Times Archive Blog

20 things to do with a haggis

On the eve of  St Andrew’s Day [November 30], 1936, Mr C. H. Tremlet of Bruton, Somerset, wrote a heartfelt appeal to The Times:

I should like, as an Englishman who once spent 15 happy years in Scotland, to protest against the annual output of alleged humour at the expense of the haggis - humour that is born in ignorance and nurtured in prejudice

It’s a very nice letter - you can read the rest of it here - but, sorry Mr Tremlet, if you’re still with us. This is a traditional blog and, notwithstanding the shades of Scottish forebears, this blogger likes to celebrate high days and festivals in the traditional manner. 

So, from canning it to cannibalism, here are 20 helpful suggestions, drawn from The Times Archive, for making the best of a haggis:

1. Give it some of that Je ne sais quoi

No lesser person than the head chef of the Savoy responded to Mr Tremlet, with some mouthwatering Gallic refinements to his serving suggestions:

May I be permitted to point out that it is more appropriate and much more satisfactory to make a double cut in the form of a St Andrew's Cross in the skin of the haggis, instead of the single incision that Mr Tremlett advocates? In this way the skin will open like the petals of a flower.

Last year for St Andrew's Night I conceived the idea of serving a pumpkin puree instead, and this innovation was favourably received. On Monday - St Andrew's Night - I propose offering Le Veloute de Marrons Robbie Burns - a light chestnut puree, the flavour of which blends well with that of the haggis, and which, I feel, is even more attractive than the pumpkin, and certainly more so than the potato puree

Bombay or Mumbai

As of Monday, The Times is going to change its use of Bombay to Mumbai. Richard Dixon, The Times chief style editor, explains the decision here.

This has been a hot topic for longer than you'd think. In 1905, after the future King George V and Queen Mary arrived in the city, The Times printed this letter to the Editor.

Sir, In an interesting prelude to the description of the landing of the Prince and Princess of Wales at Bombay, your Special Correspondent alludes to the Portaguese origin of that city's name and repeats an etymology which I believe to be incorrect. He gives the origin of the word as "Bom Babia " - meaning in Portuguese, "Good Bay". Bahia in Portaguese certainly means "bay", but, as it is feminine, the correct phrase would be "Boa Bahia". But, as a matter of fact, the Portuguese always spelt the name (and probably do so still) Bombaim, and there are numerous suggestions in their first allusions to tho place to lead us to believe that "Bombaim" is merely an adaptation of an earlier Indian name of the little island on which this great and beautiful city has grown up. Perhaps Sir George Birdwood could tell us? Your obedient servant, H. H. JOHNSTON

Naturalist, journalist and prominent citizen of Bombay, Sir George Birdwood was born in India in 1832 and was a frequent letter writer to The Times, but he was pipped to the post by this reply from another old India hand:

Sir, The question asked by Sir Harry Johnston will be found answered on page 20 of the volume of the last Bombay census dealing with the history of the island. Mr Meredith Edwardes, the author, rejects, for the same reason as Sir Harry Johnston, tho derivation from "Buon bahia", and traces the native term "Mumbai" to a contraction of "Maha-Amba-Ai", Amba being the local name for Bhawani, the tutelary goddess of the fishing caste which first colonized the island. The termination "ai" merely signifies mother. Your obedient servant, J. A. BAINES, late Census Commissioner, Kidlington, Oxon

Birdwood's authoritative reply came a week later (with an apology that "a short indisposition" had prevented him from writing sooner):

The derivation of the name from a supposed Portuguese form "Bom-Babia" is, as Sir Harry Johnston points out, bad grammar, and altogether unhistorical. I have given all the earliest notices of Bombay in my "Report on the Old Records of the India Office," second reprint, W. H. Allen and Co, 1891. See also Gerson da Cunha in "Indian Antiquary", 1874. But all that it is necessary to know on the subject of this interesting place name is given in the most charming literary form in Sir Henry Yule's glorious glossary of Anglo-Indian words and phrases entitled "Hobson-Jobson", the second edition of which, edited by Mr. W. Crooke, was recontly published by Murray.

You can read the letter in full here ... The name "Bombay"

Thanksgiving or Christmas: who was first with the turkey?

By Ellen Przepasniak

The first American Thanksgiving was in 1621 and was simply called the Harvest Celebration. It occurred at Plymouth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts, between the Puritans and the Wampanoag tribe. According to historians, it probably wasn’t anything like its modern reincarnation. Today, Americans celebrate with a long weekend, watching American football, parades and eating copious amounts of food.

