Times Archive Blog

1929: The first Oscar awards - and a British winner

The first Academy Awards ceremony was held in 1929, with the best film being won by Wings, a flying adventure set in the First World War starring Clara Bow and a very young Gary Cooper.

The award for "engineering effects" was given to a British producer, Roy Pomeroy, as gleefully reported in this Times article. Wings was a silent film and won against the tide of talking pictures that was about to kill the silents off for good.

As well as reporting the Academy Award winners, the article reprints a speech which Pomeroy had recently made about the new talkies, and the effect they would have on the film industry - both here and in the United States. He believes that they represent a huge opportunity for British cinema and British actors, with their perfect enunciation - "English voices are beautifully modulated and record perfectly, which is an absolute necessity".

The speech is a fascinating window on a great moment in cinema history, and Pomeroy's statement of faith in the future of British films is very much worth a look in a year when Britain has the strongest chance of winning the best film award with Slumdog Millionaire. Extract below, and read it in full here.

The talking picture represents the greatest opportunity which has presented itself to the British film industry. It will enable British films to have their representative place in the film world, for here are beautifully modulated voices, splendid acting ability, the national and historical scenery, and well-equipped studios. The War caused British films to lose the ground gained in the world markets. After the War they rallied amazingly, but had difficulty in competing with American films for several reasons, the chief one being that British houses were booked solid with American films, and it was practically impossible to show a British-made film.

The British studios which I have seen are spacious and well equipped, and compare favourably with the largest studios in Hollywood. They have everything to work with, and the time is certainly ripe for the British film to take its place in the sun.

Darwin again: a chinwag about The Origin of Species

For the rest of today's Darwin bicentenary celebration go here

A new Tutankhamun moment, and the old one

Amid much fanfare, Egypt's head of archaeology, Zahi Hawass yesterday opened a newly discovered sarcophagus at Saqqara. The site at Saqqara in the south of Egypt, has been being excavated for 150 years and, according to Hawass, there is much more still to be found.

While there's plenty of excitement about the new finds, and the opening of the tomb was carried out in front of live cameras, yesterday didn't compare with the media exploitation of 87 years ago, when Howard Carter broke through the sealed door of Tutankhamun's tomb.

Of course one difference was the gold - "Egyptologists describe the discovery is beyond the dreams of avarice and value it at millions of pounds sterling," The Times reported - but perhaps, despite Dr Hawass's best efforts, archaeology just isn't the showbiz it used to be.

View our video of how the discovery of Tutankhamun was brought to the world, and follow this link to read the original Times reports

A Valentine poem, 1789

In case you think Comment Central's limericks will leave your loved one cold, how about this poetic gem? While the French were getting ready to take oaths on tennis courts and storm the Bastille, the boring British were urged to work themselves into a romantic lather with this ornithological allegory:

Look out and see the pretty birds
How each doth chuse his mate,
To kiss and coo, and Jove pursue,
Their kind to propagate

There's lots more along the same lines, with crows, blackbirds, sparrows, the lot. If you think it will get hearts a flutter, you can read the full version here: Valentine's Day, by Philalethes

I thought Valentine mania was a more recent craze, but on Feb 15, 1804, The Times reported:

Yesterday being Valentine's Day, the Twopenny Post had such an extraordinary influx of letters, with Valentines enclosed, that the Postmen, although assisted by a number of supernumeraries, could not get through their deliveries in the regular time. At the receiving house in New Street, Covent Garden, near 1000 Valentines were put into the box

(Incidentally, I looked up Philalethes, and it seems to be something to do with Freemasonry - aargh, what's that about? They didn't have trouser legs in those days did they?)

Also in the Archive blog:

Birds do it, bees do it, bounders in stripy blazers do it

Darwin's defence of vivisection

Ben Macintyre writes today - "Animal rights and wrongs" -  on how, in a letter to The Times, Darwin ignited the vivisection debate and enraged the formidable feminist, Frances Power Cobbe, and Professor Colin Blakemore describes - "Darwin understood the need for animal tests" - why the correspondence has a special poignancy for him, and an important lesson for today.

You can read the full correspondence between Darwin and Frances Power Cobbe below:

The Iranian revolution: why The Times wasn't there

Ordinarily, with an anniversary coming up like the 30th year since the Shah was toppled in Iran, the Archive would have been here with links to the original reports and comment articles so you could revisit the news as it happened. In this case we've been a bit handicapped, because from December 1978 through to November 1979 The Times wasn't published.

In November 1978, reporters in Tehran filed on the Shah's teetering regime while, back in London, The Times management was reaching the conclusion that the only way to stop unofficial strikes by the National Graphical Association - the printers' union - was to close the paper down.

