Further Pavlova

The fiendish problem of how to come up with a working definition of the color known to Melbourne retailers in 1926 and 1927 as “Pavlova” is brought into startling focus by a lengthy and enthusiastic review in the Argus of one of the eponymous ballet star’s performances for J. C. Williamson that was printed on Monday, March 15, 1926 (p. 12), under the four-point banner “Genius of Pavlova. Great Dancer’s Charm. Skill in Contrasted Ballets. Enthusiasm at His Majesty’s”:

She is dressed as everyone expects a fairy doll would dress. Her very short skirts, which are made of numberless layers of white tulle, and the top layer, which stands out almost like a wheel, is adorned with a bold lattice work of silver ruching and diamante and interlaced with a delicate tracery of pale blue. In between the spaces of the silver are clusters of cyclamen pink and mauve feathers. The close fitting bodice is of silver tissue and the long transparent sleeves of tulle are bound loosely to the arm by twists of frosted silver ruching. The toilette of this most amazing doll is completed by a wonderful wig of soft pink curls, which are kept in place by a meshed cap of brillian[t]s. In the Chopiniana scene there is nothing to remind one of the coquetry of the doll in the lovely spirit-like creature who seems to drift on the air like a thistle-down. Again she wears white, but its substance is allied to the indefinite transparency of the mountain mists. It seems crude to describe such ethereal delicacy as being tulle, yet it is by such a mundane medium that the exquisite effect is obtained. But the tulle is not that of fairyland; it is more like the “white samite, mystic, wonderful” of King Arthur [sic]. In the divertissement of The Dying Swan Madame Pavlova was again in white, but she invested its neutrality with a completely new expression—that of tragedy. The soft white feather wings which fluttered on the buffant tulle skirts seemed to quiver with the throes of death. On her head Madame Pavlova wore a bonnet of soft white breast feathers. In the last number the great dancer changed her clothes with her mood. She wore a characteristic Russian costume of rich material, and her towering triangular headdress was in keeping with those worn by the rest of the ballet.

Incidentally, Tennyson’s “samite” (in Morte d’Arthur, as worn by the disembodied arm that belongs to the Lady of the Lake) was a brilliantly contrived exercise in etymological archaeology, and strictly speaking meant (via the Latin samitum and, in turn, the Greek hexamiton) a six-ply silk brocade incorporating gold and silver threads, much in vogue during the Middle Ages, but let us not be deflected.  

This precise description of Pavlova’s stage costuming serves to demonstrate that in every branch of the visual arts the impression of white is rarely created without harnessing the far more complex effects of colors and textures other than white. The problem is here set out with such precision that it is somewhat surprising that the critic was evidently unaware of the larger chromatic implications. And it deepens when, a week later, the same reviewer, covering Pavlova’s Tchaikovsky program (“Pavlova Season. Tschaikowsky Night. Great Dancer’s triumph,” Argus, Monday, March 22, 1926, p. 14) described, first, the ballerina’s costume for the role of the Queen of Snowflakes, then proceeds to the Empire design of several scenes in The Nutcracker. In this program Pavlova was

robed in shimmering white and silver, with diademed head and ankles tied with rosy ribbons…The fairy scene vanishes and a radiant figure—(Pavlova)—[re-]enters the stage walking with the delicate precision and grace of some wild bird. A billowy frock of mauve and pink tulle, with a tiny jewelled bodice, is completed by a tinted wig in the same primula shade, while glittering bracelets, caught with wisps of tulle, show up the fairylike wrists manipulating a great fan of snow-white plumes. Another scene transports the audience to Napoleonic times, and Pavlova and her partner (M[onsieur]. Varzinski) appear in the picturesque Empire gown and richly coloured suit made familiar by such artists as Prud’hon and David. The slim robe of primrose satin with its graceful train caught to one wrist, is relieved by a waistbelt and ornaments of glittering malachite green, the green note being repeated in a hair ribbon showing under the quaint poke bonnet of primrose straw.

Later, Pavlova returned to the stage in a “vivid rose pink silk pelisse trimmed with white swansdown,” with a “dainty bonnet and barrel muff…of silk and fur to match. In her arms [were] a tinsel-decked Christmas tree and a number of toys, which form the main theme of the drama.”

