural phenomenon ever inspired such an array of whacky bizarre headlines (a la “Ripley’s believe-or-not!”) as this minuscule spiky particle pathogen has? In an atmosphere heightened by anxieties over a sense of that which we cannot control, “miracle cures” have saturated social media channels, everything from Llama Antibodies Could Help Scientists Stop the Coronavirus Pandemic? to Does JK Rowling’s breathing technique cure the coronavirus? to Colloidal silver toothpaste will fix your Covid virus. Then there’s the “contributions to the debate” from the White House, a kaleidoscope of quack cures being incredulously recycled by “The Donald” who continues to be in the thrall of non-scientists sprouting convenient opinion to him (“UV light and disinfectant injections killing the virus inside human bodies”, “hydroxychloroquine and bleach“, etc). The Covid-19 pandemic has been somatotropin for conspiracy theorising, with no handbrake applied to how asinine they can get…the 5G network is an ‘accelerator’ of coronavirus; Bill Gates Foundation’s COVID-19 Vaccine is a Satanic Plot; Not a pandemic but a plan-demic; Coronavirus hoax is an Agenda 21 plot to microchip us; etc. ad nauseum⌖. (‘Miracle ‘coronavirus cures’ haven’t changed in 700 years’, (Jennifer Wright), New York Post, 18-Apr-2020, www.nypost.com)◨.
Suspicious-looking 5G mobile towers
PostScript: the coronavirus crisis leads to some surprising scenarios. A report on a news bulletin a couple of weeks ago disclosed the trials of tribulations the super rich have had to endure at this time. Because of social distancing measures, many of society’s wealthy burghers have for safety concerns dispensed with the services of their house maids and auxiliary staff. This has resulted in grievous inconvenience and vexation for the plutocrats as they are now forced to learn for themselves how to use washing machines and other appliances in their palatial homes…ahh, those eternal First World problems – they just never let up.
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✥ when Covid-19 first hit the US,eight of the eleven states in which cannabis is legal, declared ongoing access to the narcotic an essential service for medicinal and recreational users. This prompted, in microcosm, a similar run to that on toilet paper, on marijuana outlets by aficionados of the weed. Consumers flocked to their local dispensers to stock up on essential ‘pot’ for the long, hard days of confinement ahead. This panic-buying of cannabis led some with a vested interest in the industry to talk up the prospects of a medicinal marijuana-led recovery of the US economy once the cloud of coronavirus disperses (‘Aurora Cannabis and Tilray set to detail hoarding of marijuana during COVID-19’, (Max A Cherney), Market Watch, 09-May-2020, www.marketwatch.com)
◨ plucking supposed panaceas out of the ether in time of pandemic has been ever thus…in the Black Plague they tried onions to ward off the disease, in the coronavirus crisis the equivalent recommendation is garlic (same degree of effectiveness)
⌖ the authors of these expressions of coronavirus denial, once thought largely confined to the United States, are spreading to different parts of the world, ironically enough, like a virus in themselves. They are drawn from different groups of society—anti-vaxxers, 5G truthers, sovereign citizens, QAnon believers and other Alt-Right, fringe conspiracy theorists—that have through ”cross-pollination” of their beliefs, converged into “a virulent if not entirely coherent umbrella movement against coronavirus lockdown measures“ (’Why Are Australians Chanting “Arrest Bill Gates” At Protests? This Wild Facebook Group Has The Answers’, (Cameron Wilson), BuzzFeed, 11-May-2020, www.buzzfeednews.com.au)
When a novel virus comes along, such as we are facing now, there is no medical vade mecum, no universal guidebook to follow, no one proven route to safely navigate the crisis. Governments weigh up the choices, then in consultation with medical experts, decide on a strategy and do modelling on how to chart the optimal course through the unpredictable straits of COVID-19. Local factors in each country, the conditions, the capacity to respond, the culture, all shape what direction the fight against the virus takes.
The following focuses on just two of the 212 countries and territories which have reported cases of the novel coronavirus disease. The two countries, Sweden and Vietnam, have very different societies, cultures and political systems. Each has followed its own distinct strategy and have produced results that are polarities apart from each other.
🇸🇪SwedenOne thing you can’t accuse the home of ABBA and Ingmar Bergman of is sheepishly following the flock. While countries like the US and the UK ‘sleepwalked’ for precious weeks at the start of the crisis, Sweden went out on a limb. From the get-go, Sweden identified itself as an outlier, a contrarian country in the coronavirus war. It adopted a particular course and implemented it. Or to put it another way, Sweden opted for a “change very little”, “wait and see” position, which amounts in effect to the pursuit of a “herd (or community) immunity” approach. Put simply it means you intentionally expose as many people as possible in the community to infection and so (the theory goes) the majority become immune to the virus. It’s effectiveness hinges on (quickly) minimising the number of high-risk people overall. For it to work, there needs to be an infection rate of at least 60%. Critics of herd immunity, and there are many in both the medical and non-medical world, describe it, among other things, as a “let it rip” strategy✱.
Getting back to Sweden’s experience, the Social Democrat government under Stefan Lofven, and state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, were at the outset confident of success with a “let it happen ASAP” approach. Sweden stopped organised sporting fixtures and closed university buildings but it eschewed a strategy of mandatory lockdowns (restaurants, bars, cafes and schools for pupils under 16 all stayed open) for a libertarian-like “principle of responsibility”, trusting the Swedish populace to “behave like adults” and do the right thing voluntarily.
The figures tell a different and disconcerting story: Sweden with a population of just 10.33 million has a reported Covid death toll of 3,225 (as at 10-May-2020) – with capital Stockholm overwhelmingly the primary hotspot. As illustrated below, compared to it’s Nordic neighbours Sweden’s mortality figures resonate like a distress beacon in the ocean, and in per capita terms it even outstrips the horrendous, spiralling toll of the US.
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The mortality rate for Sweden has prompted even the Swedish chief medical scientist Dr Tegnell to comment that it is now a “horrifying large number” [‘Sweden’s near “horrifying” death toll of 3,000 from coronavirus with 87 new fatalities, including a child under ten’, (Ross Ibbotson), Daily Mail (UK), 07-May-2020, www.dailymail.co.uk]. The body responsible, the Swedish Public Health Agency has come under mounting pressure (increasingly internal) for the current situation. A group of 22 scientific researchers from Swedish universities and institutes have called on the SPHA for a rethink of the strategy and a more cautious approach [‘Sweden: 22 Scientists Say Coronavirus Strategy Has Failed’, (David Nikel), Forbes, 14-Apr-2020, www.forbes.com].
A consequence of “granny-killer metrics” A leading molecular virologist from Sweden’s Karolinska Insitutet has accused the government of taking unnecessary risks and sacrificing the elderly (half of the total deaths are from aged care homes), as well as placing the health of their carers and hospital workers in jeopardy [‘Sweden urged to reconsider controversial coronavirus advice as infections rise sharply’, (John Varga), Express, 07-May-2020, www.express.co.uk].
A Stockholm bar: elbow distancing only
Defending the hard to defendThe Swedish authorities have tried to defend its strategy—citing dramatic drops in the use of public transport and a survey which the agencies conclude is evidence that people are practicing safe distancing from each other during the crisis (Ibbotson)—unfortunately the visual evidence from photos and videos within Sweden suggests otherwise with crowded restaurants, bars and parks still the norm and few people seeming to be social distancing. So far, the government for the most part is holding the line and appears to be committed to the long haul, although they have now given some ground, banning outdoor gatherings of more than 50 (Nikel)ㅁ.
There are some outside observers who still take a sanguine view of outlier Sweden’s methods of dealing with the crisis. Stanford School of Medicine (US) professor, Michael Levitt, has been critical of other countries with a different approach, the so-called “first mover” countries like Australia, Austria, New Zealand, Denmark, Czech Republic, Israel and Greece, who he says have paid too heavy a price for locking down their communities – resulting in severe damage to their economies, social upheaval, the loss of an academic year for students, and still having not attained herd immunity [‘Granny-killer metrics don’t add up in Australia’s costly coronavirus battle’, (Andrew Probyn), ABC News, 08-May-2020, www.abcnews.com.au]. No doubt the decision-makers in Sweden would find this external support comforting, and of course Sweden could turn around and say to the growing number of doubters that it’s approach is keeping people in jobs, keeping businesses from closing down, and the economy afloat … but at what a human cost! This is the Solomonic trade-off.
(Source: www.irishtimes.com)
Update since originally published: (information updated to 21-May-2020) SWEDEN has overtaken the UK, Italy and Belgium to record the highest coronavirus per capita death rate in the world. Sweden has recorded 6.08 deaths per million inhabitants, higher than the UK, USA and Italy (www.express.co.uk/).
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🇻🇳VietnamWith international media attention on the COVID-19 dilemma focused largely on the US and the Eurocentric world, the efforts of Vietnam in the war against coronavirus has garnered little notice till recently. Many observers would be surprised to discover that the South-East Asian country has had zero recorded deaths from the virus, out of a total of 288 confirmed cases (10-May-2020). Surprising…for a few reasons. First, it seems a bona fide claim, unlike some of it’s S.E. Asian neighbours who claim also to have done well with little to substantiate it. As a general rule, S.E. Asian numbers, even more so African numbers, are often problematic as there has been an inadequate amount of testing carried out to gauge progress accurately✮.
(Photo: AP)
Second, Vietnam shares a (northern) border with China, the country of coronavirus origin, plus in normal times Vietnam is a busy destination with frequent international flights from nearby Taiwan, Hong Kong and China itself, leaving it, one would think, quite susceptible to to the importation of the infection. Third, Vietnam has an estimated 97 million people but for a medical emergency of this magnitude it lacks the allocatable resources and health infrastructure of the more economically dynamic Asian states. It simply can’t afford to engage in the level of mass testing that say South Korea has managed [‘Vietnam shows how you can contain COVID-19 with limited resources’, (Sean Fleming), World Economic Forum, 30-Mar-2020, www.weforum.org].
Why has Vietnam done so well in the war against the “invisible enemy”?Part of the explanation is that Vietnam has approached the crisis very much like a military campaign. In fact war rhetoric has been employed by the government, which constantly speaks of “fighting the enemy”. The country’s response was early and proactive, border closures, rigorous mass quarantines of whole towns for weeks, were implemented up front, not just as a last resort like some places elsewhere [‘How Vietnam is winning its “war” on coronavirus’, (Rodion Ebbighausen), DW, 16-Apr-2020, www.dw.com]. The authorities conducted targeted testing and thorough contact-tracing procedures. To compensate for the country’s limited resources they created low-cost test kits for wide distribution (“70-minute rapid test kits”).
“Rice ATMs” initiative: Made available 24/7 to Vietnamese people during the time of pandemic
(Photo: www.vietnamnet.vn)
An ingrained culture of compliance The key to what Vietnam has achieved is the central government’s ability to secure almost universal integration into the fight against the disease. Communist Vietnam’s authoritarian one-party state structure with a highly organised army and security apparatus makes this task more easily obtainable (whereas in a liberal society where plurality is the norm this would be nigh on impossible). The regime can much more easily mobilise the people to adhere to it’s rules and restrictions…there is a prevailing culture of compliance, and a range of effective mechanisms in the hands of Hanoi to attain that compliance. The government-controlled media and the high numbers of Vietnamese people exposed to social media have facilitated this. Apps have been a standard part of the public information campaign to get the government message out – and the degree of transparency about COVID-19 and the government’s plan to counter-attack it, has raised public confidence and made it more receptive to what Hanoi is saying [‘The Secret to Vietnam’s COVID-19 Response Success’, (Minh Vu & Bich T Tran), The Diplomat, 18-Apr-2020, www.thediplomat.com].
The government has called on a raft of idiosyncratically-Vietnamese cultural devices to creatively drive home it’s theme. ”Viral hand-washing” songs have been popularised among the people and most effectively, the regime have resorted to propaganda art, something with a long tradition in communist Vietnam. Calling on the familiar slogan, “In war, we draw” (again, invoking the war metaphor), the government has fostered a patriotic response in Vietnamese to get 100% behind the war on the virus (#TogetherWeWillWin), resulting in the production and dissemination of visually-powerful and meaningful posters like these two (above and below). COVID-19 has also prompted the release of special stamps to help unify the Vietnamese people [‘“In a war, we draw”: Vietnam’s artists joint fight against Covid-19’, (Chris Humphrey), The Guardian, 09-Apr-2020, www.theguardian.com; Fleming].
Coercion and collaborationAnother side of Vietnam’s use of “soft power” to get everyone thinking as one can be seen at work in the coronavirus emergency. The socialist ethos in Vietnam operates on one level as a “surveillance state“…ordinary Vietnamese are conditioned, not just to obey rules, but to help the authoritarian regime’s realisation of it’s goals by spying on neighbours and reporting back to the authorities the activities of non-conformists or of anyone breaching the public health regulations (Humphrey).
Notwithstanding this further encroachment on civil liberties, the Vietnamese people as a whole, having accepted the seriousness of Hanoi’s fight against coronavirus, are on board, and appear genuinely proud of their country’s success in avoiding thus far any serious outbreak of the epidemic in a country with a healthcare system woefully ill-equipped to deal with harmful effects on it’s large population (Ebbighausen).
The Vietnamese achievement, having been successful so far in keeping a lid on the epidemic, might lead it’s citizens to feel or at least hope that they are out of the woods. But even if they are in the clearing now, there’s another forest looming largely in the shape of the economy, which of course is another matter entirely. Over 85% of Vietnam’s enterprises have been adversely effected by the crisis. Tourism, which Vietnam like so many is highly dependent on, could be looking at a loss of $US3 to $US4 Bn in 2020, and so on down the line of the country’s businesses. At the moment business leaders in Vietnam are preoccupied with exploring new economic opportunity that may arise for the country post-crisis [‘Vietnam is set to lose billions due to coronavirus, and it’s already feeling the impact of the deadly outbreak’, (Kate Taylor), Business Insider Australia, 25-Feb-2020, www.businessinsider.com.au].
EndNote: Peering inside that can of worms
The UK Johnson government initially toyed with the idea of going the herd immunity route, before being awakened to it’s senses by a vociferous chorus of British medical experts recounting the dire ramifications of such a gamble.After chief epidemiologist Prof Neil Ferguson did some remodelling, the UK government (belatedly) switched to a suppression approach. The Netherlands in March announced it would follow Sweden’s strategy but the Dutch prime minister then walked back the herd immunity line, opting instead for what has been described as “lockdown light” [‘Caught Between Herd Immunity And National Lockdown, The Netherlands Hard Hit Bt Covid-19 (Update)’, (Joshua Cohen), Forbes, 27-Mar-2020, www.forbes.com]
𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟𖡟
✱ the medical critics would be quick to point out that, if herd immunity can’t be accomplished by vaccination (and there is no vaccine for coronavirus yet, not even on the horizon), then it is an extremely risky business to dabble in. It puts the old and vulnerable into the position of sacrificial pawns for the greater good; it can also expose a country’s health-care system to intolerable demands on its resources (not to neglect the heightened personal danger for nursing staff and medics); a third drawback with the approach is that mortality from coronavirus is a reality for the under 70s and under 60s as well
ㅁ in an implicit admission of a failure of it’s voluntary compliance arrangements, Sweden announced recently that it would close bars and restaurants which flaunted the social distancing guidelines [‘Sweden is shutting down bars and restaurants where people defied social distancing guidelines’, (Kelly McLaughlin), Business Insider, 28-Apr-2020, www.businessinsider.com]
✮ like Myanmar for instance which admits to only six deaths from the virus. A population of 55 million, according to a World Bank estimate it has only 249 ventilators in the whole country. The Myanmar regime’s lack of transparency, the sheer logistics of trying to safely social distances and the attribution of it’s very low fatality level to the country’s diet and lifestyle, cast more than reasonable doubts on the true extent of the epidemic in the republic [‘Zara’s Billionaire Owner Was Praised For Helping in the Coronavirus Crisis. Workers In Myanmar Paid the Price’, (Nishita Jha), BuzzFeed News, 07-May-2020, www.buzzfeed.com]
Formost of us the coronavirus crisis is, if not all-consuming, at the front and centre of just about everything at the moment. This pandemic, this pandemocracy, is all over social media, and one of the most curious by-products is how the emergence of this novel virus has spawned a novel social media and sociological phenomena called the armchair epidemiologist… instant experts with their own special take on how COVID-19 should be handled, what it’s all really about, the whole thing de-mystified and unravelled in a nutshell. As you will see below, it is unfortunate at this pivotal moment that the practice of responsible social distancing hasn’t always been matched by the practice of responsible social media distancing.
Why is armchair epidemiology a burgeoning sub-industry at the moment? One general explanation lies in the character of the pandemic itself. It’s a troubling time right across the globe, people are naturally anxious about the disease—especially if you are unlucky enough to be living in a country that is one of the major hotspots at the moment—so talking about it can be a calming mechanism of sorts, working it all out in your head so it makes sense. As Noah Feldman neatly puts it, “one way for humans to cope with anxiety is to seek rational mastery over observable phenomena”. This becomes doubly the case in this situation because of the nature of this particular ‘beast’. The lack of “concrete empirical data” on the disease, the shortcomings in the science as it stands now, means that even amongst the genuine experts, uncertainty reigns (‘Will the Armchair Coronavirus Experts Please Sit Down’, Noah Feldman, Bloomberg: Opinion, 25-Mar-2020). The experts have disagreed over which is the correct strategy to follow in the fight to contain the virus, what works, what doesn’t, full lockdowns, “let it rip” herd immunity, whether or not to use face masks, etc✱. Add to this the questionable way some countries have handled their outbreaks—eg, the slowness of for instance Italy, the US and Britain to take decisive steps in the early phase of the pandemic—the result, a critical failure to get on top of COVID-19 before the curve took off on it’s rapid skyward trajectory. Into this void the amateur epidemiologists have been only too happy to step.
Mandatory hibernation: Too much time on their hands? Of course another reason for the house-bound commentariat directing its focus and energies towards the COVID-19 debate, could be sheer boredom. There’s only so much time on any given ‘Groundhog’ day you can spend bingeing on modish, ”must see”television series before you start to suffer mental fatigue and withdrawal symptoms.
(Image: www.rfclipart.com)
Another explanation of Feldman’s that I am taken with is armchair epidemiology expert as a substitute for armchair sport expert. The suburban “Weekend Norms” of the world ritually delight in analysing the games of football and other sports they watch on the ‘box’ and on Fox, but courtesy of the pandemic the sporting calendar is denuded, the presence of live sport on our screens is already a fading memory. The average punter, Feldman suggests, may simply, by necessity, have switched from analysing sport to analysing the coronavirus phenomena (the only game in town!).
(Image: www.geneticliteracyproject.org)
Some observers of the armchair epidemiology contagion have noted an element of the Dunning-Kruger Effect at work here – “a cognitive bias in which people overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific domain” (‘Psychology Today’)◇. This contends that someone’s legitimate expertise in another field “gives them a false sense that their speculation and predictive powers are more informed” than the general person…and thus in this time of global upheaval, they don’t hold back in telling everyone (‘Elon Musk is the Ultimate Armchair Epidemiologist’, Alex Lauer, Inside Hook, 01-May-2020, www.insidehook.com). Tim Requarth’s example are certain Silicon Valley “data wonks” who have produced “superficially convincing but flawed epidemiological analyses” and “sweeping predictions” of the pandemic to arrive at a conclusion that the emergency restrictions are an overreaction, contradicting the advice of public health experts. The criticism of much of the amateur epidemiology indulged in by non-public health professionals is that they tend to throw data round randomly, get the basic principles skew-whiff and make faulty assumptions. Spare us from the “good intentions” of a plague of DK-19 experts! (‘Please, Let’s Stop the Epidemic of Armchair Epidemiology’, Tim Requarth, Slate, 26-Mar-2020, www.slate.com).
Tangier is a coastal city in northern Morocco that looks out across the Strait of Gibraltar to Tarifa, Spain, a distance of just 20 miles, hence its sobriquet, “the Door to Africa”. Strategically located at the cusp of Africa and Europe, Tangier has a long history of interactions with foreign cultures and civilisations – having been occupied at different periods by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans❈, Vandals, Arabs, Moors and Berbers (Islamic and pre-Islamic), Byzantine Greeks, Spanish, Portuguese and English.
Tangier in the scramble for Africa
By the beginning of the 20th century, during the “Scramble for Africa”, the territory of Morocco (which Tangier falls within) was divided up between Spain and France (and held as “protectorates”). The clandestine deal between the two prompted objections from Germany demanding a “slice of the (African) cake”. A provocative response by impetuous and volatile emperor Wilhelm II in Tangier precipitated an international crisis in 1905. Tensions were dampened down by the ensuing Act of Algeciras: Germany was appeased with a portion of the French Congo, but at the same time Britain and France consolidated their alliance.
Tangier’s special status
Under an agreement (the Tangier Convention) signed by France, Spain and the UK in 1923, Tangier became an International Zone (TIZ), effective from 1924. The tripartite administration of TIZ was later extended to include the US, Belgium, Portugal, Netherland, Sweden and Italy. Forms of everyday official life in the enclave reflected its new internationalised nature, although limited to a very select band of foreign countries. As CG Fenwick described it at the time, TIZ was ”a condominium of select states, a limited board of trustees acknowledging no political responsibility to the nations of the world at large“ (Fenwick, C. G. “The International Status of Tangier.” The American Journal of International Law, vol. 23, no. 1, 1929, pp. 140–143. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2190247. Accessed 14 Apr. 2020).
The judiciary adopted a mixed court comprising two English judges and one each from France and Spain, and the type of law adhered to, analogous to French law (Brown, R. Weir “International Procedure under the Tangier Convention.” Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, vol. 7, no. 1, 1925, pp. 86–90. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/753030. Accessed 14 Apr. 2020).
🔺 Tangier, 1924
(Photo: www.pinterest.com)
TIZ was neutral and demilitarised, retaining for zonal security a small force comprising 250 native Moroccan gendarmes under the command of a Spanish major assisted by other subordinate officers from the vested-interest countries. If needed, there was a provision to call on the sultan of Morocco to bolster security strength (Delore, Gabriel. “The Violation by Spain of the Statute of Tangier and Its Consequences as They Affect the United States.” The American Journal of International Law, vol. 35, no. 1, 1941, pp. 140–145. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2192608. Accessed 14 Apr. 2020).
The various international diplomatic corps in Morocco were consolidated in the city of Tangier (apparently the sultan preferred that they be accommodated there rather than Fez, Morocco’s principal city), together with other municipal services, further reflecting the special character of TIZ (Brown).
Political authority in TIZ
The Zone’s political structure (from 1928) had as its basic unit of governance a Legislative Assembly (membership: 4 from France, 3 each from Spain, GB and Italy, 1 each from the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and the US). Real power however lay with the Committee of Control – with consuls representing Belgium, France, GB, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. The Committee had the power to veto the Legislative Council and to dissolve it. At a grass-roots level there was an administrator in charge. Under the TIZ Statute the authority of the sultan, acting through a mandūb (proxy), was recognised (though the sultan’s sovereignty over TIZ was nominal) (Graham H Stuart, (1945). The Future of Tangier. Foreign Affairs, 23(4), 675-679, www.foreignaffairs.com)◘.
Tangier International Zone
Area: 373 km. Pop Est.(ca 1936) approx 50,000 (Muslims 30,000, Jews 12,000, Europeans 8,000-plus).
Currency: £ pounds sterling
Casablanca or Tangier?
By this time Tangier had acquired a reputation for cosmopolitanism and diversity, being a destination for international businessmen, black marketeers, smugglers, diplomats, military men, refugees, writers and spies. It is widely thought that the classic war espionage film Casablanca (1942) was “inspired by the international ambience of Tangier” (Rachid Tafersiti, L’image de la Ville entire Cinema et Urbanisme, quoted in “The bar at Cinema Vox in Tangier”, Cinema Vox, www.cinemavox.ma)◍. More transparently, Tangier was the subject (or the mood-creating backdrop) for a spate of American mystery/thriller B-movies in the Forties and Fifties with titles like Tangier (reviewed by Variety, 1946: as “spy melodrama with plenty of hokum”) and The Woman from Tangier.
Franco’s takeover
In 1940, with France totally blindsided by the immediate, existential threat to Paris from the German Wehrmacht, General Franco, using the pretext that he was protecting Tangier from a possible Italian invasion launched a surprise invasion of Tangier (‘Spanish protectorate in Morocco’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org). With Spain in military occupancy of the city, its soldiers tried to turn TIZ into a garrison town, imposing themselves, stopping citizens, checking their IDs, etc. The invasion and aftermath brought protests from UK and US and the Francoist state had to give assurances that the city would not be fortified and that the international institutions would be restored (‘U.S. Protests Step of Spain in Tangier’, New York Times, 16-Nov-1940, www.nytimes.com). At the end of the war the Allies forced the Spanish to withdraw…the TIZ continued until 1956 when the independent Kingdom of Morocco was created with Tangier subsumed within the new Maghreb nation.
PostScript: About a decade after its international status was terminated, Tangier became a sought-out destination for a whole new category of outsiders, the ”beat generation”, Western writers and artists like William S Burroughs. Within a few years other counterculture devotees were flocking to Tangier as it became part of the Moroccan hippie trail (although soon upstaged by Marrakech as the preferred ‘Mecca’ for Western non-conformists in Morocco).
⇿———-———⇿⇿———-———⇿⇿———-———⇿
❈ Tangier first acquired the status of a free city in 38 BC under imperial Rome
◍ gambling was not permitted in Moroccan cities, whereas the activity flourished in nightclubs in the International Zone, so the fact that it is featured in Casablanca gives further credence to the idea that Tangier was the template for the movie (Cinema Vox)
◘ the Statute was criticised for several shortcomings – including a lack of democracy, Tangierinos were disenfranchised; and TIZ’s economic interests were neglected (Stuart)
Mention “The Ten Commandments” to cinephiles and almost invariably they’ll think of the 1956 epic with Chuck Heston as the resolute Moses. But that was Cecil B DeMille’s second attempt at filming the Old Testament story, or his (Cold War-inspired) interpretation of it at least. Back when Hollywood was still in it’s adolescence, 1923, DeMille made a silent version of The Ten Commandments, in black and white with some sequences in Technicolor.
(Image: www.bestplaces.com)
The location chosen by DeMille for his first go at shooting the biblical epic was a barren 18-mile stretch of sand some 170 miles north of LA, at Guadalupe on California’s central coast. Today, the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, as they are called, are a protected sea coast and wildlife refuge (eg, for the endangered western snowy plover) and largely unchanged, but for three months in 1923 it was a hive of mega-budget movie-making activity as DeMille transformed the empty dunes into a reconstruction of an ancient Egyptian city. DeMille chose the Guadalupe dunes for the movie set because he thought it might pass for the Egyptian desert (or at least the Sahara Desert) [‘Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes’, Atlas Obscura, www.altasobscura.com].
𐅉 ‘10 Commandments’ of California in glorious “techni-tint”
Hollywood scale extravaganza
The set was massive scale, destined to become the director’s trademark – 120 foot high by 720 feet wide, erected by 1,500 construction workers, a twelve-story tall “Egyptian city” of plaster, wood and straw. The city’s human population comprised a further 3,500 actors✖and technicians plus 125 cooks to feed the assembled masses. Add to these impressive numbers some 5,000 animals, 300 chariots and 21 plaster sphinxes. Statues of Pharaoh Rameses were eleven metres tall and the facade had a 110-foot high gate enclosure✧[‘The Ten Commandments, (1923 film)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Bob Brier, Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs, (2013); www.lostcitydemille.com].
(Source: G-N Dune Center)
A Virtuous Camp DeMille?
DeMille had a huge makeshift tent city erected (nicknamed “Camp DeMille”) to house all of the personnel on the set. Perhaps, in keeping with the overtly religious theme of the film⊡, DeMille laid down strict rules of non-engagement for everyone involved on the production…men and women were billeted separately with no fraternisation allowed, no gambling, no alcohol and no coarse language [‘The Ten Commandments of 1923: The Exodus, Take One’, Patheos, 20-Apr-2012, www.patheos.com]. The alcohol ban adhered to the Prohibition rules in place in America at the time, but subsequent generations of beach-combing visitors to Guadalupe’s dunes have discovered evidence that participants on the movie set found a way round that…the debris of empty bottles of alcohol-laced cough syrup strewn all over the dunes [PJ Grisar, ‘How DeMille made his ‘Ten Commandments’ Jewish again’, Forward, 08-Apr-2020, www.forward.com].
A vanishing “Egyptian metropolis”
After filming of The Ten Commandments on the Central Coast finished in August 1923✥, what DeMille did next astounds. Instead of dismantling and hauling the costly set (the overall budget for the movie was a staggering $1.5M or more) back to Hollywood, DeMille had it bulldozed and buried in the Guadalupe dunes. The film-maker just didn’t want to be bothered with the logistics or expense of an enormous removal task and/or he didn’t want rival Hollywood film-makers or studios to get their hands on the set.
(Photo:www.fws.gov)
Unearthing cinematic artefacts
And there it sat—or shifted around in the constantly swirling winds of the dunes—for sixty years, one of Hollywood’s most expensive-ever film sets. Then in 1983 film-maker Peter Brosnan became intrigued after a chance encounter with the story, got hooked on it and spent the next 30 years searching for the site, finding it and trying (frustratingly) to excavate it. The project is ongoing, and has taken this length of time due to a combination of factors – local “red tape” (jurisdiction of the dunes falls under two separate counties); the site is a bird-life sanctuary with limited, seasonal access; plus there’s the extremely high cost of funding excavations. Over the years, archaeologists, both professional and amateur, have joined the quest to dig up DeMille’s treasure-trove. Buried replicas from DeMille’s Lost City have been unearthed including a 300-pound plaster sphinx which now resides in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center [‘There’s a Fake Egyptian City Buried in California’, (Marissa Fessenden), Smithsonian Magazine, 15-Oct-2015, www.smithsonianmag.com]. Brosnan compiled his years of research, including interviews with surviving actors, extras and other crew members, into a documentary film, The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille, screened in 2016.
✖DeMille also bused in some 250 Orthodox Jews as extras to give the movie a more authentic Hebrew look
✧ Rameses’ ‘temple’ contained recreations of hieroglyphics copied from the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922
⊡ certainly in keeping with the sternly moralising tone of DeMille’s film
✥ only part of the film was made on the Guadalupe dunes, the wonky parting of the Red Sea scene was shot at Seal Beach in Orange County, and a modern-day morality tale DeMille tacked on to the film was shot back at the studios
In1900 the population of Los Angeles was 102,479, the 36th largest city in the USAⓐ. A couple of years into the new century the name Hollywood resonated only as a hotel, Hollywood’s legendary preeminence as the epicentre of the world’s film industry was still over a decade away. Nonetheless the city’s growing numbers were already putting pressure on the water supplies. LA’s location on a water-poor, semi-arid plane magnified those pressures. A lack of rainfall and groundwater and droughts was making the situation worse (‘The Los Angeles Aqueduct and the Owens and Mono Lakes’ (MONO Case), Case No 379, (TED Case Studies), www.web.archive.org).
Mulholland in the valley (Photo: LA Times)
A couple of ambitious engineers in the city’s water company (later the LA Board of Water and Power)—Fred Eaton (also the LA mayor) and William Mulholland—cast their eyes round for a more reliable source of water to accommodate Los Angeles’ continued growth and development. The solution lay to the northeast, in the Owens River Valley which backs on to the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges. If Los Angeles owned the land here the water could be diverted to the city. The obstacle was that this was farming land with hundreds and hundreds of farmers legally ensconced on small plot-holders. The farmers’ land-holdings also gave them water rights and they had their own agenda regarding the Owens valley, they were backing a national valley reclamation project to irrigate the valley farmlands.
Mulholland(pointing), with members of his syndicate (Photo credit: www.latimes.com)
It was former mayor Eaton who started the ball rolling, at the same time setting the ethical standard for Mulholland, by securing options on riparian lands under the pretense of establishing cattle ranches (Marian L Ryan, ‘Los Angeles Newspapers Fight the Water War, 1924-1927’, Southern California Quarterly, 50(2) (June 1968)). Soon Mulholland was driving the scheme and the Los Angeles water authority set about buying up as much of the land around the Owens River as they could. Mulholland, Eaton and other local business notables including Harrison Gray Otis and Henry Huntingdon formed a business cabal which became known as the San Fernando Syndicate. The syndicate allegedly used inside knowledge (the plan to build a aqueduct connecting the valley to the city) to buy up land that would become highly profitable (‘William Mulholland’, Wikipedia,http://en.m.wikipedia.org).
Cottonwood Creek diversion conduct and Owens Lake in background (wwww.owensvalleyhistory.com)
Mulholland’s vision for LA’s prosperity was dependent on the monopolisation of the valley’s water, but he was completely unscrupulous in the way he went about it, “employ(ing) chicanery, subterfuge, spies, bribery, a campaign of divide-and-conquer, and a strategy of lies” to secure the water LA needed (‘Reading Los Angeles.: Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert’, (Christopher Hawthorne), LA Times, 29-Jun-2011,www.latimesblogs.latimes.com). The cagey, Belfast-born Mulholland deceived Owens Valley farmers and also misled the Angelenos as well by grossly understating the quantity of water that would be taken for LA.
Route of the LA aqueduct (Image: www.owensvalleyhistory.com)
The syndicate, from 1905 on, bought up strategic parcels of land piecemeal in the valley (by 1928 90% of the water rights were in Mulholland’s hands). The City of Los Angeles meanwhile built a 375km-long aqueduct (completed in 1913) to siphon off the water from the Owens River. Some of the water was diverted to irrigate the San Fernando Valley but most went via the aquifer to service the needs of the LA metropolis. (‘The Water Fight That Inspired “Chinatown”’, Felicity Barringer, 25-Apr-2012, (Green),www.green.blogs.nytimes.com).
The problem with the proposed Owens Valley Reclamation Project, which had it gone ahead would have stymied Mulholland’s plans, was already taken care of. Mulholland through his political connexions in Washington lobbied the US president, Theodore Roosevelt, who squashed the project (‘The Los Angeles Aqueduct’). This was viewed by the farm settlers as a public act of betrayal (‘The Valley of Broken Hearts’, C.E. Kunze, The San Francisco Call (1924), in ‘Owens Valley’s – Los Angeles Aqueduct’, (Owens Valley),www.owensvalleyhistory.com). In time the Owens Valley farmers amd ranchers realised the enormity of the threat to them…by 1926 Owens Lake was completely dry. Frustrated, angered and rebellious, they attempted to retaliate through acts of sabotage, in 1924 blowing up the aqueduct. Mulholland responded by calling in armed guards, conflicts occurred and tensions ran high over water access. A second flashpoint occurred when Owens Valley activists aided by a local scofflaw element commandeered the Alabama Gates section of the aqueduct resulting in a four-day standoff. Afterwards Mulholland hired Pinkerton private detectives to track the ‘culprits’ and ‘ringleaders’. Other incidents escalated the conflict including more dynamiting of the infrastructure in 1927ⓑ (‘The Water War that Polarized 1920s California’, (Gary Krist), Literary Hub, 17-May-2018,www.lithub.com; ‘New Perspectives on the West’, ‘William Mulholland (1855-1935)’,www.pbs.org).
Detectives investigating the scene (Photo: LA Times)
Mulholland eventually came out on top in the ‘war’ due to a combination of factors, “determination and deceit” on his part, but also because the Inyo County Bank folded , taking with it most of the ranchers and farmers’ savings. Personally for Mulholland though, he had just a modicum of time to savour his victory. In1928 the collapse of St Francis Dam cost nearly 500 lives and caused widespread devastation of property and crops. As he had been project engineer, Mulholland was blamed for the disaster and forced to resign in disgrace (‘New Perspectives’, PBS). By 1930 the handful of remaining farm-owners, with unviable land having lost their irrigating water—the “white gold” as they called it—and confronted with droughts, their only one recourse was ultimately enforced migration (Kunze, ‘Owens Valley’).
Mono Basin, Cal.
The Los Angeles Water Department (even after Mulholland’s esclipse) continued the search for new sources of water, one scheme sought to extend the LA aqueduct to the Mono Basin. Local farmers after eventually realising that Mono Lake was staring down the same fate as Owens Lake, took action to save it from destruction (‘Mono Lake’)ⓒ.
The Los Angeles water authority’s and Mulholland’s diverting of the Owens River and the incorporation of the San Fernando Valley into LA’s municipal boundaries, paved the way for LA’s eventual growth into a mega-sized city by any standardsⓓ (Hawthorne). But this achievement was at devastating and irreparable cost to the Owens Valley environment which became no longer viable as a farming community… the Owens River was reduced to a trickle and the Owens Lake ecosystem destroyed (Barringer).
Endnote: Chinatown backdrop
The story of the LA water wars and the Californian “water czar” William Mulholland’s machinations inspired the 1974 cult neo-noir mystery film Chinatown. Polanski’s film uses the historic 1920s conflicts as backdrop for a fictional detective story in which the persona of the larger-than-life Mulholland is represented by two characters: the visionary and straight dealing Hollis Mulwray, and the Machiavellian über-schemer Noah Cross (Barringer).
ᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽ
ⓐ ‘Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1900’. United States Census Bureau, June 15, 1998
ⓑ prompting LA newspaper of the day The Gridiron to report that “Civil War Threatened” as “L.A. Faces Water Famine”, (11-Jun-1927)
ⓒ Mulholland and Los Angeles also looked at tapping into the Colorado River to replenish the city’s water supplies but this proved logistically too difficult even for Mulholland
This piece in the China Daily Show caught my eye recently…”the first season of CSI’s much-anticipated ‘Shanghai’ spin-off has been cancelled, after scriptwriters failed to take into account the East Coast city’s complete absence of crime”. It goes on to say, “plotlines involving corruption, sexual harassment and high-end ergotou[𝕒] were shelvedafter quality-control cadres for the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) cited an ’insufficient suspension of disbelief’ for viewers”[𝕓].
🔺 The formula: the standardShànghâiperiod crime series
This amused me, less for the satirical tone inherent in the piece (CSI detectives investigating “high level wok theft”), but because every time I switch on the television in China and flick through the drama offerings on China’s subscription network, a more than healthy proportion of the fare seems to be fixated on 1930s Shànghâi noir and underground crime gangs.
Chinese television entertainment csars of course trade on the viewing public’s nostalgia for a past time where Shànghâi pulsated to a rhythm of decadence, glamorous nightspots and ostentatious ritzy opulence, counterposed against an underbelly of sin, gangland warfare and corrupt police. While these television series, such as the popular Meng’s Palace and New Bund, are pure and typically exaggerated fictions, the sources of their invention were very real.
If the Shànghâi of the 1920s and ‘30s that we visited in the preceding blog deserves it’s glowing epithet, “the Paris of the South”, then it’s other sobriquet, “the whore of Asia”, to describe the seedy and violent underbelly of the same city, is every bit as applicable. The “freebooting capitalism” of Shànghâi in the interwar years[𝕔] and it’s rewards, spawned a wave of criminal activity with underworld bosses vying for a bigger piece of the city’s stupendous economic pie. Like the legitimate commercial powerhouses on the Bund, the gangland “Mr Big’s” were very much part of Shànghâi’s “movers and shakers”.
The Big Three?
The conventional view of Shànghâi‘s criminal underworld in the Twenties and Thirties is that there were three main gang chiefs who ran most of the show. This triumvirate of crime was made up of Du Yuesheng, Huang Jinrong and Zhang Xiaolin, …of the three gang bosses (san daheng), Zhang was of lesser significance, confined to playing a secondary role to Du. The older Huang was first to attain prominence, entering the French Concession police force and rising through the ranks to become police chief. From this advantageous post the corrupt Huang could play both sides and garner a cut of the criminal profits [𝕕].
Huang—Lin—Du
Huang was eventually dismissed from the FP constabulary which led to him going full-time as a criminal overlord. The sacked cop made his fortune with a scheme involving the stealing of incoming opium from the docks, which his gang then transported into Huang’s residence by a back entrance. Huang had the opium—which cost him zilch!—distributed throughout China through his Sanxin Company [‘Murder, Mayhem and Money’, (Ni Dandan), Global Times, 12-Mar-2013, www.globaltimes.cn]. It was the pockmarked Huang’s first wife (Lin Guisheng), an influential behind-the-scene figure in Shànghâi power circles, who provided the boost to the career of the third of the crime triumvirate. Madame Huang took on the young Du Yuesheng as a partner in a French Concession operation, the start of a business empire for Du which ultimately eclipsed that of her husband’s. Du’s power base and muscle was the much feared Green Gang, which numbered as many as 20,000 members at it’s zenith [‘Shanghai in the 1930s’, World History, http://world history.us].
Du and the Green Gang
“Big-eared” Du was a complex and fascinating figure in the Shànghâi underworld scene. As zongshi (grandmaster) of the local crime operation, he was ruthless in business and intimidating in method (he would despatch coffins to the houses of gangland rivals who had earned its displeasure as a grim warning). Yet he forbid members of his Qing Bang gang to violate women, the wealthy Du was generous and wrote off many debts owed him by friends. Du’s business scope was panoramic … opium dens, gambling shacks, prostitution rings strung out across the city, kidnapping, protection rackets, labour contracting, heroin and morphine labs, as well as more ‘legit’ activities. He also founded a boys’ school in the French Connection and was president of the Chinese Red Cross during the Sino-Japanese War. And, in a perverse twist, Du, having made a ‘motza’ from his cur of the proceeds of the opium monopoly, was ultimately made president of the “National Board of Opium Suppression Bureau”! [Derks, Hans.History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, Ca. 1600-1950. Vol. 105, Brill, 2012.JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctv4cbhdf. Accessed 21 Feb. 2020].
Du’s political ties to the Chinese republic’s political elite
Du sided with Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists in the conflict against Mao’s communists, playing a role in the 1927 Shànghâi purge. After the Japanese invasion in 1937 Du fled to Hong Kong, a move which lost him goodwill in Shànghâi. After the war Du wanted to return to the city but was not welcomed back and died in Hong Kong exile [‘The three tycoons of gangsters’ Shanghai’, Timeout, 22-Mar-2016, www.timeoutshanghai.com].
It didn’t end in a happy story for the other two ‘tycoons’ either. When the Japanese army invaded, Xiaolin switched sides and aided the Japanese efforts to root out subversive (ie, anti-Japanese) elements in Shànghâi, making him a wanted man by the Nationalists. In 1940 he was executed by one of his own bodyguards. As for Huang, his ultimate downfall was the communists’ takeover in 1949. Stripped of his great wealth, Huang was forced to submit to “self-criticism” and take up lowly work as a street sweeper (‘The three tycoons’).
1932 Hochi map of Shànghâi🔺
A Mexican ‘godfather’ of Shanghai crime?
Another name—juxtaposed against that of Du—occupied a similar senior role in the gangland power structure in Shànghâi. Carlos Garcia, a Mexican who migrated to the fabled city of the east, carved out a lucrative (illicit) business shipping Mexican tequila via Shànghâi back to prohibition-hit California. He has been depicted as the closest thing the Shànghâi underworld of the day had to a “capo di tutti capi”[𝕖]…gang boss Garcia proved indispensable in his ability to adjudicate disputes and ensure that they didn’t develop into internecine gang warfare [‘The Canidrone Tower Gang’, Paul French, (‘That’s Shanghai’), 23-Sep-2019, www.thats,mag.com].
During the 1920s and 1930s it is estimated that there was some 100,000 gangsters in Shànghâi (around three percent of the city’s population at the time) [Brian G Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919-1937, (1996)]. The vice empires of Du and his ilk were built on control over the city’s prostitution, gambling and drug trade, especially opium.
The law-enforcers’ role
The city’s police, tempted by tangible graft and corruption all around, were inherently weak, explaining why Shànghâi fell prone to unchecked lawlessness and gangsterhood. Irredeemable “bad apples” like the discredited Huang thrived in the tainted civil police agencies of 1920s and ’30s Shànghâi. The individual carve-up of the city constabulary into three distinct and unrelated entities, added to the police’s overall inefficiency. Law enforcement suffered hugely as a result of the absence of a single, paramount city police force, making it very difficult for the police to operate strategically and cohesively to rein in the city’s countless ’villains’ [‘The Shanghai Settlements’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Endnote: Gangs of old Shànghâi
Carlos Garcia’s key role in the city’s crime business is a reminder of the importance of the non-Chinese element in the Shànghâi underworld. As well as Garcia, there were other “blow-ins”, characters like ’Lucky’ Jack Riley. Riley, an escaped convict from the US, “lucked-in” in a big way on settling in the inter-war East Asian crime capital. Riley succeeded in cornering the Shànghâi slot machine market (patronised heavily by the foreign military personnel in residence), and with a Jewish criminal associate, he ran from a business from Shànghâi servicing prohibition-era America’s habit for heroin. Roaming the mean streets of 1930s Shànghâi were a host of multicultural gangs—Portuguese gangs, Spanish gangs, Mexican gangs, Jewish gangs, etc—giving the cosmopolitan edge of Shànghâi another dimension [‘Those Rogue Foreigners Ruled the Streets of 1930s Shanghai’, (Seth Ferrenti), Vice Media, 22-Jun-2018, www.vice.com].
﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏
[𝕒] a white-coloured liquor (a type of baijiu) popular in China; literally ”second pot head”
[𝕓] “’CSI: Shanghai’ cancelled due to lack of crime”, (Ping’an Jiedao), China Daily Show, 20-Feb-2020, www.chinadailyshow.com[𝕔] Ferranti: 2018[𝕕] of the several territorial police forces in Shànghâi, the French was the most corrupt – according to Bernard Wassermann, Secret War in Shanghai: Treachery, Subversion and Collaboration in the Second World War (2017, 2nd Ed.)[𝕖] ”boss of bosses”
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”
From the end of the Sixties the militant Weathermen in the US rode a global wave of youth and student rebellion against “the establishment” (see blog, 17-Jan-2020). Their emergence was in part a direct consequence of the student protests and violent clashes with the police and security forces that shook the leading cities of Europe and elsewhere in 1968 (the “Generation of 1968”). That same wave that gave impetus to the first stirrings of violent resistance by the Weathermen also ushered in other paramilitary organisations in Western Europe around the same time. The two of these that gained the most publicity/notoriety are discussed below.
|⫸ West Germany: Red Army Faction (Ger: Rote Armee Fraktion) AKA Baader-Meinhof Gang❉ Ideology: anti-fascist, communist revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, anti-Zionist
The radical studentcritique: The West German “fascist state”
West German youth by the late 1960s were experiencing a sense of alienation from the Federal Republic (BDR). The source of this disquiet lay in the nature of West German society and politics. The BDR that they had grown up in was now prosperous, but it was moving away from the direction of liberalisation and reform toward a polity that was increasingly authoritarian under the veneer of democracy. The postwar West German government, allying itself to the US and to NATO, and with Berlin on the front line of the Cold War, was charting an increasingly illiberal course, as the country’s politicised youth saw it – the West German Communist Party had been banned in 1956; the police had violently over-reacted to student protests killing one unarmed student activist; the Brandt government had introduced the Radikalenerlass (German for “Radical decree”) law in 1972 barring radicals (as defined by the state) and those with a ‘questionable’ political persuasion from holding public sector jobs. Many in the student left railed against what they saw as hypocrisy from Bonn – assuming the guise of an advanced liberal democracy while at the same time hosting visits fromruthless dictators like the Shah of Iran, not to mention it’s other politically uncomfortable associations [‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki), http://military.wiki.org].
The Wirtschftswunder(the West German “economic miracle”) and its creator, economics minister Erhard 🔻
Students and those on the left generally viewed the postwar denazification of West Germany with justifiable suspicion, it’s outcomes were ineffective and at best incomplete. The policy was breached repeatedly, eg, Chancellor Adenauer’s appointment of a former Nazi-sympathiser to high political office; even more alarmingly, Kurt Kiesinger, a former Nazi Party member, roseto the republic’s top political post, Bundesrepublikkanzler, in 1966; and many ex-Nazis were still able to walk into government positions at the local level up. Many on the left in the BDR were convinced that the republic’s conservative media, controlled by Axel Springer, was biased in favour of the establishment, while the more liberal press in BDR was heavily censored by the government. At the same time radicals looked on aghast when the two major parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, formed themselves into a “Grand Coalition” (‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki).
As the succeeding generation, many students were left with a feeling of war-guilt as inheritors of the nation’s Nazi past. Added to this was the disillusion many Germans felt at their country being associated with a blatantly imperialist war in Vietnam. All of these dilemmas coalesced into a conviction for many on the left that the BDR government lacked legitimacy and was tantamount to a “fascist state”. Hence the collective call of West German youth for radical social change. The radicalisation of many in the republic’s student movement was partly fuelled by healthy doses of Marxist economic theory (it should be remembered that in 1966 the BDR economy had gone into recession—for the first time in 15 years) [‘German students campaign for democracy, 1966-68’, (Global Nonviolent Action Network), http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu].
BMG – terrorising the BDR
Student disaffection and that of other activists in the West German New Left was rife, many protested their disapproval, some turned to more violent and direct ways of voicing their opposition. Into this turbulent milieu came, among others, the first incarnation of the Red Army Faction, better known courtesy of the media’s tag, the Baader-Meinhof Gang (BMG), at the end of the Sixties. Its founders and main leaders were Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Horst Mahler.
BMG started by engaging in arson as a protest against the Vietnam War and graduated to bomb attacks on US military facilities, German police stations and media outlets controlled by the Springer press. To bankroll their terrorist activities the gang robbed banks and kidnapped VIP hostages for ransom✫ [‘The Red Army Faction and the Stasi’, TELOSscope, 24-Oct-2016, (Review of Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals), www.telospress.com; ‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki)]. Among BMG’s victims were symbols of the BDR regime (individuals from the political and economic elites), US military personnel, as well as a number of unfortunate bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Despite killing some 34 people during its urban guerrilla ‘career’, RAF managed to elicit a measure of support from within West German society. For scores of disillusioned young West Germans at the time, there was support for or at least acceptance of RAF’s actions…(as Siegel put it), owing to the (still recent) Nazi legacy many “guilt-ridden liberals saw (RAF’s) panache as a countercultural critique of West Germany’s boring bourgeois life”. There is evidence also that there was collusion between BMG and East Germany and specifically the DDR’s Stasi (secret police) (Neaman). BMG also underwent some guerrilla training from the Palestinian al-Fatah in Jordan – which didn’t go exactly to plan. Andreas Baader, the group’s leader, deliberately cultivated an outlaw image, likening himself to Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie and Clyde criminal infamy) [‘The Romance of Evil’, by Fred Siegel, City Journal, 18-Sep-2009]§. Baader, Meinhof and their close associates were arrested in 1972 and the leaders died in custody within a few years—apparently by their own hands (though some are skeptical that these were in fact suicides).
The two eponymous leaders of BMG 🔻
With the founding members in prison, a “second generation” of RAF cadres emerged, sympathetic to the group’s cause, picking up the terrorist-guerrilla baton where the incarcerated pioneers left off. This “RAF 2.0” was proactive between 1975 and 1979, especially during what became known as the “German Autumn” of 1977. They held personnel hostage at the West German embassy in Stockholm, perpetrated hits on public prosecutors and bankers, kidnapped industrialists, etc.). In the 1980s and 1990s a” third generation” of RAF materialised and was intermittently active for some years, but since 1998 RAF has been considered to be moribund.
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|⫸ Italy: Red Brigades (It: Brigate Rosse) Ideology: anti-fascist, communist revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist
As with theirWest German counterpart, the Red Brigades (BR) had its antecedents in the massive-scale student protests of 1968 against the state, and the workers’ struggles in Italy in 1968-69 to bring about social andpoliticalchange. The militant organisation was formed from a leftist student group at the University of Trento in Italy’s north set up by Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol. BR claimed a membership of up to 1,000 strong at its peak (others have put it at about 400 to 500 full-time members) plus an indeterminate number of supporters [“Years of Lead” — Domestic Terrorism and Italy’s Ref Brigades’, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, www.adst.org ; Sundquist, Major Victor H. “Political Terrorism: An Historical Case Study of the Italian Red Brigades.” Journal of Strategic Security 3, no. 3 (2010) : 53-68. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.3.3.5. Available at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol3/iss3/5].
CDP-PCI’s “compromiso storico”
In Italy BR was able to tap into the prevailing student and worker discontent with the government (at first through it’s grass-root activism in northern industrial cities like Milan and Turin). Many radicalised sections of Italian workforce were disillusioned by the ‘historic’ coalition formed between the conservative Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and a belief lingered that PCI’s deal with the main bourgeois party would not ultimately represent the interests of the country’s working class (Sundquist)(cf. the CDU/SDP coalition in West Germany).
Red Brigades in “the Years of Lead”
From the early to the late 1970s BR unleashed a series of terror strikes, a chapter in what became known in Italy as “the Years of Lead” (It: Anni di piombo), which was a longer period of postwar social and political turmoil in Italy characterised by terrorist attacks from both right- and left-wing paramilitary groups. Material help for BR was forthcoming from the USSR and Czechoslovakia (weaponry). After the arrest of Curcio and Cagol in 1974, a “second generation” of radicals took up the ‘war’ against the Italian authorities. The act most associated with the BR Mach II (now led by Mario Moretti) and earning it its greatest notoriety and opprobrium was the kidnapping and eventual murder of former Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, in 1978. BR’s murder of the highly popular Moro lost it much public support, including that of some sections of the left◔.
The assassination of Moro galvanised the nationalgovernment, the Italian security forces and the Carabinieri into launching an all-out war against the leftist terrorist organisation☌. With a more concerted counter-terrorist strategy including intelligence from paid informers, the authorities were ultimately successful in capturing the leaders and a large chunk of BR cadres, effectively eliminating the threat to the country during the 1980s◎. [‘The Red Brigades’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org ; ‘Years of Lead (Italy)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Sundquist]. Despite its eventual failure and demise, BR was lethally effective in its methods – between 1973 and 1994 the terrorist group killed 223 people in its assaults (Global Terrorism Database, University of Maryland). One academic calls it “the most menacing radical group in Italy‘s post-WWII history”, [‘Learning from thePast: Case of the Red Brigades in Italy’, Daniela Irrera, Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses. Vol. 6, No 6 (JULY 2014]. International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research. URL: www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26351263].
Fmr PM Moro paraded in front of a BR banner
Methods of the “Red Euro-terrorists”
Both RAF and BR used similar tactics and strategies – primarily sabotage, arson, bank robberies, kidnappings and assassinations. The human targets were generally politicians (almost all right-wing), senior police, judges, industrialists and bankers, though BR also went after trade union officials in Italy which eventually helped undermine its support. Initially, BR refrained from lethal violence, often inflicting the punishment of aginocchiare (kneecapping) on its selected targets. But, as the Seventies rolled on, they were taking a more direct and extreme retribution on the capitalist state expanding the scope of terror to murder.
RAF ‘wanted’ poster (source: www.vukutu.com)
These two far-left European terrorist groups according to their pronouncements shared roughly the same broad, radical objectives as the Weather Underground – to destabilise the state and bring down the country’s capitalist regime◘. The two, also like the Weathermen, took great inspiration and more than a few tips from the Tupamaros urban guerrilla group of Uruguay. The Weather, BR and RAF all pursued a avowedly violent strategy against the authorities, but the Weathermen, when compared to BR and RAF, were “terrorism-lite”. Whereas the Weather targeted material damage only, meticulously avoiding the endangering of human life, the two European terrorist groups had no such compunctions or qualms.
Endnote: RAF and BR – red militants in a crowded field of left-wing Euro-terrorists
Neither RAF in Germany or BR in Italy were sole traders in the leftist-terrorism game in their respective countries, such is the splintering nature of ultra-left, extremist groups. There were a string of other terrorist groups operating at the same time, the most consequential of these were Prima Linea (Italian for “First Line”) in Italy and the Revolutionary Cells (Ger: Revolutionäre Zellen – RZ) in West Germany—the latter having a lower profile than RAF but actually perpetrating more bomb and arson attacks on the state than it (Military Wiki).
❉ sometimes also called Baader-Meinhof Group. Red Army Faction was its official organisational name
✫ BR went one better in fund-raising it’s revolutionary mission, getting involved in drugs and arms trafficking which included doing business with the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra (‘Red Brigades’, Wiki)
§ a trait shared by the Weathermen
◘ BR also had another, more specific objective of wanting to force Italy to leave NATO
◔ this did not stop BR Mach II from making another high-profile kidnapping, that of American deputy chief of staff, General Dozier, in 1981. This time Italian police managed to rescue the general unharmed (Italian and NATO security forces executed successful retaliatory action against BR (Sundquist)
◎ BR though didn’t entirely disappear…after it split into two separate groups in the early 1980s, the more hardline splinter group continued into the 2000s (amounting to a third organisation claiming to represent BR)
I remember where I first heard about the Weatherman, or as they later came to be called, the Weather Underground (Organisation). Some time during the 1970s I was thumbing through the pages of the 1973-74 edition of Pears Cyclopaedia❈ and came across an entry on this oddly named group subsumed under the section on “Ideas and Beliefs”…the meteorological sounding nametriggered my curiosity. As the Pears editornoted of the name: a “rather incongruous name for the most radical and volatile of the many groups making up the so-called ‘underground’inthe United States of America“⊡.
What most struck the editor about the phenomenon was that“the Weathermenappear(ed) to be largely drawn from the highly intelligent and well-educated strata…well-to-do, academic backgrounds”, something Pears opined to be “sinister and ominous” (a hint toward class betrayal perhaps?). The entry goes on to explore a classic conspiracy theory, the “fantastic speculation, widely held in America” that “the Weathermen are in reality financed and backed by the country’s extreme right—as a means of discrediting in the public eye the slow but steady move toward socialism that seems to be developing there”(?!?). The Pears writer adds a coy reference to one of the leaders of the group (unnamed), “an attractive and dynamic woman university lecturer (who in 1970) was placed on the FBI’s notorious ‘most wanted criminals’ list”✥.
(Source: Yale University)
The origins of the Weather Underground lie in the tumultuous politics of Sixties America—the emergence of the “New Left” and the “Counterculture”, the struggle for civil rights and the growing anti-war movement of those disaffected by the growing catastrophe of Vietnam. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had assumed the mantle of leadership of the “youth rebellion” in America and of the anti-war movement. The Weathermen, dissatisfied with the SDS’s limited, reformist approach to curing the ills of modern capitalist society (with its emphasis on disruption and non-violent student demonstrations), split off from the SDS, who they labelled “movement creeps”, in 1969. After the Chicago “Days of Rage” riot, the Weathermen determined on a new, direct and revolutionary approach to changing a society that they avowed hatred for.
Bombed interior of Capitol (Wash DC) (Photo: Washington Post) 🔻
1970 was the year that domestic terrorism embarked on a rapid upward trajectory in the US. The catalyst for the Weathermen adopting a more extreme line was Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War into Laos and Cambodia and the Kent State student murders. The fringe policos went underground and turned ‘outlaws’. “Declaring war on the United States”✪, the network operating in small clandestine cells launched a series of bomb attacks on targeted sites—police stations, court houses, military installations, banks, the Capitol and Pentagon buildings in Washington DC, etc. Weather Underground attached the tag-line “bringing the war back home” to this serious switch of tactics.
1971, the assault on the “Amerikan war machine” continues
The following year brought no let-up by the Weather arsonists and incendiaries. The International Association of Chiefs of Police declared 1971 the worst year for bombings in US history. Despite causing such upheaval, the Weathermen failed abjectly to achieve any of their avowed aims [Daniels, Stuart. “The Weathermen.”Government and Opposition, vol. 9, no. 4, 1974, pp.430-459. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/44482282. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020].
A giant fail
The Weather faction (WUO) failed for a multiplicity of reasons fundamentally arising out of a muddled understanding of how to effectively use political discontent to build a mass movement. The Weathermen aspired to be the revolutionary vanguard to lead the revolution that overthrew US imperialism and capitalist society. Yet it laid none of the groundwork necessary to achieve it! WUO established no popular support base for its leadership and it stayed numerically small, a “Prairie Fire” that failed to ignite!₪
Finally, in 1974, the folly of this omission was recognised within Weather and some members tried to re-orient the organisation to a policy focused on wooing the American working class. The hardliners in WUO however resisted and predictably clung to the old guerrilla war tactics, with the result of a splintering and further weakening of Weather [‘How the Weather Underground Failed at Revolution and Still Changed the World’, (Arthur M Eckstein), Time, (02-Nov-2016), http://time.com].
Rather than the Weathermen’s actions and tactics leading to a crystallisation of the (new) left in America as a cohesive force, its recourse to the nihilism of violence, the pattern of random bombings, alienated it from other sections of the far left such as SDS (Daniels). The greatest damage of the group’s bombings in fact was a self-inflicted one, when three of the Weathermen accidentally blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970⊕.
🔺 Scene of the WUO terrorists’ backfiring bomb (Source: Bettmann/GettyImages)
The middle-class dilemma
The Weathermen were essentially middle-class kids who took inspiration from grass-roots radicalsand authentic working class militants like the Black Panthers. Therefore, they knew that to be taken seriously they needed to lose the bourgeois tag, to ‘declass’ themselves (to use Michael Miles’ term). Hodgdon has suggested that they were motivated partly by the “guilt arising from members’ acute consciousness of their own white privilege” [Hodgdon, Tim. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 144–146. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/41887583. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020]. The outcome was a resort to high focus violence by WUO which it equated with the demonstration of revolutionary commitment. Ultimately, violence became a habitual self-indulgence for the Weathermen. Fascinated with the idea of terrorism per se, their actions became more anarchic and nihilistic and only served to further isolate them from Middle America (Daniels).
Weather logo 🔺
A junket of romance and fantasy
Studentsof the WUO phenomena have noted how remarkably detached the group was from the realities of contemporary USA. Exhibiting a romantic view of Third World Liberation Movements, importing the urban-guerrilla tactics of the Tupamoros of Uruguay, of whom the Weathermen were only ever pale imitations. For ideological underpinnings, the Weathermen cherrypicked from Marxist political theory (Mao, Guevara, Marighella, Debray, etc) to forge a blueprint for extreme militant action. The often immature and at times infantile Weather members revelled in their status as deviants in society…and in their notoriety as politicised “bad-boy rock stars” of crime. Clearly, more than a few of the members gained a huge thrill from being publicly portrayed as fugitives, enemies of the state [‘”Prairie Fire” Memories’, (Jonah Raskin), Tablet, 18-Jul-2019, www.tabletmag.com].
🔺 The character “Mark Slackmeyer” in Garry Trudeau’s ‘Doonesbury’ comicis based on Weatherman Mark Rudd
Their ready resort to acts of violence was one manifestation of this, as was their indulgence in drug-taking (wholeheartedly embracing LSD and ‘grass’) and “free love” as integral to what they saw as liberating themselves from the strictures of a rigid and corrupt society (Daniels).
PostScript:WeatherUnderground, fade to black
Having failed to make the slightest dint on the fortress of the American political and economic elite, the Weathermen reduced their bombing acts after 1971 and continued to scale back through the rest of the seventies. The Weather Underground lingered on for several years before eventually petering out. This however did not stop the FBI from pursuing the home-grown terrorists long after they had ceased to be active. As Eckstein noted, the FBI’s responses to the Weather phenomena had caused the Bureau embarrassment. The FBI, the nation’s chief law enforcement organisation, continued to get them wrong…initially they underestimated Weather’s seriousness as a hostile element, then they overestimated its effectiveness. The FBI persisted with a misreading of their strength, thinking there were around 1,000 Weathermen guerrillas at large in the US, overstating the reality by a factor of ten. The FBI also illegally botched the evidence against the group so none of the Weathermen could be prosecuted for conspiring to bomb government buildings [‘The Americans who declared war on their country’, (Mark Honigsbaum), The Guardian, (21-Sep-2003), www.theguardian.com ; Eckstein, Time; ‘Bad Moon Rising’, AM Eckstein, www.yalebooks.yale.edu].
❈ an annual British publication (first published 1897, now discontinued), a one-volume compendium of general and specialised knowledge in a select number of different fields
⊡ the original name, ‘Weatherman’, was taken from the lyric of a 1960s Bob Dylan song
✥ Bernadine Dohrn – who with Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Jeff Jones,Trevor Robbins, Kathy Boudin, Karen Ashley, Howie Machtinger and John Jacobs, founded the Weathermen. Jonah Raskin points out that a significant number of the members were, like him, Jewish (Raskin). Dohrn also headed up a Women’s Brigade within WUO
✪ a ‘symbolic’ war as Todd Gitlin described it
₪ Prairie Firewas the name of WUO’s 1976 published political statement, and a metaphor that the organisation was fond of using (eg, “a single spark can start a prairie fire”)
⊕ the three WUO bomb assemblers were the only victims of Weathermen bomb explosions as the group always forewarned the target locations so that humans could be evacuated from the spot in time
Ambrose Bierce, American short story writer, man of letters, journalist and civil war (Union side) veteran, is best known for his unorthodox lexicon, The Devil’s Dictionary, a humorous, satirical and very personal take on a selection of words in the English language. The dictionary was compiled by Bierce over three decades, being initially published in instalments in various newspapers and magazines. Eventually the collection was published in book form, first as The Cynic’s Word Book in 1906 and then as The Devil’s Dictionary in 1911, two years before Bierce’s never satisfactorily-explained disappearance in Chihuahua, Mexico, where the journalist was visiting to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution.
Highly influential literary critic of the first half of the 20th century, HL Mencken, heaped lavish almost doting praise on The Devil’s Dictionary… “the true masterpiece of the one genuine wit that These States have ever seen“…”some of the most gorgeous witticisms in the English language“…”some of the most devastating epigrams ever written“.⇑First (1911) edition of the Dictionary
დ~დ~დდ~დ~დდ~დ~დ
Cynicism and satire provide the backbones of Bierce’s provocative dictionary. So, an interesting place to start looking is how he handles these terms – the words ‘satire’, ‘cynic’ and ‘dictionary’ themselves. Despite being fully versed in the craft himself, Bierce views the practitioner of cynicism less than favourably.
Cynic: A blackguard❅ who sees things as they are, and not as they ought to be (which presumably is the definition of an optimism۞).
Satire: An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness✫.
Dictionary: A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.
Bierce goes on to add with tongue firmly planted in his cheek that his dictionary, however, is “a most useful work”.
But a cynic Bierce certainly is. At one point he sweepingly declares, in the blanket fashion that is his trademark, that “all are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher” (in which case, what would Bierce have made of Freud and the “dark art” of psychotherapy!?!). This perception of the author reminds me to some extent of the distinction often made between a person with an erratic behavioural pattern who is poor (and is labelled insane), and a person with an erratic behavioural pattern who is wealthy (labelled merely eccentric).
Romance and true love falls by the wayside with Bierce’s cynic always hovering around ground level:
Love: A temporary insanity cured by marriage.
Politics is even more fertile ground for Biercian cynicism…even the highest office in the land is not spared. With characteristic directness, there is:
President: The greased pig in the field game of American politics.
Senate: A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and misdemeanors.
Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.
And of course, to Bierce, ‘capital’ (ie, the capital) is defined as “the seat of misgovernment”.
The contemporary power politics of the day is very entrenched in Bierce’s cynic’s consciousness:
Cannon: an instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.
In a similar vein Bierce gives recognition to the tradition of his nation’s imperialistic ambitions in possibly the most quoted and most acute of Bierce’s definitions:
War: God’s way of teaching Americans geography⬲.
Bierce’s entries can go off on a tangent☒, often making extensive use of quotations from “eminent poets” to underscore his definitions (Father G Jape, SJ, is a much relied upon prop for Bierce). Sometimes this involves recourse to wordy anecdotes and phrases. In contrast to lengthy descriptors, some Devil’s Dictionary‘s entries are succinctly on the mark, some are absolute poetic corkers:
Absent: Peculiarly exposed to the tooth of detraction.
Erudition: Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
Envy: Emulation adapted to the meanest capacity.
Fib: A lie that has not cut its teeth.
Martyr: One who moves along the line of least reluctance to a desired death.
Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.
And even more succinctly summarised is:
Hope: Desire and expectation rolled into one.
Some of Bierce’s ‘opinions’ veiled as definitions are little more than whimsical nonsenses or clever wordplays:
Incumbent: A person of the liveliest interest to the outcumbents.
Harbor: A place where ships taking shelter from stores are exposed to the fury of the customs.
The Devil’s Dictionary dishes up irony in spades, repeatedly turning the mirror back on the reader:
Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.
Bierce’s lexicon is strewn with idiosyncratic elements, one is a recurring motif of robbers and theft, regularly he describes a situation where someone’s hands are in someone else’s pockets:
Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.
Bierce is often lauded for his humanist perspective of the world…the major organised religions do not escape his critical eye:
Religions are “conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises”
Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
He can be irreverent – “Christians and camels both receive their burdens kneeling”.
The Dictionary dishes up a smorgasbord of satirical, ironic and often bitter definitions of the world as seen by Ambrose Bierce (one of the acerbic writer’s nicknames was “Bitter Bierce”). But Bierce is of course a creature of his time with all the glaring faults and prejudices of the 19th century white man’s mindset. So, through the satire and cynicism we witness the less savoury traits and predisposition of the lexicographer. Casual assumptions of racism and misogyny run through the pages of The Devil’s Dictionary.
Witch: A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.
Widows are depicted as “pathetic creatures”, whereas wives are dismissed as merely “bitter halves” (big surprise: Bierce was separated from his own wife). On occasions he crosses the line that even he should not have ventured, such as advocating or at the very least implying a violent impulse towards the female sex:
Bang: The arrangement of a woman’s hair which suggests the thought of shooting her.
The dreaded ‘N’ word is wheeled out in the cause superior of cynicism:
African: A nigger who votes our way.
And there is more than a hint of a general misanthropic disposition emerging from the pages of the Dictionary:
Birth: The first and direst of all disasters.
Marriage is the union of “two slaves”.
AB’s miscellany of hobby horses
Politicians and philosophers are on Bierce’s “hit list”, as are lawyers who get a predictable assessment:
Lawyer: One skilled in the circumvention of the law.
Liar: A lawyer with a roving commission.
Historians, in The Devil’s Dictionary are reduced to “broad-gauge gossips”, and ‘history’ is summarily pigeonholed as “mostly false (and) about unimportant events”.
Although he doesn’t specifically give medical students a definition entry, his regular references to them through the book might prompt one to conclude that their single defining feature is that of “grave-robbers”∞.
Places like New York City and specifically Wall Street are “dens of iniquity”, the sort of Biblical association Bierce employs to those things or entities representing (in his eyes) absolute evil.
Bierce’s idiosyncratic designation of ‘happiness’, as “an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another” dovetails neatly to the definition of the German term Schadenfreude (substituting the word ‘perverse’ for ‘agreeable’ perhaps).
Bierce’s dictionary is also prone to outbursts of elitism – such as:
Laziness: Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.
Idiot: A member of a large and powerful tribe✪ whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling (an ‘idiotocracy’ perhaps).
EndNote: Bierce’s cold trail
The mysterious disappearance of Bierce has fascinated interested parties for the hundred plus years since the author vanished in Mexico. Speculation has been wildly unrestrained and rampant as to the writer’s supposed end (eg, he hooked up with Mexican bandit leader Pancho Villa and he was killed by Federal troops, or by rebels, or by his own hand or by Villa himself). Novelists, playwrights and filmmakers have all had a go at unravelling the mystery, but the reality is that no one really knows what happened to Bierce [‘The Death of Bierce’, The Ambrose Bierce Appreciation Society, www.biercephile.com].
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⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝
❅ Bierce defines ‘blackguard’ as an “inverted gentleman”, like a box of cherries that displays the fine ones on top but with the box “opened on the wrong side”
۞except that Bierce’s ‘optimist’ is “a pessimist (who) applied to God for relief”
✫ obsolete or not, it doesn’t stop AB from indulging in the device
⬲ it is not universally accepted that this most famous of Bierce-isms originated with Bierce himself, see for instance “The Ambrose Bierce Site”, www.donswain.com
☒ for example see the entry for ‘story’
∞ maybe overstated but Bierce was not fabricating a connection – “body snatching” for medical education was a very real and very lucrative activity at the time
✪ Bierce tended to view different societal groups as tribal entities
One of the many enduring urban myths that used to float around about celebrated Hollywood actor and director Charlie Chaplin was that he once entered a “Charlie Chaplin Look-alike Contest” – and lost! [‘Charlie Chaplin allegedly entered a Chaplin look-alike contest and lost’, (Domagoj Valjak), The Vintage News, 05-Jan-2017, www.thevintagenews.com].
Given the gravity of the Hollywood silent star’s experiences on a 1932 visit to Japan – a close brush with mortality – the “Little Tramp’ may have wished in hindsight that he was similarly unrecognisable on that particular perilous occasion in Tokyo.
This bizarre as it sounds episode took place during a heightened period of political tensions in Depression-hit Japan. The incumbent Japanese prime minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, a fan of Chaplin, invited him to Japan. Unfortunately, this occurred at a time that certain far-right cells in the Japanese military were plotting to assassinate PM Inukai and cause an international incident.
⇣PM InukaiThe group of young reactionary officers from the Japanese Imperial Navy – including Kiyoshi Koga, one of the ringleaders – sensed an opportunity in Chaplin’s impending visit to double their intended impact (chaos, anxiety and upheaval within mainstream Nihonjin society). The conspirators’❈ purpose was straightforward – to weaken the fabric of Japanese democracy and the rule of law culminating in the supplanting of the status quo civilian national government by a military one [‘May 15 Incident’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Why Chaplin?
At his trial Koga, responding to the prosecutor’s question, explained why the plan was to include Chaplin in the ‘hit’: “Chaplin is a popular figure in the United States and the darling of the capitalist class. We believed that killing him would cause a war with America, and thus we could kill two birds with a single stone” [‘No laughing matter’, (Shibley Nabhan), The Japan Times, 15-May-2005, www.japantimes.co.jp].
Why Inukai?
The perpetrators’ intent was to railroad the civilian regime in Japan, but Inukai had especially earned the ire of the clique because of his opposition to the military interventions in Manchuria and elsewhere, and it’s manipulation of the decision-making functions in the kyabinetto (キャビネット) (Japanese cabinet). The centre-right politician was planning to negotiate the Manchurian situation with the Chinese government and halt all further Japanese military activities in China – all anathema to the ultra-right militarists [‘Inukai Tsuyoshi, Prime Minister of Japan’, Britannia, www.britannia.com].
The coup attempt
Eleven young naval officers were chosen to carry out the “double strike” (known as the May 15 Incident or the ‘5.15 Incident’). They were thwarted from completing their assignment of taking out the second of their targets, owing to Charlie Chaplin’s own sudden about-face…once in Tokyo the film star lost interest in attending the reception to be held in his honour at the Japanese PM’s official residence and skipped it, instead he went to a sumo wrestling match with Inukai’s son (known as ‘Inukai Ken’), a pastime much more to his liking – this 11th hour change of mind probably saved the Hollywood cinema icon’s life!
The assassins on arrival at the prime minister’s residence or Sōri Kōtei (総理公邸)◙ (which was alarmingly short on security) duly liquidated incumbent PM Inukai as planned. The cadre of ultra-right extremists rounded out the night of terror by attacking the residence of the head of the Rikken Seiyūkai Party and tossing grenades into the Mitsubishi Bank’s Tokyo headquarters.
Chaplin meeting with the mayor of Tokyo on his trip ⇣
The Aftermath
The ensuing trial of the perpetrators was marked by a wave of public sympathy for the accused✙. Many believed that the young assassins’ actions admirably embodied the nativist Yamato (大和) spirit of Japan [‘May 15 Incident’, loc.cit.]. In such a politically charged environment, the assassins were handed extremely light sentences. The incident and its feeble handling by the establishment served to encourage conservative elements of the military to further excesses, eg, the February 26 Incident (1936), a failed putsch by a radical faction of the army with the same aim of installing a military government in Japan.
The developments in Japan in the 1930s, the isolated violent incidents by maverick cadres within the military and the incursions into Manchuria and beyond, set Japan on a path to the eventual dissolution of all political parties and the establishment of a military junta in 1940, and thus on a path to war.
Footnote: Chaplin, much later, from the sanctity of his memoirs, wrote light-heartedly of the incident: “I can imagine the assassins having carried out their plan, then discovering that I was not an American, but an Englishman – ‘Oh, so sorry!'” [Nabhan, loc.cit.].
