Stephen Lycett's Blog

For ten weeks starting Monday 6 October I shall be reading stories from Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium on Radio Odstock. The series is called Night-Time Stories and will be aired at 9pm every Monday.

I have edited the stories so that they stand on their own and do not depend on the outer framework story, which they often do in the printed version. I shall read two stories in each programme, with a short musical interlude between each.

Radio Odstock can be found radioodstock.org.uk

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I visited the Rocketship for the first time today. It’s a
new bookshop for children, though it has a shelf of Salisbury authors and,
since I am a Salisbury author, I took some copies of Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium along. I think anyone who wants to write
ought to start by reading to children, ideally between the ages of six and
nine. That way you tune your ears to sentence rhythms, sense whether the narrative
pace is right and whether the dialogue rings true. You get instant feedback from
a young audience and you can learn a lot from it. The best children’s writers
have, I am convinced, tested their work in this way.

Two series of books, which I loved reading to my children,
are ideal for this purpose. The first are the Captain Najork books by Russell
Hoban, beautifully illustrated by Quentin Blake. There are, unfortunately, only
two of them: How Tom Beat Captain Najork
and his Hired Sportsmen and A Near
thing for Captain Najork. Hoban was a complete original. His books, whether
for adults or children, are quite unlike anyone else’s. (The Mouse and His Child must be one of the darkest children’s books
ever written, and his adult dystopia Ridley
Walker is unforgettable.) The other fictions I want to commend are the Frog
and Toad books by Arnold Lobel. There are four of them and all concern the
adventures of the exuberant Frog and the melancholy Toad, who form a kind of
Tigger/Eeyore pairing. (It may be heresy to say so, but I think Frog and Toad
books are much better than Winnie the Pooh.) They are told with the utmost
economy, with understated humour and with real delicacy of feeling. They are
really the story of a friendship. As a fan of the BBC sitcom Detectorists, it struck me that the real
subject of that, too, is friendship. In fact, the more I watch it, the more
similarities I see between Andy and Lance and Frog and Toad. Did Mackenzie Crook,
who wrote it, know the Frog and Toad books, I wonder? I like to think so. One
of the Frog and Toad stories ends: ‘Then Frog and Toad ate a big breakfast. And
after that they spent a fine long day together.’ Substitute Andy and Lance, and
the last sentence could conclude many a Detectorist
episode.

God bless the Rocketship and all who sail in her.

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I bonded with the Victorians a long time ago. Until I was six
I lived in a house where there was no electricity, so I’ve experienced at first
hand the ways in which family life arranges itself round a single source of
light and heat. I went to a Victorian school which had gas lamps – one of the
classrooms didn’t have any lights at all – and which was run by three
moustachioed Victorian ladies who were hot on the Bible, long division ad not
much else. It wasn’t all bad, though: I went to school on a steam train, and on
winter evenings a friend and I were allowed to light the gas lamps on the station.
 

My grandparents, who lived opposite the Lotus shoe factory
in Stafford, were true Victorians. From the time they moved into it in the
early 1900s until the time my grandmother died in 1965, their house and its
furnishings remained unchanged. There were mantelpieces full of Victorian
knickknacks, an aspidistra in a brass pot – a cliché, I know, but there really was
one – a painting of cattle coming home at sunset, a print of Noah’s ark, a set
of horsehair-upholstered armchairs (complete with antimacassars) and rooms full
of yellowing wallpaper whose paste had lost its grip, leaving the paper to roll
itself up from the bottom. My grandfather used to shave with a cut-throat razor
at the kitchen table, whilst my grandmother cooked on an iron range and did the
washing with washtub and dolly peg, rolling it afterwards though an enormous
finger-crushing mangle. Because Victorian houses were draughty, she would seal
the house for the evening with little wads of folded newspaper inserted into
the gaps round the ill-fitting outside doors and windows.

Of particular interest was my grandparents’ dressing table.
As thrifty Victorians, they never threw anything away. Thus there were combs
without teeth, hairbrushes without bristles – it’s a bruising experience having
your hair brushed with the back of the brush – and scent bottles with perished
rubber bulbs. There were also paper weights, two of them, their glass globes
scratched and the pictures underneath faded. One picture was of the Royal
Crescent in Buxton, the other of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. Both must
have been souvenirs. Buxton was a place Midlanders went on holiday, the Crystal
Palace, in its original version, a place where people went to see the Great
Exhibition of 1851.

I like to think that the Crystal Palace paperweight was
brought back by my grandfather’s father, Joseph Burch, who, as a young man
working for Bright and Co of Manchester, exhibited a carpet-printing machine in
the Exhibition.  I do hope so. In that
way I feel I can reach out and touch someone – only two generations away – who
was really present at the wonder of the age: the Great Exhibition of the Works
of Industry of All Nations, which was held in Hyde Park in that far-off, rainy
summer of 1851.

