MORE KITCHEN SINK

 

I had the pleasure of being guest presenter on my son-in-law, Martin Myles's radio programme, The Kitchen Sink.  Guest presenter on episode168, to be pedantic (as each of us is).  My pleasant role was to select three tracks, and to introduce them to the listening audience (and to Martin).

 

Martin's programme, aired in the evening on community radio, presented music from Martin's personal collection accompanied by his expert commentary.  An indication of the flavour of The Kitchen Sink can be gotten from the names of the artists who performed the first few tracks that night - Big Dish, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Weather Report, World Party, Adrian Belew, Dream Academy.  Anything that a virgo septuagenarian (as I then was) might choose to play would inevitably be a cuckoo in that nest.  But we all survived; and so did the broadcast - Martin had installed a recording device...........

 

Thanks, Martin.  The first track is from Charles Trenet, French singer and songwriter.  I suppose he ought to be called Sharle Trenet.  Trenet lived from 1913 through into the 21st Century, into February 2001; so he died aged 88 - a long and successful career.  He was probably the most prominent of all the French popular singers.  He wrote his own songs and is said to have written close to a thousand.  His policy was to record only his own songs, so any Trenet recording you hear will be featuring a song that he composed.  

 

His most famous song, the one that we're going to hear tonight, is La Mer, The Sea.  He was said to have composed it while riding on a train in 1943 but put it in a bottom drawer because he thought it was not suitable to the sort of swing-type popular music of the time; but he did record it in 1946.  

 

There are more than 400 cover versions of La Mer, including a whole bunch of them based on a re-written version of the song, called Beyond the Sea, which was made famous by Bobby Darrin, I guess in the '60s or the '70s.  

 

The version we're going to hear is, I should have thought, the 1946 original version, that's the one that I grew up with and was played on the radio back in the '40s and '50s. But I've discovered another version, which seems to be much older than the one we're going to play; and it's a totally different song, in the sense that it's played at a sort of dance-band beat, dancing music.  At the time Trenet's voice was much lighter - totally different effect.  Anyway, we're playing the version that is famous and you'll hear that the voice is much deeper and more mature, and I should have expected a much older man than he apparently was when the recording was made.  So La Mer.........

 

La Mer - Charles Trenet

 

I think that that's a very sweet song, and it's surprising that he thought at the outset that it wouldn't be a seller or a goer.  And I think it was only when he slowed it down a little, and dropped his voice a little, and with  different orchestration, that it became a world hit, really a world hit. 

Now we're going to hear the song Joe Hill.  We're going to hear it twice, two different versions; and I wanted to do that by way of contrasting how a song has a traditional way of being presented, and how it's changed by subsequent generations and different interpreters.

 

Joe Hill, as a person, was an American labour activist early in the twentieth century, in the early 1900s, a hundred years ago.  In those days many trades unions were banned, or at least in many States trades unions were banned then.  They weren't as progressive as we - as we had become - in Australia, and Joe Hill was one of those people who was regarded as a sort of professional agitator, and who went from mine site to mine site "causing trouble".

 

The reason for the song is that in a small town there was a grocer and his son who were murdered by intruders, and Joe Hill on the very same day appeared in hospital with a gunshot wound; and he said it was through a lover's quarrel, and nobody believed him.  And he wouldn't reveal the name of the woman involved, and her other lover, and he was tried and executed by firing squad.  The story goes that at the end of the day Joe Hill didn't spill the beans because he thought he'd be more useful to the labour movement as a dead martyr than he would be as a live activist.

 

That's how it came about.  Some years later (he was executed in 1915)......it wasn't until 1936 that this song was written, and it took off as a song of protest, something that was subscribed to by members of the union movement and those who were happy to proclaim that Joe Hill was a martyr.