PostScript: Japan, a dangerous environment for politicians
Assassination has been a constant in Japanese politics, a recurring feature in the nation’s political landscape. In the same year as Inukai was shot, there were two other political assassinations in Japan perpetrated by the League of Blood (the casualties a former finance minister and the head of the Mitsui Group corporation). The victims of extremist fringe violence in Japan include prime ministers or former prime ministers Prince Itō, Hara Takashi and Viscounts Saitō Makoto and Takahashi Korekiyo (these last two assassinated in the February 26 Incident). The pattern continued into the postwar era…two Japanese politicians were killed in 1960, and again in the 2000s some provincial politicians have been assassinated (these most recent killings have however tended to be the work of yakuza crime organisations).
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❈ comprising the naval officers’ cell, some cadets of the Japanese Imperial Army and civilian members of the ultra-nationalist League of Blood
◙ in 2013 Shinzō Abe after regaining the prime ministership refused to move into the same presidential residence that Inukai was assassinated in, though he denied he was motivated by superstition [‘Japanese prime minister fails to move back into ‘haunted’ residence’, (Justin McCurry), The Guardian, 19-Aug-2013, www.theguardian.com]
✙ 350,000 signatures in blood were received, petitioning the court for lenient sentences for the eleven
The Brill Building at 1619 Broadway in Midtown New York City, architecturally, has few distinguishing features to set it apart from most any other homogeneous looking commercial medium high-rise building in the “Big Apple” (save for a rather dazzlingly decorative archway entrance). But for a period from the end of the Fifties to the late Sixties it was the fulcrum (if not quite the epicentre) of innovative and groundbreaking Rock and Pop music-making in the USA.
The young professionals are in the Building! The collaborative and creative energies of the Brill Building produced a conducive environment for young professional songwriters of the period to work with music producers to create highly productively musical outcomes. So there were song-writing teams that emerged around 1960 (often they were couples) – (Carole) King and (Gerry) Goffin, (Barry) Mann and (Cynthia) Weil, (Jeff) Barry and (Ellie) Greenwich – who linked up successfully with young producers like “wonder-kid” Phil Spector※ [‘The Brill Building: Assembly-Line Pop’, (Reebee Garofalo), Encyclopaedia Britannia, www.encyclopaediabritannia.com].
⬆ Kirshner, King & Goffin
But the Brill Building’s genesis as a revolutionary force in 1960s US pop music actually started in a building across the road – at 1650 Broadway. Here in 1958 “pop entrepreneur” Don Kirshner and musician Al Nevins formed Aldon Music✳. Aldon’s reading of the popular music zeitgeist of the day was that rock and roll’s original impact had dissipated and somewhat lost its way. Kirshner’s remedy was “to take its energies and reapply the old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley❁ disciplines to the craft and professionalism of making hits for the youth market” [Inglis, Ian. “‘Some Kind of Wonderful’: The Creative Legacy of the Brill Building.” American Music, vol. 21, no. 2, 2003, pp. 214–235. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3250565]. Kirshner put together a stable of aspiring young songwriters, including Goffin and King, Mann and Weil, as well as Howard Greenfield and Neil Sedaka.
1619 + 1650 = the Brill Building styleThe term “Brill Building” in the musical context doesn’t confine itself exclusively just to that one building…Brill Buildingas a descriptor for the achievements inNYC pop and rock creativityof the day is an omnibus reference for what was happening at two addresses, 1619 and 1650 Broadway, New York.
The pioneers of the new professionalism that was to become labelled as “Brill Building” were probably the song-writing team of Leiber and Stoller (Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller) who had earlier written for Elvis Presley, started to write hits for the Drifters from the late 50s that mark the starting-off point for Brill [Garofalo, loc.cit.]. A new wave of songwriters began to etch out pop songs from within the walls of 1650 Broadway and 1619 Broadway (the Brill Building adopted Aldon’s ‘hothouse’ style of songwriting from youthful collaborators with a creative overlap between the two addresses)✥ [Inglis, op.cit.].
Distinguishing features of Brill Building musicand music-makersKirshner’s writing staff at 1650 Broadway were not only dedicated professionals, they were remarkably youthful…the eighteen songwriters Kirshner had in his employ in 1961 (roughly equally male and female) were aged between 19 and 26, a clear departure from the status quo ante of “middle-age men churning outnovelty songs” [ibid.].This contemporary generation of songwriters, not much older than their target audience, grasped the idiom of teenagers and wrote exclusively for the youth of the 1960s [Garofalo, loc.cit.]♕.
Other composer/lyricist teams to thrive in the environment ofthe Brill Building included Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart (who later worked with Kirshner and the Monkees) and the extraordinarily prolific hit-making duo of Burt Bacharachand Hal David.
The songwriting teams at Brill allowed women a measure of gender equality unusual for that period. Brill provided a leg-in in the industry for female pop and rock songwriters like King, Weil and Greenwich. Their ascent to the fore corresponded with the rise of the girl groups of the early 60s in the US…these female writers wrote hits for the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Chiffons, the Ronettes and the like [Inglis, op.cit.]✪.
⬇ The Ronettes: “Big hair” sound!
‘Brill’ place, ‘Brill’ music?Recollections of the songwriters’ working conditions at the Brill Building doesn’t suggest an ideal environment to inspire the creation of Top 40 hits: writers were assigned their “respective cubby holes” (Carole King), “a tiny cubicle the size of a closet”…”no window or anything” …(an upright) “piano and a chair” …”we’d go in and write songs all day” (Barry Mann, ibid.). The creators of pop and rock worked in an assembly line fashion in something akin to a standard nine-to-five office job [Garofalo, loc.cit.]. Kirshner would play one young writing team off againstanother to enhance their productivity [Sociology of Rock, Simon Frith (1978)].
The hit factoryAnd yet despite these strictures it somehow worked! The songwriting team did come up with “teenage drivel” from time to time, but collectively, the youthful penners of contemporary Sixties song generated a steady series of musical hits for a Pop-crazy world! Fusing the urgency of R & B with “the brightness of mainstream pop” melodies, Goffin and King, Greenfield and Sedaka and the other B.B. star writing teams came up with perennial pop classics like “Will you Love me Tomorrow?”, “Calendar Girl”, “Leader of the Pack” and the much revered “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” [ibid.].
A vertical integration of the pop music biz on a micro-scaleThe “B.B. factory” was good at matching artists to appropriate material. By 1962 the Brill Building contained 165 separate music businesses. This meant a B.B. musician “could find a publisher and printer, cut a demo, promote the record and cut a deal with radio promoters, all within this one building”, Garofalo, loc.cit.; ‘The Brill Building’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World Volume 8: Genres: North, (Edited by John Shepherd, David Horn), 2013, www.books.google.com.au]
Time call on the Brill BuildingBy the mid to late 1960s the B.B. music line was losing its energy. A new creative force was rapidly filling its void – the rise of the singer-songwriter, heralding a new era of artists who wrote their own material. The new wave led by the phenomenal global success of the Beatles (the unsurpassed potency of the Lennon/McCartney songwriting duo) and the guru-like acclaim afforded Bob Dylan, fairly swiftly relegated the Brill Building writers to the edges of pop music relevance [Garofalo, loc.cit.].
Footnote: A Brill Building ‘sound?’The Brill Building style of songs drew inspiration from diverse strands of earlier music – R & B (rhythm and blues), Latin, jazz and African-American gospel. The result was often referred to as the “Brill Building sound” but there actually wasn’t a specific or distinctive sound at all. The only similarities between the Brill ‘products’ was in the recurring themes and components in the song lyrics (might be described as “First World problems” seen through the eyes of 60s American youth) [‘The Brill Building pioneered assembly line pop music but left a legacy of hits’, (Troy Lennon), The Daily Telegraph, 13-Sep-2017, www.dailytelegraph.com.au]; Inglis, op.cit.].
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※ Spector was both a collaborator with the Brill songwriters and a customer of their compositions
✳ described by Ian Inglis as “a crucial moment in the development of Brill Building’s pop sensibilities”
❁ Tin Pan Alley was a loose collection of composers, lyricists and music publishers based in NYC who dominated the industry for several decades through the first half of the 20th century (Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Sammy Cahn, Hammerstein and Rodgers and many more)
✥ although two of the mainstays of the Brill team, Goffin and King, never actually worked in the Brill Building, producing their entire creative output in the period over at Aldon Music (they did however sell some of their compositions through the Brill Building)
♕ many of the Brill songwriting alumni went on to be highly successful performers in their own right – top of the totem included industry names like Neil Diamond, Gene Pitney, Paul Anka and Paul Simon
✪another interesting juxtaposition emerging from the Brill Building music factory was the ethnic contrast between writer and artist – the songwriters were all white and mostly Jewish, writing largely for emerging black girl groups (Inglis)
⇩ 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.
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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].
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※ 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
First World problem – Cadbury’s or Nestlé’s?FOR children of the Fifties and Sixties growing up in the West, the preference of chocolate usually came down to a shelf choice between two, Cadbury or Nestlé. My recollection is that my own juvenile palate tended towards Nestlé, but only partly due to taste…yes I did as a kid have a fondness for Nestlé’s slim, pocket-size milk chocolate bars but Nestlé was also great for youthful card collectors. Each bar contained a different colour card (vintage cars, planes, etc.) that you could paste into your Nestlé Car Club book or Sky Club book or into their “Conquest of Space” series book. A glance at the enduring popularity of Cadbury’s chocolate is confirmation that the British confectioner did not miss my preference for their Swiss rival.
(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)
As a child I was very aware that Cadbury’s had a chocolate factory in Tasmania (known as “the factory in the garden”)…the idyllic image of rustic Claremont was imprinted in my head courtesy of innumerable Cadbury TV ads (spectacular mountain scenery didn’t improve the taste of the chocolatier’s product but it gave it the perception of an extra lustre). What I wasn’t aware of as a young chocolate consumer was that that Cadbury’s—nay, almost all of the English pioneering chocolate manufacturing industry—was a Quaker company. Cadbury’s kicked off from a small shop in Birmingham, England, in 1824, but before Cadbury’s there was Fry’s Chocolates which opened its first shop in Bristol in 1761, and after it Rowntree’s (established 1862, in York{a}). All of these chocolatiers were founded by English Quakers and the companies business ethos imbued with the Quaker philosophy.
(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)
In business by circumstance and conviction British Quakers in the 19th century not only cornered the chocolate market, they excelled in business in a multiplicity of fields, ranging from banking (Barclays, Lloyds) to biscuit manufacturing (Huntley and Palmers, Carrs) to footwear (Clarks’ Shoes) to match manufacturing (Bryant and May) [‘How did Quakers conquer the British sweet shop?’, (Peter Jackson), BBC News Magazine, 20-Jan-2010, www.bbc.com].
The circumstance that Quakers found themselves in guided their decision to embrace the world of business. As a Christian non-conformist group in a sea of English Anglicanism, adherents of the Quaker faith in the 1800s were subjected to the systematic discrimination befalling religious outsiders – exclusion from the universities (until the 1870s) meant the leading professions of medicine and law was barred to them. Naturally enough, this barrier to the industrious, go-ahead Quaker person, turned them towards business and commerce [ibid.].
The senior Cadbury⤋
Kings of the chocolate business{b}
The Quaker philosophy incorporates a commitment to social reform and the pursuit of justice and equality. This ethos informed their business practices, Cadbury’s and other Quaker firms established a reputation for being honest and reliable. This gave them a competitive advantage over their non-Quaker competitors. The perceived ethical nature of Quaker confectionery firms was rewarded with customer loyalty. John Cadbury and his successors were among the first to set a firm (and fair) price – this was a clear departure from the hitherto customary retail practice of point-of-sale price bartering [ibid.]{c}.
Cocoa the health drink
Founder Cadbury started off mainly selling cocoa drinks (solid chocolate came later)…this was borne out of 19th century social concerns – a Quaker (by definition teetotal) response to the “perceived misery and deprivation caused by alcohol” in British society (Helen Rowlands, Quaker historian){d}. The Cadburys marketed cocoa as a cheap available drink, one that was healthy (the process involved boiling thus removing the impurities lurking in the dubious public water supplies of the day)[ibid.]{e}.
Democratising cocoa and drinking chocolateCocoa and drinking chocolate had been around in England since the 1650s but before Cadbury’s came along it had been a luxury beverage for the elite. John Cadbury’s improvements to the product gave it more varieties and made it a more palatable drink, and after the Gladstone government reduced taxes on imported cocoa beans in the mid 1850s, the cost of cocoa became within the reach of the greater majority of Britons. Cadbury’s introduction of unadulterated “cocoa essence” in the 1870s coincided with a government crackdown on the widespread adulteration of food in the UK. The upshot was free ‘plugs’ for the purer Cadbury product and a boost in fortunes for the Quaker business [‘The Story of Cadbury. Early Days – A One Man Business’, www.cadbury.com.au].
Even ‘Lancet’ was lavish in it’s praise of Cadbury’s Cocoa⤋(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)
Worker welfare and satisfaction a priority The Cadbury brothers, Richard and George (sons of the founder), placed an uncommon degree of emphasis on the fitness and health of their workforce (again philosophically driven by their faith). After moving their factory to a greenfields site south of Birmingham to cope with the business’ growth, George built the Bourneville village in the vicinity – this was a model village community for Cadbury’s workers – replete with schools, leisure facilities (including a lido) and parks, canteen, a carillon and its Friends meeting house. Cadbury’s employed doctors and dentists for the benefit of Bourneville employees and was among the first to pioneer pension schemes for their workforce [Jackson, loc.cit.]. The village included attractive “Arts and Crafts” style cottages in picturesque surrounds, but no pubs were permitted on the Bourneville estate{f}.The Bourneville factory ⤊
Chocolate you can eat! Cadbury Dairy Milk Richard and George’s acquisition of a new cocoa press reduced the cocoa butter content, further improving the taste of the Cadbury cocoa drink. The press also helped Cadbury’s make a breakthrough with eating chocolate in the 1890s…learning from the Swiss prototype, Nestlé, it started to create milk chocolate bars to rival those on the Continent. In 1905 Cadbury’s introduced Dairy Milk Chocolate which would go on to become its and the UK’s top selling chocolate bar (60% UK market share in 1936). DCM, together with Bourneville Cocoa, have established themselves as Cadbury’s two all-time stand-outs, iconic products in the history of the company [‘The Story of Cadbury’, loc.cit.; Deborah Cadbury, The Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World’s Greatest Chocolate Makers, (2010)].
(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)
Following success came expansion – in 1918 Cadbury’s opened a new factory in Tasmania (the first outside the UK). In 1910 Cadbury’s finally overtook J.S.Fry & Sons in chocolate and cocoa sales…Fry’s got the block of solid chocolate right before Cadbury’s but the legendary “glass and a half” merchants surged ahead in the end. [ibid.]. So much so that Cadbury’s acquired its biggest domestic rival in 1919 (giving it Fry’s top lines, ‘Chocolate Cream’ and ‘Turkish Delight’). In 1967 Cadbury’s added the Australian chocolate manufacturer MacRobertson(‘Freddo’, ‘Snack’){g}.
Family Fry and partnersThe Fry chocolate business was another dynastic Anglo-Quaker confectioner. The original Joseph Frystarted the company in the mid Georgian period in Britain, taking on a partner, John Vaughan. Upon Fry’s death his widow Anna Frytook over the family business and the firm name changed to Anna Fry & Son. Joseph Storrs Frysucceeded her and partnered with a Dr Hunt. Storrs Fry patented a method of grinding cocoa beans using a Watt steam engine. The company then devolved to his sons, Joseph, Francis and Richard, as joint partners. Under the next generation of Frys (Joseph Storrs Fry II), the business reached its commercial pinnacle before it got swallowed up by the vast Cadbury empire [‘J.S.Fry & Sons’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Shadowing Cadbury’s, the rise of Rowntree’s Rowntree’s, Cadbury’s other domestic rival in the sweets trade, was the creation of Henry Rowntree. Like Cadbury’s Rowntree applied Quaker principles to his business and always insisted on the best quality ingredients [‘Rowntree’s’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. JosephRowntree, Henry’s brother, joined as partner in 1869, and being a staunch advocate of social reform, steered some of the firm’s profits towards his Quaker philanthropy. The company’s first big success was with ‘Fruit Pastilles’ and ‘Fruit Gums’ which allowed it to follow Cadbury’s earlier move in purchasing aVan Houten press. This enabled Rowntree’s to produce chocolate sans cocoa butter, so as to compete with Cadbury’s successful ‘Cocoa Essence’ [Robert Fitzgerald, Rowntree and the Marketing Revolution, 1862-1969, (2007)]. Rowntree’s, as their rival Cadbury’s did, created a dynasty of chocolatiers, merchants, philanthropists and social reformers – succeeding sons and brothers kept the family name at the helm of the company (Joseph Rowntree Jr, Henry Issac Rowntree, John Stephenson Rowntree).
Rowntree’s later created the consumer favourites ‘Kit Kat’, ‘Aero’ and ‘Smarties’, and went on its own expansion journey, merging with the Halifax “Toffee King” Mackintosh in 1969 (which added ‘Quality Street’ and ‘Rolo’ to its product inventory). Rowntree’s (rebranded Rowntree Mackintosh Confectionery) then acquired Australian chocolate manufacturer Hoadley’s (1972) which gave RMC Hoadley’s ‘Violet Crumble’ bar.
Rowntree’s introduced the ‘Yorkie’ bar in the Seventies which put a serious dent in Cadbury Dairy Milk’s market share and contributed to Rowntree’s reaching fourth spot in the world chocolate manufacturers’ ladder by the Eighties{h}. This was Rowntree’s apogee however as its underperforming shares saw it fall victim to a successful takeover from the Swiss giant Nestlé in 1988 [‘Rowntree’s’, op.cit.].
Nestlé’s Yorkie, a dubious sales pitch: the “NestléGoliath” was clearly tone deaf to the advantages of presenting as inclusive when they designed this, a chocolate bar which discriminates on the grounds of gender? ⤋
“Not for girls!”
A British institution undone
Cadbury’s, despite its continuing success, in 2010 suffered the same fate as Rowntree – swallowed up by another Goliath of the food business, US Kraft Foods (operating now as Mondelēz International). The loss of Cadbury’s, a household name in British manufacturing for 186 years, was highly controversial, causing an outcry in the UK. What was especially galling to many patriotic Brits was that Kraft had to borrow £7bn to seal the acquisition deal, and the banker brokering the financial transaction was itself British – the Royal Bank of Scotland [Deborah Cadbury, op.cit].
Ft-Note: Pseudo-QuakersThe runaway commercial success of Quaker food and confectionery companies did inevitably lead to imitation. A US food manufacturer in the 1870s introduced “Quaker Oats” to the cereal market…on the packets and in product advertising are images of a man dressed in Quaker garb, despite the US company having NO connexion whatsoever with the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers){i}. The company states that it chose the “Quaker Man” as its figurehead “because the Quaker faith projected the values of honesty, integrity, purity and strength”, [‘Quaker Oats website’, (FAQ 2009), www.quakeroats.com] (an early example of retail “identity theft’ to try to cash in commercially on the high regard, ethically, Quaker businessmen were held in).
تتتتتﭢ ت ﭢ تتتتتتتتتتﭢ ت ﭢ تتتتت
PostScript:Third World cocoa beans and the Quaker chocolatiers – an uncomfortable associationIn the late 19th century the Cadbury brothers and other British chocolate-makers started exporting a large proportion of their cocoa beans from the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe (Portuguese West Africa)…by the turn of the century this amounted to 55% of Cadbury’s total supply of beans. Although Portugal had abolished slavery in its colonies, the rigid labour contract system which replaced left the African labourers working the plantations in a de facto slave status. This uncomfortable connexion of an ethical Quaker business to neo-slavery prompted one of the managing grandsons, William Cadbury, to commission an investigation of worker conditions in São Tomé and Príncipe in the 1900s. Cadbury eventually found an alternative source of cocoa beans (the Gold Coast) and organised a boycott of the two Portuguese plantations, but not before he had to fend off a spate of newspaper attacks on Cadbury’s alleging that it profited from the labour of slaves [‘William Cadbury, Chocolate, and Slavery in Portuguese West Africa’, (Lindsey Flewelling), 11-May-2016, https://britishandirishhistory.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/william-cadbury-chocolate-and-slavery-in-portuguese-west-africa/].
(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)
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{a} the non-Quaker exception to this was Terry’s (established 1767, York, UK), famous for “Terry’s Chocolate Orange” and now owned by Kraft Foods
{b} the Quaker chocolatiers’ success was remarkably out of proportion to their numbers…with Quakers just one in fourteen out of a total UK population of 21M in 1851, they comprised >0.1% of the population [Jackson, loc.cit.]
{c} descendant and family historian Deborah Cadbury states that the Cadbury founder practiced a brand of “Quaker capitalism” that valued hard work and “wealth creation for the benefit of the workers, the local community, and society at large” [Cadbury, op.cit.]
{d} John Cadbury had a long connexion with the Temperance Society
{e} later with the move into making chocolate bars, what gave the Quaker confectionery businesses an added edge over rival manufacturers was their preparedness to invest in new, state-of-the-art machinery [Jackson, loc.cit.]
{f} the Cadbury village inspired the American non-Quaker Milton Hershey(a Pennsylvanian Mennonitein fact) to create his own ‘utopian’ village for his chocolate factory workers [Cadbury, op.cit.]
{g} a 1969 merger with soft drink giant Schweppesproved less enduring with the two partners demerging in 2008
{h} behind Mars, Hershey and Cadbury’s
{i} in recent years some brethren of theQuaker movement have objected to the way the company’s advertising depicts Quakers, ‘Quaker Oats Company’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
Cinesound is a name that resonates brightly in the history of Australia’s film industry – it harks back to a time when the indigenous industry still had a place of some significance in the pecking order of world cinema. The establishment of Cinesound Studios (in 1931) to make talking motion pictures, evolved out of a group of movie exhibiting companies (including Australasian Films and Union Theatres) which had coalesced into Greater Union Theatres in the Twenties.
In 1925 Australasian Films purchased a roller skating rink at 65 Ebley Street, Bondi Junction, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Australasian converted part of the premises into a film studio but maintained the skating rink as an ongoing commercial concern to help finance the studios’ film production (by day a film studio, by night a skating rink) [‘Cinesound: From roller rink to sound stage’, (Waverley Library), www.waverley.nsw.gov.au].
# 1 Studios Bondi Junction ⬇
Greater Union (henceforth GUT) was involved in all forms of the movie business – production, distribution and exhibition. The Bondi Studios made a few silent films in the late 1920s, like The Adorable Outcast and most notably The Term of His Natural Life which cost £60,000 and bombed badly at the box office [‘Cinesound Productions’, Sydney Morning Herald, 06-Aug-1934 (Trove).
Stuart F Doyle, GUT managing director, appointed former film publicist Ken G Hall as general manager of the newly formed Cinesound Productions. Two more Cinesound studio locations were opened, one at nearby Rushcutters Bay and the other at St Kilda (in Melbourne). Over an eight-year period (1932-40), with Hall at the helm as producer-director, Cinesound produced 17 feature films (16 of which were directed by Hall). The first of the sequence, On Our Selection, revolved round the adventures of one of Australian cinema’s most popular characters, Dad Rudd and his family. The film, benefiting from a new sound-recording system invented in Tasmania, was a box office triumph for Cinesound, earning £46,000 in Australia and New Zealand by the end of 1933, providing a tremendous fillip for the fledgling studios [Andrew Pike & Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900-1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production, (1998)].
Studios # 1 at Bondi Junction※ provided a large interior space for film production, over 20,000 square feet…with more than 100 craftsmen on the staff, the facility was equipped to complete “all stages of production, processing and sound recording, in the preparation of topical, scenic, educational, industrial, and microscopic films” [SMH, 06-Aug-1934, loc.cit.]. Some newspapers of the day erroneously referred to the main studios as being #3 and the location as Waverley (an adjoining suburb of Bondi Junction).
Cinesound and Hall exploited On Our Selection’s popularity with a series of sequels, Grandad Rudd, Dad and Dave Come to Town and Dad Rudd, MP. Of these the ‘Dad and Dave’ entry especially proved a hit, matching the profitability of the original movie.
↗ Ken G Hall (centre) with American actress Helen Twelvetrees during filming of ‘Thoroughbred’ (photo: Mitchell Library)
Sydney’s ‘Little Hollywood’ While Ken G Hall’s cinematic canvas was unmistakably Australian (only one of the Cinesound movies was not set in Australia), his approach to film-making saw Hollywood clearly as the model. With the characteristic “spirit of a showman”✺, Hall wanted to shape Cinesound Studios in the Hollywood mould⊡…to create a “Little Hollywood” with a star system, hyped-up promotion of the studios’ movies, etc. [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.].
↗ Twelvetrees outside Cinesound Studios
FT and Efftee Studios Sydney-based Cinesound’s domestic rival in the film-making caper was Melbourne’s Efftee Studios, started by theatrical entrepreneur Frank W Thring (FT) in 1930. Thring produced the first commercially-viable sound feature-length film in Australia, Diggers (1931) in collaboration with Pat Hanna. Efftee, unlike Cinesound though, had to import the optical sound system for its movies from the USA. [‘Efftee Studios’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Other notable Efftee films of the Thirties include an adaption of CJ Dennis’ The Sentimental Bloke to the screen, and several George Wallace vehicles, His Royal Highness, Harmony Row and A Ticket in Tatts. Thring’s premature death in 1935 put paid to Efftee Studios’ productions.
⬆️ Australian cinema’s long tradition of Bushranger flicks beginning with the original 1906 feature film
The outlawing of bushranger films A 1930s Cinesound project for a film based on the popular Australian novel, Robbery Under Arms was quashed as it would have transgressed the standing prohibition by the NSW government (in force since 1912), banning movies about bushrangers✪ [‘Bonuses for Films’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20-Oct-1934 (Trove); ‘Bushranger ban’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Shirley Ann Richards: Cinesound’s contract female star In accordance with Ken G Hall’s star-making approach, he fostered the career of actress Shirley Ann Richards, starring her in several of his films (It Isn’t Done, Tall Timbers, Lovers and Luggers and Dad and Dave Come to Town). Richards, Cinesound’s only star under long-term contract, later emigrated to America and had a reasonably high profile Hollywood career (under the name Ann Richards).
The Kellaway brothers and Cinesound Alec Kellaway and his more famous brother Cecil were feature players for Hall and Cinesound. Alec was a regular performer, appearing in a raft of the studio’s movies including The Broken Melody, Mr Chedworth Steps Out and several of the Dad Rudd series. South African-born Cecil Kellaway started his acting career on the Australian stage, establishing himself first as a top Australian theatre star before appearing in two Cinesound films where his performances opened studio doors in Hollywood for him…Kellaway subsequently carved out a career as a major character actor in numerous US films.
George Wallace, Aussie “king of comedy” In addition to being a prominent actor in Efftee Studios musical-comedies, George Wallace was Ken G Hall’s “go-to” favourite comic performer, starring in two late 1930s Cinesound films directed by Hall – Let George Do It and Gone to the Dogs.With the outbreak of world war Cinesound called a halt on feature film production. During the war years the studios directed all energies into making newsreels, initially covering the war against Japan and beyond that on all aspects of Australiana.
Newsreel rivalry: Cinesound Vs Movietone: the focus on newsreels by Cinesound was not a novel innovation. From its outset Cinesound produced newsreels – short documentary films containing news stories and items of topical interest – in competition with the rival Fox Movietone company. The two newsreels differed in content, Cinesound concentrated on Australian only topics while Movietone covered a mix of international and national news✤.
Newsreels in Australia prior to 1956 occupied a unique place in media and communications. Before the introduction of television, cinema-goers’ exposure to newsreels (part of the “warm-up” for the main feature) were the only images Australians saw of their land – the footage of elections, natural disasters and other such events [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.]. Thus, newsreels like the Cinesound Review, with its distinctive red kangaroo symbol, were an important source of news and current affairs, and were an integral part of the cinema program [‘Cinesound Movietone Australian Newsreels’, (ASO) (Poppy De Souza), www.aso.gov.au]✙. According to Anthony Buckley, the newsreels reflected Ken G Hall’s “pride and spirited nationalism” [Buckley, A, ‘Obituary: Ken G. Hall’, The Independent (London), 17-Feb-1994].
The studios site post-Cinesound In 1951 Cinesound sold off the Ebley Street building which became a factory manufacturing American soft drink. However, between 1956 and 1973 the building reverted to the world of visual communications, housing various film and television production companies including Ajax Films. Following that, it housed a furniture retailer. Today it is the home of a Spotlight store (fabrics and home interiors) [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.].
Ken G Hall in his autobiography contended that Cinesound Productions never lost money on any feature films. Some did very well – crime drama The Silence of Dean Maitland, for instance, for an outlay of £10,000 returned takings of more than £70,000 in Australia and the UK [Graham Shirley & Brian Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, (1989)]. One Cinesound movie however, strictly-speaking, probably did lose money…Roy Rene’s single venture into celluloid, Strike Me Lucky, in which ‘Mo’s’ humour, robbed of it’s spontaneity in live performance didn’t translate well to the big screen and was reflected in negative critical reviews and at the box office [Film Review: ‘Strike Me Lucky’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19-Nov-1934 (Trove)]. Despite Hall’s faith in the studios’ films, from 1937 there was a decline in box office returns (prompting GUT head Doyle to resign). Another (external) factor affecting Cinesound profitability occurred in 1938 with the passing of the Cinematograph Films Act in the UK…under this legislation Australian films no longer counted as local, their removal from the British quota meant a loss of market for Cinesound and other Australian movie producers [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.].
The war resulted in a temporary halt to Cinesound feature films, however the studios made only one more (postwar) feature film, Smithy, a biopic about pioneering aviator Charles Kingsford Smith in 1946. Another blow to Cinesound’s future prospects at this time was a move by Rank Organisation – the British film giant purchased a controlling interest in Greater Union, preferring to use it to exhibit its own UK films in Australia [‘The first wave of Australian feature film production FROM EARLY PROMISE TO FADING HOPES’, http://afcarchive.screenaustralia.gov.au].
⬆️ ‘Smithy’ star Ron Randell later pursued a career in Hollywood
Stuart Doyle’s contribution WWII took all the impetus out of the Australian industry, there was a shortage of performers and crew due to recruitment and conscription. Stock available for film was also in short supply, what there was directed first and foremost to making propaganda and news films in support of the allies’ side. More particular to Cinesound’s challenges, the loss of MD Stuart Doyle before the war was especially telling. Film production is high cost (especially sound which proved massively more expensive) and high risk…Hall’s ability to pursue a good number of projects in the Thirties, depended on Doyle’s willingness to take a risk with Cinesound. When he departed, he was replaced by a “risk-adverse accountant who favoured real estate over film production” [ibid.].
Footnote: Cinesound Talent School The Cinesound people eventually established its own talent school for young actors. Run by George Cross and Alec Kellaway (a regular player in Cinesound movies)…offering training in “deportment, enunciation, miming, microphone technique and limbering”✥. By 1940 the school had had over 200 students including Grant Taylor, later a prominent actor in Australian movies and TV dramas [‘Cinesound Talent School, SMH, 02-Feb-1939, (Trove); Cinesound Productions’, Wiki, op.cit.].
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※ In 2002 GUT merged with Village Roadshow, these days Greater Union picture theatres go under the name ‘Event Cinemas’
✺ a trait shared by Greater Union boss Doyle ⊡ the company even closed down production at Bondi for several months in 1935 to let Hall go off to Hollywood to study American film techniques
✪ the state authorities felt that the popularity of the bushranger film genre would exert an ‘unhealthy’ influence on Australians, especially on the young, and make them more resistant to authority
✤ the two newsreel providers merged in 1970, forming the Australian Movie Magazine which folded in 1975
✙ the 1978 film drama Newsfront is a fictionalised account of newsreel makers in Australia between the late Forties and mid Fifties which includes actual newsreel footage from the period
✥ school director Kellaway’s brief was teaching dramatics and mic technique
Ealing is a name synonymous with British film comedy, Ealing comedies of the late 1940s through the 1950s…high quality, well written and acted feature films such as Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers✲.
Ealing’s film association with Australia is less well known. It’s genesis lay with Ealing’s movie mogul and powerful postwar image-maker, Michael Balcon. With the Second World War still raging, Balcon despatched documentary film director Harry Watt to Australia to explore its filmable story possibilities. Balcon was looking to make films which reflected “the strength, diversity and stoicism of the (British) Commonwealth” [‘Ealing Studios in Australia: An Introduction ‘, (Stephen Morgan) (2012), www.thefarparadise.wordpress.com].
Pagewood before Ealing …
Once Ealing committed to Australia as a film production location, it sought out appropriate studios for projects, which it found in the southern Sydney suburb of Pagewood. These studios in fact were already operating as a film production unit…constructed in 1935 for National Studios❄ in anticipation of an expansion of the local film industry as a result of the Film Quota Act (1936) which imposed a minimum domestic quota on the level of film distribution in New South Wales❂. The studios’ first production was Charles Chauvel’sUncivilised and other significant, early Australian movies were shot there – including Columbia’s “Australian Western” Rangle River (1936)and Ken G Hall’s Dad Rudd, MP (1940) – but a pattern of closures of National Studios (1937-40, 1942-45) hampered its efforts to establish itself as a film production unit [Sydney Morning Herald, 27-May-1936 (Trove)].
In 1946 Harry Watt fulfilled the task set him by Studio head Balcon by writing and directing the first feature for Ealing “down under”. The Overlanders, the story of an epic cattle drive across the continent, made Chips Rafferty an international star and an Australian screen icon.
The success of The Overlanders prompted Ealing to establish a film base in Australia. At the beginning of 1949 it acquired the struggling Pagewood studios❇. Ealing took over a “shambles of a place” (rundown through neglect and misuse by both the Australian and US armies during WWII occupancy), but nonetheless it invested considerable capital into the property to create state-of-the-art film studios with first-rate sound-engineering departments, cutting room and sound stage – a concern worth all up £100,000 [“The studio for indoor filming of ‘Kangaroo’ “, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 11-Sep-1950 (Trove)].
Chips Rafferty was chosen to head up the cast of Watt’s next Ealing Australian movie Eureka Stockade (1949) – the dramatic and symbolic story of miner resistance to overbearing British rule on the 1850s goldfields. ‘Eureka’ (released in the US as Massacre Hill failed at the box office (general consensus of critics was that Chips was miscast in the lead role of the 1850s Irish-Australian rebel Peter Lalor).
Bitter Springsdirected by Ralph Smart followed…this time with Chips more comfortable returning to the role of courageous pioneering bushman in the Australian outback. The most interesting aspect of Bitter Springs is that it was prepared to tackle the polemical topic of indigenous land rights – in the movie white settlers clash with local Aboriginal people (Pitjantjatjara and Kokatha Mula tribes) over the possession of land. This screen subject was 25 to 30 years ahead of its time, however an assimilationist mindset prevails in its handling…in one scene Wally (Chip’s character) betrays the gross ignorance of Europeans about Aboriginal Australian – when the fair-minded territorial ranger (Michael Pate) questions the planned land grab, Wally summarily dismisses the Aborigines’ claim to the disputed land, stating that the Aboriginal culture was only about 1,000 years old! [Morgan, loc.cit.]✥. One jarring note is that the serious theme of Bitter Springs is undermined by Ealing’s decision to cast comic Tommy Trinder in the movie, Trinder’s character’s constant cracking of jokes tends to deflate the build-up of tension arising from the film’s central conflict between the blacks and the whites [Byrnes, ‘ASO’].
Chips Rafferty ▼
After 1950 however Ealing made few of its own films at the Pagewood Studios, instead it leased out the premises to other movie production companies, eg, to 20th Century Fox who made Kangaroo (1952) at Pagewood with Maureen O’Hara, the first technicolor film made in Australia.
Closing chapters of Ealing Pagewood
In 1952 the Pagewood Studios shut down production◙ (in what was meant to be a temporary move only), but the following year Ealing sold the studios to Associated Television which renamed the studios “Television City” and leased it to independent film producers. A 1954 independent production of the “Treasure Island” tale, Long John Silver, (with Robert Newton) was filmed at Pagewood (interiors) and exteriors shot at the Royal National Park [‘AAARRRHH There Matey! – The Strange and Wondrous Tale of Bill Constable & the Cinemascope Pirates of Pagewood…’ (Bob Hill, Oct 2018) www.apdg.org.au].
Ealing had been trying to make Robbery Under Arms in Australia since 1949 but it was finally completed by Ealing’s parent company Rank Organisation in 1957 – with some footage shot at Pagewood but mostly in London (exteriors: Flinders Ranges and near Bourke) [‘Film World Weather in Australia Disappoints Studio’, The West Australian, 03-Nov-1949, (Trove)].
Pagewood on it’s last legs
The final film to be made (or partly made) at what had become Television City (Pagewood) was a film version of the hit Australian play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1958/59). ‘Doll’ was made by Burt Lancaster’s HHL company using US and British leads…the production however took radical liberties with Lawler’s play and the film was ultra-Americanised with unsatisfactory results. In 1959 the Pagewood site was sold to General Motors Holden Australia which allowed the car manufacturer to expand its existing plant in the suburb. In the Eighties the studios’ land (and the adjacent bus depot) were redeveloped again, becoming the location of Westfield’s huge Eastgardens shopping mall and a housing estate built by the Meriton Group [‘Pagewood Studios’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
GMH Pagewood, formerly the site of Ealing’s Australia ▼
Ealing’s last Antipodean hooray
The Siege of Pinchgut (1959) was Ealing’s last film shot in and with an Australian setting (and as it transpired, it proved to be the company’s final ever adult feature). Harry Watt came back to direct what was a grim convicts-on-the-run drama filmed around Fort Denison (Pinchgut) in Sydney Harbour. ‘Pinchgut’, released in the US as Four Desperate Men, did not succeed at the box office⊛.
Australia closed for film-makers!
Ealing’s venture in Australia was never really a secure one…the follow up films to The Overlanders yielded only disappointing returns. The writing was on the wall for Ealing’s Australian enterprise from the time Menzies’ Liberal-Country Party won power in Australia in 1949 and took an antithetical attitude towards domestic film production. The LCP government refused to renew Ealing’s lease on the Pagewood Studios (a bitter pill for Ealing who’d already spent considerable funds on the Pagewood project). In a move which set the industry in Australia back decades, the government deemed that “film making was not an essential industry” and pointed out that the lease-holders (Ealing) were not an Australian residents in any case [The A-Z of Australian and New Zealand Cinema, (Albert Moran & Errol Vieth), (2009)].
If that wasn’t the tipping point for Ealing, it came with the studios’ own assessment… Balcon authorised the company’s accountant to undertake an financial evaluation of the Australian studios’ viability – which was negative [ibid.]. In the words of Eric Williams (manager at the Ealing Pagewood Studios), ultimately Ealing found it “impossible to maintain continuous production at a range of 12,000 miles”. That there was no Australian sponsor for productions was put forward as an additional disincentive for staying [‘Decision a blow to film industry’, The Mail (Adelaide), 26-Jan-1952 (Trove)].
PostScript: The failure of Ealing’s Australian venture was merely one chapter in the larger story of Ealing Studios’ global rise and fall. The rising costsand risks of big budget films of the parent company in Britain, large staff numbers and increasing expenditures, all contributed to the toll of financial problems plaguing Ealing and the UK industry as a whole…leading to Ealing’s eventual demise (this accumulation of pressures forced production head Balcon to unload Ealing in 1955).Note: the original 1930s studios in West London (above) were bought by the BBC in the 1990s and resurrected as a facility for hire [‘Remembering Ealing Studios and the golden age of British film’, BBC News, (Vincent Dowd), 30-Aug-2015, www.bbc.com].
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✲ and by association, synonymous also with actor Alec Guinness, the star of most of this “purple patch” of Ealing classics
❂ unfortunately the state government failed to back its own law, not allocating adequate funding to its implementation… when resisted by Hollywooddistributors the legislationwas killed off by the end of 1937
❇ Pagewood’s rival film production houses in Sydney, Cinesound at Bondi Junction and Figtree Studios at Lane Cove had folded, and turned into, respectively, a cordial factory and a transport depot [Barrier Miner, 11-Sep-1950]
✥ Wally’s band of settlers reinforce the stereotype with “disparaging views about stone-age men who do nothing with the land” [‘Bitter Springs (1950)’ Synopsis, (Paul Byrnes), ASO mobile, www.aso.gov.au]
◙ described by Ken G Hall as “a fatal blow” to the national film industry which would relegate Australia to “the bottom of the list of the world’s 60 film producing countries”
⊛ although an historical point of interest of the movie are shots of what was left of the old Fort Macquarie Tram Depot then being demolished for the construction of Sydney Opera House [‘Siege of Pinchgut’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
❛ Wherever you look, it’s a case of “Blow you, Jack, I’m all right”. ❜
(Stanley Windrush)
☬ ☬ ☬ ☬ ☬ ☬ ☬
The Boulting Brothers created some of postwar Britain’s most distinctive films across several genres, but it is their joyous 1959 comedy I’m All Right Jack that stands tallest in the film-making twin brothers’ oeuvre of cinematic comedy classics.
I’m All Right Jack takes up pretty much where it’s prequel, Private’s Progress, left off. The protagonist of both movies is the gullible and seemingly gormless Stanley Windrush (played to a tee by Ian Carmichael). Naive and good-natured, the persona of Stanley can be best summed up as epitomising the bungling, accident-prone, upper class twit.
In Private’s Progress Windrush “pussyfoots” his way through his army war service, causing unintended mayhem and allowing himself inadvertently to be duped…then by mistake he precipitates a chain of events leading to the capture of a division of enemy German soldiers and ends up an accidental war hero of sorts!
In I’m All Right Jack the Boultings reprise several of the previous film’s characters and actors…as well as ‘Stanley’ there is his scheming, unscrupulous “Uncle Bertie”, Bertram Tracepurcel (played by the urbane Dennis Price) and his harassed personnel manager, “Major Hitchcock” (the gap-toothed “professional cad” Terry-Thomas). Richard Attenborough plays “Sydney Cox”, Tracepurcel’s co-conspirator in perfidy and supposedly Stanley’s old friend from the war – the smoothest of smooth con men!
Ian Carmichael (Stanley) with ‘IARJ’ co-star Liz Fraser ◬
I’m All Right Jack satirises 1950s British society, still coming out of the straitjacket of postwar austerity, with sabre-like sharpness. The Boultings’ film fixes its microscope on industrial relations in a missiles production factory, exposing both the bosses and its blue collar workforce as unconscionable and utterly self-serving, solely out for what they can get for themselves! The Boulting brothers are “equal opportunity satirisers”, skewering management and labour alike to a commensurate degree. For both sides of the workplace divide, self-interest is unchallengingly the “drug of choice”, hence the film’s title⍟. The Boutlings also dish up a few barbs aimed at the fact-loose world of advertising along the way.
◬ Stanley’s bubble-car at the gate of Missiles Ltd
The film portrays the plant workers as work-shy and devious in their tunnel-visioned pursuit of the singular goal of doing less work than they are required to do✥…Stanley unknowingly upsets the “apple-cart” by demonstrating to the company’s T & M man (the ever-dour John Le Mesurier – another Boulting recruit from Private’s Progress) just how much work can actually be done in a day if one makes a “fair dinkum” effort (and of course this results in him being ostracised by the factory’s union). The factory management show themselves to be equally duplicitous – engaged in enriching themselves through a corrupt, clandestine arms deal with a swarthy, shonky Middle Eastern intermediary.
I’m All Right Jack also takes a comical pot shot at other societal institutions of the day – government for its torpid ineptitude, the English class system, advertising and the tabloid media for their falseness and alarming capacity to sway public opinion – lampooning each of them in turn! The Boultings are showing a Britain that is corrupt at its core, one that unearthed a late 1950s generation of “angry young men” dissatisfied with the blandness of society of the status quo [‘I’m All Right Jack review – Philip French on the Boulting brothers’ biting state-of-the-nation satire’, The Guardian, 18-Jan-2015, www.guardian.com].
Peter Sellers as Fred Kite is the movie’s stand-out, producing a gem of a performance. Kite is the comedy’s pivotal character, the chief shop steward who orchestrates the factory floor’s “go-slow” work culture, zealously obstructing management at every opportunity. “Red Fred” is your archetypal ‘Bolshy’ minor trade union official (with a Hitlerian moustache), but a union ‘heavy’ more ridiculous than menacing…a “Stalinist Don Quixote, tilting with alarming predictability at the windmills constructed by his own class enemies” [Timeout, www.timeout.com]. Sellers’ ‘Kite’ is given to awkward, Gothic turns of phrase and a pompous, halting, almost robotic mode of speech…in his essence he is hilarious as a blinkered Sovietphile idealist: “Ahhh (he sighs wistfully), Russia. All them corn fields and ballet in the evening”❂ [‘ I’m All Right Jack and The Organizer: Bread and Roses and a Lot of Laughs’, Criterion, (Michael Stragow), 19-Jan-2018, www.criterion.com].
Sellers as “Bolshy” Kite (centre) ◬
The success of I’m All Right Jack—it was the number one box office hit in the UK for 1959 and winner of a BAFTA award—led the way for a number of British films focussing on the world of worker/management relations – including the diametrically different in tone The Angry Silence (1960) (also with Richard Attenborough).
The film climaxes with Stanley, having finally ‘twigged’ to the IR game he has unwittingly been a pawn in, exposing both sides for their greed and duplicity on national television. I’m All Right Jack ends with Stanley ‘retiring’ to a rural nudist colony…he is invited by a bevy of naked women, discretely obscured by a hedge (it was 1959 after all!) to a game of tennis. The characteristically nervous Stanley bolts at the suggestion and is last seen hareing full-tilt across a meadow frantically pursued by the bare damsels.
PostScript: A punchline for the nascent anti-Apartheid movement
The Boultings’ film resonated in unexpected circles. The New Zealand Rugby Union, unwilling to offend South Africa’s racist policy of non-contact between whites and non-whites in sport, declined to select any Māori players for the 1960 All Blacks tour of South Africa (the Nash Labour government was fully complicit in this gutless act of appeasement). The ensuing controversy provoked widespread protests within NZ (a call for “No Maoris, no tour”) and a most memorable placard inspired by the film: “I’m All White, Jack!”
✲ directed by John Boulting, produced by brother Roy, and written by John with Frank Harvey from a novel by Alan Hackney (the same creators of Private’s Progress)
⍟ “I’m All right Jack” (of naval origin) was a popular UK expression of the period, meant to signify a smug and complacent self-centredness
✥ a recurring Boulting theme…in both Private’s Progress and I’m All Right Jack Windrush enters a world of “gold-bricks”, people doggedly determined to go the last mile to evade work of any kind
❂ apparently BBC Television in 1979 canned a scheduled screening of I’m All Right Jack for fear that Sellers’ ‘Kite’ might prejudice viewers against the Labour Party in an upcoming election! [ibid.]
An essential part of a tour of Independent Samoa’s main island, Upolu, is a trip to Aggie Grey’s…Samoa’s historic hotel in Beach Road on the western bank of the Vaisigano River. The place is a South Pacific institution, as was its legendary eponymous founder.
Aggie Grey’s Hotel (#77) on Apia map⍗
The ‘Aggie’ of Aggie Grey’s was born Agnes Genevieve Swann✲, the offspring of an English pharmacist from Lincolnshire and his Samoan wife, a local taupou (a ceremonial maiden). Business seemed to be in Miss Swann’s DNA – in her early twenties she opened her first club in Apia, the Cosmopolitan Club, and in 1933 started a Samoan private tourism company, Grey Investments (later called the Grey Investments Group).
No luck with ‘Kiwi’ spouses
The early death of Aggie’s first New Zealand husband left her without support and with four children to care for…the addictive gambling of her second husband squandered what money they had. In addition Aggie now had three more children and desperately needed to find a way to revive and consolidate her precarious financial situation.
With the advent of the Pacific War and American involvement, the resourceful and inventive Aggie eventually found the solution in 1942. She had earlier borrowed US$180 to purchase a colonial home which previously had been the “British Club”. As New Zealand’s prohibition laws were in force in Western Samoa⊡, Aggie started ‘Aggie Grey’s’ as a snack bar selling hamburgers and coffee to US servicemen on their tours of duty [Lonely Planet Samoan Islands, (M Bennett, D Talbot & D Swaney) (4th Ed 2003)].
The Hotel in 2006 ⍐
The American GIs in the South Pacific had plenty of money to splash around on their R & R activities, but the prohibition on liquor was a hand-brake on Aggie’s capacity to grow her business. Aggie found a inventive method of circumventing the ban…although serving alcohol was illegal, Aggie got round it by dispensing “medical permit doses” of booze to the American servicemen [‘Aggie Grey: West Point Hotelier, Legend – Apia, Upolu, Samoa’, in The Samoans: A Global Family, Frederic Koehler Sutter, (1989)].
⍗Aggie Grey: on the maiden Pan Am flight from Pago Pago (American Samoa) to Sydney International Airport, 1962(photo: John Mulligan)
From a backwater-town bar to a tourist hub
Beyond the war, over the following years, Mrs Grey turned the Apia hotel from a modest “drinking club” to a 200-room international hotel (arguably vying with Suva’s Grand Pacific Hotel for the mantle of the South Pacific’s premier international hotel) [‘Memories of the incomparable Aggie Grey’, Samoa Observer, (Terry Dunleavy), 26-Apr-2016, www.samoaobserver.com].
An ‘aiga welcome
The key to this success can be found largely in Aggie’s management style – her warm interpersonal skills, authentic, convivial personality, and her innate “understanding of the human condition”. Through her personal example of showing hospitality she imbued “Aggie Grey’s” with an atmosphere of “laid back Samoan friendly fa’aaloalo” (‘respect), conveying to each guest a sense that they were ‘aiga (‘family’) [Dunleavy].
In the formative days the hotel thrived as a result of Aggie’s ability to network… forging business links with the world outside Samoa – with the management and crews of TEAL (forerunner of Air New Zealand), and in encouraging celebrity A-listers (especially from the US) to make Samoa and Abbie Grey’s a regular stopover on route to film assignments in French Polynesia [ibid.]. Accordingly, the likes of Hollywood stars Marlon Brando, Dorothy Lamour, William Holden and Gary Cooper✥et al would be regular AG guests. Aggie sought to capitalise on the celebrity aura by naming each of the hotel’s fales (rooms) and bungalows after visiting movie celebs.
Stay in the Marlon Brando fale (№ 93) at AGs⍗
The hotel’s postwar success rested on a number of contributing factors. The arrival of trans-Pacific airlines (TEAL/Air NZ, Pan Am, QANTAS, then later Virgin’s Polynesian Blue) brought increasing numbers of tourists to replace the WWII servicemen. Aggie also had the right people behind her…a son with a good head for business, and a irreplaceable and devoted handiman, a “Mr Fixit” by the name of Fred Fairman, who Aggie could always rely on to keep the ‘wheels’ of the hotel running smoothly [ibid.; Sutter, loc.cit.].
Aggie Grey’s made it’s owner very wealthy…Aggie, a stalwart of the Samoan hospitality industry, continued at the hotel’s helm into her old age. In 1988 she died age 91, having long been one of the most respected members of the Apia business community.
Footnote: In December 2012 Cyclone Evan severely damaged Aggie Grey’s, closing it down for over three years. In August of the following year, management of the hotel complex, still under repairs, passed to the Sheraton’s hotel chain. Aggie Grey’s reopened in 2016, now operating under the name Sheraton Samoa Aggie Grey’s Hotel & Bungalows. A second Aggie Grey’s complex in Upolu, Aggie Grey’s Lagoon Resort, was opened in 2005 off a coral reef in the west of the island (a joint venture between the Grey family, the governments of Samoa and New Zealand and Virgin Samoa). 🇼🇸
PostScript: Prototype for Bloody Mary?
One of the US servicemen who frequented Aggie Grey’s during the War was travel adventure author James A Michener. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific was later adapted into the hit Broadway musical South Pacific. One of it’s main characters, the loud and formidably forceful “Bloody Mary”, was widely thought to have been modelled on Aggie Grey, a comparison that didn’t endear itself to the Apia hotelier! [‘Lonely Planet’, op.cit.].
⍐‘Return to Paradise’ – Samoan film set & resources of ‘Aggie Grey’s’ 🇼🇸 (see below)
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✲ ‘Grey’ was the surname of Aggie’s second husband from New Zealand
⊡ New Zealand administered Western Samoa as it was called at this time, under a League of Nations mandate
✥ Cooper in fact made a movie in Samoa, Return to Paradise in 1953 (pretty stock standard South Seas adventure stuff), and of course Aggie came on board to contribute to the production …Aggie Grey’s hotel providing logistical support and a base for the project’s accommodation, and the indefatigable hotelier personally supervised the catering unit for the film [Dunleavy]
America’s greatest city, the vast metropolis of New York, can claim an interesting and varied history of nomenclature. Until the English hold on New York was established permanently in the late 17th century (permanently that is until the American Revolution!), the settlement changed hands and names several times.
⇩ Manhattan Island Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of the early colonial period of America will know the early Dutch association with the area of New York. Based on the earlier exploration of the area by Henry Hudson, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) established a trading post on the southern tip of Manhattan island in 1624. The Dutch named the post New Amsterdam✲, the capital of its American colony Nieuw Nederlandt (New Netherland) – comprising an area including the hub of modern-day New York City, a strip of upstate New York including Beverwijck (now Albany), centre of the WIC fur trade, part of Connecticut and New Jersey and bits of the coastline down to the Delaware.
⇧17th century map of Nieuw Nederlandt
The English already had a foothold on Long Island and were keen on securing New Amsterdam and New Netherland for themselves…the English king Charles II granted his brother James, Duke of York rights to a large chunk of land on the Atlantic Seaboard. James duly launched an invasion fleet in 1664. Under pressure, the unpopular Dutch governor Pieter Stuyvesant failed to muster any significant support for its defence and was forced to surrender the settlement without any bloodshed. The occupying English force renamed it New York in honour of the Duke and future king of England and Ireland, James II. Richard Nicholls became the New York colony’s first governor.
A much less familiar fact is that New York was known by two other names at different periods in its history. The first European to set eyes on New York harbour was Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524 …. Verrazzano named the place New Angoulême after his patron Francis I of France (formerly the Count of Angoulëme). Verrazzano never attempted to establish a settlement there✥.
Manhattan Transferred
In 1673 during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, a sizeable Dutch fleet led by Admiral Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest AKA Keesje de Duivel (“Little Cornelis the Devil”) and Jacob Benckes, turned up in New York harbour, demanding the city be surrendered to it. Evertsen knew from intelligence gathered that the English governor (Francis Lovelace) was absent and the settlement’s defences were in a shabby state with Fort James being poorly garrisoned. After a brief military flexing of muscle by the Dutch, the English acting commander surrendered without resistance – in a reversal of the events and results of 1664! [‘The End of New Netherland’, (American History From Revolution to Reconstruction and beyond’), www.let.rug.nl].
New York was renamed Nieuw Oranje (New Orange) in honour of the Prince Willem of Orange (ironically the future King William III of England and Ireland). The officer commanding the Dutch land forces, Captain Anthonij Colve, was appointed governor-general of the restored Dutch colony. The Dutch coup was short-lived however, within a year the English had regained the settlement through the Treaty of Westminster – by which the Netherlands received Suriname in South America as a swap. New York was New York again – this time for good!
PostScript: New York by metonym✪or other informal name
Aficionados of mainstream American popular culture know Gotham or Gotham City as the supposed abode of the superhero Batman, courtesy of the long-running DC comic strip-cum-TV and film series (Gotham City is modelled on NYC albeit evoking the darkest possible manifestation of the city). The original attribution of ‘Gotham’ to New York however long predates the Batman phenomenon (the first Batman comic hit the book stalls in 1939). Its genesis was a creation of the mind of celebrated 19th century writer Washington Irving…Irving first referred to Gotham/NYC in a satirical periodical on New York culture and politics, Salmagundi, in 1807, and the association caught on with the public [‘Gotham City’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
There are a host of other nicknames for New York but by far the most popular, the most affectionate, is “the Big Apple”. The term gained currency on provincial racecourses circa 1920 and was made popular by newspaper reporter John Fitz Gerald, [‘Why is New York City nicknamed the “Big Apple”?, Elizabeth Nix, 23-Jul-2014, www.history.com].
As The New York Times‘ Sam Roberts remarked of the city’s Dutch name of 1673/1674:
(New York) “was the Big Orange before it was the Big Apple”! [quoted in ‘When New York was officially named New Orange’, Ephemeral New York, 07-Mar-2011, www.ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com].
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✲ the colonists followed this later by naming the adjacent island, present-day Long Island, Nieuw Amersfoort
✥ leaving aside the undocumented and speculative claim made on behalf of Norseman Lief Ericsson who may conceivably have been the first to visit the site of New York over 1,000 years ago
✪metonym: the use of a (descriptive) name in place of the proper) name because it is closely associated (eg, the “White House” in lieu of the US Presidential Palace)
Three hundred years ago this coming April, London merchant-cum-journalist Daniel Defoe published his debut novel anonymously✱ – it was to become one of the most iconic and most imitated literary works ever…it began with a title page descriptor that read in full:
The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.
Once “cast on Shore by Shipwreck”, Crusoe, isolated and alone, is forced to make the best of a perilous predicament in an alien and challenging environment. His solitary, epic struggle in the face of hardships and the existence of threats from wild animals and the unknown elevates the story to mythic proportions. The myth is complete when Crusoe ultimately succeeds in conquering all impediments and fashions the island into his own “miniature Great Britain”.
A multiplicity and diversity of readingsRobinson Crusoe is a multifaceted work of fiction, viewable from a number of different perspectives. On a straightforward level its an adventure novel and a travel book (rather than a guide) tantalising the 18th century Englishman and woman with a sense of faraway “new worlds” which were still undergoing a process of discovery and exploration.
The personality of the protagonist Crusoe himself is an Everyman figure, representing a cross-spectrum of contemporary English societal types – above all he is the archetypical survivor prompting untold numbers of readers to identify with the despair of his plight and “embraced his myth of struggle, survival and triumph against all odds” [Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, Frank, K (2011)].
⍐ One of the numerous screen adaptations of the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ tale
Crusoe as “economic-imperialist” and coloniser
There is the hero of romantic, bourgeois individualism, the Englishman who turns his dire circumstance to his ultimate financial advantage. When others appear on the island (Friday, the boy slave Xury, the ‘savages’, the Spanish sailors and English mutineers), Crusoe reacts with a sensibility typical of the “natural superiority” of a coloniser and uses the others as ‘commodities’✥. James Joyce described Robinson Crusoe as the “true symbol of the British conquest”, embodying “the whole Anglo-Saxon spirit” [quoted in ‘An introduction to Robinson Crusoe’, (Stephen Sharkey), 21-Jun-2018, www.bl.uk].
A spiritual voyage
On another level Robinson Crusoe can be read as a kind of spiritual autobiography (popular in Defoe’s time). Crusoe’s journey from one exotic land to another can be seen as the “spiritual voyage” of Bunyanesque Puritan Christianity. Crusoe’s long, long sojourn on the island is a test of his faith. Being alone with infinite time on his hands he devotes himself to intense self-scrutiny, questioning the Providence that landed him in his predicament (ie, his relationship with God). Some critics have noted that Crusoe’s thought processes on the island entailed a progression from rebellion, acknowledgement of mortal sin, atonement and religious conversion [‘Robinson Crusoe Theme of Religion’, (shmoop), www.shmoop.com].
DIY Robinson Crusoe and the Conduct book
Defoe provides a very detailed description of how his hero goes about making the most of his enforced stay on the island. As Katherine Frank observes, DeFoe’s novel is the “ultimate how to book: a step-by-step guide on how to live in a particular tricky situation”, ie, a method for surviving alone on a desert island◘ [Frank, op.cit.]. On the ship and again on the island Robinson spends copious amounts of time cataloguing items and making lists of everything that comes into his head.
The novel’s preoccupation with DIY touches on something else close to Defoe’s heart, the “Conduct book”✪ (a kind of user’s guide for life in the 18th century). The self-help component in Robinson Crusoe gives a sample of the writer’s broader interest in instructional works…Defoe spilled a lot of ink in writing a series of published texts telling people how they should live their lives – with titles like The Family Instructor, The Compleat English Tradesman and The Compleat English Gentleman.
A Defoe conduct book on the Robinson Crusoe theme
Always look on the bright side of life
Defoe’s faith in the individual’s capacity for self-improvement comes through in his novels as much as in the didactic Conduct books. In Robinson Crusoe Defoe’s central character refuses to give up and submit to his fate no matter how glum his prospects look. With each new challenge he faces on the island, Crusoe time and again evokes the “power of positive thinking”…in his solitude he learns “to look more upon the bright Side of my Condition and less upon the dark Side” (Defoe imbues the protagonists of his later novels like Moll Flanders with this same positive disposition) [ibid.]. Defoe really had to be a glass half-full kind of guy to keep bouncing back from all the reversals life was lobbing on him (viz. a succession of self-inflicted, calamitous business ventures he managed to embroil himself in, doing gaol time for failure to pay his debts, etc).
PostScript: Cashing in on the “golden egg”The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was an instant commercial success with four editions printed in 1719. Defoe, always with his mind fixated on how to enrich himself, was quick to follow-up Robinson Crusoe with a sequel. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published in the same year, proved to be almost as much a hit with the public. The Farther Adventures (usually today called the Further Adventures) was intended to be Robinson Crusoe’s swan-song, but Defoe couldn’t resist going to the well one time too many with a third book in 1720 entitled Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick.Serious Reflections ‘bombed’ badly and the less said about it the better⊡.
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✱ it was commonplace for 18th century texts to be published either anonymously or using a pseudonym…Defoe was especially inclined to obscure textual ownership to try to cover himself when raising polemical questions [‘Anonymity in the Eighteenth Century’, (Gillian Paku), (Literature, Literary Studies – 1701 to 1800: Aug 2015 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.37 www.oxfordhandbooks.com]
✥ Crusoe’s mercenary nature (equating with that of the money-obsessed Defoe) is best illustrated with Xury who Crusoe is happy to sell back into slavery when he is no longer required and by so doing fetch a tidy sum for himself
◘ novelist EM Forster once remarked that Robinson Crusoe reminded him of a “Boy Scout manual”
✪ Conduct books, today’s self-help guides, in Defoe’s day took the form of sermons, devotional writings, familiar letters, chapbooks and instruction manuals offering advice on social mores and manners, spiritual guidance and practical information on state and household duties, [Batchelor, Jennie. “Conduct Book”. The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 July 2004
https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=216, accessed 29 December 2018.]
⊡ the Farther Adventures had the same trademark derivative framework as the original novel – Defoe borrowed heavily once again from Robert Knox’s autobiography and seems to have modelled the last part of Crusoe’s journey on a 17th century Moscow Embassy secretary’s travel journal (Moscow – Peking), The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Frank, op.cit.]
A common retort to people purporting to be in a unique situation of any kind is the phrase, usually emphatically stated, “you’re not Robinson Crusoe!” – ie, (not) alone. The phrase references probably the best-known solitary and physically isolated character in English literature, a shipwrecked voyager stuck seemingly alone on a deserted island in some unidentified expanse of the great oceans. Daniel Defoe’s classic 18th century novel Robinson Crusoe.
A search for the genesis of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, like the story’s narrative itself, has taken scholars far and wide. Geographically, this has included both the South Pacific and the South Atlantic Oceans, the Caribbean and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The search has also led, through the work of biographers, to a study of DeFoe’s own life experiences for sources of inspiration for the work of fiction.
Alexander Selkirk’s adventures
For the great bulk of the (almost exactly) 300 years since Robinson Crusoe was first published, the conventional wisdom has been to attribute the book’s origin to the real life experiences of Alexander Selkirk. Selkirk was a Scottish privateer who fell out with his captain and crewmates on a voyage and was voluntarily marooned on an uninhibited island for a bit over four years. When Robinson Crusoe was published less than a decade later, many made a clear link between it and the well-publicised accounts of Selkirk’s episode of being a solitary castaway. Moreover, some people thought that Defoe’s hero must have been a real person and that the book was a travelogue of actual events [‘Robinson Crusoe’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
“Selkirk’s Island” 🔽
Some commentators today still hold that Selkirk was the true inspiration for Defoe’s most famous fictional protagonist [‘The Real Robinson Crusoe’, (Bruce Selcraig), Smithsonian Magazine, July 2005, www.smithsonianmag.com; ‘Scientists Research the Real Robinson Crusoe’, (Marco Evers), Spiegel Online, 02-VI-2009, www.spiegel.de]. A perception that was given some added credence by the Chilean government. With an eye to the tourist potential spin-off, Chile renamed Más-a-Tierra, the small island in the South Pacific which had been Selkirk’s enforced home for over four years, Robinson Crusoe Island.
Defoe’s ‘Crusoe’ cf. Selkirk
Most literary critics these days however accept that Selkirk’s epic misadventure was “just one of many survival narratives that Defoe knew about” (by no means the major one)✲. Becky Little has listed some of the key differences between Defoe’s story and the accounts of Selkirk…Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked, whereas Selkirk asked to be cast on shore; Crusoe is a plantation owner with a colonising mentality who adapts the island to his own world, while Selkirk was effectively a “glorified pirate” who “goes native”; Crusoe’s Island, as Robinson was to discover in time, was inhabited, whereas Más-a-Tierra was completely uninhabited; Crusoe was stuck on his island for 28 long years compared to a shade over four years that Selkirk had to endure [‘Debunking the Myth of the “Real” Robinson Crusoe’, (Becky Little), National Geographic, (28-Sept-2016), www.nationalgeographic.com].
Aside from Selkirk’s story, Defoe who read widely and voraciously would have drawn on other, existing accounts of shipwreck and survival – this includes a work by 12th century Arab Andalusian writer Ibn Tufail, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, both a philosophical treatise and the first novel to depict a desert island castaway, and the story of Pedro Luis Serrano (Maestre Joan)♉, a 16th century Spanish sailor thought to have been marooned on a small Caribbean Island for seven or eight years [‘RC’, Wikipedia, loc.cit.]❇.
Robert Knox, a prototype for Crusoe?
One of the major influences on Robinson Crusoe is sea captain Robert Knox’s experience of prolonged confinement after his British East India Company ship was forced aground on the island of Ceylon (published in 1681 as An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon). Katherine Frank in her book Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, has pointed to the parallels between Defoe and Knox. Knox’s Island confinement consumes some 20 years, comparable to the 28 years Crusoe is marooned on his remote island. Both Crusoe (in the book) and Knox (in real life) are unable to secure the full patrimony (inheritence) entitled them upon their return. Both are engaged in slave-trading activities at different times [Katherine Frank, Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, (2011)].
The derivative Defoe
Frank describes Defoe as a “congenital plagiarist” who freely borrowed material and ideas from numerous sources for Robinson Crusoe. Among the literary works mined by Defoe are Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. He also relied upon the books of voyages by contemporary explorers such as William Dampier and Woodes Rogers. And of course there was the borrowings from published accounts of real castaways and their ordeals – in addition to Serrano, Selkirk and Knox, Defoe drew upon the accounts of Fernando Lopez on St Helena in the South Atlantic and Henry Pitman’s stranding on Tortuga, et al [ibid.].
‘Robinson Crusoe’, allegory of incarceration
Frank also draws on biographical aspects of Defoe’s life that can be reflected in the famous novel. On two separate occasions Defoe was imprisoned for failure to settle his (very considerable) debts (the first saw him detained in the Fleet and the King’s Bench Prisons and on a subsequent occasion in notorious Newgate). DeFoe’s journal tells us how profoundly affected he was by imprisonment. Frank invokes the symbolism of being “shipwreck’d by land”, analogising the author’s mandatory detention with the catastrophe of being tossed about in a storm and helplessly cast adrift on a desert island, and concludes that “Robinson Crusoe clearly had its autobiographical genesis in Defoe’s bankruptcies and incarceration” [ibid.].
PostScript: a legion of imitators, the Robinsade
As plentiful as were Daniel Defoe’ sources of inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, the novel has continued to this day to capture the imagination of countless writers, film directors and TV producers. Seemingly ubiquitous, it has inspired the creation of a genre of writing, “survivalist fiction”, and even spawned a literary sub-genre known as the Robinsonade. These works include novels as disparate as Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, The Lord of the Flies and JM Coetzee’s Foe, filmic representations of the novel by Luis Buñuel and modernised updates of the story such as Cast Away, plus the television series Lost in Space and Gilligan’s Island. The form of the Robinsonade has also extended to a Science Fiction offshoot with Sci-Fi Robinsonades (movies: Robinson Crusoe on Mars, The Martian; fiction: The Survivors (Tom Godwin), Concrete Island (JG Ballard)). Robinson Crusoe has proved to be particularly fecund in the world of reality television, inspiring a host of “real life”(sic) programs with titles like Lost! and Survivor that say it all! As Katherine Frank commented, “Crusoe hasn’t just survived, he has thrived, flourished and proliferated”.
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✲ eg, the scholarly consensus tends to the view that no single, real life ‘Crusoe’ existed, the character was an amalgam of “all the buccaneer survival stories” [AD Lambert, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, (2016)]
♉ after Robinson Crusoe was published Serrano became known as the “Spanish Crusoe”
❇ Defoe got the idea for Crusoe’s familiar goatskin clothing from reading about another exile, John Segar, on St Helena
One of the iconic historic associations with the hills of Appalachia is the fateful conflict in the last quarter of the 19th century between two mountain-dwelling families – the Hatfields and the McCoys. The feud between the two “warring clans” has tended to be wrapped in the veneer of legend, obscured by the myth-making of popular culture over the decades. The McCoy-Hatfield feud has featured in a raft of US books, songs, comic strips, feature movies and television shows (with both animated and human content)✱. These overwhelmingly fictionalised narratives of the Hatfields and the McCoys have vouchsafed a place for them in the annals of American folklore and at the same time contributed to the caricatured impression of ‘hillbillies’ in the popular consciousness.
Tug Fork Valley and the family patriarchs
In the 19th century the McCoys lived (as they do today) on the Kentucky side of Tug Fork (a tributary of the Big Sandy River), with the Hatfields residing on the other side of the river (in West Virginia). The Hatfield patriarch was William Anderson Hatfield, widely known as ‘Devil Anse’, while the patriarch of the McCoys was Randolph McCoy (sometimes identified as ‘Randall’ McCoy). Of the two families the Hatfields were appreciably more affluent than the McCoys (Devil Anse’s profitable timber business employed many men including some McCoys).
Patriarch of the Hatfield family, ‘Devil Anse’ ⬇Background to the feud
The earliest incident between the two families seemed to have occurred during the Civil War…in 1865 Asa Harmon McCoy, who fought with the Union during the war, was ambushed and killed by members of a local Confederate militia connected to the Hatfield family. Some have identified the feud’s genesis in the murder, but Harmon McCoy’s siding with the North (while almost all of the McCoys and the Hatfields gave their allegiances to the Confederacy) made him unpopular with both families. His death did not trigger a reprisal and most historians have concluded that the incident was a stand-alone event [‘The Hatfield & McCoy Feud’, History, www.history.com].
A porcine pretext for feuding
Some thirteen years after the shooting of Randall McCoy’s brother, a new incident was the catalyst for a downward decline in relations between the McCoys and the Hatfields. The trigger was a dispute over the ownership of a razorback hog in 1878. The McCoy clan claimed that the Hatfields had stolen one of their pigs. A subsequent legal case (known as the “Hog Trial”) was brought before the local Justice of the Peace (who happened to be a Hatfield), who predictably dismissed the charge…the McCoys responded by killing one of the allies of the Hatfields.
Makings of a vendetta: “Tit-for-tat” acts of vengeance
Over the next ten to twelve years a pattern emerged of accusations, recriminations, acts of violence and retaliations – with excesses on both sides. Both clans used their connexions with the law in ‘home’ jurisdiction (either Kentucky or West Virginia) to try to exact retribution against the other. In separate incidents, the McCoy boys ‘arrested’ Johnse (pronounced “John-see”) Hatfield after he entered into a romantic liaison with Roseanna McCoy✦, followed in turn by Hatfield constables apprehending and extraditing three of Roseanna’s brothers for the killing of Devil Anse Hatfield’s brother Ellison.
Escalation and denouement of the feud
By now “bad blood” was endemic between the families. In the years after 1882 the conflict escalated dramatically…killings met with counter-killings (more than 12 members or associates of the two families died during the decade). A Hatfield raid on the McCoy patriarch’s farm in 1888 – known as the ‘New Year Night’s Massacre’ – resulted in the murder of two of Randolph McCoy’s children. The subsequent Battle of the Grapevine Creek, an attempt by the Hatfields to take out the McCoys once and for all, resulted in an ambush gone wrong…the tables were turned on the Hatfield raiders and the bulk of their number were arrested. Over the next few years they were tried and all given jail sentences (except one, possibly a ‘scapegoat’, who was executed). The ill feelings slowly dissipated with the conclusion of the trials and the conflict receded from memory – in 1890 the New York Times reported that the feud was at an end (there was in fact still the odd simmering flare-up such as in the mid 1890s but the potentially explosive incidents were effectively over) [‘A Long Feud Ended’, NYT, 06-Sep-1890, www.rarenewspapers.com].
⇧ Hatfield clan 1890s
Scope of the feud: a media “beat-up”?
While the McCoy-Hatfield feud played out in the Appalachians, the Eastern Seaboard press whetted the public’s imagination with its well-received accounts of the conflict. The press coverage tended to be negative, especially towards the wealthier Hatfields, who it portrayed as “violent backwoods hillbillies” roaming the mountains wreaking violence. As the shootings continued, what had been a local story of isolated homicides got national traction and was sensationalised by the newspapers.[‘History’, loc.cit.]. Some historians, in particular Altina Waller, have argued that the myth-making surrounding the ‘feud’ has obscured the realities and significance of the event. Waller’s contention is that the feud lasted only twelve years – from the hog episode to the sentencing of the Hatfields. [AL Waller, Feuds, Hatfields, McCoys and Social Change in Appalachia,1860-1900, (1988)].
Advocates for the Appalachian region tend to view the Hatfield-McCoy feud (as depicted by the press) as part of the widespread stereotyping of the entire mountain region [West Virginia Archives and History,, ‘Time Trail, West Virginia’ (1998), www.wvculture.org]. The negativity of the story and the focus on it by external mechanisms of popular culture is seen by many locals in Pike and Mingo counties (where the events took place) and the wider region as another example of the outside’s “Appalachia bashing”✥.
Matewan (WV) wall illustration: ⬆ depicting the Hatfield-McCoy feud
Economic underpinnings of the feud
The feud at its height was a deeply personal one for both families, however an underlying factor in the hostilities was the depressed economic situation in Appalachia at the time. Resentment of Devil Anse Hatfield’s success as a timber merchant (contrasted with the less sanguine fortunes of the McCoys) no doubt played a part in the inter-family tensions. Given the McCoys’ struggle to make a go of farming their land, the incident of the stolen hog (from their perspective) was a serious economic setback for the family. Another player and prime mover behind the conflict was McCoy cousin Perry Cline, who hated Devil Anse and the Hatfields as much as any of the McCoys. Cline was sued by Devil Anse for allegedly cutting timber on Hatfield land. Devil Anse won the judgement and was awarded as damages all of Cline’s virgin West Virginian land (5,000 acres). From that point on, Cline, a lawyer, believing he had been robbed of his rightful property, unwaveringly pursued the Hatfields using his political connections in Kentucky. Cline’s actions, spurred on by the desire to payback Devil Anse Hatfield, helped revive and prolong the feud [AL Waller, ‘Hatfield-McCoy: Economic motives fuelled feud that tarred region’s image’, Lexington Herald Leader, 30-Jul-2012, www.kentucky.com].
Footnote: Rampant flourishing commercialism
The famous feud is long-buried but not forgotten in the Tug Fork and Big Sandy River valleys. The opportunity for commercial advantage from the McCoys and Hatfields’ past remains alive…tourism of the area is well-served by the “Hatfield and McCoy Historical Site Restoration”. In the 21st century reunion festivals and marathons (“no feudin’, just runnin'”) have taken place. More crassly opportunistic was the appearance of descendants of the two families as contestants on the TV panel show ‘Family Feud’ in 1979 [‘Hatfield-McCoy feuds’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
PostScript: The ‘Sheep Wars’
The Hatfield-McCoy feud is not the only protracted inter-clan feud in American history, just the most famous. Arizona’s version of Hatfield v. McCoy was the Pleasant Valley Feud (AKA the ‘Tonto Range War’) which pitted the Grahams’ against the Tewksburys’ in the 1880s and ’90s…the Arizona-based feud was the classic “grazing war” of cattle-men versus sheep-herders, a recurring source of conflict in much of the ‘Old West’ [‘Arizona’s Pleasant Valley War’, www.legandsofamerica.com].
