Times Archive Blog

Remember paper knickers? What about when the Germans tried to sell us paper suits

Disposable paper pants must have been one of the shortest fashion crazes in history. A classic 1960s gimmick, they were beloved of fashion writers but never caught on with the public because they were itchy, scratchy and hideous. What I didn’t know was that there was a male version - until I came on this weird men’s fashion page from 1968.

Apparently you could buy 24 pairs of gents’ paper pants for £1 at BHS. I dread to think what they looked like, but that’s not the half of it. Our fashion writer then goes into a slightly worrying riff about going to Malta with his mother-in-law and everyone ending up with paper knickers on their heads. Fashion writing isn’t like that nowadays.

Anyway, stranger still, this exciting news item from 1920 tells us that a German importer was trying to undermine British manhood by getting them into full paper suits. For 2/6 you could get yourself kitted out in a brand new whistle every week:

It would be possible for an Englishman to be "comfortably dressed" in a new suit once a week and the entire cost would be less, over a period of 12 months than for one single West-end suit, cut and style thrown in.

I like the use of those quotes.

US Presidents in Britain: 90 years of state visits

In pictures: US Presidents and the Queen

Last time President Obama came to London it was for a stag weekend. His arrival today will be a bit higher profile, and is likely to steal much of the limelight of the G20 summit.

Presidential arrivals have always caused excitement here - if you click on the links below you can read the contemporary reports in The Times Archive covering official and unofficial visits, from Wilson to Reagan.

The first acting President to visit Britain was Woodrow Wilson, who arrived in December 1918 by boat from France, with an impressive naval escort, to be greeted by the Mayor of Dover and

a party of little girls, wearing frocks fashioned with the Stars and Stripes, [who] strewed with English roses the path of the President as he walked along the station platform to receive an address from the Dover Corporation on behalf of the townspeople

Coming so soon after the end of the war, the visit was a great opportunity for a party and London went to town on the bunting:

In honour of Mr Wilson Charing Cross Station was transformed from a railway terminus into a gaily decorated reception hall. The platform to which his special train was to come was carpeted with red matting and overhung with flags. The blackened framework of the roof, through which the light came dimly, except where a gleam of sunlight pierced the smoke-grimed glass, was half-hidden by strings of flags stretched from pillar to pillar. The pillars of the roof were wrapped in bunting and wreathed with laurels. Baskets of holly and mistletoe hung here and there from the girders. Palms and evergreens were grouped around the feet of the pillars and about an enclosure guarded by crimson-covered rails. At the gate leading to the platform was an archway of green leaves and big red berries, crowned by a gilt American eagle. The main hall of the station was hung with dark-red curtains, and the floor had a dark-red covering ... 

... etc. A fine time was had by all - you can read the full report of the visit here (click on the "plain text" link to get the complete text).

It took another world war to get another president to darken our shores, albeit briefly. In August 1945 Harry S. Truman landed in Plymouth by air from Berlin before taking a ship back to the US. He was only on British soil for a couple of hours, but George VI came down from London to meet him. Many of the public who had come out to wave were cheated by a last-minute change of itinerary, and he managed to miss the sight of Plymouth's massive bombing damage:

Owing to the changed plans, thousands of disappointed well-wishers were unable to express thieir good will in streets which would have included a view of such bombed buildings as the Guildhall, the ancient St. Andrew's Church, and the municipal buildings. Instead, a route was taken for the President for which neither police nor public were prepared. The welcome necessarily lost much of its fervour, but on the seven-mile drive approaching the city, wherever small groups of people had assembled, President Truman's car slowed up, and he waved vigorously

In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower came to London for talks with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. The Prime Minister went to greet him at Heathrow and, after a couple of brief speeches, they drove to London waving to onlookers from an open-topped car:

Apparently the President had asked that he should be clearly visible to onlookers on his journey into London and had thus set the British Government the problem of finding a suitable open car (all Government cars are closed). Eventually they borrowed the grey Rolls-Royce from a private owner in the City

President Kennedy came to Britain twice; the first visit, in 1961, was intended to be private, for a family christening, but inevitably there was huge media and public attention, with crowds congregating to follow his every move and cries of "We want Jack!".

He came again, officially, in 1963, and travelled down to Birch Grove, the Macmillans' home village in Sussex. His arrival caused a sensation:

There was a loud crash. Two small boys had falled 20ft out of a tree in their excitement. And no wonder, for suddenly down the lane came to of the most enormous Cadillacs that anyone had ever seen

President Nixon's arrival in 1969 was less rapturous. He was greeted by anti-war demonstrators and an unimpressed press. The BBC ordered an inquiry after David Dimbleby "had made several "ad lib" remarks during television broadcasts covering Mr Nixon's visit".

