Counting to the power of eight

I have been fossicking through the mountains of paper that gradually accumulated while I was researching and writing The Finger: A Handbook, lately published in New York by the house of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in other words sweeping the cutting-room floor. Sometimes the things you abandoned at first eventually found their way back into the book by another route—and indeed might have benefited from the ballast of additional evidence that was originally discarded for completely different reasons. For example, at the beginning of the chapter entitled “The Finger and the Economy” I explore the relationship between the fingers and counting to the power of ten: “There have been important exceptions, such as counting to the power of twenty (fingers and toes)...and more primitive counting systems developed around the concepts of two (hands), four (hands and feet), five (the fingers of one hand) and, intriguingly, eight, a rare anomaly once encountered among a certain group of First Nation Americans which, according to John D. Barrow, owes its existence not to the fingers themselves but the spaces separating them—four on each hand.”

Maybe counting to the power of eight is not such an anomaly. I have just retrieved a letter addressed from Kyrenia in Cyprus by one “H. Campbell” to the editor of that indispensable monument to fruitful curiosity and antiquarianism in England, Notes and Queries (February 15, 1930):

OCTAVAL NOTATION.—Has it ever been suggested that the European races (and perhaps others) originally omitted the thumbs and used only the eight fingers [sic] in counting? I can find nothing about it in the new [thirteenth 1926] edition of the “Encyclopædia Britannica.” Yet how else can we account for the fact that the words for “nine” and “new” are so alike in four out of the five main branches of the White Races? I cannot speak for the Slav tongues; but I daresay the rule holds true in them also. Thus, in Latin “nine” is novem and “new” is novum; Greek en-nea and nea; German neun and neu; Gaelic naodh and nuadh. English appears to be an exception; but this is due to the fact that we get “nine” from the German and “new” from the Scandinavian, the two words in the latter being “ni” and “ny,” this last word being pronounced very much like “new,” only much thinner. Gaelic shows the similarity more clearly when we remember that the root of “nuadh” is “nodh—.” As to Greek, one can hardly doubt that “en-nea” was originally “hen-nea” (one new”). All southern races tend to disuse the aspirate. Furthermore, in all these languages we have a trace of the root of “two” in the word for “ten.”

The Russian девять (nine) does not seem especially close to новый (new), and I doubt if, being rather preoccupied with race, H. Campbell would have attached much significance to octaval counting among the First Nations Americans so carefully observed by John D. Barrow. It does strike me, though, that counting to the power of eight makes better sense as an expression of the number of intervals between all ten fingers than as a tally of fingers excluding the thumbs, because, as far as I can tell, anxieties about whether or not the thumb is a bona fide finger simply did not exist before the nineteenth century. I wonder why that is so?

Drinking champagne from a lady's satin slipper III

What is beginning to emerge from my inquiries into the custom of drinking champagne from a lady’s white satin slipper is that this weird craze was most probably brought from the continent into the theater world and mess rooms of late Regency London. It lingered through the mid-nineteenth century, but underwent a whole-of life revival on both sides of the Atlantic in about the 1870s, and flourished until the First World War.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle (July 18, 1889, p. 3), the actress Sylvia Gerrish (1858–1906), “one of the most remarkable women on the stage,” was indirectly responsible for reintroducing it. Miss Gerrish, they stated, “isn’t pretty, she can’t sing, but she has the most wonderful legs and feet in the world. Nothing like them has ever been seen before, nothing ever will again. They have walked with her right into fame, popularity, and a big salary.”

...The owner of the Thistle so worshiped those beautiful feet that he filled one of her tiny satin slippers with champagne, drank to the success of his boat, and then nailed it to the cutter’s mast; and though it didn’t bring him luck, he did not cease to worship at the owner’s feet until his defeated racer bore him away from our shores.

The Scottish cutter Thistle (above) was designed by George Lennox Watson and built by D. & W. Henderson and Co. for a syndicate of mostly Presbyterian owner–members of the Royal Clyde Yacht Club led by one James Bell. The vessel was launched amid great secrecy on April 26, 1887, contested that year’s seventh America’s Cup in Newport, R.I., and lost twice. In theory any one of the members of the syndicate could have engineered that amusing publicity stunt using Miss Gerrish’s slipper (French heels, size 1), but it is not clear how they obtained it.

