From Mr Codd to codswallop

Look up codswallop in a dictionary and you’ll find it means nonsense, but there’s a nice bit of history to the word – and a prized Victorian invention.

Soda water and fizzy drinks were popular with the Victorians, but there was no reliable way of trapping that fizz once a bottle was opened. Until, that is, Hiram Codd came up with a bottle fitted with a ‘globe stopper’ in the 1870s. The glass stopper in the neck was pushed into the bottle when it was first opened. After that, the gas from the soda or lemonade in the bottle kept the stopper pushed against a rubber washer in the neck, creating a seal. When the bottle was turned upside down, the stopper was dislodged, allowing the drink to be poured.

By 1878, 450 soda water makers were using the invention in Great Britain and Ireland, according to Codd’s advertising in the first issue of The Caterer and Refreshment Contractors Gazette (April 6).

It’s unclear how the phrase ‘a load of codswallop’ came about, but ‘wallop’ is a word for beer, and the wallop in a Codd’s bottle – fizzy soda – would not have been much good as beer.

John Plummer was credited on the cover as editor of of The Caterer. Notice the voluminous description of the journal: ‘A monthly journal issued in the interests of the proprietors and managers of hotels, restaurants, dining rooms, cafes, refreshment bars, coffee houses, and confectionary establishments.’ Quite a mouthful, but it certainly defines the target readership.

1984: the year T-shirts went to war

Models wear Katharine Hamnett activist T-shirts on the June 1984 cover of The Face magazine

These days, T-shirts just seem to be covered in commercial logos or platitudes. Back in the 1980s, however, British fashion designer Katharine Hamnett made the activist T-shirt  a force to be reckoned with across the world.

Hamnett meets Thatcher

‘Stop Acid Rain’, ‘Worldwide Nuclear Ban Now’ and ‘Stop Killing Whales’ in huge black capital letters on white cotton were among her in-your-face slogans for 1984. 

Hamnett even brought her campaigning style to a Downing Street reception to promote Britain’s fashion business in March that year.

She wore one of her own T-shirts that yelled ‘58% don’t want Pershing’ to meet Margaret Thatcher. This was a reference to a US missile system being deployed in Europe. The prime minister is supposed to have remarked ‘We don’t have Pershings, we have cruise [missiles]’ as she shook hands with the designer.

Frankie Goes to Hollywood used Hamnett-style T-shirts to promote Two Tribes, the Liverpool band’s second single after Relax, in summer 1984. The slogans were ‘Frankie Say War! Hide Yourself’ and ‘Frankie Say Relax Don’t Do It!’ Both singles got to number one, as did The Power of Love at the end of the year. Three consecutive chart-topping  singles was a feat that not even the Beatles achieved.

Note the word ‘bodylicious’ on the Face cover at the top of the page. It was used 20 years later as the title of a top 10 Destiny’s Child single.

The Observer Magazine colour supplement did its own version of one of Hamnett’s designs for its New Year 1986 cover. Hamnett still does activist T-shirts today.

Get a fix on 86: the Observer Magazine‘s take on Hamnett’s designs for its end of 1985 cover

Prince pops up on a fag packet

I mentioned a while back who I thought a fake cigarette had been painted on a photograph of Edward, Prince of Wales in 1919.

And now I’ve come across this advert in a 1923 issue of Printers’ Pie for the Prince Charming cigarette brand. He’s painted on a packet of cigarettes rather than a cigarette being painted oh him!

The brand was made by Moustafa of Piccadilly and the character is clearly based on the Prince of Wales, in a pose and uniform just like the ‘doctored’ photograph.

Celebrity endorsements were popular at the time, but they were usually by stars of screen and stage, rather than the next-in-line to the throne. There is not sense that Edward was involved in this.

 

 

Ouroboros – more than just a worm

As a teenager I read The Worm Ouroboros by ER Eddison, in which the Lords of Demonland battle against the devilish King Gorice of Witchland. This followed on from reading the fantasy fest of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (the latter read in the form of a ripped up copy of all three works in a single-volume paperback shared between a bunch of pals).

Coming across this advert for The Worm Ouroboros in a 1971 copy of Oz magazine (number 38, September) brought all this teenage history back. And I’ve now learned that Eddison was a British civil servant.

