August Theme Day - Bright Colours

London's colourful gay pride fits the bill for this month's theme of bright colours.

Click here to view thumbnails for all participants

A hot night in Bengal

One hundred and seventy years ago, on the 1st of August 1840, a court-martial convened in the East India Company military base of Dinapore (now Dānāpur, in India’s Bihār state).

Dinapore was a staging post on the route up the Ganges plain inland from Calcutta towards Delhi, and an important garrison supporting East India Company rule in the sub-continent: it was the largest military cantonment in Bengal. Within it there would always have been based a large population of European soldiers doing their best to cope with an unfamiliar culture and an unfamiliar climate. (By the start of August, Dinapore would have been well into the monsoon season, with an average temperature of close to 30°C and weather dominated by massive convection thunderstorms.) Historically, the British response to culture shock and to hot weather has often revolved around downing large amounts of alcohol, and a manuscript in the Library’s collections (MS.2127) details the results of one such incident.

The manuscript, currently undergoing conservation work, consists of a large volume into which an unknown clerk has bound numerous letters and administrative documents generated at the base in the period 1840-1841: material relating to stores and supplies sitting alongside accounts of courts-martial and other important hearings. On August 1st 1840, a court-martial was assembled to hear accounts of an incident not long after dawn that morning – although for at least one of the participants this had clearly been not the start of the day, but the end of a long night.

An Assistant-Surgeon looking after the artillerymen at the base, a Mr Barber, takes up the story, relating that "this morning between the hours of 6 and 7 Oclock whilst I was examining the eyes of a Patient in the Artillery Hospital", Gunner Shehan – who was one of two sentries guarding a patient, Gunner Hasterley, for reasons not set out in this account – left his post and came over to Barber "in an insolent way" and demanded why he, Shehan, had not been allowed entrance to the hospital to visit his wife, who was a patient there at the time. One possible reason for his not being admitted occurs in Barber’s next sentence, in which he notes that "Perceiving that the Man was Drunk, I desired him to go away, and not interrupt me".

Whether Shehan is drunk from the night before, or has made an early start on drinking this morning, the diagnosis is convincing. Barber’s rebuff sends him away for a little while but soon he is back:

shortly afterwards [he] came back in a more violent manner and repeated his Questions, adding that I had no business to take a woman into Hospital that did not belong to the Detachment, that a Mrs Coveny a Patient there, was a Whore, and that I had admitted her, to make money by her, that I was a Buggar, and not fit to have charge of an European Hospital…

You can almost smell the alcoholic breath and feel the spray of spittle as the rant continues. Barber has had enough, but his next intervention does nothing to calm the scene:

I then desired the Apothecary to call for a file of the Guard to take him away. On hearing this Gunner Shehan walked up and down close to me, and after a short time asked if I intended to confine him; on my answering in the affirmative, he became furiously enraged, said he was on duty, and that I had no right even to speak to him, and that he would run his Bayonet through my bloody Guts; he immediately drew it out, and advanced towards me with the wilfull intention of carrying his threat into execution.

Barber calls out to Gunner Dunn, the other sentry guarding the mysterious Gunner Hasterly, and a struggle follows:

he sheathed his Bayonet, but again and again threatened to stab me, and put his hand on his Bayonet to draw it out again. Seeing him struggle with Gunner Dunn, I went into the Ward and procured a Stick for my own defence, being in momentarily expectation that he would succeed; Soon after a Guard of Sepoys [native Indian soldiers] came up, and he was with difficulty taken away, continuing however the whole time to abuse me.

We may be in up-country Bengal in the mid nineteenth century, but scenes like this play out in taxi queues and pedestrian precincts across Britain every weekend. Gunner Shehan is unusual, mind you, in being so drunk so early in the day. His defence is not included in this documentation so we do not know if he had the presence of mind to blame the monsoon weather for upsetting his European bodily rhythms. Nor do we know his fate, although drunkenness on duty and threatening an officer would normally be treated with considerable severity.