To be fair, there is no evidence to suggest that Miss Gerrish ever claimed credit for re-inventing the champagne-and-slipper habit, but Mrs. Bettina Ordway Gerard Padelford Raffael Wolff Schuyler most certainly did. A notable beauty, “Pretty Betty” was the daughter of Brigadier General Albert Ordway of Virginia, sometime chief of ordnance of the United States Army, and in retirement commander of the National Guard of the District of Columbia. Bettina Ordway was born in Washington; educated by nuns in Georgetown; made her début as a Reconstruction “southern belle” (to universal acclaim), but soon ran into trouble. According to the Chicago Daily Tribune (July 12, 1896, p. 38):

There was a banquet at White Sulphur Springs in [West] Virginia, whither the Ordways had gone for the summer, and Miss Bettina was the loveliest of the guests. In a dazzling evening dress, adorned with laces and jewels, she sat among gorgeously arrayed diplomats, army officers, and government officials. Everybody drank freely, and Miss Bettina’s face became flushed and her eyes sparkled with unusual brightness. A young man who was attached to the French Embassy and who had shown considerable attention to Miss Ordway during the season sat opposite her. Just as they were rising from the table a young cavalier who had sat beside her began to jest with her about the young Frenchman’s assiduous devotion. “Some day,” said the young man, “your admirer will probably be famous.” The incident that followed was over in a minute. Into the motives that prompted her action it would be idle to inquire. Suffice it that the curl of Miss Bettina’s rosy lips became intensely mischievous and that, with her hand under the table, fumbling among the draperies, she replied: “I’ll make him the most famous man at the Springs tomorrow.” And thereupon, with an enchanting smile, she held aloft a tiny white satin slipper, warm from her foot, and bade a waiter fill it with champagne. She then proferred this novel bumper to the Frenchman. A hush fell upon the room and every eye was turned to the young man’s face. He was painfully embarrassed. From his neck to the roots of his hair his skin was scarlet and he looked as if he were devoutly wishing that the floor would open and swallow him. The slipper was within his reach and a pair of roguish eyes were turned full upon him. He hesitated for one long moment, and then—true to his country and his calling—he took the slipper and quaffed deeply of the wine. His gallantry was greeted with a burst of applause, With a low bow he returned the slipper to its owner, who, perceiving that there was still some wine in it, raised it to her lips and with her eyes upon the young Frenchman’s face drained it to his health.

Word of this incident reached every corner of the United States, and amid much sensation straight away propelled Miss Ordway onto the stage, where, assuming the name of Bettina Gerard, she shone briefly in comic operas. There followed a string of disastrous marriages, beginning with the millionaire Arthur Padelford of Philadelphia, whom she divorced after three months. Next came the not very good operatic tenor Jack Raffael, then the character actor John Harrison Wolff, and in due course another actor, William Beach. In between Miss Gerard indulged in risqué dalliances, and was even involved in court proceedings relating to other people’s divorces. Eventually she descended into disgrace, a nervous breakdown, prolonged spells in a sanatorium, and ruin. General Ordway provided a modest allowance on the condition that Pretty Betty went abroad, and stayed there. After the General died, she made a partial comeback, this time on the Vaudeville circuit, and one last plucky effort at marriage—moderately successful—but died of pneumonia in a plain and crowded ward at the Roosevelt Hospital in New York on January 8, 1905. The life of Bettina Gerard was one of scandalous celebrity, all founded on a single, rash gesture of the shoe that was carefully noted in every one of her ferociously detailed obituaries. I have not yet identified the young French diplomat.

There is a chapter about gloves in The Finger: A Handbook, but nothing more on shoes, and, needless to say, no footnotes.

Scandal

There are relatively few scandalous subtopics in my new book, The Finger: A Handbook, except for some damaging rumors that circulated in London during the early 1820s about the distinguished bibliophile and member of Parliament Richard Heber and his exceedingly young protégé and intimate friend Charles Henry Hartshorne (for which see chapter 7 “The Finger of Play,” p. 190). On the whole, scandals do not interest me very much, except when they are old, comical, or relate to art fraud, as in the strange affair of Benjamin West and the Venetian Secret. Alas the recent discussion of how the British tabloid press lately entrapped Sarah, Duchess of York, and the remarks about herself and alcohol that she has this week confided to Oprah Winfrey, do not meet my stringent criteria. Indeed I feel these matters ought to be kept in strict perspective. It could be so much worse for the duchess. On April 7, 1908, for example, whilst covering in New York the messy divorce proceedings of Mr. and Mrs. Howard Gould, no less an organ than The Washington Post screamed the following headlines on its front page:

GOULD SAYS WIFE DRANK—

Before breakfast—cocktails (3 or 4).

With luncheon—a pint of wine.

After luncheon—brandy highballs.

Before dinner—more cocktails.

With dinner—champagne.

After dinner—liqueurs.

Nightcap—brandy highballs.

