Competitions nos. 91A and 91B: results

It’s the Christmas issue (although there will be another issue before the New Year), so Thomas Earle Welby has set up a seasonal competition: how to cook a turkey, in rhyme. There are many runners up, including W.A. Rathkey, who can be found in periodicals in the 1930s, and composed this limerick:

G. B. Shaw wrote to Yeats: “P’haps it’s mad of me,
And I know that you folks with think bad of me,
But may I remark,
Before you embark,
That I am the Irish Academy.”

But the winners are Belinda and Lester Ralph. As Welby remarks, they’re eschewing the traditional roast turkey. He also woders how onions can be fried in mayonnaise, but drily comments that Belinda must have meant something else, as Shakespeare did in his difficult passages. I think I’d have problems with Ralph’s iced chicken cream.

91B is a four-liner to celebrate surviving until Boxing Day. The entries are deemed a ‘poor lot’, but prizes are given to Heber and Seacape, the latter taking, as Welby notes, a bit of a gamble. (Welby was the editor of Landor’s collected poems, and Seacape is parodying Landor.)

Competitions 53A and 53B: results

James Agate notes that the 100th anniversary of Mrs. Siddons’ death is approaching: June 8th 1931. He wants 250 words on the contention (‘fallacious or otherwise’) that we would not think much of her now.

Sarah Siddons as The Tragic Muse (detail) by Joshua Reynolds

It’s interesting that this is essentially a perfectly serious competition. You could ask the same question now about Laurence Olivier or Charlie Chaplin. Styles of acting come and go. I was intrigued to see what the response would be – Agate is of course the right person to ask, as he is the pre-eminent theatre critic of his day.

In the event not many more than twenty entered this competition, and many turned Agate tetchy. Rather unfairly, he suggests that ‘fallacious or otherwise’ is A Big Hint, and that it’s a waste of time comparing actresses who exist in very different contexts. That, he says, is ‘the correct answer, or rather the answer I was looking for’. He even quotes, anonymously, an entrant who has had the temerity to suggest that Marie Tempest and Sybil Thorndike must be regarded as superior. So I came away from this competition a little disgruntled.

He allocates a single prize to Belinda, and shifts the balance to 53B.

For 53B, parodies are invited of either a) Humbert Wolfe, b) A.A.Milne or c) Wilhelmina Stitch having encountered a dead bird. Wolfe we know from the WR, and I imagine most people are familiar with A.A.Milne …

Wilhelmina Stitch

AA Milne

But Wilhelmina Stitch (1888-1936)  a poet, was best known for her pearls, if that’s the word I’m looking for, of wisdom in The Daily Graphic, and there are some extracts here. Once you’ve spotted the rhymes, you may feel that Patience Strong was a positive Tennyson.

Agate picks out William Bliss (a regular entrant and near-winner) for suggesting that Wolfe is the only real poet, and he can’t see how to parody him, but offers what he might have written, and cites it rather dismissively as ‘how the right thing becomes the wrong when it is not the thing which is wanted’. I have unwarmed to James Agate. Lilian Braithwaite, the actress, once responded to Agate saying she was the second most beautiful woman in London by announcing that she would ‘long cherish that, coming from the second-best critic’. On this evidence, she let him off lightly.

To the spoils of the victors. Gertrude Pitt scoops the top prize (Wolfe), W.Hodgson Burnet follows hard behind (Milne) and Letty Stack gets the held-over half-guinea for a demolition job on Stitch:

Competitions nos. 48A and 48B: results

J.C. Squire returns with a competition that has been set many times in the ‘modern era’: by which I suppose I mean since I started entering in 1978. Hmmm. The task is to write up to 300 words in any genre, composed entirely of monosyllables. Squire (who seems to me the judge who understands his audience best) attracts a large postbag. There is a long list of near-misses, including Jane Smith (aged 12) and somebody with an amusing pseudonym, Corona Underwood (they’re two makes of typewriter). Another also-ran is V.I.Longman, a writer whose novel ‘Harvest’ (1913) has been considered culturally significant enough to be be reprinted in the last decade in France. Longman is a bit of a tricky figure to identify, but I would guess that it’s Violet Isabelle Longman, who married first a man called Balkwill, and secondly a man called Dean: but the British Library does not catalogue her 1913 novel.

The prizewinners are Belinda and C.H.P.:

48B is for a ballade – and Squire does say ballade, not ballad – with the refrain ‘If only I had stopped to think’. He’s had a large postbag for this, too, which he’s been able to winnow by removing all those who didn’t use the ballade form properly – including his sister! One of the competitors who misses out is W. Leslie Nicholls, who wrote a number of hymns, and whose poems can sometimes be found in contemporary magazines (he has a villanelle in The Windsor Magazine in 1928). He later became an actuary, and there is quite a helpful obituary of him on an actuarial site:

W. Leslie Nicholls, a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries and an Associate of the Society, died in Mount Royal, Quebec on June 22, 1992. He was 87 years old. Born in London, England [in 1905] Mr. Nicholls attended Alleyn’s school there. He was on the actuarial staff of Atlas Assurance Company in that city from 1923 to 1937, earning his Institute Fellowship in 1931. Atlas bought control of Montreal Life Insurance Company in 1937, and he was sent to Canada to become Actuary of the company. In 1938 he was granted Society Associateship by waiver of examinations. For many years he was General Manager and Actuary of Montreal Life and was elected Vice President and General Manager in 1956. He inherited the financial stewardship of Montreal Life in difficult circumstances and not only nursed it through rough patches but also built it into one of the soundest small-medium companies in Canada. He retired in 1970, living in Mount Royal until his death. Mr. Nicholls was a quiet man who performed his duties effectively and was well liked by those who knew him. He was a devout member of the Mount Royal United Church and was its treasurer for 30 years, up the day he died. He was also an avid lawn bowler. He is survived by his wife, Laura.

Need I say that T.E.Casson was in the running?

The winners are H.S. Mackintosh and D.C.R.Francombe. H.S. Mackintosh was keen on the writing of ballades, and he was known to Squire, who had published a ballade by him in the paper he edited, the London Mercury. It may have been this ballade that was picked out by Belloc for an anthology in 1931 (One Hundred And One Ballades) – and Mackintosh produced his own collection, Ballades and other verse in 1953 (Rupert Hart-Davis). Another of his ballades can be found here. He was evidently Scots, and this may possibly mean he was the rugby player who played for Scotland in 1928, and subsequently became a teacher: idle speculation.

The week these were published (February 21 1931), Gerald Barry started a new feature in The Week-end Review. It was called ‘This England’, and Gerald Barry had the idea from a column in an American newspaper The American Mercury, which had a similar column, ‘Americana’. It was instantly popular with readers, and it still survives in New Statesman. It proved, even more than the competition, to be one of the attractions for Kingsley Martin when he absorbed the WR into New Statesman (by which time, Barry had already had an anthology printed). In its third week, Barry wrote quite a serious article in its praise, ironically perhaps making much of the fact that people were complaining that a chocolate advert showed someone smoking, and objected. He referred to tobacco as an ‘alleged poison’. But this little historical clanger doesn’t detract from how seriously Barry saw the job of This England as being a way of debunking ‘the pontifications of magistrates and coroners’ and others who threatened the liberty of the individual.