The conditions of India certainly seem to have had an impact on the volume itself: the pages are stained by damp at the top of the volume, which has led to mould-growth at some stage in the past. The entire volume is fragile, with easily fraying edges to the pages and traces of insects nibbling the paper. The images attached to this blog post give an idea of its current condition. At present the volume is undergoing work by our Conservation department and is not available for consultation, except by appointment with the conservators, whilst that takes place. In a painstaking process, the volume will be disbound, its individual pages cleaned and freed of the traces of mould and then placed in clear sleeves, and those pages then sorted into a more comprehensible order (the unknown clerk who compiled it seems simply to have stuffed a year’s worth of letters into the binder without regard to their order). When this is all done, readers will have the chance to explore more British interactions with the Indian Subcontinent. One hopes – vivid though this little window on the Raj is – that they will be more elevating scenes than the one just laid before us.

Images: top, a Hindu shrine in Bihar province, from the Wellcome Library's Iconographic collections (catalogue record here). The remainder of the images are of MS.2127, including one taken in the Library's Conservation studio as work begins upon it.

Exposed

What museum exhibition would you find the above picture of Paris Hilton on her way to jail in? 10 points if you guessed "Exposed" - a show originated by SF MoMA and now at the Tate Modern in London.

The exhibition offers a fascinating and original look at pictures made without the explicit permission of the people depicted. With photographs from the late nineteenth century to present day, the show tackles its voyeuristic theme in a way that's at once serious and pleasurable.

Beginning with the idea of the 'unseen photographer', "Exposed" presents 250 works by celebrated artists and photographers including Brassaï's erotic Secret Paris of the 1930s images; Weegee's iconic photograph of Marilyn Monroe on the set of "Some Like It Hot"; and both Nick Ut's Paris Hilton picture and his more famous image of children escaping napalm attacks in the Vietnam War.

At a time where organized surveillance is dramatically increasing and reality (or faux-reality) t.v. is the mainstay of cable, the issues raised by "Exposed" are timely and provocative. So drop by if you're in London. If not, there's an excellent catalog readily available.

The Contessa Castiglione by Pierson.

Liz Taylor and Richard Burton caught by a paparazzi.

Helmut Newton's famous image of Lisa Taylor, considered to be the first image where the female gaze was allowed to appear as predatory as a man's.

Murder, he telegraphed

July 31st 1910: one hundred years ago today, a small, balding, bespectacled man stands in handcuffs on a docked ocean liner, arrested on his arrival in Canada. The man is Hawley Harvey Crippen, and he is under arrest for the murder of his wife. His arrest is a landmark in that defining story of the twentieth century, the abolition of distance: during these years it became possible for news routinely to travel between continents faster than a person could carry it, and Crippen is one of the first people to be caught by the law as a result of this.

Crippen is notorious even now, a member of the same Rogues’ Gallery of public opinion as Jack the Ripper or Denis Nielsen. It can often come as a shock to people when they learn that, while he was undoubtedly convicted as a murderer, he had only one victim: he was no serial killer but someone whose crime was, if anything, a banal one. Tolstoy tells us, at the opening of Anna Karenina, that all happy families are alike but that unhappy ones are all unhappy in their own way. With all due respect to the Russian master, Crippen’s marriage was unhappy in all-too-hackneyed ways.

A native of Michigan born in 1862, Crippen had qualified as a homoeopathic doctor in 1884. After his wife’s death ended a short first marriage, he moved to New York to set up as a general practitioner, and it was here that he met Kunigunde Mackamotzki, the daughter of a Polish fruit stall owner, who had aspirations as a music hall singer and used the name Cora Turner. Crippen married her in 1892 and the couple lived initially in New York; however, when his practice failed in 1894 he took a job with Munyon’s Homoeopathic Remedies and three years later was sent by the firm to set up a London branch. Crippen remained in this rôle for only two years before Munyon’s fired him for spending his time managing his wife’s music hall career; however, he remained in London, moving from one shadowy quack establishment to another for the next ten years.

Behind closed doors, the Crippens’ marriage was coming off the rails. Mrs Crippen, now using the stage name Belle Elmore (in so far as her faltering stage career made it necessary at all), drank and was routinely unfaithful; in 1906 Crippen discovered her in bed with one of their lodgers. Their day-to-day existence followed a drearily familiar pattern: Belle vain, drunk and verbally abusive; Crippen, outwardly submissive, seething with resentment. Into this toxic situation had come a young typist called Ethel Le Neve, employed by Crippen when working at Drouet’s Institute for the Deaf. Crippen and Le Neve fell in love around 1903 but it was not until the lodger-in-the-bed incident three years later that Crippen crossed a barrier and consummated the relationship. Tensions must have risen inexorably during the following years: in 1908 Crippen moved to the Yale Tooth Specialists in Albion House, New Oxford Street, taking Ethel with him as a typist, whilst in the same building were the offices of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, a charity for which Belle did work as a way of maintaining her connections with the stage (a stage on which very few people would pay her to perform). Farcical encounters on the stairs must have ensued.

