The Game of 100 Games

Well before a Columbian dancer came up with a worldwide fitness phenomenon called 'Zumba' in the 1990s, there was 'the game of 100 games' - and it was called ZIMBA...

What is Zimba? I don't know. But I discovered a fabulous full-page art-deco inspired advert for the game in a 1934 programme for the Regal Cinema which was situated in North London, on the southern stretch of Golders Green heading towards Child's Hill. The cinema itself had a very short life from 1932 to 1956, before it was taken over by Top Rank, and transformed into a ten pin bowling venue. But I wonder how many years the game of Zimba was played for, before it would slide into the land of the lost?

she's got a perfect 'permanent wave' hairdo, but what is she holding?

on this site now stands 21st century residential apartments - this postcard dates from 1932, when the Regal screened Ernst Lubitsch's, 'Broken Lullabye' aka 'The Man I Killed'

People You See: The Shop Sign Men

Here's a super one-page spread from 'Teddy Bear'. Back in 1969 the comic declared itself to be "the best Picture Paper for Young Children". Young readers got 16 colour and black and white pages for 7d - with a nice regular full page series called 'People you See'. These were rather trad Ladybird Book-like depictions of people at work - like these Shop Fitters fixing a new sign to Brown the bakers in a high street somewhere near you 45 years ago...

Can you say what is happening in the Picture?

Do You Know

What Causes Fog?

My parents always drank Brooke Bond (PG Tips) tea - and I still do. However my maternal grandparents only kept the Ty.Phoo brand in the cupboard above the fridge. Back in the late 1960s, I used to clamber up their little step-ladder to grab the packets of tea, and attempt to cut-out the black and white photo of a football star which was often printed on one of the side panels.

I was swiftly re-united with those memories last year, when I bought a slim album of Ty.Phoo's 'Do You Know' cards in Spitalfields Market for a few quid. Dating from 1962, they're before my time, but what a delightful period piece. A series of 24 picture cards, each one answering a 'Do You Know' question on the reverse: What causes a Rainbow?, What is a Mirage?, How does a Fly walk Upside-Down? and so on...

When I got home and tried to find more about their history online, what was clear from the start was that they're actually almost worthless to collectors! But so what.

Card No.23 is just magnificent. A superbly evocative painting of London's Piccadilly Circus in the fog. A tiny masterpiece designed as a freebie for tea drinkers like my grandparents to hand over to their grandchildren. Interesting that by 1962 when this card was issued, those notorious pea-souper fogs were already recent history. The introduction of the Clean Air Act of 1956 had banned the use of coal for domestic fires, which drastically reduced the sulfurous thick smog that once hung over London.

Ty.Phoo's foggy London squeezed into just 3.7 cms x 6.8 cms

Ty.Phoo was a product of  Edwardian Britain, and the word means 'doctor' in Chinese 

Now this is a FAB publicity shot for the brand c.1967. I never knew drinking a Cuppa T  could be such fun! Maybe that was when my grandparents became Ty.Phoo devo-teas...

London Bus Tickets 1970s

For you Londoners who have deeply embedded memories of the clicks and twists of a Routemaster Bus Conductor turning the knobs and handles of their Gibson ticket machines - this first posting of 2014 is especially for you! Of course everyone is invited to the party - and enjoy viewing some of the very same thin paper tickets that were handed to me some 40 years ago...

Below is a 3 Pence ticket. The vogue back then was a Blackjack/Pontoon-like competition, where we'd compare tickets with other school pals and passengers. Here's a 21 winning ticket scored on a 260 Bus:

ORD Class - must have been my Mum's ticket

Back in the mid-70s, the cost of a spiraling inflation hit the schoolkids pockets, and my 3p ticket soon became 4p, and then 5p. A score of 21 was not the only winning bus ticket. Others were cool-looking sequences of numbers - like four of the same:

C Class stood for Child Single fare

Four 2's on a 26 Bus 

All the eights

I must have been over-child's age when I got this ticket which was produced by an alpha-coded Gibson machine. Fare charts were displayed in buses as the machine printed a letter rather than a number in the FARE PAID section. Rising ticket prices meant that instead of a combination of multiple tickets being issued to cover a single fare, or price bands needing constant changing, just a single letter would do the trick.