 

Now the principal exponent of the song was Paul Robeson.  Robeson was an Afro-American; and I'm happy to quote a line I read somewhere: "He was one of the most accomplished human beings in history."  This is a pretty bold statement.  He was the son of a clergyman.  He was born, fortunately for him, in one of the northern states of the United States, so he wasn't in the south.  He grew up in the north, not exactly rich, but certainly not suffering terrible hardship.  

 

He won a scholarship: his brains got him into Rutgers University, only the third ever black person to be admitted to that university, and the only one there at the time.   He was not only academically brilliant but he was a star of track and field, and basketball, and baseball, and he was in the football team - the American football team - as an all-American.  His sporting prowess was second to none.

 

He went on to Columbia law school, got a law degree; but it was the theatre that got him in.  He acted in plays.  It turned out he had a voice as well, and this voice is one of the most profoundly beautiful voices of the twentieth century.  He was on Broadway.  He acted in first performances of Eugene O'Neill plays.  He spent time in London.  He played Othello: he played Othello on Broadway for more than 200 performances, the longest ever season of a Shakespearian play.

 

 

So he was profoundly gifted.  Unfortunately for him he was also involved in the human rights movement, and he fell foul of the establishment and fell foul of important people; and he found that other countries did better things for their workers than did America at the time.  

 

He spent a lot of time in England, made ten movies there. Indeed he could speak twenty languages. He also spent a lot of time in Russia, and unfortunately he was a bit bewitched by Stalin and what the Communist system was doing at the time, and thought it was the way to freedom for the workers, and he didn't see that one man's freedom can be  another man's despotism. And that's what was going on in Russia - he didn't see that.

 

But he caused such a lot of trouble at home that he was in grave difficulty with the FBI and ultimately, in the 1940s, they took away his passport and he couldn't leave his own country for ten years. During that time his health declined. He died at the age of 77; with a bit of a comeback towards the end in his fortunes and reputation.

 

You can't take away the voice though, and that's what we're going to be hearing tonight.  A brilliant singer.

 

Now at one time, towards the end of his career, he came to Sydney, and he actually went to the Sydney Opera House while it was under construction, pulled up his car, and sang to the workers, and they all came down, sat on the scaffolding.  There's a film of that, you can see it on YouTube; and one of the songs he sang there was Joe Hill, the song we're going to hear tonight.

 

Now the second version of this is by John McCutcheon.  John McCutcheon is an American folk singer, currently aged 61.  He was born in 1952.  He also focusses on singing socially conscious songs, and this performance is recorded at a performing arts centre called Wolftrap, which is just out of Washington DC.  Wolftrap was bequeathed to the nation, a theatre was built into it, and it holds all sorts of functions - including John McCutcheon.

 

John McCutcheon sings Joe Hill with quite an extensive introduction as to how he came to be singing it.  A lot of it is boloney, actually.  For instance he tells us that Paul Robeson was an opera singer, which he never was. Nevertheless it's a very affectionate introduction to his revival if you like of the song and the revival of interest in Paul Robeson.  Here we go, Joe Hill.............

 

Joe Hill - John McCutcheon

Joe Hill - Paul Robeson

Martin: Pretty unmistakeable voice, there.

 

Gary: Yes it is.  I could listen to it forever.

 

Martin: I was just reflecting on your mini-bio of his, and how he seems like one of these gifted individuals who could have taken his life in all sorts of directions, but presumably chose his first love although he was no doubt capable of so many other things.

 

Gary: Well, I suppose it's because his life was framed in a situation of underprivileged black America.  There were occasions when he went to perform and couldn't get into the hotel in the town.  That sort of thing.  There was one hotel apparently on the west coast where it was the only hotel in town that would admit him, and so he sang in their foyer every day for two hours to pay them back for their - their farsightedness, I suppose.  All the time it was full on, all those years of his life he was fighting the good fight as he saw it.  In the end it brought him undone, he lost his mind, really; had lots of breakdowns; and in the last ten years of his life he was really housebound, and unable to do any of the things that he really loved to do.

 

Martin: And the John McCutcheon version.  As you said, a quite different version, much more in the folk tradition I suppose.  How did you come by John McCutcheon in general?

