Sepia Saturday 27 : The Big Match

It is Saturday, so it must be Sepia Saturday. It is the day of England's first match in the 2010 World Cup, and therefore the logical choice of subject has to be football. And note I say "football" and not "soccer" : I have never quite understood why we need to apply such an uncomfortable nickname in order to distinguish the beautiful game from a raft of other games that may involve balls but have little to do with feet. I suspect our friends in the USA are responsible for this, and let's face it, what do they know about football? (Note to myself : remember to come back and edit this bit if things don't go according to plan in the game this evening).

My picture - which is taken from the collection handed down by my great Uncle Fowler - shows the local football team in Longtown, Cumbria. I have carefully looked at the faces to see if there are any I recognise from the bowling photograph (See my Sepia Saturday 25 and 26). If I examine as many group photographs as I can from Fowlers' collection and narrow down the common denominator from all of them, I might finish up with a picture of Fowler. But there again, I might just settle down and watch the game tonight instead.

If you are not a football fan you can always spend your time looking at all the other wonderful Sepia Saturday posts which are listed on the Sepia Saturday site. If you are a football fan - there is always half time.

ADDENDUM
On re-reading the above post I realise that I might have given the mistaken impression that (a) England can play football, and (b) the United States of America can't. If that is the case, I would like to sincerely apologise and state that, in future, I am quite happy to refer to the game as "soccer"

This And That And Patriotic Prejudice

Another end of the week round-up of miscellaneous jottings - the accumulated fluff at the bottom of the drawer of my subconscious mind.

THIS will be my penultimate post for a week or more (there will be a Sepia Saturday Post tomorrow). On Monday, the Good Lady Wife, Amy The Dog and myself set out for a tour of the country something in the style of the Royal progresses of old (you stay with a succession of friends, eating their food, drinking their booze and slaughtering their game) (the last bit has been included for veracity's sake - I am glad to say that Veracity will not be coming with us and therefore no wild animals will be injured in the making of this holiday). The first couple of nights we are staying at a pub in Dorset called "The Fox". I will do a full write-up on my return along with a complete set of tasting notes on Hall and Woodhouse beers. So after tomorrow I won't be around for a bit, but I will be back on-line on Monday the 21st.

THAT means that I will be away for the first week of the World Cup. I realise that a third of you out there will not even know that the World Cup is about to take place in South Africa and another third will know but not care. But I belong to the third that will be engrossed by this festival of the beautiful game and - wherever I may be - I will try and see as many of the games as possible. I have tried to be cynical and adopt an intellectual dismissal of football, but it is no good : I love watching the game and if it is being played well I am not too bothered who might be playing it.

Having said that, I will still be supporting England, although that support will be tinged by a fair degree of realism. We should progress to the knock out stage but with the England team, who knows. I would like to say that we have a good team this time around, but you know us English we don't like to blow our own trumpet in case we are accused of PATRIOTIC PREJUDICE. Step up to the microphone Michael Flanders and Donald Swann.

Theme Thursday : Candy

The trouble is, I have never been quite sure exactly what candy is. Oh, I know it is one of those American words - like "cookie" - which can be applied to a gamut of things which are pleasant to consume, but what is the "proper" English equivalent of the word "candy"? Is it "sweets", or "chocolates", or "confectionery" or what? Not wanting to pick a fight with my American readers - I will postpone that pleasure until Saturday - I will adopt my usual cautious approach and stick (pun intended) to the type of candy any child raised on the traditional British seaside holiday will be familiar with - candy floss.

Photograph from the LIFE Magazine website

Now I realise that, once again, we are in the difficult sphere of semantics : what we call candy floss, you over there, call cotton candy. But what I am talking about is that wonderfully fluffy, sticky, sweet stuff that gets stuck to your chin (or, trust me, even worse, stuck to your mustache) and tastes absolutely delicious. As a child, I was so attracted to candy floss that I seriously considered saving up my spending money and investing in a candy floss machine. Having seen how such a small amount of sugar could be easily translated into such a large amount of candy floss, the desire for a candy floss machine was stimulated equally by my growing entrepreneurial spirit as my sweet tooth. 

Never having had the time in my youth to acquire such a machine, and stimulated by the theme this week, I have decided to try and bring my plan to fruition now. Not having the necessary financial liquidity to buy a machine, I will make one myself. I discovered the rather wonderful Google Patents site on which you can access over 7 million American patent and trademark applications. Making such a repository of quirky, fascinating and sometimes bizarre information available is something the Internet does so well and Google has been in the forefront of pushing back the boundaries of free information. I discovered that a patent had been granted - back in 1931 - for a candy floss making machine, and therefore detailed, and alas, rather complicated drawings, were available.

