Mornington Crescent - the poem

Found - a slim volume of poetry called Annotations (London: Humphrey Milford, 1922) by 'Susan Miles'' (i.e. Ursula Wyie Roberts 1887-1975 feminist, suffragist and poet). She wrote a pamphlet in 1912 The Cause of Purity and Women's Suffrage. This copy is signed in 1960 to Russell and Letitia Sedgwick. The poem's title is taken from the famous tube station (and later the humorous improvisational radio game) Mornington Crescent. It is slightly reminiscent in sentiment and setting of Ezra Pound's earlier imagist haiku of 1919 In a Station of the Metro - 'The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/ Petals on a wet, black bough.'  Persephone recently republished Susan Miles's  Lettice Delmer, a novel in verse, which had first appeared in 1958. ‘Its simplicities are at a profound level. The theme is a great one and the characters are superb,’ wrote Storm Jameson. Her poetry was also anthologised in the 1920s by poetaster Harold Monro, said to be a hard man to please when it came to poetry...

MORNINGTON CRESCENT

HOMELY-FEATURED little daughter in the Tube,
Homely-featured mother,
Why have you turned for me this criss-cross world
Into a place of beauty
And of peace?
You have not spoken;
You have just sat there
Silent.
Your four grey eyes
Are four grey pools of unplumbed joy.

Toad in the Hole - the progenitor of pinball?

It’s called Toad in the Hole and it was popular (and still is, to some extent) in some pubs, especially in South East England, and particularly around Lewes. According to one online source, competitors stood back from a sort of   table on top of which was a sloping board containing holes. The object was to aim thick coin-like ‘toads’ towards these holes. Those toads that fell through the holes scored points.
However, an interesting variant of the game can be found in an illustrated article by the folklorist L.N.Candlin that appeared in the magazine Courier for November 1949. In this version:

The board for the game is about the size of modern dinner wagon and has three shelves. The top one has a large toad sitting in the middle with its mouth wide open. Around it are a number of hazards. The rest of the apparatus includes a miniature paddle-wheel, two trap doors hinged in the middle and guarded by hoops, and a number of holes, two of which are screened by iron hoops.

In this version, which was being played at the Bull Inn, West Clandon, Surrey, on Candlin’s visit, the prime object was to propel the coin-like missile (Candlin does not mention that they were called toads) into the toad’s mouth, but failing this, into one of the holes and down a chute to lie in a tray against one of the numbers painted on the lower shelves. What makes this particular apparatus similar to a modern pinball machine are some additions to the basic version of the table----the paddle wheel which, when turned, may have  guided any toad that had failed to drop into a hole towards the trap door, and the hoops which were there to prevent toads from entering the holes. According to Candlin, Toad in the Hole was played in some form or other in the reign of Elizabeth the First.

A phone call to the Bull’s Head, as it is now called, revealed that the current owner was aware of the pub’s old Toad in the Hole machine, but had no idea of where it was now, nor whether the game was still played in pubs in the district. Perhaps it ended up in the private collection of a regular at the pub, simply fell to bits, or was discarded when a new owner decided to replace it with a jukebox.

I wonder what Pinball wizard Tommy would have felt about all this… [RR]

Mad March Hare Card Party

From a 1921 booklet published in Cincinatti. The game of 500 (a Contract Bridge related game close to Euchre) was popular in the 1920s and tally cards for it sometimes turn up on Ebay.  The book also has suggestions for an October Nut party where guests come as the thing they most dislike 'thus a man may rouge his cheeks and paint his lips and spray himself with a strong perfume, while a woman may wear a plug of tobacco on cord as a pendant' and many nut related dishes can be served including 'black walnut ice cream.' Autre temps, autres moeurs.

MARCH

A Mad March Hare Card Party

  Trace the outline of a rabbit in the corner of a correspondence card and write thereon this invitation:

  The Hatter and the Dormouse and the Mad March Hare–all three,

  Would like to have the pleasure of your jolly company,

  To help them celebrate in a manner fit and hearty

  The umptieth anniversary of their famous "Mad Tea Party".

  Below are the names of the hostess, and the day, date, and hour. The guests arrive to find the rooms all upset–chairs crowded into a heap, books on the floor, curtains askew, card tables still folded, and jonquils and other spring flowers scattered on tables beside vases of water.

A Look at Monte Carlo

This is a cutting from a book from about 1990 that fell out of another book...wonder if this is the man who broke the bank!

A Look at Monte Carlo

The longest consecutive run of even numbers in the history of roulette at Monte Carlo is a series of twenty-eight. The mathematical odds against a series of twenty-nine even numbers occurring are so great, that the wheel at Monte Carlo would have had to have been spun since prehistoric times (about 6500 years ago) to give a statistically justified expectation of such a sequence occurring once.