Category Archives: Humour

by | February 11, 2024 · 6:17 am

The Last of the Saxon Kings (1)

When I was a little boy, I used to read every comic I could lay my hands on, usually for a period of just a few weeks. I was very quick to change if they didn’t attract me for whatever reason. Some took only five minutes to read, which was clearly a waste of my sixpence pocket money. Some were repetitively inane, something which is funny the first time but not the fiftieth.

Two stories stood out and I remembered them well into my adult years.  There was “The Big Tree” in “Rover and Wizard”, and, best of all, “The Last of the Saxon Kings” in “Eagle”. The Last of the Saxon Kings, of course, was Harold, and the double page centre spread began in Volume 12, No 38, and finished in that volume’s No 52.

In terms of dates, that would be September 23rd-December 30th 1961. As a little boy 0f only seven, I did not know that the story had already appeared in a publication called “Comet”, but entitled “Under the Golden Dragon”. These were issues 285-306, January 3rd-May 29 1954. The story was written by Michael Butterworth and it was drawn by Patrick Nicolle.

When the graphic novel appeared, Eagle was already on the way down and out. “Last of The Saxon Kings” was quickly accused of being historically inaccurate and of being sluggishly and insipidly drawn, with two many small panels. But I adored it.

I can still remember the thrill of reading the first four frames. They use the well tried device of a single person making his way to somewhere important, usually in darkness. I would meet it for the first time in my final year at school, in the novel “Germinal” by the French novelist Emile Zola, the man who invented cheese.

Here’s the first frame. It’s really raining. But what is this daring rider doing? :

Just look at the sheen on the soaked surface of the stone area in front of the castle:

And now we are given some idea of what is going on:

And here is the solution to the mystery. The colours are not desperately dramatic, nor is the palette particularly varied, but a seven year old was delighted:

The king, not named at this point, is actually Harthacnut.  The next picture I have chosen may be the first outbreak of “historical inaccuracy”. As an argument about who will succeed to the throne develops, Harold finds himself fighting his elder brother, Sweyn. Whether it all happened in this way on such an absolutely splendid bridge I do not know:

Harold is unwilling to kill his brother, no matter how much of a swine Sweyn is. The frame below has a very Roy Lichtenstein like look about it:

Even in the most dramatic situations, the dialogue can be rather extended. Still, at least you know who’s doing what to whom and why.

17 Comments

Filed under France, History, Humour, military, Personal, Writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by | February 5, 2024 · 6:17 am

Part 3 : John Watson and Mycroft Holmes

Last time, we saw how Arthur Conan Doyle decided to immortalise his favourite bowler and wicketkeeper combination by combining the two names “Shacklock” and “Sherwin”, to give the name “Shackwin” to the hero of his new detective novel, “A Study in Scarlet”.

“Shackwin??” said all of his friends “Are you mad?? Think again. You can do better than that!!”

Arthur went away to think again, and he turned the name on its head. Now it became “Sherlock”.  And Sherlock Holmes, a star, was born.

The next question is, of course, whether anybody else in the Sherlock Holmes books had their origins in cricket?

Well, there was an Alexander (Alec) Watson, who was a slow bowler for Lancashire. He took 1,384 wickets in a career that took in 303 matches. I believe that Arthur Conan Doyle, as a keen member of the Marylebone Cricket Club, watched Watson play in May 1886, and take 10 wickets for 54 runs, an extraordinary feat. And Alec was duly rewarded with a kind of immortality.

Here is the exact analysis of his bowling:

And in May 1877, perhaps Arthur Conan Doyle had again been there to watch Watson take 14 wickets for 49 runs against the Marylebone Cricket Club.  After all, Lancashire were one of the very best teams in England .Here are the MCC innings:

And here are the detailed statistics of each bowler:

No wonder that Arthur felt he had to include “Watson” as one of his two main characters. Fourteen wickets for 49 runs is really as good as it gets! Here is our hero, second from the left……..

And a close up………………

Now, a frequent pub quiz question.

“What was the name of Sherlock Holmes brother?”

Well, he was called Mycroft Holmes.