Nor do Pavlova’s many informal but skillfully choreographed publicity appearances assist us much, although they are all noteworthy for the exactness with which her costume was reported in detail. In “Women’s Views and News. Pavlova. Behind the Scenes,” for example (Argus, Friday, March 19, 1926, p. 14), backstage at His Majesty’s:

There was Pavlova, her hair bound gypsy fashion in a piece of pale pink silk and over her silken tights a loose robe of lavender silk, knotted on the shoulders and bound at the waist with a narrow band of ribbon [color unspecified].

The previous day’s Argus (March 18, 1926, p. 13) also carried a notice of the Wednesday matinee of The Polish Wedding, in which the dominant theme was “striking colour, with a prevailing effect of red, white, green, and a most brilliant blue.”

None of which solves the small mystery of what was meant by the new season’s shade of Jersey wool (Argus, Monday, April 26, 1926, p. 7), which as far as I can ascertain constitutes the earliest walk-on appearance of “Pavlova” in the guise of an abstract color, along with tangerine, amourette, nilesque (a truly ghastly effort to freshen up the canonical and, incidentally, exquisite shade long known as eau de nil), veronese, tan, oriflamme, rust, and burnt oak.

 

The Pavlova again

A small but intriguing coda to my exhaustive researches into the question of the origins of the canonical pavlova, New Zealand’s premier cultural export, has last evening emerged from a close reading of Australian Newspapers beta.

Coinciding with the first of Anna Matveyevna Pavlova’s two sensational Australian tours for J. C. Williamson, in 1926 the Melbourne retailers, led by Georges, hitched their caboose to the prima ballerina’s publicity locomotive. In an advertisement for their winter sale that appeared in the Argus on May 19 (p. 15), it was noted that suits and frocks came in “jade, wine, cocoa, Pavlova, bois de rose, and cinnamon.”

With characteristic competitiveness Myer’s chimed in on June 12 (p. 9) with Saxony frocking in “bracken, bois de rose, Pavlova, almond, bottle, palm green, and parma violet”; bordered frockings in “Sahara, bracken, amethyst, Pavlova, palm green, nut brown, bottle, bois de rose, nigger, and rust”; and English velours in “wine, Burgundy, plum, Pavlova, saxe, Princess blue, bottle, navy, and black.” 

At around this date the ugly term “nigger” was also applied to the color of shoes and gloves sold by Debenham and Freebody in London, but that is, of course, irrelevant. What is so interesting, however, is that among the more conventional prompts, one finds here (so insistently capitalized) a loud tribute to the ballerina exclusively in terms of color, as well as, of course, a deep bow to the arrival on April 21 of Princess Elizabeth of York, a powerful reminder that The Queen was hugely famous from birth.

Gradually filtering “down,” on June 22 we find the following advertisement placed by the Charles M. Read Stores of Chapel Street, Prahran, for their winter sale, (“having purchased the entire stocks of Messrs. Wallace and Shorter Pty. Ltd., in voluntary liquidation, from Messrs. Wilson, Rattray and Danby, Public Accountants, 41 Queen Street”), namely a “Wholesale Slaughter of Woollen Dress Goods” consisting of Kasha suitings “in diagonal stripe effects of Pavlova, Dutch blue, bottle, russet, and new red,” and tubular Jersey cloth in “rose, rosewood, santal, bois de rose, Pavlova, deep mauve, cinnamon, cocoa, rose, beige, mole, grey, new green, Persian, beaum (wine) [sic: beaune], spring, vert de gris (two shades), Elizabeth blue, sky, light tan, wine, full brown, navy, also black and cream.” 

Among Melbourne retailers it seems only Read’s of Chapel Street gamely persisted in this vein. On September 20 (p. 15) their after-stocktaking sale featured French colored chiffon taffeta in “pervanche [sic: pervenche, i.e. periwinkle blue], bois de rose, plum, navy, white, brown, raisin, champagne, wine, mulberry, nattier, vieux rose saxe, rose, beige, chardron, parma, Pavlova, cocoa, and black”; inch crepe de chine in “santal, rosewood, rose, beige, chardron, cocoa, parma, mulberry, burgundy, Pavlova, mauve, bois de rose, vert de gris, navy; also ivory and black”; all-wool Jersey frocks in “saxe, reseda, nude, putty, Pavlova, wine, bottle, fuchsia, and fawn,” and all-wool Jersey jumpers in “red, reseda, jade, bois de rose, cardinal, saxe, fawn, putty, grey, and Pavlova.” 

