Messengers by Appointment to Her Majesty – the “Silver Greyhounds” Service

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
International Relations, Regional History, Society & Culture

The Brits are nothing if not traditionalists. Take one of the primest examples of their fidelity to tradition – royalty! Putting aside the interregnum of the Cromwellian Commonwealth (1649-1660) as an aberration, the people of GB have faithfully stuck with the monarchy as the preferred form of rule for the long haul. Kings or queens have ruled Britain, or at least England, since the Anglo-Saxon King Egbert unified various regions of England and Wales around 830 to be recognised with the title Bretwalda (“ruler of the British/Anglo-Saxons”) [‘Kings and Queens of England & Britain’, (Ben Johnson), Historic UK, www.historic-uk.com].CD757CBF-70AD-4CB8-A409-6FB4056AF14B

Despite the small island in the North-eastern Atlantic not having been the most ‘united’ of kingdoms of late (witness Brexit, Scottish secessionist moves, etc), the British monarchy still possesses a very healthy pulse indeed. There remains a British queen, though now a nonegenerian, one with a clearly defined line of succession to follow her. The contemporary Windsors seem determined to uphold the prediction of Egyptian king, Farouk I, who upon being deposed from the Alawiyya dynastic throne in 1952, remarked with graveyard humour: “Soon there will be only five kings left…the king of spades, the king of clubs, the king of hearts, the king of diamonds…and the king of England!”

1E0ABF7E-EF1E-49C3-89CC-272D489F10A1So given that Britain has the stability of a long-reigning queen and the institution of monarchy is firmly rooted in Anglo-Celtic soil, then it should not really come as a surprise to discover that the queen retains a team of  “secret mission” messengers who are at her beck and call 24/7. The title queen’s (or king’s) messenger does have an anachronistic ring to it – when you conjure up images of darkly-clad couriers  (perhaps spies), secretly scurrying from castle to castle across Medieval Europe on royal business.

A long tradition of HM service 

The role of messengers as part of the English monarch’s contact network appears to stretch back a whole millennium. The 13th century monarch, King John, younger brother of the more flamboyantly heroic Richard the Lion-Heart, apparently used his messengers for less orthodox missions (such as transporting part of the dismembered body of Norwich traitor Henry Roper). The earliest recorded King’s Messenger was one John Norman, appointed by Richard III in 1485 to deliver his private letters [Marco Giannangeli, ‘Queen’s Messengers face the axe, heroes who resisted all tyrants, honeytraps and pirates’,  Daily Express (UK), 05-Dec-2015, www.dailyexpress.co.uk].

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‘Silver Greyhounds’

The royal messengers are colloquially known as “silver greyhounds”, a name bestowed on them by the Stuart king Charles II who to aid their identification at their scheduled destinations, gave each of his messengers one greyhound figurine  which he had broken off from a silver breakfast platter [’The Silver Greyhound – The Messenger Service’, (Keith Mitchell), 25-Mar-2014, (History of government blog), www.history.blog.gov.uk ]. These days the tradition continues with the appointed QMs being issued with silver greyhound badges or tie-clips.

After the establishment of the British Foreign Office in 1782, the role of the King’s Messenger took on an enhanced importance, and from 1795 with the resumption of war with France, a greater hazard for the couriers. Journeying through enemy France on secret mission was especially frought with danger for the messenger…one such silver greyhound, Andrew Basilico, when caught by the French, had the foresight to eat the part of the paper containing the covert message to ensure the integrity of the message [‘Queen’s Messenger’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

In the 19th century royal messengers could claim expenses for their journeys on behalf of the Crown. Some canny messengers supplemented their earnings on the side by selling the empty seat in their carriage (a practice the government tried – albeit unsuccessfully – to outlaw in the 1830s) [Mitchell, loc.cit.].

In the 20th century with East-West political tensions on the rise, KMs and QMs continued to play an important role against a backdrop of tense Cold War espionage encounters. George Courtauld, a retired silver greyhound, in his memoirs recounts some of the hazards of smuggling the confidential messages of Queen Elizabeth through communist countries, including the tricky business of dealing with Eastern Bloc “femme fatales” (the ‘honeypots’) [Giannangeli, loc.cit.].

