Evening Standard dated Thursday August 26th
1926
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Rudolph Valentino had died the previous Monday. See this post.
Peggy Scott was variously described as an actress, dancer and scriptwriter but
I can’t find anything online about her career. She had claimed to know
Valentino but a representative of the late star attended Scott’s inquest and
denied any connection between the two.
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Cont'd from page 1
After the General Strike of May 1926 the coalminers were no
better off than before and continued their strike. By November it had fizzled
out as workers at mine after mine were forced back to work as their Unions ran
out of money. The tone of this article, especially the last ‘Down the Pit’
section is decidedly anti-miners and this may well reflect the opinion of the
paper’s owner Lord Beaverbrook.
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Valentino’s body was laid out for public viewing in the Gold
Room of Frank E Campbell’s Funeral Church in Manhattan, where others including
Oscar Hammerstein and Enrico Caruso had also been displayed. The circus
atmosphere that surrounded the lying-in-state, encouraged by the media
presence, offended George Ullman and he stopped it after only 2 days. It turned
out that the Fascist guards mentioned in the article were in fact a publicity
stunt concocted by the Funeral Home’s management and that the wreath from
Mussolini was bought in the Home’s own florists.
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Edward Creed had been the manager of a cheese
shop and on the night of July 28th his assistant left him to put the
day’s taking in the safe and to lock up the shop. Several hours later the
next-door neighbour thought he could smell gas coming from the shop and he
called the police. They found Mr Creed dead and the gas jets on but unlit. The
safe had been cleared of money. Witnesses placed 2 men loitering near the shop
on the day of the murder and the police published descriptions but no one was
found. The two women mentioned in the article were never traced and a verdict
of ‘murder by person or persons unknown’ was returned at the inquest. The case
remains unsolved.
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Krishna Murti (or Jiddu Krishnamurti) was born
in 1895 in India and at the age of 14 was taken under the wing of Charles
Webster Leadbeater and Theosophical Society who groomed him to be the new World
Teacher. After training and a European education he travelled the World
lecturing on esotericism, or hidden knowledge or wisdom that offers the
individual enlightenment and salvation. In 1929 he split from the Theosophical
Society, but continued teaching until his death in 1986.
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Presumably Sarah Carlisle was under 21, because I believe
that Thomas H Grater was 24, having been born, according to the FreeBMD
website, in 1902, and if they had both been over 21 they wouldn’t have needed
any parent’s permission. A further search at FreeBMD shows Thomas marrying in
1930 to a lady by the name of Broughton. Sarah Carlisle is too common a name to
pin her down.
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I remember hearing these SOS messages at the end of news
broadcasts and usually of the form ‘would so-and-so believed to be on holiday
in the Lake District please contact their mother who is seriously ill’. They
became redundant with the spread of mobile phones in 1990’s.
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Yes you guessed it – it’s the drawing that made
me post this, although a cold Barclay’s Lager would go down a treat today. It
was brewed by Barclay Perkins of Southwark, not by a bunch of merchant bankers.
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The term ‘bandit’ seems to refer specifically to motorised
smash and grab raiders. According to Robert Murphy’s very good book ‘Smash and
Grab – Gangsters in the London Underworld’ the most famous girl bandit was
Lilian Goldstein who drove for Ruby Sparks while they carried out numerous
raids between 1922 and 1927.
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Quite what this fashionable young lady is doing with a
coal-scuttle on her head is anyone’s guess, but then I know nothing about haute
couture.
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Tunnels Bathing Beach was, and still is, a
feature of Ilfracombe, North Devon. No helicopter rescues in those days.
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I remember that when I was a kid it was common knowledge
that stevedores at the London Docks, while unloading bananas from ships, were
forever being attacked by tarantulas. There again it was common knowledge that
if you trod on the cracks in the pavement the boogieman would get you.
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The famous songwriter Irving Berlin was a Russian-Jewish
immigrant and Ellin Mackay was a Catholic heiress and daughter of the head of
the Postal Telegraph Cable Company. Despite Mr Mackay’s objections, the couple
were married at the New York City Hall on January 4th 1926 and he
subsequently wrote her out of his will. It took another 5 years for father and
daughter to be reconciled.
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Nicholas Zographos was one fifth of the infamous
‘Greek Syndicate’ of gamblers who were a fixture of the great European casinos
of the inter-War period. A detailed article on the Syndicate can be found here.
Zographos died in 1953.
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An example of the art being created for the London
Underground in the 1920’s. Charles Paine, whose name adorns this advert,
produced posters and advertising artwork for the LU from 1920 until 1929. He
was born in 1895 and died in 1967.