A chart dated February 1980. Fares went from A to P

Amazing to think that nowadays kids go free on London Buses, and that just one flat fare covers any length of journey. Back then, you were kicked off the bus if the conductor had spotted that you'd extended your journey without paying the correct fare!

Leon's, Quaker Street, London E1

Leon's was literally a corner shop selling newspapers, sweets and groceries on the edge of Quaker Street and Grey Eagle Street, just off East London's Brick Lane. I took this photograph of Leon's long shuttered-up shopfront in 1988. At the time, it was one of many closed-down businesses that I was recording in the area - before the so-called 'regeneration'.

Just today, I spoke with someone who had very fond memories of the shop, and its owner. With a tear in his eye, he reminisced about a time when Leon had actually given his father shelter in a room at the back of the shop when he was in troubled times.

47 Quaker Street, twenty five years ago

Years after Leon had shut up shop, this is a remarkable coincidence. It is Leon's old shopfront that had been selected for a spray-painted message for 'Crisis', the national charity for single homeless people (whose headquarters are still based just around the corner from the site of Leon's shop).

The 'Crisis at Christmas' campaign had begun in 1971, with a small team of volunteers providing food and shelter for homeless people at the first 'Open Christmas'. Forty two years on,  there will be ten 'Crisis' centres around England and Scotland, staffed by volunteers and employees, welcoming homeless people in from the cold for warmth, support and comfort. 

Happy Holidays

Seven Seas Books, Berlin

Yesterday lunchtime I dropped in to Housman's Bookshop which has been based at 5 Caledonian Road, King's Cross since 1958. It's a marvelous place, housing a treasure trove of radical books, journals, 'zines and ephemera, and a superb London-related writings section.

In their used-book basement I came across a copy of Jan Petersen's 'Our Street' written in 1934, and published by Seven Seas Books in 1961. It's a book that I'd come across several references to - but I'd never seen it - or knew of a paperback edition.

Several intriguing stories here. Firstly the book itself  which is based on left-wing resistance to the Nazis in an ordinary Berlin street (Wallstrasse, Charlottenburg district). Petersen, a Communist activist, was known to the Nazis, and was on one of their death-lists. So he typed-up two copies of the manuscript of 'Our Street'. One was bound for England in the hands of a German soldier he knew - but it was thrown into the sea to avoid last-minute detection. The other - and the copy that would eventually sell one million copies worldwide - was smuggled out of Germany and into Prague by Petersen himself. Amazingly, the manuscript was first split up into two sections - and then concealed into two enormous cakes that Petersen had baked! The first English translation of the book was eventually published in 1938 under Victor Gollancz's 'Left Book Club' imprint.

But what's the story of  my copy of 'Our Street' - which was published in English, in East Germany, sixteen years after the end of WW2?

Cover design by Lothar Reher

That's down to a fascinating publisher called Seven Sea Books, that was based in Glinkastrasse, Berlin. Seven Seas had been founded in 1958 by the American Gertrude Gelbin, the wife of the German author Stefan Heym.

Heym (real name Helmut Flieg), was Jewish, and an outspoken anti-Nazi who had fled Germany in 1933, and had been living in the US since 1935. He was attached to the American psychological warfare unit during the War, composing destabilizing communications to the German soldiers - but by 1952 he and Gelbin had decided to quit 'the West' in protest of the American involvement in the Korean War. Seven Seas Books initially published Heym's own writing, as well as the work of the 'Hollywood Ten' blacklisted screenwriters.

Significantly, though Seven Seas Books were all in English, and mostly printed for the export market (India, Ghana and Australia were popular destinations). Gelbin also declared that the Seven Seas publications were by 'progressive authors, neglected or censored in their own countries, and favouring work that demonstrated anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-war themes, but which also possessed considerable literary merit'.

Although there doesn't appear to be a great deal written about the history of Seven Seas, several online posts include incomplete listings of their output over some twenty or so years. Around 140 books in all...

Written in 1947, this classic part-biography, part-compilation of Jack London''s life and work by Philip Foner was re-printed by Seven Seas Books in 1958.
Below the publishing information inside is the typed addition (as seen at the head of this posting):
 'Printed in East Germany-Soviet occupied'

Published in 1966. Cover design by Lothar Reher

First published in 1953, this Seven Seas Books edition came out in 1966. Another cover designed by Lothar Reher.

another Pop Art series in a different kitchen