The promotional quote in the advert – ‘a literary event of the first importance’ – looks to be from a reviewer with a made-up name, Orville Prescott.

In fact, Prescott was the leading book reviewer on the New York Times from 1942 to 1966. He will have been just 16 in 1922 when The Worm was published by Jonathan Cape in London with illustrations by Keith Henderson, so it’s not clear when the comment was written. Most probably, it was a 1952 hardback edition, with an introduction by Prescott. 

So, I read them in the wrong order, because the first publication of The Worm predates Tolkien’s Hobbit by 15 years; and the Rings did not appear until 1954.

Like Tolkien’s works, there is a sense of the Norse about The Worm, but then Eric Rücker Eddison was a Viking enthusiast alongside his career in the Board of Trade. And he was well ahead of the fantasy curve, with another work, his Zimiamvian trilogy, coming out between 1935 and 1958.

He also mixed with the Inklings, the Oxford-based literary discussion group that included both Tolkien and CS Lewis, author of the Narnia books.

Today, The Worm has been scanned and can be read free online.

The name ouroboros comes from the motif of a snake or dragon biting its own tail and forming a circle, an image that goes back to the ancient Egyptians. The symbol denotes eternity, along with love or mourning, and was made fashionable by Queen Victoria in the 1840s. Today, Ouroboros is the name of a software protocol underlying one of the most fashionable of financial experiments, the Cardano cryptocurrency.

 

Mr Barraud’s photographs

Advertising page from 1883 Merry England magazine for photographer Herbert Rose Barraud

This advertising page from the May 1883 issue of Merry England magazine is for the photography studio of Herbert Rose Barraud in London’s Oxford Street. He specialised in portraits of Victorian society and celebrities. The National Portrait Gallery has 500 of Barraud’s photographs.

The advert quotes John Ruskin, ‘the great art critic’ and one of Barraud’s sitters, writing about Barraud’s photographs:

They are wonderfully and singularly beautiful, and go as far as the art can at the present day, and I do not see it can ever do much better.

It’s not the sort of advert you can imagine a photographic studio running today. There is lovely detail in the engraving, with many literary and artistic allusions:

• The laid-back, cheerful Old Father Time points to his scythe, on which is written: ‘In the twinkling of an eye’.
• He has wings and one arm rests on his hour glass. A steam train runs below him and there is a spider’s web and ‘head rest’ by his feet.
• In the rays smiling rising sun is a quotation from Shakespeare: ‘The sun stayeth its course to play the alchymist.’ In each of the flames of the sun is a number or letter spelling out the photographer’s address: ‘Barraud. 263. Oxford. St. W.’
• In the background to the left is a horseman vaulting a gate, and a windmill with birds and an arrow flying overhead. To the right is a camera, and a palette with ‘truth’ written on it, and paint brushes. In the centre is an easel offering image sizes: life size, panel, promenades, cabinet and cartes.

This detail shows how the flames of the sun spell out Barraud’s address

Barraud’s studio was renowned as being one of the largest and best-fitted studios in Europe, complete with a lift, so the visiting dignitaries – who included Gladstone and his family, Darwin, Tennyson and a raft of leading actors – would not have to climb the stairs.

Saucy side of the first superstar of comics

Ally Sloper was ‘the first superstar of comics’, says The Oldie magazine, who inspired the screen personae of Charlie Chaplin and, especially, WC Fields.

No small accolade, but it doesn’t end there. From 1867, with his first appearance in Judy, a rival magazine to Punch, into the 1920s, Sloper also put his name to no end of goods – and got his very own weekly comic, Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday, which ran for nigh-on 40 years. His fame also spread through the music hall, theatre and magic lantern shows, and in motion pictures as early as 1898.

The BFI has a short comedy sketch online based around a man reading a copy of Half Holiday at the barber’s.

As shown here, Ally Sloper’s Relish was one of these products, alongside everything from clay pipes to doorstops to ceramics and watches. These, alongside empty bottles of the sauce, often come up on eBay searches for Ally Sloper. The advert is from the February 1932 copy of The Fleet, a monthly aiming at serving sailors and anyone else interested in Britain’s Royal Navy.

 

 

 

Chubb banks vaults in Chambers’s Magazine

It’s not often anyone gets to go in a Goldfinger-style bank vault, but pay a visit to Lisbon’s Museum of Design & Fashion and you’ll find yourself in one.