A QM vade mecum: apparently the book of choice for aspiring King’s and Queen’s Messengers in the 20th century  (Courtauld) ⇩

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The modern day Queen’s Messenger

QMs (officially in Whitehall protocol known as the Corps of Queen’s Messengers) in Britain today are employed by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Despite the glamourous image of the world of international spies, as portrayed in popular culture, today’s QMs live a decidedly “un-James Bondian” lifestyle, no luxury accommodation in the Bahamas, no first-class travel, nor the trappings, thrills and supposed sexual exploits of jet-setting secret agents!

A peak under the dusty sheets of the service

The QMs Corps, as with all “cloak and dagger” official organisations with a culture of high security, functions on a “need-to-know” basis. A 2015 Freedom of Information request to Whitehall did shed some light (but no insights into the inner workings) of the obscure world of QMs. The FCO communique revealed that the QMs dress in plain clothing and are not particularly well remunerated, being paid at only C4 officer scale (£25,200-£33,250); at that time the QMs were 18 in number and all males in the age range 40 to 70✴. The FCO in true intelligence protocol would “neither confirm or deny” if QMs were armed✲. The requisite skill-sets of QMs stated in the document include the capacity to travel on short notice; work overseas for extended periods; work independently or within a team; think quickly on one’s feet; and remaining calm under pressure (occasionally extreme pressure)⌽ [FCO written reply, FOI Ref: 0315-15 (27 April 2015), http://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk].

‘Queens Messenger’ (2001): a modern attempt to use the QM motif to make a James Bond style post-Cold War action flick ⇩

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Is there still a role for the Queen’s Messenger in the 21st century?

The “hands-on”, person-to-person couriering of QMs seem out of place in the world of modern state communications, a “snail mail” approach compared to the instantaneous transference of information via electronic platforms. Unsurprising then, that in recent times, whenever a critical eye is routinely turned to British government spending, the microscope fixes its gaze on the QM service – which thus far survives despite seeming to habitually “fac(e) the chop (from) cost-cutting Foreign Office mandarins…(viewed as a) “legacy of a by-gone age” [Giannangeli, op.cit.].

An uncertain new world of unsecured information

The mechanism of modernity, those same communication innovations of the online world also create the very justification for the continuance of the QM service. Today we are awash with online crime, cyber-hacking, code-breaking and security interceptions by groups like Wikileaks. In such an environment Buckingham Palace is faced with a choice – trust those who you trust, the loyal silver greyhound retainer, or take the odds on the random anonymity of the vast, ungovernable cyberspace. On an ad hoc basis the royals will continue to find merit in relying on QMs,  “safe-hands” who can get the task done seamlessly, rather than always leaving it to the quicker but potentially more chancy method of transferring the message electronically [ibid.].

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Footnote: the official case carried by the silver greyhound, presumably containing “the message”, has its own diplomatic passport and therefore cannot be opened, x-rayed or inspected by airport staff when transiting customs – although the QM himself and his personal luggage are subject to the normal airport procedures [‘Her Majesty Queen’s Messengers – History and Current Status’, (Passport-collector.com, 22-Mar-2016), www.passport-collector.com]


⍅⍆⍆⍆⍅⍅⍅⍆⍆⍆⍅⍅⍅⍆⍆⍆⍅⍅⍅⍆⍆⍆⍅⍅⍆⍆⍆⍅⍅⍅

✴ in the main, in practice QMs tend to be men and recruited from the ranks of retired army or police officers

✲ these days QMs almost certainly would never carry guns on missions. Apocryphal or not, it has been suggested that the greyhounds are however ‘armed’ with an excellent, aged bottle of Scotch on their travels [Giannangeli, op.cit.]

⌽ QMs receive core training which comprises induction, mentoring, security, IT and SAFE training

 

 

The United Fruit Company: Neocolonial Elites, Banana Monopolists and Oligarchs in the Tropical Americas, Part 1

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Economic history, International Relations, Popular Culture, Social History, Society & Culture

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 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.

