Keen observers of British Library blogs will have noticed a profusion, perhaps that should be a peloton, of posts related to the Tour de France 2014.  In this post Jerry Jenkins, Curator for International Organisations & North American Official Publications, describes his motivation for joining the ‘Tour de British Library’:

On Friday last week I had the pleasure of riding my folding Brompton bike, with colleagues on a tandem, from the Library’s site in Boston Spa to Selby and back again. This was our contribution to the Tour de British Library, a monumental two-day cycle by library colleagues between the British Library’s twin sites at St. Pancras in London and Boston Spa, Yorkshire to celebrate Le Grand Départ of the Tour de France 2014 from Leeds.

Jerry Jenkins and colleagues Roy, Lynne and Alastair preparing for their departure from Boston Spa to Selby.

When plans were drawn up to unite our London and Yorkshire sites with this two day, two-hundred mile ride to coincide with the start of the Tour de France, I was keen to take part. Aside from the obvious pleasure of going for a spin in the country, there is a good reason why this endeavour is appropriate: a large portion of the Library’s collections are stored in Boston Spa.

Indeed, the 'Roswellesque' sounding Building 24, where official publications are stored, contains linear mile upon mile of shelving holding a treasure trove of information, debate, statistics, discourse, reports, pamphlets and periodicals on every conceivable subject, including a few items on cycling and bicycles.  In the daily life of the Library these publications quietly trundle back and forth to and from Boston Spa to the Reading Rooms at St Pancras in their own “petit depart”.   So my excursion to join colleagues on the Tour de British Library for the final stage was, in part, homage to the collections.  The way they make their way up and down the country illustrates how the route between London and Yorkshire is well-worn with the transference of knowledge between the two British Library sites.

It was also a way of supporting other colleagues who had set off the day before from London with a copy of Douglas Cowie and Matthew Shaw’s book, Stoller’s Depart to Boston Spa as part of the Tour de British Library.  Stoller’s Depart is an especially commissioned work to coincide with the Yorkshire Grand Depart.

Le Tour de France dans les Pyrénées, by Jean-Bernard Métais.  Photograph by Jerry Jenkins.

To celebrate the Tour de France the Library currently has two displays of related material: The Grand Depart -Tour de Lead Graffiti at St Pancras and Le Grand Départ at Boston Spa.  Both displays can be viewed free of charge.

A resource guide to the library's holdings of Official Publications can be found here. 

 

Sue Ashpitel, Business and Intellectual Property Collections Manager writes:

As some of the British Library’s intrepid cyclists set off from St Pancras to Boston Spa to celebrate Le Grand Départ of the Tour de France 2014 from Leeds, we thought we should encourage them by reminding them just how much more arduous (yet strangely stylish) their trek north would have been 200 years ago at the very dawn of the bicycle age.

From our historic collection of British patent specifications we can show them coachmaker Denis Johnson’s patent of 1818 for a “pedestrian curricle” (GB4321/1818).  This machine, popularly known as a Hobbyhorse, lacked pedals or any sort of driving gear and was, essentially, a sort of ride-on scooter. Intended to diminish “the labour and fatigue of persons in walking”, Johnson’s Hobbyhorse was closely based on the Draisienne invented a little earlier by the German Karl von Drais.

Well, pedals, tyres, brakes, a chain and some gears may be making the journey north so much easier for our colleagues than their regency counterparts but, when it comes to the clothing, we think a frock coat and top hat win the style race hands down!

 

Image from Patent GB4321/1818. Johnson's specification for the Pedestrian Curricle or Velocipide

It would take another 60  or 70 years of development, hundreds of patents and a detour into the high-rise technology of the penny-farthing for the pedestrian curricle to evolve, by the late 1890s, into a bicycle familiar to today’s cyclists. From this point on there was no major change in the shape and general appearance of the bicycle until the early 1960s when Alex Moulton patented his small-wheeled Moulton “F Frame” cycle (GB907467 of 1962).

To find out more about our collection of British patents you can contact our reference team in the Business & IP Centre on 020 7412 7454 or by submitting a query online.