I believe that Arthur Conan Doyle got the name “Mycroft” from William Mycroft, a bowler who played for Derbyshire in 138 matches and who took 863 wickets. I am 99% certain that Arthur had perhaps watched William Mycroft play for the Marylebone Cricket Club in May 1877 when Alec Watson took fourteen wickets for England. For the other side, though, Mycroft took a fabulous six England wickets for 12 runs in the second innings. Here we are. First of all, the full scorecard. Just look at the second innings:

And the bowling figures:

It looks as if Arthur took two names from this one single game, Mycroft and Watson. Here’s Mycroft:

Here’s another superb performance by William Mycroft, playing for the MCC against Hertfordshire in July 1879. Again, the probability is that Arthur Conan Doyle actually watched this game, insofar as he was a member of the MCC. Mycroft went out to bowl against Hertfordshire with the odds stacked strongly against the MCC. Hertfordshire, with ten batsmen needed a paltry sixty runs:

Wickets fell regularly during the innings. A wicket was lost when the score was 2, then 10, then 10 again, 11, 11 again, 15, 17, 23 and 23 again.  Mycroft’s bowling figures were:

An amazing nine wickets for eight runs!!  And here’s another picture of Mycroft to finish with:

Sadly, despite a fair amount of research, I have been unable to come up with the origin of the surname. “Holmes”.

 

8 Comments

Filed under cricket, History, Humour, Nottingham

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by | January 23, 2024 · 6:17 am

Widdle (11)

Last time, I had managed tro show you two of the three routes Widdel used to reach our patio aka “Sausageland”. He could do a tightrope act fifteen feet from the ground round the back of next door’s garage…….

He coulf take the path whose steps wound their way up the rockery…….

I didn’t mention though, the last route, which was to make his way across the lawn to the hedge between ourselves and the other neighbours’ garden, and then to walk in and out of the hedge, through the foliage, climbing upwards, slowly, until he reached a fence, a fence which, like the path, I had made some forty years previously when we first moved in…….

Then he could follow the fence along to his destination……..

The last picture was in spring. woth a moulted coat and fairly sparse vegetation. Here’s late summer with an early arrival of his winter coat…..

He’ll soon have reached his destinastion……

And then it’s off to see what’s happening in Sausageland…….

After that, he could do what he wanted. H could reverse his steps and make his way to “The Waiting Tree” which you can just see on the left of this photograph. There, he would wait and wait patiently until somebody came out, and ascertained what he wanted, as if we didn’t know…..

He might put his paws on somebody’s knee and then look wistful and plaintive until he was given a sausage or two…..

If he was feeling particularly fierce, he might even go down to the end of the patio for a quick game of “The Lone Wolf on Watch”………

 

22 Comments

Filed under Humour, My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Personal, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as , ,

by | January 17, 2024 · 6:17 am

Part 2 : where the name Sherlock came from

First class cricket has a very long history in England, and Nottinghamshire is one of the oldest counties.  Teams of that name have, in fact, played cricket since at least 1835. During that time, they have played their home games at a world famous ground called Trent Bridge……

One of their most famous, and colourful, nineteenth century players was Mordecai Sherwin who was born in 1851 and died in 1910. In the wintertime, when cricket was impossible because of the weather, “Mordy”, an expert at catching a moving ball, actually played football for Notts County, the local football club. He was very agile and, despite weighing seventeen stones (238 pounds, 108 kilos), he always played as a goalkeeper. Even though he carried a lot of weight, every time that Notts County scored a goal, he would treat the crowd to a cartwheel.

In those days, goalkeepers could be barged into the net to score a goal, so Mordy’s weight frequently came in useful. On one famous occasion, the Blackburn Rovers outside right, Joe Lofthouse, barged him, but merely bounced off. Sherwin famously said:

“Young man, you’ll hurt yourself if you do that again.”

A little while later, Lofthouse tried his luck again, but Mordy stepped aside and Lofthouse collided with the goalpost and cut himself .

Mordy was much more famous, though, as a first class cricketer for his native county. He played 328 times for Nottinghamshire and three times for England in international “Test” matches. He scored 2362 runs as a batsman and as a wicketkeeper he caught 616 batsmen and stumped 227. We have not looked at stumpings but it is basically a way which only the wicketkeeper can use to dismiss the batsman. If the batsman tries to hit the ball but misses it, the wicketkeeper can catch it and knock the wicket over himself, but only if the batsman has wandered too far down the pitch, beyond the special white line, about a yard or so from the wicket. Here’s Mordecai. You can just about see the white line for stumpings…..

During Mordy’s golden years, one of Nottinghamshire’s most effective bowlers was called Francis “Frank” Joseph Shacklock (1861-1937). He played for Nottinghamshire from 1886-1893 and took around 120 wickets. In his entire career, playing also for Derbyshire, the MCC/Marylebone Cricket Club and Otago in New Zealand, he took 497 wickets.

