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FEATURES
Gaiety, a Magazine of Humour, With a Nice Surprise for Sherlock Holmes FansBy Bruce ToberCopyright © 2008 Bruce Tober - All Rights Reserved Books at Star Dot Star recently acquired a bound copy of Gaiety (Volume VI, Numbers 1 - 6, June through November, 1924) in which we discovered an extremely rare Sherlock Holmes tale, and other goodies.
This Sherlock Holmes story and/or the entire book will be either sold or auctioned in October 2008. To be notified of when and how it will be disposed of, please e-mail me here. Authors whose work appears in this volume, in addition to Wotherspoon and the other two discussed below, are: Paul Marchant, F. R. Buckley, "Arrtemas" (the magazine's editor). William Caine, Holloway Horn, J. Edgar Nichols, "Atom" ("atom" is the narrator in a reference to the ancient Greek idea of atoms.), A. Demain Grange, W. Pett Ridge, William Merriam Rouse, William Freeman, A. A. Thomson, W. C. Dickenson, Ellis Parker Butler, J. Isherwood Wright, Clarence Buddington Kelland, E. R. Punshon, George Woden, Robert McBlair, R. W. Bond, Archie Joscelyn, H. K. L., Basil Macdonald Hastings, Robert Magill, J. A. E. Kitchen, Manning Campbell. Artists include: Inder Burns, Lunt Roberts, Leslie P. Marchant, Wal Law, A. T. Smith, H. Cutner, A. E. Batchelor, Frank Whitburn, Chas. Chilcot, Field Smith, Peter Fraser, Alfred H. Taylor, Cecil Nicholson, Bowes, Geo. S. Dixon, Nibs, L. B. Martin, G. D. Machin, Harry Low, Syd. A. Clement, Morgan Rendle, D'Egville, J. C. B Knight, Horace A. Stephens, H. M. Talintyre, Jacques Browne, Treyer Evans, Vernon Shewring, Norman Pett, Geo. Holland, Geo. Davey, Edwin Morrow, Frank R. Grey, Graham Simmons, Fred Buchanan, G. S. Sherwood, and William L. Robertson. Ralph Wotherspoon Wotherspoon (George Ralph Howard) was graduated from Oxford and served in the military during the First World War. In addition to writing for Gaiety in 1924, he also began writing for Punch in that same year. From 1939 through 1945 he wrote for the British military services paper, Blighty . And he is known to have written for The Looker-On, London Opinion, and Men Only magazines between the late 1920s and the early 1940s. While he was a Director of Smith and Whiley Theatrical Productions, from 1948 through 1961, he was the original backer of Agatha Christie's play THE MOUSETRAP.
In the seven-page story, "The Adventure of the Thirteenth Club: a Hitherto Unpublished Experience of Sherlock Holmes", Wotherspoon has Sherlock inviting Watson to play bridge with him that evening. Watson agrees and it is only then that Holmes informs him, "I have asked Moriarty to join us in a friendly rubber. He is almost due." And that Lestrade will "make a fourth", at which point, "the game is afoot". Interestingly, "The Game is Afoot" is the title of a webpage which provides Bridge-related problems from a contest conducted in August 2003. The contest drew 838 entrants from 114 locations. The premise of the contest was that Holmes, Watson and Moriarty (and Colonel Moran as the fourth) was that "On each of the six problems, you [the contestant] are South, and all you have to do is choose your play from options A-F. Each option is rated on a 1-to-10 scale based on my judgment. Bidding and carding by West (Moriarty) is standard, and assume expert skill. For a reference on these agreements, see my outline of Standard American Bridge. Do not draw any inferences from East (Moran) who always passes and knows little about card play except to follow suit." George A. Birmingham George A. Birmingham (or Bermingham, as it was sometimes spelt) was a pseudonym for James Owen Hannay (1865-1950), a Canon of the Church of Ireland who had been born in Belfast. He produced two stories for this volume. He was a Canon of the Church of Ireland. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he entered the church, becoming rector of Westport, County Mayo, in 1892, according to A Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB), edited by Henry Boylan and published by Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, in 1998.