On November 28, The Times asked, "Will the Shah be toppled from his shaky throne?" and the next day ran a leader calling for him to start handing over power. Elsewhere in that issue, the Editor, William Rees-Mogg, wrote under the heading, "A decisive test for The Times", that drastic measures were to be taken to topple the power of the printers:

There have been ten Editors of The Times since Barnes was appointed in 1817; in the same period there have been fourteen Popes. The one thing we have in common with the Popes is that we have an unqualified responsibility to protect the integrity and continuity of our institution. It is the first duty of an Editor of The Times not to be the last one.

Birds do it, bees do it, bounders in stripy blazers do it

Lovely sex education film from 1932, The Mystery of Marriage, just released by the British Film Institute as part of their 2-DVD celebration of 90 years of sex education. The images of preening peacocks and hearty youths romping in haystacks can't have been a vast amount of help for the curious, but it probably gave a few schoolchildren a laugh. Watch a clip here

In the same year, the "women's section of the Alliance of Honour" held a conference on the subject of Sex Education in the Home; the Churches, they said, had made it their "supreme duty" to teach small children the facts of life. The Duchess of Atholl, MP, thought this was all very well but some parents might be embarrassed and perhaps an aunt, cousin or "even an old friend" (God forbid) could be recruited and, in the case of the working classes, who were unlikely to be articulate enough for the task, a teacher.

And speaking on "the sex temptations of youth", the Dean of St Pauls, Dean Inge, said that he didn't think most people were really as interested in sex as they were made out to be, but if they did have problems stamping out the fires they should not hesitate to ask for help:

"If any of you," said Dr Inge, "have failed to master these temptations and want help or advice, you need not be at all afraid that any experienced clergyman or doctor whom you may take into your confidence will be shocked, whatever you may have to confess. We have seen far too much of the seamy side of human nature to be surprised at anything."

And, above all, they should avoid popular fiction:

"Popular novels represent sex as the supreme fact in life. It is nothing of the kind. In any sane life its part is a small one, and I will add that the free and natural comradeship between the sexes which now prevails makes it smaller still. Love, as Christianity knows it, is not a thrill of rapturous desire; it is a thing which grows through mutual companionship, shared interests, and common sacrifices into a union of personalities."

The Joy of Sex Education, a film anthology documenting 60 years of sex education in Britain from the 1910s to the 1970s, is available from the BFI.

Twaddling, lick-spittle, wishy-washy, cringing ... bank directors being sorry

Word cloud by wordle.net

When banks collapsed in the old days there was no holding back when it came to naming and shaming perceived culprits. The Isle of Man Joint Stock Bank went west in 1843 when some of its investments, like this ambitious loan to the aspiring king of Spain, came to grief:

A BAD SPECULATION. We understand that amongst the advances made by the joint-stock bank which has just exploded in the Isle of Man, was one of £10,000 to no less a personage than Don Carlos, of Spain, made at the time when his army was starting from the Basque Provinces for Madrid, and which was to have been repaid tenfold when he arrived there. Unluckily, both for the Don and the bank, he was stopped on the way by Espartero, in consequence of which he lost his chance of the crown, and the bank lost both its principal and interest. We have heard that the sailing of the Spanish Armada was retarded by the refusal of the bankers of Genoa to make certain advances to the Government of Spain, but we certainly were not aware until very recently that the fate of the Spanish monarchy had been so nearly decided by a joint-stock bank in the Isle of Man.

The collapse was the worst financial disaster to affect the island, and The Times, which was always critical of joint-stock banks, quoted in full this furious comment piece from the Manx Advertiser:

It moves us from our natural equanimity, when we reflect upon the widows and the fatherless, who have been so callously bereaved of their all by means of this most disgraceful of joint-stock bubbles, and left to meet the chances of a cold-hearted world without a sixpence, while the sharks who have ruined them, to all appearance, go at large and without being harmed ...

Did Charles Darwin stick pins into babies?

This indignant letter, under the heading “Myths about Darwin”, was published in The Times in 1934. Leonard Darwin is writing to defend his father against the charge that the great man was in the habit of sticking pins into babies to see if they felt pain.

As I grow older my faith in the veracity of mankind gets steadily less and less, and now in my eighty-fifth year it is small indeed. Nothing has added more to this decay than the anecdotes which I have heard from time to time about my father, Charles Darwin …

A secret parliamentary society? Golly

November 27, 1896: the American community in London was assembled for a slap-up Thanksgiving dinner, but the ambassador couldn’t attend. He’d been summoned to Windsor Castle to see the Queen, but sent a telegram instead, as The TImes reported:

Windsor Castle, 7 pm, November 26, 1896. “Your charming souvenir of the day we celebrate just received, and the copy for her Majesty will be presented before your dinner is over.” The souvenir referred to was a handsomely-bound edition of the menu and toast list, with original illustrations by Miss Florence R. Upton. Each guest was presented with a copy of this very tasteful little book as the gift of the Chairman.

