23rd January 1766.

Ampersand, Interrobang, Pilcrow, Octothorpe, Capitulum; some of the weird names for single type faces.

Tomb of Caslon the Elder at the deconsecrated St. Luke’s, Old Street, London.

Today gunsmith and typographer William Caslon the Elder died in 1766 once notable as the founder of a distinctive and legible typeface. This secured for him the patronage oF leading printers in England and on the Continent, after being inspired by the Dutch Baroque style once the most commonly used in England.

Specimen of Caslon typefaces.

Born in Cradley in the Black Country in 1692/3. he trained as an engraver in Birminham and in 1716 started in London as an engraver of gunlocks and barrels. Becoming a bookbinders’ tool cutter which due to his contact with printers induced him to fit up a type foundry after being encouraged by William Bowyer. (1)

His name soon became identified with an enduring style of Latin alphabet and later known as Caslon’s first type called ‘Exotics’. His first design was Arabic made at ‘English size’ and commissioned by the Society for Propagation of Christian Knowledge (pre 1725), followed by Hebrew created for Bowyer in 1726 and Coptic for Wilkins in 1731.

His designs was later to influence John Baskerville typefaces and was progenitor to Transitional and Didone type classifications. Caslon’s first print version was used in the US Declaration of Independence and the motto was: ‘When in doubt use a Caslon’. However after his death his style fell from favour but revived in 1840s with several revivals still used today.

Caslon was buried at St. Luke’s, Old Street, London where his table tomb is still preserved.

(1) Two year dates common before calendar reorganisation of 1752.

References/Pics.

wikipedia.org.

npg.org.uk.

Simon Garfield. Just my Type. and other Typography Curiosities.

Keith Houston. Shady Characters, 2013.

 

 

 

22nd January 1666. The Plague.

By 21st December in 1665 Pepys recorded, ‘that I have never lived so merrily as I have done this plague-time’. By Today on 22nd January 1666 he was able to return to Seething Lane from Greenwich, London, where he had escaped the ravages of the outbreak as many other rich people had done. 

However on return to his own parish St. Olave’s near the Tower he was rattled : ‘It frighted (sic) me indeed to go through the church more than I thought it could have done, to see so many graves lie so high in the churchyards where people have been buried of the plague. I was much troubled at it, and do not think to go through it again a good while’. (1)

In 1665 at the climax of the plague the Court was forced to retire to Salisbury when in London about 7,000 died in a single week (probably 100,000 in total). . More than two-thirds of the population had died by the outbreak had ended in October 1666.

Bill of Mortality.

One of the best accounts of the plague was the work of physician Nathaniel Hodges (1629-88), ‘who rose early every morning, took a dose of a Pestilential Electuary (sweetener) as big as a nutmeg and on entering a house took a lozenge and afterwards drank sack and dish of roast meat and pickles.

Elected a Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1672, Hodges fell on hard times and imprisoned at Ludgate Debtors Prison. After dying he was buried at St. Stephen’s Walbrook which was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. (2)

The Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed the overcrowded, insanitary conditions which had been favourable for the plague outbreak, as 300 years later Hitler’s bombs were to reduce the slums to rubble.

(1) Despite all the calamities of Samuel’s life, the Pepys family later prospered, a descendant being Lord Chancellor in the Governments of the Lords Melbourne and Russell.

(2) Leimologia sive pestis nuperae apud populum Londinensem grassantis narratio historica 1672.

Historical account of contagion which spread among the London populace.

 

References/Pics.

pepysdiaries.com.

wikipedia.org.

21st January 1958. Bank Rate.

Raising Bank Rate keeps down inflation and encourages saving, deters people from borrowing resulting in lower demand. Lowering Rates stimulates demand, pushes up prices leaving people with more disposable income after items such as mortgage payments are factored in.

Leaks or allegations on matters political or financial, have a long history, and it was Today that Lord Chief Justice Parker’s Tribunal reported in 1958 on improper disclosure of the increase of the Bank Rate.

