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)

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)

Wife or Husband, Selection of

Doctors of 1911 (according to that edition of 1000 Medical Hints - The care of the body in health and disease by the Medical Adviser of the Sunday Chronicle) 'are often asked questions relating to the suitability of certain persons for the purposes of matrimony... one does not have to be a member of the Eugenics Society, or an enthusiastic believer in Eugenics... a fashionable pastime... to feel how important it is that married couples should not start life handicapped'.

And the doctors' response? The Medical Adviser (who goes entirely unnamed) is clear that there is no general rule. He is comfortable with the marriage of near relations, such as cousins, so long as there is no 'cancer, nervous trouble or insanity' in the family. He is opposed to marriages between 'May and December' - where a husband is more than ten or twelve years older than his wife; of course, 'the wife should never be older than the husband by more than a year or two at the most.'

'Marriages between different races are generally more or less sterile' he concludes, firmly and with reference to some observations of cross-racial marriages. And then: 'I heartily approve of men marrying when they are in their early twenties - provided, of course, their pecuniary condition is such as to permit it.'

Hard as I'm trying to imagine myself in 1911, taking this advice is a step too far. I wonder if people still ask their doctors about who they should marry. It's not in NHS Direct: I wonder what they're told.

The woman who saved the children

How had I not heard of Eglantyne Jebb? 105 years older than me, in 1911 she was touring the Tyrol with her sick mother, writing passionate letters to a former colleague and wondering about her social purpose. Two years later, affair over, she set off for the Balkans (a war zone) to oversee the distribution of aid, including investigating the truth of a massacre. The information she uncovered was so sensitive she sewed it into her clothing for safety.

It's what Eglantyne did six years later that makes me think I should know her: just after the First World War she founded Save the Children. With her team - including one of her equally interesting sisters - she organised relief for children all over Europe, including those in 'enemy' countries. What she did there has left a legacy, not only in lives saved and an organisation of international standing, but in the whole way we think about children at war.

I've just finished her biography - The Woman Who Saved the Children, by Clare Mulley. Amazed by Eglantyne's achievements, I enjoyed following her through her life - finding empathy with her frequent depression and her feelings of purposelessness, and finding hope in the fact that she did, eventually, figure it all out.

I am inspired - but also outraged. How many other eminent, impressive women have I never heard of? The 1920s-30s are a period I studied at GCSE: I know about Lloyd George and Clemenceau but had not once heard of the parallel, influential peace movement, with its often female leaders.

I will go in search of further such women. Meanwhile thank you Clare Mulley - I recommend this book to everyone.

Historical Mutton Research Episode 2

Saturday's historical mutton tasted surprisingly good. Not really very strongly of anything, but mild and brothy, comfort food. The mutton was like tougher, stronger lamb.

I'm quite looking forward to using up the leftovers. Someone suggested boiling it all a bit more would improve the mutton. Boil boil. I'm going to cheat and add fresh parsley and frozen peas. I sit in the kitchen typing and waiting.

My housemate comes home. "Alex, no offence but - in the nicest of possible ways, your cabbage is making the house smell of school dinners." There is no cabbage in it. Which makes his point about the smell even more telling.

As he prepares courgette cakes and beautiful smelling sausages, I try to eat my soggy, nearly burnt pearl barley, my still-tough and now tasteless mutton, and the bloated corpses of what were carrots. I think this is the basis of England's bad cooking reputation. I do not want to live in 1911. I do not like it at all.

Luckily I have chocolate to take the taste away. And my housemate makes me a cup of fresh ginger tea. This century is much better.