Matters came to a head in January 1910. On January 31st two friends of Belle’s dined with the Crippens. After this, no-one saw her again. Crippen gave out that she had gone to America for a few months and then, in March, that she had died there. Ethel moved into the Crippens’ house at Hilldrop Crescent, Islington. Outwardly, normality was resumed and Crippen continued to work as though nothing was amiss: the letter by him held in the Library’s Archives and Manuscripts collection as MS.8332 dates from early April, in the middle of this calm before the storm. However, Belle’s music hall friends were unconvinced by Crippen’s account of her convenient death; their investigations revealed no trace of a Belle Elmore or Cora Crippen either crossing the Atlantic or dying in California as her husband had claimed. Scotland Yard were alerted and Detective-Inspector Walter Dew interviewed Crippen on 8th July. Crippen cracked: although he had told an outwardly plausible tale in the interview, of being deserted and lying to cover the humiliation this brought him, he was unable to keep up the pretence and bolted the next day. Alerted by his flight, the police searched the house and on July 13th, under the floor of the kitchen coal cellar, found a dismembered female body. The corpse contained a poison Crippen had bought shortly before Belle’s disappearance.

Crippen and Ethel had fled together to Belgium and on 20th July sailed on the Montrose from Antwerp, bound for Montreal. Crippen used the name John Philo Robinson and Le Neve, in boy’s clothes, was posing as his sixteen-year-old son. Captain Kendall of the Montrose, however, was suspicious that Robinson and his son were a little too lovey-dovey in their behaviour for father and son. Crippen’s disappearance, and the murder, had been widely reported: readers with a Wellcome Library card will be able to see how the Times reported the flight and the body’s discovery on Friday July 15th here. The captain made the correct guess as to the couple’s identity and, in a first for crime prevention, sent a message back to the ship’s owners, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, by telegraph. The owners informed Scotland Yard, which dispatched Detective-Inspector Dew in pursuit on the faster liner Laurentic; they also informed the press, which from July 25th onwards was able to report on the slow-motion chase as the two ships ploughed across the Atlantic. On the 30th the vessel arrived off Quebec and police disguised as river pilots rowed out to her; Dew looked at the couple, confirmed the identification, made the signal and the arrest was made. The Times correspondent reports that “Crippen turned the colour of death, and his voice gurgled some unintelligible sound as he was hurried below. Miss Le Neve became hysterical and fainted.” The escape had failed.

Crippen was returned to London and tried for murder; his defence was unconvincing (the human remains must already have been under the floor when he bought the house). The pathologist Bernard Spilsbury, in one of his first notable cases, demonstrated that a scar on the corpse matched one on Cora Crippen. (Nonetheless, in fairness one should note that there have been attempts to prove that the conviction was unsafe: see here.) Crippen was hanged on November 23rd, but succeeded in minimising damage to Ethel Le Neve; she was acquitted at her trial of acting as an accessory to murder after the fact, and lived until 1967.

Why do we remember Crippen to this day, when the facts of this crime are so banal, and other widely reported crimes of the time are forgotten? The “Battersea Flat Murder”, the shooting of the actor Thomas Weldon Anderson (stage name, Atherstone) which was reported in the same issues of the Times as the chase for Crippen, has sunk into oblivion. Bernard Spilsbury did not think the Crippen case sufficiently interesting for him to keep any note of it in his set of index cards documenting noteworthy cases (held in the Wellcome Library archives collection as PP/SPI), yet Crippen has a notoriety out of all proportion to the dingy facts of the case. In part, perhaps, it is the fascination with doctors that kill, the transgression involved when those whose vocation is health turn to murder. (The calculating use of medical skill to dismember a body, the element of cold self-control in the killing rather than a simple upwelling of violent passion, often especially outrages us.) Crippen, of course, was essentially a quack – it is notable that the Times often uses inverted commas, the typographical equivalent of tweezers, around his title “Dr.” – so there is also something a little sleazy about him, the disreputable truth behind the respectable façade. That meeting of the respectable and the furtive is, of course, true of Crippen’s appearance as well: contemporaries exclaimed at the idea that this unassuming polite little man could have been capable of killing. But in the end, Crippen was just in the wrong place at the wrong time: unlucky enough first of all to have the press, for the reasons set out above, pick up the story and run with it (Wellcome Library card holders can follow the whole story in the Times Digital Archive), but most of all to be on the receiving end of a technological breakthrough, and to be the first person arrested as a result of a telegraph message from a ship summoning a faster liner. Technology caught Crippen; had he been accused of the crime ten years earlier and fled in the same way, he might have got away scot-free. Today, of course, technology in the shape of this blog perpetuates his notoriety. Would he have preferred Anderson’s oblivion to his own posthumous fame? We can ask, but the grave within the walls of Pentonville Prison will never answer.