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I have written before in this blog about the lion attack on the Salisbury mail coach in 1816. For those of you who missed it, this is the story.

In The Devil’s Coachman, the first of the inventor’s two tales, there is an account of how a lioness attacked the Salisbury mail coach at what was then called the Winterslow Hut (until recently The Pheasant). This is a true story, which occurred in October 1816. A travelling menagerie had pulled in for the night at the inn. A lioness escaped its travelling cage and attacked Pomegranate, the leading horse of the Devonport mail. All the passengers fled to the safety of the inn, while the owner of Ballard’s menagerie fed one of his dogs to the lioness to distract it. One poor passenger was too slow, however, and found the door shut in his face. When the lioness was at last secured, he was let into the inn. He recovered sufficiently to write an account of his ordeal for the local paper, but later went mad and was incarcerated in the lunatic asylum at Laverstock, where he died twenty-seven years later. After the incident the coach resumed it journey, arriving in Devonport only forty-five minutes late. The proprietor of Ballantine’s Menagerie, clearly a man who knew a good business opportunity when he saw one, bought Pomegranate and exhibited him alongside the guilty lioness at Salisbury Fair. When the novelty had worn off, he sold Pomegranate back to Royal Mail, where he resumed his duties. By all accounts, Pomegranate, who was an ex-racehorse, was an ill-natured brute in the stable but a co-operative animal in the traces. He had a brief posthumous fame when the Post Office, as part of its bi-centennial celebrations of the introduction of the mail coach, issued a 16p commemorative stamp in 1984. The coach is the last remaining mail coach made by Vidler, who were given the contract in 1786 to supply vehicles to the Royal Mail. Its working life came to an end in 1835 when Vidler ended their contract.

Astonishingly, the coach, which was named Quicksilver, still survives. The Times of December 5 reports: “It has undergone an extensive two-year restoration by Mark Broadbent of Fenix Carriages in Devon, after languishing in private storage for 40 years. When the Duke of Edinburgh, a keen carriage rider, found out about the restoration in October, a visit to Windsor Castle was organised and it was displayed to the Queen.”

One last thing: those who know the area will recognise that the Post Office got the picture on their commemorative stamp the wrong way round. If it was coming from London it would have been travelling across the picture from right to left.

The post Lioness Attacking the Salisbury Mail Coach: an Update appeared first on Stephen Lycett.

The collapse of Thomas Cook and Sons seems a good opportunity to remember the founder of the company and the age of excursions which he helped initiate. When he founded the business in Leicestershire in 1841 it was for local visits only.  Package tours which included whole UK itineraries, including steamer travel, and trips abroad came later. A cabinet maker and Baptist preacher, he wanted to offer working class people a harmless and healthy alternative to drinking, which he saw as at the root of most social ills. He used the newly built railway to offer his first 12-mile trip from Leicester to Loughborough, at the cost of a shilling per head. The visit was such a success that Cook repeated it over several summers on behalf of Sunday schools, thus laying the foundations for the business which survived until this year. He was not the only ‘excursion agent’ of the period. Others were active – and successful – but what secured Cook’s fame was his association with the Great Exhibition of 1851. He not only organised the trains; he also found accommodation for visitors to the Exhibition. I have written in an earlier blog about the part he played in setting up Harrison’s Hostel in Pimlico. Here is an extract from Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium:

Now for those of you for whom that summer of 1851 is a faded memory or perhaps not even a memory at all, let me say a little about our destination. In order to prevent landlords from taking advantage of their guests, the great excursionist Mr Thomas Cook had persuaded Mr Thomas Harrison of Pimlico to turn his furniture depository into a hostel where visitors might be cheaply and decently lodged. For one and threepence per night up to a thousand residents were to be provided with bed and bedding, soap and towel. A decent breakfast was to be had for 4d, a good dinner for 8d, and for a further penny per item, the visitor might have his boots blacked, his chin shaved and his infirmities treated by a surgeon who attended every morning at nine. The dormitories were partitioned into cubicles, and, in order to prevent pilfering or drunkenness, janitors patrolled the gas-lit corridors day and night. If the necessities of life had been provided for, the luxuries were not neglected either:  there was a large smoking room in which a band played every evening, gratis, and on top of the building an observation platform from which visitors might enjoy uninterrupted views of the river and the city.

In my next blog I shall look at the work of some of the other Victorian excursion agents.

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I was recently interviewed on the American website nfreads.com. Follow the link:

Interview With Author Stephen Lycett

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The painting is Life at the Seaside or Ramsgate Sands by W.P. Frith. By modern standards these seaside tourists of 1853 look horribly uncomfortable because they look horribly over-dressed. That it’s a hot is obvious from the number of parasols. But why, we ask ourselves, the bonnets and shawls, the bowlers and top hats, the neckties and the waistcoats? Why is no-one, apart from the child in the foreground, barefoot? Why is no-one bareheaded? Why are some of the women wearing gloves?