It didn’t take me too long to find some examples of Frank Shacklock’s partnership with Mordy Sherwin as they played together for Nottinghamshire.

These scorecards come from the annually appearing almanac of cricket entitled “Wisden”. Here is part of the scorecard for a Nottinghamshire v Sussex game in July 1891:

In this game, Shacklock  managed eight wickets for 144 runs, with four in the first innings (in a a total of 332 runs by Sussex) and four more in the second (a pathetic 38). That is a remarkable difference in the two innings totals for Sussex. Below are the bowling statistics. Shacklock took his four wickets in the first innings at a cost of 117 runs but at a cost of only 27 runs in the second.  :

Here’s Frank Shacklock :

In this next game, Shacklock took nine wickets in the match, which was a fixture against Somerset in June 1892. First come the statistics for Nottinghamshire’s two innings, and then Somerset’s two innings. Look how many times the phrase “b Shacklock” appears, particularly in the second Somerset innings of just under one hundred……

A frequent visitor to watch Nottinghamshire cricket at Trent Bridge around this time was an up-and-coming young author called Arthur Conan Doyle. Arthur was a huge sports fan. He actually played in ten first class cricket matches with a highest score of 43 and just one wicket as a bowler, that of WG Grace, the greatest cricketer in the world at the time. Arthur enjoyed bodybuilding and he was an amateur boxer as well as a keen skier, a talented billiards player, a golfer and, in amateur football, a goalkeeper for Portsmouth FC, the predecessor of the present club. Here he is:

Arthur had enormous regard for the wicketkeeping skills of Mordecai Sherwin and the bowling skills of Frank Shacklock. He was very much taken with how frequently batsmen were out, “caught Sherwin bowled Shacklock”.

Arthur decided that he would commemorate the skills of these two cricketers in the forthcoming detective novel he was about to start writing. The book was to be called “A Study in Scarlet” and it would appear in 1887. The best idea, Arthur thought, would be to have “caught Sherwin bowled Shacklock” become an important part of the book. One way of doing this would be to use the two men’s names in the name of the book’s hero, by taking the first syllable from one cricketer’s surname and the second one from the second cricketr’s surname. An excellent idea, although his first effort was a very poor one, it must be said. Who could admire a detective with the first name “Shackwin” ?

And so…….Arthur Conan Doyle turned the name on its head, came up with “Sherlock”, and the famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, was born.

“But what’s the connection between Mordecai Sherwin, Frank Shacklock and a Victorian pub called the Grove”, I hear you all ask. Well, with the money he had made playing cricket, Mordecai Sherwin bought the Grove pub. I have only got a few photographs from its very last days…

…..but it would have been a nice pub during the last few years of Queen Victoria’s reign. And I cannot imagine that with a character like Mordecai in charge, his old pal rank Shacklock didn’t come along every now and again for some free ale!

Next time, two other major characters in Sherlock Holmes stories who arrived directly from a fine bowling performance at Lord’s, probably witnessed by Arthur Conann Doyle, who was a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club and who would have visited this famous old ground on many occasions.

21 Comments

Filed under cricket, Criminology, History, Humour, Literature, Nottingham, Writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by | January 5, 2024 · 6:17 am

Sherlock Holmes : Part 1

Bear with me, but before we get to the meat of this post, I need to explain a little bit about cricket for those of my readers who think that cricket is some kind of insect, albeit a big, scary one, that you definitely wouldn’t want to find on your knee. This one can be up to four inches long…..

Cricket can be a very complicated sport but most people can recognise the two wickets, one at either end of the pitch.

Then there are two “batsmen”, one of whom, Batsman A, tries to hit the ball as far as possible when it is bowled at his wicket.

The other batsman, B, stands at the other end of the pitch and awaits developments.  By coincidence, he is near where the “bowler” bowls from.

If Batsman A hits the ball a long way, then both batsmen, both A and B, may then decide to run as fast as they can to the wicket at the other end. Every time they do this, they exchange their original positions and their team scores one “run”.  The batsmen here are wearing yellow helmets……

The two batsmen’s immediate opponents are the bowler who bowls the ball, subject to a rather long list of rules, and the wicketkeeper.  Any ball hit by Batsman A is eventually returned to the bowler so he can have another go.  By that point, more or less, the batsmen will have stopped running.  Here’s the bowler bowling, and Batsman B waiting for Batsman A at the other end to hit the ball to the moon so that they can run 10,000 times.

Now comes the complicated bit.