Read’s of Chapel Street were still pursuing the same strategy in the Argus on January 6, 1927 (p. 11), where the full-page advertisement for their bumper annual half-yearly sale was headed “Silks at Remarkable Sale Prices”:

French crepe de chine, 6/11 Yd. 38–40 in. wide French Crepe de Chine, a good heavy weight All-silk Cloth, in shades of helio[trope]., grey, nigger, salmon, petunia, vert de gris, lettuce, lemon, Pavlova, apricot, champagne, burgundy, fuchsia, reseda. Usual price 10/13; SALE PRICE, 6/11 yard.

It is hard to reconstruct with any degree of precision the color of “Pavlova,” except by a tedious process of elimination. However, I earnestly hope that an answer may yet reside in the vast body of critical comment that accompanied the ballerina’s Australian engagements. Certainly it was not ivory, white, or any other vaguely predictable (or even unpredictable) color that one might readily associate with an on-stage prima ballerina, nor by the insistent jostling around Pavlova (the color) of various pinks, mauves, greens and pale blues does Pavlova appear to stray in any of those directions. We may well be dealing with some sort of rich gold or warm, sunny, buttery yellow.

In any case this hitherto forgotten meaning of “Pavlova” is yet to make it into the Australian National Dictionary, nor even the Oxford English Dictionary and I must speak to the editors about that careless omission. The fact that the color of Pavlova has since vanished into the ether of forgotten fashion (only to be supplanted by a meringue “cake” with New Zealand provenance) goes some distance towards explaining why it is not there, however we must as a nation aim for complete coverage of our linguistic heritage.

Of course, there is the issue of letting sleeping dogs lie, because once you start down this path only insanity awaits, because inevitable questions arise as to what on earth chardron, nattier, parma, and Sahara actually looked like. “Saxe” clearly relates to Dresden china, which, given their broad palette does not help very much, but at least we may assume “bottle” was green.

Australian Newspapers beta

I cannot think of any single resource for the study of Australian history that has in my lifetime come as close to providing almost overnight such an enormous sweep of access as does the National Library of Australia’s brilliant Australian Newspapers beta service—“Historic Australian Newspapers, 1803 to 1954.” Hurry: sign up; subscribe for free, and join the happy throng of we obsessives who are busily and selflessly correcting as we go the full electronic transcripts of such brilliant articles as “Matters Feminine: Are You Beautiful?” (Northern Territory Times and Gazette, Saturday, March 8, 1919, p. 19), or, even better, “‘Wild Eelin:’ Her Escapades, Adventures, and Bitter Sorrows, by William Black, Author of ‘A Daughter of Heth,’ ‘A Princess of Thule,’ ‘Macleod of Dare,’ ‘The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton,’ ‘Briseis,’ ‘Highland Cousins,’ &c. &c. (Copyright). Chapter XIII: Playing With Fire,” Brisbane Courier, Tuesday, May 3, 1898, p. 7.

I am wholly and happily addicted, and Australian Newspapers beta has already shone an important sidelight onto one or two pressing matters to do with fingernails that will feature in my next book. The keyword searchability can at times be a little hit or miss, but that is neither here nor there. Because if you want to monitor the imminence of the colonial reputation of Queen Maud of Norway, or find and document the career of a particular racehorse, or study the incoming shipments to the Sydney agents of certain Paris milliners, or gauge the progress of irrigation in the Riverina, or take soundings of German espionage in the 1890s, or find someone who has hitherto been completely invisible to most if not all other published sources—Australian Newspapers beta will henceforth need to be your first stop.

