In the early movies, black characters were almost exclusively played by whites who had blacked up, and it reached the absurd point where black actors, singers and comedians who were finally finding mainstream audiences were also painting their faces and lips in “blackface” style. While the American public started to show distaste for the idea of blacking up in the 1930s, the variety TV show The Black And White Minstrel Show was still on British screens and using blacked-up actors in the late 1970s. We’re much more sensitive now, to a point where even the old Dutch custom of Zwarte Piet (which involves painting the face black but has no racist meaning) just feels very, very wrong.
Wearing Exceptionally Colourful Military Uniforms into Battle
You don’t have to be a master military tactician to understand that the most effective tactic on the field of battle is the element of surprise. Many and various methods have been tried over centuries of conflict to shock and unsettle the enemy – including using elephants (see Vomiting Copiously at Mealtimes without Saying Sorry) – but nothing says “Coo-ee, here we come, boys” like an army wearing bright red trousers and blue overcoats with shiny buttons. Or, indeed, a cavalry wearing plumed helmets and polished breastplates. This, tragically, was how the French army turned up for World War I; the uniforms had effectively been stashed away in a cupboard since the Battle of Waterloo, and, despite them having proved reasonably sensible in previous campaigns they suddenly seemed massively conspicuous in 1914 – almost a request for the enemy to mow them down in cold blood.
This happened almost immediately at the First Battle of the Marne, which saw a quarter of a million French casualties and prompted a more sober choice of clothing for the 1915 slaughtering season. The situation wasn’t helped by the army’s malfunctioning, ineffective guns; the French government wasn’t even able to give them away at the end of the war. These days, the first rule of soldiering is to blend into the background. You might look silly wearing a khaki helmet with a small bush stuck on top, but hey, at least you’re not dead.
Pushing a Slinky Down the Stairs
Throughout history, there have only ever been two games that you can play on the stairs. One of those involves having a running race up and down stairs – which, to be honest, isn’t something that’s restricted exclusively to stairs – and the other is playing with a slinky. Like some of the best inventions, and probably a good proportion of the worst, too, it came about quite by accident: naval engineer Richard James observed the delightful way a spring he was playing with fell off a shelf, uncoiling and recoiling, and discovered that kids quite liked it, too. Seeing a gap in the market for things that look good coiling and recoiling, he and his wife went into business, manufacturing four hundred “slinkies” to be demonstrated at a Philadelphia department store in November 1945; the entire stock sold out, at a dollar a piece, in a mere ninety minutes.
It proved to be a hit at the following year’s American Toy Fair, and in the first ten years, more than a hundred million slinkies were manufactured and sold, driven by extensive advertising campaigns including a jingle which pointed out that “it’s fun for a girl or a boy” – which was true, although boys were probably a little more enthusiastic. While they’ve always been lovely, tactile objects, that level of interest was never going to be sustained, and these days they most often appear in science lessons when the teacher uses them to demonstrate the concept of waves. Richard James lost interest, too; in 1960 he apparently left his wife and family to join a cult in Bolivia.
Attempting to Contact the Dead by Using a Ouija Board
We’re destined to be forever absorbed with the mystery of what might happen to us when we die. Many would argue, with a certain amount of scientific backup, that we simply cease to exist and become incapable of any further sentient thought. More religious-leaning folk might believe that our souls continue to exist on some parallel plane. Others imagine that we spend our time waiting to be contacted by a group of people sitting in a circle with their hands on an upturned glass which has been placed on a board containing letters of the alphabet, and the words “yes” and “no”. A bit far-fetched, possibly, but an idea put forward very strongly by spiritualists in the USA during the nineteenth century, who believed that the “talking board” could bring answers from the afterlife.
The first board sold as a “Ouija” was manufactured in 1901, and was quickly copied; by the 1920s it had achieved craze status. From that point on, amateurish séances would be regularly interrupted with the question “Did you move it? No, seriously, did you move it?” To which the answer was always “no”, but to which the truthful answer was “yes”. American magicians Penn & Teller brilliantly debunked the Ouija board phenomenon with a simple experiment; blindfold the participants, turn the board without them knowing, and watch them move the glass to the areas where “yes” and “no” had previously been. The Ouija board certainly had an effect on people – there’s evidence of people becoming mentally disturbed as a result of using one – but it was only ever in the mind, and certainly not zooming in from the hereafter.
Decorating yourself and your Home Egyptian-style
Following the discovery of KV62 – better known as the tomb of Tutankhamen – on 4 November, 1922 by Egyptologist Howard Carter, the Western world appeared to go Egypt-mad. Okay, we didn’t shave our heads and start wearing wigs on top (see Women Shaving their Heads and then Wearing Wigs on Top) or start mummifying our nearest and dearest (see Preserving Dead Bodies with a Spot of Myrrh) but clothes, jewellery, hairstyles, art, architecture and general nick-nacks all began to take on an undeniably Egyptian flavour. Hieroglyphs, scarabs, lotus flowers and pyramids were suddenly embraced by designers who were keen to exploit our insatiable interest in the news that was regularly emerging from the Valley of the Kings, while architects were inspired by the clean, geometric lines and started work on buildings with heavy Egyptian influences – including some 69 Egyptian cinemas that were erected in the USA and the UK during the 1920s and 1930s. “Egyptian-ness” was also one of the many influences on the emerging Art Deco movement.