Batsman A is trying to defend his wicket against the bowler, who bowls the ball from a position level with the opposite wicket. Batsman B is standing nearby (picture above).

Batsman A, at the other end, will try to hit the ball as far as possible.

The bowler, though, is trying to dismiss Batsman A so that he will have to return to the dressing room and cannot bat any more. The most obvious way for the bowler to do this is to hit the wicket and to knock at least some of it over. And then the batsman is “out” ! :

And now, the wicketkeeper. He is on the same side as the bowler, and his primary job is to stop any balls bowled by the bowler and then missed by Batsman A. If he doesn’t stop the ball, the batsmen can run, just as if Batsman A had hit it:

The wicketkeeper also has another job to do. If Batsman A hits the ball, but only nicks it, then wicketkeeper can catch it as it whizzes past at high speed, and Batsman A will be “out”, dismissed from the game, provided that the ball doesn’t touch the ground.

Indeed, this same rule applies to all the members of the bowling side. If Batsman A is a fool, he will hit the ball in the air and then when any opponent catches it before it touches the ground, it’s “Goodnight, Vienna” for him. This way of being, literally, “caught out” is the commonest way to be dismissed for a batsman:

Extremely common too is the situation mentioned above where Batsman A just nicks the ball as it passes him, and the wicketkeeper then catches it. The reason is that the ball may well be travelling extremely fast when Batsman A nicks it…perhaps 80 or 90 mph in top class cricket. If a team has a very good fast bowler, then the bowling team’s main tactic will be to get the batsman to nick the ball and then have the wicketkeeper catch it.

In the 1970s, the Australians’ main bowler was Dennis Lillee, and he bowled extremely fast, and with any luck, his colleague, Rodney Marsh, the Australian wicketkeeper, would catch the ball when it was nicked by the terrified Batsman A.

Here’s Dennis Lillee, my favourite ever bowler:

And here’s Rodney Marsh, who died recently, in March 2022. Dennis Lillee is also in the picture:

In the scorebook, that particular dismissal of the batsman would be recorded as:

Batsman A        caught Marsh        bowled Lillee        0

In the more usual abbreviated form…..

Batsman A         c    Marsh                b  Lillee                  0

Those five words soon became the most frequent means of dismissal in the history of international cricket, with more than 200 occurrences. Here’s just one of them:

Lillee is on the right, Marsh is flying, and the English batsman is Tony Greig.

And here’s another. Lillee is on the left, flying, Marsh is on the extreme right and the English batsman is doomed.

Be patient. This blog post is definitely leading somewhere. On a journey. A journey that takes in a world famous cricket ground. An author with a household name. And a demolished pub about a mile away from where I am sitting right now. Just bear with me.

In the meantime, here’s that pub, just before the demolition men got to it:

And here it is now;

It was a great pity to lose a real Victorian pub, even if social housing replaces it.

19 Comments

Filed under cricket, Criminology, History, Humour, Literature, Nottingham, Writing

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

by | October 17, 2023 · 6:17 am

Goose Fair (4)

Before the sudden advent of the huge electric amusement machines around 1900, exotic animals were a firm favourite of the Goose Fair hordes………

The big problem, of course, was the fact that, in the desire to exhibit the most unusual animals, the owners of the animals would often end up by going to an animal market and buying a creature that they themselves could not identify. So sit back and enjoy my own attempts to work out what the unknown animal really was………

Let’s start with……..

“Tiger Wolves direct from the Black Rocks of Abyssinia”. These were shown in Day’s “No 1 Royal Menagerie” in 1898 as a “Group of Wild and ferocious Tiger Wolves direct from the Black Rocks of Abyssinia”. Alongside them was a group of Baby Lions”.

There are wolves in Ethiopia, but they are red, so much so that they are also called “the Simien fox or Simien jackal or horse jackal”. Intriguingly, at this time, the name “Tiger-Wolf” was the accepted shortened form of “Tasmanian Tiger-Wolf”. This phrase was used to refer to the Thylacine, an unbelievably rare Australian animal to turn up in a fair in Nottingham. I really do wonder what these animals were!

A slightly less colourful one:

I think you’re getting the idea…..

Day’s “No 1 Royal Menagerie” also had “Blonko Bill, King of the Lion Tamers” working for them.” I have been unable to trace the meaning of “blonko”, although if ever a word sounded like Australian slang, this is it! The internet was no help. One site said it meant “kind, entertaining, handsome”, another said it meant “fat, fat, fat”.

