Interesting, even if I have cavils

[oursin]

You know, I would be a bit more convinced by this (article about The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes), if the author were not described as holding a post which does not exist - people are not Professors of 'the University of London' but of one or other of the constituent colleges federated to it. This may be a reporter's error, I suppose. There had also been a similar previous case, although it had only involved being listed in the Peerage as the heir, rather than actually succeeding: Michael Dillon. (Would like to check Clare Tebbutt's work on 'sex-change' cases of the 30s, too.)

But you know me and revelations about history of startling secret cover-ups...

(Okay, that thing about the Mountbatten papers is still muttering on, if we are talking about cover-ups.)

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Again, I'm a bit 'is this really a secret history?' about this: ‘Sex workers, reggae girls, squatters, all the ones who didn’t fit in’: how Rebel Dykes reveals a secret lesbian history. Some of that reminds me of heated hoohahs in the feminist periodicals back in the day - a forgotten rather than secret history?

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Are we surprised: Nazis based their elite schools on top British private schools.

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Somebody gets perhaps a little over-excited on first looking into Victorian pornography - or at least, over-generalising (#NotAllVictorians is I think appropriate). It was a very niche genre! But even so, has struck a very interesting and previously unexplored (to my knowledge) element, i.e. menstruation (NSFW, and usual content warnings for Victporn).

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Not exactly news to anyone who works on STIs in the early C20th, military health in WW1 and related issues: These Are The Forgotten Sex Workers Of The First World War Who Played An Important Role In Soldiers' Lives. The historiography on prostitution and its control around the front line and concern about this particular threat to military efficiency exists.

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Happy 50th. Predictor: The First Home Pregnancy Test.

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WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO KNOW THE TRUE SIGNS OF WITCHCRAFT, IN CASE THOSE DANGEROUS AND DEADLY VOICES COMES FOR YOU OR SOMEONE YOU LOVE? THE VOICES NEVER STOPS UNTIL IT DESTROYS YOU! deeply weird and in design terms, a real blast from the past.

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This Ghost Town’s 'Curse' Isn't What You Think:

For years, guilty souvenir-takers have been sending those letters to the park staff, detailing the misfortune they believe has plagued them ever since -- and desperately sending their “cursed” items back. Yet the most curious thing about this so-called curse isn’t even how deeply people believe in it: It's how it began. This myth did not originate with superstitious Gold Rush prospectors, or credulous ghost hunters. It was started by the California Department of Parks and Recreation itself -- and it's had an effect the state parks service didn't expect.

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Everything You Thought You Knew About ‘Hobo Code’ Is Wrong. Incongruously, I am reminded of those articles that pop up from time to time about the alleged 'fan' code of Victorian ballrooms and similar. People like to think there are secret signaling systems? (Well of course there was the handkerchief code, but that was specific to particular settings where everybody knew what it meant, not bat-squeaks between strangers in public spaces.)

Comments

[davidgillon]

The i missed a chance to make the Ewan Forbes case even more lurid, because there were also two major establishment cover-ups involving his brother William.

In 1920 William was the heir to the Baronetcy, 'the Master of Sempill', a significant figure in early aviation, and was involved in helping the Japanese with starting up the Imperial Japanese Naval Air Service. Which was fine, it was an official UK government approved mission to Japan.

The problem was he didn't stop passing them information, even the secret stuff, never mind that the alliance with Japan ended in 1921 because we were convinced by then that they were the people we would end up at war with. Military Intelligence knew he was being paid to pass information to the Japanese Naval Attache as early as 1922, but it all blew up in 1926 when he was vetted for an adviser role to the Greeks and MI5 had to tell the Foreign Office he was actually a known spy. But his father was aide-de-camp to the King, so it was decided by the Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, that it was not in the national interest to prosecute him. There was a valid argument about needing to hide the fact we were reading Japanese signals, but he'd been witnessed discussing classified information with foreign officials on a train, so that could have been worked around.