The background was the financial crisis of 1957 when rising inflation caused a Bank Rate increase from 5% to 7% on the 19th September which had been improperly disclosed.

Then as now the cost of the Inquiry was enormous as it examined 132 witnesses and 236 written statements and concluded that it had unhesitatingly reached a unanimous conclusion that there is no justification for allegations about the raising of the Bank Rate was improperly disclosed.

In the 19th century the Bank of England and Bank Rate, was virtually independent of government control so much that Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool in the Lords in 1822 bemoaned as extraordinary and injurious the refusal of the Bank to discount at a lower rate than 5% when the market rate was 4%.

Finding it impossible to induce the Bank to lower the rate of interest on their discounts conformably with expectations in 1817, his majority government borrowed £4 million on Exchequer Bills from the Bank with a view to applying that sum for the relief of the country.

The collapse in 1866 of Overend and Gurney, the ’Bankers’ Bank and the largest Discount House in the world was calamitous for the mid 19th century economy and the problem was exacerbated in that Bank Rate was 10% for the longest period in British history, in an attempt to cap inflation and demand and deter borrowing. (1)

By 1921 Bank Rate was reduced from 7 to 6 ½% on 28th April which rates were to become the norm or thereabouts until the 21st century. However this ignores the turbulence of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1980, Thatcher’s second year, inflation reached 25% and Bank Rates wandered from 8.1% to 16%: Compare this with the early 1960s which saw a rise from 4% to 5%, to the crisis of autumn 1979 when it reached 17%: good for savers, bad for borrowers.

Thatcher’s hostility to ERM and preference for the pound was justified two years later, in the time of her successor, John Major, with the fiasco of Black Wednesday September 16th 1992. when Bank Rate rose from 10% to 12% and then to 15%.(2)

The measures failed to stem the flight from the pound and caused us to quit the ERM. Thus Major’s governmen now lost any chances of winning the next election and indeed took the Tory’s renown as a party for economic soundness. What the debacle showed was the dependence of political decision on the markets in this case Bank Rate: ignore the markets at your political peril.

In 1997 the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) took over from the Chancellor the control of bank rate, so taking political advantage out of the reckoning.

In the 2008 credit crisis Bank Rate was cut by 1.5% to 3 % the largest cut since 1981 and the lowest rate and in March 0.5% and this is where it has obstinately stopped to Nov 2013: bad for investors, good for borrowers.

(1) This was the height of ‘railway mania’ speculation.

(2) The Author remembers this day as holding large cash reserves his interest rates rose very nicely when one could get 10% on money.

Ref: guardian.com/Interest Rates in the Uk since 1694.

Ref: Bank of England 1950s to 1979. Forrest Capie, CUP 2012.

20th January 1569.

The Elizabethan bearded wood-cut figures of the illustrated Geneva Bible have conditioned our view ever since of the prophets and patriarchs and even people’s notion of Jehovah himself. This bible was eventually banned in favour of the State Authorised Version by 1644, as its glosses (comments) were thought seditious.

Today Bible translator Myles Coverdale died in1569 in London. Bishop of Exeter until he was deposed in 1553 by Mary I (Bloody Mary’), Coverdale was an assistant of Tyndale, whose Bible made extensive use of the 1526 New Testament and original Greek sources. Written in English the translation helped to standardise the English tongue in the southern dialect.(1)

Geneva Bible.

The Coverdale Bible was commanded by Henry VIII in 1538 to be set up in every church for public reading, after Tyndale’s Bible had been suppressed as ‘pestilent glosses’. Coverdale was followed by Matthew’s 1537 and Taverner’s Bibles to culminate in the Great Bible of 1539, the result of Cranmer’s efforts to produce an authorised text with Coverdale as editor-in-chief.

In 1536 the Protestant Thomas Cromwell ordered the Paternoster and Commandments to be taught in English instead of Latin, resulting in the northern unrest of the Catholic Pilgrimage of Grace, as their traditional services were removed.