The accompanying article went into much detail, filling two dense columns:

Coming down to specifications in regard to his wife’s drinking capacity, Mr. Gould tells one occasion when she and a man friend—name unmentioned—drank a whole bottle of brandy, with only one bottle of seltzer, at Palm Beach, in January, 1905. A few weeks later, he says, while visiting some friends in West Eighty-seventh street, she became intoxicated and assaulted her hostess, scratching the latter’s arm and threatening the other guests. She was next found in the cellar of the Eighty-seventh street house, lying on the floor in a disordered condition. She had to be removed to the St. Regis, where a physician attended her…In the latter part of 1905 Gould seems to have taken particular notice of what his wife drank every day, for he is able to furnish the Supreme Court with a summary of her wants. Three or four cocktails before breakfast, or luncheon, as it might be, was the ordinary fare, he says, and at lunch she invariably tackled a pint of Moselle or Sauternes. After luncheon, brandy highballs, till dinner-time approached, when a few more cocktails would be in order. At dinner, champagne, he says, was her invariable drink, and she would partake liberally of the sparkling wine. Liqueurs always followed dinner, and brandy highballs gave Mrs Gould her nightcap. What else she drank, her husband cannot say for certain, but he knows, or says he knows, that she kept all kinds of whisky, brandy, and liqueurs in her boudoir, the bottles being frequently renewed.

I suppose people who for whatever reason now find themselves immured in scandal should thank their lucky stars that at least they do not have to contend with broadsheet journalism as it was practiced 100 years ago. And besides, in 100 years’ time who will remember that grainy video footage, the mad eyes, the unfortunate gimme gimme gestures, or even remotely care?

Drinking champagne from a lady's satin slipper II

Alas there was obviously no convenient berth in my new book, The Finger: A Handbook, for an exhaustive or even cursory account of the bizarre custom of drinking champagne from a lady’s white satin slipper, but lately I have made some progress in that department. On Saturday, March 17, 1855, readers of the Supplement to the Courant (Vol. 20, No. 6) in Hartford, Conn., found the following report lurking at the bottom right hand corner of page 47:

A BOMBE BOUCHE.—A Mr. Tumerelli [actually Édouard Petrovich Turnerelli], a gentleman who is said to have traveled in Russia, has been lecturing in London on the “social and moral characteristics of the Russian people.” He related the following anecdote: “When Madame [Marie] Taglioni [the great ballerina] quitted St. Petersburgh, she left a pair of slippers at the hotel. The landlord soon made his good fortune known, and 50, 100, and even 200 roubles (£20) were freely offered for the forgotten slippers. The landlord, however, finding the public enthusiasm increase as his raised his demands, peremptorily refused to part with the slippers under 1,000 roubles (£100). This sum being rather more than any individual appeared willing to give, thirty-five persons clubbed together and purchased the slippers. They then wanted to know what to do with them. After many suggestions, none of which gave general satisfaction, it was proposed by one of the speculators, more enthusiastic and original than his fellows, that they should eat them! The landlord of the hotel pronounced the idea to be excellent, and proposed to make a fricassée of them, which was accordingly done, and the thirty-six enthusiasts, with the lecturer as their guest, did actually eat Taglioni’s slippers, and washed them down in bumpers of champagne, in which they drank to the health of the charming danseuse.”

I presume this is what John Cooper was talking about when this all started. Already by the 1850s the concept of drinking champagne from a lady’s slipper was well and truly established, and viewed as sensational. But eating a pair of slippers took the process one step further. One senses the typical hallmarks of a craze. “Beau Nash His Ghost,” a pseudonymous contributor to the London Lady’s Companion, remarked: “Out of Mademoiselle [Henriette] Sontag’s shoe was champagne outrageously drunk in chorus in the days of Sontag-olatry when [P. T.] Barnum was a baby” (“High Heads and High Heels: A Fragment,” The North American Miscellany, Vol. 2, No. 23, Saturday, July 5, 1851, p. 436).

Henriette Sontag was born in 1806, and made her operatic debut at the age of 15. Three years later she was the soprano soloist at the première of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor (Opus 125), and was thereafter a great, great star until 1854 when she died of cholera in Mexico.

If the outrageous podiatric choral champagne-quaffing associated with “Sontag-olatry” took place at the height of her fame in the 1830s—not quite when Barnum was a baby; he was born in 1810—then this surely squares with what the critic of the Argus remembered about “exquisites” and “mashers” in “Fops’ Alley” during the reign of King William IV, and also implies a continental provenance.