For our Edwardian Opulence exhibition, for example, I picked up the scent of an object that was represented in this splendid photograph, but has since then gone to ground. I refer, of course, to “Melba’s Diamond Tiara: Mysterious Disappearance,” Argus, July 19, 1932, p. 6:

Much interest has been aroused by the difficulty experienced by the trustees of the estate of the late Dame Nellie Melba, the Trustees, Executors, and Agency Co. Ltd., to trace a diamond tiara, valued at ₤20,000 which belonged to Dame Nellie Melba. One report stated that the tiara had been detained illegally in Europe, and that the executors had evidence to support this theory. The general manager of the Trustees, Executors, and Agency Co. Ltd. (Mr. G. M. Smibert) said last night that the report was without foundation. Mr. Smibert added that he was unable to indicate whether the tiara would be traced, but there was no reason to believe that it had been detained illegally overseas.

God, I adore the National Library of Australia. So many hearty congratulations and sincere thanks to the director-general and everyone in Canberra who made this colossally precious gift so widely and generously available to every citizen of the world to harness, enjoy, and learn from, no matter where you happen to live. 

Now please let us scan all the rest, especially the especially wacky regionals such as the dear, wonderful Gippsland Times and Gippsland Mercury, neither of which ever fails to yield treasure in abundance.

El Escorial

El Escorial must surely count as one of the most extravagant acts of self-mortification ever accomplished by a Catholic prince. In any case, land-locked Madrid was a bizarre place from which to rule over a maritime empire and most of the rest of the known world, but in the 1570s King Philip II, the richest man in Europe, took retreat from the world a whole step further by relocating his court and government to his enormous new granite monastery on a commanding hillside, an energetic half day’s ride from the capital. It functioned as a religious establishment, royal burial ground, oratory, confessional, library, school, university, basilica and palace, the residential portion of which is notable for its modesty and unpretentiousness. The place is above all severe, but in scale and magnificence of design it makes Windsor look like something out of the Flintstones.

I went to participate in a summer school run by the University of Madrid on the subject of the Westmorland, a British merchant vessel that was captured with two other ships in 1779 by the French, soon after setting sail from Livorno. Apart from the several thousand barrels of anchovies in the ship’s manifest, the Westmorland carried numerous crates containing portraits, history paintings, antiquities, books and prints, sheet music, relics and other precious objects belonging to English grand tourists and consigned in their absence. In the Spanish port of Málaga, the Count of Floridablanca, Charles III’s prime minister, swiftly saw the opportunity to stock the new Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid by confiscating the lot. And there they remain, a marvelous snapshot of English taste in the later stages of the Grand Tour. We are currently planning an exhibition of the stuff here at Yale.

The summer school lasted for a week, and this gave the foreign visitors a rare opportunity to see the whole of the Escorial systematically and in chronological order, which is not a feat that can be accomplished even in a single day. Philip’s modest apartment was designed with a convenient hatch into the sanctuary of the basilica for ease of bedside communion. In the other direction, also from bed, he could look out over the magnificent dry valley down towards Madrid. A few steps away is the gloomy staircase down into the nine opulent rooms of the royal vault where the relations lie, though Mary Tudor is banished to a relatively unimportant spot second last before you reach the gift shop. Don Carlos, of Verdi’s opera, lies next to her. Only queens who gave birth to kings qualify for burial in the main octagonal room.

In the eighteenth century the Bourbons tried to cheer up El Escorial by decorating an entire set of apartments with Brussels and other tapestries (for which some remarkable full-scale cartoons by Francisco Goya survive in the Prado). The first thing you see as you enter is an exquisitely stitched peasant vomiting in a ditch. One evening at about 9.30 (well before dinner time) we were given a concert of liturgical music, a whole mass that was written for the church of the Escorial soon after its construction by Juan de Villanova. It was rather creepy.

But nothing in creepiness compared with the Valle de los Caídos (the Valley of the Fallen), Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s enormous monument to himself and his régime, which occupies a whole valley not too far distant from El Escorial—every stone of which was dug, cut and lifted through the 1940s and 1950s by slave laborers consisting mostly of defeated Republican prisoners of the civil war. The huge subterranean barrel-vaulted basilica—carrying an extravagant inscription in the narthex recording its expedient Cold-War dedication by Pope John XXIII—extends the entire length and breadth of a small conical mountain, at the summit of which rises a granite cross. You take a funicular to get all the way up there.