So that was the first cover-up, and that meant he could go on to become President of the Royal Aeronautical Society and travel around the Empire advising friendly governments about military aviation. In 1934 he became Baronet Sempill on his father's death and spent the late '30s cosying up to every far right/anti-semitic group he could find. Despite which he was given a position in the Admiralty on the outbreak of war, and then in 1940 MI5 deciphered a Japanese signal making it clear he was still passing on information, and being paid for it. And again, Attorney General this time, it was decided not to prosecute, never mind there was evidence to suggest he was leaking stuff as sensitive as the transcript of Churchill's meeting with Roosevelt in Newfoundland. They did eventually force him to resign, but the initial response was a stern talking-to by the First Sea Lord.

Even Churchill knew about this and only wanted him booted off to the outer wastes of Scotland. Anyone else would have been hanged. Twice.

I saw the Sempill name and thought the establishment cover-up lightning couldn't possibly have struck three times in the same family in the same generation, but it appears it did.

[oursin]

Leads me to ponder whether Ewan was in the less than splendid tradition of 'Colonel' Victor Barker....

[jesuswasbatman]

The "hobo code" thing reminds me of a panic a few years ago all over Britain about alleged "burglar codes" which was even promoted by some actual police officers. Turned out that the markings were painted on pavements by utility workers to show the guys who were going to actually carry out works on pipes/cables of various sorts where to dig and where not to.

[anna_wing]

Indeed. I always thought that fan language was a daft idea and couldn't possibly be real, since presumably everyone knew it. One could of course use a public fan language as a secret code among a small group of conspirators, who would know that the tapped cheek signal meant "message received, check the dead-drop for reply", rather than "your petticoat flounce is coming off".

[azara1]

The Forbes article seems to have at least two other errors: referring to his mother as "Lady Gwendolyn" when she does not appear to have been a peer's daughter - I know it's a lost cause with reporters but I expect better of historians. More annoyingly, it says "As the second son, Forbes would inherit both paternal titles: the barony and the baronetcy, which could only be passed down the male line.", when his niece was the one to inherit the barony. I would certainly reckon on a careless reporter.

[oursin]

The 'Professor at University of London' seems to be also on the publisher's site and LinkedIn page. I find this rather sus, as the U of L itself does not have a Dept of Philosophy - it does issue degrees, my own PhD is U of L by way of UCL, but does not itself teach.

[ethelmay]

Is the male line thing at least true for a baronetcy? Because I can see accidentally thinking that only the second term was modified by the "which" clause. (Still careless, of course.) If it's not true of a baronetcy either, then disregard. ETA: Of course there'd be no case if it wasn't true for a baronetcy. I plead wooly-mindedness due to getting up at five for a Zoom meeting with people who were mostly eight hours away.

[taelle]

As a teenager I was at times haunted by the idea of such a code - as in 'what if some gesture code exists, everyone knows it but me [the feeling that I missed the memo everyone else got never left me] and I make some gesture which gets interpreted and gets me into trouble?' Not _seriously_ haunted, but somehow it was an idea that kept reoccurring to me.

[ethelmay]

"Heated hoohahs" in that context made me giggle, because I am ten.

[silveradept]

A most interesting set of articles there. The thing I found most interesting about the brothels and sex workers one was the sidebar about how U.S. servicemen seemed to be trying very hard to get infected so that they could avoid being in the fighting. What's most important is the lack of narrative from the sex workers, but it certainly seemed interesting to recognize that, even contemporaneously, the persons sent to the trenches to die certainly preferred not to do such a thing.

[oursin]

On the narratives of sex workers themselves, this has always been a difficult area to get at, except either the life-stories of the top courtesans (heavily constructed for the public audience) or confessional tales of salvation from sin. Julia Laite has done some wonderful work in this area on what one can uncover about specific individuals but even then the record is usually tantalisingly fragmentary.

What one gets from the reports of concerned feminist activists of WW1 (and some other sources) is that conditions in military brothels were an appalling form of regimented exploited labour.

[silveradept]

Ah. This sounds life a problem of history being written by the winners, or at least mostly by people who have specific agendas to push on others.

Merely mentioning the fact that war and prostitution often go together would probably be enough to get the entire history module exorcised in the States by prudes who do not wish to acknowledge the existence of sex work in combination with those who can't abide a story that is not completely jingoistic.