The meal, of course, remains the most important part of the day. A traditional meal is comprised of turkey with cranberry sauce, stuffing, mashed potatoes, brown gravy, squash, sweet potatoes, corn and topped off with pumpkin pie. Every family has their own variations, but the staples of squash, corn and sweet potatoes are autumn harvest vegetables and were probably the only common dishes from the first Thanksgiving. This article from 1913 set out to explain this strange American tradition for the Brits:

It is a nice question, which does not appear to have been authoritatively settled, whether the European Christmas turkey or the American Thanksgiving turkey is the elder fowl. To most Englishmen it may seem that the matter needs little argument, and that Thanksgiving turkey, with or without its cranberry sauce, comes near to heresy; but the turkey, after all, is purely a creature of the New World, exclusively confined, in its wild state, to North and Central America ... Read on

Sometimes we blundered

Inspired by the admirable Regret the Error, I've been having a browse through some old corrections. The cryptic way they're worded doesn't seem to have changed much in 200-odd years and it's sometimes tempting to go back to the original article to see what on earth they're about.

On reflection though, I think they're mainly more enjoyable in their own right, with their mysteries intact. The mind boggles at how this original theatre review must have read:

April 1, 1788: Errratum in our "Theatre" of yesterday: in noticing Mrs Siddons, for positions, read passions

And what about this bishop, getting worked up about women in chains:

May 9, 1842: The accidental omission of two or three words in the report of what fell from the Bishop of Norwich on Friday night gave to the passage a meaning whch the right rev prelate did not intend to convey. Describing the chaining of young females in some coal-mines, the right rev prelate is represented to have said, "The chain was passed round the waist of the young female," &c. It should have been "The chain was passed throuqh a belt round the waist," &c

Alistair Cooke's 'letters' to The Times

During the early years of the War, while Alistair Cooke was struggling to persuade the BBC to take up his suggestion of a weekly “American Letter”, he contributed a series of articles, as a "Special correspondent" or "Our New York correspondent", to The Times.

Today is the centenary of his birth and, as Comment Central reports, the University of Norwich is making 3,000 of his Letter from America scripts available to the public.

You can read some of his Times articles here:

Three days after the first bombing of London Americans contributed over $100,000 to the Allied Relief Fund in answer to a new appeal from its president, Mr. Winthrop Aldrich, for aid to the homeless poor of London

The torrent of American sympathy, October 15, 1940

Mickey Mouse, political agitator and propaganda puppet

Slideshow: Mickey Mouse at 80

Bruce Forsyth and Fats Domino have beaten him to it. Noam Chomsky's coming up fast behind. Mickey Mouse is 80 today.

We've been having a look into his early life and found it unexpectedly eventful.

On December 15, 1937, questions were asked about him in the House of Commons:

"Mickey Mouse" in Belgrade: The expulsion of a British journalist

Mr Mander (Wolverhampton East, Labour), asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs if he would state what action he proposed to take with reference to the expulsion of Reuter's correspondent, Mr H. D. Harrison, from Yugoslavia on the ground that he transmitted to foreign countries a statement that a "Mickey Mouse" comic strip in a Belgrade newspaper had been banned because it bore on national politics.

Prince Charles's alter ego fined for a kick up the arse

There's no disputing that Captain Burnaby, on whose portrait the Prince of Wales seems to have based his 60th birthday snap, was an all-round Victorian hero. Aside from his military exploits, he was, as Valentine Low reports, the first solo balloonist to fly the Channel, "dispensing altogether with  anything in the shape of life-saving apparatus"; he rode 3,000 miles across Russia, returning to write a bestselling book about his journey - "Captain Burnaby has tried the Russians, and found them wanting, while the Turks have secured his verdict of approbation" - and he was an enthusiastic  amateur scientist.

But his early career was somewhat less glorious. A scandal over a punch up at a shooting party in Tunbridge Wells nearly cost him his Army career, and earned his this stinging condemnation in the Army and Navy Gazette:

Although the imputations of cowardly brutality made against him by some of our contemporaries are quite unwarranted, his conduct on the occasion appears to have been far from that which we should like to see imitated by the gentlemen of the army. He and Mr Hooker appear to have abused each other like fishwives, and Mr Burnaby to have ended the discussion after a fashion natural enough among navvies, but not quite in harmony with the feelings of gentlemen.