In 1899, Bostock & Wombwell produced a special poster listing all of their animals, including the “Great Pongo Baboon, or Hairy Wild Man”. Intriguingly, “Pongo” is the scientific name for the orangutan, thought to be a close relative of Bigfoot, hence the “Hairy Wild Man” epithet:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

Another strange sounding animal on the Bostock & Wombwell poster was the “Hamadryas, or Sacred Baboon” although, ironically, it is very simple. The poster is referring to the Hamadryas Baboon from the Horn of Africa and the southwestern region of the Arabian Peninsula. You can just see the side of his bright scarlet posterior……

The same owners had a “Chiropottamus, or Vlacko-Vark” which is merely a sort of wild pig. It may be the Red River Hog, “a wild member of the pig family living in the Guinean and Congolian forests. Here’s the old Brooke Bond tea card from the “Wild Animals of Africa” collection….

Alternatively, it may be the warthog which is the “vlakvark” in Afrikaans…..

A “Leucoryx Antelope” sounds a very strange beast but it is also called the “Gemsboc” on the poster. And the “Gemsboc is the gemsbok, gemsbuck or South African oryx, native to the arid regions of Southern Africa, such as the Kalahari Desert. It is a very beautiful animal….

The “Brindled Gnu, or Horned Horse” is a lot easier, because we have all seen this strange word. Not totally unexpectedly, the Brindled Gnu is the blue wildebeest, also called the common wildebeest, the white-bearded wildebeest or the white-bearded gnu. It is one of the two species of wildebeest…..

The Bostock & Wombwell poster advertises a “White Silken Sacred Yak” which would have been a pure white yak. Nowadays, some 5% of the herds are white. They are regarded as an extremely auspicious animal since white represents light, a personification of the illumination of wisdom and the universal Buddha……

Some animals are very easy to sort out.

A “Puma or Silver Lion” was presumably a North American mountain lion, cougar or puma. Here’s a lovely picture of one of the first ever mountain lions to be found in North Dakota…..

A “Jaguar or Clouded Tiger” is nowadays called a “jaguar” or a “clouded leopard”……

A “Bison, or Wild Prairie Bull” is most probably the North American bison…..

A “Monstre Nennock” sounds incomprehensible, but the alternate names give it away, with “Arctic Sea Bear” making it the polar bear. It would be nice to know what a nennock is, though. Incidentally, I’ve just turned my slides into digital photographs, photoshopped them to make them a little lighter and got rid of the hairs and general dirt. So, here is a nennock or two at Basel Zoo in Switzerland in 1979….

Two final animals though, are most intriguing. Just what were the “Hideous Aswaila”, or “Himalayan Monsters”? Were they a family group of yetis? I bet they were, but the people of the time did not know what yeti was…….

And last of all. What on earth were “Lorenzo’s Performing and Talking Bears”? Were they a family group of Bigfoots? Using their famous “Samurai Chatter” to pass comment about Nottingham and its inhabitants? Here’s a youtube video, and if you move swiftly to 4 minutes exactly, you’ll hear what “Samurai Chatter” is. At 4.40, you can hear the Bigfoot walking around the cabin. It’s really scary!

17 Comments

Filed under Africa, Cryptozoology, History, Humour, Nottingham, Science, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by | October 11, 2023 · 6:17 am

Goose Fair (3)

Last time we finished with Mr Pat Collins’ “Giant Nottingham Geese, All Alive and Kicking” but some surprisingly exotic, and indeed, unusual, animals made their appearance at Goose Fair.

Smallest of them all were the performing fleas:

Look at what they could do:

And don’t worry:

“Each flea is Securely Chained”

In 1899, for their last visit to Goose Fair, Bostock & Wombwell produced a special poster, which listed all of their animals.

Their rivals, of course, boasted about their own animals which included “Novelties never owned or dreamt of by any other Menagerist.” There was the “Great Pongo Baboon”, the “Hamadryas, or Sacred Baboon”, the “Leucoryx Antelope or Gemsboc”, a “Brindled Gnu, or Horned Horse”, a “White Silken Sacred Yak”, a “Puma”, “Jaguar”, a “Bison, or Wild Prairie Bull” and the “Monstre Nennock”.

Here we are:

There was also a huge elephant christened “The Mighty Mastodon”. We still have photographs of him apparently pushing and shoving his way through the Goose Fair crowds, apparently unsupervised, making his way back home to his trailer. Don’t worry about safety, though. Only two years before the council were discussing whether it was dangerous to have brown bears in Upper Parliament Street. Talk about re-wilding!