Images, from top:
1/ Crippen and Le Neve in the dock at the Old Bailey, from Wellcome Images
2/ Belle Elmore, an image originally from the Library of Congress, from Wikimedia Commons
3/ Police excavating the garden of Crippen's house (Detective-Inspector Dew on the extreme right), from Wikimedia Commons
4/ Letter from Crippen to a client, dating from the period between Belle Elmore's death and Crippen's flight, held in the Wellcome Library’s Archives and Manuscripts collection as MS.8332.

Afternoon Trot

Quick trot through Hyde Park. Who needs the country.

Review: Nothing is Forever - South London Gallery

Review by Elisa Caldarola

Nothing is Forever celebrates the renewal of South London Gallery, based in a late 19th century building in Southwark. It is not an exhibition of works in a gallery, but of works on the gallery. The works are mostly directly painted on the walls of the gallery itself and are not “forever”, because they will be painted over at the end of the show. The works are on the gallery also in a more abstract sense, because they celebrate the spaces of the building.

South London Gallery is at the same time an intimate and a public space: it is a big building, but not bigger than many of the London town mansions. The Outset Artists’ Flat on the second floor –where artists in residence will be hosted from October 2010 – highlights the house-like character of the gallery (on this occasion the flat is open to the public). On a similar note, one of the gallery’s café rooms has a single long rectangular table with 14 seats around it. It looks like the place where a typical Victorian family would have dined. The café is embellished by Paul Morrison’s work Asplenium (2010), a wall-paint in gold foil of beautiful botanical motifs in dialogue with the outside garden.



A more traditional exhibition space is to be found in the large downstairs room with various works focussed on language by acclaimed American conceptual artists Robert Barry and Lawrence Weiner and British artists Fiona Banner and Mark Tichtner. Barry’s work is the landmark Telepathic Piece (1969-2010: it was originally conceived for an exhibition in San Paolo, but was never shown or printed out in the exhibition catalogue), referring to a series of possible objects of telepathic transmission: desires, volitions, feelings, emotions, concerns. It sounds like a semi-ironic user’s manual for the enjoyment of the exhibition space. Tichtner’s is a slogan painted over a colourful pattern borrowed from the Victorian decoration of the gallery’s floor. The slogan itself is the result of a twofold borrowing, from the words of 19th century inventor Nikola Tesla (‘Let the future tell the truth’) and the World Social Forum (‘Another world is possible’): a cross-fertilization much in the spirit of the gallery’s values. In the Clore Studio – a space to be dedicated to participatory activities – Lily van der Strokker, Dan Perjovschi and David Shrigley further address political themes, with works full of wit and a fresh graphic.



On the stairs to the upper floors Gary Woodley has traced a black line playfully twisting around the steps, the walls and the ceiling (Impingement No. 56, 2010). Invited to follow it, I felt like I was chasing a cat playing with a ball of thread. With a simple move the work succeeds in re-defining a space that is often left aside by the logic of exhibitions. The same applies to the bathroom in the Artists’ Flat, where there is a comic about the Paris Commune painted on the wall, A Brief and Idealistic Account of The Paris Commune of 1871 (Sam Dargan, 2010). It is definitely a more effective reminder of our relatively recent political history than a book on a shelf by the WC. Again, the very public and the very private merge with originality and wit. In a sort of game of displacement, a work concerned with plumbing and body waste is placed on the chimney breast of the apartment’s front room (Sam Porritt, Me & You Then Everyone Else, 2010). This is clearly a work about the building, since it represents what happens deep inside it, but also the binomial public/private finds here one more way of expression, as it can be deduced from the title. Moreover, the work’s representational content is linked to the exhibition’s motto: ‘nothing is forever’.



