“Come Watson, come! The game is afoot!”: The Elementary Fame of Sherlock Holmes.

November 30, 2009 at 7:29 PM (Sherlock Holmes)

“Come Watson, come! The game is afoot! Not a word! Into your clothes and come!”

And so begins one of Holmes and Watson’s most famous and interesting adventures, ‘The Abbey Grange’.

For over 120 years, men, women and children have been fascinated and enchanted, amazed and delighted, by the adventures of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and his friend and colleague, Dr. John H. Watson. But nearly all their stories were written over 100 years ago, the last ones were not completed until 1927, and even those are over 80 years old by now. All their exploits happened well over a century ago in a completely different world to our own. That being the case, why, after all these years, are the immortal duo, Holmes and Watson, still alive and well in literary circles? Why is it that there’s a movie on Holmes and Watson coming out this Christmas, in just a few weeks’ time? What is it about Holmes and Watson that keeps them forever coming back for people to read and wonder about?

Undying Popularity.

The Guiness Book of World Records states that:

    “…the most frequently portrayed character on the silver screen is Sherlock Holmes…The Baker Street sleuth has been portrayed by around 75 actors in over 211 films since 1900…”

- Guiness World Records (2003).

There has to be SOMETHING about Mr. Holmes which makes us all love him. What is it? Or indeed, is it possible at all, to nail it down to that ONE some…THING? Or are there, in fact, dozens, or hundreds of reasons why Holmes and Watson have enjoyed undying popularity for the past 100+ years? The very name ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is synonymous with crime, detection, good against evil and…the um…calabash pipe and deerstalker hat. Why has Holmes remained so famous when other fictional detectives disappeared into the mists of time and history? He’s up there with Miss Jane Marple or Monseiur Hercule Poirot…but what is it about him that means he deserves to be placed up on a pedestal like this?

It was not just the man himself, it was the world in which he lived in. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the British doctor who started writing about Holmes in his spare time while waiting for patients to show up at his surgery for their appointments, captured a world which is, in the 21st century, an intricate and detailed and minute portrait of late Victorian London, as complete as any encyclopedia. The stories contained all these fascinating little details which bring Holmes to life. The infamous London fog, the gaslight, the clattering horses hooves, the hansom cabs, the beggars, the filthy docks, the disreputable East End. Posh, West End gentlemen’s clubs, horse-racing and scandals. All these features transport us back to a time where we can lose ourselves in the smoke and chill of Holmesian London and to follow the great detective as he charges off into the mist, in search of another killer, thief or desperado. London was the perfect setting for crime and for the criminal agents who brought them to justice.

“The Only One in the World”.

    “…I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”
    “The only unofficial detective?” I said, raising my eyebrows.
    “The only unofficial consulting detective,” he answered. “I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection…”

- The Sign of Four.

One of the chief reasons why Holmes has remained popular for so long, is because the man who created him, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, did something to detective fiction which had been almost unknown at the time of his writing, in the late 1880s. That something was to have a detective who actually solved his cases and who explained every single step along the way. Until Doyle came along, no other writer had managed to do this. In his own words, Doyle said (in the one and only filmed, audio-recorded interview that he ever gave, literally months before he died):

    “…it always annoyed me, how, in the old-fashioned detective story, the detective always seemed to get at his result, either by some sort of lucky chance or fluke, or else, it was quite unexplained how he got there! He got there, but he never gave an explanation how! Well that didn’t seem to me, to be quite ‘playing the game’. It seemed to me that he’s bound to give his reasons!…”

Before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came along, detective fiction was weak, boring, uninteresting and generally poorly written, with writers having no idea how to successfully get their detectives to solve a crime convincingly. What Doyle did was to create a detective who not only solved his crimes, but could show every single step he took, in order to solve it, through the ‘science of deduction’ and the ‘art of observation’, as they were called in the Holmesian canon. For the first time ever, readers could read a detective story and they could follow this detective through his entire case and learn how he solved his crimes. Such a thing had never been seen before; it was a revolution! This, in a nutshell, was what made Holmes so immensely popular to begin with.

The Man Behind the Man.

But who was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?

Doyle was a Scotsman born in 1859. He studied medicine at the University of Edinbrugh and spent his younger years as a ship’s surgeon, sailing around the world. When he was a bit older, he turned his medical skills to becoming a civilian doctor and set himself up in practice in Southsea, England, near the town of Portsmouth. While Doyle was a skilled physician (for the day), he had constant financial struggles. In fact at one point, he was so poor, he had only just enough money to furnish the rooms in his house that his patients would see! In his spare time between patients, Doyle wrote stories to pass the time. He had little else to do, and having his younger brother, Innes Doyle, who helped in the surgery, always nearby, meant that Arthur had a lot of spare time.

Struggling to make ends meet, Doyle decided to try his hand at detective fiction, dissatisfied with the detective-fiction then in circulation. He based his legendary sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, on Dr. Joseph Bell, who was one of his lecturers at the University of Edinbrugh. Bell had introduced Doyle to the science of observation and deduction, and had the uncanny ability to diagnose patients’ ailments the moment they stepped into his office. Doyle was much impressed by this skill, and decided that it could just as easily be transferred from medical diagnosis to the detection of crime. One does not have to look far to see that Doyle based Dr. Watson, Holmes’s medical colleague, friend, chronicler and narrator of most of the stories, on himself. In 1887, Doyle published his first Holmes story: “A Study in Scarlet”. It was a runaway success. Within a few years, Doyle had made a name for himself as a detective-fiction writer and he was now living very comfortably from his royalties from his Holmes stories as well as his other writings.

Doyle got his ‘Sir Arthur’ title, his knighthood, in 1902, due to services rendered during the Boer War. He gave up writing Holmes in the early 1900s and only started writing about Holmes again when publishing-houses paid him big money to resurrect the character. He had initially killed Holmes off when he decided that his character was distracting him from what he considered his better and more important writings. In a letter to his mother, Mary, Sir Arthur wrote that:

    “[Sherlock Holmes] keeps me from better things”.

Doyle wrote his very last volume of Holmes stories, ‘His Last Bow’, in the mid 1920s, just a few years before his death in 1930.

The Science of Deduction and the Art of Observation.

    “…You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles…”

- The Boscombe Valley Mystery.

Sherlock Holmes solved his cases through what was called the ‘science of deduction’, where one examined minute details and drew conclusions from them. But one could not examine minute details if they did not first observe them. Mr. Holmes was like a radar or a heat-seeking missile dressed in a three-piece suit with a top hat and cane. He had the ability to seek out tiny details about his clients’ dress, appearance and accessories, to tell him who they were, why they had come to see him, and what their occupations were. He first observed them and then drew deductions and inferences from what he had observed. From one item, he could deduce its entire history. Using these skills, he was able to read into things, information that had eluded less observant investigators. And it’s not that hard to do. I’ve done it myself and, with practice, it does work. Think of this for example:

A letter with smudged handwriting with deep troughs in the paper from where the pen-point has been pressed into the page, combined with bleedthrough of the ink. What inferences might be drawn from this?

1. The writer is left-handed. Only a left-handed writer would smudge his ink, as his hand moves across the page (and thus, across the ink) as he writes.
2. He wrote with a ballpoint pen on a soft surface (perhaps on top of some newspaper or a notepad). Only a ballpoint pen requires such force in writing that it leaves trenches in the paper. And yet, these trenches would not exist if the paper had been on a perfectly hard, flat surface, like a desk. The ‘give’ provided by the padding of the extra sheets of paper, allowed the fibres of the page to crease under the pressure of the pen-point.
3. The paper is cheap notepad paper. If it was expensive or of a better quality, the ink would not stain all the way through.

It’s really not that hard.

Despite the fact that deductions, observation and inferences had existed before Doyle famously made them the traits of his master detective, nobody had ever thought to use them for the detection and solving of crimes before. This was what made Sherlock Holmes so revolutionary. It made his cases seem believable, possible…it made them seem…real. It was this realism that made him a success. It made people believe that it was possible to solve crimes, if one just spent enough time observing and studying the things that were in front of them every single day.

Having observed all the little details, it was then necessary to make the correct inferences and to draw the correct conclusions from the clues given to you, by applying various theories, until you found a likely one that held all the facts together.

    “…It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts…”

- A Scandal in Bohemia.

Drawing the correct inferences could be easy, or it could be almost impossibly hard. It’s like trying to put together a puzzle and getting everything to fit together correctly, by removing what is obviously not possible, and examining all the real probabilities.

    “When you have elminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.

- The Sign of Four.

Sherlock Holmes: The Man.

    “My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know”.

- The Blue Carbuncle.

Although Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made him seem incredibly real and again, it was this realism that led to his fame. Sherlock Holmes wasn’t some secret sleuth or caped crusader who lived in a cave in a mountain on the other side of the Valley of Doom, sitting on a throne made of marble…he lived in London. At 221b Baker Street, in the well-to-do West End, in a nice, central, normal-sounding address. He wore ordinary clothes, he ate ordinary food. He had a housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson, an elderly Scotchwoman. He had his older brother, Mycroft. He even had his best friend: John Watson, M.D. This homely and seemingly real portrait of Sherlock Holmes endeared him to his readers as a real, physical being whom they could visit, talk to and whom they could go to for help.

Sherlock Holmes had his vices, like any other man would. He was rude, he was arrogant, he drank, he shot himself up with morphine and cocaine. He would stay awake for days and nights at time, he chain-smoked, he denied himself food when on a case, and he got injured during the course of his investigations, as any detective might. He carried firearms and other weapons and he had his enemies who wanted to kill him. Holmes never married and he rarely spoke of his family. The only one of Holmes’s relatives whom Doyle explicitly mentions (and even introduces the reader to), is Holmes’s brother, Mycroft, who is described as being seven years older than Sherlock and possessing even greater deductive and observational powers than his younger and more famous brother.

Holmes was described as being tall (6′-6’3″), lean, hawk-like, pale and with black hair. He said himself, that he was ‘exceptionally strong in the fingers’ (Beryl Coronet) and that he had ‘some knowledge of Baritsu’ (Empty House). He was able to hold his own in a fight and he had considerable acting ability, being able to fool Watson (and others) into thinking that he was…an Italian priest…a clergyman…a bookseller…an old man…and a common loafer.

Sherlock Holmes’s very name was a mix of the real and the fantastic. Holmes is an ordinary enough surname, but with a name like ‘Sherlock’, he was bound to stand out, the same with his brother, with a name like ‘Mycroft’. And yet, I suppose we should be thankful that Sherlock is just plain old…Sherlock. Early drafts of his first story had Doyle naming him Sherrinford Holmes! In the end, he decided this name was too flowery and flamboyant and that a simpler, but still stylish name, might be better-suited.

Behind every Good Detective is a Sidekick.