Even in the midst of so traumatic a crisis as the Crimean War, one foreign correspondent (“The Crimean Year—From Alma to the Malakhoff,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 22, October 1855, p. 62) made room for an explicit allusion to this strange practice when describing near Sebastopol the humiliating capture and confiscation by Captain Peel of a traveling carriage belonging to the Russian Commander-in-Chief, Prince Aleksander Sergeyevich Menschikoff. The “curious and heterogenous” contents of Prince Menschikoff’s luggage included Hussars’ uniforms, furs, tortoise-shell looking glasses, “military memoranda, stars and orders, a case of champagne, and a lady’s satin slipper.”

Drinking champagne from a lady's satin slipper

After A Brief History of the Smile and The Finger: A Handbook, lately published in New York by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, I am not inclined to tackle any more body parts. Already I receive quite enough inquiries from colleagues who are sure I will know the answer to arcane queries about hands and feet.

Most recently, a young English graduate student who is very interested in the history of dance described to me an incident in which a party of balletomanes somehow got hold of the shoe of a prima ballerina, chopped it into little pieces, stirred them into a broth, and drank it—a kind of homage. This put me in mind of that extravagant custom that seems to have flourished in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth whereby raffish gents toasted some celebrated beauty with champagne drunk straight from her satin slipper. The excellent John Cooper had never heard of this practice, so I resolved to track it down for him.

The standard line appeared in a brief article signed by “The New Sub” and entitled “Where the Shoe Pinches,” in Judy: The London Serio-Comic Journal, July 21, 1906, p. 341:

In the age of gallantry, for which the present period is not remarkable, it was the custom to toast the mistress of one’s affections by drinking champage out of her white satin slipper; how many young men of the present day have a slipper amongst their valued collection of souvenirs? Not one of them; indeed, it is doubtful if they have souvenirs at all. Of course, it may have been a bit awkward for the lady, depriving her of her slipper, unless she provided herself with another pair, but those who indulge in poetical follies of this description never troubled their heads about practical matters. Nowadays we are too hopelessly dull and matter-of-fact for anything.

The New Sub seems to place this “age of gallantry” at some considerable distance from 1906, but a review by Ivor Brown of Charlot’s Revue at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London (“Bark and Bite,” The Saturday Review, September 27, 1924, p. 308) implies that drinking champagne from a lady’s slipper was not entirely un-topical, in other words an Offenbach-ish, Léhar-esque, Marlborough House baccaratty, Folies Bergère, Moulin Rouge, or at the very least Belle Epoque phenomenon, and, from the vantage point of the mid-1920s therefore, a sitting duck for the spiky wit of the brilliant young Noël Coward:

The chance thus to maul the ludicrous is supplied by the two chief librettists, Mr. Ronald Jeans and Mr. Noël Coward. These authors are usually more than flippant if less than philosophical…Mr. Coward, for instance, is at his liveliest in depicting a Parisian cabaret of 1890 with the polka as its high lavolt and a vintage English gentleman (Mr. Morris Harvey) drinking champagne from the slipper of La Flamme, a ravishing and freely proportioned charmer who sustains her ardour for the polka and English whiskerdom with much knowing application to the absinthe glass. This is nonsense de luxe. I need hardly say that Miss Maisie Gay coruscates as La Flamme, Mr. Harvey being an engaging moth to this prodigious candle.

More recent sources attribute the gesture to individuals such as H.R.H. Prince Henry of Prussia (a younger brother of the Kaiser, and rather less complicated with both arms in working order), who, when touring the United States in 1902, apparently expressed keen interest in visiting the demi-monde Everleigh Club at 2131 South Dearborn, Chicago, Ill., and was said to have drunk champagne from the slipper of one of the proprietors, the Misses Ada and Minna Lester, who lost it whilst dancing on a table. (Earlier the Lesters ran a modest but friendly bordello in Omaha, Nebr.)

However, identically the same incident was soon ascribed to H.I.H. the Grand Duke Boris of Russia, and instantly deplored by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who protested in the strongest possible terms by registered letter to President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt. The Grand Duke hotly denied ever having done such a thing on the grounds that he was a prince of the blood royal, and haughtily blamed gutter journalism. (See “That Naughty Boris,” The Camperdown Chronicle, Tuesday, November 18, 1902, p. 6, and “Boris the Badgered,” Tuesday, December 9, 1902, p. 6.) One senses the the thrum and sparkle of the Lesters’s overreaching public relations machinery—overreaching because before too long it got them raided by the police, and closed down.

