stuff 'n other stuff

Over on one of my other blogs I mentioned that I’ve been trying to identify the provenance of some photographs from the Spanish civil war including this one of a group of Milicianas, young women republican soldiers

The young woman on the right is clearly wearing lipstick, which is not the first thing one thinks of in connection with the Spanish civil war, but it’s not that surprising.

While before the first world war, middle class young women did not use cosmetics, or if they did, very discreetly, as the more obvious use of cosmetics was associated with cabaret dancers and actresses.

Louise Bryant, who later married the revolutionary John Reed, caused a stir in rural Oregon, when as a school teacher, she wore powder and perfume

and as can be seen in this later picture, lipstick.

So why lipstick?

A lot of it is to do with the first world war. Sociologically, the reasons are quite complex, but young middle class women began to replace men in some jobs and became more liberated with their own incomes as a consequence, and of course in a number of countries the absolutely horrific death toll of the war led to a shortage of eligible young men, because, to quote Olivia Coleman’s character in Mothering Sunday, ‘they’re all fucking dead’.

This of course meant that young women inevitably began to compete with each other to secure a ‘nice young man’.

Some didn’t of course – if you look back into your family history you’ll almost certainly find some female relatives who you would have expected to be married in the 1920s who weren’t.

And if one looks at photographs of the time you notice the increased use of lipstick.

It could be put down to the influence of the growth of cinema, but it’s probably more the case that cinema, and female movie stars, reflect reality.

Now there’s been some research on the increased use of powder compacts by young women in the 1920’s and 30s, and certainly when I was documenting the contents of Dow’s Pharmacy for the National Trust, I came across quite a few powder compact refills that I would date to the 1930s on stylistic grounds

There were also quite a few lipsticks, but almost all were from after World War Two

While some were locally made, quite a few were imported, and that may be why I found few if any from the inter war period – shortages meant that they were all used, and few if any survived. It’s notable that after World War Two, Australian industry started producing replacement cosemetic products to replace imported ones.

I must confess I havn’t found any scholarly research on the use of lipstick in the 1920s and 30s, but both newspapers and photographs of the time show that lipstick was clearly being used by young women in England, France and America.

And the young woman soldier in the original picture?

One tends to think of pre Republican early twentieth century Spain as backward and repressed, but the Spanish cosmetics company Puig started making lipstick in 1922, and hand wavingly, I would guess that in the cities young women would have access to the fashion magazines of the time and see movie stars wearing make up and wish to copy the look, so it’s more that possible that by the 1930s young women in the cities routinely wore makeup and lipstick …

I have been down an internet rabbit hole with this one.

I was reading an Italian novel (in translation) and it mentioned the last Italian cavalry charge as taking place in 1942 at Poloj, in what is now Croatia, where an Italian cavalry unit was encircled by Yugoslav partisans and mounted a charge to escape.

What surprised me is that they were still using cavalry that late in the war – soldiers mounted on horseback to cover the rough trackless terrain yes, but full grown cavalry?

But then both the Italian and Greek armies made use of mounted soldiers during the war in Albania and northern Greece, but then if you had trained cavalry, it probably made sense to use them to patrol trackless terrain.

There’s a good article in Wikipedia on cavalry, which includes an extract from a book by Erich Kern, in which he describes an attack by mounted Hungarian hussars with parade ground horses on a Soviet position, something that caused the Soviet defenders to break and run when charged by ton after ton of top quality Hungarian horseflesh.

If you’ve ever heard the ground thud under racehorses, you might just be able to get a glimpse of just what a terrifying thing a cavalry charge was with ton after ton of seemingly unstoppable horse coming towards you.

But Poloj?

It was if anything a Pyrrhic victory – the break out succeeded but at tremendous cost with many of the men and horses going down to the partisans’ machine guns in much the same way that at Balaklava the pride of the British cavalry was destroyed by Russian cannon in the Charge of the Light Brigade…

Normally, I concentrate on either Roman antiquity, or nineteenth century history, but I’ve been down a World War 2 rabbit hole with this one.