Jimmy Carter got a friendlier reception, at least in The Times. The former US correspondent, Louis Heren, criticised the downbeat mood of some of the coverage, and praised Carter's flag-waving for democracy.

Senior civil servants and appointed official on both sides of the Atlantic tend to dislike summit conferences, and their journalist friends reflect this dislike with world-weary cynicism. I have never understood this

But the full showbiz style of presidential visits came to its climax with the arrival in 1982 of Ronald Reagan. The delighted press were allowed to cover his trip to Windsor Castle where he went riding with the Queen.

The verdant splendour of Windsor Home Park was graced by two styles of horsemanship yesterday. The Queen favoured that of a National Hunt diehard, as tidy, restrained and proper as the familiar silk scarf on her head. President Reagan plumped for the Tom Mix school of equestrian discipline and jogged around in his unfamiliar English saddle with a rolling freedom more usual in Wyoming than Windsor

Why T. S. Eliot wouldn't publish Animal Farm

Richard Brooks writes today in The Sunday Times about T. S. Eliot, and his decision, when he was director of Faber & Faber in 1944, to turn down George Orwell's Animal Farm.

Twenty five years later, Eliot's wife, Valerie, sent a copy of the rejection letter he wrote to Orwell to The Times for publication - in order, she said, to put an end to speculation about his reasons.

I'm not sure it does that. It's an extraordinary document, appearing to tell Orwell that the book wasn't left-wing enough,while the pigs deserved to be in charge because they were the cleverest. Or is that what he's saying? For a great writer, Eliot has managed to be strangely obscure.

Maybe he was embarrassed. You can read it in full by clicking on this link - see what you make of it: T. S. Eliot and Animal Farm: Reasons for Rejection

Dave Brubeck, still cool after all these years

There's a musical treat on BBC4 tonight at 10pm in 1959, The Year That Changed Jazz.  The programme concentrates on four classic albums which exemplify the move away from bebop to a freer, more experimental era - Miles Davis's Kind Of Blue, Dave Brubeck's Time Out, Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um, and Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come.

Only one of the four, Time Out, was reviewed in The Times. The anonymous reviewer wasn't sure about Dave Brubeck's new departure, but concedes "It was a worthwhile experiment, however, and it fails only because it is impossible to reconcile the musically irreconcilable. Nevertheless, in making what one may regard as a jazz precipitate, Dave Brubeck has much that is inventive and intriguing to give you."

Ornette Coleman appeared at the 1960 Monterey Jazz Festival, reviewed here.

Speaking of Coleman's music, [Gunther Schuller] described it as "consisting of continuous unabated variation. a kaleidoscopic reshuffling of phrases so that nothing ever repeats itself . . . everything exists in a state of flux and renewal, often in terms of sharp contrast and surprise."

There's more Dave Brubeck in some classic clips featured in Arena's "Cool", also on BBC4, next Friday and Saturday, two programmes looking at the meaning and history of cool through the American music of the 1940s and 50s.

Four of Dave's sons are musicians and Darius, the oldest, is playing tomorrow with his own quartet at the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho.

10 asteroids that didn’t crash to Earth

The asteroid that landed on earth today weighed 83-tonnes, which is not nothing, but fortunately most of it burnt up as it came through the atmosphere and the rest landed in a thinly populated bit of Nubian desert. Here are some other asteroid spottings or near misses from The Times archive.

1. Asteroid's wanderings, 1936
Astronomers in the US were reported to be "keenly interested" in the behaviour of a newly discovered flying object, now identified as an asteroid:

The object, which is one-third of a mile in diameter, is the smallest heavenly body known apart from meteors, and has the added distinction of having approached nearer the earth than any other body of its kind. It was only 1,500,000 miles distant on February 7, whereas previous asteroids rarely came nearer than 5,000.000 miles.