Interestingly, the gesture eventually came to be associated with particular actresses such as Lillian Russell, also of Chicago—though rather satisfactorily the owner of the shoe now took the driver’s seat. According to “Beaucaire,” in her regular column “While Strolling Around Town” (Argus, Saturday, February 1, 1941, p. 14),

Back in Lillian Russell’s day, no actress possessed the real spirit of the theatre if she didn’t periodically dance on a supper table and drink champagne out of a slipper. But though I watched Elsa Stenning, the Australian actress [and soprano], who opens at His Majesty’s to-night in “The Vagabond King,” very closely at a party the other night, I didn’t notice her do either of these things. She seemed quite content to nibble nuts and ham sandwiches.

Though diminished, and transplanted to midtown Manhattan, the Lillian Russell tradition was still alive and kicking as recently as March 20, 1996, when Russell Baker remarked in the New York Times (p. 23):

After long absence from New York you notice things that full-time New Yorkers have quit seeing. Has it been widely observed, for instance, that the famously talky New York cabdriver is gone with the Trylon and Perisphere, the $1.50 second-balcony ticket for the best show on Broadway, Yankee Stadium crowds wearing fedoras and business suits, and old Delmonico’s [at Fifth Avenue and 44 Street], where men with diamond studs glittering on starched shirts may or may not have drunk champagne from Lillian Russell’s slipper?

Nowadays certain members of the international bondage and discipline set have taken up this curious scenario, noting with some excitement that the shoe-designer Christian Louboutin (top) “s’est associé à la marque de champagne Piper-Heidsieck pour remettre à la mode un «rituel» quelque peu fétichiste du monarque anglais Edouard VII dans les années 1900: boire le nectar pétillant dans les chaussons d’une danseuse juste après le ballet.”

However, by far the earliest and most intriguing clue I have yet located as to the origins of drinking champagne from a lady’s slipper is a throwaway remark tucked in the middle of a tedious and prudently unsigned review of Turquoisette, or, A Study in Blue, the first classical ballet ever conceived and produced in colonial Australia. Expensively choreographed by Rosalie Phillipini, and set to music by Léon Caron, the prolific composer of bad commemorative cantatas, Turquoisette was commissioned for Williamson and Musgrove’s Italian Grand Opera of Melbourne “as a plotless divertissement in one act.” The show augmented Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci and Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana during a brief but lively season at the Princess Theatre (Argus, Saturday, September 16, 1893, p. 10). According to the Argus’ critic:

The pas seul, pas de deux, pas de trois, and pas de quatre, which used to drive the exquisites of “Fops’ Alley” wild with excitement in the reign of William IV. [1765–1837], when champagne would be drunk out of a figurante’s white stain slipper, and a glove that had been worn by Fanny Eissler [the celebrated Austrian ballerina] was worth its weight in gold, have been superseded to a great extent by brilliant groupings, picuresque masses, a harmonious blending of the dominant note of colour, supple and simultaneous maneuvres of a hundred flexile figures in sumptuous costumes, rapid changes of position, producing the effect of a bed of gorgeous tulips swaying hither and thither as the wind stirs them, and brightening and darkening under alternate sunshine and shadow.

“Fops’ Alley,” incidentally, was the comparatively wide space between the edge of the orchestra pit and the first row of stalls in which during the entr’acte “exquisites,” “mashers,” and other dandies ogled young ladies in the boxes, and puffily drew to themselves as much public attention as possible. If the part about the reign of King William IV is true, then blame for the unsavory and stubbornly durable habit of quaffing perfectly good champagne from a grubby, smelly, lukewarm old shoe may safely be laid at the feet of Queen Victoria’s awful Hanoverian uncles, or at least their regimental mess-room pals.

Further chair

A major development in respect of the chair. Using his new laptop computer and a wireless internet connection, Uncle Tony writes from a caravan park at remote Charters Towers in Far Northern Queensland: “I definitely remember that chair. I cannot remember in which room it was, but it was definitely at Huntingtower Road. It may even have been at Portsea at some stage.”

The pretty house in Huntingtower Road, Armadale, was where our grandparents raised their family of four Trumble boys in suburban Melbourne between the wars. Portsea, by contrast, is at the very end of the Mornington Peninsula, hard by Point Nepean and the treacherous mouth of Port Phillip Bay. There in the 1920s Nan and Pa built a boxy weekender, set back from the main road along a sandy winding dead-end track that was rather ambitiously dubbed “Macgregor Avenue.” Macgregor Avenue ran roughly parallel with Campbell’s Road, which I believe was named after our mining great grandfather, Alexander Campbell of Argyll, sometime director of the Broken Hill Proprietary Block 14 Company, Ltd., and chairman of its useful subsidiary, the King Island Scheelite Co. Presumably he surveyed it. The old house at Portsea occupied a cheerful rise (essentially a sand dune). I vividly recall Nan’s garden, with its somewhat counterintuitive sloping lawn, vigorous hedges of oleander, the sumptuous but exceedingly thirsty rhododendrons, and above all the background noise of fragrant, crunchy, untamed ti-tree scrub that encroached upon the perimeter, and seemed to stretch all the way to the ferocious ocean beaches. There cannot have been any neighbors until comparatively recently, just dense, crouching ti-trees, and the never less than deafening summertime uproar of local birds and insects.