A more general Google Books search came up with an even better solution to my problems : an article in the October 1914 edition of Popular Mechanics entitled "How To Make A Candy Floss Machine". As the article says, "The device for making candy floss consists of ordinary things that can be had in any home, and usually a boy has a battery motor of some kind that will furnish the power". But here again, I run into a problem. As most people will know, I am not particularly mechanically gifted. If ever a boy didn't have a battery motor of some kind, it is this boy.

But a solution could be on the horizon. As I said yesterday, next week we will be visiting our good friend Jane and Edwin. Now Edwin is an expert on such things as Bunsen burners and battery motors. I will take a copy of the Popular Mechanics article with us, and whilst I am taking photographs of his wife for yesterdays' project, he can build me a candy floss machine. Edwin, if you are reading this, be warned.

William Brigham And A Handsome Woman

I am still acquiring a small collection of Carte de Visites and my latest acquisition is a picture of a rather handsome Victorian lady taken by William D Brigham at his studios in Scarborough. I have no idea of who the lady is, but half the fun of collecting old photographs is not knowing who they are, where they came from, or where they are going. As for a date, I would guess the photograph was taken during the golden age of CdV's - the 1880s. By 1890, Brigham had moved his studio from the Esplanade (on the sea front) to Westborough (in the centre of town). I have been able to find a few examples of Brigham's work on the Internet - mainly a photograph he took of a young Edith Sitwell in the early 1890s.

Looking at the face in the photograph above, I am half tempted to try a "then and now" approach to it. A modern day photograph using a similar pose, a little bit of Photoshop magic .... the results might be interesting. I will have to see if I can get anyone to sit in the right pose. I will report back.

Postcard Of The Week : High Street Leicester

My postcard of the Week resulted from a random dip into my postcard box. It shows the junction of High Street and Silver Street in Leicester in, I would guess, about 1905. I don't know Leicester at all well - I only visited the city for the first time a couple of years ago - but a quick review of Google Earth reveals that much of the city centre has been rebuilt during the last fifty years or so, However, I did manage to find a photograph taken from almost exactly the same spot as the 1905 one, which suggests that the one part of the city centre that has retained its buildings and its architectural style is this particular part of the High Street. I tried to trace the history of Hogget Son and GGH but I could find no information on either. Hopefully someone familiar with Leicester will add a comment and let us know what happened to both shops.

Photograph by NED TRIFLE. Downloaded from Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence and used with thanks.

Project Bull : The Fall Of Samuel Gledhill

In one of my posts last week I spoke of the LibriVox project which is doing such a fine job in bringing copyright free audio recordings to the internet. It is, of course, a close relative of Project Gutenberg which has been making copyright free e-books available for many years and now has a library of over 30,000 available. I have long believed that the internet has an almost revolutionary ability to free information from the chains of ownership, and I fully support the work of these great projects. As well as providing a platform for the distribution of copyright-free material, the internet also provides a wonderful resource by which we can all contribute to this task with the aim of creating a twenty first century equivalent of the Library of Alexandria - a repository of every aspect of human life and creativity. With this in mind, I am launching Project Bull (named after the John Bull printing kits we used to play with as children - they probably called them something different outside Britain!) which is like Project Gutenberg but on a much smaller and more parochial scale. 

The idea behind Project Bull is that you add something new to the collective digital depository of mankind not so much by creating it yourself, but by transcribing or reprinting something that was created long ago - and is therefore outside the mean grasp of the copyright lawyers. We can leave the digitization of Dickens or Turner to others who have the resources available to undertake such important tasks. But we can all help ensure that the parochial, the seemingly insignificant, and the oblique is saved from crumbling into the dust of obscurity by helping it make that once-in-a-lifetime jump into the digital age. Once there - once on the internet, on your blog, my blog or anybody else's blog - Dame Google will index it and the digital library doors will be thrown open.

As an example, here is my first Project Bull contribution. It is nothing more than a 23 line article from the December 1862 edition of the Brighouse and Rastrick Chronicle. It tells the sad tale of Samuel Gledhill of West Vale. To the best of my knowledge this article has never found its way onto the internet before. And now, thanks to Project Bull, it is available to everyone in the world!

