The Age Of The Digital Warehouse and a Narrow Pair of Corsets

One of the great delights of the web at the moment is the amount of material that is being added. We have managed to get passed the stage where a large proportion of the material available was not of the type you would want your maiden aunt to see. We have also got passed the stage where large parts of the web were given over to corporate shop-windows. We have reached the age of the digital warehouse : the age when the complete written records of mankind are slowly being transferred so they are available on-line. The true delight of being around at the moment is that you can wake up each day and discover yet another treasure trove of information. For information nuts like me it is not so much like being a kid in a sweetshop as being a kid let loose in a chocolate factory.

Yesterday I discovered that the entire British parliamentary records are now available online and free of charge. Hansard is the verbatim transcripts of the proceedings of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords and the digital archives cover every day of every session from 1803 to 2005 (more recent Hansard records are available from the Houses of Parliament website). It is the historical archives which are more interesting and offer endless hours of pleasure for information drifters like me. I tested the system out by calling up the day of my birth and was well rewarded with a tabernacle full of trivia. 

There, for example was a youthful Harold Wilson (then President of the Board of Trade) explaining to Reg Sorensen MP that women could get corsets without the need of clothing coupons as long as they were less than six inches wide. A few pages later, up pops a dear old friend of mine (Lucy Middleton, then MP for Plymouth) asking why Princess Elizabeth's wedding dress was not being exhibited in her constituency. Cyril Dumpleton MP - such a splendid name - rose to his feet in indignation to ask the Education Minister why a juvenile under the age of 12 was being allowed to take part in a public performance by conducting an orchestra at the Harringay Festival. The House of Lords was engaged in more weighty stuff but with their usual efficiency they managed to give a Third Reading to the Ascot Racecourse Bill in just 12 words and adopt the William Brown Nimmo Charitable Trust (Amendment) Order in just four sweet words.

I could go on, but I won't. Loosen your six-inch corsets and go for a wander yourselves.

The Photographs Went In Two-By-Two

I always think that the Internet is the ideal medium for people to share images. Whilst there are numerous sites where you can post your latest photos, there are few where you can share archive photographs. Where they do exist, such sites all too often are infested with the "I can make money out of this" virus and carry ridiculous copyright warnings. It is therefore refreshing to discover a site dedicated to the free sharing of archive photographs between people, like me, who see old photographs as windows to the past. The site is Photo-Ark.co.uk. It is well worth a visit and well worth an extended browse.

Fat George Wyatt and The Apprentice

I was watching The Apprentice last night and noticed that one of the contestants described himself as owning a chain of ten public houses. I thought this must be a sign of the times : with the state of British pubs at the moment I suspect that you would be able to acquire a chain of ten pubs and still have change out of a fifty pound note. I launched into one of those "it wasn't like this in the good old days" rants : when I was a young man landlords looked after one pub and looked after it well.

And then this morning I was reading John Pudney's excellent history of the Courage Brewing Group when I came across the story of George Wyatt.  Towards the end of the nineteenth century the increasingly powerful brewers were beginning to establish a pattern of "tied" houses which continued for almost one hundred years. Different brewers adopted different approaches to creating the all-important "tie", the approach favoured by Courage was to use loans. Innkeepers would receive the necessary capital to develop their business from the brewery in return for an agreement to exclusively buy their beer. It was not uncommon for publicans to obtain a series of such loans in return of exclusivity agreements : one for draught beer (from, for example Courage), one for bottled beers (from, for example, Bass or Worthington) and one for spirits.

In his book, Pudney tells the story of one George Wyatt, a nineteenth century publican who was a big man in a number of ways. Physically he was a big man weighing in at over 20 stones, but he was also a sizable businessman as well, owning some fifteen public houses. He had a loan from Courage for each of his fifteen pubs and was in receipt of some £100,000 in total from the brewery (which, according to the clever little measuringworth calculator, is the equivalent of getting on for £8 million today). The brewery was understandably worried about - what today would be called - their exposure and the Directors decided to take out an endowment insurance policy on Fat George to cover themselves in case of his demise. The insurance company demanded that George should be weighed before a policy could be issued and he was told to report to the brewery for weighing. When he got there it was discovered that the brewery did not have enough weights to complete the process so a string of clerks were sent to the brewery office to carry out the heavy office ledgers to use as balances on the scale. 

