Old Fogeys

After last month’s blog, I received a query: who or what was Big White Carstairs? Well, Big White Carstairs was a character invented by JB Morton for his humorous column in the Daily Express, under the pen-name Beachcomber. Carstairs was a British Empire stuffed shirt, obsessed with formalities and proprieties, who had perennial problems with his dress trousers, making attendance at dinner difficult in whatever corner of Africa or Asia provided his current posting. There was a lengthy thread of stories about him, titled ‘Trousers Over Africa’.

Morton had served in the trenches in the first world war. Back in civvy street, he wrote the column, By the Way, by Beachcomber, from the 1920s to the 1970’s, for which he ought to have got a medal anyway, regardless of his wartime service. He was one of several conservative, indeed fogeyish, newspaper funny men of the mid-twentieth century. Despite active service in the British Army and subsequently in military intelligence, the targets of his humour were often British establishment attitudes and habits.

The Beachcomber column was offensive in many ways: storylines included The Filthistan Trio, The Twelve Redbearded Dwarfs, and Dingi-Poos, the Tibetan Venus. This is not just a case of the past being a foreign country- much of this material would have been considered offensive even in the 1940’s and 1950’s when Beachcomber’s popularity was at its height. Indeed, George Orwell noted of Morton and of a similar columnist of the time, Timothy Shy (DB Wyndham-Lewis), ‘…it would be difficult to find a reactionary cause that they have not championed — Pilsudski, Mussolini, appeasement, flogging, Franco, literary censorship; between them they have found good words for everything that any decent person instinctively objects to.’

This is probably slightly unfair, as Morton lampooned Hitler pretty mercilessly too. Also, Orwell explicitly linked the reactionary nature of Beachcomber’s and Timothy Shy’s output to their Roman Catholicism. This seems to be stretching a point, but remember, Lewis and Morton were not born and bred catholics, but converts. And as my dad used to say, converts are holier than the pope. To be fair to Orwell, they are also usually ultra-conservative.

However, it has to be admitted that Morton produced some very funny material in the Beachcomber column, and other newspaper columns have tended to be at their funniest when they were at their most fogeyish. The Beachcomber column formed the source material for Spike Milligan’s BBC series, The World of Beachcomber. Not being a reader of the Daily Express in my teens, I would probably never have encountered Beachcomber without Spike’s TV series.

Anyway, the rather simple point that I am labouring excessively and in leaden fashion is that for the most part, you don’t get a lot of laughs by supporting the trends of the age. You get the laughs by disapproving or even despairing of them. The very first piece in this blog, written in the hateful days of January 2021 when more than a thousand people a week were dying of COVID in the UK, was mainly related to Patrick Campbell’s Sunday Times column in the 1960s and 70s. Although Campbell’s work had considerably fewer political undertones, it did have the grumpy-old-man style, albeit with an endearing self-deprecation. I feel that if you want to know what the nineteen-sixties were like, best not to ask someone like me who was a child or a young person then: instead look at the commentaries of someone like Patrick Campbell who was already middle-aged in the sixties.

Perhaps the outstanding example of the grumpy old newspaper humourist is Flann O’ Brien. In addition to working as a senior and from all accounts very able civil servant, O’ Brien wrote several regular columns for different newspapers at the same time. He also produced some of the most imaginative Irish novels of the twentieth century (and bear in mind that twentieth century Irish literature included Joyce and Beckett), notably At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. And all the time maintaining a crippling alcohol habit.

His Irish Times column, Cruiskeen Lawn, written under the pseudonym of Myles na Gopaleen, was inspired, whimsical, eclectic, and angrily acerbic at times- he referred to one contemporary journalist as a ‘workshy Marxist toad’. At the time I read an anthology of his Irish Times pieces, I was a young left-wing firebrand and I would read the weekly newspapers of the various left-wing sects of the time: The Socialist Worker, The Socialist Organiser, The Militant, and so on. It occurred to me that there should have been a periodical called The Workshy Marxist.

O’Brien also wrote a column for the Nationalist and Leinster Times, under the byline George Knowall. This was considerably gentler than Cruiskeen Lawn, less funny, but very informative and interesting. In one column he noted that many older people in Ireland at the time didn’t actually know when they were born, so that when old age pensions were introduced, for some applicants they decided age eligibility on the basis of what events from history they could remember during their own lifetimes.

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OK, that’s enough of that. Here are a couple of memories from my childhood. First, in those days, the jokes we told were offensively racist, sexist and homophobic. In particular, Irish jokes invariably stereotyped Irish people as stupid. However, there’s one which I heard at school when I was about fourteen years old for which I have some affection as it subverts the genre slightly.

Two Irish guys, let’s call them Pat and Mick to be original, are waiting to be interviewed for a job. Pat goes in first. The interviewer says, ‘First we have a wee test. What would you be if I poked out one of your eyes?’

‘Dunno,’ says Pat.

‘Well, the answer is half-blind. Now what would you be if I poked out both of your eyes?’

‘Dunno,’ says Pat.

‘You’d be totally blind.’

And the interview continues for a few minutes. When Pat emerges, he says to Mick, ‘Here, listen. The answers to the test are half blind and totally blind. OK?

‘Thanks,’ says Mick, and goes in for his interview.

The interviewer asks, ‘What would you be if I cut off one of your ears?’

‘Half blind,’ says Mick with sublime confidence.

‘And what would you be if I cut off both of your ears?’

‘Totally blind,’ Mick replies.

‘How do you work that out?’ says the interviewer.

Without pausing for thought, Mick answers, ‘My hat would fall over my eyes.’

The second childhood memory dates from when I was pre-school. When we lived in Kinglassie, a little mining village, much of our groceries were bought from co-op and independent shopkeepers’ vans which came round several times a week. One was a fishmonger, who usually shouted something completely incomprehensible as he drew up in our street. However, one day, he bellowed, ‘Herring! Kippers!’

‘What’s a kipper?’ I asked my mum.

‘It’s a wee fish the fishmonger smokes,’ she replied.

I had an image in my mind of the fishmonger with a fish in his mouth, smoking it as if it were a cigar.