When we were in Italy last year, we stayed for part of the time in a tiny medieval borgo on the edge of the Appenines overlooking the vineyards of rural Tuscany.

The area was crisscrossed with walking tracks making it relatively easy to walk up the hill away from the agricultural area to the heavily wooded hilltops – a different, more primeval Tuscany, littered with Etruscan tombs and abandoned farmsteads, as well as the occasional remains of bunkers left over from the Second World War.

If you have read Eric Newby’s Love and War in the Appennines, and wondered how easy it would be for escapee to hide out on isolated farms, a muddy morning looking for Etruscan tombs is enough to convince you that it would not be as difficult as you might think to hide out in the forest especially with some help from the partisans, as Newby had.

During the Second World War, after Italy’s surrender to the Allies, the Germans, supported by Italian forces still loyal to Mussolini, fought a vicious guerilla war across these hills against a mixture of Allied forces, partisans, and those parts of the Italian army loyal to the new pro allied government.

For the Italians, it was in effect a civil war between pro and anti Fascist forces, as well as being part of a much larger conflict. And the ruined bunkers ? These were usually built by the Germans as strong points overlooking strategic roads and passes in the hope of hindering the Allied advance.

Both sides carried out extrajudicial executions of suspected traitors and collaborators, as well as acts of mass murder against innocent peasants, and the killing of prisoners captured during firefights in the mountains.

As I have said it was a vicious, brutal war.

Anyway, I was looking for information on the location of Roman and Etruscan sites, and I stumbled across a site documenting left over World War Two bunkers and emplacements, when I came across a confronting image of what purported to be execution a young woman by German soldiers.

The young woman was naked, but there was something about the image that did not seem quite right. She seemed relatively relaxed and showed no signs of physical or sexual violence as might have been expected, and the quality of the image was less grainy than the images of the surrounding soldiers.

So, as an experiment, I grabbed a screenshot of the image and pasted it into Google Lens (I had previously used Lens to track the provenance of an image with some success), expecting that it would come up with some World War 2 photographic archive sites.

It didn’t. It came up with a list of American pornography websites.

Not what I expected, but as a number of these sites routinely scrape the web looking for content, perhaps not unexpected given the subject matter.

Lens searches initially only give you the top ten or so results by default but clicking on the ‘more results’ button I also got links to a number of Russian language sites, one of which had quite a detailed technical analysis of the image (and also of some other equally confronting images).

These days, while I can still read simple Russian, I’m badly out of practice and have to resort to Google Translate for more complex texts, so Google Translate it was

That said, the upshot of the article was that Stalin’s NKVD, who employed some excellent photographic manipulators, appear to have produced a number of manipulated images to illustrate German atrocities on the Eastern front, and that these images made their way into a number of Soviet era histories as if they were the truth.

I’ll add a caveat here, the Russian language site that contained the detailed analyses had an agenda about the systematic use of image manipulation by the Soviet authorities during World War 2 to exaggerate the brutality of the German forces on the Eastern Front.

However, having read the quite careful analyses, I’m convinced that whatever the agenda of the website concerned, the image under discussion has been manipulated for propaganda purposes and that it has been perpetuated as a true record of an extrajudicial killing.

After all, the camera never lies, does it?

After last year’s trip to the Pierre Bonard exhibition at the NGV, this year’s burst of Francophilia was a trip to the Belle Epoque exhibition at Bendigo Art Gallery.

Strictly it wasn’t the Belle Epoque period, which is normally bracketed by the Franco Prussian War and the horrors of the First World War, when, under the Third Republic, Paris was a liberal and cultured haven unlike the repressive and dull atmosphere of other European capitals – rather the exhibition covered the period between 1880 and 1925.

Most of the material was from the Belle Epoque, with a large collection of impressionist paintings from the period, early cinematography, enlivened by a nice range of artefacts including these rather splendid golden snails

which once adorned a snail vendors shop.

