In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Irish intellectuals tried to forge an Irish cultural identity distinct from being British by adopting Irish names, the use of the Irish language, and the use of the Gaelic alphabet, as distinct from the normal English/Latin alphabet.
Based on the typefaces used in the first printed Gaelic books in Scotland, it harked back to the Celtic uncial script used in early manuscripts.
Other than in the names of restaurants and pubs, it is little seen now, but was once common in Ireland on street signs and fingerposts, as well as being used in the pre-decimal currency as in the Percy Metcalfe designed half penny
It’s a postcard from 1901 between two well known Irish intellectuals of the time (the author is Padraig O’Seaghdha, a noted writer and Irish langauge campaigner) listing terms in Gaelic for various diseases horses were prone to – you will need to click on the link to see the reverse of the postcard on the NLI’s site, but the Irish langauge term is given in Gaelic script, and the definition in English.
However, what struck me was the way that the address combined both scripts, the name of the addressee given in Irish script, and the rest in normal English handwriting of the time, as the writer of the card perhaps did not expect the post office staff to be able to read Gaelic script…
An interesting example this, neatly showing a fusing of technologies – a late nineteenth century postcard, dated 25 November 1899, addressed to W H Scott, Engineer, Casterton VIC.
As you would expect form the period the postcard is hand addressed in what looks to be iron gall ink.
Flip it over and you see something else
The message is in typescript and looks to have been typed using an indelible ink ribbon, or at least one that used an aniline based ink rather than the more usual carbon based inks used at the time.
Hicks Atkinson and Sons was an upmarket department store in Melbourne (I first came across Hicks Atkinson while documenting the contents of Dow’s Pharmacy in Chiltern for the National Trust where I found an advertising flyer among the ephemera in a drawer in the pharmacy.)
1940s Hicks Atkinson advertising flyer
William Henry Scott was the shire engineer for Glenelg shire. Originally from Scotland, he lived for a time in Omaru in New Zealand before moving to Victoria in 1890. Voter registration records show him as living in Casterton at the time this postcard was sent.
One of his sons, also William Henry Scott, served with the Light Horse in what was then Palestine and eventually rose to the rank of Brigadier.
Casterton is a small town in the far west of the wheat growing area of Victoria, almost on the border of South Australia, and is notable for the number of women that signed the suffrage petition in 1891, as well as claiming to be where the kelpie breed of Australian working dog originated.
a copy of ‘Psalms and Hymns’ published by James Nesbit and Co.
James Nesbit never seem to have put publication dates on the religious material they published, but as this is an Australian edition printed and published by arrangement with George Robertson in Melbourne, we can tentatively date it to the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
The book has obviously had a hard life, the spine is detaching and it has been scribbled on in pencil. Devotional items such as this are quite common and their real value is in the names (and sometimes the date) that the owner wrote on them, as it shows that they were in the area.
In this case Edina House, which is potentially interesting.
Edina House is a large Victoria mansion in Sydney, built in the nineteenth century by Ebenezer Vickery who made a fortune manufacturing boots for goldminers and others.
Vickery donated the house to the Methodist curch in 1919 and it became an obstetrics hospital, so the first question is, was the hymn book property of Edina House, or was it owned by a person called Edina House. Edina isn’t a very common first name in English for women, so we could quite plausibly argue for the name of the hospital than for a person.
There’s no way of telling, but as the book is graffitied by different hands it’s not impossible it originally belonged to the hospital chapel.
The left hand page, the fly leaf, is also a puzzle. It has an inscription in short hand, in fact it has the same inscription, first written in a confident hand and then repeated in a less confident hand
Shorthand is of course a dead skill, but in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century it was a valuable skill to take notes at speed, used by secretaries, journalists, and for transcripts of parliamentary debates and court sessions.
However, it didn’t look quite right – just looking at the image and comparing it to Pitman and Gregg shorthand (the two most common shorthand systems in Australia in the early twentieth century) it simply looked different.
In fact, of the various examples of shorthand systems I could find online it looked more like Yiddish shorthand than anything else.
I did post a query to Mastodon to see if anyone recognised it, something which attracted quite a bit of attention, but despite a general consensus it was shorthand, no one could identify it definitively.
One respondent did suggest that it might be Teeline, a system popular with journalists. Unfortunately, Teeline only came on the scene in the late sixties, which was possibly a bit too late.
I was talking to J about the problem, and she immediately said that it looked like Dacomb, a system that she had learned in school.
Dacomb was an alternative shorthand system developed by Beatrice and Clara Dacomb in Melbourne in the 1930s. Dacomb, a phonetic based system like both Gregg and Pitman became very popular in Australia, but is little known outside of Australia.