The museum is housed in a former bank. On the ground floor, you can stroll past  clothing, accessories, household goods and furniture – and the pair of Vivienne Westwood platforms that brought Naomi Campbell tumbling down on the catwalk in 1993.

The underground vault and upper floor host temporary exhibitions, with jewellery on display in the old steel safe deposit boxes.

The vault, built for the Banco Nacional Ultramarino, is just like the one shown in this advertising insert from a 1924 copy of Chambers’s Journal (August 1). And it was made by Chubb – you can see a chub fish symbol engraved in the side of the crane hinge door as you walk in, as well as the usual branding. British vaults made by Chubb, or Tann, its main rival, can be found in central banks across the world. Today, however, Chubb only exists as a brand name on locks and alarms.

Of course, there were probably not that many bank vault owners reading Chambers’s Journal, but the reverse of the insert promotes Chubb’s domestic and commercial products. The insert was printed offset by George Stewart & Co in Edinburgh.

Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal was a weekly founded in 1832 in Edinburgh by William Chambers. In 1854, the publishing offices moved to 47 Paternoster Row in London, an area near St Paul’s Cathedral that was then the centre of the English book trade. The title was expanded to Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts. The title shrank again in 1897 and the magazine survived to pass its centenary, but closed in 1956. Chambers’s English Dictionary was founded in 1872 and is today an imprint published by Hodder & Stoughton.

 

Field & Tuer’s types of beauty

 

Field & Tuer advert for their typefaces of beauty and Stickphast paste

This page advert for Field & Tuer, art printers and publishers, is from the first issue of Merry England in 1883.

Andrew Tuer and Abraham Field founded the printing firm of Field & Tuer in the early 1860s and went on to establish a publishing arm, the Leadenhall Press, named after their  offices in Leadenhall Street in the City of London.

Stickphast, a vegetable paste and a ‘cleanly substitute for gum’, was a profitable sideline.

Merry England, was a monthly magazine that lasted two years from 1883, according to the British Library. It was based in Essex Street, which runs down to the Thames river at 2 Temple Place from The Strand at the west end of Fleet Street. Halfway down the street is the Edgar Wallace pub (pre-coronavirus archived page).

How Radio Times marked VE Day

This is the front cover of the Radio Times listing VE-Day celebrations in Britain to mark Germany’s surrender in May 1945. Special victory radio programmes on the BBC marked the week, celebrating each of the armed services and the civilian effort.

Beautifully illustrated as always, even the advertising, such as this Nestle advert, drawn, I reckon, by Mabel Lucie Attwell. She was an incredibly successful illustrator, renowned for her drawings of cute children.

 

 

Magazines and adverts in Fleet Street

Fleet Street has run with printing ink ever since Wynkyn de Worde moved Caxton’s press from Westminster into Shoe Lane, just off the east end of the street, in the 1490s. This coloured postcard tells of much of that history.

The view looks east along Fleet Street across Ludgate Circus and through the railway viaduct that once spanned Ludgate Hill up to St Paul’s Cathedral. The church spire in front of the cathedral’s dome is St Martin’s Ludgate, a church that, like St Paul’s, was rebuilt by Christopher Wren after the 1666 Great Fire of London. Ludgate Hill station closed in 1929, but the bridge was not demolished until 1990 as part of the construction of Thameslink, the line that crosses the capital to join the south coast with the Midlands.

Newspaper seller by Poppin’s Court

Bride Lane is to the right and a newspaper seller stands on the left at the archway leading into Poppin’s Court. Shoe Lane would be behind to the left.

At least three pubs can be seen. The King Lud is in front of the rail bridge on the left. Today, it’s split into a Santander branch and a Leon fast food joint. There’s a plaque up on the wall on the Ludgate Hill side of the Leon marking the site of publication of the first regular English daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, in 1702. The pub was named after the king who, legend has it, founded London and gave his name to Ludgate. A statue of Lud and his sons that was once part of the gate now stands in the porch of St Dunstan-in-the West church at the other end of Fleet Street.