 

Gary: Actually I heard that track played on the radio, that was all.  I thought, that's so good I have to have that.

 

Martin: And it came complete with the introduction on the radio as well?

 

Gary: Yes.

 

Martin: I did like the story, although as you said it's a little flawed, not necessarily apocryphal, but loosely based on fact you might say.

 

Gary: Well, it was entertaining for the audience.

 

Martin: It was entertaining for the audience, exactly right.

 

 

********************

La Mer 

 

[English version]

 

We see dancing along the shores of clear bays,

Shimmers with silver

The sea

Changing shimmers

Under the rain

 

 

The sea

With the summer sky

Mix up her white horses

With the angels so pure

The infinite azure shepherdess

Sea

 

 

Sea

By the ponds

Those big wet reeds

See

Those white birds

And those rusty houses

 

 

The sea

Has cradled them

Along the shores of clear bays

And with a love song

The sea

Has rocked my heart for life

 

 

Joe Hill  

[per John McCutcheon] 

 

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you or me.
Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead",
"I never died", said he.
"I never died", said he.

 

The Copper Bosses killed you Joe,
they shot you Joe", says I.
"It takes more than guns to kill a man".
Says Joe, "I didn't die".
Says Joe, "I didn't die".

 

And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes,
says Joe, "What they could never kill
went on to organize."
"Went on to organize."

 

From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
where workers fight to win their rights,
it's there you find Joe Hill.
It's there you find Joe Hill.

 

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead".
"I never died", says he.
"I never died", says he.

[Additional verses]

"In Salt Lake, Joe," says I to him,
Him standing by my bed,
"They framed you on a murder charge,"
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead,"
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead."

"Joe Hill ain't dead," he says to me,
"Joe Hill ain't never died.
Where working men are out on strike
Joe Hill is at their side,
Joe Hill is at their side."

 

 

BRITAIN IN PICTURES - NUMBER 9

#121 English Fashion by Alison Settle

 

Alison Settle (1891 to 1980) was a fashion journalist for more than 50 years.  She was fashion editor of British Vogue for nine years from 1926, and held a similar post at The Observer from 1937 to 1960.  Somewhat overlapping, was her 27-years-long fashion column for The Lady.   The Lady, an independent fortnightly with "quirky, entertaining and informative features and quality writing", has been published since 1885: so, a magazine both established and influential.  Clearly, Alison Settle was likewise.  Settle provides us with some observations by way of backgrounding the scope of her survey of English fashion.

 

*  In no period down the centuries has there been any costuming that might be pointed to as English national dress.  "The lack of any peasant dress is an outstanding factor in the fashion history of the English people."

 

*  Moreover, "because there was no national peasant costume, dress in England has acted less as a barrier between one class and another than in any other country " [other country, that is, that does have a national dress].

 

*  The "essential Englishness" of fashion was underpinned by the great woollen trade.

 

*  While the Court in London was associated with stiff formality, elsewhere there developed dress of ease and comfortable elegance.  "Informal dress, like the informality of home life, was the contribution of the squire and his lady who proved so much more important in the shaping of English ways of thought than any fops and beauties of the Court." 

 

One of the inevitable shortcomings of the little volumes in the Britain in Pictures series is that there are no subject indexes: the “lack of space” excuse is both obvious and unnecessary.  But when the reader is confronted with a subject to which the reader has had little or no prior exposure that reader is obliged to tackle the subject-matter from start to finish, with no prospect that skimming will unearth aspects that may be of enlivening interest.  So it is with English Fashion (1948): no ability to search for hoop skirts, ruffles, breeches, pompadours, periwigs.  However, author, Alison Settle, eases the anxiety somewhat by adhering to a chronological presentation.  And so shall we.