Ya-hooo! The Ad-men milking the stereotype for all its worth…
✱ the preceding blog, ‘Ma and Pa Kettle on the Farm Again: Hillbilly Stereotypes in Film and Television’ touched on films based on the McCoy and Hatfield saga. Even in mainstream product advertising, the overly hirsute, “Moonshine-crazed”, “gun-toting” hillbilly trope permeates, eg. PepsiCo’s “Mountain Dew” soft drink
✦ the subject of a 1949 Hollywood B-movie (Roseanna McCoy) which largely fictionalised the cross-clan romance – New York Times‘ short-hand summation of the movie was “feudin’, fussin’ and lovin'”. The real Johnse later dumped Roseanna for another McCoy, her cousin Nancy who he married
✥ part of a whole litany of complaints by Appalachians about how they are portrayed in the media, in film and TV, by Democrat politicians in the big cities
In Part 1 we saw how robust intervention of the United Fruit Company and other commercially aggressive American companies in Central and South America brought about the socio-economic conditions that led to the characterisation of some of the countries therein as “banana republics”. This second part will focus on the experience of one particular country in the region, British Honduras (modern-day Belize), which, although a different type of polity to the other neighbouring states at the time, nonetheless exhibited the same or similar patterns of disruption and exploitation from the North American banana barons.
Pre-conditions for the banana importersBritish Honduras in 1900 was a British crown colony, a status it had since 1862✱. At the head of the colony, the Crown’s representative, was the governor [‘British Honduras’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Before bananas, the prized commodity in BH was timber – logwood, cedar, chicle, and above all mahogany✪. Moberg notes that despite the abolition of slavery in 1838, the conditions peculiar to British Honduras (BH) continued to perpetuate a debt servitude of rural workers to an oligarchy of local and immigrant land-holders. Nineteenth century BH economy was dependent on mahogany exports, a situation which created what has been described as an elite ‘forestocracy’ made up of timber companies and merchants (both domestic and foreign) [CH Grant]. This bound generations of forestry workers in BH to the powerful employer-class…one resident colonial secretary described the plight of the workforce as being “virtually enslaved for life”. Moberg’s case study describes the role of the British authority in this status quo as one of aiding and abetting the goals of the timber and mercantile elites [Moberg 1996].
Br.Honduras mahogany exports ▸
The debt peonage that the unskilled BH farm workers were forced into (known locally as the “advance-truck” system), helped create a climate favourable to industry (ie, cheap and docile labour force) in the later American intervention by banana companies. Banana industry workers on plantations inherited similar harsh working conditions, including being subjected to the draconian ‘Masters and Servants’ Acts. Checks on what the United Fruit Co (UFCo) could do within British Honduras resided at least on paper with the colonial chief official, the governor (after 1884), (formerly the lieutenant governor 1862-1884, who during which time was subordinate to the governor of Jamaica). As Moberg’s study shows, the will to resist United Fruit’s incursions into the colony varied considerably from governor to governor. Early governors like Goldsworthy earned the ire of the resident elites who agitated for more political power. Under pressure from the business elites and oligarchs, the Colonial Office (in London) was forced to curb the power of governors in the 1890s and give the Legislative Council (and especially its five ‘unofficial’ members) a right of veto over the governor. In the 1900s governors like Sweet-Escott and Swayne made token efforts to dilute the members’ clout on council (with minimal success), but most governors ultimately conceded power to the elites [ibid.].
Acceding to the demands of big foreign capitalThe governors discovered that the interests of foreign capital in British Honduras – initially through British mercantile and timber firms but increasingly through a burgeoning of US investors❅ – could not be ignored. By around 1900 bananas represented 71% of the value of exports to the US✥. It amounted to increasingly significant revenue for the colony’s coffers. The British Honduras government saw it as vital to the colony’s economy. Moberg indicates that “despatches from the governors to the Colonial Office reveal an eager accommodation to the banana multinational”. One of the most compliant, Governor Wilson, proposed to his masters in London that the government build railroads in the colony as an incentive for United Fruit to invest. Governor Swayne, undergoing a 180° turn from his earlier opposition to UFCo, started to act like a “virtual agent for the company in London”, negotiating the approval of incredibly generous land concessions to UFCo…under its terms United Fruit was asked to pay only $1 an acre compared to between $3 and $8 an acre required of small landholders (and UFCo was largely exempted from standard land tax). Sometimes UFCo received land gratis or for virtually nothing in exchange for the company’s promise to build railroads in the tropical lowlands (which of course benefitted UFCo’s business!) [ibid.].
United Fruit Co’s corporate muscle-flexingOn the rarer occasions that the BH government were reluctant to automatically lay down and do the American banana giant’s bidding, UFCo’s immediate reflex was to engage in bullying tactics against the government and threaten retaliatory action. When United Fruit asked the government for the unprecedented control of the British Honduras wireless (a very “banana republic” situation by which the British Central American colony’s entire radio communications would be held in foreign hands!), the Colonial Office declined its request. UFCo responded by withdrawing its steamship passenger line from service until the Colonial Office finally caved in to its demands for control of the radio system in 1911. UFCo took the same measure with its service on another occasion (which deprived the colony of mail delivery for over a month) in order to extract a higher subsidy payment from the government [ibid.].
United Fruit Co’s strategy in BH: Beginnings of the ‘Musaocracy’When it commenced business as a buyer of bananas in Central America (1899/1900), UFCo embarked on a strategy that envisaged a monopoly situation end-game. One of the first moves was into transport. In 1900 UFCo acquired majority ownership of six Caribbean coast steamship lines⌖, this also gave it the government mail contract as well (the Belize Royal Mail). The strategy to maximise its stake in the colony’s bananas was clinical and precise: UFCo first raised the price it was paying to independent growers, this allowed it to eventually crush all competition from other buyers…a monopoly of the market achieved, the company was now free to “dictate ruinous prices and conditions to private growers”. At the same time United Fruit thwarted the marketing efforts of independent growers, thus denying them alternate sources for the sale of their produce [ibid.].
Restrictive competitive practices 101: United Fruit achieves vertical integration in bananasAfter securing a stranglehold over the exporting side of the banana game in Belize and having established its own rail network to transport the produce, UFCo’s next step was to create its own banana plantations in the colony’s south at Stann Creek and Toledo. As a major BH producer United Fruit consolidated its position in several stages, it set about monopolising the land available for cultivation. By 1930, the land area of Belize cultivated by the company comprised 139,000 acres, but UFCo also held over 20 times this area of unused land in BH, seriously limiting the area of cultivable land available to competing planters. United Fruit’s price-fixing had the ultimate effect of decimating the local banana growers✧ [ibid.]Fusarium wilt (‘Panama disease’)⬆️
Industry reversals and exit strategyIn the 1910s the banana business in British Honduras was hit by a series of natural and climatic disasters…heavy rains causing flooding with loss of 90% of banana crop; infectious diseases especially the Panama disease (a soil-borne fungus), particularly devastating to UFCo’s Middlesex and Stann Creek estates; poor cultivation techniques exacerbated the losses (reliance on primitive milpa cultivation). The persistence of Panama disease⊠ further depressed production and United Fruit gradually reduced its banana operations in BH and in some cases, in locations like South Stann Creek, eventually replaced banana cultivation with citrus fruit [ibid.].
⬇UFCo promotional booklet (Source: JJ Burns Library, Boston College)
Successive Belize colonial governments were repeatedly outwitted by United Fruit negotiations leaving it in a default position vis-á-vis the US company that was inferior and subordinate. One weakness stemming from the contractual arrangements was the governors’ abject failure to make UFCo keep its side of bargains. When things started to go “belly-up” for United Fruit in the banana colony, UFCo in imperious contempt of their contractual obligations simply pulled the plug. To compound the folly, subsequently, the colonial officials meekly bought back the key Middlesex estate from United Fruit✜, incredibly and bizarrely on terms which allowed the withdrawing company to make a profit! [ibid.].
United Fruit’s activities in British Honduras were typical of its approach throughout the Caribbean littoral. Large-scale integration into the local economy with massive infrastructure, using its economic clout to manipulate the local authorities into making advantageous concessions banana market…control of the market in bananas allowed it to set artificial low prices which Belize suppliers were obliged to accept because they were bereft of alternate viable markets. BH, being a colony of the British, varied from the prevailing pattern in other Central and South American countries in only one respect, a lack of personal graft. Unlike the banana republics, UFCo had no recourse to bribery with the colony’s British career diplomats, but bluff and intimidation usually produced the results it sought. As Moberg noted, “Colonial officials acted on behalf of the multinational not from venality or corruption…rather (it) reflected an ascendant US political and economic influence…one that officials found increasingly difficult to resist” [ibid.].
Tentacles of ‘El pulpo’ (“the octopus”)United Fruit was particularly adept at playing one country off against another. When British Honduran officials kicked back against the demands of the company, UFCo would make clear that not acquiescing to what it wanted, had serious consequences. A standard ploy was to pit British Honduras against neighbouring states. On the occasions that the BH governor would deviate from his default submissive position to UFCo demands, the company manager in Belize Town would drop none-too-subtle hints about moving the centre of United Fruit’s Central American banana operations to Puerto Cortés in Hondurus. Similarly, United Fruit would also periodically issue threats to both Guatemala and British Honduras that it would switch its investments from one to the other [ibid.]
PostScript: Modern BelizeTiny British Honduras was one of the last crown colonies in the Americas to shed the shackles of European colonialism. It achieved self-governing status in 1964, renamed Belize in 1973, it finally gained full independence from Britain in 1981. Mestizos, Creoles, Maya and Garifuna make up around 90% of the population. Belize’s much delayed passage to full independence largely stems from its neighbour Guatemala’s long-standing claim on the territory of Belize (or part thereof). Guatemala’s largely military regimes have aggressively pursued its claim (including making a number of threats to invade Belize and border-massing of troops since the 1940s), with Guatemala refusing to recognise the new nation in 1981. Accordingly the UK maintained armed forces in Belize after independence (till 2011) [‘Belizean-Guatemalan territorial dispute’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼
✱ although as far back as 1783 a local British presence had existed following the Treaty of Versailles which gave them the right to cut logwood between the Hondo and Belize Rivers
✪ the following, outlining what transpired in British Honduras in particular between 1900 and 1920, is heavily based on a case study by Mark Moberg [Moberg, Mark. “Crown Colony as Banana Republic: The United Fruit Company in British Honduras, 1900-1920.” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, 1996, pp. 357–381. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/157625]
❅ by the early 1900s US capital had attained a hegemonic position in BH (overtaking British capital) as it was in the rest of the Caribbean littoral
✥ at the same time the Belize mahogany trade was starting to taper off
⌖ UFCo’s passenger and cargo ships were known as the Great White Fleet. The ships were painted white apparently to keep the shipment of bananas cooler! [‘United Fruit Company: The Great White Fleet’,https://visitpuertoarmuelles.com]
✧ tactics replicated elsewhere in the region with similar results – the independent Jamaican growers, the Jamaican Banana Producers’ Association, resisted the United Fruit Co dominance of the Caribbean island’s market for a time but in the end couldn’t compete in a price war
⊠ United Fruit established very large plantations in different countries (known as ‘divisions’), when Panama disease hit, it would abandon the farm and relocate…each time UFCo would “systemically destroy the infrastructure (railroads, bridges, telephone lines, etc) to prevent competitors from being able to renew production on a smaller scale” [PI Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, cited in Moberg]
✜ these days United Fruit Co goes under the banner of ‘Chiquita Brands International’ (still extensively in bananas)
Banana republic: In politics the term “banana republic”✱ describes a politically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the exportation of a limited-resource product such as bananas or minerals. The term was coined in 1901 by American author O. Henry as a depiction of Honduras and neighbouring countries under intense economic exploitation by US corporations as typified by the United Fruit Company of Boston [‘Banana Republic’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
❖❖❖❖❖❖
When I first heard the saccharine, content-lite melodies of “Bubblegum Pop’s” 1910 Fruitgum Company, I didn’t realise that the name of this innocuous, syrupy 1960s musical group was a corny pun on a historic commercial entity that I did not know of at the time…this commercial enterprise was in fact something much less edifying and infinitely more sinister and consequential – the United Fruit Company of Boston, Mass. As the following will show, the United Fruit Co would come to epitomise the high degree of hegemony established by US business interests in the tropical regions of the Americas after the late 1890s.
Boston Fruit C°’s ‘Golden Vale’ plantation, Jamaica⬇From railroads to plantationsThe United Fruit Company had its origins in 1899 from a merger of various fruit exporting concerns (including the Boston Fruit Company which had already embedded itself in the banana trade in Jamaica) controlled by American railroad constructor and entrepreneur Minor Cooper Keith. Earlier Keith stumbled into the banana trade virtually by accident. In 1872 Costa Rica defaulted on it’s bank loans and was unable to pay Keith for constructing the country’s railroad. In lieu of part of what it owed Keith, he was granted over 5% of vacant Costa Rican land. Accordingly the American used the land to establish banana farms alongside his newly finished railroad. The crops when yielded had a ready-made, on-the-spot transport line to carry the produce to port. Keith’s early banana experiments in Costa Rica proved a lucrative earner and paved the way for United Fruit’s later role as producer and exporter of the fruit. From that base in Costa Rica Keith the banana trader looked further afield in Latin America for other openings.
Monopoly, oligarchy? Other players in the tropical banana tradeAlthough classically monopolistic in its practices, United Fruit Co (UFCo) was not the only player (American or foreign) in the Central American/Caribbean banana game. In fact at the turn of the 20th century there was plenty of competition in bananas, in 1899 some 114 firms were engaged in importing bananas to the US via New Orleans [Davies 1990, cited in S Striffler et al, (Eds.), Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas, (2003)]. UFCo grew by acquisition, quickly adding 20 smaller banana export firms to its list of business holdings.
United Fruit’s main rival during this time was the Standard Fruit Company. This company was first known as the Vaccaro Bros & Co✧. The Vaccaros began by importing fresh produce – initially coconuts and then bananas – from Honduras. After establishing a beachhead in the region the company diversified into operating steamships✪ and eventually provided the ice for onboard refrigeration❅. In 1924 Vaccaros Bros reformed into the Standard Fruit Company (in 1926 renaming itself ‘Standard Fruit and Steamship Co)…during this period Standard Fruit and United Fruit maintained competitive relations with each other for the lucrative banana trade in New Orleans – the principal marketplace in the US for banana sales. Like its gargantuan rival United Fruit, Standard Fruit’s profound impact on the economies of Latin American countries like Honduras courtesy of the high degree of control it was able to exert over the supposedly sovereign governments, contributed to the perception of these nations as banana republics. Hondurus was particularly vulnerable to the Banana barons with its banana monoculture and economic reliance on a single export crop. In the 1960s Standard Fruit was acquired by the Castle & Cooke Corporation (which in 1991 was renamed the Dole Food Company). [‘Standard Fruit Company’,‘Vaccaro brothers’, Wikipedia entries].
United Fruit Co soon extended its tentacles (the Latin American press was fond of labelling the firm El pulpo – “The Octopus”) beyond the Caribbean littoral, establishing banana exporting concerns in Columbia, Panama, Spanish Honduras, British Honduras (Belize), Jamaica and elsewhere in the region. Everywhere it invested, UFCo would rely on its famous “dollar diplomacy” to induce the local elites to grant it concessions which allowed the company ever increasing monopoly control over the banana trade.
Rivalry with mutual benefitsIn addition to Standard Fruit, another US rival of United Fruit was the Cuyamel Fruit Company. Cuyamel started in transportation as the Hubbard-Zemurray Steam Ship Co and morphed into a large New Orleans-based agricultural corporation (see ‘Sam the Banana Man’ below). The three American companies in the Central and South American banana business (United Fruit, Standard Fruit and Cuyamel) were separate business entities, each in competition for bananas et al products from the same tropical region. And yet there was something slightly schizophrenic about the relationship between the three…concurrently with the earnest rivalry was the existence of a cartel-like cooperation between the companies – which was of mutual benefit financially, eg, being able to launch joint business efforts in advertising and in increasing banana agricultural outputs in Honduras. United Fruit Co’s dominant position in the triangle (always the senior player) facilitated this arrangement…it had both a 60% stake in Cuyamel and a 50% stake in Vaccaro Bros⊠ [Ralph Lee Woodward Jr, Central America, a Nation Divided (3rd ed. 1999), cited in ‘Cuyamel Fruit Company’ (Wikipedia entry].
‘Sam the Banana Man’Schmuel Zmurri was an immigrant from the Russian Empire (born in Bessarabia, in modern Moldova) who changed his name to Samuel Zemurray after coming to the United States. Zemurray was to become a major player and shaper in the banana republic phenomenon, a seminal figure who contributed to the massive imprint left on the tropics by American banana barons.
Zemurray, establishing himself in Honduras around 1908, was to have a career as a “recidivist Yankee intervener” that made him one of the most controversial figures in the Central American banana republics’ tainted and sorry history. When the current Honduran regime favoured the rival Vaccaro Bros over Cuyamel, Zemurray agitated to foment a series of coups against President Dávila. The first coup failed but Zemurray in 1911 having chosen former president Manuel Bonilla to replace the elected Dávila government, bankrolled two Americans (“soldier of fortune” Lee Christmas and New Orleans gangster Guy “Machine Gun” Molony) to overthrow Dávila. With the malleable Bonilla back in charge, Zemurray’s Cuyamel was soon the beneficiary of generous land and tax concessions [‘The ousting of the president of Honduras, 1911’, (Stephen Kinzer), www.libcom.org]. Zemurray’s unconscionable incursion into the domestic politics of an independent state by hijacking its political process was to set a dangerous precedent for other banana republics.
Zemurray’s company made deep inroads into the Honduran banana trade (Zemurray became universally known as “Sam the Banana Man”), but at great cost to the national sovereignty of the country and to the detriment of the local economy✥. In 1930 Zemurray was able to sell his company to United Fruit for $31.5M in stock, after a short retirement he returned to active banana involvement, managing to join the board of UFCo and eventually take the helm of it (CEO and president until retiring for good in 1951) [K Norsworth & T Barry, Inside Honduras, (2nd Ed. 1994), cited in ‘Cuyamel Fruit Company’ (Wikipedia entry)].
United Fruit “a state within the state” of Guatemala: another intervention by Zemurray in the banana republicsAlthough no longer UFCo president, Zemurray wasn’t quite finished meddling to gain a financial advantage for United Fruit, he had one last contribution to the destabilisation of Central American regimes. The Guatemala banana trade had long been one of United Fruit’s most prized possessions…from the early 1900s President Manuel E Cabrera’s cosy relationship with UFC saw him grant the company a 99-year concession in Guatemala. United Fruit’s role in Guatemala has been described as “a state within a state” [William Blum, cited in ‘1954 Guatemalan coup d’être’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. In 1953 Zemurray enlisted UFCo in a US State Department propaganda campaign to overthrow the left-leaning but democratically elected Guatemalan government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz. The campaign together with the active intervention of the CIA paved the way for a coup the following year which ousted Arbenz and replaced it with a military junta which immediately reversed Arbenz’s decision to expropriate a portion of the unused land owned by the United Fruit Co [‘Sam Zemurray’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The fallout from the 1954 coup – for which the contribution of Zemurray and UFCo was no small part – was long-term destabilisation for the Guatemalans. The country, through a succession of military rulers, descended into three decades of civil war, 200,000 deaths including genocidal outrages against the native population [‘Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past’, (Stephen Schlesinger), New York Times, 04-Jun-2011, www.nytimes.com].
United Fruit thrives in neo-colonial conditionsUFCo and Zemurray’s banana export and production triumph in the equitorial Americas owed in no small measure to the compliance of the countries’ political elites. In some instances, compliance, especially from right-wing authoritarian/military regimes, was bought. The neo-colonial charge against the banana republics and against UFCo as an employer, also concerned a claim of exploitative treatment of its labour force. In Part 2 I will focus on a case study of the United Fruit Company in one country which is instructive in detailing the pattern of how United Fruit went about securing and consolidating its “banana hegemony” in much of the region in the period.
PostScript: Banana WarsThe banana as a metaphor for the region lends itself to the pattern of American imperialist intervention in Latin America over the course of the 20th century. Coined by Lester D Langley in the early 1980s, the “Banana Wars” descriptor has been applied collectively to a sequence of ‘backyard’ US military occupations and police actions – these include the ‘1000 Days War’ (American intervention in support of Panamanian independence from Columbia/protection of US future interests in construction of the Panama Canal); the Spanish-American War (US invasion and occupation of Cuba and Puerto Rico); Dominican Republic (ongoing and intermittent occupations between 1903 and 1924); Nicaragua (an in/out pattern of occupation 1912-1933); the Border War with Mexico (1910-1919, including the occupation of Veracruz 1914); Haiti and the 1st and 2nd Caco Wars (occupation 1915-1934); and Honduras (seven interventions between 1903 and 1925). Aside from that, between 1869 and 1897 the US sent it’s warships a total of 5,980 times into Latin American waters to protect its national commercial interests [Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, The United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism, (2005)].
✱ in political taxonomy, ‘republics’ they may (nominally) be, but in practice most so-called banana republics are grotesquely dysfunctional ‘republics’, typically, thinly masking what effectively are dictatorships and or regimes of ruthless military juntas
✧ the founders being three Italian-American businessmen brothers from Sicily (and their brother-in-law)
✪ expansion of fleet ownership was achieved by buying surplus steamships at a discount…by 1935 Standard Fruit had 35 ships in operation
❅ ultimately earning company president Joseph Vaccaro the sobriquet “Ice King”
⊠ this was a characteristic stratagem of United Fruit’s upward trajectory in Central America…the stake-holdings in Cuyamel and Vaccaro’s enterprises in Honduras were an initial import foothold on the path to becoming a direct producer in its own right – when United Fruit later acquired its own Honduran plantations in Trujillo and Tela [Woodward]
✥ as a disadvantaged party in its business dealings with UFCo, Honduras was worse off than all other banana republics in that it was unable to either urbanise or diversify its economy beyond the banana industry (for which its equatorial location was ideal) [Norsworth & Barry]
A journey to Trinidad (that’s the one in Cuba, not the one also in the Caribbean Sea which is nearly always spoken of in the same sentence as ‘Tobago’) takes you right into the heart of azúcar country. The nearby Valle de Los Ingenios (‘Valley of the Sugar Mills’) housed the vast sugar estates of the 18th-19th centuries (three score and ten sugar cane mills remain in the three-fold Sancti Spíritus valley system). Sugar, one of the staples of the Cuban economy, and enforced slavery (facilitating its economical production) was the foundation upon which Trinidad’s great colonial wealth rested.
As for getting round the perimeters of Trinidad de Cuba and seeing as much as we could in the paltry two days we were there, we hooked up with the local walking tour service. I have done a string of free city walking tours on recent trips overseas (and rarely ever come away disappointed), so it was almost an obligatory thing for me to do the Trinidad walking tour through the casco histórico! First thing to take account of was the ancient cobblestones below our feet, irregular and uneven, and we were immediately conscious of the fact that we needed to tread with care…and at the same time avoid the hordes of people on the streets! One of the visuals that stood out straightaway was the countless great examples of Spanish Colonial buildings and houses all around the centre of town.
We got a two minutes on the spot lesson from the guide about the layout of the sprawling city and outskirts, the different barrios (neighbourhoods), consejos populares (villages), etc. The far-too-many-to-count casa facades we passed were uniformly pastel in colour – cream, baby blue, mauve and pink seem the most popular choices for the houses. A treat was grabbing a peak inside some of the tiendas (shops) as we passed, the highlight being shops with wonderful Trinidadian artworks (strikingly colourful paintings and bold and bright ceramics). The guide gave hints on where to buy gifts, and where to eat and drink the local food and spirits at reasonable prices! Underscoring the old charm of Trinidad are the archaic cobblestone roads everywhere we went…I noticed something puzzling about them – every afternoon water would stream down (occasionally rush down) the valleys in the middle of the cobbled laneways and roads. I wondered where the water was coming from (run-off from the casas?) and meant to ask our guide about it but forgot to!
Plaza Mayor
If you’ve just touched down in Trinidad this is the ideal place to start from and fan out and explore the ciudad antigua. The square is the hub of the colonial old town, a place where people congregate, relax, chill out, sit and connect to wi-fi – if you are lucky (and have a stack of patience!). Restaurant choices aplenty across the other side of the square (an accompanying cool mojito obligatory with all meals). The central section of the square comprises a four-part attractive garden setting with hedges and palm trees. Enclosing the individual gardens are white fences, with another outer fence made of white wrought-iron grilles surrounding them. Decorative statuettes and vases added to the cute appeal of the plaza gardens.
On one side of Plaza Mayor is the main cathedral (Iglesia de la Santísima Trinidad AKA Parroquial Mayor), this church is next to a set of steep, archaic looking cobblestone steps that lead up to the Casa de la Musica (Music House). People enjoy al fresco dining at the top while Cuban bands play and Salsa dancers strut their stuff here in the open air.
Plaza Mayor is also a place where you’re likely to see some of Trinidad’s impromptu artists and musicians performing in the square…on one extremely hot day I saw a “living statue” in (lack of) motion, the guy was dressed in heavy, bulky religious garb, looking like he’d was doubling for Brother Cadfael or perhaps an extra in the Da Vinci Code! Everybody else was in shorts and T-shirts, I don’t know how he could stand the searing humidity, his back was a mat of perspiration through his tunic. No sign though of any relief from divine intervention coming his way in the sweltering heat, notwithstanding his appropriate ecclesiastical attire! While in the vicinity, also worth a gander, just off a side street to the square, are a few specialist museums – notably the Museo Histórico Municipal, one exhibiting colonial furnishings and another colonial architecture.
Hora de la cena
Like anywhere popular to eat in Trinidad, Restaurante San José on Maceo does a brisk night-time trade, turning over a large quantity of diners quite rapidly. Part of San José’s popularity is because of the regard its fish and shellfish are held in…confronted with the temptation to have the lobster was too great, especially as they were going for a bargin $13 CUC each (and they weren’t small crustaceans either just quietly!). Before that, a nice appetiser to warm up for the mains was the patatas dulces fritas (sweet potato fries). While you wait for your food to arrive, they’re plenty to occupy your time, such as taking in the interesting wall decorations, and always in Cuba, there is the steady throb of background, mood music.
The first Levittown housing development on a former potato farm on New York’s Long Island (1947-1951) was seen as a ‘godsend’ by GIs returning from the war. Two-bedroom homes in the suburbs at a cost of only $6,990 with a minimal amount of money down (zilch down if you were a GI), seemed an opportunity too good to miss. The only catch was you had to be White as well as a veteran to get one! William Levitt’s planned housing development was intended for Caucasians only, restrictive covenants were inserted into sales contracts barring African-American families from membership of these new, model suburban communities.
Building comfortable White enclaves?
With Black veterans of WWII turned away from Levittown, Bill Levitt was forced to defend his exclusivist policy. Despite avowing (rather hollowly) that “as a Jew, I have no room in my heart for racial prejudice”, Levitt sought to justify his position on the grounds that a White-only community was best for business. He argued that if he sold “to one Negro family, 90 to 95 per cent of White customers would not want to buy into the community”. Levitt was clearly not prepared to be an agent of social change if it meant a diminution of business profitability…self-interestedly and rather lamely he protested that it was unreasonable to saddle one builder with “the entire risk and burden of a vast social experiment” (even though the particular “one builder” in this case had been recognised by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in America) [‘When the Niggers Moved into Levittown’: Review of David Kushner’s Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb, Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 63 (Spring 2009): 80–81; Schuyler, D. (2003), ‘Reflections on Levittown at Fifty’, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 70(1), 101-109]. The FHA (Federal Housing Administration) was complicit with Levitt and other developers in the perpetuation of the practice of segregation, despite its clear violation of federal housing laws [‘Levittown, New York’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.Wikipedia.org]. Little wonder then that African-Americans saw the housing market as tainted, a “symbol of racial inequality”✱.
ef=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/image-22.jpg”> The Myers[/cap
Levitt received a phalanx of criticism for the racially restrictive clause⍍…the NAACP (National Committee for the Advancement of Colored People) and the ACLU (American Civil Rights Union) campaigned against it, a Committee to End Discrimination for formed to specifically take on the task of fighting housing segregation. In 1957 a Black family moved into one of the homes in Levittown Pennsylvania⌖. After Daisy and William Myers (and their children) arrived in the Dogwood Hollow section of the estate, they were subjected to ongoing harassment and intimidation by White bigots nightly outside their home. Some Levittowners called in “professional supremacists”, the Ku Klux Klan to coordinate the protest (jeering crowds milling on the front lawn, cross burnings, Confederate flags, rocks thrown through the Myers’ windows, petitions to force the family out). After the local police failed to protect the family, the protesting crowds were eventually ended only after intervention by state troopers✫ [‘White Riot in Response to Arrival of First African American Family in Levittown, PA’, www.historyengine.richmond.edu; ’60 years later, the Levittown shame that still lingers’, (Jerry Jonas), Bucks County Courier Times, 12-Aug-2017, www.buckscountycouriertimes.com].
Desegregation of Levittown
Levitt resisted the criticism and made his third mass-produced settlement, Willingboro/Levittown in New Jersey, another Whites only community (no Blacks but it did permit White ‘ethnics’ – Hispanics/Latinos and Jews). By 1960 Willingboro had its first African-American family residing there (by 1970 it was 11 per cent Black). Only in 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, did Levitt come out and announce that Levittown housing developments would no longer be racially segregated. Pointedly this occurred at the same time as the federal government enacted the Fair Housing Act into law [Kushner].
Over the years many sociological studies and much cultural criticism has focused on the Levittown housing model. An early take on Levittown described the housing project in aspirational working class terms as “the dream come true of the skilled mechanic in the blue dungarees” [‘Levittown U.S.A.’, A. Miller, Phylon Quarterly, 19(1), 1st Quarter 1958, 108-112]. Many observers have portrayed Levittown as a double-edged sword…”Levittown embodied the best and worst of the postwar American story”, some saw Levittown’s achievements symbolising America’s can do” spirit, its ingenuity and entrepreneurship, but for many liberals it symbolised violent prejudice, unthinking conformity and race-based exclusion [‘Levittown: The Imperfect Rise of the American Suburb’ (C Galyean), US History Scene, www.ushistoryscene.com].
Sanitised homogeneity of Levittown
From the time of Levittown’s first outing in New York in 1947, some critics were concerned than the large-scale experiments in housing may turn into mass slums of suburban sprawl. If they weren’t thought of as slums, they were characterised as bland and unoriginal. Sociologist Lewis Mumford depicted the developments as comprising a “low-grade, uniform environment from which escape is impossible” [‘Suburban Legend William Levitt’, (Richard Lacayo), Time, 07-Dec-1998, www.time.com]. A common perception of Levittown from the outside looking in that has become generic is of an over-sanitised suburb consisting largely of identical housing [‘Levittown, New York’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Standardised houses produce standardised people was a popular view of critics at the time. Some went further and labelled Levittown a “social failure and an environmental disaster” [Steven Conn].
From an aerial or from a panoramic view, Levittown did leave itself susceptible to satire…the clear-cut “cookie-cutter” pattern of little boxes and white picket-fence wholesomeness invited comparisons with the world of the 1950s as portrayed on American television. The neighbourhood houses and their neat configurations resembled the sets of Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best: images of irenic and idyllic communities of harmonious middle class suburbia…in other words, they looked like the cruel parodies of the American dream detached from realities – as depicted on the small screen [Review of Diane Harris (Ed), Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania, (2010), (DR Contosa)].
Customising a Levittowner
The view of the Levittown landscape as fixed and immutable has been rejected by some observers who point out that the owners themselves were the agents of change and non-conformity…after they settled in some of the residents altered the nature of their tract-houses to suit themselves and their lifestyle – extending a standard utilitarian Cape Cod or a Rancher to express the individuality of their homes. They also converted car ports into garages or additional rooms for new children, and the like [Schuyler]. Furthermore, Richard Lacayo argues that Levitt homes were made to be customised, the original structures were basic and over time homeowners added features such as porches, dormers and new wings [Lacayo].
Un-Americanism, McCarthyism and Levitt
The formative days of the first Levittown projects coincided with the McCarthyist period of political witch-hunts aimed at exposing supposed communists within America. By a curious convergence of mutual interests, Senator Joe McCarthy joined up with fellow illiberal Bill Levitt in promoting the virtues of Levittown (“a model of the American way” McCarthy declared). In one of his incendiary speeches McCarthy equated public housing (Levitt’s competitors) with communism [‘The Levittown Legacy’, (Ellen Leopold), Monthly Review, 01-Nov-2000, www.monthlyreview.org]. Levitt returned the favour by vilifying anyone who opposed his segregationist practices as ‘communist’, linking Levittown to the McCarthyist cause, and by endorsing the Levittown way of housing as a more American and capitalist alternative to public housing [Galyean].
In 1968 Levitt sold Levitt & Sons to telecommunications goliath ITT for a cool $92M. Subsequent attempts by Levitt to replicate the glory days of Levittown in overseas housing projects (Nigeria, Iran, Venezuela) floundered, and then a big project in Orlando, Florida, also went “belly up”, with dire personal consequences for the realty developer. Levitt misused funds belonging to customers and from his charitable trust [‘Tough Times for Mr. Levittown’, (MT Kaufman), New York Times Magazine, 24-Sep-1989, www.nytimes.com]. The once great ‘King of Suburbia’ – whose multi-multi-million dollar business at its height was constructing 12 houses a day on its construction sites – died in debt, still dreaming of pulling off one more mega-housing triumph.
FN: By the late 1980s there were high taxes imposed on individual Levittown properties due to the absence of a commercial tax base. Levitt recognised, all-too belatedly, that this was a weakness of his developments (the estates were designed without adjacent industrial/commercial complexes)… which also deprived residents of a local employment source [Kaufman]. Another ironic twist for Levitt whose marketing mantra always invoked the affordability of a Levitt home, in 1988 homes in Levittown Philadelphia had a $200,000 price tag on them! [‘It Started With Levittown in 1947: Nation’s 1st Planned Community Transformed Suburbia’, (JF Peltz), Los Angeles Times, www.latimes.com]
PostScript: “Little Boxes”
The period from the mid/late Fifties to the early Sixties saw a heightening of criticism of Levittown (and its clones) in literary and cultural forms. US novels of the period presented a downbeat, unappealing and even bleak view of life in a Levittown style environment, especially John C Keats’s The Crack in the Picture Window and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. Social critic Keats wrote of the postwar suburban ‘solutions’, “find a box of your own in one of the fresh air slums”, Yates spoke of an era dominated by “a general lust for conformity”. The takeaway message of these works was that the tract-home buyer was entering a stultifying world of social alienation, the anonymity of suburbs, impersonal supermarkets, inane ‘mod’ gadgetry and mortgage servitude✜…bleak stuff indeed! To William H Whyte these were the “new package suburbs” whose residents (were) “transient, interchangeable cogs in the engine of corporate America” [Schuyler]. The critique of the Levitt house also extended to pop music of the day, Malvina Reynolds’ song ‘Little Boxes’ added a similar disparaging note to the Levittown commentary.
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✱ even after the removal of racial exclusion covenants in the 1960s, the 2000 Census revealed that Caucasian residents of Levittown, Bucks County, still comprised 98 per cent of the population
⍍ Kenneth Jackson has argued that the problem would have been avoided had Levitt simply made Levittown available to all from the start, he asserts that the demand for houses after the war was so great that White buyers wouldn’t have been put off by the prospect of having some Black neighbours [quoted in Schuyler]
⌖ it had been sold to the African-American couple by the home’s original owner (Levitt was legally powerless to prevent the re-selling of Levittown properties)
✫ the 2017 George Clooney movie Suburbicon is a fictionalised interpretation of the Myers Levittown incident
✜ the acerbic (other) Mr Keats followed up The Crack in the Picture Window with The Insolent Chariots (1958), a comparable hatchet job on the automobile and Americans’ problematic relationship with it
Postwar society – in America as elsewhere – was beset with a multitude of problems. Affordable housing was high on the agenda of priorities – servicemen returning from World War II and a new generation of Americans that would become known as the ‘Baby Boomers’ were about to come into the world. Due to preoccupation with the war and its drain on US domestic manpower, housing construction levels were well down at a time that birth-rate numbers were about to take off.
Into this scenario, at a most opportune time, walked the Levitt family, father Abraham and sons Bill and Alfred. Bill Levitt, who took over the family real estate development business from his father, saw a chance to meet the country’s pressing accommodation needs by mass producing houses at lower cost. Levitt and Sons, as the company was called, had already entered the field pre-war, initially successfully but had failed in its first foray into the high-volume sector✱. Venturing into postwar low-cost housing bore a certain irony for the Levitts – as they had began their career in property development during the Depression building and selling high-end, custom-made houses to upper middle class people (the Strathmore project in Manhasset, Long Island). Indeed, the years spent making and selling exclusive, upscale properties to the gentry of New York made the family rich[‘William Levitt Facts’, (Your Dictionary), www.biography.yourdictionary.com].
Levittown, New YorkThe first mass scale suburban project, commenced in 1947, was at Island Trees, a hamlet in the town of Hempstead (Nassau County, Long Island). 1,400 tract-homes were sold in the first three hours of the opening of the Island Trees estate sales office [‘Levittown New York’, Wikipedia Republished, http://wiki2.org], within four years the Levitts had built 17,500 homes in Hempstead. The company concentrated on small two-bedroom dwellings, predominantly ‘rancher’ or Cape Cod style, seventh-of-an-acre lots (750 square foot). These tract-houses as they are known in the trade were modest structures, for the most part pretty basic (a living room, a kitchen, but no garage, an unfinished second floor) and pressed fairly close together in rows. But they were (initially anyway) very reasonably priced as well, affordable to US veterans from the World War, Levitt’s initial target market (“the Levittown house was the reduction of the American Dream to an affordable reality” as historian Barbara Kelly described it). Each Levittown housing complex was divided into distinct sections.
A revolutionary approach to housingPrior to the advent of the Levittown model, house construction was done in a unitary fashion, a building company would work on a new home until completed and then move on to the next project (the average builder had been constructing only about four to five homes a year). William and Alfred Levitt✫, building on the mass-production experience of Californian builders, devised something radically different, a totally new division of labour to speed up the process dramatically. Construction was divided into 27 separate steps or operations, each worker or specialised team of workers would complete one step and then move to the next house to repeat the step there, and so on (for example one worker’s job would be the singular task of going from house to house bolting washing machines onto the floor all day!)[Schuyler, D. (2003), ‘Reflections on Levittown at Fifty’, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 70(1), 101-109. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27778531].
Everything on site was orchestrated to work seamlessly, the tradesmen were scheduled to arrive in a strictly planned sequence. Bill Levitt admired automobile tsar Henry Ford’s production methods and replicated them in what was an assembly line style of home construction. The comparison was widely noted, Time magazine called Bill Levitt “the Henry Ford of Housing” [Schuyler]. Others, only barely a little less grandly, styled him “the King of Suburbia”.
Vertical integrationKey to the spectacular success of Levitt & Sons (at its peak the company was constructing homes at the staggering rate of one every 16 minutes!), and its rapid prosperity, was the way it achieved a vertical integration of the industry…the company purchased its own forests in Oregon and started its own mills to provide the lumber it needed; a lot of the parts came in prefabricated; Levitt & Sons even made its own nails. It also purchased materials in mass quantities thus avoiding markups on prices paid [Schuyler]. By buying directly from the manufacturer, Levitt’s saved through cutting out the middleman in the process. Kenneth Jackson credited the Levitt brothers with “transforming a cottage industry into a major manufacturing process” [KT Jackson, Crabtree Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985)].
Integral to Bill Levitt’s cunning strategy for success was his exclusion of labour unions from his projects and his capacity to persuade lawmakers into softening industry regulations making Levittown easier to achieve [‘William Levitt Facts’]. Another huge advantage in boosting the success of Levitt’s projects was the securing of mortgage financing incentives from the federal government (veterans could buy into the estates with little or no down-payment) [‘Levittowns (Pennsylvania and New Jersey)’, (Suzanne Lashner Dayanim, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia), www.philadelphiaencyclopedia.org].
Levittown, Pa. ca.1959
Levittown, Pennsylvania
The second Levittown (commenced in 1952) was located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about 20 miles north of Philadelphia. The Levitt houses built had limited exterior variations – six types: the Levittowner, the Rancher, the Jubilee, the Pennsylvanian, the Colonial, the Country Clubber – but again they were moderately priced with low down-payments. At project’s end, 1958, a total of 17,311 homes had been built on the site [‘Levittown, Pennsylvania’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Growth and expansion of the prototypeEventually the Levittown concept of housing estates extended elsewhere – both far and wide. In Burlington County, New Jersey, Levittown Willingboro started in 1958, followed by Levittown Largo in Maryland, 1963, and two other Maryland communities, Bowie (1964) and Crofton (1970). As well, a Levittown in Puerto Rico was built in 1963, and two “Gallic Levittowns” in Northern France in the 1960s, Lésigny and Mennecy (both close to Paris)⍉.The Levitt covenantsWilliam Levitt, in the first instance at least, once he sold families a Levitt house, did not entirely leave them to their own devices. Owners had to comply with certain suburban covenants that he wrote into the contracts…the rules and regulations included no laundry to be done on Sundays and no fencing off of yards. Owners were required to keep their lawns mown and neatly hedged. Bill Levitt himself would drive around some of the communities on Saturdays to ensure that the residents complied with this edict – when he spotted properties that were non-compliant, he would despatch his own lawn-mowing team to do the job and bill the owners on the following weekday [‘Suburban Legend William Levitt’, (Richard Lacayo), Time, 07-Dec-1998, www.time.com].
There was another more controversial Levitt covenant, this one with grossly inequitable and far-reaching overtones. From the onset of the first Levittown, Bill Levitt refused outright to allow African-Americans to buy into the company’s housing estates. Levitt, a Jew, copped a lot of flak for his stance on excluding Black citizens, including Black veterans (see below FN re the dilemma of his Jewishness). I will detail this less edifying side of the Levittown phenomena in Part II of the blog.
Footnote: A “Gentlemen’s Agreement”:
‘Gentleman’s Agreement’, a lauded film of the day
William Levitt’s discrimination against Non-Whites in Levittown was preceded by a similar policy against his own race in the earlier, North Strathmore housing project. Despite being Jewish himself (and a generous benefactor of the state of Israel and an organiser of Jewish-American funding for Israel during the Six-Day War) Levitt in his business dealings would not buck the local practice of real-estate agents refusing to sell to Jews – the unspoken “Gentlemen’s Agreement” among Gentiles to discriminate against Jews [‘William Levitt Facts’].
rꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰꚰ
✱ building a 1,600-shack community in Norfolk, Virginia, which still had unsold units in 1950 [‘William Levitt’ Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
✫ William was overall the boss of the business as the financier and promoter, whilst Alfred created the mass production techniques, designed the homes and the developments’ layouts. Father, Abraham, pretty much early on took a step back, ceding the running of the enterprise to oldest son Bill. This allowed the elder Levitt (a horticulturist by training) free rein to pursuit his pet interest, taking charge of the Levitt projects’ landscaping
⍉ Levitt designed tract-homes can be found also in Buffalo Grove and Vernon Hills (Illinois) and Fairfax (Virginia)
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𓇽 see also the October 2021 blog Lakewood Park, Ca Housing Development, the West Coast Answer to Levittownon www.7dayadventurer.com Lakewood Park, a mega-sized, rapidly constructed Californian housing development in the 1950s—the brainchild of three Jewish American developers—operated what was effectively a (unwritten) covenant discriminating against non-white prospective home-buyers.
Felix the cat,
The wonderful, wonderful cat!(Popular theme song lyrics)
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❛ I made the cat and the cat made me! ❜~ Pat Sullivan
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The model for a certain cartoon mouse …
The best part of a decade before Mickey Mouse made his first appearance on a celluloid screen and then went on to establish himself as the international popular culture phenomenon par excellence, there was Felix the Cat. The parentage of Mickey Mouse is not a topic that has generated the same level of controversy as that of Felix, which over the last forty years has been a matter for much impassioned cross-Pacific conjecture.
BF – before Felix…Felix, the anthropomorphic black cat with the massive white eyes and the broadest of broad grins, was not the first animated cat to grace the screens of movie theatres. That honour went to a mouser called Krazy Kat, the conception of cartoonist George Herriman…first appearing as a comic strip character in the New York Evening Journal, Krazy Kat debuted on movie screens in 1916 in a silent short featuring the eponymous cat and his brick-throwing ‘frenemy’ Ignatz Mouse.
Master Tom, prototypeNot long after, Felix had his beginnings in the prototype form of Thomas Cat. In 1917 Australian cartoonist Pat Sullivan produced a short, animated silent film about a black cat, The Tail of Thomas Cat, through his own New York studio. By 1919 ‘Thomas Cat’ had morphed into ‘Master Tom’ in the short Feline Follies. After a follow-up entry (The Musical Mews) again starring Master Tom, Sullivan’s third short of 1919 (Adventures ofFelix the Cat) changed the name of the ‘Tom’ character to the name he would henceforth be universally known as – Felix. Despite the seemingly clear lineage between Thomas Cat and Felix, some American animation historians discredit the connexion, citing Thomas Cat’s non-anthropomorphised nature, the uncertainty of his fur colour, the fact that he loses his tail fighting a rooster without ever being able to recover it (cf. the difference with Felix who can magically transform his tail into other forms) [‘Felix the Cat – McGill CS’, www.cs.mcgill.ca].
The chief animator of Sullivan’s film studio was Otto Messmer, but because of Sullivan’s proprietorial role in the process of animation production it was Sullivan’s name alone that appeared on the credits of films (this was a common business practice in animation at the time), despite Messmer as principal artist conceivably doing a weighty share of the studio’s artwork. After Sullivan’s premature death in 1933 his relatives in Australia took ownership of Felix. It wasn’t until 44 years later, that Messmer in an interview with animation historian John Canemaker belatedly made his claim to have been the originator of the famous feline.
Conflicting stories of Felix’s originSullivan maintained all along that he was the creator – on a visit back to Australia in 1925 he told the Melbourne Argus newspaper that the idea for Felix had come to him when his wife brought a stray cat into Sullivan’s studio one day (as was her wont). On other occasions he said that the inspiration came from a Rudyard Kipling story, ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself’. For the name of his cartoon creation Sullivan explained that he had drawn on his native Antipodes… Australia Felix was a term in use from the 19th century to describe the western districts of the state of Victoria (also later the name of an Australian novel by Henry Handel Richardson). Another source for the cat’s name came from a contemporary fellow cartoonist – appearing in print in 1936 the cartoonist affirmed that Sullivan told him that he derived the name from a black West Indian-born boxer living and fighting in Australia called Peter Felix whom Sullivan was acquainted with (the animator being a big enthusiast of boxing) [Pat Sullivan – I made the cat and the cat made me’,www.vixenmagazine.com].
Messmer by contrast had a wholly different story of Felix’s ‘birth’ and evolution. He recounted to Canemaker for the latter’s 1977 documentary film that because Sullivan’s studio was busy at the time, he (Messmer) went away and by himself at home drew the figure that was to become Felix. He perceived of the mischievous black cat as a kind of animated Charlie Chaplin. Messmer explained that the name “Felix” was thought up by a Paramount Magazine journalist from the Latin words felis (cat) and felix (happy). Canemaker and other contemporary American animation historians have been undisguisedly dismissive of Sullivan’s creative contribution, backing Messmer’s claim, subscribing to the view that Messmer ‘ghosted’ Felix for Sullivan who was preoccupied with his entrepreneurial role (inexhaustibly promoting and marketing Felix to the world)✱.
Contesting FelixNot surprisingly the strongest argument for endorsing Sullivan as Felix’s true creator comes from Australia, the animator-cum-entrepreneur’s homeland. Australian cartoonists, including some who knew Sullivan, have drawn attention to a comment during an interview when he visited Sydney in 1925 (quoted in the local papers): Sullivan stated that his practice was to ‘do the “key drawings” and leave the rest to a staff’ [Vixen Magazine, op.cit.]. Moreover, the Australian Cartoonist Association have argued that the distinctive lettering style of Sullivan can be detected on the Felix artwork, eg, in Feline Follies (Felix’s first incarnation), the lettering used matches examples of Sullivan’s handwriting. Additionally, certain speech bubbles in the short uses expressions and terms which have distinctive Australian usage, especially ” ‘Lo Mum! “. Australian animators, argue that had Otto Messmer conceived and created the prototype Felix film, as he claimed in 1977, he would have used the traditional American form of shorthand for mother, ‘mom’ (not ‘mum’) and he would not have dropped the ‘h’ in ‘hello’ which is more characteristically Australian or British◰. [‘Reclaiming Felix the Cat in the Picture Gallery’, (Judy Nelson, Exhibition, 1-May to 7-Aug 2005, State Library of NSW, Sydney),www.pandora.nla.gov.au]
Animator Ub Iwerks drawing animated rodent extraordinaire, M Mouse ▶
Sublime collaborationsWhether it was Messmer or Sullivan who was the true creator of Felix we may never know for sure, given that the episode occurred around 100 years ago and both claimants have been long dead. For a very long time the reflected glory for the creation of the animal superstar even more famous than Felix, Mickey Mouse, was almost exclusively falling on Walt Disney. Only in a relatively recent period, historically speaking, has the role of animator Ub Iwerks been properly acknowledged. Today even the Disney Corporation (metonymically known as the Mouse House), more or less unequivocally recognises Iwerks as the real creator of the mouse. But this doesn’t diminish Walt’s integral role from the origin point in developing Mickey’s personality and traits (not to mention the story lines). Similarly with Sullivan and Messmer, the fairest course may be to attribute causation, Felix’s genesis and transformation to the screen, to what was quintessentially a collaborative effort between two creative individuals.
PostScript A: Felix, a template worth copyingOne green-eyed embryonic animator in the US in the mid-Twenties very much aware of Felix’s ascending star was Walt Disney. Disney’s earliest innovation in the field was his Alice Comedies where he inserted a human figure “Alice of Wonderland” into an animated landscape. As foil to Alice, the main animated figure in these shorts was Julius, a cat with a particularly strong resemblance to Felix…basically a clone of Felix [‘Felix the Cat’, (Ian Gordon), St James Encyclopaedia of Popular Culture (2002)]. Disney’s later followed up Julius with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (a product he ultimately lost creative control of) and then lucked in again, hitting the jackpot with Mickey Mouse…Oswald and Mickey were both different animals to Felix but again the physical similarities to the (original) Felix are there – albeit with reshaped faces and ears.
PostScript B: Felix, the image de jour to launch a new mediumFelix with his funny, all-too-fallible anthropomorphic ways (fond of a drink or two in ‘speakeasies’, given to making whoopee and his general hijinks and manic spurts in surrealistic situations)✪ suited the “Jazz Age” to a tee! [Michael Cart, ‘The Cat with the Killer Personality’, New York Times, 31-Mar-1991, www.nytimes.com]. Capitalising on Felix’s success on the big screen (upward of 150 animated shorts made in the 1920s), Sullivan introduced a comic strip version of Felix in 1923 (syndicated by King Features 1923-1967). Everyone wanted a piece of the famous celluloid feline, the US Navy’s Bombing Squadron adopted Felix as its insignia, his countenance was used as the logo for car dealerships, he was the mascot for the New York Yankees at one time and for many high schools [‘Felix the Cat’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The universal appeal of Felix made him the prime candidate to introduce television to Americans…in 1928 broadcaster RCA choose a papier-mâché doll of Felix as THE image for testing the new technology [‘The First Star of Television’, MZTV Museum, www.mztv.com].
PostScript C: A marketing bonanza
Felix as a commodity had an electrifying impact on the world of celebrity merchandising in the 1920s – the iconic image of the black cat popped up on toys, dolls, ceramics, postcards, cigarette cards, jigsaw puzzles, clothing, pencils, sheet music and so on (earning Sullivan an estimated $100,000 a year) [Dictionary of Sydney staff writer, Felix the cat, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/felix-the-cat, viewed 6th Oct 2018]
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✱ the generally accepted view of Sullivan’s character and behaviour, which was very far from exemplary, seems to have jaundiced the opinion held by some commentators (particularly Canemaker) as to the merits of the Australian animator’s achievements
◰ as Nelson et al have argued, these discrepancies in the case for Messmer have not been accounted for satisfactorily by American animation historians including Canemaker
✪ this said, Felix could also be contemplative at times, deep in thought, working things out, solving problems…a cat for all seasons!
Having visited the site of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the Museum that commemorates its triumphant outcome for the Cuban people, our appetite to learn more about “The Revolution” was piqued. The city of Cienfuegos was on our itinerary and as another saga of the war to liberate Cuba from a right-wing dictatorship with US mafiosi connexions was at hand in nearby Villa Clara province, a small detour was in order.The pueblo of Santa Clara is inextricably woven into the story of Ernesto Guevara and his victory in the decisive battle of the civil war against the Batista regime. Guevara or simply ‘Che’ – the image that launched a million T-shirts, and the man who signed many more million pesos’ worth of Cuban bank notes!✱ – is proudly remembered and commonly revered, especially in this part of Cuba, as two separate Santa Clara monuments testify.
The first is in the centre of the township itself, a monument to the final victory of the war (Battle of Santa Clara, 31st December 1958) when a Cuban battalion under Comandante Che derailed a train carrying government troops, ammunition and heavy weapons, intended to reinforce Batista’s embattled army in Havana.
A portion of the captured train still sits on the site, now part of a monument to the battle which clinched victory for Castro and the Cuban rebels. In Spanish the monument is called Monumento a la Toma del Tren Blindado (literally “Monument to the Taking of the Armoured Train”)
The other tangible tribute to the legendary Cuban revolutionary líder is more personal, not far from the city is Guevara’s sombre but impressive mausoleum (Mausoleo de Ernesto Guevara). The monument was originally conceived as a memorial to the charismatic maestro guerrillero who was executed and buried in the Bolivian jungle in 1967… thirty years later the Cuban government retrieved his exhumed body and returned it to Santa Clara. The remains of Che and 29 of his fellow guerrilla fighters are interred here in a large burial vault (in area a decent sized lounge room).
The mausoleum remains a popular place to visit for tourists as well as Cubans, there were several big tourist buses and umpteen dozen cars in the parking lot when our group visited. The immediately noticeable feature of the mausoleum building which is set down on a wide patch of land is the extra-large statue of Che. Cast in bronze, it is 22 feet high and characteristically depicts Che armed and dressed in army/militia fatigues. The statue officially goes by the somewhat ‘highfalutin’ title Ernesto Guevara Sculptural Complex (AKA Complejo Monumental Ernesto Che Guevara).
Security around the mausoleum entrance was pretty tight, more guards than you think might be necessary hovered around the entrance portal. We all lined up and were soon ushered in by a bevy of serious-faced officials and whisked out again fairly rapidly. There was not a lot to see inside in any case, it was dimly lit and unnervingly cold. We glanced at the photos of the 30 dead comrades on the wall and spotted a few pieces of Che paraphernalia on display – such as Che’s handgun (Czechoslovakian), his water canteen and field glasses.
There’s not much else to the complex (a lot of vacant space actually) but there is a gift shop (Tienda Artex) (opportunity to get that authentic “Che in classic Guerrillero Heroico pose” T-shirt on Che’s own turf!) and a restaurante/cantina. There’s another, official looking building close to the arched entrance to the shops but I couldn’t work out what it was used for.The museum maintains a strict prohibition on the taking of photos within the burial vault, so I didn’t even give a thought to trying to sneak a quick ‘Polaroid’ (even if I had one) – the officials, all wearing the same “not happy Juan” face, gave the impression they meant business!
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]
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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].
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✱ 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
🇲🇨 Monaco: millionaires’ playground on the western Mediterranean
The tiny hereditary principality of Monaco on the French Riviera/Côte d’Azur has long-held a reputation for being a playground of the rich and famous (thanks to its high cost of living and its tax laws)✱, in addition to being a micro-state with a high-profile royal family (The Grimaldis) whose capacity to attract publicity is grotesquely way out of proportion to the entity’s minuscule size and insignificant political importance. Monaco is also famous for its industries – gambling⊞, banking and tax avoidance. It is this last area of finance that was the crux of a brief 1960s confrontational episode in the country’s historical relations with its larger regional neighbours.
Hercule Harbour, Monaco
In October 1962 the French government of Charles De Gaulle imposed a blockage of Monaco’s main port. The prospect of an advanced Western European power threatening a tiny territorial enclave – possessing a microscopic gendarmerie and no army or navy – with force must have struck outsiders as a farcical situation…in reality the blockade stayed in place ever so briefly although it was not officially lifted until Easter 1963. The Franco-Monégaseque ‘Crisis’ was completely in the shadow of the terrifyingly real crisis occurring in Cuba at the same time, the international missile crisis standoff between the global Cold Warriors, USA and the Soviet Union [Fabien Hassan, ‘Lessons from history – The Monaco crisis from 1962-1963 and the emancipation of tax havens’Finance Watch, 27-Apr-2015, www.finance-watch.org].
The royal palace on “The Rock”
The nub of the conflict
Monaco’s historical practice of not imposing any direct income tax on its residents (including those migrating to the Principality from France) and having minimal taxes on business had a deleterious outcome for France – a significant loss of revenue for the French coffers. In this regard De Gaulle had a legitimate gripe against Monaco for letting wealthy French persons evade their tax obligations to the Tricolore Republic…this was especially galling to the French President as it was France that footed the entire bill for tiny Monaco’s national defence (plus forking out some other financial outlays as part of the two nations’ special relationship). At the time the French media was stridently doing its utmost to drum up national disaffection with the Monaco situation⊛.
⍍ Grace Kelly’s 1955 Hitchcock film made on location in the French Riviera that led to that momentous meeting between America’s “patrician pure-bred” star actress and Monaco’s bachelor monarch – and a subsequent change of careers and destinies!
Too much American influence in a French ‘pond’?
De Gaulle was also apparently concerned about the growing influence of Americans over Prince Rainier’s governance of Monaco…in so doing they were stepping on the toes of France, Monaco being clearly within the French sphere of influence (it also reflected De Gaulle’s wider antipathy to the ‘Americanisation’ of Europe!), a concern he harboured even before Rainier’s marriage to US film star Grace Kelly! Prior to that, Rainier had already engaged Americans as some of his closest advisers to assist him in his day-to-day duties and personal affairs✥. The 1962 political tensions between the two countries can be traced back to events in 1959, namely the Prince’s decision to suspend the Constitution (interpreted by France as a Monégaseque move towards securing US support) [Hassan, ibid.].
1950s Sister ‘coup’: Usurping Rainier
Apparently not long after Rainier ascended the throne (1949), his older sister, the Paris-born Princess Antoinette, tried to exploit a Monégaseque economic crisis at the time due to a series of reckless state loans…the Princess’ intrigues involved trying, unsuccessfully, to convince Monaco’s oligarchs that they should replace her (then) unmarried and childless brother with her legitimated son Christian as prince (with herself as regent until he came of age) [‘Monaco’s Machiavellian Princesses’, 27-Apr-2013, www.royalfoibels.com]. In the 2014 film, Grace of Monaco, to heighten the dramatic narrative of the movie, the episode of Antoinette’s attempted coup d’être (1950) is clumsily and inaccurately interwoven into the story of the 1962-63 crisis [Alex Von Tunzelmann, ‘Grace of Monaco – historically accurate? you’ve got some de Gaulle’, The Guardian, 4-Jun-2014, www.theguardian.com].
The tourist-friendly Grimaldi palace
Crisis averted…through compromise
In the end a compromise was negotiated with France so that French citizens living in Monaco for less than five years were now to be taxed – at French rates, and Monegasque businesses doing more than 25% of their business outside the Principality had to pay corporate taxes for the first time, with all the revenues going back to the Treasury in Paris. The Franco-Monégaseque compromise, with some revisions from time to time, is still in effect today [Hassan, op.cit.]
Footnote: Historical roots and etymological nomenclature curio
The name ‘Monaco’ derives from monos (single, alone) and oikos (house), conveying the meaning, a people “living apart” or in a “single habitation”. Monaco’s origins were as a Greek colony founded in 6th century BCE although the first inhabitants were Ligurians, an ancient Indo-European tribe – Monaco was absorbed into the Roman Empire, later invading Saracens gained control of the territory. Eventually it fell under the control of the seafaring Genoese. After one of these, François Grimaldi, disguised as a Franciscan monk, established a hold over “The Rock” in 1297, the independent status of Monaco has been periodically punctuated by the intervention of outside forces – viz. taken by France for a period in the 14th century and then retaken from 1789-1814, under Spanish protection briefly in the 16th century, and then under French protection for most other intervals of time since the Middle Ages.
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Monaco Palace ‘sideshow?’
PostScript: Personal impressions … less than overwhelming
When I visited Monaco in 2009 I was taken with just how French it was…hardly surprising given that the French Republic surrounds the tiny monarchy and French residents heavily outnumber the Monégaseque!❂ We were touring the south of France in summer and staying at Cannes, just a short drive down the road from the pocket-sized Principality. We had an early dinner at a great spot overlooking the harbour before popping into Monte Carlo to do the obligatory tourist thing of visiting the Casino (boring, bereft of atmosphere…major anticlimactic letdown that turned out to be!). Then on to the Grimaldi royal palace on “The Rock”. The take-away message I took from the royal seat of power was that it was rather akin to visiting the palatial residence of a comic-opera royal family, something along the lines of the fictional Ruritania or the Grand Duchy of Fenwick. I think the Lilliputian nature of Monaco, the sheer lack of size of the Principality adds to this notion. Monaco is less than two square kilometres, which is on the slim side for an average Sydney suburb, infinitesimally minute for a national entity – only Vatican City is smaller! One other thing that struck me on arrival at the Palace entrance and whilst strolling around its grounds, was the relative lack of security in existence (like there just wasn’t anything that important to safeguard!). The incongruous presence of odd vehicles and vessels from some sort of expeditionary enterprise within the grounds, suggesting a museum-like setting, did not reinforce an impression of a serious regal residence, say, as at Buckingham Palace. But the dubious significance of the Monégasque Principality aside, aesthetically, Palais du Prince, whilst not exactly Versailles in scale or opulence, nonetheless comprised several fine, stately buildings. The big chunk of rock the Palace sits on is a good place to take in wide views of the harbour, La Condamine with its flotilla of moored millionaires’ yachts, and of Monte Carlo across the Hericule. Tour over, we headed out of the grounds, through the tunnel to the coach taking us back to our Cannes hotel, feeling as if we hadn’t really ever left France, but had just visited a uniquely peculiar part with a slightly ‘Fantasyland’ feel about it!
The Mouse That Roared – a 1959 British satire about a fictional speck of a micro-state called ‘Grand Fenwick’ which declares war on the USA
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✱ a 2014 study revealed that 30% of Monaco’s population (around 38,000) were millionaires [‘One in Three is a Millionaire in Monaco: Study’, www.ndtv.com]
⊞ associated with Monte Carlo Casino, a fame reinforced by James Bond movies, but Monacoan gambling was long controlled by Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis before his eviction by Rainier
⊛ the French press zealously took it to extreme lengths, even calling for the AS Monaco football club to be kicked out of the French championship [Hassan, op.cit]
✥ An American clerical oblate, one Father Tucker, was front and centre in the body of royal advisers at the palace…one of his very specialised roles reportedly was to select suitable, available Catholic girls for the very eligible bachelor prince, ‘Who is Father Francis Tucker in “Grace of Monaco”? This Priest Played an Interesting Role in History, Bustle, 26-May-2015, www.bustle.com
❂ only around 22% of the Principality’s population are native Monégaseques, about 47% are French or of French descent and 18%, give or take, are Italian, [‘Countries and their Cultures Forum – Monaco, www.everyculture.com/Ma-Ni/Monaco.html]
❝When counterfeiting was artisanal,
It didn’t bother us much,
Now it’s become industrial,
And we’re frankly very worried❞.
~ Adrian de Flers, Comité Colbert
(An association of French couturiers and perfumers dedicated to “promoting the concept of luxury”)
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Go to any of the world’s tourist hotspots today, anywhere on the international tourist trail in fact, and check out, say, the historical centre of that city and it’s inevitable that you will run into a tsunami of vendors with stalls and shops chock full of knock-offs of designer goods…everywhere you go locals flogging pirated copies of fashion label textiles, shoes, bags, electronic goods, homewares, you name it. And of course there will always be a plethora of takers among the ranks of Western tourists, eager to take advantage of the “great deals”. For some the shopping bonanza may even supersede the profoundly more meaningful chance to engage with different cultures, histories and cuisines around the globe.
The therapeutic springs of the limestone Travertines
Many shopkeepers and retailers in tourist areas no longer bother trying to conceal the faux nature of their merchandise. At the beginning of this year while in Mexico City I was strolling through the Chinatown section of town and came upon a shady looking electronics kiosk pop-up that was selling digital devices labelled as “Clon Samsung”, openly heralding the cloned nature of the product! In Turkey at a small roadside market set up on the outskirts of the famous and unique natural wonder, the Pamukkale Travertines, a prominent banner proclaims in unmissable bold, large, capitalised letters: GENUINE FAKE ROLEX WATCHES FOR SALE!✱ In the less developed world knock-offs are a way of life and a way of commerce – part of what is sometimes blandly described in official television news circles as the “informal economy”, or in old-speak, the black market!
In 2011 the president of Mexico’s Confederation of the National Chamber of Commerce, Services and Tourism stated that the yield from the sale of counterfeit consumer goods in the country each year is US$75 million, greater than the combined income earned by Mexico from oil, remittances and tourism! (and growing at an exponential rate since that date) [Cheryl Santos, ‘a look at the colors and styles of Mexico City’s bootleg fashion markets’ (7 May 2016), www.i-d.vice.com].
Resisting everything including temptation
It does seem, from the standpoint of your average “Joe or Jill” Western tourist, that the impulse to turn the overseas travel excursion into a shopping junket, the chance to replenish that flagging winter wardrobe with a raft of cut-price bargains, is increasingly the fashion de jour when O/S. Third World imitations of high quality Western merchandise are sold at a fraction of the price and increasingly look passably (or at least remotely) like the real thing. So, who doesn’t want to end up back at his or her home airport knee-deep in inexpensive knock-offs?
Who? Well, me for one! Frankly for one thing I’ve never seen the sense of collecting a whole bunch of extra garments and accessories on route that I’ll have to squeeze into my already bulging luggage and then lug around to every single hotel, coach and airport for the entire duration of the trip, it flies in the face of my simple and practical philosophy of “always travelling as light as possible”. Besides, with the “El Cheapo” stuff you’re not buying quality that’s going to last any decent amount of time!
So, I definitely don’t contribute to the slim profit-margins of the purveyors of fake consumer goods in Third World tourist traps… but souvenirs are another matter, but even there I chart a moderate course. From the first time I ventured overseas (thank you CC!), my ambitions went no further than picking up a few souvenirs or trinkets when I got the chance, something that I would in years hence associate positively with the exotic places I had visited. Occasionally I have bought a T-shirt or a cap perhaps (small items, easy to pack and carry) and of course, out of necessity a few little gifts for the people back home. For me, the odd souvenir is merely an auxiliary memento, something tangible to connect with the mass of photos I would invariably take in each place I visited.
Fridgelandia
Fridge magnet overload!
In the past I admit to having had a bit of a mania for collecting fridge magnets on my travels…yes the proverbial, ultra-kitschy humble fridge magnet! But eventually every available space on the magnetic part of our fridge got consumed, so rather than buying a bigger fridge (a real admission of fridge magnet OCD!), I simply switched to buying other small transportable items in the markets. Paintings, attachable plates and small, decorative wall satchels, easily filled the souvenir void (and eventually the lounge room walls too!)
Sometimes when on the lookout for a token souvenir or two on a trip, I did enjoy the ‘theatre’ of pitting my negotiating skills (such as they are!) against a seasoned vendor with “home ground” advantage in the markets…trying to haggle them down a few shekels did produce a momentary thrill in me. The money saved was absolutely inconsequential in the context of the relative luxury of the First World from which I come – I was simply engaging in the tourism game (when in Egypt, do as the Egyptians, etc). I’m can happily say that over the years of travelling I grew out of this self-indulgent urge to barter, that fleeting and insignificant élan I used to get has well and truly worn off.
Henpecked!
On the trail of the fabulous “pecking hens” of…Cairo, Bogotá, Cancun, Zanzibar, Kolkata, etc.
Thirty years ago a friend brought me back a gift from Columbia or Venezuela (I forget which)…I really appreciated the object’s simplicity and understated charm. It was a plain wooden toy, a little haphazardly made, in the form of a bunch♠ of pecking hens attached by string to a sort of ping-pong bat. They were made simply by (no doubt peasant) hand, unadorned, without any pretensions to being anything like factory-finished and polished to perfection. Basic but guaranteed to capture the attention of a restless two-year-old for hours. I was so taken with the pecking hens I have in turn bought them myself as gifts for friends on subsequent tours where I have seen them (Egypt, Mexico, etc)◙.
Chico Senõr Potter
Finding ‘Choló’ Potter but where is ‘Falsò’ Tintin?
Finding myself in Lima one time and jaded from having done all the main historic hotspots like the creepy monastery catacombs and Huaca Pucliana, I made for Miraflores (tourism central) and checked out the various souvenir markets. One that caught my attention was called the Indian Market (strange that it was called that, I thought the term ‘Indian’ wasn’t considered PC here any more!). The market’s stalls were packed with arts and crafts items and other merchandise like knitted “V for Vendetta” masks and knock-off T-shirts which appropriated and ‘Peruvianised’ symbols of Western popular culture (eg, ‘Cholo’ Potter working his juvenile wizardry in the Andes and that “All-Peruvian” dysfunctional family, the ‘Cholisimpsons’!).
Where is Tintin’s Inca prisoners T-shirt?
Seeing these made me think of the Tintin character…on earlier overseas trips I had discovered Tintin T-shirts which related to a number of Herge’s cartoon books about the sandy-haired boy reporter’s adventures all over the world (in China I found Tintin in Tibet and Les Adventure de Tintin, and in Turkey, Tintin in Istanbul. I knew one of the stories in the famous series was set in Peru (Tintin and the Prisoners of the Sun), so I asked some of the vendors if they had the Tintin T-shirt for Peru…this mainly met with uncomprehending expressions of bewilderment…one guy however was curious enough to quiz me about this ‘mysterious’ Tintin person. After I explained how world-famous the fictional character was and showed the stall-holder what he looked like, the guy confidently predicted that if I come back in six months time he would have the Peru Tintin T-shirt in stock. I didn’t for a moment doubt that he probably would, considering we were in Peru! And I thought, I bet he wouldn’t be concerned by the trifling matter of copyright, it would be the least of things encumbering him in making it happen!
0nly a fiver! Not worth the effort to copy!
Brother, can you knock me up a $100 note?
Lima is one of my favourite cities for counterfeiters. The first time I went into the city centre I was puzzled why there was so many backyard style, old-fashioned printing presses, especially concentrated it seemed in one particular street that runs off Plaza San Martin. It all made more sense when I found out some time later (when back home) that Lima was “the centre of the universe” when it comes to the meticulous painstaking, serious art of counterfeiting – particularly adept at churning out fake US$100 bills, known locally as a “Peruvian note”. Peru tourist tip stating the “bleeding obvious”: check your change very, very carefully!
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PostScript: Dodgy Juliaca – from brand piracy to smuggling
The epidemic proportions of counterfeiting is bad enough, then there’s out-and-out robbery! Standing in the woefully small and threadbare Aeropuerto Juliaca one day (southern Peru), I observed how many Peruvians, catching the domestic flight to Lima (and points further north), were checking in TV sets and computer hardware as luggage. On board one guy in the seat across the aisle from me had a new 33″ LED flat-screen (in its box) which he had brought with him as carry-on luggage…somehow he managed to jemmy it into the overhead compartment! He, like so many other Limeños, had made the 1,680 km round trip to Juliaca and back to buy consumer goods at a price you wouldn’t dream about getting them for in Lima.
The reason why Juliaca lures (long-distance) shoppers in droves is that the dusty, smoggy southern city is the hub of a prosperous smuggling trade…every year over a billion dollars worth of illicit goods including cocaine and other substances, gold, cigarettes, petrol, clothing, home and electronic appliances reaches Juliava predominantly via Lake Titicaca border with neighbouring Bolivia.
Simple unpretentious craftsmanship from the developing world
✱ at least these bootleggers get credit for candidly exhibiting a sense of humour, a self-effacing one moreover
♠ a peep, a brood?
◙ a second Columbian second gift from my friend was similarly imbued with charmingly simple inventiveness – a Velcro cloth- clown with a weighted head allowing it to tumble head over apex down a sofa whilst clinging to the material
The earliest tales of traditional Middle Eastern folk tales, commonly subsumed under the umbrella title of One Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights are thought to have have come from the Indian Sub-continent and Persia. The collection was built upon in piecemeal fashion in other Islamic lands throughout the Ottoman Empire, then at some point the compiled stories were translated into Arabic under the title Alf Layla wa-layla (or The Thousand Nights) [‘One Thousand and One Nights’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
The Arabian tales reached Western audiences in book form and ultimately the (English language) cinema courtesy of the work of many western scholars over many years – of which British explorer and orientalist Sir Richard Burton was but one important contributor, not to overlook the work of Henry Torrens the first translator of the 1001 Nights from Arabic to English⊙.
Hollywood first visited the “Arabian Nights” world for subject matter early on during the silent era…including the related fascination with Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik character, but it wasn’t until the 1940s that it became a regular feature of Hollywood cinema✳. By the early 1950s the popularity of the sub-genre had passed its high-water mark and pretty much tapered off after that point. Subsequently Hollywood has shown only sporadic interest in the sub-genre.
‘Sword of Ali Baba’ (1965): Robin Hoodesque Ali
Cinema’s (especially Hollywood’s) harvesting of the “1001 Nights” for script material has been restricted to a handful of the better known stories, predominantly Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin’s Magic Lamp and the frame narrative of the storyteller Shahryar and Scheherazade. In typical eclectic Hollywood style, filmmakers have “cherry-picked”, incorporating several of the Arabian Nights story narratives into the same film…with the character of Ali Baba generally given the predictable “Robin Hood” treatment, depicted as a liberator redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor!
1940 British production values
1940, The Thief of Bagdad: The spark for a steady stream of American “Arabian Nights” films♤
The 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad (made in the UK but distributed internationally by American company United Artists) seemed to be a catalyst for the “Arabian Sands of the Desert” film. Itself a remake the 1924 silent flick with the same title starring Douglas Fairbanks Snr, the 1940 Thief of Bagdad was British made but completed in California because of the disruption of Hitler’s War in Europe. The British Thief of Bagdad had high production values, a big budget and technical innovations…Technicolour and the first significant use of bluescreening in films; elaborate sets and costumes; high calibre acting and top-notch British filmmakers Alexander Korda and Michael Powell.
Low-budget Arabian adventure flicks with a cast of exotics
The box-office and critical success of The Thief of Bagdad provided an impetus to Hollywood studios to try to cash in on its success. Columbia eventually responded with its own Arabian A-picture 1001 Nights (1945) [‘A Thousand and One Nights/1001 Nights’ (1945), www.1000misspenthours.com], but the Forties through to the early Fifties saw a spate of mainly B-flicks on the Arabian Nights theme. In essence these were blatantly escapist romantic/adventures which rehashed Arabian stereotypes through mainstream American eyes (see PostScript). These Middle Eastern adventures provided a new (exotic) setting and new material for studios to feed a public perhaps feeling a bit jaded from a surfeit of Westerns (“cowboys and indians” films). They were also a fresh alternative to the string of World War 2 pictures and historical costume dramas being churned out of Hollywood.
‘Arabian Nights’ (1942)
Universal Pictures in particular took to the sub-genre with gusto, casting exotic types of players to headline these movies, eg, using and re-using the likes of Dominican Republic born Maria Montez, Mysore born Sabu and Vienna born (of Turkish and Czech Jewish origins) Turhen Bey in US Arabian B-pics, starting with Arabian Nights (1942). This three-piece ensemble was always accompanied by the distinctly un-exotic, “All-American hero” Jon Hall! Universal’s approach was usually to alternate their adventure locales – a standard Arabian Nights pic would typically be followed by a “South Seas island adventure” (almost invariably with the same “front four” and with titles such as White Savage and Cobra Woman) – just in case the punters were getting tired of the studio’s fixation on all those dudes in flowing robes and endless sand hills!
‘Sinbad the Sailor’ (1947): D Fairbanks Jnr doing his best “Errol Flynn impersonation” – Sinbad as romantic swashbuckler!