What interested the scientists was that it seemed to be veering all over the place:

It is believed that the asteroid's orbit is perturbed by the planets which lie close to it, notably Mars and Mercury

2. Asteroid on near-crash course with Earth, 1966

An asteroid nearly a mile across and with the explosive potential of 1,000 hydrogen bombs may collide with the earth in June 1968, a Sydney University professor of theoretical physics said today

The operative word here seemed to be “may”, and although the prof said that if the asteroid were to be attracted off its current course by earth’s gravity it could wipe out a city the size of Sydney (where he happened to be speaking), the prediction doesn’t seem to have caused panic in the streets. Thankfully, as it turned out, there wasn’t a need for any of this:

There had been speculation among scientists on what could be done to avert a collision if Icarus changed course. Some believed it could be intercepted and destroyed by a nuclear-armed space vehicle. Others believed a powerful rocket could be landed on the asteroid to push it off the collision course

3. Discovery of a new asteroid 1911

The Times must have assumed a very high level of knowledge among its readers on planetary matters when this report was published because it is highly technical. The gist anyway, is that this asteroid’s eccentric orbit was hoped to be going to help in the quest to discover the sun’s distance from earth.

The boats may have rocked, but the Sixties didn't

Watch an exclusive clip from The Boat That Rocked here

Trying to listen to music radio in the 1960s was hell. British and American bands were turning out the best pop music ever and no one in the UK was allowed to hear it – legally - for more than two hours a week. Even if you were lucky enough to own a “transistor” you were stuck with Radio Luxembourg, which faded out in the middle of your favourite songs or blasted your ear off with Pools adverts. Then along came the pirates, hooray.

The early word on The Boat That Rocked isn't looking as hot as hoped, but congratulations to Richard Curtis for an inspired choice of subject. Maybe the problem is just that, looking back at the newspaper cuttings of the time, the story was really a lot more Ealing Comedy than Notting Hill.

The Labour Government had got in a lather about hairy rebels threatening the monopoly of the BBC, and its efforts to get the pirate stations off the air show Britain at its absolute worst. Radio Caroline and the other stations went through every sort of hoop to stay out of trouble and keep broadcasting, but the idiots in power just wanted them stopped, whatever the cost. Pomposity and prod-nosed killjoys were rampant, and everything the Government did showed how out of touch they were. This was 1967, for heaven’s sake. Anyone who thinks the Sixties swung only has to revisit this story to see the monster gulf that still split the generations.

My favourite moment is this parliamentary debate, headlined, “Government not 'with it' in popular radio plans”:

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, still in the news

Is Tsutomu Yamaguchi the luckiest or unluckiest man in the world, asks Richard Lloyd Parry, The Times Asia correspondent. Yamaguchi is one of the only people who survived not only the Hiroshima bombing, but the obliteration of Nagasaki three days later; you can read Richard's moving interview with him from the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb four years ago.

After many years of campaigning Yanaguchi has finally received official recognition of his survival; as he told a Japanese newspaper, "My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die."

When the bombs fell, there was no question that a corner had been turned. The Times leader, Darkness over Hiroshima, began:

An impenetrable cloud of dust and smoke, standing over the ruin of the great Japanese arsenal at Hiroshima, still veils the undoubtedly stupendous destruction wrought by the first impact in war of the atomic bomb. A mist no less impenetrable is likely for a long time to conceal the full significance in human affairs of the release of the vast and mysterious power hitherto locked within the infinitesimal units of which the material structure of the universe is built up. All that can be said with certainty is that the world stands in the presence of a revolution in earthly affairs at least as big with potentialities of good and evil as when the forces of steam or electricity were harnessed for the first time to the purposes of industry and war.

Visit this Times Archive topic page for the contemporary coverage of the bombings, and the debate that followed.

Hollywood lies about WW2; do they matter?

As Ben Macintyre writes today, The Great Escape is probably the best-known example of a Hollywood habit which has infuriated Brits almost since the war ended - hijacking engagements involving British, Indian or Commonwealth troops to make Americans into the heroes.

Objective, Burma!, in which Erroll Flynn's band of US commandos parachute into enemy territory and perform great derring-do feats in the jungle, was released in September 1945. The Times review, so soon after events, was understandably hostile:

This long film has met with objections from American service men, and it is indeed a little extraordinary for it to imply that the Burma campaign was fought almost entirely without the aid of the British ... the Japanese are throughout shown as contemptibly inefficient fighters ... and not all the parade of stubble chins and sweat-grimed faces can disguise the film's fundamental lack of honesty in its account of a particular operation as well as of the general campaign.

A couple of days later, the film was withdrawn, apparently at the behest of an outraged Churchill. The Times ran a leading article on it:

Objective, Burma once mentions Wingate in an aside but is silent throughout on the subject of the Four- teenth Army and leaves the audience to draw the conclusion that the Burma campaign was fought exclusively by American troops. It is left to an American, Lieutenant-Colonel William H. Taylor, of the US Army Air Force, to state the case against the American film in terms which a Briton might hesitate to use. He writes in Seac, the newspaper of the South-East Asia Command, of his personal embarrass- ment as an American who, as one of a minority, fought beside the British in Burma ...

