About Me

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I led workshops at the British Library2003-2019, on literature, language, art, history, and the culture of the book; and now teach the the English language at educational institutions, particularly the Bishopsgate Institute, online and in-person. I research language usage during the First World War, and lead the Languages and the First World War project. Author of Discovering Words, Discovering Words in the Kitchen, Evolving English Explored, Team Talk - sporting words & their origins, Trench Talk - the Language of the First World War (with Peter Doyle); How to Cure the Plague; The Finishing Touch; and Words and the First World War; Tommy French. As an artist I work in printmaking, performance, public engagement, curating and intervention; and I lead museum tours.

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Wednesday 30 May 2018

First World War puns

Puns as a form of rhetoric were widespread during the First World War. ‘Dug-outs’ were both shelters in trenches and retired officers recalled to the colours to help train the new armies. The involvement of French allowed multi-layering: the Sunday Mirror, 25 February 1917, p. 7 carried a cartoon of an ex-soldier delivering coal asking his customer whether she wants ‘coal a la carte’ or ‘coal de sac’. Trench journals are liberally decorated with puns and semi-homonyms between English and French: ‘Who asked for “weak nerves” when all he wanted was “huit oeufs”?’ (Fifth Gloucester Gazette, 12 March 1916), as well as the more straightforward ‘Rumour hath it that an Intelligence Department is not necessarily an intelligent Department’ (The Gasper, 28 February 1916), a joke, which applied to the Army, is still current among the Senior Service.

R H Mottram’s The Crime at Vanderlyndens (1926) starts with a misunderstanding: a wayside shrine to the Virgin Mary has been torn down to make a shelter for a unit’s pack-animals, but this is misinterpreted as ‘la violation d’une vierge’ rather than ‘une Vierge’. Puns were common and apparently enjoyed; they are found in trench journals, letters, newspaper advertisements, songs, picture postcards: an advertisement for Beecham’s Pills shows a soldier with a machine-gun under the banner ‘A Good Maxim To Remember’. Simple puns like this required little invention, but the increasing awareness of other languages gave scope for more intricate intra-lingual puns, beyond the trois/twa and the inevitable oui/wee beers jokes. The Fuze carried a joke in French based on the sound similarities between femme and faim. Or mixing visual and verbal communication: the 9.45 inch trench mortar was known as the ‘quarter to ten’.

Puns could also convey popular propaganda and pathos: ‘Boche’ was always useful for downsizing the enemy by sounding the same as ‘bosh’, while Passchendaele morphed into ‘Passion Dale’, its association with heavy losses of Canadian troops giving this an official name status after the war, a remembrance which makes the some/Somme pun all the more difficult to later observers.





from Words and the First World War, published by Bloomsbury, which is now available: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1350001929/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me= 


Thursday 3 May 2018

Print, loss and preservation


The past week has seen an increase in election material coming through the letterbox, all of which will ultimately go into the recycling bin. But as it goes we should be conscious of the ephemerality of so much printed material; when the next local elections come around, will the incentives to vote this way or that be printed on the same kind of paper or card, be full-colour, will they have glitter or 3D effects, or something we have not yet thought of, or with they even be material at all? One of the items the History of Printing class at the Bishopsgate Institute looked at in March was a flyer for a Trades Union meeting in Hackney in 1983, printed on a duplicator, probably a Gestetner, a stencilling machine that was common in offices through most of the twentieth century, now superseded and rendered obsolete by a few generations of office printing processes. The flyer is on a rough dark yellow paper, instantly recognisable as cheap stock paper from those times, and has a shoeprint across it – it would not have survived if I had not picked it up and used it as a bookmark, in a book that remained closed for a few decades. And it stands as a challenge to keep all those flyers urging me to vote this way or that, as a record of print history as much as political history, since few things are as irretrievable as a copy of yesterday’s newspaper.

There are many stories of creation, loss and destruction in the world of print: Sherman Denton produced a wonderful book of butterflies and moths of North America, published in 1900, containing extraordinarily truthful prints of the species he was describing – truthful because each illustration was made from the wings of a captured specimen, ‘transfers of species from life’ as the book describes them. There is an apocryphal story told of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, his allegory of the Christian life, which was one of the most read books in the English-speaking world for 300 years. Bunyan’s book was so popular when it was first published in 1678 that a new edition was published every year for ten years; people read it till it fell apart, and then bought a replacement, to the extent that there was a story that only four copies have survived from the first printing. Though this is not the case, it illustrates the paradoxical fragility of successful print.

The Bishopsgate Institute Archives hold several examples of printed material whose survival is a source of delight; the recent History of Printing class examined a collection of nineteenth-century playbills from the Grecian Theatre in Islington, block printed in exuberant designs and colours, but intended to serve only to advertise a few performances, and then to be pasted over with the following week’s playbill. We also handled material which was produced in secret, and which the authorities surely wished had been even more ephemeral: samizdat publishing from the former Czechoslovakia, novels typed out by hand with five or six layers of carbon paper. Maybe a month’s work, producing five or six copies, in a labour intensive process to rival that of Gutenberg and his fifteenth-century followers.


The title page of a samizdat novel, Upilované Mříže by 
the Czech novelist and philosopher Jiří Pechar


Such items are deeply precious, handled with care (and wonder), and yet handling them is what they were made for. But walking round the reading rooms of the British Library you can trace where people have been reading material produced between 1870 and 1945 from the flakes of brittle brown paper on the floor, as the process of reading is also a process of loss. Every touch creates, in the encounter between printed word and image and the eye and mind of the reader, but every touch wears away and unintentionally destroys. The fibre laminating processes that were introduced to strengthen the pages of fragile books frustrate the reading process, as the eye struggles with the loss of contrast produced by the fibrous covering; but this is surely preferable to the complete loss of physical contact that comes with digitisation. Except that digitisation allows far greater access.

The items shown here illustrate how people in earlier centuries struggled to keep up with the accidents and wear that threatened to take from them their obviously much loved books. The immediacy and care of the repairs and strengthenings show how much these books mattered to their owners. As much as books allow the conquering of time by bringing us the words and images of the past, they have their own struggles with time.





Repairs to a page of Bloomfield’s A Farmer’s Boy published in 1806, 
showing a wood engraving attributed to Thomas Bewick



Repaired and/or strengthened children’s chapbooks 
from the early nineteenth century

My one-day course An Introduction to Printing in Europe (26th May) at the Bishopsgate Institute will be looking at how and why printing began, the introduction of new techniques and technologies, the struggles with authority and the demands of the reader, the questions of easy access and the production of luxury items, the ephemerality and the permanence of print, with opportunities to handle objects from seven centuries of print.

http://www.bishopsgate.org.uk/course/3590/An-Introduction-to-Printing-in-Europe?&Keyword=&Category=&TimeOfDay=&