Many of the top male stars in Hollywood had a stab at playing the swarthy Arabian hero role during the sub-genre’s heyday…Ronald Colman in Kismet (1944); Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, following in his illustrious father’s swashbuckling footsteps in RKO’s Sinbad the Sailor (1947); Rock Hudson in The Golden Blade (1953); Jeff Chandler in Flame of Araby (1951); Tony Curtis (teaming up with Piper Laurie always outfitted as a harem girl) in The Prince who was a Thief (1951) and The Son of Ali Baba (1952). On the female lead side, Universal and United Artists gradually moved from using Dominican Montez to Canadian brunette Yvonne De Carlo as its main Arabian princess/heroine in films like The Desert Hawk (1950) and Fort Algiers (1953)◈.
Columbia’s foray into the “Arabian Adventureland”Columbia Pictures maintained a sporadic interest in the sub-genre. It made three adventure features over a 19 year span around the heroic character of Sinbad, each heavily imbued with fantasy elements. In this series comprising The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), Sinbad, played by three different actors, all have to confront and triumph over all manner of malevolent mythical creatures (dragons, gigantic birds, supernatural monsters, etc) with the odd, nefarious wizard or grand vizier thrown in along the hero’s journey.
“Arabian Nights” meets “Sword-and-Sandals”
By around 1960 sword-and-sandal epic films—sometimes called Peplum films—were in vogue especially in Europe (see article ‘Review of The Epic Film’, March 2015 blog). At the centre of the “Sword-and-Sandal” flick was the invincible strongman-hero who would typically flex his massive muscles and battle Greek, Persian, Egyptian, Assyrian or some other despot from a mythical land. In a merging of Classical and Arabian adventure motifs, studios would occasionally reassign their contracted stars of “Peplums” to “1001 Nights” pics…so in the 1961 Italian made Il Ladro Di Bagdad) bodybuilder Steve Reeves trades his Classical Greek white tunic for some robes, a turban and a scimitar!
X-rated ‘Arabian Nights’, the Pasolini Arabesque
Continental “Arabian Nights”
Enthusiasm for Arabian “desert and minaret” films was by no means restricted to Hollywood film sets and the US, nor did the sub-genre entirely disappear after the 1950s. Among the subsequent efforts there was The Conqueror of the Orient, a 1960 Italian adventure flick shot in the De Laurentiis Studios in Rome; Shéhérazade, a 1963 French production with Anna Karina; Captain Sindbad (1963) an independent production starring Guy William’s (better known as TV’s Zorro) was made in Munich. And of course there was the sexed-up, X-rated Continental version of The Arabian Nights (1974) by the always different, always polemical and confronting Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini – the third in his trilogy of takes on the greats books of the world literary canon (following The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales).
Sub-continent Hindi, Bengali and Tamil “Arabian Nights”
Considering that the South Asian Sub-continent played a formative part as an early contributor to the compilation of Arabian folktales, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that Indian cinema had embraced the Arabian Nights sub-genre. The Wadia brothers made Alibaba Aur 40 Chor in Hindi/Urdu in 1954 (remade in 1966 by Homi Wadia). Additional entries from India include Alibabavum 40 Thirudargalum (‘Alibaba and the Forty Thieves’), a 1956 Tamil-language “fantasy-swashbuckler” and a Bengali version of the Ali Baba story, Ali Baba and his Wonderful Lamp (1957).
Mr Magoo’s ‘1001 Arabian Nights’ animated feature
“1001 Nights”, longevity in animation
The one movie genre where the Arabian Nights movie has achieved real staying power and ongoing popularity has been in animated feature films. There has been numerous attempts at telling the Arabian tales through animation on the big screen. In the US, Columbia led the way with its 1959 1001 Arabian Nights, very loosely based on the Arab folktale of Aladdin, but essentially a vehicle for the popular, myopic TV cartoon character Mr Magoo. The big box-office inroads in Arabian Nights animations were made by those that came later… especially the Disney classic, eg, Aladdin (1992), which spawned successful sequels, Aladdin 2: The Return of Jafar (1994) and Aladdin and the King of Thieves (1996). Hanna-Barbera also produced its comic cartoon critters take on “The Book of the 1001 Nights” with Scooby-Doo! in Arabian Nights (1994, made-for-television). Another in the animated category was the Indian/US co-production, Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists (2000).
Aladdin, he of the lamp with remarkable transformative powers, has been well served cinematically in animation features, viz a Soviet (Russian) fantasy version of Volshebnaya lampa Aladdina/Aladdin’s Magic Lamp in 1966; a French version, Aladin et la Lampe Merveilleuse/Aladdin and His Magic Lamp in 1970. There has even been a Japanese manga anime feature on the 1001 Nights theme, Doraemon: Nobita’s Dorarabian Nights (1991).
PostScript: Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of Middle Eastern Muslims
❝(Aladdin) from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam, where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face. It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.❞
~ opening song from the original theatrical release of Disney’s 1992 Aladdin (due to protests Disney subsequently modified the offending lyrics but kept the ‘barbaric’ reference✤)
The bulk of Hollywood movies like those above have resorted to over-simplified, usually demeaning, representations of Arabs and of the Arab world回. Lebanese-American academic Jack Shaheen pioneered research in this area, unearthing the extent to which Hollywood filmmakers manipulated the images and perpetuated orientalist stereotypes on the screen¤. So, in the typical 1001 Nights movie, we get totally formulaic story-lines which have become an established trope in the trade…the (often eponymous) hero suffers an injustice (imprisonment, exile, etc) at the hands of an evil cabal of usurper sheiks/caliphs (aided and abetted by greedy merchants who covet all the wealth and power for themselves). The princely hero recovers and ultimately overthrow the tyrant/regime, and in the process of course wins the beautiful, entrapped princess!
The Harem Girls’ pool shot in the 1942 film
The films are usually decorated with an obligatory harem of young, gorgeous and seemingly empty-headed girls lounging round doing nothing, occasionally belly-dancing or reclining in a pool (kind of your Arabian equivalent of the bikini girls in the 1960s beach movies). Universal’s Arabian Nights for example is full of sexy, seductive veiled dancers. Not exactly Islamic orthodoxy here! Sightings of the Taj Mahal in the 1942 film also illustrates how Hollywood mangles geography in the Arab World…the same goes for history, many plots involve ahistorical scenarios, eg, in the 2000 Arabian Nights miniseries the 8th century AD narrator recounts stories in which 17th-18th century muskets are in use [Arabian Nights (miniseries), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wiki.org; ‘Veils, Harems and Belly Dancers’, Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, (Arab American National Museum) www.arabstereotypes.org].The settings for the movies are equally formulaic – bustling bazaars with narrow, crowded alleys full of pickpockets, cardboard palaces that look like flimsy, fake Alhambras. Genies, flying carpets, robotic guards – a scene of frivolous adventure and fantasy. Outside of the city everything is amorphous desert, endless sand hills punctuated by outposts of tents and a caravan of camels❦ [‘Ancient Egypt and Desert Landscapes’, Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, (Arab American National Museum) www.arabstereotypes.org].
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⊙ the most popular of the 1001 Nights tales, and the most utilised by movie-makers – the Voyages of Sinbad, Aladdin and his lamp, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves – were not part of the original collection of stories but were added by the French translator Antoine Galland in the 18th century
✳ I would hesitate to describe the “Arabian Nights” movie as a genre in itself, it would be more correct to call it a sub-genre, in the same way that road films and biopics are sub-genre films. Arabian Nights films are sub-genres, usually of the genre of Adventure or Adventure/Fantasy (occasionally Adventure/Comedy)
♤ Americans insist on the spelling ‘Bagdad’, rather than the traditional Anglo/Commonwealth preference for ‘Baghdad’…just as they prefer ‘Sinbad’ rather than ‘Sindbad’, as it is sometimes rendered
◈ movies such as Fort Algiers also cross-over into related-type territory, the North African Bedouin/French Foreign Legion desert film
✤ the Disney animated version makes a further sin of omission common to cinematic portrayals of the character Aladdin – making him a boy of Arab appearance. One of the few screen adaptations to heed the textual evidence which indicates that Aladdin is a Chinese boy is the 2000 Arabian Nights miniseries, casting a Chinese-American in the role
回 Hollywood has shown itself to be notorious at marginalising “the Other” on-screen, note the very strong parallels between its characterisations of Arabs/Muslims and of Native American ‘Indians’ and Mexicans
¤ Shaheen spent decades scrutinising not just the Arabian Nights movies but all Hollywood films and television that dealt with Arabs and Muslims, concluding that Hollywood depicted Arabs in overwhelmingly negative terms – as bandits, as duplicitous, naive, rapacious and malevolent people of a savage, nomadic race (and after 9/11 in particular, as one-dimensional terrorists) [JG Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilified a People (2001)]
❦ Hollywood productions reinforce the European orientalist construct, as identified by Palestinian scholar Edward Said, reducing the Orient to no more than “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences”
Within the world of macropolitics, the realm of large-scale political entities, the urge by some within the whole to secede has always been a recognisable element of those societies. During the last half century Australia as elsewhere has witnessed the emergence of individuals or small groups of people wanting to break away, for varying reasons, and go it alone.
The actions of micronations✻ or “would-be” micronations (sometimes called “model countries”) have been motivated by a host of varying reasons. These include genuine secessionist aspirations, environmental protests, a sense of grievance and financial motives. Quite a few seem to be specifically humorous in intent. Some micronations are just left-field wacky, like Asgardia, a Russian initiative which seeks to launch satellites into space to found a “real nation” recognised by the UN (and therefore, it claims, protect Earth from the threat of asteroids, solar storms and space junk)[1].
▲ The ‘border’ bridge between Vilnius & Užupis
Reactions of the periphery to the metropolitan centre have prompted the rise of quasi-anarchist communities purporting (seriously or less seriously) to be outside the jurisdiction of that same central authority…two such European instances of this are Freetown Christiana in Copenhagen whose advocates proclaimed autonomy over a small district of the city in 1971 and an established open drug trade (tolerated by the Danish authorities until 2004); and Užupis (Užupio Res Publika), a tiny enclave within Vilnius, described perhaps somewhat romantically as a “modern manifestation of a bohemian Free State”[2]. Whereas Freetown strove for a kind of anarchist autonomy, the unrecognised “Republic of Užupis” adopted all the trappings of a sovereign state (flag, currency, politicians, anthem, etc) but uncertainty remains whether the Užupis entity is “intended to be serious, tongue-in-cheek, or a combination of both”[3].
▲ The Prince of Hutt R Province
His Royal Hutt River HighnessOne recurring theme of micronationhood including in Australia has been the singular protest against the state (or against the local authority). Leading the way in this (chronologically at least) is Prince Leonard and his self-declared Principality of Hutt River. Leonard Casley was an unremarkable wheat farmer in rural Western Australia in 1970 when a dispute with the state of WA over the wheat production quota set him on a course of (declaring) succession from Australia. ‘Prince’ Leonard adopted royal titles and garb for himself and his family and the Hutt River Principality grew into a tourist attraction. Casley’s failure to comply with his taxation requirements resulted in a Commonwealth prosecution in 1977 which the prince, increasingly behaving like Count Rupert of Mountjoy✪, responded by declaring war on Australia![4].
The Hutt River WA prince, after easing himself into the unfamiliar mantle, like other Micronation ‘monarchs’ enthusiastically set about establishing the tourism potentiality of the novel enclave in the Western Australian bush…HR Province began issuing ‘royal’ stamps, ‘legal'(sic) currency and passports (described by the Council of Europe dismissively as “fantasy passports”)[5]. In 2017 Prince Leonard now a nonagenarian ‘abdicated’ in favour of his son, the altogether less regally sounding ‘Prince’ Graeme.
▲ King Paul with his court (Source: News Ltd)
The principality of the suburban quarter-acre blockSome breakaway entities and would-be sovereign states have arisen from the most trivial of domestic matters, eg, Mosman artist and art school principal Paul Delprat founded the Principality of Wy as a consequence of his local Sydney council’s refusal to grant permission for a residential driveway (a dispute lasting over 20 years!)[6]. Presiding over his ‘kingdom’ which comprised in area one suburban block, ‘King’ Paul, possessed of a theatrical bent and a large supply of whimsy, has warmed to his new status, naturally going the “whole hog” with full regal fancy dress, pomp and ceremony!
Global open borders orchestrated from the NSW South West SlopesGeorge Cruikshank together with his cousins started up his own micronation whilst still a schoolboy in Sydney. Known as the Empire of Atlantium ‘Emperor George II runs it from Reids Flat¤, 344km inland from Sydney…the 0.76 square kilometre province has its own post office, government buildings, currency, national anthem and monuments (ie, a small white pyramid and obelisk in the micronation’s Lilliputian-sized capital). What marks Atlantium out from other micronations is its espousal of liberal, progressive values – described by the Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations as serious in its aims and “a refreshing antidote to the reactionary self-aggrandisement of so many micronations”…a “secular humanist utopia”[7] George is also a bit atypical as ‘micronationals’ go as his separatist impulse derives not from a specific beef with local authority but from genuine idealism. Emperor George advocates the international freedom of movement and other socially progressive goals. The Empire claims in excess of 3,000 ‘citizens’ hailing from various parts of the globe – all signed up online.
▲ A Great Britain strawberry patch in Sth Australia!
The strawberry fields United KingdomOne of the more exotic if not outright wacky secessionists in Australia was Alec Brackstone. English migrant Brackstone, alarmed at the prospect (as he saw it) of Australia’s drift toward republicanism, founded the Province of Bumbunga in rural South Australia in the 1970s. The ultra-monarchist, self-appointed governor-general of the breakaway mini-state, planted thousands of strawberry plants in the pattern of a huge scale model of Great Britain (A++ for loyalty/subservience to the Crown!) The Bunbunga Province also issued Cinderella stamps honouring the royals, but the province dissolved in the late 1990s after the “G-G” was charged with possession of illegal firearms and repatriated to the UK[8].
PostScript: Micro-states of mind?Wy and the self-styled Hutt River and Bumbunga provinces conform with RT Reid’s characterisation of the ethos of contemporary micronations …”mock sovereign states fuelled by local disputes, utopian idealism and the imaginations of a few eccentric individuals”[9]. Ultimately it is that eccentricity, together with their isolation and the fact that they pose no real inconvenience or harm to the greater (macro) political entity✦, explains why they tend to be tolerated (but not encouraged) by the central authority of the state in which they reside.
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✻ defined as an entity claiming to be an independent nation or state but not recognised by world governments or major international or supranational organisations, ‘Micronations’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
✪ leader of the fictional minuscule tinpot state of Grand Fenwick which declares war on the USA in the 1959 comedy/satire The Mouse That Roared
¤ Cruickshank’s Atlantium had two prior “spiritual homes” in Sydney, a house in suburban Narwee and a flat in inner city Potts Point
✦ the ‘Principality’ of Seborga in the Italian Riviera is a good case in point: despite a 98.7% vote in favour of independence from Italy in 1995, the tiny town (pop: <400) still pays its civic taxes to Rome
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[1] ‘Space oddity: Group claims to have created nation in space’, Science, 12-Oct-2016, www.sciencemag.org
[2] J Crabb, ‘Gabriele D’Annunzio And The Free State of Fiume’, (Culture Trip), 12-Jul-2017, www.theculturetrip.com
[3] ‘The Republic of Užupis’ (Užupis Everywhere), www.uzhupisembassy.eu. Some of the more absurd sounding clauses of the Užupis Constitution evoke a suggestion of whimsical hippiedom, eg, 12. A dog has the right to be a dog
[4] ‘Micronations: The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations’, (J Ryan, G Dunford & S Sellars, (2006)
[5] ‘Principality of Hutt River’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[6] ‘Prince of Wy Paul Delprat loses driveway court battle’,(Simone Roberts), Mosman Daily, 17-Jul-2013
[7] Lonely Planet, op.cit.
[8] ‘Province of Bumbunga’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org. Hutt River, Atlantium and Bumbunga are only three of the estimated 35 Australian micro-nations in existence at one time or other, according to ‘A quick tour of some of the many, many Micronations Australia has to offer’, (Joseph Earp, Mashable Australia, www.mashable.com
[9] RT Reid, ‘Micronations of the World’, Smithsonian, 23-Aug-2009, www.smithsonianmag.com
Grawlix: a spiral-shaped graphic used to indicate swearing in comic strips (comprising typographical symbols, non-letter graphic characters which are encased in a word-free balloon)
~ Wiktionary, http://wiktionary.org
Etymology of the GrawlixThe term Grawlix itself comes from veteran American cartoonist Addison Morton Walker. The sprightly nonagenarian better known to the world as Mort Walker has gleaned lifelong fame in the US (and elsewhere where his comics are treasured) from two of his creations, Beetle Bailey and a spin-off of sorts, Hi and Lois. Beetle Bailey is especially beloved of seriously rusted-on US comic aficionados. Beetle, a private (zero-class!) in an unnamed US Army military post, has been described as “a feckless, shirking, perpetual goof-off and straggler known for his chronic laziness and generally insubordinate attitude”. Debuting in September 1950 Beetle Bailey is among the oldest comic strips still being produced by the original creator [‘Beetle Bailey’, Wikipedia,http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Copycat grawlixing!
Walker apparently coined the term ‘grawlix’ around 1964…it appears in a tongue-in-cheek article he penned called “Let’s Get Down to Grawlixes”. A nonsense word, grawlix is the descriptor that Walker came up with to depict a cartoonist’s standard device: to show that one of his or her’s characters was uttering a “four-letter” word or words in the strip without infringing any moral codes, the cartoonist would draw a combination of typographical symbols and insert them in the dialogue balloon in place of the actual profane words. Commonly but not uniformly, the symbols used are @#$%&! or slight variations on this (whichever typographics are used, the grawlix always ends with an exclamation mark [Nordquist]). And as a way of expressing powerful, earthy emotions without having to call in the censors, it caught on within the realm of popular graphic art!”❉
Mort Walker’s catalogue of neologisms
In his Lexicon of Comicana (1980) Walker in his jocular fashion elaborates on his personal vocabulary of neologisms from the world of the cartoonist (with mock grandness he called these his Symbolia)…so in addition to grawlix the Lexicon contains many of Walker’s trademark neologisms, words coined for his own amusement, some with strange-sounding onomatopoeic names – a few of which are listed below.
In addition to grawlix, Walker devised and named three other sets of symbols and squiggles representing graphic euphemisms for the unspeakable and very taboo swear words – Quimps, Jarns and Nittles (basically hard to distinguish from grawlixes but something very similar by another name!) [World Wide Words].
Moving away the topic of obscenities Mort came up with other words to describe some of the graphics representing the range of feelings and emotions experienced by his comic personae – such as squean – squeans are starbursts and little circles above the character’s head to indicate a state of intoxication, dizziness or unwellness¤.
Other logo-inventions in the idiosyncratic Walker Lexicon are variations on the same theme – such as:
Emanate – lines drawn around the head to show shock or surprise
Plewds – flying sweat droplets that appear around a character’s head to indicate working hard, stressed, etc.
An indotherm – as opposed to a wafteron!
Another neologism in Walker’s ‘cartoonucopia’ is Indotherm – wavy, rising lines used to represent steam or heat; when the same shape is used to denote smell, it is called a wafteron.
Before the grawlix was the unnamed ‘grawlix’
Mort Walker gave the world a recognisable name to identify what is today a standard cartoonist’s device for representing profanity in a non-verbal way, but the use of @#$%&! wrapped in a speech bubble far predates modern comic strip practitioners like Walker. Ben Zimmer has researched early US comic strip history to find that the device features in comics goes as far back as 1902 – the work of Rudolph Dirks employed the grawlix in his strip (he just didn’t it that, or anything!). In Dirk”s “Katzenjammer Kids” for the New York Journal… the pioneering cartoonist “initiat(ed) the use of both speech balloons and…symbolic swearing”. This was emulated by a contemporary cartoonist of Dirks, Gene Carr, at about the same time (1903). Zimmer himself eschews the random ‘Grawlix’, preferring the term Obscenicon💢[Zimmer].
Grawlixes and other such graphic devices are the indispensable tools of cartoonists and comic artists looking for a way to economise with words and convey an emotion succinctly. They are non-verbal and thus all about visual cues…they can convey obscenities without recourse to the offending words themselves, or they can summarise an action or reaction instantly with an image that obviates the need for words and a lengthy explanatory sentence.
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Interjections
Interjection: is a part of speech using words solely designed to convey (often strong) emotions (reinforcing meaning or feeling). It conveys the emotion, sentiment or feelings of its speaker [‘What is An Interjection?’, (Your Dictionary), www.grammar.yourdictionary.com].
Another way of characterising the interjection is through its syntactic position. It is “an exclamation inserted into an utterance without grammatical connection to it” [ibid.]. Interjections are the tools of casual or creative communication, they have an informality to them, and in many cases an outright ‘slanginess’ to them (eg, ‘Jeez’, ‘Holy cow!’ (or ‘mackerel’), ‘Fiddlesticks!’, ‘Baloney!’, ‘Bingo!’, ‘Mama-Mia!’).
All contemporary engagers in social media are (over)familiar with exclamations like ‘LOL’ and ‘OMG’ (case optional) or ‘Ha-ha’ which infest the online world of communications like locusts at harvest season⊛. Interjections are exhaustive in number and heterogeneous in nature. They can be used to communicate a broad spectrum of different feelings – from anger and frustration (Argh) to sadness or sentimentality (Aw) to confusion (Huh!) to disgust (Yuck!) to mockery (Whoop-de-doo⊡) to indifference (Meh) to surprise (Wow!) to excitement (Woo-hoo!) to triumph (Yay!) not to be confused with the affirmative ‘Yea!’ [Fleming].
Interjections are usually positioned at the start of the sentence, occasionally at the end (the purpose being to maximise the message’s impact or effect). And like the sound themselves, most interjections can be strengthened by elongating them [Vidarholen] – adding one or more extra w’s to Aw gives weight to the degree of empathy you want to convey to your interlocutor; similarly using more than one Ha-ha is interjector code for turning up the laughter gauge! Putting an exclamation mark after the interjection is not mandatory but is often employed in the spirit of the lack of restraint that characterises this part of speech. After all, interjections are at their core exclamations – the appended ! goes with the territory!(Image credit: www.7esl.com)
PostScript 1: “Onomatopoeic interjections”
Onomatopoeic words or phrases are ones that imitate the sound of a thing or action, splash! is therefore onomatopoeic, it is also an interjection. Interjections represent emotion and can usually be distinguished from onomatopoeia which represents sounds, although there is clearly some overlap between the two. Another point of difference is that an interjection is syntactically isolated, it has no grammatical connection with the rest of the sentence⌽.
PostScript 2: Batman – Holy interjections with graphics!
The cult 1960s television series Batman is a veritable feast of interjections…in just about every episode Boy Wonder Robin, with excruciating monotony, specialises in uttering interjections of the “Holy ……” kind. Robin would pick the opportune moment to breathlessly interject with “Holy Switch-a-Roo”, “Holy Superlatives”, “Holy Cliche” or whatever other topical word pertaining to the “Dynamic Duo’s” particular predicament de jour [Oxford Dictionaries Blog].
The sublimely ridiculous Bat Fight scenes in the TV show are replete with interjections…as Batman and the arch-villains land thunderous blows on each other, corny graphics flash up with words representing the pugilistic action (SOCK! AIMEE! BIFF! WHAMM! KAPOW! THUNK! BANG!). Interestingly Batman’s art department incorporated some comic strip style graphics into the flashing word cards (eg, stars within the word SOCK! signifying the effects of being ‘socked’, ie, dazed, dizzy – akin to a kind of squean? KAPOW! with a bulls-eye target inside the O)
←←←←←←←←←←←←←←←←←←→→
❉ placed in dialogue boxes above the characters’ heads (Walker calls these “Maledicta balloons”)
¤ a character with both a squean and a spurl (a vertical upward-spiralling coil) above his or her head is more than a little drunk, they’ve had a ‘skinful’ in fact! [Brownlee]
⊛ its unquantifiable definitively, but an empirical survey of the various avenues of social media would confirm an upsurge in interjection usage in everyday communications
💢 Urban Dictionary describes ‘oscenicons’ as “like a emoticon, but for profane words”
⊡ especially mocking someone who is trying to impress
⌽ the Onomatopoeia Dictionary lists a number of words that can represent both forms of expression, eg, wham, phew, shoo, shush, ha-ha, geez
╰☆╮ ╰☆╮ ╰☆╮
References:
J Brownlee, ‘Quimps, Plewds, And Grawlixes: The Secret Language Of Comic Strips’, (Co. Design), 15-Jul-2013, www.fastcodesign.com
Grace Fleming, ‘Interjections’, Thought Co, 23-Apr-2015, www.thoughtco.com
Richard Nordquist, ‘What the @#$%&! Is a Grawlix?’ (Thought Co), 02-May-2017, www.thoughtco.com
B Zimmer, ‘How did @#$%&! come to represent profanity?’, Slate, 09-Oct-2013, www.slate.com
‘Grawlixes’, (World Wide Words), www.worldwidewords.org
The lexicon of comicana’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
‘Dictionary of Interjections’, www.vidarholen.net
‘From “Gadzooks” to “Cowabunga”: some episodes in the life of the interjection’, Oxford Dictionaries, www.blog.oxforddictionaries.comOnomatopoeia Dictionary A-Z, (Written Sound), www.writtensound.com
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The beach and the seaside being such an integral part of Sydney, it is not surprising that amusement piers – following the fashion of Brighton, Blackpool, Hastings and a host of other seaside piers scattered throughout Britain – sprang up and achieved popularity for leisure-seeking Sydneysiders in the early to mid 20th century. I have previously outlined the meteoric but short-lived rise of Tamarama’s Wonderland in an October 2014 blog, ‘A Day-Trippers’ Paradise: The Vogue for Pleasure Grounds in 19th/20th Century Sydney’. In this piece I am focusing on former amusement piers at two of Sydney’s most iconic beach suburbs – Coogee and Manly.
Coogee Pier
Coogee Pier AKA Coogee Pleasure Pier took four years to construct (1924-28) but its operational lifespan was as ephemeral as Wonderland, lasting only a mere six years! (1928-1934) The pier was constructed by a private firm, the Coogee Ocean Pier Company, at a princely sum of £250 thousand…”large crowds gathered to watch the first pile being driven on 24th July 1926. Radio stations 2BL and 2KY made live broadcasts of proceedings”¹.
Coogee Amusement Pier
The Pier on the beach at Coogee, when opened was a spectacular sight, reaching out 180 metres out to sea. Built with the boardwalks of English Coastal towns in mind, the entertainment pier complex was lavishly furnished with a 1,400 seat theatre, a ballroom that could accommodate 600 dedicated foot-shufflers, a 400 seat restaurant, a penny arcade and small shops. Beach-goers flocked to the pier as illustrated in the old photograph at right, helping to establish Coogee’s credentials as a resort town. The pier also incorporated a large, netted safe swimming area for its patrons – the shark net itself, attached at one side to the pier, cost £6,750. The “occasion of the shark net’s official opening was made grander by the additional unveiling of the new Giles’ Ocean Baths and the new surf sheds. The celebration was promoted as ‘Come to Coogee’ Week and attracted a crowd of 135,000 people”².
Unfortunately the amusement pier’s fate was sealed by its precarious location in the open bay, where it was subjected to the physical onslaughts of nature. Damage to the pier by the surf’s repeated thrashings❉ took its toll and the operators eventually decided to pull the plug – in 1934 Coogee Pier was closed and subsequently demolished³.
Manly wharf & fun pier 1950s/1960s
Manly Fun Pier
Manly Fun Pier (MFP) (at one point it was referred to as Manly Amusement Pier and Aquarium) was located in Manly Cove on the wharf that had hitherto been used as a cargo wharf♦. The Pier opened to the public as a “fun parlour” in 1931, eventually adopting as its slogan, Built for Fun in ’31. Establishing itself as a local icon, MFP gradually expanded its rides and features over the years – which included the Octopus ride, the Space-Walk ride, the Mexican Whip, a tumbling house and slide, indoor mini-golf, as well as more traditional features such as a ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, a ghost train, a mirror maze and a train ride. The Pier’s aquarium anticipated the Fun Pier’s debut, kicking off from the year before, 1930⁴. The distinctive feature of the aquarium was its entrance which required visitors to go through a gigantic synthetic shark mouth to get inside!⁵
Later additions to MFP included dodgem cars, scooter-boats, speedboat joy rides, Pierrot shows and a wax museum. Richard Smith rose from being in charge of the speedboats to become manager of the entire amusement pier. MFP continued to be run by Smith’s family until 1971 when a group of concession holders took over its management under the banner “Fun Pier Company”. A sygna storm in 1974 damaged the Pier necessitated repairs by the Company⁶.Manly Fun Pier & Aquarium late 60s/early 70s
By the 1980s MFP was on the wane, small suburban fun piers were passé, and it was of no surprise when the Pier closed in 1989. The old Cargo Wharf was incorporated into an expanded, modernised Manly Passenger Wharf in 1990 and new amusement rides were erected (carousel, Ferris wheel, etc). However this revival was short-lived – locals living on the eastern side of Manly Cove (East Esplanade, Little Manly) didn’t waste much time before they started voicing complaints about the noise and light coming from the new rides at night…within a short time what remained of the Manly wharf amusement park was permanently closed⁷.
Old portico entrance to Giles’ Baths
PostScript: Coogee’s “pay-to-swim” baths
As suggested above, the opening of Coogee Pier in 1928 was something of a double act for Coogee with the simultaneous opening of Giles’ Hot Sea Baths, in a natural rock pool setting off the northern headland of Coogee Beach¤. The baths (AKA “Giles’ Gym and Baths”) were built on the same site as the earlier Lloyd’s Baths. The baths’ proprietor was Oscar E Giles, a masseur who promoted health and fitness through hydrotherapy, electric and hot sea bath treatments, as well as offering a “weight-reduction massage course”⁴.
Coogee Beach’s long tradition of “pay-to-swim” baths extends to the other (southern) side of the beach, two such still operating are Wylie’s and McIver’s. Wylie’s Baths, an ocean tidal pool, was started by Henry Wylie for Olympic swimmers (including his daughter Mina (Wilhelmina Wylie) and pioneering Australian gold medallist Fanny Durack) to train. McIver’s Ladies Baths is the only women only saltwater pool in Australia. The baths have been available only to women and children since the 1880s□. Since 1922 it has been run by the Randwick and Coogee Ladies Amateur Swimming Club.
Manly Marineland – was situated on the Esplanade not far from the amusement pier. The aquarium opened in 1965, underwent a number of name changes before closing at the beginning of 2018.
The Conqueror (1956) was a doomed film, both cinematically and in terms of its devastating human cost. Its reception critically was abysmal and its performance at the box office was less than mediocre. Reviews for the movie disaster have been consistent in assigning it an unenviable position as one of cinema’s worst ever pictures, one of Hollywood’s greatest “turkeys”¹.
Yahoo!Movies described The Conqueror as “the most toxic movie ever made”…tarnishing the careers of those who appeared in this egregious stinker, especially its star John Wayne, effectively bankrupting RKO Pictures (costing a blown-out $6 million) and contributing to the deaths of an inordinate number of its cast and crew².
John Wayne, faced with the need to fulfil the third and final picture of his contract with RKO, apparently fished the discarded script out of the rubbish bin and convinced the assigned director Dick Powell (who in turn convinced RKO’s owner Howard Hughes) to make the film with Wayne playing the role as Mongol warlord Genghis Khan (a role intended apparently for Marlon Brando). By all accounts Wayne was grossly miscast⋇, interpreting the great Mongol leader as a cowboy (probably an entirely natural notion for the Duke!). The script (by Oscar Millard) was terrible and vacuous as the following inane, awkward samples of the dialogue illustrate:
Temujin: I feel this Tartar wo-man is for me, and my blood says, take her. There are moments for wisdom and moments when I listen to my blood; my blood says, take this Tartar wo-man.
૱…………૱…………૱
Temujin: She is wo-man, Jamuga…MUCH wo-man!
૱…………૱…………૱
Snow Canyon, radioactive movie set
The Conqueror was a patently absurd vehicle by any standard – as an attempt at film art or as a plausible historical reconstruction…but as disastrous as the movie was, it was to have far more serious and far-reaching tragic consequences. Most of the filming took place at Snow Canyon¤ near Saint George in Utah, 130 odd miles from a nuclear test site where the US Government detonated 11 above-ground nuclear explosions in 1953. By the time location filming took place, June-August 1954, winds had shifted the still highly radioactive soil downwind to Snow Canyon. The shooting of the action sequences (in an adventure movie this was most of the film!) necessitated that the performers wallowed in the carcinogenic dust day after day.
The film’s producers (Hughes and Powell) were aware of the proximity of the atomic testing before shooting started but had been assured by the government that the atomic tests posed no risks to public health, a gross deception (self-deception?). Compounding the dilemma, at the end of the location work Hughes ordered that 60 tons of the radioactive reddy-brown dirt from the Snow Canyon site in Utah be carted back to the RKO film set at Culver City for re-takes!
Human Fallout
Consequently, by about 1980 it could be shown that 91 of the 220 individuals who made up the film’s location staff had contracted cancer including its stars Wayne, Susan Haywood, Agnes Moorehead and Pedro Armendáriz (one of Wayne’s sons who had a small part in the movie later also died of cancer). There is no definitive way of proving that the contaminated soil was 100% to blame for the cancer deaths…Wayne had a heavy smoking habit (up to seven packs a day!), as did others in the cast, which could have been a contributing factor to the malignancies⍔. The harmful effects of the area’s radiation however is undeniably part of the explanation for such an aberrant outbreak of disease. Robert Pendleton, professor of biology at the University of Utah, concluded that the toxic fallout of Saint George was of epidemic proportions, that the toll was about three times what might be expected³. In addition it is well documented that health checks on ordinary residents of Saint George similarly revealed higher incidences of cancer than other comparable areas⁴.
PostScript: Howard Hughes’ own private purgatory
As is well-known, The Conqueror’s Producer Hughes lived as a recluse, (literally) hermetically sealed off from the rest of humanity, for his last years. It is believed that he deeply regretted his decision to go ahead with The Conqueror project. Hughes delayed the film’s theatrical release and attempted to purchase every single print to try to keep it out of the public eye. Part of his penance in his hermit mode of existence, it has been claimed, was to watch and re-watch the disastrous movie every day (along with Ice Station Zebra⁵).
╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼
⋇ Wayne as a 13th century Asiatic warrior was a ludicrous choice, as the casting was overall – only two of the entire performers were of Asian descent. Many of the doomed extras were undisguised Navajo Indians
¤ Howard Hughes thought the rolling red hills would be similar in appearance to the steppes of Mongolia
⍔ although ‘Duke’ Wayne did not die from his lung cancer (which went into remission) but from the subsequent stomach cancer he contracted [Gaggiano, below]
¹ included in H & M Medved & R Dreyfuss’ 1978 The Fifty Worst Films of All Time
² ‘The Conqueror: The story of the most toxic movie in Hollywood history’, (Yahoo!Movies, 09-Nov-2016), www.uk.movies.yahoo.com
³ Pendleton: “…in a group this size you’d expect only 30-some cancers to develop. With 91, I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up even in a court of law” – Karen G Jackovich & Mark Sennet, ‘The Children of John Wayne, Susan Hayward and Dick Powell Fear That Fallout Killed Their Parents’, People, originally posted 10-Nov-1980, www.people.com
⁴ Rory Carroll, ‘Hollywood and the downwinders still grapple with nuclear fallout’, The Guardian,, 06-Jun-2015, www.guardian.com
⁵ Greg Caggiano, ‘The Conqueror (1956): The Film That Killed John Wayne … Literally’, Reel to Real, 26-Jul-2010, https://gcaggiano.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/the-conqueror-1956-the-film-that-killed-john-wayne-literally/
The 1939 cinema classic The Wizard of Oz, the movie that launched teenage singer/actress Judy Garland into stardom, has long had a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most ‘cursed’ films.
Book of the iconic 1939 film
Many, many things did go wrong on the set, including costs…the MGM musical/fantasy came in over budget at a cost of $2.8 million. This in part reflects The Wizard of Oz’s disjointed trajectory – going through five directors including King Vidor, George Cukor and Richard Thorpe and 14 screenwriters in the course of the production. The movie’s ultimate director Victor Fleming (who also directed the other great Hollywood film of 1939 Gone With The Wind) was widely suspected of Nazi sympathies.
Judy as Kansas Dot in Oz
The staggeringly appalling treatment of 17-year-old Judy Garland (Dorothy) would today be seen as out-and-out child abuse, irrespective of whether it was within or without the celebrity world. The film-makers half-starved Judy, limiting her to only one square meal per day, fed her on barbiturates and got her fixed on an 80-a-day cigarette habit. Garland eventually spiralled into a tragic pattern of drug dependency and suicide attempts. [E Power, ‘The Wizard of Oz – Dark side of the rainbow’, Irish Examiner, 15-Sept-2014, www.irishexaminer.com].
Equally alarmingly was the casual disregard of the health and well-being of other cast members as well. Buddy Ebsen (later famous as Jed Clampett in TV’s Beverly Hillbillies), to achieve the silver make-up of his character “The Tinman” was coated in aluminium powder which gave him an allergy and got into his lungs, after two weeks he became seriously unwell and was hospitalised and out of the film✳. His replacement Jack Haley was less exposed to deadly toxins but still contracted a troublesome eye-infection.
Fitting out supporting actress Margaret Hamilton for the role as the “The Wicked Witch of the West” meant painting her skin with green copper, exposing her to a clear carcinogenic risk. Even more perilous, in one hazardous scene Hamilton was nearly burned to death when a pyrotechnics feature went horribly wrong…requiring the actress to be hospitalised for a couple of weeks.
The film’s jinx extended to minor players like the munchkins (small colourfully-garmented characters portrayed predominantly by people with the condition dwarfism). The vertically challenged actors were grossly underpaid (‘Toto’, Dorothy’s dog in the movie was paid more than them!) and consequently they got drunk every night and reportedly ran riot on the set. Even Toto didn’t escape a mishap – one of the supporting actors accidentally stepped on him in a scene breaking the mutt’s paw and necessitating a canine replacement.
In the celebrated poppy field scene Dorothy and other characters get saturated in snow flakes, the only problem was the substitute snow comprised sheets of lethal asbestos![Power] Hollywood regularly used 100 percent industrial-grade chrysotile (white asbestos) in films, in White Christmas (1954) Bing Crosby got it poured all over him! Ray Bolger’s “Scarecrow” straw-filled costume was also lined in asbestos in order to be flame-proof [S Kazan, ‘The Wizard of Oz or The Wizard of Lethal Asbestos Exposure?’, (Kazan, McLaine, Satterley &’Greenwood], www.kazanlaw.com].
The curse for a time seemed to continue post-release. Although The Wizard of Oz is universally celebrated today as a classic of the cinema, it did not meet with immediate acclaim from either the public or critics. These reservations did not start to turn around until the CBS television network reintroduced the movie to the wider public in 1956. In 1989 the US Library of Congress nominated The Wizard of Oz as “the most-viewed motion picture on television syndication” [‘The Wizard of Oz (1939 film)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Countless scores of viewers of the joyous spectacle of ‘Oz’ over the years would have been blissfully unaware of the unhappy, off-screen events that relentlessly dogged the production.
PostScript: Judy a victim of MGM’s mogul monster
MGM’s systematic abuse and exploitation of Judy Garland emanated from the very top of the studio – MGM head Louis B Mayer. To get the absolute most out of the studio’s new star Garland, Mayer maintained tyrannical control over all aspects of the Wizard of Oz star’s life⌖.
Mayer hooked Garland on a cocktail of drugs, having her fed alternating courses of amphetamines, adrenaline shots and downers like Seconal. And Mayer, to ensure that Judy, away from the studio, kept to the strict diet of coffee, chicken soup and cigs, had a battery of spies reporting back to him on the beleaguered actress’s behaviour [Neil Norman, ‘Dark side of Oz: The exploitation of Judy Garland’, Express, 05-Apr-2010, www.express.co.uk]]
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✳ Ebsen as a result of exposure to the deleterious materials was required to use a respirator for the remainder of his life (he lived to 95)
⌖ a mistreatment aided and abetted by Judy’s own mother Ethel who mercilessly drove the early show business career of Garland and her sisters, thinking nothing of feeding the three sisters pep pills to cope with the brutal workload she had burdened them with! [Norman]
As a counterweight to the surfeit of 1960s American television that comprised a large slice of my diet of home entertainment, my juvenile literary tastes back then were decidedly more Anglophile. Plunging into the graphic art world of the 1960s comic book I digested everything I came across catering for adrenalin-pumping, red-blooded British boys.
Desperate Dan, ‘The Dandy’
Among these beacons of popular culture were The Beano (which starred Dennis the Menace and Gnasher), The Dandy❈ (featuring Korky the Cat and Desperate Dan), Knockout (Billy Bunter), The Hotspur, The Rover (these two papers were prime examples of the “Boys’ Own Adventure” style of stories) and Eagle with its centrepiece inter-galactic hero ‘Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future’, not to forget Tiger which catered for British schoolboy football mania with the stellar-booted striker ‘Roy of the Rovers’. The individual comics were grouse fun but what I most enjoyed was the comic book annuals of The Beano, etc., where I could indulge myself in reading a whole end-of-year book comprising a cross-section of the comic’s different strips⚀.
At primary school in the sixties the punitive powers-that-be weren’t all that rapt in comic books as reading material…my confiscated copy of ‘Dennis the Menace Bumper Comic’ (before I had a chance to read hardly any of it!) bore witness to that. From what was on offer in the school library, the one children’s book I did take a shine to was Just William, I should say series of books because there 38 (some sources say 39) ‘William’ books in all! All of the books were collections of short stories, with the exception of one in novel form.
Author Richmal Crompton
Just William was the creation of female English author Richmal Crompton (Lamburn). As a child feverishly devouring all the William books I shared with the overwhelming bulk of readers the uncritical assumption that Richmal was a man. How wrong were we all!!! Miss Lamburn was a school mistress (ironically – in an all-girls school!) who contracted polio and spent the rest of her life writing the William series of books as well as 41 adult novels❦.
The character of William (surname: Brown) was apparently based on Richmal’s young nephew Tommy…in the books William is scruffy and untidy in appearance, and given to directness, rebellion and straight talking – which sometimes lands him in strife. He is the leader of his own small gang of school friends who go by the name of “The Outlaws” (comprising his best friend Ginger as well as two other boys, Henry and Douglas). William is 11, an age he stays at, despite the series of books stretching over a period of nearly 50 years! [‘Just William’, Wikipedia entry]
‘William the Dictator’ (1938)
Most of the books follow the ordinary run of events of William and the Outlaws entangling themselves in minor mischiefs, usually involving nothing worse than the ill-conceived idea of painting a terrier blue! But occasionally William strayed into more edgy and outright polemical territory. In the short story ‘William and the Nasties’¤ William’s band emulate Hitler and his fellow National Socialists in order to terrorise a local Jewish sweet-shop owner (featuring in the 1935 collection William the Detective [‘Five Fascinating Facts about Just William’, www.interestingliterature.com].
Just William’s topicality
A good number of the Just William books regularly reflected current events of their day. William the Conqueror (published in 1926) was resonant of European colonial power imperialism leading up to WWI. William The Dictator (1938) reflected the world’s concern with fascism and National Socialism. Similarly, William and the Evacuees (appearing in 1940) was set against the backdrop of WWII. In the post-war period, the superpowers’ preoccupation with the space race inspired new books like William and the Moon Rocket (1954) and William and the Space Animal (1956) [‘Just William’, Wikipedia entry].
Just William book spin-offs
With such popularity that the Just William books attained (12 million sales in the UK alone), they inevitably flowed through to adaptation to other forms – cinema (three films in the 1940s), two television series (one in the mid-1950s and the other in the early 1960s), radio and even theatre. As well, the schoolboy hero spawned a host of Just William merchandise…from jigsaws and board games to cigarette cards, magic painting books and figurines of William [‘Richmal Crompton’s Just William Society’, www.justwilliam.co.uk]
Celebrity fandom: Lennon as William
Some time after the Beatles visited Australasia in 1964 at the height of “Mop-top mania”, I remember hearing that John Lennon had been a fan of the fictional William in his boyhood. Lennon’s devotion to the books prompted him to form his own, real-life version of the Outlaws, moulding his friends Ivy, Nigel and Pete into a Liverpudlian boy foursome. With John of course as leader, the boys engaged in “small acts of defiance and daring” on their local turf [J Edmondson, John Lennon: A Biography (2010)]. The revelation that I had been propelled into the stratospheric company of such a youth icon as Beatle John, only served to magnify my primary school days zeal for all things William Brown!
PostScript: Continental comic book legends
My childhood taste in comics were not exclusively confined to the gold standard of British comics. Like millions of other children I was also captivated by those ancient Gallic tormentors of Roman legionnaires, Asterix and Obelix (Astérix le Gaulois by Goscinny and Uderzo). In equal measure I was in the thrall of Tintin, Hergé’s creation of a globe-roaming Belgian boy-reporter. Each comic album of The Adventures of Tintin was a lesson in political geography embroiling Tintin in high-stakes adventures in a new and exotic land. But as rewarding as the respective adventures of Asterix and Tintin were, in my book nothing quite scaled the same exalted heights of anticipation as did the prospect of dipping into the treasure trove of Just William’s world.
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❈ The originals The Beano and The Dandy were of course far superior to the highly derivative and latter imitations like The Topper and Beezer and Cor!!
⚀ not to be overshadowed, schoolgirls had their own comics and annuals such as Bunty and School Friend Annual
❦ the most accomplished of which was Leadon Hill. The tone of the adult novels was more pessimistic than the Just William series, dealing with themes of divorce and infidelity [Danuta Keen, ‘Not Just William: Richmal Crompton’s adult fiction republished’, The Guardian, 21-Apr-2017]
¤ the name ‘Nasties’ is the result of William’s mishearing of the word ‘Nazis’
When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s and 60s I was exposed, like everyone else, to saturation levels of US commercial television. Faced with the novelty of a new and revolutionary form of home entertainment, I clocked up the viewing hours big time, thousands and thousands of hours glued to the “idiot box”. Eventually through trial and (a lot of) error I decided what my favourite American programs were, a few gems among the preponderance of TV dross and mediocrity.
Back then I was particularly fond of old black-and-white movies on TV (until 1975 all Australian television was in black-and-white!). Drilling down even deeper, 1940s and 50’s movie serials were highest on the totem of my juvenile television tastes. I lapped up countless viewings (and re-viewings) of the like of Ma and Pa Kettle, Blondie, Batman, Tarzan, Bowery Boys/Dead End Kids, to barely scratch the surface of my childhood obsession.
As an Antipodean-based “honorary American boy”, a lot of my vicarious existence was channelled through Hollywood’s projection of the typical American teenage/20ish boy. MGM had Andy Hardy (played by that pint-sized bundle of non-stop energy, Mickey Rooney), whilst over at Paramount, the studio eventually tried to counter Andy’s popularity with Henry Aldrich (portrayed initially and briefly by the over-saccharine Jackie Cooper, but universally associated with the perpetually perplexed-looking Jimmy Lydon).
The premise of both these American equivalents to the British “Boys Own” adolescent rites of passage story was the same: the point of the exercise was that both get hare-brained schemes which invariably land them in trouble of some kind, and through a series of comical twists and turns they get out of the predicament by the film’s end…both “got into jams, had romantic vexations, and mischievously interfered in the lives of their older brothers and sisters”, with consequences all of which were at worse ephemeral[1]. The screen rival teenagers Andy and Henry were both likeable even if their screen personalities occasionally irritated you.
Hardy and Aldrich each had his own distinctive and characteristic expressions, these verbal calling cards were often reiterated throughout each movie…Andy Hardy, when in ebullient mood, would chirpily respond to Polly Benedict or to another of his many, simultaneous love interests with “You said it, toots!” Henry Aldrich is universally remembered for the opening exchange with his mother who bellows: “Hen-reeeeeeeeeeeee! Hen-ree Al-drich!”, to which Henry from upstairs would haltingly and tremulously reply, “Com-ing, Mother!”
Once I latched on to Paramount’s counterpoint to the Hardys, the Aldriches, I quickly developed a preference for the new kid on the Hollywood block Henry Aldrich over Andy Hardy. The longer the Andy Hardy/Family sequence went, the more it seemed to wallow in “Gee mum'” sentimentality, with a touch of smug bourgeois self-satisfaction. Andy came from a distinctively middle class American family (his father was a court judge, as the good-intentioned Andy himself aspired to and eventually realised)…Henry seemed more to reside in the world of the working class family, not exactly down-at-heel, but hardly flush with affluence. The Henry movies were a bit more gritty, more down-to-earth and lacking the romanticised and soppy wholesomeness of the Hardy Family sagas.
The first Andy Hardy film was released in 1937, A Family Affair with 15 more following within a decade, plus a less successful ‘reunion’ film in 1958 focusing on Andy’s return, full circle, to Carvel to take up his father’s old judicial post. The character of Henry Aldrich first surfaced in a Broadway play What a Life in 1938 (playwright: Clifford Goldsmith)…from there in span off into fourteen years of very popular radio (1939-53), four years of television (1949-53), a series of ten movies, and an uncountable number of comic books, musical scores, pin-ups, games, and toys.
The lower-budgeted Aldrich movies (11 in all) never reached anywhere near the lofty heights of the Hardy films, neither in the returns from the box office or in the esteem of cinema critics✳. Henry Aldrich movies were either ignored by critics or dismissed as inferior B-movies, merely larks and juvenile fun…contrasting sharply with the symbolic status afforded the Hardy series by MGM, the cinematic embodiment of the “Stars and Stripes”, of “America”[2].
‘Henry Aldrich Haunts a House!’ (1943)
Jeffrey Dennis notes how the respective imaginary ‘worlds’ Andy and Henry inhabit sit poles apart. Carvel, the Hardy home town supposedly in small town Idaho, is comfortably ensconced in Middle American suburbia, a peaceful and harmonious realm in which the war (WWII) does not enter. Carvel and the Hardys represent an idyllic family lifestyle, with the films’ message a somewhat preachy reinforcement of solid and wholesome American values[3]. Against the stark realities of the Depression and the drift into global war, fictional Carvel offered the American public a chance to indulge in “feel-good” escapist diversions.
Henry’s home town Centerville, by contrast (located in an unidentified state) is a more grim, dark and even foreboding setting. Reminders of the war constantly swirl around the world of Henry and the Aldrich family and that of he and his best pal Dizzy (in the form of war bonds, war relief funds, rationing, air-raid drills)[4].’
Both boys regularly get themselves embroiled in injudicious teenage troubles but Henry Aldrich’s conundrums have the more serious consequences…whilst Andy at his incautious worse may be “fined for driving without a licence, but Henry is threatened with prison, juvenile hall, and a mental asylum”[5]. And Hardy’s often foolish escapades, unlike Aldrich’s, never amount to life-threatening situations.
Aldrich (Lydon) with his buddy Dizzy (Charles Smith)
Critics have also drawn attention to differences in how each screen teenager viewed the perennial adolescent boy issue of “girl trouble”. Whilst the easily love-struck Andy Hardy was unequivocally a dedicated girl-chaser most of the time, Henry Aldrich expressed a more ambivalent attitude towards the fairer sex: “Wimmen – they bore me!”, Henry exclaims in Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour[6]. Teenage Henry is reticence or seemingly indifferent to girls, preferring to spend time messing about with best mate Dizzy. Rather than being a manifestation of latent homosexuality, Henry with his simplified approach to life, most of the time just finds girls too complicated, not worth all the fuss and bother.
American youth in the Andy Hardy and Henry Aldrich films were depicted humorously, often with affectionate nostalgia and occasionally condescendingly. At the same time, both series revolving round the comical misadventures of American teenage boys were a window on the beginnings of a distinct adolescent sub-culture[7], which would take further shape in the years following WWII with the “Rebel Without a Cause” youth generation.
✳ in 1939 Mickey Rooney was the number one box office star in American films, a position he retained for the following three years, Source: ‘Top Box Office Stars: 1932-1939 (Part 1)’, (Classic Film Guru), https://classicfilmguru.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/the-box-office-stars-1932-to-1939-part-1/
[1] RJ Bresler, Us Vs Them: American Political and Cultural Conflict from WWII to Watergate (2000)
[2] JP Dennis, We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-craziness (2007)
[3] in 1943 the film series was awarded a special Oscar for “achievement in portraying the American way of life”, Timothy Shary, Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen” (2005)
[4] Dennis, op.cit.
[5] ibid.
[6] RB Armstrong & MW Armstrong, Encyclopedia of Film Themes, Settings and Series (2009)
[7] PC Rollins, The Columbia Companion to American History on Film: How the Movies Have Portrayed the American Past (2004)
The year 2015 brought an end to one of the most enduring major retailers in the history of United States business. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (universally abbreviated to A&P Tea Co) succumbed after a succession of bankruptcy proceedings played out in the early 2010s (bringing an end to 156 years of continuous retailing in the US).
A&P Tea endgame
The beginnings of A&P Tea’s decline in the retail world harks back as far as the 1950s – the source of the downward trend was its inability to maintain parity with competitors who were opening larger supermarkets that, driven by customer demand, were more modern[1]. Partial sell-offs followed in the seventies and eighties. Things didn’t really improve for the grocery ‘Goliath’ despite sporadic and ephemeral upsurges[2]. In 2010 the company filed for bankruptcy, but were only able to hold on till 2015 when A&P again filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, this time being permanently wound up.
A&P store: Westwood, NJ, 1959
According to industry analysts A&P’s demise could be attributed to a misguide focus, and to the company’s failure “to evolve with the changing market”…A&P had a tendency to concentrate on “extracting dollars from its vendors instead of selling to its customers”. This exhibited a woeful neglect when it came to improving the customer experience (George Anderson, editor-in-chief of RetailWire)[3].
The company’s woes were exacerbated by a failure to modernise its look…it doggedly kept its grocery lines to the basics and was disinclined to adapt to changing tastes and interests of consumers with their growing preference for organic, healthy and gourmet foods. Meanwhile its competitors like Whole Foods, The Fresh Market and Kroger were stealing a march on the erstwhile market leader[4].
Humble leather goods origins
Atlantic and Pacific’s company history traces itself back to 1859, founded by George Gilman, as a sideline to his hide and leather importing business. Gilman’s diversification into mail-order tea was so successful that he dropped the leather and Gilman & Co by 1869 had become the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co[5]. A&P Tea’s fortunes rose with the ascent of George Huntington Hartford who assumed control in 1878. George and his sons (affectionately known as “Mr George” and “Mr John”) oversaw the company’s inexorable growth and monopolistic practices[6].
A&P Tea at its zenith
At its peak in the 1930s (with the Hartford brothers still ensconced at the helm), A&P was by far the largest grocery chain in the US with 15,709 stores in 39 of the 48 states plus parts of Canada. The tea and coffee merchants had already diversified into bakeries and pastry and candy shops, and introduced innovations in food retailing such as pre-packaged meats and food-testing laboratories (pioneers of quality assurance)[7]. The Economy Store was another A&P concept: small stores located in secondary streets, away from the main street (comparison with King Kullen), inexpensive “no frills” lines; operated by only one or two staff members; low cost, high volume[8].
Slow to embrace the supermarket concept
The Hartfords were unimpressed by and reluctant to adopt the model of the supermarket, pioneered by King Kullen and others. Finally in 1936 A&P opened their first supermarket in Braddock, PA. Eventually the company’s supermarkets came to replace the increasing obsolete Economy Stores[9].
1928 A&P grocery ad
When it came to reading changing consumer preferences after WWII, A&P Tea, as was the case with F.W. Woolworth, was slow to move its stores from the urban centres to the suburbs, thus falling behind rivals like K-Mart, Safeway and Kroger in this respect. From the 1960s on A&P experimented with discount stores A-Mart (folded as its name was too like K-Mart!) and WEO (Warehouse Economy Outlet) with moderate results[9]…A&P sales continued to flatten out, it continue to jettison stores into the 21st century, with its market share haemorrhaging in the fierce onslaught of rising powerhouses such as Walmart[10].
PostScript: Legacy of the retailing ‘Goliath’
The heights to which Greater Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co rose in its heyday were of Everest proportions. Until 1965 A&P Tea Co was the largest US retailer of any kind…between 1915 and 1975 A&P was the largest food/grocery retailer in the US…until 1982 the company was also America’s largest food manufacturer. According to the Wall Street Journal A&P Tea Co was “as well known as McDonald’s or Google is today” and was lionised in the world of North American retail traders as “Walmart before Walmart”[11]. By the end of the 1920s A&P had become the first retailer to sell US$1 billion worth of goods[12].
⚎⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚍⚎
[1] WI Walsh, The Rise and Decline of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (1986)
[2] ibid.
[3] Hayley Fitzpatrick, ‘A&P made one mistake that undermined its business’, Business Insider Australia, 22-Jul-2015, www.businesinsider.com.au
[4] ibid.
[5] Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, (2011)
[6] A 1946 US Federal Court ruling found the Hartford brothers guilty of illegal restraint of trade by using A&P’s size and market power to keep prices artificially low, ibid.
[7] ‘The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, Inc’, Encyclopedia.com, www.encyclopedia.com
[8] ‘A&P: The Early Years’, Groceteria.com, www.grocetaria.com
[9] ibid.
[10] Levinson, op.cit.
[11] ‘The Great Atlantic Pacific Tea Company’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[12] Levinson, op.cit.
Where the Gainsborough Pictures/Islington Studios once stood (in Hoxton, North London), today sits blocks of luxury flats built in 2004. As a token gesture the name ‘Gainsborough’ remains on the units’ facade but the only other indicator that it is the site of a former film studio is a 6.5m high courtyard sculpture of Alfred Hitchcock whose first exposure to the movie industry was at Islington … the work of art enigmatically depicting ‘Hitch’ as a gigantic head❈.
In the course of the twentieth century, the site, when it wasn’t a centre of feature film production, had something of a checkered existence. The original building started off as an electrical power station for the East London rail line, circa 1900. When Gainsborough Pictures’ film production ended there around 1949, the premises had a broad range of commercial and community incarnations for the rest of the century, including being a whiskey store, a carpet warehouse and an avant-garde theatre[1]. By the time it was chosen as a site for the apartments that occupy it today, the surviving buildings had taken on a very derelict appearance.
ref=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/image-1.jpg”> Gainsborough Studios, Hoxton, N1 (Photo: Patrick George Callaghan)[/ca
The film company’s story at Hoxton/Islington began just after the Great War when the American movie giant Famous Players-Lasky acquired it in 1919 for its British production arm. Lasky refurbed the run-down power plant, turning it into state-of-the-art film studios. Islington, with the most technical advanced studios in the UK, was also Britain’s most iconic film studios. Features included a scene dock, a large tank for filming underwater scenes and an anti-fog heating system (indispensable for notoriously foggy London). Such super-de luxe facilities earned Islington Studios nicknames like “Hollywood by the Canal” and “Los Islington” [2].
Cutts and Hitchcock: Islington Silents
Islington Studios commenced making films in 1920 … the creative figure most associated with the studio’s early silent productions was Graham Cutts, who directed a string of 1920s Gainsborough films – of these the most acclaimed were Women to Women (1923) and The Rat (1925). Cutts was mentor to the young Alfred Hitchcock … ‘Hitch’ got his start at Islington as a writer of signs for movies before rising to become the older director’s assistant in several Cutts films. Fellow director AV Bramble went so far to say of Cutts’ directorial contribution, that Gainsborough Pictures “had been built on the back of his work”[3]. The success of The Rat owed much to its star, Ivor Novello, who was a fan magnet (intentionally cast) in the Rudolf Valentino mould. As 1920s Britain’s most popular matinée idol Novello helped lift the profile (and profit sheet) of Gainsborough Studios.
The Balcon years
The American Lasky company didn’t persist with the London venture, selling the studios to ‘kingpin’ British producer Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough Pictures◙ in 1924. Balcon continued the Hollywood former owner’s practice of importing US stars (such as Mae Marsh and Dorothy Gish) to bolster Gainsborough’s productions, but he also pursued a strategy aimed at competing with the burgeoning American influence in the British industry after the war. Balcon made deals with US and German film companies to allow Islington to distribute and finance its own films⌑. Balcon nurtured Hitchcock’s development as a film-maker, despatching him to Germany to work as an assistant on a UFA film in Berlin. Hitchcock’s German influence was evident in Gainsborough’s The Lodger (1927), the best example of British expressionism in silent films[4].
In 1927 Balcon’s company merged Gainsborough with the larger Gaumont-British film co which operated from its Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd’s Bush (West London). Many Gainsborough Pictures productions were made at Lime Grove (in addition to those made at Islington). Lime Grove Studios produced the ‘quality’ films, whereas the Gainsborough Studio produced mainly ‘B’ movies (especially low-budget crime) and melodramas[5]. The core of Hitchcock’s classic 1930s espionage/mysteries (such as The Man Who Knew Too Much, Sabotage and The 39 Steps) were made by Gaumont at Lime Grove.
Edward Black and the costume melodramas
After Gaumont went into bankruptcy Balcon left Gaumont in 1936 for MGM-British (and later Ealing Studios). Gaumont-British ceased production for several years but Gainsborough was saved by a rescue package put together by CM Woolf and J Arthur Rank (partners of General Film Distributors)[6]. From the late thirties producer Edward Black came to Gaumont/Gainsborough and the subsequent type of productions the studios made reflected Black’s “unerring sense of British popular taste”. One of his earliest successes was with Bank Holiday (1938), directed by Carol Reed and Margaret Lockwood, soon to become Britain’s leading screen actress回. Black used ex-Music Hall performers like Will Hays and Arthur Askey for Islington’s light comedies. Gainsborough Pictures also afforded opportunities to the versatile Launder and Gilliat writer-director team to showcase their collaborative skills.
In the war years following, Black combined with screenwriter RJ Minney to produce a series of costume melodramas at Gainsborough, which have been described as being “visually extravagant and morally ambivalent”. Minney and Black also produced comedies and modern-dress melodramas for Gainsborough … the first and most famous of the Studio’s period costume melodramas was The Man in Grey (1943), a box-office winner with an overtly escapist formula to distract people from the tribulations of the world war[7].
Postwar: Rank and the Boxes
In 1946 the powerful Rank Organisation acquired full control of Gainsborough Pictures, leading to an exodus of its main creative figures, including Black and Minney, and its pre-Rank takeover head of production Maurice Ostrer. J Arthur Rank choose one-time self defined “hack journalist” Sydney Box to head up the Studios’ productions. Box’s collaborators, his wife, writer and director, Muriel and his sister, producer Betty, also came on board[8]. Sydney Box in his time at Gainsborough churned out films at a very steady rate of knots – 36※ all up over three years of managing Gainsborough productions. Under Sydney Box the Studio tackled a mix of genres with a focus on melodramas, thrillers and light comedies[9].
Gainsborough Pictures in the austere economic climate after the war exhibited an interest in ‘social’ films with a topical appeal. Employing the skills he honed as a documentarist, Sydney also commissioned films which explored a range of issues – no doubt with Muriel’s guiding influence. These included child adoption, juvenile delinquency, displaced persons, leisure pursuits. The light comedies, usually with Betty E Box as producer, remained among the most popular of Gainborough’s offerings, eg, Miranda (1948) (a romantic diversion about a mermaid out of her environment), Holiday Camp (1947) (which spawned a light-hearted series of sequels about the Huggett family – the amusing adventures and misadventures of a typical working class London family in the late 1940s (the workman-like cast included 1960s English pop star Petula Clark)[10].
Gainsborough – closing act
J Arthur Rank permanently shut down production at both Hoxton (Gainsborough) and Shepherd’s Bush (Lime Grove) in 1949, apparently because he was unhappy with the performance of both London studios. All films made by Rank Organisation after 1949 were concentrated at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire[11]. The last feature released under the Gainsborough banner was Trio (1950), an anthology film co-directed by the Islington regular Ken Annakin.
PostScript 1: the Gainsborough logo
All Gainsborough films open with the shot of an elegant, feather-hatted woman in Georgian period costume, enclosed within an ornate oval frame. The woman (portrayed by actress Glennis Lorimer) slowly turns and smiles at the camera, an opening feature as visually distinctive as Rank’s iconic strongman banging the gong. The shot of Lorimer was based on the famous 1785 portrait of Sarah Siddons by Thomas Gainsborough.
PostScript 2: the studio fire traps of the early ‘talkies’
By the advent of sound pictures Gainsborough’s Islington Studios were certainly among the most technologically advanced in Britain … able to adapt scenes into everything from a mad professor’s lab to a railway station to an 18th century manor house to a mermaid’s lair. But the studios at that time were inherently dangerous places – celluloid was highly inflammable, as was carbon arc lights. Sound-proofing studios usually required covering the entire building with thick blankets, which was virtually tantamount to inviting a fire! The Gainsborough Studios burnt to the ground in 1930, and the same fate befell the studios at Twickenham and Elstree. Such was the sense of threat that some studios maintained their own in-house fire brigades[12].
‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿‿
❈ there is also a plaque on one of the unit complexes commemorating the film studios
◙ the names ‘Islington’ and ‘Gainsborough’ have tended to be used interchangeably in describing the Poole Street studios
⌑ through the vertical integration of the film biz in the UK and elsewhere, Hollywood was maintaining an economic and cultural dominance of the industry
回 other leading 1940s British stars of Gainsborough pictures included Patricia Roc, Phyllis Calvert, James Mason and Stewart Granger
※ this in fact was the target J Arthur Rank had set (12 feature films a year) as a condition of Sydney Box’s appointment
[1] Steve Rose, ‘Where the lady vanished’, The Guardian, (16-Jan-2001), www.theguardian.com
[2] Gary Chapman, London’s Hollywood: The Gainsborough Studio’s Silent Years, (2014); LN Ede, ‘Designing the Silent British Film’, in IQ Hunter, L Porter & J Smith (Eds), Routledge Companion to British Cinema History, (2017)
[3] Rachel Low, The History of British Film: Vol 1V, 1918-1929, (1997)
[4] Geoffrey Macnab, Searching for Stars: Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema, (2000)
[5] ‘Gaumont British Picture Corporation Limited’, (The Alfred Hitchcock Wiki), http://the.hitchcock.zone. Often described in the trade as “quota-quickies” (Michael Powell’s term)
[6] Ede, op.cit.
[7] B McFarlane (Ed), The Encyclopedia of British Cinema – Fourth Edition, (2016)
[8] The Boxes started their careers in cinema with Verity Films, making war-time propaganda films and documentaries. Behind-the-camera roles in the industry in those days was very much a “man’s world”, and no easy path to tread for women … especially Muriel (when directing films), Rachel Cooke, ‘Power women of the 1950s: Muriel and Betty Box’, The Guardian, 3-October 2013, www.theguardian.com
[9] A Spicer, Sydney Box, (2006)
[10] ibid.
[11] ‘Gainsborough pictures’, Wikipedia, http://wikipedia.org.
[12] Rose, loc.cit.; Geoffrey Macnab, ‘The death-trap London studio that time forgot: Gainsborough Studios’, The Independent, 24-Jun-1999, www.independent.co.uk
The 1920s was a decade for innovations in communications, as we saw in the earlier related blog “Modern Mass Culture in the 1920s I” which dealt with public radio, the emergence and popularisation of the medium in the US and world-wide. The 1920s also ushered in another form of mass media which would become the most momentous innovation in communications and public entertainment of the century – ‘talking’ motion pictures.
For the last 80 years sound has been integral to world cinema, giving the hitherto silent film an added dimension, building depth into the structure of the storyline. As for its filmic predecessor the silent movie, where are we most likely to see it these days?❈ Commercial screenings of silent era films are rare birds indeed … if we seek them out, we might find them if we’re lucky in an old, suburban Art Deco picture theatre, the initiative of a handful of specialised film societies dedicated to preserving the memory of the lost art form. Or we might catch grainy, monotone snatches of an old silent pix as archaic footage on TV docos. When we do manage to view a silent movie we are often struck by how unrealistic, how stylised they appear today, how over-the-top and melodramatic the acting seems. In the decade-and-a-half up to the late 20s the truth however is that silent films and the star actors of the day had an appeal to their doting audiences that was real and totally captivating.
The Jazz Singer
The advent of talking motion pictures did not come about because of a growing dissatisfaction with silent pictures on the part of film-goers. On the contrary patrons of cinemas were completely happy with the ‘product’, the experience, as it was already. Actually, ‘silent’ movies were not really silent, they had accompanying mood or background music provided by an orchestra or a piano to set the tone of particular scenes. As well, title cards (sometimes called “inter-titles”) were interspersed between shots to advance the story, or to clarify what was happening for the audience. Screen-transfixed audiences would engross themselves in the story action, the emphasis on body language and facial expression by actors to convey strong emotion (emoting ‘feelings’) and meaning. Prior to The Jazz Singer (1927), audiences hadn’t wanted to hear actors talk (or at least they hadn’t expressed such a wish)[1].
The coming of sound
Specific technological challenges needed to be overcome to realise the successful application of sound to film. Amplification had been addressed with developments in the phonograph and the viability of radio transmission facilitating public radio. The hub of the problem was synchronising the action, the visual image, with the sound recordings of spoken dialogue, music and sound effects.
Duelling sound systems
Enter Vitaphone … Vitaphone was an analogue sound-on-disc system developed by Western Electric (a subsidiary of IT & T) in competition with an alternate system devised by RCA/General Electric, which used a sound-on-film method. A number of companies experimented with sound-on-film methods (Fox Movietone, the German company Tri-Ergon, DeForest Phonofilm, RCA Photophone), this ultimately led to the development of a superior and more versatile analogue system to that of the more haphazard dual-processing Vitaphone[2].
↗ Warner Bros Vitaphone production of ‘Don Juan’
Warner Brothers however were committed to the Vitaphone system and utilised it first on the 1926 film Don Juan which had synchronised music and sound effects, but wasn’t a ‘talkie’ (as it contained no spoken dialogue). The followed year they took it a step further with The Jazz Singer , the first (partly) talking movie, which audiences took an instant liking to, especially the presentation of Al Jonson’s songs¤.
Sound movies in, silent films out: an “overnight sensation” which took several years to happenThe Jazz Singer was a calculated gamble by Warner Bros which was in a financially precarious position at the time, but it turned out to be a ‘game-changer’ for the then minnow studio Warners and for cinema’s future as a whole … its positive reception signalled that audiences wanted sound. But this transformation from one type of feature film to another was no sudden event, the process away from profitable silents was a gradual process. First to emulate Warners was 20th Century Fox with its Movietone system, soon the other major studios followed the trail-blazers into sound. The big Hollywood companies tended to play it both ways at first, none of them stopped making silent films straight away. After all, how profitable talkies would become was still to be seen. In the two years following The Jazz Singer ‘s release, the major companies made a mixture of productions – some all-silent, some all-sound and some part-sound movies[3].
The major film companies’ decision to convert to sound, according to Donald Crafton, had mainly to do with power politics in the industry. Paramount and MGM held an oligarchic hold over the industry in the mid 20s, controlling not only the production of its films but the distribution and exhibition of them as well (vertical integration which was what Warners aspired to as well). Warners’ and Fox’s unilateral venture into the talkies was seen as a threat to the big boys’ hegemony and necessitated the majors’ eventual venture into talkies. The other minor studios including RCA and UA which didn’t immediately opt for sound pictures still survived as silent film-makers[4].
∝∝∝∝∝∝
Endnote: The “Big Five” and the “Little Three”
By the 1930s the Hollywood hierarchy, after a series of expansions, mergers and takeovers, had settled into an (unofficial) two-tier industry power structure:
⁍ The Big Five: MGM, Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros, RKO
⁍ The Little Three: Columbia, Universal, UA (United Artists)
∝∝∝∝∝∝
Sound at a price
Various factors acted as a speed bump in the transition to sound movies. There were new financial costs for the industry to take account of. Cinema theatres had to be wired for sound, the cost of which was almost prohibitive – in 1927 only 400 theatres in the US of the multiple thousands were thus connected … by the end of the decade over 40% of the country’s movie theatres had sound systems installed in them[5]. A background factor occurring concurrently with the studios’ efforts to sort out the wrinkles involved in sound pictures was that public radio in the US was still in the process of trying to establish a foothold of its own.
The international language of silent films
The silent cinema had a linguistic universality to it, exporting an American film to a non English-speaking country merely required translating of the credits and title cards. But with sound films this restricted markets for American and English films, and dubbing into the local language was an added expense[6].
↘ Clara Bow
The ‘sound’ of silent stars
From the perspective of the actors, especially those who had established their niche in the silent era, there were formidable challenges to transitioning to the new, sound medium. Acting in sound movies and the whole dynamic was different, they discovered, sometimes to their cost. Actors now had to memorise their lines beforehand, and on set they had to not stray far from the microphones, basically stand still and recite their lines clearly. The voice became THE issue for many established silent stars … a number of Hollywood actors could not make the transition❉. Some with heavy foreign accents like Emil Jannings, Vilma Banky and Pola Negri had voices that sounded harsh, unmelodious and muffled on-screen. Other top silent stars were similarly hamstrung by their voices – John Gilbert sounded weak and squeaky on screen✾, and Clara Bow and Norma Talmadge had flat Brooklyn accents – which didn’t suit their romantic lead personas[7].
Other silent film heavyweights had an instant aversion to the idea of sound films and avoided them, eg, leading silent actress Mary Pickford simply retired from acting rather than change over to sound; Charlie Chaplin, whose craft relied heavily on mime, never really embraced talkies and proceeded to make films only irregularly into the sound era (his Modern Times in 1936 was a film without spoken dialogue). Myrna Loy, an actress who successfully made the transition to sound, has recollected how much silent movies were loved. Fans felt as though that they possessed an ‘intimacy’ with their favourite Hollywood stars. Like many contemporaries Loy believed that the art of pantomime was perfected in the silent film[8].
The new medium hamstrung by technological limitations
The new sound technology transformed how movies were made, the ambience on the set completely shifted in a manner directors found inhibiting. Directors, accustomed to shouting directions to actors whilst scenes were being filmed, were hushed up by sound technicians who now in effect called the shots, demanding silence on the set so that incidental noises didn’t interfere with the recording of dialogue❦. Not only did directors feel that sound imposed a break on their free rein over the set, but the movie studio heads felt a similar loss of the financial control of their pictures … sound film production required a huge capital outlay of studios which meant that producers and moguls couldn’t keep the same tight budgetary holds on film expenditure as they previously had[9].
Directors weren’t the only movie personnel affected by sound. Projectionists at the back of the theatre had their work doubled, now having also to operate phonographs as well as projectors during screenings … the projectionist needed to be ever alert as the equipment had a tendency to jump around and result in a loss of synchronicity between image and sound. Again technological breakthroughs eventually came to the rescue after a new type of film was invented allowing for the sound to be recorded directly onto the film itself[10].
Paramount Studios
The take-up of sound films spelled bad news for a myriad of theatre musicians … the silent era had been a fruitful source of employment for them, but once movie houses had installed sound systems their services were no longer needed. On the other side of the coin, talking pictures required fully fleshed-out screenplays and the coming of sound was a boon for scriptwriters![11]
The early sound equipment was an impediment to the filming of action scenes. To avoid the camera noise being picked up by the sound recorder, the cameraman had to be ‘quarantined’ off in a stationary box to the side. Bereft of the freedom of movement enjoyed in silent movie-making, talkies became just that, static scenes in which characters stood round talking to each other (derisively referred to by some as “tea cup dramas”). The lost spectacle of the silents’ scenes of fast-action adventure caused disquiet among the audiences of early talkies. Within a few years this problem was overcome with the creation of new, quiet cameras[12].
For a section of the viewing audience who had enjoyed silent movies, the coming of sound to the cinemas created a new, consequential problem. Talking films per se excluded movie-goers who were deaf or had hearing issues. Some theatres tried to compensate for this by providing special headphones, but these were not fully effective and were of no help to those people who were completely deaf[13].
In time all of the problems and obstacles that came with the emergence of talkies were more or less ironed out … by 1930 the film-going public had voted resoundingly in favour of sound movies at the box-office – audiences at US picture theatres by 1929 had hit 90 million per week, up from an average of 50 million per week in 1920[14].
PostScript 1: Silent film stars – the ‘superstar’ sui generis thesis
The prestige and kudos of Hollywood movie stars circa 1920 was at an unparalleled high in American society. The personas of silent movie stars often came to take on a “godlike” status. As Jeanine Bassinger describes it, the film star of the early 1920s had a “level of adulation that simply had not existed before movies were invented”[15]. The leading silent stars like Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton, Chaplin and Pickford, were uniquely celebrated and adored by the public to a level not achieved by later film stars even in the “Golden Age of Hollywood”. The silent stars of the screen were modern society’s first superstars, they did not have to compete for the public’s affections as the later sound film actors did. They were no pop or rock stars in the 1920s to share the limelight with … similarly, stars of spectator sports in America were very much still a phenomenon in the making[16].