This exhortatory age now ordered in 1538 that every church was to have the Bishops’ Bible, but in 1543 Parliament panicked, and made it illegal to be read or expounded as likely to be too broadly interpreted among the lower orders and liable to make the apprentices unruly and so was to be now restricted to the less dangerous literate clergy and the upper orders.

However it was never fully enforced; only one third of the population could read and in a visual age most acquired any Biblical knowledge by rote, church windows, wall paintings and the itinerant Mystery Plays.

Matthew’s Great Bible 1539 was similarly suppressed by Mary I and so called owing to its large size. Other names ascribed to this Bible were Cromwell’s Bible as he had directed publication; Whitchurch’s as he printed it; the Chained Bible as it was chained in Churches for all to read and Cranmer’s as he wrote a preface in the 2nd edition.

England was one of the last in Europe to produce a vernacular Bible and Middle English translations include John Wycliffe’s first complete translation, the Wycliffe Bible of the persecuted Lollards from Richard II to the Reformation, and early modern versions regarded as heresies with marginal notes by Tyndall, and the Geneva Bibles.

It wasn’t until a thousand years after the Latin Vulgate, that there was felt a need to translate the Bible for the people, but even as late as Queen Elizabeth there was no universal accepted text. Puritans used the 1560 Geneva Bible, drawing on Protestant translations for which Tyndale had been executed.

King James Bible.

However this Calvinist Bible was thought too Republican; translating for instance Hebrew words for ‘king’ as ‘tyrant’ and had anti-royalist marginal notes. Archbishop Wareham noted: ‘in the Genevan translation some notes are partial, untrue, seditious and savouring of traitorous conceits’.

(1) Coverdale was buried at St Bartholemews by the Exchange which was demolished in 1840 to make way for the new Royal Exchange, and then moved to St Magnus.

Ref: bbc.co.uk/news/mag. King James’ Bible and how it changed the way we speak.

Ref: Wikipedia.org. King James’ Bible

18th January 1825. Remarkable Frankland.

Today Edward (Sir) Frankland was born in Lancashire in 1825 being notable among other things as the originator of Organometallic Chemistry and also for discovering the concept of the combining power of the Valence Bond.(1)

Diethylzinc with two Ethyls either side of the zinc.

The distinguishing feature of organometallic compounds is the inclusion of at least one non-organic, metal chemical bond between organic compound/s and includes Alkalines, Alkaline Earths, Transitional Metals and sometimes Metalloids such as Boron, Silicon and Tin.

Flammable in air Diethylzinc. youtube.

It was in 1848 that Frankland discovered Diethylzinc (C2 H5)2 Zn. known as DEZ. It is highly pyrophoric (flammable) and a very reactive organozinc compound, having a zinc centre bound to two Ethyls. It is a colourless liquid and an important reagent in organic chemistry.

In 1868 Frankland (1825-1899) and the British astronomer Norman Lockyer (1836-1920) made an observation of the sun through the smoky skies of London and in the process confirmed an observation of August 18th, made in India, of a line in the corona spectrum, at a certain wavelength, and thereby assumed that a new element was present: Helium.

(1) Organometallic bonds are usually Covalent where sharing of electronic pairs take place between atoms.

 

Ref: wikipedia.org/Pic.

Ref: youtube/Pic.

14th January 1935. Strand Magazine.

‘Cost 6d, but worth a shilling’: slogan of Strand Magazine which ran from January 1891 to March 1950. The Magazine was the nursery for such writers as Churchill, Agatha Christie, Kipling and Chesterton.

Today in 1935 Herbert Greenhough Smith died at the age of 80 after being the first editor of Strand Magazine from 1891 to 1930, and the first to publish the Sherlock Holmes stories. It could be said without his personal support and promotion the Holmes genre might have stalled.

Featuring Holmes, Conan Doyle’s first long story of the four he wrote, was a ‘Study in Scarlet’, but which attracted little interest from publishers and first appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887.