Milly Thompson has a line-drawing of a dinner party (The Dinner Party; left-field aspirational, 2010) inspired by Woody Allen’s movie Interiors (1978). There are six people sitting around a table, looking quite uncomfortable. Allen’s movie is indebted to Bergman and Antonioni for its pitiless depiction of human relationships and I guess Thompson is trying to make a similar point. One feels more at ease in other rooms, where human presence is assumed but not displayed. For example, in the first floor rooms where Ernst Caramelle has painted his intersecting colourful rectangles on the walls and around the fireplaces (Untitled, 2010). This is a work that goes beyond the canons of painting and decoration, merging traditional elements of abstract pictorial art with the architecture of the room itself, to an immersive effect.

Another smart idea for exalting the spaces of a public art gallery with a human size. The exhibition continues until 25 September. www.southlondongallery.org

Gunnar Wennerberg Tapestry Design

Illustration: Gunnar Wennerberg. The Willows tapestry design, c1913.

The Swedish designer Gunnar Wennerberg is probably better known inside and outside his native Sweden, for the innovative glass and ceramic decorative work that he produced during the last few years of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century. However, Wennerberg also produced a certain amount of textile work, particularly but not exclusively for the Handarbetets Vanner and the Licium.

Wennerberg produced a number of tapestries during the first decade of the twentieth century and those shown in this article give some indication at least as to the style and compositional qualities that were very much associated with him at the time.

Wennerberg is often seen and categorised as an Art Nouveau designer, particularly as regards his use of foliage and flora for decorative means. However, his style bore little resemblance to the excesses of French and Belgian Art Nouveau and some would see it as somewhat typical of the Swedish love for nature-based themes. This is born out distinctively with The Willow tapestry, which although having certain aspects in common with Art Nouveau, tends towards a much sparser and tranquil examination of nature than would be expected within the general Art Nouveau movement. This was one of Wennerberg's particular traits and it can be seen within the other compositions also shown here.

Illustration: Gunnar Wennerberg. Tapestry design, c1905.

It is interesting to note that it could be said that Wennerberg's extensive work within the glass and ceramics industries, was somewhat reflected within his later textile work. The imagery and compositional balance are interestingly similar in style with what would be expected both within stained glass work and also that of ceramics. The use of light, particularly within The Willows, is almost similar to a ceramic glaze, and perhaps this was not purely coincidental but could be seen as that of a conscious or unconscious bleeding through of ideas and strategies from another medium altogether.

The greatest boon to cross discipline designers and artists is when the tools and vocabulary of one discipline are used either for the same purpose or for that of a completely different aspect within another discipline. It is this cross-fertilization that has given us many purposeful creative constructs and indeed a number of happy accidents as well.

Wennerberg, although not strictly a textile designer or artist, should be included within the framework of Sweden's prestigious textile crafts, particularly that of tapestry design of which Wennerberg produced some excellent examples that were neither derivative of the rest of contemporary Europe, or indeed that of Swedish traditional crafts. His work is an excellent example of the individuality that can be achieved by both artist and designer when considering the importance of the uniqueness of an individual's creative journey, rather than that of fashion, fad and styling.

Illustration: Gunnar Wennerberg. Tapestry design, c1909.

Incidentally Gunnar Wennerberg should not be confused with the other Gunnar Wennerberg, who was the Swedish poet and composer who died in 1901, Wennerberg the designer died in 1914.

Further reading links:
Scandinavian Design (Taschen 25)
RORSTRAND: SWEDISH ART NOUVEAU PORCELAIN, FROM THE ROBERT SCHREIBER COLLECTION
Rorstrand Porcelain: Art Nouveau Masterpieces
Vavda tapeter (Swedish Edition)
SWEDISH TEXTILE ART: Traditional Marriage Weavings from Scania (The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Swedish Textile Art)
The Big Book of Weaving: Handweaving in the Swedish Tradition: Techniques, Patterns, Designs and Materials
The Treasure Chest of Swedish Weaving
33 Contemporary Swedish Weaving Patterns for Monk's Cloth
Favorite Scandinavian Projects to Weave: 45 Stylish Designs for the Modern Home
Swedish Weaving,
Swedish Weaving/Huck Embroidery Designs Book 2
The How to Book of Swedish Weaving and Huck Embroidery (Avery Hill's)
Swedish Hand Weaving - Weaving Patterns
Manual Of Swedish Hand Weaving
Weave Structures The Swedish Way - Volume 1

OHC Summer Series #7 Summer Cattail Observations

Outdoor Hour Challenge
Summer #7 Summer Cattail Observations

Train Your Senses

• Sight: Observe the cattail’s habitat. Look for birds, insects, and animals living or resting in or on the cattails. Look for nests. See if you can find the cattail flowers.
• Smell: Sit or squat near your cattails and close your eyes. Breathe deeply and see if you smell anything.
• Touch: Feel the leaves, edges, and spikes of the cattails.
• Hearing: Take a minute to listen as you stand or sit near your cattails. Can you hear any birds or insects? Water running?

