The average girl

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fire, girls, hobbies, interests

We all know what the average boy is capable of; but what were their female counterparts up to the early years of the century? They may not have been knocking together home gymnasiums in their spare time, but if Jean Stewart’s excellent Three hundred and one things a bright girl can do (1912.8.329) is anything to go by, they were still impressively accomplished. The activities suggested are many and varied: golf, fortune telling, making hammocks out of barrels (provided you have a barrel spare which your parents don’t mind you dismantling, presumably). Reading the book, though, you occasionally come across some rather strange ideas, and there’s the same (frankly, worrying) emphasis on fire-based fun that Ros encountered in Harper’s indoor book for boys. 

The book begins with a ringing endorsement of women’s “carriage, health and intellect”, and offers as proof the example of bicycle riding:

How gracefully and well does a woman ride a bicycle usually; how hump-backed and ungainly do most men appear upon the same machine!

(How very sexist.) Stewart has great faith in the abilities of girls: later on, she writes that “Almost every cultivated girl, at some period of her life, finds herself interested in Gothic architecture.” (Er … really? Oh dear. I feel sadly uncultivated now.) While some of the 301 things are, as you might expect, conventionally “feminine” – knitting, making sweets (there are recipes of 32 different types of toffee), needlework – others aren’t: there is a section devoted to the art of making and erecting a tent from scratch. (And two different kinds of tent, at that: “a simple shelter”, and a more elaborate one. I’ve always assumed that the whole business of tent assembly is beyond the wit of most mortals, but apparently I was wrong. This book isn’t good for my self-esteem.)

But, for all the good clean fun of camping and keeping pets, there are also things girls can do which are either weird, dangerous, or both. Take, for example, “coloured fires”. Stewart acknowledges, “It is perilous to make some coloured fires”, but goes on to list chemicals needed for the making of them, to be used “for charades or other home purposes”. (What purposes would those be, exactly? The mind boggles.) Pyrography is also suggested as something girls might like to try; and then there’s “Cremated alive”, which is possibly the strangest idea in the book. This is a magic trick involving the apparent cremation of a “young and beautiful girl, clothed in white”. A sack is lowered on to her, while flames and smoke “indicate to the terrified spectators that the fire is pursuing its destructive work”; when the sack is raised, “only a few bones and a skull” remain. It’s not a trick for the faint-hearted.

Anyway, for all that Three hundred and one things a bright girl can do made me feel hopelessly inadequate about my own capabilities, it’s an interesting read. Though, bizarrely (for me, at least) in a book about what bright girls can do, reading isn’t one of the suggestions …

Edwardian Drawing Competitions

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Children's art, Edwardian era

While recently cataloguing some of the larger sizes in the tower I came across some annual publications produced by the Royal Drawing Society. These were exhibition and examination papers which contained collections of children’s competition sketches, from different age groups. As I loved drawing as a kid, always hoping that my pictures would be chosen for the gallery on Hart Beat (they weren’t), I was intrigued.

I liked the drawings, which ranged from the fuzzy to the highly skilled, but what really interested me were the scenes that were sketched, the cars, trains, and boats, the outfits and situations. They presented Edwardian Britain in a really new way, from a child’s perspective.

Click on the images for a close up view.

Another interesting factor was the analyses of the pictures, these I thought prone to exaggeration …

This caterpillar by Betty Strickland earned the comment: “The caterpillar shows incipient power in using varied lines (surface description) to express different structural characteristics.”

W. Browning had apparently “a great fondness for military subjects”, his work at 3 1/2 is “enough to satisfy any martinet” but “at 8 years he feels his powers equal to the realisation of the dramatic incidents of a battle scene”.

The work of 16 year old B. Elliot was obviously inspiring. His drawings showed “strong feeling for the romance of travel and drawing of this sort might well become an incentive to active enterprise and adventure, and thus be a corrective to the coddling of the unfit in cities, and the enfeeblement of a race”.