Uncle Colin and Uncle Alec may have more to add, but at this early stage I like to think of Pa sitting in my chair at Portsea, quietly pondering on behalf of his clients, the National Bank of Australasia, Ltd., and the Australian Bankers’ Association, the pertinent and crucial free trade provision of the Australian Constitution as it bore upon the trade in dried fruits—in other words crafting his brilliant legal argument in the famous case of Commonwealth of Australia v. The Bank of New South Wales, which at Whitehall in 1949 was decided on appeal in favor of the banks by their lordships of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a stunning cold-war victory over the creeping, grasping talons of socialism.

Uncle Tony is on his way to Mareeba in the Atherton Tablelands, not too far west of Cairns, whence he will head west into the Northern Territory, to attend the annual race meeting at the approximately three million-acre Brunette Downs Station at Threeways in the Barkly Tablelands, 220 miles northeast of Tennant Creek. By my calculation this epic journey from southern Tasmania and back again will cover not less than 5,200 miles by road.

The filbert nail

Most authors run the risk of tackling a subtopic in far greater detail than is necessary, and need to be rescued from that hazardous path by sensible commissioning and copy editors. I am no different. My new book The Finger: A Handbook has just been published in New York by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and one of the sections of which I am proudest deals with the baffling Victorian taste for “filbert nails.” Eventually I cracked that nut, but not before the following, scarifying newspaper article joined a fairly large amount of comparable material on the cutting-room floor. This one was printed in the Hobart Mercury on Wednesday morning, September 30, 1874, and was syndicated a few weeks later in the expedient Brisbane Courier:

INDEX OF A GENTLEMAN.—Lord Byron proposed to recognize a patrician by the delicate conformation of his hands and the evidence of breeding in his well-kept filbert nails. Nothing can be more opposite in character than the nervous fingers of the stonemason and the soft hand and small, weak-looking nails of the linen-draper. And, as illustrating how intelligently observant is the Australian native race, a friend has communicated the following to me:—He was travelling, more than twenty years ago, in the Western District [of Victoria], and came upon an encampment of blacks. As he approached them a horseman rode off in an opposite direction. Asking who had left the camp, the darkies shook their heads, exclaiming “No know.” He was surprised that they didn’t know, as a blackfellow usually knows everyone within fifty miles. Said my informant, “Was he a gentleman?” “No, no,” they shouted emphatically, holding up their hands by way of exemplification. “No gentleman—too much dirt ’long a nail.” So that the observation of the unsophisticated child of nature and the deduction of the aristocratic peer and poet, did not differ much.

From this strange anecdote I never managed to find my way to the relevant spot in Byron (if indeed it exists). Nor could I imagine how the author conjured those strange images of an agitated colonial stonemason and a stunted linen-draper, or ever reach the conclusion that filbert nails were relaxed (or at least not “nervous”); firm or especially strong (not “soft”); large (not “small”), or by definition free of dirt—and that through some combination of all these qualities the filbert nail therefore denoted high birth. The issue of filberts was one of shape, after all, not mood, size, or particular cleanliness.

A separate point that was entirely lost on the author but nevertheless deserves to be noted is that by the mid-1850s, Western District Aborigines—maybe the allied Jardwadjali and Djab Wurrung peoples of the Wimmera—were politically astute and, I suspect, rather clever, in other words well able to steer a difficult course between the potentially conflicting claims of rival squatters, all of whom were armed to the teeth, exceedingly dangerous, and, as far as “the unsophisticated child of nature” was concerned, wholly without scruple.