And yes there were celebrities and high achievers in the performing arts prior to the advent of motion pictures – standout performers from theatre, vaudeville, opera and burlesque – but these stars were never remotely on anything like the (global) scale of silent film stars, who engendered mass adulation in their fans felt that they had an intimacy with their favourite screen stars.
PostScript 2: The slow drift toward an international cinema of talkies
This blog has concentrated on the story of the evolution of sound pictures in America – elsewhere things took longer to evolve. Cinemas in Europe were not fully wired for talking pictures till the 1930s, and the USSR and Japan were still making silent films into the mid thirties. Once sound (belatedly) consolidated itself in these overseas film industries, it sparked a surge in the international production of talking pictures in native languages[17].
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❈ in the sound era only a very select few film-makers have maintained fidelity with the spirit of the silent movie, Jacques Tati is one such throwback whose cinema harks back nostalgically to the silent days of Chaplin and Keaton with its reliance on visual gags interspersed with a modicum of incidental and incoherent dialogue
¤ Warner Brothers’ 1927 sound picture triumph has been attributed to a greatly improved quality of sound in the Vitaphone system, (‘Bob Allen asks… Why the Jazz Singer? … and puts forward a personal theory’, www.web.archive.org)
❉ there were of course a number of established silent movie actors who did successfully make the switch to talkies, including Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Laurel and Hardy
✾ in Gilbert’s case new technology did him no favours – his high-pitched voice on film was perhaps made worse by sound adjusters giving his voice too much treble. A suspicion at the time was that the studio deliberately sabotaged the actor because his salary (highest in Hollywood) was costing them too much, (‘Talkie Terror’)
❦ the 1952 film Singing in the Rain accurately captures the shambolic disruption to the profession of film-making brought about by the advent of the talkies … the recent French film The Artist also concerns itself with this subject
[1] E Thompson, ‘A Very Short History of the Transition from Silent to Sound Movies’, (Wonderstruck), (2011), www.wonderstruckthebook.com; ‘Silent Film’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.Wikipedia.org. Two years after the first sound film there was still much negativity about talking pictures, even the premier industry magazine, Variety, opined in 1929 that “movie stars should be screened, not heard”, M Donnelly, ‘The Birth of the “talkies” sounded the death knell for many silent stars’, Daily Telegraph (Syd.), 02-Jul-2016, www.dailytelegraph.com.au
[2] D Hanson, ‘The History of Sound in the Cinema’, (1997), www.cinematechnologymagazine.com
[3] C Gallagher ‘Introduction’ in C Gallagher et al, ‘The Silence After Sound: Hollywood’s Last Silent Movies’, 08-Feb-2009, www.notcoming.com. It became standard practice at this time for production companies to make the same movie in both talking and silent versions
[4] a number of theatres in America did close after the changeover to talkies but Crafton attributes this more to other economic factors, such as increased radio listening and automobile driving, D Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-1931
[5] ‘The History of Film’ (The 1920s – Part 4) (Tim Dirks), (AMC Filmsite), www.filmsite.org
[6] ibid.
[7] the studios employed diction and voice coaches to aid those contract performers struggling with their voices and elocution, although some contemporaries opined that they could have done more to help the actors adjust, J Doyle, ‘Talkie Terror, 1928-1930’, (The Popular History), 19-Oct-2010, www.pophistorydig.com; Thompson, op.cit.
[8] cited in G Flatley interview, 1977, ibid.
[9] ‘Talkie Terror’, loc.cit.
[10] Thompson, op.cit.
[11] ibid.; ‘The Advent of Sound: 1927-1930’, www.cinecollage.net
[12] Thompson, ibid.
[13] ibid.
[14] ‘The Formation of Modern American Mass Culture’, (Digital History), www.digitalhistory.uh.edu
[15] Excerpt from ‘Silent Stars’ (by J Basinger), New York Times (1999), www.nytimes.com
[16] although the 1920s did witness the beginnings of newspaper-‘created’ sports stars, eg, Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth, ‘Digital History’, loc.cit.
[17] ‘The Advent of Sound: 1927-1930’, loc.cit.
In 1920 the American public was enraptured with the still relatively new medium of film and with the growing phenomenon of movie stars – silent films were all the rage with people from all strata of society. But technological breakthroughs were already opening up new choices for consumers of mainstream entertainment in the US and the wider world.
Early radio days
That same year, 1920, following on the pioneering breakthroughs in Marconi and Tesla and a host of other contributors to the development of radio[1], the first federal licence was granted in the US to radio station KDKA (owned by the Westinghouse Company) in Pittsburgh, Pa. KDKA started with sport, broadcasting prize fights and Major League Baseball.
Early radio activities in the US were intended as a public service, not-for-profit, RCA (Radio Corporation of America) was formed as a government-sanctioned radio monopoly. RCA with David Sarnoff the instrumental figure in the company But with big business (including newspapers) making an investment in the novel form of communication with the singular purpose of making a financial ‘killing’ from it, this was destined eventually to ride roughshod over the altruistic public service function.
Ad for Atwater Kent Receiver
The Corporatisation of radio
Big business interests in the US was taking account of the brand new medium. Corporate America wanted in on the action and was looking for ways to make radio pay¤ … advertising was the key. Radio broadcasting had moved from the pre-1920s phase of inventor/entrepreneurs like de Forest (see below) and Aubrey Fessenden⌻ and amateur operators to profit-conscious organisations in the vanguard. The first radio ad appeared in 1923 on station WEAF in New York. In a familiar pattern of oligarchic business expansion, many of the existing stations coalesced into networks, big players like RCA (later morphing into giant NBC – National Broadcasting) and its rival network, CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), who were able to secure the top advertising revenue returns on their commercial stations. By 1930 nine out of ten US radio stations were selling advertising time[2].
Table 1 (below) illustrates how the number of US radio stations rose exponentially from a very low base in 1921:
Year
№ of Stations
1921
5
1923
556
1927
681
1940
765
Source: CH Sterling & JM Kittross, Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting (1978)
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Table 2 (below) illustrates a similar growth in the revenue dollar from US radio:
Year
Advertising Revenue of radio stations
1927
$4.8million
1930
$40.5million
1940
$215.6million
Source: CH Sterling & JM Kittross, Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting (1978)
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Federal Communications Commission (emblem)
Chaotic airwaves rule OK!
In the early days reception wasn’t great with the majority of listeners relying on very basic, home-made crystal sets (the eventual advent of amplifying receivers addressed some of the shortcomings). Listeners were blighted by recurring problems with the on air broadcasts … the stations’ frequencies were continually being interrupted by other radio transmitters who would suddenly cut in on them in the middle of a program[3]. Stations regularly ran experimental programs which were a mishmash of hits and misses. The airwaves were a haphazard free-for-all until measures were taken to regulate the industry in 1927 with the Radio Act. The Act empowered the Federal Radio Commission to reallocate radio frequencies into a geographical zonal system with licenses, time of operation, station power and wavelength to be equally allocated. This system however worked less than perfectly[4].
A revolution in home entertainment
Within a few short years the stations got their acts together and with improved technology and more receivers available, the American population embraced the mass media of radio. People would hold invite friends over for “radio parties” in their homes. Teenage and adolescent listeners would tune in and dance to jazz programs (the music de jour of the 20s). Radio quickly became a central part of American lives. From fairly limited offerings at first, eg, music, reading the latest news items✥, sporting broadcasts, stations started to offer quality and variety … radio shows had become the go-to form of entertainment – detective serials, westerns, comedies, romances, children’s shows, were all very popularly received. The soap opera✾ (drama serials containing multiple characters with intertwined, often emotionally fraught lives), the one significant invention of radio, became the staple cultural diet of many listeners[5].
By 1929 radio was reaching 10,000,000 American households. One of the most popular programs was Amos ‘n Andy, a form of audio entertainment which unfortunately also served to disseminate racial and cultural stereotypes (in this case reinforcing a derogatory view of African-Americans). When the phonogram invented earlier by Thomas Edison, was commercialised, the proliferation of record players in homes alongside radio sets gave Americans a “new world” of home entertainment[6].
Other countries in the western world rapidly followed America’s lead in the spread of the AM radio phenomena[7], one that would grip and enthrall listeners world-wide until the commercial introduction of public television in the 50s would eventually assume that mantle of shaping or reshaping mass communications.
“Welles-storm”
PostScript: Radio ‘pyrotechnics’ – the ‘invasion’ of America
There has been no better illustration of the sheer, mind-bending power of radio than enfant terrible and soon-to-be Hollywood directorial luminary Orson Welles’s 1938 broadcast on national radio. Welles’s performance of The War of the Worlds (by Sc-Fi pioneer writer HG Wells) spooked the nation (or at least the one-fifth of the over one million listeners to the program who were thrown into a panic by the calamitous ‘news’!) … the radio audience were fooled into believing that they were hearing a live report of an actual invasion of Earth by spaceship-transported Martians[8].
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❈ the involvement of leading newspapers in the new medium was interesting considering that radio early on was promoted as “the newspapers that come through your walls”
¤ the development pattern was different in Europe – in Britain the government agency, BBC (established in 1922) was the guiding light for public radio’s progress
⌻ undertook pioneering work in laying the foundations of AM (amplitude modulation) radio
✥ the delivery of ‘instant’ news through the air waves was a transformation for “Joe and Joan Public” who no longer had to wait to the next day to read about the latest events in their daily newspapers
✾ so named because it was the norm for soap companies to sponsor this type of day and popular evening radio programs (Scott, ‘History of the Radio Industry’)
[1] it would be remiss here not to single out the pioneering contribution of Lee de Forest whose invention of the Audion vacuum tube most possible live radio broadcasting, an amplifier and transmitter which was the “key component of all radio, telephone, radar, film, television and computer systems before the invention of the transistor in 1947” (‘Lee de Forest American Inventor’, Encylopedia Brittannica (RE Fielding),www.brittannica.com
[2] CE Scott, ‘The History of the Radio Industry in the United States to 1940’, www.eh.com
‘History: 1920s’, Advertising Age, 15-Sep-2003, www.adage.com
[3] ‘The growth of radio in the 1920s’, (Mortal Journey), (08-Apr-2011), www.mortaljourney.com; ‘Emergence of Radio in the 1920s and its Cultural Significance’, www.xroads.virginia.org
[4] ‘Federal Radio Commission’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[5] Mortal Journey, loc.cit.; ‘The Formation of Modern American Mass Culture’, Digital History, www.digitalhistory.edu; ‘Soap opera’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[6] Mortal Journey, op.cit.. Edison’s phonograph paved the way for the eventual development of sound technology for films
[7] later, in the 1930s, advances spearheaded by Edward H Armstrong led to the invention of FM (frequency modulation) radio – which prompted a backlash by Sarnoff and RCA and the breakout of an “AM Vs FM war”, ‘FM broadcasting in the United States’,
Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[8] B Lenthall, Radio’s America: the Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture. The Story of the Century, (2007), www.press.uchicago.edu
John Clarke: Trail-blazing Parodist, Lodestar, Daggstar
John Morrison Clarke died, most unexpectedly, in the Victorian wilderness a day-and-a-half ago. An ordinary looking man with an ordinary (unremarkable and yet distinctive) voice, but an ‘Everyman’ with a towering gift for communicating parody and travesty with coruscating clarity!
John Clarke, born and raised in Palmerston North, New Zealand, but domicile in Melbourne, Australia, for the last 40 years, was a uniquely talented satirist, TV comedian, comic writer and actor. The word ‘genius’ gets carelessly bandied around way too much these days, but in appraising the oeuvre of Mr John Clarke it finds a true home.
Daggstar completely out of the box
Whilst in New Zealand Clarke developed and refined the character of Fred Dagg, a stereotypical, blunt-speaking farmer from the North Island, with long straggly hair and perpetually clad in a black singlet and gumboots. Fred Dagg got Clark’s idiosyncratic brand of humour into the spotlight of New Zealand television. By 1977 Clark had outgrown both NZ and (so it seemed) Fred Dagg and moved to the bigger canvas of Australia❈. Clarke wasn’t however quite done with Fred Dagg – in Australia Fred resurfaced as a real estate ‘expert’ with his guide for would-be home buyers providing the “good oil” on avoiding the pitfalls inherent in the spiel of property agents – as the following “bullshit-busting” sampler of his trenchant wit testifies:
• a “cottage” is a caravan with the wheels taken off
• “genuine reason for selling” means the house is for sale
• “rarely can we offer” means the house is for sale
• “superbly presented delightful charmer” doesn’t mean anything really, but it’s probably still for sale!
• “privacy, taste, charm, space, freedom, quiet, away from it all location in much sought-after cul-de-sac situation” means that it’s not only built down a hole, it’s built at the very far end of the hole
• “a panoramic, breathtaking, or magnificent view” is an indication that the house has windows, and if the view is “unique”, there’s probably only one window
Fred Dagg AKA John Clarke was no admirer of the realty and property game and the proclivity of estate agents to be “fast and loose with the truth”, and he gave us the following memorable job description of what they really do:
“The function of the agent basically is to add to the price of the article without actually producing anything” (gold!)
(and how to recognise an actual estate agent when you see one)
“If you’ve got gold teeth and laugh-lines around your pockets, you’re through to the semis without dropping a set”.
There was so much to the creative output of Clarke comma J, and so much variety too … screenplays, film acting, radio, stage work, television, songs, books. Clarke’s art didn’t fit into any one particular mould, he was, to use Martin Luther’s expression, an “irregular planet which cannot be fixed among the stars”, always inventing, moving on and reinventing, exploring something new that had piqued his interest.
My personal favourite John Clarke masterwork is the Complete Book of Australian Verse⌖. This nugget of gold is a series of early Nineties recordings in which Clarke audaciously and imaginatively reinvents the “Canon of Great British Poets”, relocating it to regional and outback Australia. Clarke ‘discovered’ the existence of an Aussie poet “laureate-hood” comprising “dinky-di” Australian poetry ‘greats’ with Antipodean-sounding names like ‘Shagger’ Tennyson, ‘Stumpy’ Byron V.C, ‘Gavin’ Milton and “Fifteen Bobsworth” Longfellow⊛.
Clarke’s sublime riff on these fictional masters of Australian poetry is incisively, deeply humorous, and both wise and pretentious-sounding at the same time! Absurdly funny stuff, especially when uttered in John’s wonderful flat, disinterested, monotone voice (“he was sentenced to three years jail for insulting a lobster in a Sydney restaurant”) … Clarke’s clinical dissection of (then) Leader of the Opposition John Howard is a devastatingly savage takedown the future PM…to paraphrase playwright Simon Gray, it “made me laugh so much that I was prepared to overlook its essential cruelty”. Clarke’s poem entreats Howard—who had failed twice to win the top job in Canberra—to change his vocation:
‘To a Howard’ by Rabbi Burns
Wee, sleekit, cowerin, tim’rous beastie,
I know tha’s probably doing thy bestie,
…………………….
Thou’ll try wi’ th’ gunnery up at the range,
Thou’ll no have much truible, thou’ve dun it afore,
Thou’s an expert for a’ that; look, ‘Wanted: Small Bore’.
With ‘A Child’s Christmas in Warrnambool’ Clarke produces a poetic tour de force by turning Dylan Thomas’ classic winter-scene ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ on it’s head, transforming it into a children’s nostalgic celebration of Australian summers past:
“The smell of insect repellant and eucalyptus and the distant constant bang of the flywire door”/”the fridge of imperishable memory”/”the wide brown bee-humming trout-fit sheep-rich two-horse country”/”some middle-order nephew skipping down the vowel-flattening pitch and putting the ball into the tent-flaps on the first bounce of puberty”.
The Complete Verse‘s eclectic compilation includes a coruscating if excruciatingly painful piece by “Sylvia Blath” which is both riotously funny and disturbingly harrowing at the same time. Clarke weaves into the poem Sylvia’s harangue of her dead father who “danced upon my cradle, as I Annexed the Sedatenland” and ends with an unexpected and wicked twist (a crossed-phone line channelling of Germaine Greer!!!): “Daddy Daddy I’m through, Hello? Germaine … I can hardly hear you, this is a very bad line.”
Since the 1990s Clarke had been an on-screen constant feature with his famous series of mock political interviews (“two-handers” with Bryan Dawe as the straight-man ‘innocently’ asking questions which were fodder for Clarke’s witty retorts) … the one-liners just rolling off Clarke’s golden and acerbic tongue, skewing high-profile politicians left, right and centre:
(pricking at the bluster of an overbearing state premier)
“I’m not interested in doing the most intelligent thing … I’m JEFF KENNETT!
Prime Minister Hawke’s robust “Alpha male”, over-enthusiastic response to the question of how fit he was after a recent op:
(I’m so fit that)
“I’m a danger to shipping!”
Clarke was a wordsmith that other satirists and comic writers in Australasia must have looked at with a mixture of admiration and envy … he simply had such a razor-sharp, punchy, economical and hilarious way with words.
And there was much more to John Clarke’s stellar CV – such as his ‘invention’ of the cliché-ridden ‘sport’ of farnarkeling for The Gillies Report, and not to forget the manifold brilliant riffs on finance, business, the economy, the public service and the environment (“the front fell off (and) we towed the ship outside the environment”). Clarke was a trail-blazer in television comedy … his “on the money” take on the crazy, shambolic world of Olympics bureaucracy The Games was a template for other later projects which explored the thorny terrain of corporations and officialdom (such as Utopia) and it informed the BBC’s contribution to the 2012 London Olympics campaign.
John Clarke’s sudden, most untimely death leaves a Sydney Opera House-sized hole in Australian and New Zealand satire – and I shall never forget that voice – as with Billy Bragg’s, so distinctive, and as with Joe (Dragnet) Friday’s, so deadpan matter-of-fact … or his trademark mischievous grin and the sparkle in the eyes.
⚜⚜⚜
Vale John Clarke … thank you for entertaining and delighting us for so long and enriching the lives of so many people all the way from Palmerston North to Perth and far beyond. John’s song lyrics were wrong in one respect … there are countless people in the two Trans-Tasman countries that he lived and worked in who do know “how lucky” they were to have him, albeit for too short a time✥.
Footnote: I didn’t realise until now that Clarkey was responsible for introducing that quintessentially Australian term “budgie smuggler” into the vernacular lexicon of the nation, to the regret of one former PM (not Howard) and the joy of everyone else!
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❈ his unusual accent didn’t really fit the clipped English speech pattern of “Nu Zillunders” anyway
⌖ the success of which was followed up by the Even More Complete Book of Australian Verse
⊛ other ‘Oz’ poet-luminaries include b.b.hummings, TS (Tabby Serious) Eliot, Ewen Coleridge, Ted Lear and many more
✥ one of the incomparable Fred Dagg’s best-known songs was entitled “We don’t know how lucky we are”
The establishment by the Russian Empire of a colony in California in the early 19th century was a corollary of the earlier North American colony in Alaska. The inherent deficiencies that surfaced in the operation of the Russian American colony convinced the Russian-American Company that it needed to find new, more propitious outposts in the region that could service Russian America’s needs.
California: Fort Ross
Zealous over-hunting of the prized sea otters by the Russian-American Company et al in Alaska’s waters led the company to seek out new, profitable hunting grounds further south. After some early fur hunting expeditions (1806-11) confirmed the presence of abundant sea otters along New Spain’s Pacific coastline, RAC chief Aleksandr Baranov authorised his assistant Ivan Kuskov to find a suitable location in Northern California and establish a Russian colony.
Fort Ross
The location chosen by the RAC to settle its new colony in 1812 – on the “New Albion” shore to the north of Bodega Bay (today in Sonoma County)❈ – was carefully selected. It was close to but outside of the border that Spain had set as its northern-most jurisdiction (San Francisco). As well as the proximity to plentiful sea otter fields, the Russian-American Company wanted its Californian base to be close enough to facilitate trade with Alta (Upper) California.
(photo: www.fortross.org)
The exact spot picked by Kuskov for the settlement was the site of an Indian village called Meteni by the local Kashaya (Kashia Pomo) tribes. After negotiating the sale of the land with the Pomo[1], Kuskov built RAC’s fortress called Fort Ross (Rus: Фopт-Pocc). The other raison d’être of the Californian colony was to provide an agricultural base for the northern settlements (Alaska had proved too harsh an environment and its climate too raw to supply sufficient quantity or variety for the nutritional needs of its settlers).
Russian stamp commemorating 200th anniversary of founding of Fort Ross
By 1814 Kuskov’s men (which included Aleut natives from Alaska) had planted the beginnings of an orchard, a solitary peach tree, later adding more trees which would eventually yield grapes, apples, cherries, pears, quinces and bergamots. This fresh fruit was to prove important in preventing outbreaks of scurvy which had dogged the early Californian colony[2].
An inhospitable neighbourhood
As things transpired, the emergence of the Russian settlement at Fort Ross did provoke the displeasure of the Las Californias authorities who responded by establishing a new mission station and presido (fort) in the vicinity to check any attempt by RAC to colonise any parts of California further south. Early trade opportunities were impeded by Madrid which forbid its Californian outposts from having commercial transactions with Fort Ross (although a healthy contraband trade did exist)[3]. With the Adams-Onis Treaty (1819) by which the US acknowledged Spain’s claim to all land south of the Oregon country border, Russia was even further squeezed out diplomatically in California¤ (and forced to renounce its own Oregon claim[4]. After Mexico gained its independence from ‘Old’ Spain in 1821 it constructed its own forts (such as the Sonoma Barracks) not far from the Russian Fortress to hem it in[5].
Russian chart – Fort Ross & Bodega Bay
Other drawbacks imperiling the viability of Russia’s Fort Ross colony
A. Otter hunting and shipbuilding
Hostility from Hispanic California and free-spirited westward-roaming American pioneers was not the only issue the Russians at Fort Ross had to contend with. By around 1817 the Californian coastline was displaying the same tell-tale signs of rapid depletion of the much sought-after sea otters that had plagued the Northwest Pacific and turned RAC’s focus southward ten years earlier. Being closer to both the US and Mexico and within the English’s sphere of operations, the competition for pelts in Alta California was even more intense. With the southern colony’s annual otter pelt catch declining every year, RAC tried diversifying its industries. For a while shipbuilding took commercial centre stage at the colony’s port at nearby Rumyartsev Bay … in a productive six years from 1818 six major vessels were built there. Unfortunately the Rumyartsev builders used Tanbark oak, which wasn’t suitable for ocean-going vessels and to make matters worse, seasoned it improperly so that the wood progressively rotted and all the ships were unseaworthy within a few years[6].
B. Ranching and animal husbandry
After the wood rot disaster shipbuilding in the colony ceased and Fort Ross switched his emphasis to agriculture and the development of its animal husbandry. New ranches opened up for stock-raising, especially from the early 1830s, with some success in the production of beef and mutton. A 1841 inventory of livestock at Fort Ross (taken just prior to the colony’s demise) listed 1,700 head of cattle, 940 horses and 900 sheep … indicating some marginal success in ranching – but to put it in perspective this was far behind the herd sizes of livestock achieved by the contemporary Spanish and Mexican Californian ranchers[7].
C. Grain production and other agriculture
RAC’s hope was that a colony in Alta California – with its better soils and pasture lands, plentiful timber and good water supply – would be conducive to productive and consistent yields of produce, and would become the granary for the northern outposts in Alaska. Flawed agricultural methods and planning however meant that this would remain a pipe dream. The colonists failed to rotate their crops and fertilise the fields adequately for arability. The type of farming at the ‘Fortress’ was more that of private plots producing fruit and vegetables for local consumption rather than exporting. The quantities sent north were never sufficient, nor were they consistent in quality. At different periods the Russian colony had to trade its manufactured goods♦ for grain and seed from New Spain, both for the colonists’ use and to ship north to Russian America’s capital, Sitka. From the late 1820s on occasionally there were good crops, but even in the most fecund times Fort Ross could only supply a mere 1/12th of RAC’s needs for Alaska[8].
The Fort Ross colony workforce
The colonists’ division of labour comprised the Russians and Creoles in one group of occupations, guards, overseers, artisans and cooks, and the Aleut men as hunters (Aleut women and other native tribes were allotted the more menial tasks). After the sea otter haul largely disappeared, the Aleut hunters were reassigned to herding and lumbering jobs. The calibre of men Kuskov had at his disposal was problematic … the Russian men were often described as “riff-raff” – the risk of desertion was always a concern and many were suspected of criminal intent. As for the native workers, most brought from Alaska were convicts under punishment for “crimes committed against the colony” and many of the Indians were considerable unreliable[9]. The lack of an ongoing, stable workforce added to the colony’s woes. Quantity as well as quality – a sheer lack of manpower also contributed to Fort Ross’s failure.
Hudson’s Bay Co
Endgame for Krepost’ Ross
The isolated colony struggled on through the 1830s trying to make a go of it commercially, but Fort Ross’ death knoll was sounded when the Russian-American Company signed an agreement with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in 1839 … HBC would henceforth supply all provisions required by RAC’s Alaskan outposts[10]. RAC, pulling the plug, tried at first to sell Fort Ross to the Hudson’s Bay Company, and then to the Mexican government, but were unsuccessful in both instances. Consequently Fort Ross’s Governor Rotcher managed to sell the Fortress and all its contents (including a disused schooner in Bodega Bay) to Californian settler pioneer and businessman Johann (John) Sutter for $30,000.
ↂ ↂ ↂ ↂ ↂ
Endnote:
The Russians were only one of several players eyeing off the colonial potentiality of Spanish Alta California. French, American and British visitors all made note of how surprisingly tenuous Madrid’s hold was on the territory [11].
PostScript: Fort Ross – the movie!
Intriguingly in a time witnessing a latent reheating of American/Russian superpower tensions, a Russian film company made a feature film about the Fort Ross colony (released in 2014 presumably as a celebration of the Fort’s 200th anniversary two years earlier). Written by Dimitriy Poletaev, Fort Ross is billed as a historical adventure/action/fantasy movie. I’m more than a little skeptical about how historically accurate it is … though it does contain a character called “Komendant Kuskov”. Basically, the plot revolves around a “Gen Y” journalist who find himself transported back to 1814 Fort Ross, coonskin caps, muskets, otter pelts and everything – courtesy of his malfunctioning iPhone! (the fantasy bit). The time-travelling protagonist finds himself embroiled in various intrigues and adventures and the film gives a few nods to the state of contemporary US/Russian relations. A part of the external footage was filmed at Fort Ross National Park – shots of the Russian River (Slavyanka) and the surrounding countryside – though the producers used the recently renovated original Fort Ross itself as a model to re-create a full-scale replica of the fort in Belarus.
⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸⊸
❈ about 130km northwest of San Francisco Bay
¤ A further blow to morale was that Spain, Mexico, the US and Britain never recognised the legitimacy of Russia’s Fort Ross colony … although in the case of Mexico, it was prepared to do so provided Russia recognised it in return, but the conservative Tsar’s suspicion that the new Republic was a radical regime vetoed that diplomatic breakthrough (Schwartz 1977)
♦ such as barrels, bricks, furniture, soap, etc.
[1] ‘negotiated’ for almost sweet FA according to one account – Kuskov bought the area for a small quantity of clothing, bedding and tools, ‘History of the Russian Settlement at Fort Ross, California’, www.parks.sonoma.net/ross
[2] ‘Historic Orchard at Fort Ross’, Fort Ross Conservancy,www.fortross.org
[3] H Schwartz, ‘Fort Ross California – A Historical Synopsis’, Fort Ross Conservancy‘, (Interpretive Planning Unit, Dept of Parks & Rec, Calif. Feb 1977), http://fortross.org/lib.html
[4] ibid.
[5] ‘History of the Russian Settlement’, Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.n.em.org
[6] ibid.; Schwartz, loc.cit.
[7] Schwartz, loc.cit.
[8] ibid.
[9] AA Istomin, ‘Indians at the Ross Settlement – According to the censuses by Kuskov in 1820 and 1821’, (Fort Ross Interpretive Association, Jul 1992), www.fortross.org
[10] ‘Yukon/Alaska Chronology’, Explore North – An Explorer’s Guide to the North, www.explorenorth.com
[11] Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream 1850-1915, (1971)
The seeming ubiquity of Woolies?Woolworths is an internationally known name synonymous with traditional merchandising budgeted within the reach of the average consumer. When I was a kid I thought that the Woolworths variety store-cum-supermarket chain in cities and towns strewn all around Australia and New Zealand was an offshoot of the famous pioneering Woolworths “dime and nickel” company in the US. Until I actually went to South Africa I wasn’t even aware that there was Woolworths in that country as well. When I did discover its existence travelling around the RSA garden route I initially assumed that it too was a spoke in the far-reaching American F W Woolworth imperial retail wheel.
Only much, much later did I learn of the total absence of any business or corporate connection between the three ‘Woolworths’ entities (sometimes displayed in singular form, sometimes plural, sometimes with an apostrophe). Both the retail chain in Australasia and the one in South Africa got the name ‘Woolworths’ through the same legalistic loophole. When a collection of businessmen began the Australian retail enterprise they acquired the name because the original American company had not registered the name in NSW (or anywhere in Australia). Thus the first store in Sydney CBD’s Imperial Arcade in 1924 was called Woolworths Stupendous Bargain Basement. The transition to the eventual nomenclature used (simply ‘Woolworths’) was not quite that simple. Before settling on ‘Woolworths’, the first notion that came to Percy Christmas (Woolworth’s inaugural CEO) and his directors was to call it ‘Wallworths Bazaar’, a pun on the American retailer’s name[1].
Somerset Mall ‘Woolies‘
Western Cape RSA
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Similarly, the South African ‘Woolworths’ acquired the name because there was no legal trademark impediment to it using the name in South Africa. Founder Max Sonnenberg and his son Richard started the first Woolworths store in Cape Town in 1931, and like the Australian namesake it has never had any financial connection to the prior existing F W Woolworth Co business. Woolworths South Africa-style was a different sort of retail animal, modelling itself on the upmarket British Marks and Spencer rather than the F W Woolworth bargain basement store concept[2].
Woolworths ground zero: Creating the retail templateThe American phenomenon started in 1878 when Frank Winfield Woolworth, son of a poor potato farmer, started his first store in Utica, New York, the basis of his business strategy was to sell a wide selection of items at low price (initially all the merchandise was set at 5 cents each). The store was poorly located and failed abjectly but Woolworth persisted, opening a second dry goods and variety store the following year in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the formula eventually caught on. The entrepreneur expanded his store concept to a “five-and-dime” one (items set at 5¢ and 10¢ each).
The early F W Woolworth & Co
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Woolworth’s brother Charles (known as ‘Sum”) got in on the business, starting up his own retail stores soon after his older brother’s. Frank expanded F W Woolworth Co into a chain by mergers and partnerships with his cousin Seymour Knox I and with other relatives and friends❈. By gathering together a little club of owners Woolworth could purchase large quantities of goods directly from the manufacturers. As the US stores multiplied and prospered, Frank, remembering his own disadvantaged childhood, took pride in the fact that the “ordinary man” could afford to buy from Woolworth stores[3].
From 1890 FWW would embark on annual (sometimes biannual) large-scale buying trips to Europe, always paying the suppliers in cash on principle. Exposure to European manufacturers promoted awareness of market potentiality in other countries and may have prompted Woolworth’s eventual decision to branch out internationally. Anglophile Frank had his eye firmly on Britain as his 1890 trip diary indicates: “a good penny and sixpence store, run by a live Yankee, would be a sensation here”[4]. The chain had already extended north to Canada and subsidiaries were launched in the UK, Germany, Austria, Mexico and Cuba. The UK Woolworth sub-set itself opened stores in the Republic of Ireland, Palestine, Cyprus, the British West Indies and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
FW Woolworth store in Glasgow (Source: Pinterest UK)
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British F W WoolworthWoolworths came to Britain in 1909 with the first store, selling clothing, stationary and toys, opening in Liverpool in northern England (family cousin Fred Moore Woolworth was the British arm’s first managing director). The pricing strategy matched the US “five-and-dime” one with items selling at 3d and 6d. The British chain flourished from the 1920s on, becoming a household name through the UK, so much so that most consumers in Britain and Ireland believed that their ‘Woolies’ shops were a local invention, “where sixpence once went a long way”[5].
Like the parent company in America, British Woolworths proved a retail innovator. The Liverpool store introduced lunch counters (followed by Blackpool and other large UK stores)回, which were the precursor to the standard food courts which became integral to shopping malls later in the 20th century[6]. The Woolies restaurants also adhered to the 3d and 6d price formula, although by 1941 there had been some increases, eg, a split lobster salad had risen to the princely sum of one shilling (12d or 1/-)[7].
Woolworth UK’s rise and fallThe 1930s marked a high point for Woolworth in the UK … outside of the Christmas season the chain was opening a new store every five days! During the price inflation of the late 1930s the Woolworth giant kept the sixpence limit on its prices by asserting its buying power to coerce suppliers into accepting lower margins for their goods¤. By 1958 F W Woolworth Co had amassed 1,000 branches in Britain[8].
The first signs of the downturn in Woolworth UK’s fortunes can be traced from the 1960s, the parent company forced the British arm into introducing Woolco, a series of one stop shops usually located out-of-town. These did not succeed, as they had in America because the UK lacked the US’s higher car ownership which suited out-of-town shopping. This was also an unwise move away from Woolworth UK’s strength, its high street stores. The UK business’ problems continued in the 1970s – Britain’s decimalisation in 1971 caught Woolworth unprepared because unlike other retailers it had resisted the move to self-service. The upshot was costly to Woolworth (£5 million and a five-year process trying to replace their over-abundance of store cash registers. Also in the 1970s a number of Woolworth stores in Britain and Northern Ireland burned down, attributed at least in part in incompetent and short-sighted management … resulting in brand damage to the trusted F W Woolworth name from which it never entirely recovered[9].
Closing down: Bromsgrove store (Worcs.)
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British elements (principally Kingfisher plc) finally gained a controlling interest in the UK enterprise in 1982, but Woolies, this British institution on the retail landscape ultimately fell foul of intense competition from cut-price retailers … many customers defected to British supermarket giants Tesco and Sainsbury’s. Falling sales❀ and a cash-flow crisis affected its entertainment arm. The downturn was exacerbated by the adverse effects of the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s. In 2007 Britain’s Woolworth Co experienced its first trading loss in 95 years … and much worst was to come. Over Christmas 2008 807 stores in the UK closed. With Deloitte’s administrating, the whole Woolworth chain had a complete shutdown over a 41 day period (months short of what would have been 100 years of operation in the UK). The carve-up saw restructure specialists Hilco Capital acquire the retail business and the Shop Direct Group (owned by the Barclay brothers) taking over the online retail sector … this too however was closed down in 2015[10].
Rise and fall of the prototype organisationThe America parent Woolworth company was spectacularly successful in creating a chain of “cash-and-carry” dime stores. By 1977 there were 3,414 stores in the US, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and 1,884 outside of the US[11]. The pioneering merchandising methods of F W Woolworth with the founder’s emphasis on sales and customer service, and direct purchasing, established a solid base to enable his successors as CEO to continue to sustain and grow the Woolworth retail empire. However after WWII there was shift in the nature of shopping propelled by the burgeoning car culture … retailing in America and elsewhere moved on from the high street stores which had been the mainstay of Woolworth to the new malls located in the suburbs. Woolworth tried slowly to adjust but found itself less able to adapt to this change than its major competitors.
Woolco, Canada (Photo: Reddit)
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By the 1960s the original five-and-dime stores had morphed into other commercial entities: whilst the Woolworth flagship was retained there was a move into speciality stores and the large discount retail chain Woolco, which had a measure of success. Through the eighties and into the nineties the ailing FWW giant lingered on.
La Crosse (Wisconsin) store, 1992 (Source: La Crosse Tribune)
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In 1997 F W Woolworth Co in the US folded, following years of diminishing competitiveness with its rivals (the chain in 1996 posted a crippling loss of $US37 million). The Venator Group took its place and F W Woolworth ceased to be a trading name. Venator’s retail focus fixed on the foot ware market with Foot Locker and Kinney Shoes. This was a sudden end to a gradual process by which Woolworth Five-and-Dimes were overtaken by the likes of more dynamic enterprises, Wal-Mart, Kmart (formerly Kresge), Target and other commercial players who adapted to change far better than the veteran Woolworth[12].
F W Woolworth Co ultimately suffered the same fate as the British Woolworth – an accumulated obsolescence. As Jennifer Steinhauer summarised its plight, it had “faded in the collective memory of a nation warmly nostalgic for old stores but not willing to shop in them”. The pioneering retailer had become increasingly irrelevant to American consumers … the advantage of convenience it once possessed (where shoppers could get “lipstick, diapers and a milk shake at a discount, all under the one roof”) was now all-too-easily available at the abundance of handy drugstores, supermarkets and discount stores popping up everywhere[13].
PostScript: South Africa and Australia – Higher and HigherWhilst the Woolworths brand name no longer decorates the urban commercial landscape in the US and Britain, the Woolworths name in the Southern Hemisphere is a different story. Over the last 20 years both Woolworths Holdings Limited (RSA) and Woolworths Limited (Australia) have experienced impressive growth through expansion and diversification.
Woolworths Holdings Ltd (WHL) achieved a net income of R3.12 billion in 2015 as a provider of clothing, footwear, accessories, groceries, beauty products, home wares and financial services. WHL has pursued an aggressive campaign of expansion, taking over companies in South Africa (Mimco, Trenery) and Australia (David Jones stores, Country Road, Witchery).
Woolworths Casula (NSW)
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Woolworths Limited (WL) made a net surplus of A$1.2 billion in 2016 with its variety stores (Big W), supermarkets (Countdown, Food For Less, Safeway, Flemings, etc), grocers (Thomas Dux). Part of the company’s impressive growth has come from diversification – into petrol stations (Caltex-Woolworths) and into liquor stores (taking over BWS and Dan Murphy’s), hotels and gambling (Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group)[14]. The Aussie Woolworths brand currently maintains a presence in Australia, New Zealand and India▤. Business success aside, it has not been all smooth sailing for the RSA and Australian companies … both WHL and WL have been embroiled in controversies in their home countries from time to time. In 2010 WHL removed Christian magazines from its shelves (a financial decision by Woolworths), provoking a huge outcry from the powerful Christian community in South Africa with WHL having to back down[15]. WL’s move into alcohol has been extremely profitable (together with Coles it is estimated to account for ¾ of Australian liquor sales). Allied to this is Woolworths’ impact on poker machine gambling … through its ALH arm it has in excess of 12,650 pokies in pubs. Anti-gambling campaigners have accused WL of targeting children to push up pub sales by offering loyalty reward cards to frequent gamblers (and placing “Kid’s Club” playgrounds close to the poker machine areas in its hotels)[16].
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌❈ FWW’s mergers absorbed Knox & Co, Kirby & Co, Charlton & Co, C S Woolworth & Co and Moore & Co
回 the concept was an elaboration on F W Woolworth’s ‘Soda Fountain’ introduced in his Lancaster (US) store in 1907
¤ a similar bullying practice to that used by Woolworths Australia (and its rival Coles) this decade against local manufacturers
❀ one exception being the old Woolies favourite, the pick ‘n’ mix confectionary lines
▤ in 1989 Industrial Equity Ltd (IEL), part of the AdSteam Group (Adelaide Steamship Company), successfully took over Woolworths Australia … however the Woolworths company was subsequently publicly floated several years later
[2] after WWII the South African firm actually had a business relationship with Marks and Spencer for a number of years, ‘Woolworths (South Africa)’, Wikipedia, http://em.n.wikipedia.org
[3] One incident in particular resounded with him, being unable to afford an item in a Watertown store as a child, ‘Biography of F.W. Woolworth’, (Woolworths Museum),www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[4] J Robinson, ‘Woolworths: the rise and fall of the departmental store giant’, The Guardian (London), 20-Nov-2008, www.theguardian.com
[5] ‘Christmas Past and Christmas Presents’, (Woolworths Museum),www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[6] ‘The British Lunch Counter 1938-41’, (Woolworths Museum),www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[7] ibid.
[8],’A potted history of F.W. Woolworth’, (Woolworths Museum),www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[9] ibid.;’Preparing for decimalisation “D-Day” on 15 February 1971′, in ibid.
[10] ibid.; Robinson, op.cit.
[11] J N Ingham, Biographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders, Vol. 4
[12] F W Woolworth also tended to cling to outmoded lines, eg, in its toy department old-fashioned puzzles and no action figures, J Steinhauer, ‘Woolworth’s Give Up the Five-and-Dime, New York Times, 18-Jul-1997, www.nyt.com
[13] Woolworth Co’s competitors ultimately offered more choice of products, quicker checkouts and often lower prices,ibid
[14] Woolworths’ move into hardware stores via Masters Home Improvement was far less successful with the retail giant getting badly singed, E Stewart, ‘Masters: Five reasons Woolworths is pulling the plug on struggling hardware chain’, 18-Jan-2017, ABC News, www.mobile.abc.net.au
[15] ‘Woolworths (South Africa)’, op.cit.
[16] L Mulligan, ‘Woolworths under fire from anti-poker machine groups for introducing gambling rewards card in pubs’, ABC News, 17-Sep-2015, www.abc.net.au
Australia’s “impure origins” as a convict colony in 1788 cast a shadow over the country’s European inhabitants which stayed with them long after transportation to the colonies was halted (with the exception of South Australia whose citizens have take a perhaps inflated self-satisfaction from its status as the sole free colony from its foundation)[1]. The deep imprint of the “convict stain” was a difficult burden to throw off but as Australia became more involved in world events especially external wars, this dubious tag started to recede and a new, more estimable self-identity started to take shape in the consciousness of Australians. A catalyst for this gradual change of self-perception was the roll-call of British Empire wars in which valiant Australians distinguished themselves on the field of battle – South African War, WWI (Gallipoli, the Western Front, Palestine). The feats of Australian soldiers in war worked as an antidote to the lingering convict inferiority complex[2].
Geo. Wood, “Convict Stain” debunker
The ‘stain’ of colonial Australia continued into the Federation era but in 1922 the intervention of a Sydney University history professor into this debate presented a new (positive) perspective for Australians to build on. George Arnold Wood in his highly influential book, The Discovery of Australia, reassessed the early colonial era, repudiating the “convict stain” and argued that Australia’s convict legacy should elicit admiration rather than being the enduring object of shame for Australians. Wood tapped into a powerful Antipodean undercurrent of the time, by exulting the convict heritage and raising up the current generation of their descendants, he was emphasising a (superior) point of difference with the character of Britons back in the mother country. Wood contended that Australians were free of the environmental drawbacks that was sapping the vitality of the working class Briton (industrial grime, overcrowded tenements in cities, etc). From the late 19th century some observers had started to view the Australian and New Zealand “White Dominions” as being the region of “the coming man” vis-à-vis the mother country[3].
New Zealand, unlike Australia, did not have the stigma of a convict society to overcome, but New Zealanders had been cultivating their own distinctive image of the country which set it apart from Britain. New Zealanders nourished a national myth that NZ was peopled by highly selected stock, “Better Britons” or “Britain of the South”❈ as New Zealanders described themselves and the country that they inhabited (the claim to possess exclusive racial stock was referenced in NZ medical journals of the time)[4].
The “coming man” hypothesis bought into a number of prevailing Antipodean myths of the period. The 1850s phenomenon of the gold-rushes in Eastern Australia led some to conclude that only the best men from Britain migrated to Australian goldfields, having what it took to make the journey and prosper … the thinking was that Australia had attracted the “pick of Britain’s stock” and therefore it was somehow better than Britain[5]. Immigration patterns have contributed to the modified sense of Australian identity. With migrants being drawn predominately from the British Isles and Ireland until the 1950s, James Jupp has argued that a belief has persisted that Australians (especially native-born ones) were both of British racial and cultural descent and “superior to the British”. The ‘ordinary’ English working and lower-middle classes were often seen as “dirty, servile, unhealthy, inferior” and held in low regard by Australians[6].
Conditions in Australia were often cited as a building block for the construction of a ‘superior’ cut of British man. Australia benefitted, it was said, from a climate infinitely better than Britain, a lavish land … making for a vigorous and healthy ‘race'[7]. W K Hancock (Australia, 1930) described the Australian ‘type’ of man as a harmonious blending of all the British types, nourished by a “generous sufficiency of food (good diet) … breathing space (vast countryside) and sunshine”, endorsing a view of environmental determinism[8]. A sense of ‘racial vigour’ was a recurring motif in contemporary references to the coming or ‘new’ man in Australasia✤.
South African Boer War – coming crisis in British Manhood?
Imperial Britain’s performance in the Boer War (especially early on) against a “rag-tag” army of Afrikaner farmers fed into the rising tide of Britain’s fears of the degeneration of its racial stock. Britain’s sudden reverses in the war required reinforcements from home, leading to a manpower dilemma – unhealthy British cities and slums, from where the foot soldiers were drawn, churned out recruits from the working class who were “narrow-chested, knock-kneed, wheezing, rickety specimens” of men[9]. The average British soldier in 1900 was shorter than that of 1845 and over three-fourths of those volunteering in Manchester recruitment halls were rejected as unfit for service[10]. This crisis gave further credence to the idea of Australia and New Zealand as embodying the coming man. Whilst British soldiery seemed to struggle and its martial supremacy stumbled (albeit temporarily), the Australasian contingents of soldiers conversely equipped themselves well. The Boer War reversals only accentuated anxieties about the racial deterioration of working class Britons[11]. A report conducted in 1904, with the title “Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration”, confirmed that Britons were even more physically unfit than the war had suggested.
The “proof” of Gallipoli
The valour and skill exhibited by Australian and New Zealand soldiers in WWI vis-à-vis the perception of the British troops, reinforced the coming man stereotype[12]. Even English social Darwinists such as Randolf Bedford (London Times, 1915) described the ANZAC troops as a “race of athletes”. These ‘athletes’, it was claimed, were scientifically superior to their British cousins. Prominent in the myth-making was Great War correspondent C E W Bean who attributed Australian achievements on the battlefield to a sense of mateship and the democratic culture bred in the Australian bush[13]. Regeneration of the white stock was only achievable through the “new Anglos” to be found in Australasia amongst its soldiers and athletes, so this myth went.
Depletion of racial stock
The Great War, and specifically the Gallipoli campaign, was a “defining moment” for New Zealanders and Australians, a “global test that proved the manhood” of those “representatives of the ‘coming man'”[14]. The war was also a devastating loss of that same manhood … both countries lost a “chunk of their tallest and healthiest A1 stock” with New Zealand suffering casualties of 59% of its entire forces¤. In a talk in Australia NZ eugenicist-physician Truby King, lamenting the loss of manhood, implored white women to “repair the war wastage” by producing more babies from good stock and preventing infant deaths[15].
⍗ The 1905 champion All Blacks (“the Originals”)
(source: www.telegraph.co.uk)
This Antipodean sporting life … demonstrating superior prowess through sport
Manhood through the testing experience of war – imperial and global – helped shape Australians and New Zealanders’ sense of their own national identities, another definer of character was sport. The dominant performance of the 1905 All Blacks (New Zealand rugby team) in the UK, with its formidable physical power and skill proving too much for the best of the British Isles and Irish rugby … the Kiwis’ display of “muscular manhood” on tour made an unmistakeable impression at home. For many the All Blacks’ triumph was confirmation that NZ was “the best place to build strong bodies”. Prime Minister Richard (‘King Dick’) Seddon attributed the team’s dominance to the country’s “natural and healthy conditions of colonial life (which produced such) “stalwart and athletic sons” as the NZ players in the rugby touring team[16].
The following year, 1906, the South African tour of the British Isles saw the South African ‘Springboks’ triumph over the rugby home countries as well (two years after that the Australian ‘Wallabies’ toured Britain and Ireland, also winning the great bulk of games it played). As rugby was considered in Britain as “a sport of the elite” (played by gentlemen), defeat at the hands of these ‘colonial’ teams was a savage blow to British pride and another indicator for many of the home nation’s racial decline[17].
Not all contemporary observers accepted the distinctiveness and pre-eminence of the ‘new’ Australian and New Zealander as espoused by Wood and Bean et al. John Fraser, a visitor from Britain, observed in Australia: the Making of a Nation (1910), that the native-born Australian lacked vim and vigour, and would degenerate without “infusion of British blood”. Fraser concluded that Australians were “just transplanted British people”, albeit “modified by the influence of climate” and social environment[18].
The race card: immigration and border control
Backers of the eugenics movements and believers in the notion of the “coming man” in Australia and New Zealand tended to view new immigrants as suspect. In the reasoning of the authorities it was imperative that the numbers of the ‘unfit’, the “social undesirables” already in Australasia do not swell further. A watertight immigration control, determining who is ‘fit’ and appropriate to enter the country, would compliment the eugenic measures of sterilisation and segregation. Accordingly in 1899 New Zealand, and 1901 Australia, passed Immigration Restriction Acts. Australia’s legislation barred permanent entry for non-white people. The White Australian Policy reflected Australian fears of invasion from the north … Australia’s sense of isolation and vulnerability at the proximity of what racists depicted as “teeming hordes of Asiatics” (concerns intensified by Japan’s population spurt coinciding with a trend towards low rates of birth for Australia)[19].
In a work breaking new ground Alison Bashford in Imperial Hygiene has focused attention on the function of quarantine in Australia’s racially motivated immigration policies that came into force after Federation. Positioning quarantine as an integral part of the White Australia Policy, Bashford argues that the quarantine line on Australia’s border was also a “racialised immigration restriction line”, and together with the immigration restriction measures, part of an “international hygiene”. In an effort to block so-called “racially impure” and “unfit” immigrants from entering the country, Australia wrote mental health and hygiene criteria into its immigration laws and regulations (as did other western nations including Britain, the US and Canada)[20].
PostScript: D H Lawrence and Australia
DH (Bert) Lawrence in his novel Kangaroo, written entirely with the exception of the final chapter while the peripatetic English novelist was in Australia (1922), fleetingly entertained the possibility of Australia becoming a new and uncorrupted Britain. One of Lawrence’s enduring preoccupations, informed by his readings of Herbert Spencer and other early eugenics proponents, was the degeneration of western industrial society. In other works also Lawrence subscribed to the notion of the coming man, eg, in Aaron’s Rod (written before his visit to Australia) Lawrence described an Australian character as a “new and vital version of an English man”[21].
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❈ with such fidelity did New Zealand uphold the notion of being (better) Britons, that it wasn’t until 1948 that New Zealanders ceased to be British citizens and became “New Zealand citizens”
✤ the idea of the common or new man in society and its association with eugenics was not confined to Australasia, the Southern Hemisphere or even to the Anglo-Saxon world, for an account of the Italian eugenics movement see F Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy
¤ this was an imperial anxiety for the British and the Dominions, the loss of the best or fittest elements killed on the battlefield, a diminution of the “pool of fit white stock”, J M Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760-2010
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[1] J Hirst, ‘An Oddity from the Start: Convicts and National Character’, The Monthly, July 2008, www.themonthly.com.au
[2] D Walker, ‘National Identity’, in J Jupp [Ed.], The Australian People: An Encyclopaedia of the Nation, Its People and their Origins
[3] S Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of Racial Science’ in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds.], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
[4] A C Wanhalla, ‘Gender, Race and Colonial Identity: Women and Eugenics in New Zealand, 1918-1939’, Unpub. thesis, MA in History, 2001 (University of Canterbury, NZ)
[5] J Jupp, quoted in A Jamrozik, Chains of Colonial Inheritance: Searching for an Identity in an Subservient Nation
[6] ibid.
[7] Walker, op.cit.
[8] Walker, op.cit.
[9] C Hitchens, ‘Young Men in Shorts’, (The Atlantic Monthly, June 2004), www.theatlantic.com
[10] P Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke and Culture in Britain since 1800,
[11] S Dubow, ‘Placing Race in South African History’, in W Lamont [Ed], Historical Controversies and Historians
[12] the Great War in Bean’s vision was the fulfilment and defining feature of Australia’s manhood – shaper of the nation’s character, S Garton, ‘War and Masculinity in Twentieth Century Australia’, JAS, 22:56 (1998)
[13] Garton, ibid
[14] P Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand (2nd ed. 2011)
[15] ibid.
[16] the British press noted that the All Blacks rugby players (the ‘Originals’) possessed superior fitness (and utilised professional training techniques), T Weir, ‘Professionals, Cheats and Superior “Muscular Madhood”: British Domestic Responses to the 1905 New Zealand “All Blacks” Rugby’, (University of York, 2011), www.academic.edu; P M Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand
[17] ‘The Boer War: British Fears of Physical Deterioration and the Build up to World War I’, www.boerwar.weebly.com
[18] Fraser noted as further evidence of decay the country’s birth-rate decline from 1901, Walker, op.cit (Fn: Although according to Statistique Internationale the downward trend in Australia, NZ and GB began in the 1870s)
[19] Garton, ‘Eugenics in Aust & NZ’, op.cit.. As David Walker has noted, from the 1880s on there emerged a “powerful, masculinising and racialising impulse in Australian nationalism” which coincided with the advent of a “geo-political threat (from an) awakening Asia”, D R Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850-1939 (1999)
[20] A Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health
[21] D Game, D.H. Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire (2015)
Melbourne: Hub of the Australian Eugenics Movement
Melbourne, and more precisely, the University of Melbourne, played a pivotal role in eugenics before WWI and especially during the interwar years. Melbourne University was in the forefront of the academic dissemination of eugenics ideology, its academics persuasive in their efforts to shape public policy on health❈. With professor of anatomy Richard Berry the principal advocate of the racial ‘purification’ cause on campus, the university spawned the Eugenics Education Society (EES). According to Ross Jones the EES “eugenicists operated primarily as a pressure group within the university, the education department and various government agencies and committees”[1]. Later the society morphed into the Eugenics Society of Victoria (1936). The obsessive skull-measurer Berry declared war on “rotten heredity”, calling for mandatory sterilisation and segregation of aborigines, the poor, homosexuals, prostitutes, criminals, alcoholics, the mentally ill, people with small heads and those with low IQs. Berry also advocated for a “lethal chamber” to euthanise “the grosser types of our mental defectives” as he described them (including Australian aborigines)[2].
Berry was the zealous “campaign director” for the dissemination of egregious ideas about race and the advocacy of eugenic interventions in Victoria, but he had plenty of other willing collaborators at Parkville (the university). Other Melbourne U professors up to their elbows in the eugenics movement included educationalist Frank Tate¤, biologist Baldwin Spencer and one-time vice-chancellor John Medley. Zoologist Wilfred Agar, like the others also honoured with an eponymous building at the university[3], was at one time “chief protector” of Aborigines(sic) in Darwin where he vilified aborigines and happily oversaw the removal of indigenous children from their families[4]. Another influential proponent of eugenics was Berry’s friend, the psychiatrist William Ernest Jones. Jones railed against “low-class Roman Catholic Irish” in whom he detected an “inherent lunacy”[5]
The campaign driven by the Victorian Eugenics Society resulted in mental deficiency legislation passing through Victorian parliament in 1939 but the eugenics policies were never implemented¤ ※ initially because of the onset of war (and later on after shocking revelations about the Holocaust came to light)[6]. Meanwhile, over the border in NSW, eugenicist doctor and minister for health Richard Arthur met similar difficulties with his 1930 mental defectives bill which failed to be passed. The so-called ‘reform’ eugenicists whilst still intent on denying sectors of the community some of the fundamental rights of citizenship (including the right to marry and to reproduce), also undertook interventions aimed at societal improvement (slum clearance, health reforms, educational reforms)[7]. Despite the wholesale discrediting of the eugenics movement from the 1940s the Eugenics Society of Victoria lingered on until 1961, having steered a course away from outright endorsement of eugenic measures.
Other pillars of Victorian society also firmly entrenched in the eugenics camp included newspaperman Sir Keith Murdoch (Rupert’s father), the CEO of the organisation that became CSIRO, Sir David Rivett, and the founder of ACER (Australian Council of Educational Research) Kenneth Cunningham. The involvement of many of the eminent has not received the scrutiny that Berry has … academic Ross Jones suggests a “conscious cover up” of prominent Melburnians took place post-war with the whole subject of eugenics becoming taboo[8] (there seems to be a pattern of excising the unsavoury activities of eugenicists from biographies to ensure reputation preservation for many implicated in the Australasian movements – see also PostScript).
Feminist-Eugenists and the Racial Hygienists
The progressive circles of Australasian society with an interest in eugenics included middle class women’s groups. Several prominent feminists, for the most part well-educated, were in the vanguard of the eugenics movement. Their agenda was focused very much on birth control for poorer, working class women. In Australia the NSW Racial Hygiene Association (RHA), founded by Lillie Goodisson, Marion Piddington (an early advocate of artificial insemination) and Ruby Rich in 1926, endorsed selective breeding to end hereditary disease and defects, and campaigned without success for the “mentally handicapped” to be segregated and sterilised. The Sydney-based RHA started the first birth control clinic in Australia in 1933✤. As the practice of eugenics became increasingly stigmatised the RHA shifted its focus to family planning with an organisational name-change in 1960 reflecting this change.
The RHA were instrumental in campaigning for pre-marital safeguards to ‘purify’ the White stock … hygiene clinics, mental and physical tests and the issuing of certificates of approval to engaged couples who tick all the right boxes for ‘purity’. In a similar vein south of the Murray the Eugenics Society of Victoria were demanding compulsory pre-nuptials health checks for couples as late as 1947[9]. The New Zealand bureaucracy had matrimonial ‘purity’ checks as well … those couples who obtained an official Eugenic Certificate received a piece of paper affirming that they had been adjudged to possess “a perfect physical and mental balance and unusually strong Eugenic Love possibilities (necessary for) “the future welfare of the race”.
New Zealand women for “race improvement”: organised volunteers and ‘femocrats’
Across the Tasman various NZ elite women’s groups were active in combating what they saw as the degeneracy of society. As noted by Angela Wanhalla, “New Zealand women’s organisations were among the most vocal supporters of eugenic attempts at race betterment”[9]. These middle-class dominated groups included the National Council of Women, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Farmers’ Union (Women’s Division)[10]. As well as the volunteer organisations! many ‘femocrats’ in the professions and government bureaucracies added their voices to the chorus advocating eugenics as the way forward to a better New Zealand[11].
‘Grass roots’ racial fitness in NZ
New Zealand’s quest for ongoing, nationwide improvements in the eugenic fabric of the country included the periodical measurement of Pākehā schoolchildren. In 1927 bureaucrats delighted to announce that New Zealand children were taller and heavier than their English counterparts (and than Australian as well!)◘. These findings reinforced the belief that New Zealand was the ideal nursery for British stock. Agricultural-based New Zealand missed no opportunity to promote itself as “Britain’s farm”, the exporter of primary products to the ‘Mother’ country[12].
PostScript: No retrospective … the iniquitous past practice that dare not speak its name
Devotees of conspiracy theories would revel in the apparent hush-up subsequently of the involvement of many prominent Australasians in eugenics. A cursory thumb-through of ADB and DNZB✡ biographies of Australasian public figures (especially medical practitioners, scientists and educationalists), largely written before the 1990s, is very revealing. In the mini-bios of figures who were significant and even integral in some cases to the eugenics movements in Australia and New Zealand, eg, Richard Berry, Frank Tate, Kenneth Cunningham, Raphael Cilento, Harvey Sutton, Elizabeth Gunn, Truby King and Duncan MacGregor, eugenics doesn’t rate a mention – any reference to their key historic roles in eugenic causes have been discreetly omitted (or if mentioned at all their eugenics careers have been swiftly glossed over). By the 1950s most eugenicists still practicing in Australia and New Zealand had, as elsewhere, sought to distance themselves from the negative connotations of the eugenics title by adopting new designations such as “human geneticist”, ‘sociologist’ or ‘demographer'[13].
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
❈ the University of Melbourne’s counterpart in the US was the University of Virginia, a stronghold of the belief and practice where a “eugenics mania” existed (see also ‘The Eugenics Movement in Australasia IV’)
¤ one of Tate’s pet projects as director of education was aimed at excluding working class kids from secondary and tertiary education, in sharp contrast to his NSW counterpart Peter Board’s equality of opportunity approach
※ compare with the success of eugenics legislation in the US – in the 1920s and ’30s sterilisation laws were passed in 24 of the (then) 48 states
✤ the RHA and other elite other women’s groups were undoubtedly inspired and enlightened by the international trail-blazers in the birth control field … British palaeobotanist Marie Stopes and American nurse and sex educator Margaret Sanger, both strongly committed eugenics ideologists
◘ measurement to determine physical fitness became a pastime of state officials on both sides of the Tasman. In Australia, welfare worker Dr Mary Booth was a consistent advocate for even more anthropometry, as was eugenicist Dr Harvey Sutton. Many of the anthropometrically-inclined like fitness expert H C Bjelke-Petersen were perturbed to discover that the chest-girth of the typical white schoolboy in Australia was “distressingly small”, W Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny. All of the eugenic emphasis on measurement did have a utilitarian purpose in encouraging statistics-gathering by the state
✡ Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University; Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, NZ Ministry for Culture & Heritage)
⚜︎ ⚜︎ ⚜︎ ⚜︎ ⚜︎ ⚜︎
[1] R L Jones, ‘Eugenics in Australia: The Secret of Melbourne’s Elite’, The Conversation, 21-Sep-2011, www.theconversation.com
[2] Australasian politicians were pretty much in synch with the eugenicist-scientists, certainly in regard to craniometry – in 1911 Australian PM Andrew Fisher urged the state premiers to regularly measure the heads of state schoolchildren, Walker, op.cit. Craniology – examining the human skull to ascertain supposed racial differentiation, harks back to the earlier (19th century) pseudo-science of phrenology which purported to divine(sic) character and mental capacity by also examining the skull; E Cervini, ‘A theory out of darkness’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13-Sep-2011, www.smh.com.au
[3] community disquiet about the retention of eugenicist nomenclature at Melbourne University is a topic that is gaining heat, E Cervini, ‘Its time Melbourne Uni stopping honouring eugenicist Richard Berry’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 6-March-2016. The focus remains on the unapologetic Berry who never recanted his eugenicist beliefs and maintained a collection of aboriginal ancestral remains in the Anatomy building on campus
[4] M Dobbin, ‘Heart of darkness: Melbourne University’s racist professors’, The Age (Melbourne), 30-Nov-2015,www.theage.com.au
[5] S G Foster, ‘Jones, William Ernest (1867–1957)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/jones-william-ernest-6882/text11929, published first in hardcopy 1983, accessed online 19 November 2016
[6] Jones, ‘Secret of Melbourne’s elite’, op.cit.
[7] R L Jones, ‘The master potter and the rejected pots: Eugenic legislation in Victoria, 1918-1939’, Australian Historical Studies, 1999; 30(113)
[8] A C Wanhalla, ‘Gender, Race and Colonial Identity: Women and Eugenics in New Zealand, 1918-1939’, Unpub. Thesis for MA in History, (University of Canterbury, NZ, 2001)
[9] Cervini, ‘Theory out of darkness’, op.cit.
[9] Wanhalla, op.cit.
[10] A Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, National and Public Health
[11] A Rees, ‘The Quality and not only the Quantity of Australia’s People. Ruby Rich and the Racial Hygiene Association of NSW’, Australian Feminist Studies, Vol 27 2012 – Issue 71, http://dex.doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2012.648262, pub. online: 07-Mar-2012; ‘The Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales’, (Wikipedia), http://en.m.wikipedia.org; A C Wanhalla, ‘Gender, race and colonial identity : women and eugenics in New Zealand, 1918-1939’, (CORE, University of Canterbury 2001), www.core.ac.uk
[12] P Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand
[13] D H Wyndham, ‘Striving for National Fitness: Eugenics in Australia 1910s to 1930s’, (Unpub. PhD thesis, Department of History, University of Sydney, July 1996)
The belief in eugenics, the science (or as modern eyes would see it — the pseudoscience) of “improving the quality of the human race, especially by selective breeding”❈, had a powerful hold on societal thinking in Australia and New Zealand in the first half of the twentieth century, as it did elsewhere in the world, predominantly in western countries or western-implant societies.
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/image.jpg”> Sir F Galton[/
The term “eugenics” itself was coined in the latter 19th century by English polymath and statistician Francis Galton, whose views had been informed by the theories on “the preservation of favoured races” (Origins of the Species) of his second cousin Charles Darwin (coincidentally Darwin’s son, Leonard, was a leading eugenicist in Britain)⍍. Galton linked heredity to Social Darwinism. Sometimes called “race science” or more euphemistically “racial hygiene”, eugenics ideology in its day had a duality to its basis that was inherently contradictory. On the one hand it assumed the natural superiority of the white race (because of its ‘good’ genes), on the other, that same ‘superior’ stock was being assailed by a countervailing threat of physical, psychological and moral degeneration of the race coming from those elements of society labelled as ‘inferior’ (the dysgenic or cacogenic sections of society).
A cycle of low fertility rates in the West commencing in the late 19th century together with rising levels of crime and the emergence of welfare state dependency provoked concerns of moral and physical degeneracy of the white race[1]. In Australia this concern prompted a Royal Commission into the Decline of the Birth Rate in NSW in 1904. The widespread perception in Western countries was that the decline was hitting the “good stock” hardest, as a consequence ‘inferior’ people of “low racial stock” were out-breeding the ‘superior’ stock of the country❇.
White societies like Britain and the Dominions were viewed as becoming ‘soft’ and ‘weak’ and the foundations being laid for the welfare state in the UK were attacked as contributing to this ‘decay’ – the survival and multiplication of the poor, the deranged and other “social undesirables” was a financial burden on the state, driving up the welfare costs. Even the man who later provided the blueprint for the British welfare state post-WWII, pursued a strong eugenics agenda. William Beveridge in 1909 called for the ‘defectives’ within society to be denied their “citizen rights” – “the franchise … civil freedom and fatherhood”[2].
Britain, the US, New Zealand, Australia and other countries were informed by ‘scientific’ notions of eugenics and sought to implement policies and practices which remedied this trendஐ. This was a two-fold process, the first involving so-called positive eugenics – elevating or ‘purifying’ the racial stock by encouraging the so-called ‘fit’ people in society to procreate more (in New Zealand the act of providing literature on contraceptives was proscribed in the 1900s). Simultaneously the states sought to deal with negative eugenics (or more precisely ‘dysgenics’¤), identifying those members of society thought to be ‘unfit’ for procreation (people of unsound mind, of physical deformity, the intellectually-handicapped, the epileptic, the criminal classes including prostitutes, slum dwellers, homosexuals, dipsomaniacs, the indigenous non-white population and other marginalised sections) and either segregating them, preventing them from marrying or having them sterilised to stop their sexual reproduction[3].
The E tree
Some of the contemporary popular fiction produced in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, etc. played on the anxieties of a “race war” which put the supremacy of the white European in peril. Influential writers such as Charles H Pearson in Australia, helped to shape these perceptions with books like National Life and Character: a Forecast which argued that it was the “racially defiled” non-white races with their higher birth-rates, not the white race with its relentless imperial juggernaut, that was on the ascendency[4].
What sectors and groups of society were in the Vanguard of the Eugenics Movements in Australasia?
The eugenicists and fellow travellers of the eugenics movement were drawn from the elite circles of Australian and New Zealand society§ – including politicians, scientists, medical practitioners, educators, academics, social workers, women’s groups, churches and clergymen (excluding the Catholic Church). Other professionals such as psychiatrists, anthropologists and magistrates aided and abetted the work of the movement. Eugenics was not a left /right thing, support for it came from across the political spectrum – from socialists and conservatives both.
Opponents of Eugenics in Australasia
Although eugenic thought was accepted as the normative approach to tackling social problems in the interwar period, it was not universally countenanced by all sectors of Australian and New Zealand society. Opposition to eugenics came from organised working class elements, ie, the trade unions, as well as from the Catholic Church, from moral campaigners (concerned that sterilisation might lead to increased promiscuity), from some medical practitioners (also concerned that the poorly educated sterilised would be sexually indiscriminate and spread VD[5], plus wary of the legal ramifications of sterilising citizens), and from public intellectuals and scientific dissenters.
The eugenics movement in Aeotearoa
New Zealand in the first 40 years of the 20th century presents a similar story to its large trans-Tasman neighbour. The New Zealand Eugenics Education Society, founded in 1910, led the call for eugenic measures necessary it claimed to manage the population and ensure a healthy country. Grass roots pressure prompted a government investigation in 1924 which concluded that there was a birth-rate disparity distorting the population’s genetic balance – “the ‘fit’ were being swamped by the ‘unfit'”. It informed a view that NZ was in racial decline as a consequence of growing numbers of the feeble-minded and social defectives which eugenicists argued posed a social menace[6].
PM Stout (Picture: www.digitslnz.org)
Chief Justice Sir Robert Stout was one of the leading figures in NZ eugenics in the first half of the century. Stout, in a discursive and often anecdotal lecture to the Wellington Eugenics Society in 1912, espoused the standard eugenicist position. Stout linked heredity to fatal diseases, condemned high levels of alcohol consumption and cigarette-smoking, and warned that “the peerage” was committing “race suicide”, “the best blood” was being “enervated” and supplanted by the “second best”, “the extinction of the race was being seen everywhere”, etc[7]. Chief Justice Stout’s race views carried even more weight because he had previously been premier of NZ in the late 19th century. William Chapple was another leading NZ eugenicist who was influential in the NZ movement through his dual roles as medical practitioner and Liberal Party politician. His book Fertility of the Unfit advocated enforced sterilisation in certain circumstances.
In touch with the latest currents in eugenics thinking in Britain and the US, eugenicists in Australia and New Zealand whole-heartedly set about rejuvenating the racial ‘fitness’ of Australians. This would be achieved they believed by encouraging the elite in society to procreate, whilst at the same time, with the aid of legislators, denying those they labelled as “social misfits” or ‘degenerates’ that same right to reproduce[8].
RBP – the Scoutmaster-General (Source: www.bbc.com)
PostScript 1: British Models
The Australian and New Zealand eugenics movements took impetus from the larger and more advanced movements in Britain and the US. The leading British eugenicists themselves acknowledged a debt to Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement. Baden-Powell’s emphasis on the traits of character[9], discipline, citizenship and patriotism were appealing to eugenicists such as Karl Pearson and Caleb Saleeby. Dr Saleeby wrote in ‘The progress of eugenics’: “If national eugenics is ever achieved in Great Britain, it will come through the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides”[10].
PostScript 2: Eugenics, an agricultural template
Sidestepping the moral and ethical considerations, some contemporary eugenics enthusiasts made the argument for efficacy based on agricultural models. They advocated the utilisation of the successful principles of selective stock and plant breeding, applying them to the reproduction of humans to improve the quality of future generations. One US agricultural society member in 1911 summed it up in a straightforward, no nonsense sort of way, “better horses, better cattle, better hogs …. (why not) … better babies?”[11] The agriculture/eugenics nexus has a further dimension in the US … two of America’s foremost eugenicists, Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, had been chicken breeders.
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❈ some basic definitions to begin with – the etymology of the word ‘eugenics’ is Greek, from eugenes, root derivation: eu-, ‘good’ or ‘well’, + -genos, ‘birth’ or ‘stock’ … contrast with dysgenics, dys (‘bad’ or ‘ill’) + -genos, Collins Concise Dictionary (Australian Edition, 1995)
ஐ the US in particular was a hotspot of the eugenics movement, producing pro-eugenic films like The Black Stork (1917) which preached a chilling message of “Kill defectives, Save the Nation”
¤ this dysgenic sensibility, that race disintegration was occurring was so universally pervasive in the early 1900s that even black intellectuals in America led by W E B DuBois advocated that the ‘Negro race’ guard against racial decay by elevating up the “talented tenth” of the black community
⍍ Charles Darwin himself was ahead of the movement expressing elitist eugenics views in 1871 in The Descent of Man, “We civilised men…. do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick.. . thus the weak members of society propagate their kind.”
❇ the offspring of “low stock” were characterised as “the increasingly disproportionate progeny of the criminal” who were “swamping civilisation”, R Waddell, (Preface) The Fertility of the Unfit, cited in E J Wilson, ‘Eugenic ideology and racial fitness in Queensland, 1900-1950’, Unpub. PhD thesis (Department of History, University of Queensland, May 2003),
www.espace.library.uq.edu.au§ pointedly, many of the top figures (especially the medical doctors) in the Aust/NZ eugenics movements were born in Britain and migrated to the Antipodes
[1] the self-doubt harboured by Britons and by colonials in other dominions of the Empire was accentuated by a further sense of diminution after the Anglo-Boer War felt by the British professional classes, resulting what has been described by C L Bacchi as a “gloomy heredity determinism”, C L Bacchi, ‘The Nature-Nurture Debate in Australia, 1900-1914, Historical Studies, (19) 1980, quoted in M Cawte, ‘Craniometry and Eugenics in Australia: R.J.A. Berry and the Quest for Social Efficiency, Historical Studies, (22) 1986
[2] D Sewell, ‘How eugenics poisoned the welfare state’, The Spectator, 25-Nov-2009, www.spectator.co.uk
[3] ‘Story: Contraception and sterilisation Page 5 – Information about contraceptives’ Encyclopedia ; ‘Eugenics – Positive And Negative Eugenics’, http://medicine.jrank.org/pages/2210/Eugenics-Positive-Negative-Eugenics.html; some eugenicists, driven by fear of miscegenation, advocated complete segregation of races, especially prominent in South Africa and the USA; S Dubow, ‘Placing “Race” in South African History’, in W Lamont [Ed.], Historical Controversies and Historians, (1998),www.disciplinas.stoa.usp.br
[4] ‘Charles Henry Pearson’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org. The race war notion – especially in regard to Japan’s emerging Pacific presence – found a fervid home in the Australian and New Zealand press and literature in the early century, eg, ‘The Commonwealth Crisis’, published in The Lone Hand, presents a fantasy scenario of a Japanese invasion of the Northern Territory, D Walker, ‘National Identity’, in J Jupp [Ed.], The Australian People: An Encyclopaedia of the Nation, Its People and their Origins
[5] Venereal disease was exceptionally virulent during the Great War, and in the prevailing eugenics environment in Australia, an indicator of what constituted racial ‘unfitness’ … the dilemma for society’s ruling elite as the war went on was that ‘respectable’ citizens also found themselves victims of the disease!, M Larson, ‘The iconography
[6] A Wanhalla, ‘New Zealand’, 23-Oct-2014, (Eugenics Archive NZ). Retrieved 8-Nov-2016 from www.eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/connections/544873c7d861fb0000000001
[6] ‘Eugenics – Problem of the Race – a lecture by Sir Robert Stout’, Evening Post (Wellington), 6-Aug-1912 https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/EP19120806.2.53
[7] Neo-Malthusian ideas informed eugenics thinking, especially regarding fertility control, R A Soloway, ‘Neo-Malthusians, Eugenists, and the Declining Birth-Rate in England, 1900-1918’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1978)
[8] Baden-Powell declared in 1911: “Our business is to … pass as many boys through our character factory as we possibly can”, M Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the origins of the Boy Scout movement
[9] M A Hasian, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought
[10] C Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History
In this age of deregulated, worldwide passenger flight with more commercial airlines in the game than there are countries in the world (or so it seems anyway), its interesting to reflect that back in 1906 two American brothers had a monopoly on the very concept of human flight. Of course in 1906 there was no commercial flights – being still at the first dawn of aviation endeavour, but the only attempts at flight at all then (in a legal sense at least) were with the express say-so of those same two brothers.
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/image-12.jpg”> The 1906 Patent[/
In 1906 the Wright brothers – Orville and Wilbur – were granted a patent by the US Patent Office (after two earlier failed applications) for their “flying machine”, or more precisely, for their demonstrated method of controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight. The bicycle shop owners-cum-aviation inventors had managed to demonstrate some measure (albeit minimal) of aerial control of the third version of their Wright flyer in all three axes of aerodynamics – pitch, yaw and roll[1]. The basis of the patent was the Wrights’ experiments in 1902-1903 and the successful (852 feet/59 seconds) glider flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903.
⇓1903 Wright Flyer at the Smithsonian
The Wright brothers defended their exclusive aircraft patent against all-comers (“copiers and imitators” as they saw everybody else in the game) with a monomaniacal religious zeal that would have befitted their overbearing United Brethren minister father Milton. Orville and Wilbur freely sued and issued writs against anyone who attempted to construct and fly a new aircraft without purchasing a licence from them. As this was the pioneering era of aviation there were a lot of inventors trying to do just this[2]. Accordingly, the Wrights spent a lot of time locked in legal disputes with other manufacturers in America and overseas who were trying to avoid the patent fee. The Wrights staunchly defended their world monopoly over flight in unequivocal terms as a ‘moral’ and a ‘legal’ right, treating all other contemporary inventors in the field as in effect “hobbyists”![3].