Inside Preparation Work:
Read pages 500-502 in the Handbook of Nature Study if you have not done so before (starting on page 551 if you have the free download version) . It might also be beneficial to read it again this season and highlight the parts that contain information about the leaves of the cattail plant.

Outdoor Hour Time:
Enjoy your outdoor time this week at your cattail spot. If you have been participating in the year-long cattail study since last autumn, you will know just where to look for cattails. Use the suggestions from the Handbook of Nature Study to talk a little about the habitat where your cattails are growing.

• Is your cattail still growing in water or has it dried up?
• What does the “cattail” parts of the plant look like now?
• What color and shape are the leaves?
• Do you see the cattails seeds or balloons?
• Can you pull some of the fuzz from the cattail and observe it more closely?
• How do you think the seeds spread, by wind or water?
• How crowded are the cattails growing together?

Please note: If you do not have any cattails to observe in your area, you may wish to choose another local plant to observe in each season throughout the next year.

Follow-Up Activity:
Make sure to allow some time after your outdoor hour to discuss any subjects that your child finds interesting. Encourage the completion of a nature journal entry recording your observation of your cattails. You can use the notebook page and coloring page created for the Summer Series ebook, the notebook page from Autumn, a blank page, or any other general notebook page listed on the sidebar of my blog. You may wish to pull out your other cattail entries and compare the year-long changes in your cattails.

Please make sure to come back and post your link on Mr. Linky after completing this challenge and writing your blog entry.

If you would like all the Summer Series Challenges in one place, I have an ebook gathered for you to purchase for your convenience. Here is a link to a complete description:
Summer Series of Outdoor Hour Challenges

The Cycles

Due to start today! Rent a bike and ride around London. I'll give it a couple of weeks and report back. Great idea don't you think?

Blue Plaque for Marie Stopes

Today an English Heritage Blue Plaque was unveiled in Cintra Park, Upper Norwood, on the house in which the eminent palaeobotanist, sex educator and campaigner for birth control, Marie Stopes (1880-1958), spent her childhood years. (Some of us might feel that her mother Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, Shakespearean scholar, suffragette, and writer on women's issues, also deserves some commemoration. She made a significant contribution to enlivening the cultural atmosphere of Upper Norwood by running discussion groups, Shakespeare readings, a logic class, and meetings on female suffrage.)

Present at the unveiling were Stopes's daughter-in-law, Mary Stopes-Roe (Stopes's son, Harry Stopes-Roe, being unfortunately able to be present for health reasons) and her grandson Jonathan Stopes-Roe. Also present were representatives of the British Library, of Marie Stopes International which carries on her work on a global scale and is based in Whitfield Street, Fitzrovia, in the premises formerly occupied by Stopes's own Mothers' Clinic from 1926, and Lesley Hall, representing the Wellcome Library and the Galton Institute Council, which continues to administer one of Stopes' legacies, a Birth Control Trust for 'the alleviation of poverty by providing practical birth control advice'.

While the bulk of Marie Stopes' substantial archives are held in the British Library Department of Manuscripts, the Wellcome Library holds a significant collection of Stopes papers, consisting mainly of thousands of letters received from grateful readers and other enquirers following the publication of her pioneering marriage manual, Married Love, in 1918, but including some material on her birth control clinics and other activities. There Library also holds a substantial number of other archival collections relating to birth control in the UK and elsewhere.

