Month: August 2017

Warning

I’m sure I heard that dogs can smell cancer in us – they just don’t know that the information might be useful to us.

There is  a tradition, though, when disaster looms, of warnings given by animals – who will even speak at times. C S Lewis drew on it in That Hideous Strength when, before an impending earthquake he writes:

One had heard his donkey, another her cat, say “as clear as clear”: “Go away. ” 

Paul Farley speculates that the disappearance of sparrows – once so familiar, ubiquitous, companionable – is a conscious withdrawal, as these old friends leave us to rattle off to hell in our handcarts all by ourselves. Of course, if we were still woken by dawn choruses, the unwonted quiet in the mornings, outside our bedroom windows, would be as clear an alarm as you could imagine. 

The poem is, For the House Sparrow, in Decline:

Your numbers fall and it’s tempting to think
you’re deserting our suburbs and estates
like your cousins at Pompeii; that when you return
to bathe in dust and build your nests again
in a roofless world where no one hears your cheeps,
only a starling’s modem mimicry
will remind you of how you once supplied
the incidental music of our lives.

Pleasing billows of debauch

These debates about the Irish border in Northern Ireland reminded me of this poem from Seamus Heaney, written during the Troubles about the possession and repossession of his land by the rapist across the water.

What are these latest debates, but new inexpert fumblings from the old disabled debauchee.

OCEAN’S LOVE TO IRELAND

I
SPEAKING broad Devonshire,
Ralegh has backed the maid to a tree
As Ireland is backed to England

And drives inland
Till all her strands are breathless:
‘ Sweesir, Swatter! Sweesir, Swatter! ‘

He is water, he is ocean, lifting
Her farthingale like a scarf of weed lifting
In the front of a wave.
II
Yet his superb crest inclines to Cyntia
Even while it runs its bent
In the rivers of Lee and Blackwater.

Those are the splashy spots where he would lay
His cape before her. In London, his name
Will rise on water and on these dark seepings:

Smerwick sowed with the mouthing corpses
Of six hundred papists, ‘as gallant and good
Personages as ever where beheld’.
III
The ruined maid complains in Irish,
Ocean has scattered her dream of fleets,
The Spanish prince has spilled his gold

And failed her. Iambic drums
Of English beat the woods where her poets
Sink like Onan. Rush-light, mushroom-flesh,

She fades from their somnolent clasp
Into ringlet-breath and dew,
The ground possessed and repossessed.

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No Tofu

On World Calligraphy Day (today, apparently) this seemed like a good post, all about the way that Google and Monotype have worked together to create a typeface – Noto – that can represent digitally every written language in the world. Some have never even been printed. It’s free too.

Google does good, I’d say. Nice to see Monotype still in the game too.

Creating Noto for Google from Monotype on Vimeo.

September 1 1939

I read something somewhere recently that, historically, August was the month where things – bad things usually – kicked off.

As a theory, if you only looked at the 20th Century, you’d certainly want to check it out.

I listened to a politics podcast last week – a summer edition, with snappy soundbites from the last tumultuous twelve months – that lent weight to the Dangerous August Theory – by closing with a reading of these verses from the end of Auden’s poem, September 1 1939. It was hard to think it nearly 78 years old, so prescient it seemed. Or is it that all human crises feel the same when they are about to break over you?

This was what was read:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

This is the whole poem, read by Dylan Thomas:

By the way, the podcast, Talking Politics, really is worth a listen.

When you’d rather be outside

The sun is shining here – rare pleasure this August – and, sitting unwillingly at my desk, back to the window, I can hear children playing in the garden next door. The sound reminded me of this, from Burnt Norton:

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always-
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

Ah well, not long till lunchtime.

The tale of Callard and Bowser

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Time was when a pack of Callard and Bowser’s butterscotch was a very special treat. C and I were reminiscing about it recently, sharing a memory of the packet, the square lozenges wrapped in gold foil, the sense of beyond-pocket-money luxury the sweet commanded.

I was left wondering what had happened to the sweet and the brand. Mooching around on the internet I came across this site called Let’s Look Again – a history of branded Britain. It’s a fascinating trawl through the familiar and the nostalgic. Those names – Walls, Huntley and Palmers, Vesta Curries (for heaven’s sake) have a real tug, whether you liked the product or not.

I thought the story of Callard and Bowser somehow emblematic of so much that has happened to brands that were once so distinctively ours. I take up the story just a after Mr Callard bought out Mr Bowser:

Daniel Callard received the 80th trademark issued in Britain in 1876. The thistle logo would adorn his butterscotch into the twentieth century.

Control of the business had passed to Daniel’s son, James Percival Callard (1859 – 1940) by 1891. Expansion had seen the business move to Euston by 1894. Daniel James Callard died in 1903 with an estate valued at £99,570 (around £11 million in 2015).

[…]

Guinness hired a Major Allnatt to build up a confectionery subsidiary in 1951. Allnatt acquired an 80 percent stake in Callard & Bowser and William Nuttall of Doncaster, best known for its Mintoes boiled sweet. The remaining 20 percent stake was purchased in 1957. Allnatt also added Rileys of Halifax (best known for their Toffee Rolls) and Lavells, a confectionery store chain.

A factory on Silverdale Road at Hayes in Middlesex was acquired in 1956. Guinness acquired Rolls Confectionery of Greenford, Middlesex from J Lyons & Co in 1961. The confectionery subsidiary took on the Callard & Bowser name but had its headquarters in Halifax.