Published by Ward Lock, and notable for featuring the first appearance of Dr. Watson, with Holmes appearing on the front page with two ‘Original Drawing Room Plays’. (1)

When the Sign of Four apeared in book form in 1890 The Athenaeum commented: ‘Dr. Doyle’s admirers will read the little volume through eagerly enough, but they will hardly care to take it up again’. However within two years Doyle was one of the most popular authors and to continue until 1927.

Conan-Doyle in his autobiography ‘Memories and Adventures (1924) revealed he had written the Holmes’ stories with a view to establishing himself in the Strand Magazine and that a ‘single character would bind the reader to that particular magazine’.

The first story featuring Holmes in the Strand Magazine was a short story ‘Scandal in Bohemia’ with illustrations by Sidney Paget appearing in July 1891 and Doyle was now set to become one of the most popular and prolific contributors. The serialisation of the ‘Hound of the Baskervilles’ (1901-2) was estimated to have increased the Magazine’s circulation by 30,000.

Bound Volumes 1894.

The Strand Magazine had a blue/green cover illustrated by George Charles Haite designer, painter and illustrator who had been asked by George Newnes to produce a pen-ink illustration for his new magazine. The result was a picture looking east up the Strand in London with its title hanging from telegraph wires.(2)

The last Editor of Strand Magazine until it folded in 1950 was Macdonald Hastings, father of Max Hasting the writer and journalist.

(1) D.H. Friston was the first illustrator in this issue and was engraved by WMR Quick and issued in November at 1 shilling, being sold out before Christmas.

Samuel Beeton the publisher, husband of Isabel the famed writer of Household Management, had sold out to Ward Lock after financial difficulties. A copy of Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887 signed and inscribed as, ‘The first book of mine to be published’, by Doyle was withdraw from sale after failing its reserve of £240,000 in 2010.

(2) Haite (8.6.1855-31.3.1924).

Ref: wikipedia.org Sherlock Holmes/Pic.

Ref: strandmagazine.com/history

12th January 1887. Red Tape.

The Civil Service in the 19thc century was already associated with bureaucracy being satirised in Dickens’ Circumlocation Office: ‘While of tape-red tape it had used enough to stretch, in graceful festoons, from Hyde Park Corner to the General Post Office’(1)

Today in 1887 Stafford Northcote later 1st Earl Iddesleigh died notable for being the last non-Prime Minister to be designated First Lord of the Treasury and one of the founders of Britain’s professional civil service.

As a result of the collapse of the royal bureaucracy in the Tudor and Stuart times and the defeat of monarchy in the Civil-War, by the reign of Charles II the foundations of governance were laid down under clerks like William Blathwayt who had organised William III’s campaigns.

He harnessed the best talent: the diarists Pepys (Secretary to John Downing of the eponymous street), and John Evelyn and John Locke the philosopher, for colonial matters; Temple and Godolphin in diplomacy and William Petty the economist who founded public statistics and promoted the Royal Society.

The modern Civil Service dates from the 1780s with later principles laid down by Lord Macauley in 1833 and Sir Charles Trevelyan and Sir Stafford Northcote in 1853. They were inspired by Bentham’s Utilititarianism where was, ‘Official Aptitude Maximized, Expense Minimized’: honesty and efficiency were the key ideas.

By the early 19thc the politicians were becoming more professional as politicians devolved more administration onto Civil Servants under Permanent Secretaries as the great Departments of State were founded with openings more open to a wider group through rigorous competitive exams.