Meanwhile, we wish our colleagues bonne route!

MA student Maryna Myntsykovska writes:

The British Library presents a wealth of opportunities, sometimes most unexpected ones. Fuelled by my desire to participate in an on-going linguistic project, I recently completed a three-month placement at the British Library as part of my Linguistics MA course at Queen Mary, University of London. I worked with the BBC Voices Recordings, aiming to create a detailed linguistic description according to the framework developed by the British Library’s Voices of the UK project. My task included capturing instances of lexical, grammatical as well as phonological variation in one of the recordings.

My first task was to choose a recording, in which I would look for vernacular words, pronunciation features and grammatical constructions.  Having considered recordings from Glasgow, Cardiff and Oxford, I opted for the latter, since understanding the flow of words naturally produced by British people is not a piece of cake for a non-native speaker like me. Before coming to London last September I had previously only been exposed to the socially prestigious British accent, Received Pronunciation (RP). Speakers from Scotland or Wales presented a considerable challenge, but even some varieties of southern English speech remained undecipherable for a while. One speaker, for instance, referred to [‘broid’] and [‘stroidz’] –frustratingly, corresponding entries were elusive in the Oxford English Dictionary. Only with the help of another native speaker did I learn that this was a London pronunciation feature, and the speaker was actually saying brideand strides(his preferred variant of ‘trousers’). Gradually, listening to the recording over and over again, I got used to the speakers’ accents to the extent that I stopped noticing vernacular features and could extract the meaning effortlessly.

Bizarrely, right by the time my skill at interpreting non-RP elements reached its peak, I got to the phase of the description in which I had to listen precisely for vernacular pronunciation features. All those little deviations in vowels and consonants that I was so determined to overlook in my effort to understand the meaning suddenly became the focus of my work!

The actual discussion I had chosen was built around 40 words, presented to the participants beforehand. The interviewees had to come up with words and expressions synonymic to those presented in the list (for example, clobber for ‘clothes’ or sprog for ’baby’). My objective was to note down all the instances of a single lexical item and to check for spelling precedent in printed sources, which set me exploring endless pages of slang dictionaries and enriched my vocabulary with new acquisitions, such as chucking it down (‘to rain heavily’), tesco-bombers (‘cheap trainers bought in Tesco supermarket’) and up the duff (‘pregnant’), to quote just a few.

During my time at the Library I also attended a workshop about regional variation in accents and dialects aimed at A-level students, given by the Sociolinguistics curator of the British Library. Inspired by what I had witnessed, I delivered a similar presentation at school in my home town in Ukraine, promoting the use of the BL resources about regional varieties of English, such as Sounds Familiar?. Using Sound Map, we first listened to a fragment of the children’s story ‘Mr Tickle’ (© 1971 Roger Hargreaves), recorded by speakers from Scotland, England and Northern Ireland. The pupils attempted to guess the accent of the speaker, but admitted it was a challenging task. In fact, due to their lack of exposure to regional varieties of English in the UK, the class did not identify any of the speakers, but was definitely eager to learn more about accents and dialects. In my presentation I encouraged them to make the most of the resources created by the British Library, both for learning as well as leisure purposes.

Overall, creating a linguistic description like this helped me to appreciate the differences between accents and understand the components constituting those differences. In this respect my time at the British Library was a truly invaluable experience.

With the World Cup starting this week, we post this piece from Germanic studies curator Susan Reed who writes about one particularly relevant donation:

We receive many donations in the British Library, but one of the more unusual ones to pass through my hands arrived just in time for the 2006 Football World Cup. Football Heroes was described as ‘The complete album with over 700 Soccer Worldcup [sic] trading cards’, which I have to admit made my heart sink for a moment: did we really want a football sticker album?