By the early 1960s, Edward Sharp & Sons, J A & P Holland, Callard & Bowser and Mackintosh controlled over half of the British toffee market.

The Park Royal factory closed in the 1970s. In 1981 the Nuttall factory in Doncaster was closed down and production was transferred to Halifax. Following the closure C&B employed 1,186 people.

In 1981 the company had sales of £17 million.

Guinness sold Callard & Bowser to Beatrice Foods of Chicago for £4 million in 1982, as part of a drive to focus on its core brewing operation. Beatrice owned the Smith Kendon confectionery group of Bridgend in Wales, and it became a subsidiary of Callard & Bowser.

High business rates and an ageing factory saw the Hayes site closed down in 1983, with the loss of 500 jobs.

The South Wales site had opened in 1974, but in 1984 it was thoroughly modernised and re-opened by Princess Diana.

Callard & Bowser claimed 25 percent of the UK toffee market by 1985. In 1987 combined sales totalled just under £24 million (about £59 million in 2014). Around half of all production was exported to 65 different countries.

In 1988, in an attempt to reduce debt, Beatrice sold Callard & Bowser to United Biscuits for £21.5 million in cash (about £50.4 million in 2014). By this time there were only two manufacturing plants remaining, Halifax and Bridgend. They employed 240 white collar staff and just over 400 hourly paid employees. The Times reported that UB had acquired “one of the best-known and most traditional names in confectionery, famed for its butterscotch”.

Callard & Bowser was fully integrated with United Biscuits’s own Terry’s confectionery company to form the Terrys Group. The combined group had 3 percent of the British sugar confectionery market. In 1991 C&B claimed 33 percent of the UK toffee market. Confectionery production ended at Halifax in 1992. In 1993 UB sold its confectionery operations to Kraft of Chicago.

From the late 1980s, the company had a major success in exporting its Altoids Curiously Strong Mints to America. Packaged in distinctive metal boxes, by 1997 40 million tins were produced every year. Riley’s Toffee Rolls were discontinued in the mid-1990s in favour of increased Altoids production. Cream Line toffees were discontinued in 2001.

In 2004 Kraft sold Callard & Bowser, along with its Lifesavers mint brand, to Wrigley of Chicago for $1.48 billion. By this time Bridgend was shipping 8,000 tonnes of Altoids to America every year.

In 2005 Wrigley closed down the Bridgend plant with the loss of 173 jobs. Wrigley explained the 90 percent of production was being exported to the US, so it was more economical to transfer production there. With the exception of Altoids, the Callard & Bowser and Nuttall’s brands were discontinued.

Wrigley inform me that Callard & Bowser branded Altoids are still sold in Tesco and Morrison’s in Britain, but they are now manufactured in America.

And so it goes

A A Milne at war

I was looking for a verse by AA Milne – one of the usual ones that everyone knows from Now We Are Six – when I came across this.

I admit I know nothing about Milne outside of Christopher Robin and Pooh – Wikipedia tells us this:

Milne joined the British Army in World War I and served as an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and later, after a debilitating illness, the Royal Corps of Signals. He was commissioned into the 4th Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment on 17 February 1915 as a second lieutenant (on probation). His commission was confirmed on 20 December 1915. On 7 July 1916, he was injured while serving in the Battle of the Somme and invalided back to England. Having recuperated, he was recruited into Military Intelligence to write propaganda articles for MI 7b between 1916 and 1918. He was discharged on 14 February 1919, and settled in Mallord Street, Chelsea. He relinquished his commission on 19 February 1920, retaining the rank of lieutenant.

I think the poem tells us more:

In days of peace my fellow-men
Rightly regarded me as more like
A Bishop than a Major-Gen.,
And nothing since has made me warlike;
But when this agelong struggle ends
And I have seen the Allies dish up
The goose of Hindenburg—oh, friends!
I shall out-bish the mildest Bishop.

When the War is over and the Kaiser’s out of print,
I’m going to buy some tortoises and watch the beggars sprint;
When the War is over and the sword at last we sheathe,
I’m going to keep a jelly-fish and listen to it breathe.

I never really longed for gore,
And any taste for red corpuscles
That lingered with me left before
The German troops had entered Brussels.
In early days the Colonel’s ‘Shun!’
Froze me; and, as the War grew older,
The noise of someone else’s gun
Left me considerably colder.

When the War is over and the battle has been won,
I’m going to buy a barnacle and take it for a run;
When the War is over and the German Fleet we sink,
I’m going to keep a silk-worm’s egg and listen to it think.

The Captains and the Kings depart—
It may be so, but not lieutenants;
Dawn after weary dawn I start
The never-ending round of penance;
One rock amid the welter stands
On which my gaze is fixed intently—
An after-life in quiet hands
Lived very lazily and gently.

When the War is over and we’ve done the Belgians proud,
I’m going to keep a chrysalis and read to it aloud;
When the War is over and we’ve finished up the show,
I’m going to plant a lemon-pip and listen to it grow.

Oh, I’m tired of the noise and the turmoil of battle,
And I’m even upset by the lowing of cattle,
And the clang of’ the bluebells is death to my liver,
And the roar of the dandelion gives me a shiver,
And a glacier, in movement, is much too exciting,
And I’m nervous, when standing on one, of alighting—
Give me Peace; that is all, that is all that I seek…
Say, starting on Saturday week.

poohandtigger