You coudn’t have a detective without a sidekick, a partner in crime-detection, someone whom you could rely on to assist you in your investigations. Holmes’s investigative partner was a man named Dr. John. H. Watson, whom Doyle based on himself. Doyle’s original name for Holmes’s friend and colleague was…Ormond Sacker, however, good taste and common-sense prevailed, and Doyle decided that such a name was unrealistic and too colourful. He decided that his narrator and Holmes’s colleague should have a simpler, more down-to-earth name. Something which everyone could relate to. An everyman name…such as…John Watson. Simple, plain, unpretentious and which could belong to any man in London.

Like Doyle, Watson was a physician with a military background. Doyle was a ship’s surgeon and a medical officer during the Boer War. Watson was a medical officer during the Second Afghan War of the 1880s. Watson’s physical description closely mirrored Doyle’s, being a man of average height, solidly built and who sported a neat moustache across his upper lip. Like his creator, Watson had money-troubles, betting his army pension on the horses and losing it in gambling. In “The Dancing Men”, we learn that Holmes keeps Watson’s chequebook locked in a drawer of his desk, where the good doctor cannot get at it, to spend his money unwisely.

The Holmesian canon is a peep into Victorian era medicine, thanks to Watson. In this Watsonian world, brandy is a cure for everything from fainting to suffocation to physical exhaustion. Tuberculosis is still called by its archaic name of ‘Consumption’ and sulphuric acid is still called ‘Oil of Vitriol’. Horrendous wounds such as having one’s fingers hacked off with a butcher’s cleaver are treated professionally and quietly, and Watson’s medical skills have come to the aid of Holmes and other canon characters on numerous occasions, whether it be injuries from being mauled by a dog, being beat up in a pub brawl or being set upon by a group of streetpads (an old, Victorian term for muggers).

The Ultimate Villain.

Doyle had created the ultimate sleuth, the ultimate sidekick…and now, he had to create the ultimate villain. Professor James Moriarty.

Prof. Moriarty is Holmes’s arch-nemesis, and the leader of a large and powerful gang which operates all over London. Holmes called him the ‘Napoleon of Crime’, and considered him his intellectual equal. Like Holmes, Moriarty was brainy, sly, careful, calculating and observant. This made him an excellent criminal. It also meant that it was very hard for Holmes to ever catch him, and they played a constant cat-and-mouse game throughout the canon. Moriarty meets his end in “The Final Problem”, the story in which he had wanted to kill off Sherlock Holmes as well. Moriarty, apart from being crafty and evil, also encapsulated the physical appearance of a master criminal. He was tall, thin, hawk-like, gruff, dangerous and uncompromising.

Immortal Holmes.

Even though he was created so many years ago, even though his world seems alien to us, he remains, as Holmes himself once said to Watson: “…the one fixed point in a changing age”. His world, his skills, his cases and the man who created him, will remain legendary for decades to come. His very, phyiscal profile is instantly recognisable, the world-over; the deerstalker hat, the cape and the curved, calabash pipe.

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Ebony and Ivory: The History of the Piano.

November 29, 2009 at 10:55 PM (Musical History)

One of the most beloved, one of the most expensive and one of the most versatile and influential instruments in the world, the piano has been part of our lives for the past three hundred years. It has shaped Western music in innumerable ways and has influenced endless genres of music from classical to jazz to rock and roll, filmscore music and classic pop. But what is the history of the piano? Where did it come from? Who made it? And what does the name ‘piano’ actually mean? This article will cover the history and influence that one of the most famous musical instruments in the world, has had on Western civilisation from the start of the Stuart Period, up to the modern day.

Before the Piano.

Keyboard instruments have existed for centuries. Before the piano, there was the harpsichord and clavichord. Before the harpsichord, there was the hurdy-gurdy. Of these three instruments, the piano most closely resembled the harpsichord, which could be considered the modern piano’s birth-instrument. Before the piano came along, keyboard instruments worked by pressing on the keys, which moved a series of wooden pegs (called ‘jacks’) which sprung upwards, pluckng strings inside the instrument-case. Clavichords and harpsichords worked like this. There was one jack for each key, and each jack had a small spike or ‘quill’ in it, which plucked (and vibrated) the string as it went up, and which dampened (or dulled) the string as it came down again. Instruments such as the harpsichord and clavichord produced very twangy, metallic-sounding music, a cross between a piano and a guitar, lute or a harp. The sound of harpsichords is commonly associated with grand, European royal courts in the 17th and 18th centuries.


An 18th century harpsichord. Note the lack of pedals underneath the keyboard.

While such instruments as harpsichords and clavichords looked very much like pianos, and while they worked similarly to a piano, they differed greatly in the sounds they produced. Harpsichords, as I said, produce sound by plucking the strings, not striking them, like a modern piano. This plucking sound creates a sharp, metallic ‘twang!’, a bit like a guitar-string. Furthermore, as the harpsichord-jack fell the moment you removed your finger from the key, the damper in the jack immediately dulled the the string, preventing harpsichordists from holding notes for very long. This limited the kind of music which people could produce on these instruments. Sooner or later, someone was going to get fed up with all this stuff, and do something about it…and that someone was an Italian instrument-maker…

The Birth of the Pianoforte.

As we’ve seen, while keyboard instruments existed before the piano, they had deficiencies in how they produced sound and how well that sound could be manipulated and used by the musician, to create music. Something better and more conducive to musical creativity was needed. Something with more variety and possibilities. Something that could allow the instrumentalist to control every facet of how he played the instrument and that would allow him to get the most out of his playing. That something, was a newfangled invention, called, in its native Italian, the clavicembalo col piano e forte. Literally: Clavichord with soft and loud (capabilities). It was called this because it was the first keyboard instrument (a clavichord), which allowed the instrumentalist to control how hard or how softly he desired to strike the keys and how loud, or how soft the resultant notes would sound. It was an incredible invention!

So…who invented the piano?

Thorough musical historical research has attributed the invention of the fortepiano (later changed to the pianoforte and later still, to just ‘piano’) to one man. This one man was an Italian instrument-maker who lived in the 17th and 18th centuries. His name was Bartolomeo Cristofori. Signor Cristofori was born in the Republic of Venice (modern day Venice, Italy), in 1655. By the time of his death in 1731, he had created one of the most legendary instruments ever known.

Reliable historical documents date the first mention of Sig. Cristofori’s new instrument to the year 1700. By that stage, he had invented a keyboard instrument which worked by having hammers strike the strings, instead of having jacks which plucked them. The inclusion of pedals allowed musicians who tried out Sig. Cristofori’s new toy, to regulate how long a note hung in the air for, before releasing their foot (and lowering the damper), to muffle the vibrating piano-strings.

The piano was an incredible success. By the time a young man named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart appeared on the scene, Europe had been living with the piano for some fifty-six years. Indeed, by 1728, the first commercial piano-manufacturer had set itself up in business. John Broadwood & Sons is the oldest piano-manufacturer in the world…and nearly 300 years later…it’s still making pianos!


Piano made by John Broadwood & Sons, dated 1799. Note the two pedals jutting out of the two front legs.

Such was the piano’s popularity that by the 1790s, Mr. Broadwood and his sons had given up making harpsichords entirely. Prior to that date, they manufactured both pianos and harpsichords, but the Broadwood family must’ve been pretty brainy, for they saw rather quickly that the piano was the new thing that everyone wanted. The harpsichord’s days were now numbered and in 1793, the firm stopped making harpsichords altogether and concentrated on creating the best pianos that they possibly could. As of the year 2000, J. Broadwood & Sons holds a Royal Warrant from the British Royal Family, as official supplier (and tuner) of pianos provided to the Queen’s court and household.

The Rise of the Piano.

Such was the popularity of Sig. Cristofori’s new invention that by the early 1800s, the harpsichord was more-or-less obsolete. Nobody wanted them, and new piano-manufacturers were popping up almost overnight. While Mr. Broadwood and his family paved the way, being the first commercial manufacturer of pianos, they would not be alone for very long. Following closely behind the Broadwoods were the manufacturies of Erard (France, 1777), Challen (England, 1804), Chappell (England, 1811) and eventually, one of the most famous piano-manufacturers of all…Steinway & Sons, in 1853.

The impact of the piano on society was immense. Once the toys of only the rich, famous and powerful, towards the middle and end of the 19th century, the piano, now produced in significant quantities in factories and workshops around the world, started being made available to the upper and middle-classes of society, which were formed with the rise of the Industrial Revolution.

By the early 19th century, piano had firmly cemented its place in Western music. By this time, there were three distinct styles of pianos…


The Upright Piano. The most common, domestic piano today, the upright piano is characterised by having the soundboard and strings placed vertically, perpendicular to the keyboard.


The Grand Piano. This style of piano had its origins in the 17th and 18th centuries. Early pianos copied the case-styles of pre-existing harpsichords which were similarly shaped. Grand pianos are generally associated with larger homes or with institutions such as concert halls, schools and musical academies.


The Square Piano. Also called a square grand. The square piano was a style of piano manufactured in the earlier days of the piano’s existence and this case-style was made from the 1700s until the first half of the 1800s, when it finally died out. Very few, if any people, still make square pianos, and the majority you see today would all be antiques at least 150 years old.

The Influence of the Piano.

The rise of the piano was fast and phenomenal, and its influence on Western popular culture and the musical scene was just as intense. For the first time, an instrument with almost endless musical possibilities, was placed within the reach of ordinary men and women. Prior to the 19th century, pianos were expensive and carefully made, meant only for the wealthy and powerful. The rise of the Industrial Revolution, however, allowed pianos to be made more rapidly and more cheaply, and people started buying them and putting them in their homes, their schools, community halls and other places of social gathering. The range of notes on the piano allowed for endless musical possibilities and this saw the rise of the popular song during the last quarter of the 19th century.

The Rise of Popular Music.

With pianos now becoming more abundant and more accessible to the average man and woman, people began to see that there could be a booming music industry just over the horizon, that clever composers could make millions out of. And so, the first mass-produced, popular songs started coming onto the market.

The center for popular piano sheet-music in the United States (at least), from around 1880 until the 1950s, was a small section of Manhattan on West 28th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues…colloqually called…Tin Pan Alley.

The name was originally a derrogatory one, and reflected the sounds of dozens of pianos being played on, all at once, which supposedly sounded like a bunch of idiots beating away at a heap of tin pans. Despite the fact that people passing through Tin Pan Alley might not have liked the din of all the clashing pianos, Tin Pan Alley produced and published some of the most famous songs of late 19th century and early 20th century popular music. These are all Tin Pan Alley songs…how many do you know?