Ashi & Jerzovskaja [ed.]  Soccer heroes : the complete album with over 700 soccer World Cup trading cards = Fussball Helden : das komplette Album mit über 700 Sammelbildern zur Weltmeisterschaft (Zürich, 2006). LF.31.a.1218

But Football Heroes was in fact a clever and brilliantly executed homage to the albums many of us remember from childhood. It was the brainchild of Swiss graphic designer Jerzovskaja who explains: ‘I could never afford the expensive collector pictures as a child … So I started to draw soccer pictures myself’ (p. 11). This sowed the seed of what would become Football Heroes, for which Jerzovskaja brought together 50 artists to draw the teams competing in the 2006 World Cup and some famous national teams from the past.

Each team is shown  in basic sticker album style –  mugshots of each member arranged in a specific order – but the artists were free to choose their style and medium, and the pictures show a wide range of approaches. Some refer obviously to the team’s nationality, such as cartoonist Beach’s depiction of the 1934 Italian squad as ancient Romans, while some hint less directly at national culture: Christian Montenegro portrays the 2006 Iranian team in a stylised and modern form which nonetheless subtly recalls classical Persian art. Others go against expectations: the Argentinian duo ‘Stupid Love’ subvert their country’s macho stereotype by depicting the 2006 team in pastel colours and a kind of ‘Hello Kitty’ style, surrounded by cupcakes and cute smiley animals.

One  of the most striking – and daring – depictions is again by Beach, and shows the 1958 Brazil team in series of images which together make a pastiche of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ with Pelé in the role of Saviour. The book ends with a series of imaginary players drawn by Jerzovskaja with wonderful (and almost believable) names like ‘Ringo Thickplank’, ‘Electro Zamboni’ and ‘Brickwall van der Tor’.

Jerzovskaja [ed.]   Football heroes  see red! The complete sticker album for the European Football Championship = Fussballhelden sehen rot! Das komplette sammelbilder-album zur fussball-Europameisterschaft; (Zürich, 2008). LD.31.b.1498

Two years later we received another album, Football Heroes See Red!, marking the 2008 European Championship and featuring 38 artists from 12 European countries. As well as the team ‘sticker’ pictures, this album includes a number of full page images, including 23 of the French player Zinédine Zidane. According to Jerzovskaja, Zidane ‘embodies [the] notion of duality in the game,’ which he wanted to explore in this album, ‘the moment where passion spills over into something darker’ (p.7).

But not everything is dark here. For example, the 2008 England team members are humorously portrayed (by Beach again) as missing pets. In a reference to his long absence following injury at the 2006 World Cup, Michael Owen becomes a heavily bandaged rabbit on a poster inscribed ‘Lucky. Black + white marking. Slight limp’.

Jerzovskaja has gone on to produce other Football Heroes albums, including one devoted to the team he has followed since his teens, FC Winterthur. As well as expressing his passion for football, they are also proof of his commitment to promoting the work of graphic and comic artists from around the world.

Conference Organiser Julian Walker writes:

The First World War was, as is well known, a great catalyst for literary activity. The relationship between expectation and reality, the change, the magnitude of the experience and the sharp focus on the details are the matter of a literary experience that altered the direction of twentieth-century literature.

But these ideas could be equally seen in a non-literary written culture produced by the war, the trench journal. Trench journals were magazines produced by troops for troops. There were produced in vast numbers, at the front, in hospitals, behind the front lines, in troopships and in prison camps. Issues were printed in a small number of copies, or in their thousands. They are known from September 1914, and they immediately tell the experience of the war.

Cyclist Battalion Christmas Bulletin 1915

They are important because, as J G Fuller writes in Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies (1990), they are ‘ not coloured by subsequent experience, and they represent a collective rather than an individual commentary, validated to a large extent by their soldier audience.’ Effectively they represent the experience of the war to those who are going through the experience, presented by those who are going through the experience; as such they are uncoloured by subsequent thoughts and to a large extent give us an immediate idea of ‘what it was like’. This validity was recognised early on, as from 1915 the British Museum asked for copies of trench journals for their collection, and the British Library now holds 1138 issues, including Australian troopship journals, hospital journals and journals produced by German internees and prisoners-of-war. The most well known title is the Wipers Times, but there were hundreds of others.