Top 10 toilet horrors: Times readers kick up a stink

There’s always been one good outlet when life feels as if it’s going down the drain: write a letter to the The Times. To celebrate World Toilet Day, Ellen Przepasniak has scoured the Archive for ten particularly choice missives from readers who've got themselves in a lather about lavatories [click on the links to read the originals].

1. It seems railway lavatories have never been clean. In August 1886, a reader signing himself Viator Infelix shared his noisome experience aboard the Transcontinental Express. The stench of a lavatory in the stagnant August heat can’t have been pleasant, but the language is what makes this letter especially, shall we say, pungent: “The so-called lavatory, a pandemonium of stinks, some six feet square, with water-closet, urinal, and washing apparatus cheek by jowl, was apparently never cleansed; and neither in this one in the Pullman were there any antiseptics to deaden the sickening effluvium.”

An incredible man in a flying machine

I watched Flyboys on TV recently, which is a not bad action movie about the American airmen who signed up with the French air force before the US entered the First World War.

The plot and characters sound as if they weren't a patch on the real thing, but the flying sequences are brilliant. There's a great moment in a dogfight when the American pilot's machine gun has jammed, the German ace is gloating at him and the American, just like Indiana Jones, gets out his pistol and shoots him in the face. 

A Times correspondent went and visited the real-life squadron, the Lafayette Escadrille, during the Somme battle in 1916, and wrote a very gung-ho report on them, including a mention of their pet lion, which did figure in the film.

In case the Indiana Jones incident seems over the top, have a read of this incredible story from 1916. An observer, sitting in the back seat of the plane, realises his pilot is dead, climbs out of his seat into the front and maneouvres the plane back to land while sitting in the dead pilot's lap.

A true couldn't-make-it-up moment.

Brothers, poets and a baptism of fire

 
Nothing brings home the scale of the casualties of WWI like the stories of individual families who lost most of a generation.

One of these was the Grenfells, sporting, athletic, aristocrats who were also given to writing poetry, occasionally in Latin.

The war’s devastating scourge of their ranks was documented in The Times in a series of letters, poems and obituaries (click on the links to read them in full).

November 4, 1914: Baptism of fire
The following letter, thoroughly characteristic of the pluck and cheerfulness of the young British officer, was received yesterday morning from a cavalry subaltern at the front:

Your two boxes of cigarettes were heaven. We've been in the trenches two days and nights, but no excitements, except a good dose of shrapnel three times a day, which does one no harm, and rather relieves the monotony …

I adore war. It is like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic. I've never been so well or so happy. Nobody grumbles at one for being dirty. I've only had my boots off once in the last 10 days, and only washed twice

The letter did contain glimmers of what real action was like, but still with its larky picnic tone:

I got leave to make a dash across a field, for another farm where they were sniping at us. I could only get half-way, my sergeant was killed, and my corporal hit. We lay down; luckily it was high roots and we were out of sight, but they had fairly got our range, and the bullets kept knocking up the dirt into one's face …
I can't tell you how muddling it is. We did not know which was our front, we did not know if our own troops had come round us on the flanks. or whether they had stopped behind and were firing into us. Four of us were talking in the road when about a dozen bullets came with a whistle. We all dived for the nearest door, and fell over each other, yelling with laughter. ---- said, "I have a bullet through my best new Sandon twillette breeches." We looked, and he had; it had gone clean through. He didn't tell us till two days after that it had gone through him too; but there it was, like the holes you make to blow an egg only about 4in apart

Six months later, the letter’s author made another appearance.

May 28, 1915: The following verses have lately reached us from a young soldier fighting in Flanders. They are signed only with his initials, but we may be permitted now to reveal the fact that they were written by Captain Julian Grenfell, whose death from wounds we regret to record this morning.

Into Battle: read the full poem

The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air Death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings.

The obituary, on the same day, recorded that Grenfell was the heir of Lord Desborough, and that the barony would now pass to his brother, Lieutenant the Hon. Gerald William, who was serving in the 8th (Service) Battalion of the Rifle Brigade.

The next day came more terrible news:

May 29, 1915: News has been received in London that Captain Francis Grenfell, VC, of the 9th Lancers, was killed in action last Monday. Captain Grenfell was the first officer in the Army to receive the Victoria Cross in the present war, and has since been twice in England badly wounded. His twin brother, Captain "Rivy " Grenfell, attached to the same regiment, was killed in action on September 14. Only yesterday we recorded the death from wounds of their cousin, Captain Julian Grenfell, DSO, of the Royal Dragoons.
… Both Captain Grenfell and his brother had many devoted friends, and the memory of these two singularly gay and gallant spirits will long be cherished.