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’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; [‘Vaccaro brothers’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]

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 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.

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 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

United Fruit thrives in neo-colonial conditions
UFCo 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 Wars
The 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]

The ‘Monopoly Myth’, a Review of The Monopolists

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Commerce & Business, Leisure activities, Old technology, Popular Culture, Retailing history, Society & Culture

Monopoly: (n.) a market situation where one producer (or group of producers acting in unison) controls supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted; “exclusive possession” of the commodity is customarily implicit in the term [www.businesssdictionary.com; www.en.oxforddictionaries.com]

⌖⌖⌖ ⌖⌖⌖

As a kid my favourite board game wasn’t Monopoly, it was an old Milton Bradley game called Pirate and Traveler✱, however I certainly did play Monopoly an awful lot of times growing up (and it seemed like every game went for an interminably long amount of time!). So, having clocked up that amount of wasted Monopoly game-time, I was more than mildly interested to revisit my youth via a recent book on the universal and ubiquitous board game, and even more intrigued that its author, Mary Pilon, presents a radically different take on the genesis and development of Monopoly to what hitherto was been the received orthodoxy.

f=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/image-60.jpg”> (US Patent & Trademark Office)[/capt
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! 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 with some modifications and an updated, aviation emphasis eventually morphed into a similar 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’

Remembrances of a Juvenile Bookworm: Old Street Directories I have had the Pleasure of … (Part 1)

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Literary & Linguistics, Local history, Memorabilia, Social History, Society & Culture

I had lots of old books when I was a kid growing up, but maybe only one or two books that would possibly generate the curiosity of an antiquarian✲. One of these books was given to me by my mother when I was about ten or eleven…a most unwise move on her part as it transpired.

‘1922 Wilson’s Director’

The humble but rarely spotted 1922 street directory
This book was the Sydney street directory for the year 1922, to give it it’s correct and full title, Wilson’s Authentic Director, Sydney and Suburbs 1922. This small but squat little publication (5½” x 4½”, 735pp), the original owner of which was almost certainly my carpenter-builder maternal grandfather (an early owner of a motor vehicle I believe), came into my hands in something approaching pristine condition, notwithstanding that the directory was then already more than 40 years old!

Today although I still possess it, it is an almost unrecognisable shadow of its once immaculate state! As my juvenility slowly gave way to adolescence I managed to write (things entirely unrelated to Sydney street maps), scribble and doodle on its quasi-virginal pages. Equally as bad, I haphazardly tossed the book around with such careless abandon over the decades that the front cover (a orangey-brown hard cover) became separated from the spine and eventually disappeared forever. Of course if cornered I could sheet home part of the blame for my repeated if unintended acts of vandalism to my parents who showed such egregiously bad judgement in trusting such a historically valuable tome to a ten-year-old Visigoth in the first place! But ultimately mine was the hand that caused the damage…I suppose if I was scratching round to find any compensating factors, I might say that at the very least no one can accuse me of neglecting my parent’s gift. Far from it! As a “child-distractor” Wilson’s Street Director performed yeoman’s service! I certainly made extensive, if not good, use of it.

The directory maps
The maps of each area of Sydney are neatly and clearly drawn by hand, but lack the computerised preciseness and uniformity of a map today…the cartographers in an effort to make the street names stand out by using large, bold type, have the effect of some disproportionality in the maps…streets look a bit out of alignment with each other (refer also to Eastwood below). Moreover, a critical flaw of the maps is the absence of a distance guide.

Curiously there are some variances in the kinds of type-face used in different maps, some use a Gothic font in contrast to the classic style. ◀ The Redfern-Darlington map at left differs from the type used in most maps. On a few seldom occasions maps make reference to the traditional, nineteenth century British land concept of parishes (eg, the Parish of Gordon)…this seems extraneous as the maps and the book largely follow a division by municipalities.

