Another Kind Of Mind Advent Calendar 2021: December 3rd

I’ve written before about the lighting up of London’s major shopping thoroughfares for the festive season and how it brightens up the cold, dark winter days – but my previous posts have all been about the most famous of central London’s shopping thoroughfares, Oxford Street. It seemed only fair to let its near neighbour, Regent Street, get a look in too, so I really had to share these cheery photographs of the Regent Street Christmas lights from 1969.

Regent Street was developed during the early 19th century, and was named after George, the Prince Regent (yes, that Prince Regent, as played by Hugh Laurie in Blackadder the Third). One of the earliest examples of urban planning in Britain, it was the work of the famed Georgian-era architect John Nash and the hugely successful property developer James Burton. This made it a showpiece development and one of London’s most visible and well known examples of royal patronage at the time.

The image at the top of the post is looking from Oxford Circus towards Piccadilly Circus, and the photo above is from the same spot but looking towards the Langham Place end of Regent Street. I love the blurry glow of the Christmas trees above Garrards the jewellers on the right of the latter picture!

And as a bonus, here is a photograph of urban Christmas lights from over a hundred years ago. This festive message dates back to 1916, and was snapped on Canal Street in New Orleans – a city that definitely knows how to party, all year round!

For more Christmassy posts to light up your day, click here.

Vintage Advertising: Christmas Shopping

Last week saw the annual reappearance of Black Friday, which apparently means the Christmas shopping season is now officially underway. Black Friday started life as an American tradition in which stores and other businesses began their Christmas build-up with sales and special offers that kicked off on the day after Thanksgiving.

There is some evidence to connect the development of Black Friday sales with the Santa parades often held in American towns and cities during the Thanksgiving period.

London on Film: The Sound of Silence?

Just a quick drive-by post today…. what’s that you say? You can’t hear me? I said JUST A QUICK DRIVE-BY POST TODAY… Bloody pneumatic drills.

Like all the best things that turn up on Another Kind Of Mind, I found this extremely silly snippet of 1930s newsreel footage while I was looking for something else entirely – so here it is in all its pneumatic glory.

For more on London, visit here and here.

 

Happy Halloween!

Halloween card (1911)

Stay spooky, my friends!

For more Halloween posts, click here.

Post Early For Christmas… Again!

‘Christmas Mail’ (c. 1910-15)

In recent years, we’ve met the world’s most organised dog, a clumsy wartime comic and some of the people of Christmas, Florida (watch out for more from them soon!), who were all united in explaining how to get your cards, presents and letters to Santa in the post in plenty of time for the festivities.

I’ve been a bit rubbish with my Christmas post this year, but I loved these festive mail-related images. The black and white photographs are all American, probably taken in and around the Washington DC area, and the brightly coloured adverts (below) are from wartime Britain again.

Vintage Cartoon Scares: ‘Skeleton Frolic’ (1937)

On Halloween a few years back, I posted an early Disney cartoon with the title The Skeleton Dance (see below). This 1937 short, although not in Disney’s Silly Symphonies canon (it was released as part of Columbia Studios A Color Rhapsody series of cartoons instead), appears to be very close to a remake in colour, with a number of sequences which are almost identical to the earlier cartoon.

Creepy Vintage: Gas Mask Replica*

I found these images whilst rummaging through a huge number of official and public domain archive photos taken during both World Wars, and they immediately stood out in a flash of weirdness. There is something very creepy about old black and white photos of people wearing gas masks, and these examples are distinctly odd…

The picture above was taken in 1917 and shows a group of (probably) Dutch children during a gas mask drill. This is easily the creepiest of the photos I found, mainly because there’s something so alien about these kids in their protective gear.

Below, you’ll see a 1942 shot of a group of ATS women in the Middle East wearing their gas masks and respirators, posed and staring almost dead-eyed at the camera. I don’t know if it’s just me, but they look like they’re about to gatecrash a very tense scene in a vintage episode of Dr Who (or some other very British sci-fi show) and send me scuttling behind the sofa…

*Apologies for the mangled Captain Beefheart reference in the title!

For more Halloween reading (and watching), click here…

Vintage Cartoon Scares: ‘Hell’s Bells’ (1929)

Here’s another early Walt Disney pre-Code animated short from the long-running Silly Symphonies series. Released just before Halloween 1929, Hell’s Bells was directed by Disney himself, drawn by his frequent collaborator Ub Iwerks, and distributed by Columbia Pictures.

Vintage Cricket: The 1900 Olympic Games

Poster advertising the Olympic cricket match between France and Great Britain

This is a poster advertising the only game of Olympic cricket that has ever been played. It happened over two days between France and Great Britain (referred to in this contemporary advert as England) at the 1900 Games in Paris.

It was a slightly odd match in the context of an Olympics which was a bit of a bizarre event in its own right. Held over five months as part of the World’s Fair, the Games almost seemed like an afterthought. So little effort had been put into promoting them that many of the athletes involved genuinely didn’t know they’d competed in them!

The cricket competition was one such. It was also somewhat ramshackle in other ways. For a start, despite being an Olympic match, it was not considered to be an official first class international since both teams fielded twelve players each instead of the regulation eleven, and it only lasted two days.

Then there was the fact that the two sides were not France and Great Britain as we would know them in the modern era – Great Britain were represented by a public school-dominated touring club from the West Country, and the French team were mostly British expats living in Paris.

Whatever happened over those two days, it was always going to be a British victory on French soil it seems…

And it was – Great Britain, who are still technically Olympic champions 119 years later, won by 158 runs with a mere five minutes to spare. Mostly ignored by both the French and British national media, this was in many ways an anonymous triumph.

Four years later, the Olympic cricket competition at the Games in St Louis was cancelled at short notice due to a lack of competitors and facilities. It has never been an Olympic sport since.

Happy 2019!

Some officers of a Scottish Division on New Year’s Day (c. 1918)

It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’ve been feeling thoughtful…

Round about one hundred years ago, this cheerful bunch of Scotsmen (above – note the kilts!) would have been celebrating what was probably the last Hogmanay of World War One. They seem to have found what looks like a fairly comfortable billet, and, judging from the bottles at their feet, have undoubtedly indulged in a few beers and a chorus or two of Auld Lang Syne.

A century later, and the world is still fighting. And as this year finally draws to a close, I hope more than ever that we can eventually come to terms with the increasingly glaring truth that monetized hatred, bigotry and violence are slowly destroying us and our planet.

But it is also important to remember that kindness costs nothing. Thoughtfulness costs nothing. We need more of both in 2019, all over the world. We’re not broken – not yet – but we have to take all the chances we can still get as individuals, communities, governments to help rather than hinder peace.

There are lessons to be learned from World War One and its aftermath, as well as from the rise of fascism during the interwar years. We still haven’t learned them, and that needs to change. Going down that road should never be a feasible option again, anywhere.

For me, 2018 can do one, it’s been a particularly brutal year on a personal level all round. However, I hope your New Year is happy, bright and peaceful – and, as ever, I send a huge thank you to you all. I say this every year, but it remains true. I couldn’t do this without my readers.

Happy 2019!