 

Anglo-Saxon and Norman -

 

Taken together, the Anglo-Saxon and Norman rulers of England occupied the throne for about 750 years, from 400 A.D. to 1154 A.D. From the perspective of the present day, the story of the fashion of those times is mainly a blank page, with little written record, and even less pictorial.  Furthermore, the extant images are chiefly of religious or royal personages, and likely clothed in formulaic raiment anyway. 

 

From the Crusades to the Wars of the Roses -

 

The Crusades brought foreign fashions, fashions which were transformed and incorporated into the garb of the privileged. Settle ironically calls the Crusades "travel with a vengeance". A snippet from the times of the Crusades:  By the end of the twelfth century gloves had developed separated fingers, and the gloves of those of highest rank had become jewel encrusted - a fact which Richard the Lion-Hearted surely regretted.  He returned secretly from the Crusades, only to be imprisoned after his splendid gloves led to his recognition.

 

Women's hair, false and real, in the fourteenth century came to be coiled over the ears, and wooden pins became a necessary accoutrement; and so costly, in fact, that wives' and daughters' allowances became known as "pin money".

 

Settle notes, somewhat sadly, "the timeless determination of the elderly at any period in history to wear the clothes that suited them best in their youth or early middle age rather than to change with changing times".

 

The Tudors -

 

In the fifteenth century the trend was for thicker fabric and more of it.  "Men wore robes twelve yards in width round the hem, with sleeves so long and bulky that they trailed the filth of the streets, making the work of the street sweepers unnecessary."

 

And the fashion, by the reign of Edward IV (who reigned 1461 to 1483), was for the stuffing of clothes.......thus the age of bombast, the word bombast meaning to stuff with cotton.  Nor was cotton the only stuffing, so too was bran. "For men no fabric was too rich, no stuffing too wide......though all were prepared to laugh at such a mishap as the breeches being caught on a nail and the bran pouring out 'as from a mill that was grinding'."  But rebuke and ridicule were unable to quell such excessive fashions, and eventually laws were introduced to forbid, on pain of fine and forfeiture, any yeoman from stuffing his doublet.

 

"1561 was the year in which Mistress Montague, the Queen's silk-woman, gave the Queen a pair of stockings 'cunningly' knitted in black silk.  After that the Queen would never again wear cloth hose."

 

The Seventeenth Century -

 

With the restoration of Charles II (in 1660) Court fashions ceased to be English: the King brought with him the fashions of his years in exile, the fashions of the Court of Louis XIV.  He was, after all, restoring not only the Stuart dynasty but colour, fashion and gaiety to the Court scene.  But it took a mere six years for the King to eschew French fashions and to decree simpler garb - "the square-cut coat and the waistcoat which, in varying forms, have been worn by men until the present day".

 

The huge men's periwigs survived, however.  But over them hung the shadow of the Great Plague (1665 to 1666, with 75000 deaths).  From whose hair had the wig been made?  Samuel Pepys records that he durst not wear his new periwig "for fear of the infection - that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague".

 

The Nineteenth Century -

 

At last there is documentation of fashion on an epic scale: the nineteenth century gave us the fashion magazine, and gave us the camera.  Women gained the chemise as an outer garment, and men's breeches and stockings came to be replaced by the trouser - at first close-fitting, later loose.  These fashions have endured; not so the contemporaneous colourful garb of the Prince Regent, Beau Brummel and the Dandies.  Some enduring legacies of Beau Brummel remained, however (apart from his custom of having his boots cleaned with champagne), including "good taste, perfection of cut, suitability of accessories, and - above all - scrupulous cleanliness".

 

Women's fashions, meanwhile, went through numerous changes during the nineteenth century, not least the emergence of clothing befitting sporting activity.  "England was the first country to design sports clothes for women (as distinct from hunting, riding or shooting kit)."  "Games and sports, whether croquet, archery, tennis, golf, bicycling or skating, demanded the English quality of ease and informality."