In the Good Old Summertime.
Give My Regards to Broadway.
There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.
Danny Boy.
Alexander’s Ragtime Band.
Hello Ma Baby.
Come Josephine in my Flying Machine.
Yes! We have no Bananas.
Under the Bamboo Tree.
Chinatown, My Chinatown.
Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two).
Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

You may recognise a few of them. These were all popular songs of the late 19th and early 20th century, and they all came from Tin Pan Alley. None of this would have been possible without the invention of the piano. Without the piano, popular music as we know it today, simply could not, and never would have existed. Tin Pan Alley’s popularity was assured in the turn of the century because the middle-class people of New York, who had pianos in their apartments, were always on the lookout for new and better and more interesting songs to play. Broadway musicals and vaudeville shows, together with popular ragtime music (which was the mainstay of American popular music from the 1880s until the 1910s), kept Tin Pan Alley in business for years. It wasn’t until the rise of Rock and Roll in the early 50s that classical popular music began to gradually slide away, out of the public consciousness.

The Piano Today.

But, none of this stuff. Not the jazz, the ragtime, the pop music, rock and roll, classical, classic pop, classic rock or showtunes would be possible today, if not for that one instrument…the piano, which was invented over 300 years ago, by an Italian keyboard-manufacturer known as Bartolomeo Cristofori. The piano remains an immensely popular instrument today, both for commercial and private residential musical enjoyment.

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Public Enemy #1: The Birth of the ‘Public Enemy Era’.

November 29, 2009 at 1:43 PM (The Great Depression (1929-1939))

If you’re a fan of the “golden age of gangsters”, if you’re a fan of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression in the United States or if you’re a fan of criminal history, you’ll probably know that from 1920 until the end of the Depression in 1939, the United States of America experienced its biggest-ever crime-wave. Maybe you’ve watched that new film “Public Enemies”? What is a ‘public enemy’ and where did they come from? How were they viewed in society and what was done to stop these crooks?

Before the Public Enemy.

The 1920s was an exciting time to be alive. Hot jazz, sweet jazz, flappers, smokes, new inventions, radio, film and flashy nightclubs! People had money to burn and it was believed that this era of prosperity would go on forever. There was just…one problem. There was nothing to drink. During WWI and the late 1910s, the Temperance Movement had gained considerable steam in the United States. Various groups demanded a prohibition of alcohol on a natonal level, saying that it was for the nation’s own good. The government bowed to popular pressure and in January of 1920, one of the most controversial ammendments to the Constitution in American history, became law, creating national prohibition.

Prohibition was not popular. In fact, it was very unpopular. So unpopular that some people started doing something about it. Gangsters. The 1920s saw a dramatic rise in crime in the United States, as gangsters fought to gain control of the million-dollar illegal liquor industry that popped up almost overnight, all over the United States. Gangsters such as Johnny Torrio, Bugs Moran and the legendary Al Capone became bigtime bootleggers, smuggling and seling liquor illegally throughout America for the next decade. Just how lucrative was the bootlegging business? Why was it so popular and why were people fighting so much to get in on it? Well, in 1928, Al Capone was making…wait for it…$100,000 a year, from bootlegging. If that doesn’t sound like much, perhaps I should convert it to 2009 dollars? Imagine making $1,200,000 a year from illegal booze. It’s suddenly looking a lot nicer now, isn’t it?

Prohibition brought all kinds of hell to the authorities, such as corruption, bootlegging, gang-wars, shootouts and assassinations…but most people didn’t care, so long as they got their booze. Police-officers didn’t worry about the gangsters breaking the law, because they wanted booze just as much as everyone else! And a few, carefully-placed banknotes ensured that officers suddenly developed temporary blindness in the presence of alcohol.

The Great Depression.

If prohibition was what concieved the Public Enemy, then the Great Depression was what gave birth to it. Up until 1929, people tolerated the corruption and greed and vice and the gang-wars and everything else. All they wanted was their booze! But a tiny event called the Wall Street Crash of 1929, changed that forever. Suddenly, hundreds, thousands of people, were out of work. They had no money for booze and they didn’t care for it. Now, they were struggling to survive. Struggling to scrape together enough pennies and dimes to appease the landlord before he threw them out, trying to find enough nickels to get something to eat at the local restaurant or to buy their groceries. And of course, this lack of money and the desperation that it caused, brought up a whole new kind of criminal who was both loved and hated by the American public.

The Rise of the ‘Public Enemy’.

The term, ‘Public Enemy’, was popularised by a man named Frank J. Loesch who, in April of 1930, was the chairman of the Chicago Crime Commission. ‘Public Enemies’ was the name he used for notorious gangsters who were making the headlines of newspapers every other week, and who he saw as a threat to the safety of the American public. They were quite a crowd of gangsters, too. Maybe you recognise some of the names? The original top-ten “public enemies” were:

Alphonse Capone.
Ralph Capone.
Franklin Rio.
Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn.
Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik.
George “Bugs” Moran.
Joe Aiello.
Edward “Spike” O’Donnell.
“Polack” Joe Saltis.
Myles O’Donnell.

Al Capone became Public Enemy #1 after an infamous massacre, which was carried out under his orders. Maybe you’ve heard of it? It’s called the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of February, 1929. On that day, members of the rival gang belonging to George ‘Bugs’ Moran, were lined up inside a garage by Capone gangsters (posing as policemen), who machine-gunned them down in cold blood. Moran would have been snuffed too, but he accidently showed up late to the meeting and so missed the one-way ticket to the graveyard.

The ‘Public Enemy Era’, which is the subject of this posting, was a period of roughly five years, from ca. 1930-1935, when police officials and gangsters fought out vicious running gun-battles with each other, that spread all over the western USA. Names such as “Baby Face” Nelson, John Dillinger, The Barker Boys and Bonnie & Clyde, became famous, nationwide. Public enemies were viewed with a mixture of admiration and disgust by the American public. They were admired because they attacked institutions such as banks, robbing them throughout the American Midwest. Banks were popular targets for crooks, obviously, because that’s where all the money was, in a time when money was hard to find. Folks admired the gangsters’ balls and courage for raiding banks and sorta tolerated this, because they couldn’t stand banks either. Banks stole their houses and possessions when they couldn’t pay off their debts, so gangsters targeting banks were supported by the public.

On the other hand, gangsters also robbed ordinary people and performed kidnappings and murders. This made the public turn against them, and they began to lose their liking for these modern folk-heroes pretty quickly after that. It became clear to the American government that something serious had to be done.

Tracking Down the Enemies.

Tracking down the Public Enemies and dispatching them or capturing them, fell to the BOI. Wait…surely you mean the…FBI? No, I mean the BOI. The Bureau of Investigation, which was its name from its creation in 1908 until 1932, when it became the DOI (Division of Investigation), until 1935, when it was finally given its current name…the FBI. The Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Working with local police-forces, the FBI, or the BOI/DOI as it was known back then, set about tracking down the various Public Enemies and either arresting them or killing them in gun-battles or ambushes. The FBI was responsible for tracking down such notables as John Dillinger, Baby-Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and the Barker Boys.

Thanks to the persistence of the FBI and the police-forces which collaborated with it, FBI agents were able to close in on the gangsters. The Barker Boys, Bonnie & Clyde and John Dillinger were killed in shootouts or ambushes with either the FBI or local law-enforcement…but what happened to the crooks who weren’t killed?


The Biograph Theater. FBI photograph taken in 1934, shortly after Dillinger was shot dead outside the theater, by FBI special agents.


The Bonnie & Clyde death-car. Texas and Louisiana Sheriff’s officers opened fire on this vehicle in an ambush, killing Bonnie & Clyde as they tried to escape.

Fighting with the Enemy.

Killing Public Enemies was not easy. They were often heavily-armed with shotguns, pistols and machine-guns. One of the most famous machine-guns in the world made a name for itself during the 1920s and 30s; they called the Chopper, the Chicago Piano, the Chicago Typewriter…they called it…the Tommy Gun.

The Tommy Gun, or the Thompson Submachine Gun, was the brainchild of General John T. Thompson. He envisoned a compact firearm, capable of firing bullets in quick succession, and which was light enough to be used by one man. His invention was the Tommy Gun. The first prototypes came out in 1918, and they were meant to be used by Allied soldiers fighting in the Western Front of WWI, but by the time the guns were ready for shipment, the war was over. However, gangsters soon found that the Tommy Gun, being easy to operate, relatively light, compact and with a high rate of fire (600rpm!), answered all their prayers about an efficient killing-machine. The Tommy Gun came in several designs, but the most famous one was the M1928, with the distinctive, drum-magazine.


The Thompson M1928.

The Thompson was used extensively by both gangsters, police and FBI agents in their war against crime and against criminal agents. It was a gun that remained popular well into WWII and Vietnam, even though by that stage, it had already been declared obsolete. Even though the Tommy Gun performed admirably during WWII, it remains as the iconic weapon of the gangsters of the 1920s and 30s and the Public Enemy Era.

The End of the Line.

In the event that lawmen or FBI agents actually arrested these robbers and kidnappers, thieves and murders, these gangsters, these…Public Enemies…what happened to them after the trial?

It was pretty clear that they couldn’t just be chucked in jail. Oh no. Not just any jail. Regular jails weren’t good enough for these guys. And I mean that literally. John Dillinger alone, busted out of at least two. It became abundantly clear to the FBI and other law-enforcers, that a special place had to be created for these bozos. And so…they did create a special place. A special place that still exists today. You can even go and visit it. I’ve done it myself. What is this special place?

A little island off the coast of San Francisco, California, located in the middle of San Francisco Bay. A tiny, little island with a big past and even bigger residents. A little joint called…Alcatraz Island.

Alcatraz had been a prison almost from the day European settlers discovered it. It was a military prison, it was an army barracks, it served as a temporary prison after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake…but in the 1930s, it recieved a new name. US. Federal Penitentiary: Alcatraz Island; popularly known as…The Rock.

And Alcatraz Island really was a rock. When US. law-enforcement and prison officials decided to build a prison there, they had to ship EVERYTHING that they wanted to be on the island, TO the island; even the soil! Alcatraz was a rock in the truest sense of the word, in that barely anything grew there, as there was no soil for it to grow in! But by 1934, the prison was opened. It recieved some very famous inmates, such as Al Capone himself. Such as Robert Stroud, Machine-Gun Kelly and Alvin Karpis, to name but a few of the famous, 1920s and 1930s crimnals who contributed to the Jazz-Age and Depression-Era crime-wave. A famous line from the film “Escape From Alcatraz” summed up Alcatraz’s role very nicely: “When you disobey the laws of society, they send you to prison. When you disobey the laws of the prison, they send you to US. Nobody has ever escaped from Alcatraz…and nobody ever will”.


Alcatraz Island as it appears today. At the very back you can see the lighthouse (still operational today). In front of it is the main cellhouse, where prisoners were kept. In front of that is a high, walled yard, which was the exercise yard. Prisoners arriving on the island got off at the dock, located on the east side of the island (on the left, in this photo).

