Reginald

I keep going on about how family history research can turn up fascinating and unexpected things. My wife’s great-great-grandmother, who was widowed at 19, re-married a high official of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, 40 years her senior (23 and 63). We therefore find well-connected, upper-class cousins amongst the distant relatives. Many were odd, or potty, or both. One of my favourites is this splendid gentleman, John Reginald Rowallane Armytage Moore. He was born in County Cavan in 1876. 

Reginald lived in Ireland until his early twenties, and then moved to Vancouver as an estate agent. There, in 1909 aged 33, he met and married 22-year-old Amy (Maisie) Campbell-Johnston. Their story then becomes distinctly unusual. 

On paper it seemed a perfect match. He was high-born Anglo-Irish, and she was descended from the first Marquess of Montrose. But Maisie left after just a few months. She told one relative it was because Reginald was gay, but I am not so sure. You will have to make up your own mind. Not that it would matter much these days, but it did then. 

By 1911, Reginald is back in London alone, still an estate agent, while Maisie has gone to California to stay with a friend called George Mordecai. Soon afterwards, Reginald moved to Sydney, Australia, where a newspaper reports he had joined the rowing club, having previously won competitive rowing competitions in Canada. 

He remained in the southern hemisphere up to and through the First World War, serving with different forces in different countries. He spent a period in the Matabeleland Mounted Police in Southern Rhodesia, and then served in the forces in both New Zealand and Australia. One would have expected someone of his background and class to have been an officer, but it appears he was only an ordinary serviceman. He seems to have found it easy to move around. 

In New Zealand, he was one of the 23-strong relief force that sailed to Samoa in 1916 to replace part of the garrison there. New Zealand forces had been the first anywhere in the world to recapture land back from the Germans, i.e. Samoa, and the relief force was made up of men aged 40 and over to free up younger men to fight in Europe. 

He turns up in Australia early in 1918. He enlisted as a gunner in the 12th Field Artillery Brigade, which sailed for Europe in June that year. The photograph is from this period. They arrived too late for active service, but were engaged in post-Armistice duties in France. He was discharged in England in 1919. 

For the rest of his life, he lived in a flat in Earls Court Road from where he ran a dancing school, a highly unusual occupation for a man of his background and era. It does not seem to have been particularly successful. Although both his mother and his sister treated him more generously in their Wills than other siblings, excusing his debts, and setting up trusts to provide him with a good income, he left only £167 when he died in 1951. Surprisingly, he left this to Miss Kathleen Fricker, one of three unmarried sisters who lived in Wandsworth. Who was she? His Will had been made over 20 years earlier. 

This leaves a lot of gaps and questions. He apparently had a lady friend, but was also a man’s man and adventurer. How was he able to move easily between military postings, or was he forced to? And the school of dance? He sounds every bit as dashing as the photograph suggests. Ships’ passenger lists describe him as 6 feet tall, with dark complexion, brown hair and blue eyes. What could be more arresting than a handsome, six-foot Matabeleland Mounted Policeman? I bet he looked grand in the uniform. 

The South African Mounted Police in 1960 probably had a similar uniform

It is not clear what his relationship was with Kathleen Fricker, but had they wanted to marry, they would not have been able to, because he remained married to Maisie. And before blaming him for the shortness of that marriage, it is worth hearing a little more of Maisie’s story, which is even more bizarre. 

Maisie Armytage-Moore was a larger-than-life character who dressed in black, smoked cigars, and loved boxing and American Indians. Three years before marrying Reginald, while still a teenager, she became friends with a notorious American stagecoach robber, Bill Miner. He taught her to ride and built her a skating rink. Another friend was a North American Indian girl, Lena Vogt, who taught her about Indian ways and the outdoors. This was later very significant. Also around this time, she wanted to elope with a Christian preacher, the George Mordecai mentioned earlier. 

Three years after her short marriage, she went off to the USA with a man called Martin Joseph Murphy, a lumberjack and part-time boxer, with whom she managed a boxing troupe travelling around logging camps. She also worked for a union called International Workers of the World, which in 1919 was involved in a serious labour riot in Centralia, Washington, and she had to return to Canada. She had five children with her, presumably all born to Murphy. 

Around 1927, she began to work for a lawyer called Tom Hurley, an advocate for American Indian justice. Maisie also founded ‘The Native Voice’, a publication for and about first nation people. She was still known as Armytage-Moore, but was by now with Tom Hurley. She seems not to have divorced because of her Episcopalian faith, and could not have remarried because Hurley was Roman Catholic. Maisie only married Tom Hurley after Reginald died in 1951.  

Maisie became very well-known as a champion of First Nation people, and there is lots about her online. Many thought it subversive, and she and Tom were sent to prison at one point. It would certainly have appealed to Maisie’s non-conformist nature. She was clearly a headstrong woman, but also very odd. 

One story tells how she inherited a casket said to contain the preserved heart of her ancestor, the first Marquess of Montrose, who was executed in 1650. She had it sent out to Canada. Her grandchildren used to open the casket, take out the heart, and play with it. Imagine them daring each other to touch it, or chasing after their friends with it. One granddaughter remembers her horror when she took it out and it broke into two pieces. 

So, why did Maisie walk out of the marriage so quickly? Wild, dynamic, independent woman or ineffectual, possibly gay, dreamer? Six of one and half a dozen of the other is my guess. 

Maisie’s collection of Indian art and artefacts is in the North Vancouver Museum and Archives. The heart is in the Montrose museum in Scotland. 

The R100

New Month Old Post: first posted 10th July 2016.

