How Tall are You?

Another aspect of the eternal struggle between the sexes, from the often frankly entirely-invented-by-the-journalist London Journal of 1904:

A SHOEMAKER'S OPINION OF HIGH AND LOW HEELS

"Put half an inch extra on the heel," accompanied an order to a shoemaker from a gentleman customer. "Ah," remarked the shoemaker, "there are so many tall girls nowadays that the average height of men must be raised. Up to a few years ago the lowest heel was the rage, but now the heel is decidedly higher-  I figure it between half and three-quarters of an inch. It is all the growth of recent years. It isn't fashion, either, for you'll not find the high heel among tall men. It's only among the little fellows who try to add to their height by ever so little. But even half an inch counts in a man's height. A few years ago a man of 5ft. 6in. was seldom overtopped by a lady. Now the man of 5ft. 8in. is not infrequently looked down on.
    "Per contra," continued the philosophical shoemaker, "we have lady customers now to whom we cater with low heels. The tall girl differs from a man in not being proud of her height. She knows a little girl is more likely to be esteemed affectionate and loving by the man than is a tall girl. So she tries to get down to the loving level.
    "Then again, they know that the little girls have more chances of securing beaux, for the tall girl must restrict her hopes to the average size or tall men. Short men do not like to go out with girls several inches taller, and so fall back on the petite. So, where men are having their heels made extra high, girls and women are having theirs lowered. Hence also the flat hat."

The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat, by Saki (1914)