Gordon Rd – in the days before the upgrade to a highway

Very many of the street names that were current then survive to this day, although with some surprising little twists – the Pacific Highway, the seminal road leading north from the harbour bridge out of Sydney, was then called Gordon or Lane Cove Road. After Wahroonga it becomes Peat’s Ridge Road. Church Street, Parramatta, traditional haunt of car yards, was at the time alternately called Sydney Road.
Similarly Liverpool Road, starting from Parramatta Road, bears the alternative name “Great Southern Road” on the map (now the Hume Highway). The Princes Highway, the longest road in South-east Australia, is not to be seen! Curiously some suburbs or parts of suburbs are not shown on the maps at all!

The colliery (deepest mine shaft ever sunk in Aust.) in the 1940s (still operating at that time)

The suburb descriptors
One of the most interesting parts of the directory are the brief summaries of individual suburbs. Newtown is described as “thickly populated suburb adjoining the city” (well, no change here!), but its “numerous works and factories” have made way for the suburb’s relatively recent gentrification of modern living spaces☸. St Peters, just to Newtown’s south, is noted in the directory as being “for years the chief brick-making centre for the city” (these days the remaining, redundant kilns and chimneys are a historical curio within the undulating, expansive Sydney Park). Balmain, aside from its “fine public buildings” is “noteworthy as being the location of the deepest coal shaft in the Southern World – 3000 ft” (Balmain Colliery, corner of Birchgrove Rd and Water St, Birchgrove; an exclusive residential estate, Hopetoun Quays, today sits atop the former mine).

The Glebe

The map on page 223 details inner city Darlington (which in 1922 included the locale “Golden Grove”), then as now a suburb most approximate to the University of Sydney…the map shows that the grounds of the University had not at that time encroached onto the eastern side of City Road. The directory describes Darlington as “essentially a workers’ suburb, and being in close proximity to the City, is favoured by workers, who chiefly preside therein”.

Mascot with a racecourse where the airport should be!

Botany and Mascot are old adjoining suburbs in South Sydney. Map 151 (of Botany) and Map 405 (of Mascot) both document the existence at that time of Ascot Racecourse in Mascot…it was located on land adjacent to Botany Bay that now forms part of Sydney Airport⌽. Drummoyne is “a picturesque suburb which has made rapid strides since the tram was opened in 1902”.

Killara on Sydney’s leafy North Shore earns itself a stellar wrap that would make the burghers of the suburb today glow with pride: “(Killara) may justly claim to be both attractive and select. There are many substantial residences, the homes of the well-to-do citizen, and altogether the dwellings are of a superior class” (but not entirely exclusive because prestigious Hunters Hill also had “well-to-do citizens”).

East Subs’ residential paradise

Not to be outdone by the North Shore, the Eastern Suburbs gets even more of a ringing endorsement…the directory goes overboard with Vaucluse, and especially Watson’s Bay, lavishly portrayed as a “romantic looking and historical region, (standing) perhaps highest on the list of Australian ‘beauty spots’ “. Waxing lyrical, the writer ends with a frenzy of capitalisation extolling “the FORTIFICATIONS, LIGHTHOUSES, LIFEBOAT, SIGNAL STATION, and the WORLD-FAMED GAP, near the scene of the wreck of the ill-fated Dunbar” (a disastrous shipwreck occurring off South Head in 1857).

The other side of Strathfield municipality

Strathfield, seven miles west of the GPO, was lauded for its “numerous magnificent and substantially built dwellings (today we wouldn’t hold back, we’d simply say ‘mansions’), the homes of the wealthy citizen”. Strathfield’s maps include the locale of ‘Druitt Town’, now called South Strathfield. The map on page 583 includes the less salubrious side of the municipality (the Government Abattoirs and Rookwood Necropolis), a striking contrast with the world of Strathfield’s croquet-playing set.

Eastwood map, p235: site of future MQ University just to the south of Lane Cove River

On the other side of Parramatta River, Ryde (which in 1922 encompassed present-day West Ryde, North Ryde and Macquarie Park) is described as a “famous fruit-growing district on the Parramatta River”. The present location of Macquarie University in the northern reaches of the Eastwood district (set on generous acreage between Marsfield and North Ryde) was in earlier days the site of largely Italian market gardens and (citrus) orchards, interspersed incongruously with a greyhound racing track. An interesting feature shows a preponderance of street names around the present site of the campus with a martial theme – named after overseas battles (or campaigns) including Balaclava, Waterloo, Crimea, Culloden, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Sebastopol, Khartoum. When Talavera Rd was added later, this brought the number of streets commemorating the Crimean War alone to four.