In his autobiography, Slide Rule, the author Nevil Shute (1899-1960), a man of his time with attitudes to match, remembered working as an engineer on the R100 airship during its construction at Howden in Yorkshire in the nineteen-twenties. Much of the workforce consisted of local lads and girls trained to carry out riveting and other tasks high up in the ribs and spines of the airship skeleton. Of them he writes:

The lads were what one would expect, straight from the plough, but the girls were an eye-opener. They were brutish and uncouth, filthy in appearance and in habits ... these girls straight off the farms were the lowest types that I have ever seen in England, and incredibly foul-mouthed ... we had to employ a welfare worker to look after them because promiscuous intercourse was going on merrily in every dark corner ... as the job approached completion ... we were able to get rid of the most jungly types. 

Jungly types? That is my maternal grandma you are talking about, Nevil, and her friends and cousins. They never had the chance to be privately educated and scrape through Oxford with a bad degree. While your evenings and weekends were spent dancing, playing badminton, flying aeroplanes and writing novels, they were toiling away tending crops and animals from their damp and dingy dwellings. Better check your privilege. 

And, how come the lads were “salt-of-the-earth, vital rustic types”, while their sisters were “jungly beyond vulgarity”? How was it different from when you were in the army? 

The language of the men was no novelty to me, of course, and I could out-swear most of them, but their attitude to women was shocking... 

Workers at Howden, high up in the ribs and spines of the R100 skeleton.

Both my parents had memories of the R100. My mother’s mother worked there for a short time, and had a small, airship-shaped piece of duralumin silver metal, around an inch and a half long (4cm) and flat on one side. It was from a batch of airship brooches unfinished when they ran out of metal. She gave me it as a toy and it became an imaginary submarine. 

My dad remembered going to see the R100 in its construction shed at Howden. His dad borrowed the Model T van from work to drive there across the newly opened Boothferry Bridge. He said that the river was swollen by floodwater. Looking up in the shed, the airship was so big my dad could not see it. At 700 feet long (220m) and 130 feet in diameter (40m), it was around the size of two rows of twenty-five terraced houses with front gardens and a road between. He thought he was looking up at the roof.

The R100 in its construction shed at Howden
with one of the control gondolas hanging from the airship
which my dad thought was the roof.

The R100 squeezed out of its shed and left for Cardington in Bedfordshire in December, 1929. It was one of two airships built in competition to explore the possibility of commercial flights to Canada, India, and Australia, then still too far for aeroplanes to carry heavy loads. The other was the R101 built at Cardington. 

No more large airships were built in Britain. The R100, the better of the two, made a successful flight to Canada and back in 1930, crossing the Atlantic in three days. Rather than admit defeat, the R101 team attempted a premature flight to India, but the airship hit the ground and caught fire in France in October, 1930, with the loss of 48 lives. The airship project was abandoned and the R100 broken up for scrap. Large airships were built later in other countries, such as the Hindenburg in Germany, but these also ended in disaster. They were filled with hydrogen. 

The R100 over Montreal, August, 1930.

The Eccentric Great Aunt: the Painter

Imagine you received an annuity at a young age, never had to work, and had enough to fund your activities within reason. How would you spend your time? 

Waterfall

Soon after the death of her first husband, my wife’s great-grandmother married a wealthy bachelor who, although himself a translator rather than a writer, was very well-connected in London literary circles. His friends and house guests included Maxim Gorky, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad. The couple holidayed in Rome, Athens and Egypt in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties. 

Great-Grandma had a fifteen-year-old daughter still at home. The new husband looked after her generously, as if she were his own, funding her through Chelsea School of Art and presenting her as a debutante at the Court of King George V. 

The daughter never married, continuing to live at home through the twenties and thirties, accompanying her mother and step-father abroad. She looked after her ageing mother after her step-father died, and was eventually left on her own. She is remembered as my wife’s eccentric great-aunt who lived a rather disorganized life in Oxford, where she was part of the art scene. I met her only once when she was in her eighties. She was tall and ungainly, very upper crust, and absolutely terrifying.

Her life was spent travelling and painting. Her travel list is long and impressive, especially considering the years in which they occurred: Bavaria and Sicily in 1928, Egypt in 1932, Malta in 1939, Mauritius and South Africa in 1950, San Francisco in 1962, India in 1969, Persia and Singapore in 1970, Burma and Malaya in 1973, China in 1978, Mexico in 1982 ... this is just a small sample. It made for a wealth of entertaining stories.

She was not well-known, but exhibited in London, mostly at the Brook Street Art Gallery, and a few times at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of British Artists. 

Was she any good? You tell me. To me she was rather a messy artist with a distinctive, quirky style. Some of her pictures hang in our house, and we have some of her sketchbooks and colour slides. She had two main kinds of subject: exotic images of birds, animals and nature; and her travels, into which her quirky exoticism spilled. However, she may not have been all that original. Image searches reveal other paintings in a similar style.

Does it matter? Probably not. If we spend our time doing what we want, being creative as best we can, and are satisfied with the result, then what more could we ask? Isn’t that what we do on Blogger?

Pictures 2 and 4 are hard to photograph in their frames. 

Enkhuizen

Bali Dancers

Flamingos

Facial Animation

Back in December, I posted a piece about the automatic colourisation of black and white photographs. One of the web sites I mentioned, MyHeritage, has now added a new feature called Deep Nostalgia which animates faces. “Animate the faces in your family photographs”, it says. “Experience your family history like never before”.

It gives me an excuse to re-post this wonderful picture, taken before a boat trip from the Yorkshire seaside resort of Bridlington in 1929.