The colonnaded west front is a sort of military parade ground along the lines of Nazi Nuremberg. This overlooks the rest of the valley, which is sprinkled with further mini-basilicas connected by meandering paths that for many pilgrims form a larger than life-sized stations of the cross (covering an area that must compete fairly well against that of the real Jerusalem). Nestling in a more intimate hollow at the eastern, enclosed end—but not much more intimate—are the cloisters and extensive rose gardens of the quiet royal Abadía Benedictina de la Santa Cruz de el Valle de los Caídos, a nod to the old Spain, in which masses are perpetually said for the repose of the fallen, some more than others, I daresay, and judging from the size of the accommodations there must be hundreds of priests going at it night and day. This is not a place I shall hurry back to, but like much else in Spain it has the effect of compelling you into a melancholy, stunned silence.

Tall

It is hardly surprising that the Princeton economists Anne Case and Christina Paxson reaped a bumper crop of e-mails from outraged short people responding to their paper entitled “Stature and Status: Height, Ability, and Labor Market Outcomes” (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series, No. 12466, August 2006). But I must say that there are very few things that are unpleasant or inconvenient about being tall, except international air travel and English bathrooms.

At crowded social gatherings one may scan a 360-degree horizon, locate the bores, social predators, and potential love objects, then maneuver accordingly. Access to high shelves is a simple matter of reaching, and over a given period you tend to walk faster and further along the same stretch of sidewalk than people with a considerably lower-lying center of gravity; being tall can be efficient.

Several short friends of mine have confided to me their suspicion that tall people can at times seem haughty. I think that this is not so much due to any innate sense of effortless superiority on our part except, obviously, as regards physical height. It is more to do with the fact that short people may quite easily duck under our radar screen by accident. I have no doubt that many short people shrewdly exploit this phenomenon, and indeed many of the cleverest and most successful people I know are very short and, incidentally, very rich.

I am not sure where this leaves us, except where we were before.

Max

In a broadcast that went to air on Sunday, December 29, 1935, the great Max Beerbohm sketched from memory a view of the streetscape of Edwardian London.

Mayfair and Westminster and St. James’s were grand, of course, very urban, in a proudly unostentatious way...They were places of leisure—of leesure, one might almost have said in the old-fashioned way. And, very urban though they were, they were not incongruous with rusticity. St. James’s Park seemed a natural appendage to St. James’s Street; and the two milkmaids who milked two cows there, and sold the milk, did not seem strangely romantic. The Green Park seemed not out of keeping with the houses of Piccadilly. Nor did the Piccadilly goat strike one as more than a little odd in Piccadilly. I don’t know much about him, though I often saw him and liked him so much. He lived in a large mews in a side street, opposite to Gloucester House, the home of the venerable Duke of Cambridge. At about ten o’clock in the morning he would come treading forth with a delicately clumsy gait down the side-street—come very slowly, as though not quite sure there mightn’t be some grass for him to nibble at between the paving-stones. Then he would pause at the corner of Piccadilly and flop down against the railings of the nearest house. He would remain there till luncheon-time and return in the early afternoon. He was a large, handsome creature, with great intelligence in his amber eyes. He never slept. He was always interested in the passing scene. I think nothing escaped him. I wish he could have written his memoirs when he finally retired. He had seen, day by day, much that was worth seeing. He had seen a constant procession of the best-built vehicles in the world, drawn by very beautifully bred and beautifully groomed and beautifully harnessed horses, and containing very ornate people. Vehicles of the most diverse kinds. High-swung barouches, with immense armorial bearings on their panels, driven by fat white-wigged coachmen, and having powdered footmen up behind them; seigniorial phaetons; daring tandems; discreet little broughams, brown or yellow; flippant high dog-carts; low but flippant Ralli-carts; very frivolous private hansoms shaming the more serious public ones. And all these vehicles went by with a cheerful briskness; there was hardly ever a block for them in the traffic. And their occupants were very visible and were looking their best. The occupants of those low-roofed machines which are so pitifully blocked nowadays all along Piccadilly may, for aught one knows, be looking their best. But they aren’t on view. The students of humanity must be content to observe the pedestrians. These, I fear, would pain my old friend the goat…

