I am indebted to Ed Baxter (who in turn acknowledges the assistance of Adrian Barry) for providing an answer to the question: “Who was on the bill with Russolo and Marinetti when the Futurists visited London, performing at the London Coliseum in June 1914?” The query was posed by Ed himself, by the way, but, recognising that this information would be of immeasurable benefit to Hooting Yard readers, he has kindly allowed me to post the results of his research here, including the invaluable links. And the answer is:

Lydia Kyasht, Russian ballerina, b.1885, performing an excerpt from Javotte.

Helen Eley and Sam Hearn, after their tour of Hullo, Tango! (a successful 1913 revue – 485 performances in the West End –  devised by Max Pemberton and Albert de Courville. Music by Louis Hirsch; Lyrics by George Arthurs. Additional songs by Maurice Abrahams, Grant Clarke and Edgar Leslie. One song from which “Get Out and Get Under” was still popular enough to be performed in the 1960s.)

Arthur Winckworth, Emilie Smith and George Graves & company in Koffo of Bond Street (farcical playlet, four years old already in 1914, featuring popular comedian Graves and opera singer Winckworth).

George French , b. 1876, Scots comedian and panto star who drew on multiple cultural personae including a very popular madcap Geordie footballer, chosen to appear in the 1912 Royal Music Hall Command Performance.

Gertie Gitana (“the Staffordshire Cinderella,” b. 1887), popular for her signature tune “Nellie Dean” (premiered in 1907). Her earnings rose to well over £100 per week and her name could fill any hall. Recorded songs on the Jumbo label in 1911 – 13.

Cecilia and Lina Lallier – no details available

The Nathal Trio – A novel turn. “One of these performers, in the guise of a monkey, might be described as Darwin’s “Missing Link”. He climbed a rope fixed from the orchestra to the roof of the building, gripping with his toes as easily as with his fingers, and hanging head downwards from that dizzy height, literally made the audience gasp.”

Henry Helme, a “singer from the French Alps.”

In the interlude(s), The Bioscope (films unknown, but likely to be independently made in the provinces by small companies and comedic in nature: see here.

Alfred Dove & orchestra, playing (i.a.) Saint Saens’ Javotte. Dove was conductor of the London Coliseum Orchestra, later the musical director for Oswald Stoll, who during the First World War put together all-female orchestras. The Coliseum retained its male drummer during the War.

Note: Marinetti “got the bird” for a full twenty minutes from the audience “more thoroughly than we have ever heard it given in the history of variety theatres,” according to The Stage. Later Marinetti castigated the English newspapers for their baleful influence on perceptions of the avant-garde: “the public drank in their poisonous garbage.” Plus ça change?

Everything you need to know about the German “Democratic” Republic (1949-1989), courtesy of Neil Clark in the Morning Star:

ordinary people could eat good hearty fare at affordable prices in a communal atmosphere

In this context, the phrase “good hearty fare” somehow suggests to me stodge with lashings of suet. Yum. Readers’ recipes – and serving suggestions – welcome.

Hooting Yard’s anagrammatist-in-chief, R., has alerted me to Joel Stickley’s How To Write Badly Well blog. A cursory examination suggests I can pick up some very useful tips there. This, for example, entitled “Present your research in the form of dialogue”, is brilliant:

‘My god,’ said Geoff, ‘so it’s true. We hold in our very hands the original draft of the hitherto unknown third treaty of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia signed by the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III himself.’

‘Yes,’ confirmed Sally. ‘Who would have thought when we set off this morning for this remote Swiss village that we would end the day in possession of the very document which marked the birth of modern European statehood?’

‘Certainly not me!’ laughed Geoff.

’Nor me!’ guffawed Sally.

‘And to think,’ Geoff extemporised, ‘the Ratification of the Treaty of Münster occurred exactly three hundred and sixty-one years ago today!’

Mister Dan the Da Vinci Code Man has clearly been keeping a gimlet eye on this blog, or I’m a Huguenot. There is much else there to split your sides to, so go and visit. It may keep you all occupied while I am away. Yes, Mr Key, the so-called “Diogenesian recluse” (© Chris Cutler) will shortly be venturing abroad for a spell, during which postages here will be sparse. More details later, when I have packed my rucksack haversack knapsack pippy bag…

This is the Venerable Mother Jerónima de la Fuente, painted by Velázquez in 1620. She posed for him while passing through Seville on her way to Manila in the Philippines where she was to found a convent. The Venerable Mother was renowned for her particularly austere programme of penitence, one which might not go amiss for some of today’s unruly hoi polloi. Apparently, she was given to re-enacting the crucifixion by attaching herself to a cross and hanging upside down, like a bat in  a cave, for up to three hours at a time.

You can go and prostrate yourself in spiritual abandonment before the Venerable Mother at the National Gallery’s exhibition The Sacred Made Real, until January next year. There are twenty-nine other works to see, all of them utterly marvellous. Catholicism has never been so passionate and gruesome.