Even more frightening, apparently, was “Madam Jumbo”, an elephant of, well, elephantine proportions. It could actually lift people down from the second floor of the Post Office in Queen Street. Just look at the size of it. Look at the baby elephant in comparison, or the horse:

Amazingly, in King Street, “The Royal Monster Whale” was on exhibition for Goose Fair week, and for the week after that. It cost only threepence, with children half price. A “Royal Monster Whale” must have caused a great many difficulties for everybody, not just when it was delivered on a handcart, but in providing thousands of gallons of seawater in a city more than fifty miles from the sea. However, that may have been the least of their problems. As Monty Python so rightly said:

“Where are we going to get forty-four tons of plankton from every morning?”

An insoluble problem, unless, of course, “The Royal Monster Whale” was stuffed.

At least one lion at Goose Fair was personally supplied by the great Cecil Rhodes, the diamond billionaire who established the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford University, the oldest graduate scholarships in the world. Every year, 102 full postgraduate scholarships are granted to students across the world. Here’s his lion, serving a life sentence by the look of it:

Sedgwick’s Menagerie had some baby lions, “Performing Elephants”, “Alphonso’s Group of Educated Lions”, “Lorenzo’s Performing and Talking Bears”, “Lorenzo’s Performing Wolves” and then you could see “Lorenzo performing with Nero and Brutus, the largest full-grown untameable African Forest Bred Lions”. Another threepence well spent, children half price.

One of Sedgewick’s chief attractions was “Blonko Bill”:

The first Goose Fair of the new twentieth century starred “the Mafeking Monkey”. During the Siege he had rung a bell every time the Boer artillery shelled the town:

I still don’t see what’s so smart about him, though. Every time the town is shelled, he rings a bell to tell people that they’re being shelled. How is that helpful?

Alongside “the Mafeking Monkey” were “Professor Burnett’s Fencing Booth and Military Tournament”, “Walls Electric Boer Warograph” and “Twigdon’s Electric Palace.” There was also a hairless or “rubber-skinned” mare from the Transvaal, a horse with a mane and tail 21 feet long, a giant horse over 20 hands high and a miniature horse and mule both only 24 inches high.  In addition, there was the “smartest boxing kangaroo” in the world and, sadly, allocated to the animal section,”the giant negro Aaron Moore who is 8 feet in height.” In actual fact, Aaron is known to have been more like 7 feet 3 inches. He was from North Carolina, and, from the photographs I have seen, seems to have worn nearly all the time, a 9 inch high pillar box hat:

13 Comments

Filed under Africa, History, Humour, military, Nottingham

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by | October 5, 2023 · 6:17 am

Goose Fair (2)

Goose Fair always brought with it a host of what could be called “camp followers” who, to be honest, would probably have made their way to pretty well every large fair in the country.

Wandering the streets, therefore, were a good number of distinctively dressed gypsy women, who sold “tickling sticks”, bags of confetti, balls on elastic, ropes of beads and “monkeys on sticks”. All vital commodities in Victorian England!

The gypsy women were extremely popular as fortune tellers, and were always recognisable as such because they traditionally carried a linnet in a cage at the end of a long, thin staff.

And in this photograph of a gipsy woman, notice the boy’s funky pillbox hat. Eagerly, he ia waiting for the birth of  Bob Dylan:

A linnet was chosen, incidentally, because:

“When finches come into our awareness, it is a sure sign of joy-filled, happy times ahead.”

I knew that.

Here are some “sundry sellers, who no doubt had access to their own private supplies of tickling sticks, bags of confetti, balls on elastic, ropes of beads and monkeys on sticks:

And at the other end of the spectrum, a little further away, on Upper Parliament Street, around the columns in front of the Theatre Royal, stood the “nymphs of fashion”.

Here are the columns of the Theatre Royal which is to the left of the now long demolished Empire Theatre :

The “nymphs of fashion” were what we would nowadays call prostitutes. They charged men for their sexual favours. Here’s one of the hottest, preparing to drive the young men wild, or perhaps straight to their doctor:

And here she is without her make-up. Surely, I’m not the only one who thinks that’s a man:

Setting aside for a moment the delights of these disease ridden lovelies, I investigated the attractions which appeared most frequently at Goose Fair around 1900. I discovered that, on Long Row, there was “Wadbrook’s Ghost Exhibition” with the celebrated “Pepper’s Illusion”. In front of the Exchange Building, Pat Collins had his roundabouts including his “Mountain Ponies”, his “Venetian Gala Gondolas” and his “Pneumatic Steam Bicycles”. There was “music produced by electricity on the latest musical instrument, the “Gaviolophone”, equivalent to a String Band of 60 performers, playing Opera, Classical and Popular Music.”