Rosé wines back in the pink

Tomorrow rosé wine will take its place of honour on the nation's official shopping list - a theoretical measure by which the Office of National Statistics measures inflation. Rosé has been sniffed at by connoisseurs for years, but now it's made a surprise comeback after a boom in sales to youngish women - and one old one. Sales rose from £114 million in 2002, less than 3 per cent of the wine market, to £200 million in 2005, nearly 7 per cent.

In the late Sixties and early Seventies, Mateus Rosé was the biggest-selling single brand of wine in Britain. Thanks to ferocious price-cutting it had a fairly downmarket image, but those of us who didn't normally drink wine could easily recognise its bulbous bottle, made familiar by heavy advertising, and feel confident enough to order it in restaurants. And once you'd slugged it back, you could take the bottle home and make it into a table lamp.

And it was cheap. This article about the state of the wine trade brings back all kinds of bad memories - nights of shame on Mateus Rosé, Blue Nun, Mouton-Cadet and Emva Cream. In 1966 you could get a bottle of Mateus Rose for 11/6d. But by 1972 The Times wine writer reported that the price had been raised to over a quid in an effort to raise its tone. Probably a mistake, looking back. I don't think I bought a bottle of rosé again until last year - which just shows how in touch with the zeitgeist I must be.

A Greenland triumph

As Will Pavia reports today, Fiona Lindsay, 36, a physiotherapist, is setting out to retrace a historic journey made by her grandfather, Lieutenant Martin Lindsay, in 1934.

The Greenland ice-sheet was one of the last unknown regions of the Arctic, and the expedition went through all  sorts of adventures and at one point were given up for lost.

Lieutenant Lindsay was hired by The Times to write a series of despatches, which were published exclusively in the newspaper. You can read them here (I'm afraid all of them turn over the page, so in order to read the full text, click on the "read plain text" link at the bottom of the article viewer):

Sledging into the unknown, July 5, 1934

A Greenland Triumph, part 1: The Dash Over The Ice Cap, October 11, 1934

A Greenland Triumph, part 2: The Unmapped Range, October 12, 1934

A Greenland Triumph, part 3: The Run Home, October 13, 1934

Over-the-counter cocaine, at a grocer near you

Slightly surprising to find this 1896 ad for Ambrecht's Coca Wine - "a marvellous cure for sleeplessness, brain fag, and mental worry" - and "invaluable for athletes, cyclists, Alpine climbers and others".

Cocaine was so popular as a painkiller and stimulant that it seems to have had imitators claiming the same effects, as in this "Cocoaine" ad from the same time.

It wasn't long before the downside of this new elixir was realised. Newspapers were soon full of stories of overdose and addiction, and the drug's use was soon to be restricted to medical use. 

Face of mass murderer Charles Manson at 74

If it wasn't for the swastika tattoo you'd never recognise him. This photograph, taken on Wednesday, has just been released by Corcoran State Prison, California, at the request of the Los Angeles Times.

Manson was sentenced to death for conspiracy to murder seven people - the the Sharon Tate/LaBianca killings which horrified Los Angeles in 1969. The temporary suspension of the California death penalty in 1972 meant that his sentence was changed to life in prison. He has been before the parole board 11 times, the last refusal being in 2007.

Death penalties 1: ghastly experiment with electric chair

Every time a gross miscarriage of justice comes into the news a chill goes down the spine about what might have happened if we were back in the bad old days of the death penalty. Commenting on the  Sean Hodgson case, Rod, from Saltash, says: "Quoted as the longest duration of miscarriage of justice  in British legal history, this ignores the even longer cases where conviction led to execution and the miscarriage of justice was eternal."

Although no one had been hanged for five years, the death sentence for murder wasn't finally abolished in the UK until 1969, and that despite the votes of, among others, Margaret Thatcher. 

Britain's most famous hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, took pride in the speed and efficiency with which he dispatched his customers. He could estimate their weight at a glance through a spyhole in the cell door, and so calculate exactly how long a rope would be needed for an instant death. He's reported to have spent his retirement betting strangers in bars that he could guess their weight, and causing no end of hilarity when he revealed where he'd learnt his skill.