All the graffiti in the hymnbook is in pencil.
This is quite significant.
Before the advent of cheap ball point pens in the nineteen fifties, a lot of the impromptu writing one sees is in pencil.
Writing in ink was hard. With a dip pen it was a laborious business. When fountain pens came on the scene at the end of the nineteenth century, things became easier, although the early models were cumbersome to refill and tended to leak spoiling clothing and bags, meaning that pencils were still used for most run of the mill writing.
Search any listing of nineteenth century postcards for sale on ebay, especially non pictorial ones, you’ll come across examples written in pencil, usually with fairly mundane messages, confirming the size of a cabinet, or ordering a bucket of nails for use on the farm.
Pencil was the go to tool for spontaneous writing, be it scribbled notes, graffiti in books or simple messages.
So, given that the shorthand is written using the Dacomb system and is written in pencil we can probably argue for a date in the 1940s or there abouts, which if nothing else shows the longevity of hymn books.
And I did ask J if she could read the message, but she said no, she’d forgotten it all once she went to Art School …
Clara Bow in 1921 – public domain via wikimedia commons
Flappers.
Usually when we hear the word flapper we think of young women in the 1920s with bobbed hair, short skirts who smoked, drank gin martinis, and might even have occasionally gone to bed with men they were not married to.
F. Scott Fitzgerald has a lot to answer for.
Over the last year or so, I’ve been researching the Friends of Russian Freedom, a loose group of early English socialists, Tolstoyans and dreamers who allied themselves with with groups of middle class escapees from Tsarist repression in pre revolutionary Russia.
In the press at the time the catch all term for Russian political exiles was ‘anarchist’ – not socialist, not communist, not Tolstoy’s utopian peasant anarchism, but just plain anarchist.
This is where we get the image of the anarchist throwing a bomb – it was often the preferred means by which revolutionists still inside Russia used to assassinate tsarist officials such as senior police officers and city governors.
Now as part of this research, I’ve been looking into the meetings of Russian political exiles in England – before World War One the British government adopted a relaxed attitude letting Russian politicals come and go provided they didn’t commit any acts of violence on British soil – something that was reciprocated on the revolutionist’s side with no less a person than Lenin vetoing terrorist acts in Britain – afterall they might need a bolthole if the victory of the proletariat didn’t eventuate.
Just to complicate matters, ‘anarchist’ was also sometimes used for activists on the left of the socialist movement in Britain. This meeting turned out on further research to be a gathering of the British radical left and not of exiled Bolsheviks and the rest of the Russian pre revolutionary alphabet soup.
But what struck me about this report from 1914 was the use of the word ‘flapper’.
Like most people I’d seen its use as a 1920s thing.
So I checked with Google’s ngram viewer to get an impression of the usage of the word
and while the peak is in the early 1920s, there’s a gradual increase in usage from 1900 onwards.
Searching Trove for mentions in newspapers produced, in among articles about duck hunting, a few articles describing flappers, or Oxford flappers, as young women who wore their hair down and affected short skirts – something outrageous in the Edwardian era
Unfortunately I’ve not been able to find a photograph of an Edwardian period flapper, so we’ll have to use our imaginations, but it’s clear it was a recognised female subculture of the time
The best I could manage was this 1913 cartoon from the Cambrian Mail saterizing older women who adopted flapper styles.
A hunt through Welsh Newsapers online was enough to convince me that a flapper was a recognised female subculture in Edwardian Britain
At the same time, I did wonder if the ‘Oxford Flapper’ was another term for ‘bluestocking’, those brave young women who studied at Oxford and Cambridge before women were awarded degrees and were properly admitted to university education, but I’ve found no proof of this.
Finally I tried the Oxford English Dictionary
and there we have it two different usages, one from before World War One and one from after.
(If you have access to the OED online it’s worth doing a search and scrolling down to the examples they cite showing how the usage changed…)
Knowing nothing about the book, I simply assumed it was an early Victorian children’s story – a sort of Alice in Wonderland lite.
Well I was wrong, wrong as a doorknob.
James White was born in Scotland, but became an Anglican vicar in England. Inheriting money he retired to the Isle of Wight to become writer of stories and historical tragedies.
Many of his short stories were published in Blackwood’s Magazine, which was a major early Victorian publication – such was its standing that many would be authors – including Bramwell Bronte – tried to achieve some sort of reputation by being published by Blackwoods.
James White was friends with Dickens – for a time they were neighbours, but unlike Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and others of Dickens’ network of friends and fellow writers seems to have dropped out of the literary canon.