An Overnight Star Is Manufactured

The larger percentage of Golden Age movies seem to have been designed for people whose leisure time was given over to theatre-going. These were the patrons who'd be there several times a week no matter what was playing. When Van Johnson died in 2008, I wondered if staff at the nursing home where he finished up had any idea what a big star they'd been housing. By then Van was an old man of course (92), and much of his fan base had preceded him out. Overnight fame is common enough today with reality shows and such, but recognition borne of these is shorter-lived than even teen idols of a previous generation. Anyone can be a celebrity now, but only momentarily it seems. Sudden fame like Van's was more remarkable in the forties where media was slower to get out word and image for idols-to-be. All the more impressive then, that Van Fever so rapidly swept a moviegoer nation in Spring of 1945. His ascension blurred customary lines between A and B product out of employer Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The anticipated B was Between Two Women, another Blair Hospital chapter remade from a same named feature of eight years before. Dr. Kildare had gone off his shift as result of Lew Ayres' WWII induction troubles and beginner Van donned scrubs to play continuing Dr. Randall "Red" Adams. The Kildare, then Blairs, supplied useful training for beginners like Johnson, what with lower budgets, supporting program placement, and little at risk. What no one figured was Between Two Women crashing through to place among most profitable films MGM had in 1945.

It would have been neat being around for Van Johnson's build-up, what with fan clubs organized in theatre lobbies (as here) and "fan fotos" handed out by thousands to ticket-buyers. The mechanics of star construction is something we're the poorer for losing. Between Two Women plays today as pleasant disposal of 83 minutes. You can watch it on TCM and imagine teen girls stampeding boxoffices sixty-five years ago for the same privilege. Van Johnson caught fire like Frank Sinatra, and around the same time, but his was talent less rarified than Frank's, so he's locked forever in that era that discovered him. Patrons didn't like to feel manipulated into star worship, so Metro reassured its public that they and no one else were responsible for Van Johnson's ascent. He has a fan following with a fervor found only in fans who have the feeling that they discovered a favorite themselves and that he is their own protégé for stellar honors, said Metro scribes to exhibitor subscribers of The Lion's Roar. With a war having sapped established leading men, 1945's accent would be upon youth ... And they're getting material that's attuned to the dreams and imagination of youth, added the Roar. Reward for fulfilling those dreams was considerable. Between Two Women spent about even with previous entries in the series ($436,483 negative cost), but this time, thanks to recently released Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Van Johnson's bounce to exaltation, there were domestic rentals ($1.896 million) three times what MGM's last visit to Blair Hospital realized. This was phenomenal money for a B picture, Metro's or anyone else's.

Between Two Women was the fourth and last time Van Johnson played his Kildare variant. Not again would this personality be spent at humble fare. Van enters Between Two Women with a flying tackle to bring down a gun-wielding intruder in Blair's lobby, that opener typical of never-never hospital life envisioned by Metro. Authenticity as to medical settings would have to wait for television, it seemed. There's no sight of blood during Blair procedures and discussion of ailments stay at elementary level with cures quickly arrived at. Lionel Barrymore as Gillespie was crusty thread that ran through the series and pivot around which youngsters spun, his character a font of wisdom overlaid with irascible shtick long since an expectation with Barrymore's audience. Doctor rituals are lovingly observed. Washing of hands and placement of operating gowns and headgear play like coronations, all spotless white linens with crisp pleating. I wonder how many viewers pursued careers in medicine as result of movie stays at Blair. The series surely boosted nursing applications at the least, what with plethora of eligible males on Blair's treating staff, routinely hosting after-duty parties at night clubs where song-and-dance Metro contractees perform specialty numbers to relieve stress of the OR. Between Two Women breaks throughout for musical inserts with Gloria DeHaven and chorines, Keenan Wynn pattering, and war bond appeals following each number. The film is silly and dated and probably a waste of 2010 time, but it's a valuable sampling of something for everyone entertainment circa 1945, as accurate a mirror of patron appetites then as we are likely to come across.

Van Gogh

On this day in 1890 Vincent Van Gogh committed suicide using a gun he had previously brandished at the doctor treating his increasingly difficult mental state - Paul Ferdinand Gachet. Gachet had encouraged Van Gogh to create an etching and allowed him to use his personal press (Gachet was a keen artist also). It remained Van Gogh's only etching and now resides in the Medicine Man Gallery at the Wellcome Collection.

This poignant work silently records the relationship between not only doctor and patient but also two individuals who used art as both a means of expression and a therapy. The modestly sized etching is accompanied by three audio commentaries. One of these proposes that Van Gogh's condition was typical of what we now call Bipolar Disorder. For a full account of Captain Johnston-Saint (Sir Henry Wellcome's agent) and the acquisition of this unique creation see the article by Gertude Prescott in Medical History