“Such is the immensity of this metropolis, so innumerable are its thoroughfares, and so widely separated its districts, that one who had passed half a lifetime at the west-end of London might well be excused for entire ignorance as to the situation of Bethnal Green, Jacob’s Island, Mile-end, and Stepney. They are as vaguely remote to many as the Ultima Thule of Orkney or Shetland. It is exceedingly probable that we have among our readers thousands who, with or without a map, would be utterly unable to point out the localities of Piccadilly Square, Honey-lane Market, Hay-Hill, Little Britain, Cloth Fair, Cock-lane, Bell square, Long-alley, and Bleeding-heart-yard; and people are born and run their race of life, and die within a mile or two of one another, and are as completely estranged from their neighbours as though they were separated from them by rocky mountains, by unfordable streams, by stormy seas.

“This London is an amalgam of worlds within worlds, and the occurrences of every day convince us that there is not one of these worlds but has its special mysteries and its generic crimes. Exaggeration and ridicule often attach to the vastness of London, and the ignorance of its penetralia common to us who dwell therein. It has been said that beasts of chase still roam in the verdant fastnesses of Grosvenor square, that there are undiscovered patches of primaeval forest in Hyde Park and that Hampstead sewers shelter a monstrous breed of black swine, which have propagated and run wild among the slimy feculence, and whose ferocious snouts will one day up-root Highgate archway, while they make Holloway intolerable with their grunting. Seriously that may be said of the Londoner, who prides himself on his accurate topographical knowledge, which was said in modesty by the great philosopher of light. He is but picking up shells on the shore, while all before him lies a vast and undiscovered ocean.

“It has seemed, however, fated, of late days, that the London public should hear enough – if not, indeed, too much – of the remote and ungenial region at the east end of the metropolis. Murders, actions for seduction, fierce theological dissensions, followed by alarming riots, robberies, and murderous assaults – such eventualities as these have formed the staple of our most recent tidings from the outlying faubourgs of White Chapel, Spitalfields, Mile-end, Bow, Stepney, Wapping, and Rotherhithe… To the scandalous accounts of church brawls have been lately added the ghastly revelations of the charnel house. The last importation from the East-end is the revolting story of the surreptitious disposal of the dead body of an infant, the illegitimate child of one Elizabeth Yorath, and which was smuggled into the earth in the coffin of an adult person, under the auspices of an undertaker in the Borough, and a clergyman of the Church of England.”

Editorial in The Daily Telegraph, Monday 10 October 1859, quoted in Black Swine In The Sewers Of Hampstead : Beneath The Surface Of Victorian Sensationalism by Thomas Boyle (1989)

Two unrelated matters of note to draw to your attention. I was going to write “two unrelated headlines”, but “headline” suggests news, and one of these is not only three years old but was not a “news headline” even then.

Though having said they are unrelated it now occurs to me that one could in fact connect the two, or imagine a scenario in which they were jammed together, for example, by using the contraption in (A) to view the incident in (B).

(A), then, is Build Your Own Dobsonian Telescope. Tragically – and I am quite clear about the usage of that word – the Dobson in question is not our beloved out of print pamphleteer, but another Dobson entirely. Still, to discover that such a thing as a Dobsonian telescope exists, and that its creator might, every now and then, be mistaken for our Dobson, is most pleasing.

(B) is news that a Japanese fishing trawler has been sunk by giant jellyfish. Unfortunately, the details of the story are rather prosaic. You might want to skip them, and instead imagine you are standing upon a promontory on the coast of Japan, peering through your Dobsonian telescope at the terrible sight of a fishing boat being attacked by a hideous semi-transparent sea monster with flailing tentacles.

“The changes in his appearance suggest an atavistic religious process. In one of the few surviving photographs he appears in Russian army uniform, neatly groomed, but with an intense, monastic appearance, like an Orthodox mountain hermit, but near the end of his campaign he rode bare-chested, ‘like a Neanderthal’, hung with bones and charms, his beard sprouting in all directions and his chest smeared with dirt. He had gone from monk to shaman in a few years.”

Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg (1885-1921), as described by James Palmer in his biography The Bloody White Baron (2008)

This is Shirley Hibberd – or James Shirley Hibberd to give his full name – a Victorian writer and horticulturalist (1825-1890). I draw him to your attention apropos of nothing in particular. By all accounts he was a prolific author, churning out books and articles on many subjects apart from his specialist field. He wrote beautifully. Consider this, from “The Instincts And Habits Of Bees”, published in The Intellectual Observer : Review Of Natural History, Microscopic Research And Recreative Science, Volume VI (1865).

“If a man has but one stock of bees and is of the right temper to make pets of them, his attachment to them will grow so surely that it will be strange if he does not, in a very short time, renounce many a commonplace pleasure in order to make room in his heart for a strong affection for these happy confectioners, and perhaps appropriate a portion of his head to an investigation of their instincts and habits, so as to prove for himself all the written records of bee history, and live in hope of adding to them the results of personal observation.”