And yet, despite these bold words, no less than 14 escape-attempts, involving a total of 36 inmates, were carried out, during the prison’s 29 years of operation. Of these, only one was ever truly successful (if you can call slumping ashore in San Francisco half-dead from hypothermia ‘successful’). But despite this, for nearly 30 years, Alcatraz was America’s dumping-ground for its most hardened crooks. Some prisoners were sent straight there, while others were transferred from other prisons. When the prison was opened, messages were sent out to all the prison-wardens throughout the US, inviting them to wash their hands of their most dangerous inmates, and to send them on to Alcatraz where they could be locked up, safely and securely.

The End of the Public Enemy.

By the end of 1934/35, the FBI had risen to prominence. With its brutal efficiency and fast actions, it had managed to sweep up nearly all the major players in the Public Enemy game, and a legendary crime-wave was soon a thing of history.

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The Distinction between a Physician and a Surgeon (when it really mattered!)

November 28, 2009 at 5:26 PM (Cultural History)

“Dr. Mortimer?”
“Mister, sir, Mister! A humble MRCS!”

And so…’Doctor’ James Mortimer is introduced to the reader at the start of one of Sherlock Holmes’s most famous cases: The Hound of the Baskervilles. But what’s all the fuss about ‘doctor’ and ‘mister’ and what the hell is an ‘MRCS’, anyway?

Anyone who’s spent enough time around the medical profession, either as a medical professional themselves, or maybe just someone who spends a lot of time visiting doctors, surgeons and hospitals, will probably know that physician is addressed as ‘doctor’, while a surgeon is always addressed as ‘Mister’. Why is this? A surgeon deals in medicine as well, so surely he deserves the title of ‘doctor’ along with his other colleagues, right?

Well no, actually. From the earliest days of medical history, right up to the 21st century, surgeons were not, could not, still are not, addressed as ‘doctor’ and are not awarded or given the title of ‘doctor’. This article will explain why.

Titles

To begin at the beginning, with titles. A medical doctor is given the prefix “Dr.”, which stands for “Doctor”, or the suffixes “M.D” or “G.P”, which stand, respectively, for “Medical Doctor” or “General Practicioner [of medicine]“.

By contrast, a SURGEON is always given the title of “Mr.”, that is, “Mister”.

The reasons for this are several, and they come from traditions started centuries ago.

The Doctor

The job of a doctor, or a physician, was to prescribe medicines. A doctor’s job was to examine, diagnose and treat illnesses and to cure the sick. This was considered a respectable and honorable occupation. The saver of people’s lives was therefore given the title of “doctor”. A physician was above the level of a surgeon. He had a greater degree of medical knowledge and skill. He was not the one with the dreaded hacksaw, forceps, tonsil-knife or the red-hot poker which was used to cauterise bleeding stumps after the completion of an amputation. A physician was an entirely different kind of person. One with REAL medical knowledge.

Sherlock Holmes’s friend and colleague, John Watson, M.D., graduated from the University of London 1878 with the degree of Doctor of Medicine. This grants him the title of “Doctor” before his name and he was, by the standards of the day, a fully-qualified doctor, who could prescribe medication, treat injuries and diagnose ailments. Back then, to call a physician ‘mister’ was considered an insult, as it implied he had not the proper medical kowledge or skill to hold his title. On the other hand, calling a surgeon ‘doctor’ was to suggest that the surgeon was standing above his station and expertise.

The Surgeon

The job of a surgeon in the Victorian era (1837-1901), and even before then, during the Regency and Georgian eras, was to perform surgery. While the job-description may not have changed, the manner in which it is carried out, certainly has, and when you see how surgery was carried out, you’ll understand why nobody thought a surgeon should be called a ‘doctor’.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the mainstay of the surgeon’s occupation, was performing amputations and removing foreign bodies from injured persons. Such things could be bullets, arrows, lead shot and splinters of wood (which caused a great deal of injuries onboard wooden battleships at sea). Another job of the surgeon was to remove various stones from the kidneys, bladder and liver.

While operations such as these are perfectly safe today, in the Victorian Era and Georgian eras, surgery was risky, uncertain and extremely painful. Anasthetics had not yet been discovered, and any operation would have been incredibly painful, with the patient wide awake. Imagine, if you will, being fully concious while a surgeon dug around in your ribcage with a pair of tweezers, trying to pull out a bullet, or had a tourniquet tied around your arm while he sawed your limb off at the elbow, with you being as just awake as he is. Amputations were what surgeons were ‘famous’ for. Sawing off infected, broken or gangrenous limbs with hacksaws, when recovery or treatment had proved ineffective. The only painkiller you would have would have been laudanum or morphine, both of which were of questionable effectiveness in alleviating the considerable pain of having the teeth of a hacksaw slicing through your arm.

Because of the painful and dangerous nature of their work, it’s probably not surprising that surgeons were greatly despised by society. People would not look the same way at a surgeon that they did with a doctor. Surgeons caused pain and suffering, even though they were medical people. Their operations, even if successful, would cause death by infection. And if unsuccessful, would cause the patient to die a painful and fully-concious death, still lying on the operating table.

While these days, a surgeon may be seen to be on equal footing with a physican, one must remember that once upon a time, “surgeon” was not the person’s full title. In medieval and early modern times, they were called “barber-surgeons”. A barber, then, as now, is a person who cuts your hair. Only back then, it wasn’t just hair that they cut off you. The famous “barber-pole”, of red and white diagonal, spiralling stripes, which are sometimes found outside barbershops, are descendant from this time. They represent the white of bandages and the redness of dripping blood, from the days when a barber-surgeon would just as likely saw off your arm as he would give you a shave and a new hairdo. The slang-name for a surgeon, a “sawbones”, comes from the days when a surgeon’s main occupation was chopping off limbs.

It is for these reasons that surgeons, such as “Doctor” Mortimer, were denied the rank of “Doctor” before their names. Such men were seen as being unworthy of holding the rank and title since, while they worked for good, they caused so much pain and suffering to their patients. By the way, ‘MRCS’ stands for a MEMBER of the ROYAL COLLEGE of SURGEONS. This is why Mortimer cannot actually be called a ‘doctor’, because he is in fact a surgeon.


Amputation-kit, possibly belonging to a ship’s surgeon. Note the presence of the two hacksaws, used for sawing off patients limbs and the knives and probes for removing bullets and other foreign bodies from patients’ bodies. The two long knives at the bottom of the medical case are Liston knives (invented by Dr. Liston in the Crimean War of the 1850s). They are used for cutting through flesh and muscle. Hacksaws are used for cutting through the patient’s bones.

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Archie, Aces and Airspeed: Aerial Combat during the First World War.

November 27, 2009 at 10:33 AM (WWI (1914-1918))

In 1903, two brothers who ran a bicycle-repair shop, created the world’s first successful, heavier-than-air…gasp!…FLYING machine! People marvelled at a new contraption called the ‘airplane’ which could take off, fly where-ever the pilot wanted it to, and then land safely again. They thought that this was a magical new invention that could do marvellous things for mankind and spur it onwards to a new age of technology, science and transportation.

Well, Orville and Wilbur Wright thought so, anyway.

In fact they thought so, so much, that once their newfangled ‘flying machines’ were perfected and reliable, they took their courage by the balls and went off to all the national militaries of the early 1900s. They approached the American, British and even French armies, toting their new toy as a practical weapon and machine of war. With airplanes, you could spot troop-movements, direct men and see the entire battlefield! Armies were so excited about these amazing possibilities, that they jumped on the new invention!

Or…they would have, in a perfect world.

The truth was that most of the commanding officers and generals, all thought the Wright Brothers’ invention was something of a joke, and saw no practical application for this contraption in their arsenals and warehouses.

Just over ten years later, however, they were singing a different tune.

The first Airplanes.

The very first airplanes were used purely to demonstrate that powered, controlled flight was possible. But that was all they were used for. People just didn’t see how such flimsy, wood and cloth machines could be practical in any way other than to provide cheap, five-minute thrill to excited little boys and girls at funfairs! However, this perspective quickly changed with the onset of the First World War.

In the hell of the Somme, Flanders, Passchendeale, Ypres and the Marne, generals began to realise that having ‘eyes in the sky’ that could tell you where things were, would be a huge advantage. Suddenly, the allies didn’t think the Wright Brothers were stupid after all, and a few months after the war had started, airplanes were being used in warfare.

The first planes used in warfare just flew around taking photographs. Fun, huh? They were reconnaissance aircraft, gathering valuable military information. Airplanes were able to fly over enemy trench-systems, photograph them and then fly home, relatively unscathed from enemy fire. Knowing the layout of enemy trenches allowed generals the opportunity of finding weak-spots in enemy defences.

Fighter-Planes.

Originally, German, English and French pilots just flew around each others trench-systems taking snapshots, but soon it was realised that such activity should not be tolerated! The airspace above your trenches was YOUR airspace, and to hell with anyone trying to break into it! To this end, pilots started becoming more aggressive with each other. Pilots began taking to the air with revolvers, grenades, rocks and lengths of rope, to shoot, bomb, damage or entangle their enemies. New weapons called anti-aircraft guns were placed around entrenchments to shoot down hostile aircraft. They fired explosive or incendiary rounds, known during WWII as ‘flak’, known during the Great War, by the name ‘Archie’. A new era of warfare had begun.

On the 1st of April, 1915, April Fools’ Day, a French pilot named Roland Garros made history. His plane, the first of its kind in the world, flew into the skies and shot down a German pilot and his plane. While this was not the first air-to-air kill (people had been shooting, bombing and throwing stuff at each other, 1,000 feet up before Garros came along), this was significant because of the type of plane that Garros was flying. It was the first plane specifically designed for aerial-combat, having machine-guns and triggers which the pilot could aim and fire during flight! The Fighter Plane and the Fighter-Pilot had been born!

Aerial-combat, in which planes fought against planes, pilots against pilots, was the latest form of warfare in a war which was rapidly changing everything it touched. Unfortunately for the allies, Garros was shot down and his plane crashed in German territory. Garros survived and was taken prisoner, but his valuable flying-machine was not completely demolished on impact. Before he could set the plane on fire, the Germans had captured it and were soon turning out fighter-planes of their own!

The affect on Allied morale was devastating. Until that point, the British and French had ruled the skies, but now, the Germans had planes that could match theirs! The French and British started making newer, faster, more powerful planes and the era of Aces had begun.

Aerial Aces.

An ‘Ace’ is a pilot who is exceptionally skilled, and who can successfully shoot down enemy aircraft. Now that aerial combat was well-and-truly established, it was time for men with courage and balls to really show what they could do.

To understand just what this was like, you need to understand just how the men were fighting. If you’re picturing sleek, modern airplanes with enclosed cockpits and armour-plating and all that stuff…forget it! WWI fighter-planes were little more than box-kites with engines on them! The majority of the plane was made of wood and canvas! The fuselage was wood, canvas, two pairs of wings, an engine, cockpit and propeller and a wooden rudder and tail-fins at the back. These planes were very light, but also very delicate. If you put your foot in the wrong place, it ripped through the canvas and out you went!