 

Nota bene the invention of the sewing machine. While not the first developer of the domestic sewing machine, Isaac Singer was clearly the most entrepreneurial and successful.  He made his first machine in Boston in 1850, and by 1863 Singer was producing 20,000 machines per annum - by which time the Singer company was manufacturing in Europe and was in effect the world's first multi-national company.  A little over thirty years on, in the year 1895, 14 million Singer sewing machines were manufactured and sold worldwide.  English fashion in the upcoming century could not but be affected by this revolution.

 

The Twentieth Century -

 

Settle's story concludes in 1948 with less than half the century having elapsed.  There is little point in me attempting to outline the fashion of that first half or, indeed, outlining what has transpired since.  There is no doubt that fashion has been an ever-changing feature of the human experience; and the twentieth century (and the years since) has seen change at an increasing rate.  That degree of change (whether or not English) has probably rendered the word "fashion" meaningless.  Sure, it's still possible in the eyes of the world to be "fashionable", but a "fashion" these days is little more than a fad, or a blip between advertising campaigns. 

 

#72  British Postage Stamps by S.C. Johnson

 

Let there be no doubt.  In the minds of the publishers and of our author, S.C. Johnson, and apparently in the minds of the buying public of 1944, the word "Britain" meant the entire British Empire.  Accordingly, more than half of Johnson's British Postage Stamps is devoted to sections styled Stamps of British North America, West Indian Islands, South Africa, Nigeria to Somaliland, Aden to Burma via the Persian Gulf, The Far East, Australia and New Zealand, and The Scattered Islands of the Empire - clearly worlds apart from Great Britain itself.  Regardless of the world of postage stamps, these names - as with the places coloured red on world maps of those times - give a salutary snapshot of the world as it was.  If written today the volume would be said to encompass the whole British Commonwealth, although through the changes of the intervening 77 years that Commonwealth is somewhat smaller in geographic scope than the Empire of Johnson's day.  

 

How dated are these promotional comments from the dust wrapper?:  "The range and diversity of the British Empire is reflected in her postage stamps which come from every quarter of the globe and are used by peoples of many different races........These Empire stamps help to tell the tale of British Colonisation [note capital C] and settlement overseas."

 

I had intended first to deal briefly, in a number of dot points, with Johnson's overview of Empire and then to focus on the more weighty story of the postage stamp in Britain.  But I changed my mind, because Johnson's Empire story, while interesting, is too anecdotal and, frankly, irrelevant.  For instance, the mention of some Empire stamps being of eye-watering value in 1944 is of little moment in 2021........I am not about to ascertain present-day comparisons, and to see whether such collectables have kept pace with the 77-year inflation rate.  I'll repeat just one morsel of Johnson trivia:  In 1897 a set of Canadian stamps was issued showing the monetary value in words only.  But Universal Postal Union rules required all stamps to show their denomination in figures, and the stamps had to be withdrawn.  Which leads to a piece of Andrews trivia:  the word "trivia" is from the Latin trivium or trivialis meaning commonplace or found everywhere, derived from the junction of three roads, where commonplace or vulgar people were likely to meet. The word evolved over the centuries to mean something barely worth mentioning.

 

So, from the classroom back to the Sceptred Isle. 

 

While it's a truism that there can be no postage stamps without there being a postal service, it may surprise to know that there was a British postal service centuries before there were postage stamps. Sir Brain Tuke was a long-standing and high-ranking official in the Court of Henry VIII, and from 1517 (or perhaps some years earlier) he served as Governor of the King's Posts.  Governor Tuke's role concerned official mail only - this situation being somewhat belatedly confirmed by a 1609 Act of Parliament which made letter-carrying a Crown monopoly.  In 1635 Charles I made the mail service available to the public, with postage to be paid by the recipient; and for some years the Crown monopoly was farmed out to favoured individuals.  This "privatisation" ended in 1657 when Oliver Cromwell re-established the Post Office for the whole country, and appointed the first Postmaster-General.  Fixed delivery charges were introduced by Parliament, although there was something of a flaw in the system which, in addition to payment on delivery, imposed a delivery fee based on distance travelled by the letter.  Recipients were free to refuse delivery, and thus avoid payment, and they did!