The chair again

The chair in no way relates to my new book, The Finger: A Handbook—an ideal gift, incidentally, for typists, harpists, pianists, erotomaniacs, iPad users, and public speakers much given to extravagant gesture—other than that from time to time in the old sitting-room at Number 18 various sets of digits drummed merrily on its slender arms, whilst lifting a small glass of dry sherry before Sunday lunch. But new information has come to light. Cisco thinks Mum had the chair re-covered in about 1968, which makes some sense to Pancho because the old fabric certainly reflects Helen’s taste for natural texture, muted color, and the overriding qualities of discretion and restraint. I can say with absolute confidence that Mum disapproved of oversized tropical parrot or hibiscus prints in daring colorways of aubergine, lilac, lemon yellow, and turquoise. Rich satins, brocades, and heavy oriental silks were equally dubious. There was a period of bold experimentation in the 1970s when Mum chose to hang mind-altering Marimekko curtains in the playroom, their wide, undulating, horizontal chocolate-brown-and-white stripes offering to her youngest son a difficult aesthetic backdrop in the earliest stages of puberty, though in that period modern Scandinavian design evidently gained traction among stronger personalities even than hers. Meanwhile, Cisco also confirms that the chair probably came to us from Nan and Pa, and that the 1949–68 fabric (of which there is no surviving scrap or remnant) was much dowdier, maybe a brown chintz—if not actually brown, then almost inevitably the whole-of-life psychic mustardy brownness conveyed by so many economical, non-spry chintzes of the mid to late 1940s. The Truncles may have more to say about this.

The chair

A few months ago, before my new book, The Finger: A Handbook, was published in New York by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, I inherited from my mother’s estate a handsome armchair. I have always liked the chair, but for some reason Mum didn’t. She banished it to a spot in the attic where it sat neglected for many years, exposed to the full sub-nuclear impact of the southern summer sun.

When the chair arrived here in New Haven, Conn., I knew I needed to take radical steps to save it. This was merely a reflection of Mum’s own policy: Don’t replace any useful thing unless it cannot be repaired. Ironically, she made a lifetime’s habit of discarding certain irreplaceable things, which from time to time she assessed with an especially unsentimental, even coldly critical eye—above all teddy bears, and other stuffed toys (with some notable exceptions).

At first, to my colleague Patricia E. Kane, the senior furniture guru in the American Arts Department of the Yale University Art Gallery, I described the chair as “perhaps proto-modernist,” because what I remembered were the snappy lines and boxy shape; a certain elegance in the slightly unconventional, serpentine profile of the back and shoulder that is echoed in the outward flare of the arms.

But when my chair finally arrived in late February (by cargo ship, all the way across the Pacific, and by transcontinental truck from Seattle, Wash.), I realized it was not really proto-modernist at all, but instead conventionally, even supremely Edwardian in flavor—most definitely not Victorian. It is the kind of chair you might reasonably expect to find in the front parlor of a spacious bungalow in the garden suburbs, circa 1912. I wondered if the Pearsons picked it up in England at around that date, perhaps for The Orchard at Chorleywood in Surrey, where they sat out World War I.

At Pat’s suggestion, I asked the excellent objects conservator Susan Holbrook, of the firm of Holbrook & Hawes L.L.C., in Bethany, Conn., to take charge. I was glad when at length she agreed to do so. I delivered it to Susan about a month ago, and the day before yesterday I went to pick it up again, and lob it on to the re-upholsterer. According to her meticulous report, “This is a small side chair fully upholstered on back and arms. The finish is dirty and degraded, and there are many small scratches and scuffs, with a few small chunks missing from the top.”

In due course, Susan removed the old fabric and interior cotton coverings and padding, leaving in place the original springs, the straps, and burlap. The padding was retained for possible re-use, or at least for matching the shape and volumes. She cleaned off the dirt and grime. Using ethanol and acetone on cotton rags, she removed the old, degraded finish. She checked for stability the broken parts, the loose elements, and the wobbly joins, and where necessary repaired them with hot animal-hide glue—completely indestructible.

Susan added screws to secure the arms. Using clamps and more hot animal-hide glue, she reset from its slumped position the seat rail on one side—this put me in mind of Uncle Henry. She repaired with wood epoxy resin larger areas of old damage to strengthen the joins, and then carefully toned or tinted them to match. She treated the wood with Danish rubbing oil, a preparation that usually has a linseed or tung oil base, and allowed it fully to cure.

Susan then applied a finish of three coats of dependable shellac, meticulously toned exactly to match the original. Finally, she rubbed the surface with microcrystalline wax, and polished it up to a high and splendiferous sheen. Overlooking no detail, finally Susan cleaned the sprightly casters supporting the front two feet, and thoughtfully coated them with more microcrystalline wax. They have never rolled more smoothly, quietly, or appealingly.