The exhibition was nicely set out, and well captioned. In truth the only post world war one material were some dresses by Worth to show how women’s fashions had changed compared to the pre WW1 clothing on show, and some immediate post World War I cinematography produced by students for the Bal des Qua’z’Arts in 1919.

I’ve only really two criticisms of the exhibition one minor, one major. The minor one is that they should have made more of the rise of informal photography after the 1885 arrival of the Box Brownie, and the major, was to fail to acknowledge the impact of the First World War on the city, when the guns at the front could be heard most nights and Paris was occasionally shelled by German long range artillery.

That said, it’s an interesting exhibition, and well worth the trip.

Getting there was little more complex than a trip to the NGV in Melbourne. There’s no direct public transport links to Bendigo from where we live, meaning that while you could take the train, you would need to go via Melbourne meaning a six and a half hour trip, so we drove, given it was only 250 km.

As  usual we stopped roughly halfway at Murchison, which has reliably clean public toilets, even if one time I found myself sharing with a brown snake, a nice riverside area with picnic tables, multi coloured glass fibre cows and a decent bakery for pies and sandwiches – there’s even decent public wifi available courtesy of Greater Shepparton  council if you need to pull out your laptop to send a couple of emails.

This time I was derided, probably rightly, by J for being fascinated by the self service library machine next to the Heritage centre.

While it would be possible to go and return in a day, we opted to stay overnight with dinner at Clogs Pizzeria – it may not be traditionally Italian but it’s a fun informal and welcoming place. In fact we stayed two nights and ate at Clogs both nights as there wasn’t a lot of choice on Sunday or Monday nights in the middle of winter.

Driving home, we originally planned to take in the relatively new Shepparton Art Museum, but realised that we would be driving back on a Tuesday when the museum is closed so basically returned via Murchison and a pretty good chilli beef pie and takeaway coffee with the cows.

Shepparton Art Museum will have to be a day trip once the weather has warmed up a little …

As you might know, as well as my gig at the Athenaeum, I’m back with the National Trust, this time cataloguing the contents of Lake View House.

Like a lot of historic properties, it has been ‘dressed’ ie artefacts from the period have been added to the display to give an impression of how the house would have looked when it was lived in in the late 1800s.

One of the items I catalogued yesterday was a rather attractive metal container with a hasp closure for a padlock.

On the outside it’s painted to look as if it was made of wood, and the inside was painted a rather attractive blue colour.

Obviously the item was designed for transporting something safely, what I was not sure at first, but probably a hat box to safely transport one of these over the top late Victorian or Edwardian ladies hats.

Certainly a trawl of the web brings up a number of similar items categorised as late Victorian tin hat boxes on antiques trading sites. Admittedly mostly sites from the UK where antiques are more of a thing than Australia, but at the end of the Victorian era it was still the case that most consumer goods were imported from the UK than manufactured locally, so we can safely say it was a hat box.

On the lid is pasted a fragmentary Victorian Railways luggage ticket – basically the equivalent of an airline checked baggage tag – from Bairnsdale to Prince’s Bridge station.

Prince’s Bridge station, was a  now closed railway station in Melbourne, adjacent to, but separate from Flinders Street station.

Crucially, it was where trains on the Gippsland line used to terminate (trains on the Gippsland line now terminate at Southern Cross, as do all other V/line country services).

So, we can say that someone, and we don’t know when, checked the box on a train from Bairnsdale to Melbourne.

As to when, well my first thought was that one of the train nerds on Mastodon might know when that particular design of luggage ticket was used

Nothing doing. Well I guess that luggage tickets are a bit too esoteric, so I turned to online auction sites where collectors buy and sell old railway tickets.

Again nothing.

So this morning I played with some editing software to sharpen the image and see if there was a ghost of some ink or pencil addition to the label

Basically nothing.

Now the train line didn’t reach Bairnsdale to 1888, which means that the label cannot be any earlier than then.

