Flappers

Posted on April 14, 2026 by dgm

Clara Bow – 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.

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…)

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Sir Frizzle Pumpkin…

Posted on April 12, 2026 by dgm

Up at the Athenaeum, one of the books I catalogued last Friday was Sir Frizzle Pumpkin, by James White.

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.

But I am going to read the whole thing…

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Postcards and encryption (again)

Posted on April 9, 2026 by dgm

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.

I’ve just come across this nice example from the Highland Archives Centre in Inverness in Scotland

© Highlands Archive Centre

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

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…

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An odd moment on the Walpole river …

Posted on March 31, 2026 by dgm

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.

There’s been some oddities along the way, such as the story of a pair of Tolstoyan anarchists riding from London to Yasnaya Polyana on their bicycles (didn’t happen), but this was possibly the oddest.

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.

And they needed to be printed.

And one of the places they were printed was the Free Word Press in Hampshire, which was run by a Tolstoyan commune led by Vladimir Chertkov, a close associate of Tolstoy.

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.

Walpole at the time was still very isolated – the railway from Albany only went as far as Denmark, and access to the area was by boat.

On one of his trips to Albany for supplies Skinner Thompson, and his sister Phyllis, picked up a survivor from the wreck of the Norwegian sailing barque Mandalay which had come to grief on the coast.

Skinner Thompson accompanied by his son and nephew rescued the other members of the crew the following day.

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.

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The man who might have been king…

Posted on February 7, 2026 by dgm

I’m about half way through ‘If you’re reading this, I’m already dead’, a novel very loosely based on Otto Witte, the acrobat who aspired to become King of Albania in the chaos of Albania’s independence after the Balkan Wars that preceded world war one.

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…

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Bicycle soldiers

Posted on January 30, 2026 by dgm

Personally, I’ve always liked bicycles.

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…

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Queen Victoria died 125 years ago today

Posted on January 22, 2026 by dgm

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…

Licking the queen

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.

And that does seem to typify her reign…

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More Balkan ephemera…

Posted on January 17, 2026 by dgm

An Albanian 1 Lek coin from 1931.

Albania, in the early part of the twentieth century, had a complex, and at times farcical history.

Emerging from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after the Balkan wars, at first the European powers attempted to impose a German princeling as king – after all such a move had worked reasonably well in both Bulgaria and Romania a generation earlier.

Needless to say, this time it didn’t.

The would be King of Albania was deposed before he’d ever properly been installed and a republic declared. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, shrewder than he is often portrayed as being, said it would probably have been better if an Ottoman prince had been installed.

In the midst of this chaos at the start of world war one, Otto Witte, an Austrian acrobat and fantasist claimed he had been mistaken by one Albanian faction for a nephew of the Ottoman sultan and had been invited to be king.

The story is almost certainly baloney, even if the police in Berlin during the Weimar republic allowed Witte to style himself ex-king of Albania on his id card.

As it was, for a few years it didn’t matter. During world war one the Albanian polity was occupied first by retreating Serb forces, who did not treat the local population well, followed by both Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria occupying the north and east of the country, not to mention other parts of Albania being occupied by Greece, France and Italy, but eventually, at the end of the first world war, Albania finally became a republic in more than name.

Power struggles within the government eventually resulted in the president, Ahmed Zogu, declaring himself Zog I and king of Albania in 1928. During Zog’s reign, Albania increasingly came under the influence of Mussolini’s Italy and was eventually invaded by Italy and made an Italian protectorate at the beginning of the second world war.

Not surprisingly, Zog needed a founding myth for Albania, given that it was little more than a loose confederation of feuding clans, and fastened on Alexander the Great and his Illyrian grandmother, Eurydice, as a better sounding story, and comfortably in the past, than any event in the more recent history of Albania.

Hence the coins of his period have Alexander, modelled after a classical period Greek coin of Alexander the great on the obverse and Alexander charging on his horse Bucephalus on the reverse, the design echoing Italian coins of the period in harking back to a heroic classical past

as in these Italian 50 centesimi of the period – Mussolini’s fascist era coin on the left with the Roman eagle, and the 1920’s version, showing a pride of four lions, celebrating equality, aeqvitas, as in the French ideal of Liberté Egalité Fraternité, on the right.