Somerset House, London was built for the use of a growing Civil Service, built by Sir William Chambers the King’s architectural adviser and with Civil-Service Commissioners being created in 1855 to conduct exams. However not until the Order in Council of 1870 were open exams prescribed with a clear distinction between ‘Intellectuals’ and ‘Mechanicals’.(2)

A rigid division now came with Administrative, Executive and Clerical grades and many other sections such as ‘industrials’ and postman. In effect it reinforced Oxbridge with exams geared to a Public School bias of ’Arts’ and reflecting the ‘gentleman amateur’, but at least one of merit rather than patronage.(3)

Reforms were expedited by the Crimean War which had exposed the cult of noble un-meritocratic and incompetent leadership as reflected in the Battle of the Light Brigade on October 25th 1854, and also notable by a lack of proper clothing, food and shelter resulting in thousands dying from cold, exhaustion and disease.

It was mismanagement which saw demands from the new meritocratic middle-class demanding access to the professions with both the Liberals and Tories seeing the need for reform. The growing public schools were now being groomed not only to man the growing Empire and the Indian Army, but also the Colonial and Home Civil Service.

(1)  Sir Tithe Barnacle defending the Office in Parliament) in Little Dorrit (Book 2. Ch 8.) Thomas Carlyle also refers to parliament as: ‘Little other than a red-tape talking machine’ and [an]‘Unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence’.

Red Tape‘: a term synonymous with bureaucracy from the tape used for securing files and made in Cheadle, Staffordshire. The coloured-cotton tape was dyed with the Safflower carthamus tinctoria.

(2) There used to be a palace there, but the land was swapped for the Buckingham Palace site.

(3) Now divided into numerical grades.

Gettyimages.

11th January 1810. Boulton and Watt.

Boulton and Watt produced many metal products at their Soho Works, Birmingham and were famous for their stationary engines much in demand in the Cornish tin mines.

Boulton and Watt Steam Engineering Factory, Soho, Birmingham.

Today in 1810 Engine No 42B was entered into the Boulton and Watt, Birmingham Order Book so called as it was the second engine of the Company having a 42 inches cylinder. It was installed two years later at Crofton Pumping Station, where it has continued to run, except for a few years in the 1960s.

Crofton Pumping Station.

Pumping Station Boiler.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before the modern production lines of the 20th century the Company at its Soho factory in the 18th century, was making products using replaceable uniform parts and pioneering mass production division of labour in an interlocking system of workshops each serially engaged in its own particular segment of metal processes. These included casting, assembly, stamping and burnishing etc.

Boulton spatially located each operation in a flow line, before production lines were even thought of with the aim to minimise movement, time wastage, transportation and maximising division of labour, one of the key tenets of economics and in the process endorsing Adam Smith’s dictum: ]That] ’the greatest improvement in production powers of labour …seem to have been the effect of division of labour’.

In the early days of the Industrial Revolution it was relatively easy for an ambitious man to start in business, with the potential to rapidly expand and thus to form the basis of Britain’s wealth.

Little capital was required then to set up in business and this along with nous and a deal of brashness and an ability to see where money or ‘brass’ could be made was to ensure the success of the industrious men of the hard north.

Many took over from a dad who had started in a workshed in the process creating factories which relied on simple robust machines in serried ranks, steam-driven by a system of belts and wheels.

Some as with Boulton were highly organised chains of distinct workshops engaged in multifarious processes. The fact that entry to manufacturing was relatively easy meant that competition was stiff so the more one could drive down wages by employing cheap labour such women and children the more profitability was attained.

Ref: Soho Foundry.wikipedia.org/wiki/soho.

Ref: The Penguin Social History of Britain: English Social History in the 18thc Roy Porter 2001.

Ref: googleimages.

9th January 2004. TPO.s

The ‘mail-net collection apparatus’ made famous in the Ealing Film comedy, ‘Two Way Stretch’ introduced in 1852, was abandoned in 1971. (1)

The Illustrated London News called the Great train Robbery of 1963, the ‘most daring and fruitful mail robbery in English history’. Forty one years later the last Travelling Post Office (TPO) from Stonebridge Park in north London left Today for Newcastle at 11.18 pm in January 2004.