Pilots in planes such as these could expect to be incredibly uncomfortable. Enclosed cockpits did not exist, and the only protection they would have had against the stinging, freezing wind, would have been their leather jackets, flying caps, goggles and maybe some gloves to stop their hands freezing from the windchill! Oh, and scarves. Pilots wore nice, long white scarves. Not to look cutesy for the ladies, but to prevent…skin-irritation, of all things. Without radar, the only way to spot enemy planes was to literally turn your head left and right to search the skies for them. All this twisting and turning rubbed your neck against the collar of your jacket and this could make you very uncomfortable. In a situation where the last thing you want to be, is uncomfortable, the scarves provided much-needed padding to prevent skin-chafing, as well as an extra layer of badly-needed warmth!

Back then…and even today…an instance of aerial combat between two opposing pilots is called a ‘dogfight’. They were called dogfights, probably, because pilots literally flew at each other like mad dogs. Planes could come within inches of smashing into each other and they fired their guns willy-nilly, trying to hit each other. Dogfights were fierce, fast, lethal battles of skill, courage, balls and determination. If you got shot down, you could expect a plunge of several thousand feet to the earth below. Your plane could explode in mid air, it could catch fire, or you could fall out of your cockpit. Few pilots carried parachutes back then.

When planes flew out in ‘sorties’ (a ‘sortie’ is a mission), they would fly out in groups set in strict formations. Pilots organised their planes so that they could attack the enemy as effectively as possible. Planes and their pilots were organised into groups called ‘squadrons’. Each squadron, or squad, had a ‘sqaudron leader’, usually the best pilot with the most experience. His job was to lead his men into battle and to direct the other pilots through the air so that they would know where to go and how to act. In the days before aerial radio-communications, hand-gestures were used to direct your fellow pilots through the air. Squadron leaders usually had their planes painted or marked in some way, so that they would be easily-recognised by Allied pilots during combat. The universal sign of ‘rocking wings’ (moving your wings up and down), was the signal to return to home-base. Better to crash on home soil than in enemy territory.

Taking down an enemy aircraft was difficult at best. Machine-guns were still fairly new weapons back then, and they were prone to jamming during dogfights. Apart from that, you had to find your target before you could shoot at it. And when your target is a plane zooming all over the skies, this is difficult at the best of times. There’s no heat-seeking missiles, there’s no target lock-on, there’s no laser sights, it’s just you, your plane, your guns and your eyes. Everything was done by hand and everything was done manually, using your own judgement, timing and skill.

The most famous Ace of all, was a German pilot. His name was Manfred von Richtofen, more famously known as ‘der Rote Baron’;…The Red Baron. The Baron was credited with somewhere in the neighbourhood of 80 confirmed kills. While 80 doesn’t seem very impressive today, it was damn impressive back in 1917, when aerial-combat was how I described it above. Unfortunately for Richtofen, he was shot down and killed on the 21st of April, 1918. The man credited with shooting down the Red Baron and killing him, with a bullet to the chest, was an Australian soldier named…Cedric Popkin! Popkin was a soldier in the First AIF (the First Australian Imperial Force). At the time of Richtofen’s death, Popkin and his men were manning Vickers anti-aircraft machine-guns and it was Popkin’s firing which shot the Baron and brought down his airplane, his famous Fokker Dr. 1, painted bright red.

Bombing Raids.

Apart from reconnaissance, protecting airspace and spying, airplanes in WWI had another major role to play – air-raids.

Various aircraft, such as the famous Sopwith Camel, were combination fighter-and-bomber aircraft, meaning that they could drop bombs as well as fire machine-guns. In later stages of the war, generals began to see even more possibilities for these newfangled machines, specifically in their ability to bring death to the enemy in ways previously unimaginable.


The Sopwith Camel, a typical, WWI-era fighter biplane.

By 1917, when aerial-combat and warfare was firmly established, Allied airforces and Allied armies began to collaborate with each other in an effort to pool their resources, skills and manpower to win battles. Some later battles went like this…

First there would be an intense artillery barrage, bombing and shelling the enemy trenches. At an appropriate time, rows and rows of tanks rumbled across No Man’s Land, shooting at the enemy soldiers who had survived the artillery barrage. While the tanks moved forward, infantry marched behind, taking advantage of the covering fire provided by the tanks, to engage enemy infantry. Upstairs, Allied bomber and fighter-planes flew overhead, strafing (raking) the ground with lethal swathes of machinegun-fire, killing soldiers in the enemy trenches, followed by intense, aerial bombardment, while below them, their Allied army buddies pressed on to take their target trenches. The airplane had proved its worth as a practical and useful machine of war.

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“Over the Top!” – Life in the Trenches during WWI (Pt. I)

November 25, 2009 at 10:24 PM (WWI (1914-1918))

From early 1914 until November 1918, the world was at war. The ‘Great War’, as it was then called, inflicted upwards of six million casualties from over six different countries and mankind saw a new kind of mechanical warfare so devastating that many prayed that it would never happen again.

Known today as the First World War, this conflict pitched the countries of Canada, France, Italy, Australia, the USA, Great Britain and Russia against Turkey, Germany and Austria-Hungary in battles where men died in their thousands for just a few yards of earth. WWI was a disaster of epic proportions, throwing 19th century tactics against 20th century technology, the resultant explosion reverberating across the following decades to the present day.

One of the most enduring images of the Great War was trench warfare. Trench warfare was brutal, sloppy, slimy, smelly and sickening. Vomit-inducing, sleep-depriving, smelling of piss, shit, rotting flesh, stagnant water…and that was when you weren’t being shot at, gassed, shelled to Kingdom Come or having to shoot back at enemy soldiers charging towards you!

From mid 1914 right up to the day the war ended in 1918, trench-warfare remained a staple of life during the ‘Great War’. It remained like it did for so long because nobody could figure out how to successfully attack trenches without having the living shit blasted out of them or being mown down by machinegun-fire. Commanding officers pitched men against men using 19th century tactics and strategies and 20th century technology, which is about as useful as trying to storm a building filled with heavily-armed terrorists with a peashooter. Given that trench-warfare lasted so long…what was it actually like living in a hole in the ground for so long?

Digging the Trenches.

Before you could live in a trench, you had to dig it out. Digging took ages, even with the thousands of men with shovels. Trenches were roughly seven to eight feet deep, about six feet wide, with a drainage channel at the bottom, which was covered over by a type of planking (which would create a semi-sturdy walkway), called duckboards. Trenches literally stretched for miles and miles and miles and MILES. From southern France, they headed north, all the way to the North Sea. And it wasn’t just the ONE trench. There were dozens of them. First you had the ‘Front Line’ trench, and then behind that, you had communications trenches, and behind that, more trenches, and then to protect everything, you had machine-gun nests, barbed wire, landmines and sandbags. It’s little wonder that these things were so damn hard to capture! Trench-systems could be small cities in themselves!

Apart from the trenches, there were also ‘dugouts’. A dugout is a tunnel or underground chamber where officers could live and work, relatively protected from the rain outside. Dugouts were reinforced with wood and sheet metal and they provided a tiny bit of comfort for the men. The trenches themselves, once they had been dug out, were reinforced with wood, metal and reeds, woven to form a sort of basket-type mesh. All these things prevented the walls from caving in.

Living in the Trenches.

You’ve dug the trenches, you’ve fortified them, laid down duckboards, put in reinforcements and planking and dugouts and electric lighting…you can pack up and go home!…Right?

No.

You actually had to live IN the trenches. Not for very long, perhaps a few days, a couple of weeks at any one time. That was provided you actually survived the two weeks. If you did, you could head back behind the lines and chill out on leave. Otherwise…it was in the trenches. And life in the trenches was crap at the very best of times.

One thing the commanders hadn’t counted on when they ordered their men to ‘dig in’, was the lay of the land. Unknown to the French and British COs, the land in which they were going to dig their trenches, had the water-table just a few feet below the ground! In some places it wasn’t so bad and you could go down the whole six, seven or eight feet into the earth. But in other places, the water table was barely four or five feet below the ground! If you dug any further, you’d be standing in a canal! In cases like this, soldiers stopped digging at four feet, and just stacked up sandbags to make up the additional three feet, but with trenches so close to the waterline…you can imagine what happened next.

Flooding. And a lot of it.

Not just a few inches or milimeters of water to grumble over that got into your socks…I mean SERIOUS flooding. Water could reach two or three feet deep and men would be sloshing through trenches turned into rivers, in muck up to their waists! Given that even in the nicest of weather in Europe, it can still pour down and be freezing cold, you can bet this was one of the worst things that soldiers had to put up with.

Well…you’d be wrong. Because there’s worse. Much worse.

If you just said ‘Aww rats!’…you’d be right.

As the war continued, there were thousands of dead bodies all over the battlefields and nobody had the time (or indeed, the PLACE!) to bury all the corpses. These corpses brought rats. Hundreds of them. They feasted on dead bodies, eating at them until only skeletons remained. They grew fat and even hungrier and it wasn’t uncommon for soldiers to go around shooting all day long…not at the enemy, but at rats! They tried to do everything to get rid of the rats…drown them, gas them, club them…Some would even spike cheese onto their bayonets. When the rat started eating the cheese, the soldier pulled the trigger on his rifle. BAM! Rat gone! But for every rat they killed, there were hundreds to take their place.

Food in the trenches was pretty basic, too. The support-trenches, further back from the front line, were supposed to be able to supply soldiers with hot, freshly-cooked food, but since the trenches were being shelled, gassed or bombed every other day of the week, you can bet they didn’t get much of that home-cooked goodness. You try preparing a meal for 10,000 starving soldiers when artillery-shells and mortars are crashing all around! It’s not easy!

Most men survived on canned or otherwise preserved food. They ate biscuits, salted meat, whatever vegetables and fruit they could find, together with…chocolate. Yes, chocolate. When you’ve got almost nothing else to look forward to, a nice bit of Cadbury’s or Whitman’s goes a long way. In fact in both world wars, the Whitman chocolate company (famous for its yellow ‘Whitman’s Samplers’ boxes), sent boxes of candy overseas to Europe to feed Allied soldiers!

What goes in has to come out…right? Where did you go to the toilet?

Well…you see that empty patch of land there which nobody’s using? Take your trowel, some old newspapers..and commune with nature. There were no toilets, and if you had to go, you had to make your own toilet, digging a hole in the ground. Some trench-sysems actually had specifically-dug sewerage-channels where soldiers could go and relieve themselves. But after three days of heavy rain…you can imagine where all the stuff in the sewerage-channel ended up…Yep…right back in the trenches!

Health in the Trenches.

Given the appalling living-conditions, it’s no surprise that disease was a BIG problem on the Western Front. Common trench ailments included headlice and ‘trenchfoot’. Headlice were such a problem that most men gave up trying to keep the lice out of their hair! Instead, they just got a pair of scissors and a razor and shaved themselves bald! The other common trench disease was something called ‘trench-foot’.