It appears that, despite his size, George Wyatt survived to pay off the loans. As the owner of a chain of fifteen pubs he would have been prime material for a Victorian version of The Apprentice.

The Start Of The Book Bag

Just back from a holiday - a big thank you to Jane and Edwin and Sue for their hospitality - and immediately my mind starts planning for the next one. And the next one - a 16 day cruise around the Eastern Mediterranean - is just nine weeks away today. Once it gets less than ten weeks away I feel as though I can launch a number of pre-holiday rituals. I can start, for example, tracking the ship on the P&O webcam, just to ensure that the captain is looking after it in anticipation for my annual residency. This year we will be sailing on the Arcadia and - if the webcam is anything to go by - it is currently drifting off the coast of Dubai. I shall watch its progress over the coming weeks just to make sure it gets back in time to pick me up.

Another ritual is the annual book-bag. No cruise is complete without a bag full of books to read and the choice of the annual selection is a treasured part of the pre-cruise experience. I bought my first choice over the weekends and therefore a copy of Donna Leon's "The Girl Of His Dreams" has gone into the bag. We will be visiting Venice and therefore the latest in the splendid series featuring Commissario Brunetti makes a wonderfully apt choice. If I remember, I will try and update people on the other choices which go into the bag over the coming weeks.

Another pre-cruise ritual is that people begin to send me press cuttings highlighting lurid stories about mass outbreaks of cabin fever, pirate attacks and mechanical meltdowns. I mention this to save all those who were about to e-mail me details of the latest breakdowns and cancellations on board P&O's Aurora. I have read the stories about being stranded in Aukland harbour and having to abandon several stops in order to get back on schedule. I have read all the comments about it being a cursed ship ever since the bottle of champagne failed to break on its launch day. Having spend a memorably fine holiday on board the Aurora, as far as I am concerned it is a load of nonsense. And as for those passengers who became upset on being becalmed in the Antipodes : they should have taken a Book Bag with them.

Black Clothes For Self And Children

My trouble is that I can't stick to one thing, I'm a digital jack-of-all trades and a somewhat sad master-of-none. I know this because a long succession of people have told me so, starting with Mrs Turner in Primary School (strange, I have been thinking of her a lot recently). Well, it's got to stop. What I need is focus. Direction. I need to grow up. In future these blog postings will be on SERIOUS subjects, they will be on-message, they will be professional.

Today I would like to announce that Microsoft will finally launch the non-beta version of its new web browser, Internet Explorer 8. It has many new and advanced features including ....

Talking of browsers, I was browsing around the web the other day when I came across the Charles Booth Online Archive. Charles Booth (1840 - 1916) was an English philanthropist and social researcher best known for his recording of life in working class London at the end of the nineteenth century.  His research papers are kept at the Library of the London School of Economics and they have recently made them available via a online digital archive. Amongst the various papers are six notebooks containing transcriptions of Stepney Union casebooks, 1889-1890 which record detailed case histories of the inmates of Bromley and Stepney workhouses and of people who received outdoor relief from the union. Do yourself a favour, forget work for a minute, forget your current worries and cares, and just dip in at random and have a read of the case notes.