All of which brings me to the fourth and final part of A History of Lost Sensations, namely touch. In previous blogs I have explored some of the ways the Victorian world, the world of Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium, sounded and smelt different from ours. In this blog I want to suggest how it felt different.

The best place to start is clothes. There were no artificial fabrics. Clothes were made of wool, cotton or linen, all of which were heavier than the mixed fabrics we wear today. Radiators weren’t invented until the 1850s and weren’t in widespread use until the end of the century, so houses were cold in winter. People sat by open fires, which meant that they were often scorched on one side and frozen on the other. In the absence of double glazing people minimised draughts with large free-standing screens. The obvious way to keep warm was to wear heavy clothes, both indoors and out.

Woollen fabrics were not just heavy but stiff and prickly. People’s movements were restricted by them, which is why I rarely find television costume dramas convincing. The actors are obviously wearing modern fabrics which allow them to move too freely. Other obstructions to free movement included starched collars for men (their lower jowls must have been permanently sore) and whalebone corsets for women. Long skirts trailed in the mud and to avoid soiling them, Victorian ladies employed crossing sweepers to clear away mud and horse manure when they crossed the road. Shoes had leather soles and uppers, which made them heavier; they also had hobnails to protect the leather soles. Hobnails often pressed upwards through the soles they were designed to protect and gave the wearer blisters.

The more one thinks about it the more one realises that a great deal of Victorian tactile life consisted of low-level pain, irritation and inflammation. Tooth ache was more common. The pressure on the bladder from corsets (and men sometimes wore corsets too) must have mean that women in particular spent a lot of time with their legs crossed. Living in damp houses and sleeping in damp sheets would have increased the chances of rheumatism.

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The olfactory world of the Victorians was more rank than ours.

Let’s start with sewage. Most people know about the Great Stink of 1858, when a heatwave acting on the raw sewage in the Thames produced a stench so overpowering that Parliament was forced to close. Among the reasons for the sewage pollution in the river were the well-meant reforms of the 1830s and 40s which encouraged people to fill in garden cess pits and discharge their effluent into ditches which fed in the Tyburn, the Walbrook and all the other London rivers and streams which, in turn fed, into the Thames.

Then there were the smells of transport, both animal and mechanised. Most transport, apart from the railways, was horse drawn, hence smells of horse dung, horse piss and sweaty leather. Steam trains smelt of hot oil, hot metal, coal dust and sulphur. Waiting rooms smelt of gas lamps.

Industry, too, fed into the mix. Every trade had its own distinctive smell – tanneries, dye works, glue boilers, copper-plating works, abattoirs, breweries, forges, cobblers, saddleries –  as did shops. In modern supermarkets most things are packaged and therefore smell-proofed, but when items were sold loose the smells were distinctive, sometimes pleasant, sometimes not. Throw away the plastic wrapping and you might smell tea, coffee, wet fish, bread, cheese, washing soda, carbolic soap (often sold by weight and cut off the block like cheese), candles and vinegar.

Think how many types of smoke you might have smelt – bonfires, domestic coal fires, tobacco smoke (pipe and tobacco and cigars in the first half of the nineteenth century, cigarettes in the second half), the sharp-smelling smoke of recently snuffed candles, incense in High Anglican and Catholic churches. Domestic and industrial smoke fed the sulphurous fogs that afflicted major cities. (See the opening pages of Dickens’s Bleak House.)

Domestic smells would have included blackleaded fire ovens, Macassar oil, camphor, damp sheets, soot, tobacco smoke (again!), mothballs, paraffin from lamps, paraffin wax or tallow from candles, dusty carpets (remember, no vacuum cleaners), boot polish, furniture polish, cod liver oil, sulphur matches, floor polish. And don’t forget good, honest sweat – if you watch old films it’s surprising how often you can spot sweat patches in armpits – not to mention halitosis, more common than not in days of poor dental hygiene.

Finally, Here’s an extract from Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium. The excursionists have arrived in London and enjoying (?) their first view of the Thames:

Seven miles of putrid fermentation produced an overwhelming stench of corruption and decay. No carriage crossed London Bridge with its windows open, no driver omitted to bury his nose in his muffler. Far from being the silver ribbon of the poet’s imagination, the Thames was a midden, whose greenish waters blended the outpourings of soap boilers, slaughter men and bone grinders with the personal effluence of a million Londoners. At low tide the river deposited its bounty on the mud where it was picked over by ‘mudlarks’, who carried off their reeking trophies with whoops of delight. Even as we watched, a dead cat floated under the bridge. “And there’s another!” shouted Gabriel. “Ginger tom by the look of it.” Dodging between the carriage wheels, he dashed to the opposite parapet to watch the ginger tom continue his stately progress towards Greenwich.