Trenchfoot is a bit like ‘athlete’s foot’…only a hell of a lot worse. It comes as a result of spending hours every single day, standing in stagnant, freezing, disgusting water and never giving one’s feet enough time to fully dry out. When you consider that the trenches were flooded half the time, you can imagine how bad trenchfoot could get. A soldier was useless if his feet were so infected that he could barely walk! Commanding officers had to make it a rule that ALL MEN were to change their socks on a regular basis to keep their feet dry and clean to prevent trenchfoot. As the war progressed, trenchfoot did eventually go down, but it never completely went away and isolated cases continued to pop up throughout the duration of the war.

Another medical condition which came to prominence during the war in the trenches was a mental incapacitation called ‘shell-shock’, what people today like to euphamistically call ‘post-traumatic-stress disorder’. Shell-shock had been known of before the Great War, but it had never been seriously examined until so many cases of shellshock started popping up during the mid 1910s! And shellshock is a lot more than just irritability or not being able to sleep…it could turn men into shivering, jibbering, glubbering wrecks, barely able to function in civilian society.

Shell-shock got its name because it was caused by artillery-shells. Before a big offensive move, the enemy (or you, depending on who was moving where), would shell the other fellow’s lines with artillery and mortar-fire. INTENSE fire. I don’t mean just a few minutes of ‘boom-boom-boom, let’s go boys!’, I mean REALLY INTENSE FIRE. A proper artillery-barrage could go on for hours…even days! Shell-shock was caused by the mental anguish inflicted by these barrages. Imagine that you’re a soldier in a trench…and you hear artillery-fire in the distance. Sooner or later, you’ll hear the high-pitched shriek of the shells sailing downwards towards you. In most cases, you won’t see them until it’s too late. You’ll have about a split-second to run before the shell slams into the ground and destroys everything around it! That’s just one shell. Imagine a hundred, two hundred, three hundred shells…all being fired at once, for hours and hours on end, day and night. The noise, the panic, the fear and the severe sleep deprivation was enough to send a man literally raving mad. Some cases of shell-shock were so bad that the men literally became shivering, nervous wrecks.

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“Over the Top!” – Life in the Trenches during WWI (Pt. II)

November 25, 2009 at 10:23 PM (WWI (1914-1918))

Continued from Part 1, above.

Attacking another Trench.

Given all these horrible, horrible, horrible things…it’s no wonder that trench-warfare was so hard. You needed balls to survive out there, no doubt about that. If you couldn’t hack it, you’d be snuffed out in a second.

But once you were there, you had to fight. Defending a trench-system was actually fairly easy. You lined up your men, stuck your rifles over the top, manned the machine-guns and then fired at the enemy coming towards you. What was REALLY hard was trying to ATTACK a trench, because they were so damn well-protected!

Basic battle-tactics had not changed much over the past few decades. In the 1700s, you lined up your men and marched in close-formation across the battlfield with muskets. Muskets were inaccurate, so amassing your men together was the only way to ensure a decent amount of firepower.

By the Civil War period in America, of the 1860s, firearms technology had advanced to such a stage that rifles were now more accurate, amassing your troops like you would have back in Napoleonic times would get them slaughtered, because they presented a nice, easy target to men with nice, accurate weapons. To handle this, men marched across the battlefield more spaced out, to present smaller targets which were harder to hit.

By the 1910s, when the heavy machine-gun was deemed a powerful and useful weapon, even these tactics were outdated. Machine-guns could mow down hundreds of men, no matter how they moved across the battlefield. Constant shelling meant that they weren’t even marching across a FIELD anymore, either, but a quagmire of water, craters, mud, blood, dead bodies and hell knows what else. Commanding officers who were old-fashioned and unaware of the power of machine-guns, worked out battles as they would have 25 and 50 years ago, when machine-guns were less common and less effective. This led to thousands of men being killed every day, since enemy soldiers set up their machine-gun nests to create wide fields of interlocking crossfire which soldiers couldn’t escape from. Commanders set their men impossible objectives, given the manner in which battles were fought, and this contributed to the stalemate on the Western Front.

Changing Tactics.

It took a while, but eventually commanders recognised that if they were ever going to win this war, they had to change the way in which they fought. They needed a way for men to be mobile, protected and efficient on the battlefield. They needed better weapons which could do more than just go ‘boom!’.

After his disastrous attempt to ‘Force the Narrows’ during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, a then, relatively unknown man called Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, headed to the trenches. He spent a considerable amount of time there, hiding from the shame of his disasterous naval campaign. While in the trenches, Churchill learnt a thing or two about how battles were fought and how he might improve the Allies’ chances of winning.

Instead of trying to run before they could walk, Churchill went in the other direction to most battlefield strategists, and suggested that intead of running or indeed, walking…they should instead…crawl.

Using a method which he called the ‘Bite and Hold’, he reasoned that in the long-run, soldiers would be able to win battles more effectively. The ‘Bite and Hold’ tactic worked like this:

Instead of trying to take everything all in one day, soldiers would instead take only half of their objective. Having secured this, they would hold their position, restock, resupply, rest…and then jump forward and grab the rest another day, when they felt up to fighting again. This allowed men to take ground, but it didn’t wear them out or put them in any significant danger. The idea worked and bit by bit, the Allies began to advance.

Changing Technology.

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. Well in 1916, it was necessary for the British to mother an idea about how to win this goddamned war. The biggest problems were the issues of mobility and firepower. Soldiers could move quickly across the battlefield, but they lacked any serious firepower apart from their rifles, which were useless against the high-power heavy machine-guns. Machine-guns provided the intense firepower that soldiers needed to protect themselves with, but these guns were so big and heavy, they required upwards of three or four men just to operate them! Hardly effective when you’re out in the middle of No Man’s Land beng shot and shelled at all the time! A typical machine-gun of the period, like the belt-fed Vickers Gun, required a gunner and something resembling a race-car pitstop team just to keep the gun working! You need a gunner, you needed riflemen to protect him. You needed someone to feed the ammunition belt, someone to carry the ammuntion, someone to carry the tripod, someone to refill the empty ammo belts…you see where this is going, don’t you? It just wasn’t practical! Machine-guns were great in defensive-positions when they didn’t have to be moved around, but the moment you told a gun-crew “go from A to B”…you had problems. They were simply no good on the move.

Apart from that, machine-guns were prone to overheating and jamming, hardly ideal when you’re trying to kill the enemy. Vickers machine-guns were water-cooled and this could be a problem when you didn’t have any water (not that this happened much in the waterlogged trenches!). But when you really didn’t have any water…you couldn’t shoot! One way to overcome this problem was to actually fill the gun’s water-jacket with piss! Soldiers who had to take a leak, would urinate into cans and this delightful, apple-juice-coloured liquid, would then be poured into the Vickers gun’s water-jacket to keep the gun cool and ready to fire!

The Lewis Gun, another popular machine-gun of WWI, was considerably easier to use than the Vickers. The Lewis was air-cooled and it was magazine-fed. This meant that it was lighter, easier to carry, quicker to load and required fewer men to look after it. Despite this, the Lewis was still big and bulky, but at least it was (sorta) portable.

To deal with the problem of firepower and mobility, the British invented a new machine, originally called ‘landships’…now called…’tanks’.

The tank was a revolutionary machine in 1916. While it had almost no armour, even though it was slow (9mph was break-neck speed for a tank!) and even though it was prone to engine-failure, it answered peoples’ prayers about wanting armour, mobility and firepower. Commanders soon learnt how to use tanks effectively, and they sent them out in waves like mechanised cavalry, with infantry behind the tanks. The tanks provided the heavy firepower and protection while the infantry provided the mobility. A winning combination had been found!

There are of course, other types of technology which both sides used to try and win the war. One of the most famous…is…gas!

That’s right! Even before grandpa was dancing the Charleston, mankind had invented chemical warfare.

The gas used was either chlorine gas or mustard gas. Both of which were absolutely 100% nasty. If it got into your lungs…you were screwed.

Gas was fired into enemy trenches in metal gas-canisters. When the cans exploded, the gas spilt into the trenches like smoke from hell and went into all the crevices and low-places and little hidey-holes. While soldiers did have some primative gas-masks to protect themselves, the best way to escape gas was to do the opposite to what the gas did. Since gas went down…soldiers went up! They got out of their trenches and worked on their sun-tans until the gas in the trenches had disappated. Of course, this also left the exposed soldiers vulnerable to enemy attacks.

There are of course, other aspects of the Great War, all of which are equally fascinating, but which are too numerous to be mentioned here. And at any rate, they’re not strictly confined to the trenches. These will be covered in other postings, at a later date.

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“WHItehall-1212, please!” – Understanding Alphanumeric Phone-Numbers

November 24, 2009 at 6:59 PM (Cultural History)

These days, telephone numbers are just…numbers. A sequence of digits which, when entered into your phone correctly, should bring you in contact with the owner of number who should be the person you want to speak to. Simple, isn’t it? And yet, some of us may remember a time, perhaps not too long ago, when a telephone-number didn’t start with a number, but rather a series of letters or a word. Welcome to nostalgic and at times, confusing world of alphanumeric telephone numbers.

The telephone was invented in the 1870s, but it wasn’t until the early 1900s that its use really took off, once all the little kinks and kooks had been worked out, transforming this newfangled contraption into a practical communication-device. In the early days of telephone-usage, numbers were small – 1, 2, 3 or 4 digits long. It was easy for telephone switchboard operators to connect the leads left and right and remember everything. As time went by, however, and as more people started being hooked up to the machine which gradually entered popular culture being called the ‘bell’ or ‘pipe’ (such as ‘give me a bell!’ or ‘tell me over the pipe!’, which I suspect is a holdover from the days of old-fashioned speaking-tubes), numbers needed to be longer and longer to accomadate the extra customers. And with telephone-usage growing in big cities, it was obvious that one main switchboard wasn’t enough to handle everything.


A page from a telephone directory for Canning, Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1958. Note how the numbers are set out and how they’re listed. Here, the exchange-name is ‘JUniper’. Mr. Arthur Caldwell’s number, (top left) is JUniper 2-3404, or 582-3404.

To overcome this, extra telephone-exchanges were set up to cope with the traffic. Each one was given a different name and number so that more telephone numbers could be assigned and used. For example, the number 49312 could only ever be assigned to one person, but with multiple exchanges, you could have REdbrook-49312 and perhaps SYcamore-49312, allowing people to use the same number without messing up the telephone-lines.

Telephone Exchanges.

As numbers grew longer and longer and more exchange switchboards were set up to handle them, each exchange was given a number to identify it by. Exchanges were given special names so that people could remember them easier. The names were determined by the numbers which identified a specific telephone-exchange. For example an exchange assigned the ID numbers ’944′, would spell out ‘WHI’ on a lettered telephone dial. A word starting with those three letters would then be assigned as that exchange’s name. This is a real example, by the way. The exchange-name is ‘Whitehall’, which is a suburb in London.