"He chose the name of ‘Birmingham’, which is very common in Mayo," according to M. Bellasis. in a 1959 article in The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), "when planning some novels with an Irish background. He had been writing under his own name since 1890: magazine stories, newspaper articles, and scholarly works upon The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism (1903) and The Wisdom of the Desert (1904). His first five novels, beginning with The Seething Pot (1905) and Hyacinth (1906), have been termed disguised political tracts; a contemporary authority observed that to read them was to understand ‘the Irish problem’; also to understand its insolubility. Hannay himself said that he had no solution to offer, in his An Irishman Looks at His World (1919), where he confessed that he was ‘more interested in Ireland than in anything else’." His earlier novels had no legs, according to the DIB but in 1908 he published Spanish Gold, which "had for its central character the Reverend J. J. Meldon, a red-haired curate of undaunted audacity and unceasing loquacity," says the DNB article. "Similar characters, such as the doctor in Send for Dr. O'Grady (1923), enlivened many later novels; and in 1913 General John Regan, which concerns the erection in a small Irish town of a statue to a totally imaginary Irish hero, was very successful as a play in London with (Sir) Charles Hawtrey (and later still, in Feb 1930 on Broadway). When performed in Westport, however, it led to a riot. Hannay's parishioners relished neither his astringent humour nor his political bias; when his pseudonym was penetrated, they boycotted him." A 1949 journal article on the production, "The Riot in Westport: George A. Birmingham at Home", published in New Hibernia Review, described it thus, the performance was "punctuated by catcalls throughout the first act, was stopped during the second act when angry protesters stormed the stage. Members of the audience who were not part of the planned action, triggered by the cry "Now boys!," fled the theater. Although alerted to the likelihood of trouble by posters calling for the protest, the police were unable to restore order in the theater to allow the performance to continue. Chairs were hurled, stage properties and scenery destroyed, the theater itself badly damaged. The actor playing the Catholic parish priest was the focus of the attack. "Rioters ripped off his Roman collar and, after leaving the theater, burned it in the Octagon (Westport's town center)", the article continues. "Police accounts report that the crowd had swelled to 700. The windows of the box office, theater, and hotel accommodating the actors were broken. In the course of what the police called a riot, a constable was badly injured and five baton charges were made against the crowd. The riot was quelled only after the intervention of the parish priest, Father Canavan, who pleaded for order. Twenty young men described as students were arrested....," according to the article by Joan Fitzpatrick Dean, published in New Hibernia Review (Vol 5, No 4, Winter 2001, pp. 9-21). "After this stormy ending to his pastorate in Mayo," says the DNB article he departed for a lecture tour of the United States, and afterwards wrote Connaught to Chicago (1914). After his military service he settled at Mells rectory, Somerset, in 1924. "In 1929, however, his rectory was burnt down, with heavy loss; and in 1933 his wife died," the DNB says. "He was glad therefore to change the scene in 1934 for the small, quiet London parish of Holy Trinity, Prince Consort Road. Here his preaching was appreciated; and his friends at the Athenaeum and Garrick clubs could take pleasure in his company. With curling grey hair, and blue eyes which twinkled behind spectacles, he remained tall and robust in person at past seventy. Every year he produced at least one ‘George A. Birmingham’ novel; the last was completed only just before his death in London 2 February 1950." During his lifetime he wrote under his own name eight mostly non-fiction works and as Birmingham some 75 novels. Stephen Leacock Stephen Butler Leacock (1869-1944), born in England to a well-to-do family but grew
up, from the age of six, in Canada, where the family fortunes were less fortuitous, was "a professor and humorist",
to put it mildly, as J. A. Stevenson did in his 1959 article in The Dictionary
of National Biography (DNB). Perhaps more accurately
Stephen Leacock, humorist and academic
The rather precocious Leacock, according to Stevenson in the DNB, "was educated at Upper Canada College and returned there as assistant master in 1889 whilst attending the university of Toronto. He took his degree in modern languages in 1891 and was appointed modern languages master at Upper Canada College where he remained until 1899. In that year he went to Chicago to do graduate work in political economy and in 1903 he took his degree in philosophy. He was then appointed a lecturer in political science and history at McGill University, Montreal, where he had already been a special lecturer since 1901. In 1905 he became an associate professor in the same subjects, and in 1908 he was appointed William Dow professor of political economy and head of the department of economics and political science, a position which he held until his retirement in 1936." Hardly the training, one would assume, for someone destined to be "the most popular humourist in the English-speaking world". But, it was. And "early in his career Leacock turned to fiction, humour, and short reports to supplement (and ultimately exceed) his regular income. His stories, first published in magazines in Canada and the United States and later in novel form became extremely popular around the world," says the wikipedia article. "Although he wrote learned articles and books related to his field of study," wikipedia continues, "his political theory is now all but forgotten. Leacock was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1937, nominally for his academic work." Stevenson notes, "He cultivated the friendship of his pupils, with whom he was very popular... [and his] humour was well known to his students. He had begun writing humorous articles whilst teaching at Upper Canada College and many of them were published in North American journals such as Truth and Life. In 1910 a collection of these was printed privately under the title Literary Lapses. The book caught the attention of an English publisher who arranged for its publication in Great Britain in the same year, and in New York in 1911." It was followed by several other volumes of humour including Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town in 1912, the book which established Leacock's international reputation as a humorous writer. He went on, Stevenson notes, "to produce a book almost every year. In all, he had to his credit more than 50 books... most of them are of a humorous nature." But he also wrote serious and academic tomes including biographies of Mark Twain (1932) and of Dickens (1933), and his Our British Empire (1940), Montreal: Seaport and City (Garden City, 1942), and Canada: The Foundations of Its Future (Montreal, privately printed, 1941), which, Stevenson says, "are admirable contributions to historical literature." Stevenson defines Leacock's humour style as being "loose and racy with irony and satire given free play, and he employed with great skill an effective blend of American exaggeration and British understatement." As to the "loose and racy" stories, these are exemplified by, "The Perfect Lover's Guide" included in this collection. The Book Itself Covers (green cloth boards with black stamped titles to front board and black stamped titles and caricature to spine) are badly soiled, stained, and edgeworn with bumped corners. As to the textblock, there are inked and pencilled scribbles to the End Papers (FPDP, FEP, and RPDP, REP is missing) and to some other pages. The scribbles vary from pretty much filling the page (as with the EPs) or just a line or two (as elsewhere). There is also spotting and foxing to many pages. It is mostly to the page borders and mostly does not affect the text. Both front and rear hinges are split with the covers being held on
by pieces of sello tape in front and rear, but the one at the rear is attached to the last text page (the rear
end paper is missing) and a complete split exists between the last two leaves. |
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