But hangings had not always been so scientific, or "humane"; after some gruesome mishaps at the latter end of the 19th century, there was a lot of interest taken by the UK press when Auburn prison, New York, proposed an experiment with the newly invented electric chair. Tests had been run on animals and lumps of meat, and the inventers were confident it would be a painless, instantaneous alternative.

Queen Victoria and the cult of the shamrock

March 17, 1909: St Patrick's Day is now a Bank Holiday in Ireland, perhaps the most popular of all the Bank Holidays. We feel that it is special to ourselves, and it comes at a time of year when, after the rigours of winter, the public mind is peculiarly susceptible to the joys of change and rest. Tomorrow, if the weather be bright and fine, there will be a general exodus from Dublin and other large towns, while the country people, by means of many special trains will make their way into the cities.

And everywhere would be the shamrock. "It is probably safe to say," reported The Times's Dublin correspondent, "that while, ten years ago, not more than 40 per cent of the Irish people showed their nationality on March 17, not more than 5 per cent will be tomorrow so singular or so forgetful as to dispense with 'the leaf'."

This flurry of enthusiasm for the shamrock was, according to our writer, entirely due to Queen Victoria's intervention. Nine years earlier she had overruled the objections of the Army authorities and decreed that soldiers could "wear the green". And once the Army were sporting shamrocks, he said, the Nationalists had to follow.

Could you have beaten the Spelling Bee champ of 1875?

Difference, dialogue, corrigible, chirography, alibi, aggregate, and varioloid - these were the first words thrown at competitors in the 1875 spelling bee, held at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, USA. Amazingly, all were answered correctly.

Spelling bees were a new craze, "a New England invention which has made rapid strides over the country," according to The Times reporter.

"Spelling" for prizes is the prevailing infatuation, and every town and village is having its "bee", attended by crowds - who cheer the successful and laugh at those who are afflicted with a "bad spell". The amusement furnished by these contests is hearty and genuine, and nothing could be more harmless.

And a welcome diversion from politics:

It is gratifying to know that the public taste, diverted into this channel, will enjoy a temporary relief from the almost perpetual political wrangling in which we indulge.

Today The Times Spelling Bee heats kick off all over Britain, and with more than a million visitors to our spelling bee website since its launch last October, it's clear that the appeal is still alive and well. Have a look at the original Times report which lists the words from the 1875 bee, and see if you could have beaten Miss Lizzie J. Rook, the Philadelphia schoolteacher who triumphed over a rowdy and competitive field 134 years ago.

Shopping for fun - it's 100 years old

At 9am, on March 15 100 years ago, a bugle call summoned Londoners to the launch of a thrilling new leisure pursuit - shopping for fun. For weeks, huge display advertisements had heralded the opening of the new Selfridge's store in Oxford Street, teasing with glimpses of the fabulous range of goods to be bought and issuing a lavish open invitation to the first-day celebrations.

We have issued between half-a-million and six-hundred-thousand personal invitations to the Selfridge Opening, but even these vast numbers do not include all to whom we are desirous to pay this initial courtesy ... Omissions have no doubt occurred - unintended and unavoidable. We beg herewith to extend our Formal Invitation to the entire Public, offering them, individually and collectively, the assurance of a cordial welcome to Selfridge's, on any day and every day, from the hour of opening on Monday, March 15th. NOTE.- While the formal opening is for the purpose of showing ... this magnificently constructed edifice, its enormous collections of beautiful merchandise and its novel accommodations, we shall from the very first be prepared to Sell to all who are disposed to Buy.

The Times published a news report the next day:

The great "Store" which Messrs. Selfridge and Co. have erected in Oxford-street, London, was opened yesterday almost literally with a flourish of trumpets ... The [proprietor's] invitation was accepted by a vast number of people, and it was noticeable that women - whose enthusiasm for new shops, whether American or English, is of course irrepressible - by no means predominated unduly; the male sex was well represented.

Sam Patch jumps Niagara Falls - eyewitness account

190 years ago a squeamish reporter from the New York Advertiser watched stuntman Sam Patch taking his exhibition leap over the Niagara Falls. "Being here," he said, "I must either shut my eyes or see the show", and his vivid description of the event was reprinted here in The Times.

Patch's jump was the culmination of a series of exhibitions, which had attracted huge crowds of spectators. First was to have been an artificial earthquake set off by dynamite, intended to shift some of the projecting rocks at the top of the Falls. Probably just as well for the city of York below, this stunt was abandoned.

