Discovering stars in 1911

I've been wondering for a while about the reason for this blog - not the obvious reason, that time travel has not been invented yet and somebody has to try to compensate, but the deeper one: why anyone would want to time travel in the first place.

And it struck me the other day that I'm looking for role models.  Obviously, the challenges facing women today aren't what they were in 1911. But as I've researched this blog it's become clear that things weren't as different back then as I had thought. I've also realised that it's not been a few charismatic, controversial leaders who have moved women's liberation forward: it has been a crowd of people taking each a small step, from the hundreds of women who persuaded reluctant fathers to send them to university to the thousands today pushing through to the highest ranks of the professions while working out how to balance that with family lives.

Many of those small steps have gone little remembered. Last week I found the story of Williamina P Fleming. Her obituary was published a hundred years ago this month. As Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard she spent thirty years working with a catalogue of very early glass plate photographs of the night sky. She analysed images of over ten thousand stars, discovering ten entirely new ones. And she faced the question of what stepping into a male sphere does for your essential likeability as a woman. Annie Cannon, the author of Fleming's obituary in Science, (Vol 33(861), 987-88, June 1911), gives full credit to her discoveries and to her thorough, systematic approach to a library of 200,000 fragile glass plates. She then concludes that ...'of a large hearted, sympathetic nature, and keenly interested in all that pertains to life, [she] won friends easily, while her love of her home and an unusual skill in needlework prove that a life spent in the routine of science need not destroy the attractive human element of a woman's nature'

Williamina P Fleming was one of many who demonstrated, through living out her life,  that female and scientist were not mutually exclusive. We no longer use needlework to make that proof, and thanks to Fleming and hundreds more we don't have so many exclusions to eliminate.  But I think we are still facing that challenge on some fronts.

Bicycle use and abuse

I was cycling quietly home from work, as I do most days.  I stopped abruptly to have an eye-to-eye with a truck driver before he gave me right of way. Then I cycled on, pedal, pedal, pedal, until my peace was rudely interrupted:

"You should learn to cycle, girl," came a squawk somewhere behind my left shoulder. I stopped, wondering what was going on. The voice came from a woman leaning out of a car window. "I saw what happened, you didn't see that van. You should learn to cycle."

I didn't really have a good response (judging it unhelpful to observe that the truck, being elephant sized, white, and stationary in the middle of the road, was not something I'd have missed). I cycled on. The woman started her car and swerved out to overtake me, then stopped at a T-junction to lecture me some more. Eventually she got bored and drove off.

Determined to use my fury for something constructive I decided to look up cycling in 1911. Would I have been on the roads? OK, OK, not cycling to work from a shared flat, in jeans. But cycling? I strike lucky: the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911 has more information than I knew there was to know about bicycles, and the picture is just like my bike, well, nearly. (Admittedly this is because as a cyclist I am a little behind the times.)

Then I found the story of Viscountess Harberton, told by Surrey History. Her 1911 obituary pictured her in something called Rational Dress. Rational Dress was a long divided skirt devised especially for cycling, resented noisily by certain readers of the Daily Mail - 'that disgusting dress called rationals'. In 1899, Viscountess Harburton was refused luncheon in the coffee-room of the Hautboy Hotel in Ockham because of her choice to wear it.

I cheer her mentally and wonder if my car-driving foe had such a good 1911 story behind her. To my regret, the answer is yes - I've discovered Dorothy Levitt. But that's a story for another day.

Bachelor's Buttons for the Bellenden Big Lunch

Our street is making a habit of the Big Lunch - an Eden Project inspired event that gets street parties happening across the UK at lunchtime one Sunday a year. Bellenden Road is great for it - there's food from all over the world (go Peckham!) and particularly, it stars amazing carved watermelons.

I'm going to add to the variety with food from the past. I have been wanting to make Bachelor's Buttons for a while now. The recipe doesn't sound particularly exciting, but their name does.

It's a lost joke from 1911. Not a raucous laugh-out-loud joke but a shared between-friends nudge. Why, I wonder, rubbing in butter (3oz) to flour and sugar (6oz, 3oz) do they have that name? Are they for feeding to bachelors seductively, or winking at them over with a cup of tea? Are they the sort of dry, dull fare bachelors make for themselves? I stir in baking powder (1/2 tsp) and an egg, and start to make 'walnut sized pieces' and roll them in sugar. They are particularly large buttons: was there a fashion amongst bachelors to ornament their jackets with outsize closing devices?

Got it. As I pop then in the oven (what is a 'moderate oven?' Oven precision has come on - I go for 180 degrees) the buttons in rows look lost. That, I am sure, is why they are Bachelor's Buttons - nobody to sew them on.

Though the enormous button theory is getting more entertaining - when I pull them out of the oven 20 minutes later they are a couple of inches across. And the sugar makes them good and sparkly. Could it be that the bachelors of 1911 were, just a bit, bling?

(Recipe credit: Unrivalled Cookery for the Middle Classes (1911) by Miss Tuxford. They're excellent, by the way - somewhere between shortbread and macaroon)