Mosman, still today a suburb whose affluence makes real estate agents salivate at the prospect of dollar symbols followed by multiple zeros, was ever thus the sought-after destination for the cashed-up aspirational denizen…”(a thriving suburb) situated on a charming arm of Port Jackson…on the abrupt sides nestle red-tiled villas in many quaint styles of architecture…but a few years since the tramway rendered its beauties easily accessible to city men”, etc.⊡

Dee Why

Freshwater (on the Northern Beaches) is depicted as being a “pleasant one-half mile walk” from the Brookvale tram stop at Curl Curl, (comprising) “permanent camps and excellent surf-bathing”. Similarly, close-by Dee Why, reflecting its use as a vacation destination in the day, is a “delightful and charmingly situated sea-side resort (with) a lot to be proud of” – one factor of which presumably is the safety of its beach of which “drowning casualties are up to now unknown”.

Manly, by 1922 already long-established as a “must go-to” day trip for Sydneysiders, is described as a “delightful (ferry) trip down the harbour”…the writer is unrestrainedly fulsome in praise of its virtues, “Few resorts offer such a diversity of attractions – bathing in surf and baths, riding, driving, cycling, and motoring; while golf, cricket, football, la crosse, rifle, rowing, sailing, tennis, croquet, bowling clubs are all in full swing. Open air entertainments and band concerts nightly, and the usual attractions of a popular watering place”.

Vying with Manly for the beachside glamour stakes (then as now) was Bondi (subsumed under Waverley in the directory). Bondi Beach, in the words of Wilson’s, was equipped with baths and municipal “surf sheds” which accommodated 4500 men and 1500 women (clear evidence that 1922 was indeed a pre-feminist era devoid of the slightest pretence to gender equality!)…the (beach) park, the writer went on, “remodelled with the construction of the sea wall” was “now a rendezvous for natural pleasure seekers”. Beach accessible suburbs are always in demand with homebuyers, as underlined in the description of Maroubra – “a favourite place for surf bathers and is advancing with lightning rapidity and they are building fast there” (no hyperbole spared!)

South Kenso & Daceyville

Page 513 illustrates how much can change over lengthy periods of time. In 1922 Sydney’s second university, the University of New South Wales, was still 27 years away, but the future UNSW site was then occupied by Kensington Racecourse✾ and Randwick Park. Nearby was Randwick Asylum, now the Prince of Wales Hospital, and the Randwick Rifle Range, further south on Avoca St, is no more. Anzac Pde runs through the present suburb of Kingsford which in 1922 was called South Kensington with a small part of this suburb forming the locale of Lilyville.

Penrith & the (“world-class”) Nepean

Even suburbs located far the city CBD were given a positive spin by Wilson’s – Penrith, 34 miles from the GPO is described as “the centre of a fertile agricultural and fruit-growing district” only one hour’s journey by rail. The township is “well lighted with electricity and excellent water supply”. Among its attractions are the Nepean River, “world famed for its championship sculling courses, which is recognised by many as the best course in the world” and beautified by its “rugged grandeur of mountain scenery (which draws in) tourists and camping parties”. It also offers short day trips to the “delightful villages” of Mulgoa, Wallacia and Luddenham for shooting and fishing.

The township of Hornsby in the north-west of Sydney is the “centre of a prosperous district”. And with its high elevation (594 ft above sea level), Wilson’s Directory talks up Hornsby as a “metropolitan sanitarium”. The country of its environs “abound with charming drives and magnificent scenery”. Galston is “seven miles north by good metal road” (the “famous Galston ZIG-ZAG”).

