Professor Strange: Victorians, modesty and table legs

Long ago, in its February 2004 issue to be precise, I wrote an occasional humorous column for Clinical Psychology Forum under the name Professor Strange. As I still come across people who are quite convinced that the Victorians thought table legs indecent, I am repeating it here.

I doubt you will find anything like this in Clinical Psychology Forum today, but Professor Strange is an ancestor for the columns I now write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Victorians, modesty and table legs

The Victorians do not get a good press these days. A random trawl of the Internet finds the American AIDS Czarina complaining of a ‘Victorian society that misrepresents information, denies sexuality early, denies homosexuality particularly in teens, and leaves people abandoned with no place to go.’ A sermon tells us that ‘Thanks to the 1960s, we have given up Victorian hypocrisy when it comes to ourselves.’ And a journalist announces that ‘Victorianism today is generally interpreted to mean little more than an atmosphere of sexual repression and hypocrisy’.

Well, I knew Victorians; I worked with Victorians; Victorians were friends of mine. (Indeed, I cannot wholly rule out the possibility that I was a Victorian myself.) And I do not believe that they were any more repressed or hypocritical than we are today.

Yet this libel persists. So much so, that many otherwise intelligent people are convinced that the Victorians were so afraid of the power of sexuality that they felt obliged to cover up the legs of their pianos. Perhaps you believe it too?

You are not alone. An Australian website on sexuality and modernity is convinced they did. Another on culture and colonisation reports that ‘An era that could wrap table and piano legs with frilled covers that men may not harbour “certain” ideas is incredible, to say the least.” 

How true! For something does not fit when a website on the Victorian pantomime tells us that “audiences were not accustomed to viewing the legs of a pretty actress, especially in an era when even piano legs were cloaked for modesty's sake! However, in a male or ‘Breeches’ role, the actresses were allowed to display as much leg as they dared.’

So piano legs have to be swathed but, in certain circumstances it is fine for human legs to be displayed? The Victorians I knew were odd, but not that odd.

The truth – and I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book Inventing the Victorians for what follows – is that the Victorians did not cover the legs of their pianos at all, unless it was to keep off the dust or children’s boot.

The idea that anyone would worry about the eroticism of furniture first surfaced in Captain Marryat’s A Diary in America, published in 1839. He reported that the word ‘leg’ was not used in polite society across the Atlantic, and that when he visited a ladies’ seminary his guide informed him that the mistress of the establishment, in order to demonstrate her ‘care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!’

No doubt the guide was making fun of Marryat’s credulity, but the story soon caught on in nineteenth century Britain. How those Victorians enjoyed poking fun at the strait-laced Americans! Nothing so absurd would ever be seen over here.

Somehow the story remained in circulation, and when the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians made it fashionable to scoff it was recycled to make fun of the people who had originally found it so funny. In my experience the Victorians had more go that the Bloomsbury types who came after – Virginia Woolf was particularly hard work – but the mud has stuck to this day.

Just as the Bloomsbury lens distorts our picture of the Victorians, so the Swinging 60s have given us a false view of the 1950s. But they want to close the College Library and there are macaroons for tea, so that story will have to wait for another day.

How British deference to the Royal Family protected child abusers

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Back in 2003 I wrote a column for Clinical Psychology Forum under the name Professor Strange arguing that the practice of sending British children abroad was centuries old and had frequently been controversial.

Despite that controversy, it had lasted until around 1970.

Media coverage of the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse has brought to the fore one reason: the patronage of the Royal Family.

Take this report from ABC News in Australia:

In 1956 a fact-finding mission was sent to Australia to evaluate how child migrants were being treated. 

Soon afterwards the three inspectors published the Ross Report, which placed both Fairbridge schools on a blacklist, prohibiting children from being sent there. 

This outraged the Fairbridge Society's British Secretary WR Vaughan, who used all the establishment clout he could muster to reverse the ban. 

He went straight to Australia House in London and told the migration officer there he had 16 children waiting to sail and that he wanted the situation resolved within days. 

Then he marched down to the Commonwealth Relations Office where he declared there would be a "first class row" if the blacklist was not lifted. 

Senior civil servants knew exactly what this threat meant. The Fairbridge Society's president was the Queen's uncle — the former Governor General of Australia — the Duke of Gloucester. 

A departmental memo warned the Duke's "intervention would be sought" if the standstill continued. 

Within days the blacklist was lifted and the British Government allowed children to be sent to the Fairbridge farms in NSW and WA. They even helped subsidise the journeys.