But how late could it be?

Stylistically, no later than the 1920s, the give away being the destination station name Prince’s-bridge.

If you look at late nineteenth century and early twentieth century  newspapers you will see that sometimes street names are given with a hyphen – so Lonsdale-street instead of the more modern Lonsdale Street. Not everyone followed this convention at the time, but enough people did for the use of a hyphen in a street name to be a widely recognised usage.

And obviously Victorian Railways did in regards to Prince’s Bridge station which is given as Prince’s-bridge.

So it’s a reasonable guess that the label was printed sometime after 1888 and before 1920, by which time you might expect that the design might have become a little more modern.

Except, no. When I was working on the contents of Dow’s pharmacy, I came to realise that some of the letterpress labels that you might think on grounds of typeface and design to belong to the late Victorian period were being  used as late as the 1940’s – obviously the wholesalers had had batches of the labels printed in the 1890s, and kept using them until they ran out, where they printed some more using a more modern typeface.

And so it may be with the luggage tickets. Victorian railways probably printed a batch when the line opened in 1888, but probably didn’t reprint them until stocks ran low, so it’s possible that they might have been using stocks of an older design later than 1920.

How much later is an open question, but given that big hats went out of fashion with World War One, we can probably say the label was stuck on the box sometime in the late Victorian or Edwardian era.

That is unless eccentric Aunt Mildred was still  wearing a hat dating from the time of Edward VII in the 1930s …

I’ve just finished Linda Stratman’s 2019 compilation of excerpts from the Illustrated police News.

The Illustrated Police News, the ‘police’ in the name refers to crime, the Victorians referred to news of criminal activities as ‘police news’ in much the same way as the French refer to a crime novel as a ‘roman policier’.

The Illustrated Police News was the pre-eminent tabloid of its day, and its woodblock illustrations are beloved by documentary makers where no photographs exist, as for example in the Mordaunt case where the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, was accused of having sex with Lady Harriet Mordaunt. The accusation came to light in a very messy divorce case where basically her husband tried to divorce her on the grounds of promiscuity.

(While the men got off with little or no reputational damage, ‘boys will be boys’, poor Harriet Mordaunt spent the rest of her life in a lunatic asylum, which seems a trifle harsh.)

There were of course no photographs of the Prince of Wales appearing as a witness at the trial or indeed of him canoodling with Lady Mordaunt, but the Illustrated Police News provided woodcuts of the supposed events, which have ever after been used in TV documentaries about royal shenanigans.

Like today’s tabloids, the IPN could never resist a good story, whether it be about murder, especially somewhere shocking, as in a railway compartment, violent housebreaking, or the sexual peccadillos of the upper classes.

As can be imagined, it went to town with such violet events as the Jack the Ripper murders in London. However it wasn’t all blood and gore, it also reported on the social conditions of the times, and events such as pregnant housemaids being turned out to starve, after having had sex, willingly or unwillingly, with the householder, or indeed his teenage sons.

Its prime was in the high Victorian era, later on after various changes of ownership it became increasingly xenophobic and jingoistic, perhaps reflecting the prejudices of its readership. At the same time increasing production costs led to a decrease in the quality of the illustrations.

However, the IPN, as the prime nineteenth century tabloid, and the first to be widely circulated among the newly literate poor has an important role in the history of England in the latter half of the nineteenth century

Vicars, especially nineteenth century ones.

Often derided, I’m a quiet fan of Victorian vicars, and their  watercolourist daughters.

In remoter nineteenth century communities in colonial Australia the Church of England vicar, and it was most definitely the Church of England then, was the only man of education, with sufficient leisure to pursue his interests.

The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of great interest in natural history

and it was also common practice for educated men to keep a journal.

Now not every journal keeping vicar was as engaging a writer as Francis Kilvert, but buried in among the tedious records of parish goings on there are gems about the plants and animals found there, and even sometimes about the presence of indigenous people in the area, often the only record we have, as the local settlers wanted all to often to drive the local indigenous people off their land.