I turned to the first case in the first volume - that of Mary Ann Brown. In 1889 she was 48 years old and living at 112 North Street Stepney. A widow of six years, she gave birth to 16 children 5 of whom had survived. The cause of her "pauperism" is listed as the death of her husband, a lighterman, in 1883. The notes list the circumstances of poor Mary Ann Brown in shocking detail (all the more shocking because these are the original hand-written notebooks). From the money she received from her husband's Burial Club she paid £6 for his funeral, bought a mangle for £5 in order to try and support herself in the future, and with what remained "bought black clothes for self and children". When she was no longer able to support herself as a washerwoman she applied to the Poor Law Guardians for support. The various reports chart the tragic history of Mary Ann : eviction from her rented accommodation, the illness of her children, the eventual death of her youngest son Charles. Her son Robert becomes a member of "the Union Shoeblack Brigade" and two other children are taken into the workhouse. 

The notebook moves on to the next case and you never know what happens to Mary Ann. But I defy anyone to flick through the digital pages of these notebooks and not be moved. Who the hell wants to talk about Internet Explorer when there are things like this to read?

View Our House

Just tried - go to maps.google.co.uk, put in our post-code, click on 'street view' and with a bit of tweaking you can see the front of our house. Fame at last!

An Averagely Envoweled Handsome Celt

Not sure how, but the other day I was re-directed to a site called "Is This Your Name". In ways which are beyond me the site already knew my name was Alan Burnett and it went on to supply me with some wonderful information I had never known before (not only had I not known the information, I didn't realise I wanted to know), But on the understanding that information is empowerment, I an now empowered by the following series of facts:

Top 5 Facts for this Name:

1. 36% of the letters are vowels. Of one million first and last names we looked at, 47.7% have a higher vowel make-up. This means you are averagely envoweled.
2. In ASCII binary it is... 01000001 01101100 01100001 01101110 00100000 01000010 01110101 01110010 01101110 01100101 01110100 01110100
3. Backwards, it is Nala Ttenrub... nice ring to it, huh?
4. In Pig Latin, it is Alanway Urnettbay.
5. People with this first name are probably: Male. So, there's a 98% likelihood you sweat just thinking of the price of shaver blades.

Name Origin and Meaning:

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Forename:  Origin: Celtic Meaning: Handsome

3 Things You Didn't Know:

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1. Your personal power animal is the Cynomolgus Monkey
2. Your 'Numerology' number is 2. If it wasn't bulls**t, it would mean that you are supportive, diplomatic, analytical, and play well with others. A team-player, you seek peace and harmony in a group.
3. According to the US Census Bureau°, 0.204% of US residents have the first name 'Alan' and 0.0239% have the surname 'Burnett'. The US has around 300 million residents, so we guesstimate there are 146 Americans who go by the name 'Alan Burnett'.

So now you know. Kind regards from Nala T Tenrub

Blogged Up Again

Two years ago I introduced a new phrase into the vocabulary of bloggers. To be "all blogged up" meant that one had managed to update all of one's blogs on the same day. It is to be at one with the world, the blogging equivalent to putting your house in order. Two years later I can now announce that for the second time I am "all blogged up". There is nothing left to achieve today. Might as well go to bed.

Ink And Paper And A Bus Journey

In the early 1990s I had an office in the back room of a library. We were setting up a European Information and Economic Intelligence Unit at the time and someone within the Council decided that a suitable location for it would be in the back room of the Public Library. As the European Information and Economic Intelligence Officer (yes, I was able to answer the phone by saying EIEIO) I argued against a library-based office, saying that I wanted the Unit to be paperless and I wanted the raw material to be digital rather than stuffy old ink and paper. We shared the same tea room as the Library Staff and I recall many a happy argument about the future of printed media. I even submitted a mock report at one stage to the Chief Librarian saying that it would soon be financially viable to shut all the local libraries down, sack all the staff, sell all the books, and give people a free computer and a disk drive.

Of course it didn't come about as I imagined it would do. I thought that the future of information would be disk-based and not web-based and I underestimated the pull of paper and cardboard. I also got the timescale wrong. However, eighteen years down the line, perhaps some of my predictions were not all that far off the mark. These thoughts were prompted by my need the other day to look someone up in the Dictionary of National Biography. I don't have a copy and the local library is a fair old bus ride away so I checked out - without much hope - on-line access. I found that you can take out an on-line subscription and it costs £195 per year. I was just about to leave the site - and abandon my investigation into the life of John Pudney - when I noticed a second log-in option which asked for your library card number. After a bit of experimentation I discovered that my local Kirklees Library Card entitles me to log-in free of charge. 