DRINK AGAIN - On Wednesday evening, the 24th, an innkeeper named Samuel Gledhill, alias, "Sam o Wam's," residing at West Vale, was drinking at the Saville's Arms, Elland, which place he left at turning out time, rather the worse for liquor. He set off home alone, going along Westgate, and when he had got in the Longwall road, he stood upon the wall and pulled off his stockings and boots. At a quarter to six o'clock on the following morning, as some of Mr Phillip Kershaw's quarrymen were going to their work, they found him lying by the side of the bottom road in an almost insensible condition. It is supposed that after he had pulled off his boots and stockings, he had fallen off the wall, fancying probably he was getting into bed, and must have rolled down the hill side a distance of nearly 50 yards, and which is somewhat steep. When aroused, he pathetically requested that he might be permitted to lie undisturbed a little longer; but a conveyance was procured in which he was removed to his residence. Mr Gledhill's injuries are of a very serious nature; is left arm is fractured in two places, and several of his ribs are broken.

SOURCE : BRIGHOUSE AND RASTRICK CHRONICE (WEST YORKSHIRE) DECEMBER 1862

Sepia Saturday 26 : Staying With The Beanlands

I'm sticking with the Beanlands this week, moving on from Fowler to his brother Albert, my grandfather. The picture shows my grandmother, Kate Kellam, my grandfather, Albert Beanland, and their two children Amy (standing at the rear) and Gladys (my mother). Using this picture of Albert as a guide, I have looked back of the picture of the bowlers from last week to see if I can narrow down which might be his brother, Fowler.  Here are the various heads, with the known Beanland - Albert - on the extreme left. 

I must confess I am no closer to identifying which bowler might be Fowler : possibly the second one standing from the right ... possibly not. I need to do more digging into the Beanlands, let's hope that I come up with something more than a handful of bean seeds.

This And That And A Punnet Of Fresh Strawberries

Another end of the week round-up of miscellaneous jottings - the accumulated fluff at the bottom of the drawer of my subconscious mind.

THIS week I have been enjoying the splendid LibriVox podcasts of readings from the 1831 classic "The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H.M.S. Bounty : Its Causes and Consequences" by Sir John Barrow. For anyone not familiar with LibriVox, it is a non-commercial Foundation dedicated to making books in the public domain available in audio form free of charge on the internet. It uses a panel of volunteer readers and currently has a catalogue of over 3,000 books which can be downloaded - free of charge - in a number of ways. One way is to trust to chance and subscribe to the thrice-weekly LibriVox podcast. Here the book is chosen by the LibriVox editors and you just sit back or - if like me you are walking the dog - stride out, and enjoy listening to whatever happens to be the book of the moment. Recent choices have included such diverse fare as David Copperfield, The Decameron and The Return of Sherlock Holmes : but currently it features Barrows' book on the Mutiny on the Bounty.

THAT element of serendipity, also tends to be carried over into my reading habits in that I am a sucker for those "three for two" offers you find in bookshops. My own personal rule of thumb is to choose two books I would have bought anyway, but go for very much of a lucky dip with my third (notionally free) choice. Which explains why I am currently reading a surprisingly lucid account of the lives and times of four great Central Bankers in the period leading up to the great economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s. I am never sure what the secret of a good group biography is, but whether it is a readable style, a dusting of wider historical colour, or just the one-and-a-half times spacing between lines of print : whichever it is, Liaquat Ahamed's book seems to have it. I am not going to suggest that everyone should rush out and buy it - like salt and vinegar crisps, it might be a matter of taste - but if you ever encounter it on a three-for-the-price-of-two table, it is worth a second glance.

Is there any finer pleasure associated with this time of the year than the widespread availability of A PUNNET OF FRESH STRAWBERRIES? For readers from outside these shores I might need to explain the word punnet - a small plastic or cardboard basket used to sell or deliver a specific quantity of soft fruit - but, as far as I am concerned, the word itself is an essential component of the joys of summer strawberries. Nothing beats the ability to go into a greengrocers' shop and order a punnet of fresh strawberries. Not strawberries that have been picked two continents away, frozen and flown in by air, but strawberries that were picked in the same time zone and in the same month. Delicious.

The Old White Beare

Picture the scene if you will. It is the summer of 1588 and Britain faces the threat of naval defeat and invasion as an armada of Spanish ships sails up the English Channel and an army of 30,000 soldiers wait in the Netherlands to capitalise on the expected defeat of the British Navy. The British fleet is a rag-tag collection of old warships, privateers' galleons and rough trading vessels : not unlike the collection of little boats that would evacuate the troops from the Dunkirk beaches some 352 years later. At the heart of the British fleet are the 34 ships of the royal fleet, and the largest and most imposing of them all is the White Bear. Built in 1564, the 40 gun White Bear was seen as one of the grand old ships of the British Fleet at a time when the average life of a galleon was just 10 years. But under the command of Lord Edmund Sheffield, the White Bear played a central part in the routing of the Spanish Fleet and, in triumph, returned to port in Harwich on the 18th August. During the height of the great battle, one can almost imagine her captain gripping onto those sturdy timbers searching for the resolve to carry the battle through to a successful conclusion.