So, out of curiosity I went searching for an online copy of the book. It turns out that as well as the Internet archive there’s a version available on Google Books as part of the National Library of Scotland’s digitisation strategy, and it appeared to be the same edition as ‘our’ version.
I transferred it to the generic e-reader I bought a few weeks ago and began to read.
It’s not a children’s book at all. It’s satire, and a collection of the pieces that James White wrote for Blackwood’s.
The first story, about Sir Frizzle, reads like something out of Thackeray, about how a profoundly cowardly man, ends up, by a series of accidents – which are interpreted as acts of foolhardy bravery by onlookers – a senior commander in the British Army at the time of the Napoleonic Wars.
It’s well written, it’s amusing, with none of the heavy handedness of some early Victorian humour.
I’m not going to pretend I’ve read the whole book. I haven’t. Yet.
I’ve written before about how nineteenth century people sometimes obfuscated the text on postcards to hide a message from prying eyes, be it the maid servant, the postie or a family member.
The obfuscation method is breathtakingly simple – move the first letter of the word to the end of the word and add the letter ‘a’ to the string.
So, while the first few strings read
ustja otga ourya ongla etterla
discarding the ‘a’ characters we get
ustj otg oury ongl etterl
and moving the last character to the start of the string gives
just got your long letter
The obfuscation scheme is probably inspired by Pig Latin, where the initial consonant is shifted to the end of the string and a suffix such as ay added to the string, so just would become ustjay. Pig latin was apparently popular among children in late Victorian times as a way of obscuring what they were saying.
I’ve seen a couple of other examples of the same encoding scheme in digitised letters online, so I’m guessing the scheme was quite widely known.
I must say I’m quite taken with this scheme, and adding a final a to each string makes the short text look superficially as if it has been written in a language other than English…
There we were, in the middle of the Walpole river in the far south west of WA, when suddenly the eco tour guide mentioned Tolstoy and the Brotherhood church.
Utterly surreal.
Over the last year or so I’ve been researching the Friends of Russian Freedom, a group of Bloomsbury intellectuals (mostly) who supported tsarist period Russian exiles in London and helped smuggle banned material back into Russia behind the Okhrana’s back.
The Russian dissidents had to get their material printed and published somewhere (I remember when I was a young man and studying Russian, besides paperbacks by approved writers printed in Russia on hairy recycled paper, there were the books by dissident writers such as Solzhenitsyn, printed on better quality paper, and published by small publishing houses in Hamburg, Paris and Amsterdam.)
And so it was before the Revolution – while Tolstoy was respected, some of his writings idolizing peasant life were banned, as were other books arguing for peasant socialism.
And it was books such as these that were smuggled into Russia.
Chertkov needed a business manager to deal with the paper and ink suppliers, the orders, the bills and the rest of it.
And the man he chose was the English Tolstoyan Frank Skinner Thompson.
Even after many of the exiles returned to Russia during a brief thaw in 1908, Skinner Thompson remained at the Free Word Press as the business manager, but by 1910 he was becoming seriously worried that, as things became harsher again in Russia, the Okhrana might come calling, and decamped to Tinglewood house near Walpole in the far south west of Western Australia to become a farmer.
The Mandalay was actually owned by the King of Norway, and Skinner Thomson in time received a cheque and a gold watch from the Norwegian King for his efforts in recuing the crew.
After this, Skinner Thompson seems to have lived the quiet isolated life of a cattle farmer, eventually dying in 1949.
The novel is very silly, but makes for a decent bedtime read.
In the course of the novel, when the hapless group of circus escapees finally arrive in Albania, accompanied by a camel (don’t ask why, this is fiction, not history), they encounter a British spy called Sandy Arbuthnot.
My ears pricked up at this point. I’d read Greenmantle by John Buchan a few weeks ago and that book also features a character known as Sandy Arbuthnot, one of these Empire types who ‘knocks about’ in the backwoods of the Balkans and Turkey, and even if he’s not exactly a spy, he’s certainly a player in the Great Game.
Like the later travel writer Eric Newby, if Arbuthnot was a real person, there would always be a suspicion that he had some sort of connection with British Intelligence.
And then I did something silly.
I typed the string “Sandy Arbuthnot” into wikipedia’s search box.
And there we have it, the undoubtedly fictional Sandy Arbuthnot has his own Wikipedia page.
But it also reveals a more interesting story. John Buchan’s character Sandy Arbuthnot was based (mostly) on Aubrey Herbert, who not only spent a considerable part of his life travelling in Albania and Turkey, was most definitely a player in the Middle Eastern politics of the time, especially during the first world war.