Glenn Hammond Curtiss, a New York engineer and aviator, was one of many inventors who fell foul of the litigious Wright brothers when he added ailerons (French: “little wing”), a movable attachment to a fixed wing for greater control, to his experimental aircraft. Unfortunately for Curtiss he became the main focus of the Wrights’ wrath and in their eyes their greatest nemesis … in 1913 the Wrights won lawsuits for patent infringement against Curtiss et al, when US courts ruled that ailerons fell under the ambit of the Wright patent. Consequently Curtiss and his business partners (Aerial Experiment Association – AEA) were forced into bankruptcy[4].
The Wrights’ broad litigious reach was generally less effectively outside of the USA. Many European inventors were able to escape paying the patent fees, sometimes with the aid of sympathetic European courts. The Wrights’ demands for royalties were ignored or evaded, or if they were contested, one strategy was to stretch the case out until the patents had expired[5].
The Wright brothers’ obsession with enforcing their legal patent❈ had wider ramifications for the industry to the point of retarding progress in the development of US aviation. Beyond the early breakthroughs in lateral control, the brothers did not really add much to their aviation achievements (consequently in these years Curtiss pulled far ahead of them in design innovation). After America entered the Great War in 1917, the brothers’ perversely rigorous enforcement of the patents left America woefully short of new airplanes at a time they were desperately needed. The upshot was that the US forces in WWI had to secure French fighter planes for their military pilots[6].
Because of the Wrights’ unwavering stance on their patents (after 1912 Orville alone, as Wilbur died that year), resentment towards the brothers was strong, they were accused of being greedy by licensees, eg, by demanding “money first” from prospective buyers BEFORE giving a demonstration of the prototype flyer, or by setting too high a royalty fee (at one point demanding 20% of sales); after a string of fatal air crashes in Wright planes Orville Wright lost sympathy with the public by attributing the accidents solely to “pilot error” (characteristically giving no consideration to the fact that the Wrights might be at fault for not having tried to make improvements to their prototype Flyer’s basic design[7].
Eventually, inevitably, the US authorities moved to close down the Wrights’ monopoly. A patent pool system was introduced in 1917 whereby all aircraft manufacturers in the country joined an association requiring the payment of a relatively small fee for patent use. The pooling of the aircraft patents signalled the end of the Wrights’ patent wars … by this time Orville had already sold his interest in the Wright Company at handsome profit and moved on to other (non-aviation) ventures[8].
PostScript: Curtiss-Wright parallels
Intriguingly, Curtiss shared a common background with the brothers Wright, like them he began as a bicycle shop owner, designing, building and repairing bikes in small-town USA. But before moving into aviation Curtiss excelled in another area, motorcycles … he began designing V-8 powered motorcycles. The adventurous Curtiss even raced them, winning several races and setting a world record speed of 136 mph (earning himself for a brief period the tag of “the fastest man on earth”).
Despite the early setbacks at the hands of the Wrights, Curtiss went on to have a stellar career in aviation (and in naval aviation), designing practical seaplanes and airplanes, the viability of which he happily demonstrated in public (cf. the Wrights who tended to shroud their aircraft projects in secrecy). With financial backing from the famous inventor Alexander Graham Bell and from Bell’s wife, Curtiss’ international prize-winning planes (“The June Bug”, “The Albany Flyer”, “The Jenny”) completed the first publicly witnessed flight and the first long distance flight in North America (220 km, Albany to New York City). Curtiss, far superior to the Wrights as a pragmatic, go-ahead businessman, quickly became a multimillionaire. Curtiss possessed a flair for publicising and promoting his inventions that the brothers did not exhibit, and turned his inventions into rapid sales of units[9]. In a superb irony given Orville’s fierce, lifelong antipathy to Glenn Curtiss, the two aviation companies eventually merged in 1929❦ to form the Curtiss-Wright Corporation[10].
◖◗ See also the related November 2014 blog article ‘Wright or Not Right?: the Controversy over who really was “First in Flight?” ‘
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❈ the stock joke the Curtiss people liked to tell at the time went … (the two brothers were so litigious that) every time somebody jumped in the air and waved his arms, the Wrights would demand a patent royalty or threaten to sue!
❦ by which time neither man had active roles in their respective companies any longer … Notwithstanding that Orville still objected to the new corporation’s title listing Curtiss’ name first!
[1] activating the pitch (moving the aircraft’s nose up and down) and yaw (moving the nose side-to-side) of the projectile was the previous, understood (but unsuccessful) method of controlling flight … the Wrights reasoned that these worked only in unison with the third element of rotation, roll (lateral movement through the novel wing-warping feature of the Flyer). Warping (twisting) of part of the wing on either side causes the plane to roll or bank in that direction, Phaedra Hise, ‘The 1903 Wright Flyer’, Air & Space Magazine (Smithsonian), March 2003. The addition of twin-rudders to the rear of the 1902 model of the Flyer helped stabilise it and prevent it spinning out of control, ‘Rudder – Yaw (Wright 1903 Flyer)’, (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), www.wright.nasa.gov
[2] as W J Boyne described it, the Wrights went about “systematically sueing anyone suspected of infringing their patents, which really meant everyone attempting to make a living from building or flying airplanes”, Walter J Boyne’s “World Aviation History”, (‘The Wright Brothers: The Other Side of the Coin’), 2008, www.wingsoverkansas.com
[3] Sparks of Invention: Need for Speed, (Series 1, episode 5, TV documentary 2015, 9-NOW Network, screened 23-Oct-2016); ‘Wilbur Wright to Octave Chanute’, (letter, Dayton, Oh. 20-Jan-1910), cited in ‘Wright Brothers patent war’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
[3] ibid.
[4] ‘Wright Brothers patent wars’, ibid.
[5] ibid.
[6] ibid.
[7] Boyne, op.cit.; Phaedra Hise, ‘How the Wright Brothers Blew It’, Forbes, 19-Nov-2003, www.forbes.com
[8] Wright Brothers patent wars’, op.cit.
[9] ‘About the Man – Glenn H. Curtiss’, Glenn H. Curtiss Museum, www.glennhcurtissmuseum.org
[10] Flying (magazine), ‘Century of Flight’, 130(12), Dec 2003
1936 was a momentous year for the Olympic movement, the official, IOC-sanctioned Olympic Games was hosted by Nazi Germany’s Berlin. Never before had a modern games been manipulated for propaganda purposes to the extent that the Germans under Hitler did in Berlin 80 years ago this month. When Berlin was awarded the Games in 1931, Germany was still under the governance of the democratic Weimar Republic, but with Hitler coming to power two years later Germany swiftly took on a more unsavoury and increasingly sinister complexion. The Third Reich was soon savagely attacking the liberties of Jews, communists, the Roma (gypsies) and other targeted groups of German society … and much worse was to come!
As it got closer to the event there were questions asked within the Olympic community about whether the Games should go ahead in Berlin. The Nazi regime’s transparent violations of human rights at home, and it’s failure to behave like a good international citizen (eg, pulling out of the League of Nations in 1933, illegally occupying the Rhineland in March 1936, etc), prompted a number of nations to consider boycotting the event.
The US Olympic Committee debated the issue at great length. American Olympic association heavyweight, Avery Brundage (later controversial head of the IOC) was “gung-ho” for going ahead with participating, running the (now hackneyed) line that politics had no place in sport. The head of the American Amateur Athletic Union, JT Mahoney, and many others, were in favour of boycotting. The patrician Brundage was widely thought to be anti-Semitic and racist (in 1935 he alleged there was “a Jewish-communist conspiracy” trying to prevent the US team’s participation in Berlin). Ultimately Brundage’s lobby narrowly carried the AAAU vote in favour of going. The American decision to participate in Berlin was pivotal in salvaging the Games for the host city[1].
Catalonia’s Olympiad Stadium
International opposition to the Nazi Olympics remained very vocal in the lead-up to the event. Spain and Barcelona in particular had a vested interest, having lost the bid to hold the 1936 Games to Berlin (the German city won easily, 43 votes to 16)♔. SASI (the international federation of workers’ sports) decided to hold the next instalment of its Workers’ Olympiads (see my previous post) in Barcelona in 1936. The Catalan Committee in Favour of Popular Sport (CCEP), boosted by the election of the leftist Popular Front in Spain in February 1936, worked with SASI to plan and prepare the Barcelona Olympiad♕, scheduled to begin just two weeks before the start of the official (Berlin) Games (clearly timed to steal Nazi Germany’s thunder!).
Politics and sport, the National Socialist way
In the end, although only two countries, the USSR and Spain, withdrew from the Berlin Games in favour of the Barcelona Olympiade, support for the Barcelona alternative games was widespread. The Olympiad was not state-sponsored in the fashion of the IOC carnival but backing came from progressive bodies and associations within western countries (trade unions, socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists, etc.). The Peoples’ Olympiad was also supported by various individuals – eg, dissident Germans with first-hand experience of the Hitler state and Jewish-American athletes opposed to Nazism[2].
SASI preached a cooperative and fraternal spirit to the 6,000 athletes from 22 countries who committed to participate. Whereas the Berlin Games were perceived as an affront to the Olympic ideals, Barcelona was intended to be based on a foundation of international solidarity that would elevate the “brotherhood of men and races” and “show the sport-loving masses (a Olympiad) that is neither chauvinistic or commercialised”, one devoid of the “sensational publicity of stars” that was characteristic of the IOC-run Games[3].
Olimpíada Popular poster: International worker-athlete brotherhood
The organising committee for the Peoples’ Olympiad employed an emblem which reinforced the SASI themes of solidarity, brotherhood and world peace … three male athletes standing defiantly side-by-side, one white, one coloured and one (to all appearances) of mixed or Asian ethnicity (no females in the poster to be seen however … inclusiveness apparently hadn’t extended that far by then!)[4].
Most of the mainstream IOC sports had been slated for inclusion in Barcelona and one or two former ones like amateur rugby revived. Also tacked on to the Olympiad were a variety of cultural activities such as folk dancing, theatre, music, chess♚ and an “Art Olympiad” (the promoters advertised the event also as a “Folk Olympiad”)[5].
Avery Brundage and the IOC were not alone in condemning the ‘rebel’ Olympiad in Catalonia, the Spanish right-wing press slammed the idea saying, variously: it would be a “second class Olympics” because it was open to all-comers, it was a “Jewish-communist” games, etc.[6]. On the Left the Spanish Marxist Workers’ Party (POUM) opposed the Peoples’ Olympiad on two grounds – the preoccupation with sports was “a waste of time” distracting the working class from its ‘proper’ objectives, and they mistrusted the motives of the democratic socialists (ie, SASI)[7]. Another instance of the lack of unity of the European Left in the face of the threat from the totalitarian Right.
Estadio Montjuïc
In July 1936 on the eve of the games opening, the Peoples’ Olympiad was thwarted when the Spanish military led by General Franco staged a coup against the republican government. The outbreak of a full-scale civil war in the country resulted in the Olympiad’s cancellation. Some of the overseas athletes A number of the overseas athletes who had already arrived in Barcelona stayed, joining the Republic side and fighting in the International Brigades against Franco’s Falange forces. The Berlin Olympics kicked off as planned on 1st August with the politics indeed overshadowing the sport[8]. Barcelona and its Montjuïc Stadium had to wait another 56 years before it finally got its chance to hold the Olympic Games in 1992.
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♔ a double blow for Barcelona as it also earlier had lost the 1924 Olympic bid (to Paris)
♕ the infrastructure for the sports tournament was already in place – the main stadium and hotels (to be converted into a state-of-the-art Olympic village) had been constructed for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition and upgraded for the city’s bid for the 1936 Games
♚ Chess has a long tradition (since 1924) of staging its own brand of international Olympics, the Chess Olympiads, now held biennially
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[1] H Gordon, Australia and the Olympics ; ‘The Movement to Boycott the Olympics of 1936’, (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), www.ushmm.org
[2] British support of Barcelona (and opposition to Berlin) was formidable, promising a big representation of UK athletes for the Olimpíada Popular, TUC (Trade Union Congress), ‘Labor Chest – Opposition to the Nazi Games, British Workers’ Sports Associations’ (Press Release), 9-Jun 1936), in Documents on the Popular Olympiad from “Trabajadores: The Spanish Civil War through the eyes of organised labor”, BTU Congress (Modern Research Centre, University of Warwick), www.contentdm.warwick.ac.uk
[3] ibid.
[4] J Freedland, ‘The Anti-Nazi Games that never were’, Evening Standard (Lon.), 16-Jul 2012
[5] ‘The Peoples’ Olympics in Barcelona’, http://iberianature.com/
[6] G Calomé & J Sureda, ‘Sport and Industrial Relations’ (1913-1939): the 1936 Popular Olympiad’, (1995), www.ddd.uab.cat
[7] ibid.
[8] Photos of the Berlin Games at the time of the event capture how completely Nazi propaganda lorded it over the ideals of the Olympics – the massive Nazi swastika symbol is seen to dwarf the Olympic Rings at venues, ‘The Olympics: Playing Political Games’, (Modern Research Centre, University of Warwick), www2.warwick.ac.uk
❛❛Life is all right in America,
If you are all-white in America ❜❜
~ Stephen Sondheim, West Side Story
❛❛Travel is fatal to prejudice❜❜ – Mark Twain (inscription on the cover of the 1949 edition of ‘The Green Book’)
“Carry your Green Book with you … you may need it!” (the publication’s motto)
༄࿓༄࿓༄࿓༄࿓
An earlier (and subsequently) a rival publication from the US Black community▼
In the early 1930s an African-American postal employee from New York, Victor Hugo Green, came up with the idea of producing a book for Black Americans to guide them in travelling safely around their own country. Green got some inspiration from the Jewish-American press which for several years had been publishing travel guides for its community’s travellers, and from earlier, embryonic and less successful efforts to service the African-American community (eg, the Negro Business Directories from the early 20th century)[1].
In the 1930s, with the era of “Jim Crow” segregation still very much alive, the experience of Black Americans migrating or travelling around the United States was a very precarious and outright dangerous activity. The notorious white-only “Sundown towns”* were in force, not just in the South but right across the country. The open and legally sanctioned discrimination practiced against Black people in their everyday domestic lives extended to their travel experiences. Victor Green understood that the emerging Black middle class aspired (like all other Americans) to car ownership which held the tantalising promise of individual freedom. For African-Americans, having your own vehicle was the means of escaping a degrading reliance on segregated public transport[2].
▼ American auto dreams!The project like many entrepreneurial dreams started small, The mailman-cum-entrepreneur Green initially focused his efforts on helping African-American motorists and travellers locate businesses (lodgings, restaurants and other food outlets and fuel stations) in the greater New York metropolitan area that would accept their custom. As the business grew (with assistance from the US Travel Bureau) Green expanded his guide to the rest of the US, and to Alaska, Bermuda and parts of Canada and Mexico. The Green Book’s aim was to help Black and Coloured travellers chart a safe path through a segregated America by pinpointing exactly where on route they could stop and get the services they required to make the trip a happy and pleasant one.
In 1947 Green retired from the New Jersey Postal Service, and together with his wife Alma, started their own travel agency in Harlem. International editions of the book followed with the firm also handling air travel business for the Black community. The Green Book gradually added extra service providers including drug stores, barbers and hairdressers, tailors, salons, garages, nightclubs, taverns, liquor stores and doctors’ offices.
According to the civil rights leader, Julian Bond, Green used his network of contacts in the Postal Workers Union to ascertain where Black visitors would be welcome[3]. Early on, Green visited the locations he would include in his Green Book to check them out personally, but when the book took on a national (and international) focus this became impractical[4]. Aside from hotels and motels, other accommodation options advertised in the Green Book included “tourist homes” (the private residences of African-Americans made available to travellers) and the Harvey House hospitality chain[5].
The Green Book, or to give it its full title, The Negro Motorist Green-Book (later called The Negro Travelers’ Green Book), had its debut edition in 1936 with a green-coloured cover. Green’s intention for the book was to equip Black travellers with the information to avoid the pitfalls, the very real dangers and manifold inconveniences of travelling across a landscape still largely hostile to their race. People could use the Green Book as a vade mecum to find African-American friendly services and hospitable havens on their journeys. It gave travellers the assurance that they could travel with dignity, and not have to suffer the ignominy of being constantly turned away and put down by racist accommodation providers. Green in fact advertised his book as making it possible to have a “vacation without humiliation”.
◥ 1949 Negro Motorists’ Green Book
The Green Book circulation was initially 15,000 copies a year. It was sold in the first instance by mail order through participating Black businesses, and later via Esso gas stations[6]. The cost of the 1936 edition was a Depression-conscious 25 cents, rising to $1.95 by 1960. Some Black enterprises, especially newspapers, eventually sponsored the book, as did Esso, whose gas stations had an unusually high number of Black franchisees in this period … this was reflected in its prominent place in the Green Book’s list of friendly businesses. According to historian Gretchen Sorin, under an agreement with Standard Oil, Esso service stations were selling two million copies of the Green Book annually by 1962[7].
◥ 1956 Negro Motorists’ Green Book
The 1956 edition – whose cover bizarrely featured two unmistakably fair-haired, white motorists(!?!) – made the assertion “Assured Protection for the Negro Traveler”, and it did offer Black travellers some element of choice, where hitherto going to an unfamiliar town was a total lottery. In 1955 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, only about six motels out of 100-plus on Route 66 took Blacks – so without a copy of Green’s road trip companion with them travellers could be faced with a long, frustrating and demoralising series of fruitless enquiries[8].
Ernest Green (a member of the defiantly brave band of schoolchildren known as the “Little Rock Nine” which ran the gauntlet of racist bullies at the first desegregated school in the South in 1957) used the Green Book in the 1950s to travel the 1,600km from Arkansas to Virginia. Green, no relation to publisher Victor, later described the book as “one of the survival tools of segregated life”[9]. Other accolades for the Green Book followed … “A credit to the Negro race” (William Smith); “The Bible of Black Travel”.
Undeniably, the book’s popularity for nearly 30 years (spawning imitators as well) is testimony to how appreciated it was by ordinary African-Americans … the practical guidebook was invaluable to travellers by minimising or avoiding inconvenience, embarrassment and harassment whilst on trips and vacations around the US.
Victor Green died in 1960 however his family kept the Green Book going until 1966. Rebranding was tried with the word ‘Negro’ dropped from the title to try to widen the publication’s appeal, but with the implementation of the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the outlawing of racial discrimination in public housing, it’s relevance to 1960s America had dwindled away.
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Victor Hugo Green ▼
When the resourceful Mr Green published the inaugural Green Book in 1936, he wrote in the preface that he looked forward to the day when “this guide will not have to be published”. That day was a long time happening (sadly not in Victor’s lifetime) … but it did come.
Footnote: In the decades after the publication folded, the story of the Green Books slipped more or less completely out of the public consciousness. It was only by happenstance that it resurfaced after playwright Calvin A Ramsey met an elderly traveller in the South in 2001 who asked him where he could get a “Green Book”. Curiosity aroused, Ramsey did some background research and eventually wrote two books – a children’s story and a play – on the topic. Since then revived interest in the Green Books has amounted to a bit of a ‘Renaissance’ … there has been the Schomburg Center’s GB digitization project (‘Revisiting a Jim Crow Era Guide for Traveling While Black’), the National Parks Service Route 66 Corridor Preservation Project, as well as numerous recent articles, blogs, museum exhibitions, documentaries (including Ric Burns’ current Driving While Black project) and podcasts, all on the Green Books[10].
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* so called because visiting Blacks were systematically warned to be out of town “by sundown” or risk violent reprisals from the local white population. This phenomenon was by no means restricted to backwater redneck, hick towns. Sundown towns included large suburbs such as Warren, Michigan (pop. 180,000), Levittown, New York (80,000) and Glendale, California (60,000).
[1] K Kelly, ‘The Green Book. The First Travel Guide for African-Americans Dates to the 1930s’, Huffington Post, 8 Mar 2014
[2] ibid. Although car ownership was liberating for African-Americans it did lead to other problems such as racial profiling by police (deliberate targeting, harassment and random arrest on suspicion of Black drivers on the street) … still very much a threat to the civil liberties of the African-American community today, T Owen, ‘Driving While Black: Cops Target Minority Drivers in this Mostly White New Jersey Town’, 11-Apr 2016, (Vice News) www.news.vice.com
[3] ‘ “Green Book” Helped African-Americans Travel Safely’, Talk of the Nation, 15-Sep 2010, www.npr.org
[4] C Taylor, ‘The Negro Motorist Green Book’, www.taylormadeculture.com
[5] C McGee, ‘The Open Road Wasn’t Quite Open to All’, New York Times, 22-Aug 2010
[6] Kelly, op.cit
[7] McGee, op.cit. Sorin, cited in J Driskell, ‘An Atlas of self-reliance: The Negro Motorist’s Green Book (1937-1964), 30-Jul 2015, www.americanhistory.si.edu
[8] ‘The Green Book Video Transcript – Route 66’, www.ncptt.nps.gov
[9] E Lacey-Bordeaux & W Drash, ‘Travel Guide helped African-Americans navigate tricky times’, 25-Feb 2012, www.edition.cnn.com
[10] See ‘Mapping the Green Book’, (MGB production blog), www.mappingthegreenbook.tumblr.com
October 7 this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Taronga Zoological Park, or as it is simply known to successive generations of children and parents of Sydney and its environs, Taronga Zoo (Taronga: Abor. for “beautiful sea view”). Sydney’s premier zoo can in fact trace its genesis considerably further back than that to the formation of the Zoological Society of New South Wales in 1879‡.
The Society’s initial purpose was to import English birds (and other introduced species) to the Antipodes and to acclimatise them to the conditions before distributing them to different parts of the continent. In 1883 the Sydney City Council gave permission to the Zoo Society to open a public zoo on government land allocated to it in Moore Park (3.5km south of the city centre). The location of the zoo was in a part of Moore Park known locally as Billy Goat Swamp, today occupied by Sydney Girls High (zoo remnants survive, still visible within the school grounds, ie, two bear pits in the ‘Lowers’ area adjoining Sydney Boys High). The zoo was designed by Charles Moore, responsible for the earlier creation of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens[1].
🔝 the Primitive lion enclosure at Moore Park
As more animals were added to it, the zoo soon outgrew its original land grant of 7.5 acres[2]. Gradually the zoo’s space encroached on more and more of the Moore Park parkland. Mostly in the 19th century, the new additions of animals for big public zoos came from engaging overseas professional hunters to capture exotic animals for their collections[3]. Melbourne Zoo acquired its hippos and monkeys, and Moore Park its Californian and Cinnamon bears, via this channel. Others like Jessie the Asian elephant were gifts for the Sydney zoo from the King of Siam.
By 1910 Moore Park Zoo was too small for the burgeoning number of animals accumulated. As a result the New South Government made 43ha of bushland§ between Little Sirius Cove and Bradleys Head (Mosman) available as a new site for Sydney’s zoo[4]. Around 1913-14 most of the zoo inhabitantsφ were bused from Moore Park to Circular Quay and then ferried by flat-top barge across the harbour to Mosman. With the taller animals, the elephants and giraffes, the zoo authorities eventually realised that it would be prudent to transport them to their new home in the middle of the night to avoid a public commotion in the streets. The sight of the massive beasts silhouetted against the night skyline whilst being barged across the water would have provided an inspiring, even poetic, vision.
Melbourne Zoo was founded in 1862 at Royal Park (Parkville). Heavily modelled on London Zoo, it has often been described as the first zoo in Australia[5], but this is not strictly correct – as there were small, private zoos in Sydney that predate it. Melbourne’s position however as the first public zoo in the country is certainly not in dispute, starting up some 22 years before Sydney’s Moore Park Public Zoo (Royal Melbourne Zoo is also the longest, continually operating zoo in Australia).
The concept of a zoo in the NSW colony has its origins in Hyde Park in the centre of Sydney Town in 1810. Soon after taking office Governor Macquarie established Sydney Common as a “people’s park”. Hyde Park initially housed a racecourse which by 1825 had given way to a menagerie of domestic and imported animals¥. By 1848 one Captain William Charlesworth, having procured exotic animals from India, and with the imprimatur of the Australian Museum, displayed them in a private menagerie-cum-small zoo in the Park[6].
🔝 Botany Zoological Gardens
🔝 In memory of the elephant at Banks Zoo
The Hyde Park zoo experiment was short-lived and in 1851 its exhibits were ‘gifted’ to the publican (William Beaumont) of the Sir Joseph Banks Inn in Botany in Sydney’s south. The Botany hotel included a large land holding which was turned into pleasure grounds, with the private zoo being one of its star attractions. Among the new zoo’s animals acquired from Hyde Park were a ‘docile’ Asian elephant, a Bengal tiger, a gorilla, male and female Himalayan bears, black Bengal sheep and a pair of Manilla red deers[7].
After a change of hotel lease-holders the zoo folded and the animals were sold (late 1850s) to another pub at Watsons Bay in Sydney’s eastern suburbs – the Marine Hotel, owned by Henry Billing. “The Marine” was originally a private mansion built by Colonial Architect Mortimer Lewis ca 1837 and initially named “Zandvilet” (or “Zandoliet”) and then “Marine Villa’ under different owners (known simply as “Watsons Bay House” to many).
Billing located the zoo in Robertson Park (Clovelly Street Watsons Bay) in the grounds of the Marine Hotel, which he later renamed Greenwich Pier Hotel⊕. The private zoo (and hotel) had its own wharf for visitors. The collection included a lion (which was obviously tame, and perhaps worst, declawed, as the zoo advertised that it was available for visitors to ride!), elephants, tigers and harnessed zebras (no further information available on this but the inference is that the zebras might have been used bizarrely to pull carriages – like a horse!)[8].
The ‘showman’ Billing tirelessly promoted his private zoo as the largest and finest collection of wild animals in the Australian colonies, with “the wonder of the world, the Monstor Bengal Tiger Hercules, three East Indian Leopards, East Indian Porcupines, a Brahmin Cow, Egyptian Sheep, Golden Pheasants, Mongoose and English Ferrets”[9].
🔝 Dunbar House – former grounds of Watsons Bay Private Zoo
Not surprisingly, the zoo was a big hit with the punters, especially when combined with the on-site pub! Unfortunately in 1861 the zoo suffered a setback when one of the Bengal tigers mauled its keeper. This resulted in litigation against Billing and although cleared of any blame, the hotelier soon after died. His widow tried to get the colonial zoological board to purchase the animals, but the government rejected her request. Her excessive reaction, sadly, was to poison the 18 animals (some reports list the number as higher) in the Robertson Park zoo. A few years later Mrs Billing embarked on a new “show business” venture, operating a waxworks in Sydney[10]. There is no record of whether it was a successful business or not, but at least it didn’t involve any animals.
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‡ the Zoological Society was formed to carry on the role of the Acclimatisation Society, viz. the introduction and acclimatisation of (especially English) song birds and game (Royal Zoological Society of NSW)
§ an additional 9ha of Ashton Park bushland was later made available to the zoo
φ calculated at 228 mammals, 552 birds and 64 reptiles (Taronga Conservation Society Australia)
¥ Mrs Macquarie was reputed to maintain a personal menagerie of animals at Government House in Parramatta during her husband’s governorship.
⊕ the building housing Billing’s hotel in Robertson Park can boast a most colourful and manifold history. Since Billing’s ownership it has continued to change hands and names. Later in the century it got a new name, this time becoming the Royal Hotel, which had an open-air cinema added to its rear. From 1924 it was the municipal chambers of Vaucluse Council until the Council was abolished and merged into Woollahra Council in 1948. Part of the house became a library for a time. In the fifties as “Fisherman’s Lodge” it hosted wedding receptions and the like. Today it is the revamped Dunbar House, owned by the Grand Pacific Group, and hired out for events and operating as a cafe/restaurant for the many visitors to Watsons Bay
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[1] the Botanic Gardens provided many exotic birds for the new Moore Park Zoo aviary, ‘Who’s Who in the Moore Park Zoo?’, Centennial Parklands, History & Heritage, 7 May 2015, www.blog.centennialparklands.com
[2] pointedly,the Australian Town and Country Journal expressed “surprise that such a charming effect should be obtained in so comparatively small an area”, ‘The Zoological Gardens – a popular holiday resort with Sydney young folk’, Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney), December 17 1892, www.trove.nla.gov.au
[3] ‘The Zoo’s first hippos stars: William and Rosamund’, (Culture Victoria),www.cv.vic.gov.au. There was more of an overlap of zoos and circuses in that era with both obtaining their ‘wild’ animals from this same source. It wasn’t until much later that zoos developed an interest in conservation and education
[4] a thriving artists’ colony, Curlew Camp, on the cove at Ashton Park, was closed down to make way for the zoo. Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, two of Australia’s most celebrated late colonial artists were members of the Curlew Camp group. As it eventuated the camp section of the bush headland was not used by the zoo. A bush track (the Harbour Hike) skirts around the Taronga fence and is part of the Sydney Harbour National Park
[5] eg, ‘Le Souëf Family Archives: Royal Melbourne Zoological Gardens’, www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au; ‘Melbourne Zoo’, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
[6] T Lennon, ‘Colonial Sydney went wild for first zoos at Hyde Park and Botany’, Daily Telegraph, September 10 2015
[7] ‘Sydney’s First Zoo’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 October 1931 (Trove collection online). The picnic grounds at Sir Joseph Banks Park contain a series of zoo animal statues commemorating the zoo’s one-time existence there
[8] W Mayne-Wilson, ‘Robertson Park Its Secret Past’, Historic Environment, 17(3) 2004. Beaumont retained some of the Botany zoo animals which were later donated to the Moore Park Zoo
[9] V Campion, ‘Bayside Beauty – Dunbar House revives forgotten 1830s glamour’, Daily Telegraph, 10 May 2011
[10] Robin Derricourt, Watsons Bay, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionary of Sydney.org/entry/watsons_bay, viewed 30 April 2016
A Rector is a type of office-holder pertaining to both the ecclesiastical and the academic realm. It is in this second context of the term, that of academe, that is the focus of this blog. The word ‘rector’ itself derives from the Latin regere (Ruler), and in the 17th century it signified one who governed a city, state or region. In the contemporary world of universities it is widely employed in Europe, Latin America, Russia, Pakistan, Philippines, Indonesia and the Middle East. Its meaning varies from place to place, in some of these the term ‘rector’ is used in the sense of chancellor, ie, the executive head of a university, but much more likely it denotes the ceremonial head (in a British University the real power would usually reside with the vice-chancellor rather than the chancellor).
The Ancient Universities of Scotland (Aberdeen)
In the English speaking world the rector is not a common office in the university hierarchy, the exception to this being Scotland where the post dates back to the 16th century. Each of the four ‘ancient’ universities of Scotland (St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh) plus Dundee – all have the office of rector, in some cases it is called, more grandly, lord rector. Scottish rectors are elected by the student body for a three year term, although at the University of Edinburgh rectors are still elected by both students and staff.
In the sphere of higher education the duties of rectors vary from institution to institution but broadly they are there to represent the interests of students in the wider university context on various governing bodies, eg, in Scotland they might also chair the University Court, the highest governing council of the university. One way they directly represent students is in an ombudsmen’s role, being a forum for students to air their grievances and complaints and a conduit to have their issues addressed within the university. Other duties of a rector might include participating in convocation ceremonies [‘What does the Rector even do?’, http://queensu.ca/rector/blog/].
In past centuries the Scottish tradition was for noblemen as rectors, titled gentlemen with a assortment of names sounding like variations on the “8th Earl of Cumbleyheathwaite”. By the 20th century the post tended to be filled by high achievers from business, politics, the civil service, the military, and the occasional notable clergyman. In the interwar period St Andrews set a precedent, by electing inventor Guglielmo Marconi, North Pole explorer Fridtjof Nansen and writer Rudyard Kipling to the post. After WWII Edinburgh University followed suit by electing the popular British actors Alastair Sim and James Robertson Justice, having earlier given the post to Churchill and a host of other MPs.
“Nero” as Rector…Peter Ustinov actually. If it was the historical Nero, most likely he’d have been “wrecker” rather than “rector”
By the late sixties and the seventies celebrity rectors were starting to become a feature of the academic landscape. Students at Dundee University elected actor and “Renaissance Man” of letters Peter Ustinov for a second term which seems a measure of his popularity … perhaps this was not universally the case however. In his memoirs Dear Me, the rector emeritus expressed stinging criticisms of the arts students at Dundee for having the temerity to protest vociferously against the Vietnam War and militarism and authoritarianism in general, whilst under his watch. The peeved thespian compared them unfavourably to the University’s political and socially apathetic but scholastically conscientious engineering students.
Other colourful rectors followed at Dundee. Actor and omnipresent TV personality Stephen Fry was a popular rector in the 1990s, a popularity apparently not tarnished by Fry’s recent admissions that he used cocaine and Ecstasy during his rectorship at the University [Reported in The Courier (UK, 14 Oct. 2014) www.thecourier.co.uk ]. NB: the good burghers of the Dundee University community, if perturbed by this revelation, should take comfort in Fry’s disclosure in his memoirs that he also snorted coke on a visit to Buckingham Palace, so Dundee is in lofty company. The incumbent rector of Dundee University in 2015 is another celebrated Hollywood actor, Brian Cox, a Dundee local whose two terms are incident free to this point.
Dundee students may have expressed a preference for actors as their rectors but this has not exclusively been the case. In the 1970s they selected chef, broadcaster and politician Clement Freud (grandson of the father of Psychobabbling, Sigmund Freud). Clem Freud later had a second turn as rector, this time at St Andrews University where he edged out polarising feminist icon Germaine Greer in the ballot for the job.
Cleese anyone? The rector for “Silly Walks”
St Andrews’ most high-profile rector in recent history was comic actor John Cleese (1970-73), the “Minister for Silly Walks” himself. Cleese proved a popular rector at St Andrews and his staunchly anti-Vietnam War speeches struck a receptive cord among politicised students of the day. Cleese was an active participant in University activities and allayed any fears there may have been about his whacky persona bringing discredit on the office with any “Monty Python” antics [Cinema St Andrews , ‘John Cleese elected Rector of University of St Andrews’, www.cinemastandrews.org.uk]. Actors and television personalities have been the preferred flavour of the St Andrews’ student body, numbering Tim Brooke-Taylor, Frank Muir and Nicholas Parsons amongst their “media-sourced” rectors.
Edward Snowden (Image: NY Review of Books)
Whereas Dundee University’s preference has been for actors as rectors, Glasgow University students in recent times have made more bolder political choices. The Glasgow rectors have ranged from ANC (African National Congress) anti-Apartheid activists, Albert Lutuli and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, to establishment vilified ‘whistleblowers’ Mordechai Vanunu and Edward Snowden (the current rector). The selection of these individuals were only symbolic choices as rectors (meant as a student statement of support and solidarity with international figures and causes) as none of the people were free to travel to Scotland to take up their posts. Accordingly the office of rector has been effectively unoccupied during these tenures.
A recent working(sic) rector voted in by matriculated Glasgow students was the actor and journalist Ross Kemp. Kemp’s term was truncated as a result of an abysmal performance in the post (repeated failure to attend important university events like the “freshers’ welcome”). The Students Representative Council at Glasgow carried a vote of no confidence in him and forced his resignation[‘Kemp quits university post’, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk].
Aberdeen University students have been a little more restrained than their southern Scottish university counterparts in seeking out the very famous for rector, opting in the main for locally known identities. The University hasn’t steered clear entirely of rectors with celebrity status. In the early 2000s it had Clarissa Dickson Wright, TV cook and writer, one half of the popular “Two Fat Ladies” series, as its rector (though perceptive gender equality enumerators would have already noted that women have been numerically disadvantaged in the bestowing of the post of rector across all the institutions❈).
The ambitious & frugal young Mr Brown – his first leg on the political ladder
Overall, opinion north of the River Tweed has been mixed about the merits of celebrity rectors. Those who support the trend and try to explain its appeal, point to the growing dissatisfaction of students with party politics, and the perception that politicians are bland and dour and lacking in dynamic, like recent British PM Gordon Brown who was rector of Edinburgh University back in the early 1970s – having been elected to the office whilst still being a student (unusual). Entertainers and media personalities on the other hand, the theory goes, can add cache to the university, attracting positive publicity and much-needed funding … and they can bring a fresh, outsider’s perspective to what are traditional organisations.
Of course how successful or otherwise the celebrity rector is comes down to the individual. A factor in how much benefit the celebrity can be as rector is how much time (and energy) the incumbent can give to the position. Rectors with heavy demands on their time due to their full-time “day jobs” will be restricted in what they can give to the office. Also, if a rector attracts adverse publicity during his or her tenure (eg, Fry and Kemp), by association it could reflect badly on the institution [‘After this soap, your next role will be a rector’, Times Higher Education, (22 Jun. 2001) www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/feature].
The process for the election of Scottish rectors is open and quite democratic. Only 20 signatures are required to nominate someone for rector, which can give rise to surprising nominations. For example a Dundee student nominated his pet rat for the post, which might be viewed by some as trivialising and ridiculing the office. A nominee in 1928 for rector of St Andrews, coming clear out of right field, was Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. Had the Fascist head of state been successful in his bid it might have been interesting to see what if anything he would have done with the office[ibid.].
Billy Connolly (Source: The Independent)
So, an academic post with the potential to maximise publicity for financially-struggling universities in Scotland, I am left to ponder the obvious thought that comes to me … why isn’t Billy Connolly on anyone’s short-list when they were putting forward the next round of nominees for Scottish rectors?
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❈ this comes as no surprise but women have been hugely under-represented as university rectors even in more socially-inclusive, recent times
If ever you take a tour of China, one of the first places you will probably want to visit is Xi’an, home of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses site and its Museum. Once you get there, while being driven to the venue from Xi’an Xianyang Airport or perhaps from your city hotel after a ride around Xi’an’s impressive City Walls, there’s a good chance that your Chinese tour guide while giving you his or her information talk will bring up the topic of Bill Clinton’s famous 1998 visit to Xi’an. This celebrated occasion has entered into local folklore and most Chinese guides in the Terracotta “palace” are armed with the “special Clinton anecdote”. I’ll get to that story soon enough but first some basic background on the Terracotta Warriors.
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The Yangs do some digging with totally unexpected consequencesThe whole phenomena of the Terracotta Warriors has its origin in March 1974 when several dirt-poor peasant farmers (thought to be seven in number) in Xiyang village in Lintong County, were digging for water in the dry, forbidding countryside 35km east of Xi’an. One of the farmers, Yang Zhi’fa, struck something hard with his hoe which he thought was a bronze relic of some kind. Digging a bit deeper he discovered the object had the form of a shoulder and torso. The other farmers, thinking they were human remains and fearful of Buddhist superstitions, urged Yang to rebury it so as not to offend the ancestors (ghost lore has been commonplace in the eastern Xi’an region for centuries). Yang was unperturbed and shortly later took the dismembered clay warrior to the Lintong Museum. Before long archaeologists from Beijing were swarming all over the site and so commenced a massive state-run excavation (of three pits) which has unearthed over the course of the last 40 years, an army of terracotta soldiers, horses and chariots, of what is the Mausoleum of the first Chinese Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi who unified China c. 221BC (imperial Qin Dynasty).
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The Terracotta Warriors discovery: Profitable to some involved but not to others!The government eventually expropriated the land from the farmers to give free rein to the excavations, effectively destroying the Yang village. The dispossessed villagers were inadequately compensated for the disruption to their lives. By the early 1990s, after years of meticulous and arduous preparation work, the site area was opened as a museum and rapidly became a modern wonder of the world and a tourist mecca. The permanent exhibition proved to be a great little supplementary ‘earner’ for local Communist Party officials and many enterprising business people also profited enormously from the financial opportunities. This propitious good fortune has not been shared by the statues’ discoverers or by the Yang community as a whole. In fact Yang’s fellow farmers blamed him for the loss of their plots and livelihoods, and he was ostracised by his neighbours. Other misfortune followed for the community, two of the farmer Yangs died, only in their fifties due to impoverished circumstance and another, Wang Puhzi, hanged himself. To the farmers who had feared that the feng shui of the location would be disturbed by digging up the area, these tragic outcomes confirmed in their minds that it had been cursed.
A Terracotta Army fan with good connexionsOver in Washington DC, President Bill Clinton, when he wasn’t being leader of the “Free World”, had been following the unfolding archaeological story of the Xi’an terracotta army with growing interest and fascination. So, not long after, on a scheduled 1998 state visit to Beijing, Clinton requested that PRC allow him to make a side trip to Xi’an so he could see the terracotta marvels in situ for himself. The Chinese authorities, sensing a PR coup in the making, arranged for Mr Yang to be on hand at the site to meet the American president before the news cameras. For the occasion the (presumably) illiterate farmer was taught a few words of English to greet the president with. As it transpired, Yang got very nervous at the prospect of meeting the US leader and when introduced to Clinton on the day, instead of saying “How are you?”, what came out of Yang’s mouth in his halting English was “Who are you?” to which Clinton instantly responded, “I’m Hillary’s husband!” The flustered Mr Yang replied,”Me too!” Everybody laughed…on the Chinese officials’ part it was more of a nervous laugh!
⬅️ When Bill met Yang (yes but which Yang?)
Mr Yang, ‘professional’ book-signerThe encounter between president and peasant farmer generated a second anecdote: at the meeting Clinton asked Mr Yang for his autograph. Yang, who could neither read nor write, simply drew three circles on a piece of paper. Followed a slightly uncomfortable moment … not least for the embarrassed Chinese officials in attendance. Consequently, the local authorities later sent the uneducated Yang for calligraphy lessons, after which Yang was given a job by the government in the Terracotta Warriors tourist shop. His task was to sit at a table all day signing books on the Terracotta Warriors (leading to his being called by some people, “China’s First Professional Signer”). It should be added that Yang Zhi’fa subsequently disputed the inference of this story circulated by a Chinese newspaper in 2002 that he was illiterate, contending that he in fact had a primary school education. Yang sued the newspaper and was eventually awarded damages [Yu Fei, ‘Living with the Terra-cotta Army’, (Consulate-General, Peoples Republic of China in Houston), www.houston.china-consulate.org].
Crafty Mr YangIf you venture into the Emperor Qin Museum shop in Xi’an, as I did three years ago, you will still see the same unsmiling Mr Yang, inscribing his signature on the inside of countless coffee table books, none of which are written by him! Although he looks distracted and bored in his sedentary confinement, he is in actual fact ever vigilant, on the lookout for maverick tourists trying to snap his precious photograph, something he is peculiarly adverse to. While he was looking the other way, and thinking I was out of the line of his peripheral vision, I tried to grab a surreptitious, sneaky photo of Yang from the side…just as I was about to, the sour-faced septuagenarian, suddenly and without looking towards me, raised a cardboard sign in my direction which said in large English letters, “NO PHOTOS OR VIDEOS ALLOWED!”.But is it the ‘real’ Clinton? ⤴
Other spots, other ‘Yangs’If you wander further afield around the Terracotta Warriors complex you may chance upon other individuals also purporting to be “Mr Yang”. It’s quite an industry in Xi’an! In one building near the entrance to the complex there is Yang Xi’an who passes himself off the discoverer of the warriors (although his banner actually says “the discover of the warriors”), displaying a photo of himself posing with Clinton as proof of his credentials. It transpires that this Mr Yang was in fact the manager of a Xi’an factory making replicas of the warriors at the time of Clinton’s 1998 visit – this explains the photo taken when “Slick Willie” stopped off at the factory on route to the Terracotta Museum.
Would the real Mr Yang, the genuine “Discoverer of the Terracotta Warriors’, please stand up?In the glow of world attention being lavished on the terracotta army discoveries and the recognition bestowed on Mr Yang, it is not surprising that the other three surviving farmers present at the 1974 archaeological find wanted to get in on the act. Yang Quany was also given a spot in the museum signing books for a small stipend and began promoting himself as “the discoverer of the treasures”. The remaining two Yangs followed suit. Yang Zhi’fa however discredits his fellow Lintong farmers’ motives and insists that it is he who was primus intra pares (first among equals) in discovering the Emperor Qin relics.
And it doesn’t stop there by any measure. Zhao Kangmin, retired curator of the nearby Lintong Museum, has made his case for recognition as the real discoverer. The way Mr Zhao tells it, after the initial finding Yang Zhi’fa brought the fragment of the terracotta relic first to him at his museum and that he went back to investigate the discovery, and later he reconstructed the first terracotta warrior and horse. Zhao argues that he was the one who had the expertise to grasp the significance of the cultural relics, and that “seeing” as Yang and the others merely did, “doesn’t mean discovering”. You’ll find Zhao, despite being retired, most days at the Lintong Museum where he has set up a small display of the terracotta figures. Zhao spends the day signing postcards for tourists, on the cards he writes, very deliberately: “Zhao Kangmin, the first to discover, restore, appreciate, name and excavate terra-cotta warriors” [Ibid].
Whilst the Lintong farmers haven’t made much money from discovering (or being associated with the discovery of) the terracotta army, the same can be said of the workers who did most of the hard physical work of unearthing and restoring the statues. Most of those recruited to curator Yuan Zhongyi’s archaeological team found themselves working round the year with only a break at the time of the Spring Festival holiday for a wage of only 1.72 yuan (US $0.28) a day in 1976 [Zhao Xu, ‘Yang Zhifa, 76, soldiers on amid terracotta warriors’, (09-XII-2014),China Daily USA, www.chinadaily.com].
A Terracotta Warriors discoverer–impostor industryBack at the Qin Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum, as the fame and popularity of Emperor Qin’s Mausoleum grows, more impostors continue to spring up. These “fake discoverers” of the warriors were like Yang Xi’an, not even present at the discovery of the relics in 1974 (some are not even old enough to have been there!). A manager of one of the gift shops admitted that the complex shops hire men who fraudulently passed themselves off as discoverers of the relics to facilitate the sale of terracotta warrior books by the retailer [Simon Parry, ‘Curse of the Warriors’, South China Morning Post, 15 Sept 2007, www.scmp.com].
“The three in the middle just moved!” ⤴
PostScript: Discovery of yet more warriors made from fired clayMeanwhile back in the football field sized excavation pits at Lintong, Emperor Qin’s life-sized army of clay statues continues to grow. Archaeologists working in pit Nō 2 recently made a fresh discovery, one which might yield another 1,400 warriors, archers, horses and charioteers (and 89 chariots of war) [‘China’s Terracotta Army has new recruits’, Daily Mail, 6 May 2015, www.dailymail.co.uk]. Chinese officials have speculated that there may be around 6,000 terracotta warriors at the site still to be excavated … ensuring no doubt that there will be plenty of new and ongoing opportunities for discoverer-impostors in the future.
Two of the more interesting suffixes borrowed by English and put to good neologistic use are -naut and -nik. The origins of the word ‘naut’ have connotations of travel and water, Naut derives from an Ancient Greek word, translated as ‘naútēs‘, meaning ‘sailor’, sometimes rendered as ‘to navigate’. From naut we get the word ‘nautical’, something nautical relate of course to water and ships, although the root word naut has been employed to form new words which relates more to the sky or to atmosphere rather than to water.
✒︎ The Argonauts
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The first use of this suffix in the above sense seems to emanate from Greek mythology and the story of Jason and his crew who sailed according to legend in search of the Golden Fleece – the Argonauts. The etymology is: Classical Latin Argonauta; from Classical Greek Argonautēs; from Argō, Jason’s ship + nautēs, sailor; from naus, ship [Webster’s New World College Dictionary]. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles dates it’s use in English from 1596, so it’s been in currency for a long time.
The post-war phenomenon that has given naut words their impetus and continued relevance was the Space Race from the late 1950s, initially involving only the USSR and the United States. The US space program brought astronaut into common use , a word formed by simply conjoining the prefix astro (= stars) with naut. Far from being newly coined, the word itself has a history that long pre-dates the 1950s and 60s “Race to the Moon”. In 1930 the term was used in a pioneering Sci-Fi short story, ‘The Death’s Head Meteor’ by Neil R Jones (and there are other instances of the word in fiction go back to the late 19th century). The explorations of space fired the popular imagination, propelling astronaut into common usage to describe those (especially American) who ventured into space on behalf of the “Free World”. Astronaut may have been influenced by the term aeronaut (aero meaning air or atmosphere, as in aeronautics, from Ancient Greek aēr = air) in use to describe balloonists dating from the 1780s [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut]. With the long-term goal of reaching the Moon accomplished by the US in 1969 and further Moon missions planned, it was of no surprise that the more precise lunarnaut soon crept into the vocabulary.
As the Soviet Union entered the bipartite race with the intention of ‘conquering’ space and establishing a technological superiority over the US, the Russian Cold Warriors wanted for ideological reasons naturally enough to differentiate their extra-planetary achievements from those of their capitalist foes. So when the first successful spaceman Yuri Gagarin went up in Vostok I in 1961, the word cosmonaut (from Cosmos, the Universe, from Ancient Greek Kosmos = order) came into the lexicon – the New York Times attributed its genesis to Premier Khrushchev “and Soviet publications” [‘Russians coin a word for him: “Cosmonaut”, NYT, 13 April 1961].
✒︎“astroboy” touches down
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Astronauts by other names
The expansion of the Space Race to other nations outside of the big two spawned a whole lot of other naut-based neologisms. The first Indian in space (1984) was initially depicted as a cosmonaut (because he flew under the Soviet space program), but Indian pride and patriotism and the advancement of their own, homegrown space program, soon led to the evolution of a distinctive term for Indian space-traveller, vyomanaut (from Sanskrit vyoman (= sky). Although among Hindi-speakers there has been some debate about the rival merits of other terms, eg, there is a measure of support for anthanaut (or antharnaut), derived from anthariksh, meaning ‘space’ in Hindi.
When China joined the “Man-in-Space Club” by launching their own pilot beyond the stratosphere in 2003, the Chinese inevitably found their own term to describe it – tàikōnaut (taikon the Chinese word for space or cosmos, derived from tàikōngrén = spaceman) [‘Taikonaut’, Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/]. Although it was apparently a Chinese-Malaysian who first used the term for Chinese astronaut and the Xinhua News Agency uses it in its English-language publications (but not the Shenzhou space program).
NB: For a pure Chinese rendering of the concept, either hángtiānyuán or yūhángyuán (literally translated as sky navigator or sailor and Universe navigator or sailor respectively) more accurately capture the essence of the meaning [ibid.]
Another word invented to describe the profession of space explorer of a specific country or region is spationaut, meaning a French astronaut, from Fr: spationaute (= space navigator). Spationaut is also used more generally to delineate astronauts from other European states, although a more suitable, generic term for this might be Euronaut.
Along the lines of aeronaut we also have aquanaut which might be a grander way of describing an underwater diver (the prefix ‘Aqua’, from Ancient Greek for water), which is distinct from an oceanaut whose scientific marine exploration is done in a submarine. ✒︎A NASA aquanaut (source: theatlantic.com)
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Other -naut-suffixed terms signifying navigation in either a precise or looser sense include:
• chrononaut (a time-traveller – inspired by Doctor Who or Back to the Future?)
• cryonaut (one whose body is preserved by cryonics)
• cybernaut (a voyager in cyberspace; user of the internet or virtual reality. Could also be called an infonaut)
• gastronaut (person with a keen appreciation of food, ie, a more formal name for a ‘foodie’)
• hallucinaut (a hallucinator)
• neuronaut (one who studies the brain especially the effects of psychedelic drugs). cf.psychonaut who explores one’s own psyche under the effects of drugs.
• oneironaut (one who explores dream worlds)
As can be gleaned from the above there is a high degree of artificiality in the construction of many of these naut words. Some involve the choice of a convenient word (eg, gastronaut) rather than involving an act of literal navigation. Another concocted naut word with an interesting medical-related origin is responaut. The term was first applied c.1964 to a group of people at a particular facility in England with severe breathing difficulties whose condition needed them to be attached virtually permanently to the newly invented iron lung (mechanical respirator) in order to preserve their lives. ‘Responaut’ (formed from combining respirator + naut) was chosen because these patients experience similar problems to astronauts and oceanauts in establishing and maintaining communications and vital air supplies [Sunday Times (Lon), 12 January 1964, cited in Word Finder (Oxford English Dictionary), http://findwords.info/term/responaut].
The word Juggernaut contains the form of the naut suffix only by coincidence. It it unconnected to the idea of navigation or sailing, having come into English currency from a difference language group. Juggernaut derives from Sanskrit via a Hindi word, jagannath, meaning literally, world lord or protector. In English it has come to signify anything to which persons blindly devote themselves to or are ruthlessly crushed by [Shorter OED on Historical Principles].
Yinglish and spacerace-speak
Turning to words with the suffix ‘nik’, these come to English from a different path being of Slavonic origin with some Yiddish influence. Nik suffixes are very common in Slavonic languages, we find for example polkovnik (meaning colonel) in Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and so on. Just as the Space Race gave naut words a new impetus, nik also found its way into English from Russian after the Soviet Union’s successfully launched a space craft named Sputnik in 1957.
The word beatnik was coined by journalist Herb Caen [San Francisco Chronicle, 2 April 1958] to describe adherents to the “Beat Generation”, a sort of subculture movement characterised by youthful anti-conformism, rebelling against the mainstream and hip culture (“being cool, man!”) (cf. the word ‘hipster’ as used today). Other traits include devotion to jazz, drug use and Eastern religions, and pseudo-intellectualism. Through the writings of ‘Beat’ leaders such as Jack Kerouac, other neologisms followed the pattern of beatnik … jazznik, bopnik, bugnik [Jack Kerouac, Brandeis Forum, ‘Is there a Beat Generation?’, 8 Nov. 1958, www.wnyc.org/story/.]
The Cold War tensions of the 1970s spawned another new word formed from the root nik – refusenik. Originally, refuseniks were individual citizens (many Jewish but not exclusively so) of the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries who were denied permission by the Communist authorities to emigrate. Over time the application of ‘Refusenik’ in colloquial English has broadened to take on the meaning of “a person who refuses to do something, especially by way of protest” [Oxford English Dictionary (online)].
Peacenik is a word which has often been used in a derogatory way to describe someone who is an activist or demonstrator who opposes war and military intervention [www.dictionary.reference.com/browse/peacenik] (cf. “woke”/”wokeism”).The term is thought to have originated in the 1960s [possibly 1962 according to www.wordorigins.org]. Its precise origin is not known but very likely the term arose out either out of the anti-nuclear weapons movement or the anti-Vietnam War movement of the sixties. Peacenik is a synonym for pacifist or dove.
Holics – taking it to the nth degree
An unrelated but similarly manufactured word to peacenik is peaceoholic (sometimes spelt peaceaholic). Peaceaholic and other words with an -aholic or -oholic postfix are back-formed by analogy with the word alcoholic (into English from Arabic via French or Middle Latin). So we have shopaholic, workaholic, chocoholic, sexoholic, etc. which convey the sense of an addiction to or obsession with an activity or object.
Other nik words with a Yiddish flavour to them include Nudnik and Kibbutznik. Nudnik means obtuse, boring, a bothersome person a pest (nudyen = to bore). The Jewish Chronicle reports (18 February 2009) that Nudnik has entered modern Hebrew … “a common and even respected modus operandi in Israeli society”. A nudnik is someone “who is constantly asking you for something or otherwise taking up your time” [www.thejc.com]. Kibbutznik is a name given to workers who are members of an Israeli collective farm (a Kibbutz).
The Epic Film: Myth and History, by Derek Elley (re-published 2014, originally published 1984)
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The onset of the 21st century seemed to herald a revival in the epic genre in film. Large-budget “Sword-and-Sandal” movies of the early 2000s such as Gladiator and Troy, labelled “Neo-epic films” by cinema critics, have reinvigorated the genre. At the same time, a new blockbuster phenomenon in the shape of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series of films, padded with wall-to-wall distinguished British (and Commonwealth) actors, have extended the epic genre, and in the case of the ‘Rings’ cycle, given the flagging “Sword-and-Sorcery” sub-genre a new lease of life.
The author’s approach to his subject is a somewhat scholarly one, although the book also remains accessible purely on an entertainment level. Elley begins by making clear the distinction between the heroic and the epic … “heroes alone do not make an epic,” other ingredients especially the “all-important mythic quality” is needed to elevate the narrative to a higher plane, the ‘supra-human’ dimension. The author then proceeds to trace the transition from the epic in its original, literary form to its cinematic form.
The book concerns itself to a large extent with the type of epic film much in vogue in the fifties and sixties, drawn from the history and mythology of antiquity (Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia). Right up front I’d have to say that I think that the author is inclined to take the genre a bit too seriously. The epic movie, in whatever phase or incarnation it takes, has been something difficult to be especially serious about! By definition the standard form of the epic has tended to be characterised by an indulgence in excess – grandiosity, vulgarity, basically everything 8XL in size! Mention the epic film and people often think of monumental Hollywood flicks like Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and the like. Conspicuous consumption the order of the day, so much so so that it could be suggested that epic films should be primarily seen as a kind of parody of themselves.
The Epic Film spends a good deal of time examining another type of epic movie, the Continental Sword-and-Sandal variant of the species which further takes away from the serious side of the genre’s purpose. The “Sword-and-Sandal” as the book points out is also known in the trade as a Peplummovie …from peplos the type of ancient Greek robe or tunic worn by women (as modelled below). Strictly speaking ancient men wore chitons, a lighter, simpler and usually shorter garment than the feminine peplos, but the name ‘Peplum’ stuck for the epic movie!
This sub-genre had its heyday between the late 1950s and the mid 1960, usually set in Ancient Greece or Rome and often filmed at Cinecittà in Rome (for a time the world’s film studio of choice) and/or in the campagna in Italy or Spain. The elements of the genre are well-known and entirely formulaic: heroic but one-dimensional gladiatorial strongmen, a bevy of immaculately beautiful but defenceless heroines in sexy, ultra-mini peplums, a paper-thin storyline appallingly scripted and only coincidentally unrecognisable as history, incoherently edited, low budgets, sloppily shot with atrociously wooden acting and haphazardly dubbed into English.
Footnote: the popularity of the Italian Peplum provided career change opportunities for body builders as many would-be actors like Steve Reeves, Mark Forest and Kirk Morris, made the transition from the bodybuilding game to become leads in Sword-and-Sandal sagas. Interestingly, many of the Italian musclemen-stars took Anglo-sounding names in an attempt to make them more appealing to the American market, thus the well-known Sergio Ciani became on screen the aptly named “Alan Steel”.
Steve Reeves’ phenomenally successful Labors of Hercules (1957) was the springboard for a spate of strongman-centred Pepla. From the mid sixties a number of the Peplum strongmen made the switch to Spaghetti Westerns which spectacularly filled the void when the popularity of the Sword and Sandal costumers began to wane. Spaghetti Westerns utilised the same device of giving its Italian stars American-sounding names, the most famous of which were the ‘Trinity’ duo, Terence Hill and Bud Spencer.
Whilst acknowledging the limitations of many of these B-grade epics Elley soberly proceeds to unearth all manner of meaningful cinematic aesthetics from the likes of Samson against the Moon Men, Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon, etc, etc. The author describes his text somewhat grandly as an extended essay on defining “the epic form in its filmic context”. The definition in the book that took my eye is attributed to Charlton Heston, “There’s a temptingly simple definition of the epic film: It’s the easiest kind of picture to make badly” (Chuck should have known – he appeared in his fair share of dud epics in his career).
Strongman ‘Maciste’
Elley points out that spectacle is the most characteristic trademark of the epic genre, and that trait is (or was) synonymous with Hollywood. Although we connect the Pepla of that era with Italy and the Continent, we tend to associate the wider phenomenon of epics with America. The author quotes Peter Ustinov to good effect: “I’ve always thought that only the Americans can do Ancient Rome pictures. Both cultures have the same kind of relaxed, rangy pomp. Both have exactly the same kind of bad taste”.
⇧ Transparent marketing attempt to capitalise on the famous ‘Ben-Hur’ chariot racebut failing to meet those expectations
The book is adorned with some 88 pictures in glorious black-and-white and these may hold for some readers the greatest interest. Amongst these is a still from the 1964 movie The Fall of the Roman Empire, a long range shot of a Late Roman frontier fortress under attack – complete with a modern Italian villa and two parked fiats close by in the background. Another revealing picture contains a close-up of the cleft-chinned Kirk Douglas as the fabled Ulysses, his heroic countenance somewhat spoiled by the clearly visible but unsightly appearance of Kirk’s varicose veins! Or equally entertaining, is the photo (below) of Victor Mature as Samson, teeth gritted, valiantly wrestling a ‘savage’ lion which looks like it’s been recently rejected by a local Los Angeles taxidermist.
Many of the era’s epic films that came out of Hollywood tend to be prone to snatches of excruciatingly bad dialogue. The book provides a wealth of atrocious quotes from the genre. Savour if you will these little vignettes which run the gamut from overblown dramatic(sic) intensity to inane absurdity:
“When you speak of destiny, this is something I must at last believe” (delivered with exaggerated emphasis), Genghis Khan, in Genghis Khan (1965).
“Love and hate are horns on the same goat”, Rune woman, in The Vikings (1958).
“At one time, when you were a little fella, you were always asking questions!”, Joseph, to Jesus, in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).
This last line of dialogue, tinged with more than a touch of folksy mid-western Americanism, could easily have rolled from the mouth of failed actor-turned-US president, Ronnie Reagan, whilst whittling wood on the back-step of his Californian ranch.
By focussing on 50s and 60s Hollywood and Italian epics Elley largely neglects the first resurgence of the Sword-and-Sorcery film which took place in the late 70s and early 80s … the Star Wars cycle, Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian, etc (all made before The Epic Film‘s original publication in 1984). Other (admittedly minor) sub-genres of the epic such as the Sinbad saga films (The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, and so on) and the Swashbuckler/Pirate films don’t get a guernsey at all … although the Sinbad movies could just as well be categorised as adventure-fantasy films, rather than strictly Sword-and-Sorcery ones.
Elley’s study of the epic film genre is informative and instructive in so far as it goes. Ancient Greeks and Romans, Biblical figures, barbarians and Norsemen, all get a good run, but Elley’s historical survey cuts off at the end of the Dark Ages. I’m left with a tinge of regret that he didn’t take a more expansive approach in the book to include the grand and occasionally grandiloquent epic movies made about legendary Britons of a later era like Arthur and Robin Hood, as well as the more modern epics like Lawrence of Arabia or Dr Zhivago and even extend it to examples of the genre as diverse as 2001 a Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes.
Hogsback, 18 kilometres from Alice in South Africa’s Eastern Province, is just about the coldest place I’ve been to in sub-Saharan Africa, barring the mountainous Malealea region of Lesotho. In fact it is one of the few places in South Africa where it actually snows!
Auckland village, above M&C Falls (ECP)⋄The topography of Hogsback is characterised by dense forests, an extended mountain range (the Amathole Mountains), lush, verdant hiking trails (a veritable hiker’s nirvana) and teeming rivers, magnificent waterfalls such as the Madonna and Child Falls and the 39 Steps Falls, the Arboretum (a garden comprising a wide selection of international trees including a grove of Californian Redwoods over 100-years-old).
⋄In the period since JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books became famous, many acquainted with this part of Eastern Cape have drawn attention to the physical similarity of Tolkien’s fictional Middle Earth with the town of Hogsback. Director Peter Jackson could as well have chosen Hogsback for the setting of “The Rings” series of movie epics had he not been a native of a country (New Zealand) with a landscape equally evocative of Middle Earth.
Even before “The Lord of the Rings” movie series some Hogsback locals did their best to capitalise on a handful of tenuous links with the celebrated Lord of the Rings author. The story goes, the ‘Rings’ books were inspired by the magical, enchanting physical form of Hogsback. The proponents of this theory point to the fact that Tolkien was born in South Africa (in Bloemfontein, Free State). The thesis loses traction when probed more closely. The famous author and avid philologist left South Africa at the tender age of three, never to return and having not ever visited Hogsback.
⋄Myth-making about the Master Mythologist:
Despite this inconvenient fact, it hasn’t stopped the local tourist industry from milking the supposed nexus at every turn! ‘Lords of the Rings’ themes pervade the town and its surrounds, driven obviously by an effort to exploit the enhanced fame of Lord of the Rings. Tolkienesque references are scattered throughout Hogsback in the names of lodgings, shops and outdoor activities – Rivendell, Gandalf’s Rest, Merrell Hobbit Trail Runs, The Shire, Lothlórien, The Rings Hardware and Bottle Shop, Hog and Hobbit, Away with the Fairies Backpackers, River Running, Camelot Cottages, etc, etc. The association can probably be traced back in 1947 with the establishment of Hobbiton-on-Hogsback, an outdoor recreation and education centre for disadvantaged kids just off the R345 as you come into the Hogsback township. The “fantasy and fairies” theme is underscored in the numerous pieces of town sculptures depicting these motifs.
The Tolkien Middle Earth connection is often emphasised in print, such as in the following: “The romance of Hogsback, is recognised by reading The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) which seems to capture the special atmosphere of the unspoilt Hogsback forests and of a time when peace will rule the world” [Trevor Webster, The Story of Hogsback, www.hogsback.com].
Talking to the staffer in the Hogsback Visitors Information Centre, she was unequivocally dismissive of the Tolkien LOTR nexus. So the lingering myth clearly wasn’t emanating from the likes of her! She also warned me against buying the primitive wooden toy horses and zebras in the street from members of the local Xhosa community. The street sellers, looking cold and dismal in the freezing conditions, were only asking R2 an animal, but the Visitors Centre lady explained that they are not properly gazed and sealed, making them a prohibited item to export out of RSA. Apparently a local artisan/sculptor had offered to glaze the artworks for the community at minimal cost so that they could charge more for the figurines, but his offer had not been taken up.
So, how plausible is the link between “Middle Earth” of Lord of the Rings and the sleepy, little village of Hogsback? Clearly, as stated above, JRR Holkien had no direct association with Hogsback, having left South Africa at age three. Information on Tolkien’s life however, suggest the existence of an indirect link. One of Tolkien’s sons, whilst in the Royal Air Force during WWII, was stationed at Hogsback and did correspond regular with the author with his reflections on the locale. These correspondences from Tolkien Junior included sketches and descriptions of the Hogsback ambience [Ibid.].
The Hog’s back!⋄Accordingly it is quite feasible that, at the very least, these glowing accounts of the mystical, magic-like countryside provided background material for the physical world of The Lord of the Rings trilogy published in 1954/55. The parallels existing present a strong case to say that the description of the Mirkwood forest in the Rings cycle may conceivably have been inspired from Tolkien having read the war-time accounts of the place provided by his son.
To the vast majority of people, especially in America, the name Wright brothers and the first mechanically-propelled flight in a heavier-than-air craft have always been synonymous with each other. The reality is that the achievement of Orville and Wilbur’s “First Flight” has always been strongly contested from certain quarters within the aviation industry in the United States – and internationally as well.
Not long after the news spread about the momentous event at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903, the significance of what the Wrights’ had done found itself under challenge, especially as time went on from the European aviation community. French newspapers after 1903 described the celebrated American brothers as bluffeurs (bluffers). Doubts were raised about their achievements when the Wrights failed to release the photo of the Wright Flyer in flight at Kitty Hawk until nearly five years after the groundbreaking 1903 flight … newspapers acerbically asked: “Were they fliers or liars?”, Paris edition of the New York Herald (10 Feb 1906); ‘Wright Brothers: European skepticism’, www.spiritus-temporis.com.
The state of North Carolina has harboured no such doubts, proudly displaying the slogan First in Flight on its car number-plates. Whether you accept the Wrights’ claim to be first in flight, or some other contender (of which there are several), in a sense could depend on what is meant by manned, aeronautical flight. Orville Wright’s first successful if brief powered flight was by no measure the first human flight in history. The genesis of intentional manned air travel can be traced back to the late 18th century with the advent of large hot air balloons (starting with the Montgolfier brothers of France in 1783).
As well, in the 30 years preceding Kitty Hawk, there was a host of aviation pioneers experimenting with monoplanes, biplanes, box-kites and gliders including, 1874: Félix du Temple; 1894: Hiram Maxim; 1894: Lawrence Hargrave; 1898: Augustus Moore Herring [B Kampmark, ‘Wright Brothers: Right or Wrong?’, Montréal Review (April 2013]. These flights however were either pre-power ones, or if motorised, they have been largely discredited as having been either unsustained, uncontrolled or as at the least not sufficiently controlled [P Scott, The Shoulders of Giants: A History of Human Flight to 1919].
The achievements of Orville and Wilbur in their 1903 Wright Flyer moved beyond the brothers’ earlier experiments in motorless gilders, but there are at least two other rival claimants prior to December 1903 whose aeronautical experiments were also mechanically-driven and became airborne albeit briefly – Gustave Whitehead in 1901 and Richard Pearse in 1902/1903. The late 1890s and early 1900s were awash with would-be plane makers, there was a veritable aircraft mania world-wide with people all the way from Austria to Australasia trying to construct workable “flying machines”.
☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬
Richard Pearse ⇓
Pearse’s somewhat erratic aircraft experiments in New Zealand, far away from the salient aeronautical developments in the US Eastern Seaboard and Europe, largely flew under the radar (to invoke an obvious pun!). The evidence suggests that Canterbury farmer Pearse’s home-built glider (equipped with tricycle wheels and an air-compressed engine) made at least one (but probably more) flights, but with little control over the craft. What was to Pearse’s credit was that unlike the Wright Flyer which managed only to travel in a straight line on 17 December 1903, the New Zealander was able to turn right and left during his flight on 11 May 1903 [PS Ward, ‘Richard Pearse, First Flyer’ The Global Life of New Zealanders, www.nzedge.com].
Pearse’s low-key approach to his attempts meant that no photographs were taken, although Geoffrey Rodcliffe identifies over 40 witnesses to Pearce’s flights prior to July 1903 [http://avstop.com]. Pearse did not actively promote his own claims for a place in aviation history (unlike the consistently determined and even pathological efforts of the Wright brothers to consolidate their reputation), and he himself conceded that the Wrights’ flight achieved a “sustained and controlled” trajectory, something that he had not. But Pearse did contribute to aviation’s development nonetheless through the creation of a monoplane configuration, wing flaps and rear elevator, tricycle undercarriage with steerable nosewheel, and a propeller with variable-pitch blades driven by a unique double-acting horizontally opposed petrol engine [G Ogilvie, ‘Pearse, Richard William’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (Te Ara) 7 Jan 2014].
☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬
Gustav Whitehead⇓
G A Whitehead was a German migrant (born Gustave Weisskopf) living in Connecticut who started experimenting with gliders (variations on the glider prototype design developed by aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal) in the mid-1890s, at a time when Wilbur and Orville were still making and repairing bicycles in Dayton, Ohio. The case in support of the flight made by Whitehead on 14 August 1901 in what must be noted was an improbable-looking, bat-shaped, engine-propelled glider at Fairfield near Bridgeport, was first taken up in 1935 (in an article in an industry magazine, Popular Aviation, entitled ‘Did Whitehead Precede Wright In World’s First Powered Flight?’)回. Whitehead’s claim lay dormant until the 1960s when army reservist William O’Dwyer, took up the German-American engine-maker’s cause and did his upmost to promote his “flying machine”.
A surprise rival to the Wrights’ crown
Supporters of Whitehead recently received a further boost through the research of Australian aviation historian John Brown who discovered a photo (lost since the 1906 Aero Club of America Exhibition) purporting to be of Whitehead’s № 21 Gilder in flight. Largely on the basis of this, Brown was able to convince the premier aviation journal, Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, to recognise Whitehead’s claim over that of the Wrights’ as the first powered and navigable flight in history [“An airtight case for Whitehead?”, www.fairfield-sun.com, 24 August 2013]. Doubts remain however about the Whitehead thesis. Brown’s reliance on the newly-discovered photo remains problematic, the image even ultra-magnified is indistinct and inconclusive of anything much. In any case the providence is questionable, there is no irrefutable evidence yet unearthed linking it to Whitehead’s 1901 flight. [“The case for Gustave Whitehead”, www.wright-brothers.org]
⇑ Whitehead & his № 21 Glider
Footnote: The newly-acquired kudos of Connecticut arising from Jane’s recognition of Whitehead, has led to the amusing suggestion from some Connecticuters, that the state’s number-plates now be inscribed (at the risk of some serious grammatical mangling), Firster in Flight“, as a counterfoil to North Carolina’s “First in Flight”❈.
☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬
Santos-Dumont’s biplane ⇓
Santos, breaking through for Europe (and Brazil)
A case has also been made for Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian aviator-inventor as the first to fly a mechanised aircraft – the 1906 Paris flight of his 14-bis biplane (Condor # 20). Supporters of the Brazilian aviator argue this on the grounds that it, not the Wrights 1903 flight, represented the first officially witnessed, unaided take-off and flight by a heavier-than-air craft. Brazilians, whilst acknowledging that the Wright Brothers conducted a successful flight earlier, argue that Santos-Dumont should be given pre-eminence because the 14-bis‘ take-off was made from fixed wheels (as was Pearse’s flight in NZ incidentally) rather than catapulted into the air from skids as happened with the Wright Flyer in 1903 [‘The case for Santos-Dumont’, www.wright-brothers.org]. The patriotic Brazilians, always ready to embrace a national hero, sporting or otherwise, have gone to great and amusing lengths to register their pride in Santos-Dumont’s achievement. Many Brazilian cities have an Avenida Santos Dumont named in honour of the aviator. In a characteristically Brazilian vein of jocularity, some Brazilians have taken a “stretch-limo” approach, rendering the street name into English thus: Santos Dumont the True Inventor of the Airplane and Not the Wright Brothers Avenue [V Barbara, ‘Learning to Speak Brazinglish’, New York Times, 8 November 2013].
☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬
Hargrave at Stanwell Tops⇓
Hargrave down under: providing lift
More seriously, Santos-Dumont’s 1906 successful, powered flight in Paris (dismissed by the Wrights as a series of “long hops”) owed a large debt to Lawrence Hargrave, Santos’ Condor biplane being based on Hargrave’s box-kite construction. Not just Santos but many other aviation pioneers, including the brothers Wright, all benefitted from Hargrave’s conscious decision not to patent his designs. The Australian inventor has an under-recognised role in the history of aviation, but he contributed massively to the first successful airplane through the development of three critical aeronautical concepts – the cellular box-kite wing, the curved wing surface, and the thick leading wing edge (aerofoil). The world’s first commercial aircraft built by Frenchman Gabriel Voisin incorporated the stable lifting surfaces of Hargrave’s box kites. In addition, Hargrave invented the radial rotary engine which drew great interest from Europe and was later used extensively in military aircraft [‘The Pioneers: Aviation and Aeromodelling – Independent Evolutions and Histories’ (Lawrence Hargrave 1850-1915), www.ctie.monash.edu.au].
Illawarra’s place in the pioneering story of manned flight: Hargrave started off constructing ornithopters (“mechanical birds’ utilising a ‘flapping’ method) before experimenting with designs based on kites. Hargrave’s cellular or box kites provided the basis for a rigid, stable aeroplane. In 1894 at Stanwell Park in the Illawarra region, south of Sydney, Hargrave tested his own four-kite device which got the inventor airborne for a distance of five metres, the world’s first ”flying contraption” to achieve aerial lift from a fixed-wing [‘Aviation in Australia Hargrave’s flying machines’, State Library of NSW,www.sl.nsw.gov.au].
☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬
Jane’s magazine’s decision in 2013 to jettison the Wrights’ primacy and endorse Whitehead’s claim to be the first powered flight is in marked contrast to the position of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on the subject. The key to understanding the Smithsonian’s rigid, on-going refusal to countenance the Whitehead case, or even to have an open mind on it (the Smithsonian dismissively refers to it as the “Whitehead Myth”), has its roots in the testy relationship that prevailed between the Wrights and the Institution. From the start the Smithsonian did not immediately and unconditionally embrace the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk achievement. Instead, the Institute sought to elevate Samuel Pierpoint Langley‘s unsuccessful Aerodrome craft on an equal footing with the Wright Flyer (at one point Langley was Secretary of the Smithsonian – a clear suggestion of a conflict of interest within the Institution). In retaliation the Wrights refused to display their 1903 “First Flight” aircraft in the Smithsonian. Orville, after Wilbur’s early death, eventually shipped it off to England where it was exhibited in the Science Museum in South London instead [‘History of the 1903 Wright Flyer’, (Wright State University Libraries), www.libraries.wright.edu].