A detail from the photograph used for the coloured postcard. Signs for Smith’s Advertising Agency (SAA), Quiver magazine and Tit-Bits, probably in May 1914

On the right of the postcard, can just be made out the square white sign for the Punch Tavern (No 99). It can be seen better, left, in the photograph on which the postcard is based. The Punch Tavern was called the Crown and Sugar Loaf, but took the new name after Punch magazine moved to 85 Fleet Street in 1845. The pub developers Saville & Martin rebuilt the pub in 1890s and it is now grade II listed. Smith’s, one of the biggest advertising agencies, occupied the offices above the Punch Tavern, named Publicity House. The SAA lettering can be seen on the corner of a building it occupied from 1885 to at least 1936. Coming back in this direction on the right is Bride Lane, home to both the journalists’ church and the  St Bride’s Institute and Printing Library. There’s then an awning with a shop frontage below and a white sign for Ye Olde Bell Tavern (No 95).

Today, the newsagents under the awning is gone and there is a fancy windowed frontage to the Old Bell, but photographs show there used to be just a tiled entrance way into the pub (like the Punch Tavern today).

Above the Old Bell are two hoardings. The lower one with a green background is for Tit-Bits, promoting ‘£500 in simple cricket competition’.

The larger hoarding shows a poster for The Quiver, a popular monthly, headed up with the words ‘Special mothers’ and daughters’ number’. The name Annie S Swan tops the billing. Swan was a famous romantic fiction writer, and editor of Women at Home from 1893 to 1917. She was also a founder of the Scottish National Party. The Quiver serialised Swan’s Corroding Gold from early 1914 and Cassell published the book that same year. The poster appears to be advertising the May issue, suggesting the photograph was taken at that time.

Other writers on the Quiver list include Amy B Barnard LLA (author of The Girls’ Encyclopaedia), the author Mrs George de Horne Vaizey,  Mrs Elizabeth Sloan Chesser MD, and Helen Wallace. 

The Quiver, February 1914. The cover lines are for Arnold Bennett’s ‘mental stocktaking’ and the romantic serial ‘Heart’s Desire’ by Mrs George de Horne Vaizey

The Quiver, which ran from 1861 to1926, was published and printed by Cassell at La Belle Sauvage Yard, a few hundred yards away near the foot of Ludgate Hill. Cassell was a publishing house that pioneered cheap reprints of classic books and hit it big in 1883 with Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines two years later. The Quiver was originally ‘designed for the defence and promotion of biblical truth, and the advancement of religion in the homes of the people’, what would have been called ‘Sunday reading’, but became more general in its coverage in the Edwardian era. The name Cassell is now associated only with books, but the company was also one of the biggest magazine publishers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and sold its titles to Harmsworth’s Amalgamated Press in the late 1920s. Its titles included Cassell’s Magazine, the short-lived Woman’s World (edited by Oscar Wilde), Cassell’s Saturday Journal, Chums, the Penny Magazine, New Magazine and The Story-Teller.

La Belle Sauvage Yard no longer exists, but John Cassell moved his publishing and printing offices there in 1852, when it was part of one of the oldest inns in the City of London, The Bell Savage, dating back to 1380. According to The Story of the House of Cassell, the name derives from a combination of William Savage and the name of the hostelry he owned, Savage’s Inn, otherwise called the Bell on the Hoop. It later became a theatre and coaching inn.

The book places the Francification of the name to La Belle Sauvage at the door of no less a literary figure than Joseph Addison, co-founder of the original daily Spectator in 1711. In issue 82 of the Spectator, despite customers finding their ale at ‘the Sign of a Savage Man standing by a Bell’ he writes about ‘the reading of an old Romance translated out of the French, which gives an account of a very beautiful Woman who was found in a Wilderness, and it is called in the French La Belle Sauvage.’

Cassell gradually took over the yard and rebuilt it. The entrance was through an arch off Ludgate Hill. The inn was demolished in 1873 to make way for the railway viaduct. The rest of La Belle Sauvage was destroyed, like much of Fleet Street, by bombing in 1941.

Notice how prolific the advertising signs are. The Bovril sign atop the building on the far side of Ludgate Circus was there from about 1900 for 40 years. Below are promotions for Schweppes and the Isle of Man office with its Legs of Man logo.

Finally, the postcard demonstrates image manipulation, not only because it was a black-and-white photograph that has been coloured, but part of the view has been edited. Compare the bottom-right corner of the postcard with the close-up photograph of the Quiver poster; you’ll see that the lorry with the Robin starch advertising on its canvas side has been removed and painted over with pedestrians, probably because it was felt to detract from the card.