Why were these explanations so over the top? The answer lay in the philosophy and ideals of the Society itself. The Royal Drawing Society was founded in 1888 in Great Britain by a Mr. Ablett, who found a keen supporter in H.R.H. Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll and was aided by Lord Leighton, Sir John Millais, and Sir Edward Burne-Jones.

Ablett’s aim was to develop the teaching of drawing for educational purposes. He believed that by focusing the eye and exercising the coordinating powers of the mind as it developed, intellect would increase. His plan was to encourage children’s impulse to draw and support their observatory skills in order to promote astute perception and retentive memory. This he thought could be found even in the most primitive stages. For example the picture here, apparently depicting a stream of water coming from a siphon, demonstrates the “delineation of movement”. He also found adult art study to be dull and unobservant and believed that by supporting the observing powers of children, their freshness of vision would carry through to adult work.

Large numbers of children took part in these programmes and competitions. At the 19^th annual exhibition held in 1908, 15,000 drawings were exhibited in the Orangery, Kensington and many children won medals for their work. It is also true that some went on to artistic success as adults. Brian Hatton (1887-1916), Claire White (1903-1997), Edward Seago (1910-1974), Edward Ardizzone (1900-1979) and Robert Sargent Austin (1895-1973) are recognised artists to a greater or lesser extent. My favourites, however, still remain the hopeful unknowns and their squiffy caterpillars and off kilter sketches. I am glad they were supported and encouraged by the Society, even if a little over eagerly.

Come live with me …

Visitors to the UL tower most often admire the immaculate condition of the books there, particularly the children’s books. Sent straight from publisher to library, they are crisp and brightly coloured still. I find they trigger sharp memories of the books I read and loved as a child. There were a lot of them: some books were read to us in school, I borrowed others from the junior library, scavenged for them at jumble sales, got some as presents.  And seeing the books in the tower brought it all back …

Learning to read in the late 1960s inevitably involved the Ladybird reading books featuring Peter and Jane, and their impossibly bright and cleanly-coloured lives. The pictures of Peter putting on his party outfit (shorts, ironed shirt and tie) were far removed from our world of casual jeans. But other books felt close to home: Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet shoes, with its London setting, and above all the contrast between everyday home life and the thrill of going to the theatre and ballet. My mum used to read it to us when we were little, we used to act out bits and made my brother play the ballet dancing prodigy Posy because he had red hair. (I’m very sorry, honestly.)  And Eve Garnett’s The family from One End Street, was the one book I read as a child that seemed to be set in a familiar place (though it was in fact based on Lewes rather than London). One of the favourite places to play when I was little was the builder’s yard in our road, with its mountains of sand to climb up and slither down, and huge pipes that you could crawl inside. Joe of One End Street did so too and was carried away in the pipe:

 

In contrast, Arthur Ransome‘s Swallows and Amazons books were set in a landscape I could only imagine, with lakes big enough to sail across and islands you could  live on and be away from streets and people. I had the complete set, very pale blue Puffin paperbacks with a sharp beaked Puffin on the spine, but the library had the older hard backed editions with those distinctive dustjackets.

 

You couldn’t get Enid Blyton in the library or at school because she was banned in Hounslow Borough, so oddly enough getting hold of her books provided the sort of thrill that other people got from reading Nabokov’s Lolita. I was very attached to the Malory Towers series, set in a school packed with girls, horses, a swimming pool, cliffs overlooking the sea, plus a criminal element among the girls that livened things up. I had all six books in a bewildering mixture of editions with illustrations ranging from girls in gymslips and plaits to mini-skirted 1960s teens. Needless to say this didn’t bother me any more than any other children.

So stop coveting the perfection of the books in the tower: they haven’t been taken to bed by children who can’t wait to know the ending or covered in chocolate spread. They haven’t lived!

Code breaking – Mystery object no. 2

Method of calculating newly discovered

Following the swift and successful identification of our first mystery object, I thought I’d see if anyone has any idea what this is. What does it calculate? What is the relationship between the letters and numbers? Suggestions very welcome!