Oranges and Sunshine: Child migration was never a secret

Oranges and Sunshine, the first film directed by Jim (son of Ken) Loach, has just been released. It deals with the work of the Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys on behalf of adults who were sent to Australia from the British care system as children.

Much of the discussion of the film is predicated on the idea that Humphreys had uncovered a secret or hidden scandal. As Germaine Greer pointed out on The Review Show last night, this is nonsense.

My fictional alter ego Professor Strange (a sort of Lord Bonkers of the senior common room) also pointed this out in a column from 2003:

The other day I was reading the blurb of a book from 1994 which dealt with Barnardo’s and other charities’ practice of resettling orphaned children in Australia and Canada. It began:

"In 1986 the author, an ordinary Nottingham social worker and mother of two received a letter from a woman asking for help to trace her parents. She claimed that at the age of four she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British Government. Margaret Humphreys replied that she must be mistaken, yet curiosity drove her to investigate the case."

And eventually she wrote Empty Cradles, winning such reviews as “The secrets of the lost children of Britain may never have been revealed if it had not been for Margaret Humphreys” from the Sunday Times. The Independent said it was “a story that defies belief”.

Margaret Humphreys and her reviewers would have been less amazed if they had read Philip Bean and Joy Melville’s Lost Children of the Empire, published in 1989, or Gillian Wagner’s Children of the Empire from 1982.

These two books, dealing with the much same material, were also promoted and reviewed as though they were revealing a long-buried secret, but a little research shows it was nothing of the sort.

Britain began sending children aboard in the 17th century and the practice continued until as recently as 1967. It was done on a massive scale – 3264 children were sent to Canada alone in 1905 – and was widely discussed.

You will find accounts of child emigration in the Curtis Report of 1946, the document which revolutionised childcare after the War, and official delegations went to see how children sent to Australia (1952) and Canada (1924) were faring. Every biography of Dr Barnardo deals with the subject at length, whether it is a near-hagiography like J. Wesley Bready’s Doctor Barnardo: Physician, pioneer, prophet from 1930 or a more balanced modern work like June Rose’s For the Sake of the Children from 1987.

And sending waifs and strays abroad was always controversial. A succession of murders and suicides in Canada kept the subject in the headlines there and back in Britain, thanks to Horatio Bottomley’s John Bull magazine.

I had an email earlier today from Clare Sambrook and the End Detention Now campaign (their website seems to be down at the moment) drawing parallels between Barnardo's involvement in child migration and its decision to co-operate with the government in the running of its new “family-friendly” facility in the Sussex village of Pease Pottage.

But then Barnardo and his charity has a more controversial history than you might think. As Professor Strange went on to say:

Nor was Dr Barnardo himself free from controversy. More than one parent went to court in an attempt to secure the return of children who had been sent overseas. Strangely these children always seemed to have been adopted by wealthy but eccentric figures who made it a condition of the arrangement that their identities would never been revealed.

One mother, a Mrs Gossage, fought the good doctor all the way to the House of Lords and won her case, but she never saw her son Henry again.

Child migrants to Australia

As this story is in the news again because of the Australian government's apology, it is time for a quick plug for the column by Professor Strange that I posted here in June.

Desperate Romantics

I rather enjoyed that. It was at least a marvelous change to see Victorians presented as young and energetic and sexy. For far too long we have been in thrall to the Bloomsbury view of them.

As one of my alter egos, Professor Strange, once wrote:

The Victorians do not get a good press these days. A random trawl of the Internet finds the American AIDS Czarina complaining of a ‘Victorian society that misrepresents information, denies sexuality early, denies homosexuality particularly in teens, and leaves people abandoned with no place to go.’ A sermon tells us that ‘Thanks to the 1960s, we have given up Victorian hypocrisy when it comes to ourselves.’ And a journalist announces that ‘Victorianism today is generally interpreted to mean little more than an atmosphere of sexual repression and hypocrisy’.

Well, I knew Victorians; I worked with Victorians; Victorians were friends of mine. (Indeed, I cannot wholly rule out the possibility that I was a Victorian myself.) And I do not believe that they were any more repressed or hypocritical than we are today.

Yet this libel persists. So much so, that many otherwise intelligent people are convinced that the Victorians were so afraid of the power of sexuality that they felt obliged to cover up the legs of their pianos. Perhaps you believe it too?

If you want to form a more balanced view of 19th century Britain I recommend Matthew Sweet's Inventing the Victorians.

Incidentally, during the programme several people landed on the blog after searching for John Ruskin pubic hair.