Further investigation revealed that my ability to access the Dictionary of National Biography forms part of something called the 24 Hour Library Service which also gives access to the full Oxford Reference Collection and a powerful press cutting service called NewsBank. It is not just my own Local Authority that has this kind of access : most local authorities throughout the country have similar arrangements which allow people to access powerful on-line sources of information via noting more than their library card number.

It's not ink and paper, I know, but it beats a half-hour bus journey any day of the week.

Desert Island Smells

There is no better way of spending a rainy day than a nice game of Desert Island Smells. The game is prompted by the simple question - if you were cast away on a desert island which six smells would you take with you? I have my own personal half-dozen carefully chosen, bottled and stoppered, and packed away ready for whenever I go travelling : just in case. I was reminded of one of the six on Friday afternoon when I was in Leeds with a bit of time on my hands.

Dedicated lovers of breweries will know that last November the international brewing conglomerate, Carlsberg, announced that it would shortly shut down the Tetley Brewery in Leeds. The brewery, which dates back to 1822, currently produces both Carlsberg and Tetley beer. Production of Carlsberg will, in future, be concentrated at the firms' Northampton Brewery. A question mark still hangs over the future of Tetley bitter.

So finding myself in Leeds with time on my hands I decided to walk down to the Tetley Brewery and check that it was still open. It is many, many years since I was there last and Leeds has changed beyond all measure over recent years, particularly down by the riverside. Therefore I was not all that sure which way to go, but soon found signs to Brewery Wharf and followed them down between blocks of flats and plate-glass offices. Brewery Wharf eventually came in site but it was nothing more than a collection of hotels, restaurants, shops and offices gathered around one of those meaningless modern sculptures.

But I have played too many games of Desert Island Smells to stay lost for long. A quick sniff told me that the brewery - wherever it was hidden - was still open and that today was a brewing day. A few twisting passages later and the steel, glass and concrete gave way to a majestic brewery. If only it was the offices and flats they were pulling down and not the brewery. Soon, very soon, this part of Leeds will not look the same, nor will it smell the same.

New mobile

Yesterday I gave into pressure I should have a mobile phone - a Nokia 2630 (pictured above) - so that Jane could use our old 6230i to call me should we both be out of reach of a land-line. (Camera in the 2630 is low quality and besides I can only download pictures using blue-tooth which we don't have.)

So I spent a happy afternoon trying to find out how to set everything for ease of use. Quite tricky to run check tests because in our house the signal is very dubious and comes and goes.....

What few people could possibly know is that I have to chuckle at the way the buttons do different things according to the number of pushes within a time limit, or do different things if you hold them down, because a very long time ago when black electronic chips were only just becoming available in places like Harwell I was student-poor but had this idea to fit my room with dimmable lights.... and to cut the number of switches and wiring cores realised I could use just a push button with two wires if my electronics counted how many times you pushed it within a time limit. Exactly the same idea so many devices now use. And now such very old history. (Sometimes I very much feel my age....)

Now, there's a nice logical problem with Jane's plan... we have to remember to have both phones switched on and in a suitable accessible pocket. And the 2630 is so tiny I can quite see I won't even know where it is unless I carefully tell my personal computer to be aware.... and that's becoming increasingly blocked by all the things I should be trying to remember.

Which reminds me we have visitors due not so very far away and at the moment the bed is covered in boxes I didn't bother to squirrel away at the time. But I could mobile them, now, - the people, not the boxes - if I had any idea of their mobile numbers - which I don't. And if I walked out the house because otherwise it's quite likely there's no signal. (These practical trivia are everything. )