First, let’s look at what face animation does to our Prime Minister’s official photograph. The result may not be suitable for those of a nervous disposition. 

Where photographs have multiple faces, the tool crops out and animates one at a time.

I animated five of the faces from the automatically colourised version of the 1929 photograph, and put them together in the following video. They are (1) my grandad on the right, (2) my dad standing behind him, (3) the Somerset Maugham lookalike in the hat on the left (there is a crease in the original photograph), (4) the woman behind him, and (5) the wiry-haired man behind her:

I don’t know why some video segments are longer than others. I think the woman comes out best but it doesn’t really endear them to you. I certainly didn’t “spend the evening balled up in tears” as the following news report implies. It also touches upon the dangers of these tools.

The MyHeritage site only allows you to animate five faces before asking for money. However, my experiments were carried out in collaboration with my very good friends Mickey Mouse, Billy Liar and Seán ÓEigeartaigh. Between us, we were able to do it without paying. Their assistance was greatly appreciated. 

 Video links if you can’t see them:

• Boris Johnson: https://youtu.be/M-G2_CMZtIU
• Bridlington 1929 faces: https://youtu.be/EIrMf5o9Ssw
• News Report: https://youtu.be/tjBYSnoAWqg

Colourisation

I have been playing with colourisation tools. No, not paints and crayons, but software that colours black and white photographs automatically. It uses “artificial intelligence” and “deep learning” through “electronic neural networks” “trained” on millions of colour photographs. 

“Wow! Fantastic!” one might say, but having once worked on the periphery of a team of artificial intelligence researchers, I remain sceptical. I used to go from “Wow! Fantastic!” to “Is that all it is?” in the space of a forty-five minute seminar. 

Carried out manually, colourisation is a skilled, time-consuming, labour-intensive process. As well as expertise in tools such as Photoshop and a level of colour-sense I simply do not possess, it can also involve historical research to indicate what colours the photographer actually saw. Experts can spend a month on just one picture. 

So, it would be wonderful to be able to colour photographs automatically. I found these free resources (it may not be a complete list): 

• Algorithmia: https://demos.algorithmia.com/colorize-photos
  
• MyHeritage: https://blog.myheritage.com/2020/02/colorize-your-black-and-white-photos-automatically-with-myheritage-in-color/
• Photomyne: https://photomyne.com/colorize-app
• Pixbim: https://pixbim.com/colorsurprise-ai-pixbim  
• Playback.fm: https://playback.fm/colorize-photo

With four of them you upload a black and white photograph to the web site and then download the colourised version. Pixbim is different in that you download and install a trial version on your computer and carry out the colourisation locally.

Are they any good? I tried them out on black and white photographs from earlier blog posts.

Bridlington c1929 - colourised by MyHeritage

Uncle Jimmy’s Bullnose Morris c1929 - colourised by photomyne

Bridlington 1955 - colourised by MyHeritage

Grandma 1963 - colourised by playback.fm

In general, the different tools gave different results and no one was consistently better than the others. I tried to pick the best result in each case but you might have chosen otherwise as I possess a different distribution of cone cells from most people. My choices might be a bit green, or a bit pink, I don’t know, I wouldn’t be able to tell. However, there were some truly awful ones, one of which seems to think I was wearing pissy underpants.

 

Colourised by Pixbim

Colourised by Algorithmia

Colourised by photomyne

Colourised by Algorithmia

Of course, we do not know what the colours really were, although I do feel fairly confident that the Bullnose Morris was not brandy coloured, and know for a fact that the Pratts petrol can on the running board was spruce green (#2e4a41), which none of them got right.

 

One test of colour accuracy would be to re-colourise an existing colour image after first reducing it to monochrome. MyHeritage does not seem too bad to me on the Abbey Road cover (I wonder if this was one of the pictures it was trained on), but they all struggled with scenery.   

The Beatles Abbey Road (left) recolourised from monochrome by MyHeritage (right)

Spring Polyanthus 2020 (left) recolourised from monochrome by MyHeritage (right)

Glacial deposits in Glen Roy 2020 (left) recolourised from monochrome by Pixbim (right)

Johnson and Trump (left) recolourised from monochrome by Pixbim (right)

It is pretty impressive that black and white photographs can be coloured automatically at all, even though the colours are by no means accurate and not a patch on the original. 

Colourisation does seem to add something, particularly depth. Perhaps it works better with cine film, as in Peter Jackson‘s painstakingly restored First World War films (They Shall Not Grow Old) in which the moving faces of young soldiers, poignantly grinning amidst the mud of the trenches, become living people like us. 

I am not as sceptical as I was, but find myself thinking that with photographs it is probably better to stick with the original black and white. 

It would be interesting to see your efforts (irrespective of whether you call it colourisation, colourization, colorization or colorisation). 

FURTHER NOTES

I usually preferred MyHeritage, photomyne or playback.fm, but some reviews speak highly of Pixbim, possibly because it allows control over the colours (see below).

The colourised photographs are not always the same size as you started with.

There are other limitations too. MyHeritage permits a limited number of free colourisations (I’m not sure what it is, maybe 10, but me, Mickey Mouse and Billy Liar have all used our quotas) before asking for a minimum £50 subscription to its genealogy services. One should also be aware that the uploaded photographs are retained and may be visible to others, but can be deleted.

Pixbim (the one you download and install) allows you to adjust various processing parameters, such as colour intensity and colour temperature (from reddish to blueish), and provides a brush tool for correcting incorrect colours, whereas with all the others you get what you are given. However, the trial version of Pixbim comes with only a 7-day licence after which it costs £40. Also, unless you buy it, the colourised photographs have “Trial Version” printed all over them, but you can get round this using PrintScreen to capture a smaller version of the coloured image.