   Jocantha Bessbury was in the mood to be serenely and graciously happy.  Her world was a pleasant place, and it was wearing one of its pleasantest aspects.  Gregory had managed to get home for a hurried lunch and a smoke afterwards in the little snuggery; the lunch had been a good one, and there was just time to do justice to the coffee and cigarettes.  Both were excellent in their way, and Gregory was, in his way, an excellent husband.  Jocantha rather suspected herself of making him a very charming wife, and more than suspected herself of having a first-rate dressmaker.
   "I don’t suppose a more thoroughly contented personality is to be found in all Chelsea," observed Jocantha in allusion to herself; "except perhaps Attab," she continued, glancing towards the large tabby-marked cat that lay in considerable ease in a corner of the divan.  "He lies there, purring and dreaming, shifting his limbs now and then in an ecstasy of cushioned comfort.  He seems the incarnation of everything soft and silky and velvety, without a sharp edge in his composition, a dreamer whose philosophy is sleep and let sleep; and then, as evening draws on, he goes out into the garden with a red glint in his eyes and slays a drowsy sparrow."
   "As every pair of sparrows hatches out ten or more young ones in the year, while their food supply remains stationary, it is just as well that the Attabs of the community should have that idea of how to pass an amusing afternoon," said Gregory.  Having delivered himself of this sage comment he lit another cigarette, bade Jocantha a playfully affectionate good-bye, and departed into the outer world.
   "Remember, dinner’s a wee bit earlier to-night, as we’re going to the Haymarket," she called after him.
   Left to herself, Jocantha continued the process of looking at her life with placid, introspective eyes.  If she had not everything she wanted in this world, at least she was very well pleased with what she had got.  She was very well pleased, for instance, with the snuggery, which contrived somehow to be cosy and dainty and expensive all at once.  The porcelain was rare and beautiful, the Chinese enamels took on wonderful tints in the firelight, the rugs and hangings led the eye through sumptuous harmonies of colouring.  It was a room in which one might have suitably entertained an ambassador or an archbishop, but it was also a room in which one could cut out pictures for a scrap-book without feeling that one was scandalising the deities of the place with one’s litter.  And as with the snuggery, so with the rest of the house, and as with the house, so with the other departments of Jocantha’s life; she really had good reason for being one of the most contented women in Chelsea.
   From being in a mood of simmering satisfaction with her lot she passed to the phase of being generously commiserating for those thousands around her whose lives and circumstances were dull, cheap, pleasureless, and empty.  Work girls, shop assistants and so forth, the class that have neither the happy-go-lucky freedom of the poor nor the leisured freedom of the rich, came specially within the range of her sympathy.  It was sad to think that there were young people who, after a long day’s work, had to sit alone in chill, dreary bedrooms because they could not afford the price of a cup of coffee and a sandwich in a restaurant, still less a shilling for a theatre gallery.
   Jocantha’s mind was still dwelling on this theme when she started forth on an afternoon campaign of desultory shopping; it would be rather a comforting thing, she told herself, if she could do something, on the spur of the moment, to bring a gleam of pleasure and interest into the life of even one or two wistful-hearted, empty-pocketed workers; it would add a good deal to her sense of enjoyment at the theatre that night.  She would get two upper circle tickets for a popular play, make her way into some cheap tea-shop, and present the tickets to the first couple of interesting work girls with whom she could casually drop into conversation.  She could explain matters by saying that she was unable to use the tickets herself and did not want them to be wasted, and, on the other hand, did not want the trouble of sending them back.  On further reflection she decided that it might be better to get only one ticket and give it to some lonely-looking girl sitting eating her frugal meal by herself; the girl might scrape acquaintance with her next-seat neighbour at the theatre and lay the foundations of a lasting friendship.
   With the Fairy Godmother impulse strong upon her, Jocantha marched into a ticket agency and selected with immense care an upper circle seat for the "Yellow Peacock," a play that was attracting a considerable amount of discussion and criticism.  Then she went forth in search of a tea-shop and philanthropic adventure, at about the same time that Attab sauntered into the garden with a mind attuned to sparrow stalking.  In a corner of an A.B.C. shop she found an unoccupied table, whereat she promptly installed herself, impelled by the fact that at the next table was sitting a young girl, rather plain of feature, with tired, listless eyes, and a general air of uncomplaining forlornness.  Her dress was of poor material, but aimed at being in the fashion, her hair was pretty, and her complexion bad; she was finishing a modest meal of tea and scone, and she was not very different in her way from thousands of other girls who were finishing, or beginning, or continuing their teas in London tea-shops at that exact moment.  The odds were enormously in favour of the supposition that she had never seen the "Yellow Peacock"; obviously she supplied excellent material for Jocantha’s first experiment in haphazard benefaction.