I appropriated a portion of my head to wondering who this reminded me of. I appropriated another portion of my head to discovering the titles of some of the books of this proto-Dobson. They include:

The Seaweed Collector: A Handy Guide To The Marine Botanist Suggesting What To Look For, And Where To Go In The Study Of The British Algae And The British Sponges (1872)

Clever Dogs, Horses, Etc (1868)

The Golden Gate And Silver Steps, With Bits Of Tinsel Round About (1886)

Water-Cresses Without Sewage (1878)

And, in 1856, this:

The photograph of Shirley Hibberd, by an unknown snappist, is copyright The Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography.

“It is the single most brilliant piece of film-making I have ever seen.”

Elizabeth Taylor on the edited rehearsal footage of a recently deceased popster. As we speak, earnest cineastes the world over are hurriedly revising their “Best Films” lists.

Every now and then, I come across a piece of writing so magnificent that I consider packing in this whole business. Why continue tapping away when such genius stalks the land? This, from yesterday’s Observer, is quite simply matchless:

Dear Mariella, I have had a long-time interest in beekeeping. Unfortunately I have a mortal fear of bees (and similar stinging insects), and neither my partner nor I enjoy the taste of honey, rendering the material benefits of keeping bees somewhat moot. I have read a great deal of books on the subject and have yet to determine just why I am so fascinated by this most peculiar hobby – though I do quite enjoy watching beekeepers remove the honeycomb frame from an apiary, as I find it quite relaxing. It has got to the point where it is affecting my marriage, as my partner is entirely unsympathetic to what she describes as an “obsession”. I tend to spend most evenings reading apiarist manuals and commenting on beekeeping forums on the net, to the detriment of our sex life. I am interested in sex, but at this point I am more interested in bees. Is this kind of relationship normal? How can I bring my partner round to enjoying my interest in beekeeping with me?

“… we can see those English-speaking academics who are investing their time, energy and personal endorsement in the concept of postmodernism as sorry figures indeed. They thought they were participating in an exciting and new theoretical movement. Instead, all they are producing, albeit unwittingly, is an English-language version of a French theory from the 1980s, which itself derives from a German thesis from the 1940s and 1950s that was originally developed by a group of ex-Nazis to lament the defeat of the Third Reich.”

Keith Windschuttle, The Killing Of History : How Literary Critics And Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (1996)

From Wasp Watch to Walrus Watch. Glyn Webster prods me in the direction of The Dim-Post and its Walrus o’ the Day. I agree with Mr Webster that it is indeed a most magnificent walrus. The pedant in me hesitated to link to it, due to the annoyingly misplaced apostrophe in the postage title, but I am in a magnanimous mood. Also, comment number four, from “garethw”, which I recommend you read after glorying in the visual magnificence of the walrus, served to remind me that it is quite some time since I have been active in my pursuit of L’Oreal. Readers may recall that I was outraged to discover the company was claiming to have invented light reflecting booster technology, even employing the airhead Andie MacDowell to parrot this balderdash in its television adverts. For the umpteenth time, let me set the record straight. Light reflecting booster technology was originated and developed and concocted and devised here at Hooting Yard, for purposes other than hair. One day, I feel sure, L’Oreal will admit this, and get me to disport my bouffant in their adverts instead. Perhaps they think I have let them off the hook. Not so! I shall fire off one of my much delayed more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger missives later today.

Miriam Burstein directs us to what sounds like a masterpiece of wasp-related fiction:

“This evening, I came across a one-two punch sort of death in a Catholic novel, the Rev. Langton George Vere’s For Better, Not For Worse (1882).  Early on, the novel’s two female protagonists nearly tumble into a quarry; much Flashing Neon Foreshadowing ensues.  At the end, the Honorable Laura Mapleson shoots Lizzie, the younger of the two female protagonists, then chucks the body into the nearest “rippling stream” (231)…  Righteous smiting soon follows.  Laura, who apparently failed to look where she was going, stumbles into a nest of wasps, and is quickly beset by “infuriated insects” (231).  While trying to rid herself of the aforementioned insects, the Flashing Neon Foreshadowing kicks in, and Laura “lay a bruised and bleeding mass of humanity in the darksome depth of the old disused quarry, where her victim, the palefaced girl, had stood and shuddered, as she thought of the horror of a fall into that dreadful darkness!” (231)”

A weasel can both kill a rabbit and wriggle through a wedding ring.

This is the first in our important new series Incontrovertible And Startling Facts About Weasels.

A note arrives from my son Ed.

Hey Pa, he writes, Did you realise that Not Hairy God is an anagram of Hooting Yard? I liked that, and I think you will too.

And I do. I just wonder why I had not already been informed of this by R., the sort of anagrammatist-by-appointment to Hooting Yard. Those of you who keep a beady eye on the comments here will be familiar with R.’s stupendous work. Though R. remains resistant to being anagrammatised himself, for obvious reasons.