And these vicars, often had daughters who were closeted at home, there being no people of sufficient ‘quality’ for them to mix with, who became quite proficient watercolourists and self taught botanists, there being little else for them to do.

So, next time you see a comic vicar in an English comedy show, remember that while often preposterous and pompous, they did have their uses …

While I was researching something else entirely, I had this light bulb moment about trams, and why they were a product of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.

A tram in Launceston Tasmania on a sunny Edwardian afternoon

A lot of large nineteenth century cities had cobbled streets in the city centre, and these relatively smooth streets allowed the operation of horse buses.

Crinolines and horse buses

Horse buses were cramped and could not carry more than a few people at a time.

However quite a few streets were simply gravelled, and some had a surface that was not much better than that of a dirt road today and basically horse buses didn’t cope well with rough surfaces and potholes.

So, in quite a few places they had horse trams – the lightweight track ensured a smooth ride and the horses could pull a heavier load.

Horse tram in Darlington England

Horses of course needed to be looked after, fed, and rested, which meant that even horse trams could not carry that many people, and were not particularly cheap.

And then, on the back of demand for the new electric lighting, cities began to acquire power plants. Sometimes these were privately owned an operated, and sometimes they were publicly owned by the local authority.

Suddenly there was a source of readily available motive power that didn’t need to be fed and watered, so it seemed like a no brainer to convert the horse tram systems to electric operation – in some cases as in Dundee in Scotland where the city owned the Carolina Port power plant they took over the tram system and expanded it, in other places the tram system remained in private hands, and there are instances such as Falkirk again in Scotland, where the tram system was actually built by the local power company.

All of this happened unevenly – there were places, like Stirling, yet again in Scotland where the horse tram system was never electrified, and the horses were eventually replaced by petrol engines.

Look Ma! No wires! Petrol powered tram in Stirling

And that’s a key observation – by the 1890s overhead transmission lines and electric power was a mature technology. Internal combustion engines were not reliable enough or powerful enough to power public transport until roughly 1910, when motor buses began to appear.

But again they needed a relatively smooth surface, so it was not until after the first world war when increasing car use led to city streets being sealed with bitumen that they really became a viable option.

Approaching Queen Victoria Street in York

At the same time trams were beginning to be a problem.

Most tram systems dated back to just before 1900 – a few were later –  but it’s true to say that by 1920 a lot of the systems were in need of maintenance, especially as maintenance had been skipped during the first world war, leading to a backlog of track repairs and worn out trams well past their use by date.

Trams, cars, and buses in Museum Street York some time in the 1920s

Buses were cheaper to operate, and didn’t run on tracks down the middle of the road – what seemed a great idea in 1890, running the tramline down the middle of the street to avoid bicycles and horse drawn delivery carts didn’t seem such a good idea in in the 1920’s with the increasing use of motor vehicles, especially when dealing with narrow European city streets.

And so tram systems began gradually to be closed down and replaced by buses.

Sometimes the ghosts of long vanished tram systems can still be seen – for years there were still tram tracks running down the middle of High Street in Dundee, and as late as the early 2000s there were still sections of track poking through the bitumen on Great Western Road in Glasgow, forty years after the last tram rattled down towards the city centre …

‘Seven Colonies’ was a phrase used in nineteenth century Australia and New Zealand to refer to the six Australian colonies and New Zealand in the run up to federation, which formed a little squabbling group of British polities a long way from any other British colony.

I wanted to try and gain some sort of handle on how popular the phrase was.

If you search Trove for occurrences of the phrase in newspaper articles you get over four and a half million hits suggesting that the phrase was reasonably popular.

Using QueryPic to make sense of the data you end up with the following chart

where the phrase becomes increasingly popular in the run up to federation, and then rapidly drops out of use especially as it became clear after 1907 that New Zealand was unlikely to ever federate with Australia.