By the way…if you’ve ever wondered why telephones today HAVE those letter designations:

0 Operator
1 -
2 ABC
3 DEF
4 GHI

etc etc etc…It’s a leftover from the days of alphanumeric phone-numbers, when people needed to know which letters were covered by which numbers, so that they could be assured of dialling the correct telephone exchange switchboard.

A typical rotary telephone-dial of the period, showing which letters were covered by which numbers. ’0′ was used to contact the switchboard operator. The original number for this phone was OLympic 4-6753, or 654-6753.

The amount of letters at the start of the exchange-name which stood for the exchange’s ID-number, varied from country to country, and even from city to city within a country! The number of letters was usually the first two or first three in any given exchange-name. In the United Kingdom, three letters followed by four numbers (3L-4N) was the rule. So ‘Whitehall 1212′ would be “WHItehall 1212″, or 944-1212.

In the United States, by comparison, phone-numbers followed the 2L-5N (two letters, five numbers) rule. This meant that the first two letters of the exchange-name stood for numbers. Notable exceptions to this rule were cities of New York, Philidelphia, Boston and Chicago, which followed the British example of 3L-4N. This brought up exchange-names like ‘PENnsylvania’, ‘TREmont’ and ‘ELDorado’. Since the rest of the country did 2L-5N, this could create some understandable confusion to people who weren’t from the US. East Coast. Eventually, these cities conformed with the rest of the nation, altering their phone-numbers so that instead of the above, they had numbers like: ‘PEnnsylvania 65000′ or ‘ELdorado 51234, to avoid confusion.

If you’re wondering why I’m typing the exchanges like ‘LAMbeth’ or ‘KLondike’…this is how they were actually printed, ‘back in the day…’. The capital letters in the exchange-name told you which numbers to dial to get the exchange, by reading the capitalised letters and dialling the corresponding numbers on your phone-dial (which had numbers assigned to specific groups of letters).


A typical telephone-exchange switchboard, ca. 1943. When you count how many leads and cables and sockets there are, it’s no wonder people wanted short numbers so that you didn’t clutter everything up!

The end of Alphanumeric Telephone Numbers.

Alphanumeric phone numbers began to die out in the 1960s-1970s when it was recognised that there were more telephone-numbers than exchanges to handle them and in the 1960s and 70s, communications companies started switching to all-digit numbers, the kind we know today. Few people today still use alphanumeric phone numbers and even fewer people would understand them. If you had to suddenly leave from a coffee with a friend and you told him to call you back on ‘CAstle-38742′, he probably wouldn’t have a damn clue what you were saying! Eh…incidently, that’s 223-8742. Today, the numbers remain as an interesting bit of cultural and telephonic history, if nothing more.

Alphanumeric telephone numbers used in this Article:

WHItehall-1212: This was the number for New Scotland Yard, London, England. 944-1212. The number has changed slightly over the years, but as of 2009, it still ends in ’1212′. An old 1950s British radio program dealing with the cases of Scotland Yard, was called ‘Whitehall 1212′.

DEAnsgate-3414: This was the number for Kendals department store in Manchester, England. That’s 332-3414.

ELDorado-1234: This was the (fictional) phone-number of the office of Richard Diamond, the famous NYC private detective, the main character of a highly popular 1950s radio show (see ‘The Golden Age of Radio, below). Sticking to the 3L-4N format, this would be 353-1234.

PEnnsylvania-65000: Originally ‘PENnsylvania-5000′, it was changed to PEnnsylvania-65000 when New York switched to the 2L-5N format. This number remains the oldest, continuously-used phone-number in New York City. Issued in 1919, it has belonged to the Hotel Pennsylvania in central Manhattan for the past 90 years! Dialling that number today (736-5000) still gets you the Hotel Pennsylvania, just as it did 60-odd years ago when Glenn Miller wrote his song! It’s usually spoken or written as ‘Pennsylvania six, five thousand’, because ‘Pennsylvania sixty-five thousand’ sounds a bit silly, doesn’t it?


The current header for the Hotel Pennsylvania’s website. Note the phone-number on the bottom right: 736-5000.

CAstle 3-8742: I admit I made this number up on the spot. Whether or not it ever really existed, I’ve no idea!

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“The story you’re about to read is true…” – The Golden Age of Radio

November 23, 2009 at 8:53 PM (Cultural History)

To most people born after the 1950s, it’s hard to imagine life without that box in the living-room with the flashing pictures and sounds and the big, clear screen the size of a billiard-table, but what about life before television? While it first appeared in the 1920s, television would not become a practical reality until after WWII in the late 1940s. So, before the family gathered around the box every night to watch the news and eat dinner and watch stuff like Ed Sullivan, the Dick Van Dyke Show, Dragnet, the Brady Bunch, Gilligan’s Island or Bewitched, how the hell did people pass the time?


A picture showing something that would soon become as much a part of everyday life today as unwanted teenage pregnancies…television!

“Well uhh…they read books or…wrote or…um…went for walks?” someone might uncertainly suggest.

Well…yes. But they also did something else.

They listened to the radio.

“Oh come on! A bunch of opinionated jackoffs talking about world affairs or dial-in shows where the hot topic is: ‘embarrassing places you fell asleep in’ can’t be THAT interesting, can it?” you might say.

Haha!! No.

What most people seem to forget these days is that before television came along, there was another, immensely popular electronic entertainment medium that existed for nearly 40 years until TV finally put it out of business in the late 1950s. That medium was radio. Not music radio, not talkback radio like we’re used to today, playing jazz, rap, rock, or ‘the Top Ten Hits of the 60s, 70s and 80s!’ or discussing funny things your pet kitten did when grandma came to visit, but actual radio serials.

That’s right. Before TV serials such as The Simpsons, House, Jeeves and Wooster, Poirot, Midsomer Murders and Two-and-a-half Men ever came on the air, radio was already producing its own serial shows. Or rather…programs, since there was nothing ‘show’ on the radio. Radio programs covered everything that TV shows would cover today. Action. Crime. Drama. Comedy. Horror. Popular Music. Anything you can think of.

The Impact of Radio.

The radio was born at the turn of the last century and mankind marvelled at the ingenuity of a man named Guglielmo Marconi, who showed everyone that wireless telecommunications was possible…if only through Morse Code at the time. Within 25 years, Marconi’s invention…wireless radio…would have revolutionised the world. Radio did great things to mankind. In 1912, it sent ships racing through frigid Atlantic waters to an ocean liner in distress. In 1937, it spread the news of a catastrophic aircraft disaster, in 1939, it announced the start of a great conflict which would consume the world…and from the mid 1920s until the mid 1950s, it would bring such classics as ‘The Shadow’, ‘Dragnet’, ‘The Abbott and Costello Show’, the ‘Jack Benny Program’ and ‘The Whistler’ into people’s living-rooms every night.

During the Great Depression and throughout World War Two, American president Franklin D. Roosevelt used the radio to broadcast his ‘fireside chats’ to the nation, a series of radio broadcasts in which the president personally explained his policies, ideas and concerns to the nation in a series of speeches which ordinary people could listen to in their homes.

The Golden Age of Radio Begins.

Marconi can’t possibly have known the impact his innovations had, but they were huge. For the first time in history, people all over a city…all over a country, could listen to the same thing at the same time, all together, and be informed or entertained by the smart, wooden-cased electronic gizmo in their living-room, which by then was called the ‘radio’.

Once practical broadcast radio, of the kind we know today, was developed in the mid 1920s, people were quick to recognise the entertainment-possibilities of a machine that could send music and voices all over the country. The radio-serial was born! Once distribution of home radio-sets was started, it was soon realised that people would want something to listen to on their new doohickies, otherwise they’d soon lose interest. So people started scripting and producing radio-serials.

The Radio Serial.

A radio-serial is a regularly-scheduled program of a specific genre, much like popular TV shows today. They’re scripted, rehearsed, broadcast, recorded and sent out all over the world at a specific time. The first radio-serials came into being shortly after the invention of the electronic microphone in 1925 and less than a year later, people were able to listen to a whole new kind of entertainment.


A Zenith ‘tombstone’-style radio, typical of the wood-cased household radios of the 1920s-1950s.

The very first shows were ones like ‘Sam’n'Henry’, written, produced and acted out by a pair of white men trying to be black, who soon became infinitely more famous for their next attempt at radio comedy, a little-known show called…um…’Amos and Andy’? The men were, of course, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll. Starting in March of 1928, ‘Amos and Andy’ was one of the first hugely popular radio-shows ever created. So popular in fact that it lasted nearly 30 years on radio and when TV came along, it jumped onto the new medium like a fly on honey.

Radio serials were as varied as TV serials are today. Programs covered almost everything imaginable, from…

Comedy (Amos & Andy, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Abbott & Costello, Fibber McGee & Molly, Life with Luigi).
Action (Rocky Fortune, Richard Diamond Private Detective, The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, The Falcon).
Suspense & Thriller (The Shadow, The Whistler, the New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes).
Police-procedural (Dragnet, Gang Busters).
Popular music (Grand Ole Opry, Bell Telephone Hour, and live broadcasts of popular big-bands from famous hotels).
News & Current Affairs (Hear it Now).
Movies and Literature (Lux Radio Theatre, the Mercury Theatre on the Air).

“Regularly-Scheduled Programming”

The impact of radio-serials was immense. From 1925 until 1960, people all over the world gathered around their radios to listen to their favourite programs or to the news, and sat back to laugh, gasp and giggle, groan, grind and grimace at the events unfolding in their minds as they listened to the music and words coming out of their Wurlitzers, Zeniths or Philcos. How many of these popular phrases do you recognise?

“Now cut that out!”
“Oh the humanity!”
“Ladies and gentlemen, the story you’re about to hear is true…only the names have been changed, to protect the innocent”.
“HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEY ABBOTT!!”
“Who knows what evil…lurks in the hearts of men?”
“2X2L calling CQ…2X2L calling CQ…Isn’t there anyone on the air?…Is there…anyone?”
“Yesterday…December 7th…1941…A date which will live in infamy…the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked…by the Empire of Japan”.
“I have to tell you now…that no such undertaking has been recieved, and that consequently…this country is…at war…with Germany”.

Maybe all? Five? Four? Two or three? At least one?

Great things were broadcast over the radio and many great events were brought home to ordinary people thanks to the power of the radio. If you don’t recognise any of those quotes, they were…

1. Jack Benny.
2. Herb Morrison, commenting on the crash of the airship Hindenberg in May, 1937.
3. The opening to the famous radio police-procedural show ‘Dragnet’.
4. Lou Costello.
5. The opening to the famous radio program ‘The Shadow’.
6. A line from one of the most famous radio broadcasts of all, the 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio-drama by Orson Welles.
7. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt making a speech about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, December 7th, 1941.
8. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s speech, announcing the British Declaration of War against Nazi Germany. September 3rd, 1939.