 

In 1660, under the restored monarchy, Charles ll officially established the General Post Office; but even then, for some years, this function was auctioned off: most notably when one Henry Bishop - for the incredible sum of 21500 pounds - acquired the right to be Postmaster-General for the ensuing seven years.   Bishop was the first to frank a postmark on envelopes that passed through the system. That system, in those days, involved Government "letter offices" in major centres, with "post boys" who rode between them carrying the mail.  Letters had to be taken to the letter offices for "posting"; and since there weren't offices in all centres there arose, additionally, the system of carriers, who collected mail from their local neighbourhoods and took them to the nearest letter office.  There were hundreds of such carriers.

 

By 1680 one such carrier, William Dockwra, operated over four hundred local offices in London within a ten mile radius, had upwards of ten collections a day, and charged a penny per letter for his service. Dockwra also invented the postmark on the envelope, effectively a receipt for the penny charged.  The Dockwra innovation was short-lived, and over the next 150 years or so the postal system muddled along.  Post boys were so badly paid that robbing their own mail was a constant temptation; and there was ever-present danger from highwaymen; and, overall, the system was not efficient.  Notwithstanding, the cost of posting a letter kept rising.

 

The situation was salvaged by the introduction of pre-paid postage and the postage stamp.  The 1837 recommendations on postal reform, by Rowland Hill (later Sir Rowland), were blindingly obvious: charge the fee before dispatch, charge a standard fee no matter the length of the journey, and attach a sticker to the envelope as proof of payment. Hill argued that postmen would no longer have to spend time waiting to collect the fee, and claimed that the simplified system would result in increased postal business.  Hill further suggested that the standard fee should be one penny.  Hill was ridiculed, but prevailed.  His plan was adopted.  Hill's plan was consummated with the introduction in 1840 of the "Penny Black", the first adhesive postage stamp.  From that time (but, alas, not for all time!) the letter postal rate was reduced to one penny.  By 1860 some 90 countries were issuing postal stamps.

 

As flagships of the new order, the Penny Black, and its companion the Twopenny Blue, were short lived.  Released in May 1840 they were withdrawn in February 1841....because it was found that the inks were permanent, and that this enabled the postmarks to be washed off and the stamps used again!.  However, the ink of the stamps from 1841 was designed to wash away.

 

From 1840 to 1847 there were stamps of the two denominations only, meaning that a letter to the United States or to the Australian colonies - priced at one shilling - required a minimum of six, up to twelve stamps. This absurdity led to the issuing of the shilling stamp.  There was great official concern about forgery, doubtless fed by residual embarrassment from the Penny Black debacle, and the shilling stamps were produced with embossing, and with embedded silk thread - serious over-reaction to the perceived threat. Then, triggered by the fiscal constraints of the Crimean War (from 1854) cheaper methods of production were considered, leading to a type of paper that "broke up when wetted".  Somewhat improved over time, this non-reusable paper remained the standard until 1935, when the Photogravure process was introduced.

 

Johnson provides us with an unenthusiastic description of the prosaic British stamps issued during the near hundred years that followed. The story of Rowland Hill and the Penny Black would be difficult to beat, he says, but that stamp has been "followed by too many nondescript designs".  "Our stamps travel the world over and can stimulate interest in us.  On that score alone, we should be content with nothing less than the very best."

 

Johnson then appears to assuage his disappointment at the native product - by unleashing the following bit of condescension:

 

"Another series of classic stamps are the Sydney Views, which were issued in 1850-1 for use in the Australian province (?) of New South Wales.  The Sydney Views were produced in the colony and they show clearly that the art of engraving and printing was then in a backward condition.  Though the design was intended to imitate the Penny Black, with a view replacing the Queen's profile, they were very different in conception and are in fact the work of amateurs."  They were probably former convicts, too.

 

Gary Andrews