It wasn’t all tasteful. You’d find the odd dog-headed statue, for example, and the wearing of gold sandals and heavy eyeliner might have marked you out as a bit over-enthusiastic. But it’s safe to say that this was the only time that an archaeological dig inspired a fashion movement. No one went around caking themselves in peat when Tollund Man was discovered in 1950, for example.
Making a Crystal Garden as a Cheap Alternative to a Real One
Chemistry and entertainment aren’t two fields that cross over very often. Perhaps fireworks … although while their production inevitably requires some chemistry know-how, most people aren’t interested in what goes into them; all we care about is setting them on fire and watching them explode unimpressively at a height of about forty feet while we sigh in disappointment. But the ability to grow your own crystals in a tankful of water did manage to marginally lift the spirits of Americans embroiled in the misery of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Instead of growing flowers in a real garden (which, if you had one at all, would be used to desperately cultivate vegetables) or buying flowers (which you couldn’t afford) you’d look to chemistry to offer you some aesthetic pleasure instead.
They ended up being called “depression gardens” as a result. They were easy to create and didn’t require any maintenance – just a few lumps of coal in a tank of water, along with some salt, some ammonia, and either laundry bluing or mercurochrome for a bit of pink or blue colour. Then you just sat back and waited for the crystals to start growing. It probably says something that they were abandoned once the Depression was over – probably because the crystals reminded people of the Depression – and today they’re only made by seven-year-old boys from chemistry sets they’ve got for Christmas. If you wish to be distracted from the current recession, much the same effect can be had from sitting in front of a computer screensaver.
Using an Absurdly Long Cigarette Holder
It would b
e wonderful for smokers if the worst they had to fear was making their fingers a bit discoloured and smelly. But back in the era where doctors would prescribe the evil weed to those of a nervous disposition, or simply to “loosen the chest”, cigarettes did indeed appear to pose no more danger than malodorous digits, and for those who worried about such things – particularly ladies of a certain class – cigarette holders provided the perfect solution, and they became fashionable from the mid 1910s onwards.
But as we’ve seen with shoes and will see again with cars) once an object becomes a status symbol, everyone wants theirs to be more remarkable than everyone else’s. And so cigarette holders became incredibly ornate, beautiful items, made out of tortoiseshell, amber or ivory, and a competition began to try to place the cigarette as far from the fingers as possible. The standard dinner-length cigarette holder was already pretty long (around six inches) but when compared to the excesses of the theatre holder (twelve inches) or the opera (eighteen inches or more) the dinner holder started to look like the model of austerity and restraint. The cigarette holder does still have a whiff of elegance about it, but that’s more than offset by the whiff of imminent lung cancer emanating from the cigarette itself.
Hoping that Esperanto Might Make the World a Nicer Place to Live
While differences in language undoubtedly make the world a richer and more fascinating place to live, and occasionally throw up such magnificent delights as a Chinese toy being labelled with the warning “Do must let children play under the adult”, there’s no doubt that international misunderstanding has led to innumerable arguments and conflicts that simply weren’t necessary. In the late nineteenth century, Ludwik Zamenhof decided that he was going to work towards a utopian ideal where his own constructed language, Esperanto, would become the universal second language of the world, and would help to “foster international understanding”. For a doctor and ophthalmologist without a huge amount of money at his disposal he didn’t do too badly; in 1905 the first World Congress of Esperanto took place in Boulogne-sur-Mer, and by 1920 a proposal to make Esperanto the working language of the League of Nations was only blocked by the French delegation who were worried about the status of their own language.
As with many wonderful cultural oddities of the era, the expansion of Esperanto throughout Europe was curtailed by the Nazis, who saw its spread as part of an international Jewish conspiracy; many Esperantists were executed as a result. There is a branch of Esperantists which still embraces the idea of Finvenkismo or “Final Victory”, where everyone in the world will be able to speak Esperanto. But with only an estimated ten thousand people currently having fluency in the language, that ambition is such an uphill struggle as to be almost vertical.
Dressing your Children up to Look Like Sailors
The motherly whims of Queen Victoria can be blamed for this long-running and slightly odd habit which continued well into the twentieth century. During a cruise in 1846, her four-year-old son – the future Edward VII – was dressed in a uniform which resembled that of the sailors of the Royal Yacht. This ended up causing something of a sensation which was further fuelled by a popular portrait of the shipmatey royal toddler by painter Franz Winterhalter. Suddenly, any middle-class parent with lofty social ambitions would try to emulate the royal family by sticking their offspring in a blue collar and white bell-bottoms – as absurd as clothing youngsters in a beret and fatigues today. The craze spread like wildfire in America from around 1905 – and remember, this was a nation that was already dressing their children up in the fancy blouses and ruffled collars depicted in the book Little Lord Fauntleroy.