Picture the scene if you will. It is 1593 and we are in the port of Hull on the east coast of England. The country is now safe from invasion and Queen Elizabeth is secure on the throne of a country that is beginning to build a worldwide empire. The lessons of naval defense have been long learnt and the Royal Navy is renewing, re-equippping and re-building. The life of the White Bear comes to an end in the breakers' yards of Hull, where the timbers that once provided the very skeleton of the countries' salvation or now ripped from the heart of the ancient hulk. But wood was too precious to rot and to waste : there are always buyers for ships' timbers for the quality is good and the cuts are the best. One can imagine the salvage merchants appraising those timbers and thinking where they might be sold and how they might be used.

Picture the scene if you will. It is early June 2010 : a warm evening in West Yorkshire. An old blogger, his Good Lady Wife and his faithful dog decide that it is a perfect evening for a pint of foaming beer and they head to one of their favourite pubs, in the West Yorkshire village of Norwood Green. Our hero enters the bar - wife and dog having settled at one of the outside tables - to appraise the range of excellent traditional hand-pulled beers on offer. With a sense of anticipation, her runs his fingers along the ancient wooden bar top and makes his choice.

NOTE : The White Beare was originally built as a farmhouse and alehouse in 1533 on the Old Packhorse track running between Halifax and Leeds. It was rebuilt some 60 years later following a fire using timbers from the Elizabethan Galleon called ‘The White Bear’ and was renamed in honour of the ship.

This is a Theme Thursday Post. For other great Theme Thursday posts go to the Theme Thursday Blog.

The Cross-Dressing Cousins

I am often asked by non-bloggers how I decide what to write about. Do I write about what I have been doing (no, it is generally quite boring), about some great dominating theme or interest (no, there are far too many), or about the social, economic and political affairs of mankind (no, just no)? The answer, I suppose, is that it is a serendipitous process. Fellow bloggers will know what I mean, but for the chance visitor, here is an example.

I woke up this morning and had my usual glass of orange juice (Asda Freshly Squeezed Orange Juice) and slice of toast (Warburton Soft White Toasty - medium / well done setting on the toaster). Noticing that Boy Cameron will be facing his first Prime Ministers' Questions today in the House of Commons - and fighting to hold back a yawn - I begin to clear my desk of the accumulated detritus of the previous day. Amongst a pile of papers that seem to have appeared from nowhere I find an unused postcard. It is not a particularly old postcard and it has never been used. It is neither colourful nor particularly pretty. It shows two cousins having a bit of a giggle by dressing up in each others clothes.

The two cousins concerned are George Frederick Ernest Albert of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (known to his subjects as King George V) and Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov (known by some of his subjects as "Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias" and others as a hapless tyrant). The picture was taken in Berlin in 1913 whilst they were visiting another of their cousins, Friedrich Wilhelm Victor Albert (known by everyone as Kaiser Bill). The two chaps thought it would be a bit of a wheeze to dress up in each others uniforms and thus it is Czar Nicholas on the left wearing the British uniform and King George on the right wearing the Russian uniform. Within just a few years of the photograph being taken, the world would change radically for everyone concerned. Having abdicated, Kaiser Bill was living in exile in the Netherlands. King George was still on the throne, but he was King of a country that had been socially and economically broken by the Great War. And his cousin Nicholas was long dead : the victim of a bloody execution in a cellar in an obscure palace in Yekaterinburg. Recent research suggests that the British Government were willing to allow the Czar and his family to come to exile in Britain (a plan the Bolsheviks supported), but King George, fearing some form of political backlash against his own family, vetoed the suggestion.

It just goes to show .... well it just goes to show something. I need to take the dog for a walk now, so I will ponder just what it goes to show whilst we are out on our walk.

Variations On A Set Of Victorian Playing Cards

The Bank Holiday is behind us and normality settles around me like a comfort blanket. Routine can be a mesmerising siren: promising safety in place of fear, solace in place of hope. But blink your eyes and she becomes a monster, dripping tedium from her venomous fangs.

Begone, dull care!

I prithee, begone from me

Begone, dull care!

You and I shall never agree

Long time hast thou been tarrying here

And fain thou wouldst me kill

But in faith, dull care

Thou never shall have thy will.

(TRADITIONAL SONG)

If the pleasure of success can be calculated in units 

(let us call them triumphs)

And an average successful enterprise equals 10 triumphs

How can we calculate the value of a near miss,

A second best, A nearly caught?

We can subtract from the 10 triumphs of success

6 for failure, 2 for disappointment, and 1 for anger

Which leaves but 1

Which goes to show

If at first you don't succeed .... stop trying.