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In the last blog I offered soundscapes from the present, from fifty years ago and from 1533. What about a hundred and fifty years ago?

We think of the modern world as a noisy place and, if you live under the Heathrow flight path, no doubt it is, but I think we’d be surprised by how noisy life in Victorian cities really was. Thomas Carlyle lined the study of his house in Cheyne Row with cork to stop himself from being driven mad by street noises. Here are some of the ones he might have heard:

Steel-rimmed wheels on cobbles, horses’ hooves on hard surfaces, horse noises generally (snorting, whinnying, jingle of harness, whipcracks, etc), mice under the floorboards, barrel organs in the street (Carlyle’s pet hate), singing from pubs, hammers on anvils, street vendors’ cries, newsboys shouting the headlines, scrape of hobnail boots, train whistles, wheel tappers on the railway, tap of walking canes on pavements, church bells, striking clocks, ring of coin on counter, hiss of gas jets, parlour harmoniums, bands in bandstands, grunting of pigs (which many people kept in their back gardens), rattle of stick on railings (a favourite pastime of small boys), creak of stiff leather shoes …

It is lost sensations of this kind that I tried to work into Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium in an attempt to bring to life the everyday world of ordinary Victorians. This is the scene that awaits the Canterbury excursionists when they reach London Bridge Station:

What can compare with the hurly burly of a London station? Such tumult of voices, such shrilling of whistles! What a scramble for departing trains! What a shoal of top hats and bonnets, caps and derbies bobbing on the tides that flow through the barriers and swirl round the coaches. And what a tide! Here are newspaper vendors weaving in and out of the crowds, porters bent double under trunks, cabmen discharging last-minute passengers, oilmen greasing axles, scourers searching beneath seats for forgotten umbrellas. Over there a porter drags a leash of pointers towards a guard’s van; close by a country gentleman watches anxiously as a parcel of saplings is strapped to a carriage roof; from the Dover train a Frenchman and his wife, conspicuous in Parisian finery, alight in an avalanche of luggage; in the cab rank a mother of two haggles over a fare. Every train whistle makes someone’s heart beat faster – the felon fleeing from justice, the debtor absconding from his debts, the soldier about to join his regiment, the schoolboy returning to school. In that vast crowd all are surely there – all those and many more, more than imagination can compass or eye discern.

In my next blog I shall try to re-create some Victorian smellscapes.

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Here’s a modern urban and domestic soundscape:

– Unsilenced motorcycle exhausts, burglar alarms, lorry reversing beepers, pings and buzzes from your mobile, other people’s ring tones, humming of fridges, music from builders’ radios, clang of scaffolding poles being loaded and unloaded, rasp of garden strimmers, creak of cooling radiators, rip of opening Velcro, rumble of trains on bridges, drone of microlights, chimes of ice cream vans, whistle of spin dryers, etc

Or to go back fifty years:

Factory sirens, steam train whistles, clatter of milk bottles, whirr of electric milk floats, grinding of gears, sounds of heavy industry, clank of shunting engines, clackety clack of wheel on rail, scrape of shovel in coal scuttle, scratch of pen nib on paper, thud of rubber stamp on documents, ring of cash registers, quasi-religious silence in libraries, etc

And here’s one from 1533:

– Lord what ado women made in their beds: some scolding, some laughing, some weeping, some singing to their sucking children which made a woeful noise with their continual crying, and one shrewd wife a great way off (I think at S. Albans) called her husband cuckold so loud and shrilly that I heard that plain – and would fain have I heard the rest, but could not by means of barking of dogs, grunting of hogs wailing of cats, rumbling of rats, gaggling of geese, humming of bees, rousing of bucks, gaggling of ducks, singing of Swans, ringing of pans, crowing of cocks sowing of socks, cackling of hens, scrabbling of pens, peeping of mice, trulling of dice, curling of frogs and toads in the bogs, chirping of crickets, shutting of wickets, shrieking of owls, flittering of fowls, routing of knaves, snorting of slaves, farting of churls, fizzling of girls – with many things else, as ringing of bells, counting of coins, mounting of groins, whispering of lovers, springling of plovers, groaning and spewing, baking and brewing, scratching & rubbing, watching and shrugging, with such a sort of commixed noises as would deaf anybody to have heard …

(The latter comes from Beware the Cat by William Baldwin, a book that is sometimes referred to as the first English novel.)

All the above are examples from a book I shall never get round to writing entitled A History of Lost Sensations. They are the particles of everyday experience, particles so commonplace that no-one thinks to record them, particles which disappear with changing technologies, particles which are quickly forgotten and are hard to recover. Part of my purpose of writing Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium was to re-awaken these lost particles and make them tickle the senses again. Next week I shall try to evoke some distinctively Victorian soundscapes and smellscapes.

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