A friend of TE Lawrence, Herbert knew most of the major players in the jockeying for power in the wake of the first world war in the Middle East, and in a you couldn’t make this up moment was apparently offered the throne of Albania.
Twice.
Herbert died young, in 1923 from blood poisoning, just a few months after his brother, George Herbert, Lord Carnarvon, who sponsored Howard Carter’s dig for the tomb of Tutankhamun, died in Cairo from an infected mosquito bite.
Not the man who would be king, but most definitely the man who could have been king…
When I was a lot younger than I am now a bicycle gave me a freedom to explore, as well as providing cheap and reliable transport.
And because I’ve always had a soft spot for bicycles, I’ve also been interested in the history of cycling.
Bicycles were really important at the end of the nineteenth century to both men and women.
To women, because they gave women the freedom to travel without a male chaperone and allowed them to travel independently. To men, especially working class men, they provided both cheap transport and a way of getting out of industrial towns and their pollution.
But one aspect that had totally escaped my attention was their role in warfare.
Army Cyclist badge, Auckland Museum, Public domain via Wikimedia commons
In fact I only really came across the use of bicycles by the British Army in the first world war when I read Ursula Bloom’s memoir, when she mentions that someone that she knew had joined a cyclist’s battalion.
Image: Imperial War Museum, London
So what were they?
Richard Holmes “Tommy”, his history of British soldiers on the western front in world war one provides a little more detail explaining that cyclist’s battalions were recruited primarily as messengers – radio was in its infancy, and field telephone lines were in continual danger of being broken by shellfire – hence the use of cyclists carrying messages back from the front to the officers behind the lines and also to the artillery.
Indian soldier cyclists during the battle of the Somme, 1916 via the IWM Wikimedia commons image collection
In such a static war as the western front world war one, bicycle soldiers were found to be ineffective by the British, but due to their mobility they were used on the British mainland for anti invasion coastal patrols, and also on the Salonika front in northern Greece to patrol remote villages.
However, other armies have used soldiers on bicycles and a cheap and efficient way of moving troops.
In 1940, Danish soldiers used bicycles to ride to war before being overwhelmed by the Wehrmacht, and the Japanese, when they invaded Malaysia confiscated bicycles from the population and gave them to their soldiers as a way of moving their army without the use of motorised transport.
Tellingly, both Sweden and Switzerland maintained bicycle detachments until the last quarter of the twentieth century, with Switzerland ending their use in the 1970s and Sweden in the early 1980s.
Both armies used custom made, easy to maintain bicycles and also bicycle trailers to transport heavier and bulkier items.
Swedish soldiers carrying anti tank missiles on bicycles – Wikimedia commons
And from the Swedish and Swiss perspective their use made perfect sense.
During wartime, even if they were able to maintain their neutrality, fuel would be scarce (Sweden, Finland and the USSR maintained a strategic reserve of steam locomotives during the cold war as a buffer against fuel shortages. Incidentally, despite rumours to the contrary the United Kingdom did not.), and in a country with well maintained roads, bicycles would provide a cheap and effective way of moving soldiers.
By using simple single speed bicycles that need little in the way of specialist maintenance, or indeed any maintenance beyond fixing punctures and keeping the chain clean and lubricated.
In a time when bicycles were still used as transportation, changing a tyre or an inner tube would be a skill most people would already have.
Swedish conscripts fixing their bicycles – Swedish Army museum via Wikimedia commons
And as experience in the Vietnam war showed, bicycles can be incredibly valuable as a means of transporting supplies, especially during a partisan or asymmetric conflict.
And bicycle warfare does not just belong to history, there are unconfirmed reports of Ukrainian soldiers in the current conflict using bicycles to transport attack drones to the front line…
Queen Victoria died 125 years ago today, on 22 January 1901. as memorialised by the Vicar of Ingleton, North Yorkshire, in the parish register
Queen Victoria’s reign, was like our own time, a time of great change and innovation with the industrial revolution, the development of a large urban working class, large scale migration to the colonies and the United States, the development of railways and steamships, speeding and simplifying communication and trade, and a cheap and affordable postal service, not to mention a global telegraph network.
She herself was simply the Queen Empress, and after her nervous breakdown following the death of Albert had little or nothing to do with the process of governance.
So how best to remember her? Well I came across this story from New Zealand that seems a fitting mix of modernity, cultural clashes and tradition…
The Māori name for stamps is pane kuini (‘queen’s head’). Māori initially found the concept confusing, as in Māori culture the head is sacred and licking the head of the most prestigious person in the Empire seemed odd.
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