Incidentally, here’s Long Row to the north of the Old Market Square. The western end:

The central area:

And finally, the eastern end, with the incomparable Black Boy Hotel, which, during the Second World War, supplied all of the beds required for the sexual adventures of every single member of Bomber Command in all the RAF bases for fifty miles around:

There may well have been “Wadbrook’s Ghost Exhibition” with “Pepper’s Illusion”. There may well have been roundabouts such as the “Mountain Ponies”, the “Venetian Gala Gondolas” and the “Pneumatic Steam Bicycles”. Despite all of them, though, despite even the “Gaviolophone”, many people, and all the children, still liked to see a few exotic animals, no matter how moth eaten they might have appeared.

By 1898, Day’s “No 1 Royal Menagerie” had returned to the Market Square after a short absence. Day’s was “a Special Engagement of the Greatest Lion Tamers on Earth” with “Captain Laurance & Delvonico, The Lion Kings” (96 years before Disney!). There were “20 noble lions of all ages and sizes” who provided the members of “Delvonico’s Wrestling Lions”, “Delvonico’s Boxing Lions”, “The Clown Lions” and “A Lion in a Trance”. All of them were acts which had been “The Rage and Talk of Europe”, as was “The Daring Performance of Captain Laurance” along with “the only Real Original and Absolutely Untameable Lion Wallace”. Wallace had also appeared in 1896 and 1897. He doesn’t look very fierce in this photograph, though:

Among the animals were “Many Specimens of Birds, Beasts and Reptiles” some of which must have been stuffed, as there was actually a humming bird mentioned, a species which, even nowadays, cannot easily be kept in captivity. At the same time though, there was an elephant called “Elephant Jumbo” who was surely a live animal, as an elephant would be a bit of a nightmare for the taxidermist.

Overall, the proprietors of Day’s “No 1 Royal Menagerie” were happy to call themselves, “The People’s Show at the People’s Price”.

Slightly less exotic as animals were Mr Pat Collins’ “Giant Nottingham Geese, All Alive and Kicking”:

“For rollicking fun, there’s nothing to beat them

If you are “out for the night” don’t miss them;

And while you are there, try the razzle-dazzle cars

Drawn by ostriches, and spinning round at lightning speed.”

And the judges’ verdicts……….. “No rhyme and very little reason.”

19 Comments

Filed under Bomber Command, Criminology, History, Humour, Nottingham

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by | September 29, 2023 · 6:17 am

Goose Fair (1)

Every year, a huge fair is held in Nottingham. It lasts from the first Wednesday in October to the following Saturday. It dates back to a royal charter in 1284 although it is known that the Saxons had held “St. Matthew’s Fair” long before that. Modern belief is that the Saxon fair was based on a fair held by the fun-loving Vikings. A Viking army had captured Nottingham from the Saxons in 868 AD. Its leaders had two of the coolest names ever.

“Ivar the Boneless”

“Halfdan Ragnarsson”

Presumably his Dad was “Wholedan”, or even “Fulldan”.

This combination of Saxons and Vikings would make the Goose Fair well over a thousand years old. Here are some Vikings:

And here are some Saxons:

The name “Goose Fair” comes from the thousands of geese that were driven to Nottingham on foot from Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and East Anglia. Their feet coated with tar and sand to protect them on the long journey of a hundred miles or more, the geese would provide the traditional Michaelmas dish of roast goose on September 29th. Goose Fair was traditionally held in the Old Market Square in the city centre, although it was moved to the Forest Recreation Ground in 1928. The fair has only been cancelled on very few occasions. In 1646 because of bubonic plague, during both World Wars, and finally in 2020 and 2021.

The Old Market Square was a very different place before 1928.

In the 1700s, the fair was no longer about geese, but was more to promote the sale of Red Nottingham, the local cheese which was traditionally made in the shape of a large wheel. The whole thing became a little too Red Nottingham in 1766, when the natives of the town got a little over exuberant and started “The Great Cheese Riot”.  I shall be doing a blogpost about that glorious day when I have spoken to the Archivist of the Museum of the Fifteenth Dragoons to see if the names of the Nottingham peasants they slaughtered have been recorded anywhere.