The intriguing twist in this story occurred in 1942 when the remaining Wright, Orville, relented on the Smithsonian ban, but only after a deal was struck. The Smithsonian recanted its long-standing statement that Langley’s Aerodrome was the first machine capable of flight in favour of the Wrights’ claim. In return the Washington DC Institution was allowed to hold and exhibit the 1903 Wright Flyer. The rider which contractually committed the Smithsonian stated that if the Institute ever deviated from its acknowledgement that the Flyer was the first craft to make a controlled, sustained powered flight, then control of the Flyer would fall into the hands of Orville’s heirs.
On display at the Smithsonian (National Air & Space Museum)⇓
Critics of the Institute believe that the Smithsonian’s indebtedness to the Wrights’ legacy (the fear of losing the historic Flyer to the estate executors) prevents it from recognising the merits of Whitehead’s pioneering achievement irrespective of the weight of evidence put forward [J Liotta, ‘Wright Brothers Flight Legacy Hits New Turbulence’, www.news.nationalgeographic.com]. Clearly this is a powerful disincentive to the Smithsonian objectively assessing the merits and new evidence for any rival claims to the Wrights (not just Whitehead’s) which may be unearthed.
The Wright stuff
There were numerous aviation pioneers, engineers and technologists experimenting with new forms of aircraft at the turn of the 20th century, so what was it that made the Wright brothers stand out from the others? The preservation of identifiable photographic evidence and documentation of the December 1903 attempts certainly contributed to the strengthening of the brothers’ argument for being “First”. Another factor is that the brothers scrupulously consolidated and cultivated their reputation as the foremost air pioneers. Clearly the Wrights had an eye on history which contrasts with the less calculated approach of their rivals (especially Whitehead and Pearse). The Wrights vigorously defended the accomplishments of their Flyer against that of competing airships. They also went to great efforts to protect their technologies against intellectual theft … the propensity of the Wrights to resort to lawsuits when they felt their interests (eg, patent preservation) was threatened, pays testimony to this.
The Wrights, unlike most of the competition, kept on improving the quality and capability of their airplanes (at least up until they got bogged down in patent litigation), eg, the development of “wing warping” helped control the aircraft through enhanced aerodynamic balance. [D Schneider, ‘First in Flight?’, American Scientist, 91(6), Nov-Dec 2003]. The patents issue and the brothers’ preparedness to play “hardball” with their rivals led them into questionable ethical terrain, eg, their refusal to acknowledge the influence on their designs of pioneers who came before them, such as the Anglo-Australian Hargrave [‘The Pioneers’ op.cit.].
The credence given to the Wright brothers’ claim to be the first successful flyers should perhaps come with an asterisk, signifying it as heavily qualified, as in David Schneider’s all-inclusive, tongue-in-cheek description: “First in Sustained, Piloted, Controlled, Powered, Heavier-than-air Flight of Lasting Technological Significance” [ibid].
☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬
Many in the public at large would hold with tradition and still attribute the crucial breakthrough in aerial navigation to the Wright brothers…but can we really say that in that start-up era of aeronautics that any one of the countless attempts by aviation pioneers was absolutely the definitive one? The differences between what Whitehead, Santos-Dumont, Pearse, the brothers Wright and Herring achieved with their best efforts seems to be one of degree, not kind.
Augustus Moore Herring, the darling of Michigan aviation enthusiasts, managed a flight of only 73 feet and no more than 10 seconds in duration, no more than an extended hop according to National Air and Space Museum curator, Tom Crouch, but it registered as a lift-off nonetheless [TD Crouch, A Dream of Wings]. “Bamboo Dick” Pearse’s optimal flight in Temuka, NZ, travelled a mere 50 feet or so and abruptly ended 15 feet up in a gorse-hedge! The last and best attempt of Orville in the Wright Flyer on that December day in 1903 lasted 59 seconds and travelled some 852 feet in distance. Gus Whitehead’s best try on 14 August 1901 was half a mile according to him, but it was poorly documented, lacked verification and any pellucid images of the feat.
Did any of the documented early flights per se achieve “sustained and controlled flight”? Human conquest of the sky didn’t happen in one quantum leap, surely it came about in a series of small, measured steps, each building on the one before. It is more meaningful to see the development of viable flying machines as something that happened incrementally, an aerodynamic puzzle put together piece-by-piece. It was an international effort, the culmination of the accumulated efforts of gifted pioneering aeronautical designers such as George Cayley, Octave Chanute, Samuel Langley, Lawrence Hargrave and Otto Lilienthal whose experiments made it possible for the Wrights and others to experiment with flight, coming closer and closer to the realisation of successful manned, powered flight.
☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬ ☬☬☬☬☬☬
PostScript:Pittsburg 1899
In a documentary shown on national ABC television (Australia) John Brown made the case for an even earlier attempt at powered flight by Gus Whitehead, which occurred in the city of Pittsburg in 1899. Brown does not contend that this flight by the German-American should be recognised as the first successful attempt because it was not controlled – to the point that the aircraft actually crash-landed into a brick building, Who Flew First: Challenging the Wright Brothers, (DTV 21, ABC 2016).
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回 freelance writer Stella Randolph was responsible for maintaining interest in Whitehead’s aviation pursuits, researching and writing The Lost Flights of Gustave Whitehead in the 1930s
❈ then there’s the claims of Ohio and specifically Dayton to their part in aviation history, the Wright Flyer being manufactured in Dayton
◖◗ See also the related article on this blogsite (October 2016) – “The Wright Way, the Only Way: the Aviation ‘Patent Wars’ and Glenn Curtiss”
NOW that Scotland have expressed an inclination, but not a preference, to secede from the Union with England (the UK), it would be interesting to take a gander at other secession attempts both closer to home and around the world. The impulse for or advocacy of secession by a section or part of an established, multi-ethnic nation state is a recurring feature in contemporary international relations.
The enthusiasm with which so many Scots embraced the notion of “going it alone” and their, so it seemed up to polling day, excellent prospect of pulling it off, is a fillip for long-lingering secessionist movements around the world – Catalonia, the Basque Country, Québec, Flemish Belgium, Kurdistan (although some of the several Kurdish groups seek only autonomy, not outright independence) [“The Kurdish Conflict: Aspirations for Statehood within the Spirals of International Relations in the 21st Century”, www.kurdishaspect.com]
In the Southern Hemisphere, on this very continent indeed, in the state of Western Australia, an air of secessionism has tended to linger, much like the relieving breeze visited upon Perth in the afternoon from the Indian Ocean’s “Fremantle Doctor”. The Western Australians, from the very outset in 1900, were reluctant to join the Commonwealth of Australia…in fact the state’s name was conspicuously omitted from the original Federation document of 1 January 1901! A special provision (Section 95) guaranteeing that a planned inter-colonial tariff would only be gradually phased in, had to be added to the Constitution before the West would sign up. A further inducement that clinched it was the prospect of a transcontinental railway to be built linking WA with the eastern states.
The proposed colony of ‘Auralia’ – an irredentist goldfields colony
𓂃𓂅𓂅𓂅𓂃
In the end, what swayed WA in joining (as argued by Tom Musgrove) was the affinity with the East held by recent settlers lured to WA by the goldfield discoveries. The huge population surge in the 1890s in WA, due to the influx of these Eastern fortune-seekers made them more numerous than the established residents on the coast who were, conversely, distinctly isolationist in their outlook. The miners formed a pressure group advocating that the eastern goldfields area (calling itself the colony of ‘Auralia’) break away from the rest of WA and unilaterally federate with the Commonwealth. The WA Parliament eventually succumbed to the threat of being splintered and losing the goldfields, and committed to the Federation [T Musgrove, ‘Western Australian Secessionist Movement’, The Macquarie Law Journal, www.austlil.edu.au; ‘Separation Movement on the Eastern Goldfields, 1894-1904’, West Australian Historical Society 1949, 4(5) 1953]. So, even prior to Federation, a bent for Western secession was evident.
Black Swan State
𓂃𓂅𓂅𓂅𓂃
The secessionists succeed…or do they?
The threat of ‘Westralian’ succession has been a recurring theme in the state’s history since the early days of colony… lying dormant for years before being triggered into prominence by the emergence of some economic upheaval or issue (more recently over the distribution of mining revenues by the Commonwealth). In 1933 the issue of secession was actually put to the electorate of WA in a referendum held concurrently with the state election. The pre-conditions leading up to such a momentous development were brought about by the Great Depression. Wheat, WA’s top primary product export-earner was decimated (the price per bushel declined by less than half in three years) and unemployment in Perth reached 30 per cent. The WA Dominion League spearheaded by H Keith Watson agitated from 1930 for secession in the West. As a result of the League’s vigorous campaign (contrasting with the lacklustre campaign of the Federal League’s ‘No secession’ campaign), the referendum resulted in a greater than two-thirds vote (68 per cent) in favour of secession. Interestingly, the only region of the state to oppose the secession motion was again the goldfields!
“Westralia Shall Be Free”
𓂃𓂅𓂅𓂅𓂃
The Electorate’s each-way bet!
Paradoxically at the same time, the WA electors dumped the incumbent Nationalist/Country Party Coalition from power (even though the NCPC had backed the ‘Yes’ camp), and elevated the Labor Party opposition, who had opposed secession, into office in the state. The apparent contradictory behaviour of the electors has been explained thus: support was given to the ‘Yes’ case because there was widespread dissatisfaction with WA’s situation vis-à-vis the eastern states (WA had long identified itself as the “Cinderella State” of the Commonwealth, it’s perception being one of it contributing more to federal funds than it receives back). At the same time, the unacceptable state unemployment situation in 1933 resulted in voters seeking to punish the incumbent conservative government by turfing them out (as was done federally to the Scullin Labor Government in 1932) [‘Secession 1929-39: Western Australia & Federation’ www.slwa.wa.gov.au].
The WA delegation bringing the petition to secede to London
𓂃𓂅𓂅𓂅𓂃
Westminster or “Yes Minister”!
The new WA premier, Philip Collier, after some prevarication, appointed a delegation which took a petition for WA secession to the UK. Westminster, in a farcical turn of events which the writers of the popular 1980s TV series Yes, Minister would be proud to put their name to, simply sat on the issue, doing nothing! The British Government after a lengthy delay informed the WA Government that it could not act on the petition without the assent of Canberra. By 1935 the economy had recovered somewhat, the secessionist movement and the Dominion League lost momentum and the issue petered way for ordinary West Australians as they got on with the day-to-day task of making the best of what they could with the status quo [ibid.].
Western successionism, a simmering pot!
The media in WA helps to keep the issue alive with periodical appeals to the spectre of “secessionist redux” (with regular articles appearing with titles like “Why the West should secede” and “Secession still on our mind”). Secessionism has remained a rallying cry for disgruntled Western Australians whenever they feel aggrieved about what they see as the excesses and encroaching powers of Canberra. In the 1970s maverick millionaire/WA mining magnate Lang Hancock tried to revive the state’s secessionist trajectory with his short-lived “Westralian Secessionist Movement”, in effect a political campaign against the allegedly ‘socialist’ policies of the Whitlam Labor Government.Most recently this reared its head again in the concerted opposition to the Rudd and Gillard Labor Governments’ mining taxes.
‘Prince’ Leonard & his consort – in the ‘Principality’
PostScript: Fringe micro-secessionists – seceding from the secessionist state!
In 1970 West Australian wheat farmer Leonard Casley declared his 18,500-acre agricultural property near Northampton (south of Geraldton) to be ‘independent’ of the Commonwealth and the state of Western Australia when Canberra and the WA government tried to limit the size of his wheat crop. In true “comic-opera” style, the eccentric Casley turned his farm into the Hutt River Province Principality, adopting the title of “His Majesty Prince Leonard I of Hutt”, and in so doing spawned a whole new wellspring of tourism for the locality. Enthused with the spirit of commercial opportunity Leonard and his Hutt River ‘micro-nation’ has gone the whole hog…flag, coat-of-arms, royal seal, coins, stamps, medallions, passports, souvenirs, etc. The response from the Australian authorities to such a “bold act” of “unilateral independence” has been a “softly-softly” approach, not seeking to unduly push the matter, a bit surprising as the Hutt River ‘Principality’ purportedly owes the Commonwealth many years of unpaid taxes (although it does make rate payments to the local government authority, the Shire of Northampton)…the state and the federal governments seem to gravitate between being nonplussed and amused by the eccentric entity❈ and generally try to ignore it! [M Siegel, “Micronation Master: Prince Leonard of Hutt River”, 17 May 2012, www.businessweek.com]; ‘Principality of Hutt River’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wiki.org
﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋
❈ the Prince’s pattern of bizarre and idiosyncratic behaviour includes trying to seize government land surrounding his farm to increase his wheat quota; invoking the 1495 British Treason Act as proof of Hutt River Province’s status as a de facto monarchy; and declaring war on Australia (for four days in 1977!)
Most Australians have at some time or other glimpsed the grainy old Cinesound newsreel footage or the still pictures of the dramatic events of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in March 1932. What should have been a moment of glory for the NSW Premier, Jack Lang, declaring open Bradfield’s engineering wonder of a bridge, was turned into a minor public relations coup for a shadowy fringe paramilitary group called the New Guard through an audacious act by one of its members.
De Groot’s ‘coup’
Just as the Bridge ribbon was about to be cut by the NSW Premier, Captain Francis De Groot who had attached himself undetected to the escort cavalry, rode forward and pre-emptively slashed the ribbon. In doing so he declared the bridge open “in the name of all decent and respectable people of New South Wales”. De Groot, the Irish-born antique dealer, furniture restorer and part-time soldier, with one outrageous swipe of his sword, secured his “15 minutes of fame”, embarrassed the Lang Labor Government and thrust the New Guard deeply into the consciousness of Sydneysiders at large!
Primrose’s ceremony at the Northern Pylon
Now all this is well known, but what is largely not known is what was happening at the northern end of the Bridge whilst attention was focused on the high drama at Dawes Point. Soon after De Groot “opened the bridge” in unorthodox fashion at the southern pylon end, another member of the New Guard cut the ribbon at the northern pylon. Hubert Leslie Primrose, Mayor of North Sydney, was an assistant adjunct and quartermaster-general in the New Guard. Primrose as mayor had organised his own bridge-opening ceremony from the North Sydney side. Although NSW Police (and Premier Lang) had decided reservations about Alderman Primrose’s Northside celebration of the Bridge, because of his involvement in a suspect para-military movement that was under investigation (the New Guard), they ultimately made no attempts to stop the municipal representative going ahead with his act of public ceremony.
So, remarkable as it may seem to us today, the opening of both ends of that most iconic of Sydney symbols, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, was accomplished by the New Guard. These deeds (one undertaken officially and the other without state sanction) were achieved by a small, para-military organisation that at best was only ever a marginal player in provincial Australian politics.
Harbour Bridge from Kirribilli (looking south)
Primrose’s fascination with the New Guard, like many of its initial supporters, was short-lived. In June 1932 he was one of many New Guardsmen elected to the Legislative Assembly for the new conservative force in party politics, the United Australia Party (forerunner to the Liberal Party of Australia), later rising to the rank of UAP Minister for Health, and later Minister for National Emergency Services. Primrose Park in the northern Sydney suburbs of Cremorne and Cammeray is named in his honour, but clearly not for his activities on behalf of the New Guard!
Footnote: Apart from his right wing, para-military enthusiasms, Captain De Groot, the stealer of Premier Lang’s thunder on thatillustrious day, had a respectable day job as the proprietor of a successful antique furniture business in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. The plaque below stands on the site of the former shop in Rushcutters Bay.
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Refs: Australian Dictionary of Biography (Vol 11) 1988, HL Primrose, ADB, (Supp. Vol) 2005, FE De Groot, both articles by Andrew Moore
I have long thought that one of the more intriguing back stories of 20th century Australian history is the rise and (rapid) fall of the New Guard movement. The New Guard which flourished in the early 1930s was Australia’s own home-grown, ‘wannabe’ fascist organisation, one of a number of disgruntled, peripheral Australian Alt-Right groups in the Depression years.
The New Guard was a fairly obscure fringe organisation in early 1931, formed by ex-World War I army officers who broke away from an existing organisation (the Old Guard) deemed by them to be too cautious in its anti-socialist methods❈. The singular incident associated with the New Guard that resonates most clearly in the public consciousness today is the intervention by Francis De Groot (divisional commander in the New Guard) in the opening ceremony of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in March 1932. The fanatical, sword-wielding De Groot, on horseback, upstaged the State Labor government by dramatically cutting the ribbon at the southern pylon of the bridge before NSW Premier JT Lang could do so officially.
At its height the New Guard had somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 members in New South Wales❅ (men only, women were not permitted to join the New Guard). Included in these numbers were prominent Australians such as the famous aviators, Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, Sir Thomas Henley (Nationalist Party MP), Hubert Primrose (Mayor of North Sydney, later NSW UAP Minister for Health), and leading business figures in industry and agriculture such as the Patricks (Patricks Stevedore and Shipping Lines) and the MacArthur Onslows (sheep barons). Interestingly, it has been alleged (though not substantiated) that Lyall Howard, the garage owner-father of former PM John Howard, was very likely to have been a New Guard member (Andrew Moore, ‘The New Guard & the Labour Movement 1931-35’, Labour History, No 89).
JT Lang in typical demagogic mood
.The background to the New Guard’s emergence was the societal dislocation caused by the Great Depression and the sudden and calamitous level of unemployment of the early 1930s. This gave the New Guardsmen the impetus to thrive as it did to right-wing authoritarian political forces in Europe during the same period. In October 1930 a left-leaning Labor Government was elected in NSW under the demagogic nationalist Jack Lang. Lang’s scheme to tackle the state’s catastrophic economic crisis comprised repudiating Australia’s international loan obligations and refusing to make any further interest payments to British bondholders (and re-channelling those retained monies into job creation for the state). This polemical stand not only enraged Big Capital interests but also made fringe groups on the right, especially the New Guard, flare up in hostile opposition to Labor.
Lt.Col Campbell
The leader of the New Guard (NG) was a Sydney North Shore solicitor, company director and WWI army officer of patrician stock, Eric Campbell. The attraction of men who followed Campbell into NG was that it appeared to offer a fresh, alternative solution to the problems of society to those espoused by the democratic parliamentary parties of the day⊚. NG viewed communism and socialism as having a corrosive and degenerative effect on Australian society. Campbell characterised the incumbent Lang government as avowedly socialist, and thus tried to relegate the Labor Party to the status of being abject co-conspirators with the communists working against the liberties of loyal Australians.
Lt-Colonel Campbell asserted that New Guard was “staunchly patriotic”, but by this he meant patriotic to the British Empire, so intricately linked in his mind was Australia with the ‘mother country’, Britain. In effect the New Guardsmen were undisguisedly über-British loyalists. So, when Lang signalled his intent to default on loans to British banks, this infuriated Campbell and loyalists to the British Crown generally. Campbell and his executive redoubled the movement’s efforts to bring Labor down. NG believed in minimalist government and individualism, in “sane finance” as Campbell put it, in freeing up private enterprise to get on with business…Lang’s plans to expand the public sector to alleviate the unemployment crisis, put ‘Langism’ very squarely in the ideological cross-hairs of NG.
Campbell & his NG acolytes giving a familiar salute at a Sydney rally
By late 1931, disillusioned with parliamentary party politics, the New Guard adopted more aggressive tactics in the fight against the left. New Guardsmen also started to display some of the trappings of fascist parties (military uniforms and armbands, the Nazi salute, ID badges) and began to break up meetings of communists and the unemployed. NG’s unleashing of its paramilitary arm provoked the left into forming communist and Laborite militias which eventually led to pitched street battles with the NG forces.
The most significant, physical confrontation between these groups, occurring in early 1932, became known as the “Battle of Bankstown”. The New Guard in its coercive actions in Bankstown and elsewhere in Sydney did succeed in its aim to disrupt meetings of the labour movement, but these mobilisations ultimately proved counterproductive to the NG leaders’ attempts to consolidate the new movement. The Bankstown mêlée had two adverse effects for NG. First, the leadership’s decision to up the ante in NG’s strong-arm tactics against their ideological opponents alienated a lot of the movement’s rank-and-file and many disaffected members resigned in the aftermath of Bankstown. At an NG meeting soon after some members moved motions of no confidence in the leadership of Führer (the leader) Eric Campbell, ibid.
Secondly, the level of New Guard violence exhibited at Bankstown, and to a lesser extent at other NG mobilisations like Newtown, Drummoyne and Canterbury, following upon De Groot’s bridge antics, convinced NSW Police of the need to take the threat to law and order posed by Campbell’s organisation seriously. The promotion by Premier Lang of an uncompromising, aggressive Glaswegian, Big Bill MacKay, to Acting Metropolitan Superintendent, was the catalyst for a much tougher police line taken against the right-wing paramilitary groups. MacKay intimidated Campbell and De Groot and other NG leaders and exhorted the State police to respond with unrestrained force every time the New Guard initiated a public fracas.
Given free rein by A/Supt MacKay, the white-helmeted state police launched a savage assault on the trouble-making New Guardsmen, especially in an incident that became known as the “Liverpool Street Police Riot”. Campbell’s enthusiastic but volunteer guardsmen proved no match for a well-trained, disciplined and highly motivated police force. The largely middle class NG members who clashed with the police found the experience distinctly not to their liking. Under instructions from MacKay, the police went at the New Guardsmen full-tilt and absolutely brutalised Campbell’s militia. MacKay’s tactics of intimidation and savage counter-violence against NG paramilitaries kept the agitators in check and dissuaded many from continuing their active involvement in the right wing organisation (Moore, ibid).
Berrima Gaol, NSW
NSW Police in early 1932 undertook investigations aimed at unearthing a possible plot by Campbell to use his so-called Secret Army to launch a coup d’être against Lang’s Labor Government. It was widely rumoured in the press that the New Guard planned to overthrow the Government, kidnap and imprison Lang and his senior cabinet ministers in the disused Berrima Gaol in country NSW, (‘The revolution that wasn’t’ (www.matthewleecunningham.com). Whether Campbell was planning such a strike on democracy or not (he publicly denied it however Major Treloar, disaffected NG deputy commander, informed police that this was indeed Campbell’s true intention)(Robert Darlington, Eric Campbell & the New Guard). The question became academic in May 1932 when the Governor, Sir Philip Game, sacked the Lang Government for withholding revenues deemed owing to the Commonwealth as part of the debt to British financiers. The incoming State UAP Government quickly shelved the CID’s investigation into the alleged New Guard plot.
⇑ Gov. Game, co-conspirator in a class conflict?
In what sense could the New Guard movement be said to be fascist in nature?Historians have long debated whether the New Guard organisation was a fascist one or even a quasi-fascist one – as they have done with regard to Franco’s Falange Party in Spain and other authoritarian-right movements. If we stack the New Guard up against the classic Italian and Germany models of inter-war fascism, it is of course a ludicrous comparison. The New Guard movement, in addition to lacking a totalitarian systemic structure, falls well short even of fulfilling the criteria for a semi-fascist organisation like the British Union of Fascists, whose leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, Campbell expressed great admiration for. Campbell visited Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in 1933 and came away deeply impressed by the Nazi and Fascist systems of rule, and subsequently did integrate some aspects of Mussolini’s Italian Corporatism into the New Guard’s ideology. The most that can be said about Campbell’s organisation however was that it was heavily influenced by the success of the European fascist movements and was openly sympathetic to fascism (Matthew Cunningham, ‘Australian Fascism? A Revisionist Analysis of the New Guard’, Politics, Religion & Ideology , 13(3)).
Real fascists ⇓
Nor can it be said that the New Guard had any claims to be considered as a mass movement in NSW politics. NG remained fundamentally a middle class organisation, the core of its base were urban professionals and small businessmen, like Campbell himself (Cunningham, Ibid.). Unlike many other fascist/authoritarian parties in Europe, it lacked for significant working class participation (Moore, op.cit.). Moreover, geographically, the New Guard was very limited in scope. It was confined almost entirely to one state, NSW, and even more, was essentially a Sydney metropolitan phenomena with only around 3,000 members from rural areas outside of Sydney (Cunningham, ibid.).
The staunchly pro-monarchist and pro-capitalist (and distinctly non-radical) positions of the New Guard demonstrates that the organisation didn’t cross over into a fascist character…contrast the monarchist fervour of Campbell and NG with the positions of Hitler and Mussolini in their countries, Hitler had no interest in restoring the exiled Kaiser during his Reich, and Il Duce merely ignored the powerless Italian King. Rather, the retention of these allegiances shows that the NG movement retained an essentially conservative authoritarianism in appearance (Cunningham, ibid.).
1930s New Guard propaganda against Premier Lang
Why did the New Guard decline and dissolve so swiftly in the mid 1930s?As alluded to above, one reason for the disaffection and eventual alienation of much of the respectable, middle class membership from the New Guard was the resort to more extreme violent means by the leadership from around the end of 1931. Vigilante action by the Fascist Legion, a splinter grooup within NG, did nothing to assuage the doubters in the organisation. In May of that momentous year several of the Fascist Legion members, clad in black Ku Klux Klan style hooded capes, attacked and bashed Jock Garden, a prominent communist and trade union official in his Maroubra home (Garden was a close associate of Premier Lang). This violent act, what we would now call home invasion, brought disastrous publicity to the New Guard (Richard Evans, ‘A menace to this realm’: The New Guard & NSW Police, History Australia, 5(3). This coming on top of the general perception that NG leadership was seriously contemplating taking extra-legal action against the elected Lang Government, made many people distance themselves from the increasingly extremist actions of the New Guard. Interestingly, afterwards the Deputy Leader of the opposition Nationalists came out in parliament denying any involvement by NG in Garden’s bashing, alleging it was a Labor “put-up job” in which Garden himself was complicit! (Darlington, op.cit.).
The ‘Maroubra incident’ 1932 Garden’s bashing by NG thugs
One week after the Maroubra bashing of Jock Garden, the State Governor dismissed Lang and at the subsequent election Labor was soundly beaten by the UAP led by Bertram Stevens. The removal of Lang–Labor had been the New Guard’s overriding objective, so with Lang gone and the conservatives firmly in control, a large part of NG’s raison d’être was at an end. The sacking of Lang released the tension that had been building up between the various opposing forces in the political crisis of 1932.
The signs of a gradual recovery of the economy starting from late 1932 encouraged many who had joined the movement from a fear of socialism to drop their political allegiance to NG (Darlington, op.cit.). The New Guard’s strength dwindled after 1932 and by 1935 the NG support base had largely eroded. In that year Campbell tried to revive the movement’s fortunes by forming a new political group, the Centre Party, and contesting the state elections. Campbell’s last despairing grab at some semblance of power, a electoral bid for the seat of Lane Cove, went nowhere, and soon after, he faded into political obscurity.
PostScript: The New Guard – the Mini-series? A few years ago I suggested to SBS that the story of the New Guard and its ambitious if deeply flawed leader, Eric Campbell, would have the makings of a first-rate mini-series for television, and that they might like to explore the possibilities of this. They never got back to me!
I think this episode in Australian history has the same kind of dramatic ingredients and appeal as the successful Bodyline mini-series made for TV in the 1980s where the English cricket captain’s s breaching of the rules of the “Gentlemen’s game of cricket” forced many Australians (momentarily at least) to question their loyalty to Crown and Empire. Lang’s refusal to back down and the establishment’s uncompromising response was the makings of a high political stakes drama set against the turbulent background of the depression and a very real chance of a bitterly antagonistic explosion of class conflict; the violence of the New Guardsmen and the counter-violence from organised labour, and the unleashed mayhem and retribution of the NSW Police; there are the colourful and complex personalities in the story, larger than life figures such as Jack Lang and Bill MacKay, the paradoxical and enigmatic Campbell. There was also Sir Philip Game – the political executioner of the rebellious Lang, was he acting to safeguard the interests of international capitalism or was he just the dutiful King’s representative, an honest broker bring to heel a dangerously out of line state premier?
Was there a conspiracy or not? – a coup, behind-the-scenes, shadowy figures intent on usurping by whatever means the premier, an arrogant demagogue but nonetheless a democratically elected head of a provincial government (a forewarning of 1975?). How far did NG infiltrate the Sydney establishment and the conservative Nationalist Party? Then there was the question of the bashing of the communist union official Jock Garden, who was really behind it? Many questions to explore.
The New Guard had something of a chameleon–like character, many in society and in the press didn’t take it very seriously with its pompous and overblown leader and his supporters who at times resembled a ‘Dad’s Army’ trying to imitate the real thing in Germany and Italy (the NSW Labor press regularly referred to them as the ‘Boo Guard’). Some however were concerned, especially on the left, including European émigrés with an insight into the threats to liberty a nascent fascism might pose – these sectors viewed the New Guard’s brief moment in the sun very gravely. Others in the community of a more traditional, conservative bent, well-connected politically and socially and often from the North Shore and the Eastern Suburbs, took a different and more sanguine view of the New Guard and endorsed the fringe group’s need and right to inject some new energy into the stalled world of parliamentary politics.
Drama, tension, intrigue, civil unrest, all set against an international context of fascism and communism on the rise. Unfortunately, SBS did not express any interest in this proposition, but I still maintain that the subject conveyed through a mini-series remains a most worthy project – done well! An expert academic history consultant for the period (such as Andrew Moore or Robert Darlington) working with a good screenwriter and some money, could produce a very good product, both as entertainment and as historical reconstruction of a not terribly well known chapter of our history. Perhaps the ABC … budgetary constraints in the reality of a national Liberal coalition government permitting?
𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑
❈ the New Guard in rhetoric also distanced itself from the establishment conservative parties as well, the National (or Nationalist) Party and the Country Party (despite there being a good amount of conspicuous cross-membership!), seeing them as failing to take action against the communists and trade unions, and seeing itself as a legitimate, alternative right-wing movement
❅ an active membership of around 36,000 was claimed by the NG leadership
⊚ Campbell himself had impeccable establishment credentials…a professional man, a Freemason, a company director, the Turramurra resident was a member of all the right clubs (Imperial Services, the Union, the NSW, Rotary, Royal Sydney Golf and Killara Golf), [Keith Amos, ‘Campbell, Eric (1893–1970)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/campbell-eric-5487/text9331, published first in hardcopy 1979, accessed online 31 May 2014].
word meaning & root formation
Cereologist: pondering the enigma of the crop circle ⭕️
ABACTOR (Image: American Fine Art)
ADELPHOGAMY
ARISTARCH: Aristarchus of Samos
Source: pastposters.com
Images: Columbia Pictures
Wernher Von Braun (Photo: Mondadori via Getty Images)
Herman Kahn (Source: Alchetron)
Gen. Jack Ripper (Photo: Columbia Pictures)
Gen. Turgidson (Scott) in the War Room (Columbia Pictures)
Fail Safe (1964)
Errol Flynn (Source: New York Post)
Father & son together 
Son of Errol 
Sean with Pili…or is it Mili? (Source: briansdriveintheater.com)
The last photo of Sean Flynn (left) & colleague on the day they disappeared (Photo: Perry Deane Smith/MCT/Tribune News Service via Getty Images) 
Sean Flynn on patrol (Photo: Tim Page)
The Beatles flying from London to Hong Kong
The Beatles without drummer Ringo Starr⌧ touched down at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong in early June of ‘64 and booked into a suite recently vacated by the President of Indonesia in the President Hotel in Kowloon. The band only stayed in the British crown colony for a couple of days while they played two concerts at the Princess Theatre (130 Nathan Road, Tsim Sha Tsui) on the 9th June…long enough though for Beatle Paul and road manager Neil Aspinall get themselves bespoke tailored suits made up in 24 hours.
Note concert date, incorrectly printed as 10-06-64 (Source. ha.com)
Early boxing bout at the Old Tin Shed (Source: Nat. Lib. of Aust.)
Jimmy N, all alone at Melbourne Airport, end of the fairytale
Source: ha.com
Staid NZ says “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!” (Source: nzherald.co.nz)B&W 4d Milk Bar with mechanical cow & Red Cross-like symbol
Golden Star Milk Bar, Perth (Photo source: M. Coufos)
Olympia, tea and milkshakes (Source: Daily Mail Australia)
Green plaque in limbo!
⊳ Texas, 1835-36 (Source: texashistory.unt.edu)
⊳ The Alamo, San Antonio (Photo: age fotostock)
⊳ The Alamo according to the John Wayne movie
⊳ The post-bellum myth portrayed a society of happy, docile slaves and benevolent masters as conveyed in the classic film Gone With The Wind
⊳ Slaves in the cotton field (Artist: John W Jones)
Source: art.com
Alfred’s hitch in making ‘Hamlet’
The final project pursued by Hitchcock was ”The Short Night”—based on a novel of the same name by Ronald Kirkbride and on the exploits of real-life double agent George Blake—which was to be Hitchcock’s red-hot crack at making a “realistic Bond movie”. In an interview with John Russell Taylor for Sight and Sound Hitchcock outlined the story’s great allure for him: ”It’s a situation that fascinates me: the man falls in love with the wife of a man he’s waiting to kill. It’s like a French farce turned inside-out. If he sees a boat coming across the bay with the husband on it, he can’t hop out of the back window, he has to wait and do what he has to do. And of course he can’t take the wife, who loves him, into his confidence. And so the whole romance is overshadowed by this secret, which gives it a special flavour and atmosphere. That’s what I want to convey”.
Poster for the movie that never materialised
THE phenomena of James Bond in both book and movie form was meant to be purely escapist entertainment, bereft of the slightest pretension that they were anything remotely cerebral. Interesting then that Bond has gleaned so much serious academic enquiry and analysis over the years. A sample of articles on JSTOR reveals a feast of scholarly entries on the subject of James Bond — “Shaken, Not Stirred Britishness: James Bond, Race, and the Transnational Imaginary”, “The Marketable Misogyny of James Bond“, “Paradoxical Masculinity: James Bond, Icon of Failure”, “Why James Bond Villains Prefer Post-Soviet Architecture”, “The Spy Who Loved Globalization”, ”How safe do you feel?: James Bond, Skyfall, and the Politics of the Secret Agent in an Age of Ubiquitous Threat”, and so on it goes.
The James Bond film franchise is certainly sui generis among English-language movie series. October 5 this year marked the 60th anniversary of the introduction of James Bond to cinema screen audiences (Dr No, 1962), and the cinematic sequence remains as yet unbroken, notwithstanding ”the elephant in the room” of last year’s No Time To Die in which the indestructible James Bond actually dies! Virtually all other elongated movie series have ultimately reached a natural (or unnatural) termination point – even the long-running, prolific and increasingly unimaginative Carry On comedy series ran out of steam by the Eighties 🄰.
Ian Fleming ‘Casino Royale’, 1st 007 novel (Image: bondfanevents.com)
If you came anew to the Bond movies looking for a healthy dose of gritty social realism based on the world of espionage a la John LeCarre, you’d be sadly disappointed. The franchise’s entries are all about fantasy and high-adventure escapism. Unlike the shadowy cloak-and-dagger characters that the real world of spies and secret agents (apparently?) inhabit, James Bond 007 in his public persona is an open book, he doesn’t use a fake name, he doesn’t try to disguise his appearance or furtively hide in dark corners. He’s direct, brash, brutal and recklessly undisciplined in his actions and antics, with a propensity to be easily distracted from the assignment at hand by the happy prospect of a spot of horizontal folk-dancing.
Though wildly successful at the box office over an extraordinarily long shelf life, James Bond is not everyone’s cup of tea. An early critic Judith Crist described the series’ first vehicle Dr No as “an updated comic strip of the Fu Manchu school, fast moving, faster shooting, utterly fantastic”. JB has been pilloried by feminists for his unrepentant chauvinism—especially in Sean Connery and Roger Moore’s interpretations of the character—and four decades of “Bond Girl“ objectification of women. The backlash against JB’s misogyny compelled producers to tone down the blatant sexism in the most recent incarnation of the most famous of all British secret agents played by Daniel Craig. Bond has also been excoriated as a “thug trained to wear a tuxedo”…007’s “license to kill” green-light unleashes the agent’s deep predilection for perpetrating extreme, lethal violence in cold blood.
Bond with “Jaws”, larger than life henchman-turned-ally
British Bond and foreign Blofeld
Bond, tapping into the zeitgeist of the day One (insider) view on the longevity of James Bond comes from those at the helm of the multi-billion dollar franchise today, Cubby Broccoli’s daughter Barbara and his step-son Michael Wilson. Broccoli’s heirs attribute the success to the family having managed to keep hold of the franchise’s reins throughout its entire history, and to JB’s and the franchise’s adaptability, 007 being able to change with the times🄶 (‘Why James Bond Has Endured For So Long, According to the Franchise Producer’, Joshua Meyer, Film, 8-Dec-2021, www.slashfilm.com).
Hergé with a cinematic clone of his fictional boy hero
In the early Sixties there were 2 French-made film adaptations of Tintin
A parody by Belgian cartoonist Dubus depicting a captive Tintin begging businessman Rodwell for his liberty (Source: Sydney Morning Herald)
Moulinsart have mined the full depths of Tintin’s merchandising potential, many spin-off items priced at the luxury high-end
Genootschap (Source: www.hergegenootschap.nl/)Fmr Australian prime minster Kevin Rudd satirised as Tintin
The “indomitable Gauls” in question are the tribe of Astérix, pint-sized Gallic hero of the long-running eponymous French comic strip with its legion of dedicated fans. Like all classic literary modes, be they of a pop cultural kind or more highbrow, the Astérix comic can be read on more than one level. On the surface the impossible but highly comical escapades of its principal cartoon characters (Astérix and his sidekick Obélix) are much loved and savoured by aficionados across the globe. On another level some observers have detected various allegorical meanings delving within the cartoon series. 
Astérix’s debut, 1959
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Getafix, Druid & grandmaven
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Dubbleosix in ‘The Black Gold’
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Nomenclature of the dramatis personae
When sketching out the framework of their fictional First century BC Gaul Goscinny and Uderzo decided on a formula for the names of each of the groups of characters. The Gauls’ men’s names would end in -ix (the inspiration for this was the real-life Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix who revolted against Julius Caesar’s Rome in 52BC), so we have Vitalstatistix (chief of Astérix’s tribe) and his brother Doublehelix; Assurancetourixൠ (English: Cacofonix) (bard and scapegoat of the village); Geriatrix (oldest member of the village); Unhygienix (village fishmonger); Cétautomatix (village smith) (Eng: Fulliautomatix); Saingésix (wine merchant) (Eng: Alcoholix), etc. etc. The Romans mostly are identified by names with the suffix “-us” (although “Julius Caesar” (Fr: Jules César) appears as a fictional character under his own name)…as the “bad guys” the Romans all tend to have derogatory or demeaning names, eg, Pamplemus (Arteriosclerosus); Cadaverus; Caius Fatuous; Caius Flebitus …you get the idea! 
‘Astérix and the Normans’
‘Astérix and Cleopatra‘
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Black pirate lookout in ‘Astérix in Corsica’
Bravura and the village women in revolt
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‘Astérix and the Great Crossing’: Astérix & Obélix tango with native Americans – more sterotyping of ”the other”࿏ ࿏ ࿏ 
Enter the new generation of Astérix comic artists
By 2011, Uderzo in his eighties, was ready to pass the Astérix baton on to two cartoonists who he had been mentoring. The new team, Jean-Yves Ferri (writer) and Didier Conrad (illustrator), having got the master’s nod of approval, produced Astérix and the Picts in 2013, followed by four more Astérix albums thus far. Ferri and Conrad have even introduced new characters with contemporary and topical resonance, eg, Confoundtheirpolitix, a muckraking journalist, spoofing Julian Assange (Astérix and the Missing Scroll). Unfortunately, since becoming custodians of the world’s most famous cartoon Gaul, Messieurs Conrad and Ferri have missed the opportunity to redress the earlier derogatory depiction of Africans drawn by Uderzo. Instead Conrad tactlessly reprised Uderzo’s Black pirate lookout character in 2015 in ‘Missing Scroll’) with the same racist depiction of Baba with bulbous red lips.
‘Astérix en Bretagne‘
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The Astérix industry
As at 2021, with the publication of the 38th Astérix comic book Astérix and the Griffin, the books have sold a staggering combined total of 385 million copies worldwide. They have been translated into 111 languages and dialects including Afrikaans, Welsh, Hebrew, Occitan, Arabic, Urdu and even Latin. Astérix adaptation to the screen comprise 10 animated films and four live action films (of which only Mission Cleopatra merits any accolades at all). There’s the usual accompaniment of merchandising of course and even a theme park, Le Parc Astérix, north of Paris. The comic books’ following spans the globe, in their heartland, France and Belgium, in Germany, Britain, just about everywhere they have been in vogue with the notable exception of the US.
What’s the secret of the Asterix comics’ success?
To M Uderzo the endearing nature of Astérix’s popularity remained a puzzle that he couldn’t fathom, best left to others of which there has been no shortage of opinions aired over the years. Clearly, the character of Astérix is deeply rooted in French popular culture. Two-thirds of the French population had read at least one Astérix books according to a 1969 national survey (‘Going for Gaul: Mary Beard on 40 years of Astérix’, The Guardian, 15-Feb-2002, www.amp.theguardian.com . Some observers put the appeal down to the escapism the comics represented – providing “a world of joyful innocence born in the aftermath of (world) war” ‘My hero: Asterix by Tom Holland‘, The Guardian, 26-Oct-2013, www.amp.theguardian.com . This sentiment is echoed by those who have called the series ”the most brilliant antidote to (the catastrophe of) Vichy in French literature”. Many French people identify with the petit Gaul as a symbol of rebellion, standing up for the “little guy“ against Goliath. To them Astérix’s steely determination to defy the juggernaut of Roman power mirrors the impulse in the hearts of many modern-day French citizens to hold out and not succumb to the all-conquering globalisation driven by the United States⚘. While the French feel an inextinguishable pride in Astérix (“simply French”), to many outsiders the comics personify what they take to be the French character, such as the trait of “infuriating, occasionally endearing contradictions” (John Thornhill, Lunch with the FT: Asterix the national treasure’, Financial Times, 24-Dec-2005, www.financialtimes.com). Another take on Astérix’s popularity beyond the borders of France is that the idea of an heroic “native freedom-fighter” defying Rome struck a resonant tone in countries which had once been subjected to the tyranny of the Roman Empire (Beard). 
Footnote: In Astérix in Belgium, the 24th volume in the series໒꒰, village chief Vitalstatistix, Astérix and Obélix head off to Belgae to tangle with an equally fierce tribe of Belgian Gauls. As usual, the comic is saturated with cultural references, Goscinny weaves in a series of gently digs at the Belgians, spoofing famous national celebrities like Walloon actress/singer Annie Cordy and cyclist Eddie Merckx. The comic’s battle scene is a riff on the historical Battle of Waterloo and Uderzo draws in a cameo appearance by fictional detectives Thomson and Thompson from Belgium’s most honoured cartoon strip Tintin (‘Asterix v24: “ Asterix in Belgium”’, Augie De Blieck Jr, Pipeline Comics , 25-Jul-2018, www.pipelinecomics.com).
‘Down by Law’.
Source: truelocal.com.au
Like most popular commercial trends the mobile ice cream van was an import to these shores. The archetype Mr Whippy emerged from the English Midlands city of Birmingham in 1958, starting with a modest six vans and copying the formula, look and business plan of America’s Mister Softee ice cream trucks (see below). By 1961 the homegrown Mr Whippy fleet on the road had extended to 150 vehicles. Mr Whippy came to Australia when company founder Dominic Facchino shipped six pink and white Commer Karrier vans out to Sydney in 1962. Two years later Mr Whippy vans landed on the shores of New Zealand. By this time Facchino had sold the business which was eventually acquired by industry giant Unilever. By the 1970s the Mr Whippy franchises down under were sold to private operators who varied the vans’ styling and colours (‘1962 Mr Whippy arrives in Australia’, Australian Food TimeLine, www.australianfoodtimeline.com.au). The NZ Mr Whippy operators switched vehicles (to Isuzu Elfs) as well as colour schemes (a common choice became orange and white with a yellow stripe)𝟙. 
The ubiquitous Mister Softee (Photo: Elena Kadvany)
Marchetti Bros ice cream van, 1980s Glasgow
Mr Whippy Clones (Photo: 9Nine.com.au)
Mr Softee’s bête noir Master Softee (Photo: Newtown Pentacle)
early Good Humor vending truck (Source: mahoninghistory.org)
Photo: Manchester Evening News
EP in Ottawa 1957 (Source: Elvis Presley Photos)
Elvis For Beginners
“Elvis the Pelvis” and the “Colonel” (Photo: Getty)
Breda, Netherlands
“Colonel” Tom, 1960
Jay North as Dennis in the American TV series
Source: Pinterest
The coincidence of two identically named sub-adult comic book characters evolving separately and independently has an even more remarkable, almost unbelievable, parallel. The two Dennises debuted as comic strip characters on either side of the Atlantic on the exact same day, 12th March 1951. Which “Dennis“ was conceived first by his respective creator cannot be known, but the two Eureka moments were certainly distinctively different.
Ketcham (1953), not dissimilar to Dennis Mitchell’s father in appearance
Source: Beano Studios
Just William
Sidekicks
British Dennis’ “besties” are Curly and Pie-Face (fellow “menaces”) but also prominent in the story is Dennis’ girl cousin Hermione Makepeace AKA Minnie the Minx, a rival to Dennis in the carnage creation stakes with a reputation as Beanotown’s “wildest tomboy”. Dennis Mitchell’s friends are the rather nondescript and naively loyal Joey and the feisty Margaret Wade who’s more of a frenemy and occasional nemesis to “The Menace”.
Canine deuteragonists
Boy’s best friend…both Dennises have a dog companion although Moonie/Law’s Dennis’ dog Gnasher—an Abyssinian Wire-haired Tripe Hound with black spiky hair to match its owner—didn’t get to make an appearance in the strips until Issue 1362 in 1968. Dennis Mitchell’s dog Ruff is a dog of a very different proportion, a Briad (a large French sheepdog{b})
Postscript: Bringing Dennis into line with the modern world
The arrival of the UK’s Dennis the Menace strip was a godsend to The Beano, boosting the comic mag’s flagging sales at the time. Today it is still The Beano‘s star vehicle{c} although the editors have had to tone down Dennis and some of his rougher edges. The 21st century Dennis the Menace is less anti-social, his more unsavoury traits such as bullying have been eradicated to conform to modern sensitivities [‘Beano hero: Dennis the Menace turns 70’, Alison Flood, The Guardian, 17-Mar-2021, www.theguardian.com]
Incoherent or indecipherable words in a song can be the source of “great storms in a teacup”. The Kingsmen’s 1963 recording of “Louie Louie”—incomprehensibly vocalised by Jack Ely—prompted an avalanche of complaints from outraged parents of teenagers about a supposed litany of obscene and pornographic lyrics in the single. Knee-jerk misinterpretations abounded from the morally-incensed in mid-century Middle America. One irate father even wrote to US attorney general Bobby Kennedy moaning about the lyrics’ “moral degradation” leading bizarrely to the FBI investigating the song (while wasting public funds the Bureau failed to unearth any such obscenities)! All of which lends credence to the axiom that “people will hear what they want to hear” – which goes to the very heart of Mondegreens※.
IN a 1966 double-A side single the Beatles sung “we all live in a yellow submarine” but in real life the Fab Four (or at least, 75% of them) did want to live together on a secluded Greek island that they intended to buy. It happened the following year, 1967, the boys were holidaying in the Greek islands and were island-hopping when they came upon an ideal island location. Or at least that was what George, John and Paul thought while on acid the whole time of the “inspection”{𝔸}. The island that their eyes lit on was roomy enough, some 80-acres with a fishing village, a large olive grove and four beaches. In addition to the main island there were four smaller islands surrounding it (one for each Beatle!) 
The prime mover for the island home scheme was Beatle John. At that point in his life Lennon was edging his way into his glorious hippie phase. The Aegean “Arcadia” represented a chance to live communally, an idyllic place where he and the other three celebs could escape the overwhelming pressures and attentions of superstardom. The plan was for the four musicians and the group’s entourage (manager Epstein, the roadies and the inner circle of assistants plus relatives) to all live together on a huge estate on the island hideaway. Paul and George seemed to have been on-song with John at that hazily propitious moment in time…McCartney: (the island was the means of achieving) “a sort of hippie community…where nobody’d interfere with your lifestyle”…Harrison concurred: “we’ll buy the island, we’ll just go there and drop out” (‘The Beatles in Greece’, Daily Beatle,, 03-Jul-2014, www.wogew.blogspot.com).
Team Beatles hit Greece (Source: Greek City News)
Trinity Is (Source: Culture Trip)
Trinity Is is commonly referred to as “guitar-shaped” but with such a profound bend in its “neck” it looks more like one of Pete Townshend’s well-thwacked Fender guitars
Nihonjin cultural lesson for Ringo & John (Source: nippon.com)
Fateful words of the leader
John’s spontaneous act of hubris had profound ramifications as the year unfolded. On the “reunion” visit back to Hamburg, Germany, the Beatles received a death threat. In Japan though fans at concerts were rapturous, Japanese traditionalists voiced opposition to them, and were incensed that the Beatles’ gigs were held at the Nippon Budekan, a Japanese shrine for the war dead. But this was all mere turbulence compared to the tsunami greeting them in Manila, the Philippines’ capital. Moments after the boys stepped foot on the tarmac they were separated from manager Epstein and abruptly whisked away by military types to visit some local plutocrat VIP they didn’t know. The two concerts scheduled for the Rizal Memorial Football Stadium for that day (before a Beatle record combined audience of 80,000) though went exceedingly well.
The Marcoses in 1966 (with an American “friend”) (Photo: Yoichi Yokamoto/National Archives) 
Manhandling the teen icons
But that wasn’t the end of the ordeal for the Beatles and their minders. The authorities suddenly discovered that some of the group’s flight paperwork was awry and roadie Mal and press officer Tony Barrow were forced to leave the safety of the Beatles’ KLM plane and return to the terminal to make amends. So the Beatles’ jet sat idly on the tarmac for another 40 minutes before it was finally allowed to depart. When they arrived back in London (via a stopover in India) the Beatles vowed never to return to the Philippines – an oath that all four musicians kept.
Talking it down…or up? (Photo credit: AP)
▪ ▪ ▪ Cliff Richard: not wholesome enough for Israel? 
Retro McCartney sparking a mini-Beatlemania revival in Tel Aviv (Source: abc.com.au)
ʰᵃᵐᵇᵘʳᵍ ¹⁹⁶¹ ⁽ᵖʰᵒᵗᵒ﹕ ᵍᵉᵗᵗʸ ⁱᵐᵃᵍᵉˢ⁾
ˢᵉᶜᵒⁿᵈ ᶠᶦᵈᵈˡᵉ ᵗᵒ ᴿᵒʳʸ ˢᵗᵒʳᵐ ᵃⁿᵈ ᵗʰᵉ ᴴᵘʳʳᶦᶜᵃⁿᵉˢ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ: ᵇᵉᵃᵗˡᵉˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ.ᶜᵒᵐ⁾
ᴷˡᵃᵘˢ, ᴬˢᵗʳᶦᵈ & ˢᵗᵘ, ¹⁹⁶¹ ⁽ᴾʰᵒᵗᵒ: ᴳᵉᵗᵗʸ ᴵᵐᵃᵍᵉˢ⁾
ᵀᵒᵖ ᵀᵉⁿ ᶜˡᵘᵇ . ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ: ᴷ & ᴷ ᴴᵃᵐᵇᵘʳᵍ
ˢᵗᵃʳ⁻ᶜˡᵘᵇ
ᴷᵃᶦˢᵉʳᵏᵉˡˡᵉʳ. ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ: ᴮᵉᵃᵗˡᵉˢ ᴮᶦᵇˡᵉ!
ᴴᵃᵐᵇᵘʳᵍ ᴮᵉᵃᵗˡᵉˢ ʷᶦᵗʰ ᴳᵉⁿᵉ ⱽᶦⁿᶜᵉⁿᵗ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ: ᴾᶦⁿᵗᵉʳᵉˢᵗ⁾
🏴 their booking agent Allan Williams was getting three times what the musicians were!
⥉ Lennon & Shotton (Source: forums.stevehoffman.tv)
⥉ The Quarrymen performing in 1957 (pre-Paul & George)
In 1958 Lennon, having abjectly failed his ‘O’ Level exams at Quarry Bank High, shuffled off to Liverpool Art School. Lennox’s art school period was a key phase in the formation of the scruffy “Teddy boy’s” relationships, meeting his first girlfriend Thelma Pickles, his first wife Cynthia (née Powell) and close friend and early Beatle Stu Sutcliffe whose gifted artistic merit influenced him greatly. John formed other friendships at the art school including with Jeff Mohammed who took on a older brother sort of role in helping John try to cope with the trauma of his mother Julia’s sudden death; and with Bill Harry who went on to create Mersey Beat , a local music publication which helped the band gain early traction in Liverpool music circles. Harry also published Lennon’s poems and drawings in the newspaper.
⥉ Allan Williams (Source: Meet the Beatles for Real)
The Cavern Club in Liverpool was synonymous with the early Beatles who debuted in its damp, dingy warehouse cellar as the Quarrymen in 1957⦑2⦒. Ringo Starr then in another skiffle band had already made his first appearance in the club a week earlier (Ringo went on to join Liverpool’s top ‘beat’ band prior to the Beatles’ ascendancy – “Rory Storm and the Hurricanes”). A key Cavern figure was its longtime emcee/DJ Bob Wooler, instrumental along with Bill Harry in helping arrange Brian Epstein‘s first visit to the Cavern to see John, Paul, George and Pete play.
⥉ Pete & Mona (Photo: John Smart/Associated Newspapers/Shutterstock)
⥉ Neil Aspinall filling in for George in the “Fab Four” lineup (Source: independent.ie)
⥉ Paul & Bodyguard Mal return from safari in Kenya
⥉ Derek Taylor (Source: Pinterest.co.uk)
⥉ George Martin (Source: USA Today)
𝔉𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱 𝔭𝔬𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔯 ~ 𝔭𝔯𝔢𝔰𝔞𝔤𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔞 𝔰𝔶𝔪𝔟𝔬𝔩𝔦𝔠 𝔭𝔬𝔴𝔢𝔯 𝔰𝔥𝔦𝔣𝔱
⚔️ 𝒮𝒸𝓇𝑒𝑒𝓃 𝓈𝒽𝑜𝓉 𝒻𝓇𝑜𝓂 𝒻𝒾𝓁𝓂 𝑜𝒻 𝐵𝓊𝓇𝓃𝓈 𝓋 𝒥𝑜𝒽𝓃𝓈𝑜𝓃 𝒷𝑜𝓊𝓉 (𝒩𝐹𝒮𝒜/𝒜𝒮𝒪 𝑀𝑜𝒷𝒾𝓁𝑒) ⚔️
𝔖𝔶𝔡𝔫𝔢𝔶 𝔖𝔱𝔞𝔡𝔦𝔲𝔪 (𝔓𝔥𝔬𝔱𝔬: 𝔑𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫𝔞𝔩 𝔏𝔦𝔟𝔯𝔞𝔯𝔶 𝔬𝔣 𝔄𝔲𝔰𝔱𝔯𝔞𝔩𝔦𝔞)
𝔍𝔬𝔥𝔫𝔫𝔶 ℜ𝔞𝔶 𝔠𝔬𝔫𝔠𝔢𝔯𝔱 𝔞𝔱 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔖𝔱𝔞𝔡𝔦𝔲𝔪, 1957 (𝔓𝔥𝔬𝔱𝔬: 𝔉𝔞𝔦𝔯𝔣𝔞𝔵 𝔄𝔯𝔠𝔥𝔦𝔳𝔢𝔰)
𓂀 𝓣𝓱𝓮 “𝓕𝓪𝓫 𝓕𝓸𝓾𝓻” 𝓪𝓽 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓸𝓵𝓭 𝓽𝓲𝓷 𝓼𝓱𝓮𝓭 1964 
Leichhardt Stadium in Sydney’s inner west never managed to capture the limelight of Rushcutters Bay but was still very popular in its time, it’s Thursday night boxing events regularly ”packed to capacity” (‘Packing a punch’, James Cockington, 01-Jul-2009, SMH, www.smh.com.au). Leichhardt was Sydney pro boxing’s ‘Medina’ to Sydney Stadiums’ ‘Mecca’, together, this brace of stadiums was the home of professional pugilism in Sydney in the early to middle part of the 20th century. The suburban stadium on Balmain Road, Leichhardt, first opened its doors in 1922. The two Sydney stadiums featured many of the popular active Aboriginal fighters, typically stepping up from the touring boxing tents to try to earn their livelihoods inside their square rings, including Ron Richards, Jack Hassen, George Bracken, the Sands brothers and many more. Other names regularly featuring on Leichhardt Stadium’s draw cards included Jack Carroll, Jimmy Kelso, ‘Kid’ Rooney and Hockey Bennell.
ᗝ 𝒱𝒶𝓊𝒹𝑒𝓋𝒾𝓁𝓁𝑒 + 𝒶 𝒮𝒾𝓃𝑜–𝐼𝓇𝒾𝓈𝒽 𝒹𝓇𝒶𝓌 𝒸𝒶𝓇𝒹? 
𝐹o𝓇𝓂𝑒𝓇 𝒷o𝓍𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓈𝓉𝒶𝓇𝓈 𝒷𝑒𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒾𝓃𝓉𝓇o𝒹𝓊𝒸𝑒𝒹 o𝓃 𝒮𝓎𝒹𝓃𝑒𝓎 𝒮𝓉𝒶𝒹𝒾𝓊𝓂’𝓈 𝒻𝒾𝓃𝒶𝓁 𝒻𝒾𝑔𝒽𝓉 𝓃𝒾𝑔𝒽𝓉, 𝟫th June 𝟣𝟫𝟩0 (𝒫𝒽o𝓉o: 𝒮𝑀𝐻) 
◥ 𝓦𝓱𝓲𝓽𝓮 𝓒𝓲𝓽𝔂 𝓯𝓾𝓷 𝓹𝓪𝓻𝓴 (𝓢𝓸𝓾𝓻𝓬𝓮: 𝓦𝓸𝓸𝓵𝓵𝓪𝓱𝓻𝓪 𝓜𝓾𝓷. 𝓒𝓸𝓾𝓷𝓬𝓲𝓵) 
‘Coniston’ Ashfield, Bea’s first home (Source: hafs.org.au)
Bea with men of the press, circa 1946
Bea’s recital services board
Main Reading Room, NSW State Library (Flickr)
Bea in the driving seat? (Photo: Daily Telegraph)
“Bee in charcoal”, Roderick Shaw (Source: portrait.gov.au)
(Sydney Morning Herald)
ˢᵏᵉʷᵉᵈ ﹠ ⁱⁿᵉᵇʳⁱᵃᵗᵉᵈ ᵒᶻ ʰⁱˢᵗᵒʳʸ
ᵈᵉʳᵉᵏ ʷᵃᵗᵉʳˢ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ᶜˢᵗ ᵒⁿˡⁱⁿᵉ⁾
ⁱⁿᵛᵉⁿᵗⁱⁿᵍ ᶜᵒᶜᵃ⁻ᶜᵒˡᵃ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ⁱᵐᵈᵇ⁾
ˢʸᵇⁱˡ’ˢ ʳⁱᵈᵉ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ⁱᵐᵈᵇ⁾
“ʷᵉⁱʳᵈ ᵃˡ ʰⁱᵗˡᵉʳ” ⁽ᵖʰᵒᵗᵒ﹕ ᶜᵒᵐᵉᵈʸ ᶜᵉⁿᵗʳᵃˡ⁾
▙ Publicity shot: Dixie was popular with the ladies, married 6 times (all his wives met him via the phone at his pole-sitting events) (Source: Dayton Daily News)
▙ Luke the Stylite
▙ Georgian hermit headquarters (Source: Vintage News)
Pete Seeger (Source: Mother Jones)
Image: the78prof (YouTube)
“Paul Campbell” is the only writing credit on ‘Wimoweh’ (a common nom-de-plume ploy used to claim royalties on public domain songs)☥
In 1961 a new chapter in the story opens, “doo-wop” band the Tokens, like all pop music enthusiasts in the US, are familiar with the super-catchy “Wimoweh” refrain and want to record it. Their RCA producers get songwriter George David Weiss to revamp the song. Weiss adds new lyrics (“In the jungle, the mighty jungle”, etc) and shifts the focus of the song on to Linda’s chanting melody. ‘Mbube’ having previously morphed into ‘Wimoweh’ is repackaged by Weiss as ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’, all three versions still bearing the essential imprint of Solomon Linda (Malan). The Tokens’ single—with singer Jay Siegel’s distinctive high falsetto—reaches # 1 in the US and internationally, eventually selling more than three million copies§. Again, no credit and no moolah for Linda who dies destitute in 1962 with just $25 in his bank account, leaving a widow and a half-dozen young children behind.
The Tokens (Source: singers.com)
The two remaining Ntsele sisters looking at the 1939 photo of their father’s band (Source: Netflix)
Rian Malan (Source: Writers Write)
Source: Definitely Owen on YouTube
Python running rugby
At the time Paul Rigby was living in Perth, WA, where the “art form” took off. The cartoonist’s favourite “watering hole”, the Palace Hotel in the Perth CBD became the epicentre of the performance art of limp falling, the epicentre of the activity in Australia at least. A 2013 article by Aleisha Orr suggested the spectacle of limp falling “swept across many parts of the world in the 1950s and 60s”. In the same article one of the few surviving, octogenarian members of the club had his own take on the mysterious origins of the art of limp falling, the result of a house party accident when one of the journos—well-lubricated at the time no doubt—fell through an asbestos wall❂
Palace Hotel, Perth
‘President’ Rigby (Source: AMHF)
(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)
⿻ ⿻ ⿻
Nolan’s “Ned Kelly” series ▲ 
(Image: Omaha World Herald, CooksInfo Food Encyclopedia)
The image stereotype of the Sherlock Holmes character (Source: Culture Livresque)
(Photo: CrimeReads)
As the intra-family ‘Barney’ over who controls the copyright to the Sherlock Holmes works deepened, the imbroglio entangled an investment company specifically set up to manage the windfall (aptly named “Baskervilles Investments”) and even the Royal Bank of Scotland (‘History of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Copyrights’, (2015), www.arthurconandoyle.com).
Andréa Plunket (Source: goodreads.com)
The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Estate for its part has been particularly litigious in defence of its literary legacy. The Estate has consistently striven to maintain water-tight control over both the Sherlock Holmes stories and the characters. In 2013 it demanded author Leslie S Klinger pay a fee to license the Sherlock character for an anthology he was planning to do. Klinger’s response was to sue the Estate on the basis that most of the Sherlock material was in the public domain. In court the judge upheld Klinger’s position, while reaffirming that some late works were still covered under copyright (‘Sherlock Holmes Copyright: An overview’, Brogan Woodburn, www.redpoints.com). In 2020 it sued Netflix over its upcoming film Enola Holmes. The grounds? The film apparently depicts Holmes as having emotions and respecting women. This, the Estate contends, breaches Conan Doyle’s copyright (‘Lawsuit over ‘warmer’ Sherlock depicted in Enola Holmes dismissed’, Alison Flood, The Guardian, 22-Dec-2020, www.theguardian.com).
‘The Red-Headed League’ story (Golden Press edition, 1963)
In its early days Coke was marketed both as a medicinal drink and as a “refreshing tonic”
Pepsi’s watershed year was 1975 when it mounted the “Pepsi Challenge”, a series of filmed blind-taste tests in which the majority of participants chose Pepsi over Coke as their preferred soda. This boosted Pepsi sales and escalated the rivalry between the two “Big Sodas”, kicking off what became known in America from the Sixties on as the “Cola Wars” or the “Soda Wars”. Until the Pepsi Challenge happened Coca-Cola had been coasting somewhat, complacently presenting itself as “the real thing” in contrast to the upstart pretender. Coca-Cola’s response to PepsiCo’s move was to promote the then most popular personality on US TV Bill Cosby as “the face of Coke”.
Pepsi embarked on a marketing campaign which depicted itself as a younger, hipper brand than its outmoded rival. Drinking Pepsi was a cool thing to do (so proclaimed the marketers), when stacked up against the tired, same old, same old Coke alternative. Integral to PepsiCo’s campaign was the recruitment of celebrities to endorse the beverage, the centrepiece of which was Michael Jackson. Other pop music icons followed the success of Jackson’s involvement with the product – David Bowie, Madonna, Lionel Ritchie, etc. Ad men heralded Pepsi as “the choice of a new generation”.
In the early Eighties, under pressure from Pepsi’s inroads into the market, Coca-Cola introduced diet Coke, a caffeine-free soda, followed by a complete redesign of Coke—given the secret codename “Project Kansas”—the outcome in 1985 was a sweeter Coke, New Coke. To counter Pepsi’s sweeter, more syrupy taste, Coca-Cola replaced sugar with corn syrup (which also reduced the production cost). New Coke however proved a disaster for the company, provoking a huge backlash from loyal consumers, some described the new taste as like “two day old Pepsi”. Southern fans of Coke, where Coca-Cola (and Pepsi) had its origins, were especially offended.
Faced with an avalanche of criticism, Coca-Cola brought back the old formula under the name “Coca-Cola Classic”. New Coke for its part got rebranded but never really took off and was eventually discontinued. Disappointment that it was, New Coke did provide one unanticipated positive – it managed to reawaken in many Coca-Cola drinkers suffering from a bout of ennui a new craving for the original taste (Little).
Vintage 1950s ad: “Pepsi-Chic” before it went “Pepsi-Hip” (Robt Levering)
Photo: George Marks/Retrofile/Getty
The story of Robin Hood is one of those enduring English chronicles from the distant past, which like the Arthurian legend has continually provided rich fodder for the screen. The basic story is an all-too familiar one with universal appeal: a virtuous Saxon nobleman in Mediaeval England, fleeced out of his estate and title by powerful villains, responds by mobilising an heroic and effective resistance against the status quo, on the way freeing the poor and oppressed peasantry from their yokes. That the legend is known throughout the Anglophone world and Europe, is testimony to the fact has there been so many film and television goes at retelling the legend – starting with the first silent one in 1908.
It wasn’t until the 1922 silent version with Robin Hood played by the lead Hollywood actor of the day Douglas Fairbanks Sr that the Robin Hood movie achieved serious cinematic recognition. Fairbanks’ athletic prowess and spectacular stunts elevated the movie and captured the imagination of audiences. With a budget of nearly one million dollars (one of the biggest in the silent era) the 1922 Robin Hood helped to establish the ‘swashbuckler’ sub-genre in cinema.
The next version of note, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) is considered by many to be the best movie on the iconic Saxon hero. Errol Flynn in the title role brings the energy and verve to the film that largely accounts for The Adventures of Robin Hood’s standing as one of the great swashbucklers of Hollywood. As one critic observed: “Flynn’s Robert of Locksley, dripping with sexuality, good humor, panache and swagger, captures not only the derring-do character, but also the more dramatic side of his fight for injustice” (Susan King, ‘Classic Hollywood: 100 Years of Robin Hood movies’, LA Times, 12-May-2010). The use of (Technicolor) colour, still not widely used at that time, added to the film’s freshness and appeal.
One of two 1991 feature film versions of Robin Hood was the much hyped Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves which did well at the box office but was not critical well received. Kevin Costner was lambasted for his less than credible impersonation of an English noble as was the screenplay, though Alan Rickman won plaudits for his deliciously hammy Sheriff of Nottingham — “wicked, droll, sly, eye-rolling, witty one-liners and put-downs” (Roger Ebert). The second film entitled simply Robin Hood, starring another Irish thespian Patrick Bergin, tries for more modern touches. The movie tones down the traditional “rob from the rich, give to the poor”, socialist-leaning revolutionary Robin, opting for a more out and out impudent anti-authoritarian (Tom Jicha, SunSentinel, 13-May-1991). Another innovation is the replacement of Hood’s traditional nemeses, the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne, with two new baddies, Sir Miles Folcanet and Baron Deguerre. The Maid Marian role in RH adaptions are usually passive objects of attention, but this film has Uma Thurman attempting to redress this by actively participating in the climactic sword fight, (one critic was dismissive of this as “a contrived nod to present-day feminism”, Tom Shales, The Washington Post, 13-May-1991).
The 1950s was the first decade that television really impacted on the public and popular culture in advanced Western countries…for countless viewers in Britain, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand, this meant a new opportunity to indulge in the perennial classic adventure story of the Lincoln-green set. In those pioneering days in the new medium Associated Television’s Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-59) was compulsory viewing in grainy black and white. Richard Greene was a reassuringly efficient “righter of wrongs” and appropriately English in pedigree. His presence as Hood aided by interesting stories and an enticingly catchy theme song, saw the production through 143 episodes. The success of the Greene “Robin Hood” inspired a new wave of TV series on the Nottinghamshire archer extraordinaire from the Seventies on🅐. The pick of these is probably the 1984 series Robin of Sherwood which had the novelty of two different incarnations of Robin Hood. The ITV series was widely praised as a “gritty, authentic production design with real-life history, 20th century fiction and pagan myth” (‘Robin Hood’, Wikipedia). World expert on Robin Hood literature Stephen Knight described it as “the most innovative and influential version of the myth in recent times”. A haunting soundtrack by Clannad helped the “moody and atmospheric” vibe of Robin of Sherwood. Personally, I’m a bit partial to a more recent Robin Hood series (2006-09), largely for Keith Allen’s high camp, deeply sarcastic performance, replete with a range of exaggerated often incredulous facial gestures as the Sheriff of Nottingham (one episode spoofs the Bob Marley song in its title, “Who Shot the Sheriff?”).
So deeply embedded in film and popular culture is the Robin Hood story that inevitably someone would lampoon it and that somebody was Mel Brooks in his 1993 parody Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Brooks makes fun of other (serious) iterations of RH like Costner’s Prince of Thieves. In fact Brooks has already roamed into this territory in television in 1975 with his sitcom on Hood and co, When Things Were Rotten. Both were replete with one-liners, sight gags, literal humour and anachronisms (something the non-humorous versions were also very prone to).
One of the funniest alternative iterations of Robin Hood came out of late Eighties children’s television. Creator Tony Robinson‘s Maid Marian and her Merry Men as the title suggests inverts the roles of the legend…Marian is the de facto leader and the brains of the Sherwood Forest outlaws, while Robin, an incompetent ex-tailor (“Robin of Kensington”) is a complete airhead. Another comic inversion of the traditional legend seen here and in Men in Tights is the presentation of Robin as being far from heroic.
Postscript: Political Hood The Adventures of Robin Hood TV series was clearly intended as good fun, a vehicle of commercial escapist entertainment, nonetheless buried in the storyline are snatches of political commentary on contemporary events in the UK during the strait-jacketed postwar decade after 1945. An analogy can be made between Robin’s return from serving in the Crusades to find his property and titles confiscated, and the shabby treatment of British veterans returning from the WWII conflagration. The Adventures‘ political messages were not confined to contemporary Britain. The TV program was the brainchild of a blacklisted US producer Hannah Weinstein. Weinstein hired leftist American writers such as Ring Lardner Jr similarly persecuted by the McCarthyism scourge in the US. Lardner and the others were not slow to draw comparisons between the fictional Robin Hood’s plight and their own ongoing victimisation by the zealous American Right. According to Lardner, writing for the show afforded “plenty of opportunities for oblique social comment on (the assault on liberties in) Eisenhower-era America” (Allen W.Wright, ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood 1950s TV Series Page 2’, (Sept 2005), Robin Hood: Bold Outlaw of Barnsdale and Sherwood, Spotlight, www.boldoutlaw.com).
⇧ A Hitler, landscape (Source: Widewalls)
⇧ Beckmann: ‘The Night’
Dix’s ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ (1933)
[R] 17-y-o Roy Race on his ‘debut’
Roy on the field epitomises fair play (often in contrast to his opponents), his personality embodies all the virtues of “sportsmanship, etiquette and why a fractured ankle, a broken rib and an early case of polio should never stand between a determined team captain and victory in FA cups” (McGinty). Roy’s Rovers competed against the other teams in the League—like their arch-rivals Tynefield United—who never come close to ever matching up to the ethical pedigree of Melchester Rovers.
Roy is beyond the slightest doubt the absolute gun player in Melchester’s colours, however it’s not quite a one man band. He gets stirling assistance from teammates, most notably from Johnny Dexter the team’s “hard man” and goalie Gordon (“the safest hands in soccer”) Stewart (cf. Gordon Banks).
By the early 1990s, with the inevitable ebbing of ROTR’s popularity, the publication folded. However, at several intervals, the comic, phoenix-like, has been resurrected for the diehearts, most recently in 2018.
The story line is pure farce, supposedly detailing the experiences of communist East European football player Ricky Lenin (Alexei Sayle in a heavily accented voice which appears to be channelling his Balowski family character from The Young Ones) at Midlands club Felchester Rovers. Lenin is portrayed as a “tactical mastermind/balding midfield maestro” but more accurately might be described as thick as two planks. Through constant rhetorical flourishes Lenin lectures the team on dialectical materialism, the inevitable destiny of Felchester Rovers football club*, but he is exposed as a faux Marxist for covertly trying to enrich himself through football connexions. Lenin launches a proletarian coup which removes the club’s manager Ray Royce (a transparent pun on Roy Race), and then himself has to ward off a challenge from Felchester’s “burly defender” Stevie Stalin and “hard nut” henchman Terry Trotsky.
In the episode where Felchester travel to Germany to play Borussia Mönchenpastry (cringe!), they encounter diabolical German tabloid publisher Max Gut, a thinly disguised Robert Maxwell. Piss-taking comes fast and furious in LOTR, another episode involving Ricky putting out feelers for a move across the Irish Sea to represent the Republic of Ireland national whose team sheet reads like the United Nations with not a solitary Gaelic name in it! One of the team apparently qualified for Ireland due to having once read a James Joyce novel!
From go to whoa it’s a pun bonanza, reminding me a lot of those exquisite Sixties radio comedies like I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. Felchester’s Euro opponent is Swiss club FC Toblerone (groan!). Their arch-rivals in the English comp is the thuggish Crunchthorpe United, however the Felchester team itself triumphs in the Cup employing the same tactics of illegal crunching tackles and skilless brawn. Needless to say that in the computer football universe, Felchester Rovers would be Melchester’s Crunchthorpe United.
⏏️ Pepsi’s role in the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate
So began a novel bilateral trade. With Russian rubles not valued outside of the USSR, a barter system was forged. The Russian and other Soviet people got to drink Pepsi, in return vodka (in the form of the state-owned brand Stolichnaya) was made available in the US market.
(Source: www.naval-encylopedia.com)
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].
(Image: Lonely Planet)
Dracula’s transformation into a classic of the Gothic horror genre captured the imagination of film-makers, inspiring numerous silver-screen interpretations of Dracula – from the silent German feature Nosferatu to countless Western film versions which made actors such as Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee famous – and typecast. The Dracula character’s pervasion of especially American popular culture has seen the trope extend to parody cartoon versions on TV (Duckula), to female teen “vampire-slayers” (Buffy) and even to “blaxploitation” movies asserting the emergence of a self-conscious black culture in the US (eg, Blacula). 
Constructing the Ur-vampire
Transylvania, being to outsiders, “a mysterious land of vampires and other supernatural things”, handed down a long tradition of folklore and legends, it’s not surprising that Stoker drew on this source for inspire and inform his vampire story. Superstitions and beliefs of Romanian peasants in Stoker’s time fuelled a plentiful supply of tales about vampiri (vampires), vârcolaci (werewolves) and other supernatural monstri. Stoker’s library research would also have acquainted him with the strigol, a Romanian figure of legend—“a reckless spirit that returns to suck the lifeblood from his relatives”—the type of vampirish “undead souls” that would find a place in Stoker’s horror novel [‘The Use of History in Dracula Tourism in Romania’, (Tuomas Hovi), www.folklore.ee].
⇧ Whitby, England (Image credit: www.visitwhitby.com)
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(Photo: Britannica)
In his lifetime Fleming never said definitively who the principal model for 007 was, but the consensus seems to gravitate towards a Serbian double agent Dušan (‘Duško) Popov, someone Fleming came across in the course of his own intelligence career. A famous scene in Casino Royale (Fleming’s first James Bond novel) further advances the association of the world’s most celebrated fictional spy with Popov. Bond’s besting of a powerful Russian criminal at the baccarat table in Casino Estoril (Portugal) in the book/film mirrors an exchange Fleming observed first-hand when the real-life spy spectacularly called the bluff of a boastful Lithuanian gambler in a baccarat game at the same location.