They were produced by people who often had no professional journalistic experience, but employed the skills of soldiers who in civilian life were printers, compositors, or commercial artists. Some were made up in the trenches and printed back in Britain, others were copied out by hand and circulated amongst a handful of men. Full of in-jokes, poetry of dubious quality, limericks, pastiches, well and badly drawn cartoons, awful puns, diary-sketches that give self-censored references to the frontline experience, football results and thanks for gifts from home, they often resemble school magazines. But then the people who wrote and read them were in many cases little older than schoolboys.

 

Morning Rire Issue 3 1916

It is in homage to this extraordinary journalistic culture that the Languages and the First World War conference is working with Graphics students from Central St Martins College of Art and Design to produce a homage ‘trench journal’. It will contain articles by some of the people who wanted to come to the conference but were unable to attend, some linguistic titbits (including new finds), illustrations and photographs, excerpts from journals in the British Library collection and some in private collections, and pastiches of trench journal material.

The Central Saint Martins students have studied trench journals in the British Library collection, and for them this project, working in direct relation to a print medium a century old that was produced under the most stressful conditions conceivable, is a challenging venture. Various print methods are being explored, including letterpress and mimeograph, the print technique by which some of the more close-to-the-action original trench journals were produced. Echoing the ‘autonomy within self-imposd boundaries’ of the originals, the students have full design control of the journal, including the title; working from the description by Graham Seal (The Soldiers’ Press, 2013) of trench journals as a ‘democratic cultural republic amidst a hierarchical martial regime’, the publication is called At No-one’s Authority.

The relationship between the wartime journal editors and their superiors varied; while some were explicitly published under the authority of commanding officers, for others, circulating even in typescript or manuscript, this was not an issue. It is particularly pertinent that Koenraad Du Pont from the University of Leuven will be giving a paper on how an Italian trench journal, L’Astico, was centrally manipulated for propaganda purposes; in this case the attempt to use a range of dialects to cement camaraderie within the army backfired. Though British journals display attitudes of ‘grumbling but not complaining’, pride in achievement, group identity, ‘laughing will get us through’, and ‘getting on with the job’, these were perhaps uneasy and fragile masks of the soldier’s awareness of his unprecedented relationship with his environment, and manifestations of a desperate need to say ‘I am still here and alive now’.

At No-one’s Authority will be available in a very limited edition, and only at the conference, so book your ticket now.

Programme, booking links, and blog: http://languages-and-first-world-war.tumblr.com/

The Football World Cup starts next month, and the British Library is celebrating the event on 23rd May with a conference about football and culture. Our collections include fascinating titles about sport in general and football in particular. Barry Taylor curator for Hispanic Studies describes one of them and shows how football and culture are closer than one might think.

El libro homenaje a Diego A. Maradona. San Martín Pcia Bs As : SAFE, Sociedad Argentina de Fomento Editorial, 2001 British Library shelfmark: HS.74/2205

England fans may well remember Diego Maradona as the man whose hand ball won Argentina victory over England in the quarter final of the 1986 World Cup and paved the way to Argentine triumph over West Germany.

In his native country he is of course a god (to put it mildly) and this item from the BL collections points up some cultural differences between the two footballing nations who faced each other on 22 June 1986 at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City.

‘Cultural’ itself is a word with quite different connotations in English and Spanish.  In vernacular English, culture lives in art galleries and concert rooms.  In Spanish, it’s a much broader term, commonly used in the sense in which only anthropologists use it in English.  It’s the whole way of life, as much in the streets and on the terraces as in the academy.

This lavish production also demonstrates the integration of the Argentine intellectual into the life of the nation.  In Latin America, poets are seen as the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’, speaking for the nation in times good and bad.  It’s eloquent that the prefaces of this volume are by Rosa María Ravera ( President of the National Academy of Fine Arts) and Daniel Arcucci (Maradona’s biographer and editor of the prestigious daily newspaper La Nación)

El libro homenaje a Diego A. Maradona contains texts by ten well known Argentine authors, illustrated by original prints by ten well known Argentine artists.  The artists are: Alicia Scavino, Alicia Díaz Rinaldi, Mirta Ripoll, Leonardo Gotleyb, Lucrecia Orloff, Carlos Scannapieco, Ricardo Tau, Pablo Delfini, Alberto Arjona, and Vera Rodriguez.   The authors are: Roberto Fontanarrosa, Pacho O'Donell, Federico Andahazi, Dalmiro Sáenz, Martín Caparrós, Elvio Gandolfo, Rodolfo Fogwill, Leopoldo Brizuela, Sergio Bizzio, and Daniel Guebel.  Authors and artists have signed each copy. It is an edition of 505 copies.