In Albania the coinage was replaced during the Italian occupation by coins bearing an effigy of Victor Emmanuel III of Italy on the obverse and fascist iconography and the Albanian eagle on the reverse.

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Ursula’s war…

Posted on January 9, 2026 by dgm

Over the last few days I’ve been reading Ursula Bloom’s memoir of her life as a young woman during the first world war.

It’s not history, it’s very much a personal memoir, but on another level it is an important resource describing how people in Britain on the Home Front felt about the war and a developing sense of cynicism about its progress.

Much of British World War One history focuses on generals, the hell of the Western Front, and very little on how people at home in Britain felt.

Bloom’s memoir helps correct that.

A clergyman’s daughter, living with her slowly dying mother, first in St Albans and then in Walton on the Naze in Essex, Bloom was a member of the genteel poor of the Edwardian era, living on a small fixed income which she supplemented by playing piano to accompany silent films in the cinema, she started the war full of the Edwardian certainties of Britain’s position in the world.

But when the army didn’t perform as well as expected, not to mention the navy, doubts began to creep in as to how well the war was actually going. Even the Daily Mail, Bloom’s newspaper of choice, couldn’t manage to maintain an upbeat tone, especially when Field Postcards ceased to be a novelty and often brought news of a loved one being wounded and in a field hospital.

Bloom habitually refers to the new post-1914 volunteer army as ‘Fred Karno’s Army’ that replaced the British Expeditionary Force due to its disorganisation and the way it consisted of half trained squaddies commanded by officers straight out of public school – Fred Karno was a well known slapstick comedian of the time who had a touring troupe.

Bloom also describes the impact of inflation on the genteel precariat on fixed incomes – things that were affordable became unaffordable, and, coupled with increases in income tax, began to hollow out the bottom end of Edwardian middle class.

Households could no longer afford maids and cooks, and the Aunt Mildreds, who had formerly managed quite well on small fixed incomes found it increasingly hard to manage.

Rationing in a sense was their salvation, as they had to live on a poorer meaner diet than before, and shortages of meat and potatoes, among other things, helped disguise that they simply couldn’t afford meat every day.

Other things stand out. Living on the Essex coast, Bloom would sit, in the blackout, watching the Zeppelin raids on the Thames estuary.

(As an aside I tried researching some of these raids using Welsh Newspapers Online. It’s quite clear from the reports that the British authorities heavily censored the reports of zeppelin raids, where they occurred and what damage there had been, perhaps for fear of spreading panic among the civilian population, or simply trying to curb war weariness.

On the other hand, perhaps because the Zeppelin raids worried the population so much, they were keen to publicise successes

As in the shooting down of L15, which Bloom witnessed. The Royal Flying Corps officer responsible for shooting down L15 was in fact from New Zealand, something the British papers seem not to mention, although it was headline news in New Zealand.)

As I say, an interesting resource, and a valuable counterweight to the ‘big men’ style of much of military history, especially where World One is concerned.

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Austro Hungarian Field Postcard 1915

Posted on January 1, 2026 by dgm

I’ve acquired an AustroHungarian field postcard for my little collection of world war one ephemera

Compared to British examples it’s quite simple.

On the front of the card there’s a section on the left – helpfully labelled in the principal languages of the empire – for the sender to write their name and a return address

In this example there’s only a name, the unit name and address is given in the official purple stamp, in other examples I’ve seen there might be a line like ‘Feldpost 306‘ to give the number of the appropriate field post office.

Unlike British examples the rear of the card is blank for a simple message – no restrictive list of pre printed messages or warnings that the card will be destroyed if a personal message is added, as on the British ones.

The card is labelled Feldkorrezpondenzkarte – Field correspondence card- and that’s exactly what it is, a means for soldiers at the front to send short messages home for free.

Here the message is quite short and accompanied by a scrawl in pencil in a different had, presumably by the censor.

If you want to know more about German and AustroHungarian field postcards I’ve come across an informative blogpost with some good example images

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