Do not stand speaking in the street

Lady Colin Campbell (in Cassell's Etiquette of Good Society, 1911) is a stickler. Undoubtedly, she is the 1911 equivalent of someone who writes to the BBC to complain about the bad spelling of modern youth. Undoubtedly, were she to belong to this century, she would frown upon many common habits - watching DVDs in bed, microwave meals, texting. But even bearing in mind that she may be stricter  than the average Mama, her set of rules about introductions is - well, below:

How to introduce someone in 1911
1. Ask the lady if she is happy to be introduced to the gentleman
2. Introduce the gentleman to the lady (not the other way around.) Now go away.
3. The lady and gentleman will converse.

On second meeting someone in 1911
1. It is the lady's role to recognise and acknowledge the gentleman - he may not either bow or shake hands until she has made the first movement. Nor must he ignore her.
2. If they meet on the street, the gentleman must then walk by the lady's side, because 'on no occasion is it permissible for a lady to stand for any time while talking in the street.'

It must have been really tricky timing saying goodbye to people. Did you just have to go round another block if you still had something left to say? And also - why? What wrong message were you sending out if you stood and chatted on a street corner? I dread to think.

Not much different, except gloves

I hoped, in flicking through Cassell's Etiquette of Good Society, edited and revised in 1911 by Lady Colin Campbell, to find the ways of a bygone world. But it was the similarities that came through first: complaints and tensions that I recognise:

On letter writing: 'Nowadays, when so much correspondence goes on daily, few letters are indited which are really worthy of commendation. The lives we live are so crowded with events...'

On bridesmaids' dresses: 'The bride has her ideas... and it is only right that her wishes should be mainly consulted, but let her consider others as well as herself...'

On language: 'barbarous mutilation of phrases' (Such as 'thanks' for 'thank you')

The exception? Gloves. Ladies must wear gloves at all times if in company. I only spot this fact because of the emphasis given to moments we could remove them - before the soup course at dinner, and to put on a wedding ring during a marriage service.

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.

1911 Cures for Hiccups

Ah, who would be without an outdated medical encyclopedia?

Here's how you cure hiccups in 1911 - although as the Medical Adviser* puts it, there are many recommended cures 'none of which are often any use'. You can:
 - hold your breath and count to a hundred
 - apply heat to the back of the neck
 - take an emetic to produce vomiting (surely a worse symptom than a hiccup?)
 - inhale chloroform (not without medical advice though as, he acknowledges, chloroform is dangerous stuff)
 - take potassium bromide (now withdrawn for use on humans - it's toxic - but still used to treat epilepsy in dogs - Wikipedia)

I'm glad we have moved on from chloroform, bromides and vomiting (and would like to emphasise to anyone reading this that it is seriously out of date advice - don't take it.) NHS Direct agrees only about holding your breath and has several new suggestions for cures that include eating granulated sugar.

We've moved on, but we've still not cured hiccups.


*(of the Sunday Chronicle, as quoted in 1000 Medical Hints - the care of the body in health and disease, 1911)

Slang of the 1910s

Just spent an enjoyable if frustrating morning trying to discover the slang of the 1910s. It seems to be a non-subject online. (I thought everything was out there if you looked for it, but the vocab of middle-class young ladies in the 1910s is remarkably absent.)

On the other hand, there's some great 1811 slang in Francis Grose's dictionary of the vulgar tongue. Some of it's still with us: "Leaky. Apt to blab; one who cannot keep a secret is said to be leaky." Some of it has shifted its meaning: " Frosty face. One pitted with the small pox." Some of it's gone: "Clack. A tongue, chiefly applied to women; a simile drawn from the clack of a water-mill." In Sinks of London laid open by an unknown author of the 1800s there's "Black beetles: the lower order of people." and "Box of ivory: the teeth."

There's a whole pot more stuff on slang at the BBC's h2g2. I didn't know there was a gay undercover language in the '50s and '60s that contributed masses to my everyday vocab. And knowing the origins of swearing must be useful too. (Berk is ruder than you think.)

I gave up on the internet and tried fiction. Dorothy Sayers; P.G. Wodehouse; both a bit late really, and Wodehouse, rumour has it, made up a lot of his slang. But immediately something is clear - not only do class and region define your language, but women use a slightly different vocabulary from men.

I have one genuine source of 1910s ladies' middle(ish) class slang: my collection of letters from the First World War. It's not a big collection or a representative sample. It's letters home though, not as informal as speech but closer than published prose. So it's a start. Here are some phrases I don't use much that seem to prevail: beastly cold, tremendous, a budget of letters, the stove is a perfect brute, dreadfully, she's very jolly, she's a lazy hound, topping, we are all very cheery, awfully well, feeling rotten, frightfully excited, rather a character, she's an old tadpole.

I'm going to keep on looking. And I'm going to look at my own language to see if I speak differently from men.