Measuring 42 x 33 cm, printed on hand-made paper, physically it consists of a  booklet (24 pages); another booklet with facsimiles of the texts (20 pages); 13 unbound quires; a postcard; and a pair of gloves..  This last element a fitting monument to the Hand of God.

 A Cultural History of the World Cup, a one day conference at the British Library, will be held on Friday 23 May 2014, 09.30- 17.00. Tickets £30 (full price), £15 (concessions) 

Julian Walker writes:

The early part of 2014 saw a rush of books, new websites and television programmes about the First World War, and for some of us there was a concern that ‘First World War fatigue’ would set in before the arrival of the actual anniversaries. Finding a new way of considering the conflict seemed a remote idea. The field of language, however, has been little considered, is a fantastically rich area, and allows examination of both the differences and the commonality of experience among civilians and combatants across all the combatant nations. How did language change during and as a result of the war, how did languages influence each other, and what effects have lasted through the century between then and now?

The conference ‘Languages and the First World War’, to be held at the University of Antwerp and the British Library in June 2014 will address some of these questions, with papers from 27 speakers, and subjects ranging from the influence of French on English trench-slang, to the professionalisation of interpreting, to the censorship of soldiers’ letters home in Welsh, the difficulties faced by French-speaking Caribbean soldiers in France, and the use of propaganda in an Italian soldiers’ magazine. The conference coincides with Enduring War: Grief, Grit and Humour, the British Library’s exhibition on the First World War, and is open to the public.

The linguistic experience was a fundamental part of the experience of the war, and ranged from the deeply problematic to the enjoyable. The melting-pot of the Western Front brought together speakers of different dialects or sociolects within one language, leading to the uptake and spread of previously isolated terms. Officialese brought terms such as ‘debus’ and ‘attest’, while British soldiers tucked into ‘Bombardier Fritz’ (pommes de terre frites); new terms from the conflict – camouflage, tank, air raid – quickly came into common use. The management of the war was in many cases required to be multilingual: administrators dealing with Belgian refugees were baffled by Flemish, and the 1919 report on the Belgian community in County Durham relied partially on sources from the Catholic Church, written in Latin.

Pastiche glossaries were popular in trench journals, newspapers produced by soldiers for soldiers.

The British Expeditionary Force was to a large extent made up from men who were the beneficiaries of a series of compulsory education acts, and who constituted the most literate army Britain had ever had. They were led ‘over the top’ by junior officers who were in many cases public school and university educated, conversant with Latin and Greek. Trench journals, diaries and letters home give evidence of how important reading and writing were for the Tommies – 15,500 bags of mail crossed the Channel just from England to France every day in 1916 and 1917. Those who found themselves further away from home, in Palestine, Greece or Iraq, might not know exactly where they were – so labelled those parts ‘Mesapolonica’.

Examination of the linguistic aspects of the war reveals an underlying sense of shared experiences, and there are instances of parallel wordplay occurring across the hell of no man’s land. German hand grenades were called ‘potato-mashers’ by both sides. Both German and British soldiers were unimpressed with the substitute for butter in their rations: on one side they called it ‘Wagonschmiere’, on the other ‘axle-grease’. Sometimes this wordplay emerged as the most awful puns: a German raiding party scrawled the words ‘Gott mitt uns’ on a plank left amongst the barbed wire; the following night a British raiding party turned it round closer to the German lines, adding the words ‘Don’t swank – we’ve got mittens too’.