   Jocantha ordered some tea and a muffin, and then turned a friendly scrutiny on her neighbour with a view to catching her eye.  At that precise moment the girl’s face lit up with sudden pleasure, her eyes sparkled, a flush came into her cheeks, and she looked almost pretty.  A young man, whom she greeted with an affectionate "Hullo, Bertie," came up to her table and took his seat in a chair facing her.  Jocantha looked hard at the new-comer; he was in appearance a few years younger than herself, very much better looking than Gregory, rather better looking, in fact, than any of the young men of her set.  She guessed him to be a well-mannered young clerk in some wholesale warehouse, existing and amusing himself as best he might on a tiny salary, and commanding a holiday of about two weeks in the year.  He was aware, of course, of his good looks, but with the shy self-consciousness of the Anglo-Saxon, not the blatant complacency of the Latin or Semite.  He was obviously on terms of friendly intimacy with the girl he was talking to, probably they were drifting towards a formal engagement.  Jocantha pictured the boy’s home, in a rather narrow circle, with a tiresome mother who always wanted to know how and where he spent his evenings.  He would exchange that humdrum thraldom in due course for a home of his own, dominated by a chronic scarcity of pounds, shillings, and pence, and a dearth of most of the things that made life attractive or comfortable.  Jocantha felt extremely sorry for him.  She wondered if he had seen the "Yellow Peacock"; the odds were enormously in favour of the supposition that he had not.  The girl had finished her tea and would shortly be going back to her work; when the boy was alone it would be quite easy for Jocantha to say: "My husband has made other arrangements for me this evening; would you care to make use of this ticket, which would otherwise be wasted?"  Then she could come there again one afternoon for tea, and, if she saw him, ask him how he liked the play.  If he was a nice boy and improved on acquaintance he could be given more theatre tickets, and perhaps asked to come one Sunday to tea at Chelsea.  Jocantha made up her mind that he would improve on acquaintance, and that Gregory would like him, and that the Fairy Godmother business would prove far more entertaining than she had originally anticipated.  The boy was distinctly presentable; he knew how to brush his hair, which was possibly an imitative faculty; he knew what colour of tie suited him, which might be intuition; he was exactly the type that Jocantha admired, which of course was accident.  Altogether she was rather pleased when the girl looked at the clock and bade a friendly but hurried farewell to her companion.  Bertie nodded "good-bye," gulped down a mouthful of tea, and then produced from his overcoat pocket a paper-covered book, bearing the title "Sepoy and Sahib, a tale of the great Mutiny."
   The laws of tea-shop etiquette forbid that you should offer theatre tickets to a stranger without having first caught the stranger’s eye.  It is even better if you can ask to have a sugar basin passed to you, having previously concealed the fact that you have a large and well-filled sugar basin on your own table; this is not difficult to manage, as the printed menu is generally nearly as large as the table, and can be made to stand on end.  Jocantha set to work hopefully; she had a long and rather high-pitched discussion with the waitress concerning alleged defects in an altogether blameless muffin, she made loud and plaintive inquiries about the tube service to some impossibly remote suburb, she talked with brilliant insincerity to the tea-shop kitten, and as a last resort she upset a milk-jug and swore at it daintily.  Altogether she attracted a good deal of attention, but never for a moment did she attract the attention of the boy with the beautifully-brushed hair, who was some thousands of miles away in the baking plains of Hindostan, amid deserted bungalows, seething bazaars, and riotous barrack squares, listening to the throbbing of tom-toms and the distant rattle of musketry.
   Jocantha went back to her house in Chelsea, which struck her for the first time as looking dull and over-furnished.  She had a resentful conviction that Gregory would be uninteresting at dinner, and that the play would be stupid after dinner.  On the whole her frame of mind showed a marked divergence from the purring complacency of Attab, who was again curled up in his corner of the divan with a great peace radiating from every curve of his body.
   But then he had killed his sparrow.