I wonder if Miss Upton had chosen to illustrate the menu with her trademark “gollywogg”, and whether Queen Victoria was as delighted as the ambassador with her present.

Queen Victoria's last journey

On board the press boat moored outside Portsmouth harbour on February 1, 1901, the Times reporter wrote an awed account of Queen Victoria's body being brought from Osborne, on the Isle of Wight, to the mainland for burial.

Amid the ceaseless thunder of the minute guns and the faint wail of the funeral march, the tiny Alberta passed noiselessly and relentlessly onward; and behind her, slowly and reverently, moved the other Royal yachts ... As the procession receded into the distance across the shimmering silver of the sea, the sun, sinking to the horizon, broke into a still greater blaze of glory. Its slanting rays touched the two towers of Osborne House into light, and suffused the western heavens with a blinding glow. Far, far off, the pall upon the Royal coffin was still distinguishable, for the little Alberta as she passed between the towering battleships was still in the track of the sun. Above her the moon, almost full, showed faintly in the sky; and the air trembled with the notes of a funeral march, rising from some ship in the far distance. It was a scene and a subject for the canvas of a Turner; for if others might have risen to so great an inspiration, no other could have done justice to the intolerable glory of that sunset.

Turner had been dead for 50 years but never mind; my great uncle, Nigel Severn, was ready to have a go. Uncle Ni was a struggling water-colourist who, as far as I know, only ever did pictures of ships, boats and Oxford colleges. The Times's judgment was right on the button; this is not The Fighting Temeraire. What it is, though, is an absolutely precise illustration of the newspaper article, right down to the single figure standing to attention in the bows of the leading boat. Was Uncle Ni actually on the spot, or did he paint this at home with The Times as a crib? Unfortunately, family history doesn't relate.

The Regent's Park skating disaster

An awful warning about venturing on to frozen lakes and ponds in this Arctic weather. In the cold snap of January 1867, 40 people drowned when the ice collapsed on the boating lake in Regent's Park, London.

Victorian newspapers did relish a good disaster, and this one had all the ingredients for some seriously over-the-top reporting.

A disaster on the Alps sends a thrill of horror through the country, yet it is rarely that more than two or three travellers are lost. But in this instance, in the heart of London, and in the presence of a thousand or two of spectators, between thirty and forty human beings have been suddenly plunged into eternity.

Buddy Holly, Eden Kane, and me

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper  and Richy Valens. Here's the news report of the day. Holly recorded so much in such a short time that they had singles stacked up that they could go on releasing after he died. I remember an anxious dilemma about whether to buy his Peggy Sue or Eden Kane singing Well I Ask You. My brother and sister and I had decided to form a co-operative; by pooling our pocket money we could afford to buy one 45 record a week, and that was the first week's choice. Slightly shamingly Eden Kane won, and the record co-op died a death only one more week into its career.

Eden Kane didn't have quite the lasting influence of Buddy Holly - here's Bob Dylan, for example, recalling the night he went to see Holly, only three nights before the crash - Buddy Holly looked at me.
But Kane did come from an astonishing family of one-hit wonders: his real name was Sarstedt, and his brother Peter got to number one with Where Do You Go To My Lovely, and another brother, Clive, called himself Robin and had a hit with My Resistance Is Low. 

Postman buried in snow

The people who didn't turn up to open the Post Offices in North London today might be interested in this story from January 5, 1867:

FOUND IN THE SNOW. About noon on Thursday as a labourer, in the employ of Mr Cooper, of Pyrford - a village about seven miles from Guildford - was passing through Pond-field, in the neighbourhood of his master's farm, he espied an object in the ditch, which attracted his attention. On examination the object, which was nearly covered with snow, turned out to be a man named Tappin, the messenger who delivers post letters in the outlying districts of which Pyrford and Wisley form part. Mr Cooper was at once communicated with, and he speedily arranged for the delivery of the letters, while with equal promptitude the messenger was assisted from his bed of snow, where he had been for some hours. Tappin's account is that he got into the drift and pitched headlong into the ditch, when he was too exhausted to extricate himself. The frost continues very intense in West Surrey. The thermometer on Thursday night at the coldest period registered 14 deg Fahrenheit, or 18 deg below freezing point. Yesterday in the shade it stood at 16 deg

Don't you like that we had to be told that the letters were delivered safely before the poor postie  got rescued