Hurstville is depicted as “the centre of a large and progressive district…charmingly situated nine miles south by rail from Sydney”. It includes Mortdale, a township of recent growth, most of the property owned and occupied by the working class”. Also within the Hurstville municipality, the book refers to the suburb of Dumbleton – now called Beverley Hills (conspicuous today for its plethora of restaurants favouring Cantonese Hong Kong and Guangzhou cuisines).

The cover of my edition is long gone but the 1926 edition is very approx.

Pertinent omissions
There is an arbitrariness to the scope of the 1922 directory, it doesn’t extend to most peripheral districts like Liverpool, Blacktown, Campbelltown and Windsor/Richmond, all of which are included within the perimeters of contemporary greater Sydney. This perhaps provides a pointer to the trajectory of the early development patterns and communications of Sydney. Significant population and urban infrastructure reached districts like Penrith and even to parts of the Blue Mountains before it got to Windsor for instance☉.

‘ Gregory’s’ 1st street directory of Sydney 1934

PostScript: Swallowed up by Gregory’s expanding empire of streets? ‘Gregory’s’ before there was a Gregory’s?
In 1934 Gregory’s Street Directory (of Sydney Suburbs and Streets) made its debut, it was not long after this the Wilson’s Street Directory discontinued its annual publication and went out of business. I haven’t been able to ascertain for sure but I suspect a correlation between the two…it is quite feasible that the demise of Wilson’s was linked to the rise of Gregory’s, the latter becoming a household name in metropolitan street directories (and until the advent of GPS an unwaveringly constant companion of the majority of automobile glove-boxes).

Footnote: Taking the Eastwood map (above) as an example of the deficiencies of scale of the directory’s maps, the block between Herring St and Culloden Rd bisected by Waterloo Rd, encompasses the land occupied today by the rump of the campus of Macquarie University. This is some 16 hectares in area, but due to the use of large bold fonts for streets which condenses the sizes of blocks, the area seems quite small on the map!

More nomenclature change: the maps refer to the Municipality of Prospect and Sherwood, later the council was renamed ‘Holroyd’. Prospect retains its identity as a suburb but there is no longer a ‘Sherwood’ locality.

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✲ is Wilson’s Authentic Director, Sydney and Suburbs 1922 an antiquarian book? The key words in any definition of a antiquarian book are ‘old’ and ‘rare’. The perception of ‘what is old’ is subjective and can be related to a given individual’s experience. To me (even way back when I first got hold of it) it was and is old! The quality of ‘rareness’ though might be harder to attribute to this book, short of conducting a survey of the remaining second-hand bookshops in this city (these days an increasingly less difficult task to accomplish) I have no earthly idea of how many copies there are in existence. It is certainly the only hardcopy of the publication that I have encountered in its physical state, however I am aware that multiple copies exist online in microfiche form. I suspect then that strictly speaking it probably falls short of the standard definition of antiquarian, so I am happy to go with any variation on a theme that retains that association…quasi-antiquarian, semi-antiquarian, even pseudo-antiquarian!
⌽ Mascot’s Ascot Racecourse (named after the premier horse-racing course in Britain) was the site from where the first aeroplane flight in Sydney took place (1911), [‘Ascot Racecourse, Sydney’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org]
⊡ appropriately enough to match its elite and exclusive status, Mosman, along with North Sydney, are afforded the only inset maps in “three colors” in an otherwise entirely black-and-white publication (alas these too were casualties of my cavalier treatment of the book during my juvenile years – the tricoloured inset maps of the two suburbs were torn off long ago!)
✾ the maps of the South Sydney area indicate how littered it was with racecourses in 1922…in addition to Kensington and Randwick, there were racecourses at Ascot (see below) and at Eastlakes (Rosebery Racecourse) now occupied by The Lakes Golf Course
☸ the locale of South Kingston gets a nod in the book but these days this name for part of the Newtown suburb has long fallen into disuse and is obsolete
☉ the Penrith and Windsor districts are both roughly equidistance from Sydney (moreover, Windsor was settled as early as 1791, a mere three years after the British takeover of the continent!). Blacktown’s omission is even more puzzling, being considerably closer to the GPO than Penrith!