I also found mention of two other tools: Colourise SG which now appears to have been withdrawn, and Colorize Photo (www.colorizephoto.com) which assists you in carrying out the colourisation yourself, which I have not tried. 

Uncle Jimmy

(New month old post) First posted 28th June, 2015. 1,600 words)

The life of an intersex man born in the 1890s

My mother always said it would have been better if Uncle Jimmy had been brought up as a girl. When I was older, she added: “You see, he didn’t develop properly when he was a little boy.” She also said: “His sister was completely the other way round.” 

Uncle Jimmy was not really an uncle or indeed any relative at all. He attached himself to the family just before the First World War when he crossed the Pennines to take a job in the local branch of the clothing and furniture retailer where my grandfather worked. As Jimmy had nowhere to stay, my grandfather took him home and asked whether they could put him up for a time. Jimmy soon found his own accommodation and later, perhaps surprisingly, a wife, but he remained a close friend of the family for the rest of his life. He appears in no end of our family photographs: a surrogate uncle.

“A jolly little fat man with a high voice,” is how my brother remembered him, “Uncle Jimmy Dustbin,” not his real name but a pretty good homonym. He had been slightly built in his youth. His army attestation papers show he was five feet two inches tall (157 centimetres) with just a 31 inch chest (79 centimetres). He must have suffered terribly at the hands of childhood bullies and may have left his native Cheshire to begin life afresh where nobody knew him.

He tried to join up for war service six times but was rejected because of poor physique. After being accepted at the seventh attempt, he found himself passed rapidly from regiment to regiment like a bad penny. He first joined the York and Lancasters, but on mobilization was transferred back into the army reserve to grow and gain strength. He was mobilized again eight months later but within another six months had been transferred to the Yorkshire Regiment. He managed three months there before being compulsorily transferred to the 5th (Cyclist) Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment. This was part of the Army Cycle Corps used for coastal defence work inside the United Kingdom. His situation seems to have improved for a while because he qualified as a signaller, but within a year his difficulties had returned and he was transferred to the West Yorkshire Regiment. A month later he was judged physically unfit for war service, permanently discharged, issued with an overcoat and sent home. Jimmy’s war was thus based in such far flung locations as Durham, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Hartlepool and Aldershot. At no time did he see service in France.

Jimmy married while still in the army. He was almost twenty-five and his wife, let’s call her Beatrice, almost twenty-seven. They remained together for forty-seven years until she died. For some years they looked after one of Beatrice’s nephews but were unable to have children of their own. What Beatrice expected is not entirely clear, although she did once say to my grandmother she had little idea of what was supposed to happen on wedding nights, and remained just as mystified afterwards because nothing did. She seemed content to have settled for a marriage of crafts, hobbies and companionship.

Jimmy and Beatrice became grocers. Beatrice’s widowed mother had a corner shop in one of the town’s dense grid of terraced streets, so Jimmy moved in to help with the shop and eventually became the nominal owner. Beatrice did most of the work as Jimmy always found plenty of other things to occupy him. He became a churchwarden along with my grandfather, and a Sunday School teacher. He collected glassware and was a natty dresser, but his greatest joy was motoring. He advertised his services as an express courier and hence became one of the first in town with a private telephone and private motor car.

Uncle Jimmy with his 1922 ‘Bullnose’ Morris on an outing to Bridlington in 1928.
In the car (right to left) are my father (in cap), his sister (in bonnet) and Jimmy’s wife’s nephew.

His first car was a 1922 ‘Bullnose’ Morris. My father said that whenever his own family took their annual week’s holiday, in those days always to one of the Yorkshire coastal resorts, Jimmy would arrive in his car to join them for a day. On other occasions he would take my father and his sister on trips to the coast. They had a clear memory of one happy outing when they drove under the arched bridge between Bridlington and Filey where the railway embankment crosses the road, when Jimmy jokingly forbade them to shout as they passed through, which of course they did, their high spirited voices echoing back to them in the open-topped car. On another occasion he took my aunt for a ride in an aeroplane at Speeton airfield.

In later years, after my grandparents had died, Jimmy and Beatrice became surrogate grandparents, especially to my cousins. In fact they remember Uncle Jimmy and Aunty Beatrice by far the more clearly. They spent hours reading, singing, playing games and looking after them. Beatrice shared her jigsaw puzzles and taught them to crochet. Jimmy was the only one with the patience to feed to my elder cousin her breakfast in the way she wanted, one cornflake at a time, even though he was supposed to be at work in his shop. My uncle described him, in bemused admiration, as the only man he knew who had managed to get through life without working.

Eventually Jimmy and Beatrice retired from the grocers shop and moved for around fifteen years to a large house in a green and leafy part of town overlooking the river, but after Beatrice died Jimmy moved back to the same terraced street they had lived in previously, and was very lonely and unhappy. It was by then the nineteen-sixties. Society was changing and the street had lost its sense of community. Jimmy was a frequent visitor both to our house and my cousins’, arriving in his car, always a Morris. He showed a lifelong loyalty to the Morris marque.

Jimmy lived to eighty-one. During his last illness, unable to eat, he turned to my aunt for help and she told him she thought he should be in hospital. “All right,” he said, “but let’s have a cig first. We’ll have one of yours.” It was his last one. My aunt, a nurse, looked after him during his final days, and in dealing with his most intimate needs was disturbed to observe just how incompletely developed he was, “more female than male” she later confided.