Before the ending of the service it was still possible to post a letter on a TPO as every carriage had its post-box, mainly used by philatelists for the postmark. At the final count it cost £16 million to run and there were eighteen trains with 420 staff running from Carlisle and Newcastle in the north to Penzance in the South West, handling 15,000 bags of mail ensuring that remote areas would get their post. (2)

Postal workers sorting mail, c 1929.

It was in 1838 that the first Travelling Railway Post Office, a converted horse-box left London for Birmingham. It had only one sorting clerk and a red-coated mail guard who had been recruited from the Royal Mail’s horse drawn carriages. Such was its success that within a couple of months a government bill was passed obliging the railway companies to provide a separate carriage for sorting letters en route.

The establishment of new rail routes and the heavy increase in mail confirmed the travelling post offices as an integral part of the Royal Mail system and by the beginning of the First World War there 139 TPOs that made up the web of interconnecting routes.

The service however has constantly been downgraded and after WWII only 43 were reinstated and with the introduction of two-tier postage in 1968 only the first class would be sorted on trains. 20 years later a revamp of Royal Mail saw a further reduction in TPOs.

The TPOs most dramatic day was in 1963 when the ‘up’ train to London was robbed in Bucks., ‘The only reason most of us knew something was wrong was we shouldn’t have stopped for that length of time’, recalled Dino Howell who joined TPO in 1962.

In March 1964 and with twenty members of the gang still at large, ten men were convicted of the robbery. The next month twelve members were sentenced to a total of 307 years in jail, though later the Appeal Court was to quash the 25-year jail sentences against two of those convicted.

The Night Mail poem of the 1930.s by W.H. Auden caught the rhythm and action of the mail train going north to Scotland. With music by Britten it celebrated the centenary of the TPO in a  GPO documentary and was shown on cinema screens.

(1) It involved a net at the side of the railway line which picked up bags of mail, without the train stopping.

(2) The last TPO left Bristol for Penzance at 6.30 on the following day.

blog.nationalpostalmuseum.org/Pic.

6th January 1949. Punch.

The 19th century was the era of the great cartoon satirists such as George du Maurier famous for the ‘Curate’s Egg’: ‘True Humility: The egg is only bad in parts’. Then ‘the Bedside Manner’ (1884): ‘What sort of doctor is he?’ ‘Oh well I don’t know much about his ability, but he’s got a very good bedside manner’.

The use of paradox and irony has long been part of literature and none more so than in Punch Magazine which Today in 1949 saw the cover design of Richard Doyle celebrate 100 years.(1)

In the early days Punch’s cover changed half-yearly, with artists such as Hablot Knight Browne (‘Phiz’) illustrator of Dickens’, Pickwick Papers and illustrator John Leech who had originally made his name on Bentley’s Miscellany.

Punch’s ‘nagging and beating’ ethos was reflected in Mr Punch whose picture was the main feature of the front page, a pugnacity employed against injustice as embodied in Establishment and its institutions.

26th April 1916. Richard Doyle’s cover of 1849 in colour.

Malcolm Muggeridge, the Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph, later to make his name in television was made editor and between the years 1952 and 1956 attempted to bring in younger readers biting satire against Churchill, the BBC and Prime Minister, Anthony Eden.

In the early days Punch cartoons became widely popular as newspaper reading grew and a great source of social comment over the years.

It was founded in a tavern, which still exists in Fleet Street, London and was first issued on 17th July 1841 and included many of the leading writers of the day.

The magazine had many campaigns and was sceptical, along with the military, of the early plans, to build a Channel Tunnel in the 19th century, by Sir Edward Watkin.

Punch was to initiate an art form based on stock characters and stereotypes which had been the stock in trade of the 18thc cartoonists. However the magazine once the mainstay of gentlemen’s clubs and dentists’ waiting rooms, found its sales had dropped from 175,000 in the 1940s to its final figure of 33,000 in 1992.

(1) The magazine cover was not to change until 1956.

Ref: wikipedia.org/Pics.

Ref: Defunct Magazine Titles.

Ref: Punch.gutenburg.org/files.