From Bethany I took the chair to Benny Becker of Norton Upholstery over on the Boston Post Road in West Haven, Conn. He’s so great: supremely businesslike, indeed quite obviously an artist of great professionalism. At length we chose from his stock of clean and judiciously preserved remnants a long-wearing, eucalyptussy, dry, greyish blue-green mohair velvet, which Pat reckons is the most historically harmonious fabric, together with a playfully inventive “gimp,” that is, the elaborately woven tape that is used to conceal the borders. This gimp is slenderer and finer than the old gimp, certainly fancy, but not at all vulgar. Happily, Benny’s arrangements will be historically accurate, and also suit my personal needs—if I can express it in that pert way. I look forward to introducing the world to my finished armchair in about a month’s time, and to sitting in it for many years to come.

But here’s the interesting part. By this half-way point, Susan was fairly sure that my chair was made in Australia, possibly using the glorious, dense, deep-red Western Australian timber called Jarrah. With exquisite tact she broke it to me that the chair was provincial (her word)—in other words not at all well-made (mine). This view she prudently omitted from her report, though she needn’t have. From my point of view this is really intriguing. The chair exhibits certain wholly charming oddities, such as glaringly mismatched rear legs (mismatched, that is, with each other), a detail that I never noticed. The original maker probably banked on that: Why bother to match two perfectly serviceable rear legs if they’re apprimately the right length and shape; will hold the thing up, and are knocking around the workshop, ready to go? It’s not as if anyone will be on their hands and knees inspecting the back or bottom of the bloody thing. (This practical outlook or frame of mind is supremely Australian, though clearly he did not anticipate the careful scrutiny of Holbrook & Hawes.) As well, there is that unmistakable clumsiness of internal construction that is the universal trademark of the journeyman carpenter, or even the layer of railway sleepers turned ad hoc colonial furniture-maker. None of this matters to me. Having previously liked the chair, now I just love it.

Anyhow, here is what Susan found down the side, irretrievably lost, deep down between the seat and the arms:

a little coffee spoon belonging to the set Mum and Dad acquired after their sterling silver flatware was in 1961 nicked from Nan and Pa’s house in Huntingtower Road, where ironically it was temporarily stored for safe-keeping; an Australian ten cent piece (dated 1979, reverse view with lyrebird); and a small key manufactured in Hong Kong—not, I suspect, the key to anything like a safe-house, letter, or bank security deposit box, but more probably the missing portion of a padlock. There is a single notch on it, so perhaps this was a spare key to the first sleep-out at Metung. More telling, however, was the discovery of two scraps of old newspaper from inside the stuffing of the seat—which also contains plentiful wads of coconut fiber, scraps of eccentrically garish material evidently swept off the floor of the upholsterer’s workshop, and other intriguing manavalums, about which I shall go into greater detail when I retrieve the rest of the stuffing from Benny, and analyze it further.

Now that most historical Australian newspapers have been digitized, thanks to the generosity and foresight of the National Library of Australia in Canberra, it is now possible (using a judicious combination of sufficiently unusual keywords) to trace in a matter of seconds those shreds of newspaper to the exact page of the very issue from which they came adrift, in this instance page 15/16 of The Age of Wednesday, February 2, 1949.

Now the wooden parts of my chair are certainly much older than that, so the most reasonable conclusion to be reached is that it was thoroughly renovated; re-upholstered in Melbourne, and maybe also re-covered some weeks or months after February 2, 1949. Therefore I’d say it was almost certainly a carefully thought-out wedding present for Mum and Dad, who got married in June.

Who gave the present? Certainly it could have been Gran, but if so I think that was a case of thoughtfully fixing up a neglected but useful item of furniture, and tossing it in with Helen’s trousseau. However, at that stage the Borthwick family still lived in Geelong. I suppose The Age was sold and distributed in Geelong, but a small voice in my head wants to say that your self-respecting local upholsterer—and at that time Geelong tradesmen were never more self-respecting—was more likely to have old copies of the Geelong Advertiser floating around his upstairs workroom in, say, Little Malop Street, and not a stray sheet from the late Sir Geoffrey Syme’s mouthpiece of the left-leaning masses who lurked sullenly in the dens and meeting-houses of that sinister metropolis forty-five miles to the northeast.

No, a firm-ish Melbourne provenance puts the Trumbles, Nan and Pa, more firmly in the frame. I suspect Nan was much more a soft-furnishings sort of mother-in-law—the grandmother, in due course, of generous second helpings, exciting wind-up toys, and other relatively harmless contraband. And in that case, she might have inherited the chair from her own parents, and maybe parked it in a spare bedroom at Huntingtower Road. My recollection is that she favored cosier, shapelier armchairs. The uncles may know; I must remember to ask them.

At any rate Peter and Helen have left us no other clues as to where my beautiful old armchair came from, but what a very handsome couple they were!