Again, we were spared the details but some years ago, thirty five years after his death, I looked at Jimmy’s army service record in an online genealogy resource. It included Army Form B, 178A, Medical Report on a Soldier Boarded Prior to Discharge or Transfer to Class W, W(T), P or P(T), of the Reserve. Across the various sections of the form I was dismayed to read:

Feminism. Undesirability of retaining with hommes militesque. Congenital. Poor physique from infancy and puberty. Pain with equipment. Tastes and habits male. Married 12 months, no children. Enlarged breasts, female type. Poor general physique. R. testicle incompletely descended. Penis abnormally short. Embryonic pocket in scrotal line. Voice female. Was rejected 6 times on grounds of physique and accepted the 7th time. Discharge as permanently unfit.

And what of his sister, a back-slapping sporty woman who my mother said should have been brought up a boy. She also married but after several years her husband was granted an annulment. She then became a champion ladies golfer who represented her county. It was said she astonished other golfers by driving consistently long distances from the men’s tees. She spent her life organising competitions and golfing associations, and was still playing in veterans’ tournaments at the age of seventy. Did she have a similar congenital condition? We can now easily see that there were four other siblings who survived into adulthood. What about them? They seem to have produced few children and grandchildren.

Today, abnormal sexual development is much better understood than when Jimmy and his sister were born in the eighteen-nineties. For example, research into sex hormones did not make any real progress until the nineteen-thirties. The various conditions are now handled sympathetically and have a range of treatments. How very different from when Jimmy and his sister were young. What desperately miserable and lonely episodes they must have endured. Yet to us, Uncle Jimmy always seemed happy and jovial. He was kind and thoughtful, very much loved. I think we must have given him something of the family life he would never otherwise have had.

There was one last thing we could do for him. It was saddening to see his medical record on public display. Although British Army First World War service and pension records, if they survive, are now accessible through online genealogical resources, medical records are usually confidential. We wrote to the National Archives at Kew to ask whether it was possible, on the grounds of respect and decency, to remove the medical report from the online resource, to which they agreed. Genuine researchers can still go to Kew, look up the microfiche copy of his army service record, and find Army Form B178A included, but in the online version it is no longer there.*

In wanting to tell Jimmy’s sad and touching story, albeit with names changed, and in quoting from the form, I hope I am not indulging in the kind of prurience we want to avert.


* Unfortunately, since the original post, other genealogical resource providers have been permitted to scan the documents and it is now visible on several sites.

Bridlington

I like this photograph. It was taken in the late nineteen-twenties at the Yorkshire seaside resort of Bridlington. The location appears to be beside the harbour wall looking up to Garrison Street.

There is something about the figures, their clothes and expressions, the composition, the depth of focus and the greyscale tones that reminds me of photographs by Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, the celebrated Whitby photographer. They all look very serious, as if about to emigrate to the New World perhaps, whereas, actually, they are on board for a short trip around Flamborough Head.

My dad, aged about 7, is to the right with his Jackie Coogan cap tight on his head, and my grandfather, in front of him, looks very smart in a suit and flat cap. They seem to be the only ones without raincoats or waterproofs, unless those loose ones are for their use. None appear to have life jackets. One wonders who the others in the picture were: are they three couples or is one of the women the daughter of the older man: Somerset Maugham with a pipe? Who could now know? My dad could easily be assumed to be with the couple behind him.

We have lots of other family pictures at Bridlington in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties: in deck chairs, on the beach by the sea wall, digging in the sand, paddling in the sea, walking around town. One, some two decades later, shows my pregnant mum with my dad and others on the sands. Nanna is gazing down at her bump with me inside as if for a caption competition.

Later, when I was little, we continued to go to Bridlington. Here I am in front of the Spa buildings, digging on the beach near the breakwater in my baggy white underpants. They look as if they would still fit me. I bet they made wonderful car polishing cloths. We went on the same trip around Flamborough, and when the sea was calm Dad would hire a rowing boat and row us out beyond the harbour mouth. I also remember visiting the Flamborough headland and being frightened by the fog-horn.

I haven’t been back much since. It seems to have a lot of noisy rides and fast food smells now. But, hoping to repeat history, I went with my young family one day in 2004. The cold wind and rough sea were too daunting for a sea trip, so we drove to Flamborough instead and climbed the 119 internal steps to the top of the lighthouse, terrified of the drop down the middle. Scary place, Flamborough.

For the nerds amongst us, Flamborough Head is a promontory to the north of Bridlington, the northern end of a band of cretaceous chalk that stretches through Eastern England down to the South Coast. A  27-metre lighthouse sits on top of 30-metre cliffs, giving a range of 28 miles to the horizon, high enough on a clear day to be able to see the Humber Bridge to the south near Hull. Inside the lamp room, a four-panel catadioptric lens revolves around an enormous light bulb (in the top central  square in the picture) to create a signature code of four flashes every fifteen seconds. It continues to revolve even when the bulb is off so as not to concentrate the sun’s rays and start fires. The light was automated in 1996 but when we visited there were still reserved parking places for the non-existent staff.

What Is Wrong In These Pictures? (13-15)

Not sure how good an idea it was to post five of these in a week but with some relief we’re on to the last set of three pictures from my dad’s 1927 edition of the wonderful Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia. Each contains an error to identify. My answers and the answers are below.

I’ve not posted so frequently before and wonder at the energy of bloggers who post every day. There are more picture puzzles in the ten-volume encyclopedia but I need at least six months rest before looking at any more, and maybe then only one set of three pictures a month. What do people think?

My overall score so far is 6/12. Got them all wrong last time. Hoping for better this time.