All memory is suspect. Any form of nostalgia carefully calibrated for widespread public consumption is even more so. Yet in retrieving and setting out his ostensibly eyewitness account of the mood and appearance of Piccadilly, c. 1903, and, in particular, its free-flowing private traffic, Max Beerbohm’s blasé, self-conscious goat’s-eye view ignores the insistent clarion call of the blanket advertising that shrieks so insistently from placard to omnibus, from hoarding to shop window, in the many surviving strips of footage that were shot in London before the First World War. And the unequivocal visual evidence of cinema more accurately attests to a complicated skein of insistent appeals for public attention than the ostentatious display afforded by those “very ornate people” in their high-swung barouches, or even the unostentatious, purely private accommodations of that elderly Hanoverian first cousin of the old queen, whose long life was spent rising ever higher in military rank, and gradually descending countless notches in the order of succession to the throne: Field Marshal H.R.H. the second Duke of Cambridge, K.G., K.T., K.P., P.C., G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.C.M.G., G.C.H., G.C.I.E., G.C.V.O., died on March 17, 1904.

Airports

When, five hundred million years ago, having formed in the oceans, primitive vertebrates crawled through sand and slime, paddled up creeks, streams and rivers, slithered out of swamps to higher ground, and those most basic, yet revolutionary physical characteristics—the backbone, jaws, limbs, and the ability to reproduce on dry land—provided the key to the evolution of intelligent life on Earth... Norman paused to sip from his unsatisfactory cup of tea, and looked out the window. He blinked. After all this happened, what, I wonder, thought Norman, do we make of the fact that so many of the very places in which this magnificent transition took place are now airports? He looked at his watch, and glanced towards the departure gate. The bog and the fen, marsh and estuary: Here, unwittingly acting on our behalf, those primitive, monstrous fauna literally took the first fishy footsteps that over many millions of years ultimately led to the exquisite concoction of homo sapiens... Norman had always fostered a certain self-indulgence in respect of his chain of thought, and this reverie was no exception—in other words big on panoramic sweep, but as some of his colleagues regretted, rather long-winded. Fortunately that bit about the exquisiteness of homo sapiens collided with the arrival of a group of scowling flight attendants. In other words, mused Norman after wincing at the distraction, how curious, how extraordinary even that the very same places in which our great ponderous unthinkable beast ancestors first made landfall are these days so often the perfect spot, the ne plus ultra of an airport. What does it mean? Bing, bong.

Pack Up Your Troubles

In 1914, evidently before anyone had formed a clear view of what horrors lay ahead, the British music publishers Francis & Day ran a competition to find the best marching song of the year. The winner was Pack Up Your Trouble In Your Old Kit-Bag. The chorus is still familiar to many people, but the verses are not as well known: (A “Lucifer” was a brand of match and a “fag,” of course, was a cigarette.)

Private Perks is a funny little codger,
With a smile, a funny smile,
Five feet none, he’s an artful little dodger,
With a smile, a funny smile,
Flush or broke, he’ll have his little joke.
He can’t be suppress’d.
All the other fellows grin
When he gets this off his chest, Hi!

Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, and smile, smile, smile.

While you’ve a Lucifer to light your fag,

Smile boys that’s the style.
What’s the use of worrying?
It never was worthwhile, so
Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, and smile, smile, smile.

Private Perks went a-marching into Flanders,
With his smile, his funny smile.
He was loved by the privates and commanders
For his smile, his funny smile.
When a throng of Germans came along
With a mighty swing
Perks yelled out, “This little bunch is mine!
Keep your heads down boys and sing, Hi!”

Pack up your troubles, etc.

Private Perks came back from Bosch shooting,
With his smile, his funny smile.
Round his home he then set about recruiting
With his smile, his sunny smile.
He told all his pals, the short and the tall,
What a time he’d had
And as each enlisted like a man
Private Perks said, “Now my lad, Hi!”

Pack up your troubles, etc.

Private Perks is the archetype of the indomitable Tommy in his most cheerful aspect. The verses underline his pluck and popularity, despite his tiny stature, 5’0”, and the fact that his smile is evidently “funny” in the sense of odd. Despite these impediments, everybody loves him, officers and enlisted men, “flush or broke.” He is brave and cunning too – “an artful little dodger,” who, champing at the bit, goes after the Germans and comes back triumphant. He is also persuasive, as the final verse with its ominous recruitment theme makes clear.