Professor Strange: Dr Barnardo and the emigration of children

I have previously given you Professor Strange's research into trainspotting and autism and the Victorians and modesty. This, his first column, is from October 2003 and looks at the dark side of Dr Barnardo.

The secret that never was

They don’t let me out of College much these days, so I spend my time feeding the ravens and exploring the less-frequented shelves of the library.

The other day I was reading the blurb of a book from 1994 which dealt with Barnardo’s and other charities’ practice of resettling orphaned children in Australia and Canada. It began:

In 1986 the author, an ordinary Nottingham social worker and mother of two received a letter from a woman asking for help to trace her parents. She claimed that at the age of four she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British Government. Margaret Humphreys replied that she must be mistaken, yet curiosity drove her to investigate the case.

And eventually she wrote Empty Cradles, winning such reviews as “The secrets of the lost children of Britain may never have been revealed if it had not been for Margaret Humphreys” from the Sunday Times. The Independent said it was “a story that defies belief”.

Margaret Humphreys and her reviewers would have been less amazed if they had read Philip Bean and Joy Melville’s Lost Children of the Empire, published in 1989, or Gillian Wagner’s Children of the Empire from 1982.

These two books, dealing with the much same material, were also promoted and reviewed as though they were revealing a long-buried secret, but a little research shows it was nothing of the sort.

Britain began sending children aboard in the 17th century and the practice continued until as recently as 1967. It was done on a massive scale – 3264 children were sent to Canada alone in 1905 – and was widely discussed.

You will find accounts of child emigration in the Curtis Report of 1946, the document which revolutionised childcare after the War, and official delegations went to see how children sent to Australia (1952) and Canada (1924) were faring. Every biography of Dr Barnardo deals with the subject at length, whether it is a near-hagiography like J. Wesley Bready’s Doctor Barnardo: Physician, pioneer, prophet from 1930 or a more balanced modern work like June Rose’s For the Sake of the Children from 1987.

And sending waifs and strays abroad was always controversial. A succession of murders and suicides in Canada kept the subject in the headlines there and back in Britain, thanks to Horatio Bottomley’s John Bull magazine.

Nor was Dr Barnardo himself free from controversy. More than one parent went to court in an attempt to secure the return of children who had been sent overseas. Strangely these children always seemed to have been adopted by wealthy but eccentric figures who made it a condition of the arrangement that their identities would never been revealed.

One mother, a Mrs Gossage, fought the good doctor all the way to the House of Lords and won her case, but she never saw her son Henry again.

We know this, the ravens and I, but if I am invited to conferences I get excited and wave my arms about too much. That is why they don’t let me out of College much these days.

Professor Strange: Victorians, modesty and piano legs

Following his thoughts on trainspotting and normality, here is another contribution from Professor Strange. It was first published in Clinical Psychology Forum in February 2004.

Victorians, modesty and piano legs

The Victorians do not get a good press these days. A random trawl of the Internet finds the American AIDS Czarina complaining of a ‘Victorian society that misrepresents information, denies sexuality early, denies homosexuality particularly in teens, and leaves people abandoned with no place to go.’ A sermon tells us that ‘Thanks to the 1960s, we have given up Victorian hypocrisy when it comes to ourselves.’ And a journalist announces that ‘Victorianism today is generally interpreted to mean little more than an atmosphere of sexual repression and hypocrisy’.

Well, I knew Victorians; I worked with Victorians; Victorians were friends of mine. (Indeed, I cannot wholly rule out the possibility that I was a Victorian myself.) And I do not believe that they were any more repressed or hypocritical than we are today.

Yet this libel persists. So much so, that many otherwise intelligent people are convinced that the Victorians were so afraid of the power of sexuality that they felt obliged to cover up the legs of their pianos. Perhaps you believe it too?

You are not alone. An Australian website on sexuality and modernity is convinced they did. Another on culture and colonisation reports that ‘An era that could wrap table and piano legs with frilled covers that men may not harbour “certain” ideas is incredible, to say the least.” How true! For something does not fit when a website on the Victorian pantomime tells us that “audiences were not accustomed to viewing the legs of a pretty actress, especially in an era when even piano legs were cloaked for modesty's sake! However, in a male or ‘Breeches’ role, the actresses were allowed to display as much leg as they dared.’

So piano legs have to be swathed but, in certain circumstances it is fine for human legs to be displayed? The Victorians I knew were odd, but not that odd.

The truth – and I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book Inventing the Victorians for what follows – is that the Victorians did not cover the legs of their pianos at all, unless it was to keep off the dust or children’s boots.