Message for the Bulgars: the conflict in Salonika allowed references to what was at that time a highly contentious term

German soldiers could find themselves using a phrasebook that told them how to say in French both ‘I am confiscating the money’ (schè kongfisk larschang) and ‘Waiter, bring me half a litre of wine’ (garsong, donneh moa öng dèmih litr dè wäng). It all looks very like an English schoolboy’s attempt to pronounce French; but then many of the British soldiers fighting in France were not long out of school themselves.

Postcard home: Arthur Tildesley writes that he is ‘tray bon’.

Perhaps the one word that conjures up images of the First World War is ‘Blighty’, meaning ‘home’ or ‘Britain’. Deriving from the Hindi bilyati, meaning ‘foreign’ or ‘European’, it was applied to British soldiers and administrators, who then took the term themselves. ‘A Blighty one’ or ‘a blighty’ was a wound that would take you safely away from the fighting, while ‘a Blighty touch’ was the same thing, but self-inflicted.

Throughout the war there was discussion of the origins of the names of allies and enemies – did the nickname Poilu (‘hairy’) for French soldiers really derive from their being able to grow beards while on active service, or was it from a novel by Balzac? And where did the word ‘Boche’ come from? Indeed was it ‘Boche’ or ‘Bosche’? Newspapers regularly updated their readers with new slang terms, and there was an awareness in the UK that the ‘war of words’ was enlarging and enriching the English language. Right at the beginning of the war the Rev. Andrew Clarke set about collecting what he saw as ‘ordinary words’ – the words used in reporting the war, in advertising, and in people’s conversation as they experienced the fear, grief, relief and stress of the conflict. Lynda Mugglestone, University of Oxford Professor of the History of English, will be giving a keynote paper on his work.

The conference is at the University of Antwerp on 18^th June and the British Library on 20^th June, and is open to all. Regular updates and information will be posted on the blog http://languages-and-first-world-war.tumblr.com/ and the twitter feed @LanguagesFWW and tickets can be booked on http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event160561.html

In this post Philip Eagle, Content and Collection Specialist for Business and Intellectual Property, provides more information about the Library's Item of the week.

On the 6th May 1994, twenty years ago this week, the Channel Tunnel was officially opened by HM the Queen and President François Mitterrand. The current Item of the Week on the British Library's website is a Deputation to the Prime Minister by promoters of an earlier Channel Tunnel scheme, published in 1913 and held in the Business & IP Centre's Trade Literature Collection.

The work describes a scheme quite close to today's Channel Tunnel, with two bored single-track tunnels from Dover to Sangatte. Trains would be electrically hauled and cross passages would be used for workers and to improve ventilation.

Much of the 136-page brochure, however, is taken up by arguments against the fear that a Channel Tunnel might provide an avenue for France or some other hostile nation to invade Britain, which had shut down the most serious previous attempt to start construction of a Tunnel in 1882. It is argued that changes in both the political situation and military technology since would make a Channel Tunnel less of a hazard to Britain in the event of a European war, and more helpful as a way of evading any naval blockade to trade.

Arguments for the Channel Tunnel are familiar - increased trade, tourism, and the avoidance of seasickness. The most prominent supporter of a Tunnel scheme listed in the brochure is the late William Ewart Gladstone, whose speech of 1890 supporting a tunnel is quoted. The brochure ends by predicting through trains from London to points as far away as Lisbon, Nice, Palermo, Constantinople and Siberia, and the possibility of a tunnel under the Bering Strait to link Russia with North America for a London-New York express.

The illustration shows a drawing of an even earlier scheme by Hector Horeau in 1851, which would have involved a submerged iron tube resting on the sea bed. The huge moored towers seen in the picture would have been retained after the completion of the tube, to hold it in place and provide ventilation.

Elsewhere in the Trade Literature collection, we have a number of items covering the modern tunnel, including annual reports from Eurotunnel and Wimpey, and celebratory items in staff magazines from the contractors Tarmac and Costain. For people who want to see what St Pancras and Kings Cross were like before the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, we have a brochure published by the City and South London Railway tube company for their 1907 extension from Angel to Euston via Kings Cross (now part of the Northern Line), which has fascinating pictures of the station and the streets around.