Popov stumbled into the espionage game after being arrested by the Gestapo. To get out of that pickle Popov agreed to spy for the Abwehr (German intelligence agency). While in England he was recruited by MI6 and turned double agent✫. During the war Popov managed to feed a steady stream of misinformation to the Nazis about the Allies’ movements, strength, etc. Most productive for the Allies was his role in Operation Fortitude – Popov helped to convince German military planners that the D-Day invasion of France would occur in Pas de Calais, not Normandy, the actual landing point. As a consequence of Popov’s disinformation, when Operation Overlord was launched in 1944 there were seven German divisions stuck in Calais and unavailable to the Reichswehr in Normandy [‘My name is Popov, Duran Popov’, (Marta Levai), www.0011info.com].
(Image: Getty)
(Source: www.newspapers.com)
Banned, but not eliminated
Other cities were quick to follow NYC’s example, Including Chicago, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and New Orleans, with pinball bans extending across the country. Other cities like Washington DC didn’t go as far but prohibited children from playing it during school hours. The inevitable consequence of banning was to drive pinball activity underground (resurfacing in places like the back rooms of ‘porno’ book shops). Thus marginalised, pinball become “part of rebel culture”⧆ (Klein).
(Source: www.money.org/)
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(Source: www.bbc.com/)
The lengths a Sov-Cit will go to
Your dedicated Sovereign is not adverse to creating fake car licence plates or printing his or her own currency and then trying to pass it off as real money. One SCM provocateur in Florida, in acrimonious conflict with his local Bank of America branch, sent it a bogus foreclosure notice and even barricaded the branch during opening hours (SPLC).
When testosterone-charged visitors to coastal Belgian towns began strolling around the shops and cafes bare-chested in 2015, locals objecting to this aesthetic blight on the landscape took to labelling the offending blow-ins “Tarzan tourists”. References to that archetypical, mesomorphic white hero of amorphous jungle habitats, Tarzan, have permeated popular culture for over a century. Since the time pencil-sharpener salesman Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) turned his hand to writing his first story in 1912, the aura of Tarzan, carefully cultivated by the author into a cultural icon, has extended from pulp fiction, to various media including comic strips, films (over 90!), radio shows, TV series, Broadway musicals, computer games and a raft of commercial merchandise
(Source: www.movieposters.ha.com)
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(Source: www.theatlantic.com)
The government has called on a raft of idiosyncratically-Vietnamese cultural devices to creatively drive home it’s theme. ”Viral hand-washing” songs have been popularised among the people and most effectively, the regime have resorted to propaganda art, something with a long tradition in communist Vietnam. Calling on the familiar slogan, “In war, we draw” (again, invoking the war metaphor), the government has fostered a patriotic response in Vietnamese to get 100% behind the war on the virus (#TogetherWeWillWin), resulting in the production and dissemination of visually-powerful and meaningful posters like these two (above and below). COVID-19 has also prompted the release of special stamps to help unify the Vietnamese people [‘“In a war, we draw”: Vietnam’s artists joint fight against Covid-19’, (Chris Humphrey), The Guardian, 09-Apr-2020, www.theguardian.com; Fleming].
For most of us the coronavirus crisis is, if not all-consuming, at the front and centre of just about everything at the moment. This pandemic, this pandemocracy, is all over social media, and one of the most curious by-products is how the emergence of this novel virus has spawned a novel social media and sociological phenomena called the armchair epidemiologist… instant experts with their own special take on how COVID-19 should be handled, what it’s all really about, the whole thing de-mystified and unravelled in a nutshell. As you will see below, it is unfortunate at this pivotal moment that the practice of responsible social distancing hasn’t always been matched by the practice of responsible social media distancing.
Why is armchair epidemiology a burgeoning sub-industry at the moment? One general explanation lies in the character of the pandemic itself. It’s a troubling time right across the globe, people are naturally anxious about the disease—especially if you are unlucky enough to be living in a country that is one of the major hotspots at the moment—so talking about it can be a calming mechanism of sorts, working it all out in your head so it makes sense. As Noah Feldman neatly puts it, “one way for humans to cope with anxiety is to seek rational mastery over observable phenomena”. This becomes doubly the case in this situation because of the nature of this particular ‘beast’. The lack of “concrete empirical data” on the disease, the shortcomings in the science as it stands now, means that even amongst the genuine experts, uncertainty reigns (‘Will the Armchair Coronavirus Experts Please Sit Down’, Noah Feldman, Bloomberg: Opinion, 25-Mar-2020). The experts have disagreed over which is the correct strategy to follow in the fight to contain the virus, what works, what doesn’t, full lockdowns, “let it rip” herd immunity, whether or not to use face masks, etc✱. Add to this the questionable way some countries have handled their outbreaks—eg, the slowness of for instance Italy, the US and Britain to take decisive steps in the early phase of the pandemic—the result, a critical failure to get on top of COVID-19 before the curve took off on it’s rapid skyward trajectory. Into this void the amateur epidemiologists have been only too happy to step.
Mandatory hibernation: Too much time on their hands? Of course another reason for the house-bound commentariat directing its focus and energies towards the COVID-19 debate, could be sheer boredom. There’s only so much time on any given ‘Groundhog’ day you can spend bingeing on modish, ”must see” television series before you start to suffer mental fatigue and withdrawal symptoms.
Mention “The Ten Commandments” to cinephiles and almost invariably they’ll think of the 1956 epic with Chuck Heston as the resolute Moses. But that was Cecil B DeMille’s second attempt at filming the Old Testament story, or his (Cold War-inspired) interpretation of it at least. Back when Hollywood was still in it’s adolescence, 1923, DeMille made a silent version of The Ten Commandments, in black and white with some sequences in Technicolor.
(Image: www.bestplaces.com)
(Source: G-N Dune Center)
(Photo:www.fws.gov)
In 1900 the population of Los Angeles was 102,479, the 36th largest city in the USAⓐ. A couple of years into the new century the name Hollywood resonated only as a hotel, Hollywood’s legendary preeminence as the epicentre of the world’s film industry was still over a decade away. Nonetheless the city’s growing numbers were already putting pressure on the water supplies. LA’s location on a water-poor, semi-arid plane magnified those pressures. A lack of rainfall and groundwater and droughts was making the situation worse (‘The Los Angeles Aqueduct and the Owens and Mono Lakes’ (MONO Case), Case No 379, (TED Case Studies), www.web.archive.org).
Mulholland in the valley (Photo: LA Times)
Mulholland (pointing), with members of his syndicate (Photo credit: www.latimes.com)
Cottonwood Creek diversion conduct and Owens Lake in background (wwww.owensvalleyhistory.com)
Route of the LA aqueduct (Image: www.owensvalleyhistory.com)
Detectives investigating the scene (Photo: LA Times)
Mono Basin, Cal.
If the Shànghâi of the 1920s and ‘30s that we visited in the preceding blog deserves it’s glowing epithet, “the Paris of the South”, then it’s other sobriquet, “the whore of Asia”, to describe the seedy and violent underbelly of the same city, is every bit as applicable. The “freebooting capitalism” of Shànghâi in the interwar years[𝕔] and it’s rewards, spawned a wave of criminal activity with underworld bosses vying for a bigger piece of the city’s stupendous economic pie. Like the legitimate commercial powerhouses on the Bund, the gangland “Mr Big’s” were very much part of Shànghâi’s “movers and shakers”.
Du and the Green Gang
“Big-eared” Du was a complex and fascinating figure in the Shànghâi underworld scene. As zongshi (grandmaster) of the local crime operation, he was ruthless in business and intimidating in method (he would despatch coffins to the houses of gangland rivals who had earned its displeasure as a grim warning). Yet he forbid members of his Qing Bang gang to violate women, the wealthy Du was generous and wrote off many debts owed him by friends. Du’s business scope was panoramic … opium dens, gambling shacks, prostitution rings strung out across the city, kidnapping, protection rackets, labour contracting, heroin and morphine labs, as well as more ‘legit’ activities. He also founded a boys’ school in the French Connection and was president of the Chinese Red Cross during the Sino-Japanese War. And, in a perverse twist, Du, having made a ‘motza’ from his cur of the proceeds of the opium monopoly, was ultimately made president of the “National Board of Opium Suppression Bureau”! [Derks, Hans. History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, Ca. 1600-1950. Vol. 105, Brill, 2012. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctv4cbhdf. Accessed 21 Feb. 2020].
RAF ‘wanted’ poster (source: www.vukutu.com)
What most struck the editor about the phenomenon was that “the Weathermen appear(ed) to be largely drawn from the highly intelligent and well-educated strata…well-to-do, academic backgrounds”, something Pears opined to be “sinister and ominous” (a hint toward class betrayal perhaps?). The entry goes on to explore a classic conspiracy theory, the “fantastic speculation, widely held in America” that “the Weathermen are in reality financed and backed by the country’s extreme right—as a means of discrediting in the public eye the slow but steady move toward socialism that seems to be developing there”(?!?). The Pears writer adds a coy reference to one of the leaders of the group (unnamed), “an attractive and dynamic woman university lecturer (who in 1970) was placed on the FBI’s notorious ‘most wanted criminals’ list”✥.
1970 was the year that domestic terrorism embarked on a rapid upward trajectory in the US. The catalyst for the Weathermen adopting a more extreme line was Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War into Laos and Cambodia and the Kent State student murders. The fringe policos went underground and turned ‘outlaws’. “Declaring war on the United States”✪, the network operating in small clandestine cells launched a series of bomb attacks on targeted sites—police stations, court houses, military installations, banks, the Capitol and Pentagon buildings in Washington DC, etc. Weather Underground attached the tag-line “bringing the war back home” to this serious switch of tactics. 
🔺 The character “Mark Slackmeyer” in Garry Trudeau’s ‘Doonesbury’ comic is based on Weatherman Mark Rudd 
Highly influential literary critic of the first half of the 20th century, HL Mencken, heaped lavish almost doting praise on The Devil’s Dictionary… “the true masterpiece of the one genuine wit that These States have ever seen“…”some of the most gorgeous witticisms in the English language“…”some of the most devastating epigrams ever written“.
⇑ First (1911) edition of the Dictionary
Cynicism and satire provide the backbones of Bierce’s provocative dictionary. So, an interesting place to start looking is how he handles these terms – the words ‘satire’, ‘cynic’ and ‘dictionary’ themselves. Despite being fully versed in the craft himself, Bierce views the practitioner of cynicism less than favourably.
Romance and true love falls by the wayside with Bierce’s cynic always hovering around ground level:
The Dictionary dishes up a smorgasbord of satirical, ironic and often bitter definitions of the world as seen by Ambrose Bierce (one of the acerbic writer’s nicknames was “Bitter Bierce”). But Bierce is of course a creature of his time with all the glaring faults and prejudices of the 19th century white man’s mindset. So, through the satire and cynicism we witness the less savoury traits and predisposition of the lexicographer. Casual assumptions of racism and misogyny run through the pages of The Devil’s Dictionary. 
The group of young reactionary officers from the Japanese Imperial Navy – including Kiyoshi Koga, one of the ringleaders – sensed an opportunity in Chaplin’s impending visit to double their intended impact (chaos, anxiety and upheaval within mainstream Nihonjin society). The conspirators’❈ purpose was straightforward – to weaken the fabric of Japanese democracy and the rule of law culminating in the supplanting of the status quo civilian national government by a military one [‘May 15 Incident’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
(Photo: https://nypost.com)
⬆ Kirshner, King & Goffin
(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)
Kings of the chocolate business{b}
The Quaker philosophy incorporates a commitment to social reform and the pursuit of justice and equality. This ethos informed their business practices, Cadbury’s and other Quaker firms established a reputation for being honest and reliable. This gave them a competitive advantage over their non-Quaker competitors. The perceived ethical nature of Quaker confectionery firms was rewarded with customer loyalty. John Cadbury and his successors were among the first to set a firm (and fair) price – this was a clear departure from the hitherto customary retail practice of point-of-sale price bartering [ibid.]{c}.
Democratising cocoa and drinking chocolate Cocoa and drinking chocolate had been around in England since the 1650s but before Cadbury’s came along it had been a luxury beverage for the elite. John Cadbury’s improvements to the product gave it more varieties and made it a more palatable drink, and after the Gladstone government reduced taxes on imported cocoa beans in the mid 1850s, the cost of cocoa became within the reach of the greater majority of Britons. Cadbury’s introduction of unadulterated “cocoa essence” in the 1870s coincided with a government crackdown on the widespread adulteration of food in the UK. The upshot was free ‘plugs’ for the purer Cadbury product and a boost in fortunes for the Quaker business [‘The Story of Cadbury. Early Days – A One Man Business’, www.cadbury.com.au].
(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)
The Bourneville factory ⤊
(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)
Rowntree’s later created the consumer favourites ‘Kit Kat’, ‘Aero’ and ‘Smarties’, and went on its own expansion journey, merging with the Halifax “Toffee King” Mackintosh in 1969 (which added ‘Quality Street’ and ‘Rolo’ to its product inventory). Rowntree’s (rebranded Rowntree Mackintosh Confectionery) then acquired Australian chocolate manufacturer Hoadley’s (1972) which gave RMC Hoadley’s ‘Violet Crumble’ bar.
Ft-Note: Pseudo-Quakers The runaway commercial success of Quaker food and confectionery companies did inevitably lead to imitation. A US food manufacturer in the 1870s introduced “Quaker Oats” to the cereal market…on the packets and in product advertising are images of a man dressed in Quaker garb, despite the US company having NO connexion whatsoever with the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers){i}. The company states that it chose the “Quaker Man” as its figurehead “because the Quaker faith projected the values of honesty, integrity, purity and strength”, [‘Quaker Oats website’, (FAQ 2009), www.quakeroats.com] (an early example of retail “identity theft’ to try to cash in commercially on the high regard, ethically, Quaker businessmen were held in).
PostScript: Third World cocoa beans and the Quaker chocolatiers – an uncomfortable association In the late 19th century the Cadbury brothers and other British chocolate-makers started exporting a large proportion of their cocoa beans from the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe (Portuguese West Africa)…by the turn of the century this amounted to 55% of Cadbury’s total supply of beans. Although Portugal had abolished slavery in its colonies, the rigid labour contract system which replaced left the African labourers working the plantations in a de facto slave status. This uncomfortable connexion of an ethical Quaker business to neo-slavery prompted one of the managing grandsons, William Cadbury, to commission an investigation of worker conditions in São Tomé and Príncipe in the 1900s. Cadbury eventually found an alternative source of cocoa beans (the Gold Coast) and organised a boycott of the two Portuguese plantations, but not before he had to fend off a spate of newspaper attacks on Cadbury’s alleging that it profited from the labour of slaves [‘William Cadbury, Chocolate, and Slavery in Portuguese West Africa’, (Lindsey Flewelling), 11-May-2016, https://britishandirishhistory.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/william-cadbury-chocolate-and-slavery-in-portuguese-west-africa/].
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Greater Union (henceforth GUT) was involved in all forms of the movie business – production, distribution and exhibition. The Bondi Studios made a few silent films in the late 1920s, like The Adorable Outcast and most notably The Term of His Natural Life which cost £60,000 and bombed badly at the box office [‘Cinesound Productions’, Sydney Morning Herald, 06-Aug-1934 (Trove).
Stuart F Doyle, GUT managing director, appointed former film publicist Ken G Hall as general manager of the newly formed Cinesound Productions. Two more Cinesound studio locations were opened, one at nearby Rushcutters Bay and the other at St Kilda (in Melbourne). Over an eight-year period (1932-40), with Hall at the helm as producer-director, Cinesound produced 17 feature films (16 of which were directed by Hall). The first of the sequence, On Our Selection, revolved round the adventures of one of Australian cinema’s most popular characters, Dad Rudd and his family. The film, benefiting from a new sound-recording system invented in Tasmania, was a box office triumph for Cinesound, earning £46,000 in Australia and New Zealand by the end of 1933, providing a tremendous fillip for the fledgling studios [Andrew Pike & Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900-1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production, (1998)].
Cinesound and Hall exploited On Our Selection’s popularity with a series of sequels, Grandad Rudd, Dad and Dave Come to Town and Dad Rudd, MP. Of these the ‘Dad and Dave’ entry especially proved a hit, matching the profitability of the original movie.
↗ Ken G Hall (centre) with American actress Helen Twelvetrees during filming of ‘Thoroughbred’ (photo: Mitchell Library)
⬆️ Australian cinema’s long tradition of Bushranger flicks beginning with the original 1906 feature film
With the outbreak of world war Cinesound called a halt on feature film production. During the war years the studios directed all energies into making newsreels, initially covering the war against Japan and beyond that on all aspects of Australiana.Newsreel rivalry: Cinesound Vs Movietone: the focus on newsreels by Cinesound was not a novel innovation. From its outset Cinesound produced newsreels – short documentary films containing news stories and items of topical interest – in competition with the rival Fox Movietone company. The two newsreels differed in content, Cinesound concentrated on Australian only topics while Movietone covered a mix of international and national news✤.
Newsreels in Australia prior to 1956 occupied a unique place in media and communications. Before the introduction of television, cinema-goers’ exposure to newsreels (part of the “warm-up” for the main feature) were the only images Australians saw of their land – the footage of elections, natural disasters and other such events [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.]. Thus, newsreels like the Cinesound Review, with its distinctive red kangaroo symbol, were an important source of news and current affairs, and were an integral part of the cinema program [‘Cinesound Movietone Australian Newsreels’, (ASO) (Poppy De Souza), www.aso.gov.au]✙. According to Anthony Buckley, the newsreels reflected Ken G Hall’s “pride and spirited nationalism” [Buckley, A, ‘Obituary: Ken G. Hall’, The Independent (London), 17-Feb-1994].
Ken G Hall in his autobiography contended that Cinesound Productions never lost money on any feature films. Some did very well – crime drama The Silence of Dean Maitland, for instance, for an outlay of £10,000 returned takings of more than £70,000 in Australia and the UK [Graham Shirley & Brian Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, (1989)]. One Cinesound movie however, strictly-speaking, probably did lose money…Roy Rene’s single venture into celluloid, Strike Me Lucky, in which ‘Mo’s’ humour, robbed of it’s spontaneity in live performance didn’t translate well to the big screen and was reflected in negative critical reviews and at the box office [Film Review: ‘Strike Me Lucky’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19-Nov-1934 (Trove)]. Despite Hall’s faith in the studios’ films, from 1937 there was a decline in box office returns (prompting GUT head Doyle to resign). Another (external) factor affecting Cinesound profitability occurred in 1938 with the passing of the Cinematograph Films Act in the UK…under this legislation Australian films no longer counted as local, their removal from the British quota meant a loss of market for Cinesound and other Australian movie producers [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.].
⬆️ ‘Smithy’ star Ron Randell later pursued a career in Hollywood
Note: the original 1930s studios in West London (above) were bought by the BBC in the 1990s and resurrected as a facility for hire [‘Remembering Ealing Studios and the golden age of British film’, BBC News, (Vincent Dowd), 30-Aug-2015, www.bbc.com].
The ‘Aggie’ of Aggie Grey’s was born Agnes Genevieve Swann✲, the offspring of an English pharmacist from Lincolnshire and his Samoan wife, a local taupou (a ceremonial maiden). Business seemed to be in Miss Swann’s DNA – in her early twenties she opened her first club in Apia, the Cosmopolitan Club, and in 1933 started a Samoan private tourism company, Grey Investments (later called the Grey Investments Group).
The Hotel in 2006 ⍐
Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of the early colonial period of America will know the early Dutch association with the area of New York. Based on the earlier exploration of the area by Henry Hudson, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) established a trading post on the southern tip of Manhattan island in 1624. The Dutch named the post New Amsterdam✲, the capital of its American colony Nieuw Nederlandt (New Netherland) – comprising an area including the hub of modern-day New York City, a strip of upstate New York including Beverwijck (now Albany), centre of the WIC fur trade, part of Connecticut and New Jersey and bits of the coastline down to the Delaware.
Three hundred years ago this coming April, London merchant-cum-journalist Daniel Defoe published his debut novel anonymously✱ – it was to become one of the most iconic and most imitated literary works ever…it began with a title page descriptor that read in full:
Once “cast on Shore by Shipwreck”, Crusoe, isolated and alone, is forced to make the best of a perilous predicament in an alien and challenging environment. His solitary, epic struggle in the face of hardships and the existence of threats from wild animals and the unknown elevates the story to mythic proportions. The myth is complete when Crusoe ultimately succeeds in conquering all impediments and fashions the island into his own “miniature Great Britain”.
⍐ One of the numerous screen adaptations of the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ tale
A search for the genesis of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, like the story’s narrative itself, has taken scholars far and wide. Geographically, this has included both the South Pacific and the South Atlantic Oceans, the Caribbean and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The search has also led, through the work of biographers, to a study of DeFoe’s own life experiences for sources of inspiration for the work of fiction.
Some commentators today still hold that Selkirk was the true inspiration for Defoe’s most famous fictional protagonist [‘The Real Robinson Crusoe’, (Bruce Selcraig), Smithsonian Magazine, July 2005, www.smithsonianmag.com; ‘Scientists Research the Real Robinson Crusoe’, (Marco Evers), Spiegel Online, 02-VI-2009, www.spiegel.de]. A perception that was given some added credence by the Chilean government. With an eye to the tourist potential spin-off, Chile renamed Más-a-Tierra, the small island in the South Pacific which had been Selkirk’s enforced home for over four years, Robinson Crusoe Island.
Aside from Selkirk’s story, Defoe who read widely and voraciously would have drawn on other, existing accounts of shipwreck and survival – this includes a work by 12th century Arab Andalusian writer Ibn Tufail, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, both a philosophical treatise and the first novel to depict a desert island castaway, and the story of Pedro Luis Serrano (Maestre Joan)♉, a 16th century Spanish sailor thought to have been marooned on a small Caribbean Island for seven or eight years [‘RC’, Wikipedia, loc.cit.]❇.
The derivative Defoe
Frank describes Defoe as a “congenital plagiarist” who freely borrowed material and ideas from numerous sources for Robinson Crusoe. Among the literary works mined by Defoe are Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. He also relied upon the books of voyages by contemporary explorers such as William Dampier and Woodes Rogers. And of course there was the borrowings from published accounts of real castaways and their ordeals – in addition to Serrano, Selkirk and Knox, Defoe drew upon the accounts of Fernando Lopez on St Helena in the South Atlantic and Henry Pitman’s stranding on Tortuga, et al [ibid.].
One of the iconic historic associations with the hills of Appalachia is the fateful conflict in the last quarter of the 19th century between two mountain-dwelling families – the Hatfields and the McCoys. The feud between the two “warring clans” has tended to be wrapped in the veneer of legend, obscured by the myth-making of popular culture over the decades. The McCoy-Hatfield feud has featured in a raft of US books, songs, comic strips, feature movies and television shows (with both animated and human content)✱. These overwhelmingly fictionalised narratives of the Hatfields and the McCoys have vouchsafed a place for them in the annals of American folklore and at the same time contributed to the caricatured impression of ‘hillbillies’ in the popular consciousness.
Tug Fork Valley and the family patriarchs
In the 19th century the McCoys lived (as they do today) on the Kentucky side of Tug Fork (a tributary of the Big Sandy River), with the Hatfields residing on the other side of the river (in West Virginia). The Hatfield patriarch was William Anderson Hatfield, widely known as ‘Devil Anse’, while the patriarch of the McCoys was Randolph McCoy (sometimes identified as ‘Randall’ McCoy). Of the two families the Hatfields were appreciably more affluent than the McCoys (Devil Anse’s profitable timber business employed many men including some McCoys).
Background to the feud
The earliest incident between the two families seemed to have occurred during the Civil War…in 1865 Asa Harmon McCoy, who fought with the Union during the war, was ambushed and killed by members of a local Confederate militia connected to the Hatfield family. Some have identified the feud’s genesis in the murder, but Harmon McCoy’s siding with the North (while almost all of the McCoys and the Hatfields gave their allegiances to the Confederacy) made him unpopular with both families. His death did not trigger a reprisal and most historians have concluded that the incident was a stand-alone event [‘The Hatfield & McCoy Feud’, History, www.history.com].
Escalation and denouement of the feud
By now “bad blood” was endemic between the families. In the years after 1882 the conflict escalated dramatically…killings met with counter-killings (more than 12 members or associates of the two families died during the decade). A Hatfield raid on the McCoy patriarch’s farm in 1888 – known as the ‘New Year Night’s Massacre’ – resulted in the murder of two of Randolph McCoy’s children. The subsequent Battle of the Grapevine Creek, an attempt by the Hatfields to take out the McCoys once and for all, resulted in an ambush gone wrong…the tables were turned on the Hatfield raiders and the bulk of their number were arrested. Over the next few years they were tried and all given jail sentences (except one, possibly a ‘scapegoat’, who was executed). The ill feelings slowly dissipated with the conclusion of the trials and the conflict receded from memory – in 1890 the New York Times reported that the feud was at an end (there was in fact still the odd simmering flare-up such as in the mid 1890s but the potentially explosive incidents were effectively over) [‘A Long Feud Ended’, NYT, 06-Sep-1890, www.rarenewspapers.com].
⇧ Hatfield clan 1890s
Matewan (WV) wall illustration: ⬆ depicting the Hatfield-McCoy feud
Tewksbury homestead
Pre-conditions for the banana importers British Honduras in 1900 was a British crown colony, a status it had since 1862✱. At the head of the colony, the Crown’s representative, was the governor [‘British Honduras’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Before bananas, the prized commodity in BH was timber – logwood, cedar, chicle, and above all mahogany✪. Moberg notes that despite the abolition of slavery in 1838, the conditions peculiar to British Honduras (BH) continued to perpetuate a debt servitude of rural workers to an oligarchy of local and immigrant land-holders. Nineteenth century BH economy was dependent on mahogany exports, a situation which created what has been described as an elite ‘forestocracy’ made up of timber companies and merchants (both domestic and foreign) [CH Grant]. This bound generations of forestry workers in BH to the powerful employer-class…one resident colonial secretary described the plight of the workforce as being “virtually enslaved for life”. Moberg’s case study describes the role of the British authority in this status quo as one of aiding and abetting the goals of the timber and mercantile elites [Moberg 1996].
Acceding to the demands of big foreign capital The governors discovered that the interests of foreign capital in British Honduras – initially through British mercantile and timber firms but increasingly through a burgeoning of US investors❅ – could not be ignored. By around 1900 bananas represented 71% of the value of exports to the US✥. It amounted to increasingly significant revenue for the colony’s coffers. The British Honduras government saw it as vital to the colony’s economy. Moberg indicates that “despatches from the governors to the Colonial Office reveal an eager accommodation to the banana multinational”. One of the most compliant, Governor Wilson, proposed to his masters in London that the government build railroads in the colony as an incentive for United Fruit to invest. Governor Swayne, undergoing a 180° turn from his earlier opposition to UFCo, started to act like a “virtual agent for the company in London”, negotiating the approval of incredibly generous land concessions to UFCo…under its terms United Fruit was asked to pay only $1 an acre compared to between $3 and $8 an acre required of small landholders (and UFCo was largely exempted from standard land tax). Sometimes UFCo received land gratis or for virtually nothing in exchange for the company’s promise to build railroads in the tropical lowlands (which of course benefitted UFCo’s business!) [ibid.].
Restrictive competitive practices 101: United Fruit achieves vertical integration in bananas After securing a stranglehold over the exporting side of the banana game in Belize and having established its own rail network to transport the produce, UFCo’s next step was to create its own banana plantations in the colony’s south at Stann Creek and Toledo. As a major BH producer United Fruit consolidated its position in several stages, it set about monopolising the land available for cultivation. By 1930, the land area of Belize cultivated by the company comprised 139,000 acres, but UFCo also held over 20 times this area of unused land in BH, seriously limiting the area of cultivable land available to competing planters. United Fruit’s price-fixing had the ultimate effect of decimating the local banana growers✧ [ibid.]
Fusarium wilt (‘Panama disease’) ⬆️
Tentacles of ‘El pulpo’ (“the octopus”) United Fruit was particularly adept at playing one country off against another. When British Honduran officials kicked back against the demands of the company, UFCo would make clear that not acquiescing to what it wanted, had serious consequences. A standard ploy was to pit British Honduras against neighbouring states. On the occasions that the BH governor would deviate from his default submissive position to UFCo demands, the company manager in Belize Town would drop none-too-subtle hints about moving the centre of United Fruit’s Central American banana operations to Puerto Cortés in Hondurus. Similarly, United Fruit would also periodically issue threats to both Guatemala and British Honduras that it would switch its investments from one to the other [ibid.]
𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼
When I first heard the saccharine, content-lite melodies of “Bubblegum Pop’s” 1910 Fruitgum Company, I didn’t realise that the name of this innocuous, syrupy 1960s musical group was a corny pun on a historic commercial entity that I did not know of at the time…this commercial enterprise was in fact something much less edifying and infinitely more sinister and consequential – the United Fruit Company of Boston, Mass. As the following will show, the United Fruit Co would come to epitomise the high degree of hegemony established by US business interests in the tropical regions of the Americas after the late 1890s.
From railroads to plantations
The United Fruit Company had its origins in 1899 from a merger of various fruit exporting concerns (including the Boston Fruit Company which had already embedded itself in the banana trade in Jamaica) controlled by American railroad constructor and entrepreneur Minor Cooper Keith. Earlier Keith stumbled into the banana trade virtually by accident. In 1872 Costa Rica defaulted on it’s bank loans and was unable to pay Keith for constructing the country’s railroad. In lieu of part of what it owed Keith, he was granted over 5% of vacant Costa Rican land. Accordingly the American used the land to establish banana farms alongside his newly finished railroad. The crops when yielded had a ready-made, on-the-spot transport line to carry the produce to port. Keith’s early banana experiments in Costa Rica proved a lucrative earner and paved the way for United Fruit’s later role as producer and exporter of the fruit. From that base in Costa Rica Keith the banana trader looked further afield in Latin America for other openings.
Monopoly, oligarchy? Other players in the tropical banana trade
Although classically monopolistic in its practices, United Fruit Co (UFCo) was not the only player (American or foreign) in the Central American/Caribbean banana game. In fact at the turn of the 20th century there was plenty of competition in bananas, in 1899 some 114 firms were engaged in importing bananas to the US via New Orleans [Davies 1990, cited in S Striffler et al, (Eds.), Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas, (2003)]. UFCo grew by acquisition, quickly adding 20 smaller banana export firms to its list of business holdings.
Rivalry with mutual benefits
In addition to Standard Fruit, another US rival of United Fruit was the Cuyamel Fruit Company. Cuyamel started in transportation as the Hubbard-Zemurray Steam Ship Co and morphed into a large New Orleans-based agricultural corporation (see ‘Sam the Banana Man’ below). The three American companies in the Central and South American banana business (United Fruit, Standard Fruit and Cuyamel) were separate business entities, each in competition for bananas et al products from the same tropical region. And yet there was something slightly schizophrenic about the relationship between the three…concurrently with the earnest rivalry was the existence of a cartel-like cooperation between the companies – which was of mutual benefit financially, eg, being able to launch joint business efforts in advertising and in increasing banana agricultural outputs in Honduras. United Fruit Co’s dominant position in the triangle (always the senior player) facilitated this arrangement…it had both a 60% stake in Cuyamel and a 50% stake in Vaccaro Bros⊠ [Ralph Lee Woodward Jr, Central America, a Nation Divided (3rd ed. 1999), cited in ‘Cuyamel Fruit Company’ (Wikipedia entry].
‘Sam the Banana Man’
Schmuel Zmurri was an immigrant from the Russian Empire (born in Bessarabia, in modern Moldova) who changed his name to Samuel Zemurray after coming to the United States. Zemurray was to become a major player and shaper in the banana republic phenomenon, a seminal figure who contributed to the massive imprint left on the tropics by American banana barons. 
United Fruit “a state within the state” of Guatemala: another intervention by Zemurray in the banana republics
Although no longer UFCo president, Zemurray wasn’t quite finished meddling to gain a financial advantage for United Fruit, he had one last contribution to the destabilisation of Central American regimes. The Guatemala banana trade had long been one of United Fruit’s most prized possessions…from the early 1900s President Manuel E Cabrera’s cosy relationship with UFC saw him grant the company a 99-year concession in Guatemala. United Fruit’s role in Guatemala has been described as “a state within a state” [William Blum, cited in ‘1954 Guatemalan coup d’être’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. In 1953 Zemurray enlisted UFCo in a US State Department propaganda campaign to overthrow the left-leaning but democratically elected Guatemalan government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz. The campaign together with the active intervention of the CIA paved the way for a coup the following year which ousted Arbenz and replaced it with a military junta which immediately reversed Arbenz’s decision to expropriate a portion of the unused land owned by the United Fruit Co [‘Sam Zemurray’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The fallout from the 1954 coup – for which the contribution of Zemurray and UFCo was no small part – was long-term destabilisation for the Guatemalans. The country, through a succession of military rulers, descended into three decades of civil war, 200,000 deaths including genocidal outrages against the native population [‘Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past’, (Stephen Schlesinger), New York Times, 04-Jun-2011, www.nytimes.com].
A journey to Trinidad (that’s the one in Cuba, not the one also in the Caribbean Sea which is nearly always spoken of in the same sentence as ‘Tobago’) takes you right into the heart of azúcar country. The nearby Valle de Los Ingenios (‘Valley of the Sugar Mills’) housed the vast sugar estates of the 18th-19th centuries (three score and ten sugar cane mills remain in the three-fold Sancti Spíritus valley system). Sugar, one of the staples of the Cuban economy, and enforced slavery (facilitating its economical production) was the foundation upon which Trinidad’s great colonial wealth rested.
We got a two minutes on the spot lesson from the guide about the layout of the sprawling city and outskirts, the different barrios (neighbourhoods), consejos populares (villages), etc. The far-too-many-to-count casa facades we passed were uniformly pastel in colour – cream, baby blue, mauve and pink seem the most popular choices for the houses. A treat was grabbing a peak inside some of the tiendas (shops) as we passed, the highlight being shops with wonderful Trinidadian artworks (strikingly colourful paintings and bold and bright ceramics). The guide gave hints on where to buy gifts, and where to eat and drink the local food and spirits at reasonable prices! Underscoring the old charm of Trinidad are the archaic cobblestone roads everywhere we went…I noticed something puzzling about them – every afternoon water would stream down (occasionally rush down) the valleys in the middle of the cobbled laneways and roads. I wondered where the water was coming from (run-off from the casas?) and meant to ask our guide about it but forgot to!
Plaza Mayor
If you’ve just touched down in Trinidad this is the ideal place to start from and fan out and explore the ciudad antigua. The square is the hub of the colonial old town, a place where people congregate, relax, chill out, sit and connect to wi-fi – if you are lucky (and have a stack of patience!). Restaurant choices aplenty across the other side of the square (an accompanying cool mojito obligatory with all meals). The central section of the square comprises a four-part attractive garden setting with hedges and palm trees. Enclosing the individual gardens are white fences, with another outer fence made of white wrought-iron grilles surrounding them. Decorative statuettes and vases added to the cute appeal of the plaza gardens.
Plaza Mayor is also a place where you’re likely to see some of Trinidad’s impromptu artists and musicians performing in the square…on one extremely hot day I saw a “living statue” in (lack of) motion, the guy was dressed in heavy, bulky religious garb, looking like he’d was doubling for Brother Cadfael or perhaps an extra in the Da Vinci Code! Everybody else was in shorts and T-shirts, I don’t know how he could stand the searing humidity, his back was a mat of perspiration through his tunic. No sign though of any relief from divine intervention coming his way in the sweltering heat, notwithstanding his appropriate ecclesiastical attire! While in the vicinity, also worth a gander, just off a side street to the square, are a few specialist museums – notably the Museo Histórico Municipal, one exhibiting colonial furnishings and another colonial architecture.
Building comfortable White enclaves?
With Black veterans of WWII turned away from Levittown, Bill Levitt was forced to defend his exclusivist policy. Despite avowing (rather hollowly) that “as a Jew, I have no room in my heart for racial prejudice”, Levitt sought to justify his position on the grounds that a White-only community was best for business. He argued that if he sold “to one Negro family, 90 to 95 per cent of White customers would not want to buy into the community”. Levitt was clearly not prepared to be an agent of social change if it meant a diminution of business profitability…self-interestedly and rather lamely he protested that it was unreasonable to saddle one builder with “the entire risk and burden of a vast social experiment” (even though the particular “one builder” in this case had been recognised by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in America) [‘When the Niggers Moved into Levittown’: Review of David Kushner’s Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb, Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 63 (Spring 2009): 80–81; Schuyler, D. (2003), ‘Reflections on Levittown at Fifty’, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 70(1), 101-109]. The FHA (Federal Housing Administration) was complicit with Levitt and other developers in the perpetuation of the practice of segregation, despite its clear violation of federal housing laws [‘Levittown, New York’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.Wikipedia.org]. Little wonder then that African-Americans saw the housing market as tainted, a “symbol of racial inequality”✱.
Desegregation of Levittown
Levitt resisted the criticism and made his third mass-produced settlement, Willingboro/Levittown in New Jersey, another Whites only community (no Blacks but it did permit White ‘ethnics’ – Hispanics/Latinos and Jews). By 1960 Willingboro had its first African-American family residing there (by 1970 it was 11 per cent Black). Only in 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, did Levitt come out and announce that Levittown housing developments would no longer be racially segregated. Pointedly this occurred at the same time as the federal government enacted the Fair Housing Act into law [Kushner].
Over the years many sociological studies and much cultural criticism has focused on the Levittown housing model. An early take on Levittown described the housing project in aspirational working class terms as “the dream come true of the skilled mechanic in the blue dungarees” [‘Levittown U.S.A.’, A. Miller, Phylon Quarterly, 19(1), 1st Quarter 1958, 108-112]. Many observers have portrayed Levittown as a double-edged sword…”Levittown embodied the best and worst of the postwar American story”, some saw Levittown’s achievements symbolising America’s can do” spirit, its ingenuity and entrepreneurship, but for many liberals it symbolised violent prejudice, unthinking conformity and race-based exclusion [‘Levittown: The Imperfect Rise of the American Suburb’ (C Galyean), US History Scene, www.ushistoryscene.com].
From an aerial or from a panoramic view, Levittown did leave itself susceptible to satire…the clear-cut “cookie-cutter” pattern of little boxes and white picket-fence wholesomeness invited comparisons with the world of the 1950s as portrayed on American television. The neighbourhood houses and their neat configurations resembled the sets of Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best: images of irenic and idyllic communities of harmonious middle class suburbia…in other words, they looked like the cruel parodies of the American dream detached from realities – as depicted on the small screen [Review of Diane Harris (Ed), Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania, (2010), (DR Contosa)].
In 1968 Levitt sold Levitt & Sons to telecommunications goliath ITT for a cool $92M. Subsequent attempts by Levitt to replicate the glory days of Levittown in overseas housing projects (Nigeria, Iran, Venezuela) floundered, and then a big project in Orlando, Florida, also went “belly up”, with dire personal consequences for the realty developer. Levitt misused funds belonging to customers and from his charitable trust [‘Tough Times for Mr. Levittown’, (MT Kaufman), New York Times Magazine, 24-Sep-1989, www.nytimes.com]. The once great ‘King of Suburbia’ – whose multi-multi-million dollar business at its height was constructing 12 houses a day on its construction sites – died in debt, still dreaming of pulling off one more mega-housing triumph.
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✱ even after the removal of racial exclusion covenants in the 1960s, the 2000 Census revealed that Caucasian residents of Levittown, Bucks County, still comprised 98 per cent of the population
Postwar society – in America as elsewhere – was beset with a multitude of problems. Affordable housing was high on the agenda of priorities – servicemen returning from World War II and a new generation of Americans that would become known as the ‘Baby Boomers’ were about to come into the world. Due to preoccupation with the war and its drain on US domestic manpower, housing construction levels were well down at a time that birth-rate numbers were about to take off.
Levittown, New York
The first mass scale suburban project, commenced in 1947, was at Island Trees, a hamlet in the town of Hempstead (Nassau County, Long Island). 1,400 tract-homes were sold in the first three hours of the opening of the Island Trees estate sales office [‘Levittown New York’, Wikipedia Republished, http://wiki2.org], within four years the Levitts had built 17,500 homes in Hempstead. The company concentrated on small two-bedroom dwellings, predominantly ‘rancher’ or Cape Cod style, seventh-of-an-acre lots (750 square foot). These tract-houses as they are known in the trade were modest structures, for the most part pretty basic (a living room, a kitchen, but no garage, an unfinished second floor) and pressed fairly close together in rows. But they were (initially anyway) very reasonably priced as well, affordable to US veterans from the World War, Levitt’s initial target market (“the Levittown house was the reduction of the American Dream to an affordable reality” as historian Barbara Kelly described it). Each Levittown housing complex was divided into distinct sections.
Everything on site was orchestrated to work seamlessly, the tradesmen were scheduled to arrive in a strictly planned sequence. Bill Levitt admired automobile tsar Henry Ford’s production methods and replicated them in what was an assembly line style of home construction. The comparison was widely noted, Time magazine called Bill Levitt “the Henry Ford of Housing” [Schuyler]. Others, only barely a little less grandly, styled him “the King of Suburbia”.
Levittown, Pa. ca.1959
The Levitt covenants
William Levitt, in the first instance at least, once he sold families a Levitt house, did not entirely leave them to their own devices. Owners had to comply with certain suburban covenants that he wrote into the contracts…the rules and regulations included no laundry to be done on Sundays and no fencing off of yards. Owners were required to keep their lawns mown and neatly hedged. Bill Levitt himself would drive around some of the communities on Saturdays to ensure that the residents complied with this edict – when he spotted properties that were non-compliant, he would despatch his own lawn-mowing team to do the job and bill the owners on the following weekday [‘Suburban Legend William Levitt’, (Richard Lacayo), Time, 07-Dec-1998, www.time.com].‘Gentleman’s Agreement’, a lauded film of the day
BF – before Felix…
Felix, the anthropomorphic black cat with the massive white eyes and the broadest of broad grins, was not the first animated cat to grace the screens of movie theatres. That honour went to a mouser called Krazy Kat, the conception of cartoonist George Herriman…first appearing as a comic strip character in the New York Evening Journal, Krazy Kat debuted on movie screens in 1916 in a silent short featuring the eponymous cat and his brick-throwing ‘frenemy’ Ignatz Mouse.
Master Tom, prototype
Not long after, Felix had his beginnings in the prototype form of Thomas Cat. In 1917 Australian cartoonist Pat Sullivan produced a short, animated silent film about a black cat, The Tail of Thomas Cat, through his own New York studio. By 1919 ‘Thomas Cat’ had morphed into ‘Master Tom’ in the short Feline Follies. After a follow-up entry (The Musical Mews) again starring Master Tom, Sullivan’s third short of 1919 (Adventures of Felix the Cat) changed the name of the ‘Tom’ character to the name he would henceforth be universally known as – Felix. Despite the seemingly clear lineage between Thomas Cat and Felix, some American animation historians discredit the connexion, citing Thomas Cat’s non-anthropomorphised nature, the uncertainty of his fur colour, the fact that he loses his tail fighting a rooster without ever being able to recover it (cf. the difference with Felix who can magically transform his tail into other forms) [‘Felix the Cat – McGill CS’, www.cs.mcgill.ca].
Conflicting stories of Felix’s origin
Sullivan maintained all along that he was the creator – on a visit back to Australia in 1925 he told the Melbourne Argus newspaper that the idea for Felix had come to him when his wife brought a stray cat into Sullivan’s studio one day (as was her wont). On other occasions he said that the inspiration came from a Rudyard Kipling story, ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself’. For the name of his cartoon creation Sullivan explained that he had drawn on his native Antipodes… Australia Felix was a term in use from the 19th century to describe the western districts of the state of Victoria (also later the name of an Australian novel by Henry Handel Richardson). Another source for the cat’s name came from a contemporary fellow cartoonist – appearing in print in 1936 the cartoonist affirmed that Sullivan told him that he derived the name from a black West Indian-born boxer living and fighting in Australia called Peter Felix whom Sullivan was acquainted with (the animator being a big enthusiast of boxing) [Pat Sullivan – I made the cat and the cat made me’, www.vixenmagazine.com].
Contesting Felix
Not surprisingly the strongest argument for endorsing Sullivan as Felix’s true creator comes from Australia, the animator-cum-entrepreneur’s homeland. Australian cartoonists, including some who knew Sullivan, have drawn attention to a comment during an interview when he visited Sydney in 1925 (quoted in the local papers): Sullivan stated that his practice was to ‘do the “key drawings” and leave the rest to a staff’ [Vixen Magazine, op.cit.]. Moreover, the Australian Cartoonist Association have argued that the distinctive lettering style of Sullivan can be detected on the Felix artwork, eg, in Feline Follies (Felix’s first incarnation), the lettering used matches examples of Sullivan’s handwriting. Additionally, certain speech bubbles in the short uses expressions and terms which have distinctive Australian usage, especially ” ‘Lo Mum! “. Australian animators, argue that had Otto Messmer conceived and created the prototype Felix film, as he claimed in 1977, he would have used the traditional American form of shorthand for mother, ‘mom’ (not ‘mum’) and he would not have dropped the ‘h’ in ‘hello’ which is more characteristically Australian or British◰. [‘Reclaiming Felix the Cat in the Picture Gallery’, (Judy Nelson, Exhibition, 1-May to 7-Aug 2005, State Library of NSW, Sydney), www.pandora.nla.gov.au]
Animator Ub Iwerks drawing animated rodent extraordinaire, M Mouse ▶PostScript A: Felix, a template worth copying One green-eyed embryonic animator in the US in the mid-Twenties very much aware of Felix’s ascending star was Walt Disney. Disney’s earliest innovation in the field was his Alice Comedies where he inserted a human figure “Alice of Wonderland” into an animated landscape. As foil to Alice, the main animated figure in these shorts was Julius, a cat with a particularly strong resemblance to Felix…basically a clone of Felix [‘Felix the Cat’, (Ian Gordon), St James Encyclopaedia of Popular Culture (2002)]. Disney’s later followed up Julius with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (a product he ultimately lost creative control of) and then lucked in again, hitting the jackpot with Mickey Mouse…Oswald and Mickey were both different animals to Felix but again the physical similarities to the (original) Felix are there – albeit with reshaped faces and ears.
The pueblo of Santa Clara is inextricably woven into the story of Ernesto Guevara and his victory in the decisive battle of the civil war against the Batista regime. Guevara or simply ‘Che’ – the image that launched a million T-shirts, and the man who signed many more million pesos’ worth of Cuban bank notes!✱ – is proudly remembered and commonly revered, especially in this part of Cuba, as two separate Santa Clara monuments testify.
The first is in the centre of the township itself, a monument to the final victory of the war (Battle of Santa Clara, 31st December 1958) when a Cuban battalion under Comandante Che derailed a train carrying government troops, ammunition and heavy weapons, intended to reinforce Batista’s embattled army in Havana.
A portion of the captured train still sits on the site, now part of a monument to the battle which clinched victory for Castro and the Cuban rebels. In Spanish the monument is called Monumento a la Toma del Tren Blindado (literally “Monument to the Taking of the Armoured Train”)
The mausoleum remains a popular place to visit for tourists as well as Cubans, there were several big tourist buses and umpteen dozen cars in the parking lot when our group visited. The immediately noticeable feature of the mausoleum building which is set down on a wide patch of land is the extra-large statue of Che. Cast in bronze, it is 22 feet high and characteristically depicts Che armed and dressed in army/militia fatigues. The statue officially goes by the somewhat ‘highfalutin’ title Ernesto Guevara Sculptural Complex (AKA Complejo Monumental Ernesto Che Guevara).
Security around the mausoleum entrance was pretty tight, more guards than you think might be necessary hovered around the entrance portal. We all lined up and were soon ushered in by a bevy of serious-faced officials and whisked out again fairly rapidly. There was not a lot to see inside in any case, it was dimly lit and unnervingly cold. We glanced at the photos of the 30 dead comrades on the wall and spotted a few pieces of Che paraphernalia on display – such as Che’s handgun (Czechoslovakian), his water canteen and field glasses.
The museum maintains a strict prohibition on the taking of photos within the burial vault, so I didn’t even give a thought to trying to sneak a quick ‘Polaroid’ (even if I had one) – the officials, all wearing the same “not happy Juan” face, gave the impression they meant business!
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
⍍ Grace Kelly’s 1955 Hitchcock film made on location in the French Riviera that led to that momentous meeting between America’s “patrician pure-bred” star actress and Monaco’s bachelor monarch – and a subsequent change of careers and destinies!
The therapeutic springs of the limestone Travertines
Who? Well, me for one! Frankly for one thing I’ve never seen the sense of collecting a whole bunch of extra garments and accessories on route that I’ll have to squeeze into my already bulging luggage and then lug around to every single hotel, coach and airport for the entire duration of the trip, it flies in the face of my simple and practical philosophy of “always travelling as light as possible”. Besides, with the “El Cheapo” stuff you’re not buying quality that’s going to last any decent amount of time!
Fridgelandia
Henpecked!
Chico Senõr Potter
Where is Tintin’s Inca prisoners T-shirt?
0nly a fiver! Not worth the effort to copy!
Simple unpretentious craftsmanship from the developing world
1001 Nights archetype city
‘Sword of Ali Baba’ (1965): Robin Hoodesque Ali
1940 British production values
‘Arabian Nights’ (1942)
‘Sinbad the Sailor’ (1947): D Fairbanks Jnr doing his best “Errol Flynn impersonation” – Sinbad as romantic swashbuckler!
X-rated ‘Arabian Nights’, the Pasolini Arabesque 
Mr Magoo’s ‘1001 Arabian Nights’ animated feature
Aladdin, he of the lamp with remarkable transformative powers, has been well served cinematically in animation features, viz a Soviet (Russian) fantasy version of Volshebnaya lampa Aladdina/Aladdin’s Magic Lamp in 1966; a French version, Aladin et la Lampe Merveilleuse/Aladdin and His Magic Lamp in 1970. There has even been a Japanese manga anime feature on the 1001 Nights theme, Doraemon: Nobita’s Dorarabian Nights (1991).The Harem Girls’ pool shot in the 1942 film
▲ The ‘border’ bridge between Vilnius & Užupis
▲ The Prince of Hutt R Province
▲ King Paul with his court (Source: News Ltd)
▲ A Great Britain strawberry patch in Sth Australia!
Copycat grawlixing!
An indotherm – as opposed to a wafteron!
(Image credit: www.7esl.com)
The sublimely ridiculous Bat Fight scenes in the TV show are replete with interjections…as Batman and the arch-villains land thunderous blows on each other, corny graphics flash up with words representing the pugilistic action (SOCK! AIMEE! BIFF! WHAMM! KAPOW! THUNK! BANG!). Interestingly Batman’s art department incorporated some comic strip style graphics into the flashing word cards (eg, stars within the word SOCK! signifying the effects of being ‘socked’, ie, dazed, dizzy – akin to a kind of squean? KAPOW! with a bulls-eye target inside the O)
Coogee Amusement Pier
Manly wharf & fun pier 1950s/1960s
Manly Fun Pier & Aquarium late 60s/early 70s
Old portico entrance to Giles’ Baths
Manly Marineland – was situated on the Esplanade not far from the amusement pier. The aquarium opened in 1965, underwent a number of name changes before closing at the beginning of 2018.
Yahoo!Movies described The Conqueror as “the most toxic movie ever made”…tarnishing the careers of those who appeared in this egregious stinker, especially its star John Wayne, effectively bankrupting RKO Pictures (costing a blown-out $6 million) and contributing to the deaths of an inordinate number of its cast and crew².
John Wayne, faced with the need to fulfil the third and final picture of his contract with RKO, apparently fished the discarded script out of the rubbish bin and convinced the assigned director Dick Powell (who in turn convinced RKO’s owner Howard Hughes) to make the film with Wayne playing the role as Mongol warlord Genghis Khan (a role intended apparently for Marlon Brando). By all accounts Wayne was grossly miscast⋇, interpreting the great Mongol leader as a cowboy (probably an entirely natural notion for the Duke!). The script (by Oscar Millard) was terrible and vacuous as the following inane, awkward samples of the dialogue illustrate:
Snow Canyon, radioactive movie set
The film’s producers (Hughes and Powell) were aware of the proximity of the atomic testing before shooting started but had been assured by the government that the atomic tests posed no risks to public health, a gross deception (self-deception?). Compounding the dilemma, at the end of the location work Hughes ordered that 60 tons of the radioactive reddy-brown dirt from the Snow Canyon site in Utah be carted back to the RKO film set at Culver City for re-takes!
Many, many things did go wrong on the set, including costs…the MGM musical/fantasy came in over budget at a cost of $2.8 million. This in part reflects The Wizard of Oz’s disjointed trajectory – going through five directors including King Vidor, George Cukor and Richard Thorpe and 14 screenwriters in the course of the production. The movie’s ultimate director Victor Fleming (who also directed the other great Hollywood film of 1939 Gone With The Wind) was widely suspected of Nazi sympathies.
Judy as Kansas Dot in Oz
The curse for a time seemed to continue post-release. Although The Wizard of Oz is universally celebrated today as a classic of the cinema, it did not meet with immediate acclaim from either the public or critics. These reservations did not start to turn around until the CBS television network reintroduced the movie to the wider public in 1956. In 1989 the US Library of Congress nominated The Wizard of Oz as “the most-viewed motion picture on television syndication” [‘The Wizard of Oz (1939 film)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Countless scores of viewers of the joyous spectacle of ‘Oz’ over the years would have been blissfully unaware of the unhappy, off-screen events that relentlessly dogged the production.
‘William the Dictator’ (1938)
Hardy and Aldrich each had his own distinctive and characteristic expressions, these verbal calling cards were often reiterated throughout each movie…Andy Hardy, when in ebullient mood, would chirpily respond to Polly Benedict or to another of his many, simultaneous love interests with “You said it, toots!” Henry Aldrich is universally remembered for the opening exchange with his mother who bellows: “Hen-reeeeeeeeeeeee! Hen-ree Al-drich!”, to which Henry from upstairs would haltingly and tremulously reply, “Com-ing, Mother!”
The first Andy Hardy film was released in 1937, A Family Affair with 15 more following within a decade, plus a less successful ‘reunion’ film in 1958 focusing on Andy’s return, full circle, to Carvel to take up his father’s old judicial post. The character of Henry Aldrich first surfaced in a Broadway play What a Life in 1938 (playwright: Clifford Goldsmith)…from there in span off into fourteen years of very popular radio (1939-53), four years of television (1949-53), a series of ten movies, and an uncountable number of comic books, musical scores, pin-ups, games, and toys.
✳ in 1939 Mickey Rooney was the number one box office star in American films, a position he retained for the following three years, Source: ‘Top Box Office Stars: 1932-1939 (Part 1)’, (Classic Film Guru), https://classicfilmguru.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/the-box-office-stars-1932-to-1939-part-1/
A&P Tea endgame
The beginnings of A&P Tea’s decline in the retail world harks back as far as the 1950s – the source of the downward trend was its inability to maintain parity with competitors who were opening larger supermarkets that, driven by customer demand, were more modern[1]. Partial sell-offs followed in the seventies and eighties. Things didn’t really improve for the grocery ‘Goliath’ despite sporadic and ephemeral upsurges[2]. In 2010 the company filed for bankruptcy, but were only able to hold on till 2015 when A&P again filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, this time being permanently wound up.
A&P store: Westwood, NJ, 1959
A&P Tea at its zenith
At its peak in the 1930s (with the Hartford brothers still ensconced at the helm), A&P was by far the largest grocery chain in the US with 15,709 stores in 39 of the 48 states plus parts of Canada. The tea and coffee merchants had already diversified into bakeries and pastry and candy shops, and introduced innovations in food retailing such as pre-packaged meats and food-testing laboratories (pioneers of quality assurance)[7]. The Economy Store was another A&P concept: small stores located in secondary streets, away from the main street (comparison with King Kullen), inexpensive “no frills” lines; operated by only one or two staff members; low cost, high volume[8].
1928 A&P grocery ad
Where the Gainsborough Pictures/Islington Studios once stood (in Hoxton, North London), today sits blocks of luxury flats built in 2004. As a token gesture the name ‘Gainsborough’ remains on the units’ facade but the only other indicator that it is the site of a former film studio is a 6.5m high courtyard sculpture of Alfred Hitchcock whose first exposure to the movie industry was at Islington … the work of art enigmatically depicting ‘Hitch’ as a gigantic head❈.
Edward Black and the costume melodramas
After Gaumont went into bankruptcy Balcon left Gaumont in 1936 for MGM-British (and later Ealing Studios). Gaumont-British ceased production for several years but Gainsborough was saved by a rescue package put together by CM Woolf and J Arthur Rank (partners of General Film Distributors)[6]. From the late thirties producer Edward Black came to Gaumont/Gainsborough and the subsequent type of productions the studios made reflected Black’s “unerring sense of British popular taste”. One of his earliest successes was with Bank Holiday (1938), directed by Carol Reed and Margaret Lockwood, soon to become Britain’s leading screen actress回. Black used ex-Music Hall performers like Will Hays and Arthur Askey for Islington’s light comedies. Gainsborough Pictures also afforded opportunities to the versatile Launder and Gilliat writer-director team to showcase their collaborative skills.
Sound movies in, silent films out: an “overnight sensation” which took several years to happen
The Jazz Singer was a calculated gamble by Warner Bros which was in a financially precarious position at the time, but it turned out to be a ‘game-changer’ for the then minnow studio Warners and for cinema’s future as a whole … its positive reception signalled that audiences wanted sound. But this transformation from one type of feature film to another was no sudden event, the process away from profitable silents was a gradual process. First to emulate Warners was 20th Century Fox with its Movietone system, soon the other major studios followed the trail-blazers into sound. The big Hollywood companies tended to play it both ways at first, none of them stopped making silent films straight away. After all, how profitable talkies would become was still to be seen. In the two years following The Jazz Singer ‘s release, the major companies made a mixture of productions – some all-silent, some all-sound and some part-sound movies[3].
The ‘sound’ of silent stars
From the perspective of the actors, especially those who had established their niche in the silent era, there were formidable challenges to transitioning to the new, sound medium. Acting in sound movies and the whole dynamic was different, they discovered, sometimes to their cost. Actors now had to memorise their lines beforehand, and on set they had to not stray far from the microphones, basically stand still and recite their lines clearly. The voice became THE issue for many established silent stars … a number of Hollywood actors could not make the transition❉. Some with heavy foreign accents like Emil Jannings, Vilma Banky and Pola Negri had voices that sounded harsh, unmelodious and muffled on-screen. Other top silent stars were similarly hamstrung by their voices – John Gilbert sounded weak and squeaky on screen✾, and Clara Bow and Norma Talmadge had flat Brooklyn accents – which didn’t suit their romantic lead personas[7].
Early radio days
That same year, 1920, following on the pioneering breakthroughs in Marconi and Tesla and a host of other contributors to the development of radio[1], the first federal licence was granted in the US to radio station KDKA (owned by the Westinghouse Company) in Pittsburgh, Pa. KDKA started with sport, broadcasting prize fights and Major League Baseball.
Daggstar completely out of the box
There was so much to the creative output of Clarke comma J, and so much variety too … screenplays, film acting, radio, stage work, television, songs, books. Clarke’s art didn’t fit into any one particular mould, he was, to use Martin Luther’s expression, an “irregular planet which cannot be fixed among the stars”, always inventing, moving on and reinventing, exploring something new that had piqued his interest.
John Clarke’s sudden, most untimely death leaves a Sydney Opera House-sized hole in Australian and New Zealand satire – and I shall never forget that voice – as with Billy Bragg’s, so distinctive, and as with Joe (Dragnet) Friday’s, so deadpan matter-of-fact … or his trademark mischievous grin and the sparkle in the eyes.
Fort Ross
(photo: www.fortross.org)
Russian stamp commemorating 200th anniversary of founding of Fort Ross
South African Boer War – coming crisis in British Manhood?
Imperial Britain’s performance in the Boer War (especially early on) against a “rag-tag” army of Afrikaner farmers fed into the rising tide of Britain’s fears of the degeneration of its racial stock. Britain’s sudden reverses in the war required reinforcements from home, leading to a manpower dilemma – unhealthy British cities and slums, from where the foot soldiers were drawn, churned out recruits from the working class who were “narrow-chested, knock-kneed, wheezing, rickety specimens” of men[9]. The average British soldier in 1900 was shorter than that of 1845 and over three-fourths of those volunteering in Manchester recruitment halls were rejected as unfit for service[10]. This crisis gave further credence to the idea of Australia and New Zealand as embodying the coming man. Whilst British soldiery seemed to struggle and its martial supremacy stumbled (albeit temporarily), the Australasian contingents of soldiers conversely equipped themselves well. The Boer War reversals only accentuated anxieties about the racial deterioration of working class Britons[11]. A report conducted in 1904, with the title “Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration”, confirmed that Britons were even more physically unfit than the war had suggested.
(source: www.telegraph.co.uk)PostScript: D H Lawrence and Australia DH (Bert) Lawrence in his novel Kangaroo, written entirely with the exception of the final chapter while the peripatetic English novelist was in Australia (1922), fleetingly entertained the possibility of Australia becoming a new and uncorrupted Britain. One of Lawrence’s enduring preoccupations, informed by his readings of Herbert Spencer and other early eugenics proponents, was the degeneration of western industrial society. In other works also Lawrence subscribed to the notion of the coming man, eg, in Aaron’s Rod (written before his visit to Australia) Lawrence described an Australian character as a “new and vital version of an English man”[21].
The E tree
The Wright brothers defended their exclusive aircraft patent against all-comers (“copiers and imitators” as they saw everybody else in the game) with a monomaniacal religious zeal that would have befitted their overbearing United Brethren minister father Milton. Orville and Wilbur freely sued and issued writs against anyone who attempted to construct and fly a new aircraft without purchasing a licence from them. As this was the pioneering era of aviation there were a lot of inventors trying to do just this[2]. Accordingly, the Wrights spent a lot of time locked in legal disputes with other manufacturers in America and overseas who were trying to avoid the patent fee. The Wrights staunchly defended their world monopoly over flight in unequivocal terms as a ‘moral’ and a ‘legal’ right, treating all other contemporary inventors in the field as in effect “hobbyists”![3].
Because of the Wrights’ unwavering stance on their patents (after 1912 Orville alone, as Wilbur died that year), resentment towards the brothers was strong, they were accused of being greedy by licensees, eg, by demanding “money first” from prospective buyers BEFORE giving a demonstration of the prototype flyer, or by setting too high a royalty fee (at one point demanding 20% of sales); after a string of fatal air crashes in Wright planes Orville Wright lost sympathy with the public by attributing the accidents solely to “pilot error” (characteristically giving no consideration to the fact that the Wrights might be at fault for not having tried to make improvements to their prototype Flyer’s basic design[7].
As it got closer to the event there were questions asked within the Olympic community about whether the Games should go ahead in Berlin. The Nazi regime’s transparent violations of human rights at home, and it’s failure to behave like a good international citizen (eg, pulling out of the League of Nations in 1933, illegally occupying the Rhineland in March 1936, etc), prompted a number of nations to consider boycotting the event.
Catalonia’s Olympiad Stadium
Politics and sport, the National Socialist way
Olimpíada Popular poster: International worker-athlete brotherhood
Estadio Montjuïc
In the early 1930s an African-American postal employee from New York, Victor Hugo Green, came up with the idea of producing a book for Black Americans to guide them in travelling safely around their own country. Green got some inspiration from the Jewish-American press which for several years had been publishing travel guides for its community’s travellers, and from earlier, embryonic and less successful efforts to service the African-American community (eg, the Negro Business Directories from the early 20th century)[1].
The project like many entrepreneurial dreams started small, The mailman-cum-entrepreneur Green initially focused his efforts on helping African-American motorists and travellers locate businesses (lodgings, restaurants and other food outlets and fuel stations) in the greater New York metropolitan area that would accept their custom. As the business grew (with assistance from the US Travel Bureau) Green expanded his guide to the rest of the US, and to Alaska, Bermuda and parts of Canada and Mexico. The Green Book’s aim was to help Black and Coloured travellers chart a safe path through a segregated America by pinpointing exactly where on route they could stop and get the services they required to make the trip a happy and pleasant one.
According to the civil rights leader, Julian Bond, Green used his network of contacts in the Postal Workers Union to ascertain where Black visitors would be welcome[3]. Early on, Green visited the locations he would include in his Green Book to check them out personally, but when the book took on a national (and international) focus this became impractical[4]. Aside from hotels and motels, other accommodation options advertised in the Green Book included “tourist homes” (the private residences of African-Americans made available to travellers) and the Harvey House hospitality chain[5].
◥ 1949 Negro Motorists’ Green Book
◥ 1956 Negro Motorists’ Green Book
When the resourceful Mr Green published the inaugural Green Book in 1936, he wrote in the preface that he looked forward to the day when “this guide will not have to be published”. That day was a long time happening (sadly not in Victor’s lifetime) … but it did come.
🔝 Taronga – southern (ferry end) entrance
🔝 Taronga – southern (ferry end) entrance
🔝 the Primitive lion enclosure at Moore Park
🔝 the Primitive lion enclosure at Moore Park
🔝 Botany Zoological Gardens
🔝 Botany Zoological Gardens🔝 In memory of the elephant at Banks Zoo
🔝 Dunbar House – former grounds of Watsons Bay Private Zoo
🔝 Dunbar House – former grounds of Watsons Bay Private Zoo
The Ancient Universities of Scotland (Aberdeen)
“Nero” as Rector…Peter Ustinov actually. If it was the historical Nero, most likely he’d have been “wrecker” rather than “rector”
Cleese anyone? The rector for “Silly Walks”
Edward Snowden (Image: NY Review of Books)
The ambitious & frugal young Mr Brown – his first leg on the political ladder
Billy Connolly (Source: The Independent)
But is it the ‘real’ Clinton? ⤴
Would the real Mr Yang, the genuine “Discoverer of the Terracotta Warriors’, please stand up?
In the glow of world attention being lavished on the terracotta army discoveries and the recognition bestowed on Mr Yang, it is not surprising that the other three surviving farmers present at the 1974 archaeological find wanted to get in on the act. Yang Quany was also given a spot in the museum signing books for a small stipend and began promoting himself as “the discoverer of the treasures”. The remaining two Yangs followed suit. Yang Zhi’fa however discredits his fellow Lintong farmers’ motives and insists that it is he who was primus intra pares (first among equals) in discovering the Emperor Qin relics.
Whilst the Lintong farmers haven’t made much money from discovering (or being associated with the discovery of) the terracotta army, the same can be said of the workers who did most of the hard physical work of unearthing and restoring the statues. Most of those recruited to curator Yuan Zhongyi’s archaeological team found themselves working round the year with only a break at the time of the Spring Festival holiday for a wage of only 1.72 yuan (US $0.28) a day in 1976 [Zhao Xu, ‘Yang Zhifa, 76, soldiers on amid terracotta warriors’, (09-XII-2014),China Daily USA, www.chinadaily.com].
“The three in the middle just moved!” ⤴
✒︎ The Argonauts
✒︎ “astroboy” touches down
✒︎ A NASA aquanaut (source: theatlantic.com)
The word beatnik was coined by journalist Herb Caen [San Francisco Chronicle, 2 April 1958] to describe adherents to the “Beat Generation”, a sort of subculture movement characterised by youthful anti-conformism, rebelling against the mainstream and hip culture (“being cool, man!”) (cf. the word ‘hipster’ as used today). Other traits include devotion to jazz, drug use and Eastern religions, and pseudo-intellectualism. Through the writings of ‘Beat’ leaders such as Jack Kerouac, other neologisms followed the pattern of beatnik … jazznik, bopnik, bugnik [Jack Kerouac, Brandeis Forum, ‘Is there a Beat Generation?’, 8 Nov. 1958, www.wnyc.org/story/.]
The onset of the 21st century seemed to herald a revival in the epic genre in film. Large-budget “Sword-and-Sandal” movies of the early 2000s such as Gladiator and Troy, labelled “Neo-epic films” by cinema critics, have reinvigorated the genre. At the same time, a new blockbuster phenomenon in the shape of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series of films, padded with wall-to-wall distinguished British (and Commonwealth) actors, have extended the epic genre, and in the case of the ‘Rings’ cycle, given the flagging “Sword-and-Sorcery” sub-genre a new lease of life.
The book concerns itself to a large extent with the type of epic film much in vogue in the fifties and sixties, drawn from the history and mythology of antiquity (Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia). Right up front I’d have to say that I think that the author is inclined to take the genre a bit too seriously. The epic movie, in whatever phase or incarnation it takes, has been something difficult to be especially serious about! By definition the standard form of the epic has tended to be characterised by an indulgence in excess – grandiosity, vulgarity, basically everything 8XL in size! Mention the epic film and people often think of monumental Hollywood flicks like Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and the like. Conspicuous consumption the order of the day, so much so so that it could be suggested that epic films should be primarily seen as a kind of parody of themselves.
Footnote: the popularity of the Italian Peplum provided career change opportunities for body builders as many would-be actors like Steve Reeves, Mark Forest and Kirk Morris, made the transition from the bodybuilding game to become leads in Sword-and-Sandal sagas. Interestingly, many of the Italian musclemen-stars took Anglo-sounding names in an attempt to make them more appealing to the American market, thus the well-known Sergio Ciani became on screen the aptly named “Alan Steel”.
Strongman ‘Maciste’
“When you speak of destiny, this is something I must at last believe” (delivered with exaggerated emphasis), Genghis Khan, in Genghis Khan (1965).
Elley’s study of the epic film genre is informative and instructive in so far as it goes. Ancient Greeks and Romans, Biblical figures, barbarians and Norsemen, all get a good run, but Elley’s historical survey cuts off at the end of the Dark Ages. I’m left with a tinge of regret that he didn’t take a more expansive approach in the book to include the grand and occasionally grandiloquent epic movies made about legendary Britons of a later era like Arthur and Robin Hood, as well as the more modern epics like Lawrence of Arabia or Dr Zhivago and even extend it to examples of the genre as diverse as 2001 a Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes.
Auckland village, above M&C Falls (ECP)
Even before “The Lord of the Rings” movie series some Hogsback locals did their best to capitalise on a handful of tenuous links with the celebrated Lord of the Rings author. The story goes, the ‘Rings’ books were inspired by the magical, enchanting physical form of Hogsback. The proponents of this theory point to the fact that Tolkien was born in South Africa (in Bloemfontein, Free State). The thesis loses traction when probed more closely. The famous author and avid philologist left South Africa at the tender age of three, never to return and having not ever visited Hogsback.
The Tolkien Middle Earth connection is often emphasised in print, such as in the following: “The romance of Hogsback, is recognised by reading The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) which seems to capture the special atmosphere of the unspoilt Hogsback forests and of a time when peace will rule the world” [Trevor Webster, The Story of Hogsback, www.hogsback.com].
Talking to the staffer in the Hogsback Visitors Information Centre, she was unequivocally dismissive of the Tolkien LOTR nexus. So the lingering myth clearly wasn’t emanating from the likes of her! She also warned me against buying the primitive wooden toy horses and zebras in the street from members of the local Xhosa community. The street sellers, looking cold and dismal in the freezing conditions, were only asking R2 an animal, but the Visitors Centre lady explained that they are not properly gazed and sealed, making them a prohibited item to export out of RSA. Apparently a local artisan/sculptor had offered to glaze the artworks for the community at minimal cost so that they could charge more for the figurines, but his offer had not been taken up.
So, how plausible is the link between “Middle Earth” of Lord of the Rings and the sleepy, little village of Hogsback? Clearly, as stated above, JRR Holkien had no direct association with Hogsback, having left South Africa at age three. Information on Tolkien’s life however, suggest the existence of an indirect link. One of Tolkien’s sons, whilst in the Royal Air Force during WWII, was stationed at Hogsback and did correspond regular with the author with his reflections on the locale. These correspondences from Tolkien Junior included sketches and descriptions of the Hogsback ambience [Ibid.].
The Hog’s back!
Not long after the news spread about the momentous event at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903, the significance of what the Wrights’ had done found itself under challenge, especially as time went on from the European aviation community. French newspapers after 1903 described the celebrated American brothers as bluffeurs (bluffers). Doubts were raised about their achievements when the Wrights failed to release the photo of the Wright Flyer in flight at Kitty Hawk until nearly five years after the groundbreaking 1903 flight … newspapers acerbically asked: “Were they fliers or liars?”, Paris edition of the New York Herald (10 Feb 1906); ‘Wright Brothers: European skepticism’, www.spiritus-temporis.com.
The state of North Carolina has harboured no such doubts, proudly displaying the slogan First in Flight on its car number-plates. Whether you accept the Wrights’ claim to be first in flight, or some other contender (of which there are several), in a sense could depend on what is meant by manned, aeronautical flight. Orville Wright’s first successful if brief powered flight was by no measure the first human flight in history. The genesis of intentional manned air travel can be traced back to the late 18th century with the advent of large hot air balloons (starting with the Montgolfier brothers of France in 1783).
As well, in the 30 years preceding Kitty Hawk, there was a host of aviation pioneers experimenting with monoplanes, biplanes, box-kites and gliders including, 1874: Félix du Temple; 1894: Hiram Maxim; 1894: Lawrence Hargrave; 1898: Augustus Moore Herring [B Kampmark, ‘Wright Brothers: Right or Wrong?’, Montréal Review (April 2013]. These flights however were either pre-power ones, or if motorised, they have been largely discredited as having been either unsustained, uncontrolled or as at the least not sufficiently controlled [P Scott, The Shoulders of Giants: A History of Human Flight to 1919].
G A Whitehead was a German migrant (born Gustave Weisskopf) living in Connecticut who started experimenting with gliders (variations on the glider prototype design developed by aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal) in the mid-1890s, at a time when Wilbur and Orville were still making and repairing bicycles in Dayton, Ohio. The case in support of the flight made by Whitehead on 14 August 1901 in what must be noted was an improbable-looking, bat-shaped, engine-propelled glider at Fairfield near Bridgeport, was first taken up in 1935 (in an article in an industry magazine, Popular Aviation, entitled ‘Did Whitehead Precede Wright In World’s First Powered Flight?’)回. Whitehead’s claim lay dormant until the 1960s when army reservist William O’Dwyer, took up the German-American engine-maker’s cause and did his upmost to promote his “flying machine”.
Critics of the Institute believe that the Smithsonian’s indebtedness to the Wrights’ legacy (the fear of losing the historic Flyer to the estate executors) prevents it from recognising the merits of Whitehead’s pioneering achievement irrespective of the weight of evidence put forward [J Liotta, ‘Wright Brothers Flight Legacy Hits New Turbulence’, www.news.nationalgeographic.com]. Clearly this is a powerful disincentive to the Smithsonian objectively assessing the merits and new evidence for any rival claims to the Wrights (not just Whitehead’s) which may be unearthed.
The credence given to the Wright brothers’ claim to be the first successful flyers should perhaps come with an asterisk, signifying it as heavily qualified, as in David Schneider’s all-inclusive, tongue-in-cheek description: “First in Sustained, Piloted, Controlled, Powered, Heavier-than-air Flight of Lasting Technological Significance” [ibid].
Did any of the documented early flights per se achieve “sustained and controlled flight”? Human conquest of the sky didn’t happen in one quantum leap, surely it came about in a series of small, measured steps, each building on the one before. It is more meaningful to see the development of viable flying machines as something that happened incrementally, an aerodynamic puzzle put together piece-by-piece. It was an international effort, the culmination of the accumulated efforts of gifted pioneering aeronautical designers such as George Cayley, Octave Chanute, Samuel Langley, Lawrence Hargrave and Otto Lilienthal whose experiments made it possible for the Wrights and others to experiment with flight, coming closer and closer to the realisation of successful manned, powered flight.
NOW that Scotland have expressed an inclination, but not a preference, to secede from the Union with England (the UK), it would be interesting to take a gander at other secession attempts both closer to home and around the world. The impulse for or advocacy of secession by a section or part of an established, multi-ethnic nation state is a recurring feature in contemporary international relations.
The proposed colony of ‘Auralia’ – an irredentist goldfields colony
Black Swan State
The WA delegation bringing the petition to secede to London
‘Prince’ Leonard & his consort – in the ‘Principality’
De Groot’s ‘coup’
Primrose’s ceremony at the Northern Pylon
Harbour Bridge from Kirribilli (looking south)
Nor can it be said that the New Guard had any claims to be considered as a mass movement in NSW politics. NG remained fundamentally a middle class organisation, the core of its base were urban professionals and small businessmen, like Campbell himself (Cunningham, Ibid.). Unlike many other fascist/authoritarian parties in Europe, it lacked for significant working class participation (Moore, op.cit.). Moreover, geographically, the New Guard was very limited in scope. It was confined almost entirely to one state, NSW, and even more, was essentially a Sydney metropolitan phenomena with only around 3,000 members from rural areas outside of Sydney (Cunningham, ibid.).