The need to incorporate elements of nineteenth century sailor chic into modern fashion has never really died out; you’ll see elements of it on the catwalk every decade or so, and middle-class, middle-aged women will still have an urge to clad themselves in blue and white if their schedule takes them within spitting distance of a seagoing vessel. But unless there’s an imminent fancy dress party, cladding your offspring in bell-bottoms and a sailor’s hat is more or less tantamount to child cruelty.
Concrete Blocks and Minuscule Frocks: The Fifties and Sixties
After the restraint, austerity and fear of slaughter that marked the wartime years, you might have expected the Western world to immediately erupt into a frenzy of free love, drug taking and general anarchy. But first we had to deal with the 1950s, a period of repressed social conservatism. Words like “tradition”, “values” and “sensible shoes” chimed resonantly with the spirit of the decade, and materialist ambitions coupled with some thoroughly decent behaviour conjure up an anodyne picture of a family with 2.4 children, a nice house, a lovely car and perfectly coiffured hair.
But hair was about to get a whole heap more unruly; rock’n’roll and Beat-generation poetry heralded the emergence of “beatniks” (so-named by journalists to infer an un-Americanness on a par with the Sputnik space missions) who in turn spawned a radical, subversive counterculture. The ensuing excess and flamboyance of the swinging sixties made the previous decade look like a vicar’s tea party that didn’t even have any cake: as Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane was to memorably point out, “If you can remember anything about the sixties, you weren’t really there.”
Planning your Escape from Nuclear Fallout
The presence of several thousand hurriedly built underground bunkers across the Western world is mainly down to JFK, who not only pondered the possibility of nuclear war in a speech in July 1961, but also suggested that we should think about trying to shelter from it. An old US government pamphlet called “Family Fallout Shelter” – which had hitherto been languishing in some box file – suddenly had to have 22 million copies run off in order to keep up with the subsequent demand; people were understandably keen to protect their families, and if cowering under a table laden with bricks was going to help them, then they wanted to know exactly how to arrange those bricks.
Of course, the nuclear strike never happened, and the chances of any cheaply built, leaky underground structure offering any meaningful reduction in exposure to gamma rays was minimal in any case. As the Cold War continued, the billion-dollar nuclear survival industry flourished – but when the Berlin Wall finally came down in 1989, that demand for survival packs and shelters rapidly diminished. We still live under the threat of random terrorist acts and climate change, but protecting ourselves seems so futile that we just tend to keep our fingers crossed instead.
Complaining about how Ugly those New Brutalist Buildings are
The good thing about concrete is that it’s cheap. The bad thing about concrete is that its hulking, grey monotony is so unpleasant to the eye that it manages to pull off the feat of making bricks look almost exciting. This didn’t stop architects of the 1950s and 1960s creating grand designs from the stuff, however. Far from it. Many of them saw this austere material as magnificently anti-bourgeois, and perfectly suited to the task of forming dozens of angular post-war buildings.
Sadly, their construction coincided with a period of social and urban decline. If standards of living had soared, then perhaps the failure of the Brutalist blocks to blend in with the surrounding landscape might have been forgiven. But instead, they became inextricably associated with feeling miserable, and came in for stinging criticism that snowballed as the inevitable moss, lichen and damp stains started to remove what little aesthetic appeal the the buldings might initially have had. It took Prince Charles until 1984 to lose his temper at them, labelling a proposed extension to London’s National Gallery as a “monstrous carbuncle”, but today many surviving Brutalist buildings are viewed as historic monuments that ought to be protected – if only as a reminder of how not to do things.
Pretending to be Short-sighted
Wearing glasses isn’t that much fun. You have to scrabble around on the bedside table in the morning before you can actually see anything worthwhile. Your vision is impaired as soon as it starts to rain. And in moments of vanity, you wonder whether you’d be more at
tractive, successful even, if you didn’t have to wear them. It seems hard, therefore, to believe that anyone would want to pretend to be suffering from myopia as some kind of fashion statement, any more than they’d want to feign diabetes or leprosy. But in mid-1960s California, that’s precisely what happened.
The blame could be laid at the door of various pop stars – Buddy Holly, Roger McGuinn of The Byrds, John Lennon – who had managed the rare achievement of wearing glasses while also garnering screams of appreciation. The thick-rimmed glasses of Clark Kent also helped to portray wearers of specs as perhaps possessing some hidden powers, like the ability to fly through city streets or vanquish evil. Lensless glasses became all the rage as a result, until a marked shift away from student frivolity in the late 1960s saw them discarded into the backs of cupboards. No such luck for those who were actually dependent on them for walking about without repeatedly bumping into things.
Teaching Children to Read and Write by Mangling the Alphabet
If you spend a few minutes teaching an English speaker the rudiments of the Hungarian phonetic system, you could sit them down in front of a Hungarian book and get them to read aloud from it. Falteringly, sure, and without much feeling for the text, but reading aloud nonetheless. Teach someone elementary English phonetics, however, and the chances of them being able to convincingly pull off a sentence like “the ghost coughed roughly by the lough” would be very slim indeed.
The Next Big Thing Page 9