SAKI (1914)

Popular Science

A selection of items from the US magazine Popular Science in c.1915-1918 ... strange, but true, even the Illuminated Muff ...

The Sad Decline of Kensington and Belgravia

The grand Victorian houses of the West End of London faced a threat in 1919. Taxation and overheads were rising; 'homes fit for heroes' were being built for the poor; and the working-classes were simply loathe to 'skivvy' in Kensington, Belgravia or Bayswater, as new work opportunities opened up in modern manufacturing and service industries. This article from the Saturday Review of Politics in 1919, mischievously entitled 'Housing the Poor', bemoans the lot of the upper-middle-class, forced to abandon their decaying mansions. The writer cannot envisage the possibility of splitting such places into flats ("... they might be occupied by two or three tenants, each on a floor, if they could agree to use a common kitchen and to use a common staff of servants. And why should they not do so? Because Britons are shy and quarrelsome animals ..."), yet many of them would become precisely that - via Rachman's slum rents some thirty years later (Rachman was born in 1919, as it happens) followed by either demolition or gentrification in the 1970s/80s.

[click here for some great images of derelict West London]

HOUSING THE POOR

LET no one imagine that we purpose writing about the provision of £l,000 houses to be let at £10 a year to the overpaid, underworked, overfed classes, once known as the labouring or deserving poor, now sponging by virtue of an exploded title on the crushed and terrified victims of their blackmail. Nothing of the sort is in our mind : the proletariat have champions and flatterers to spare. It is about the housing of the upper and upper middle classes that we are concerned. Where and how are they to live? The other day we wandered round Bayswater, South Kensington and Belgravia. We passed through streets and squares of gracious, Spacious houses, two-thirds of them apparently shut up, at least the blinds were down, though, of course, the family, like the De Courcys in Tollope's novel, may have been living in the little back room, politely called by advertisers "the study." Take Lancaster Gate, for example, and Queen's Gate, and Eaton Square. How are people to go on living in these houses without servants, and with rates perpetually rising? Last year the County and Borough Councils suddenly raised the rate by 14 per cent., so that he who formerly paid £87 a year now pays £100. With large housing and educational schemes in sight, these rates will have to he raised again, probably by 50 per cent., until the rates will equal half the rack-rent. This is bad : but it is not so bad as the impossibility of getting servants, even at double the pre-war wage. These Bayswater and South Kensington and Belgravian houses require a staff of servants running from four to ten in number, four being the irreducible minimum. Eaton Square is a good old country gentleman's square; Queen's Gate and Lancaster Gate, and their vicinage, have been the homes of the prosperous professional and City classes. With incomes halved by taxation, and the remaining moiety halved by the present prices, how are these people to meet the demand for double wages advanced by demoralised servant girls? The thing is not to be clone. The question presses, what is to be done with these large houses, built nearly a century ago? It is a question which touches nearly the great ground landlords of London, whose leases will be falling in during the next twenty years, some of them at an earlier date. Marylebone, which is divided between Lord Portman and Lord Howard de Walden (the successor to the late Duke of Portland), was built before what used to be called Tyburnia, and is now called Paddington or Bayswater. On the Portman and Howard de Walden estates the leases have in many cases not more than five or six years to run. On the Paddington estate, which is divided between the trustees of the Bishop of London and the Thistlethwaites, the leases have about sixteen years to run. On the South Kensington estate, partly owned by Lord Iveagh, who bought from Lord Kensington, and Smith's trustees, the leases are running to about forty years. On the Duke of Westminster's estate the run of the leases is about twenty years, though many new leases have been granted. The last developed of the London estates is the Pont Street, Cadogan Square and Sloane Street portion of Lord Cadogan's property, and there the leases are quite long, running to seventy or eighty years. Of course the jewel of the Westminster property is Mayfair, and there a great deal of rebuilding has been done in the last forty years, and new long leases have been granted. We can remember when Mount Street consisted of two rows of what we should now call hovels.
     There can be no doubt that there will always he enough rich people to occupy a few favoured spots, Carlton House Terrace, Berkeley Square, Grosvenor Square, and Belgrave Square, though Grosvenor Place is in some peril. The millionaire will always be with us, no matter what taxation may be imposed, and the tribe will be large enough to fill the houses on the Olympian heights described above. But of the other houses that we have indicated, in the "gardens," "gates" and "squares," we know not where the occupiers will be found. The usual answer is that they will be turned into flats. But it is easier said than done. Take an average house of  £300 a year, with rates of another £100 a year. Such a house has three or four sitting rooms (the fourth a cupboard, in effect, or closet), eight or ten bedrooms, and the basement occupied by kitchen, servants' hall, butler's room, etc. How is such a house to be converted into flats? The ground floor consists of an entrance strip, or corridor, a dining-room of good size, a small back-room, called a library or study, and sometimes a smaller third room, which ought to be a lavatory. The first floor is entirely occupied by what is called a double-drawing-room, that is a large room shaped like the letter L, which would make two good separate rooms; nothing else at all on that floor. How can you make flats out of such houses? Where are the kitchens, pantries, lavatories, to be found, as they ought to be, on each floor? Where are the separate entrances, which are necessary to secure the comparative privacy of a flat? Where are the lifts to be put? Apart from the expense, there is no room for a lift in the average Bayswater or South Kensington House. These houses cannot be converted into flats, as that term is ordinarily understood. But they might be occupied by two or three tenants, each on a floor, if they could agree to use a common kitchen and to use a common staff of servants. And why should they not do so? Because Britons are shy and quarrelsome animals, not in the least gregarious, like the Americans, or the French. The instinct of self-preservation is, however, stronger than the longest habit; and we think that hard necessity may force some families to give up hating their component members, and others to abandon their exclusiveness. The difficulty, of course, is with the women. There ought to be no difficulty in bachelors of the class we are thinking of combining to run joint establishments of quite a luxurious character. Another result of this housing problem may be that the pleasant suburbs, so vulgarly derided by Gilbert and Oscar Wilde, may once more creep into favour. Lord Chesterfield maintained a summer house at Blackheath, and Horace Walpole lived at Twickenham, while the great Bacon died at Hampstead. The great difficulty which the upper and upper middle classes have at present is to get out of their town houses. We suggest that they might offer them to the County Council as new homes for the idle rich under their protection. The paying-guest system will doubtless be adopted, in secret, by many aristocrats. The contributory arrangement was the usual thing among relatives, and even friends, in the Elizabethan and early Stuart days. The first P.G. was undoubtedly King Lear ; but he, if we remember right, did not find it a workable plan ; and amongst "the splendid women" of war-times we fear there will be found not a few Regans and Gonerils.

At the Zoo

London Zoo has a fine history of escaping animals. Here's one of my favourites, from 1908:

KANGAROO HUNTS IN LONDON.—During the unpacking of the Australian collection in the Zoological Gardens on Wednesday two incidents occurrred which varied the monotony of the proceedings and lent a little excitement to what would otherwise have been a commonplace piece of work. The keepers walked the kangaroos from their boxes in which they had made the pasaage to the cages in the new house at the west-end of the Prince's Ground. In "walking" a kangaroo it is usual to hold the animal by the back of the neck with the left hand and by the root of the tail with the right. Things were going on smoothly till one of the men went to shift a Woodward's kangaroo, when, by some means, the animal freed itself and went straight forward along the path. At the other end were some workmen, but these it evaded, and bounded down the slope, over the bridge, and out into the Outer Circle. Some people in a motor-car followed, but failed to come up with it before it turned into the park. The assistant superintendent and a staff of keepers started in pursuit, but were obliged to return without the kangaroo, though they sent off others to look for it. Eventually the animal was run to ground in the area of a house in Baker-street, where it was captured without difficulty and taken back to the gardens. Something similar occurred with one of the wallaby, which succeeded in freeing itself from the grip of the keeper who was taking it along the upper walk to the house. It went down the slope on to the towpath, but was headed back each way by the men sent down by the officer in charge. As they closed in round the fugitive it jumped into the canal and swam for the opposite side, whence it was frightened back by a boy. The keepers remained quiet till it attempted to land when it, was promptly seized, and transferred to one of the cages in the new block, whence escape will be impossible.

The Times, 1908