A week later, another of Julian Grenfell’s poems was published:

Because of you we will be glad and gay,
Remembering you, we will be brave and strong;
And hail the advent of each dangerous day,
And meet the great adventure with a song ...
Read the full poem here

Then on August 4, it was the turn of Gerald, or “Billy”:

THE HON. G. W. GRENFELL. We regret to learn that Lord Desborough's second son, Second Lieutenant the Hon. Gerald William Grenfell, 8th Rifle Brigade, was killed in action in Flanders on July 31. He was killed instantaneously by machine-gun fire while leading a counter-attack. His elder brother, Captain the Hon. Julian Grenfell, 1st Royal Dragoons, died of wounds at Boulogne on May 26, and his twin cousins, Captain Francis Grenfell, VC, and Captain "Rivy" Grenfell, have both been killed, the former last May and the latter last September

Billy was also a poet:

On May 28, the day on which his death from wounds was announced, we published some remarkable verses written in the trenches by Captain Julian Grenfell. The following lines are a translation from the Latin written by his brother, Mr. G. W. Grenfell, who was killed in action last week, in memory of a friend, also killed in action earlier in the war.
To John
O heart-and-soul and careless played
Our little band of brothers,
And never recked the time would come
To change our games for others ...
Read the full poem here

Into Battle quickly became a classic of war poetry; it was used on the RSPB’s Christmas card in the same year he died, and still appears in anthologies. The Grenfell family’s social prominence made sure that the story of their loss became legend, and it was retold again very recently in a new biography of Ettie Desborough, who not only lost two sons and two nephews in the war, but whose third son died a few years later in a car crash. Osbert Sitwell wrote this appreciation of her when she died in 1952.

In Memoriam: Remembering the Great War
Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London, SE1.
Open daily, 10.00-18.00
Closed: Closed 24-26 December
www.iwm.org.uk

For more on the poets of the First World War visit the War Poetry website

Moments of hope on the battlefield

In his Saturday Wild Notebook column, Simon Barnes paid tribute to Harry Perry Robinson, The Times’s correspondent reporting from France in 1917. On a quiet day in the coldest spring in memory, Robinson filed a column about the bird song that could be heard between bouts of shelling. Later on, in July, he departed from his military updates to marvel at how the wild flowers, birds and butterflies had swarmed in to fill the devastation of a year-old battlefield.

It touches me very deeply [Simon wrote]: the thought of this dauntless journo, writing his dispatches from hell, and, momentarily distracted, looking up and saying to himself: “Ah, that's the first willow warbler this year.” These birds, these flowers, these scraps of life held a staggering significance for those who were there - so much so that we commemorate them to this day.

You can read the original articles here:

Spring at the Front, May 3, 1917

Nature in the battlefield, July 30, 1917

In Memoriam: Remembering the Great War
Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London, SE1.
Open daily, 10.00-18.00
Closed: Closed 24-26 December
www.iwm.org.uk

How the Imperial War Museum was born

In the summer of 1916, the huge sum of £6,000 was paid at auction for a 70-word letter, the handwritten original of Lord Kitchener's appeal for 300,000 men to join the New Armies. It was his fourth draft and the price paid, by shipping magnate and philanthropist Thomas Fenwick Harrison, reflected how conscious people were, even at the time, of its historical significance.

Harrison generously said he would present the letter to the nation, "through what channel he had not yet decided", and shortly afterwards facsimiles were offered for sale in support of the Red Cross.

The lack of an obvious place for the letter may have been one reason why, six months later, a national war museum was proposed. The public were invited to contribute "war souvenirs of all kinds, pictures, photos, models, books, posters, leaflets, cartoons, paper money, stamps, medals, etc".

The museum became the Imperial War Museum, and the benefit of its magpie approach  to collecting can be seen in its extraordinary current exhibition, In Memoriam, commemorating the 90th anniversary of the end of the war.

Click on the links above to read the original Times articles, and you can read a detailed review of the exhibition here, at the 24-Hour Museum, and visit the exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London, SE1.
T: 020 7416 5000
Open daily, 10.00-18.00
Closed 24-26 December
www.iwm.org.uk