Back to pictures 10-12
Back to beginning


MY ANSWERS AND THE ANSWERS

13. Easy. Everybody knows spiders have eight legs. 7/13.

14. The flower looks like a concoction of all kinds of things, but I don’t know exactly. Evidently it is a passion flower and should therefore have five petals and sepals rather than six. Did the gardeners get that one? I didn’t. 7/14.

15. Once a train spotter always a train spotter. Got it right. The flanges should be inside the tracks on the inside edges of the wheels, not the outside edges. As drawn it would only work after a complete redesign of the track and points. 8/15. (And incidentally, there may be a second error which is that by 1927 British Railways had no such three-headlamp code. Apart from the Royal Train they used a maximum of two headlamps to identify the type of train. They were placed in different arrangements on the funnel and across the buffer bar, but only two were used. Furthermore, what is called a railway carriage in the answers is actually a locomotive. Do I get a bonus point?) 

So, overall, with a little generosity, eight out of fifteen = 53%  Much better than with the room and the steamer puzzles linked to the first set of three. That would have been a 2:2 in my university days. Not acceptable. I’ll have to find another set and try harder.

Back to normal posts next time. 

Here is the whole page followed by the answers .

What Is Wrong In These Pictures? (10-12)

This is turning into a marathon but I’ll see it through to all fifteen. Almost there.

Here is the penultimate set of three pictures from the puzzles in my dad’s 1927 edition of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia. Each contains an error to identify. Most people found the last three the easiest so far. My overall average went up to 67% - six out of nine. Can I maintain it? My answers and the answers are below.

Back to pictures 7-9
Forward to pictures 13-15


MY ANSWERS AND THE ANSWERS

10. This stumps me. The shadows all seem correct except, on consulting the answers, it says they are drawn in perspective rather than parallel. That’s not very obvious in the drawing. Unfair. 6/10.

11. What shield is this? I’ve no idea. It says it’s the arms of the City of London and that the dagger should be the other way up. 6/11.

12. I’m going to say that ostriches don’t live where there are palm trees. Wrong again. They should have only two toes visible on each foot. 6/12.

None at all right for me today. A disaster. Back to 50%. The final set of three next time.

What Is Wrong In These Pictures? (7-9)

Yet another three pictures from my dad’s 1927 edition of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia. Each contains an error to identify. I’ve managed to get three out of six right so far, which could be worse, but could be better. One follower has got them all! My answers and the answers are underneath.

Back to pictures 4-6
Forward to pictures 10-12 


MY ANSWERS AND THE ANSWERS

7. We’re on a winner. Surely the Pole Star should be over the North Pole. Hooray! 4/7.

8. The smoke is blowing one way but the yacht’s sails and flag are blowing the other. 5/8. We’re on a roll.

9. What’s wrong with the penny? This is really esoteric. I’m certain that Britannia is facing the right way so I suspect it is may be to do with the ship and lighthouse. I bet that they don’t accord with the date. It’s a guess but I’m right. Evidently the ship and lighthouse were omitted after 1896. Well, shiver my timbers! Should I get that? I think so. 6/9.

So with a bit of leniency I’m up to 67% right, a good 2:1 in university scoring. But these are probably easier than the first six so best not get carried away. More next time.

What Is Wrong In These Pictures? (4-6)

Another three pictures from my dad’s 1927 edition of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia. Each contains an error to identify. I’m not doing very well so far having got only one right out of three. Hope it goes better today. My answers and the answers are underneath.

Back to Pictures 1-3
Forward to Pictures 7-9 


MY ANSWERS AND THE ANSWERS

4. Are they cherries? But cherry leaves are single. These look more like horse chestnut leaves although they’re not because the sections are insufficiently separate. Let’s just go with a mismatch between fruit and leaves. Answer: it’s cherries on a vine. I’m giving myself a generous 2/4.

5. What could be wrong with the sun dial? I thought at first the Roman Numerals were wrongly put together, but they should of course be read looking from the outside towards the centre, e.g. the 12 correctly reads XII not IIX. Could they be in the wrong positions, particularly in the lower half where some numbers are repeated. But no, that’s not the answer either because six in the morning would cast a different shadow from six at night, so they should be repeated. The answer: how many people know that gnomons should point north not south? I suppose that casts the best shadow. I’ve never had to think about gnomon design before. 2/5. This is depressing.

6. It must be the reflection. At first I thought it was that there are not enough windows in the spire reflection, but I’m being more careful now. Maybe you can’t see it all – you can only see the top half of the other part of the church. I’ve got it. The spire in the reflection looks twisted: you should not be able to see the right hand side. Yes! Fanfare please! 3/6.

More to follow.

What Is Wrong In These Pictures? (1-3)

Towards the end of 2017 I posted two picture puzzles from my dad’s 1927 copy of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia: What Is Wrong In This Room? and What Is Wrong With This Steamer?

Both showed scenes containing errors to identify. I failed miserably: 2 out of 17 in the room and 4 out of 11 in the steamer. Nineteen-twenties children were either much cleverer than us or our world has changed more than we imagine. 

I refuse to accept defeat so here are some more, this time a set of fifteen pictures with something wrong in each one. Here are the first three. My answers and the answers are underneath.

It “will help you cultivate your power of observation” it says, “– the power of seeing with your mind and of understanding what you see.” I could definitely do with some of that, so here goes.