The New Zealand data gets drowned out by Australia, but graphing the data from New Zealand separately one ends up with much the same curve

showing that by 1910, the phrase had more or less dropped out of use in New Zealand as well.

So what other evidence do we have?

Postcards for one.

Prior to the early 1890’s the header strap on prepaid penny postcards issued by the colonial post office in Victoria looked like this

While after the early 1890’s they looked like this

quite explicitly saying that they were valid for use not only within Victoria but also for mail to the other Australian colonies plus New Zealand.

I havn’t been able to find images for postcards from WA, Queensland or NSW, so I can’t say if they also included a similar strap line, but South Australia and Tasmania did not

but as smaller colonies with smaller volumes of mail it’s possible they simply didn’t bother reprinting the card blanks. After all everyone knew the validity of penny postcards, didn’t they?

Interestingly, New Zealand also made the validity of their penny postcards explicit

However, this story is slightly complicated by the advent of the Imperial Penny Post – a movement from 1898 onwards to introduce a flat rate of one penny (or the equivalent in local currency such as Canadian dollars and Indian rupees) to send a letter or postcard anywhere in the British Empire.

Australia never adopted the Imperial Penny Post, but New Zealand did from 01 January 1901, much to the chagrin of the Argus.

Even though the Imperial penny post as such ended in 1918, its ghost hung around to the early 1960’s when it was still cheaper to send a letter or postcard from England to a Commonwealth country than a neighbouring European country such as France …

I was reading about the history of the gold rush in Otago in the 1860s, and the author consistently referred to the seven colonies – basically the six colonies of colonial Australia plus New Zealand.

And certainly in the 1860s the seven colonies formed a little British community trading and squabbling among themselves with little industry to speak of – most manufactured items were imported. For example Australia didn’t get round to making making its own glass medicine bottles until the early 1870s, and glass beer bottles were also usually imported from England until around the same time.

Incidentally, even though glass bottle manufacturing started in the 1870s, the import trade continued – when the Fiji went down in 1891, part of her cargo was glass medicine bottles imported from Germany.

Now, in 1889, when Henry Parkes gave the Tenterfield oration, he urged the seven colonies to form a federation, and indeed right until the 1920s there was an assumption that New Zealand would some day join Australia – its why Canberra Avenue in Canberra was originally going to be named Wellington Avenue and why it passes the suburb of Manuka. Its also why there’s still a reference to New Zealand joining in the Australian Constitution.

Well, New Zealand never did, and became a successful nation in its own right, rather than ending up as a second Tasmania.

Today, the idea of New Zealand joining Australia seems a bit odd, but in Parkes’ time it kind of made sense, and part of reason is to do with railways, or rather the lack of them.

When Parkes gave the oration in Tenterfield, Tenterfield was on now abandoned main line to Brisbane – there was no coastal railway line, and most of the coastal communities of New SouthWales were reached by sea from Sydney – it’s why small places like Tathra on the south coast still sport impressive steamship wharves.

Melbourne and Sydney had been linked by rail only a few years before as had Melbourne and Adelaide. There was no direct Sydney Adelaide line via Broken Hill until the 1920s, and in Queensland the Far North line to Cairns was not completed until around the same time.

There was no railway line across the desert to WA and the line from Adelaide to Darwin was stalled at Alice Springs, and remained so until the early 21^st century.

Travel between the big cities of Australia – which all lie on the coast more or less was by ship. Cargo mostly moved the same way, in part due to the break of gauge between the different colonies’ railway systems – bulk items sent by ship from Melbourne to Sydney say did not need to be transhipped on the border at Albury.

And in such a world of sea based transport it probably seemed eminently sensible to consider New Zealand as an extension of Australia – the journey from Sydney to Auckland or Wellington was no longer than that to Hobart, or indeed from Brisbane to Cairns.

Now of course, we are oriented to land transport and we see the difficulties of a sea based world, but in the nineteenth century a sea based journey was sometimes the only choice and considerably more comfortable than a slow, jolting, steam train.