Next, an empty schooner was towed into the water above the rapids so that the assembled crowd could watch it crash down the Falls. The reporter gushed

This was truly a beautifiul spectacle. Her velocity became quicker as she glided gracefully onward, running like a youth in the smooth sea of pleasure, to swift and certain destruction.

All went well till the boat stuck on a rock

about midway between Goat Island and the shore where she now lies, the hull entire, bidding defiance to the impetuous torrent which comes dashing against and rushing by her.

Enough for one day. The main attraction was still to come

Thus closed the memorable 6th of October, 1829, on the Niagara frontier, with a promise which nobody believed would be performed, that Mr Samuel Patch should leap the Cataract on the day following, at 12 o'clock precisely.

Sam did jump, and survived - this time. His luck ran out a month or so later, when he tried to jump, for the second time, the falls in the Genesee River at Rochester, New York (advertisement above).

'Secret' message in Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch

The Smithsonian in Washington has revealed a message scratched inside President Lincoln's pocket watch by the man who was repairing it on the day the American Civil War broke out. You can read the full story here, but it seems Jonathan Dillon told The New York Times in 1906 about the "grafitti" and for some reason it has taken until now for someone to unscrew the back of the watch and find it. President Lincoln himself is thought never to have seen it.

The message reads:
Jonathan Dillon
April 13-1861
Fort Sumpter [sic] was attacked
by the rebels on the above
date J Dillon
April 13-1861
Washington
thank God we have a government
Jonth Dillon

News of the attack on Fort Sumter took a couple of weeks to reach London. The first report appeared in The Times on May 1:

The advices from the South teem with accounts of the enthusiasm of the Secessionists. President Davis's answer to President Lincoln's proclamation was of the curtest. He said, "Fort Sumter is ours and nobody is hurt. With mortar, paixhan, and petard, we tender 'Old Abe' our beaux regards." 

On the same day, The Times commented in a leading article, Indignation at the attack on Fort Sumter:

If wishes were weapons, if the trumpet blast of Northern defiance could throw down the walls of every Southern fort, then the campaign would, no doubt, be short enough. But this enthusiasm of the North only leads us to believe that a fierce and lasting struggle may possibly be begun.

Also in the Archive blog:

Lincoln, FDR, JFK: The most memorable inaugural speeches

Archive topic: The assassination of Abraham Lincoln

10 items that have done most to liberate women (clue: they’re all washing machines)

The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, has come over all groovy and relevant for International Women’s Day, and grabbed headlines with the pronouncement that washing machines have done more to liberate women than the pill, legalised abortion or careers outside the home. I don’t want to delve too far into what uncomplicated sex has to do with piles of dirty football shirts, but I think I may have come upon the source for this revelation. As you'd expect, issuing from that neck of the woods, it’s right up to the minute, happy, uncomplicated and bang on the button for the modern woman. You can see it here ...

1. Joy unconfined for the most important person in the world

The automatic washing machine was indeed a great innovation, even if that £30 price-tag would have put it well out of the reach of many downtrodden housewives.

2. The selling line was simple …

Of course you only did the washing once a week, on Mondays, and little did you expect that once you had a washing machine people would want clean clothes all the time and suddenly every day would be washday.

London swamped by freak high tide

February 3, 1791: The spring tides, and the very high wind at North by West of the preceeding evening and yesterday morning, occasioned one of the most extraordinary high tides that was ever known, and by overflowing the banks of the river; it has done very considerable damage.

While scientists are warning that London risks severe flooding in 100 years if the ice-caps continue to melt at their current rate, it’s interesting to read about the effects of a freak tide that swamped Westminster and large areas south of the Thames just over 200 years ago ...

The water rushed into Westminster Hall like a torrent, to the great terror and confusion of the Gentlemen of the Long Robe, who retreated from their seats in the Courts of Law with great precipitancy; some paddling through up to their knees in water, while others took to boats, which plied very successfully in Palace yard and about the Hall. Two watermen made each a guinea in sixpenny and shilling fares in the course of half an hour.

… especially since  commentators were quick to draw a link with that year’s unusually warm winter:

In every respect the weather has been this winter very remarkable.  We have had thunder and lightning in December, equal in awfulness and more destructive in its effects than is generally known in the Tropics.  We have had, within a few days past, as warm weather as it is sometimes in May. The  country has been deluged with rain for some months past, and the wind has done more mischief, particularly among the shipping, than was ever remembered in so short a space of time. At one time we have had a confused war of the elements – hail, wind, rain, thunder, and lightning, in dreadful conflict.