The idea that anyone would worry about the eroticism of furniture first surfaced in Captain Marryat’s A Diary in America, published in 1839. He reported that the word ‘leg’ was not used in polite society across the Atlantic, and that when he visited a ladies’ seminary his guide informed him that the mistress of the establishment, in order to demonstrate her ‘care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!’

No doubt the guide was making fun of Marryat’s credulity, but the story soon caught on in nineteenth century Britain. How those Victorians enjoyed poking fun at the straitlaced Americans! Nothing so absurd would ever be seen over here.

Somehow the story remained in circulation, and when the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians made it fashionable to scoff it was recycled to make fun of the people who had originally found it so funny. In my experience the Victorians had more go than the Bloomsbury types who came after – Virginia Woolf was particularly hard work – but the mud has stuck to this day.

Just as the Bloomsbury lens distorts our picture of the Victorians, so the Swinging 60s have given us a false view of the 1950s. But they want to close the College Library and there are macaroons for tea, so that story will have to wait for another day.

Trainspotting, autism and what it means to be normal

Back in July 2005 I contributed this column to Clinical Psychology Forum, signing it "Professor Strange" - a sort of academic cousin of Lord Bonkers.

Trainspotting, autism and what it means to be normal

Saturday afternoon on Platform 1. Freight trains and passenger trains coming and going. My notebook filling with engine numbers. The packet of sandwiches that Mother made me. The summer sunshine burning my bare knees. An excited shout goes up. I rush to join the throng and taste again the oily tang of steam.

Yes, I enjoyed my visit to York last Saturday and may well go again this weekend. Yet when I look around me, I see that trainspotting is thoroughly out of fashion.

I do not refer to the adventures of Begbie, Spud and Sickboy: they are very much in fashion. Though, as I said in my review in Steam Railway Quarterly, anyone who watches the film of Mr Welsh’s book in the hope of gaining an insight into the operation of Gresley’s A4 Pacifics on the LNER is likely to be sadly disappointed.

Rather, I refer to the hobby which enthralled generations of schoolboys. It flourished in the decades after the Second World War as families became affluent enough to spare the cash for their children to explore the railway system.

That sort of trainspotting is more than out of fashion: it is rapidly being turned into a mental illness. The other day I was looking at a piece on the narrow gauge railways of North Wales written by Bill Bryson. He said: ‘I had recently read a newspaper article in which it was reported that a speaker at the British Psychological Society had described trainspotting as a form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome.’

It is just as well that he or she did not describe it in those terms in my hearing, but we have come far from the days when boys were expected to be interested in trains. I can recall, as a young practitioner, having families referred to me because the son did not want to be a train driver when he grew up. ‘We’re at our wits’ end, Doctor Strange,’ the tearful parents would say. ‘We have tried everything, but he’s just not interested in railways.’

I was able to reassure them, puffing on my pipe, that it was just a phase the lad was going through and that they should not worry too much – though some parents had found Strange’s Herbal Supplements™ wonderfully efficacious in similar cases.

Not that trainspotting was without controversy. Popular stations could be overrun with children in the holidays. Questions were asked in the House about problems at Tamworth, and when overzealous spotters were picked up wandering around locomotive depots, magistrates would call for the hobby to be banned.

Yet it is not the criminogenic properties of trainspotting that have led to its decline, nor has it been the result of advances in the understanding of autistic spectrum disorders. In part it is because we are all – children included – far too cool to be interested enough in anything to call it a hobby. And in part it is because there has been a change in our idea of what it means to be normal.

When I was young, to be normal was to be male, white and upper middle class and to wear a tweed jacket and smoke a pipe. I must say that always seemed perfectly reasonable to me, but as I was male, white and upper middle class, wore a tweed jacket and smoked a pipe, I suppose it would.

Today to be normal is to be female and quite often it is to be a mental health professional too. Just think of the articles which treat a willingness to take part in workshops as a sign of normality in psychiatric inpatients when this activity plays no part in the lives of 99 per cent of the population.

So ‘normality’ is a slippery concept, and what it means has changed markedly over the years. That is why I have never made any great efforts to appear normal myself.

Introducing Professor Strange

In my role as columnist of last resort for Clinical Psychology Forum, I have now written three pieces in the guise of the elderly academic Professor Strange.

I have just added the third of them to Lord Bonkers' website, and they now have a page each. The columns are:

The secret that never was (October 2003)

Victorians, modesty and tablelegs (February 2004)

Trainspotting, autism and what it means to be normal (July 2005)