Pack Up Your Troubles was a spectacular success, and when Felix joined up and went to France it must have been a source of pride to discover that the song had become so popular, especially in the midst of worsening conditions at the front. Equally, it brought renewed satisfaction to both that the song was equally popular among an entirely new generation of soldiers who fought Hitler. Felix Powell survived the First World War, but sadly he appears to have been a victim of the Second. He committed suicide in 1942 while serving in the Home Guard.

Everybody knows how hard it can be to pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile. The lighthearted tone of Private Perks’s refrain is at odds with the bravery and self-sacrifice which it urges upon the men, and the mortal danger to which it alludes. Think of the unfortunate tommies who found themselves actually having to sing Pack Up Your Troubles on their way to the trenches in Flanders. In fact, the smile is a surprisingly persistent motif the literature and mythology of warfare. It has been worn by victorious generals, such as Lord Roberts whose “ruddy smiling countenance” was noted by The Times on the Victory Parade through the streets of London at the end of the Boer War. It has been worn with compassion, but also by the vanquished with bitterness or resignation. We find it in Homer. It has been traced to primitive conflict, expressions of rage, observed on the faces of slain warriors, and deployed as a badge of courage, as in Robert Browning’s memorable scene of the storming of Regensburg by Napoleon’s army where “Smiling the boy fell dead.” And it is showing no sings of losing its power, particularly in the sinister conflicts of our own time.

The chair

Even in the mid-nineteenth century, by which time dentistry was rapidly improving and laughing gas even offered the gladsome prospect of anesthesia, a visit to the dentist was still dreaded, as indeed it is still by many people today. In his 80-page Dentologia: A Poem on the Diseases of the Teeth and their Proper Remedies (1833) Solyman Brown, a New Englander, dentist and graduate of Yale, sought to offer reassurance, though his lines nevertheless unfurl a gloomy vista:

Whene’er along the ivory discs are seen
The rapid traces of the dark gangrene,
When caries comes, with stealthy pace, to throw
Corrosive ink-spots on those banks of snow,
Brook no delay, ye trembling, suffering Fair,
But fly for refuge to the Dentist’s care.

Incredibly, Brown is known in some circles as the Poet Laureate of dentistry but I suppose one must be thankful that at least he did not choose to close that final, hideous couplet with the word ‘chair.’

The Cheshire cat again

The earliest printed reference to the Cheshire cat’s grin evidently comes in 1792 in the concluding lines of Peter Pindar’s A Pair of Lyric Epistles to Lord Macartney and His Ship:

Yet, if successful, thou wilt be ador’d –
Lo, like a Cheshire cat our Court will grin!
How glad to find as many gems on board,
As will not leave thee room to stick a pin.

Pindar, whose real name was John Wolcott, was referring playfully to the British government’s high expectations of the magnificent, but ultimately unsuccessful diplomatic mission of Lord Macartney to China, which sailed in September 1792 on board the 64-gun Lion. Some years later the essayist Charles Lamb remarked in a letter to Thomas Manning dated February 26, 1808, that his friend the dramatist Thomas Holcroft “grinned like a Cheshire cat.” Interestingly Holcroft was himself responding to a humorous remark about the cat. “Why do cats grin in Cheshire?” Lamb continued. “Because it was once a county palatine and the cats cannot help laughing whenever they think of it, though I see no great joke in it.” An English ‘county palatine’ was a county over which an earl or lord originally had royal privileges with the right of exclusive civil and criminal jurisdiction. Presumably Lamb’s cat laughs at the disjunction between this ‘palatine’ status and modern, more bucolic realities. The phrase also crops up in chapter 24 of William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes: Memoir of a Most Respectable Family (1855). There it is applied to a character who smiles “with all her might.” I am not quite sure where this leaves us, but I suppose it adds a little glimmer of extra light to the section about Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat, and the bizarre grin that makes a walk-on appearance in his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For reasons that I cannot now recall, that excursus needed to be excised from the chapter about deceit in my last book, A Brief History of the Smile. The thing about collateral losses of this kind is that they represent quite a lot of hard work, and I suppose the genius of blogging is that you can dust them off and put them in a place where interested parties can find and use them.