The Golden Age of Radio brought all kinds of things to people for the first times in their lives, in a startling and amazing clarity that you could never get from a newspaper or a book. The comedy of Jack Benny, the fight-scenes and shootouts in westerns, the harsh interrogations in ‘Dragnet’ or the emotional and grief-stricken report made by Herb Morrison when the airship Hindenberg crashed to the ground outside Lakehurst, NJ, in 1937.


A massive, console radio, typical of the kind seen during the 1920s and the early 1930s. Smaller, tabletop radios (see above), would soon replace these big, bulky units which were the size of filing-cabinets!

Radio serials remained popular for decades. Most episodes were done 100% live-to-air, being recorded as they were broadcast, onto transcription disks or audio-tape. A typical radio-episode lasted from 30-60 minutes and was usually rehearsed a couple of times beforehand. Any mistakes made during broadcasting could be heard all over the country! In later days, radio broadcasts could be done in front of live, sudio-audiences or at the scenes of major disasters, much like how TV camera-crews would do it today. Yeah…nothing is new. If you think it is, take a look at history.

Radio-serials often required special-effects men, to simulate the sounds of whistles, car-horns, gunshots, doors slamming, doorbells, footsteps, telephones ringing and a million other sounds. Most programs had one, two or probably three sound-effects men. Jack Webb’s program ‘Dragnet’ needed no less than five! Some generic sounds were pre-recorded and stored on playback records, but other than that, they’d all have to be done, live-to-air, right on cue. You needed incredibly good timing to be a sound-effects man! When sound-effects men working on the Jack Benny Program forgot to plug in the power-cord for the phonograph to play the audio for an old, 1926 Maxwell automobile, vocal artist Mel Blanc was forced, in the middle of a live broadcast, to jump to the microphone and improvise on the spot, vocally-produced automobile engine-noises! Jack Benny liked it so much, he made Mel do it for every episode thereafter.

It wasn’t unknown for radio shows to be interrupted for important announcements. When the Pearl Harbor attacks happened in 1941, radio-listeners all over the USA had their listening pleasure interrupted by a message that told them that the US. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was being bombed by the Japanese.

Radios remained incredibly popular even though by the late 1940s, television was beginning to peep up over the horizon. What was it like back in the 1930s and 40s to listen to the radio? Well for one thing, you had to make sure the radio was working. Most of the early radios were all battery-powered. To get the batteries working, you had to take them down to the local drugstore or car-garage to get them charged up. Once they were working and charged and put back into the radio, you turned it on. Don’t expect an immediate response…old radios worked through vacuum-tubes, and these required time to heat up and get going properly. The muffled, slightly dull tone which is synonymous with Old Time Radio was the result of the technology available at the time, and the natural muffling caused by the cloth-grilled speakers which most radios of the period had.

Once the radio was turned on, you had to know what program you wanted to hear. Much like TV guides today, newspapers published regular radio-guides, listing what shows were broadcast that day or week, what station or frequency these programs could be heard on, and the time which they were to be broadcast at. Once you knew the date and time, and your radio was charged, on and working, all you had to do was sit back in front of the set, put your feet up, close your eyes…try not ot fall asleep..and listen.

The End of an Era.

Radio’s dominance of the entertainment industry ended in the late 1950s, when television was finally being accepted as the new entertainment medium. Some shows such as Dragnet, The Jack Benny Show, Richard Diamond Private Detective, Amos & Andy and Life with Luigi transferred to television in the 1950s; Dragnet did radio AND television for nearly a decade! But in the end, television won out, and the family tradition of sitting around the wireless listening to two men saying:

    “Hey Abbott! Did you hear the news? Hitler’s just invented a brand new weapon that’ll end the war in five minutes!”
    “A new weapon? What is it!?”
    “A pole…with a white flag on the end of it!”

were soon to be a thing of the past. Radio vanished quickly from the public remembrance and imagination, to replaced by ‘Dancing with the Stars’, ‘Survivor’ and ‘America’s Next Top Model’ and a unique and incredible form of entertainment was lost forever.

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The Analogue Desktop (or ‘what’s that rocker-thingy?’)

November 22, 2009 at 9:36 PM (Pens and other Writing Paraphernalia)

In days gone by, before keyboards and printers, laptops, PCs, mice with really long tails which you plugged into your hard-drive, or even great, clanking typewriters which weighed as much as a small suitcase, the desktop had all kinds of things on it. What are some of the things you might find on a desktop, before the computer came along and monopolised all the space on your special little table?

Leather pad.

Most desks these days don’t have neat, green pads of leather on top, which are either separate, or specially inlaid into the table-surface. If they do have leather pads, they’re usually looked on purely as decorative additions to the desk and thought to have no practical function. 50, 75 and 100 years ago, however, no desk worth its salt was sold without one of these pads.

While today a big, usually green, leather pad on top makes a desk look nice and fancy, back in the ‘old days’, a leather pad was an essential component of any good desk. Today we think it’s just a cutesy cosmetic or aesthetic styling choice, but in fact, they served a very practical purpose. The reason no good desk was found without one of these pads was because without one, you could do considerable damage to the wooden surface of your desk and you would also have a rather unsuitable (to say nothing of uncomfortable), hard, solid writing-surface, which is not what you want your pen-nib scraping over while you write out an important document.

Before the widespread use of the typewriter (and even after), the only way to record things was to write it down by hand. A hard, wooden desktop is uncomfortable to write on, especially when you’re writing with a metal dip-pen, with a steel nib sharp enoough to stab someone in the neck (I’m not kidding, those nibs are SHARP!). Leather pads provided much-needed protection of the desktop as well as a comfortable writing-surface, important when you might be pen-pushing for hours at a time. The pad allowed the pen to have some cushioning underneath it and allowed for smoother, frictionless writing, a more relaxing and enjoyable writing-experience.

Desk-Blotter/Blotting-Pad.

On desks which did not have either separate or inlaid leather writing-surfaces, a substitute might have been found in the desk-blotter. The desk-blotter was a stiff board (of wood or very strong cardboard), which was used to hold a large sheet of white blotting-paper, which was secured to the board by a series of triangular tabs at the edges. The desk-blotter was to serve as a big, all-purpose sheet of blotting-paper which was always within reach, should the writer need to quickly blot a sheet of paper with freshly-written ink on it. It also provided the important, cushioned writing-surface which would prevent the wooden desktop from being scratched by sharp pen-nibs.

Inkwell.

Inkwells were common on desks even after the fountain pen arrived on the scene. They could be small, unassuming clay or wooden affairs with porcelian liners, or they could be extravagant and decorative desk-accessories, made of cut crystal, silver, gold or intricately and cleverly cut glass. Inkwells typically have hinged lids and were heavy, solid ink-receptacles, to prevent them from being knocked over and having their contents spilt everywhere. Inkwell-lids were hinged to provide for easier access to ink, but they came with the downside that ink coud evaporate from the well, without an airtight seal. It is therefore necessary to top up the inkwell every few weeks (even when you’re not using it), to keep the well full.

Inkstand.

An inkstand was one of the largest desk-accessories you could have back in the old days. It consisted of a large platform, usually made of wood, metal or glass. On this platform was space for a pair of matching inkwells (which came with the stand) and space for a blotter, spare nibs and a few troughs or grooves in the stand, where pens could be laid when not in use. The wells would usually contain two different colours of ink, such as red and black, or red and blue. Inkstands were typically found on larger, grander desks, which had the desk-space to spare for them. Large, partner’s desks, which were meant to be used by two people (business partners, hence the name), might have an inkstand in the middle, with each man having his own inkwell to draw ink from while working.

Rocker-Blotter.

On most desks today, the rocker-blotter, much like the inkstand and inkwell, is a largely ornamental desk-accessory, but there was a time, not too long ago, when no desk would be found without one. As dip-pens and early fountain pens wrote very wet (that is to say, they laid down very bold, wet, intense lines of ink), it was necessary to blot one’s writing, to prevent the ink from bleeding (staining through the paper) or feathering (spreading across the paper), and thus creating a nasty mess of one’s work.

To be able to blot quickly and neatly, the rocker-blotter was developed. Such a blotter is typically made up of three pieces – A knob, a top-plate and a base. The knob is the small handle on top of the blotter, which gives you a place to grasp the blotter while using it. The knob also screws down into the base and holding the top-plate firmly in place.

The top-plate is the wood panel or board between the knob and the base. The top-plate holds the blotting-paper firmly in-place, between the top of the base and the bottom of the top-plate. The bottom of the blotter is the base, a large piece of wood (normally, but they can also be made of metal), which is flat on the top and curved on the bottom.

Paper is inserted into the blotter by unscrewing the knob, removing it, sliding the top-plate away and cutting a strip of blotting-paper to fit the curved underside of the base, with about a half-inch to an inch of length on each side of the strip of paper, so that two tabs may be made, to fold over the top of the base and which the top-plate can grasp and hold in-place. Sometimes it helps to put some sticky-tape on the blotting-paper tabs to hold the paper in-place on the base, while you put the top-plate back, and screw the knob back down, to hold everything together.

Using a rocker-blotter takes no serious skill, but care should be taken, to prevent a mess. Once your writing is done, you rock the blotter across your writing in a smooth, even fashion. As the blotter rocks across the ink, the blotting-paper soaks up the ink and when the blotter is lifted away, neat, dry handwriting is all that’s left on the page. Don’t use a blotter too quickly, because if you do, you stand the chance of smudging your ink and sending it all over the page.

A popular plot device in some detective fictions (this happens at least once in a Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter’), information about the victim’s or suspect’s correspondence can be gleamed by examining the blotting-paper on his desk or in his rocker-blotter. If you’re wondering if you can actually read the marks on a sheet of blotting-paper, the answer is yes…provided that the blotter is relatively fresh and clean, that the blot was a clean, smooth one, and that the writing was sufficiently wet to leave a clear imprint. Not enough ink means a poor imprint, too much ink means smudging, either causing the words on the blotter to be totally unreadable.

Pounce pot.

You wouldn’t find a pounce pot on most desks today, not even in an ornamental capacity. Pounce pots were a desk-accessory of the 16th-18th centuries and looked a bit like salt-shakers, being tall, with lids with holes in the top. The pounce pot held a substance called ‘pounce’, which was a dry, grainy substance, made up of finely ground sand, salt or crushed cuttlefish-bones (amongst the several other things which could be used to make pounce). Pounce was used to soak up ink before the advent of blotting-paper, and it acted a bit like talcum-powder, soaking up any moisture on the page. Having written your document, you tipped the pounce onto your page, sprinking it all over your writing like an overly-generous helping of salt, and waited for the ink to be sopped up by the powder. Once the paper was nice and dry and the excess ink was soaked up, the writer tipped the used pounce back into the pounce pot.

As you can imagine, this was a slow and rather messy process, if you didn’t do it properly. I can imagine that people were very relieved when blotting-paper was invented.

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