Forward to Pictures 4-6


MY ANSWERS AND THE ANSWERS

The first one looks dead easy: just a case of adding up the weights on each side. Everyone over sixty remembers there were sixteen ounces in a pound. So the left adds up to 8 + 4 + 3 + 1 = 16 ounces which makes one pound, and the right adds up to, oh shit, one pound. So it should balance. There seems to be nothing wrong with the instrument either. It means an immediate sneak a look at the answers. Arthur Mee catches me out straight away.  How could anyone be expected to know that troy weight has only twelve ounces to the pound? Half a pound of gold and half a pound of silver add up to 12 ounces.  0/1.

OK. We’re going to have to think things through more carefully. Number 2 must be the iceberg. Shouldn’t four-fifths be underwater? The answer says seven parts below to one part above but I’m having that one. I got the correct principle. 1/2.

Number 3. The Royal Flag. What could it be? I bet the sections are in the wrong places. No. Wrong again. Evidently the Scottish Lion does not turn his back on the others. I’m not doing very well am I? 1/3.

What Is Wrong With This Steamer?

Having failed so miserably to identify the seventeen errors in What Is Wrong In This Room?, I need to try again, if only for my self-esteem. So here goes, another puzzle from my 1927 copy of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia: What Is Wrong With This Steamer?

I am going to cruise through this because I know all about ships. I’ve got nautical blood. My great-grandpa was a master mariner and my dad used to take me to watch tide-time at Goole docks. We had books about ships, used to play with toy ships and went to see the Queen Mary sail. I’ve been on the cross channel ferry, sailed a model yacht across the West Park pond and circumnavigated Peasholm Park lake in a swan pedalo. My wife’s grandfather wrote books about sailing. It’s going to be a sea-breeze. I’m on course for a fleet of ten out of ten. So, full steam ahead Captain, all hands on deck, let’s cast off and get under way.

Just look at those Roman numerals on the bow. They are supposed to show how deep the ship is floating in the water so should obviously run from bottom to top. And while we’re looking at the bow, where is the ship’s name? As for those rope ladders up the mast, they have no rungs at the top. Easy! We’ve logged 3/3, a fair rate of knots.

Is this the calm before the storm? Sailing close to the wind, I sneak a look at the answers. I must have had only one oar in the water not to realise that portholes open inwards, not outwards, as should that square shaped hatch. Evidently it’s a scupper for draining water from the deck. That scuppered me. But is the marking scheme above board to tally these as two answers? If so, it’s only 3/5 now.

We’re into deep water. We’ll batten down the hatch and press on, but I can’t fathom out any more. The answers say that the foremast and funnels should lean backwards rather than forwards. Oh come on! You can hardly tell. It might help if the drawing was shipshape. And does it fit the bill to score these as yet another two. I’m all at sea with 3/7. 

The next ones leave us becalmed in the doldrums. The waste steam pipes should be in front of the funnels rather than at the sides – I didn’t even realise what they were – and you would really need to know the ropes to realise that ships do not lower their anchors in dock. The answers then say that the anchor-chain hole is the wrong way: presumably it should be more vertical than horizontal. All right, I didn’t spot these, but ahoy Arthur Mee, matey, don’t you know that an “anchor-chain hole” is correctly called a hawsehole? I’ll hazard that every nineteen-twenties child would have known that. I should get extra credit, even if I only remembered it because it sounds rude. I’m sunk with 3/10.

But what’s this – an eleventh answer, or is it thirteen? It said there were only ten. There are no ventilators (those sticking up tuba shaped things you see on ships). Nor are there any halyards or foretop-mast stays. No what? I’ve had to google those. It’s beginning to sound like a verse from What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor.

Well, I’m pooped. Shiver my timbers. That’s taken the wind out of my sails. But if Arthur Mee is going to take us aback with supernumerary answers, then I should get my extra hawsehole mark, so 4/11, or 36%. In my university days that would have been a refer grade. I demand another re-sit, to start again with a clean slate. I’m up in the crow’s nest on look out for another puzzle.

What Is Wrong In This Room?

Brian’s Blog recently reminded me of the puzzles in Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia.

Browsing Volume 3 a month or two ago, I came across the puzzle “What Is Wrong In This Room?” which invites you to find seventeen things wrong in a drawing of, presumably, a typical early twentieth-century sitting room. It struck me how different it is from today’s homes, so different that finding all seventeen is nigh impossible. 

I got off to a good start: it slowly dawned on me that the door knob should not be on the hinge side of the door and that the picture above the fireplace is upside down. I didn’t spot the problems with the other two pictures though: that the one near the window is not hooked on to the picture rail, and that the hook for the picture near the door is upside down. How many rooms still have picture rails these days anyway? And what about the large skirting board? Who would spot that it is upside down in the drawing? It looks fine to me. (Score so far: 2/5).

Oh dear, but now for two I might have got with the shrewd intelligence of Miss Marple and the observational acuteness of Sherlock Holmes: qualities I clearly do not possess. The floorboards at the two sides of the carpet run in different directions (no fitted carpets then), and the hands on the clock are not in the correct positions because if the big hand is showing quarter-past, then the little hand should be past the hour rather than before. I got neither of these. It is starting to be as demeaning as University Challenge. (Score now 2/7).

It gets harder. Do any of us still have maids (unless you count wives), or coal fires for that matter? It appears that the hinged handle of the coal-scuttle is unusable – some people will never have heard of coal scuttles – and that the fire the maid is about to load with coal is a gas fire (you just can’t get the staff!). When you look carefully you can see that it is not fully inside the fireplace, and there is also a supply pipe. We used to have a portable stand-alone gas fire similar to that which connected to a gas tap by a long rubber tube. That was in the nineteen-fifties. Where did the fumes go? Poison! Perhaps that’s why my score now sinks to 2/9. 