By 1900, the fair was all about entertainment of every kind, with Aunt Sally’s (sic), shooting galleries, swing boats, roundabouts and merry-go-rounds (is there a difference?). There were theatres showing short films called “animated photographs”. These included boxing matches from the USA, bullfighting from Boulogne in northern France and the famous “Dreyfuss Affair” which was probably the series of eleven short silent films made by the famous French director, Georges Méliès. The very biggest attraction, though, and the most exciting thing on offer, was the increasingly large number of huge spectacular machines powered by electricity. As Pat Collins, the owner of many of the attractions, said:

“the build-up of the mechanical side was very rapid as the manufacturers turned out better machines in each succeeding year”.

One perennial attraction was the Children’s Corner which was situated away from the main fair, at the junction of King Street and Queen Street:

The enntire Market Square was lined with stalls, which also continued up Market Street. These stalls sold “gingerbread, without which Goose Fair would hardly be Goose Fair”, “coconuts, almost equally indispensable” and a profusion of “comestibles and indigestibles”, the latter including mainly children’s toys, books and fruit. On Market Street, the stalls sold a profusion of wash leathers and sponges, and, for the children, there were “penny prize packets” which contained a mixture of tiny sweets and chocolates. There was also a Cheese Fair and a Poultry Fair, and out at Eastcroft, a large cattle market was held. Punch and Judy shows were very popular and they frequently graced St Peter’s Square, or the area in front of the Talbot public house, a little further on than the junction with Market Street.

Next time, the “Nymphs of fashion”, an ironic title, perhaps, given how willing they were to divest themselves of their clothing.

16 Comments

Filed under History, Humour, Nottingham

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by | August 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

Widdle (8)

Last time, I tried to explain why and how there came to be a healthy population of urban foxes living in the leafy suburbs of London. Within a decade, there were large populations of urban foxes in other cities with extensive leafy suburbs, such as such as Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham. One of these sophisticated city foxes even came to be a personal friend of Banksie:

There was nothing to stop the urban foxes.  On average, councils found that for every letter of complaint, there were 25 which said “Hands off our foxes”. And killing them off was very expensive. anyway. And unpopular. The Daily Express reported that…….

“Hackney Council ordered the removal of traps in a popular park within hours of animal lovers reacting angrily to the idea of the inner city foxes being destroyed.”

Nottingham, of course, has its urban foxes. On one occasion. long before I got to know Widdle, I found traces of them near a path between the Ring Road and the tennis courts. Here’s the path, which seems to be Nottingham’s first Linear Litter Bin. The tennis courts are to the left behind the chainlink fencing, and the ringroad is behind the heavy black metal fence on the right:

Something seems to have crawled underneath the chain link fencing which protects the tennis courts:

At one point I found this carefully excavated hole, which I believe to be a fox’s den.

In a city, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of possible places for a fox family to live, such as disused sheds and out buildings and underneath garden decking. There’s plenty of food, especially if there is a fast food restaurant nearby. Indeed, news was released recently that foxes in cities have begun to have broader, stronger muzzles than their country cousins, because a certain amount of strength is needed to open the discarded food containers. Once the containers are open, though, the food that they contain will contain many more calories than the usual diet of a fox out there in the countryside, eating mice, hedgehogs, beetles and other insects.

It was Kevin Parsons, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, who recently announced that investigators had found that “urban foxes had wider, shorter muzzles than those in rural areas. Diet plays a large part in some of the changes. Urban foxes need a stronger bite for the food they eat in cities.

Foxes have all they might need in the city. Even their life expectancy is better than country foxes. The only fly in the ointment is mange which is a disease which can sweep through a city’s fox population and kill nearly every single one. Here’s a fox with the early stages of mange. Look at his tail ! :

Here’s a fox who is past the point of no return. He looks, and is, a terminally sick animal:

Don’t be fooled though! Sometimes a perfectly healthy fox can look as if he is at Death’s Door, when he is moulting, which is, of course, a perfectly normal stage of his life:

Surely you will recognise this rather tatty chap. He is called “Widdle” and was a personal friend of mine. He could look extremely ill when he was moulting, but there was a difference. If a fox is basically healthy, his moult starts at the tail and then spreads up towards the head, which is usually the last to go. Other body extemities, such as the legs, may also stay rich red rather than turn to that tatty fawn-pale orannge-black. And in the three photographs, one of a healthy Widdle and the other two of a fox with mange, that is exactly what is happening.

 

17 Comments

Filed under Humour, My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Personal, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as , , , ,