I put my failure to identify the next ones down to the poor resolution of the drawing – a convenient excuse, I know, but did you notice that the curtain-pole support is fastened on top rather than at the side, making it impossible to put the pole over it, or that the window shutter knob is (like the door) on the wrong side? I didn’t but I’m getting irritated now because is it not possible to slide the pole through, and don’t the window shutters look like folding double-hinged ones which open out to the middle, in which case the knob would be on the right side? Who has window shutters anyway? The answers also say that the window fastener is the wrong way round (the flatter part you move with your thumb is against the window), and that the handle by which we lift the lower half is fixed back to front. I suppose when it comes down to it they are, but you’d think they would be drawn so as to give you at least half a chance of being able to see. Maybe those still with sash windows did better here. An unjust 2/13.

Did you do any better with the soft-furnishings? The box-shaped thing next to the dog is evidently a hassock – a what – a hassock, like the cushions you kneel on in church (well that’s if you go). You are doing very well if you realised that the handle-lugs should be at the ends rather than at the sides. And then there is the chair. The answers say the pattern is upside down. When you rotate the image you can see it appears to show a bird on some kind of perch, but really? And then there is the chair castor which is supposed to be fixed the wrong way round so that it would break under weight. I don’t understand that one at all. When were swivelling ones invented? (2/16).

Lastly, the dog. I’m not a doggy person, that’s my excuse, but I would be surprised if you got it even if you are. It is a spaniel with a collie’s tail. Couldn’t it be just a mongrel?

So, 2/17 for me, 12%, an unmitigated, dismal fail. Even with a lucky resit I doubt I would manage more than six or seven. 

The ten volumes of this encyclopedia were bought in 1927. Were children a lot cleverer then, or is it just that the once-familiar has changed beyond recognition?

Perhaps we should set a modern version that they wouldn’t be able to do – a central heating radiator with the pipes attached to the top rather than the bottom, a light with a missing bulb and a television with an image on the screen despite not being plugged in. And how wrong they would be when they said that that our pictures had no support at all. That would show ‘em we‘re not stupid.

 

You might also like What Is Wrong With This Steamer? and Knockout, Knowledge and Arthur Mee.
 

Mum’s Little Bear

I’ve written about all kinds of objects, documents and other treasures my dad kept squirrelled away, but hardly anything of my mum’s. This is mainly because she rarely kept things. She was hardly ever sentimental. When belongings had served their purpose they were either given away or thrown out. It was the fate of many of my toys. So anything she did keep must have been very special.

When they closed the church where she had been a Sunday School teacher during the early years of her marriage, where she began to build a social life for herself having escaped the suffocating village of her childhood, I was surprised to find she had brought home one of the children’s tiny wooden chairs from the church schoolroom. It must have been associated with many happy memories.

Looking at the bustling supermarket and car park that now occupies that site you would never know a church had once been there, or imagine the happy community it supported through not only worship and other religious activities, but also coach excursions, children’s groups, tableaux depicting Biblical scenes in Whitsuntide processions, a youth club and a very active drama group. Small towns used to be like that, although to me, catching the tail end, it seemed just as claustrophobic as my mother’s village must have been to her. She put the little chair in the loft where it stayed for several years. I don’t know what became of it. It would be satisfying to think it still in use, the favourite chair of a small child somewhere.

She also had three small toy figures, each around four inches tall, which she kept in a tin high on a shelf in the built-in kitchen cupboards that seem to have been constructed with the house in the 1920s because the neighbours’ kitchens were all exactly the same. One of the figures was a wind-up clockwork monkey with a red coat and beret, a yellow scarf and black trousers, which banged a tin drum hanging from its waist with drumsticks held in its hands. Another was a blue-uniformed toy soldier that came with a tiny knife which you used to cut the soldier in half, except that after the knife had passed all the way through his abdomen, the soldier remained intact. I’ve no idea how it worked, possibly some combination of moving hooks and magnets. There seems to be nothing like it on the internet but the drumming monkey was very similar to ones made by Schuco in Nuremberg during the 1920s and 1930s.

 

Again, I have no idea what happened to the drumming monkey and the immortal soldier but the third figure I still have, a delightful miniature golden mohair teddy bear which was definitely made by Schuco before the war. Its head turns and its arms and legs move at the shoulders and hips, but it also has a secret. When you remove its head it opens out to reveal a mirror, powder compact and lipstick holder. Traces of powder remain in the oval metal recess behind the powder puff. The lipstick holder slides out of the neck tube. Evidently, being in such good condition, with its original felt puff, it’s worth several hundred pounds.

Assuming that at least two but possibly all three of the toys were made in Germany, then how did my mother acquire them? Presumably they were given to her when she was a girl, but I cannot think of any member of her family who travelled abroad. Living close to a sea going port there were other local men who did, but I know of no one who would give her presents like these. Or were they bought in England? If so when, and by whom. I wish I’d asked when I still could.

The little bear was inside the last of my mum’s objects I still have, a nineteen fifties Egyptian leather handbag where she kept her notebook and diary and birthday lists. I’m not sure she liked it, and don’t think she ever used it as a handbag, but she kept it because it was present from my aunt and uncle’s period in Aden.

I remember at the same time they gave me an Arab man’s silk headband known as an agal (a bit like this), and a large square of white cotton material known as a keffiyeh, which are still worn together by Saudi kings and throughout the Arab world as protection from the sun, dust and sand. I don’t know what happened to them either. I wouldn’t have been seen dead in it. Not even in a Biblical scene in a Whitsuntide tableaux.